Southern Bookman

New York Times critics present their best books of year

Serving their annual feast of critic-ese, The New York Times' daily book reviewers on Friday presented their best books of the year.

The lists of Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai came from the books each of them had reviewed during 2019. I mourned the absence of the astute Janet Maslin, and as a connoisseur of overwrought Times prose missed Michiko Kakutani's pronouncements.

Garner, who must have never heard the rule against overusing adjectives, admirably fills in for the divine Michiko. He called Sarah M. Bloom's "The Yellow House," a staple on best books selections this year, "forceful, rolling and many-chambered." Maybe Garner was thinking about Emily Dickinson's alabaster chambers.

The characters of Kevin Barry's "Night Boat to Tangier" are described as "existentialist and twinkling thugs." Stars may twinkle, but not former drug runners, and John-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus would agree that existentialist is this year's most overused adjective.

Garner does perform a public service by mentioning Albert Woodfox's "Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades of Solitary Confinement: My Story of Transformation and Hope." Woodfox, who spent years in solitary confinement at Louisiana's Angola Prison for a crime he didn't commit, tells how he decided to "take my pain and turn it into compassion, not hate."

Sehgal shows her wit in recommending "Ducks: Newburyport," by Lucy Ellman. The novel is told in one 436,000-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages. Sehgal says the stunt "seems designed to thwart the timid or lazy reader but shouldn't. Timid, lazy readers to the front!" Sorry, Parul, Proust and Faulkner's sentences were long enough for me.

The untimid scribe deserves praise for discovering books not found on many other end of the year lists.

Szalai's choices favor history, politics and memoirs, with no novels. Among her selections, I was intrigued by poet Carolyn Forche's "What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance," which tells about Forche's trip to El Salvador between 1978 and 1980, when the country was near Civil War. I read Forche's poems about meeting cold-blooded dictators and oppressed peasants, and would like to get her prose perspective after many years.

Another Szalai selection that sounds compelling is Patrick Redden Keefe's "Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland," which tells about a mother's kidnapping during the Time of Troubles.

One plus from the critics' summaries: With Michiko gone, they retired her favorite adjective, "indelible."

And the existential threat to books appears overblown.

 

 

Elizabeth Hardiwck's anguished letters to Robert Lowell unveiled again

Robert Lowell's closest friends castigated him for using his estranged wife Elizabeth Hardwick's anguished letters to him in his Pulitzer-Prize winning collection "The Dolphin."

Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell's poetry soulmate, told him "art just isn't worth that much."

Now, the letters between the heart-broken Hardwick and Lowell after he left her for the British writer Lady Caroline Blackwood will be published Dec. 10 in "The Dolphin Letters 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle."

Saskia Hamilton, who earlier edited collections of Lowell's letters and his correspondence with Bishop, is the editor of the new book. New York Times critic Parul Sehgal in a review Wednesday said the new collection revives arguments about the use of private material in works of art.

Hardwick, who saw Lowell through many mental breakdowns and infatuations with young women during their marriage, has received renewed appreciation recently for her novels and critical essays. She considered Lowell a more important writer than herself, according to an abject letter quoted by Sehgal. After the republication of Hardwick's books, she's seen as just as major as Lowell, if not more so.

Lowell, whose reputation as a poet fell after his death in 1977, has been the subject of several recent books analyzing his bipolar illness and love affairs. His poetry has also received fresh acclaim following the publication of his collected poems, edited by the poet Frank Bidart, who knew Lowell and Bishop.

Along with the Dolphin letters, Hamilton has edited a new edition of "The Dolphin," which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize despite the controversy over Lowell violating Hardwick's privacy.

After marrying Blackwood and having a child with her, Lowell decided to return to Hardwick. Lowell died in 1977 in a New York City cab on his way to Hardwick's apartment. When the heart attack felled him, he was clutching a portrait of Blackwood painted by her former husband, Lucian Freud.

The "Dolphin Letters" raises the question of whether Hardwick's private anguish is again being exploited.

Excerpts reprinted in Sehgal's review put Hardwick in a bad light, revealing her as devastated by Lowell's abandonment. The scandal has been aired in numerous biographies, Hamilton's previous collections and Lowell's poems. Will republishing Hardwick and Lowell's letters add anything new?

 

 

"Tiny Love: The Complete Stories of Larry Brown" promises new readership for late Mississippi writer

Larry Brown enjoyed a brief burst of fame from his novels and stories about hard-drinking and hard-loving working people in small-town Mississippi .

A former firefighter in William Faulkner's home of Oxford, Miss., Brown persevered as a writer despite years of rejection. Like Raymond Carver and fellow Oxford literary star Barry Hannah, Brown examined men who turned to alcohol, illicit sex and macho posturing to ease the pain of their desperate, low-wage lives.

