A novel about vengeance with a powerful female narrator off to a great startt

I started reading charles Portis's  much-recommended 1968 novel, True Grit, and I was surprised how much of it wasn't coming back to me. I'm sure I never read it before , and I would have sworn that I never saw the famous John Wayne movie version, but I guess I have seen it - so much for memory and for swearing (tho not underneath oath) for recollected truth. In any event like so many other readers, I'm struck right away by the powerful plot - a 14-year-old in Arkansas during I think the reconstruction era sets off alone to hire a gunman to avenge the murder of her father - and the voice of the plucky, daring, intelligent narrator - all this becoming evident in literally the first paragraph. You can't stop reading, and the wonder is it took a while for a film version to be made. I suspect that most who read this novel are guys, but given the powerful and self-reliant female narrator I would not hesitate to recommend this book to all readers, thomof course even if I saw the film I can't recall the outcome, so Imcant say for sure that Portis maintains he momentum and the voice.  I'm guessing he does, tho he seems in complete control of his material and exceptionally well versed in the details of life in that era - esp in the life of roughneck horse traders, outlaws and lawmen. If he had to do research to get this novel going, he wears it lightly.

Current New Yorker story seems to have missed an opportunity

China-nor English-language writer Yiyun Li has a mostly successful story , When We Were Happy We Had Other Names (she is known for her unusual titles), in current New Yorker.
, mostly successful because she does a fine job esp in the opening pp in capturing the suffering and pathos and sense of isolation and abandonment of a couple that is enduring the sorrow and even guilt following the suicide of a seemingly untroubled teenage son. Especially powerful are the passages of dawn dialogue betweeen the man and woman. That said, it's somewhat surprising that she does not attempt to unravel the mystery of the suicide nor does she give us any significant back story on the young man. Rather, the woman - the protagonist of this story - to ease her suffering begins a project of recollecting her memories of everyone she knew who died. In her metaphor, recollecting death is like pulling straws from a haystack - each straw dislodges many other (memories). I wish however that her recollected memories were more profound or unusual or moving, but moments has the force of the death of her son; they do , however, lead her to think about those she has known from childhood in china and to remember her beloved grandfathers who died at 102 - but somehow I think she missed an opportunity to tell us more about the protagonist's life through her memories of the dead - I don't feel I knew much more about her, or her son, at the end than I did halfway through this story.

A novel that cries out for first-person narration

Obviously - judging from the numerous cover, back cover, and inside the book blurbs - many readers loved Dorthe Nors's recent novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, but not this one. Unfortunately for me it's a novel stuck in stasis; DN introduces the protagonist, Sonje, who is obviously a young (30ish) woman w/ a good income (she translates gruesome Swedish crime novels - in other words novels that are not at all like this one) and high intelligence but w/ numerous problems: bad relationship w/ younger sister; some sort of estrangement from her parents, who live on a farm that like so many small farms in Denmark (where this novel is set, but elsewhere, too, of course) has been taken over for luxurious country living or for development; various physical tensions and neuroses. She seems to have few friends - a friend from youth (Molly) who plays no role in first half of novel; her massage therapist, whom she is starting to befriend, though their relationship remains tenuous and more therapist-client than pals. The center of the novel - referenced in the title - is Sonje's attempt to get a driver's license. She is unable to "shift gears," which bears a pretty heavy symbolic weight, if you ask me. She switches driving instructors, and perhaps will develop a relationship w/ new instructor. (Is there a debt here to the Mike Leigh film Happy-go-lucky?) All in all, over 100+ pp., very little actually happens. There's nothing wrong w/ a character-based novel, but there needs to be some tension and something at stake. Some of the blurbs referenced Sonje's wit and humor, which completely eluded me. I'm generally a fan of 3rd-person narration, as it seems classier and gives the novelist more leeway, but this seems to me a novel crying out for first-person narration; Sonje needs to directly express, and reflect upon, her angst and social discomfort. The 3rd-person approach makes her too much of a clinical specimen. I'd have liked to have heard her voice; sorry, but nothing makes me want to read the second half of this novel - though I'd be interested in the views of others.

A novel that, so far, is alll about chsracter and devoid of plot

About 50 pp into Danish writer Dorthe Nors's short novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (the title represents three instructions the protagonist, Sonje, receives from her driving instructor) and still waiting for even a semblance of plot to develop. To this point, Nors has given us a fair amount of background about Sonje - she's in her 30s or so, lives alone and seems to have few friends none close, has a strained relationship with her younger and more conventionally attractive sister, is just learning to drive (perhaps not as unusual in Copenhagen for a 30-something to never have learned?), which is of course a metaphor for her life: She is uncertain of direction and cannot "shift gears." She makes her living as a translator of a Scandinavian crime writer, one who in particular writes about gruesome sex crimes (it's not Stieg Larson, but an imagined writer somewhat like him), which again shows that she's a person at one remove from engagement w/ life and with others - life as a translator is another good working metaphor. So I am getting to know this character, which is good and which is part of what we look for in literature, but I also am waiting for something to happen - some conflict, crisis, moment of decision, instrument of change, introduction of new person or element in her life, something to build this novel toward a plot. Yes, it's true, some fine novels are not really about plot - e.g., Proust, Knausgaard - but in those cases there are well detailed episodes and development of character over a long span of time. Can this wisp of a novel - about 150 pp or so - develop enough depth of character to balance out the dearth of action and event?

