Thanks, Obama

The first half of David Litt's terrific book about speech writing for President Obama is a litany of funny, mostly personal situations and lessons learned as he makes his way, starting just out of college, toward his imagined dream job.  The book's second half when Litt is part of the President's speech writing staff during his second term has the deep pleasures of binge watching an early season of The West Wing, when Aaron Sorkin was writing at his best.  Insightful, funny, audacious and terrifying all apply when someone is living at that level of purpose.  The book highlights successes and failures in equal measure and is better for it.

There is an inadvertent sadness which accompanies this half.  In writing about Obama, Litt shows us a man of deep intelligence, who is wickedly funny, passionately engaged in living and learning, and deeply committed to doing a extremely difficult job relentlessly while trying to make America a better place for all its inhabitants. We wish for him, or for any serious woman or man to do this job other than our current President who represents the worst America has to offer.  Uninformed, boorish, uninterested in the mechanics of government, a gleeful non-reader, with a degree of self-absorption that would glaze over the eyes of Narcissus (thank you Tom Stoppard for that last thought!). 

 Weep for us all.

Some Brief Thoughts on Memorable Summer Books, and an Autumn Preview

There were many wonderful books in the store this Spring and Summer and I always wish for time enough to attack more of them, but life has many conspiratorial ways of interfering so I will share some brief thoughts on some of the best of what I did get to read. 

But before moving on to the Summer I must draw your attention to a fascinating interview with the Scottish writer, Ali Smith in a recent issue of The Paris Review. (find it HERE).  Her book Autumn, released last Winter, will remain, I'm certain, one of my favorite books ever.  Smith, is the most deeply playful serious writer I know.  Directors of plays, as I am one, train themselves to seek out the music of writing for the stage.  Here is a quote from Smith's interview that reveals a clue as to why I respond to her "music", 

"The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it-- the word, the phrase,the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it."   

She is a marvel.

The prolific English poet and novelist, Helen Dunmore, died this Spring.  She was 64, and gifted in many ways.  Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, was published this month.  Dunmore frequently wrote of common people caught in the wake of history's tidal surges, and the new book is set in England at the time of the French Revolution.  It is a shattering love story, and a book of the perils of ambition, of family, and of seeking a firmer footing in an uncertain world.  Dunmore was unaware of her illness as she was writing the book, but as she remarks in the afterword, her subconscious must have sensed it

The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel.  While I finished and edited it I was already seriously ill, but not yet aware of this.  I suppose that a writer's creative self must have access to knowledge of which the conscious mind and the emotions are still ignorant, and that a novel written at such a time, under such a growing shadow, cannot help being full of sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm.

I still think often of her early novel, Talking To the Dead.  She will be missed by many. The Guardian published a haunting poem she completed a week before she died (You can read it HERE)

There has been much coverage in late Summer commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Indian Partition.  The issues of the partition remain volatile and many contemporary writers from the sub-continent are both frustrated and fearful for the future of both India and Pakistan (Their opinions can be found HERE).  No writer is more passionate than Arundhati Roy, whose second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is a fascinating glimpse into an often overlooked, but valued group in Indian life, the transsexual community. Roy combines this touching story with excoriating chapters on the miscalculations and assassinations and murders that have plagued life in the two countries.  Roy exploded onto the literary scene in 1997 with her first novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize.  Then she backed away from writing fiction and focused her heart and pen on numerous causes, frequently focusing on human rights in India.  When she turned back to fiction for this lyrical, broad canvas of life in India's present, her passions and anger drove large sections of the story.  The book is complicated, but well worth the effort to reconnect with this distinctive voice (You can read a detailed dissection of the book by Francine Prose HERE). 

Penelope Lively is 84 years old.  Her 1987 Booker Prize winner, Moon Tiger, is a personal favorite.  (You can read a fun piece about its history HERE)  Until this May she had not published a short story collection in 27 years. Lively's  The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories  covers the deep contours of woman's lives during many stages.  It is a superb collection.  Like Alice Munro as she aged, Lively writes with deep understanding and compassion about the struggles inherent in late-middle age (and beyond), but retains a sharp ear for the dialogue and thoughts of young women as well.  In an interview recently she marveled at finding these tangy, brief stories one by one, and relishing writing in the short story form again.  Ever the realist, when asked in the interview if more were coming, she said simply, "None." (You can hear the interview HERE).  In one of my favorite stories, "License to Kill", all of 12 pages long, Lively creates a girl of 18 and her charge, a woman over 80 on a shopping excursion.  What starts with awkward silences and generalities evolves into a deeply surprising dialogue which opens a door for the young woman that we pray will stay open.  Both voices seem absolutely accurate, and the story's end is a tiny miracle.

