Joy and light, but not much else

It still baffles me that one must go to the mystery section of any bookstore to find the novels of Alexander McCall Smith. Even his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels are out of place there. In The Joy and Light Bus Company (2021), the most intriguing mystery is whether Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni will lose his shirt, his auto repair shop and his wife's detective agency by investing in a bus company.

Precious Ramotswe does have a client for her agency, a man worried that his aging father will leave his home to a "wicked woman," the nurse who had taken care of him for years. But this generates little interest. Let's get back to the Joy and Light Bus Company, readers are probably thinking.

The 22nd novel in the wonderful series retains the charm and humor that has made the series so popular, yet it lacks the cohesive strength of earlier books. McCall Smith does give us some weak surprises, but they are not enough to make a novel we will remember as fondly as some of the others.

Keeping pace

The art of reading is among other things the art of adopting that pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed.

Mark Van Doren, American poet

Mark Van Doren

I like Mark Van Doren's phrase "the art of reading." When we learned to read, it was a science. We learned the words, how to pronounce them, what they meant. We learned about punctuation. With time reading became an art, or it did for most of us. Two equally literate people do not necessarily read in the same way. One may see meanings and implications that the other misses. Writing that excites one person can bore another.

Van Doren's main point is about adopting the pace of the author. What does "pace of the author" mean? Well, compare David Baldacci with Henry James. Baldacci writes thrillers, with short chapters, mostly simple words and lots of action. You probably aren't going to read a Baldacci novel at a pace of one chapter each night before turning out the lights. It wasn't written that way. If you try to make such a book your bedtime reading, you will probably not get much sleep.

A James novel would be an equally poor choice as a bedside book. It wouldn't keep you awake, but would rather put you to sleep after a paragraph or two. (On second thought, it sounds like an ideal beside book.)

Seriously, to appreciate a Henry James novel or almost any work of serious literature, one needs to be wide awake, fully alert and willing to read at the same pace as the writer — slow and deliberate, in other words. A few pages at a time may be enough,

Read a Baldacci novel too slowly and you would forget what all the excitement is about. Read a Henry James novel too quickly and you will miss everything.

Campaign lies

George Orwell

During the political season — and isn't it always the political season? — one's thoughts can turn to George Orwell. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others," we remember from Animal Farm. It sounds like the double-talk we hear during political campaigns, doesn't it?

Politicians lie, of course. That's just what they do. They need to win votes, so they say what they need to say to win those votes. Thus, one group is told one thing and another group something else. How they act once in office often bears little resemblance to what they said on the campaign trail.

Listen to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown's campaign ads this year and you might think he is a Republican and a friend of Donald Trump. I have known Sherrod since we were both in our 20s and have spoken with him many times and sometimes wrote newspaper endorsements in support of him, and believe me, he is not a Republican. Rather he is a Democrat running for re-election in Ohio, which is now a Republican state, and he will say what he needs to say to win votes.

Both presidential candidates have told us lies, but they seem to be different kinds of lies. Donald Trump exaggerates. He boasts. He promises impossible things. Yet there is a positive side to these lies. They at least tell us what he believes in, what he desires for the country, what he hopes to accomplish.

With Kamala Harris, we are left in the dark. Her campaign seems more designed to hide what she believes in, what she desires for the country, what she hopes to accomplish.

Orwell wrote, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink." Word salad, in other words.

Wrapping up

Richard Russo ties up his Fool trilogy nicely with Somebody's Fool (2023), following in the footsteps of Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool.

North Bath, N.Y., the small town at the center of the earlier novels, has ceased to exist in the third one, having been swallowed up by its wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. The characters we have come to know, like their town, seem lost. Where do they fit in now?

Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief, lost his job when the force was disbanded, while Charice, his girlfriend (or is it former girlfriend?), has been named police chief in Schuyler Springs. Yet because she is both black and female, her new position seems shaky.

