Best novels of the year

Matt Haig

My last post awarded superlatives to a dozen books read during this year, yet without mentioning some of the best novels I read in 2021. So I want to mention them here.

I have become a big Richard Russo fan in recent years, and Everybody's Fool did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for his work. A sequel to Nobody's Fool, it shifts the focus to different characters, especially the hapless police chief obsessed with discovering the identity of his late wife's lover.

Rules of Civility by Amore Towles is a wonderful novel about pretense and how manners can give a person something to hide behind.

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a stunning and subtle novel about a young Irish woman's struggle to free herself from the influences of others to discover her own path.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler makes a house a character in a story about the people who live in it.

May Doria Russell's Epitaph won't be the last word on the Gunfight at OK Corral, but the novel is good enough to be.

Ann Patchett. like Anne Tyler, puts a house at the center of her novel in The Dutch House. But while Tyler's house brings people together, Patchett's house divides them.

Beaming Sonny Home by Cathie Pelletier tells of a woman who watches her son's life unravel on television, while her own life begins to come into focus.

All these are terrific novels, yet were I to choose a Novel of the Year it would have to be one I did mention in my last post, Matt Haig's The Humans. It sounds like science fiction, a new variation on Jack Finney's Body Snatchers theme, but in fact the novel becomes a beautiful mediation on what it means to be human.

2021 superlatives

Next time I may write about some of the best books I read this year, but today I want to focus on other superlatives, some of those suggested by J. Peder Zane in his book Remarkable Reads.

Most Enchanting Book: That would have to be Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt. Here's a witty, moving novel that reads like a fairy tale, something akin to The Princess Bride. There's a giant, a castle, true love and a Very Large Hole.

A still from the film version of Fahrenheit 451

Most Important Book: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1951, seems as important as ever.  In Bradbury's vision, firemen don't put out fires but start them, especially for the purpose of burning books. In 2021 in America, there were hints that his vision might actually be coming true, with even Dr. Seuss books being stripped from shelves for being politically incorrect.

Most Daunting Book: Edward Dolnick's Down the Great Unknown is daunting only in the sense that to read it is to accompany John Wesley Powell, at least in one's mind, on the first boat ride down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It's interesting to consider that the only members of his team to die were those who abandoned the expedition because it was too dangerous.

Wisest Book: This title goes to Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. Gladwell makes the case that the weak sometimes have the advantage over the strong because their weakness forces them to look for unconventional ways to win.

Most Familiar Book: I read Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King for the third time this year, so by now it is a very familiar book. It's the story of a wealthy man who knows something is missing from his life, and he goes to central Africa to try to discover what it is.

Most Incomprehensible Book: Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac turned out to be too surrealistic for my taste.  There's a chunk of his life that James Purdue cannot remember, and the novel is about his search to discover the missing pieces. S.J. Watson explores a similar plot in Before I Go to Sleep but with greater success.

Most Beautiful Book: I purchased a copy of William Trevor's short story collection A Bit on the Side when I visited England in 2005, but didn't read it until early this year. I was amazed by the beauty and tenderness of these stories.

Most Fearless Book: Because of its subject matter, Lolita was a fearless book when it was published in 1958, and a new collection of essays about the novel, Lolita in the Afterlife, seems no less fearless.

Most Surprising Book: I expected  Larry Watson's short novel Montana 1948 to be a good book. What I didn't expect was a great book.

Most Disappointing Book: The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem has been around for a number of years, so I thought this collection of stories about literary feuds and arguments would be more entertaining than it turned out to be.

Most Unpleasant Book: Usually I discard unpleasant books long before I finish reading them, so I have to interpret unpleasant in a different way. My choice is The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas, which is about the crew of an American submarine stranded at the bottom of the sea. Sounds terribly unpleasant to me.

Most Luminous Book: My vote here goes to Matt Haig's incredible novel The Humans, which is about a monstrous being from another planet who takes the form of a human in order to destroy all traces of a dangerous mathematical formula. This requires him to learn to be a human, and in so doing he becomes a better human than the man he replaced. This was a contender for the wisest book of the year.

Game for readers (2021 edition)

For more several years now I have played a game at year's end where I pose a series of questions — the same questions each year — and answer them by using only the titles of books read that year. It's a game any reader can play, although it helps to read a lot of books and keep a list of them. True answers are, of course, optional. Because of my move to Florida, I read 20 or 30 fewer books than usual in 2021, but let's see how I do.

Describe yourself: Everybody's Fool

How do you feel: Something to Live For

Describe where you currently live: Sun Going Down (I live near the Gulf Coast of Florida, which is where, in Florida at least, the sun goes down)

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Kingdom by the Sea

Your favorite form of transportation: Mystery Ride

Your best friend is: Moonwalking with Einstein (OK, that's weak)

You and your friends are: All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (at least that's what I fear, having left so many of them back in Ohio)

What's the weather like where you are: A Clearing in the Distance (Unbelievable would also work, this being Florida in December)

What is the best advice you could give: Accidence Will Happen (yes, that spelling is correct)

Thought for the day: We'll Always Have Casablanca (or maybe Anything Goes)

How would you like to die: Before I Go to Sleep

Your soul's present condition: Surprised by Paradox (or perhaps Imponderables)

Ghosts of Christmas Past

We all inhabit multiple time zones. We have the world of our daily present, which usually claims most of our attention, but we are also wrapped in shadowy bands of the past.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies

This observation by Sven Birkerts may be especially true at Christmastime. Ebenezer Scrooge is not the only one haunted by Christmas Past. This haunting may for most of us be a good thing, as we are flooded with memories of Christmas mornings spent with parents and siblings, Christmas meals shared with our extended family and Christmas parties enjoyed with friends and co-workers. The older we get the more Christmas Past dwells on our minds, even as Christmas Present demands our full attention.

Birkerts makes the point in The Gutenberg Elegies, as I have often thought myself, that each of us is not just the age we happen to be, but every age we have ever been. We can be a helpless baby, a pouting child, an awkward teenager, a responsible adult and, if old enough, a fretful senior citizen, all in the span of a single day

Our memories enable us to dwell in the now, while at the same time being an excited child discovering an array of gifts under a brightly lit tree, a young lover thrilled at spending our first Christmas with the one we love, a parent giving joyful memories to our own children just as our own parents did for us and a grandparent doing it all again with grandchildren. Not everyone's memories are that pleasant, but in any case we can return in our minds to the person we once were, experiencing again how we felt, what we thought and what we did.

This is all true every day of the year, but perhaps especially true at Christmas.

Small novel, big punch

You might not expect much from a short novel (just 169 pages) with a title like Montana 1948 (1993). I didn't, but having read two later novels by Larry Watson, I should have known better. The title may sound like a book of regional history. The book itself may look like an ambitious tourism pamphlet. But this is Larry Watson, and the man can write.

