Tag Archives: literary fiction

Thinking About Thinking #9 – What century-old fakery still incites the mob?

Here’s my book review of The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco.

This novel is no less than an attempt to trace the origins of anti-Semitism in Europe over the last two centuries. Author Umberto Eco’s story is a partially true but barely believable plot behind the multiple versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a racist tract that inspired Naziism. Eco’s account is narrated by the one character he admits to being fictional, Simonini, a master forger who made a living not only creating official documents but also fabricating the facts and stories they contained. The plot suggests that this man was hired to create the The Protocols as a deliberate hoax to incite hatred and build a political power base.

Eco has been a lifetime student of occultist movements and secret societies, including the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and various anti-clerical, anti-Papist, anti-royalist, anarchist, and, yes, anti-Semitic political and religious groups, including their agent provocateurs.

Behind this story is a general conclusion about the nature of conspiracy. In this web of loosely woven plots, conspiracy is not a masterfully directed and highly coordinated effort. It is, instead, a monstrous disease that has no direction other than its own propagation. It has no head and no permanently governing body. Spanning generations, it goes wherever it feeds best, and it serves whomever will feed and sustain it. It likewise destroys, not a specific enemy, but any person, group, or ideology the persecution of which will benefit, even for the short term, the feeders of conspiracy.

In short, it has been convenient for various groups at various times to promote hatred of marginalized social groups. But as Eco demonstrates, this agenda has  much more to do with consolidating power than with persecuting or exterminating the  victims.

Ultimately, it’s about political expediency and rousing the emotions of the masses – not to destroy an enemy but to enrich their persecutors.

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 #8 – Do forgotten stories affect you more?

My Voice Will Go with You illustrates vividly the power of a story to transform thinking and behavior – immediately. The accompanying commentary by author Sidney Rosen tells why each story is effective in changing behavior.

Psychiatrist Milton Erickson is regarded as the father of neurolinguistic programming, or NLP. This book is a collection of very short stories he told clients who were in a trance state as a means of reprogramming their thinking about a problem they brought to him. Erickson believed that stories heard and then forgotten have the most power over future actions. That’s because, once the conscious, censoring mind has ceased analyzing the experience, the persistent memory of the story can percolate in the unconscious.

 

My Voice Will Go with You. I sincerely hope it does!

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 #7 – A Curious Mind – What’s More Important? Curiosity or Imagination?

Here’s my book review of a curious mind by Brian Grazer, Hollywood mega-producer.

Brian Grazer is well known for his commercial and artistic successes, but I don’t believe he has any particular academic credentials as an educator. Nevertheless, teachers and parents everywhere should adopt the mantra of A Curious Mind:

Encouraging and stimulating curiosity should be the first priority of education.

Now, you’d think such a notion would be obvious. Apparently, it’s not – in this country, at least. The emphasis on standardized test results necessarily limits the permissible range of student curiosity. Teachers have to go by the book, as well. There’s the risk of embarrassment. Teachers and parents may not be comfortable with student queries, for which they have no ready answers:

  • What was before the Big Bang?
  • How many termites would it take to eat a house?
  • How can I get an agent?

Grazer admits he never finished law school. He took a job as a legal clerk at Warner Brothers. His duties involved running contracts to the offices in private homes of agents, producers, directors, and stars. He made a deliberate decision to use these meetings for what today we’d call networking. He’d insist that he was under strict instructions to hand-deliver the documents to the high-powered addressee. More often than not, he’d be received warmly and invited to sit and chat. And that’s when he says his curiosity took over. He engaged moguls and celebrities in conversation by asking them questions about themselves. And they were usually more than happy to talk.

Grazer cautions in the book that he never asked any of these new acquaintances for favors. He simply learned their likes and dislikes, their foibles and their fantasies. He thus learned the business from the inside, by politely asking question after question after question. So it was that exercising his genuine interest in people gave Brian Grazer the ability to work a room – and eventually a company town in a global industry.

But his curiosity didn’t stop there. He came to realize that the entertainment business was too confining to feed his curious mind. “For thirty-five years,” he writes, “I’ve been tracking down people about whom I was curious and asking if I could sit down with them for an hour. My only rule for myself was that the people had to be from the outside – from outside the world of movies and TV.”

A Curious Mind is essentially a celebrity autobiography. Grazer discloses that coauthor Charles Fishman wrote drafts based on a series of in-person interviews with him. It is an engaging story. And its scope extends beyond the basic notion of investigation is education to include the arc of a producer’s remarkable career and open-minded outlook on life.

As for Fishman, co-writers, ghosts, and editors face a difficult task in subordinating their own personal styles so they can capture their client’s unique voice. He is to be commended for capturing both Grazer’s still-boyish enthusiasm and his Hollywood savvy to generalize from all this. If you can stimulate curiosity in a child, you don’t even have to point it to the library.

