Month: September 2024

Sentences

Sentences

Sentences

You can’t judge a book by its cover, except … 

The cover of Reading Style – A Life in Sentences by Jenny Davidson displays the medley of chocolate bonbons I’ve always hoped I’d find in a magical box of perfect confection. In the book, Davidson narrates her sweet life as a reader, and she was/is a dauntingly ambitious reader. In addition to the frequently cited masters of prose (Austen, Flaubert,Fielding, Burgess, Nabokov, and Eliot), she cites works by Lionel Shriver, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and my newly discovered favorite stylist, Helen DeWitt among many other masters of the craft.

If I had any success as a teacher peddling significant books to very bright and savvy adolescents it was in taking time to read novels and short stories sentence by sentence, and plays line by line. I would trot out J.D. Salinger’s collection, Nine Stories, near the start of the sophomore year, goading my classes into reading the widely admired “For Esme with Love and Squalor”, keeping track of voice and language. That’s more than enough to keep track of as even the most unadorned of sentences has weight. 

“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”

That’s Esme’s request of the writer on a rainy afternoon in a tea shop. 

The scene and voice change as the narrator is pulled into the war, allowing the observation, “She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of exclamation points and inaccurate observations.”

I leave these and the subsequent examples without comment; they are yours to do with as you will.

A less familiar story, “Down at the Dinghy” offers this description of the central character. “Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was – in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces – a stunning and final girl.”

OK, kids, “final”?

I have a short list of sentences I’ve grabbed as I read, some profound and some piercing. 

We also read Slaughterhouse Five, in which Vonnegut offers, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

A few for your consideration:

“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

Kate Chopin – The Awakening.

“The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me, all in the right order.”

Toni Morison – Beloved

“At the still point, there the dance is.”

T.S. Eliot – The Four Quartets

The novella, The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt is almost too rich to read before going to bed. Explaining what she means by suggesting that the English understand wool, the Germans understand precision, the Swiss understand discretion, the (seventeen year old) narrator observes:

“When I speak of these forms of understanding, I do not mean that they are instantiated in every individual of a nation, a culture. I think of this thing which in France is taken so seriously, the terroir, the importance of a particular soil in conjunction with the water, the sun, the aspect of the land, and how this affects the grape.”

“In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.”

Well, it’s the first line of Scene 1 in Act I of The Merchant of Venice. Curtain up. Here we are. Lots of very dramatic stuff ahead and at least two soliloquies that are quoted at the drop of a hat – 

Shylock’s “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian?”

Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained, etc”

The first line, spoken by Antonio, is often overlooked. The play is about Shylock, or Portia (tests of suitors, etc), right? Let’s get into the pound of flesh. But … What if the play is about Antonio?

Portia is a judge; Shylock is a moneylender. Antonio is the merchant of Vence. It’s his flesh at risk, of course, but what if in addition, the play is set into motion by Antonio’s willingness to pledge a pound of himself  in order to secure a loan necessary to fund frat-bro Bassanio’s wooing of Portia? 

Portia, by the way, has a grand old time mocking the suitors who do not have the cleft chin and chiseled features rocked by Bassanio, a good old, fairly dim, boy willing to see Antonio sliced and diced if it means he has a shot at Portia.

As Hamlet reminded Polonius when asked what he was reading, “Words, words, words.” It really is all about the words after all, isn’t it?

Mystery Book Club

Mystery Book Club

I’m relatively new in town, still disconnected, unconnected, at loose ends, so I decided to join one of our excellent library’s book clubs. The Adult Book Club turned out to be a book club for adults instead of a …you know, so I hopped into the Mystery Book Club, an enterprise in its 23rd year, moderated for all 23 years by an author of some pretty engaging mysteries. My fans (?) know that I’ve written three novels which could be considered  mysteries, if “mystery” means at least one of the characters gets bumped off. 

Some impatient readers have noted that I lose interest in plot somewhere around page 12, leaving those who fancy a well crafted whodunnit in the lurch, so I appreciate writers who can devise interesting schemes and characters whose foibles make the reader (me) want to slog through 300 pages of set up, execution, and red herrings. It happened that I grew up with bookshelves pretty much exclusively dedicated to murder, some from what’s known as “The Golden Age of Mysteries”, elegant mysteries written by Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Ngaio MarshMary Roberts Rhinehart, Margery Allingham, and some later, slightly less formal but conventional mystery authors including JohnDickson Carr (locked room mysteries in particular), Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Apparently things got tough after WWII as the next wave to hit the family bookshelves was a bit darker, exactly what I needed as I ached my way through the miasma of adolescence. With my own school boy fondness for grotesquerie in mind, I offered an elective, in my last few years as a teacher in a wonderful independent school that allowed independent curricula –

 “Tough Guys, Tough Towns”, kicking off with Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me), then easing into Charles Willeford (Pick Up), Ross McDonald (The Galton Case), Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye), Mickey Spillane (I, the Jury), Lee Child (The Killing Floor), Richard Stark/pen name of Donald Westlake (Slayground), and Elmore Leonard (Maximum Bob).

Now comfortably settled into what I like to call the “Where did I leave my glasses” years, I’ve floundered a bit, but found a new home in Three Pines, the idyllic village in Quebec, mostly the setting for the Armand Gamache mysteries written by Louise Penny. I find comfort in realizing that these are humane, complex, compelling novels, driven by character (and food), but not wickedly complex murders.

They give me hope.

In any case, I’m starting the second novel to be “discussed” by the Mystery Club, a “Hap and Leonard Novel”, Honky Tonk Samurai, by Joe Lansdale, and realizing that I may have overestimated the pleasure to be had in sitting with thirty people who have all read the same case, met the same actors, and seen the same denouement. Not much to say (or hear) unless the novel has the complexity of human experience such as Penny provides in the very human exchanges inThree Pines. 

In an earlier life freelancing for a funky film magazine, “The Velvet Light Trap”, then published by the University of Wisconsin, now hosted by the University of Texas, I wrote a semi-scathing review of Magic, a film starring Anthony Hopkins, featuring Ann-Margaret, in which a vile ventriloquist’s dummy carries out unspeakable acts of creepiness. See, the thing about ventriloquism is that we enjoy the trick of a performer throwing his voice. It’s a trick that works because we know that there’s no other voice available other than the performer’s. Film pretty much allows a thousand voices to land anywhere the script demands. Trees talk in the Wizard of Oz; I wasn’t impressed by the trees, and I wasn’t impressed with Fats, the filth spewing dummy in Magic. 

(Should any reader care to be terrified by a similar wooden villain, dig up Dead of Night, a British anthology film in which Alberto Calvancanti directs a final segment which provides actual surprise and delicious frisson.) 

We have three more books lined up, none of which I’ve read before. I may love one and find a new author to follow. I may not. My hope, in any case, is that someone says something that allows me to consider the possibility of making a book friend.

I’ve written elsewhere about book friends and the peculiar ease with which one can find a cordial mind in sharing titles of books we admire. Maybe someone will say something like, “This one was ok, but have you read A Fatal Grace? 52 Pickup? The Jugger? The Snow Man? 

You had me at A Fatal Grace.