This coming-of-age story set in northeastern Montana in the summer of 1948 is narrated by a boy who is the son of the county sheriff, Wesley Hayden, who is himself the son of a sheriff. David Hayden's grandfather is a blustery, powerful man used to getting his own way, both in his family and in Mercer Country. He has never made it a secret that his favorite son is not Wesley, who gave up a career practicing law to enforce the law as his own father did. The favored son is Frank, a handsome and charming war hero who is now a prominent doctor in the community.

This last summer in Bentrock, Montana, begins to unravel when Marie Little Soldier, the Indian woman who lives with the Haydens and watches over David, becomes ill. When calling a doctor is suggested, she protests, but Frank is called in anyway. Mariel screams in fear when he arrives.

Eventually David's mother learns from Marie that Frank has a reputation of sexually molesting Indian women. She persuades her husband to investigate, which he does, first with reluctance and then with determination to see it through, whatever the consequences.

And those consequences turn out to be profound for everyone involved.

This may be a little novel with an odd title, but it packs quite a punch.

Conformity first

No matter how rebellious, the poet has to account for what has come before.

Peter Roy Clark, The Art of X-ray Reading

We have all been influenced by somebody else, no matter how independent, how original or, as Peter Roy Clark puts it, how rebellious we may think we are. To rebel, one needs something or someone to rebel against. To be independent, one needs something to be independent from. To be original, one needs a contrast.

As ideas go, this one is hardly original, let along rebellious or independent, yet it seems important to recognize the debt we owe to those who have influenced us, whether to follow in their footsteps or to set off on our own path. Different influences would likely have turned us in different directions. Nature is vitally important — our talents, our aptitudes, our genes — yet nurture plays a role as well. We can never entirely free ourselves from either.

Clark is writing specifically about writers, and I will do the same. Writers are shaped by the language they heard as children, by the books they read when young and had read to them, by their teachers (perhaps especially their English teachers), by the writers who most moved them in their youth and, perhaps most significantly, by their own everyday experiences — their loves, their disappointments, their griefs, their successes. What writers (especially fiction writers) write usually reflects in some way their own lives. Novelist Richard Russo has admitted that he can't seem to stop writing about his own father, although most of his readers might never realize that.

Young writers often imitate other writers, whether consciously or not. Only gradually do they develop their own styles. Before rebellion comes conformity. You learn how others do it before you can discover your own way to do it.

Reading extensively

In an essay called "The First Steps Toward a History of Reading," Robert Danton makes a distinction between intensive reading and extensive reading. Basically this means either reading a few books often and well or reading many books once and then, in most cases, soon forgetting most of what what we read.

There was a time, before the 20th century, when most homes had very few books in them. These few probably included the Bible, Shakespeare's plays and perhaps an anthology of poetry and something by Dickens, Twain, Eliot or whomever. When you had a few moments to read, this is what you read. Or reread. Or reread again. Chances are you could quote passages by heart. They would come to mind at certain points of your life, and when you recited them, others would know their source and perhaps even finish the quote with you. 

Sven Birkerts calls this "desert island reading" in his book The Gutenberg Elegies. If you've ever made your own list of books to take with you to a desert island, they were probably books you thought were worth reading more than once. Since so few of us ever wind up on a desert island, we tend not to actually reread those books, although we may still keep favorites on a shelf somewhere just in case. We have too many other books we want to read first.

Today most of us read extensively, meaning we read more books than people once did, but we don't get to know any of them as well. After a few months have passed, we barely remember plots or characters. Mostly we just remember whether we liked the book or not. We certainly couldn't quote passages.

We have both gained something and lost something with this shift from intensive to extensive reading. We now have exposure to a much broader spectrum of writers, writing styles and ideas. Different books appeal to different people, so we now have something for everyone on our bookshelves. Each time we open a book we can expect to find something new.

What we've lost is common ground. When we don't all read the same books, it becomes more difficult to talk about books without joining a book club. That's why people are more likely today to discuss movies or television shows around a table, although now we are even less likely to watch the same movies and television shows. Our viewing habits have become more extensive as well.

Mostly what we've lost is the deep knowledge that comes with reading something multiple times. Some people do still make it a practice to read a portion of the Bible each day or to reread a favorite book, such as Pride and Prejudice, every year or two. Most of us, however, when we reach for a book, reach for something new. That is our blessing and our curse.

David wins, again

When a boy named David slew a giant named Goliath, it was not the oddity we might think it was. So says Malcolm Gladwell in his book David and Goliath (2013). It happens all the time. The underdog upsets the champion. The outnumbered defeat superior forces. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan send the United States fleeing, just as the Colonies once did to the British.

With greater size, strength or experience often comes overconfidence and erroneous assumptions. David doesn't stand a chance, the thinking goes. Yet apparent weakness in the conventional sense can force someone to discover a hidden strength, just as David thought to use his sling, a wicked weapon at a distance, against a giant with a sword, a wicked weapon up close.

Gladwell gives several examples. A basketball coach with no experience and even less knowledge of the game led his group of untalented girls to the championship game. He did this by emphasizing defense and full-court pressure. Teams have just so many seconds to get the ball inbounds and so many seconds to get it across the half-court line. If they can't do that, your team gets the ball. These girls prevented this from happening again and again and again, rarely giving more talented teams opportunities to even take a shot. Their complete lack of ability, says Gladwell, "made their winning strategy possible." More talented girls would never have worked that hard.

Many top business leaders have dyslexia, Gladwell discovered. Even now, at the top of their professions, they still have difficulty reading. How did they do it? By listening carefully and remembering what they hear and what, with great effort, they are able to read. "Dyslexia — in the best of cases — forces you to develop skills that might otherwise have lain dormant," he writes.

There's more than one way to win a battle or a war. Swords — or bombs and heavy artillery — are one way. But slings — and guerrilla warfare and simply refusing to surrender — are another way. Passive resistance made the civil rights movement successful. Forgiveness can be more powerful than revenge. Attending a state college can be better for your career than attending Harvard or Stanford. Gladwell covers a lot of ground in a 300-age book, all of it fascinating stuff.

The second invisible man

H.G. Wells beat Jules Verne to the punch with The Invisible Man, published in 1898. Probably inspired by Wells, Verne soon began writing his own novel about invisibility, which he called The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz. It was not published in France until after his death, but only after his son had badly mangled it with substantial editing and rewriting. Several of Verne's other late books suffered a similar fate.

Not until a decade ago was Verne's novel restored to the way he wrote it and, unlike so many other Verne novels in the past, given a decent English translation. The result is a book that, even if it came after the much more famous Wells book, is original and entertaining in its own way.

Henry Vidal travels from France to Hungary for the wedding of his brother, Marc, to a lovely young woman named Myra Roderich. Myra had previously spurned a proposal from Wilhelm Storitz, the son of a noted, if mysterious, Prussian scientist. Wilhelm has vowed to prevent the marriage of Marc to Myra from ever taking place.

