Minority views

Some things are implicitly understood: you don't eat crisps at the opera and you don't admit that an author beloved by the intelligentsia leaves you cold.

Christopher Fowler, The Book of Forgotten Authors

Several weeks ago I engaged in a fascinating conversation with a man, a retired sanitary engineer as I recall, who was a big Mark Twain admirer, but he argued that Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, not Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is Twain's greatest novel.

A Wikipedia article about this book says "critics have not favored Recollections, and it is hardly read or acknowledged in the mainstream today." This makes me admire my momentary friend all the more. Not only was he a brilliant conversationalist on Mark Twain, but he was willing to espouse, and back up, an unpopular point of view.

As Christopher Fowler notes in The Book of Forgotten Authors, most of us hesitate to say anything counter to what the experts say about literature, or anything else for that matter. When is the last time you heard anyone say anything negative about William Shakespeare or James Joyce or William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf or Homer or anyone else esteemed by the intelligentsia? Yet how many of us actually read — and enjoy — these writers? Most of us would rather read Dan Brown or, well, Christopher Fowler.

As Michael Dirda says in Browsings, "We don't read for high-minded reasons. We read for aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual excitement."

It's not that the great writers aren't actually great writers. Rather, tastes differ and we each find our excitement in different places. For the most part, this is no big deal. Barnes & Noble sells a lot of different books, and there is probably something there for everybody. The problem comes when other members of the intelligentsia or literary critics or reviewers bow to more prominent points of view, while burying their own opinions, which may be no less valid.

Who is the greatest living American author? Thankfully, that question remains far from being answered, meaning that there are still many contenders, many points of view and many opportunities for new writers to enter the competition. Only when such questions are answered does the conversation get stifled, making dissenters afraid to speak up.

Which is the greatest Twain novel? The majority view might be Huck Finn, but it's good to know Joan of Arc has a brave champion.

Banned books? Hardly

Another Banned Books Week (Sept. 18-24) has come and gone with another ho-hum from me. I am a strong opponent of banning books. So why don't I get more excited about Banned Books Week? Two reasons.

1. The week has come to be more about politics and social posturing than either literature or censorship.

Most of the books at the top of this year's list have to do with LBGT-etc. These include Gender Queer, Lawn Boy, All Boys Aren't Blue and other books of this sort aimed primarily at children and teenagers. Books from the other side of the political and social spectrum are even more likely to be kept out of classrooms and school libraries, but they are ignored. Even some Dr. Seuss books have become controversial. No mention of that here.

2. What they call "banned books" aren't really banned. They are readily available, including in many classrooms and school libraries. Rather they are termed banned because many parents and educators object to their presence in classrooms and libraries. Many people consider such books little more than child pornography, or perhaps pornography for children. They probably would object to books with strong heterosexual content, as well.

Just as authors should be free to write any books they choose and publishers should be free to publish any books they choose, so should parents be free to choose which books they object to in their children's schools. And so should school boards and librarians be free to make decisions about which books to include and which to exclude. Excluding a certain book is not censorship; it is just a decision they are entitled, even required, to make. It's their job. Not every book can be taught in every classroom or shelved in every library.

And if a book like Gender Queer is taken off a school reading list, it remains readily available in bookstores. lt is hardly banned, any more than the Bible is banned just because a public school teacher is forbidden to teach it.

A mother's love

C.J. Box is at his best in Endangered, a 2015 novel in which a mother's love takes an evil twist.

Box includes a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson before his story begins: "Men are what their mothers made them." That's certainly true here in the case of the Cates family in which the matriarch shapes her three sons to believe that family trumps everything and everyone.

Joe Pickett's adopted daughter April has run off with the youngest Cates son, Dallas, a rodeo star. Now she's found along a road badly beaten and with severe brain trauma, while Dallas lies with broken ribs in his Wyoming home, the result, he says, of a rodeo injury.

Pickett, a game warden and the hero in this series of novels, is ready to believe the worst about Dallas Cates, but the evidence suggests the young man may be telling the truth, more or less. When another man is found with some of April's possessions, that seems to establish Dallas's innocence.

 

Yet there are other mysteries that prevent Pickett from forgetting about Brenda Cates, her mindless husband and those three loyal sons. Nate Romanowski, Pickett's friend with a shady past, is ambushed with shotgun blasts in a barn, and his girlfriend disappears. A flock of rare sage grouse is massacred. One of Brenda's sons, Timber, is released from prison with a mission from Mom.

All this is going on while April lies in a Montana hospital in an induced coma, while a blizzard threatens.

This is exciting stuff, and Box weaves it altogether into a satisfying and totally believable whole.

Dating writers

In effect, anthologies resemble dating. You enjoy some swell times and suffer through some awful ones, until one happy hour you encounter a story you really, really like and decide to settle down a while with its author.

