Important work

Close physical contact with the field of juvenile literature leads me to the conclusion that it must be a lot of fun to write for children —  reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work.

E.B. White, One Man's Meat

E.B. White

What's interesting about the above comment by E.B. White is that it appeared in The New Yorker in 1938, more than a decade before he wrote Charlotte's Web, (1952), thus becoming one of the most beloved writers of children's books of all time. In 1938, however, he was known only as a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His essays, such as the one called "Children's Books," were later reprinted in One Man's Meat.

White had moved from New York City to a farm in Maine with his wife, who reviewed children's books. As a result of Katharine's career, White found children's books lying everywhere in their home. Sometimes he read these books, and this led to the essay that included the somewhat prophetic comment about how fun — and easy — it must be to write books for children. Perhaps this is when the idea that he might do it himself first came to him.

Writing for children may, in fact, be relatively easy. I base this conclusion simply on the fact that so many Hollywood celebrities and Washington politicians seem to be able to write children's books. I have a friend who has had more than 500 children's books published. Not that she isn't very talented or that she doesn't work very hard. The best writers for children, including White, do work very hard, although I suspect it is also fun for them.

And sometimes, as with Charlotte's Web, their work becomes important to generations of children.

White actually made a second prophetic comment in this same essay: "Incidentally, one of the few books that struck me as being in the true spirit of nonsense is one called The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss." Dr. Seuss was just getting started at this point, having gotten his first children's book published in 1937. Yet White singled him out from all the scores of writers whose books filled his house as someone special.

Storybook stuff

They were worlds apart in everything but the simplicity of their humanity, and so they were really not apart at all.

Paul Gallico,  Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris

It's good to be Cinderella, but it's also good to be the Fairy Godmother,  as Paul Gallico shows in his charming 1958 short novel Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris.

Ida Harris, a middle-aged widow, spends her days tidying up the clutter left by wealthy Londoners. The only beauty in her life, other than her friendship with another charwoman and her memories of her late husband, is found in flowers. Then she sees a costly Christian Dior gown in the closet of one of the women she works for, and she resolves to own a Christian Dior dress no less beautiful. She has no place to wear such a gown, yet still she desires it more than anything.

It takes her years to save enough money, but she has nothing else to save her money for. When she thinks she has enough, she heads for Paris and the exclusive Christian Dior shop, thinking she can pick a gown off the rack and be back in London by the end of the day. It's not that easy, of course, especially not for a humble middle-class working woman among the snobs and elites found in an exclusive Paris dress shop.

But this is "storybook stuff," a phrase Gallico uses in his book, and over the next few days Mrs. 'Arris, as she calls herself, transforms the lives of several of the people she meets more than they transform her.

Gallico's little book holds up well after more than 60 years, and a reader today can easily understand why it was once so popular with readers.

Catching readers, holding readers

I've learned that if I don't love a book by the first twenty pages, chances are I'm not going to love it for the next three hundred.

Caroline Leavitt, author's note, Pictures of You paperback edition

Caroline Leavitt

Most novelists realize, as Carolyn Leavitt does, that first chapters are important. That's why they usually devote so much attention to those early pages. Catch readers and maybe you can hold them.

Yet second chapters are important as well. There have been many novels that I loved by the end of the first chapter, then abandoned before reaching the end of the second or third chapter. So many writers start their novels in the middle of their story, or sometimes even at the end, when there is enough tension to entice a reader, then shift back to the slow, ponderous actual beginning of the story in chapter two. But do beginnings really have to be so slow and ponderous?

One of the things that most impressed me about Mystery Ride, a novel I reviewed here a few days ago, was the way Robert Boswell started at the very beginning of his story and still made it riveting. Yet his second chapter and then his third chapter are no less riveting. There isn't a dull chapter in the novel, no chapter devoted solely to dull description, scene setting or back story. Each chapter advances the plot and each holds the reader's interest. Caroline Leavitt does something very similar in Pictures of You.

