Encyclopedia's end

A few decades ago, encyclopedia sets were a fixture in any library, large or small. When I was in high school, the World Book was the first source — and in many cases the only source — most students went to when they had to write a theme paper. The entries were relatively brief and relatively easy to understand, a better choice than the Britannica for most students.

So what happened to encyclopedias? Why don't they exist anymore? The Internet, right? Well, no, says Simon Winchester in his book Knowing What We Know. They were done in by knowledge. Knowledge began expanding too rapidly for a printed encyclopedia to keep up.

Winchester writes: "The Britannica started showing its age, appearing to be long past its sell-by date, dying on its feet The pace of change was beyond the capacity of so unwieldy and arthritic a behemoth to record it. It had become a myth. It had become a victim of its own gargantuan ambition."

An encyclopedia took years to assemble, then became outdated long before it got into print and on anybody's shelf. The Encyclopedia Brittanica stopped publication in 2012, but it was essentially dead long before that. And it outlasted most other multi-volume encyclopedias.

Much the same is true of dictionaries and other kinds of reference books. There are quicker, cheaper, more reliable ways of obtaining the latest information. New words are added to the vocabulary and old words change their meanings faster than a printed dictionary can produce a new edition.

Those encyclopedias and dictionaries that remain in print are usually single volumes that collect information that doesn't change much, or doesn't change rapidly, such as a Bible dictionary.

Encyclopedias probably served their purpose, but I doubt that many people miss them. I only rarely ever opened it even when I had a set in my home. It may have been comforting to have all that knowledge there, easily available even if rarely used, but the books took up so much space and cost so much money that they were impractical for most people. I had a set only because the local library didn't want it any longer and I thought, mistakenly, that it might be useful.

Several years ago A.J. Jacobs read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end and wrote a book about the experience, The Know-It-All. The successful book was published in 2005, or not long before the printed version was abandoned for good. He may be among the very few people who ever actually got their money's worth.

The history of knowledge

Knowledge makes humble. Ignorance makes proud.

Confucius

Books are depositories of knowledge. Now Simon Winchester has written a book about knowledge itself, Knowing What We Know (2023).

How is knowledge gathered? How is it used? How is it conveyed to others? How is it stored? Winchester tackles all such questions and in so doing discusses everything from oral traditions to schools to the invention of moveable type to the Encyclopedia Brittanica to Wikipedia and Google. He writes about libraries and newspapers and universities, as well as about many great individuals  down through the ages from all parts of the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to America, who have advanced the cause of knowledge.

Yet knowledge has a dark side, and Winchester does not ignore it, devoting a few pages to propaganda, which either creates fake knowledge or emphasizes one side of a question while downplaying the other. In other words, he writes about such things as politics and advertising. Unfortunately Winchester sometimes turns political himself and tosses in his own propaganda.

The most disturbing part of his book comes near the end when he wonders if knowledge may be becoming obsolete. Because of calculators, we no longer need to know even basic math. Because we have GPS. we no longer need to know much about geography. In which direction does the sun set? We no longer need to know even that. Because of Wikipedia and Google and Siri, we no longer need to know much of anything. What does this mean for the future of mankind?

Winchester packs so much into this book that it seems hard to believe that it comes in under 400 pages.

Mostly funny stuff

In his introduction to P.J. O'Rourke's The Funny Stuff, a collection of brief excerpts from O'Rourke's writings, Christopher Buckley describes the selection of these quotations as being like plucking "one low-hanging fruit after another." In other words, what could be easier than finding funny things P.J. O'Rourke wrote?

When I read that, I agreed with it, for I have read a number of O'Rourke books and laughed my way through each of them. Yet after finishing this book, I found that I disagreed. So what went wrong?

The main problem, I think, is that O'Rourke's lines are funnier in context than standing alone. There are exceptions, of course:

"There is only one hard-and-fast rule about the place to have a party: someone else's place."

"If you run more than twenty miles a week, try not to die young, It will make people snigger."

"El Salvador has the scenery of northern California and the climate of southern California plus — and this was a relief — no Californians."

"Freedom of speech is important — if you have anything to say. I've checked the Internet; nobody does."

Yet so many of the lines quoted were, I'm sure, much more amusing in the context of the book or article in which they are found. They are like the punch lines without the jokes.

And many of the excerpts collected by Terry McDonell, the editor, are not really funny at all, but just good examples of clever writing, even witty writing, but not knee-slapping stuff. Here is a sample about Tanzania" "Probably every child whose parents weren't rich enough has been told, 'We're rich in other ways.' Tanzania is fabulously rich in other ways." That's a great line, but I wouldn't call it funny.

I enjoyed The Funny Stuff very much, but I think I would have called it The Good Stuff. 

Fowler play

Connie May Fowler

Before Women Had Wings, the novel by Connie May Fowler I reviewed favorably two days ago, was purchased by mistake in a used bookstore. I had become a fan of Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and other fine novels, and got the names confused. I wanted Karen Joy but got Connie May.

Some mistakes turn out to be blessings, and this was one of them. I enjoyed Connie May's novel as much as I have Karen Joy's.

But adding to the confusion, there is also Therese Anne.

Therese Anne Fowler is the author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, A Well-Behaved Woman and other novels. I have not read any of her books, but this Fowler may actually have sold more books than the other two. I don't really know about that, but her books seem easier to find. I do know that when one gets to the F's in the fiction section of a bookstore or library, one needs to be careful about those Fowlers.

There is also an Earlene Fowler, but fortunately she does not use her middle name, and her books are usually shelved with the mysteries.

Flying away

Domestic abuse runs in families, children often learning and later imitating the violent behavior of their parents when they have families of their own. How can this cycle be broken? Connie May Fowler explores this question in her striking 1996 novel Before Women Had Wings.

Set in Florida in the 1960s, during the Johnson administration, the story is told by Bird, a little girl whose actual name is Avocet. Her mother wanted to name her daughters after birds, and her older sister got Phoebe. Avocet, being so unusual, was soon replaced with the nickname Bird. And bird imagery flies in and out of the novel, including its title.