Michael Dirda, Browsings

I can't remember the last anthology I've read, an anthology being a book, often a long book, filled with stories by different writers. These can be collections of the best stories of the year, for example, or collections of stories on a certain subject or theme. College literature classes often involve reading stories from anthologies — or at least they did when I was in college.

Years ago I used to read those paperbacks with Alfred Hitchcock's picture on the cover, mystery stories of the sort he might have featured, or sometimes did feature, on his television show. The anthologies that most stick in my mind are the science fiction collections I read as a teenager, books like Science Fiction Showcase and A Century of Science Fiction. And yes, as Michael Dirda observes above, this was something like dating.

At this time in my life I knew very little about either mystery writers or sci-fi writers — or about girls either, for that matter. Reading anthologies introduced me to a number of writers, some of whom I liked very much, others not at all. When I read a story I really enjoyed, I usually remembered the name of the author, and this in many cases led me to other stories or even novels by this same author. I believe my "romance" with Isaac Asimov and Clifford D. Simak, among others, may have begun by reading science fiction anthologies.

Now I prefer reading novels or books of short stories by a single author, but  I do have happy anthology memories ... and happy dating memories, as well.

Contributions to the language

Bill Bryson

Those who love the English language will enjoy Bill Bryson's Shakespeare as much as those who love William Shakespeare. (Of course, these are usually the same people.) That is because Bryson tells us a lot about Shakespeare's contribution to the language, which was considerable.

Shakespeare created hundreds of words in his plays. Often he would just turn nouns into verbs or add an un- prefix to an existing word. But just as often he created entirely new words such as dwindle, frugal, vast, lonely and critical. It might be difficult to write a page of text in English without using at least one word Shakespeare invented.

Then too there are the many phrases, now cliches, that are familiar to us all: cold comfort, to thine own self be true, pomp and circumstance, flesh and blood, foul play, etc. This says a lot about the popularity of Shakespeare's plays over the years — the popularity of The Godfather and Casablanca has also given us several memorable phrases — but it is mostly an indication of his gift for language.

The King James Bible, produced in England during this same period of history, also blessed us with an amazing number of now-familiar phrases. But Bryson mentions another contribution from this Bible translation that few of us would think of: it helped to standardize spelling. In Shakespeare's day, those who could write were free to spell any word any way they chose, even their own names. Shakespeare rarely signed his own name the same way twice, and he never spelled it the way we spell it today. The King James Bible established a standard that others would follow, bringing conformity to a written language that heretofore had none.

Elsewhere Bryson lists some of the words used to designate certain types of criminals in 16th and 17th century London. Pickpockets were called foists. Hookers were not what you might think but rather people who snatched desirable goods from open windows with hooks. Swindlers were called coney catchers. There were also whipjacks, fingerers, courtesy men and the like. 

A lot out of little

Precious little is known about the life of William Shakespeare, which makes Bill Bryson the ideal person to write Shakespeare's biography. This he did in 2007 with Shakespeare: The World as Stage, part of the Eminent Lives series of brief biographies of notable individuals.

Bryson has had a successful career writing brilliantly not just about his various subjects but about an array of more-or-less related subjects, anything that takes his fancy, in other words. Thus when he writes a chapter called "The Lost Years: 1585-1592," a period in which nothing at all is known about Shakespeare's life, Bryson can stretch it to 20 pages, and it is as interesting as any other chapter in this book.

Because so little is known about the great writer, the entire book is more about his times than his life. What was London theater like during that period of history? What were other poets and playwrights doing? What was Queen Elizabeth up to? Even, how much beer did people drink at that time? Bryson lets us know.

This being Bryson, the short book is full of wonderful trivia. There were so many beheadings in London at that time that there was actually an official position called Keeper of the Heads to keep track of where all those heads were mounted for public viewing. Piccadilly got its name from the piccadills, or exotic ruffs common on clothing at that period in history. A theater box office is so called because playgoers then actually put their coins in a box, which was later taken to an office where the money was counted. Eton students were sometimes beaten if they didn't use tobacco, for tobacco was then thought to fight off the plague.

As for Shakespeare, he does manage to make it into his own biography, even if there is more speculation than actual fact. Most of what we do know is based on a few public records and the literature he left behind. And the fact that we still have his plays is something of a miracle, for very few of the plays performed during that period, when the theater was immensely popular, survive. Bryson makes quick work out of claims that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wasn't even the most popular or most highly regarded playwright of his day. His stature grew over the centuries after his death. He is now so prominent that countless volumes have been written about him, and like this one, they all consist of more speculation than fact.

