The Netanyahus

 The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen deserved its Pulitzer Prize. It's a quick read, but it covers quite a scope for what the plot actually entails. Simply, a (fictional) Jewish professor of History anticipates and then hosts Benzion Netanyahu, who is applying for a job at his college. I mention that the professor is fictional, because we later learn that much of the story is rooted in fact. During the interview process, Netanyahu has to teach a Bible class, deliver a lecture on the Middle Ages, and hobnob with the faculty. This provides opportunities to ask larger questions about Jewish identity and Israel. These subjects are explored thoroughly and with seriousness, and yet somehow, the book is often very funny in its interpersonal dynamics. 

I haven't read Joshua Cohen until now, and I plan on reading more. He recalls many strong traits of writers I've loved for a while. The campus foibles of Saul Bellow's characters come through, as does the comic slapstick of Philip Roth. (Sentence by sentence, Cohen is as good as those two.) I recalled Zadie Smith's exploration of the American Black experience in On Beauty; only for Cohen, it's the spectrum of American Jewish life. The piecemeal nature of the novel reminded me of Jennifer Egan. The domestic scenes of 1950s America evoke John Cheever or Richard Yates. In this sense, The Netanyahus is a tribute to twentieth-century American fiction, and given who it's dedicated to (I won't spoil it), it's a worthy achievement. 

Wolf Hall

 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was like reading a Jim Shepherd short story that lasted for six hundred pages: it was brilliant. I read the historical novel during class, before bed, whenever I could hide from my children. Mantel recently died, and the subsequent memorials reminded me that I'd meant to read her, to discover  her Booker-Prize winning oeuvre. Part of the pleasure of diving into that gripping book was knowing that it was the first in a weighty trilogy, and that I could enjoy this world for untold future months. I lack patience for long-form television shows, but I imagine that the feeling of finding a good new show is the same. 

Wolf Hall is the first in Mantel's Thomas Cromwell series. It charts his rise from working for Cardinal Wolsey to working for Henry VIII, ending with the execution of Thomas More. As a sophomore at a Catholic High School, I had seen the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, and was under the impression that More was a pious martyr, the last innocent voice in a corrupt government. Wolf Hall did not disabuse me from Tudor corruption, but it also indicted More's violence and fanaticism. Everything was dark; everyone was complicit. Throughout, Mantel imbued the novel with excellent pacing, dreamlike happenings, rare moments of transcendence, and lofty religious consideration. Here's to Wolf Hall, and here's to the late Hilary Mantel. 

Westering Man

 Westering Man: The Life of Joseph Walker by Bil Gilbert is a fascinating portrait of a life, a territory, and an era. The titular character was one of the great mountain men, and his story spans from Tennessee to California, from 1798 to 1876. Walker was an extraordinary explorer, but he was not given to self-promotion. He rarely wrote down anything he did, so big periods of his life are more or less lost to history. This actually makes for good reading, because Gilbert is then forced to explain the economic, military, anthropological, geologic, and historical forces in the largely indigenous American West. In other words, you may not know exactly what Walker did in New Mexico in 1820, but you'll learn a lot about that region in that time. Biographical inferences can be drawn from these details. Gilbert is thorough and engaging: the book is rich in facts but reads more like good reportage than a textbook.

Joseph Walker was the first white man to see large swaths of the continent. He was the first European to see Yosemite, for example. He found gold in Arizona. He led the first Americans overland to the California Coast. He has a Sierra pass named for him, along with a Nevada river and lake. He discouraged the Donner Party from taking the Hastings Cutoff. He maintained amicable relations with myriad Native American tribes, Mexican governors, British trappers, and ex-Confederate soldiers. Reading Westering Man, I spent a good deal of time reflecting on places I've traveled to and through. I thought of Utah, Arizona, Missouri. The east side of the Sierras, there in Owens Valley between Mt. Whitney and the Panamint Range, especially came to mind. I'm traveling to Death Valley this November. I know that as I drive down 395, the view bright and arid and open, I'll be thinking of Joseph Walker. 

The Copenhagen Trilogy

 The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen is an absorbing read. Ditlevsen was a Danish writer during and after the German occupation of Copenhagen, and this trilogy--ominously titled Childhood, Youth, and Dependency--recounts her early life, relationships, and addiction to opiates. She is born in poverty, the child of an unhappy marriage. Her early education yields a talent for writing poetry. Unable to continue school past her mid-teens, she works a series of mundane and abusive office jobs. Recognized for her writing, she marries a much older editor of a literary magazine not for love, but for a chance to escape her social class. Bad lovers are a motif in The Copenhagen Trilogy. On one hand, Ditlevsen wants stability and peace that her childhood lacked. On the other hand, she has trouble navigating the sexual fluidity of her post-Christian bohemian milieu. After an adulterous one-night stand with a medical student, she becomes pregnant with his child. She comes to him to receive an abortion, and is given Demerol as an anesthetic. 