Thoughs on travel memoir v literary fiction - and A Time of Gifts

Read a little more, including Jan Morris's smart intro. to A Time of Gifts (1977), about Patrick Leigh Fermor - enough to see that he published about a dozen books (none of them known to me) and that the 2nd and 3rd volumes of the travel memoir that Gifts begins were published many years later - in fact vol 3 was published posthumously (PLF died in 2011). Morris notes that Gifts is one of the few travel memoirs written from a long perspective - about 40 years after PLF's trek as a teenager across Europe to Constantinople. This time gap gives the memoir an unusually and effective double-perspective, as we see his travel events with immediacy, thanks to his incredible recollection of detail, and sometimes direct and unmediated - through passages from a contemporaneous notebook that he recovered while writing the memoir, and also w/ a sense of maturity, wisdom, and perspective. Morris is right that the narrative itself sometimes strains credibility - I can imagine that a 60-year-old would have such detailed observations about culture and history, but hardly a 19-year-old; in other words, many of the observations that PLF puts into them ind of his youthful begin probably were not developed in his mind until much later. But that doesn't really matter - the memoir reads well on the whole, and includes at times brilliant passages (though by the end I was a bit overwhelmed by military history and cathedral architecture). Travel memoirs are like novels w/out plot; the narrative takes the shape of the journey, rather than developing from conflicts and incidents perpetrated by the characters as they interact and evolve over time. Generally, a novel has a shape, an arc so to speak, and a conclusion; a travel memoir develops along a geographical line - it's one-dimensional rather than 3-dimensional - and ends at a geographic terminus rather than at a resolution of conflict (or not). That said, travel memoirs are more accessible than literary fiction, in that their dimension and scope is evident from the outset and, aside from the author's liberties with fact, readers don't judge the characters and events for likelihood - the more extreme the likelihood, in fact, the better. I haven't read enough to judge, but Morris certainly has and I accept her assessment of PLF - a travel writer of the first order.

Five observations on Patrick Leigh Fermor, and what I don't know about him

I've just about finished reading A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor's 1977 memoir about his travels across Europe on foot in 1933 (when he was 18; first of 3 volumes actually), and I know nothing about him other than what I've read in this book - but I guess that still means I know a lot. First of all, he is or was an astonishingly good writer - terrific scenes and observations about life in various European cities where he stops for a few days and, more interesting, about tiny farmhouses and pubs and the occasional chateaux where the few remaining entitled elite huddle as if against a storm - he's often invited in, through various connections he makes along the way, and he never fails to describe the inhabitants and the minutia and detritus of their now nearly vanished world. Second, he's a polymath (jokingly, he applies that moniker to a man he meets on his journey) or at the very least a great listener - he seems to have the entire history of Europe and a vast knowledge of architecture and the military on the tips of his fingers and he picks up languages as he moves along. Third, like most travel writers he's a true adventurer, who rolls with the punches as it were and never seems terribly put out when he's in a difficult situation - far from his destination as night falls, for ex., - and he never complains (at least in print) or makes much of the difficulties and hardships he must have endured in his winter crossing. Fourth, he has a prodigious memory  - he's writing in detail about events from 40 years back - and, Fifth, he's a terrific diarist: Near the end of this volume he pastes in some of his diary entries from his first days in Hungary, and we see that not only was he a great writer in his 60s but the notebook he kept while traveling - he discovered or recovered it only when in the process of writing this memoir - is full of rich detail and sharp observations. What I don't know is anything else about his life - even whether he is alive today. I suspect he must have written other books - novels, perhaps? - he has most of the novelist's skills - and what he did for a living or a career: other writing? Someting in academics? Freelance historian or critic? When I finish reading this volume, today most likely, I will find more info on the life and works, if any, of PLF.

Travel in a world gone by and the poignancy of A Time of Gifts

As Patrick Leigh Fermor arrives at what he'd thought was approximately the mid-point of his trek from London to Constantinople - Vienna - he settles in for his longest stop in the journey so far (he recognizes while in Vienna that he'd been proceeding at about 10 miles a day, less than he'd thought, and he lets readers of his travel memoir, A Time of Gifts, know that he'd underestimated the difficulty of the 2nd half of his walk and that the journey took him about 11 months). PLF spends three weeks in Vienna and has some weird adventures and many observations - some of the reflections and conversations (particularly, before entering Vienna, w/ a man he dubs the polymath) about the many tribes, migrations, revolts, plots, battles, and assassinations throughout the course of history in central Europe are obscure to at least this reader, and I expect to most. His description of some of the Viennese neighborhoods and famous churches are fantastic - his vocabulary on military items alone defies belief - and a particularly amusing character is a Quixotic man from the Frisian Islands (off the coast of Denmark/Germany) whose English is mostly derived from his reading of Shakespeare and is therefore quite hilarious. This Quixote encourages PLF - dead broke as he waits for a delayed mailing of 4 pound notes - to knock on doors in a prosperous neighborhood and offer to sketch portraits, a scheme that works surprisingly well and also affords us views into various typical Viennese households. After a few days of securing his finances, he says farewell to the Quixotic man, who boards a train and heads off for some scheme smuggling sugar across various borders. It's amazing how these people pass in and out of his life and how easily PLF adapts to the adventures and hardships of life on the edge, traveling in harsh conditions w/ no money - in winter, no less, in a time before Polartek and down clothing. But his spirits and his health seem OK throughout, and his recollection is extraordinary as is his mature (he writes this memoir about 40 years after the travels) reflections on youth  and on the world gone by give this narrative a special poignancy.

An excellent very short story, Poor Girl, in current New Yorker

Current New Yorker has a story by the Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (yes, I had to check the spelling); I'd never heard of her, and the "about the author" blurb indicates she's a prolific contemporary though few of her books have yet been translated into English. I'd like to see more from her, as this story, Poor Girl, is quite good and a technical tour-de-force, a really mysterious and nuance family portrait with a sharp and surprising ending, which I won't divulge. The story reads like a novel in miniature, or at least like a Chekhov story in miniature. In essence, it's about a father who is devoted to his daughter, in an almost perverse manner - maybe not even "almost" through at least the first 8 years of her life. His wife/her mother is a doormat - so abused (not physically) by her husband as to almost go beyond the norm and be even comic: She takes care of all of the household chores, including running a little family farm/garden plot, takes care of his mother and hers, and earns the salary that keeps the family afloat, plus all the child-care other than the doting and gloating. Fortunately, at last she kicks off the shackles and moves w/ daughter to remote Mermansk, where they spend a year of unhappiness - until doting father comes for a visit, and I'll leave it at that. So we loathe the father and feel sorrow and pity for the mother and expect no good outcome for the confused daughter, yet the whole thing clicks and makes sense - maybe not in a conventional happy ending, but one that we can accept and understand. We learn more about the characters in this tight space - a 2-page story - than in many meandering tomes and flaccid plaints. And LP leaves us wondering:Who's the "poor girl" of the title?

An example of the excellent writing in A Time of Gifts

To give you a sense of Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing in A Time of Gifts, his travel memoir from 1977 (about his walk across Europe in 1933), here is part of his description of the "nearly amphibian" (!) castles he came upon as he walked along the Danube:

"Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved the short winter days."

