The meaning of life

My dad died. I'll never have golden thinking, like he did. I'll never understand meaning or find the answers falling into place.

Harriet Kline, This Shining Life

Ollie, an autistic 11-year-old boy, doesn't know how to cope even before his playful, always optimistic father dies. After Rich's death from a brain tumor, the boy is completely lost in Harriet Kline's inspiring 2021 novel This Shining Life.

Before his death, Rich tells Ollie something that is to him enigmatic about life being worth living. The boy loves sudoku puzzles, so he views his father's statement as a puzzle. If he can only solve the puzzle, everything will finally make sense to him.

The novel's only characters other than Ollie and Rich are Ruth, Ollie's mother; Nessa, her sister; Angram, Ruth and Nessa's mother; Marjorie, whom Ollie calls Other Grandma; and Gerald, Rich's father. Before his death, Rich selects special gifts for each member of the family, but because of his mental confusion sends each gift to the wrong person. Ollie believes that if he can get each gift to the proper person, he will be able to solve his puzzle.

As flawed as Ollie may be, each of the other family members has a flaw that may be no less disabling. Perhaps the greatest of these is their tendancy to ignore whatever Ollie says about solving his puzzle. His frustration builds.

How Kline resolves all this is a pleasure to read. In the end Ollie won't be the only one to learn something about the meaning of life.

Seen through the crack

Literature or sleaze? That question has always hovered around any discussion of the work of Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987), best known for the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre about poor Georgia farmers torn between the appeal of sexy women, corn liquor and fundamentalist religion.

Caldwell may have been thinking in terms of a Southern trilogy when he wrote Journeyman, beginning in 1933. The problem was getting this third novel published. The other two novels sold well, yet were so controversial that Viking Press was reluctant to publish Journeyman without substantial changes, which the author resisted. This went on for years until a compromise was reached.

The sex in Caldwell's novels was never graphic — this was the 1930s, after all — but it was suggestive enough to keep readers turning the pages. Years later, the third novel restored to its original version, sex dominates. Even in the revival service near the end of the book, women in spiritual ecstasy strip off clothing. Yet somehow the novel reads like literature just the same.

Caldwell's plot is simple enough. Semon Dye, an itinerant preacher, comes to Rocky Comfort, Ga., and stops at the shack of Clay Horey, who may be the world's laziest farmer. Semon plans to preach at the local schoolhouse on Sunday, but that gives him several days to stir up enough sin to make the Sunday service more worthwhile.

"I'll run the Devil out of this place," the preacher promises. A few lines later he adds "The Lord don't have to bother about me. He sort of gives me a free rein."

And so the preacher sets out drinking another man's corn liquor, seducing every attractive woman in sight — and in Caldwell novels all the women seem to be attractive — and using crooked dice to take Clay's money, his car and even his teen-age wife.

In one of the novel's memorable passages, Semon, Clay and another man take turns peeking through a crack in the side of a barn. They see nothing but trees and brush, yet somehow the scene seems more enticing, powerful and meaningful when viewed through that crack in the wall.

Caldwell's novel becomes a crack in the side of a barn, giving readers a small but fascinating view of life in 1930s rural Georgia.

Comedians on comedy

Jerry Seinfeld had one show that famously was about nothing. Then he had another show that was about three things: cars, comedians and coffee.

Now the highlights of that second show are available in his book The Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee Book (2022), appropriately enough in the size of what used to be called a coffee table book.

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee began on Crackle, where I caught several episodes, then moved to Netflix. In each episode Seinfeld picks up a comedian in a borrowed classic car and drives somewhere to get coffee while engaging in the show's very important fourth C: conversation.

His guests include such people as Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles, Dave Chappelle, Cedric the Entertainer, Ricky Gervais, Sarah Silverman, Ellen Degeneres, David Letterman, Chris Rock and on and on. He also visited with old pals from Seinfeld like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Larry David. Some of his guests can only be described as honorary comedians, such as Barack Obama.

The book consists mostly of excerpts from these shows on such topics as music, money, growing up, getting older and, of course, comedy. And comedians discussing comedy is where this entertaining book becomes most entertaining. Among the insights you discover here are:

• Jay Leno calls comedy "a concealed weapon." It can come out of nowhere and level a room.

