- Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (1992). I've heard about Denis Johnson for years, but had never read anything by him. He has two books on the list of 100, Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke, but both had long waiting lists at the library. So instead I read this collection of stories, which some consider his masterpiece. It is an incredible book. The stories are "linked," possibly all with the same narrator, but it isn't always clear that he's the same guy. He moves around, sometimes he drives a VW and sometimes he takes the bus, sometimes he's married and sometimes he has a girlfriend, and so on. But he's always an alcoholic and a drug addict, which is how Denis Johnson spent his 20s. His ability to convey what that's like is stunning. The story will be going along, and then suddenly he'll get confused and the names will be different, or he'll fall asleep and the action won't be what you thought it was. I don't know how to explain it. I was blown away by the book, wouldn't mind owning it, but after finishing it I wasn't sure I wanted to read anything else by Johnson right now. Heavy stuff.
In the last story, "Beverly Home," the narrator is sober, working in a nursing home, and starting to learn how to live again. In one scene he's interacting with a young man with "something like multiple sclerosis" whose wife is divorcing him, he has no visitors, and he can't talk anymore:
"No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other." (p. 159)
I love that.
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016). This book is on both the NY Times list and the readers' list (the readers' list also includes his Nickel Boys). Most copies of this book are checked out, so I was lucky to get it. It's a good book, but in the beginning I didn't love it. I think I've read so many novels set on plantations during slavery that I'm getting tired of the story. It's like books about the Holocaust -- the first few times you read descriptions of what it was like in the concentration camps you're completely overwhelmed and devastated, but then it all starts to sound the same. (This is why, I think, W. G. Sebald's books are so good -- he is writing about the Holocaust but he somehow isn't telling the same story; he manages to make it new.) I kept thinking, while reading the first section of The Underground Railroad, that I might as well be reading Uncle Tom's Cabin.
But then it changes. The underground railroad, in this book, is actually a railroad underground, perhaps built by slaves. It takes Cora, the main character, from Georgia to other states, each of which is dealing with slavery in its own terrible way. We are in the realm of fantasy here, but fantasy based in part on things that really happened. I would have preferred that the book be even a little weirder, but it's good as it is, and the ending is interesting. So, do I want to read more of Colson Whitehead? Yes, definitely, but possibly not this month. - American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997). Some people think this is Roth's best book, so even though his two books on the NY Times list were checked out, I was happy to find and read this. But I ended up a little underwhelmed. It's the story of Seymour "The Swede" Levov, the golden boy from Roth's Newark, NJ high school, who is a really good, kind, nice person, but whose life is destroyed when his 16-year-old daughter Merry becomes a bomb-throwing terrorist (in 1968). In 1997, when the book was published, this story probably still resonated with a lot of people who lived through the '60s, but I wonder if it still works today, in the era of school shootings. One little bomb that kills one person -- who can spend so much time being worried about that? The characters in the story are also upset about what's happened to the Newark they grew up in -- it's been destroyed by race riots and white flight -- and about Newark's industries going overseas -- and about movies like "Deep Throat" going mainstream. In the age of online porn, that last concern seems positively quaint.
Almost nothing happens -- it's mostly just the Swede's ruminations, as well as the ruminations of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, who is telling the Swede's story -- and although I don't usually need action in a book, this one kind of bored me. I don't know. It's a good book, and Roth is a great writer, but I wouldn't put this on my top ten list. I'd still like to read his two books that made the NY Times list (The Human Stain and The Plot Against America). But maybe not this month. - James by Percival Everett (2024). I picked this up as an afterthought -- saw it on a shelf at the library and grabbed it. Everett has a different book on the NY Times list -- Erasure -- and this book is on the readers' list. There was a profile of Everett in the New Yorker recently, and I thought at the time that I might like to read him, but didn't follow up. So this month seemed like a good time. I enjoyed James -- it's a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of Jim the slave. I probably should have re-read Huck Finn, or at least had it open beside me while I was reading James, but I decided I could remember enough of the book. James stands alone just fine, so you don't have to know Huck Finn, although I probably missed things on account of having forgotten a lot of it.
Everett does a lot of clever stuff in the book. The slaves speak a stereotypical slave dialect when white people are listening, but among themselves they speak standard English, and when white people accidentally overhear them, they (the white people) get terribly upset, and the slaves quickly revert to dialect. In a flip of what most white authors do, Everett (speaking as James/Jim) identifies only white people by race, so, "There's a white man over there," but "There's a man over there" (meaning a Black man). Another thing I liked -- this is a bit of a spoiler, but... you know how traditionally when a character in a novel does something bad, they have to pay for it? Like, someone will commit a crime, possibly murder, possibly for a good reason, and then you just know they're going to end up dead, perhaps to remind readers that you should not behave that way? It drives me crazy. I'll just say, in James, that novelistic "rule" is not followed.
At the end of The Underground Railroad, Cora is headed for Missouri, which of course is where James/Jim starts out. At the end of James, James makes it to Iowa. Both books suggest that their story, and their journey, isn't over, as we know it isn't. I wish it were.
OK, so, I read those four books, and at the end I was kind of tired of reading serious, award-winning fiction, especially by men. Even though they were all extremely good books, I felt overwhelmed by them. So I decided not to continue with any of these authors just now, although I'd like to read more by all of them eventually. I had a presidential biography to read, and the book group book, and there are those stacks of to-be-read books by my bed. Enough of the men, for now.
***
In August, I also read a biography of Calvin Coolidge. I enjoyed it more than many of the presidential biographies I've read because the author, Donald R. McCoy, managed to bring his subject to life in a very engaging way. Coolidge was grumpy, low energy, idealistic, and unrealistic, but he was also funny, and McCoy's way of describing him was often funny too. McCoy doesn't try to make Coolidge seem better or worse than he was. It's an eyes wide open biography. I liked it. The last two sentences interested me:
"Coolidge's failure was the failure of a President who does not look ahead and does not fight to head off the problems of the future. Of course, there is little to indicate that he could have succeeded in such a struggle or that there was anyone else available in national politics in the 1920s who could have done substantially better, but the nation would have been morally and intellectually better for the attempt." (p. 422)
Can a nation be morally and intellectually better? What would that mean?
***
That was about it for my reading this month, except for the book for the book group and a few odds and ends.
Next month it is time for another female author and I am planning to try to read some books by Jesmyn Ward. She's young, born in 1977, so around the age of my oldest sister's kids (born in 1975 and 1978). She's won the National Book Award twice, is the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," and has three books on the NY Times 100 best-books-of-the-21st-century-so-far list. I've thought of reading her for several years now, but always diverted to something else because I thought her books would be too depressing. They probably are depressing, but I'll give her a chance. We'll see how it goes.
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