There’s this new thing called Google. I wonder, was the Bing search engine name for Crosby or that sound you hear in your head when the light comes on?

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 #6 – Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind – Is EVERYBODY crazy?


It’s understandable that people in lockdown go stir crazy. But some brain specialists believe that mental stability is a delicate balance for everyone, all the time. Here’s another work of literary fiction that will get you thinking about thinking.

I offer for your thoughtful consideration Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe.

If you’re in therapy or considering it, you may find this novel unsettling. But perhaps also strangely comforting. It’s about Manhattan psychiatrist Dr. Estelle Berman, and two of her colleagues – middle-aged men identified only as Dr. H and Dr. Z. Most of the other characters in the book are their students or their patients. And all of these lives intersect and become entangled.

To some of her patients and even her friends, Dr. Berman can seem cold and calculating. She thinks of herself as wise and practical. All of the therapists in this story are trying improve the lives of their patients, who range from troubled to disturbed, many of them needing medication but not hospitalization.

There’s Justine, the gorgeous young movie star, who is anorexic and a kleptomaniac. There’s homely and lonely Anne, who fears she’s unlovable and gets coaxed out of the closet, only to be jilted. And the doctors refer their own children to each other for treatment. Dr. Z’s daughter Ronit is stressed because she can’t get pregnant, then Dr. Z is stressed about the possible complications when he finds out she’s carrying twins.

These are psychiatric case histories flavored with personal drama. We get insight into the mental processes and disorders of the patients, as well as those of their doctors. Because from Roiphe’s vantage point, all human minds are troubled. It’s just that some of us live with our demons better than others.

This is Anne Roiphe’s tenth novel, and she’s been described as a first-generation feminist. She’s also done nonfiction books and articles on family issues and mental health. She has an insider’s grasp of the psychiatric profession, and at times it’s not at all flattering.

Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind is a peek into the tangled psyches of a few intelligent people, most of them well-to-do and white, in today’s New York City. To paraphrase the narrator of the old TV series, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is just a few of them.” And whether outwardly healthy or visibly disturbed, each of us suffers daily from self-doubt, jealousy, rage, guilt, arrogance, fears, phobias, and nightmares.

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 #5 – The Map and the Territory – Does genius boggle the mind?

It’s perhaps a stereotype that great artists are tortured souls. Here’s a murky book by a quirky novelist. And it’s fascinating, even if I don’t quite understand it all.

Here’s my review of The Map and the Territory by contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

This author is unabashedly and unashamedly literary and intellectual. Those of us on this side of the pond who fret about novels and commercialism and fads and attention spans and the general lack of receptiveness for ideas can only envy the opportunity to wax philosophical and not only get away with it, but also actually sell books.

This is the story of a fine artist, Jed Martin, and the rationale behind various distinct phases of his work. It is also a police procedural about a ghastly murder. One connection is that the murder was performed in such a way as to create a work of art. This second story has very little to do with the main plot line of Jed’s work life. Jed’s difficult relationship with his aging master-architect father is a subplot upon which many heady sub-themes are hung, including the history and philosophy of architecture, the relationship between habitation and quality of life, and no less than the fate of civilization.

In perhaps the most stunning stroke of hubris in a work chockfull of it, occurring some way into the narrative so it’s a surprise when it comes, Houellebecq makes himself a principal character. By name. The relationship between life and art is open to question – that is, between the physical description of the French novelist, his eccentricities, and his volatile temperament. The Houellebecq in the narrative is not what you’d call a nice person – and certainly not someone you’d probably consider taking on as a friend. The author seems proud he’s alienating you, else why talk so unashamedly of his body odor and atrocious manners?

Main character Martin’s life is well-to-do Parisian, but mundane. He has an extended affair, off and on, with a Russian media executive named Olga. She is one hot babe, apparently, but even she can’t hold his interest. She did abandon him for a time, and perhaps an infantile ego can never forgive the ultimate insult of abandonment.

I’m somewhat mystified. I may reread it someday to study what I missed on first reading, which is probably a lot. I do know that, based on his descriptions of Martin’s paintings, I’d love to see them. I expect they would be photorealistic and iconic – like the old Chinese Communist propaganda posters. One of the delights of the book is imagining what these fictional works would look like.

My mystery-thriller about art history, which centers on a scandal rather than a forgery, is Bonfire of the Vanderbilts.

A hundred-year-old secret locked is in a painting. The painting’s owner, Los Angeles Museum of Art, refuses to admit I got it right. But, hey, it’s fiction, the art historians say. Why should anyone take it seriously? What, according to my decades-long research into this painting that obsessed me so, did Cornelius Vanderbilt II not want you to know? Hint: Vanderbilt and his reputed mentor, banker J. P. Morgan, were rivals in the Episcopal Church hierarchy, each claiming to be more righteous than the other.