Thomas Hardy, although one of my favorite writers, is not known for his entrancing opening chapters. He favors description and scene setting in the early pages. So it is ironic that Hardy wrote what has been called the best first chapter in literature, in The Mayor of Casterbridge. It's hard to top a chapter in which a man gets drunk and sells his wife. It's a pretty good novel as a whole, but the rest of it never quite equals that first chapter.

So in one regard Robert Boswell, whom few people have heard of, beats Thomas Hardy, whom everybody has heard of: He gives every other chapter as much attention as he gives that first chapter. Readers get hooked and stay hooked.

Blending fiction into history

E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) could be a history book that reads like a novel or a novel that reads like a history book. That it is actually the latter we know because it tells us that on the cover. Doctorow blends fact and fiction as well as any historical novelist, a plot coming into form only gradually. Historical figures like Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington, Evelyn Nesbitt and Sigmund Freud are as much characters as the two families, one black and one white, that eventually take over the story.

The book is narrated by someone who is just a boy when all this takes place, and he identifies members of his family only as Father, Mother and Mother's Younger Brother. He does not give a name even to himself.

An elegant black musician named Coalhouse Walker comes each week to their house to try to convince their maid to marry him. They already have a baby boy. Sarah finally agrees to the marriage, then tragedy strikes. Coalhouse is persecuted by members of a fire department, who destroy his new Model T. He insists they restore it to its original condition, even though as a black man he has virtually no power.

Meanwhile Sarah is killed by the police when she is only trying to summon help, and Mother takes over the care of her child, which distances her from Father. In desperation, Coalhouse turns violent, backed up by several young black men and even Mother's Younger Brother, who after being rejected by Evelyn Nesbitt is ready to use his talent with explosives for Coalhouse's hopeless cause.

The period of history is just before the First World War, and Doctorow gives us the flavor of that time. This may be his best known novel, although it is hardly his best.

Life's a mystery

They were on the ride together, Rox thought, feeling the thrill of it. The mystery ride.

Robert Boswell, Mystery Ride

Life is a journey, so we say. So is marriage or any kind of relationship. You start in one place and end up somewhere else, and how you get there is something of a mystery even after you've arrived at the end.

Robert Boswell's 1992 novel Mystery Ride is not read much today — try finding it in a bookstore — but in the 1990s it was a bestseller. The title may have been a bit deceptive. One wonders how many people bought it assuming it to be a murder mystery, perhaps taking place during a drive across the country. There's plenty of travel in Boswell's story, yet the ride of the title takes place mostly on an Iowa farm.

Very much in love when they buy the farm in 1971, Angela and Stephen Landis each envision a different kind of future. She sees the farm as just a youthful fling, a charming place to live during their extended honeymoon. He actually wants to become a farmer. And so she divorces the man she still loves and moves west with their young daughter, hoping he will follow her. He doesn't.

The story skips forward a number of years when their daughter, Dulcie, has become a troubled teenager whom Angela can no longer manage. She decides to take the girl back to the farm for the summer to see if Stephen can control her. Meanwhile she has remarried to a dashing but unfaithful man named Quinn, while a woman named Leah and her own teenage daughter, Roxanne, have just moved into the farmhouse with Stephen.

In other hands this plot could easily turn into a comedy, but Boswell has other, better ideas. Readers, like the characters themselves, have no idea where this ride might take them.

We like what we like

It seems to me there are two sorts of critics — one lot would prefer to like the things they review, the others prefer to dislike the things they review.

Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979

Michael Palin

This particular diary entry on March 31, 1977. refers specifically to reviews of Jabberwocky, a new film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Michael Palin, yet Palin's comment applies to all critics of all movies, books, plays, television shows, etc. In fact, it applies to all of us at all times: We tend to like what we want to like and dislike what we want to dislike. Old opinions color new opinions.