As the wedding approaches, mysterious things begin to occur, such as disembodied voices and objects seemingly moving by themselves through the air. When it finally becomes clear that Wilhelm has found the secret of invisibility, panic overtakes not just the wedding party but the entire city. How can anyone be confident of privacy ever again? How can any secret be safe? How can Wilhelm be found, let alone captured, when he cannot even be seen? The story reaches it crisis point when Myra herself disappears.

Myra's importance to the plot is one reason this novel is considered noteworthy among Verne's work. Mostly he wrote books for boys, who had little interest in female characters. This novel appears to have been written more for an adult audience, especially as it contains romantic scenes and wedding details. Yet Verne perhaps does women no favors by making both Myra and her mother so fragile that they faint and must be carried to bed because of the shock caused by events. 

I won't discuss Verne's dramatic ending, one of the things that his son had badly rewritten, except to say that it is exceptional. H.G. Wells may have wished he had thought of it.

Let us imagine it

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

Stephen King, On Writing

When we read a novel, there are some parts of it — dialogue, for example, and action scenes — that we focus on intently, while there are other parts we may just skip over or skim or read without really giving the words our full attention. And these parts are likely to be description, especially description that continues for more than two or three words.

Are we really interested in exactly what a character is wearing? Do we care what color a house is, how many windows it has or what kind of shrubbery stands in front of it? Some writers are actually quite good at description, and entire paragraphs of it may be worth our attention. In most cases, however, the less description the better. It can get in the way of the story. And it can get in the way of our imaginations.

And that is Stephen King's point in the comment quoted above. Good writers, he argues, describe just enough to fire the reader's imagination. We all imagine characters and scenes in our minds as we read. I mentioned once before about being disappointed when, after imagining a female character as a blonde,  the author belatedly revealed her to be a brunette.

"I'd rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well," King says. "If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can't you? I don't need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown."

Just as an author's description can interfere with a reader's imagination, so can a movie version of a novel. The other evening I watched the film based on the novel Before I Go to Sleep, reviewed here last month. Both Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth were excellent in the major roles, yet both were jarring somehow because they were not the characters I had pictured while reading the novel. The actor playing the doctor was especially unsettling because he is a younger man in the novel. Had I seen the movie first, I would have pictured the actors in my mind while reading the book, and that too would have been jarring when the author's descriptions didn't match my film-shaped imagination.

And that may be why reading a story is better for us than watching it on a screen. It leaves more to our imagination.

View from the rear

I was organizing Christian novels in a church library with a friend a few months ago when I noticed how many of the covers — the majority I would guess — had illustrations showing figures, in most cases women, from the back. Many of the illustrations were almost identical. They were attractive designs, yet all attractive in the same way. They all suggested mystery. Who is this woman? What does she look like? Where is she going? What is she thinking about? This is good, I suppose, but why did they all have to look the same?

It turns out I am not alone in noticing this book-cover trend. I recently visited Killer Covers, a website that shows and discusses paperback covers past and present. The Nov. 14 post, called "Bringing Up the Rear," shows a sampling of 59 recent covers showing the backs of figures, most of them walking away, often in darkness, in mist or in shadows. Many of these books are by authors of note, including Harlen Coben, David Baldacci, Charles Todd (most of Todd's Bess Crawford novels have covers like this) and John Le Carre.

This may be just a fad in the book publishing industry, something like using the word daughter or girl in a novel's title. Fads tend to burn out sooner or later. 

This fad may have staying power, however. Faces, like hands, are notoriously difficult for artists to draw realistically. With a rear view, both of these features can be avoided. And as I already noted, these images can be visually striking. They set a mood and hint subtly about the nature of the story inside. They also don't give too much away. That person looking away from us might be attractive or not, white, black or Asian. We all like to picture ourselves in a story. That is easier to do when we have no idea, at least until the author tells us, what this character looks like.

At some point, however, even publishers who prefer to follow each other may come to realize that these covers all look the same. Some art director with imagination may be encouraged to break the stereotype and give readers something different, something original. We can only hope so.

The life that matters

In some ways I am reading the novel as I walk, or nap, or drive to the store for milk. When I am away from the book it lives its shadow life, its afterlife, and that, as the believers have always insisted, is the only life that matters.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies

Writing doesn't just happen while words are being put down on paper or on a screen. Writers write while they are walking, driving, reading, preparing a meal or even sleeping. Writing stems from thought, and thinking, much of it at the subconscious level, can take place anywhere at anytime.

What is true for writers is also true of readers, as Sven Birkerts points out in his book The Gutenberg Elegies.  You don't stop reading when you put down the book, at least not if the book has in any way engaged you. If it's a novel you are reading, you may wonder why the characters did what they did. Or what will they do next? What is the significance of this or that in the plot? A work of nonfiction, especially something full of ideas, might provoke thoughts of another kind. Can this be true? What does it mean? What does it mean for me? How does this change what I think about that?

Birkerts calls such thoughts about a book its afterlife. A good book's life does not end when the last page is turned. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, it produces ripples. These ripples may continue for minutes, hours or days. Sometimes they can affect us for the rest of our lives. We never stop reading the book, even if we never open it again.

Familiarity breeds cliches

The difference between originality and cliche is familiarity. Those expressions we think of as cliches are that only because we have heard them so many times before. The first time we heard them, they probably seemed clever.

This occurs to me while browsing through Happy as a Clam, a collection of similes more than 200 pages long complied in the 1990s by Larry Wright, an owner of a bed and breakfast along the Mississippi River who obviously had lots of time on his hands.

Take the expression "good as gold" as an example. A cliche? Yes, indeed. But it probably wasn't back in the 19th century when Charles Dickens put it in one of his books. How about "easy as falling off a log"? I'll bet it was thought original and amusing when Mark Twain first used it. Twain also wrote "easy as playing hooky," which may still sound amusing to us because we probably haven't heard it as often.

As for "happy as a clam," that is apparently so old that Wright couldn't find anyone to attribute it to. "Happy as a lark" goes back to Anne Bronte. Other similes may seem better to us, in part, because they less familiar: "happy as a new millionaire" (Margaret Mitchell), "happy as a pig eating pancakes," "happy as a kid with a new astronaut suit," "happy as a fly in a molasses factory," "happy as a lizard on a sun-washed rock" (Dean Koontz).

"Read him like a book" is now hopelessly cliched. But not "read him like a fifty-foot 'See Rock City' sign" (Robert R. McCammon). McCammon, the author of horror novels, pops up often in this book, an indication not just of McCammon's gift for clever similes but also Wright's reading taste. Both Stephen King and Dean Koontz are also well-represented here. King has given us "hard as trying to swallow a doorknob," "glared at each other like motorists with tangled cars" and "useless as talking to an empty cat food can."

Short similes, such as "happy as a clam," seem more likely to turn into cliches, simply because they are easy to remember and repeat (even if we have no idea why a clam would be happy). Meanwhile, "rear end as wide as a bank president's desk," also by Stephen King, will probably always bring a smile because it is too long to repeat endlessly.