• "Comedians speak in commandments," Seinfeld observes while talking with Chappelle. Listen to a comedian sometime and see if that's not true.

• Seinfeld and Fred Armussen concur that comedy must be spare. Too many words spoil the joke.

• You can't teach comedy. On that Seinfeld and Steve Harvey agree.

• Nor can you give up comedy and go into another kind of work. Silverman observes "If you can quit, then you're not a comedian."

Target audience

Patricia T. O'Conner

In her advice for writers in Words Fail Me, Patricia T. O'Conner addresses the question of for whom do writers write, and she says two things that seem, and in fact are, contradictory. Yet they are both true.

First, she says to write for yourself. Write what you want to read. I've heard writers say that because others weren't writing the kinds of books they like to read, they decided to write them themselves.

Lately I have begun writing sermons — and sometimes even preach them — partly for this very reason. I rarely hear the kinds of sermons that keep me alert and inspired on Sunday mornings. So I try to write them myself.

Yet O'Conner's second point — and major point — is that a writer must write for the reader. Children's books, romance novels, sci-fi novels, newspapers, college textbooks and that letter to your mother all have very different readers. So you can't very well write the same way for each. And if you write solely for yourself, you may lose your audience entirely, for they aren't you.

O'Conner writes, "As much as possible, try to anticipate your reader's needs, sophistication, likes and dislikes, attention span, mood, tastes, and sense of humor. In our personal relationships, this kind of discretion is called tact; in writing, it's called knowing your audience."

I like her mention of tact. That's sensitivity to those you are attempting to communicate with. Thus, while trying to to please yourself, you must also try to please others.

Grief and guilt

Your silence, it has always been the most perfect punishment.

Alison Espach, Notes on Your  Sudden Disappearance

Grief and guilt come together like a matched set. Where there's one, there's usually the other. So it is in Alison Espach's impressive first novel Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (2022).

Although written in the style of a comic novel, the story rarely turns comic. The novel covers 15 years in the life of Sally Holt, who addresses her narrative to her older sister Kathy.

At first, 13-year-old Sally observes Kathy's infatuation with Billy, the handsome high school basketball star. Eventually Kathy wins Billy away from another girl, and Sally is almost as thrilled as her sister is. Then one day Sally demands Billy take her to her school, even though it risks making Billy and Kathy late for high school. Billy speeds, avoids a deer and hits a tree. Kathy dies in the crash, and Billy is badly injured, his promising basketball career ruined.

Thus grief and guilt overpower both Sally and Billy, not to mention the girls' parents. Having so much in common, the two teens are drawn to each other, despite their age difference. They hold long phone conversations in the middle of the night.

Years pass. Billy decides to become a friar. Sally moves to New York City, begins writing how-to essays for web sites and becomes engaged to a lawyer. Espach tells how she and Billy are brought back together by a hurricane — named Kathy.

Partly autobiographical, the novel holds power in part because of the author's deceptive light touch but mostly because it tells truth.

The heroic pigeon

Many novels have been written about World War II heroes. In The Long Flight Home (2019), Alan Hlad's first novel, that hero is a pigeon.

In the autumn of 1940, German planes bomb London and other British targets nightly, and a Nazi invasion is expected at any time. The British look for anything that might give them an advantage, and somebody thinks of homing pigeons. The National Pigeon Service quickly organizes and enlists pigeon owners throughout the nation.

Among these are Bertie Shepherd and his granddaughter Susan, who own some of the best racing pigeons in England. Yet Bertie's age and infirmities make his participation difficult, so Susan takes over the operation. The plan calls for dropping pigeons into France in hopes that members of the French Resistance will find them and and use them to send messages about German activities back to England. (Instead, most of the pigeons are eaten by hungry Frenchmen.)

Meanwhile an American pilot named Ollie Evans suddenly loses both his parents and their farm and decides to go to England to try to join the Royal Air Force. But after he assaults an RAF officer he sees offending Susan, he winds up helping her with the pigeon project as an alternative to prison. They quickly fall in love.

The hero pigeon is Susan's pet, Duchess, not actually part of the pigeon drop. Yet through a comedy of errors both Duchess and Ollie, not to mention the RAF officer Ollie struck, find themselves on the same plane that's shot down over France.