Swatting troubles away

His home was crumbling about his ears, his sister was going crazy and his mother wouldn't shut up. Did it matter? No, not at all. What else were heroes for but to swat troubles away like so many flies?

Anita Rau Badami, The Hero's Walk

Reading Anita Rau Badami's impressive 2000 novel The Hero's Walk, one will probably assume the title refers, sooner or later, to Sripathi Rao, the angry, disappointed middle-aged man at the center of the story. Sripathi, who once studied medicine, now writes advertising copy, and even that job hangs by a thread. The passion has gone out of his marriage. Both his troublesome mother, Ammayya, and his younger sister, Putti, live with them. Putti wants desperately to get married, but her mother time after time rejects matches proposed by a matchmaker. Sripathi's son, Arun, has dedicated his life to social protest instead of getting a good job.

Yet most of his anger and disappointment stems from the actions of his beloved daughter, Maya, who rejected an arranged marriage into a prominent Brahmin family and instead, while a student in Canada, married a white man and had a daughter. Sripathi refuses to speak with her on the phone or to read her letters.

But now word comes that both Maya and her husband have been killed in an auto accident, and their seven-year-old daughter, Nandana, has been orphaned. Sripathi must travel to Vancouver and bring Nandana back to India to raise. The girl refuses to talk to him or to anyone else and thinks only of escaping and finding her way back to Canada.

Hero imagery pops up here and there throughout Badami's novel. So does Sripathi emerge as a hero? Well, yes, but then so does virtually every other character. The phrase "everyday heroes" is more than a cliche to this author. Simply living one's life, doing one's best, taking care of one's loved ones, fulfilling one's responsibilities, keeping one's promises — all such things can be acts of heroism. Swatting troubles away is something we all must do.

An inconvenient truth

But here I was. An inconvenient truth that had indeed been born from his own body. A consequence of his actions. A wholly unique human being whose life continued to evolve long after his "donation" was made. My very existence was due to the fact that he never dreamt he'd have to deal with such a thing.

Dani Shapiro, Inheritance

Dani Shapiro says that throughout her youth she would spend long periods looking into a mirror wondering who that was staring back at her. Not until she is in her fifties does she learn the answer, as she describes so movingly in Inheritance, a memoir published in 2019.

The daughter of Orthodox Jewish parents in New Jersey, it always seemed unorthodox that she had blonde hair, blue eyes and light skin. Still she never questioned her parentage until a DNA test, taken as a lark, revealed that her beloved father wasn't her biological father. How could that be? Aided by her husband, she begins an investigation that leads her to a somewhat shady "test tube baby" operation at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s and eventually to a prominent aging doctor in Portland, Ore., who as a medical student at Penn had donated some of his sperm.

Her book reveals not just the details of her probe of her origins but also her own feelings about all this. In one sweet irony, she reveals that she and her husband once considered artificial insemination as a way to have a second child. Telling her son about the living grandfather he didn't know he had is among the book's many highlights, although the true high point comes when she finally meets the man whose genes she carries.

Shapiro had a difficult relationship with her mother, which colors her narrative. Her family love seems to have been centered on her late father, making the results of that DNA test all the more shattering. She even seems at times to question her own Jewishness, even though she well knows Jewishness is passed down through the mother.

Shapiro, whom I heard do a reading from this book in St. Petersburg in 2020, now does a popular podcast about family secrets. This is a subject she certainly knows something about.

Books vs. money

Why would anyone prefer banknotes to books?

Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

Katarina Bivald

Again and again in Michael Dirda's Browsings, he returns to the sentiment felt by one of the characters in Katarina Bivald's novel, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend. At one point, Dirda puts it like this: "It's true that even $5 book purchases do add up. Yet what, after all, is money? It's just this abstraction, a number, a piece of green paper. But a book — a printed volume, not some pixels on a screen — is real. You can hold it in your hand. Feel its heft. Admire its cover."

Elsewhere he writes, "One thing never does change: the books you really covet always cost more than you want to pay for them. But, to borrow a phrase that women use of childbirth, the pain quickly vanishes when you finally hold that longed-for baby, or book, and know that it is yours forever."

As someone who has probably spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on book purchases over the years, I know this feeling very well. Yet I have also experienced it from the other side of the equation.

Last year a move from a house to a condo forced the sale of more than half of my vast library, including many of my most prized titles on the assumption, not always realized, that they would bring in the most money at auction. Now the missing books are like a hole in my life, while the money is just money. It will help me pay for the dental implants I need, but so what? It's just money, and they're just teeth. But books are worth something.

Missing person

Elegy for April (2010), the third Quirke novel by Benjamin Black (John Banville), once again flawlessly blends literary fiction with genre fiction.

