Elliot's Reading July 2024

 July 2024

What’s left to say about Alice Munro??? In previous posts over the past, well, 2 decades at least, I have praised her work and recognized her as one of the 3 greatest English-language storywriter of her time - most recently in my June re-reading of one of her earlier books (see above). I have been re-reading another of her celebrated books, Runaway (2004) and had been amazed by the story once again (I’d read it in the New Yorker I believe) - and by coincidence we now learn that the revered author was married to a man who abused Munro’s daughter by previous marriage from the time the young girl was 9 years old - and Munro knew about it and tolerated this and never protected her daughter, her life with this horrid husband (later convicted by the way), in fact she must have shielded him and tolerated him and maybe even worse - enough to refuse her dagger help and to lose contact with her daughter for decades. Death of a hero for certain and to hell with her but what a phony. Was her later work expiatory? Nor=t really, though AM certainly wrote about guilt and shame and the coverup (by two girls) of the drowning of a girl whom picked on and teased - bullying leading to murder and to guilt - I can’t even re-read this painful story, now made even more diabolical. Let’s just take the title story in Runaway: a young woman in an abusive marriage seeks help from a neighbor, the neigh or helps set the young woman on her way to a new life (in Toronto) but en route the girl has remorse and returns to the abusive, violent husband who takes out his anger on the helpful neighbor. What dos this say? One doesn’t have to step in to help someone in trouble because they’ll inevitably come back for more abuse? Don’t protect the innocent and needful? Mind your own business? Shut your eyes? To add to the conflagration, we now learn that AM’s adulatory biography know about the criminal child abuse and Munro’s seeming disinterest but decided not to publish that information because it would be just sensationalized.Say what? He has no credibility whatsoever and his bio is trashed - the opposite, if anyone cares, of Kafka’s executor refusing to burn his mss. And just to top this off: AM’s daughter crashed in on Mom’s fame and wrote a well-received adulatory book about her life with her famous and revered (esp in Can.) mother the writer. Gulp, shel eft out some the details I guess. I’m at a loss for words. May I quote Dylan at the end?: If you see Saint Alice, please tell her thanks a lot!

July 13

Decided to take a look at some of the books on the forthcoming NYT list of best books of the 21st Century (so far, anyway) and started w/ Jasmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), her second novel. Honestly, read about 25% of the novel and that was enough for me. I do admire her talent and especially liked her more recent novel (Sing, Unburied, Sing), and the difference between these 2 novels is striking. She has definitely established herself in Salvage as one who has an extremely vivid and active facility for depiction of a scene, and in particular in creating a world of deep poverty, much violence, and social isolation ion the Mississippi delta area - a territory explored by many other novelists but seldom since Faulkner w/ such unbridled suffering, abuse, and petty crime. However: on algae she had not (yet) reached a stage in her writing a focuses or even including character and plot - it’s all, at least as far as I read, about mood and atmosphere. By p 50 or so I really wanted, how to put it?, a story. I wasn’t there, at least to yet. So after all this novel shows great promise and originality of style, qualities that she developed further and put to better use in her later work(s).

And then there’s Toni Morrison’s post Nobel novel A Memory (2008), which is a kind of prelude to her most famous work, Beloved. It’s told of and through the eyes of a slave, but not from a Southern plantation and not kidnapped into slavery nor is she destined to spend her life as a slave, actually more of a household servant - yet for these indentured servants, esp. those of color, who made their way to the US (before it was the USA) found their lives to be not better and probably much worse in physical comforts and safety. TM never goes out of her way to narrate a story, to make it easier and more clear to the reader - this one needs and probably deserves at leas a 2nd reading to get the full picture of the main character and sometime narrator - and the chronology is never straightforward, in fact I think the novel may be written in reverse order, but I’m not so sure of that. What makes the novel great and beautiful if not clear and concise is TM’s language, poetic always elliptical - much like reading a long narrative poem by a difficult writer such Jorie  Graham or Wallace Stevens. It also calls to mind  that great novel of life on a Southern plantation - the Known World - though A Mercy is more elusive as TM gives us little guidance as to the cast of characters and their histories. Similarly, TM pens a name for each character and uses that name as the proper noun, e.g., Patrician, and switches from first to third person at will - in other words this novel requires a great deal of attention and retention, sometimes with no clear end in sight. It’s unusual to come across a novel that depicts slavery outside of and before the vast enterprise in the tobacco industry in the American south - here the characters have some hope of freedom (when their tie served has been worked off, for ex.) even though their futures are bleak. All told, a novel with much beauty and originality that, never the less, requires closer attention that most readers (me) can’t take on. 

A Note: I scanned through my  library and Picked up my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V. (1963), which back in the day (much captured in recent bios I’ve been reading about Dylan) was a landmark, breakthrough, gotta read novel (I think my mother even read it!) but it does not stand up well over time, to put it mildly, with the first 20 pp or so, Enough!, the drinking and carousing and ridiculous character names and odd bursts of songs seem juvenile, confusing, ultimately boring. Couldn’t get past 20 pp if that. It has seen its day (or I have).