The Whore's Child by Richard Russo.

There are seven stories in the book, but the quality varies. The poorest were too short and inconsequential to resonate. The best have characters and story lines that seem to reveal both a history and a future for these characters. Russo is most skilled at the longer story, which might reflect his gifts as a novelist. Russo is particularly adept at creating an inner life for boys.

"Joy Ride" is the story of a mother taking her son a cross-country trip away from her husband. The story is written from the boy's point of view. It reveals the salient aspects of the mother's character that you'd expect a boy to notice--her cycles of emotion from confidence to vulnerability, her cracks about her husband, and her interactions with other adults. We also learn of the difficulties that the boy is having in his home town. These elements come together in a revealing ending that conveys a certain charm in its slight twist.

In "The Mysteries of Linwood Hart" Russo takes us inside the mind of another, younger, boy. We learn of his joining an American Legion baseball team, his relationships with other boys, the separation of his parents, his impressions of both sides of his family, and a great deal of other detail. He is bewildered by adults, as most of us can recall being, but, slowly, he is learning to understand. One incident occurs when his adolescent cousin, who has stunned him with her nascent womanhood, threatens to tell her mother that he has been looking at her chest. He calls her bluff when it dawns on him that she has no intention of carrying out the threat. Russo's description of the ten-year-old's feeling of accomplishment, as events bear out his instincts, rings true.

The title story has a slightly contrived air about it, but, in the end, is satisfying. A nun is taking a fiction-writing class from the narrator. The story she chooses to tell is treated as fiction by the students, but the teacher seems aware of the reality that lies beneath.

Stories:

The Whore's Child
Monhegan Light
Poison
Joy Ride
Buoyancy
The Farther You Go
The Mysteries of Linwood Hart

Dirt Music by Tim Winton

It's one of his best yet. There are two main characters who become involved in each other's lives.

When we meet Georgiana Jutland she has been living with Jim Buckridge for some three years. The somewhat noncommittal relationship has been ideal for her, but the gloss has gone by this time. She is having trouble with Buckridge's two young sons and is unsatisfied with her life. She surfs the Web and spends many nights awake, staring at the sea. She is an outsider in the town of White Point, Western Australia, and is alienated from the small, xenophobic community of fishermen and their families. This town is unable to shed its roots as a small fishing village, even though many of its fishermen are rich, enriched by the lucrative trade in "rock lobster" (formerly, crayfish).

Luther Fox is a musician who has stopped playing music. His brother, sister-in-law and their children were all killed in an accident, and Luther is left feeling bereft and unconcerned with life. He makes his living poaching fish, lobster and abalone in the sea off White Point. Luther is risking all he owns by doing this. The people of White Point would treat this transgression harshly.

Georgie was a nurse who dropped out and set out on a sail across the Sea of Timor to Lombok in Indonesia. She and her male sailing companion were nearly killed in a storm off the northwest coast of Australia and ran aground among the islands and inlets there. In the end their boat is sunk in a collision in Lombok. Georgie feels that she has used up her allotment of luck for her entire life. It is there, in Lombok, that she met Jim Buckridge, a fisherman from White Point.

Georgie sees Luther one morning and manages to force her way into his life in a short time. She is not sure why she is pursuing him, but her feelings are strong and she is unwillling to stop herself. She and Luther find something in each other.

Tim Winton's novel is rich and engrossing. He is alive to the wildlife and landscape of Western Australia. His descriptions never degenerate into mere lists. They are always strongly felt and observed with a detail that never palls. Luther's trip north is especially noteworthy as he wends through the changing landscape and meets unique and intriguing characters. One reviewer observed that some of these characters deserve books of their own. It is possible that they've already enjoyed fuller lives in the 1,200-page version of Winton's manuscript (whittled down to under 600 in a marathon, 55-day rewriting session).

The book ends with Luther trying to escape himself in the wilderness. Georgie Jutland and Jim Buckridge are hunting for him. The three meet in a final confrontation that avoids pat answers to the questions that these three seem to be asking themselves. Tim Winton is willing to allow his characters to have their privacy.

Undue Influence by Anita Brookner.

An interesting first person narrative about a young(ish) woman who lives alone in her parents' flat in London. (Flats in London are often inherited, and people tend to stay where they are.) Her mother died after an illness and Claire has not taken her life in hand. She works for two old spinster ladies who run a used bookstore. She has been taken on to arrange the articles of the women's father St. John for publication. She works in the dreary cellar of the establishment, which houses the foreign language section, and interacts minimally with the owners. She exchanges pleasantries with the café owner across the street and a homeless woman who lives in the general vicinity. She has a distant, but rewarding, relationship with her friend Wiggy, who is involved in a long affair with a married man. Claire's situation changes when she meets Martin Carson, an attractive, 40ish man, who has come into the bookstore's basement to seek a particular story by a French writer.

She is cajoled into visiting Martin's sick wife in company with Wiggy, and the rest of the book is taken up with Claire's complex ruminations on this man and how he will fit into her future, if at all. Martin is in thrall to the hyper-feminine Cynthia (note the moon goddess allusion--Martin is a bit of a mooncalf), and Claire spends a lot of her time trying to lure Martin into some semblance of feeling (passion being out of the question). Changes come to the somewhat settled existences of all the characters and force Claire, in a rather languorous way, to attempt to cope with and amplify these changes. Characters who refuse to see common sense are frustrating to a reader. One wishes to dash a tumbler of cold water over her head to wake her, but, in the end, Claire begins to make tottering steps into her future.