Thinking About Thinking #4 – The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey – What if you found new romance at the end of your life?

I’m reposting this review because the limited TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson just came out on Apple TV! Watch it!

Walter Mosley is best known for his prolific detective fiction. But this book is a fond, thoughtful story about a man who finds reasons to live just when he doesn’t have much time left.

Here’s my book review.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey isn’t a whodunit. It’s artful, introspective literary fiction about a 91-year-old man near the end of his life.

Ptolemy Grey lives by himself in a shabby one-bedroom apartment in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. His place is stacked with the trash of a lifetime. You see, he hasn’t paid any attention to it since he woke up one morning to find his beloved last wife Sensia lying dead beside him.

When Sensia passed, he threw a tarp over everything in the bedroom and closed the door. He now sleeps on a mattress under a table in the kitchen. He rarely goes out, except when his grand-nephew Reggie walks him to the store for a few meager supplies. And he’s terrified to open the door for anyone.

The narrative is full of Ptolemy’s fretful thoughts. He has outlived almost all of his closest friends and loved ones. And early in this story, he finds that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Another nephew, Hilly, drops by to take him to Reggie’s wake. There Ptolemy meets Robyn, a gorgeous, slender girl who is about to turn eighteen. She decides to take care of him, becoming his last love, albeit platonic, but intense as any of the romances in his long life.

As Ptolemy says to her:  I love you and I couldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for you taking care of me. And if you were twenty years older and I fifty years less I’d ask you to be my wife and not a soul on this earth would have ever had better.

This may well be Walter Mosley’s best book.

In 2013 actor Samuel L. Jackson said in an interview with Red Carpet News TV that he had acquired the movie rights to Ptolemy Grey. Just released! Watch it!

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 #1 – The Sense of an Ending

Is this a candid photo of author and show host Gerald Everett Jones? No. When I tried to grow a beard it never looked this good. This guy is probably about my age, though, and his is the mood I want to share with you – thinking about thinking. Thinking about writers and writing. Thinking about reading. And thinking on those thoughts and emotions that writing and reading stir in us.

So I’m starting a series of posts with my book reviews of literary fiction – the kind of stuff that, well, made me think.

My first suggestion is The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. A few years ago, it won the Man Booker Prize. It was an inspiration for my own Clifford’s Spiral, which won Distinguished Favorite in the Independent Press Awards last year.

It’s about trying to make sense of what you remember about your life’s experiences.

You will either be fascinated by The Sense of an Ending, or it just might infuriate you.

Main character Tony Webster is middle-aged and reflecting back on his life. Just when he thinks he has it all sorted, he has to cope with troublesome consequences from choices he made as a young man. He has to face the possibility that he may have been responsible for his best friend’s death, and he may be the father of an illegitimate child.

The two people who know the facts are gone. The third isn’t talking, and her diary, which could have revealed everything, is probably lost.

Barnes shows us how Tony rewrites history so as to make himself the hero of his own story. Or, at the very least, justify his actions. And, so do all of us. Families, communities, and nations continually adjust the favorable light on their actions over time.

Why might you be infuriated? Because, bravely I think for an author, Barnes provides only the sense of an ending.

The following analysis won’t make any sense at all unless you’ve already read the book.

[So, quadruple spoiler alert!]

To recap, Tony was in love with Veronica and best friends with Adrian. Adrian married Veronica and then ended his own life. This much, Tony believes he knows. Adrian left a cryptic formula that may have been meant as a suicide note.

In terms of overt clues and Adrian’s equation, Adrian had an affair (perhaps not so brief, near the end of his life) with Veronica’s mother Sarah, who bore a child, also named Adrian, who was later sent (after Sarah’s death?) to a caregiver facility.

What nags at Tony at the end is that there are other possibilities that could fit the evidence better. Unless Veronica spills it, or the telltale diary is not burnt after all, Tony can never know for sure. In all scenarios he’s guilty, in some achingly more than in others.

The child could have been Veronica’s by Adrian or by Tony. The memory of a trip to the river seems to imply a night of unprotected, romantic sex. Sarah might have cared for the baby when Veronica couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Veronica’s pregnancy would have been when she and Adrian were newlyweds. He might have died thinking the baby was his. Or sure that it wasn’t. Or not sure at all and tormented by it.

Tony says the child (seen now as a young man) looks like the presumed father, his old friend Adrian. But did Tony look like Adrian? Is Tony looking into a mirror and denying the familiarity he sees? Is Tony’s remarking on the resemblance a clue to throw us off the track?

