Salinger

I wonder if I should affect to be more bummed than I am about J.D. Salinger’s death. I mean, I’m certainly sorry the guy died, but I liked The Catcher in the Rye just OK, lacking that assassinate-a-public-figure fervor the book seems to have inspired in recent decades. The book had such an aura surrounding it that I expected to be gobsmacked and of course was not; I’d probably absorbed so many books penned under its direct influence that I could not appreciate what must have been so startling, so groundbreaking about it at the time of its publication. It’s kind of like being slightly underwhelmed by the The French Connection after you’ve grown up watching car chase films, which I was because I had. 

Holden Caulfield purportedly doesn’t resonate as strongly with today’s teenagers as he did with past generations. Whether that’s because they are too cyber-connected to relate to someone who is so alienated or because Catcher’s ubiquity on required reading lists has drained him of his underdog cachet I don’t know. And maybe it’s just not so; I’m woefully out of touch with teenagers these days save the two who have kindly friended me on Facebook. (I wonder did Salinger ever Google himself and if that in any way diminishes him. His having Internet access at all likely destroys the myth entirely. And yet the most effective way to toil in complete obscurity may well be to write a blog.)

Salinger received much lambasting over the years for insisting he wanted privacy but not avoiding the limelight well enough. No walled fortress, no bodyguards, a taste for lawsuits, and a penchant for actresses and young girls such as the writer Joyce Maynard, who broke her silence about their relationship in At Home in the World. Sure, it was pretty skeevy for a 53-year-old man to woo an 18-year-old girl, not the most flattering glimpse of the recluse. But why was he supposed to have better managed his renunciated public image?

I’m curious to know whether Salinger truly kept writing, and if so, what forms it took and whether it will see the light of day. Many people write and don’t publish, but without readers, or at least imagined someday readers, something’s bound to be missing. If you write only for yourself (as he is said to have claimed), does it need to have form and shapeliness–does it even need to make sense? After all, you know what you meant; no need to put on airs or explicate. So I fear a sloppy, curmudgeonly journal in the tens of thousands of pages will be released in several volumes over the next few years if his heirs have bills and J.D. didn’t feed it to the fire before his heart gave out.

Glitch

Last week I was well dug into The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, getting giddily spooked by its remote crumbly English manor setting beset by some malevolent spirit that seemed to be psychically feeding on the down-at-heels family residing there, when I reached the end of page 310 and encountered a printing glitch. It repeated pages 247 through 310, and then the narrative resumed on page 375. “Glitch” may be too mild a word–for a moment it felt like calamity, as if the malevolent spirit had possessed the book itself and was now cruelly toying with me.

Though I had a work deadline looming and scant hope of making it if I were to continue reading a novel that night, I decided this was the drama that needed addressing and called all the area bookstores that I felt I could reasonably get to before they closed in the next hour or so. (And there were many—unlike poor Laredo, Texas, my city has not yet been abandoned by the brick-and-mortar booksellers. Barnes & Noble ought to offer every resident of Laredo a free Nook e-reader and some gratis downloads as some small recompense for shutting down their last B. Dalton.) Though all were theoretically willing to swap my defective copy for a good one, none had The Little Stranger in stock. (Hope that’s of some solace to you, Laredans! All these bookstores within driving distance and I still had to resort to Amazon.)

I was wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth, perhaps even rending my garments a little, when my husband pointed out my predicament was much like that of the thwarted reader in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, and though The Little Stranger could not be had that night for love or money, he dashed out and bought the Calvino just before our nearest Borders closed. 

The reader in winter’s night is thwarted again and again, enticed by the opening chapters of books that go no further due to misprint, blank pages, a translator’s prank, international conspiracy, and so forth. Each time he (or, rather, “you” as it’s in second person) tries to procure another copy and continue reading, he ends up with another book entirely, is tantalized by the opening chapter, then left hanging.

When we’re all bereft of actual, physical bookstores, we’ll at least have Calvino’s marvelous depiction of making one’s way to the book you intend to buy but first having to force past shelves laden with

the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the  Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want to Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. 

winter’s night presents ten opening chapters (each the promise of a world unfolding) and traces their pursuit by two readers, a man and a woman. Here the pursuit itself becomes narrative, the book’s cohesion. Reading it has been a little like having my own petty predicament celebrated and mocked in equal measure—though it doesn’t seem petty to give yourself over to narrative and chafe at having it disrupted. That’s my life now, reading and writing in fits and starts, having constantly to abandon a story for the freefall of real life, then grasp for the thread of it again. A printing glitch just adds insult to injury.

