Hilary Mantel wins again with “Wolf Hall”
March 11, 2010
The National Book Critics Circle tonight gave their 2009 fiction award to Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The historical novel set in 1520s England about Thomas Cromwell won Britain’s coveted Booker Prize last fall.
I’m disappointed Bonnie Jo Campbell didn’t win for American Salvage (Wayne State University Press), but what great praise to have been a finalist not only for this award in fiction but also the 2009 National Book Award. As posted on TLC last November: “…American Salvage seemed to come out of nowhere. And so I discovered the work of a talented writer who can take readers into jobless, drug-addicted fictional lives with narrative intimacy and beauty without ignoring or simplifying the ugliness.”
Here are the National Book Critics Circle award winners in all the categories.
- The fiction award went to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall (Henry Holt).
- The nonfiction award went to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon).
- The autobiography award went to Diana Athill for Somewhere Towards the End (W. W. Norton). See the March 8 TLC post.
- The biography award went to Blake Bailey for Cheever: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf).
- The criticism award went to Eula Biss for Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press).
- The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout for Versed (Wesleyan University Press).
Athill’s “Somewhere Towards the End”
March 8, 2010
Here’s a memoir by an author who was 89 at the time of its writing in 2007. It’s not about her life, but her old age. “Book after book has been written about being young … but there is not much on record about falling away,” Diana Athill writes. And so she picked up her pen, giving us a book that neither rages at nor complains about old age, rather looks it squarely in the face to live its unwanted challenges as best as possible.
Athill is not unfamiliar to me. I read her previous memoir Stet several years ago, about her career as a book editor with a London publishing house. Over five decades, Athill worked with such distinguished authors as V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys. I found her writing starched and the stories lacking an insider’s flare. The writing in Somewhere Towards the End again is starched, but this time her thoughts resonate an engaging warmth and vulnerability. Her musings range among topics that include past romantic affairs, children, atheism, gardening, the ebbing of sexual desire and caring for a longtime friend through illness. They also include regrets, of which Athill has two: her selfishness, and her never having had the guts to escape the narrowness of her life, lacking courage and energy.
Athill doesn’t offer advice, which is refreshing. The focus is on her experience, the personal scenery of her life’s last passage, not any preaching or grand sense of wisdom from the perch of high age digits. Even when she tells us what’s required to live old age well — a positive outlook and an active mind — she says, with her usual frankness that’s also refreshing, either you have it or you don’t. “Those able to draw on such qualities will be doing so already,” she writes.
Somewhere Towards the End is a small book at 182 pages. It was first published in Britain in 2008 and won that year’s Costa prize for biography. The United States published the memoir in 2009, and it’s a finalist for a 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, to be announced this Thursday.
Huneven’s novel about guilt and forgiveness
March 3, 2010
Michelle Huneven’s new novel gets off to a great start. It’s one of those beginnings that suggests we’ll be haunted up to the last page with questions about the truth. As it relates to Huneven’s young protagonist, a history professor, that question would be: “What really happened to Patsy MacLemoore the night she suffered an alcoholic blackout and killed two people with her car?”
Patsy shouldn’t even have been driving, what with her license having been suspended. She’s a frequent blackout drinker, but nothing this horrific has happened before. Nevertheless, she’s the one found at the steering wheel of the car that killed two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a mother and her daughter.
From here on we get a gentle story about how Patsy gets sober in prison, gets her old job back, discusses her guilt with a therapist and finds an older, fatherly man to marry. He’s rich, too, so she gets to live in a house with a to-die-for Southern California view. Meanwhile, the husband/father of the victims befriends Patsy, and she’s able to experience his forgiveness.
Occasionally, Patsy tells someone she doesn’t remember much about the accident or that night. Also, when she describes what the victims were wearing, she’s off by a designer mile. It’s a no-brainer to recognize these moments as hints of some shocker to come, only they’re not intense enough to haunt and the surprise takes too long to manifest. It’s also unimagined and so hits with a mild thud, far from what the dust jacket promises: “For the reader, it is an electrifying moment, a joyous, fall-off-the-couch-with-surprise moment.” (Not really.)
Despite this let-down, Blame is enjoyable to read; it’s successfully written with a faultless, engaging style. The choices Patsy makes for her resurrected, post-prison, sober life are meaningful. Also, Patsy is a companionable protagonist whose moments — even the moment – evoke a sense of comfortable normal as she learns to live guilt-ridden but content.