Reviewers, of course, are supposed to be more professional and thus more objective than the rest of us, as if an objective opinion were possible. Yet their biases sway their opinions, just as the rest of us are swayed by our own biases. Critics who like a certain director are more likely to like that director's next film. Or perhaps they liked a director's last film so much, they decide going into the theater that the new film cannot possibly be as good.

I wrote book reviews for a newspaper for many years. At one point my editor, concerned about ethics and the appearance of ethics, decided that my being sent books for review by publishers might slant (or appear to slant) my reviews in their favor. His remedy was to give me a monthly budget to purchase books to review. What actually happened was that I tended to buy books I most wanted to read by authors I most admired. Negative comments in my reviews became more scarce than when I reviewed random books sent by publishers. Soon we reverted to the old system of reviewing books sent by the publishers, although I think that had less to do with ethics than with budget concerns and the high price of new books. Why buy books that publishers are willing to give to you? And I think my reviews became more fair as a result. At the very least a wider range of books was reviewed.

(And publishers continued to send review copies while I ignored them all. This failure to review any of them did not seem very ethical to me.)

We may have preconceived opinions, yet minds can be changed, and that's what really good books, really good movies or really good actions by people we despise can sometimes do.

The Python diaries

Michael Palin's diary had a timely beginning, timely because he started it just a month before he and five other young men got together to form what became known as Monty Python. For more than a decade Monty Python would entertain millions with a television series, movies, stage performances, records and books. Palin gives us a day-by-day account of all this in his Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years (2006).

Diaries are by nature personal and subjective, and so the book shows us Python only from Palin's perspective. It places him at the center of everything and makes him the observer of the foibles, weaknesses and habits of the others. John Cleese contributes a blurb to the cover saying that Palin never stops talking. That's the kind of thing we don't learn from the diaries themselves.

The diaries are about much more than just Monty Python. There's much about Helen, his wife, and their three young children, and about his aging parents. (His father dies during these years.) He writes about hosting Saturday Night Live three times and about trying to write a novel. Yet Python always remains the main attraction.

Palin and Terry Jones had been friends and writing partners since their university days, and according to Palin he and Jones are the core of the comedy group, the ones who do most of the writing  and can be most depended upon to be where they are supposed to be and do what they are supposed to do.

Cleese comes to the group early and is a massive talent, yet also something of a prima donna. He would much rather be on holiday in France than working in England. In 1978 Palin quotes Cleese as describing his own classic TV show Fawlty Towers as "hack work," something to pay the bills.

Graham Chapman tended to be insecure, always late and often drunk, at least in the early years. Eric Idle was one for extremes, feeling one way about something on one day and totally different the next. Terry Gilliam, the only American in the group, isn't mentioned much early in diaries. He is the illustrator, seldom used as an actor, and so was not usually at the center of things. Later as Gilliam's talent as a director begins to emerge, he earns more mention in the diaries, especially with respect to Jabberwocky and the early work on Brazil (in which Palin will eventually play an important role).

For Python fans — and who else would read this massive book? —the best entries will be those about the making of favorite scenes, such as the "Pet Shop/Parrot" sketch and the "Upper Class Twit of the Year" sketch. If only Palin had known which bits would become most beloved, he might have written more about them at the time.

The missing baby

We all have our own kinds of sin.

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls

Writing as Benjamin Black, John Banville made an impressive debut as a mystery writer in 2006 with Christine Falls. Dark, moody and muddled (in a good way), the story manages to rise above genre to become literature of the sort the author writes under his own name.

The title character, a young Irish woman named Christine Falls, is dead before the first page. Quirke, a pathologist in 1950s Dublin, notices nothing amiss until he catches Mal, his brother-in-law who is also a doctor, altering the death records late at night. Yet Quirke is drunk at the time, so later he isn't sure he remembers what he thinks he remembers.

The woman and her baby supposedly both died in childbirth. But what happened to the baby's body? And who is the father of the baby — Mal, who married the Crawford sister Quirke desired for himself. or someone else? And what really happened to Christine Falls? The more questions he asks, the more bad things happen, including the murder of a woman who knows too much and a crippling beating of Quirke himself.