In Bird's family, her father often beats her mother after both have spent a night drinking, and then her mother beats her two daughters. These beatings are often brutal and graphic, such as a coffee mug struck hard into Phoebe's face and Bird being whipped with a belt, the buckle end striking her bare back repeatedly. Their mother confesses that her father beat her as a child.

Following Bird's father's death — was it suicide or murder? — their mother takes the girls to Tampa and moves into an old motel. She works in the office to pay for their cramped quarters, while buying food and alcohol with government checks. Every night Bird's mother resumes her drinking, while her two daughters walk on eggshells.

Miss Zora, an old and mysterious black woman, also lives on the property. Bird's mother dislikes her and tries to get the motel owner to evict her, but Bird forms a deep relationship with this woman who, despite her apparent wisdom, has lost contact with her own daughter. White authors often have difficulty creating authentic black characters, choosing to bestow on them moral perfection and often mystical powers. They can have similar difficulties with Indian characters in western novels. Fowler comes close to this, but in the end she makes Miss Zora a realistic, imperfect and vulnerable human being.

Bird and Phoebe dream of flying away from their abusive home, yet they love their mother deeply, just as their mother loves them when her anger is under control. Fowler finds a way to make love provide the answer to this terrible situation.

Clever foolishness

Sebastian Faulks

In his 1992 novel A Fool's Alphabet, Sebastian Faulks has 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. The story begins in Anzio, Italy, during World War II. It then progresses to Backley, England; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Dorking, England; Evanston, Illinois, etc., while going back and forth in time. It concludes back in Italy in Zanica.

I wish I would have known about this novel years ago when I wrote a newspaper column about novels with unusual chapter arrangements. There is one novel, for example, that consists only of first chapters. The first-person narrator begins her story and then, dissatisfied, begins it again and again, each time at a different point. Eventually the entire story is told without her ever getting past the first chapter.

And there is one author whose novels never have a chapter 13.

My favorite part of the Faulks novel is where a character refers to the Fool's Alphabet, a series of puns. There are different versions of this, and it is sometimes called the Cockney Alphabet. Reciting it with a Cockney accent, or simply by saying it quickly out loud, can help in catching the puns. Here are some examples.

A for 'orses

C for yourself (or C for miles, in some versions)

G for police

L for leather

M for sis

Q for a ticket

S for Williams (or, if you prefer, S for you, you can take a hike)

X for breakfast

Several of the puns I have yet to figure out, but those that I have, including those above, are very clever, clearly not the work of a fool.

Read it again

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.

François Mauriac, French novelist

François Mauriac

If finding time to read is a challenge for most people, finding time to reread is a much greater challenge. With so many books waiting our attention, how can we dare spend time — some would say waste time — reading the same book multiple times?

Yet I have heard or read about individuals who read certain books, such as Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice, repeatedly, sometimes as often as once a year. I admire these people. They may not be able to read as many new books as they might wish, but they have managed to find one book that speaks to them deeply and says something new and different each time they return to it. That seems wonderful to me, and as François Mauriac says, the book they choose to reread tells us something about them.

I have read a number of books more than once, and a few three times — J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt come to mind —but taking the time to be dedicated to one particular novel over a lifetime seems like a luxury to me.

My passion for Charles Dickens has come rather late in life, but I think now that Our Mutual Friend or Little Dorrit would be excellent books to devote a lifetime to. They are so long and deep and detailed that it might take a lifetime to fully appreciate them. One reading clearly is inadequate. This helps explain the devotion some have toward Middlemarch. I read George Eliot's novel once and felt like I could only begin to understand all that was going on.

Of course, if one is going to focus on a single book, especially at my stage of life, it would be much easier to choose something shorter. Maybe it's time to pick up Franny and Zooey again. What does that say about me?

Mind the middle

Mickey Spillane

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

Mickey Spillane

When reviewing Hans Brinker by Mary Mapes Dodge the other day, I complained about the Dutch travelogue the author inserted into the middle of her story, which seemed to me to be mostly padding intended to make her novel for children longer than it needed to be. True, Dodge does introduce some characters in this part of the novel and creates some subplots. Even so it is the dullest part of the book and over the years has probably caused many readers to put down the novel and never pick it up again.

So many novels are like this, even if not to the extreme of Dodge's book. Most novels start out exciting, or at least interesting, to get the reader hooked. And they conclude with a flourish, as love, truth or whatever prevails and questions are answered and loose ends are tied up.

But then there is that middle part where the story slows down. The novelist fills in the background, telling us what happened before the opening chapter. We find out more about the characters and are introduced to new ones. Sometimes all this is necessary, yet often it seems like padding, sort of like Dodge's travelogue. Even mysteries and thrillers often have dead spots in the middle where nothing much seems happen.

Novelist Siri Hustvedt said, "Novels often sag under their own weight halfway through." Readers are reading for resolution of the plot, while writers are struggling to achieve 300 pages or 400 pages or whatever the desired length may be.

Ideally the author can let tension build during this central part of a novel, rather than hit a pause button on the plot. Of novels I have read recently, I would rate William Kent Krueger's The River We Remember highly this regard. The author brings in backstory without seriously slowing down the momentum of the main story. In a very different kind of novel, Thrity Umrigar does something similar in The Space Between Us.

And so it can be done. Too many authors fail to do it well.

Good story buried in detail

Mary Mapes Dodge

Because the name of Mary Mapes Dodge (1831-1905) shows up in my family tree, I wanted to like her most famous book for children, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates (1865), more than I did.

One problem with it is simply that the passage of time has dated Dodge's language and story-telling techniques. More seriously, she apparently didn't think she had enough story to make a book — for a children's book I think she did — and so the middle part of the novel becomes a sort of travelogue. A group of boys, which does not even include Hans Brinker, takes a skating tour through much of Holland. The author describes scenes and customs,  remembers Dutch history and recalls Dutch folk tales. Meanwhile readers — or at least this reader — want to get back to the story.