Just a few days later, I received an intact, properly paginated copy of The Little Stranger. In those restored-to-me pages, something was whistling through the ivory speaking-tube extending from the long-abandoned nursery above to the kitchen below. The servants quaked. The madame said stuff and nonsense and made her way upstairs to investigate. Reader, it frightened the crap out of me, and I loved it.

Too Much Happiness

My newish-release book binge is still underway. I took up with the Munro collection Too Much Happiness again; the first story, “Dimensions,” had made me recoil temporarily (about a mother whose children were murdered by their father in a fit of spiteful madness–an excellent story but I’m a cowardly wreck about the subject matter since I had kids), but one can dip in and out of a story collection pretty easily. I often read short stories while I’m reading longer works, though I wouldn’t liken them to morsels and meals.

Monro’s stories are often verging on novella length, an unwieldy size for magazines, though I usually recognize several from a collection as having appeared in The New Yorker. They’re just as long as they need to be, and because they are what they are and she is who she is, the magazines make room for her. (The print magazines that have survived, anyhow. I hope when everything goes to screen stories don’t skew super-short just so no one has to scroll. Maybe the new e-readers will make that interface so silky that they revolutionize the form–no such thing as a “standard length” when print is not curtailing it, though I suppose attention span will retain its reductive influence.)

Even when she’s writing about extraordinary circumstances, Munro’s stories are radiant in their intimate dailiness. Usually there are marriages plural, and the attending complexity of glomming-on family. There are strong echoes from earlier collections–the privately grieving widow (“Free Radicals”), the mother coming to terms with estrangement from her child (“Deep-Holes”), and the naif who readily assents to perversity (“Wenlock Edge”) in these facile plot descriptions sound much like previous Munro stories, but she always wrings something fresh from them.

The title story, which closes the book, is somewhat of a departure, set in the 1890s and based on the extraordinary life of the Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky. It put me a little in mind of Raymond Carver’s “Errand,” about the death of Chekov, though it ran deeper and wider, and when I think it through, the two may have had opposite effects entirely. “Errand” reduces the man to his final flesh-bound moments, while “Too Much Happiness” holds the glow of a life lived in its entirety.

Nightstand

The best thing about Christmas this lean year was the feeling of near decadence when Scott brought home new books for us to enjoy, an unexpected largess when we’d agreed not to exchange gifts. Among them are The Magicians by Lev Grossman and Alice Munro’s new story collection. I’m still reeling from the first Munro story, nearly as much from my own squeamishness as her brilliance since it involves murdered children. I finished the story and set the book down carefully as if it had done me an injury and I feared mishandling it would damage me further. But it’s still on my nightstand, and when my feelings are less raw I’ll take it up again.

Setting the Munro aside spurred me to take up the Grossman novel sooner than I might have. Everyone’s calling it a Harry Potter book for grown-ups, and I suppose that’s apt enough—and if that shorthand encourages a jillion folks to read it, then OK, let it stand. I dove in a few days ago, then took to my bed early last night and finished it around midnight, so it’s probably too soon to articulate what it was exactly I loved about it beyond that delicious pleasure of immersion. 

Perhaps the most important book on my nightstand right now is the bound galleys of Scott’s new book, On the Grid. I’m trying to read it through objectively, which isn’t as hard as you’d think. For a long stretch of its creation I was pretty thoroughly preoccupied with the care and feeding of our younger son, who didn’t sleep more than three hours at a stretch for the first eight months. Scott’s comings and goings from his office-shed out back were for a time peripheral, something I kept the vaguest of tabs on. But now here is all his labor distilled before me, and I can regard and admire in full both his discipline and his shining sentences. Thank you for the books, my love.

Much Ado

This is not a post solely about Twilight, but I will report that I finished it. After the midpoint momentum dropped away, finishing it meant slogging through various primings for the sequel and a prom that was only surpassed in dullness by my own–except I recall that mine culminated in a late-night screening of Brazil, so sorry, Twilight, your prom was marginally harder to endure. But Twilight? I get it now; I really do. You’re selling the fantasy that someone whose surface appears not so special (targeting female demographic ages 12-55) can yet hold such beguiling inner beauty as to entrance an otherworldly creature. I may not have bought it, but I borrowed it.

