Pulitzer Project: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel

I had a mixed reaction to this particular novel. My initial reaction was, wow, finally found a Pulitzer winner that might hit the high end of my rating scale.  Michael Chabon can write, every sentence is beautifully crafted, the various bits of trivia that the novel is salted with are intriguing, but, holy wah, Chabon could have used a better copy editor.

Remember me saying that a fat Pulitzer winner is never a good sign? That's definitely true for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It would be a much better book if it was considerably shorter, like maybe 200 or so pages shorter. The copy I had was a trade paperback and did not look like it was potential doorstop material, but it turned out to be 640+ pages filled with a font small enough that it came close to me reaching for the magnifying glass I use when doing counted cross stitch. Admittedly the first two-thirds of the book flowed sufficiently well that the tiny font didn't bother me much, but then I hit Antarctica. 

Why Chabon decided to stick one of his protagonists at a remote station in Antarctica during World War II is baffling. The Antarctica section was admittedly a slog. A reader should not be thinking "What is the fucking point?!" Maybe Chabon decided that he really needed to detail every second of Josef Kavalier's experience but it honestly did not seem to add anything to the book overall, at least not for me.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay follows the lives of two cousins, Josef Kavalier and Samuel Clayman. Both are in their late teens when Joe arrives in the United States as a refugee from Prague. The Kavalier and Clayman families are Jewish, it's the 1930s, Nazis are now in control in Czechoslovakia, and life is getting scarier for anyone Jewish. The Kavaliers decide Josef should go to America to stay with relatives there. 

After Joe arrives in New York, it turns out he and his cousin share a love of comic books. It's a time when comics are just taking off, the whole phenomenon of Superman has every would-be commercial artist excited and trying to figure out how to get in on the action. Joe is an extremely talented artist, Sam not quite as good at drawing but great at plot lines. Together they push the idea of a new superhero, the Escapist, persuade a publisher to develop the concept, and do quite well for a couple years. Joe has been stashing money in the bank to eventually pay for his family back in Prague to get out of Europe. Then the world changes. On the same day Joe learns that his younger brother died enroute to the U.S. the Japanese government bombs Pearl Harbor. Joe's response to hearing that his brother drowned when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship carrying refugees is to immediately enlist in the Navy. He is determined to kill Germans. His burning desire for revenge is thwarted, though, by the Navy's decision to train him as a radio operator and ship him to a tiny station in Antarctica. 

Back in New York Sam is slowly coming to terms with being homosexual. He does what many (most) gay men did in the U.S. in the 1940s: he works hard at staying thoroughly closeted. He marries his cousin Joe's pregnant girlfriend Rosa and presents as the stereotypical suburban dad. He has occasional discrete meetings with other young closeted men while being quietly conflicted and miserable. He had been given the opportunity to go to Hollywood with his first lover, an actor, in December 1941 but had panicked at the last minute. He stayed in New York and then steps up to marry Rosa when Joe enlists without knowing fatherhood is imminent. Time moves on, twelve years pass, and Joe returns. And that's when Chabon decides to wrap things up quickly. After almost 600 pages of meandering, chatty, and, to be totally honest, engaging text Joe, Sam, and Rosa manage to tie up all the loose ends in remarkably few pages. 

So, general conclusions about this book? Definitely a mixed reaction. On the one hand, Chabon is really good with words. Reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was not work. The book flows. I came really close to telling myself I'd finally hit a 10 on my rating scale. And then I hit the Antarctica section. Okay. As that narrative bit advanced it got weirder and weirder. Reacting to a book by muttering "What the fuck. . .?" a lot is never a good sign. 

So would I recommend it to other readers? Maybe. Chabon can write. If a person has read anything else by him (The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Wonder Boys, Telegraph Avenue) that reader is going to expect Chabon's discursive style. If the prospective reader has never read anything by Chabon The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay might be a bit much. Still, even with the odd Antarctica section the book is way more readable than most of the previous Pulitzer fiction winners. Does it qualify as a beach book? I'd say yes. The discursive style can make it hard to put the book down, which means it's perfect for long hours on a chaise lounge or beach towel while slathered in Coppertone. Just remember to hydrate. 

Next up if I keep moving up the list chronologically is Empire Falls by Richard Russo, another book and author I know nothing about. Unless, of course, American Pastoral falls from the skies (or from Thrift books) and I get to do a step backwards. 

Pulitzer Project: Interpreter of Maladies

After I finished The Hours the Younger Daughter decided to read it, too, before returning it to the library. After all, the book was pretty light weight, both in size and content. I breezed through it quickly. So did she. And then she asked the usual question: What makes a work of fiction good enough to merit a Pulitzer? By then I had started reading Interpreter of Maladies so I had two recent examples to think about. So what does make a work of fiction Pulitzer worthy? I have no clue. Some past winners have been total dreck, literally unreadable, and others were amazing: beautifully written, a joy to read.

As for the most recent, it falls somewhere into the middle of the pack. Not bad, not great, just quietly announcing, yes, these are typical New Yorker short stories. Not great literature, not bad, just sort of there. The author is Indian American, sort of. According to Wikipedia, Lahiri was born in England and came to the United States at the age of 3 when her father was hired to work at a university library in Rhode Island. 

Her parents were Bengali and placed a lot of emphasis on remembering Bengali culture. The family made frequent trips to India and no doubt provided much of the material Lahiri drew on for her fiction. Her work is described as "autobiographical" but it's a bit of a stretch to call fiction autobiographical when the work is set years, even decades, before Lahiri was born. She may be channeling her parents' and other relatives' stories, but she didn't live any of it herself. 

The book is a collection of short stories, some longer than others. "Interpreter of Maladies" might be the longest. It's an odd narrative about a man who has two jobs: he works as an interpreter for a medical doctor translating patients' descriptions of symptoms and relaying the doctor's advice to the patients. India is a land of many languages and dialects, and the doctor has a sizable number of patients who speak a language the doctor doesn't know. The man's other job is as a tour guide, and it is through his conversations with American tourists that we learn about him being an interpreter of maladies. This is the story that won a prize from The New Yorker and again I'm not sure why. Maybe for being the penultimate New Yorker type of story? Exotic setting, intriguing cultural references, a faint hint of erotica in the tour guide's extremely G-rated thoughts about the female American tourist. Totally typical New Yorker, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for that magazine other than the story being set in India instead of on a Caribbean island. 

The other stories in the book vary in setting and protagonists. Some are set in India, some in the U.S. One of the oddest stories for me involved a young married couple who moved into a new (to them) house and kept finding Christian tchotchkes: a snow globe with a Nativity scene, a garish poster, and even a large concrete Our Lady of Perpetual Cleanliness hiding in a clump of bushes in the yard -- why Mary wasn't in the usual old bathtub is a mystery. The house is apparently salted with tacky religious memorabilia. They keep finding stuff in odd places: tucked behind a radiator, for example. The wife is fascinated and wants to keep it all; her husband keeps reminding her that they're Hindu. I found myself thinking several kind of related thoughts: the tchotchkes collection is a guaranteed way to get nailed for the sin of cultural appropriation (something that no one was thinking much about back in the 1990s), non-Christians do get a little weird about religious memorabilia and holidays (lots of people celebrate Christmas or Easter with zero thought about the religious meaning of the holidays), and is it wrong of me to want a large statue of Ganesha for my garden? I have an old bathtub I could put him in. 

So how is the book in general? Well, it's competently written, i.e., it's definitely readable. Lahiri can write, which is good considering that her academic career seems to have consisted of teaching other people how to write. Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes. I mean, it doesn't suck. Or, to damn with truly faint praise, I've read worse. It's another middle of the pack book. Not great, not bad, just sort of there. 

Next up on the list? Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Garland County Public Library on-line catalog says they have a copy on the shelves so I may get it read in the next week or so. Assuming, of course, that the library does have it. Here's hoping they do because this is one book I'm actually looking forward to reading. I liked Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. I also know he was the head writer for Star Trek: Picard, but I'm not sure if that's a positive or not. In any case, after ignoring the Pulitzers for two years, I may cross three off the list in one month. 

Pulitzer Project: The Hours

It's been awhile since I thought about the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Back in 2023 I read the 1997 winner, Martin Dressler, and was so thoroughly unimpressed by it that I lost interest in moving on up the list. When I decided to get back to it I wasted about a year in trying to track down a copy of the 1998 winner, American Pastoral. Despite it being a Philip Roth novel and, if I recall correctly, a best seller, the local library did not have it. Nor did any of the other libraries in the library's interlibrary loan network. So then I did the looking for a used copy. Turned out used copies for sale were scarce, too, and the ones I found were priced higher than I felt like spending. I finally decided to step back from the obsessive need to do the list in the order the prize was awarded and moved on to 1999, Michael Cunningham's The Hours.