I turned 20 in the summer of 1968.  By the time of my birthday Lyndon Johnson had announced he was not going to run for a second term as President, done in by the bog of Vietnam, Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April with much fury following, and in early June Robert Kennedy was assassinated having just won the California Primary, a natural stepping stone to the Presidential nomination in July, which was won (?) instead by Hubert Humphrey.  It was an extraordinarily intense time in America.  The dark year had begun in late January with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and most particularly within that offensive (at least for Americans),with the capture of the ancient city of Hue, and the vicious fight to recapture it. The battle for Hue has been mesmerizingly brought to life by Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) using personal reminiscence from all sides in the fight and newly available detailed reports of the days of the battle. Hue 1968 is destined to become a classic in the deep trove of great writing about that war.  Hue shattered forever the myth of the invincibility of American forces in Vietnam, and destroyed the Pentagon's ability to control the narrative of its efforts.  In essence, after Hue, there was no going back to trying to win the war and the American public turned against it in ever growing numbers.  After Tet, even Walter Cronkite, the nations TV-news grandfather,  publicly turned against the war and the lying. This is history told at its best, and is a story that insists be remembered.

As the war in Vietnam was shuddering to its bitter conclusion and Nixon was about to face the harsh music and resign (August 8, 1974), the New Yorker published the first story of a young woman named Ann Beattie.  In 1974 America's youngish and upwardly mobile readers of magazines had ceased to wonder about the exhausting political world, and begun to wonder more about, themselves.  Beattie became a principal chronicler of her generation (which is, I admit, also mine).  In story after story her uncanny dialog (so authentic it seemed overheard) and sharp eye for the telling detail of clothing or possessions allowed us to laugh at ourselves, wince at the pretensions, and best of all, see ourselves with greater clarity.  Forty years on she is still doing it.  And doing it well.  Her new collection, The Accomplished Guest, skewers familiar types, now in late Middle Age. ( You can hear her talk about it HERE.)  Always smart and funny, and sometimes harrowing, this is a terrific collection from one of our masters of the short-form.  

If you have never read Ann Beattie, here is the end of one of her most anthologized stories, "Janus". (Read the entire story HERE). In the story a woman who sells real estate moves a beautiful bowl she owns to every house she tries to sell, as a talisman.  She is also in an unsatisfying affair.

" Her lover had said that she was always too slow to know what she really loved.  Why continue with her life the way it was? Why be two-faced he asked her. He had made the first move toward her, when she would not decide in his favor, would not change her life and come to him, he asked her what made her think she could have it both ways.  And then he made the last move and left.  It was a decision meant to break her will, to shatter her intransigent ideas about honoring previous commitments.

Time passed.  Alone in the living room at night, she often looked at the bow sitting on the table, still and safe, unilluminated.  In its way, it was perfect: the world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty.  Near the rim, even in dim light, the eye moved toward one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon."

Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.  She is a Russian historian who was known here principally for her oral history of the Chernobyl disaster.  Much of her work had gone out of print in this country.  Because of the attention of the Prize her recent book, Secondhand Time, about the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin was published in English in 2016.  It tells a a profoundly human tale of many individual lives during the period through Alexievich's brilliant use of oral history and her shaping of people's  stories.  She is a patient and encouraging listener and a firm believer in the potency of every life.  She puts a painfully human face on recent Russian life and collective memory.  It is a remarkable book.

This summer Alexievich brought out a new edition of her 1985 book, The Unwomanly Face of War.  It is equally powerful, and perhaps even more important.  It is an oral history of the 1 million Soviet women who fought during World War II.  

Their stories are moving, funny, angry, confused, full of longing, fear that they have lost their femininity... any emotion you can imagine, these women experienced.  The new edition features a long new introduction by Alexievich (you can read part of it HERE) and much new interview material that she painstakingly collected from this disappearing generation of voices.  It is translated by the acknowledged stars of Russian translation, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  Taken together these two books stand as an understated monument to the value of human life anywhere.  They are essential.