Janey lost her abusive husband in the previous novel, but now she has replaced him with an abusive boyfriend, a dirty cop and one of Charise's main foes.

Peter, the son of Sully (the central figure in Nobody's Fool), can't decide whether he wants to leave or stay or whether he wants to continue as a college professor or work with his hands like his late father did. And then one of his estranged sons shows up, gets beaten badly by that dirty cop and gives Peter both a new problem and a possible solution to his other ones.

Jerome, Charice's twin brother, has lost all his swagger. His sister has given up on rescuing him from his depression and turns the job over to Raymer.

Russo, with his usual wit and style, gives direction to these and other lost characters by the time he concludes both the novel and the series. Somehow the everybody-wins ending doesn't destroy the art.

Breathing in, breathing out

Reading is my inhale, and writing is my exhale.

Glennon Doyle, American author

I do my writing in the morning, my reading in the afternoon. It is mostly a matter of energy. I have more of it in the morning, so that is when I write, which takes more energy than reading. In the afternoon I enjoy relaxing with a book and a pot of tea.

Glennon Doyle

I am drawn to Glennon Doyle's observation that reading and writing are both part of the same thing, just as inhaling and exhaling are both parts of breathing.

In my case, that is literally true. In this blog I write mostly about the books I have read. Yet in some sense this is true of everyone who writes. There was a reason our teachers insisted that we cite references in our term papers. What we wrote was supposed to be based on what others had written, not a copy or a paraphrase but rather a digestion of the writing of others into our own thoughts and words. Writing builds on what has been read.

This is true not just of content. It is also true of style and grammar and spelling and punctuation. We learn as we read, and what we learn influences how we write as well as what we write.

Even our letters, texts and emails are often a response to the letters, texts and emails we have received. We breathe in, and then we breathe out.

The burden of untold stories

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou once said "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

I touched on this topic a couple of weeks ago ("How can stories be bad?" Oct. 4). When you have story, you must tell it to someone. It's like scratching an itch. Sometimes anyone will do. My father used to love to tell his stories. Within a couple minutes of meeting a total stranger he would be off and running with his stories, and he would continue telling them as long as the stranger was willing to listen.

I tried to satisfy my own compulsion to tell my stories by writing my memoirs during Covid, when there wasn't much else to do.

Novelists and short story writers who, in addition to having all those personal stories that all of the rest of us have inside us, have fictional stories bursting to get out. To some extent, they write stories because they must. Stories come to them, and so they write them down and share them with anyone willing to pay money for them. Unlike the rest of us, they get paid for their compulsion.

Angelou uses the word bearing in regard to untold stories, suggesting that an untold story is a burden. One relieves the burden by telling the story. That works for most of us, but not for my father. He needed to tell the same stories over and over again, sometimes to the same audience.

Giving away Sis

As much as Lonnie is impossible — and everyone agrees that she is — she's still my dear, sweet, lumbering big sister, and you can't give away a sister!

Laurie Fox, My Sister from the Black Lagoon

More than a quarter of a century after it was published in 1998, Laurie Fox's novel My Sister from the Black Lagoon may be even more topical now than it was then.

Clearly autobiographical — the subtitle reads "A novel of my life" — the first-person novel tells of Lorna, a girl growing up in the 1960s whose big sister is loud, uncontrollable and driven by dark compulsions. Mostly Lonnie wants to be a boy and hates it when her mother forces her to wear a dress.

Lorna loves her sister, yet resents it that Lonnie gets most of their parents' attention. She also hates it when Lonnie is sent to a home for autistic and mentally ill children.

Sometimes the novel is as funny as its title and cover illustration suggest, yet the story proves ultimately sobering, especially as Lorna matures, goes to college and realizes that she herself has, in effect, given away her sister. She calls Lonnie or visits her only as often as guilt forces her to.

What's more, Lorna has become her sister in a sense, a misfit struggling to find her place in the world.

There's much to like about this disturbing novel.