Back to Bleakness

I had intentionally slotted in a more light-hearted book (The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis) between Celine's Journey to the End of Night and Beckett's Three Novels.  However, within a few chapters I could tell that The Best Laid Plans was just not for me.  It's a little hard to tell what didn't go right for me but probably the over-writing and general pompousness of the characters (including a grammar Nazi) which cut against the need for implausible situations running at top speed that are characteristic of a farce.  Once you slow down and think (as some Goodreads reviewers pointed out) that there is simply no way the narrator would get a tenure-track job in the manner described (at least in any era past 1985...) and that he would be a lecturer at best, then the rest of the plot wouldn't work and the whole house of cards collapses.  I also really dislike bathroom humour and reviewers pointed out how reliant Fallis was on fart jokes, and indeed the book opens with the narrator landing in an enormous pile of dog crap for really no good reason at all.  I decided this book just wasn't for me with that many strikes against it, and I dropped it off in the frontyard library this morning.

I also gave up on Helen Oyeyemi's Gingerbread after 100 pages.  It just didn't work on any level for me after the first chapter, but I had hoped it would get better.  Instead, the novel shifted to the mother's "origin story" which was a mash-up of a bunch of legends and fairy tales, and indeed she started hanging out with Gretel (yes, of the gingerbread house) and I had no interest in following Oyeyemi on this journey.  I really do have to work at dropping novels rather than forcing myself to finish them.  I mean it shouldn't be this hard, as I can think of almost no novels that I disliked from the start that then got better as I got deeper into them.  There are a few I am glad I endured but none that I enjoyed more by the end...

On the plus side, I've gotten through a fair number of books -- and gotten them out of the house.  I also finished David Lodge's Therapy (and left it in the Asheville airport) and Richard Ford's Canada (which I left in Reagan National).  Both were better books that I don't regret reading, even if the ending of Therapy is just a bit too pat, and I didn't think Ford needed to use quite so much foreshadowing in Canada.  But I also don't expect to ever read them again.

Anyway, Journey to the End of Night was quite bleak and misanthropic, which fits my current mood quite well.  It probably would slightly overtake Malamud's The Assistant for position #5 on this list, but I may as well expand the list to 10 and include Arlt's The Seven Madmen/The Flamethrowers as well, plus leave an extra space for Beckett and Celine's Death on the Installment Plan.  One of the few positives about these early Celine novels is that they actually aren't tainted by his deep anti-Semitism; Celine is an equal-opportunity hater in these works, so I'll go ahead and read them but almost certainly stop with Death on the Installment Plan.

I really am converging a few lists, but this is currently what's on deck:

Beckett Three Novels
Barrett Ship Fever
Welty The Robber Bridegroom
Dinesen Seven Gothic Tales
Maugham The Razor's Edge
Carter Fireworks & The Bloody Chamber
Pym Some Tame Gazelle
Joy Williams Breaking and Entering
Celine Death on the Installment Plan
Kingsley Amis The Alteration & Girl, 20 
Roy The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Bissoondath A Casual Brutality
Rushdie The Satanic Verses
Vanderhaege Homesick
Gallant Home Truths
Gogol Dead Souls
Bellow The Adventures of Augie March
Desani All About H. Hatterr
Narayan The Man-Eater of Malgudi
Baker A Fine Madness
Gaiman American Gods
Waugh Decline and Fall
Maugham Cakes & Ale
Carter Wise Children
E. Taylor Blaming
Knut Hamsun Mysteries 
Munro Open Secrets
Conrad The Secret Agent & Under Western Eyes
Auster Man in the Dark
Saramago Blindness
DeLillo Cosmopolis
Mandel Station Eleven
Perec Life, A User's Manual
Martin Amis Time's Arrow
Brewer The Red Arrow
Malraux Man's Fate
Nabokov Pnin
Steinbeck East of Eden
Fante West of Rome
Ali Smith Companion Piece & Public Library and Other Stories
Dupont The American Fiancée
Skorvecky Two Murders in My Double Life

On the whole, this is fairly balanced between short and long novels and generally not too bleak, though the Carter short story collections should be darkly comic.