Elliot's Reading Notes - October 2021
Thomas McGuane, in case you haven’t noticed, has become the #1 Chronicler of life in the contemporary American West, where the old-timers and many-generationed have either been boughtout and pushed to the wayside or have figured out how to make a buck through real estate and guest services. His story in the current New Yorker, Not Here You Don’t [?], touches on this theme so familiar now from McGuane and adds a twist, as the focal character is from an old NW family and has come back to visit the site of the homestead where he was raised - now of course part of a huge tract of land - vacation? resettlement? - of one of the new moguls - finance? film? entertainment? - who has menacingly posted numerous “No Trespassing” signs; the narrator figures these don’t apply to him, because of the provenance of the land, and risks, provokes, a confrontation w/ the land-owner, very nasty and menacing guy of course. Narrator gets his revenge in a way I won’t divulge, but makes a satisfying end to the quite short story - hewing, as we expect from McGuane, toward traditional form, beginning middle end - what a pleasant surprise.
I’ve reached the midpoint in Blake Bailey’s enormous Philip Roth: The Biography with Roth on the verge of meeting/marrying Claire Bloom, a stage in his life post-Portnoy and the broadly comic series of novels (The Breast, Our Gang, e.g.), none of which bolstered his reputation and pre- the American trilogy and the quasi-autobiographical material and the journeys to Israel that marked his later career and that truly established him as a great American novelist, not just a “comic” novelist or a “Jewish” novelist. A few thoughts and midpoint:
Roth had a lot of friends, most of them in the literary world
Roth had a lot of sex with a lot of women, including some prostitutes and including on horrible marriage and at least 2 up to this point long-term relationships that Roth unceremoniously ended
Roth was extremely devoted to his writing, very prolific, about 30 novels by my quick count
Roth was brave and devoted in his commitment to help writers living in an oppressive society, esp Eastern Europe
Roth drew on his own life for material - not quite the auto-fiction that we know of today, but many thinly disguised friends, enemies, and acquaintances populate his novels
Roth bravely faced criticism throughout his career, including charges of anti-Semitism and pornographic exploitation
Roth was strangely afraid of fatherhood and of long-term commitments to women
Roth was crude and anti-feminist in his treatment of many of his female characters, and perhaps of many of the women in his life as well
Roth was a really good teacher of literature and writing, though he left off most of his teaching after becoming wealthy via the success of Portnoy
Roth was a prodigy, first winer of the NBA for his debut book, a story collection no less (a few have followed that cause since Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, including Jhumpa Lahiri and, I think, McPherson?)=Despite all the speculation, Roth was a devoted son and enjoyed an excellent relationship with his parents and, maybe to a lesser extent, with his brother
By all accounts, Roth was a hilarious dinner-table guest and a superb mimic
Oddly enough, Roth seems to have gotten along well with children
Roth’s popularity was established early but his greatness as a writer was recognized only in late career
Roth should have won a Nobel Prize, ditto John Updike
Bailey is a painstaking and thorough biographer who gives us both an unvarnished look at Roth’s public and private life and a clear sense of his excellence as a writer
Woe to everyone who becomes famous
Some books that I respect and that might be great for some readers but were not for me, at least not right now: first, “Cousin” Sallie Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You. The enormous popularity and success that she’s enjoying worldwide kind of puzzles me. Of course I respect and probably concur with most of her political ideas, expressed in various profiles in the press. But, seriously, what happens in this novel? First of all, we realize right off that her characters spend an incredible amount of their time on line or checking their messages, and, aside from its being somewhat of primer as to which apps and feeds are “hot” today, we do get the point that they relate to their world electronically. Take your eyes off the screen and look around you! But, wait, interspersed are a series of back-and-forth emails between to women friends - one of whom is a suddenly successful author who must to a degree be SR’s avatar? - and they write emails that read like chapters in a 19th-century novel. Who writes or reads any such emails? SR is the opposite of a best-selling author, in that she declines to “put the bone in the throat,” to so speak; this particular novel amounts, at least at the mid-point, to a lot of gnashing of teeth and pondering who’s in love with whom and so forth, without any obvious drama or crisis to kick the plot into motion, into action. It’s just not for me.
And second novel I couldn’t finish: Atticus Lish’s The War for Gloria. I loved his debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, and this, his second, is similar in many ways: a highly dramatic plot centering on working-class characters in urban settings (the first in Queens, this section in Quincy, Mass.), good people struggling against all odds to stay alive and to love one another. But Lish’s 2nd novel is almost too good, and over the firs 100 or so pages it really saddened and upset me more than I could handle, or more than I wanted to handle - esp. the struggle of the eponymous Gloria who is diagnosed w/ ALS. I completely agree with the Andre Dubus III (like Lish, a successful writer son of a renowned literary figure) review in the NYTimes; Lish is a great talent and this is probably a great book, but too disturbing for me right now.
Tove Ditlevsen’s story in current New Yorker - The Umbrella - written I’m not sure when: TD died own 1976 and her Copenhagen Trilogy was released in English earlier this year. There are actually two elements to this story. In part it’s the story of a young woman with poor self-image and delicate feelings who marries probably the first guy to show interest in her, a working-class man, and it’s obvious from the start that they’re mismatched and that the marriage will founder or worse, which in fact it does, leading to a violent outburst and an awkward and not promising reconciliation. That’s enough material for a great story of a sorrowful life and opportunities lost. Yet what about that umbrella? That’s the other aspect of the story, in which the woman yearns for only one gift, a bright yellow umbrella (such as she saw from her window in childhood, worn by a dashing and beautiful neighbor); this aspect of the story is heavy-handed and doesn’t work at all - a terrible example of the objective correlative. Does she really want an umbrella, or is it love, or perhaps a child, that she yearns for? Whatever it may be that she yearns for, the story would be much stronger without this forced “symbol” of her distress and emptiness and need for protection.