As usual, I knew nothing about the book before starting to read it. The cover made it clear it had been made into a movie -- even I recognized Meryl Streep -- but I didn't recall ever seeing the film. I'm pretty oblivious when it comes to cinema and had no recollection of a movie that it turns out was both a critical and financial success. According to The Google, it made tons of money and resulted in an Oscar for Nicole Kidman. 

Small digression. I find it intriguing that beautiful actresses, no matter how skilled they are, seem to get tapped for awards when they take on roles that erase their physical attractiveness. Kidman suffered through long sessions in the make-up trailer thanks to the prosthetic nose and other enhancements designed to make her physically resemble the author Virginia Woolf. (The Younger Daughter had seen the film and said she didn't realize it was Nicole Kidman until she saw the credits.) The following year Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her portrayal of Aileen Wuornos in Monster, a role for which Theron gained 30 pounds and shaved off her eyebrows. Of course, male actors do it, too, like Matthew McConaughey for The Dallas Buyers Club. He lost over 50 pounds so he could realistically portray someone suffering from AIDS.

Back to the book.. . . As is true for most of the Pulitzer winners I read, my knowledge of either the book or the author was basically nonexistent when I picked it up. My initial reaction was relief that it was a modestly sized trade paperback and not something with the physical heft of War and Peace or Kristin Lavransdatter. Both of which I enjoyed reading, but they weren't Pulitzer winners. The hefty Pulitzer winners have not been nearly as readable as anything by Tolstoy. If a Pulitzer winner looks like it would make a nice solid doorstop, I don't see that as a good sign.  

The Hours offers vignettes from three different women's lives: the author Virginia Woolf, a fairly young stay-at-home wife in late 1950s Los Angeles, and a middle-aged lesbian in New York City in the early 1990s. The three women are tied together by Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf is in the early stages of writing the book, she's working out plot points in her head. The L.A. trad wife is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and the New Yorker was nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway when she was in college. Her first name is Clarissa, the same as Mrs. Dalloway, so the nickname made sense at the time. Now, 30+ years later, she's not as sanguine about it as she was in her 20s. 

I have never read Mrs. Dalloway so I have no idea how the descriptions of the three women match up with themes in the book. I do know about Virginia Woolf's life (and death) but I have never read anything by her. I'm not sure why. Woolf is a feminist icon so maybe I should feel a little guilty about not knowing anything about her actual work. Then again, if she'd been published in one of the genres I have an addiction to (mysteries and science fiction and fantasy) I might have read her but then she wouldn't be the iconic author she is remembered as. 

So, having approached the book with my usual level of blissful ignorance and feeling cautiously optimistic ("How bad can it be? It got optioned for a movie."), how was the actual book? Brief summary: Definitely readable but thin. As noted, the novel offers slices of life, basically one day each, for the three women. The first chapter kind of threw me for a loop -- it's a description of Woolf's suicide in 1941 -- but then the frame shifts. In Woolf's case the narrative jumps back to a summer day in 1923. She's thinking about her next book (Mrs. Dalloway), preparing for a visit from her sister Vanessa, trying to persuade her husband to move back into London proper instead of being stuck in a dull suburb, and worrying about her own mental health. She apparently suffered from headaches so severe they triggered hallucinations. 

The book then jumps forward in time to a day in the life of "Mrs. D," the middle-aged New Yorker. She's running errands, shopping for fresh flowers, fussing about the health of the friend who gave her the Mrs. Dalloway nickname, and remembering incidents from back when she and the friend were young. He's now a well respected poet who's just been awarded a prestigious prize so Mrs. D is planning to host a party celebrating his accomplishments. She's worrying about the guest list (did she inadvertently invite someone Richard wouldn't want to see?), worrying about her 19-year-old daughter's friendship with a feminist activist, worrying about life in general. One odd little bit of business is while she's at the florist she notices a film company is set up down the block. There are a couple trailers for the actors, one of whom is reportedly a major female actress. She wonders if it could be Meryl Streep. Given that Meryl Street plays Mrs. D in the film, that struck me as an interesting coincidence. 

As for the party Mrs. D is stressing about, in the end other events cause its cancellation. 

The Woolf and Mrs. D chapters are reasonably interesting; the trad wife in L.A. was more of a slog. Not surprisingly, it's the thinnest sections. She's young, has been married for a few years, has one child (a boy) and is pregnant again. She is a passionate reader, has always had a reputation as a book worm, and given any sort of a choice she'd rather read than do anything else. She's also suffering from massive insecurity. She worries that she's doing a bad job as a parent, she throws out a cake because the frosting isn't perfect, she worries that she's lost herself. She feels sufficiently unmoored that she brings her 3 year old son to a neighbor to be watched while she drives into the city and gets a hotel room for a few hours so she can have a quiet place to read with no other obligations. Is this nod to A Room of Her Own? (One of the multiple Virginia Woolf novels I've heard of but never read.)

I'm sure book clubs had discussions centering on questions like "What is the theme of this book?" I have no idea. Maybe it's that we all live in our own heads too much and worry about stuff it's not worth worrying about?  Bottom line was The Hours is readable. Michael Cunningham can write. Can he write at an Edna Ferber or Upton Sinclair level? No, but good if not great beats quite a few other Pulitzer winners. On the usual1 to 10 scale, it's a respectable 6 or 7. Better than average and not work to read.

Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes, with the minor caveat of warning them not to be put off by the description of Virginia putting rocks in her pockets and walking into the Ouse in the first chapter. Cunningham must have realized a drowned woman wouldn't have much to say or think about. Virginia breathing in 1923 is a lot more engaging than a very damp Virginia drifting in a river 

Next up on the list, assuming a copy of American Pastoral doesn't drop from the sky, a collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. 

Pulitzer Project: Independence Day

This Pulitzer winner turned out to be another remarkably readable book. Two in a row. Amazing. The Garland County Public Library does have the next book on the list sitting on its shelves. I'm wondering if I should tempt fate by having Tammi check it out, too. Although I am going to give myself a short break before tackling it and indulge in some mind candy first, like reading one of the books in the Murderbot Diaries, before going back to more serious prose.

Independence Day is the middle book in a series of three novels that Richard Ford wrote about Frank Bascombe, a former sports writer and current real estate agent in this particular work. It won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1996. 

The book covers three days in the life of its hero. It's the 4th of July weekend in 1988 when Frank tries to juggle his responsibilities as a divorced dad, a realtor with clients he's trying to reel in, issues with his ex-wife, and a changing relationship with a current female friend. To be honest, if I wasn't working my way up a list and had read a plot summary that said the book chronicled a holiday weekend in the life of middle aged real estate sales guy  I would not be real interested in pulling it off the library shelf. 

Of course, I hadn't read a synopsis before starting the book. I try to go into each Pulitzer winner not knowing much, if anything, about it. I do occasionally end up doing some Googling to learn a little more, like if I'm thinking a book is pretty much a complete waste of paper and ink I'll go looking to see what reviewers had to say about it. Not surprisingly, my reaction to a book tends to be a bit different than the ones who get paid to review books for the New York Times. Professional reviewers have a bad habit of mistaking an incoherent piece of crap for a masterrpiece. 

Not that Independence Day is incoherent. It's actually quite well written and fairly easy to read. I got sucked right into it despite it being essentially one middle-aged guy musing on life as he takes care of various chores in the lead up to the Independence Day weekend: shows a house to potential buyers, tries to collect rent money from a difficult tenant, checks on a small business he owns. It helped that Ford gave his protagonist both a wry sense of humor and a dislike of right-wing politicians. 

Independence Day reminded me a little bit of the piece of unreadable dreck that won the 1982 Pulitzer, John Updike's Rabbit is Rich, in that it looks at what's going on in the head of a pretty average middle class white male, There is, however, one huge difference: Frank Bascombe is likable, he seems like a decent guy, and you find yourself hoping things work out for him. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, in contrast, came across as a rather sleazy weasel. 

So how would I rate this book and do I recommend it? The overall quality merits a high 7, maybe a low 8, and, yes, I recommend it. It's decent reading. Not super exciting but not boring either. 

Next up on the list: Martin Dressler, which is yet another book by an author I'd never heard of before starting the Pulitzer Project. The local library does have it on the shelves so now I get to decide if I want Tammi to check it out tomorrow or if I indulge in a little more escapist genre fiction first. 