The child could have been Sarah’s by Tony. This strange possibility best explains: 1) Sarah’s bequest, 2) Veronica’s rage, and 3) Sarah’s enigmatic parting gesture to Tony, implying a secret they shared (that she’d seduced him during his visit). The fact that Tony has repressed the memory of the sex act (but not the washing up after) would seem totally implausible, except in the context of this book which is all about how our minds rewrite history to suit our opinion of ourselves.

You might well ask, “Huh?”

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“Must Read” Review of Clifford’s Spiral on Reedsy Discovery

I want to thank Dorothyanne Brown for her Must Read rating with five stars and review of Clifford’s Spiral on the Reedsy Discovery book-fan website  @reedsydiscovery She’s not an acquaintance of mine (unlike some of my diligent beta reviewers), but no doubt from her observations she is a kindred soul. Her bio states that she is a retired nurse. She’s currently writing a fiction trilogy as well as a self-help book for people with multiple sclerosis and other brain conditions. I’m sure her insights on the clinical aspects informed her review of Clifford Klovis’s struggle to make sense of reality after he’s had a major stroke.

She also appreciated the humor in it. #booklovers #litfic #newrelease

Dorothyanne wonders:

Where would your mind go, if you were trapped after a stroke? Would you find happy memories? Regrets? Or philosophic meanderings?

And here’s her conclusion:

Despite Clifford’s grumpy uncooperative self, the reader can’t help but cheer for him, hope he will release his chosen silence, and be able to speak again. Clifford is so well-drawn, and his life stories capture the reader so completely that you forgive him his vanity and selfishness, and wish the book was longer so you could hang out with him longer. Highly recommended. You will want to read this more than once.

You can read the full review here on Reedsy Discovery.

If you like this review and the book please click the Upvote button at the top of the review to recommend Clifford’s Spiral to fans of literary fiction.

SYNOPSIS

Clifford’s Spiral is a quirkily comic literary novel. Its sardonic tone recalls the wry wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut, and its preoccupation with male centeredness is reminiscent of Philip Roth. Stroke survivor Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. He fusses over his lifelong curiosities about astrophysics and metaphysics, Christian faith and New Age philosophy, and why the spiral shape appears in bathtub drains and at the centers of galaxies. He has imaginary conversations and arguments with wives and lovers, as well as with Hypatia of Alexandria, René Descartes, his old mentor Reverend Thurston, and Stephen Hawking. Clifford’s best teacher turns out to be his paraplegic son Jeremy, who has found his father’s old letters and journals. Jeremy also wonders: Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?

More books by Gerald Everett Jones.

The author has no clothes!

Clifford's Spiral book cover

Cover photo by konstantynov © 123RF.com

Just released in paperback and Kindle, Clifford’s Spiral is a comic, psychological literary novel. As you might know, this type of fiction is frustratingly difficult to market. And I fretted so much about this problem that I had intended to wait until later this year to release it, if ever. Instead, I wrote Preacher Finds a Corpse, a mystery-thriller, hoping I could draw fans to a more commercial series (which I still fully intend to continue.)

Well, you know that joke about how to make God laugh? Preacher is all set for an August 12 release date (the Audible audiobook is already available), but then I happened to read about the Amazon Kindle Storyteller competition.

To be eligible for Storyteller, the digital version of the book must be exclusive to Amazon via the Kindle Select program. For that reason, Preacher won’t qualify. The other major rule is, eligible books must be created and distributed using the Kindle Direct Publishing website and released no later than August 31.

So much for my plans to set Clifford free in November. It’s on Amazon now.

Here’s my pitch to you. Although Clifford’s Spiral is not a memoir, it does follow William Goldman’s time-honored advice that everything in an author’s life is material. And, yes, I’ve lived long enough to use it. It’s heavily fictionalized, of course, should you happen to think you see yourself in its pages.

The Kindle version will be available free THIS WEEK from July 1 – 5. Click here to get your copy.

If instead you prefer your summer reading in beach-friendly, sand-resistant format, you can buy the paperback here.

If you then are so kind as to post a gentle review on Amazon, you will 1) give Clifford’s Spiral a boost in the Storyteller competition and 2) incur my never-ending gratitude, along with a promise never to divulge which character you are in the book!

Oh, and here’s the story. Stroke survivor Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. He fusses over his lifelong curiosities about astrophysics and metaphysics, Christian faith and New Age philosophy, and why the spiral shape appears in bathtub drains and at the centers of galaxies. He has imaginary conversations and arguments with wives and lovers, as well as with Hypatia of Alexandria, René Descartes, his old mentor Reverend Thurston, and Stephen Hawking. Clifford’s best teacher turns out to be his paraplegic son Jeremy, who has found his father’s old letters and journals.
Jeremy also wonders: Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis? # # #