The first two parts of The Copenhagen Trilogy are poetic and interesting. The final installment is terrifying. That first dose of Demerol makes the room expand "to a radiant hall, and [her] feel completely relaxed, lazy and happy as never before." The word "Demerol" sounds, to her, "like birdsong." The longing for that "indescribable blissful feeling" overturns her life. She leaves her husband for the reckless and enabling med student, indifferent to her  previous obligations. There are times when the reader wants to intervene in Ditlevsen's early relational bunglings, to tell her to stop when it's clear that she's picking the wrong man, but during Dependency, one can only observe in horror as her whole life becomes consumed with Demerol and methadone. Ditlevesen died in 1977, and when The Copenhagen Trilogy was finally translated into English a few years ago, it made a big impression. It's hard going, but she was an important, talented, and tragic voice. 

The English Countryside

 Most of my reading this summer has been in two novels: The Bell by Iris Murdoch and Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It was my first time reading both authors, and I found it rewarding. Murdoch, writing in the Modernist tradition, has a unique philosophical perspective, and her story centered on a failed religious community, far from a city, outside a convent of cloistered nuns. The tensions between personal desires and communal ideals drove the narrative. Hardy, a late Victorian, told a more straightforward marriage plot among simple farmers. I knew almost nothing about the novels going in, and enjoyed the surprising and believable unfolding of events in both stories.

Both writers had a great sense of setting. For Murdoch, a native bird motif highlighted the various discrepancies in her characters. Hardy described the skies and changing seasons in beautiful, elevated vignettes. He shifted to writing only poetry later in life, and his talent is clear in Far from the Madding Crowd. An important character, Gabriel Oak, represents nature, and the scenes of him quietly working a farm away from any other civilized influences are often breathtaking and transcendental. It is easy to be caught up in the frantic, often absurd, romantic exploits of the noisier characters and to forget Gabriel Oak going about his business. But as is the way with nature, steadiness and constancy win out in the end. 

Play It As It Lays

 Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion is like an old friend. I read it every few years, usually in less than a week, and admire it every time. Her story of mid-twentieth-century ennui and malaise is a rare perfect novel: I wouldn't change a single word. It does exactly what it sets out to do, and its laser focus (highlighted by brief chapters, some only a paragraph long) serves the bleakness of its subject. Maria Wyeth, the absorbing protagonist, drifts through each page like a character in a Beach House song. The whole pharmacy of palliative drugs--Dexedrine, Seconal, Edrisal, tetracyline capsules, ergot tablets, Nembutal--that course through her system do not, in fact, solve her persistent nihilism. Play It As It Lays is a spiritual descendent of another perfect novel, The Sun Also Rises, and is just as powerful. There are parts of the novel that I intentionally don't read before I sleep at night, and I don't agree with Maria's conclusions about the universe. There are only a few people to whom I would actually recommend this book. Still, its journey into the "hard white empty core of the world" is as masterfully rendered as anything I've ever read. 

The Marriage Plot

 The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is a great read. I was reminded of Philip Roth, Chad Harbach, and Zadie Smith. The novel traces a love triangle--two men in love with the same woman, all graduating an Ivy League school--with the explicit weight and implications of its title. The characterization was among the best I've ever read: each person felt believable, sympathetic, and wrought with problems. Each perspective was told in close third person with smart, overlapping narratives. As the threads tangled and departed, The Marriage Plot dove luxuriously into topics as diverse as literary criticism, religious devotion, mental illness, travel, sexuality, and class conflicts. Eugenides is a master craftsman. No part of the novel lagged, and he was able to balance the thorough ruminations with brisk dialogue and surprising set pieces. I am strongly motivated to read The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, Eugenides's more famous novels, after this one.

The only thing that gave me pause is the thing I can't describe: the ending. The Marriage Plot, in fact, has a plot. There is rising action, a climax, a resolution. My inclination and temperament drives me to weirdo meandering Euro novels by people like Knausgaard and Cusk, stories with no clear direction, on purpose. Broadly speaking, I appreciate a resolution only if it's tragic. This novel, on the other hand, had an ending that was strangely morally satisfying, like a Zadie Smith novel or a Wes Anderson movie. But it was even more constructed than both of those. So I wasn't disappointed, really. Nor did I disbelieve the conclusion. But it was the one place where there seemed to be a hint of artifice. Eugenides is a genius, and part of me wonders if this was a deliberate nod to earlier, 19th-century texts that the book references in places. I don't know. I finished The Marriage Plot yesterday, and I'm turning it over in my mind. 

Sometimes a Great Notion

 Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey is the Great Oregon Novel. It's a triumph of craft and form; it accurately captures the coastal Oregon landscape; its drama is big and mythic and deeply felt. I'd read Sometimes a Great Notion about 15 years ago, and I was driven back to it by the nagging lack of logger voices in Richard Powers's The Overstory*. Boy, it holds up. It's hard to read any scene with the character Hank Stamper without clenching your fists in defiant, vitriolic cussedness. I've never read a novel that plays with point-of-view as much: in the same paragraph the perspective might change seven times over four different narrative voices. And the plot builds and builds and builds and ends, well, exactly where it should end. A terrific book.