In the introduction to The Unwomanly Face of War,  Alexievich shares her way of "seeing" history and why she believes it matters,      

I write not about war, but about human beings in a war.  I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings.  I am a historian of feelings. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them.  The tremor of eternity.  That which is in human beings at all time......I build temples out of our feelings.... Out of our desires, our disappointments.  Dreams. Out of that which was, but might slip away.

And finally, here are two books that will be in the store in early autumn.  They are two of what promises to be a rich season of reading with new novels by Louise Erdrich, Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenides, Celeste Ng and Jesmyn Ward, a new memoir from Adam Gopnik, a powerful new look at Putin and the new Totalitarianism by Masha Gessen, Harvard lectures by Toni Morrison, John McPhee on writing, a new John Le Carre that revisits George Smiley, Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Obama Years, Hillary Clinton on the 2016 election, and much much more.

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project asked 8 contemporary novelists, Margaret Atwood, AnneTyler, Jeanette Winterson and Jo Nesbo among others, to re-imagine plays of Shakespeare in our time and in the novel form. It has been a worthy and fascinating experiment, and one of the best in the series comes next month.  

Edward St Aubyn has spent his career crafting novels about fighting to survive catastrophic family dysfunction (usually his own) in his five Patrick Melrose novels.  So who better to take on Shakespeare's King Lear, the most dysfunctional family in literature (sorry, all you Greek geeks).

Dunbar (the book's title) is the patriarch of a contemporary family of media moguls bearing a strong resemblance to the Rupert Murdoch clan except with daughters rather than sons.  Two of the daughters think dad is losing it, and the third (the stand in for Cordelia) is already out of the will in this version, and heart-brokenly estranged from her father.  Shakespeare's Lear moves with terrifying speed towards its aching conclusion, and were it not so long, really should be done on stage without an intermission.  St Aubyn achieves the same sense of dizzying dread.  His subtle shifts in story and tone are utterly plausible, and you rip through the pages despite knowing little good could be in store for anyone.  It is deft and ferocious and a cautionary tale for our times, alas.

The other book shares a strong focus on a family and a dark view of our present state.  Salman Rushdie's new novel, Golden House, is a myth, a fable, and a nightmare about an immigrant family and life in these United States through the Obama Years which then leads to our present moment.  It is his best book in years.

Filled with sharp insights into both personality and culture, the book is typical of Rushdie in its verbal dexterity and playfulness, its shifting tones and perspectives, and because the story is told us by a aspiring filmmaker,it is loaded with deliciously apt film references.  But the book carries tremendous weight of responsibility as it progresses.  Much of the responsibility is ours: Rushdie holds a mirror up to American life and insists we view the country we have become.  In a recent review of the book Alex Clark states, "If you want to know the truth of a family, send in a stranger."

(read the whole review HERE). 

That is true for this terrific book on many levels

And.....one last treat.  Hillary Mantel, whose final installment in her magnificent Cromwell Trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, may not land next summer, has written a thoughtful essay on the continuing potency and growing myth of Princess Diana, and it is well worth a read. (You can get it HERE).

Paying Homage

At the end of the first act of Alan Bennett's masterful play, The History Boys, Hector, an unusual teacher of literature is inspired by a comment by Posner, a delicate student of his, to say the following:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something-- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things--which you had thought special and particular to you.  Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone who is even long dead.  And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

I have always loved that speech.  It is a way to encourage a student and to illuminate a crucial idea about writing and thinking: we are not alone in our thoughts.  Others have come before us, and their good ideas lead us to our own.

I was reminded of the Bennett while reading a sweet interview with Julie Buntin, whose debut novel, Marlena, haunted me for weeks after I read it earlier this Spring.  Her book focusses on the all- consuming year long friendship between two disparate high school girls, aged 15 and 17.  On the novel's third page we are told that one of the girls, the titular Marlena, drowns that year in November.

Carrying that knowledge through Buntin's sharply observed lives of the girls gives the book the feel of watching a train wreck in super-slow motion. There is a sense of dread, but it is impossible to turn away.  The story is told  by Cat, the younger of the doomed pair, who at present is stumbling toward 40 and living in New York, a deeply bruised, even now, survivor of that time.  The book is a remarkable portrait of a the two young women and equally deft at revealing the dead-end existence in a small town  in Northern Michigan among people who have little and seek solace in drink and drugs. 