Blame is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction to be announced March 11. It’s not the high-calibre fiction of Wolf Hall and American Salvage, among the contenders. It’s a decent enough story, but I’m baffled by its nomination.
My Reading Table gets a make-over
February 27, 2010
A friend recently e-mailed me about a shake-up of her reading shelf. Her explanation for the change hit home, describing so well what can happen with a book that loses its glamour. She wrote: “I’ve been wading through my to-be-read shelves, moving out books that were a good idea at the time and starting [and then]discarding books that just aren’t worth the effort.”
And so, a reality check for My Reading Table, which I’ve been ignoring. Some of the books once were a good idea (Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout) and some aren’t worth the effort right now (Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition edited by Margaret Scott). They’ll likely get a spot on the table at another time, when the hunger for them returns. Meanwhile, my reading table now holds a smaller, more realistic stack of new and old books and will see action.
Below are the books moved off the reading table. They are now considered the “hopefuls,” among other unread books in my library.
- Along with Paris Trout, others once a good idea include Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, The Rains Came: A Novel of Modern India by Louis Bromfield and Dracula by Bram Stoker, which hit the table during Halloween last year.
- Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living by Declan Kiberd, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini, Loneliness as a Way of Life by Thomas Dunn and Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45 by Peter Demetz aren’t worth the effort right now.
- Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s by Tim Page got returned unread to the lender, who wanted to lend it to someone else. I ran out of time.
- Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro, Generosity by Richard Powers, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters are new books published in 2009 that I simply have to leave behind because there are — to paraphrase a popular saying, so many new books to consider in a year, so little time. They are all highly recommended. Ones to check out if you’re searching for a good book.
- About Grace by Anthony Doer and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger are novels that need beach or patio time (i.e., undisturbed, long, warm sunny afternoons).
- For all the others, including Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov and 1940 by Jay Neugeboren, it’s just not a time.
Click on the photo above to get the list of books on My Reading Table, or go here.
Good stories: “Something Is Out There”
February 23, 2010
Richard Bausch published a new collection of short stories this month. He’s recognized among the best when it comes to this form, and I’m a long-time fan.
My favorite story in his new book is “Trophy.” It concerns four co-workers and their boss who golf together one foggy Sunday morning. The boss is always down on his luck, including the recent IRS take-over of his car dealership, where they all work. “And through it all,” one co-worker says, “he was interested in how we were doing.”
That co-worker taps the boss’s golf ball into the cup on the 16th green. He blackmails another co-worker to go along with him in pretending the boss hit a hole in one. From then on, the boss’s luck turns around. “Trophy” is my favorite because it so powerfully captures the sudden, difficult and hard-to-control impulse to lie in order to do good.
The collection’s other stories are similarly deep in meaning and populated by characters flinching at the rough edges of their relationships. They take place for the most part in Tennessee and Virginia, and they are written with sagacious insight concerning themes of fear and trust, individual identity within marriage and bravery in the face of loss. While they are not depressing stories, they disturb the premise that we can rest assured in our loved ones.
In the story “Son and Heir,” the son of a prominent college president and wife is expelled from three universities and drifts through jobs and relationships. He lives in defiance of his parents’ expectations and their phony life. Eventually, his father cuts him off financially and says, “‘You’re going to want to blame somebody or something. It’s human nature. When life comes down on you, you’ll want to point at something.’” He also says, “‘I want you to know, I’m not taking the blame for you.’”
If not our husbands, wives, parents, friends or children, then who can we be assured of? Bausch plays with that question in the last story, “Sixty-five Million Years.” The main character is a priest bored by his duties and the pettiness of his parishioners’ troubles. One day, a very knowledgeable teen-aged boy enters the confession box and states that dinosaurs lived for millions of years and human existence compared to that is only a fraction of a second. “‘What was God thinking?’” he asks.
I’m not an avid short-story reader, but I was drawn to read this collection daily until it was finished. Even the book’s enticing jacket design, thick paper and Janson typeface — noted at the back of the book to be “of the influential sturdy Dutch types” – conspired to make me want to keep this book in hand.
Not your typical March Hare & Mad Hatter
February 20, 2010
I read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at an awkward age when I was too old to appreciate the nonsense and too young to get it. A Mad Hatter’s tea party? A caucus race that runs in circles? It annoyed more than entertained me those many years ago. But Jamison Odone’s whimsical and brief retelling of this 1865 classic, Stickfiguratively Speaking: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, gave me a chance to revisit the nonsense.