And that central plot is a good one. Hans and Gretel Brinker are poor children who can afford only hand-crafted wooden skates, which will be hopeless for the upcoming big skating race for children. The prize is a pair of silver skates, one pair for the fastest boy and another for the fastest girl. The reason for their poverty is that their father, Rafe, suffered a serious head injury 10 years previously and has not been the same since. Sometimes he even becomes violent.

Eventually a crusty physician, whose own sadness has soured his personality, performs a risky operation, bringing Rafe back to his senses. With his memory restored, Rafe remembers two secrets that give the Brinkers prosperity and respectability again — and also make the doctor as beholding to the Brinkers as they are to him.

As for the race, that doesn't end quite as you might expect.

So this is a pleasant, sometimes exciting, story for children packaged in such a way that few children, at least today, would care to read.

Dolls within dolls

Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn

Kate Atkinson's second Jackson Brodie novel, One Good Turn (2006), reminds me of a typical episode of Seinfeld, the 1990's situation comedy. No, it's not funny. Rather there are several characters with their individual subplots that turn out to be connected in surprising ways. Coincidences abound, yet because they are deliberate and expertly crafted, these coincidences are not as objectionable as they might be in some other novel. The way the different stories tie together is the whole point.

The story starts with a road rage incident in Edinburgh, one driver attacking another with a baseball bat. Martin, a lonely and ordinarily passive crime writer, intervenes, saving a man's life while putting his own life in danger. Brodie, a former cop and former private investigator, also happens to be on hand. He is in Edinburgh with Julia, a mismatched girlfriend who is appearing in a play.

Soon there are murders, seemingly unrelated to that road rage incident. A female cop doesn't know whether Brodie is a criminal, a witness or really an ex-cop with more insight than she has, but she falls for him anyway. Meanwhile her teenage son somehow winds up with the only copy of Martin's missing book.

Another subplot concerns a crooked homebuilder in a coma and a wife who hopes he never recovers. And there is so much else going on, including repeated references to Russian dolls, which turn out to be an apt metaphor for the entire novel.

Atkinson took a chance building a story around coincidence, when that is something most quality writers take pains to avoid. And she gets away with it.

Science embraces science fiction

Ironically, the older science fiction is, the less likely it is to have been tainted by modern preconceptions about alien life, and therefore the more accurate it may be.

Arik Kershenbaum, The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy

Arik Kershenbaum

Science fiction — including both novels and movies — gets mentioned surprisingly often in Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, a book about what alien life, if it exists, might be like. I found this interesting for three reasons.

1. A scientist actually enjoys reading science fiction stories and watching science fiction films and TV shows. It is sort of like gangsters watching The Godfather or baseball players reading Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Those who know the facts can enjoy the fiction created by those who mainly use their imaginations.

2. He takes this fiction seriously. He doesn't make fun of sci-fi, but instead makes use of it. Of course, it could be argued that Kershenbaum's book is itself a form of science fiction, because like sci-fi it amounts to speculation based on facts.

3. He finds older science fiction more useful than newer science fiction, as the line quoted above suggests.

He often mentions Fred Hoyle's novel The Black Cloud, a book I read as a teenager. He also makes mention of such old-time sci-fi writers as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. There are numerous references to Star Trek and even The Planet of the Apes.

Imagining alien life

Anyone who has even wondered if life exists elsewhere in the universe has probably also wondered what that life might look like and act like. Zoologist Arik Kershenbaun has done more than wonder. He has written a book about it, The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy (2020).

Not having any real evidence of life on other planets Kershenbaum must confine himself to examining life on earth and then trying to determine what features of life must be universal. If most animals on Earth have two eyes and two ears, would most alien life have two eyes and two ears? What is likely and what isn't?

He reaches conclusions like this:

"So we can be confident that alien worlds will (much to the delight of Hollywood) be full of voracious predators."

And this:

"Some aspects of alien communication will always be alien to our comprehension — even if we can decode its meaning."

And this:

"Their screams will probably be very much like ours."

Where Kershenbaum really gets weird is when near the end of his book he begins speculating about whether any intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy might be considered human simply by reason of their intelligence. He even wonders if dolphins and chimpanzees should be called human because of their intelligence relative to that of other animal species.

He deflates his own speculation, however, when he refers to a Star Trek movie in which Captain Kirk suggests that both he and Spock are human. Spock replies, "I find that remark insulting." Any intelligent life, including dolphins, would probably be smart enough to find Kershenbaum's comments equally insulting.

Always there, never there

You will have to face the fact that, as a writer, you will be a difficult if not a maddening person to live with.

John Mortimer, Where There's a Will

Why are writers so hard to live with? Because they are always there — and because they are never there.

Some writers may go to a coffee shop or a library to write, but most of them write at home. If there's a spouse who works outside the home, this may never be a problem. But some spouses are home most of the time, and there may be children. Everyone must keep quiet because the writer is working. And this writer does not want to be disturbed during working hours, usually the morning, whether by phone calls, a ringing doorbell, children at play, a clogged drain that needs immediate attention or whatever else may be going on.

Hilda and Horace Rumpole in the TV series

So the writer in the family may be there, yet inaccessible. Close by, yet distant.

And when the writer is not actually writing? John Mortimer says this in his book Where There's a Will: "The writer is seldom entirely involved in any situation. Some part of him is standing aside, the detached observer." Writers, or at least writers of fiction, are more interested in being observers than participants. They are always looking for material. How do people talk? How do people act in certain situations? What interesting development might prove useful in a novel?

"This is deeply frustrating to those in need of a fully committed love affair, or even a completely meaningful quarrel," he writes.

Mortimer, author of the Rumpole stories, may not be entirely joking when saying that when his wife is angry about about something, he is not so much listening to what she is saying as "memorizing her dialogue so that I may give extracts from it to Hilda Rumpole in one of her many disagreements with her fictional husband."

Uncommon intimacies

There is something about the depths of the connection through books, be they bonds of curiosity, literature, or ideas, that elicits uncommon and edifying intimacies.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

We are trained to be quiet in libraries, or at least we used to be. People read in libraries. People write. People whisper. Books themselves have a way of soaking up sound. Their very appearance encourages us to keep it down.