More tragic consequences follow Quirke to Boston when he goes there on family business. It turns out  that is where the answers to his questions lie.

This is a solid mystery debut, never losing its grip on the reader despite its deliberate pace.

Lost and found in Africa

Eugene Henderson is a man who seems to have everything — he's a millionaire pig farmer with a beautiful wife and a big family — yet he still wants something, even if he doesn't know what that something is. And thus we have the situation in Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King.

Henderson's quest for what turns out to be his purpose in life takes him to one of the most isolated parts of central Africa, where he befriends two chieftains and tries to help solve their tribes' water problems. In the first village he only makes matters worse and has to leave in disgrace. In the second, his presumed success in bringing rain turns him into the honored rain king and a close confident of the tribe's king, who slowly teaches Henderson how to roar like a lion, both literally and figuratively.

This is a big, brawling novel, like Henderson himself, yet its message is simple: to find yourself, lose yourself. By the time he leaves Africa, Henderson has decided to give up pigs and go to medical school. He may be in his mid-50s, but for him life has just begun.

Thirty views of Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita continues to generate strong feelings and strong opinions well over half a century after its publication in 1958. People love and revile the novel (and its author), and sometimes they are even the same people, as we see in the new collection of 30 essays, Lolita in the Afterlife.

This book is edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, who just happens to be the daughter of Walter Minton, the man who first dared to publish Lolita in the United States. Even though the essay writers tend to quote the same lines from the novel, the lines those of us who have read it are most likely to remember, the essays themselves are quite different.

Emily Mortimer, who starred in a movie about Lolita (The Bookshop), writes about how funny the book is and how that humor helped made it more acceptable to readers and able to avoid legal challenges. Mystery novelist Laura Lippman views the novel as a detective story. Stacy Schiff looks at it from the point of view of Nabokov's wife, who defended Lolita while considering Tom Sawyer unfit for young readers. Ian Frazier examines Lolita as a road novel and a celebration of the motels once found along Route 66 and other American highways.

Kira von Eichel writes about some 200 popular songs that mention Lolita. Robin Givhan talks about the character's influence on fashion. Others comment on the various paperback covers, which sexualize the young girl perhaps more than the novel itself does, and the two movies adapted from the book.

Several of the female essay writers tell of reading Lolita while in their early teens and identifying with the girl, imaging themselves being so admired and lusted after by older men. Reading the novel years later, they seem a bit embarrassed and shocked by their earlier attitudes. Not only have they changed, but the times have changed. Many question whether Lolita could even be published today.

In one of the more perceptive essays, Claire Dederer puts Humbert Humbert in his place as an "anti-monster" who is as "ordinary as dust." There are a lot of men out there like that. He just writes better than most. Erika L. Sanchez, with perhaps the lamest essay in the book, takes this same argument too far, saying the novel is a study in "white male entitlement," as if men of color (and women) have not sexually abused children. 

One thing that surprises me about this collection is how few of the essayists — while they all seem to admire the book despite their misgivings about it — comment in detail about its value as a work of literature. Fortunately Andre Dubus III covers this subject very well.

The Tingle

This summer I am struggling with the long-dreaded process of shrinking my personal library for a move, perhaps before the year is out, to a condo. The decisions — and I must make some 5,000 of them — are agonizing. How does one decide which books to keep and which to give away or try to sell?

It's not as easy as keeping the books I haven't read and sacrificing those I have read. Some of those I haven't read I realize I really don't want to read or will never get around to reading even if I would like to read them.  Meanwhile many of those I have read I cannot bear to part with,  even if I know I will never read them again. Like certain family photos, they are treasures that will stick with me emotionally as long as I stick around, and I would like them with me physically as well.

Sometimes the choices are easy. Usually not so much. The decision often comes down to what I call The Tingle.