Writers who read, or not

Should a writer of fiction read the fiction of other writers? There appears to be two schools of thought on this question, perhaps three: 1) Yes, you might learn something. Besides writers should like to read. 2) No,   you don't want other writers influencing what you write. 3) Read, but do it between your own writing projects. Most writers always seem to have a project in the works, so I don't know how practical the third option may be.

James M. Cain

I recently came upon an interview with novelist James M. Cain, author of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, published in 1983 in The Armchair Detective. Cain recalled meeting Dashiell Hammett without realizing at the time that the man was Dashiell Hammett. The stranger had complimented Cain's work, and Cain said he faked a polite reply. He not only didn't recognize Hammett, but had never read his books.

"I am often somewhat embarrassed talking to other novelists because I haven't read their work," Cain admitted. "Partly because I'm afraid to."

Cain explained, "I don't read a novel just to be reading it. When I read a novel, I'm rewriting it in my own mind, I'm tearing it down, I'm building it up ... it exhausts me."

Then he added that writers who admire other writers can sometimes start imitating them,, whether deliberately or not. He mentioned Rudyard Kipling writing like Bret Harte and Ring Lardner writing like Frank Sullivan. Many writers have copied Hemingway's style.

I happened to meet Mark Winegardner shortly after reading his novel Crooked River Burning, and I commented that the book's style reminded me of John Dos Passos. Winegardner admitted that he had been reading Dos Passos just before he wrote the novel. I wish I would have asked whether the style choice was deliberate or whether he was just under the Dos Passos influence when he wrote the novel. Winegardner later wrote some successful Godfather novels, proving that he is skilled at copying another writer's style.

Other writers could never refrain from reading books by other writers as Cain did. They simply enjoy reading too much. They like seeing how other writers solve writing problems. Or they earn extra money by writing book reviews or even by teaching college literature classes. Obviously no one answer to the question above works for all.

Books in boxes

A book never looks more alluring, more essential, than when it is about to get packed away in a box.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies

I seem to recall writing once before about the appeal of books in boxes, though I believe my focus on that occasion was on taking books out of boxes, not putting them into boxes.

Sven Birkerts

I read the above line by Sven Birkerts while I was still heavily engaged in the act of putting books into boxes. I have since moved from my three-bedroom Ohio house to a two-bedroom Florida condo, which unlike the spacious house has virtually no room for books.

About half of my books in boxes went to the auctioneer (trothauctions.com),who soon will have some tempting bargains to offer collectors and dealers. Fine first editions of Lonesome Dove, The Killer Angels, Death Wish and The Queen's Gambit among many others will soon be up for grabs. Mostly what I've kept are reading copies and personal treasures, and most of these are now stilled boxed in a storage unit.

If there's anything more alluring than books in a box it is books in a closed and sealed box. Except for labels like "nonfiction, mostly unread" and "fiction, read, A-C," these boxes are each a mystery. What exactly is inside? When will I be able to open it? When will I be able to read those books, or at least look at them again?

I have focused up to now on just one if the adjectives Birkerts uses to describe books in boxes: alluring. But his other adjective, essential, seems apt as well. When I was busy for days putting books into boxes, some to sell and some to keep, almost every book I picked up seemed essential somehow, even when I couldn't put my finger on why. How can I part with this book when I haven't read it yet? Or, how can I hide this book away in a box when I haven't read it yet. This book is too good to put in a box. That book I had forgotten about, but now I want read it immediately. And so it went.

In one sense books are easy to pack away in boxes. Find the right box — not too big and not too small — and books will fill it up neatly and quickly. I discovered that most liquor boxes worked perfectly, and I found myself — someone who never drinks liquor —visiting a liquor store once or twice a week seeking empty boxes. Even then I couldn't find enough. Yes, packing books into boxes was easy peasy, yet at the same time it was one of the most difficult tasks I've faced in my life.

Beginning again at square one

I have no memory, but I am not stupid.

Christine, in Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

Imagine waking up each day remembering nothing about the day before. So it goes with Christine Lucas, the woman at the heart of S.J. Watson's 2011 novel Before I Go to Sleep. The man in bed with her is a stranger; the face she sees in the mirror looks decades older than the one she thinks she should have.

Christine narrates her own story in the form of a diary she begins at the suggestion of a doctor who works with her in secret because her husband disapproves. Dr. Nash calls her each morning to tell her where she has hidden the diary. She reads it to discover anew what few details about her life she has been able to gather and record. Yet these details are often contradictory. Did she lose her memory because of an accident or as a result of a beating? Did she once write a novel or not? Did she have a son named Adam, and if so, is he dead or alive? Why are there so few pictures of her life? Did her best friend really move to New Zealand? Who is lying to her, Dr. Nash or this man who tells her each morning that he is her husband? Is there anyone she can trust?

To make such a story both believable and thrilling takes great skill and diligence, and Watson performs masterfully, which explains why this was a best-seller a decade ago. The reader may figure it all out before  Christine does, but the reader has the advantage of being able to remember the previous chapter.

Winter sports words

For several years now I have been checking the Sol Steinmetz book There's a Word for It in November to see what words entered the English language 100 years previously. Steinmetz lists year by year the words that first appeared somewhere in print.

Ulrich Salchow

Looking at the 1921 list I notice that several new words that year had to do with winter sports: goalie, power play, salchow and slalom. I don't know why this might have been so, but it may have had some connection with the Winter Olympics that would be held for the first time in 1924 in France. Perhaps sports like hockey, figure skating and skiing were just gaining popularity in 1921. These words may have already been in use among insiders who actually participated in these sports, but now they were starting to appear in newspapers, magazines and books. I'm just guessing here, but that seems to be the way new words come into the language: First they are mentioned in speech by a few people, then somebody writes them down and they gradually become familiar to the general population.

It seems easier to understand why certain other words appeared on the scene in 1921: Chaplinesque, Chekhovian, Gandhian, Dodgem, Fascist, Kiwanis and Tarzan, for example. The pogo stick was invented in 1919, but it apparently didn't get its name until two years later.

Some of the more intriguing words to show up in 1921 were blankie, bouncy, dehumidify, expressionistic, featherbedding, go-getter, goofy, goon, hicksville, peppiness, pin curler, postmodern, razz, saboteur, tearjerker and teenage. There's got to be a history behind each of those words, but that would be somebody else's book.

Difficulties of family

He stuck his head in the room and said my name but I did not answer. He closed the door and moved to his room and I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.

Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers

The "difficulties of family" lie at the heart of the crazy and crooked story that is The Sisters Brothers (2011) by Patrick DeWitt.

Professional hitmen weren't called that in the mid-19th century. Eli and Charlie Sisters are just hired guns, sent by a wealthy man to eliminate rivals and annoyances. They are good at their job, or at least Charlie is. He can kill easily and without remorse whether he gets paid for it or not. Eli, the novel's narrator, follows his brother because he is his brother, but his heart isn't really in it. He craves the love of a woman and the pleasure of staying in one spot for awhile.