The interview focuses on how much Buntin was influenced in shaping her novel, and indeed in her choice to become a writer, by reading Lorrie Moore's, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?  Moore's wonderful short novel concerns two close high school friends and is similarly told in flashback form.  Here is Buntin in praise of Moore and also giving us the gift of remembering why it matters to read and read 

I read it first as a teenager attending a boarding school I felt sure had made an egregious error in letting me in.....Mornings at dawn I'd sneak out of the dorms and down to a picnic table on the lakeshore to smoke and read....I finished Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? on one of those morning and looked up to find the sun rising on a changed world......I wanted to see like her.  I even wanted to sound like her.....Influence is a tricky thing.  I think it starts with love,  with resonance, with the exhilarating feeling that what you've read articulates something you've always felt but never had the words for.  It's reading something and jumping into the conversation to say, yes, it was this way for me too....... When I was finally ready to write a novel, when I thought about what I wanted to say, I thought about that girl sitting on the picnic table, how deeply she felt and how afraid she was to use her voice.  I thought about being a teenager, my friendships in those years.  Wiggling out of a bedroom window, storms of laughter and sleepovers that lasted weeks, all that luxurious, menacing boredom, how terribly vulnerable we had been.  I thought about how nothing has ever felt quite as bright and potent as that time, and how I'll never get back there. 

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? gave me permission to try. 

 (Read the entire interview HERE)

Buntin's act of homage led me to the memory of another.  In the early mid-1980s I was invited to a party to celebrate the launching of a new series that Random House was introducing called, Vintage Contemporaries.  It was a terrific, fresh series with great, youngish writers.  I was living in New York after graduate school in Boston, and had nothing to do with the book business.  I was invited thanks to my dear friend Melanie Fleishman who had worked on developing the series at Random House, and had become the manager of Endicott Books on the Upper West side which was hosting the event.  (Melanie is now, in addition to many other jobs, the principal frontlist buyer for Arcadia Books! ) 


The first group of writers in the series were Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City), Thomas McGuane (The Bushwhacked Piano), James Crumley (Dancing Bear), Janet Hobhouse (Dancing in the Dark),Anita Brookner (The Debut), and Raymond Carver (Cathedral).  If memory serves, all were there and most were reading short pieces.  McGuane and Carver were huge heroes of mine and I had read most of what they had written.  I was agog and probably missed many of the other glittering literati who were in attendance.  The time came for the readings and we gravitated to chairs.  As fate sometimes allows, Tom McGuane sat down next to me.  We made a bit of small talk (mine much smaller than his) and I asked why he wasn't reading.  He replied with quiet charm that he, "did not feel comfortable reading and was nervous around the other writers."  After Raymond Carver finished reading the title story of Cathedral to stunned, appreciative silence followed by prolonged applause, McGuane leaned to me and whispered, "That's why I don't read at theses events.  How do you follow that?!  It's a perfect story!"  It was such a heartfelt sentiment that  I realized for the first time how generous writers could be.

Ray Carver died of cancer in 1988.  He was 50.  The first two thirds of his adult life were a constant struggle with alcohol and bad choices.  Through it all he wrote superb short stories of the plainness of American lives. The last ten years of his life he was sober and living with the poet Tess Gallagher and he wrote indelible stories and poems.  When he died the New York Times eulogized him as "The American Chekhov".  He was close friends with a number of writers, including the novelist, Richard Ford.  Carver and Ford both loved to fish and they frequently spent time together on the water.  Carver dedicated his poem "Wind" to Ford.  (read it HERE)  In it they are fishing with little luck and decide to go in when Ford sees "wind moving across the water".

They sit mesmerized until the wind passes over the boat.  Here is the end of the poem

.........The birds going crazy now

Boat rocking from side to side.

"Jesus," you say, "I never saw anything like it."

"Richard," I say--

"You'll never see that in Manhattan, my friend."

You can feel the smile growing through the words.  

That poem is in a collection of Carver's called Ultramarine.  His last book of poems was published posthumously.  It is a book I return to over and over.  It contains his final poems, poems by others whom he admired, and snippets from Chekhov's stories.  The form of his book was inspired by a book by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz called Unattainable Earth.  Carver and Gallagher decided to title his book, A New Path To the Waterfall.