Certain books, and not necessarily the best books, give me this tingle, an emotional feeling that seems to run throughout my body when I see or even think about a particular book. Even unread books can produce this tingle, even if it's not as strong as with certain books I have read. J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, to cite one example, gives me a big-time tingle, both because of when I read it in college and when I read it again just a few years ago.

The source of this tingle is usually a fond memory of the book itself, but it can also be the circumstances of reading the book, a review I wrote about it or the person who gave the book to me years ago. I can feel a tingle about books I purchased in Europe and on other trips or even some books that have particularly attractive covers. Fiction seems to be more tingly than nonfiction, though there are plenty of exceptions.

My David Baldacci novels will go. Not much tingle there, although I do enjoy his books. Larry McMurtry and Alice Hoffman are another matter. They stay. Same with John Steinbeck, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Greene, Ann Patchett and many others. I'm keeping Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, but my other Evan S. Connell novels have already been discarded. I'm parting with all my Lawrence Saunders and A.J. Cronin novels, even though a few them produce at least a little tingle.

I still don't know what to do with Peter Devries, Agatha Christie and so many others. So far I have removed only about 500 books from my collection, or about 10 percent. The choices keep getting tougher. I must follow The Tingle.

Weird villain liaison

The late Donald E. Westlake had three words posted on a sign above his Smith-Corona typewriter: 'WEIRD VILLAIN LIAISON." Those were the words that gave him fits when writing because he could never remember the proper order of the vowels.

I thought of this while reading his 1966 novel The Spy in the Ointment, which is about a liaison of weird villains.

This novel came early in Westlake's career, soon after he shifted from serious crime novels to comic crime novels. The narrator is J. Eugene Raxford, a pacifist. In the 1960s the feds were as suspicious of pacifists as they are now of Republicans, and so they tap his phone and monitor his movements. Gene knows about it but doesn't much care. He's a true pacifist, after all.

To prove how harmless he is, Gene agrees to become an FBI spy at a meeting of representatives from small fringe groups on both the far left and the far right. Most of these people seem too wacky (or weird) to be dangerous to anyone, but that is not true of the leader of this meeting, a young man whose evil plans include blowing up the United Nations building. The weird villains are his patsies. What's more, he is the brother of Angela, Gene's wealthy girlfriend, who goes with him to this meeting and whose life he must ultimately put aside his pacifism to save.

Many complications pile up in barely 200 pages, most of them comic, but for a comic novel there are a surprising number of bodies lying around when it's all over.

The Spy in the Ointment is not Westlake at his best — that will come later with the Dortmunder novels and especially his classic Dancing Aztecs — but it shows him in the process of developing his talent as an author of comic crime.

Reading writers

Rather than read a book, I read a writer.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Paul Theroux

Most of us "read writers" to some extent. We find a writer we like, then try to read all we can by that writer. Paul Theroux goes so far as to try to read a biography of that writer as well.

I do something similar, but over a long period of time because I rarely read more than one or two books by the same author in a single year. I have yet to read all the Hardy, all the Dickens or all the Hemingway I want to read. Reading Harper Lee is easy. Reading any prolific writer can take a lifetime, for there are so many books to read and so many other writers deserving the same attention.

Reading a writer gets easier not just when writers write few books, like Lee, but also when they write similar books each time, such as most authors of mysteries and thrillers. Other authors write a different book each time, meaning that some of them are better than others, or more interesting than others to any particular reader. There are some Hemingway books I have no interest in reading. I love some Thomas Berger novels, while others bore me. Some people have written many books, but only one or two of them worth reading.

Theroux recalls mentioning his interest in reading writers to a literature professor, who replied, "That's all right for you, we don't have as much free time as you civilians." Theroux adds, "Tact prevented me from telling him he had a salary, which I lacked, and that he was a lazy and philistine fathead."

One would think that if anyone read writers it would be literature professors, who teach and write about these authors. Apparently at least some of them think that if they teach Bleak House that means they don't have to read Little Dorrit. Those of us who read for pleasure tend to think that if we enjoy one, we just might enjoy the other.