Most of the novel tells of their travails on the road to their target, a man who has discovered a seemingly magical, yet dangerous, way to extract gold from a river. Should they kill him as ordered or go into business with him?

As with DeWitt's later novels, Undermajordomo Minor and French Exit, The Sisters Brothers has enough hilarity to make you think it is a comic novel, while the author actually delivers a serious story about the human struggle to cope with life.

By the end of the novel, the Sisters brothers are quite different men and their relationship has changed dramatically. Reading their story is a pleasurable adventure.

Sex comedy

Although he made his reputation as a novelist, Graham Greene published dozens of short stories during his long writing career, including a 1967 collection called May We Borrow Your Husband? & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life.

Greene liked to categorize his work, as evidenced by the way he labeled some of his novels as entertainments to set them apart from his more serious work. Calling these stories comedies does much the same thing. He seemed to want to state before the critics could that his work was a bit of fluff, as if something entertaining or amusing could not also be artful.

"Two Gentle People," the last story in this book and one of the best ones, shows us a man and woman, each married unhappily to someone else, who meet in a park, make a connection and spend much of the day together before returning, unfaithful only in their hearts, to their spouses.

More obviously comic, though still a quality story, is "The Root of All Evil," in which a group of men meet secretly so that another man won't interfere with their drinking. Secrecy here is the root of all evil, leading to a series of hilarious misadventures.

In the title story, an attractive young couple honeymoons in Antibes, where an older writer (who seems a lot like Graham Greene himself) observes over a series of days while two men plot carefully to seduce ... the husband. As the husband shows surprisingly little interest in his beautiful bride, the seduction is all too easy.

"The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen" finds a young couple dining in a restaurant next to a table of eight Japanese men. The young woman has just been given an advance for a novel she is writing. While the young man wants only to marry her, she speaks endlessly of her bright future as a writer because of her powerful observation skills, while failing to even notice those eight Japanese gentlemen.

Despite the subtitle, there really isn't that much sex in these stories, but there is most blatantly in "Cheap in August." This is about a bored wife vacationing alone in Jamaica because it's "cheap in August." She sees this as her opportunity for a brief romantic affair, but the only man she can attract is a fat older fellow whose one attractive quality is that he is not her husband.

These are the best of the 12 stories in the book, but the others too keep the reader entertained.

Stuck at the border

The door to ordinary places was the door that I had missed. ...  I would live in the other places, among the exiled ping-pong players and the old ladies with dogs on their arms, and my true companions would be Godwin and Jenny and all those who had missed the same door,

Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Danny Deck, the young Texas writer who sells his first novel early in Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), feels sorry for himself, but readers may not feel sorry for him. If he has missed the "door to ordinary places," it is because he himself has chosen other doors that lead nowhere.

McMurtry's title sounds like that of a comic novel, and for a number of pages that appears to be what we have here. Then the title turns out to be the literal truth. All his relationships are bridges burned by the end. Mostly those relationships are with women — usually married women, a Mexican prostitute he asks to run away with him, a beauty who wants his baby but not him. "I have no real resistance to temptation," he says early on. He can resist neither women nor alcohol, and both lead him where he really doesn't want to go.

McMurtry refers again and again to borders and rivers, his other metaphors of choice. His novel ends with Danny "drowning" his second novel in the Rio Grande, the border between the United States and Mexico. Danny seems stuck on the border, or just on the wrong side of the border that separates the ordinary life he craves from the restless, purposeless life he has fallen into.

In a preface to this edition, McMurtry says he wrote the novel in a rush immediately after finishing Moving On. He calls it a kind of afterbirth to that much longer novel. Of Danny Deck, he writes, "He wasn't me, but there was no large gap between his sensibility and my own." What this suggests is that Danny is. in fact, him: a young Texas writer with early success struggling to discover whether that was a fluke or whether he really does have talent worth cultivating. McMurtry found his own way across the border, across the river and through the door to ordinary places. It is left unclear whether Danny Deck can do the same.

The self-invented man

Lewis Mumford called Olmsted's combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading "American education at its best." He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man.

Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance

Many young men who don't know what to do with their lives never find a satisfactory answer. Frederick Law Olmsted had the good fortune to have a father affluent enough and patient enough to allow his son the time he needed to find his career, and eventually the career found him, as Witold Rybczynski tells the story in a fine biography, A Clearing in the Distance (1999).

Olmsted spent a year as a merchant seaman, became a farmer and then a nurseryman, tried his hand at journalism and wrote some influential books, with his father making up the deficits in his various enterprises. Today we associate Olmsted primarily with the design of New York City's Central Park, assuming it to be the culmination of his career. Instead it was the beginning, where he discovered his true calling.

Olmsted and Calveret Vaux were hired to make a park out of a few blocks of mostly vacant land in the city. Olmsted had been to Europe and remembered parks he had seen in England and France. These observations, plus the knowledge he had gained working with plants and trees on his farm, led to the design of a park that surpassed expectations. Yet Olmsted was frustrated by New York politics, everyone trying to cut funding or change the plan. Some politicians wanted to plant flowers in the park, while Olmsted thought flowers had their place, but that place wasn't Central Park. He wanted a more natural look to the park.

He was glad to finally be rid of Central Park, but by then he had plenty of other opportunities for his thriving new business in what he called landscape architecture. Over the next decades he designed numerous public parks, grounds for public buildings, college campuses and private estates, including most famously Biltmore in Asheville, N.C. Other projects he worked on included Belle Isle in Detroit, the World's Fair in Chicago, the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, National Zoological Park, Smith College, Notre Dame University, Duke, Vasser, Yale and Stanford. A more complete list takes up three pages in Rybczynski's book.

Olmsted saw himself as an artist, not a landscaper. His art has changed through the years, much of it no longer recognizable, yet enough of his work remains, including Central Park, to still impact American culture more than a century after his death.

Meaningless twaddle

So much of what we say says nothing. And often that is entirely the point. When we say things like "how are you?" and "nice weather we're having," we are just filling blanks. Eventually, if we're lucky, a real conversation might get started. In the meantime, we exchange meaningless twaddle until somebody says something meaningful, or at least interesting. Sometimes that never happens and the small talk continues until one party breaks away and tries again with somebody else.

Yet so often even meaningful conversation contains meaningless twaddle. Consider some of these phrases that we hear all the time:

"It's as easy as ABC"

"Going forward"

"Crunch the numbers"

"Give 110 percent"

"Not exactly rocket science"

"Knock on wood"

"Let me put in my two cents"

"On the same page"

"Let's not reinvent the wheel"

And so on.