Pulitzer Project: The Stone Diaries

It's been awhile since I bothered reading any Pulitzer Prize fiction winners. Back in 2021 I hit a couple that were such duds that I lost interest in bothering with Interlibrary Loan to work my way up the list. But after we got to Hot Springs, a city large enough to have a public library that hasn't overdosed on Danielle Steele, I checked the online catalog and then asked the Younger Daughter to check the 1995 winner, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, out for me.

The book turned out to be surprisingly good. Not great, but definitely readable. Shields could write. The book is  structured as a faux biography (or possibly memoir) of/by Daisy Goodwill Flett, a woman born in a small town in Manitoba in 1905 who manages to make it into her 80s before a bad fall triggers a decline in her health. 

By the time The Stone Diaries was published, Shields was an established author with a good reputation in Canada. She was in the comfortable position of feeling free to play around with formatting, perspective, style. . . she even inserts a section of vintage photos to mimic the type of old family photos a reader would expect to see in a real biography or memoir. That particular literary trick didn't go over very well with me. I'm not sure if Shields meant for there to be a disconnect between the way a reader finds herself visualizing the characters and the supposed photos of them (a character described as "morbidly obese" appears to be not especially fat, for example) or if the incongruities were simply an accident, but the end result was that to me that section just felt weird. 

Some sections are told in the first person, some in the third, but all are more or less the story of Daisy's life. Some of the narrative is from Daisy's perspective, some is how things may have looked to the people around her. For example, at one point a college friend of Daisy's visits for a few days, and the author gives us two radically different interpretations of how that visit went. One version describes a happy home, well behaved children, and a Daisy who seems to have her life pretty much together. The other version has Daisy as a fraud, her kids rude, and depicts a household the visitor would be happy to never visit again. 

So who is Daisy Goodwill Flett? In most ways, a rather ordinary woman. She's smart, but not brilliant; attractive but not necessarily stunning; hardworking but not ambitious. She's like most of us: she goes through life behaving appropriately but not making many waves. Her life has had some tragic blips -- her mother dies in childbirth, when she's eleven years old her foster mother is killed in a bicycle accident, her first husband manages to kill himself by falling out of a second floor window on their honeymoon -- but other than hearing the splat when Husband Number One hits the pavement she's not a witness to the events. She was present when her mother died, but witnessing a death when she'd only been breathing for a few minutes herself probably didn't make much of an impression. She is, in fact, remarkably untouched by events happening around her. 

And maybe that's the point. Maybe Daisy represents all of us. We all go through life experiencing various blips but most of the time we all just muddle on. 

So was the book worth reading? More than most of the ones on the list, although still not one of the truly good ones. On the usual scale of 1 being the worst, 10 being the best, it's a solid 7. Decent writing, not a whole lot of work to get through, but in the end not that special. The Younger Daughter asked me what makes a book merit a Pulitzer. Sometimes it's because it's an amazing work of literature and sometimes it's the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Even though the announcement may say the award is for The Most Recent Work the reality is the prize is actually acknowledging the half a dozen or more better works the author cranked out decades earlier. Not being familiar with Shields' previous work I don't know if The Stone Diaries qualifies as a lifetime achievement award candidate, but it feels like it could. 

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Sure, why not. It's decently written, moderately interesting, and inoffensive. This book, in fact, proved to be such a relief to read compared to some of the others I suffered through as part of this Pulitzer Project that I've already moved on to the next one on the list, Richard Ford's Independence Day*, the 1996 winner. At this point, I'm within 25 books of the most recent winner and have already read three of the 25 out of order, it looks like I could actually live long enough to read them all. . . especially if there's a year or two between now and whenever I get to the end that no prize for fiction is awarded. 

*Also surprisingly readable. I'm already about a third done with it. 

Pulitzer Project: The Shipping News

The 1994 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, has to be one of the stranger books I've read since I began this project about 12 years ago. I'd be tempted to say time flies when you're having fun except some of the books were not fun. Some of the winners were definitely a slog, the type of reading material that should make any aspiring author think, "yes, I can do this! If this piece of crap is a prize winner, I can write a best seller, too." I wouldn't say The Shipping News qualifies as bad, but I'm also not sure if it qualifies as good. It does remind me that the fact the books are getting newer as I work my way up the list does not necessarily mean they're getting better. 

This is one novel where I'm reasonably sure the film version outshone the book -- and by a lot. The movie, after all, had Judi Dench and Kevin Spacey. Spacey may have been revealed to be a total prick, but he can act.

For that matter, it's obvious Proulx can write when she wants to, but she decided to craft a decidedly odd book when she wrote this novel. This was another one of those books where the reviews for it left me wondering if the reviewers and I had read the same novel. Professional reviewers did a lot of blathering about comic elements while referring to aspects of the book that struck me as profoundly sad. The main character Quoyle is a poor schmuck of a lifetime loser, a fellow who was raised in what was obviously a totally dysfunctional family, isn't particularly good looking, has trouble finding and keeping a job, and ends up married to a sociopath. He kind of blunders through life with only one friend to speak of. And we're supposed to be amused by him? I must have missed something. 

It gets really dark and strange before anything remotely upbeat happens. His sociopath of a wife leaves him, taking their two young daughters with her and her current boyfriend. The wife and boyfriend die in a traffic accident, but not before the wife sells the two little kids to a pervert who plans to use them in kiddie porn. Not a whole lot of comic elements in that particular section of the book unless, of course, one finds the notion of two small naked children covered with dish soap sliding around on a kitchen floor while the pedophile tries to figure out how to work his new camera amusing. 

Quoyle gets his kids back, his aunt whom he'd never met before shows up because his parents died (suicide pact), and the aunt persuades him to pack up and move to Newfoundland, the land of his ancestors. The first couple chapters describing Newfoundland made it sound as though anyone who lives there is either truly desperate or too dumb to leave. It is not an inviting province. The family home (which apparently they have a legal claim to, despite no one having lived there for several decades)(I found myself wondering just who was paying the property taxes for all the years it sat there abandoned) is not fit to live in so they end up stuck in a motel that is overpriced and filthy. Then the aunt's dog dies. Can it get worse, one wonders? Short answer: yes. 

Our Hero, such as he is, is hired as a reporter by a local newspaper. His standard assignments are to cover the shipping news (report on what freighters have arrived in port, where they're from, and when they're leaving) and traffic accidents. The paper's publisher wants suitably gory accident scene photos for the front page. Descriptions of Quoyle's new work milieu are, to say the least, bizarre.  

I usually don't look at reviews much after I've read a book. This one was an exception. As noted above, the professional reviewers, the ones who get paid for their prose and often have academic training in "literature," thought it was great. They loved it, thought it was a masterpiece. 

People commenting from the perspective of book club members or just ordinary readers were less sanguine than the literati. They found Proulx's writing style confusing and choppy, an assessment I agree with. There are flashes, a sentence or a paragraph here and there that light up a page, but overall? It is not a good sign when my reaction to a novel is "this chick needs a good editor." You know, every time I read a book that seems awkwardly constructed I find myself remembering a story about James Joyce. Supposedly when Joyce was complimented on creative elements (odd spellings, strange sentence constructions) in his work he confessed that they weren't intentional. He was just a terrible typist and never had been good at spelling. I always wonder just how much of what's on a page is what the author actually intended and how much is the result of a copy editor being afraid of stepping on the author's voice by cleaning up gross errors in grammar. Editing, after all, is an art, a balancing act, and some authors handle being edited better than others. 

So, overall assessment of The Shipping News? Not an easy read, and a remarkably depressing one for most of the book. I'll give it a 5. It's not horrible, but for sure I didn't enjoy reading it.  

Next up: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shield. Another work and author I've never heard of. It is also, of course, one that requires an Interlibrary Loan request. 

Pulitzer Project: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was a pleasant change from the last few Pulitzer winners I've read. Butler can write, among other things, and he doesn't leave you wondering just how much more misery a writer can pack into one book.  

The book is a collection of short stories that share a common theme: Vietnam. Or, more accurately, Vietnamese people. Butler is a Vietnam War veteran who trained and worked as a translator. He spent longer than the normal tour of duty in the country. Duty stationed in Saigon, he discovered he genuinely liked the people. He spent his free time exploring the city and talking with ordinary people. 

The stories vary in length, setting, and tone, from only a couple pages to almost novella size, from Vietnam while the war is still in progress to 20 years later in Louisiana, and from melancholy to upbeat. Protagonists vary widely, too. 

For example, an elderly man living in exile in Louisiana is visited by an old friend, Ho Chi Minh, that he had shared a room with many years before in Paris. The fact Ho has been dead for over a decade is irrelevant. They reminisce about the days they spent working in the kitchen of a London restaurant while Ho tries to remember what he did wrong when caramelizing sugar for Auguste Escoffier. Ho chides his old friend for becoming a Buddhist instead of becoming as involved as politics as Ho did, although he does note that at least he picked Hoa Hao, a reformist Buddhist movement.