Brown died of a heart attack at age 53 in 2004, after gaining renown for his stories of violence, despair and sudden gestures of love. While he drew criticism for gratuitous brutality, he was one of those "writer's writers" with a gift for precise descriptions.

His almost forgotten work is primed for revival with the recent publication of "Tiny Love: The Complete Stories of Larry Brown" by Algonquin Books, his longtime publisher. Writer Jonathan Miles, for whom Brown was a mentor, in an introduction to the collection recalls Brown's long and grueling struggle for publication. The Literary Hub published an excerpt from Miles' piece.

I remember liking Brown's stories when they first appeared in the 1990s, although I can't remember any of them. I recall thinking they were like literary fast-food, their payoff too easy. The language was amusing and colorful, like overheard conversations in a small-town diner or bar.

"Tiny  Love" offers the chance to get reacquainted with Brown's work. A self-taught writer who took one course with Ellen Douglas, Brown achieved literary prominence through heroic perseverance. His stories deserve a renewed readership.

 

 

Farewell, John Simon

For a little while in my younger days, I fell under John Simon's curmudgeonly spell.

The brutal critic's claims to the precise use of English appealed to my language-purist side. For a while, I reveled in his acerbic theater, movie and book reviews in New York magazine and other publications.

Simon, who took a sick pleasure in blasting intellectually fashionable plays, films and books, died at age 94 Monday after suffering a stroke.

After a while, I found that Simon's attacks came more from personal spite than critical acumen. He unfairly disparaged gay, black and women artists. While he claimed total honesty, he violated the critic's duty to respect the theater.

Simon contributed to my intellectual and artistic education. But like the late Hilton Kramer, he was an intellectually dishonest bully who unfairly damaged theatrical, film and literary careers.

 

Memories of Lisboa and Porto

Young male clerk wearing John Lennon glasses
at Livaria Bertrand, world's oldest bookstore,
stamps my books: Virginie Despentes and Pessoa.

"How did you get here so fast," I ask him
when he's already at the door,
without glasses, as I leave.
"I'm like that," he answers,
his smile like the sun on the Tagus.

Guitarist and trumpet player on the sidewalk.
playing Amy Winehouse songs.
Joyful music by young men in suits;
an old schizo joins their dance.

Smiles of women with dark hair,
the embrace of the female doctor
in her lab coat,
who takes my pulse
and assures me
my heartbeat is OK.

Small children in their school uniforms
at Sanhora do Rosario.
Community center for kids who grow up
wild on Porto's streets.
The director with his stutter
speaks of holiday barbecues,
afternoons playing football
with the young men.

At the nursing home, an old woman
wails in the corner as the elderly priest
awakens in a dusty glow
floating through the windows.
Doors flung open reveal
Christ on his cross, his downcast eyes.

How beautiful their Portuguese voices
searching for English words.
The man with legs bent backwards
begging on the Avenida de Liberdade,
men selling chestnuts on the street,
smoke rising in the light
reflected from the slippery sidewalks
made of yellow tile.

The happiness of old and middle aged men
gathered for lunch, hugs and kisses
cheek to cheek. The rain, changing to sun,
changing to rain, changing to sun,
the rivers, rushing to the Atlantic.

The suave guide John,
handsome as a rock star,
leads us to the castle,
tells how Ulysses founded Lisboa,
Tall pine trees, shaped like arrows,
cork held between our fingers.

Stylish young woman
guides us through
the immigration center.
Solemn faces of refugees
as they wait
in the enormous room.

Walking in the darkness
from the hotel to the airport,
5 a.m. departure.
Old oak trees, broken sidewalk.

As we sit on the bus,
to take us to the plane,
a song fills the space:
"I see fire burning the trees."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Millennials' jibe "OK Boomer" shows nothing new under the sun

Bob Dylan told baby boomers not to trust anyone over 30.

Now, the millennials, who comprise several generations, snarl "OK, Boomer" to us aging postwar babies.

The generational putdown, an Internet sensation, has received rebuttals from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page.

Generations X, Y and Z - what will new generations be called now that the letters have run out? - blame us boomers for climate change, declining economic prospects, Donald Trump and the Eagles. They probably think Dylan can't sing.

Dylan and other Baby Boom heroes were not even Baby Boomers. Dylan, born in 1941, and John Lennon, in 1940, were of the "Silent Generation," which came after the "Greatest Generation," and before the post-war baby explosion. With all of their music and social protest, those rockers weren't very silent.

Once we sang "The Times They Are a Changin'." Now, the younger generation wants us gone. As college football old-timer Lee Corso would say, "hey, not so fast."

In the pre-industrial age, people lived pretty much the same year after year. The generations' experience stayed the same, and people died young. Retroactively, historians branded ages like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Voltaire didn't think of themselves as members of defined generations.

