I read a book
I Read A Book
(caution: a pretty writerly blog follows; enter at your own risk)
Three weeks ago, I read a book.
By itself, a remarkable feat. It was the first novel I’d read outside of helping a colleague with a blurb, review, or edit in two, maybe three years. The novel previous I believe was a Howard Jacobson, the brilliant J, maybe, or his equally brilliant Live a Little. I hadn’t found anything else that could compete for my full attention the way those did. Truth is, I’m hard to please. Authors have to worry about the seductive rhythms of others invading their prose, at least this one does. Proof: I never wrote drivel until the year I tried to read all of Balzac. But Denis Lehane’s Small Mercies turned the trick. I devoured it.
My husband’s been encouraging me to read Lehane for years. Often, I’d already seen the movie, so the desire just wasn’t there. Even though Stephen praised his work to the sky and back, I wasn’t interested. Then a reviewer on Amazon compared my latest novel to an Edith Wharton/Denis Lehane hybrid. I was intrigued. A few days later, The New York Times reviewed Small Mercies, a character driven South Boston novel with the 1970s busing crisis as its mise en scene.
I know South Boston people, its culture well. I also remember the busing crisis well. We bought our first house during that time, a grand Victorian in West Roxbury where ‘white flight’ was in full swing. Got it at a great price. I felt a little guilty capitalizing on someone else’s fear, but Stephen said we should follow Rothschild’s rule: buy when there’s blood in the streets. Fifty years later, I gotta say. He wasn’t wrong.
Anyway, looking at the cover of Small Mercies, I decided. Kismet, I thought. This one’s for me. I bought the book. It’s a stunner. No regrets.
I enjoyed it so much, I’d really like to read another novel. But I don’t need my Southern characters sounding like the Winter Hill Gang down the line, so Lehane is out. Jacobson doesn’t have anything new. Cormac McCarthy’s last I put off reading. I hear they’re quite metaphysical. I’m afraid it (they) would wind up like that Harold Bloom I bought a few years ago: minimally read and tucked away on a shelf because I’m not clever enough to engage with it.
I wasn’t always so picky. From my teen years through my 50s, I read everything. I mean that literally. Everything. I read low-down drek. I read elevated drek. I read mediocrities, the wildly popular, and the near unfathomable. I read literary romps and fat tomes of genius, elegant slim volumes. Newspapers. Magazines. Comic books.
Somewhere in there, I developed a canon with my own saints and living stars. Saul Bellow. I.B. Singer, Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doestoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Thackery and all the others. I confess. I read mostly male authors, although I have a few women I love: Colette, Flannery O’Connor, both Brontes, Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates. I admire Nicole Krauss and Dara Horn very much. But I am a child of the midcentury last. I value the male perspective. It echoes in me. When I think of my own work, which features violence and grotesqueries aplenty, I envy the harder edge of masculine writing. Don’t hate me for this. We are all creatures of our era.
When most of my living canon aged out and died, I had no one to replace them with. I was writing hours every day, consumed with research texts when I wasn’t, and reading novels ceased to be a relaxant. At the same time, the variety of visual entertainment expanded, then exploded across the cultural landscape. I was not immune. I love my tv. I love my Amazon prime, my Netflix, my MHz, my youtube. I just love it all, even though it’s killing the book industry, and half of it isn’t any good. It may be a toxic relationship (not my first), but this is where I am.
Post Small Mercies, I couldn’t find a next novel straight away. Then Cormac McCarthy died. I read a few things about Child of God amidst all the articles published on his passing. I hadn’t read Child while I’d read just about all the others. I bought it. I started it yesterday.
It was instantly familiar. I think I’ve read it already. Apparently, Lester Ballard’s fractured remains were buried in my grey matter waiting to come back from the grave, the dirt all over them still. I didn’t remember it had such short chapters, though. What a surprise. I find it audacious to write chapters of two or three pages. How does anyone string them along like that and get anywhere? Breathtaking.
I don’t know who I’ll read next. It has to be someone with a very strong voice. In other words, no creative writing school acolytes or plotting designed by algorithm. I could use suggestions. Anyone?