The notion that the future president of North Vietnam once worked as a chef's helper in a London kitchen managed by one of the most famous names in culinary history struck me as sufficiently bizarre that I had to Google it. Sure enough, Ho worked in multiple kitchens when he was a young man and still trying to figure out just where he fit in the world. Whether or not he worked for Escoffier is debatable, but for sure he was in a kitchen in London at the right time for it to have happened. What is known is he changed jobs frequently. 

In any case, the elderly man decides visiting with Ho could be a sign he's going to die soon so he asks his children to arrange for a Vietnamese tradition, having family members come to visit him to say goodbye before he's actually on his deathbed. When they do visit, he decides it's easier to just pretend to doze in his chair than it is to talk with them. He saves his conversations for the visits with his dead friend.  

The overall tone of the stories varies. Some end on a vaguely sad note, others are more upbeat. Good things happen to people who weren't expecting a happy ending, although not always. One fellow learns the hard way that it pays to be careful what you wish for, another realizes you can't turn back time. As a whole the book was a good read. 

In one of those weird coincidences that happen all the time, I was still thinking about the book when Pat Sajak made a joke on "Wheel of Fortune" about the beaches on Antigua being full of Wheel of Fortune winners because the show seemed to give away a lot of prize packages with that particular Caribbean destination. One of the longer stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain features a couple who are on a Mexican vacation because the wife won the trip on "Let's Make a Deal" by dressing as a duck. As she's looking around at the hotel she realizes that all the other guests also look like game show winners -- and sure enough, "The Price is Right," "Jeopardy," and others are all represented. It gives an otherwise serious story a light touch. 

I am, of course, now wondering if I ever do get to Aruba or Antigua or Cancun if it will turn out that most guests won their trips and I'll be the only sucker who actually paid to go.

Back to the book. This is one I do recommend. The writing is good, the stories are interesting, and you may even pick up some trivia about Vietnam without having to think about it much. I do have to say that learning that most Vietnamese restaurants in this country with seemingly exotic names are actually just advertising their specialty wasn't much of a revelation. That's a tradition in most countries, including this one (e.g., Colton's Steak House, Red Lobster, International House of Pancakes). 

On the usual 1 to 10 scale, I'll give it an 8. It's better than average but not quite a solid 9. 

Up next: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. The L'Anse library amazed me. They actually have it in their collection. In fact, I already have it on the nightstand to be read as soon as I finish reading Battleship, an odd book that claims to be about a racehorse (a steeple chaser) but is more accurately a biography of Randolph Scott's first wife, Marion duPont. Fascinating but completely irrelevant piece of trivia: Battleship is buried at Montpelier, the home of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison. 

Pulitzer Project: A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. The good news is Smiley can write. You get sucked into the book. The writing flows. My usual goal is to do at least 50 pages a night. With A Thousand Acres I'd be reading along, not paying any attention to the time, glance at a page number and realize I'd slid past 50 pages and was nearing 100+. Then I'd look at the clock and realize how late it was getting. 

So what's the bad news, you ask? Well, for a start if you do any Googling for information on this book the first thing you will read is a statement warning you Smiley's A Thousand Acres takes Shakespeare's King Lear and sets it on a farm in Iowa. Anytime someone decides to use a Shakespearean tragedy as inspiration you know the end result is not going to be a happy one. There will be suffering, there will be death, and in the end you'll find yourself wishing you'd reached for something a little more upbeat at the library, like Crime and Punishment or The Metamorphosis. 

Just to be sure no one misses the connection with King Lear, Smiley gives the three daughters in the novel names that echo the three in the play. Instead of Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia, we're introduced to Rose, Ginny, and Carolyn. Just as in the play, the two older daughters spend their time agreeing with whatever their father suggests while the youngest questions the old man's decisions and judgement. 

Rose and Ginny stayed on the family farm even after marriage (their husbands moved to the farm rather than the women moving to where the spouses might have preferred to live). They've been unpaid housekeepers for their aging father since their teenage years, which is when their mother died, and have figured out the easiest way to deal with their father is to keep their mouths shut and let him do what he wants. If he drinks too much and drives while intoxicated, well, they're not happy about it but they refuse to do anything. If he goes on a spending spree and buys new furniture for no apparent reason, they'll just sit back and let him do it. 

Carolyn, on the other hand, is enough younger that she never fell into the acting as a live-in maid trap her sisters did. She also missed on some of the truly bad stuff that happened when her mother died but doesn't realize just how much her sisters protected her from the worst dysfunction. She left home for college and never came back except to visit. She's now an attorney living in Des Moines and sees the farm and her father in a very different way than her sisters. Her reaction to her father's odd or self-destructive behavior is to lecture Rose and Ginny on the need to keep an eye on the old man and to stop him from doing the stuff he does. Carolyn is clueless as to why her sisters are so passive, and of course they're never going to tell her. Among other things, if they did, it would torpedo Smiley's plot long before she got to her planned ending. Readers may mutter, "What the. . .?" but once an author has committed to an outline, the dominoes have to keep falling. 

As the novel progresses, Smiley throws in an ever growing list of bad things happening: marital infidelity, unrequited love, attempted murder, tragic accidents, child abuse and incest revealed after decades of denial, divorce, corporate greed, bad advice from bankers, foreclosures, auctions. Yes, the play that was the inspiration was full of bad stuff, too, but the litany of woes in A Thousand Acres turns a bit ridiculous by the time you get to the end. You name it, it's there. But you keep right on reading because Smiley can write.  

Bottom line on the book: it is extremely readable, it's well written and holds your interest, but let's face it, Smiley has managed to kitchen sink so many tragic elements that they risk becoming cliches -- the old man isn't just a drunk, he's a child beater! one of the sisters doesn't just resent a sibling, she plans to poison her! -- it comes close to qualifying as Iowa corn. 

The skirting so dangerously close to turning a tragedy into a farce makes it hard for me to do my usual rating on the 1 to 10 scale. It's good, but it's definitely not great. A six maybe? Slightly better than average, but not up near the high end.

Next up: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Butler Olen. The online catalog describes it as a collection of short stories so it will be a change from the usual novels. It will, of course, be another Interlibrary Loan request. 

Pulitzer Project: Rabbit At Rest

Life is too short to waste reading bad books. 

I was so thoroughly repelled by John Updike's character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom in Rabbit is Rich that I really had no desire to dip into a final chapter in the man's life, even if it did hold out the promise of Rabbit taking a dirt nap at some point. However, as part of the self-imposed task I've given myself, if I'm going to read every work of fiction that the Pulitzer Prize committee has chosen to honor I have to at least made a good faith effort to actually read every work. No picking a book up, skimming a page or two at the library, and rejecting it instead of checking it out. 

Of the Pulitzer winners I've bailed on to date, I gave up on one from the 1930's (The Store) because the hideously racist terminology got to be too much for even me, I gave up on The Color Purple because the writing was really bad, and I bailed on Rabbit is Rich because Updike managed to create a character who made Harvey Weinstein look like a feminist in comparison and then topped that by having that character be so repellant with the descriptions of connubial relations that suddenly a lifetime of abstinence was looking good. And now I've bailed on Rabbit Angstrom again because he has not improved with age. 

I do have a small rule of thumb: I give each book 50 pages to convince me it's worth continuing. I think Rabbit at Rest had me thinking "why am I doing this?" long before that, but I stuck with it. I'm not sure why, other than a faint sense of guilt that the library had to get it through Interlibrary Loan and it would be a waste to not try to read it. 

The weird part is Updike can actually write. He's good with words. His books get rave reviews on sites like Good Reads. He manages to turn some lovely phrases, and every so often comes out with a sentence that sings. I do recall reading other work by him and liking it, including, if I recall correctly, short stories featuring Rabbit. 

Unfortunately, for me Updike's skill as a wordsmith is not enough to redeem Rabbit, who I tend to visualize as a Herb Tarleck type, someone not too bright and borderline sleazy in a bad suit. Way too much space in Rabbit's head, the internal monologue the reader is stuck seeing, is occupied by anti-Semitism, racism, crass materialism, and a general dislike of most of the world around him, including his son and heir, Nelson. I saw a review that described Rabbit as coming to terms with his mortality. I'm not sure the reviewer read the same book I did. If anything, Rabbit's in denial about the fact the chest pains he's feeling are angina. If Rabbit were a real person now you just know he'd be wearing a MAGA hat and denouncing Michelle Obama for having the nerve to suggest healthy foods are good for people. 