Generational conflict goes back to ancient times. Ecclesiastes, in the passage from which Ernest Hemingway found the name for his novel "The Sun Also Rises," warned that "one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever."

Britain in the 19th century began identifying historical periods with the reigns of monarchs: the Victorian Age, the Georgian Age. Literary critics retroactively called Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron and Charles Lamb the Romantics. Romanticism was also a European movement, including Beethoven and Goethe.

During the 20th century, enormous changes from decade to decade led to the rise of  distinct generations. Those of the Depression Era had different outlooks from those born in the 1950s. Music, fashion, art, culture, and social mores shifted.

The designation of generations emerged after World War I, when Gertrude Stein told Hemingway that he and  his contemporaries were members of a "Lost Generation." Then came the postwar flowering of writers like John Updike, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell and Gore Vidal. New waves of writers, musicians and film stars followed. From Chuck Berry to Katy Perry, the world kept turning.

The Baby Boomers reached a new level of self-consciousness, or bloated self-importance. Talking about my generation, we did bang the drum and blow the horn quite loudly.

Now, the millennials look at us as old duffers.

But remember, kids, a new crop of babies is being born, who will look at you as hopeless.

 

 

 

 

New York Review of Books Daily boosts literature on Internet

The New York Review of Books, outside of its semi-monthly print and online magazine, offers an excellent article each day on its Web site.

Ranging from politics and social commentary to views on literature, art and culture, the NYR Daily articles give a more personal perspective than the magazine's book reviews. From autobiographical essays to trenchant reflections on current issues, the pieces in tandem are like a separate digital journal, a small but welcome effort to raise the Internet's literary standards.

Recently, the NYR Daily has published former New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg's thoughts on the Victorian critic and artist John Ruskin, Garry Wills' account of his growing dismay during his academic career at how qualified women were denied professorships, and Daphne Merkin's recollections of New York's literary life.

Klinkenborg looks back on his  deep involvement with Ruskin's life and work, prompted by the current exhibit, "Onto This Last: 200 Years of John Ruskin," at the Yale Center for British Art.

As a young staff member at New York City's Morgan Library, Klinkenborg fell under the spell of Ruskin's landmark books "Modern Painters," "The Stones of Venice" and "The Seven Lamps of Architecture." An early environmentalist and a pioneer of aesthetics, Ruskin was also a reactionary who opposed Darwin and a misogynist disgusted by women's bodies. Klinkenborg ponders how Ruskin's dualities echo in our times.

Wills in his autobiographical piece "How I Learned to Fight the Patriarchy"  recalls with anger and regret how American universities discriminated against women with outstanding scholarly credentials. He recalls resigning from a leadership position because male members of his department refused to even interview a distinguished female scholar. Male professors opposed to women were often the most mediocre in their fields, Wills recalls. His personal growth into a champion of women's equality is a story worth emulating.

Merkin in eulogizing her late friends James Atlas and Barbara Probst Solomon looks back on the vanished world of New York intellectuals. The article's centerpiece is her memories of a party given by Diana Trilling, at which she encountered Philip Roth, George Plimpton and other literary figures, many now forgotten.

She praises Atlas, the first biographer of Saul Bellow, for breaking the bonds of literary politics. Championing Solomon's forgotten novels, she calls for a revival of her work.

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Ernest Gaines

Many writers look back from exile at their origins. Ernest Gaines was different. To tell the stories of the illiterate, impoverished black people he knew growing up in rural Pointe Coupee Parish, he had to return to his native Louisiana.

Gaines, who gained international recognition for his books about his small plot of earth, died in his sleep Tuesday at his childhood home. The revered Louisiana author was 86.

As a child,  he worked in the fields among people a few generations removed from slavery. From his meager schooling, he'd learned to read and write, and composed letters for his co-workers and family members.

Along with many other blacks fleeing the South's racial violence, he moved to California as a young man. For the first time, he found himself free to read in a public library, and discovered Turgenev and other 19th century Russian novelists.

Loving the bohemian life of San Francisco, he graduated from San Francisco State, then received a prestigious Stegner fellowship to study writing at Stanford. The voices he knew in childhood remained with him.

Struggling in California to finish a book based on the strict, wheelchair-confined aunt who raised him, Gaines returned to Louisiana at the height of the civil rights movement. Back in Louisiana, he gained a clear vision of the plantation life he knew growing up and quickly finished "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," his breakthrough novel.

Tracing how history echoed in a life of quiet dignity, the book gave the world one of its most enduring characters, a woman raised in slavery who lived to 101 and saw the changes of the 1960s. Cecily Tyson gave a memorable performance as Miss Jane Pittman in a TV movie that won nine Emmy Awards.

Gaines further drew upon his memories of the black community in "A Gathering of Old Men," "A Lesson Before Dying" and other lauded books. He received a MacArthur "genius grant," and traveled the world. He always returned to his childhood home close to a body of water known as False River that had once been part of the Mississippi.

