I think these were all the books I read in March and April. It's a blur sometimes, particularly as I was really pressed for time, doing taxes and a slightly overdue book review and then pulling together two presentations for a conference! Anyway, I started off with Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, which was good, though not quite as good as Troubles.
I found Percy's The Moviegoer to be somewhat flat, particularly the last third of so of the book. I really didn't like Baker's A Fine Madness. While it is nowhere near as prominent a theme as in Cary's The Horse's Mouth, this novel is about another irresponsible artist who often took swings at his partner, though only actually hitting her when she moved too much. Charming. I'm sure I should have dropped it much sooner, but I had been carrying this novel around for so many years, I kind of felt I had to get through it. I did drop Nutshell by Ian McEwan after only a few pages, however. Generally, I find him grossly overrated as a novelist. Nutshell is basically Hamlet but with the Hamlet-figure a near-term baby that can hear everything around him and comments on it liberally. This is the same basic idea as in Christopher Unborn by Carlos Fuentes. I thought it was interesting in that novel, but maybe if I reread it today, I would just find it gimmicky and annoying. Apparently, this is also the conceit of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which I have not read.* (I was tipped off to this by a one-star review of Nutshell that I think is the most accurate.)
Inspired by Girl, 20, I did read Tom Wolfe's Maumau-ing the Flak Catchers. I probably did read all or most of Radical Chic, which is about Leonard Bernstein and the party he gave in support of the Black Panthers, and how this got him in trouble with the Beautiful People, and at some point the Bernsteins had to lay low. Incidentally, I was supposed to see Bernstein conducting in Ann Arbor. If I recall, he actually did some rehearsals with the UM orchestra but died right before the performance. Maybe I actually would have regretted this even more had he conducted but I wasn't able to score any tickets. Still I think I would have managed to slip in one way or another. But I don't believe I had read Maumau-ing the Flak Catchers, which is basically about the symbiosis of social workers, hired as part of LBJ's Great Society, and militant youth. There is a great passage on the secret heart of the bureaucrat that I will add tonight.
This lacerated the
soul of every lifer, every line bureaucrat, every flak catcher in the municipal government . . . There are those who may think that the bureaucrats and
functionaries of City Hall are merely time servers, with no other lookout than
filling out their forms, drawing their pay, keeping the boat from rocking and
dreaming of their pension like the lid on an orderly life. But bureaucrats,
especially in City Halls, have a hidden heart, a hidden well of joy, a
low-dosage euphoria that courses through their bodies like thyroxin . . .
Because they have a secret: each, in his own way, is hooked into The Power. The
Government is The Power, and they are the Government, and the symbol of the Government is the golden dome of City Hall, and the greatest glory of City Hall
is the gold-and-marble lobby, gleaming and serene, cool and massive, studded
with the glistening busts of bald-headed men now as anonymous as themselves but
touched and blessed forever by The Power ... Who else is left to
understand the secret bliss of the coffee break at 10:30 a.m., the walk with
one’s fellows through the majesty of the gold-and-marble lobby and out across
the grass and the great white walkways of City Hall Plaza, past the Ionic
columns and Italian Renaissance facade of the Public Library on the opposite
side and down McAllister Street a few steps to the cafeteria ...
Then I read Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, in part because I was supposed to see the movie version of this over at the Paradise, but it didn't work out. So I read it (again) and then borrowed the DVD from Robarts. It was interesting, though I didn't love it. (I did like it more than Miss Lonelyhearts, however.) I guess I found the movie a bit more fulfilling, mostly because they showed more of the art and artifice of Hollywood. There are a few scenes where you see characters moving between different movie sets. I assume this was a partial inspiration for the ending of Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles.
I enjoyed Coupland's Hey, Nostradamus!, which is about the aftermath of a mass shooting in a North Vancouver school. Obviously, this is much more likely to occur in the States, but there is still far too much gun violence in Canada. I don't know if I will feel compelled to write a longer review. Probably not at this point.
I mentioned that I read almost all of Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories on the train to and from Ottawa. I found some of them interesting and some very dated. While I know she was generally critiquing the very classist and racist views of some of her characters, that still doesn't make it much easier to read... I wrapped the last of the stories up the day after our return. I really wanted to pass this along to a friend I was meeting last Saturday.
I finally finished Farrell's The Singapore Grip as well. I'd say it may have been a bit too ambitious for Farrell, mixing the business doings of one group of characters with a bunch of military types. And then there is even a chapter or two from the perspective of the victorious Japanese troops! There are quite a few characters that one would expect to see more of, but who are suddenly shuffled out of the picture. Most of the women are shipped out of Singapore as the Japanese threat grows more imminent. Two characters are even married offscreen as it were, which felt a bit anti-climatic. What I found unsatisfying is that the ultimate fate of several characters who were present in the final moments before Singapore's surrender is simply skipped over completely. Presumably the majority of them survived and then moved elsewhere, either Australia or India, but it would have been nice to tie up those loose ends. As it stands, it's an interesting novel but my least favourite of the trilogy.
I also got 1/3 of the way through Guy Vanderhaeghe's Homesick. It's a bit hard to say what May will bring, but some short stories for sure and most likely Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and Desani's All About H. Hatterr. I've also been reading a great deal of poetry and even writing some (mostly while at the Rex), and I expect that will continue throughout May. As I have been reading these poems with half an eye out for a transportation-related anthology, I was really struck by Boxing the Compass by Richard Green. Not only is there a promising poem about a sea voyage, there is a long (20+ page) poem about his epic trek across America by Amtrak and Greyhound in search of Graham Greene's letters in various archives. While I generally want to avoid excerpting poems in this putative anthology, I would probably make an exception here.
* I suppose it is worth noting in this hyper-polarized world that I simply refuse to be on Team Fetus, which is to say any narratives, such as Atkinson's in particular, that stake out a claim for personhood from the moment of conception are going to get a big thumbs down for me. I suspect this means I won't enjoy Christopher Unborn this time around, whereas I thought it was pretty great in my 20s. I may get back around to it someday, but that won't be anytime soon.