Actually, that's not quite true. He wouldn't wear the hat but he would share racist tweets on Facebook. He'd be scornful of the rubes wearing the MAGA hats while he quietly sent money to the Trump campaign and told his daughter-in-law that any woman who got grabbed by the genitals had asked for it. He'd see the con and think it was genius. He'd love Trump because Trump made it clear he disliked the same people Rabbit does. 

General conclusions about Rabbit at Rest? Avoid it. The writing is skillful but the subtext is repellant. 

Next up? A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Interlibrary Loan again, of course. 

Pulitzer Project: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

 

I’m a little late in posting this. I read The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love not long after we got to Arizona last February. It was another one of the many Pulitzer Prize winning books the L’Anse library did not have in its collection, but, thanks to the wonders of online catalogs, I knew the Safford library had it on the shelves. Not long after we got parked at the Graham County Fairgrounds the Younger Daughter checked the book out for me.

It was an odd book, one of those where it’s a bit tricky trying to do a review. The writing is good, the storyline and characters interesting, but what is it with male authors and their penis fetish? As far as I could tell there was no reason to obsess about the generosity of the main character’s male endowment, the gargantuan size of his trouser snake, the impressive length and girth of the dude’s dick. Nonetheless, every time the man did a mental flashback, whether it was to his carefree days as a young man in Cuba or more recent memories of romantic encounters, the appendage in question crept into the reminiscing. It was distracting. (Note: it also makes it tricky trying to write about it without sliding into using bad puns or snickering about things popping up.)

The plot line of The Mambo Kings follows one man’s life, which as the book begins is apparently ending. Cesar Castillo is in a hotel room, comfortably ensconced with a record player, a stack of vinyl, and a generous supply of booze. It’s not clear at first that he’s come there planning to die as the flashbacks to his past are intercut with his thoughts about the present, but as his story unfolds you can tell he’s not planning to walk out of the hotel again. He’s an old man in poor health, he almost died recently while hospitalized, and he’s been told by his doctor that if he doesn’t stop drinking he will die soon. The booze supply in the hotel room makes it pretty clear he’s decided he’d rather go out pickled than live life as a frail geezer. (Note: He’s not actually terribly old by contemporary standards – early 60s maybe – but a lifetime of partying like a rock star has caught up with him.)

The records he’s brought to play while drinking himself to death are all ones from his glory days as one of the Mambo Kings, the band he and his younger brother, Nestor, formed after arriving in New York from Cuba in the mid-1950’s. They specialized in Cuban music, the songs they had grown up with and ones they composed themselves. The ‘50s were good to them. There were numerous dance clubs featuring live music so musicians could make a decent living. They recorded several albums that sold well, and, at the height of their popularity, they made a guest appearance on I Love Lucy. They played characters who were Cuban friends of Ricky Ricardo (Dezi Arnaz) and performed one of their original songs. Everything was going good for them, but of course it couldn’t last.

There were family tragedies, musical tastes changed so there were fewer and fewer paying gigs, and the Mambo Kings faded into obscurity. A man who once took center stage as a musician finds himself making a living as an apartment building maintenance superintendent. That doesn’t stop him from continuing to party hard and ignore his health – and then it catches up with him.

I have a vague memory of this book helping to revive an interest in Cuban music in the early ‘90s. Or maybe it was the movie. On a personal level, it didn’t inspire me to go searching for mambo music, but then my interest in things Cuban tends to be limited to the sandwich.

So, how would I rate this book and would I recommend it to other readers? I’ll give it an 7 – it’s on the good side of average. I might have been a little more impressed if the author hadn’t kept circling back to the size of Cesar’s cock. The author Oscar Hijuelos is Cuban himself – was he unconsciously trying to assert that Cuban men are especially virile? It was weird.

Despite that weirdness, though, I would recommend the book to other readers. The wordsmithing is good, the story overall is interesting, and, who knows, it may even inspire one to start listening to Tito Puente recordings.

Up next on the list (and I’m not looking forward to it) John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. I found Updike’s Rabbit is Rich sufficiently repellent that I couldn’t finish it. I am not optimistic about the next installment in the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. But with the library open again it appears Interlibrary Loan is unavoidable.  

Pulitzer Project: Breathing Lessons

As I was reading Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons I kept having this nagging feeling. It felt familiar, like I'd read it before. Then it hit me.

Breathing Lessons is like an episode of All in the Family, the sit-com that aired in the 1970's. The novel describes one day in the life of a middle-aged married couple, Ira and Maggie. They live in Baltimore, but have to spend the day driving to a small town in Pennsylvania to attend the funeral of a high school classmate. The deceased was married to Maggie's best friend, a woman she's known since elementary school. Ira isn't happy about going because it means he has to close his business for the day, but he recognizes Maggie needs to be there.

Ira's kind of a grump, a man of few words, while Maggie is a lovable ditz who can't stop talking. He's a pessimist, she's an optimistic. She sees the best or the potential for the best in everyone; Ira is a skeptic and a realist. They're opposites, one of those couples where you find yourself thinking "No way is that relationship going to last!" But there they are: still together 20, 30, 40 years after all the seemingly better matched couples have split up or divorced.

All in the Family had a similar couple at the heart of it: Edith, the goodhearted but a bit scatterbrained wife, and Archie, the grumpy husband. Edith liked everyone; Archie minced no words in expressing his disdain or his bigotry. A marriage of opposites, a pessimist and an optimist co-existing while viewers got to wonder what on earth Edith saw in Archie. Over the course of the show, it became clear there was more to Archie than was obvious at first, but it took awhile to get there.

At first I had a similar reaction to Ira and Maggie. The novel is told from two perspectives, first Maggie's and then Ira's, and as I was reading I kept thinking "Why on earth are these two people still married?" The perspective might be Maggie's as she's remembering how she first became friends with Serena, how she met Ira, and so on, but along the way she does enough scatterbrained stuff that you start having a Dan Savage type reaction and think Ira should just DTMFA*.

And then they have a moment at Serena's house after the church service and it hits you: it may seem like Maggie and Ira bicker about almost everything, but underneath the verbal jousting and disagreements they really care for each other. Not only do they care, despite the surface appearance of not having a clue about what the other is thinking they do actually know each other pretty well.

The second half of the novel is told in Ira's voice. The narrative continues as they're heading home, but where we spent the first half of the book seeing Maggie moving back and forth in time and memories, now it's Ira's turn. We learn about his disappointments, the family obligations that prevented him from following his dreams, and how he feels about a variety of people and events.

In contrast with the last Pulitzer winner I read, Beloved, Tyler's Breathing Lessons is grounded in reality. No magical realism here, no wondering if someone is real or imagined, an actual person or a lost spirit. The only fantasy consists of Maggie's overly optimistic dreams of her son and his ex-wife getting back together or of  her being able to spend more time with her granddaughter. The novel looks at one day in the life of a pretty ordinary married couple: a small business owner and his wife. There are no dramatic epiphanies, just occasional flashes of humor and a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people coping with the fact they've hit middle age. No one's life turned out quite the way they thought it would back in high school, but that realization has a lot less sting when you look at your classmates and see that they're not what they thought they'd be either.

Overall impression of the book is it's readable. Tyler can write. I wasn't blown away by it, but I didn't suffer. I'd put over on the better side of the scale, maybe a 7 out of a theoretical 10. It's good, but it's not great. Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes, with the usual caveats. If you like Jodi Picoult you might like it, although with the qualification that it's not nearly as depressing or heartbreaking as the typical Picoult novel. Maybe it would be more accurate to lump it in with Joanna Trollope -- ordinary people, no major drama, just life with a few mildly disconcerting bumps along the way.  [Usual small digression: why doesn't the local library have any of Trollope's books? She's really good, but I haven't seen anything by her since leaving Atlanta and the amazing DeKalb County library system.] [I keep thinking that all those shelves for Danielle Steele could surely be put to better use than housing that many cubic feet of what is basically the same book over and over with slightly different titles.]

In 1994 Breathing Lessons was made into a movie for television starring James Garner and Joanne Woodward. It was good enough that Woodward won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a tv drama; Garner was nominated as Best Actor. I think the casting was probably spot on, and the supporting cast looks decent, too. Garner physically fits the way Maggie describes Ira. Knowing that, will I go looking for it online somewhere? No. I already have a Watchlist on Prime that's going to take me several lifetimes to finish.

Next up on the Pulitzer list? The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos. I have heard good things about this book. I hope I'm not disappointed.

*Dump the motherfucker already.