A genial, warm-hearted man who spoke with Louisiana's French-inflected cadences, Gaines revealed how the love of family and community overcame bitterness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fall book selections: Vivid personalities, virtuoso writing

I've always liked those "Autumn Books," "Spring Books," "Summer Reading" and "Holiday Books" wrap-ups that literary-minded journals do.

Looking toward the holidays, gasp!, here are a few books I've liked recently, and some on my reading list.

Books I've Read

"Ragin' Cajun: Memoir of a Louisiana Man." Doug Kershaw and Cathie Pelletier (Mercer University Press): The flamboyant Louisiana fiddler, singer and writer of the classic song "Louisiana Man" tells a hair-raising tale of his boyhood on a remote Louisiana river and rise to fame. Kershaw's encounters with Nashville stars and the Music City's drug culture make "Ragin' Cajun" a perfect companion to Ken Burns' "Country Music" PBS series. Kershaw takes a deeper, and more honest, look. He and Pelletier give an unflinching and compelling narrative of redemption: How he overcame drug addiction and found enduring love. Here is a link to my Southern Bookman review.

"A Good American Family: the Red Scare and My Father." David Maraniss. (Simon and Schuster): The  Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente and noted author of books on American politics and history turns his attention to his own family. Maraniss' father, Elliott, for several years was a fervid member of the Community Party, as was his mother, Mary. Elliott was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during the 1950s "Red Scare" and immediately lost his newspaper job. For years, he had difficulty finding work until establishing a career at the Madison, Wisc., Capital Times. Maraniss in his account of his family's ordeal takes a broader look at the era's fraught politics and some of its villains and heroes.

"I Used to Be Charming." Eve Babitz. (New York Review Books):  Babitz's writing flows like a virtuoso jazz improvisation in the best pieces in this journalism collection. The book gives a vivid picture of Los Angeles, New York and cultural battles in the 1960s. She is one of those rare writers whose sentences I must read out loud.

On My List

"Sontag: Her Life and Work." Benjamin Moser.  (Harper Collins): The avant garde critic and novelist Susan Sontag led a combative, adventuresome life. Reviews of Moser's biography agree that he captures her wildness and critical acumen.

"Janis: Her Life and Music." Holly George-Warren. (Simon and Schuster): Janis Joplin, the Susan Sontag of rock and roll, fled a bleak east Texas childhood and achieved stardom in San Francisco. She remained a lost child, joining the club of counterculture drug martyrs. That voice will live forever. Her raw and tender rendition of Kris Kristofferson's line "Busted flat in Baton Rouge" evokes my hometown for me. George-Warren shows how Janis' pain drove her music, as New York Times critic Dwight Garner recently noted.

"Never So Lovely a Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren." Colin Asher. (W.W. Norton and Co.): Best-known for "The Man With the Golden Arm," Algren was the poet of Chicago's underclass. Asher's life reveals a writer whose work is worth rediscovery, reviewers found.

"Vernon Subutex 1. Virginie Despentes. Translated by Frank Wynne. (MacLehose):  Despentes' novel sounds like a wild plunge into Paris' hip underworld. Wall Street Journal fiction critic Sam Sacks said the book possesses a raw honesty most American books lack. It comes out Tuesday, with Subtex 2 to follow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As reading declines, Philip Roth's $2 million bequest to Newark Library supports books

Philip Roth in his novels wrote about Jewish life of his youth in Newark. Honoring that heritage, Roth left $2 million to his hometown's public library, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The bequest from Roth's $10 million estate shows his faith in reading and literature. Roth stipulated that the money be used to purchase books, not for capital projects. The gift will be placed in an endowment, and $80,000 a year in interest will go to the library to add to its selection of new books.

Before his death, Roth left his extensive book collection to the library. The books, with Roth's annotations, are housed in a dedicated room open to the public.The library also sponsors special events to honor Roth.

Growing up in a prosperous, middle-class Newark, Roth was dismayed by the city's decline in the 1960s and 1970s. During his youth, he often visited the city's public library, which opened the literary world to him.

Fewer children are discovering that world, according to an alarming report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. National tests showed a 3 percent decline in reading ability among eighth graders and 1 percent falloff among fourth graders. Math tests showed a 1 percent gain for fourth graders and a 1 percent drop for eighth graders.

Struggling students keep falling further behind, while those at the top are regressing, the report found.

The declines reverse significant gains in test results from 1990 to 2015, according to reports. Now, as China and other countries tout educational achievements, American students fall behind

Some commentators blamed the reversals on students' dependence on mobile phones, television and computer screens. Others said more and more parents don't read to their children from an early age. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos predictably called for more "school choice" and tax breaks for private schools rather than spending more on public education.

Like Philip Roth, children deserve the gift of reading.

 

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