Note the excellent use of detail, the tight sentences structure, the limited use of simile, the active voice, and occasional throwback word (moulting, throve), and the surprising way in which he describe the winter darkness, as if the mountains themselves are taking action. He goes on:

"Those buildings look too forlorn for habitation. But , in the tiny, creeper-smothered window, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Who lived in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew?"

Who, indeed? Frightening just to imagine the faint lights appearing at dusk. And note the hilarious reference to the family trees inside these old mansions. Then, among other potential inhabitants, he imagines:

"...a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus mustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark."

Who can top that for a vision of the last remnants of an attenuated aristocracy?

Leigh Fremor's A Time of Gifts as social anthropoloty

I continue to be impressed by the terrific writing in Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, his 1977 emoir about his wintertime solo trek from London to Constantinople (volume 1, which I'm reading, ends in Hungary, I think). His sense of detail and his capacity to bring the detail into social context is extraordinary; I would be tempted to say that the lesson for all travelers is to keep a detailed journal, but we learn in this volume that he journal, along w/ the rest of his belongings, was stolen in a youth hostel in Munich early in the travels, so the recovered info in the first section of this memoir was from memory (and perhaps some research) alone. Still, good idea to keep a journal and to keep it close to you (or in the Cloud, a resource that PLF obviously did not have). Particularly impressive passages are his hilarious description of the eating and drinking in a Munich beer hall and his unflinching recollection of the kitsch and bad taste in the design and decor of the house of a wealthy German businessman. Yes, there's a certain snobbism throughout: PLF finds it easier to critique the working class and the self-made and to go into raptures on the taste and good manners of the last pathetic remnants of the aristocracy. Still, his observations feel right on, and he incorporates them well into a great narrative, with adventures (nearly forced to spend the night in a drafty barn, where he might have frozen to death, misadventures (hard to imagine anyone taking on this kind of travel, by foot in winter across northern Germany, then or today), and frightening observtions about the signs all around him supporting Hitler and the Nazi party. Many times, as an Englishman, he felt uncomfortable or even threatened; despite his encounters w/ many "good Germans" who still held out an ethic of helping wayward travelers and students, he had to be appalled by the storm troopers, the fascist salutes, the many houses and pubs that he entered that displayed - whether willingly or not, does it matter? - pictures of Hitler and swastikas. You have to wonder: How could he stand it? Why didn't he just head due south and retreat into France or Switzerland? How could he pretend to be at ease with these people, in that culture, at that time? Nevertheless, these glimpses of fascism taking route are important; it's almost as if this work were a form of social anthropology even more than a travel memoir.

What I thought about when I wrote Cantor Pepper

I was honored yesterday that Rabbi Jim Rosenberg devoted his Yom Kippur sermon to an appreciation and interpretation of one of my stories, Cantor Pepper. It's all a bit amusing to me in that I wrote this story more than 20 years ago; it won Ann award but it's long since been out of print - but rabbi Jim remembered the story (at my request he read an early copy for accuracy re matters of Judaica). In y view he had a great interpretation of the story - he's really he perfect reader, bringing to the story more a unity and insight than I could have imagined. He spoke about the rabbi's initial attempt to use the urban-set temple to build an alliances w the black community, an attempt that grows out of control as the rabbi finds that the congregants no longer feel comfortable in the synagogue. Rabbi Jim recognized that the story in part is about a failed attempt at a noble goal - an attempt doomed to fail because he temple in the process of its transition gave up too much of its unique identity. Great reading of the story - but was that "why" I wrote the story. Of course not! No writer begins let alone completes a story to advance an idea or an ideology. I began the story with an idea about the rabbi and his quest for a new cantor and I let the characters lead me along the narrative path. I never once thought about meaning or significance - but if a story works out well readers will have a sense about the characters, they will seem "round" and real (or realistic) and we will find meaning in their interactions and collisions, a heightened version of the interactions we see and the significances we derive from those we know or know of in our lives and our world.

Trevel in remote places, depending on the kindness of strangers

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel memoir, A Time for Gifts, about his trek across Europe on foot, in the winter!, en route to Constantinople, in 1933 when he was 18, and, as noted yesterday, this mode of travel would be literally impossible today - with all the border crossings, the incredible expansion of highways and byways, and great # of cars and trucks on the road, the increased suspicion of foreigners and wanderers, the lack of cheap accommodations, the omnivorous internet, and the proliferation everywhere of tourist. One of the many things that makes his travel memoir so readable today is that he wrote it in the 1970s, looking back, so we get an adult/modern reflection on the travels of youth, not just a travel journal. Still, trekkers would be advised to note that PLF kept a detailed journal throughout his travels, without which he memoir 40 years later would be nearly impossible (part of the charm is his noting overnight stays about which he retains no memory, plus a few fact-checks and updates that put the memoir in context). Of course I'm reminded of my own far less adventuresome European travels when I was young, some of which I wrote about - like PLF decades after the events - in Exiles; as that was a work of fiction, a travel journal was not so necessary, and I had a really good recollection of those days (I don't so much anymore - as if writing purged the memories). I note, though, that my experiences in northern Sweden were in some ways similar to his in north Germany; like him I was traveling alone, on back roads, walking and hitching, and experienced the kindness of strangers: One night I set up a small campsite, and a farmer came over, chatted w/ me, invited me into their farmhouse for the night - a great experience (they spoke no English - were elderly, taking em in like that would never have happened in the U.S. at that time). Met w/ similar kindness on another trip in rural Wales. But I was in a very unpopulated land - the experiences were never the same when I traveled, sometimes trying to hitch, near cities. So perhaps travel while dependent on the "kindness of strangers" may still be possible in remote areas or in off-seasons - but the innocence of PLF's journeys feels far away, and extinct.