So does this "code of silence" that traditionally is found in libraries also apply in bookstores? It does to some extent, Jeff Deutsch says in his book In Praise of Good Bookstores. Bookstore workers rarely speak to customers unless spoken to first. They rarely ask, "Can I help you find something?" One rarely hears shouting or loud conversations in a bookstore. Even children seem to be less rowdy there.

Browsing is serious business to someone in a bookstore. The less interruption, the better.

Yet there is at least one welcome exception to this code of silence: conversation about the books themselves.

William Kent Krueger

A couple months ago I stood in line to purchase a William Kent Krueger novel when I noticed that the woman ahead of me held a different novel by the same author. I commented on this, and the two of us entered into a brief but delightful conversation about William Kent Krueger.

Many people have had such conversations with complete strangers in bookstores. It is something like conversing with the stranger next to you at a baseball game or during an intermission at a concert. The very fact that you are together at the same place doing the same thing gives you something in common. Most readers love talking about the books they've read, and finding someone with similar tastes can quickly lead to engaging conversation.

Deutsch calls such conversations "uncommon and edifying intimacies." I'll buy that.

Breaking the silence

How do you make a best-selling novel out of a story in which the main character, other than the narrator, remains silent? Alex Michaelides found a way in The Silent Patient (2019).

Alicia Berenson, a gifted artist, is arrested for murdering her husband by shooting him in the face while he was tied to a chair. Questions remain, like how did she manage to tie him to the chair before shooting him? But she refuses to answer them or to say anything at all. For years.

Theo Faber is a 42-year-old psychotherapist determined to find answers, if not from Alicia then from others who knew her before the killing. Thus the novel becomes part psychological thriller and part murder mystery.

Theo has personal problems of his own. He discovers that his beautiful wife is secretly meeting with another man. Rather than confronting her, he follows her, as well as the man she is having the affair with. He contemplates murder. Here the otherwise original novel becomes cliche — the psychotherapist may be as crazy as the patient.

Things begin to come into focus when a silent Alicia hands Theo her secret diary, and at last she begins to speak. But Michaelides holds the final surprises for the exciting climax.

This is a nearly first-rate novel that deserves its best-selling status.

Telling all

Some memoirs and autobiographies are described as "tell-all" books, suggesting that they reveal the dirty secrets of the author and those of the people he or she has known. Yet Ralph Keyes in his book The Courage to Write says this: "Even though novelists and short story writers ostensibly deal in fantasy, they are the most self-exposed authors of all."

I doubt that this is always true. Sometimes fiction really is fiction. This is usually the case with lower-grade fiction, formula fiction, genre fiction. Such stories have more to do with plot than characters and more to do with actions than emotions. Yet even these books reveal what the author's fantasies are about — hot romance, gun-blazing adventure, travel to imaginary worlds, etc. 

But mainly what Keyes is talking about is more literary fiction where writers tell stories that are supposedly fiction yet are based on their own experiences and feelings. "To create authentic feelings in their characters, they must first call up their own," Keyes writes.

Pat Conroy

And so often the characters and situations in fiction reflect real people and real situations. This is especially true of first novels, which are so often autobiographical. Harper Lee told us about herself in To Kill a Mockingbird. J.D. Salinger told us about himself in The Catcher in the Rye. And so on. Names and places are changed, yet the truth remains.

When Pat Conroy wrote The Great Santini, supposedly a work of fiction, Keyes tells us that Conroy's own family and others close to him knew very well that he was actually writing about his own abusive father. This fictional story was his own true story, a tell-all book in the form of a novel.

What lies at the bottom

People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget — the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us

Class divisions lay at the core of Thirty Umrigar's powerful novel The Space Between Us. Those divisions in modern India have eased somewhat in the sequel, The Secrets Between Us (2018), yet as the title suggests people remain separated, partly by the secrets they try to keep hidden and the pride that prevents them from speaking about them.

After being forced to leave her longtime position as a servant for an upperclass woman in the earlier novel, Bhima now works for two other women and still lives in a slum while trying to save enough money to pay for her granddaughter's college education.

Through a series of circumstances, she finds herself forming a business partnership with a bitter woman named Parvati, even older than she is. Though impoverished, Parvati turns out to be educated and has a good business sense. Bhima is illiterate, but is more able-bodied. Together they begin making money selling vegetables in the open market.

Parvati's secret is that she was sold into prostitution by her father when she was a little girl. Once a great beauty, she was the pride of the brothel, where she kept the books, as well. Eventually she married a police officer, one of her most faithful clients. He turned brutal, however, and his death left her in poverty. "...Without my secrets I am nothing," she says at one point.

As for Bhima, her secret was told in the previous novel. Her husband and son abandoned her years before. She raised their daughter, who died of AIDS, living the granddaughter, Maya, in her care. The reasons behind her firing in the other novel are also a secret she wants to keep hidden.

Gradually these very different women reveal their secrets to each other and begin to draw close, no space at all between them.

Umrigar draws her characters beautifully, making them real and their actions understandable. The novel's last line may be one of the most moving you will ever read: "Although it is dusk, in Bhima's heart it is dawn." I have revealed the ending, but you won't cry until you have read the rest.

Home decorating

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Henry Ward Beecher

During COVID, most interviews shown on television and even some news commentary took place in homes, usually in front of a bookcase. In part, this was done to give an impression about how smart and well-read the person talking was. In some cases, the books were those written by that person. But more importantly, a bookcase just made a good background. It looked good on camera.

Similarly, many photographs taken of people in their homes are posed in front of bookcases. This is especially true of authors and scholars, but it's something that works well for anyone. In fact, it even works for nonreaders.

Many people who rarely read books choose to decorate their homes and/or offices with books. Some books seem to be sold expressly for this purpose. How many people actually read those finely bound classics that seem to be meant more to be seen than read? Barnes and Noble still sells attractive, relatively inexpensive classics now out of copyright. Whether read or not, such books certainly make a good impression. The eyes of clients and guests are always drawn to these displays.

Needless to say, books dominate the walls of my own home, and I wish even more of my walls were covered by books, even though I do love the few pieces of art I have hanging there instead. But my books — those I've read or hope to read — are there to pleasure no one else but me.