Homing pigeons normally fly in just one direction — toward home — yet Duchess has two homes — with Susan and with Ollie — and thus carries messages back and forth between the two lovers.

Hlad keeps the tension high as Ollie and the British officer, both injured in the crash, elude Germans in their struggle to find a way back to England. The bittersweet ending may not be the one readers hope for, but it is one they will remember.

Nobody's perfect

Patricia T. O'Conner's advice for writers seems like good advice for us all: We all make mistakes. The 10 Commandments aren't for achieving perfection but rather for recognizing imperfection.

In her 1999 book Words Fail Me, itself an admission of imperfection, O'Conner reminds readers that even the greatest writers in their greatest books fall short of the ideal.

• Anthony Trollope has too many lengthy digressions in his novels.

• Antonia Fraser's The Wives of Henry VIII "has too damn many dashes."

• Herman Melville "introduces interesting characters, only to drop them," in Moby-Dick.

• The plot of Emily Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights "is ridiculously improbable."

One could, of course, discover similar flaws in every book ever written. Error, like beauty, often lies in the eye of the beholder. Some of us may enjoy Trollope's digressions or not mind Fraser's dashes in the least. Still there is probably something about these books and others that bothers us. They are too long. They don't move along quickly enough. There's a typo on page 198. We are annoyed by different things, but any annoyance suggests imperfection. You just can't please everyone.

Why is this good advice? We could never leave our home if we feared the wind might mess up our hair. We could never open our mouth if we feared saying the wrong thing. We could never eat anything if we thought everything might be bad for us.

And for writers it means they will never get anything published if they never declare their work finished and stop looking for ways to improve it. There's probably something in this blog post I will later regret, but I am going to post it anyway.

Nobody's perfect.

Magical reading

I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling speaking about the magic of reading seems apt. Her Harry Potter novels are about magic. Her series of books magically turned a generation of youngsters into committed readers, each of them eager for the next one in the series. Her stories magically carried these readers into another world. But how do her words apply to other other books by other writers?

Rene Descartes told us one way: "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of the past." A reader can magically converse with Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, Thomas Paine, Jane Austen or even Rene Descartes himself. It is not even a one-way conversation, for readers contribute their own ideas.

Jhumpa Lahiri told us another way: "That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet." My own recent reading has taken me to Spain in the 1950s (April in Spain), to Paris with the great detective Maigret (Maigret and the Nahour Case), to an elite fishing lodge in the Rockies (The Guide), to mid-19th century London (Bleak House), to the American South during the Depression (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) and to a distant planet in the distant future (All Systems Red). All this while barely leaving my condo. That's magic.

Malcolm X told us another: "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book." Yes, books do change lives. Not all of them, of course. Not even most of them. Yet certain books can change lives, especially if we read them in our youth. Even when they don't change lives, they can change minds and attitudes. And that too can be magic.

The tricks in 'Bleak House'

Weeks ago I reviewed The Artful Dickens ("Breaking the rules," Feb. 17, 2023), John Mullan's book about "the tricks and ploys" Charles Dickens uses in his novels. Most of these are evident in Bleak House, which I recently read.

My review of the Bleak House ("Love conquers all," March 31, 2023) mentioned the fact that it has two narrators, one who writes in past tense and another who uses present tense. Mullen notes that when Dickens experimented with present-tense narration in this novel "there had been nothing like in the English novel before." Today, of course, use of present tense is commonplace. It was Dickens who showed that it could be done.

Dickens was apparently sensitive to odors, and Bleak House, like most of his other novels, is filled with smells. The odor of cooking food, of death, of burning wood, etc, get frequent mention.

The speech peculiarities that Dickens often used to give his characters unique personalities are certainly apparent here. My favorite is a man who always refers to his wife as "old girl." He knows her to be much smarter, but he tells others he must "maintain discipline" by pretending to be in charge. So we frequently find him saying something like, "tell him what I think about that, old girl." Thus he gives the orders, while she leads the way.