As you may have noticed, I rarely read anything but literary fiction, w/ occasional forays into poetry, but I have started reading the first (of 3) volumes from Patrick Leigh Fermor, which he wrote in 1977,  about his travels from about 1933-37, when he was about 18-22 years old, through Europe en route to Constantinople; the first volume, A Time for Gifts (not a great title, btw). Reading it because it was a recommendation and gift from great friend and great read DB, and also because it's from New York Review Books, and I will read (almost) anything in the NYRB series. And it's well worth reading! A beautiful account, with an amazing amount of recalled detail, of his early life and his intrepid travels - powerful not only for the way in which he brings you right along w/ him on his wanderings and and adventures, as the great travel writers must do (e.g., Jan Morris, who wrote the intro, Chawin, Theroux, to name 3) but also for a snapshot in time of a scary time in European history and of a way of travel long gone (at least in Europe and N. America). PLF was, as he recounts, an impatient and rambunctious child in youth, always in trouble and booted from many fine schools, who at 18 got it in his head to make the journey across Europe to the Ottoman (Contstantinople at that time). He sets out on a drizzly, miserable day in December - would have made much more sense to wait till the spring, but that give you an idea of his personality - and the first part recounts his voyage out, his trek through Holland, and his first days crossing  Germany. This part is particularly scary and odd, as it was in the time of Kristalnacht, and PLF sees lots of Nazi propaganda and gatherings (and meets a few brave souls who in private mock Hitler and his henchmen) - so we see that there were some good Germans, completely overwhelmed by events. Nobody could travel today as he did, hitching rides of various barges, falling asleep in a pub until taken in, sleeping sometimes in the local lockup, traveling without a plan and without a guidebook - they'd be picked up as a vagrant or worse - and even in winter there would, today, be tourists and other travelers everywhere. His journey took place almost a century ago, and so it reads - closer in feeling to the 19th century than the 21st. I doubt I'll follow his journey through 3 volumes, but the start of volume 1 is full of promise.

The strengths of Little Women, even though it's not for me

Gave it another day's reading and have decided for sure that I'm not the intended readership for Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, so I'm dropping it - though recognizing that this is a really important book for many women readers, many of whom cite LW as their favorite book from childhood. In some ways it may parallel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel that many readers, including this one, cite as a childhood favorite; I think I was in 6th grade when I read it and loved every moment, but I don't think too many girls read that book in youth or cared for it. Nothing wrong w/ that. I will note that I was surprised the LW consists almost entirely of dialogue, with very little scene-setting or attention to milieu other than some boilerplate description of various drawing-room interiors. Similarly, there's almost no mention a broader social context - the father is away serving as s Civil War chaplain, so we do get a sense of the hardship and loneliness that many, particularly spouses left behind to raise families and survive on limited income (if any), had to endure: those are the social conditions of the novel, but it's not a novel about the civil war or about broader intellectual and social movements, such as abolition, in the 19th century. That's OK, too; LMA knew what she was trying to accomplish, didn't over-reach, and wrote fantastic novel for a specific readership. In the first quarter of the novel there are enough good, dramatic scenes and confrontations to keep readers engaged - notably Amy's plunge into the near-frozen Concord River and the guilt and remorse Jo feels about her role in letting this happen. In fact, there are enough good scenes and pliable dialogue that any contemporary reader can see that this was a work crying out for cinema - and I think there have been several adaptations, most or all of them successful. So, tip of the hat, definitely worth re-reading for those who loved LW in youth, and I'm moving on.

I am not the target readership for Little Women, but ...

I'll take a moment to honor a classic in American literature that I'd never even tried to read, until yesterday, on its 150th anniversary: Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. To say that I am not and never was the target readership for this novel is to put it mildly. And, as expected, I'm not particularly engrossed by this domestic novel of 4 sisters and their inter-relationships, while father is off serving as a chaplain in the Civil War (all closely modeled on the events and wartime situation in the Alcott household in Concord). In fact, I'm completely uninterested in the agonies of choosing what to wear to the neighborhood dance and the niceties of beginning to make conversation with the intelligent and sickly boy next door. And yet: I can definitely see that why young women would be enthralled by much of this novel, in particular by the strong, outspoken lead character, Jo. And I can see that some of the scenes that read awkwardly would translate well into film - e.g., Jo dishing about the fatherly figure living next door while he stands in the doorway unnoticed; the neighbor boy, Laurie (!), playing the piano - and in fact I remember enjoying the movie when I was a kid (2 hours v 700 pp. is quite a difference). what gives the novel its backbone is the wartime setting, so, unlike so many other domestic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, we see a family truly struggling with financial hardship, need for female self-reliance and independence, responsibility to others, including the impoverished and the men far away at war. (There have been other novels telling the Alcott tale from the POV of the father in service.) Inevitably, Little Women gets compared w/ Austen's work, esp the obvious multi-sororal Pride and Prejudice, and just as inevitably Alcott loses in the comparison (nothing to be ashamed of there), as Austen's with and her occasional narrative asides are far more subtle and nuanced: the Bennett sisters cannot be so easily typecast and labeled - but Alcott holds her own and LW has stood up well over time, esp in comparison w/ the little-read work of most of her once-famous contemporaries (e.g. HB Stowe). I'll give it one more go at least.

Fine story by English writer Tess Hadley in current New Yorker

Tessa Hadley continues her run of excellent, "veddy English" stories in the New Yorker, as she  vies to become the Munro/Trevor of the next generation of readers. Her story in current NYer, Cecelia Awakened - a cool title as it is also the 1st w words of the story, in which instance "awakened" verb (past tense) whereas in the title "awakened" is a modifier/adj. The story tells of an English teen who is closely bonded w/ her somewhat elderly, serious, scholarly parents -sharing w/ them all their interests in art history, old English houses and historical sites, seeming to be content in her life though w/out, it seems, any close relationships w/ her peers in age. The family goes on a vacation to Florence, which turns out to be the scene of her first steps toward independence: She gets a sense of how others (Italians) see her parents (fussy British tourists), she's a little embarrassed by her parents, becomes sulky and difficult (for the first time, it seems), eventually splits from them in the midst of some sightseeing on their last day and heads back alone to their hotel (they share a room, to save money, w/ Cecilia sleeping on a trundle bed, an example of their uncomfortable closeness) - a minuscule teenage result, to be sure (veddy English?), but monumental in the life of this family and an experience all teens and their parents are familiar w/ in one way or another. As always, Hadley handles the narrative deftly and efficiently, giving just enough detail to bring us into the lives of the members of this family, but not doing anything radical or melodramatic - although in an odd narrative twist the final paragraph focuses on the mother wondering what Cecilia will do back in their hotel room, rather than bring us the info directly from Cecilia's POV. Hadley writes particularly well about children and young adults (cf Munro), this being the most recent example.