Life at the bottom

I stuck with Patrick deWitt's first novel, Ablutions (2009) to the end because I love his later novels like French Exit and The Sisters Brothers, but it is a disappointing and disgusting book. The author tells us more than we want to know about humanity at its worst.

The novel — deWitt calls it "notes for a novel" because it consists of short glimpses of characters and events rather than a straight narrative — tells of the regulars at a Hollywood bar. Most of these people have either hit bottom, are on their way down or still wrongly believe they are on the way up. They all drink too much and take too many drugs. This includes our unnamed narrator, who gets free drinks as part of his compensation for working there.

Their drinking, drug taking and sex acts in the back room are described in detail. The narrator's wife leaves him for another man. He begins stealing money from the bar. His life goes from bad to worse.

Yet the novel is a confession, of sorts. The title is a religious term referring to "washing one's body or part of it," a cleansing. And that is sort of what the reader wants to do after reading it.

No excuses

A writer never has an excuse for not working.

John Mortimer, Where There's a Will

I developed an ulcer and other digestive problems during my years as a newspaper reporter and editorial writer. Even weekends were not free from worry. Then I became a copy editor, trying to improve the work of other writers, and I rested more easily. My work never went home with me.

John Mortimer

So I know very well what John Mortimer, a lawyer and an author, is talking about in the comment quoted above. Writers can always work. No excuses. A pen and paper are almost always nearby. Writers can carry notebooks when they travel. Writing can be done in the mind, as well, and even in dreams. Some of my best ideas still come to me in the shower.

And so writers have no excuse for not working. Ever.

And this, Mortimer observes, can lead to guilt. "It's true that guilt follows a writer wherever he goes, an unnecessarily faithful dog, always yapping at his heels," he says. Get to work. Get to work. Get to work. The yapping goes on and on.

Writers experiencing writer's block must feel doubly guilty. Their ideas won't come no matter how hard they try to produce something worthwhile.

Talking with the dead

There is a small town in western New York where spiritualists gather each summer to communicate with the dead. They have been doing this for well over a century. Just driving through the town, as I once did, can be a bit spooky, although that may have been my imagination.

Christine Wicker was a religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News when she first visited Lily Dale. She ended up returning summer after summer, getting to know many of the spiritualists who live there or visit there. The result was her 2003 book Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead.

Many well-known people have visited Lily Dale over the years, from Mae West (a believer) to Harry Houdini (a doubter). Wicker first went to Lily Dale as a doubter, then found herself shifting back and forth from one camp to the other. She calls it "the Lily Dale bounce." Something strange happens that makes you think spirits may actually be communicating with living people, but then something happens (or doesn't happen) that makes you think the whole thing is hooey.

Wicker bounces back and forth throughout her book. Training to become a medium herself, she discovers she has a gift for reading the pasts of other people, a gift that leaves her when she leaves Lily Dale. She sees tables dance and mediums say amazing things that have no logical explanation, while she finds that so much of what these mediums say is utter foolishness.

Even the mediums themselves doubt much of what they hear in Lily Dale. They themselves are skeptics, she finds, and they take swift action against obvious frauds.

Wicker comes to like these people. She believes that they believe. And sometimes, she admits, she does, too.

Reading Wicker's book makes me wish I had stopped on my way through Lily Dale and had a conversation or two — preferably with the living.

Toughen up

Writers and artists must learn to withstand mockery, abuse and misunderstanding as an essential part of their careers.

John Mortimer, Where There's a Will

John Steinbeck

A few months back ("That's wonderful," Nov. 3, 2023) I wrote about how John Steinbeck's wife said the writer always asked her to read his novels and comment, but what he really wanted to hear, she said, was, "That's wonderful." And that is what we all want to hear, no matter what we do.

But as John Mortimer observes in Where There's a Will, what we want is not what we usually get, especially if we choose a career which, in effect, begs for a public response. He mentions writers and artists, but actors also fit into that category. If you want people to pay money for what you offer, those people have every right to tell you, "That's crap."

I have been reviewing books for most of my life, and I think I have more often written something closer to "that's wonderful" than "that's crap." One reason is that if I hate a book, I usually have the luxury of being able to put it aside and pick up something better. But I am also a softy. I don't take as much pleasure in saying "that's crap" as some critics do, although I sometimes do say it. Honesty is as important as kindness.

Yet writers and other creative people must, as Mortimer suggests, toughen up so that they can withstand the criticism that comes with the territory and keep going. Steinbeck sometimes got bad reviews, whatever his wife said about his books, but he kept writing.

Seeing things

There is no redhead by the side of the road in Anne Tyler's 2020 novel Redhead by the Side of the Road. It is just a red fire hydrant that the nearsighted Micah Mortimer sees as a woman when he goes running every morning without his glasses.

Yet his vision doesn't really seem to be that bad. On one of his runs near the end of the novel, Micah slows down when he sees a feeble old man open his car door "with one crabbed hand" before getting inside. He can see a "crabbed hand" but not a fire hydrant? But no, Tyler makes it clear that the redhead has more to do with Micah's imagination than his vision. He converts "inanimate objects into human beings" because of his loneliness. He wishes there were a redhead by the side of the road.

Nearing 40, Micah lives alone in Baltimore and manages a one-man computer repair business out of his home. His life is orderly to the point of running at a certain time each morning and cleaning his kitchen a certain of the week.

He has had a series of short-lived love affairs, including one with a teacher named Cass, which ends early in the novel for reasons he fails to understand.

Then Brink, a college boy, shows up at his door believing Micah might be his real father. He is the son of Lorna, Micah's college girlfriend. Micah knows Brink cannot be his son because he and Lorna never had sex together, but Brink reconnects him briefly with Lorna. She explains her version of why they broke up nearly two decades earlier. And that leads Micah to take control of his life, although Tyler's ending may actually suggest just the opposite. Is he taking control or surrendering? And is there a difference?

Much shorter than a typical Anne Tyler novel, Redhead is irresistible.