Set in Dublin in the 1950s, the story opens with Quirke, who conducts autopsies by profession, drying out in a clinic. His job is not the only thing that drives him to drink. In Christine Falls, the first book in this series, Quirke finally admits that Phoebe, a young woman raised by someone else, is actually his daughter.

Now Phoebe is worried about a friend, Dr. April Latimer, a member of a prominent Irish family, who has not been seen for several days. She worries that something serious may have happened to her, even though April's own family doesn't seem concerned. In fact, they complain when Phoebe tells Quirke, who then tells a friend in the police force. Traces of blood are found in April's flat, suggesting she may have had a miscarriage or an abortion.

No missing-person case is ever formally opened, yet Quirke and Phoebe continue to ask questions, while raising the ire of the Latimer family, more worried about bad publicity than April.

This is hardly a typical murder mystery -- in fact, there is no murder -- yet the tension builds progressively just the same. Some of that tension results from Quirke's relentless struggle with strong drink and his romantic involvement with another of his daughter's friends. There's a hint of comedy, too, mostly involving his purchase of an expensive car even though he lacks both insurance and a driver's license.

Banville once described crime novels as "cheap fiction," implying that he didn't think much of his Benjamin Black novels and wrote them only because they were easy to write and more profitable than his serious fiction. Yet there's nothing cheap about Elegy for April.

Completing the process

I've also come to feel that if I don't write about a book in a review or essay, then I haven't actually read it.

Michael Dirda, Browsings

Michael Dirda

My own feeling, as I've expressed previously, is not that I haven't read a book if I haven't written about it, but more that I haven't quite finished reading it. It's like a sentence without a period at the end, a symphony without the applause, a prayer without an amen.

This is the power of habit, I know. Both Michael Dirda and I have, from the habit of years, gotten used to writing about the books we read. The writing is how we focus our minds on what we've read. It's how we process it, how we understand it, how we determine what it really means, at least to us.

There are some books I read, such as a David Baldacci thriller, that I really have nothing I want to say about. A book may, in fact, be thrilling. It may be as good as I had hoped. But so what? What is there to write, other than a brief synopsis of the plot?

Yet often I will place these books on my writing table for weeks after I've read them. Something seems incomplete. I feel the need to say something, even when there is nothing of consequence to say. Finally I will put the book on a shelf or in a box, or perhaps get rid of it altogether. Books I don't write about I am less inclined to keep.

Browsing as a way of life

Michael Dirda sounds a lot like me in Browsings (2015), a collection of essays he wrote several years ago for The American Scholar. No, I have not written for The Washington Post and a number of other prominent publications. No, I am not a member of The Baker Street Irregulars and a number of other notable organizations. No, I am not that smart. But when it comes to being incapable of resisting the allure of a used book store, Dirda and I are, as Stan Laurel might put it, like two peas in a pot.

Dirda covers a lot of ground in these essays, but one topic he returns to again and again is the endless allure of books -- bookstores, spring book sales, thrift shops where old books might be found in a corner somewhere, forgotten books, obscure books, books on books. Again and again, Dirda, also a native Ohioan born in the 1940s, reminds me of me.

The author confesses that he received a D in English the first semester of his senior year in high school, even though by this time he was already hooked on books. Yet he went on to Oberlin and became a scholar in literature and a regular Washington Post columnist on books. And although he can write authoritatively about James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Updike and the like, his true passion, it turns out, runs more to Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Rice Burroughs and classic science fiction. Give him a vintage pulp magazine or some book from the 1930s by an author nobody else remembers, and he is a happy man.

"Many people simply read fiction for pleasure and nonfiction for information," Dirda writes. "I often do myself. But I also think of some books as my friends and I like to have them around. They brighten my life." Yes, that sounds like me.

On the trail of a tractor

 

How many exciting mystery novels begin with a stolen tractor? Perhaps just one, Peter Robinson’s In the Dark Places (2015).

The team of detectives led by Inspector Banks usually gets assigned to murder investigations, but it being a slow season for murder in mostly rural Eastvale, Annie Cabot is dispatched to investigate, as she puts it, “a bloody stolen tractor.”

But at about the same time, a wounded British army veteran discovers what appears to be a substantial amount of blood in an abandoned building. The two incidents turn out to be related: the man who stole the tractor is the murder victim, his body discovered in a most grisly fashion. That’s one of the “dark places” Robinson takes us. Another is more literal: deep into a cavern, where the novel reaches its climax.

This is another exceptional entry in this series of novels featuring Banks, a music-loving police officer still attempting to cope with his broken marriage. As usual in these stories, the lives of Banks and the members of his team prove to be as interesting as the mystery they attempt to solve. This time a prominent role goes to Winsome, the Jamaican-born young officer who begins a love affair and later enters that cavern with the villain at her heels.

Don’t miss this one.