Early Work - a novel that gets better as it moves along

I'm giving props today to Andrew Martin, whose debut novel, Early Work (I love the title, especially as it's about a group of 20-something aspiring writers w/ varying degrees of talent and commitment), as it's one of the few contemporary novels I've read that gets better as it moves along. I was drawn in right away, as I have a lot of interest in fiction about a writer's career, but admit that, as noted in some preceding posts, I became impatient w/ the narcissism, the excessive drinking and smoking (cigarettes included), and the absence of any significant discussion among the characters re literature - what they're reading, what they're writing (or not writing). But the characters have grown on me, become more rounded and sympathetic, as Martin devotes some sections to giving their back stories (most but not all of the novel is narrated by Pete, a mostly unpublished trust-fund guy spending a lot of time not writing - and a lot of time in a sexual romp w/ beautiful and more successful writer, Leslie, while cheating on his thoroughly sympathetic girlfriend of 5 years, Julie, who's a med student working on the side on a epic poem, some of it published). As we get to know more about the characters, they win us over, flaws and all. Martin writes some really witty dialog - esp the trenchant observations of his sly narrator - and he's good at capturing the milieu of a scene, a locale, without dwelling unduly on particulars: some particularly fine passages include the painful car ride from Va to Maine in icy near-silence as Julie suspects that Pete has been untrue, Leslie's time in Missoula, and the night of debauchery and switched partners at Kenny's lakeside cottage, to name just three. Not sure why he didn't do so earlier, but in the second half of the book Martin effectively establishes Pete and Leslie as aspiring writers, as their literary talk becomes more than just name-checks (of which there are many). We feel for Pete in particular, completely stuck in his writing, which leads of course to his questioning of his entire self-worth. Nearing the end, I'm not sure how the particulars of the plot will resolve, but it's obvious that Pete's self-doubt was unfounded - it seems that the novel we're reading results from his sorrowful experiences; despite our doubts, and his, about his capacity for serious work, he's turned his life, or so it seems, into art - giving himself the last word.

Making sense of Eliot's Waste Land

In memory of dear friend WS - whom I will now ID as William Saunders - who died yesterday ending years of his suffering, today's post is on poetry, which Bill and I discussed often. Over the past few weeks I have been reading The Waste Land, which I mistakenly thought I new pretty well, having graduated all the way back in high school from the Prufrock to advanced Eliot, The Waste Land. But what I really "knew," like most readers I'm afraid, were the famous first stanza and last lines (the Shanti incantation). The rest, I don't know, I think over the years in grad school and maybe later I just read through the poem trying to make some literal sense of it and picking up an image here and there w/out really grappling with what Eliot was trying to accomplish. He had already established himself as a unique talent in use of blank verse (with occasional rhyme included, to build up to a shock effect - as I have long thought that the 3rd line in Prufrock is the most startling line in the history of English verse), and in Prufrock and some other early poems he developed a pastiche style, a collection of disparate images that constitute a whole. But it's so much simpler in P: a poem in the voice of a single narrator, taking stock of his life in late age. The Waste Land is infinitely more ambitious, a portrait of London in ruins in the dark wake of the World War. We again have many literary references (far more diverse and obscure than those in P) and many narratives, some in first person - but from a variety of speakers and from several points of consciousness, some much like the "found poetry" that became popular decades later among American writers as diverse as WC Williams and Michael Casey; the overall effect in TSE is one of despair, a world without faith or hope (despite the prayers in the 5th and final section), impossible to see in coherence as it's an exploded world - like much of modern art at the time, think of what Picasso did to the still life and the portrait - TSE's work is the literary equivalent. There are some things I hated and still hate about this poem: the complete obscurity of many of the quotes and references, hardly elucidated at all by TSE's gratuitous "notes," and the snobbish contempt for the language and predilections of the working classes. But there also are passages of tremendous, and complex, beauty, which I think I never before appreciated, including for ex. the opening of Part III (quoting now from text): The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf/Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind/Crosses the brown land, unheard." Also in part I the great scene of the dead crossing London Bridge, "Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled/And each man fixed his eyes before his feet." Superficially, this is TSE's vision of a parade of the dead, but more frightfully, it's his vision of what a ordinary London pedestrians, commuting to work probably, who appear as though dead, deracinated, and silenced. The key to reading this poem is, I think, to attend to each segment, don't race over any passages or phrases but take each into account, while throughout building and maintaining a grand image of society and a culture at a frightful moment in its history.

Writers and would-be writers in Early Work

In the second section of Andrew Martin's Early Work we learn some of the back story of the narrator - whose name I don't remember - and the woman whom he is smitten with, Leslie. Her history in particular is of interest. We meet her a few years back when she is a 20-something living in squalor (but still obviously in a pricey apt) somewhere inlower Manhattan , and we see her spend a great deal of time having sex w both men and women, drinking and imbibing cocaine as much as possible, and despite various references to her shortage of money spending lots of dough on expensive restaurants and shows. What to make of this? The ethosnof this novel seems to suggest that aspiring young writers need not spend any of their precious time actually writing - youth for a writer seems to be a time to gain experience, to be stored away and drawn on as material in some future, more settled space. And perhaps that is Martin's history - he might be the rare bird of riotous youth recollected in tranquillity. But I sense what we see here is a set of young people who want to "be" writers without actually wanting to "write." It's like watching a crash about to happen - disturbing, unsettling, hard to turn away from.