One of the pleasures in the book is the deep thinking that Claire engages in. Her voice is prolix but always natural. This is, undoubtedly, a testament to Brookner's stylistic gifts. The plot will not bear much scrutiny. The characters seem to have come out of a Barbara Pym novel. The qualities that they possess seem more 1950s than 1990s. Fortunately, the resolution, if not the mise-en-scéne, is satisfyingly realistic. The book is worth reading for its style and the creation of a character who seems lost but who has the intelligence to know it and to seek to rectify her situation.

Kershaw's Hitler bio had some interesting info. During the 1936 Olympics (the XIth Olympiad) Hitler had decided not to congratulate winners personally, before Jesse Owens won his 4 gold medals. When Hitler did personally congratulate winners from Finland and Germany, he was advised that this was a violation of protocol. Kershaw, then, quotes some material to indicate that Hitler did intend to snub black athletes by not shaking hands with them were they to win.

More snow in the Twin Cities today. We can expect 2-3 inches. I can tolerate snow better when it comes in small increments. Two inches today, three inches the day after tomorrow, etc. It's only after about ten days of this that you end up wanting to blow your brains out--sad isn't it? SAD?

Time to take down the Christmas tree. (!?) I have resolved that it shall not stand beyond the 31st of January. No motivation for me on this project. If it were up to me, we'd have skipped the decorations entirely. Humbug!

Shadow of the Vampire is opening at the Uptown today. Time Regained is now showing at U Film Society. Both go on the list. Others to see include: O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Traffic. I'm sure that there are others.

Here's more about books consumed aurally. (Too much Nabokov of late, I suppose.)

James Fallows wrote a column called "Reading by Ear" in January's Atlantic Monthly in which he writes of his discovery of the benefits of listening to books recorded on cassette tape. He discovers subtleties that he hadn't noticed in his silent reading of a book that he had read previously. It seemed as if he hadn't read the book at all.

I too noticed this. For me the epiphany came in listening to a Nonesuch tape of John Cheever reading his own stories as I drove east to New York to see my son's play in the fall of 1998. The strangeness of "The Swimmer" had never penetrated my consciousness when I read it silently to myself all those years ago. But, this time, the shifts in time, the narcissism of Neddy, and the stylist's joy in his work came through clearly. Perhaps, John Cheever's distinctive twang helped. The reading was a revelation. (The other side of the tape was "The Death of Justina," with it's satiric view of consumption-driven America. Well worth hearing.)

Listening to a book can be a problem for lesser works. The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett was repetitive and dated. Hammet's work shows its pulp roots clearly and his writing draws on a pitifully small stock of images. A silent reading might have benefitted this one. Other works are impossible by ear or by eye. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a ponderous, tendentious, if "Romantic," bore. I gave up on the third tape.

Fallows recommends Jeremy Irons's reading of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov as an exemplar of the best that this medium has to offer. I grant that Jeremy Irons is a fine reader and captures Nabokov's voice nicely. I got through most of it on tape. But, trying to "read" a book by listening to it demands a particular set of circumstances. These include long, uninterrupted stretches of time, as on a road trip on the Interstate, and time away from the ordinary demands of life. I bailed out after the fifth of eight tapes and had recourse to my own copy. Books by ear are a fine expedient, but they are no substitute for being closeted with a book. (I do have a quibble about some of Mr. Irons mispronunciations--"simulacrum" was twice pronounced "simulcrum" and "contiguous" was pronounced "contidgus", or so it seemed.)

Loved this moment in Lolita. H.H. is going to see Mrs. Schiller and in his ablutions "shaved my face and my chest." A lovely image. Another fine passage involves the "stability of type" that we come to expect from literary characters never being seen in real people. (Chapter 27). Nabokov calls Mnemosyne the "sweetest and most mischievous of Muses," but Mnemosyne is the dam of the Muses, Zeus being their sire. (Chapter 26)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita is a strange, disturbing book. I started this one by listening to Jeremy Irons read it on cassette. (More later on this topic.) H.H. is a person whom it is easy to despise. You get the creeps listening to his sensual jabbering, at first. Eventually, though, you become lost in the voice. Nabokov's word-play is particularly entertaining. It's rare that you find yourself rooting against a protagonist in a novel, but that is how it turns out here.

The ending is unsatisfying. The murder seemed under-motivated and made H.H. more unlikable than his perversions did. (Is that possible?) Thank God for the Library of America edition of this book. Otherwise, I'd have foundered miserably on the shoals of French language and Nabokov's arcana.


Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes

This book is a collection of essays and articles (even a radio play) by a man who has written biographies of Coleridge and Shelley and other "Romantics". The writers covered include Thomas Chatterton, Gerard de Nerval (subject of the radio play), Felix Nadar, Charles Maturin, and several others.

His previous collection of articles was called Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer was about his travels and encounters with R. L. Stevenson, Gerard De Nerval, Shelley, and one other I've forgotten. It was the one that got me started reading Holmes and Stevenson. I'm grateful to Holmes for that book. Stevenson is one of the finest writers of the 19th Century and deserves wider recognition.


Hitler: 1937-1945 Nemesis Ian Kershaw

This is the second volume in Kershaw's biography of Hitler. The first, called Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris, details Hitler's rise to power. The second volume covers the time when Hitler and the Nazis held power. Kershaw is fascinated with the question of how the German people came to be in thrall to this man.

Ongoing: (Long-term projects.)
In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust (Working on Vol 2. Within a Budding Grove)
Marcel Proust William C. Carpenter