In the summer of 1995 I was having lunch alone on the terrace of my favorite restaurant (now closed, alas) in Crested Butte, Colorado, reading.   (Lest you think I was sad to be alone eating and reading, please read (HERE) Billy Collins's delightful poem, " Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant".) I was reading Richard Ford's magnificent novel, Independence Day.  It is Ford's second book about Frank Bascombe, a failed writer turned real estate salesman who is traveling over the 4th of July weekend with his second son.  The son and father are struggling mightily with each other and Ford is characteristically blunt in dissecting the failures of each.

And then deep into the novel something wonderful occurs. The father shares with us his hope that he and his son will find, "a new path to the waterfall."

I put the book down and gazed up at the surrounding mountains grateful for Ford and Carver, for friendships, and for paying homage when we can.

Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, William Maxwell and the lasting influence of Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries"

Mary Gaitskill's first book, Bad Behavior (1988), has become a classic of a particular kind. It is a collection of short stories many of which have strong sexual themes including bondage and sadomasochism.  They are blunt, sometimes funny, and fierce. Like James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, Bad Behavior set a high and provocative bar for Gaitskill which she has happily met with several other collections of stories and three novels. While accomplishing all of that Gaitskill has also written many essays and reviews. Perhaps the most famous of these is "The Trouble With Following the Rules", which appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1994.   An intensely personal essay about date rape, victim culture and personal responsibility, it created a huge stir and much conversation and argument. 

That piece is included in a new collection of her non-fiction, Somebody With a Little Hammer,  a terrific collection filled with provocative and insightful responses to literature, music, film and well, life.  Some personal favorites include the aforementioned essay, a trenchant piece on various book covers for Nabokov's Lolita, her diary of the 2008 Republican Convention including a characteristically caustic view of Sarah Palin, a thoughtful rumination on Linda Lovelace and the moving memoir, "Lost Cat".

The title essay drew my attention immediately because the image "somebody with a little hammer" is found in the most quoted  paragraph in Anton Chekhov's memorable story, "Gooseberries".  Like many, perhaps most of her peers who write short stories, Gaitskill is drawn to Chekhov and mentions him frequently.  Chekhov is considered the master of the form, and his many stories peer into the human soul finding complication, bewilderment, longing, laughter and heartbreak, frequently all in the same paragraph.

Gaitskill's essay, written in 2006, focuses on an act of selfishness she observed on her street during a time when she was teaching "Gooseberries".  It was shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and Gaitskill read the beginning of the famous paragraph to her students

Just look at this life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies.....Yet in all the houses and streets it"s quiet, peaceful; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, or become loudly indignant.  We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don't see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere  behind the scenes.

She laments that her students seemed unmoved by the Chekhov, and surmises that his thoughts seem dated to them.  But her next thought contradicts this. "Images of suffering people have become so routine (I'm thinking of Katrina again) that you can't help but see them even if you don't live in a neighborhood where you encounter them in the flesh.  I think, though, that the students' very indifference, if that's what it was, indicates that Chekhov is still right, that no matter what we literally see, on television or in life, we nonetheless will ourselves not to see what we don't wish to see--or to feel."  Gaitskill then returns to the precipitating event and describes her anger and frustration and then shares the conclusion of the Chekhov paragraph

 At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him-- illness, poverty, loss--and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now.  But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as the wind stirs an aspen--and  everything is fine.

She readily admits that Chekhov's sentiments might seem terribly old-fashioned, and hints that he subverts them at the end of his story.

That theme is picked up and expanded greatly by George Saunders in an interview in Harper's from this past February (you can read it HERE).  Saunders, perhaps the most inventive of the current generation of short story writers, was interviewed on the publication of his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. He speaks at length about "Gooseberries" and how Chekhov frequently subverts our expectations within his stories. 