RIP friend WS (not Willm Shakespeare), a great reader, writer, friend,gone after 5 years of struggle

A millennial novel with many name-checks and much consumption

It seems I've been reading a stream of novels about and by millennials, the latest being Andrew Martin's neatly titled Early Work. Oddly enough, it seems like a neat counterpart to the novel I read previously, Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends, both about a artistic/writerly 4some (two couples) and the complicated relationships that develop among them, each narrated by one of the foursome in a sharp and trenchant manner, each involving lots of drinking and smoking (cigarettes included - I ask again whether this stupid vice is particular to the millennial gen or is it an authorial - and cinematic - device: Got to give characters something to do in between all that dialog), with major difference that one is from a female POV the other from a male (with all that this implies and entails) and that one is set in the US (Virginia) the other in Dublin - though I found nothing especially Irish about Rooney's novel. In Early Work, the narrator is a fledgling novelist (I guess we'd have to assume, mutatis mutandis, that despite his writing frustrations as a character we are reading the fruits of his labor) teaching part-time in a prison program, his long-time girlfriend/partner is a med student working on the side on an epic poem; at the outset he meets a really beautiful woman, visiting from Texas, published a few stories (putting her ahead of the game) and supposedly working on a screenplay. The 4th member of the set - her fiance, the only one not a writer, is back in Texas but will soon visit. Not a hell of a lot happens in the first quarter of the novel, although we do get sharp character delineation and we can see the dangerous flirtation emerging between narrator and Texas woman (Leslie?); question is to what extent his girlfriend sees it, and if so tolerates it. This is clearly a novel of serious name-checking, which is at times fun and at times infuriating; I can keep up w/ the literary name-checks, as most readers of this type of novel can I'm sure, but there are many references to musical landmarks that totally elude me - I feel old reading this. I also feel somewhat sad for these characters, trying to write, not writing much, and drinking an absurd amount, in fact bars and clubs, even in small-town (Charlottesville) Va. seem to be at the center of their social lives and a way by which they evaluate places to live and to write. Interested so far, and waiting for relationships to develop and entwine.

Plot and character and the novel - in Conversations with Friends

I feel like a hypocrite, having criticized some novels (e.g., The Incendiares) for too much plot and insufficient development of character and here I'm about to criticize another millennial novel - Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends - for the opposite, but I guess the point is that the ideal novel must include and incorporate both: good narrative driven by various plot developments including conflicts resolved and protagonists coming to some kind of self-knowledge, smarter and more experienced at the end than at the outset, plus strong characters who give us access to their interior life and knowledge and perspective based on where they've come from, family background etc. (Should also have a sense of style and wit, a sense of place or mood, and perhaps a point to make or a message ...) Spoilers will follow so if you're planning to read Conversations w/ Friends suggest you stop here. Rooney's novel has so much potential and promise - a really intelligent and witty narrator and a tight cast of characters; in my first post on this book I called it a chamber play, and that characterization holds true throughout: Essentially there are only 4 characters (2 couples in a sense, everyone else is a bit player at most) who go through various episodes of breakups, reconciliations, and so forth, with most of the focus on the narrator (Frances) and her affair w/ Melissa's husband, Nick. There are many well-rendered sex scenes and extensive conversations - in person, on the phone, and via email - about every aspect of the Melissa-Nick relationship. Nick, unlike just about any guy I know, talks incessantly about his feelings for Melissa and for Frances, and is extraordinarily solicitous about her feelings; the two most frequent phrases in in this novel must be "I'm sorry" and "Are you OK?" So, OK, strong character development here and a lot of insight into the consciousness of others, particularly the narrator's. On the other hand, Rooney flirts with plot development but never succumbs: it's as if she approaches the edge of the abyss but won't take the plunge. For ex., Frances is hospitalized with a serious gynecological condition. Will she die? Is she pregnant? No, and no. Her father drinks himself to oblivion and at one point fails to answer her many calls. Has he killed himself? Died of alcohol poisoning? No, and no. Frances and Nick live in dread that Melissa and FRances's roommate/best friend/sometime lover (Bobbi) will find out about their relationship. When they do, does anything change? No, and no. I could go on - but it's a novel that ends not much beyond where it began and seldom leaves the world of this foursome (as foretold perhaps in the title). We learn a lot about these characters along the way, but there's some enervated, even claustrophobic about this tight, circumscribed scope of this narrative.

Promising piece of short fiction - Audition - in current New Yorker

Really well-written piece - I'm going to call it "short fiction" rather than a shot story - Audition, in current New Yorker by Said Sayrafiezadeh (yes, I had to look up the name to check spelling); I don't know anything about this author although I'm sure I've read at least one earlier story by him in same mag. This piece shows that he really knows how to create a scene, drive a narrative, build the voice of a credible and complex narrator, and along the way get some good laughs and style points. This piece is told boy a young man (19, I think he said), college dropout or maybe never attended, working on a construction site to get a little money together in order to, he hopes, fulfill his dream and ambition: profoessional acting. He talks somewhat half-heartedly about getting a U-Haul and driving the thousand or so miles from his mid-sized (his term) city to LA. Meanwhile, he auditions (and gets) a part in a small regional theater, a role that is on stage through all 3 acts but is silent - no idea whether that's a reference to any real play (other than a kids' play that I remember from youth as friend AW starred in as a near-silent jester). The kick in this short fiction is that the narrator's dad owns the construction site and wants him working there to learn the ropes and come up the "hard way," as he did himself; father is self-made and prosperous. The narrator befriends, sort of, his on-site supervisor, giving him a ride home a few times and twice (amusingly, their dialog on both rides is pretty much word for word identical) sharing w/ him some crack (that the narrator was enticed or duped into buying). There are many simmering possibilities for plot development - most of all, wouldn't (or shouldn't) one of the workers inevitably learn that the narrator is the son of the owner/developer, and what kind of isolation or retaliation or worse would that lead to? Unfortunately, this piece just ends abruptly, without reaching any point of resolution or insight - leading me to think this may be the intro to a longer piece of fiction. I hope so, as it shows lots of promise, even if it feels incomplete.

Tension builds in Conversations with Friends, but where will it lead?

Some thoughts about the second part of Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends: The narrator, Frances, gets seriously ill at the outset of part 2, with what at first all readers (and the characters!) assume is an unintended pregnancy and a miscarriage, but no, it's some other as yet unexplained internal ailment. This makes me nervous, but it's astounding how little the characters, including the narrator herself (and her oce-cold mother) react to this malady; amazingly, her mother leaves Frances, in agony, alone in the hospital to go about her daily business such as it is. Second, we get another look at Frances's estranged father, who is living in utter squalor and who fails to come through on a promised "allowance" for Frances, but somehow she's still loyal to him - but is she in search of or in need of a father figure? Well, against their best intentions, she and Nick continue the affair - but he does not seem particularly fatherly (he's 10 years her senior, if he's not lying about his age that is). There's something utterly strange about their seemingly clandestine relationship. They both live in dread of Nick's wife's (Melissa's) finding out about their affair - yet it's amazing what risks they run and how many opportunities they have to get together w/out her knowing, or at least suspecting something's going on; I think this is intentional (on Nick's part) and that Melissa knows about the relationship and tolerates it in the interest of holding their marriage together - probably as she engages - with F's friend, Bobbi? - in an affair of her own. If not, then she's just an obtuse character, which doesn't seem in keeping with her sharp intelligence. Meanwhile, Nick is built up as a childhood genius, who appeared on some national show at age 10 or so offering commentary on Plato, but where did that intelligence go? He seems at present more like a hunk-like dolt. He has nothing to say, for example, about his work in theater, about the plays he's been in, about anything he's ever read, including Frances's poems. Rooney has built a lot of tension among the characters in this novel, but so far - 3/4 through the 300pp book - the tension holds and the characters have not changed much over the course of the narrative. Something's got to give.