I have previously written about the odd names in Bleak House ("Names to remember," Feb. 20, 2023). He also uses coincidences to his advantage in this novel. And he frequently employs one of his favorite phrases: "as if." We read, for example, that Mr. Vholes looks at Richard Capstone "as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes," and, later, "he gave one gasp as if he had swallowed the last morsel of his client." Such fantasies enhance the reality of his fiction.

Under another name

John Banville's April in Spain (2021) turns out to be a sequel to Benjamin Black's Elegy for April (2010). What does this mean, other than that April Latimer, the troubled young doctor presumed murdered at the end of the earlier novel, remains alive? It means that respected Irish novelist John Banville has finally gotten wise

Banville may have been respected for his many literary novels, but he wasn't making much money. Thus he turned to writing mysteries, which he may have thought beneath him, under the name of Benjamin Black. The mysteries, also beautifully written, feature Quirke, a troubled pathologist who manages to uncover mysteries when he isn't drunk. Now Banville, apparently realizing that his mystery novels aren't really as bad as he thought they were, is putting his own name on them.  Good.

April in Spain opens with Quirke vacationing in northern Spain with Evelyn, the wise and patient woman he has married since the earlier novel. He still drinks, but not nearly as much as he once did. But is he drunk when sees a doctor named Angela Lawless when he goes to a hospital after an injury and the doctor reminds him of his daughter Phoebe's friend, April Latimer? Isn't she supposed to be dead? He calls Phoebe and asks her to join them in Spain.

Unfortunately Phoebe first speaks with Bill Latimer, April's uncle and a powerful government official with a sinister reputation. This triggers a series of events that lead to the novel's exciting conclusion.

Quirke, once he telephones Phoebe, fades into the background. The spotlight falls mostly on Phoebe, who was an adult before she learned that Quirke is her real father, and on Terry Tice, a killer for hire. The novel is actually more a thriller than a mystery.

Banville leaves so much hanging at the end that readers will feel compelled to grab up the next book in the series. That's something that probably never happens with his literary novels.

A shy robot

Both my son and grandson loved "The Murderbot Diaries," a series of short sci-fi novels by Martha Wells, so I took their advice and read the first in the series, All Systems Red (2017). Now I'm all aboard.

Can robots be introverted? Well, they can, apparently, if they are part human. And just as the Bionic Man of the old TV series was mostly human with a little bit of electronics filling in the gaps, so this SecUnit has a bit of humanity mixed in with his electronics and metal.

Although officially called a SecUnit, available for rent like a U-Haul truck, our narrator calls himself a murderbot because killing is his purpose when defending his humans.

What his humans don't know is that their SecUnit has a broken governor, meaning that it is actually an independent agent. It follows orders because it wants to, not because it has to. What's more, it is capable of giving orders, which it does when necessary to save lives from a murderous foe on a distant planet.

The adventure of eluding and eventually conquering this unknown enemy proves exciting enough, yet the novel's real appeal lies with its central character. The shy murderbot prefers isolating itself from humans so it can watch the thousands of hours of secretly downloaded video episodes about fictional interplanetary adventures.

When it writes, "Now they knew their murderbot didn't want to be around them any more than they wanted to be around it. I'd given a tiny piece of myself away," our hearts melt, as if it were 100 percent human.

Read the notes

You don't want to read Bleak House, or any other Dickens novel, without also reading the footnotes.

Written in the middle of the 19th century, the novel shows us a very different world than what we know today. Customs have changed. Geography has changed. Language has changed. Perhaps most significantly cultural references have changed.

An old woman has a pet bird named Gammon. The name means nothing to me, and perhaps not to you. A note tells us the word means nonsense or humbug. (A few weeks ago I did a blog post about odd words meaning nonsense. I missed this one.)

A character is given a glass of negus. What's that? It turns out to be a mixture of hot water, port, sugar and lemons.

"I am in the Downs," a character says. That turns out to be an expression meaning depression.

Reading the novel, one feels the original readers must have much more literate than we are today, for they didn't need footnotes to understand all the many references to Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible and a variety of poets. Did people read more then than they do now? Perhaps, or perhaps they just read different things. In today's world cultural reference are more likely to be movies and popular music or television shows. A few politicians and movie stars may sometimes gain mention in today's novels. If anyone should read these novels two centuries from now, those readers will also certainly need footnotes.