Eating while reading

There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read — unless it be reading while you eat.

Edith Nesbit, British writer

Just a few days ago, although I have already forgotten where I saw it, I read someone say that reading and eating don't mix. Books are precious, while food is messy. To her, don't eat and read was comparable to don't drink and drive.

E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit, who wrote children's books under the name E. Nesbit, perhaps to hide the fact that she was a woman, obviously thought differently. To her, combining the two is the height of luxury.

If you saw the food stains on some of my books, you would know whose side I come down on.

Usually I choose older books, usually books with previous owners,  to read at mealtime. My current breakfast book is a library discard, for example. Yet I don't always follow this rule. Recently I read William Kent Krueger's The River We Remember, a clothbound novel I bought new, at my breakfast bar. I believe it somehow escaped unmarked.

Now that I am widowed and living alone, I eat most of my meals in the company of books. Relationships can sometimes get messy, and so it goes with me and my book companions. But perhaps it is this casual, relaxed relationship that can make eating while reading, or reading while eating, such a luxury.

Besides, I can read a lot of extra books this way.

Tipping point

Emma Donoghue's powerful 2000 novel Slammerkin shows how delicately balanced a life can be — balanced between happiness and despair, success and failure, good and evil, a feeling of belonging and a feeling of abandonment.

The title of the novel, set in mid-18th century England, is an old word with two meanings: a loose gown or a loose woman. Both meanings become important to Donoghue's plot.

Mary is bright 14-year-old girl in London who, unlike so many girls, is getting an education. She gets pregnant after being raped, however, and is thrown out of the house by her mother. To survive, she turns to prostitution, then has an abortion. She quickly becomes settled into her new life, tutored by a new friend named Doll, who is just a few years older. Soon enough, we are told, she "couldn't remember what innocence looked like."

Due to a series of circumstances that put her life in danger, Mary flees to Monmouth, getting a job as a maid with Mrs. Jones, her mother's childhood friend. She tells the woman her mother is dead. Mrs. Jones makes gowns for upperclass women, and Mary turns out to be a talented seamstress and a big help to the business run by Mrs. Jones and her husband.

Mary misses her old life on the streets of London, yet loves being loved and accepted by this family. They begin to feel like they could be her own family. "She could almost believe she was a virgin again," we are told. Yet still thinking about returning to London, she turns to occasional prostitution and accumulates a bag of coins. This money proves her undoing.

The novel is based loosely on real people and real events. Always fascinating, the story packs an emotional wallop.

Too many memories

In The River We Remember, the fine 2023 novel by William Kent Krueger, it is not just the river that characters remember. Most of them have torn pasts they would like to forget. In many cases, that past involves their World War II experiences.

One of the characters is Sheriff Brody Dean, a war hero who doesn't feel like a hero. The year is 1958, and Brody is called to the bank of the Alabaster River, where the body of Jimmy Quinn, one of the most prominent, and least loved citizens of Jewel, Minn., has been found.

Brody would like to believe the shotgun death was either an accident or a suicide. If it was murder, he figures Jimmy Quinn probably deserved it. He wipes all prints off the shotgun to protect whoever might have done it.

Yet as much as everyone, including members of his own family, hated Quinn, there is someone they hate even more. That is Noah Bluestone, another war hero. But he is also a Dakota Sioux, and he married a Japanese woman. Soon evidence forces Brody to arrest Noah, against his own will.

There's much more going on in this novel. Brody carries on a long-term affair with his brother's wife, then falls for Angie, a former prostitute who runs a local diner in her new life. Unwise behavior by Angie's teenage son and his friend put them dangerously in the middle of this murder case. Both Noah and his wife refuse to talk about what really happened on the night Jimmy Quinn was killed.

This is a wonderfully written murder mystery that reads like a literary novel. Don't miss it.

Reflections on a life

John Mortimer's father gave him the same advice I once gave my granddaughter. If you want to become a writer, first seek another career. This will pay the bills while you struggle as a writer, and it will also give you something to write about. It will put you in daily contact with real people in real-life situations.

Mortimer took his father's advice and became a successful barrister, as well as a successful author, most notably of the Horace Rumpole stories. He tells all about it in Where There's a Will, his 2003 book of essays that can also pass as a memoir.

Much of this book is about his experiences practicing law and the amazing people and situations he encountered in this profession. There is much here, too, about the writing profession. Yet most of these essays are simply about the art of living. They have titles like "Getting Drunk," "Listening," "Lying," "Living with Children," "Male Clothing," "Giving Money to Beggars," "Eating Out," and "Looking after Your Health." They are all short and, in most cases, amusing. And sometimes full of practical advice.

He suggests, for example, to avoid eating at restaurants with menus full of page after page of entrees. Those restaurants with few options, he says, probably know how to prepare those meals very well.

He says he learned to listen to others because that is part of a lawyer's job, and he highly recommends the practice. Most people have fascinating stories to tell, if only we can stop talking long enough to listen to them.

Mortimer says many things worth quoting:

"One of the miracles of life is that few people pass through it without finding someone to love them."

"Murder has this in common with Christmas, most of it goes on in the family circle."

"The trouble with double-beds is that people tend to go to sleep in them."

Mortimer's Rumpole stories make wonderful reading, and this is no less true of this short book of short essays.

The solution is the mystery

They had met in France, where the worthy Inspector Pyke had come to study the methods of the Police Judiciare, and of Maigret especially, and had been surprised to discover that Maigret had no method at all.

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Ghost

Most of the great fictional detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Columbo, are smarter than their fans. Even so we have some idea how they work. At the very end, at least, we learn how they got from Point A to Point B. Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, however, has no method at all, as Georges Simenon tells us in Maigret and the Ghost (1964). We have no clue how he reads his clues, or even in many cases what clues he is reading.

Even so, these relatively short novels make compulsive reading, and this one is no exception. And no, this is not a ghost story.

One of the other detectives in the Paris police force is a man named Lognon, but behind his back he is usually called Inspector Luckless or Inspector Hard-Done-By. Although a clever detective, something always goes wrong with his cases. Even when they reach a successful conclusion, somebody else always gets the credit. Now Lognon is found shot and near death just outside the residence of a young woman, with whom the married detective had been spending each night.