Infidelity and its significance in Conversations with Friends

Part One (roughly, the first half) of Sally Rooney's novel, Conversations with Friends, ends not far from where it began, with the 20-something narrator (Frances) and the 30-something handsome actor, Nick, pursuing their sexual relationship and each fretting in her/his own way about whether it's love or sex, the guilt (or not) about infidelity (to spouse - i.e., his wife, Melissa, and to ex-partner, her former lover and best friend, Bobbi), and about their extremely sensitive feelings. Though one would think from this set-up that Nick would be a cad at best - the unfaithful husband - and a predator at worst, coming on to a much younger woman who's clearly vulnerable and with significant father issues, but that's not it at all: Nick notes that his wife has been unfaithful many or at least several times before while, till now, he has been true to her, the narrator seems perfectly well able to speak for herself, and most of all the two of them are extraordinarily solicitous, constantly checking in w/ each other as to whether one has said something to make the other uncomfortable - whether during sex, in general conversation, or in their many back-and-forth messages. In fact, I almost find it hard to believe in Nick - or at least he's not typical of most male characters which is to say of most males, but, OK, let it be. At points the novel strains credibility - the two are at best reckless in their sexual encounters - for example, many liaisons in Nick's bedroom (it's telling that he does not share a bed w/ his wife) while in a small rental house on vacation in France - and nobody notices anything going on between them? Not likely. Then again, maybe that's part of what's going on; clearly there's an attraction between Nick's wife and the narrator's pal, so maybe they're intentionally pushing Nick toward the narrator (Frances)? There's not a lot of plot development in this talky novel through the first half, and I'm wondering how the ground will shift and the pace will pick up, if at all, in the second half.

Comparing Murakami's recent story with one of his classics

To follow up on yesterday's post, I re-read a Haruki Murakami story from the '80s (I think), The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women, opening story in his first collection (in English tr.), The Elephant Vanishes, and maybe not a fair example in that it was obviously incorporated into his famous novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicles (not sure whether he wrote it as a story or if it appeared as a story when in fact it was an excerpt from a larger work). In any event, we can see, looking back at this story, how HM's style has changed and not entirely for the better. Some notes of comparison: with his most recent story to appear in English, The Wind Cave: Windup Bird clearly gives much more presence to the narrator, who actually does things and experiences things over the course of the story, whereas  the Wind Cave narrator just reflects on a key event in his life; there is nothing at the end of Wind Cave that the narrator would not have known or could not have said at the outset, and as a result we feel far less engaged w/ the narrator of Wind Cave. Note that the narrator if Wind-up immediately establishes a specific cultural mood: In the first sentence, the narrator says he was interrupted by cooking spaghetti and listening to a Rossini opera prelude (and a somewhat obscure one at that), so we immediately see this narrator as cosmopolitan and international - attuned to the fascination with Western culture and cuisine and, later commercial products (cigarette brands, fast food) of the West. The narrator of Wind-up has several mysterious, even troubling, encounters w/ women (see title) that leave us uneasy and remain unresolved at the end. The story also touches on a perennial HM theme: cats. In fact that's the central dynamic of the story: The narrator, on request of his wife, spends much of the day in search of their missing cat, which leads him to an abandoned and backyard of a neighboring house. He never finds the cat, so the story (or excerpt) remains unresolved, whereas Wind Cave is resolved, closed at the end - though the closure entails only the narrator's articulation of his thoughts about the death of his younger sister. We either accept his supposition - that has sister died in the eponymous cave, several years before her actual, recognized death - or not, whereas in Windup we obviously accept the narrator's account of events though there are many aspects of these events - who keeps calling him on the phone and why? who is the young girl who hangs out in the overgrown, neglected back yard? what will happen in the narrator's uneasy marriage? - that remain open and inviting. Which story is better?

Murakami establishes a mood and a tone, but to what end?

Haruki Murakami has had a long, successful career, writing novels that mix hyper-realism (life in contemporary Tokyo) with surrealism - voices from the dead, characters with strange powers of perception, alternate universes, a certain obsession with cats - to great effect. I was a huge fan of his early works, in particular the first I read, A Wild Sheep Chase, and his early stories; I have not read all of his recent works and had begun to find his style mannered and on the edge of predictable. His story in the current New Yorker, The Wind Cave, is a good example of how he establishes a tone or a mood: The story is narrated by a young man who recalls the death of his sister in their childhood, when she was about 12 and he 15; the family had known she had a heart condition, but she seems to have managed well with minimal treatment until one day on the way to school she fell dead of heart failure at a train station. The narrator mourns her and has a particularly strong reaction to the thought of her confined in a coffin and to her cremation - a reaction that disturbed his well-being for years. He reflects on an incident in their earlier youth - when she was about 10 - and, with their uncle, they visited a cave near Mount Fuji. The 2 children entered the cave while the uncle rested outside; at one point the sister enters a tiny side cave; she doesn't emerge for some time and does not respond to her brother's calls, sending him - of course - into a near panic. When she does emerge she describes to him - in language that sounds much more like Murakami than like any 10-year-old - how the cave was so dark and silent that she last all sense of her own consciousness and physical presence. Years later, the narrator reflects that perhaps she died in that cave, and was given a period of grace in which her body could carry on w/ a shadow of life for a few more years. That's it. Yes, maybe that happened - but why and to what end? Is this a piece of a longer work? Somehow, I don't think so. I love and appreciate the efficiency of short stories, the best of which contain within their constricted form all of the richness and plenitude of a novel - but by suggestion and inference only. But this story, in the end, contains less than it seems: Either you buy into the young man's supposition or not, but even if you do, what's the point.The story has no point of reference beyond itself.