Pulitzer Project: Beloved

This one was a surprise. I'd been hearing about it for years, another one of those novels by an African-American author that gets touted as seminal, ground breaking, etc., the sort of breathless praise that always has me wondering just how bad the book is going to be. A lot of the praise for authors of color, whether they're Asian, Native American, African American, or something else, tends to have an undertone of implicit racism and condescension that reminds me of the praise for a dancing bear: there's no expectation that the bear will be good at dancing. Nope, the praise comes because the observer is amazed the bear can dance at all.

Which is why after having the unpleasant experience of trying to read The Color Purple I was not expecting much from Beloved. Toni Morrison was a woman of color; the book had been subject to huge amounts of praise; ergo, the book was probably going to suck. I was wrong.

So are a lot of the comments and reviews I've read that spent way too much time obsessing about one aspect of the book -- infanticide -- and not enough on the book as a whole. The infanticide is one reason I never had much interest in reading Beloved until it came up on the Pulitzer list. It's as though readers became obsessed with the fact a mother killed her toddler and ignored everything else that's going on in the novel. When all that ever gets mentioned about a book is that the main character killed her baby you do find yourself wondering why you should bother reading it.

Granted, the infanticide is a key element, one that's a pivot point for several narrative threads, but it's not the only element just like the mother, Sethe, isn't the only character. There's her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. Her surviving daughter, Denver. A man, Paul D, who was a field hand at the same Kentucky farm Sethe escaped from shortly before the Civil War.

Sethe was born into slavery in Virginia. She thinks about her mother and remembers how she never really knew her. Her mother was a field hand and had been forced to continue working in the fields after Sethe was born; she wasn't even able to nurse her. That task was done by another woman who was also a wet nurse to the white babies on the plantation. Sethe remembers talking with Baby Suggs. Baby tells her she had a total of 8 children, but the only one she was allowed to keep, to have stay with her and watch grow to adulthood, marry, and have children of his own was her youngest, Halle.

Beloved moves around in time as various characters remember the past. Sethe and Paul D recall what life was like at Sweet Home (the farm in Kentucky) before and after the owner, Mr. Garner, died. Garner had been a "good" slave owner. He gave the men a fair amount of personal freedom, including allowing them to use guns to hunt wild game, and didn't believe in the extreme and cruel forms of discipline common throughout the slave states. And then he died. His widow is forced to ask her husband's brother-in-law to take over managing the farm. If Garner was on the good end of the spectrum for slave owners, the brother-in-law is at the other extreme. No one had talked about going North to freedom before the brother-in-law arrived, but it doesn't take long for him to be in charge and running away, even with the risks it entails of death or mutilation if caught, looks a lot better than staying.

The novel is loosely set between the early 1850s and the late 1860s in southern Ohio on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Mr. Garner had allowed Halle to rent himself out to buy his mother's freedom; she moved across the river and leased a house from an abolitionist family. That house is where Sethe and her children live after they've escaped from Kentucky, and it's where Sethe is living when Paul D finds her after he's spent 18 years moving around the country, sometimes willingly and sometimes not. For a few years after Baby Suggs moved in the house was seen as being a happy house where everyone was welcome. After Sethe kills her toddler daughter to prevent her from being taken back into Kentucky, though, the atmosphere changes.

I have seen Beloved described as a ghost story. It is, and it isn't. It is, however, a really nice example of magical realism. What's real? What isn't? Can anyone's memories be trusted? Is the spirit of a dead toddler truly haunting the house where she died or have Baby and Sethe convinced themselves that she must be?  The narrative shifts back and forth, from one person's perspective to another's, from the present to the past and back again. Some sections have an ethereal quality as though the person is remembering or living a dream; others are clear descriptions. Is the mysterious young woman who shows up near their house really the living embodiment of the dead toddler or is she someone or something else? Is she a revenant, a wandering spirit, or simply a real woman on whom other people are projecting their hopes and fears? The author leaves that possibility open with a passing reference to a colored woman who had been kept locked up, isolated, in a cabin by some man for most of her life. That woman had disappeared about the same time Sethe found the stranger.

Morrison does a nice job of describing the horrors of slavery, the physical abuse, while also touching on the psychological. If you were a slave you didn't even have the dignity of keeping the name your mother may have given you -- at one point Baby Suggs wonders why Mrs. Garner always calls her "Judy." Turns out that was what was on the bill of sale. On paper her name had become Judy Whitlow, Whitlow being the person who sold her. Four of the field hands are all named Paul, which is why Paul D is Paul D. The D is to differentiate him from the other three.

So where does Beloved rank on the usual scale? Somewhere between a 9 and a 10. This book actually deserved the awards it received. The prose is lyrical, the fabulism mixed with just enough grounded in reality details to keep you wondering what's real and what's imagined, the ghost may or may not exist. This is a book I'd recommend to anyone who wanted to read some good writing. It's another one where the subject matter is grim, but the reading never feels forced.

Small spoiler: despite the grimness, it does end on a slightly upbeat note. Not a classic happy ending, but also not totally depressing.

Next up on the list: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler. Once again, it's going to be an Interlibrary Loan request.

Pulitzer Project: A Summons to Memphis

The Pulitzer Project continues to lurch from one extreme to the other, from work that is so horrible to read you wonder about the sanity of the judges to prose that sings, from books fat enough to double as doorsteps or ballast in a freighter to books so thin they barely qualify as books and not pamphlets. 1986 had Lonesome Dove, a tome so thick and heavy it was physically hard to read in bed. 1987 has A Summons To Memphis, a piece of lightweight fluff that feels so thin you kind of expect it to just float away.

A Summons to Memphis seems to fall into a familiar category among the Pulitzers, the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Author Peter Taylor was an acclaimed author with numerous short stories to his credit. According to the cover blurb, however, A Summons to Memphis was his first novel in 35 years.

I must say the book is readable. Taylor could write. The prose flows. You keep reading despite the fact the narrative feels a lot like a Seinfeld episode -- a story about nothing -- and then you realize it's actually a subtle paean to the joys of being passive aggressive. This could be one reason it earned a Pulitzer. On a surface level, reading it from a purely superficial perspective, it feels almost whimsical. The narrator, a middle-aged man who has been collecting old and rare books since his college days, works as an editor for a publishing house in New York. The story is told entirely from his perspective: his recollections of his family's trials and tribulations, his observations of spinster sisters' odd behavior, his reluctance to spend much time around his parents and sisters since he left Memphis decades earlier. The book starts off light, returns sporadically to being very light, but an undertone of bitterness slowly creeps in.

The summons to Memphis he receives when the book begins is from his sisters. Their father, a retired wealthy attorney and relatively recent widower, has moved on to a fairly predictable stage. An octogenarian, their father had first allowed himself to be cossetted by the numerous widows in his age group. After a few months of going for tea, the old fellow moved on to frequenting nightclubs and apparently flirting with much, much younger women. He's now progressed to socializing with just one woman, a middle-aged matron he has actually proposed to. She's a respectable person not dramatically younger than him but still youthful enough for the sisters to recognize that the old man is a lot more likely to take a dirt nap before his intended bride than the bride is to predecease him. The assumption is that if he dies first, the widow gets everything. No surprise. The sisters want to prevent the wedding. The narrator recalls the classic Memphis fate of elderly widowers hoping to remarry: shuffled off to an old folks' home or moved to a family property so far out in the boonies they might as well be on a different planet. He wonders just what his sisters' plan for their father is.

And this is where the passive-aggressive behavior creeps in. The narrator's family turns out to be  good at saying they're doing something nice while actually making people's lives miserable. No one ever engages in direct communications, with the possible exception of the father. His personality is forceful enough that none of the children ever directly contradict or defy him, but it turns out they're really good at payback when they've got 30+ years of resentment built up.

Nothing dramatic happens, there is no grand denouement that ties everything up in a neat bundle. The book ends as quietly as it began with the narrator back in his New York apartment. Will he ever go to Memphis again? Probably not.

How would I rate this book on the usual 1 to 10 scale? It's in the middle of the pack. The writing is good, but the style was a little odd. I'd give it a 7. Maybe. Maybe only a 6. It's one of those damn with faint praise tomes. You know, "I've read worse." Would I recommend it to other readers? Only if they're as OCD as I am about reading (or at least attempting to read) all the Pulitzer Price fiction winners.

Next up on the list: Beloved by Toni Morrison. The L'Anse library actually has a copy on the shelves. Granted, it is the large print edition but at least it's there. No Interlibrary Loan for a change. And, given that this is another novel that gets described as "seminal," I'm hoping it turns out to be readable. Usually seminal is another way of saying "No one has read this book."

