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Thinking About Thinking #32 – A Spool of Blue Thread – Can a house be the main character?

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There’s a saying in show business: Give them a new story that’s stood the test of time. Anne Tyler, who is possibly America’s most revered living novelist, has done just that. She’s presented us with a new, fictional extended family with all their foibles and melodrama, and placed them in the setting we know well from so many of her books – in the community of Roland Park in North Baltimore and in a hand-crafted old home with varnished hardwood floors, meticulously hung pocket doors, and vaulted ceilings. The Whitshanks are a quirky, close-knit family of builders, craftsmen, and nurturers. And this house is their pride and joy. Its stately endurance through a family saga of three generations lends a sense of timelessness – but Tyler’s story is all about the passage of time and the influences our short lives have on each other.

Another time-honored Hollywood maxim: The main character grows stronger as his villain opponent becomes meaner and stronger. To her credit, Tyler not only ignores this rule, she defies it. This story has no single main character – unless it’s the house. And, as in all of her books, there are no vicious opponents. The engines of conflict whir almost entirely within the family. Adversaries that seem the most obnoxious, inconsiderate, and spiteful ultimately show us their redeeming qualities.

In every Anne Tyler novel there’s a conspicuous bad boy. In A Spool of Blue Thread, Denny shows up on the first page. And throughout the story, he’s obnoxious, inconsiderate, and spiteful. And he’s the one his saintly mom loves best, and eventually, we do, too.

Authors, your Hollywood agent or your book editor will tell you to raise the stakes to life and death. The dreary result is on-screen violence – shootouts, and fiery crashes, and bloody mayhem. But Anne Tyler quietly and bravely won’t go there. She gives us a no-fault auto accident and a sibling quarrel that ends with punch in the nose.

So how does Tyler do it? How by defying the rules does she engage us? Her narrative slows down to the pace of daily life. She gives us none of her own opinions, but a stream of meticulous detail about meals, clothes, woodwork, plants, weather, money problems, idle thoughts, and petty grievances. And in focusing the marvels of the mundane, she helps us appreciate the joys of living our own ordinary and wonder-filled lives.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #31 – The Professor of Desire – Male-centered fiction – So yesterday?

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Philip Roth is best known for his classic boychik lit coming-of-age story, Portnoy’s Complaint. Remember boychik is Yiddish for a young man with more chutzpah than brains. And, all of Roth’s novels since then seem to be about self-centered males who are thinly disguised extensions of his own fragile ego.

The Professor of Desire is the first-person confession of David Kepesh, an English professor like Roth himself, who obsesses, not about finding love so much as gratifying his urges without feeling too guilty.

We meet him as overprotected young man working in his family’s business. When he wins a scholarship to attend university in London, he has his first adult relationships with a pair of Swedish girls, Elisabeth and Birgitta. Ideal as the situation might seem for a man of his age and lusts, he’s miserable. Elisabeth moves out because he’s inconsiderate. Birgitta stays and is more than willing to please, but her eagerness turns him off.

Flash forward, and David falls for gorgeous supermodel Helen, who led a shadowy past life in Southeast Asia. Ignoring the fact that she must have left her heart there, he worships her, and they marry. One day, she leaves him abruptly for Singapore to take up with her former lover. And not so much because of anything David did or didn’t do, but because she simply doesn’t care enough about him.

Now entering his forties, David takes up with Claire, a sweet shiksa from New England, a caring, sensible woman, and the relationship is too good to be true. Just when David is beginning to suspect he can’t go the distance, his widowed father shows up all excited that his son will finally make a happy marriage.

We don’t get to find out. That’s where the book ends. The Professor of Desire was published in 1977, about the time activists like Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem were redefining feminism. They were mostly successful inspiring a new generation of young women. But Roth seems to be stumbling around, muttering to himself about what it means to be a man. He really doesn’t have a clue.

I didn’t have a chance to include this comment in my radio podcast review, but revisiting this book decades later doesn’t bring any surprises about gender roles in today’s society. But what is striking is the ageism that becomes apparent in Roth’s work. At the end of the novel, David is about forty and his father is past sixty. Roth describes the older man as doddering, forgetful, and foolish. And David’s second-worst fear, after doubting his own worthiness as a companion for Claire, is that his father will die soon. If this book were written today, the portrait of the father would not be credible unless the man were in his eighties. Even then, many mature readers whose minds are still sharp would find the caricature of the senile dad distasteful.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #30 – Back to Blood – In a melting pot, what melts, exactly?

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In his novel Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe savages urban American morality, or lack thereof, by focusing on the melting pot of Miami.