A smart and tenchant narrator - much like the author? - in Conversatoins with Friends

Yesterday's post was based on just a little (less than 10%) reading in Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friend and no doubt included some mistakes, e.g., the narrator, Frances, is 21 and lives in Dublin and I guess she must publish at least some of her poems because one acquaintance mentions reading some of them. Reading further the novel continues as a deep examination of the narrator and her relationship w/, or conversations w/ if you prefer, with 3 friends in particular: Bobbi, w/ whom she shares the stage as a performance artist, and a couple whose names I don't right now recall but the woman in an established writer-photographer who's working on a profile of the narrator and Bobbi, and that photog's husband, a very handsome stage actor. This man engages in long or at least frequent email exchanges w/ the narrator, which don't cross the line into sexual exploitation but do seem kind of creepy and a form of cheating: many late-night/early-a.m. emails about their friendship. It's obvious they're attracted to each other, and it's also obvious that his marriage - subject of much Frances-Bobbi discussion - is cold if not dead. Throughout, the narrator proves to be trenchant wit and shrewd observer of social interactions, so much so that I frequenlty mark passages w/ my notation "ha" - such as when Frances describes herself as on who takes compliments well, and then unpacks the meaning of such a statement. One suspects she's a lot like the sharp and trenchant writer herself. About 50 pp in we get into a deeper and darker view of Frances, and see what makes her so "cool" (to others) and cold and unfeeling (to herself, and to some others perhaps), as she goes to visit her mother in NE (?) Ireland, and we learn about her parents' estrangement, her father's drinking and his temper - alongside his love for his highly intelligent daughter. A visit to her father, in which he is living the the throes of squalor, is especially painful and gives us a sense of why this smart character has built so many defenses - ironic, caustic - against the pain of involvement w/ others.

Sally Rooney's novel as chamber play

Sally Rooney's novel Conversations with Friends opens w/ a cast of 4 - and in fact feels somewhat like a chamber play, at least at the outset: the narrator, an experimental poet and a committed socialist, late 20s, living alone in Ireland (not in Dublin); her best friend, a beautiful and talented actress/performer - and the 2 of them do performance art, based on poems that the narrator writers. At the outset they meet an author/photographer, impressed by their performances, who wants to do a photo-essay about their work, and the photographer's husband, a handsome man currently performing in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Royal (Irish) theater. Tensions build among the 4 as there the performer is obviously attracted the husband who in turn, surprisingly, is drawn to the eccentric an less attractive narrator; the photographer seems to coolly observe these developing relationships from afar - perhaps part of her work. I was interested in the narrator's description of her poetry, which, she says, she never writes down much less publishes, so they live only in the act of performance. She expresses some sorrow for poets who do write/publish their work - they have to live w/ these published pieces forever, whereas she gets sick of her poems after about 6 months and is pleased to let them vanish.

2 ways in which Hill's Woman in Black breaks w/ ghost-story convention

And a few ways in which Susan Hill (The Woman in Black, 1983) breaks w/ ghost-story convention - because every good ghost story has to have some element that makes it unique or at least separates it from the masses and adds a new twist to the genre. I haven't read enough in this mode to know if these are absolute unique traits in Hill's novel, but they strike me as unusual, unconventional, and surprising: First, the dog. Though he doesn't intro the cute terrier Spider until at least halfway through the novel, the presence of the little, intelligent dog who accompanies the narrator in his second risky expedition to the haunted house where he is to spend the next few days (and nights) reviewing the papers left behind by the late owner adds a welcome light touch and opens up the character of the narrator as well - it's sweet to see the loyal pup warn him of various dangers, and then the dog is endangered - caught in a quicksand mire - leading then narrator to rescue Spider, showing real heroics. Thanks to the introduction of the little dog, we come to car more about the narrator and his fate than we had up to that point in the novel. Second, and this is a bit of a spoiler as we don't see the consequences (though we can foretell them) until near the end, but, unlike most ghostly spirits that appear simply "haunted," her ghost is truly vengeful and malevolent - harming people (children, especially) who caused them no harm or pain during her stay on earth. Ghosts usually are trying to rectify some sort of wrong or issue a warning (think: Hamlet) to the living, but Hill's ghost is diabolical, bringing the specter of death to all who perceive her. So for those who say that ghosts don't exist and for those as well who say ghosts can't harm us, Hill ups the ante: If ghosts do exist, who's to say that they aren't dangerous and malevolent? Altogether, Woman in Black is a successful ghost story, creepy if not frightening, and is obviously rich material for translation into film (and there have been two versions recently, one a faithful adaptation and the other loosely adapted sequel).

More elements of a ghost story: The Woman in Black

More elements of a ghost story, as found in Susan Hill's The Woman in Black: Frame narrative prefereably in which people gather ina a remote setting to tell ghost stories; narrator who "doesn't believe in ghosts" but has his own story to tell; hint of tragedy and sorrow resulting from encounter w/ the supernatural; flashback to when narrator was young and naive and the beginning of the tale; narrator sent on a mission in which he will prove himself to his employer; ominous setting - thick, malicious fog enshrouds London; long journey in stages to an ever-more-remote destination; when he tells other travelers about his destination, they mysteriously fall silent; things look great upon arrival at his destination - e.g., nice accommodations, good food , friendly locals - but things turn for the worse; extreme difficulty in getting to the house where he must review legal papers, and it seems he will be stuck there overnight; observation of a strange woman - others either don't see her or won't talk about her; 2nd encounter w/ strange woman - who does not look like his expectation of a ghost - she looks like a troubled person from a past era; narrator ventures forth from the house and gets lost and confused; strange, inexplicable noises - like a child in terror; things look better in the a.m., of course, he narrator becomes over-confident - he can handle this situation on his own! Can he? There's still a lot to explain, to tie together, and a lot of convincing to do - but it's a powerful and fun narrative with. surprisingly, real literary style: The narrative voice is strong and confident, and there are terrific topographical and atmospheric descriptions throughout - she real cares about character and setting, as well as plot. Would that more practitioners of literary fiction did so.