* * *

I’ve been making my way in fits and starts through the recent biography of Charles Shultz. Early on I was completely smitten by the exquisitely painful shyness and secret steely determination of the Peanuts creator; later on in his life, I’m a feeling a little bit get over yourself, ultrasuccessful multimillionaire, but his terminal cancer is soon to strike, so I’m also poised for great sadness.

The book is filled with Peanuts cartoons strategically placed to illustrate various episodes in his life, and often they’d been created in sync with said events, which really hammers home just how literally drawn from life was his work. As kids growing up in the 70s, my sister and I’d been fairly Snoopy obsessed, but I didn’t realize until reading this book that by then Charlie Brown and his gang had already been a cultural powerhouse for a couple of decades. There’s also lots of interesting stuff about the merchandising of Peanuts into plush toys and coffee mugs at a time when such tchotchkes were not commonplace, and the account of making the now-iconic TV Christmas special should not be missed by anyone who teared up at Linus’s reading from the Gospel of Luke. (I’m talking to you, Jewish husband!)

* * *

Finally, I watched my friend rock the house yesterday as Beatrice in a local production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and it has made me eager to revisit the play, especially the amazing scene where the often-raucous comedy suddenly goes still as Beatrice laments her own inability to strike and coldly prods Benedick to avenge the shaming of her cousin Hero: “If I were a man, I would eat his heart in the marketplace.” It’s hard to grasp today just how ruinous it once was to cast doubt on a young woman’s virtue, but the rage Beatrice expresses at the dishonor unjustly meted out to her kinswoman burns right through to the present.

After her electric portrayal, my friend spoke of exhaustion from barely having slept the night before, which was in no way evident, and mentioned noticing her father-in-law in the audience, reminders that performance is illusion and the actor is aware of the construct as she is creating it. In that way the craft is quite similar to writing fiction, I think, though later that evening I was listening to an interview of yet another author speaking of her characters as if they had emerged fully formed from the cosmos and were speaking through her (this time it was Alice Sebald, who wrote The Lovely Bones, an uplifting tale of rape and dismemberment’s aftermath that I somewhat queasily liked).

On the one hand, I sort of know what she meant, in that as characters form they sometimes seem to nudge you toward destinies other than those you had originally conceived for them. On the other hand, you made it all up and you know you did, else you court mental illness and stream-of-consciousness hypergraphia. 

Campire or vamporn? Twilight cont’d

I may be over the hump, Twilight! Just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore ersatz teen angst, the mood shifted. Now it’s all glittery-skinned Edward of the sculpted torso sniffing Bella’s hair. I’m starting to get what the appeal is: the young woman’s fantasy of attracting someone dangerous, powerful, older (albeit some ick factor there if you think about just how much older), simply by virtue of her very being. That’s why I’m glad there was no Internet as we now know it when I was a teenager, or else I’d have been lured away by the first perv who IMed me I was special.

With some selective skimming, I’m now on page 335, and Bella has been invited home to meet Edward’s vampire family. With more than 150 pages to go, some new dangers are bound to erupt and threaten this odd domesticity, and with the narrative’s attention diverted (for now, at least) from school dances and Bella’s insipid mortal friends, I just might make it all the way! 

Meantime, an observation about vampire stories and mind-reading. In Twilight, Edward can read people’s thoughts, only not Bella’s, which contributes to his fascination with her. In the Sookie Stackhouse series (on which the show True Blood is based), it’s Sookie, a human, who can read thoughts, only not those of her vampire love interest, and that’s a big draw for her as well. Perhaps Buffy fans will recall the episode where the slayer is temporarily afflicted with this power and is overwhelmed nearly to the point of madness, but she’s unable to read the thoughts of Angel, her vampire hunk. I think it’s kind of telling that the mind-reading gambit so heavily co-opted by these lesser works was only deemed worth exploring in a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at whose feet these derivative upstarts are not fit to lie.

I’m sorry, Twilight! That wasn’t fair. Buffy’s gone and you’re here, so I’m gonna try to love the one I’m with. You have some very nice blurbs.

Twilight, I am willing!

Twilight, I am willing. I am not a books snob. Until I had children and lost much of my appetite for gore, my preferred secret vice reading was serial killer compendia and other pulpy true crimes. And I loves me some vampires. Vampires and teenagers? I was a huge fan of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so sure, sign me up. Although I’m not the target market for the Twilight series, I’m betting they do a pretty brisk trade selling to moms in search of after-hours escapist reading. Supernatural snogging is now in fact a whole subcategory of the romance genre, and likely that’s in no small part thanks to Twilight author Stephanie Meyer (with props to Anne Rice). 

