Saturday, October 15, 2011

Book Report #2

So.

I finished reading The Awkward Age back in May. In my last report, I anticipated a match being made between the protagonist and a certain young woman. Things turned out to be less simple than that; life is messy, which makes for good storytelling. Overall, it was a good read, though the prose is a bit denser than most novels one might pick up.

Next came a few more novels, including Independence Day by Richard Ford and Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. The Ford novel follows a real estate agent dealing with customers and family over a holiday weekend. Not long on plot, though there are a lot of amusing incidents; it's mainly a meditation by a man reaching middle age. The Stein book is an exercise in style: three character portraits written in distinctive voices. There's a lot of repetition, and frankly the book is excruciating to read.

H.L. Mencken's Prejudices: First Series is a collection of his early essays. This was my introduction to Mencken's acid pen. Occasionally the arrows seem lazily tossed at his subjects—he can sound like an Internet troll with good spelling—but generally his aim is true. I look forward to eventually reading his account of the Scopes trial, several series down the road.

Rereading Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, I can see why this novel is a campus favorite: The prose is easy, the chapters are short, and the level of wisdom matches that of the thinking college student. Bad things happen, and it's the grownups' fault.

On to Saul Bellow's Herzog. Even more than Ford, Bellow dispenses with plot; mostly, we get the angry thoughts and writings of Moses Herzog, misogynist. Herzog would have been a terror in the era of email and blogs; he is constantly writing outraged letters to everyone who crosses his path. Bellow is a skilled writer, but this fellow is unpleasant most of the time.

Next is the Library of America's printing of Willa Cather's uncollected stories. One could devote a semester of American literature to the study of these truthful and fully-formed stories. Cather is top-tier.

Today I started reading John Cheever's first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle. It looks like it will be an almost clichéd portrait of a New England small town; the eccentric characters include an elderly nudist, nicknamed Uncle Peepee, who is mostly tolerated by the constabulary. At the time of its publication, the book was criticized as too episodic. We'll see.