There's too much to go over in a space this small. The history, the meditations on politics/spirituality/gender/family/vengeance/free will/race/et al., the brawling conflict, the characterization . . . each could be a dissertation. I'll just focus on the setting. Kesey absolutely nails the depiction of the Coast Range. His account is that of a native son. Not only is it expertly described in its physical detail, but the amorphous spiritual effects of climate on the characters is perfect. The town and river in the novel are fictional, but they could be anywhere from Tillamook down to about Bandon. Read in 2022, the attitude is shocking. Kesey, in his accurate endemic telling, avoids the hippie sentimentalizing that most later Oregon writers (and imitators) attach to the land. His Oregon isn't a nurturing mother, it's a combative alien. You aren't welcome here. Hank Stamper understood this early--in a heartbreaking flashback--and he raised his fist against the coastal river throughout. It wasn't enough. As the loggers raged against the forest, the river rose and rose and swallowed the characters, the house, the family conflict, the whole narrative. 

*Mentioned on this very blog . . .

Edisto

 Edisto by Padgett Powell is a short, strange coming-of-age novel from the American South. It is immediately singular and disorienting, and the reader is forced to accept each sentence, each paragraph, one after another until a hazy picture begins to emerge. It never fully does. That's a strength, overall. Powell is a writer's writer: my edition boasts cover blurbs from Donald Barthelme, Walker Percy, and even Saul Bellow. Trying to make sense of it, I was reminded of Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead, in that the narrator and characters existed in a weird backwater of rural customs and bizarre syntax. 

Even with some distance from reading it, I don't know what to make of Edisto. It was funny, often. The events rarely made sense. I think I liked the book . . . and I haven't hurried to read more Padgett Powell. To enter that world again will require a rare, mysterious inclination. Maybe in a decade or two. 

South and West

 South and West by Joan Didion probably shouldn't have been published. The very small book is only a collection of notes on two essays that she didn't finish in the 1970's. She traveled through the southern United States; she considered writing about Patty Hearst. It's unpolished and incohesive and admits lacking any overall theme. 

And yet. It's a testament to Didion's brilliance--during her most fruitful writing period--that this detritus is better than almost anything I've read recently. She just drives around and talks to people and makes flash judgments, and it's all fantastic. I loved South and West. It was funny and poignant and astute. Her aborted essay notes (it occurs to me that "notes" is an underrated nonfiction genre) were a true pleasure to read, and nothing has so inspired me to begin writing again as this funny little book. May we long celebrate Joan Didion. 

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics

 Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson is a comprehensive account of the formation and strategy of the world's favorite game. I am a huge soccer fan--though a relatively recent one--and I understood about 70 % of the book. Most of the book was wonky tactics and ancient heroes, but I found the whole was satisfying. Could I relate how Hungary's system in 1953 anticipated the 4-2-4? Not really. Do I have a greater respect for the evolution of the game? Yes, certainly. The last chapters in particularly were helpful, as they explained the predilections of current coaches. The more I watch soccer, the more I learn, and I may go back to this book in five years' time and understand it much better.

Kim Ji-young, Born 1982

 Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo is in the Uncle Tom's Cabin genre of novels: obvious and didactic, but sympathetic because its subject matter is important. Cho's novel has caused an enormous sensation in its native South Korea, I imagine because it bluntly hammers at women's ongoing oppression. For that, I wish it well. The novel describes a wasteland of double-standards and ingrained sexism that ultimately causes its titular character a nervous breakdown. It hits that one note over and over, and even footnotes the cultural brutality in case readers didn't believe the descriptions were accurate. As a work of art, it's a rough read, but as a fictional manifesto, I hope it causes perspectives to change. 

Henderson the Rain King

 Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow is a fun, surprising novel. It's among my favorite of Bellow's novels, right up there with Herzog and Humboldt's Gift. It lacks the gravity of those two, so it reads like a more polished The Adventures of Augie March: just as silly, but in a foreign locale. The novel follows protagonist Eugene Henderson--a millionaire heir with a relentless, unidentified urge for more in life--through his ill-fated travels in the African interior. Henderson is pompous, dunderheaded, and strangely endearing. Encountering indigenous cultures that he can't begin to understand, he throws himself into their lives and rituals with good-natured aplomb, only to create larger problems than existed before. He's a buffoon, and yet the other characters (and reader) root for him to find that elusive thing, the thing that brought him to Africa.

Henderson the Rain King is Bellow's favorite novel. There's a Counting Crows song named after it. It was a Pulitzer finalist. While there's certainly a critique to be made about the cross-cultural depictions (and a defense, I think: the narrator is a jackass), it remains a successful novel. I think a lot of this comes from employing a tone that I see in most Wes Anderson films: low-grade persistent absurdity that will unexpectedly veer into real melancholy. Like Rushmore or The French Dispatch or Moonrise Kingdom, for most of the novel you're laughing or at least smiling. And then, apropos of nothing, a scene of beautiful, heartbreaking, human connection.