All this just to say that when a friend mentioned a little abashedly she’d been reading–and enjoying–Twilight, I saw my chance to find out what all the fuss was about without  spending any actual money or putting my name on the wait list at the library, which would surely come back to haunt me. (Though I imagine I already sullied my reputation there some five years ago when I stood at the checkout counter with a stack of childrearing manuals topped with one serial killer book–just a little one for nostalgia’s sake before committing myself to more wholesome interests–and the librarian scanned my card, looked up at me, and said, “Are you the writer June Spence?” Words I have seldom heard and which should have thrilled me but for my unfortunate selection. It was not so much the serial killer book itself, but the book within the context of the others that I felt exposed me as a freakish, unfit mother-to-be.)

I’m about fifty pages in, and so far, here is my problem: I don’t yet believe in the mortals, much less the vampires. The narrator, Bella, has left her mother in sunny Phoenix to live with her police chief father in the wet, wintry, podunk town of Forks in Washington State, where she was born but because she despised it so has not visited for the past three years. (And her mother despised it so much she apparently abandoned the marriage over it, I think so that the dad needn’t have any shortcomings other than being hopelessly provincial.) Something about wanting her mom to be free to travel with her new boyfriend is suggested to be behind this choice, but she’s 16 (17?), soon enough to be out of her mother’s hair. At that age I’d have poured all my energy into convincing my mom she could leave me for overnight trips, then converted our house into an adolescent speakeasy. In fact, that’s pretty much what I did. 

But no, selfless, noble Bella volunteers to exile herself, and while she doesn’t seem to have left any friends behind, she’s immediately escorted to her classes in strangely archaic fashion by her new classmates and welcomed to a lunch table and rather tidily folded into a peer group of apparent normals from which she can view the handsome though pallid Edward and learn that he and his equally pale and aristocratic-looking crew are the school’s outcasts. But get this: Bella, though Phoenix-raised, is also pale! So they’ve got that in common. There are some intense, confusing stares and even glares passing between them. I left off in the middle of Edward using uncanny strength and speed to save Bella from being hit by a car, which is bound to bring them together.

I’m only fifty pages in; the book is almost 500 pages long. My interest is flagging, but I can give it another fifty before moving on. I want my vampire romance!

Nora Barnacle

This past Thanksgiving week was long and and it was low on sleep as we visited out-of-state relatives with a toddler that sleeps fitfully in the best of situations. Add an ear infection and bunk the four of us in one room, and our collective health and wits are near to shattered. I have taken great solace in Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, a biography of Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s longtime partner and later, when their children were grown, his wife.

Nora was his “portable Ireland,” the basis for many of his female characters, but most particularly Molly Bloom, whose orgasmic soliloquy at the end of Ulysses (“and yes I said yes I will Yes”) is far more widely known and read than the novel itself. My husband once declared he was officially giving up on reading Ulysses via an essay broadcast on NPR, though he has since recanted. To my great shame I tried and failed to finish it while we were in Dublin for the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, but in my defense, I was newly pregnant and my brain was a muddled stew of hormones, and whenever I sat still for more than ten minutes, I went to sleep. This state of confused exhaustion went on well into the second trimester, and some would contend it persists to this day.

But in Nora, I think I have found my gateway book back into Joyce. I find myself wanting to revisit Dubliners (which I revered in high school and again as a twentysomething) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then properly girded, again tackle Ulysses. Even Finnegans Wake seems within reach! (Unlike much of his other work, Nora actually read parts of FW and liked it.)

Reading about the couple’s life of at-times scraping poverty as they bummed around European backwaters (even their Paris was a series of gloomy, unheated pensions) and raised two children is somehow inspiring. OK, sure, one kid went insane and the other one was never what you’d call employable, but that happens in rich, secure families, too. 

Mainly I appreciated how the biographer sought to rescue Nora Barnacle’s reputation. She’s often falsely cast as Joyce’s barely literate Irish peasant muse. This portrayal didn’t exalt her, but defended her for who she truly was: uneducated, yes, but sharp enough for the likes of Joyce, and infinitely more tough-minded. She was not his “enabler” in that modern, twelve-step sense of the word–that label belongs more squarely on the many patrons whose money and goodwill he burned through–yet he could not have written as he did without her. 

