Great American Novels

I have been struggling my way through this, for class:

so have failed utterly to have any interesting book/blog related thoughts. I'm disappointed in myself for not enjoying this more - for some (obviously unfounded) reason, I thought James would be my cup of tea. Perhaps it will all become clear at the end?

I had to have a brief mental-palate-cleansing read, so I went for this:


the eighth and final book in Sara Shepard's unapologetically trashy and fabulous Pretty Little Liars series. Henry would be rolling in his grave, but I have no regrets (and now I FINALLY know who killed Ali - YAY)!

BEE, again

Fiona Crawford has posted a great write up of Bret Easton Ellis' recent appearance at the Byron Bay Writer's Festival over on The Book Burgler, for those who are so inclined.




Obviously I am a huge fan of Ellis' work and it was a great pleasure to hear him speak at his Oxford Art Factory event on this tour. I was unsure of what to expect (it's foolish but easy to mistake authors for their characters, isn't it?), but I was surprised and pleased to find him a very engaging, self-deprecating and clever guy. I haven't yet started Imperial Bedrooms but I am looking forward to it all the more now.

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone

Going on holidays has killed my blog momentum (and trying to read postmodernist Mexican literature (at least, that's what I think it is) that isn't really to my taste has killed my reading momentum).

I will say though, that these are my favourite non-fiction books, and Franzen is probably my favourite non-fiction writer.



[Charles] Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life - to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this - is the opposite of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make.

There is such tenderness to his writing, and clarity, even when he writes about his own doubt or guilt or failure to understand. It has been a while since I read How to be Alone but his essays on the Chicago post office and reading William Gaddis (a novelist who I am sure I will never actually be capable of reading) are still vivid in my mind.

Read these books, they will make you feel good about having a brain.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

Was there ever a condition so idiotically pathetic as that of the penniless toff?

I've been sick for what feels like weeks (how dramatic of me) and without the presence of mind to focus on anything too challenging (the end of Simone, some so-far poorly written travel literature about the Sierra Madre, etc), I've been combing the bookshelves for something to take the edge off too many long days at home. A reading copy of Eva Rice's The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets was given to me by a friend back in our bookshop days, and I've been carting it around with me since. I can't say anything of the final cover, but the proof cover has one of those awful chick-lit-y illustrations on it, so even though this one came recommended by a trusted source I wasn't ever able to quite get past the jacket. I like to think now though, having read it, that it was just saving itself for when it knew it was really needed.

Penelope, Charlotte and their other frightfully English comrades (and a few scandalous Americans) have been such good company over the past 24 hours. I was never much of a fan of I Capture the Castle, but this one seemed to tickle me in all the places I wish Dodie Smith had. Little touches of Evelyn Waugh's crumbling aristocracy, but spoken in a more artless, youthful voice, are irresistable to me. I can't get enough of young kids in old manor houses! There's something so compelling to me about that narrative - old stately England, swept through two world wars into the age of America, quite unsure where one ought to put all these tapestries at a time like this*.

Some other online review has already claimed the metaphor that had popped into my mind while I was reading (it wasn't so original that I can be cross about that), but I'm going to have to say it anyway. This book is like chocolate cake. It's just sweet and filling and in a slightly-too-small serve. I've been saving the last mouthful for hours now but I don't think I have the will to resist any longer. Even though I'm sure I can guess exactly what is going to happen, I know I'm going to enjoy every last crumb! Tea, anyone?

*Did I mention that Eva Rice is also the author of Who's Who in Enid Blyton? Toodle pip!

Simone

I found myself with a bit of a gap in the reading schedule (in between uni reading, work reading and travel reading), and, feeling in need of some emotional/philosophical fortification, I decided to revisit Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. I was quite obsessed with Simone de Beauvoir in high school, after writing one of my last school assignments on her, but I haven't picked up any of her books since then. It is a pleasure and a relief that I still find her writing as fascinating and consoling as I did when I was seventeen. This book in particular stuns me - I have a terrible memory, so I find it astounding that Simone is able to recall incidents and emotional arcs from her childhood with such clarity. How could such a tiny person have such a sense of herself? Or such a sense of the fact that she lacked a sense of herself? Clearly only one of us had the makings of a genius!

Fear never shows up and the party ends early

I decided to re-read Less Than Zero when I found out that Bret Easton Ellis' forthcoming novel will be a kind of sequel, Clay and Friends 20 years on (great interview here). I have a bit of strange relationship with Ellis' books, in that I don't find them at all pleasurable to read but for some reason, I keep coming back. Is it because I want to cultivate hipsterish literary taste, or is there really something more there?


My first introduction - and I'm sure I'm not alone in this - to Ellis' work was American Psycho. I picked it up in my late teens in order to tick some late-20th-Century controversial literature boxes (see also: Trainspotting, which, incidentally, remains one of my favourite re-reads today as well - there goes that hipsterish taste again). American Psycho is a kind of good/bad introduction to Ellis' work, as it is what Ellis does best, but obscured, or maybe so grotesquely magnified it is difficult to recognise when you look directly at it. I recall being astounded, not by the violence, although that could be pretty heart-stopping at times, but by the absence of... something. Humanity? I don't think that's quite right, because really, on reflection I think Patrick Bateman could be embued with more pathos and desperation than any other character I've encountered. His lack of humanity is humanising, if that is ever possible. Whatever that absence is, I found it far more terrifying than any of Bateman's acts of unbelievable violence.


It's been a few years since I first encountered Less Than Zero - I first picked it up in 2005, which I realise now was 20 years after its first publication. It's hard to conceive of 1985 as being that long ago, but now that I revisit it, it strikes me as a surprisingly modern novel, despite the characters' continual discussions of The Human League. It could be yesterday, or this morning. It's vicious and funny and thoughful. But the lack, that gaping, suffocating black hole of emptiness that he somehow captures by cataloguing the minutiae of his characters' actions and reactions is everywhere. In this second reading of Less Than Zero I am choking on it. I have read and re-read that passage where Clay describes his dream of being sucked underground, fear and paranoia of the house sliding down into the canyon during the nights of rain, prank calls, a dead fish in the jacuzzi. The city is a monster and we are all monsters.

I'm not sure what has changed - my expectations, my tastes? - but this is incredible.

Waughgasm

I suppose my impromptu Evelyn Waugh festival might have something to do with work avoidance - my current course on American literature regrettably doesn't appear to cover English authors, so my sudden obsession is of no use to all those other things I'm meant to be writing.

He is pretty flippin' great though.

As a missionary priest making his first pilgrimage to the Vatican, as a paramount chief of equatorial Africa mounting the Eiffel Tower, Dennis Barlow, poet and pets' mortician, drove through the Golden Gates.

The weekend started with A Handful of Dust (I can't fully explain it, but I go to pieces with love for this novel! Surely it has been medically substantiated that one can die from Dickens and loneliness [ok, and malaria]?) and now I have found myself among the English in Hollywood, in The Loved One. If I am still seeking to avoid study later in the week, I think it could be time for a Brideshead revisit (terrible puns optional).