This time I had great fun, thanks to Odone’s quirky interpretations. Indeed, I carried the book around with me — small enough to fit in my purse and winter coat pocket — and randomly read and flipped through the pages over and over again, each time seeing something new.
Odone says in a press release, “There is really no room for the words to carry the art or vice versa—they have to all work together.” With that, he succeeds, playfully interchanging words and illustrations on the pages. Adding surprise and humor, the interior thoughts and snarky side comments of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and other characters spice up the familiar oddness. To get an idea of the stick-figure style, check out Odone’s blog post Alice’s Adventures in my pad.
Odone will produce more Stickfiguratively Speaking books. The next one in the series, scheduled to be published in September 2010, is Stickfiguratively Speaking: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
On a final note, the release date for Stickfiguratively Speaking: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is March 5, the same day Tim Burton’s movie Alice in Wonderland appears in theaters. A variation on the classic, the movie imagines 19-year-old Alice returning to a Wonderland ruled by the irrational “off with their heads!” Red Queen. Reading the former before seeing the latter is a great way to be reacquainted with the classic characters and their bizarre ways.
Risky poetry purchases
February 15, 2010
So many times I buy a new book of poetry only to find I don’t relate to or understand the poems. The collection may be award-winning and acclaimed by critics but, for me, reading the verses feels like chewing wood. Case in point is Chronic by D. A. Powell.
It’s a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Also, a few weeks ago, it won the prestigious $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. That got my attention. Then I read the following about Powell from a 2001 poetry award, and I eagerly drove to The Book Loft to buy Chronic, Powell’s newest and fourth collection of poems.
“His seems a vision born less of suffering than of an understanding of suffering’s place within the natural order, and the result is a voice that can say, believably, ‘the way to haven seems interminable,’ that can knowingly ask ‘am I not dust?’—without seeming to seek pity.”
You probably know where this is going. Ten poems into Chronic I put it aside unmoved. One more book on the poetry shelf that’s not read, sitting beside many of my favorites, ranging from the keenly observant Mary Oliver and Liesel Mueller to the raw offerings of Charles Bukowski and Diane Wakoski.
When I called The Book Loft to find out if they had Chronic in stock, the clerk casually commented — I assumed he was reading his computer screen of inventory — they had one copy that was received in May. That would’ve been 2009 because Chronic was published in February 2009. This told me the book sat on the shelf for ten months until I came along. (The mega-bookstores in town didn’t have Chronic in stock.) And here’s what this all adds up to: People don’t buy poetry like they buy novels or memoirs and because of that bookstores don’t keep a wide selection of new poetry by up-and-coming poets or mid-career poets or established-but-not-popular poets in stock and because of that we don’t have the opportunity to browse for new poetry or discover new poets and make more successful purchases.
I usually read about poetry books and then order them online with my fingers crossed because I assume, from experience, they’re not available at a local store. Chronic was an exception. In hindsight, I should’ve snuck away to a corner and read some of the poems before I opened my wallet.
Maybe it’s a good thing the poets I don’t understand hold space in my library. Tastes change over a lifetime. Someday I may reach for and enjoy them, and then the money won’t have been spent in vain. That’s how I’m choosing to think about Chronic and similar poetry disconnects on my bookshelf. And as I continue to take my chances, I’ll sigh: Oh for bookstores in our cities like The Grolier Poetry Bookshop. Oh for a time when such bookshops could and would thrive everywhere.
Note: This post was updated later in the day, after publication. It was updated again, 3/7/10, correcting 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry to 2009.
Webster is fine now (thank you)
February 12, 2010
This snowy winter, one of my two corgis got sick. The whites of his eyes became red and, when a visit to the vet and several rounds of eye drops didn’t change anything, off we went to MedVet. Four hours, an opthalmologist and a neurologist visit later, I learned Webster has an autoimmune condition. The good news is we caught it early and he’s going to be fine.
Obviously, this post has nothing to do with books, other than the fact Webster is named for a dictionary. It’s a thank you to those who’ve known about Webster’s situation and asked about him. As dog owners in the MedVet lobby with their newfies, bulldogs, basset hounds, golden retrievers and assortment of mutts said, these four-legged personable creatures are family. Dog owners everywhere get that. Just as book owners everywhere get the companionship of books.
My other corgi appeared on TLC last fall in “The dog ate it (really)”. I updated the photo on the post. (I should’ve named her Merriam.)