Sometimes such phrases are not exactly meaningless, for some cliches do mean something. They can be a shorthand way of saying something that would take more time to say if we avoided the cliches. Yet so often they add nothing at all to the conversation. Instead of saying "let me put in my two cents," why not just say what you have to say? Rather than "give 110 percent," saying simply "do your best" covers the same ground without causing a cringe among those who know 110 percent is mathematically impossible.

"Not exactly rocket science" stopped being amusing ages ago, as did "reinventing the wheel." Such phrases add absolutely nothing to the conversation. Nor do they add anything to the reputation or prestige of those who say them.

Nobody escapes to jail

Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Ursula Le Guin made her living creating fantasy, so it stands to reason that she would defend it. Yet like Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were highly intelligent, very rational individuals who wrote (and read) fantasy, and one could name any number of others like them. Lewis remembered as a schoolboy that the fantasy stories he read seemed more rational, more relevant to his own life, than the more realistic stories he read. The latter always seemed phony, somehow always unlike the real world.

Fantasy is often equated with daydreaming, which is a waste of time, at least according to most parents, teachers and employers. Better to focus on real people, real problems, real solutions. or so we've been told. They're right, but only up to a point. We all do need to live in reality, but many successful careers, my own included, have been inspired by childhood fantasies?

If fantasy always fails reality, why did our parents and teachers tell us those stories about Cinderella, the Three Bears, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Emperor's New Clothes, etc.? Even in adulthood, don't we sometimes recall some of these stories and relate them somehow to our own lives?

Fantasy is often referred to as escapism, a charge to which Ursula Le Guin had an apt reply: "Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?"

Style wins

Style wins every, every time.

Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing

Susan Hill

What separates the great writers from the pretty good writers? Style, says Susan Hill in Howards End Is on the Landing. It's not their story plots or their characters or even their message. It's always their style. Ultimately that's why we return to their books again and again, even long after their deaths.

She mentions several writers to illustrate her point. Raymond Chandler, for example. You may not always understand what's going on, but his writing style places him at or near the top of most lists of great hardboiled  mystery writers. John Le Carre holds that position for espionage novels for the same reason.

Mostly Hill writes about P.G. Wodehouse, whose plots, as I've mentioned before, are usually very similar. But one reads Wodehouse less for the plot than for the Wodehouse style, his humorous way of saying things that no other writer of comic novels has been able to equal. (Donald E. Westlake came close, I believe. And what's remarkable about Westlake is that he developed a very different style for his many serious, totally humorless novels.)

We can all think of writers we love mainly for their style. In my youth I devoured books by John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger for this reason. Ernest Hemingway's reputation has everything to do with his unique, often imitated but never equaled style.

For young writers trying to make it in publishing, developing their own style is usually the key. Often this is called their voice. The clearer, the more distinct the voice, the more the writer will stand out from others. Writers with style still have to have something to say, of course. But writers with something to say will be more likely to find readers if they also have a style.

Stop by anywhen

Anywhere is a common English word, as is anyhow. So why not anywhen? We say whenever, as we do both wherever and however. So again, why not anywhen?

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) did, in fact, introduce the word, but for some reason it never caught on. Instead we say sometime or anytime or whenever. Anywhen sounds funny to us, but then so would anywhere if it weren't so familiar. The same is true of most English words, including your own name. The more we hear a word, the more acceptable it seems.

Obviously we don't need anywhen, but there are numerous words we don't actually need. Teenager, for example. We could say adolescent or simply teen. Or we might even say teener. But somebody came up with the word teenager in the 1940s, and it stuck. We didn't need 24/7 either because we already had 24 hours and around the clock, but 24/7 came and conquered in the 1980s.

English has a huge vocabulary in comparison with most other languages. This is due to the way English speakers welcome new words, including those from other cultures. This is in sharp contrast with the French, who actively discourage new words, especially English words, from spoiling their beautiful language. Listen to Germans speak and you will frequently hear English words tossed into the mix. This happens much less commonly when French people talk.

Despite their welcoming attitude, English speakers don't embrace every new word that comes along, and we can be grateful for this or the English vocabulary might be twice the size that it is. Anywhen is but one of countless words that have been tried and found wanting, for whatever reason. Some words never get off the ground. Others, including many slang terms, have their day in the sun, then fade away.

Some words may be fairly common in one region, yet unknown elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This is especially true of slang terms, such as horse-pint, used in parts of Appalachia to be mean a large pint, something like a baker's dozen.

Or a word may simply fall out of use with the passage of time. When asked about why the war was going on for so long, Abraham Lincoln said, "If we just keep pegging away it'll turn out right." Today we would say pecking away.

Our language changes constantly, but also gradually, and that is a good thing. As James Greenough and George Kittredge said in their 1914 book Words and Their Ways in English Speech, "Both the purist and the innovator are necessary factors in the development of a cultured tongue. Without the purist, our language would change with extravagant rapidity. ... Without the innovator, our language would come to a dead stop ..."

Bewitched

Jodi Picoult gives her own unique twist to the Salem witch trials in her 2001 novel Salem Falls.

This time it's not a witch put on trial because of a community's mass hysteria but a man named Jack St. Bride. He has a doctorate in history, knows the question to every Jeopardy answer and was once a teacher and soccer coach but now feels lucky just to have a job washing dishes in a diner in Salem Falls, New Hampshire. That's because he was just released from prison.

Jack had taken his lawyer's advice to plead guilty to a lesser charge after being falsely accused of raping a student in another town. But now he must register as a sex offender in Salem Falls, and soon everyone in town is talking about him and warning their daughters to stay away from him.

By this time, however, Addie Peabody, his boss at the diner, has already fallen in love with him. Addie herself had been raped years before — as it happens, by the cop who will eventually arrest Jack for the same crime — and she is torn over what to believe when a Salem Falls teenager accuses Jack of raping her.

Gillian, the girl, had been playing at witchcraft with friends on the night in question, thus creating a situation where a "witch" falsely accuses someone else of a crime, reversing the Salem situation. Also, it is Jack who bewitches, because of his good looks, teenage girls into falling in love with him and turning their imaginations into a false reality. I don't think I am giving anything away, for readers will be confident of Jack's innocence all along, even though the evidence appears to be stacked against him. 

Most the rest of the novel takes place in the courtroom, where Jack's attorney must first convince himself, then the jury, that his client did not really rape Gilliam. But if not Jack, then who? In the end, that is the novel's most enticing mystery, unresolved, or even mentioned, until the very last sentence.

Birthing words

George Orwell

Writers use words, of course, but they also invent words, as George Orwell did with such terms as big brother, newspeak and thought police. The title of his book Nineteen Eighty-Four itself became a part of the language.

William Shakespeare was the king of invented words. His plays brought hundreds of words into the English language, including lackluster, compulsive, excitement, eventful, priceless and frugal. Lesser writers have done their part, as well.