In this city there are more recent immigrants than anywhere else. The races cohabit and wheel and deal, but they mix hardly at all. As one of his characters quips, Everybody hates everybody.

Wolfe’s main character here is Nestor Camacho, a roguish cop of Cuban ancestry who, like so many of his neighbors in Hialeah, barely speaks a word of Spanish. In many ways, Camacho is a hero, often in spite of himself. His good heart and fierce sense of duty carry him into dangerous situations, intrigues, and trouble with his superiors. The driving force of a subplot about a colossal art forgery is preppie newspaperman John Smith, who is also a rogue, and also prone to find all kinds of trouble, much of it newsworthy. And most of the truths he uncovers are inconvenient both for his media bosses and for the mob-style rulers of the social order.

This book shows a lot of skin, as they say. Situations are weird or gross, or both. Wolfe reveals himself to be a dirty old man with a massive vocabulary who will titillate you until you have way too much information. We are self-seeking animals, he seems to say, and most of our decisions and actions are motivated by our most basic desires.

Tom Wolfe’s literary predecessor could well be the nineteenth-century French satirist Honoré de Balzac, who was so alike in his low opinion of human nature and exploitation of its foibles. At heart, Wolfe is a curmudgeonly moralist. Society, he seems to be saying, still needs cops and journalists, who can occasionally be heroes, if they dare to break the rules.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #28 – Griftopia – Who Is Getting Away with What?

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Griftopia by Matt Taibbi is a fascinating, ultra-hip, and more or less comprehensible explanation of the financial bubble burst of 2008. It’s a disturbing investigative report. But let’s get real. We need to understand this stuff if we ever want to think and act like a responsible adults instead of brain-dead, wage-slave entertainment addicts.

Did you know that parking meters in Chicago are now owned by offshore investors? And that other big chunks of our municipal- and state-owned infrastructure, like parks, are being auctioned or leased to foreign interests? All because our government budgets are imploding and your friendly investment bankers have the fix – just sell off the US of A in pieces while they take fat commissions on the deals.

If only chronically curious journalist Matt Tiabbi were some crack-head scribbler who made all this stuff up to sell books. If it weren’t the shameful truth, it would make a very funny movie.

 

Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner – Is it a scam? Harry wonders if he’s being played. Then he wonders, Do I mind?

Book Review: An Eternal Audience of One by Rémy Ngamije (release date August 10, 2021)

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The Eternal Audience of One book cover

Gallery / Scout Press imprint of Simon & Schuster

The book’s title The Eternal Audience of One would seem to refer to the unrepentant self-centeredness of the young male protagonist Séraphin Turihamwe. At an overview level, focusing on entertainment value, the storytelling is a familiar coming-of-age plot, a series of hookups, mostly casual and a few intense – soft-core graphic. What’s exceptional about author Rémy Ngamije’s version are the intrigues of and insights on sexual, racial, and geopolitical strife in today’s southern Africa. Séraphin was born Rwandan, but his educated family emigrates to Windhoek, Namibia in search of both safety and prosperity. As a result, the label refugee gets appended to him, when he and his family expect to be regarded as residents who deserve a place in the country’s rapidly emerging middle class. But no sooner does overachieving student Séraphin begin to adjust than he decides to attend law school at Remms in Cape Town, South Africa. There he is rapidly thrown into a sophisticated urban environment, along with the predictable pressures of trying to balance the obligations of academic achievement and serious partying.

Cocksure Séraphin, who still harbors secret doubts about his social standing, hangs with a posse of fellow students. These men call themselves the High Lords, facilitating their exploits with liberal rounds of alcohol if not drugs. He has left an Afrikaner girlfriend back home in Windhoek to stumble into a series of hookups with young women who are variously white or black. Although he and his fellows don’t discriminate racially as to their choices in partners, they do share stereotypes among themselves about the characteristics, charms, and preferences of each. For example, a group they call the Benevolent White Girls would not think of sleeping with any of them, but those are avid notetakers in class and are eager to help their black brothers crib. As with Séraphin’s chagrin at being called a refugee, many of his mates, although from indigenous ethnicities in neighboring countries, are regarded as foreigners in Cape Town.

So, it’s mostly partying and texting, along with falling in and out of bed, if not in love. Spoiler alert: chick-magnet Séraphin doesn’t quite settle down by the time the Epilogue wraps, but one can expect, if there is a sequel, it will be set in Windhoek and he will be pleading with the High Lords to stand at his side for the ceremony. Or not?

Harry Harambee's Kenyan Sundowner cover

Releasing June 29, 2021 in trade paperback, Kindle, and EPUB. Audiobook in production.