And of course, as I read any biography, I am simultaneously imagining how my own will scan. She was a terrible housekeeper. She had a fleeting, squandered talent. She loved her children but could not manage them and so they ran amok. Approaching middle age, she let herself go to seed. And then I start to revise.

Brought to you by the number 40

Sesame Street and I both turned 40 this year–so where’s my Google logo? There hasn’t been nearly enough fanfare on my part, even when you factor in such highlights as my emerging bunion.

My mother tells me I learned to read from Sesame Street, and I don’t doubt it; I watched it twice a day most days (followed by The Electric Company with Morgan Freeman in the cast), and the second airing was a repeat. When I was given a CD of Sesame Street’s greatest hits at my baby shower, I knew all the songs that predated Elmo. Still, I don’t recall many specifics of the show, only kids cavorting with muppets against the backdrop of an urban landscape á la Ezra Jack Keats.

I do remember certain words becoming legible, like “horse,” which I sometimes mixed up with “house,” and writing my name with the letter n backward again and again on dry brown paper, thick tablets of the cheapest pulp. Though I knew the n was wrong, I could not force my hand to reverse the motion. In kindergarten and first grade, we were issued reading comprehension packets color-coded by level, but oddly, as you progressed, the colors grew more drab, peaking at brown. (My friend Margaret told me she flubbed the assessments on purpose so she could have the lavender one.) 

As my older son makes his first forays into reading, I recall such instances more often; they are among my first coherent memories, or rather, I don’t remember much of my existence before I could read, and certainly none before language, as if the story of my life could only begin once I was at least capable of the simplest narratives: I want that; I didn’t do it; it’s not fair. My great-grandmother said she could remember being a baby in the cradle, wanting someone to come and get her.

I wonder when my son’s life began to gel for him in memories; I suspect it has happened only over the past year or so, as he has been finding his way to the written word. The excitement of identifying “MILK” emblazoned on the truck we were behind on the way to preschool. Sounding out and spelling “Batman.” Slogging valiantly through the opening pages of One Fish, Two Fish. It seems almost incredible that he may not remember much about his life before the cataclysmic event of his brother’s birth, because for his father and me, there are volumes’ worth of the history of just the three of us. But that we can keep for him, and tell him those stories until he makes them his own.

All-Nighter

I finally read Beautiful Children by Charles Bock, one of those splashy debut novels the NYT slobbered all over last year. I waited until it was readily available in the library, just as I had Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, so put off am I by people I think no longer have to work and can just write; I am constitutionally incapable of contributing to their royalties. (And must they also be so fresh-faced?) I know this reveals a certain poverty of spirit, but it’s a private little spite that causes no measurable harm to others. I think I’ll work on my explosive temper first, then take a long look at my relationship to food. 

When I do finally sneak a free peek at a book post-splash, it’s with the sincere hope that it really won’t be of much account. How gratifying when Special Topics turned out to be a thin gruel of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, with some drawings thrown in, as if to say, “But this one has drawings!” Whither the sexual intrigue, the bacchanal bloodletting, the thousand or so extra pages of gravitas?

But Beautiful Children. I was getting a migraine that afternoon and downed some caffeinated headache powders, which relieved the pain but kept me up all night, and the novel made for fine company. Set in Las Vegas (though, thankfully, rarely in casinos–to me the only thing more dull than reading about casinos is going to them), it mostly orbits an obnoxious twelve-year-old boy who goes missing and the people overlapping that: his parents, the young man last seen with him, and the stray punks and homeless kids whose ranks he may have joined. I liked it the way I like a Richard Price novel, with a recurring mild surprise that the story has captivated me against expectations, and a sense of even the basest character bathed in the golden glow of the author’s attentions.

Reading all night is sort of like watching TV all night–enjoyable in the moment, though not much lingers past a slight quease from having glutted oneself. It has become a rare pleasure for me to give over a night of sleep to a book. Until this recent headache-powder-fueled stint, I’m not sure I’ve done it since I had children. The closest I came was in the weeks following my sons’ births, when I was up around the clock anyway, and they were still manageable enough for me to nurse and hold open a book. What strange juxtapositions I’d choose: a biography of Genghis Khan, then a holocaust memoir; Gibson and Sterling’s steampunk The Difference Engine, followed by Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay, which shocked the hell out of everyone when it won the National Book Award in 2004, not because it wasn’t a terrific book, but because it had been virtually invisible until that moment, reportedly having sold fewer than two thousand copies. I have to root for a book with a backstory like that.