Henry Hitchings documents many of the contributions of writers to word creation in his book The Secret Life of Words. Here are some that he mentions:

Chaucer — accident, intellect, galaxy, famous

Bible translator William Tyndall — larceny, feasible, endowment, advertisement

Francis Bacon — versatile, prescient, ignorable, acoustic, juvenile

Ben Jonson — strenuous, retrograde, defunct

Philip Sidney — bugbear, hazardous, loneliness, pathology

Thomas Hobbes — complaisance

Robert Burton — feral, hirsute, literati, meteorologist

Fanny Burney — tea party, grumpy, shopping

Laurence Sterne — lackadaisical, muddle-headed, sixth sense, whimsicality

Sir Walter Scott — winsome, guffaw, faraway, uncanny, wizened, kith and kin

It is possible, of course, that some of these words were already used in speech at the time and that these writers were simply the first to put them in writing. Scholars who study these things cannot very well trace word origins back to conversations that took place centuries ago, but they can discover when certain words first appeared in books, or even in some cases letters, magazine articles or newspaper articles. And so writers like Bacon, Burton and Burney, whose works have survived the passage of time, get the credit for birthing all those words into the English language.

Behind the fiction

We criticize movie producers for their endless sequels and remakes. Why can't they ever come up with something new? Yet even the best novelists also have difficulty coming up with something new. Time and again novels are based on real events or classic stories such as King Lear or Greek myths.  Or they write about their own lives disguised as somebody else's lives.

The characters in novels so often are not original creations but based upon people authors have known.  Back in 1985 Williams Amos, a British journalist, wrote a book called The Originals: The A-Z of Fiction's Real-Life Characters that still makes fascinating browsing for readers. He identifies who characters in fiction were actually patterned after.

Ring Lardner 

The baseball writer turned short-story writer Ring Lardner, for example, inspired the character Abe North in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown came about because of an incident Chesterton witnessed involving Monsignor John O'Connor and some students.

Ernest Hemingway based many of his characters on people he knew, including so many of the main characters in The Sun Also Rises. His friendships tended to be short-lived because of this practice. Yet other writers, including Ford Madox Ford and John Dos Passos, returned the favor by putting Hemingway in their own fiction.

Allan Pinkerton

The pulp hero Nick Carter was probably based on the famous detective Allan Pinkerton. I read David Lodge's amusing novel Changing Places several months ago without realizing the character Ronald Duck was actually Ronald Reagan in disguise.

A.A. Milne supposedly based his character Eeyore on Sir Owen Seaman, the dour editor of Punch when Milne worked there.

Margaret Mitchell turned her first husband into Rhett Butler. Mario Puzo's Johnny Fontane was, of course, a fictional version of Frank Sinatra. Thomas Berger made Eldridge Cleaver into Brother Valentine in Reinhart's Women.

Mark Twain based Aunt Polly on his own mother, Amos says. As for Huckleberry Finn, he was inspired by Tom Blankenship, the town drunk in Hannibal during Twain's youth.

The William Amos book covers more than 500 pages and lists thousands of fictional characters based on real people. And these are only characters in the most notable works of fiction prior to 1985. An exhaustive current list would go on for thousands of pages.

All this suggests that when fictional characters are memorable it is usually because the real people behind them were also memorable.

Bottom of the heap

The most important datum about Western fiction is that it is at the absolute bottom of the literary heap, somewhere below pornography.

Richard S. Wheeler, Chronicles, November 1991

Richard S. Wheeler

The last two books reviewed in this blog — Jack Todd's Sun Going Down and Richard S. Wheeler's Anything Goes — have been western novels, so obviously I don't regard westerns as "the absolute bottom of the literary heap," as Wheeler himself put it his 1991 magazine article. Wheeler didn't really believe that either, but that is  apparently what he thought so many others believed.

Western novels, Wheeler pointed out, are not read by the most educated people. They are never reviewed in literary journals. If bookstores, especially in the eastern half of the United States, sell them at all, they are usually hidden away in a small, isolated ghetto somewhere back in the store. (I remembered being shocked when I found Anything Goes on a "new books" table at a Barnes & Noble in Toledo. It's the only copy of the book I've ever seen in a bookstore.)

To me the bias seems to be more against writers of western novels than western novels themselves. When writers like Thomas Berger, Jane Smiley, Larry McMurtry and Robert Coover have tried their hand at westerns, after building their careers writing more highly accepted fiction, their efforts have been welcomed by the literary community. Even mystery writer Robert Parker won attention when he wrote a few westerns. 

Wheeler himself made a distinction between realistic westerns (the kind he wrote) and what he called mythic westerns (the kind written by Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour and Max Brand). Many of the mythic westerns, he implied, may belong in that literary ghetto. Obviously he thought his own work deserved better, and I agree. When most people think of western novels, however, it is probably the mythic variety — featuring gunfighters, cattle rustlers and range wars — that come to mind.

He wondered if westerns will ever return to a place of honor, or at least acceptance, in the literary establishment, and then he concluded his essay by saying that "whenever Americans feel good about their country, you'll see a reemergence of the Western." Right now, 30 years after his article was published, the mood of the country suggests western novels will remain at the bottom of the heap for some time to come.

The real West

Right up to the end of his prolific career, Richard S. Wheeler wrote western novels that didn't seem like western novels. They were more about the real West than the fantasy West. His 2015 novel (he died in 2019), Anything Goes, must be one of those least like a typical western novel. Not among his best, it nevertheless offers a rich reading experience.

The West has been all but tamed early in the 20th century when a small vaudeville troupe braves harsh winter weather to bring entertainment to towns in the upper Rockies. The Beausoleil Brothers Follies is run by August Beausoleil, who has no brother and has put together a variety show composed of singers, dancers, comics, an animal act and a juggler. The show barely breaks even, but keeps going and usually finds an audience starved for entertainment.

Then troubles come, one after the other. The lead singer dies. One of the monkeys in the animal act dies because of the cold weather. Several of the performers get sick. Then  the Orpheum Circuit, which has taken over the best theaters in the East, starts doing the same in the West, spelling doom for this independent group of performers. Prominent theaters begin canceling August's bookings.

Then there's Ginger, an 18-year-old girl who has run away from home, or more specifically, from her dominating mother who wants her to become an opera star. Ginger, who has also changed her name, has other ideas. She joins the Follies and soon becomes its star, but then forced changes in the schedule take her unwillingly back to her hometown in Idaho.

Wheeler's story may be weaker than usual, but his characters are vivid and memorable. Show business novels usually turn me off, but not this one.

One family in the West

Jack Todd's Sun Going Down 2008) is an intergenerational novel  inspired by the author's own family. Names and other details have been changed — this is a novel, not a family history — yet a reader can sense Todd's affection for his characters and the truth behind his fiction.

Following four generations of the Paint family from the Civil War to the Depression, the novel tells of their struggles against the elements, their rivals, tough economic conditions and sometimes each other. Ebenezer Paint sells his Mississippi riverboat early in the novel and buys land in Nebraska. Despite a loving wife and twin sons, he cannot control his wanderlust and frequently leaves them to fend for themselves.