An extramarital affair gone wrong? Not to Margaret's eyes. He goes across the street to try to discover what has been going on in the home of a notable art dealer and his beautiful wife. Why has Lognon been watching this house every night?

Maigret may be famous and mystifying, but in most respects he is an ordinary man with a wife he loves and a home he loves to go home to. Madame Maigret usually appears in these novels, and here he credits her with helping to solve the case, even though she has no idea how.

Neither do the rest of us, but it is fun watching it happen just the same.

Pretend reporters

"I'm just trying to get as much information as possible. To really write the truth, you know. I want to paint as objective — and truthful — a picture as possible."

Virginia Feito, Mrs. March

Virginia Feito

The words above are spoken by a fake newspaper reporter in Virginia Feito's novel Mrs. March. They are spoken by Mrs. March herself, a suspicious wife well on her way toward insanity. She is trying to gather clues to prove her husband is a murderer.

Even mad Mrs. March, pretending to represent the New York Times, knows very well what is required of a good reporter: gathering as much information as possible, writing the truth, being objective.

Yet newspapers across the United States today are in trouble, in part, because their own reporters don't know this. Or if they do, they ignore it. And now more and more people are ignoring them.

I am a former newspaper reporter who practiced journalism more the way Mrs. March practices it than the way most current reporters on the New York Times, Washington Post and other prominent newspapers practice it. They are more propagandists than objective reporters. They do public relations for the political left. the Biden administration and the Democrat Party. They scoff at objectivity and truth. They ignore any facts that don't fit the chosen narrative.

This, of course, is not the only reason newspapers are in trouble. They have been in trouble for decades now. Thanks to their televisions, phones and computers, people have access to many other sources of information. They can get whatever flavor of "truth" they desire, whether it is really true or not. They don't have to buy newspapers, and newspapers, having lost any pretense of objective reporting, keep making it easier to ignore them.

Something snaps

Comedy quickly turns to tragedy in Virginia Feito's 2021 novel Mrs. March.

The wife of a best-selling novelist, Mrs. March is shocked when a woman in a pastry shop raves about his latest book, then adds that the main character, a plump and unattractive woman, appears to have been inspired by Mrs. March herself.

Something snaps in Mrs, March, who appears to have been not all that stable to begin with. Without bothering to actually read the novel, she listens to conversations about it and suspects people are talking about her. She steals and destroys copies of the novel. She starts lying  about everything, however unreasonable the lies. She has always been one who puts on airs, but that trait intensifies. When she spots a cockroach in her kitchen, she won't call an exterminator for fear of what people might think.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in the town near her husband's hunting cabin, she concludes that he must be the murderer and begins looking for evidence, even to the point of visiting that town and searching for clues in the cabin.

The biggest mystery in Feito's novel is what George March saw in Mrs. March in the first place. And Mrs. March is what she is called throughout the novel, even in flashbacks to when she was a little girl. Her mother, we are told, was "pregnant with Mrs. March." Was she ever truly stable, and what is she capable of now that she is truly insane?

Secrets and lies

Chris Pavone cheats his readers in his thriller Two Nights in Lisbon (2022). Whether readers feel cheated or, on the contrary, feel rewarded by one more plot twist, is up to them. I felt cheated.

Ariel Pryce, a middle-aged newlywed, wakes up alone in a Lisbon hotel room. Her much younger husband has taken her there on a business trip, but now he has disappeared. Later that day comes an appeal for a ransom, much more money than she has.

She goes to the Lisbon police and the United States embassy for help, and the CIA gets involved.

To get the money she blackmails a man high in the U.S. government by threatening to reveal a secret about him.

Much of the novel comes as flashback as we gradually learn what that secret is. Meanwhile the authorities, who at first think Ariel is just overreacting, take the situation more and more seriously. And the tension builds.

Pavone's story gets complex, and the characters can be hard to tell apart. Readers will have fun trying to guess what's really going on. If the author told us the truth that would be too easy, which is the reason for his deceit.

Different contexts

Susan Cheever

Biography is an exercise in context.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

Think about your own life, the home you grew up in, the neighborhood you lived in during your youth, the choices you made, the people you loved,  the defeats you suffered as well as the victories you celebrated, the culture that shaped you. What you look like, where your talents lie and what ailments you suffer from are mostly the result of genetics, but most everything else in your life was influenced by environment, and each of us experiences a somewhat different environment. Or to use Susan Cheever's word, a different context.

She goes on to explain what she means in the above-quoted line: "In writing a life, biographers must create the time in which that life was lived."

Some biographers fail to do this. She observes, without naming names, "Sometime biography looks back in judgment, condemning a subject's action with the advantages of modern knowledge and customs. Sometimes a biographer will try to re-create circumstances in which a subject's action may be understood in a way in which they could not be understood at the time of writing."

In other words, biographers — and also readers of biographies — need to show a little tolerance, a little understanding, a little grace. People of a different time just didn't think the same way you do. For that matter, other people living today don't necessarily think the same way you do. They come from different contexts.

An amazing world

Virtually every species experiences the world in a unique way, in most cases a very different from the way humans experience it. Ed Yong gives us countless examples of this in his eye-opening 2022 book An Immense World.

Each species has the sensory perception it needs to survive and reproduce. If it doesn't need to see, because it lives where there is no light, then it is blind. Orher animals need strong vision. Some may need a powerful sense of smell or a powerful sense of hearing. Others have senses human beings can only imagine, such dolphins, which can use sonar to detect buried objects, and bumblebees, which can sense the electric fields of flowers.

Yong offers up one jaw-dropping natural science fact after another. Mice sing, though our ears cannot hear it. Catfish are, in effect, "swimming tongues" because of their ability to taste with their entire bodies. Some insects can hear with virtually every part of their bodies.

Yong points out that earlier scientists have been dead wrong time and again about what animals can sense. Fish don't feel pain, for example. Well, yes they do. But if earlier scientists can be wrong, so can the scientists represented here. If any of them are wrong, however, chances are the real truth is even more amazing than the amazing information gathered here.