Pulitzer Project: Lonesome Dove

How can a book that's so huge (800+ pages), reasonably well-written, and packed with action and Western cliches (cattle drives, cattle thieves, bad guys in general, love triangles, hooker with a heart of gold) be so boring? Lonesome Dove was a hard slog for me. Individual paragraphs were gems, but it really felt like the book overall went on and on and on and on without much of anything seeming to happen. It is not a good sign when I'm reading a book and keep falling asleep before I get through more than a couple pages.

Lonesome Dove was a best seller when it was published in 1985. It didn't take long for it to be optioned and turned into a hugely popular mini series on television.  According to Wikipedia (not always the most reliable source, but what the heck, I'll believe them this time) Lonesome Dove first saw life as a screenplay developed by McMurtry and director Peter Bogdanovich (they also collaborated on the film The Last Picture Show) in the 1970's. At the time, McMurtry saw Lonesome Dove as a John Wayne film. Wayne wasn't interested, time passed, McMurtry turned the screenplay into a massive novel, and a decade later it aired as a mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones.

In any case, I am totally mystified as to why Lonesome Dove turned out to be a snorer. McMurtry can write, there were individual paragraphs and pages that were great, but it was also one of the most soporific books I have ever read. Better than Valium. I'd pick it up, start reading, and pretty quickly I'd be falling asleep with the book in my hand. Really strange.

So where would I place it on the usual zero to 10 scale? Somewhere in the middle of the pack, I guess. The writing is good, the storyline reasonably interesting. Would I recommend it to other readers? I don't know. Something that served as a great sleeping aid for me could be gripping and dramatic for someone else. I do know that if anyone decides to read the book they need to block out a fair amount of time. The sucker is fat enough to serve either as a doorstop or a footrest.

Next up on the list: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor. Once again, it's a book I've never heard of despite it being published in 1986, a mere 33 years ago. Never heard of the author either. This could be a very good thing -- some of the best Pulitzer winners I've read were by authors who were apparently one hit wonders. Or maybe not. In any case, unless I stumble across a cheap copy at Goodwill it's not getting read until Fall. It is now late enough in the school year that Interlibrary Loan is not an option.

Pulitzer Project: Foreign Affairs

Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985. It doesn't quite live up to some of the cover hype -- it is not wildly comedic -- but it is gently amusing. One biography of Lurie described her writing as "social satire," which is probably accurate. It's also probably the reason I wouldn't describe the book as comedic. Comedic novels are laugh out loud funny. Foreign Affairs elicit some smiles, but you don't have to worry about spraying coffee across the room.

The novel as a whole is satirical with its jabs at English upper class society, academic culture, and tourism, but it doesn't feel quite right on the level of individual characters. Satire involves making fun of people, laughing at them, and Lurie's characters are too sympathetic. It's hard to laugh at people you like. If anything, you find yourself wincing in sympathy as young Fred Turner misreads English social cues in his romantic pursuit of an actress, and you hope nothing horrible happens to Vinnie Miner when she's doing research in a questionable neighborhood.

The plot of Foreign Affairs follows two American university professors who are both in London for six months for research purposes. Virginia ("Vinnie") Miner is tenured faculty, a full professor in the English Department at a New England university. Her area of expertise is children's literature; her personal focus is traditional rhymes and their origins in historic events. A petite, quiet person, she's in her 50's and fits the classic image of a spinster English professor. Fred Turner, in contrast, is young. His academic career is just beginning; he's still at the stage of having to worry about tenure and the need to publish or perish. He's in London to work on a book about John Gay, the 18th century author of "The Beggar's Opera."

Turner and Miner teach at the same school but scarcely know each other other. Miner's opinion of Turner is probably higher than his is of her. Miner knows that Turner is regarded favorably in the department, but of course will never tell him that. Young assistant professors are supposed to stress about tenure. Turner, on the other hand, tends to be a bit dismissive of Miner. She's part of the old guard, the dinosaurs in the department. Neither had anticipated seeing the other in England, but as it turns out, their paths do cross occasionally. They're both using resources at the British Museum, and they also see each other at parties hosted by mutual friends.

As a divorcee whose marriage ended in bitter disappointment, Miner has no illusions about romance. She is resigned to being alone. She is not looking for a lover when she arrives in London, although she admits to enjoying sex so would not object to a brief liaison with a fellow scholar. She does find love, but in a most unexpected place.

Turner is married but quarreled nastily with his wife just before leaving on his sabbatical. He is sure he will be divorced soon, the marriage is irreparably damaged. He spends his first few weeks in London sulking, sunk into a morose mood, and neglecting his research. Then he meets an English actress, a classic English beauty who is also a member of the aristocracy, and he's instantly smitten. He pursues the actress and succeeds, although he never does realize that the two of them are speaking different languages.

Both affairs end, Miner's through a cruel twist of fate and Turner's when he tells the actress he has to go back to the States because he's obligated to teach summer classes. Her ensuing melt-down makes Turner recognize that he never really knew her. When was she acting and when was the relationship real? He doesn't know. He'll never know, but suddenly his estranged wife is looking really sane and remarkably attractive.

As usual, after I finished the book I did some Googling. I kept thinking it read a lot like a Hugh Grant film. I can see where as a film there could be some obvious humor, even slapstick, that the book lacks. It was a made-for-television movie in 1993 starring Joanne Woodward and Brian Dennehy as (I assume) Vinnie Miner and her improbable love interest. I probably won't go looking for it. I liked the book but not so much that I want to see a film treatment, too.

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Yes. Lurie can write. It's was also nice to read a book that was essentially fluff. No serious issues, no inside glimpses of the life of a down--and-out alcoholic (Ironweed) or the mental weirdness of a skeezy middle-aged car salesmen's dick (Rabbit is Rich). On my usual scale with 10 being the best, I'd stick Foreign Affairs over on the high side. It's not quite a 10, maybe not even a 9, but for sure an 8+.

Next up: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I was surprised I had to do this as an Interlibrary Loan request. It was so popular when it came out I was sure the L'Anse library would have it. Nope. The librarian was surprised too. We speculated that one of two things happened: The copy they had wore out and wasn't replaced or, more likely, someone checked it out and kept it. (We have Lonesome Dove on VHS, but I guess it would be cheating to go see if the tv with the built-in tape player still works.)

Pulitzer Project: Ironweed

William Kennedy's Ironweed was a pleasant surprise. Not only did the L'Anse Public Library actually have it on the shelves (no Interlibrary Loan delays), the book turned out to be readable. Definitely a bit strange, but readable.

Ironweed is set in Albany in the late 1930's. It describes a few days in the life of Francis Phelan, a self-described bum. Phelan walked away from his wife and family in 1916 when his infant son died. Phelan blames himself for the child's accidental death and so runs away from everyone and everything he knew and crawls into a muscatel bottle.

Phelan bums around the country, works odd jobs here and there, and eventually ends up back in his hometown of Albany, New York. At times he's hanging out with two friends, and at times he's on his own. Sort of. He keeps seeing ghosts, people he knew years ago and that are now long dead. Some of the ghosts are people he just knew, hung out with in hobo jungles or met while riding the rails, but several are people whose death he caused, almost all unintentionally: a fellow he tangled with in Chicago who cracked his skull when Phelan threw him and he fell back against a concrete bridge pillar, for example.

The book flows smoothly despite the frequent flashbacks to different episodes in Phelan's life and his conversations with people who aren't really there. It's one of those books where you find yourself wondering exactly why you're reading it -- after all, it's the life of a bum at the tail end of the Great Depression, a dude who's definitely leading a fairly grim life -- but the writing sucks you right in. This book for sure falls on the upper end of the scale in terms of readability.

When I did a Google image search to find a cover photo, I noticed it was made into a film back in the '80's. The book won the Pulitzer for 1984; the movie was released in 1987 so Kennedy's agent must have done a good job of peddling the screenplay. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred in the film. When I saw that my first reaction was "Why?!" The book is pretty damn grim, although Kennedy's writing is so good the plot doesn't repel you. However, I cannot imagine sitting in a theater for two hours to watch a movie about a drunken bum and his cronies lurching around from dive to dive and speculating about where they can find an abandoned building that would be safe to sleep in for a night. This is one movie that I will not look for online despite the superstar casting.

That said, I do recommend the book to anyone who appreciates good writing.

Next up: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie. I know Lurie can write; now the only question is whether or not it's going to be another Interlibrary Loan request. The L'Anse library really does devote way too much shelf space to Danielle Steele.

Pulitzer Project: A Twofer, Rabbit is Rich and The Color Purple

I figured I might as well lump these two together because I couldn't make it through either one.

