July 09, 2007
Overwhelming Crush
It's been an age and a half since I've posted anything here. Now, due to an overwhelming crush of requests (does zero count as an "overwhelming crush"?), I have decided to note some of the books I've read in recent months. (For a while, there, I all but stopped reading, which was disastrous to my frame of mind, and I have now committed myself to getting back in the saddle, so to speak.) Okay, here are some titles worth paying attention to:
My Antonia, by Willa Cather. I waited until my 38th year to read this book because . . . why? Because I'm an idiot. Go read this book (reread it, if you were smarter than I and have already read it).
Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson. I started this Norwegian novel months ago and quit after 20 or so pages, because it just seemed too, well, quiet. But when I tried it again last month, I made it to the scene that sold me (page 33 is a stunner) and then couldn't stop. Petterson's creativity with chronology is masterful. The novel is eloquently heartbreaking about adolescence, old age, friendship, loss, bravery, betrayal.
What You Have Left, by Will Allison. This novel-in-stories by my pal Will was worth the wait. (He worked on it for 8 years, and it shows in all the best ways.) He packs more plot into the first paragraph than you'll find in many books of so-called literary so-called fiction. If you ever doubted that NASCAR aficionados have souls, read this book.
Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell. This razzle-dazzle novel deserves all the praise it's garnered. It reinvents the coming-of-age novel by the sheer force of its firecracking prose. It was especially resonant for me because the protagonist (like the author) is exactly my age, and the markers of his 13th year (e.g., the Falklands War) are the same as mine. In fact, the conclusion of an essay I wrote for a book called Queer 13 is centered around the Falklands conflict.
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. I planned to dislike this novel (over-hyped, I thought; plus, could a runaway bestseller actually have real literary chops?) but ended up being pretty enthralled. It's clever (okay, maybe a little bit too clever) without being cutesy, sentimental without being overly goopy. It's got capital-v Voice, and a sense of history, and in terms of imagination it runs circles around a lot of too-close-up contemporary fiction.
P.S., by Helen Schulman. I read this novel when it first came out, then saw the movie version, and recently reread the book. The book's better than the movie. So smartly funny. I love writers who risk sentimentality and get away with it. And ooh, the sex!
So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell. I've read this classic, oh, four or five times (including this spring), and it just gets better. A novel that begins with a murder but that ends up making the murder seem less dramatic than a moment when someone passes someone else in a high school hallway and doesn't say anything. Breathtaking.
Three Junes, by Julia Glass. As with the Nicole Krauss novel, I thought this one would be too easy, somehow, too Lifetime TV. No way. It's got an abundance of hard-edged truthfulness, scrumptious prose, and a bracingly wide scope.
Lies of Silence, by Brian Moore. Does anyone read Brian Moore anymore? I read his haunting first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, because I learned that my writing god Richard Yates had admired it. (Judith Hearne was published in 1955, a few years before Yates's Revolutionary Road, by the same publisher.) Lies of Silence, published in 1990 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is a taut whip-crack of a thriller about a Belfast hotel manager who gets caught up in some IRA business. The last page made me gasp.
Posted by Michael Lowenthal at 07:30 PM