War as muse

More than any other before or since, World War I was our literary war.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

Susan Cheever

E.E. Cummings took part in World War I. In fact, he was a prisoner of war for three months. Susan Cheever lists several other writers from that war, some of whom died in it: Yeats, Owen, Brooke, Sassoon, Graves and Hemingway. There were a number of others, such as Erich Maria Remarque. Most of them were poets.

By the time World War II came along, just two decades later, poetry was in decline. This may be one reason why fewer writers emerged from that war. Yet still there was Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, James Jones and many more.

The Vietnam War inspired others.

These wars, as well as others, continue to motivate writers, even those writers who have never experienced war. War has just about everything that makes a dramatic story, or in Heller's case, a comic story. There's conflict and death, certainly, but also suspense, love, desperation, poignancy, fear, hope, heroism. Put war in the background of almost any story and you get a more powerful story. Take Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See as one example.

So every war is a literary war. But I agree with Cheever. The Great War produced great literature.

Books that have known passion

A book is like a woman. She should leave your bed with her hair tangled and her clothes on backward. A book without creases is a book that has never known passion,

Terri-Lynne DeFino, The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses)

Passion is hardly the only explanation for books with creases. Misuse is just as likely, if not more likely. Pages are dog-eared. Books are stored in damp places. Dogs chew on them. They are left face down for long periods. Dust jackets were not removed before the books are read. They are covered in dust.

Terri-Lynne DeFino

Yet the character in Terri-Lynne DeFino's The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses) does have a point. Books that have been read but don't look like it may have never known real passion.

Books with passionate readers are often books with passages underlined.

They have been read more than once — and show it.

They fall open to certain pages where favorite passages — or poems — have been read over and over again.

The covers show signs of having been carried around, taken from place to place.

The top of the spine indicates the book has been pulled down from a shelf repeatedly.

All this is particularly true of Bibles. A Bible that looks like it has never been opened probably hasn't been opened. One that has been read passionately over the years shows it on almost every page.

Look at your favorite books, the ones you would never part with. Chances are your passion for them is apparent just by looking at them.

Two for the price of one

Writers like to hang out with other writers — at writing retreats, at book fairs, at book festivals. So why not a retirement home just for writers? Terri-Lynne DeFino imagines that very thing in The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (and Their Muses) (2018).

Alfonse Carducci, the most famous of the famous writers, enters the home as the novel begins and is given the best room in the place. He is dying and so doesn't expect to be there long.

Alfonse is as famous for his adventurous love life as he is for his books, and one of the facility's other residents is Olivia, a former lover. While he still has feelings for her, his real reason for holding onto life for as long as possible is Cecibel, who quite literally is two-faced. An accident destroyed half of her beautiful face, leaving her a monster on the other side, she thinks. She wears her hair long to cover that side of her face. She lives and works at the home, stopping in to see Alphonse each day.

Lacking the energy to write a book by themselves, Alfonse, Olivia and another writer compose alternate chapters in a novel about a love triangle, complicated when another man and another woman enter the picture. And so we get to read their novel even as we read Defino's.

Cecibel finds herself in a love triangle of her own. She feels drawn to the dying Alfonse even as Finley, another employee with a tragic history, falls in love with her.

And so readers get to enjoy two stories at the same time, each quite different yet each about the mystery of love and the difficult choices it requires of us.

First form, then freedom

The energy in Cummings's poems comes from the strict forms that seem to be barely containing their passionate subjects and images.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

E.E. Cummings

The poetry of E.E. Cummings isn't nearly as popular as it once was, although that is true of poetry in general. What people are most likely to notice about his poems is their lack of form — not just the absence of rhyme but also his words that run together or are spread out over a page, the lack of punctuation and capital letters and the seeming nonsense of so many of his word choices.

Yet Susan Cheever makes a valid point in her biography of the poet. The freedom of his verse sprang from his mastery of form. He knew very well how to write a standard poem — and often did. But once he had mastered form, he felt free to wander from form into new directions. It's sort of like moving into a new city. First you find your way around by traveling the main streets and highways. After that you explore, looking for short-cuts, more interesting ways of getting from here to there, less congested routes. Freedom follows form.

Cheever puts it this way. "Much of Cummings's poetry plays with form in the way that only a formalist can play — this was the whole idea behind modernism as he embraced it."

One can find evidence of this sort of thing in the work of other artists. James Joyce wrote The Dubliners before he wrote Ulyssses. The early paintings of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali show they knew very well how to paint women who looked like women — two eyes, two breasts, etc. After they had mastered form, however, they sought freedom.

Cummings revealed

E.E. Cummings made more money reading his poems than writing them. That's just one of the fascinating tidbits Susan Cheever gives us in her excellent 2014 biography E. E. Cummings: A Life.

Another is this: Cummings may have been a radical in his poetic style, yet he was a firm anti-communist, unlike so many of his fellow intellectuals. Friends returned from Russia with praise for what they had found there, but Cummings turned against Stalin and communism almost from the moment he entered Russia. Everyone there seemed afraid. Nobody seemed happy.

Cheever gives us plentiful examples of his poetry, often playful, sometimes angry, usually obscure, always thoughtful. These poems provide commentary on his life, from loving memories of his clergyman father to his late-in-life fondness for birds.

The poet had difficulties with women: two marriages, two divorces. He never married the love of his life, who stayed by him until the end, although she was jealous even of his own daughter.

His relationship with Nancy, his daughter, makes a wonderful story in itself, perhaps even worthy of a movie. Cummings knew her when she was a little girl, but then his ex-wife took her away to Ireland, changed her name and refused to tell her anything about her real father. Years later, after Nancy herself had become a poet, Cummings reentered her life, yet for a long time refused to tell her he was her father. Only after Nancy declared her love for him did he reveal the truth.

Like her father, John Cheever, Susan Cheever is an outstanding writer, as her other books such as American Bloomsbury, have shown. This is a fine, revealing biography, perhaps too brief to be definitive, but beautifully written.