Technically John Updike's Rabbit is Rich is more readable than Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Updike could string words together in a way that didn't insult the reader. It's too bad the actual storyline was so repellent.

Rabbit is Rich is part of a series of novels Updike penned about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. In this novel, Harry has hit the dangerous mid-life crisis years -- he's described as having been born in 1933, and it's the Carter administration in the novel so he's got to be somewhere not far past 45 or 46. And he is so skeezy it makes a reader's head spin, the classic misogynistic sexist pig in a polyester suit. A young couple comes in to the Toyota dealership Angstrom owns and Angstrom is more focused on plotting how to get close to the girl (who's probably close to 30 years younger than he is) than he is on actually selling them a car. His college age son brings a young woman friend home and Angstrom is immediately thinking he'd keep her happier in bed than his kid can. He and his wife go to the country club for an afternoon and Angstrom is ogling every woman in the pool and visualizing what they might be like in the sack. Everyone knows that men tend to think about sex a lot more than women usually do, but most writers don't manage to make that obsession seem quite so sleazy and off-putting. Is there a word to describe the opposite of erotica? Smut that turns you off instead of on? If not, there should be.

Maybe if Updike had stuck to Angstrom's fantasies it wouldn't have been so bad, but it did not help at all that Updike managed to write an explicit sex scene -- Angstrom and spouse in bed -- that on the "ewww really gross scale" probably scored an 11. A younger reader could read that sex scene and think, "omigod, if that's what sex is like when you're pushing 50 celibacy is looking good."

It was actually a little bizarre just how badly dated this book is. Were the late 1970s really that horrible? The only thing missing (at least in the section I got through) was members of the Rotary swapping motel room keys. Didn't Updike see "Oh Calcutta"? Anyway, between the racist language and the protagonist's fixation on assessing all the women he sees (except possibly his elderly mother-in-law) in terms of their fuckability a reader finds herself hoping the book really isn't too heavily biographical. I'd hate to think that Updike himself was as much of a pig as his protagonist/ I do know that Updike modeled his mythical town in his novels on his home town in Pennsylvania so maybe he was, but it is a tad depressing to be reminded of just how disgusting middle class middle-aged men can be.

In any case, I gave up about a third of the way into the book. When you start hoping that the "hero" is going to drop dead of a cardiac event on the next page and you've barely hit page 100 in a 400+ page book you know it's time to cut your losses and move on.

Unfortunately, the move on was to The Color Purple. This is ticks all the boxes on my list of things I hate: epistolary writing, overuse of dialect, murky character development. Once again I found myself wondering just why on earth the prize committee felt the need to award the prize to this particular book. It also really had me wondering just why Oprah Winfrey thought the book was so great.

Granted, Oprah was sexually abused by a trusted family when she was young, and The Color Purple starts off with the narrator telling us she's been raped repeatedly by her father, but. . .  the book sucks. It really, truly sucks. The plotline might have made a good screen play (and I'm assuming it did, although I've never seen the movie) but the book reads like something an undergraduate would churn out in a creative writing course. It's clunky, it's riddled with contradictions (the narrator is supposedly the smart kid in the family but she doesn't know how to spell? And she writes her letters in dialect? I might have a Yooper accent, but when I write a letter I'm going to say "them," not "dem" and when I describe going someplace it'll be "We went to Green Bay" not "We go Green Bay."), and it makes it seem like the protagonist exists in a vacuum. There is zero context. Nada. Zip.

Still, I think I got as far as page 50. Then I decided life is too short to waste on bad books.

As for the hype around it, there are two ways to sell books. One is to have a book that is just really, really good, something that grabs the reader and sales take off based on word of mouth. The other is through publicity about how wonderful the book is, how it's this masterpiece by (dramatic pause) an African American woman, and people start thinking they have to buy it. And then if you say, wow, this really sucks, it's like you're wrong, it can't suck, all the critics love it, eventually you just stop saying this book is awful, quietly set it aside, and let it gather dust on the bookcase. I have a strong hunch The Color Purple has slid into the same category as books like Ulysses and Their Eyes Were Watching God. People will claim they've read it, loved it, and will never admit they gave up on The Color Purple right about the time the protagonist's father gives her to a local widower, a dude who's willing to take her as a replacement wife/housekeeper as long as her father tosses in a cow with her to seal the deal.

I totally fail to see why this book got hailed as this amazing piece of African American fiction because it spends most of the book perpetuating every racist stereotype every cracker has ever held about blacks: the men are brutish animals who abuse their women and children, their women aren't particularly smart (after all, they put up with the brutish men), and they're all okay with living in squalor.

For what it's worth, I am perfectly willing to read some remarkably grim material if it's reasonably well written. After all, I read The Road cover to cover, roasted baby on a spit and all.

Recommendations? Skip both of these turkeys. On the usual sliding scale, they're both in the basement.

Up next:  Ironweed by William Kennedy. I know nothing about the book, nothing about the author, so maybe this is a good sign. Maybe I'll actually be able to read it.

Pulitzer Project: A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces is an odd book. The author died nine years before it was published. His mother found the manuscript after John Kennedy Toole committed suicide and then devoted her life to making sure it found its way into print. The novel's rejection by multiple publishers was apparently one of the things that drove Toole to kill himself, which I'll confess strikes me as an odd reason to voluntarily check out. Authors get rejected all the time.

The novel's initial rejection doesn't surprise me. The novel is set in New Orleans in what seems to be the early 1960's. The various reviews and cover blurbs I've read all use phrases like "comic" and "rollicking masterpiece." I guess once it was actually in print no one wanted to use more accurate terms, like "weird" or "inchoate." This is another novel that reads more like a preliminary draft, maybe pass two or three the planned novel, but still a work in progress that's begging for a good copy editor. The various pieces are reasonably well written, there are flashes of whatever the equivalent of slapstick on paper might be, but it's uneven. The reader goes from being intrigued and amused to repelled and back again to amusement with fair amounts of befuddlement interspersed. There is a narrative thread, but it has some definite knots in it.

A Confederacy of Dunces follows the misadventures of a creature that is now familiar to us all, the man-child who refuses to grow up and apparently intends to sponge off an aging parent forever. The hero, such as he is, is one Ignatius Reilly, a character best described as a fat neurotic slob. Reilly is apparently really, really smart in one narrow area of expertise and a complete screw-up when it comes to life in general. H survived college, apparently even managed to acquire a Master's in something (history?), and then blew it when he had a chance to land a teaching job in Baton Rouge. He had a panic attack on the Greyhound, decided he could not survive outside New Orleans, and has spent several years doing the equivalent of living in a basement and eating Cheetos. He cultivates the air of an eccentric genius, but is absolutely lost when it comes to living in the real world. He also comes across as thoroughly physically repellent (morbidly obese, wears funny clothes, totally self-centered) so the fact he has an actual girlfriend, a bohemian New Yorker with money, seems more than a tad unbelievable.

But then, so is everything else in this novel, which is one of the reasons it qualifies as "rollicking" and "comic" instead of just odd. There's a police officer who keeps getting sent out dressed in very strange costumes so he can work undercover. A clothing factory that manages to keep muddling along despite the fact none of the employees seem to have a clue as to what they're doing or why. A bar owner who's making most of her money by selling pornographic photographs to high school students. Ignatius's alcoholic mother, who against all odds manages to snag a fiance.

In short, this is a novel that today might be described as "magical realism." Back when it was published I'm not sure what they called it, although the publishers managed to round up a slew of well-known authors and scholars to praise it. I will say that Toole manages to capture the seedy, slightly tawdry atmosphere one associates with New Orleans, especially the New Orleans of 60 years ago, really well. New Orleans always strikes me as being a city that has seen better days even when it was what qualified as "better days." It never was a shining city on a hill -- it's also one of those rare places where having seen it one time I have no desire to ever go there again. But I digress.

Where would I rank this book in the overall scheme of things for Pulitzer winners? I'm not sure. It might be unquantifiable. No number for it because in some ways it's up on the high end and in others it's down on the low side of the scale. You know, interesting lyrics but you can't dance. Would I recommend it to other readers? Again, I'm not sure. If you're the type of reader who likes a nice clean narrative and having everything make sense as you go along, this is not the book for you. Do you like a little eccentricity tossed in? Then maybe you'll like A Confederacy of Dunces. It's not a particularly easy read, but it's also not hard, just a tad choppy. I've read worse.

Next up on the list: Rabbit is Rich by John Updike. I probably won't get to it until sometime in the Fall when Interlibrary Loan resumes with the new school year. The L'Anse Public Library has several of Updike's novels, including one in the Rabbit series, but not the one I need.