As for the sons, Ezra inherits his father's need to keep moving, while Eli settles down, raises a large family (mostly girls) and builds up a huge, successful ranch. One of his daughters, Velma, carries the ball for most of the rest of the novel. She is not yet 16 when pregnancy forces her to marry a handsome cowboy, and Eli tells her he doesn't want to see her again. He regrets that decision, for she was his favorite daughter, but he is too stubborn to backtrack.

Velma develops TB and marries three times in her short life. One of her children, Emaline, fills in much of the rest of the story.

Except for the Eli-Velma split, the novel has little of what could be called a plot, yet the episodes in these characters' lives keep the reader engrossed from one chapter to the next, even when years pass in between.

Women in charge

Female writers may still complain, as Ursula de Guin does in Words Are My Matter, about unfair treatment in comparison to their male colleagues, but walk into any bookstore and you may get the idea that women have taken over the publishing industry. Some bookstores have become almost as girlie as lingerie shops.

Examine displays of new fiction and it may take awhile to spot any novels by male authors. Novels that appeal primarily to men, such as westerns, science fiction and war stories, tend to be hidden in the back. I've seen many paperback tables that were a sea of pastel, suggesting novels written by women for women.

Looking at the last two issues of Book Page, a free monthly book magazine available in many bookstores and public  libraries, I counted 61 novels by female authors reviewed, compared to just 21 by male authors.

Bookstores have become increasingly owned and/or managed by women. More women are publishers, editors and literary agents than ever before.

True, some important literary prizes still go mostly to male writers. Louise Erdrich won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but the previous six winners were men. Thanks to Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Donna Tartt and others, however, female writers have been winning a higher proportion of major prizes in recent years. The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded only to women. There is no equivalent prize just for men.

Readers of fiction have long been predominantly women. This was probably true even back in the 1950s and 1960s when most paperbacks, even the classics, had suggestive covers designed to catch the male eye.  If sleazy artwork couldn't attract enough male readers, frilly pastel covers are likely to send men running for the exits.

Drama on both sides of the screen

Most of Cathie Pelletier's Beaming Sonny Home (1996) takes place where so many people live most of their lives — in front of the television. So stationary is the novel that one is surprised by how much movement there is in the story, how much happens, how much changes in 284 pages.

Mattie Gifford's three grown daughters invade her home in Mattagash, Maine, and flip on the TV because their brother, Sonny, has taken two female hostages, supposedly at gunpoint, and is holding them in a mobile home in Bangor that belongs to his estranged wife. Why he does this is a mystery — something to do do with his wife, something to do with his dog, something to do with starving children, something to do with John Lennon. Sonny just seems to be having a good time.

For three days the standoff is at the top of each newscast, and these four women, plus various neighbors, friends and other relatives watch to see what happens next. The supposed hostages seem happy to be where they are, Sonny being a charismatic young man whom every woman loves. That is, except for his three sisters, who have always resented that their mother loves him best. Mattie doesn't deny this, and even now during this crisis she wishes her daughters would just go to their own homes and leave her alone.

Her love for Sonny seems surprising. for he is so much like her late husband — handsome, always smiling, unambitious, irresistible to women and faithful to none. Sonny may be the same kind of man as his father, yet Mattie loves him more than anyone else, certainly more than she ever loved Lester.

Pelletier is so gifted with imagery that she almost overdoes it, tossing out a new metaphor before a reader can digest the last one. Among these images is a jigsaw puzzle Mattie is working on in which the eye of Jesus is missing. Only when she finds the missing eye and places it in the puzzle does this story come together — or fall apart, as the case may be.

Grand adventure

Years later when asked how he and other members of his party managed to be the first to take boats down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, John Wesley Powell replied simply, "I was lucky."

More than luck was involved, of course, yet Powell and the others certainly were lucky, as Edward Dolnick explains in his adventurous 2001 book Down the Great Unknown.

Consider that Powell himself, leader of the expedition, had but one arm, having lost the other in the Battle of Shiloh. Consider that their large wooden boats were totally unsuitable for running river rapids and and no less suitable for carrying around the worst of the rapids. Consider that the rowers faced backwards. Consider that none of the men wore lifejackets or helmets. Consider that, because they were the first, they had no idea what might be beyond the next curve in the river. Many others, including some in recent years, have died trying to go down this river. That Powell and the others succeeded in their first attempt had something to do with luck.

Most of the 10 men who started the 99-day, 1,000-mile river trip that started in Wyoming Territory were Civil War veterans. Having survived the war, they figured they could survive anything. They were all eager for adventure, although Powell himself was also in pursuit of science. He wanted to map the river and study geology along the way. Names he gave to rapids, canyons and other features along the way are still in use today.

Only six of the 10 completed the trip, the others bailing out along the way because of the hardships they endured. Powell was cautious, choosing to avoid the worst rapids whenever possible, but to his crew carrying those heavy boats long distances over rocks often seemed worse than taking their chances with the rapids.

Dolnick makes a nail-biting adventure story out of this river trip, describing what happened each day along the way. At the same time he tells us much about river rapids in general, about the Grand Canyon's history and geology and about others who have ventured down it. His book makes exciting and informative reading.

First craft, then art

"Art stands on the shoulders of craft." — Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett

Richard Russo quotes this bit of wisdom from novelist Ann Patchett in an essay called "Getting Good" in his book The Destiny Thief. The advice seems sounds, no matter what you are doing. It's actually just a fancy way of saying what we've all said at one time or another: You learn from your mistakes.

Russo goes as far as to say, "You come to understand that rejection, at least for a period of time, is indeed your friend." The early stories of J.D. Salinger were rejected regularly by magazines, including those magazines that would later welcome them. The same was true of Donald E. Westlake and most other writers who would later become successful. The "first novel" of many authors is actually their third or fourth, but just the first one accepted for publication. The earlier ones were rejected. They were just learning experiences.

The publication of Go Set a Watchman did no favors for its author, Harper Lee, for it was an early version of To Kill a Mockingbird. It just wasn't good enough, and so she put it aside and went back to work. When she had mastered the craft, she went on to produce art. It was unfair to later publish what was essentially a rough draft.

Russo's inclusion of the phrase "at least for a period of time" is important, for none of us can easily handle endless rejection. Something has to give. Most of us will move on to something else.

Among the saddest of literary stories is that of John Kennedy O'Toole, who in frustration at repeated rejection committed suicide at 31. Eleven years later, thanks to the efforts of his mother and novelist Walker Percy, A Confederacy of Dunces was finally published and went on to win a Pulitzer. What makes this story even more sad is that O'Toole had mastered his craft and produced art, yet still found only rejection. Percy himself admitted that when O'Toole's mother thrust the novel at him, he didn't want to read it and hoped it would be bad enough to discard after a paragraph or two.

It makes one wonder how much art might lie ignored at the bottom of publishers' slush piles.