Thinking About Thinking #26 – The Centaur – How did you make it through high school?

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Here’s my book review of The Centaur, a novel by John Updike. This book’s central metaphor from Greek mythology is that Chyron, the noblest of all the centaurs, took pity on humankind. The man-beast sacrificed himself to appease Zeus.

The Chyron of Updike’s story is George Caldwell, a middle-aged high-school teacher in small-town Pennsylvania. Although Caldwell would seem to be the main character, a lot of the narration is by his teenage son Peter. The lad loves his father but wishes the old man had a higher opinion of himself. George thinks he’s a loser, even though he seems to be beloved by most of his students, even the ones who mock him mercilessly.

The father-son relationship is the core of the book. Mother Cassie isn’t much of a character at all unless you sense the compassion between the lines. There isn’t much mythology in it except in bookend chapters that take us in and out. Updike seems to have done his homework and knows his Greek stories. But how those intertwine with the Caldwell family saga is obscure.

Updike’s legacy has been his Rabbit books, much like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. Updike’s came first. I sampled both and I wasn’t drawn to either. Too cynical, too bitter. Does anyone really care whether middle-class white men experience heartache and disappointment? I admit that’s a sarcastic rhetorical question. I haven’t read them all, but I suspect The Centaur might be John Updike’s best book.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #25 – Can you imagine living in the south of France?

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As we think back over the pleasures and pain of the past year, here’s my review of A Good Year by Peter Mayle.

A bored, urbane London career man inherits a rundown vineyard in the Bordeaux region of France. Fortunately, he speaks fluent French and doesn’t act so English as to be spurned by the locals. His predictable romantic adventures with bucolic hotties are not graphic at all, but the descriptions of his meals at the local bistro border on the pornographic. If reading about artfully prepared food and incredible wines get you excited, this is your book.

The wine, of course, is a topic of infinite variety. I’m familiar with rhapsodic descriptions including tastes of chocolate, berry, and oak, but this is the first time I saw “dirty socks” mentioned in connection with the taste of wine.

There’s a bit of a crime story here, nothing so stressful as to inspire a Hollywood blockbuster. Unanswered questions about the history and lore of this French farming community may pique your interest, like an appetizer course, or what the French call an amuse bouche, a tasty morsel to tease the mouth.

The mystery is not much of a crime. The most violent act involves spitting into a crachoir (a spittoon for wine tasters), which as the Brits might say is a bloody shame, especially if the wine contains just the right hint of dirty sock.

But if in the midst of winter, you’re tempted to escape to the south of France, reading The Good Year is a quick and inexpensive vacation.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #24 – Do you speak the Bard’s English?

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Ever since I learned that Gerald and Shakespeare both mean “spear chucker,” I’ve had a long-standing Jones for the Bard. Quite coincidentally, a colleague recently suggested that I’d enjoy anything written by Bill Bryson. My friend suggested A Walk in the Woods or A Short History of Nearly Everything. The first sounded too much like a mossy travelogue and the ambitious scope of the second seemed far too cumbersome for casual sampling. So Bryson’s biography, Shakespeare: The World As Stage, was the irresistible choice for me.

I can now agree that Bryson may be the most entertaining nonfiction writer I’ve ever read. He dares to be a stylist in these days of plain-vanilla journalism, and that is praiseworthy in itself. Perhaps it’s in the blood: His father was a sportswriter with the flair of an H. L. Menken or a Heywood Hale Broun.

Apparently Bryson was assigned to write Shakespeare as an entry in the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books (a HarperCollins imprint, a News Corporation subsidiary, a Viacom competitor, and a prize possession of Rupert Murdoch et al). Right off, Bryson seems bewildered that so much material has been generated about the most illustrious English dramatist — and most of it on scanty and even nonexistent evidence. You can almost hear Bryson implore, “I got stuck with writing this, now how do I fill a few hundred pages without making stuff up?”

Chandos Portrait of William Shakespeare

He starts by describing the Chandos portrait (shown here), and after tantalizing us with intriguing details about the wealth of the sitter (apparent from the dark clothes, which require lots of expensive dye) to the earring (as rakish on a man then as now), the embarrassed biographer bestows the fact that no one knows whether this most famous likeness is actually the person we’ve been told it is.

Bryson chatters on, quite amusingly, making much ado about nothing as he overturns reams of research. Perhaps because statistics offer some hope of solid evidence, he informs us that Shakespeare’s vocabulary included about 20,000 words. You probably know about 50,000, but today’s world is a more complex place. But — and here’s the astounding factoid — when Shakespeare couldn’t find an appropriate word, he apparently made one up.

In fact, Shakespeare contributed about 800 words to your 50K. Among these coinages are: abstemious, antipathy, assassination, barefaced, critical, eventful, excellent, frugal, indistinguishable, leapfrog, lonely, well-read, zany, and, as Bryson quips, countless others, including countless.

Suffice it to say Shakespeare must have had a fairly deep knowledge of Latin and Romance-language root words and syllables, to so effectively concoct and combine new polysyllabic English ones. Is this more grist for the grinders who allege Shakespeare was in fact someone else? Bryson does not comment specifically, but he does a credible job of debunking various Baconian and Marlovian speculations later in the book.

Shakespeare’s turns of a phrase also enhanced the language. Many of his inventions are cliches of modern speech (Bryson’s compilation): one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father of the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, and foregone conclusion.

The King James Bible was a new translation back then. Most spiritual and scholarly works were still being written in Latin. So the English Bible and Shakespeare’s plays apparently contributed more to our daily discourse than you’d think.

I plan to read lots more Bryson, and thanks to him I now admire William Shakespeare (whoever he was) more than ever.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #23 – Can you enjoy a story you don’t understand?

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Here’s my book review of Invisible by Paul Auster.

First off, there are many books with the title Invisible. Make sure you get the right one. Paul Auster writes fascinating literary novels, which are often baffling. This book presents three interwoven versions of the same story as told by three different narrators.

Main character Adam Walker is a young poet in New York. Soon after graduation he meets a worldly couple at a party – Frenchman Rudolph Born and his mistress Margot. Born is an international man of mystery, an unscrupulous character who may be con-man or spy or both. Margot is a seductress. Born helps Walker hook up with Margot, and the first plot complication is a love triangle.

Born pulls Walker into a publishing venture, and then – out of the blue – he murders a man in front of him on the street. He intimidates Walker into helping him cover it up.

Walker is now carrying a burden of guilt that will haunt him forever. When he thinks Born and Margot are out of his life, Walker has a love affair with his own sister. More guilt.

Walker tries to make sense of it all by writing an autobiographical novel. When circumstances prevent him from completing it, he challenges his friend Jim, who is also a writer, to finish the story. Jim then narrates the next part of the book, describing what he’s been able to discover about Walker’s past.

In a third narrative, a French woman named Cécile narrates. She was a minor character earlier in the story, but now she’s center stage. She met Walker by way of Born. She was in love with Walker and tormented by Born. Near the end of the book, she meets up with Born, and he tries to pull her into yet another of his traps.

The book ends on a final scene which seems to have no connection to Walker’s story. Like his protagonist Walker, Auster is a poet. It’s up to the reader to find meaning in this concluding image. This plot is complex and not easily understood. But Invisible isn’t a pulp-fiction whodunit. In the end, you probably don’t have all the facts, and the facts you do have, may not even be true.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #22 – Musicianship – When can a band come out of the garage?

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The topic of this book review is musicianship.

Musicianship is a common theme of three different stories. The first is An Equal Music, a novel by Vikram Seth about a European string quartet. Another about chamber musicians in New York is the movie A Late Quartet. The third, and most unusual, is The Bear Comes Home, a novel by Rafi Zabor.

Musicianship is the first thing you notice about any band. Do you hear individual instruments and voices or a mellow blend? Inexperienced amateurs are too concerned with projecting their personal sound. Professionals know that listening to each other is a measure of not only artistry, but also of generosity.

In An Equal Music, a violinist who plays in a chamber quartet carries on a love affair with an accomplished pianist. The main issue with them is mutual trust, which is also the crucial element that binds a successful quartet. However, one of them has been slowly growing deaf and is hiding it from the other. As we learn, a relationship can work, for a while, even if it is not based on truth, but on a willingness to agree.

In A Late Quartet, the second violinist and the violist are married to each other. The violinist is having doubts about his playing, which leads a brief affair with a dancer. The arrogant first violinist is giving music lessons to his colleagues’ talented daughter. He betrays his bond to them by allowing the girl to seduce him. Again, it’s all about trust and cooperation, sometimes in spite of the underlying truth.

In The Bear Comes Home, the bear in the title is an alto sax player who is crazy about jazz, girls, and Shakespeare. He’s not a bearlike man, he’s a furry animal. And, he’s beset by the blues. Oddly, he blames his difficulties getting along with his human musician friends on everything except his essential bearishness. His situation reminds us how immigrants must feel, knowing they’re so much like the rest of us, while we can only see their differences.

Musicianship – it’s about collaboration, and what it takes for all us kids to play nice. Not just in music, but in personal relationships and even in international negotiations.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.