It's basically a story of two friends who get caught in a rainstorm while they are out hunting, and they go to a nearby house of someone they know ...one of the friends, Ivan, tells a story about his brother, who had an obsession with owning a small estate, and with eating gooseberries that he grew...... Ivan's story builds in intensity, and by the end he's making this beautiful, passionate case for why happiness is a confusing, undesirable emotion.  In his telling, it's almost a delusion to be mindlessly happy when others are sad.... (Saunders then quotes the end of the same paragraph that Gaitskill uses) I've quoted this line on book tours, trying to explain why I don't mind writing dark fiction: One role of literature, I'll tell them, is to be the guy with the hammer, saying, "Look we're all pretty happy right now, but let's not forget the fact our happiness doesn't eradicate the suffering of others."  It's a beautiful insight about the lazy nature of happiness--and for a few minutes I think we are meant to think that this stirring speech by Ivan is the whole point of the story.  In a way, it is.  Except, on the next page, we see that Ivan's audience is bored and disappointed by the story.  They wish he'd had something better to say,   and the whole evening ends on a flat note. But then there's this wonderful little reversal at the end, a mysterious and beautiful turn.....(he then quotes the end of the story).....Ivan leaves his unclean pipe out all night, keeping his friend Burkin awake.  And that's how Chekhov gets away with putting his real feelings about the oppressive nature of  happiness into a character's mouth.  Without irony, without condescension, he just lets the character have his say.  But then, here, Chekhov destabilizes the beautiful rhetoric of the previous section by showing another side of the guy who made that impassioned speech: He's also self-obsessed and  thoughtless enough to burden his friend with a smelly pipe. It's a great double whammy.  You get the beautiful, articulate case against happiness, and then you get this complicating overtone of selfishness in the person who just made that beautiful speech.

Saunders goes on at length about "Gooseberries" and how it is structured. It is a wonderful interview and I urge you to read it, but I will urge you even more to read "Gooseberries".  I have read it over and over since first encountering it in my 20's, and it informs my world differently on each reading.  Chekhov's mature plays, written towards the end of his too short life (he died of tuberculosis at 44), are masterful examples of the art of play-writing.  APT is producing Three Sisters this season.  But if you want to immerse yourself in the complexity, the perplexity, the heartbreak, the laughter, the cruelties and simple pleasures of the everydayness of life without a shred of the judgmental, then read Chekhov's stories.  And then, re-read them.

William Maxwell, the revered fiction editor of the New Yorker for 40 years, and author of many tender, I would argue, Chekhovian novels, wrote in a 1973 letter to Sylvia Townsend Warner,

 ......Emmy (his wife) and I walked all over the island, knee deep in wet Queen Anne's lace.  I climbed up into the Martello tower and the gun emplacement, and she, not liking heights, wandered off and found a seagull's nest with three eggs in it. I would tell you what they looked like if I weren't absolutely sure that you already know.  The goats stared at us, the view in all directions was sublime.  In my next life if I don't succeed in being a story by Chekhov called "Gooseberries" I shall be an island.

Maxwell was a deep admirer of Chekhov and their sensibilities matched in their uncanny powers of observation of daily life and quiet struggle.  In the introduction to his superb short novel, They Came Like Swallows, Maxwell speaks of a room in which he wrote as a young man

 .......The third floor, reached by an outside stairway, was a little study with a brick fireplace, white wicker furniture covered with a cheerful cretonne, and a desk facing a window.  I went there once at the end of winter and found, between the cushions of the chaise lounge, the dry odorless body of a dead squirrel.  It had come down the chimney, been unable to get up again, and died there of hunger and cold.  If I had understood and allowed myself to feel the full implications of this lonely death I would have become, in that instant, a mature novelist.

That might have come from Chekhov's notebooks.


In "Lost Cat", her lovely short memoir in the present collection, Mary Gaitskill weaves two indelible stories.  One is of the loss of her cat, Gattino, and searching in vain for it for months.  The other concerns her complicated relationship to two children, a brother and sister, whom she first encounters through New York City's Fresh Air Fund.  The young woman eventually became the inspiration for Gaitskill's 2015 novel, The Mare.  These stories, blunt and heartfelt, entwine and deepen and reflect on each other over fifty pages.  At the end, Gaitskill returns to Chekhov

I once read a Chekhov story that described a minor character as "trying to snatch from life more than it can give"; maybe I have turned into such a person, unable to accept what is given, always trying to tear things up in order to find what is "real," even when I don't know what "real" is, unable to maintain the respect, the dignity of not asking too much or even looking too closely at the workings of the heart, which, no matter how you look, can never be fully seen or understood. The thought makes me look down in self-reproach.  Then I think, But life can give a lot.  If you can't see inside the heart no matter how you look, then why not look? Why not see as much as you can?  How is that disrespectful? If you are only given one look, shouldn't you look as fully as you can?

I think Chekhov would answer, "Look. Look again."






We carry The Essential Tales Of Chekhov Deluxe Edition
edited by Richard Ford, which contains the short story "Gooseberries".

Two Old Coots, Russo and Ford

Collectively, Richard Ford and Richard Russo have been writing for 70 years.  Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, in 1976, and Russo his first, Mohawk in 1986. Between them they are known as master observers of ordinary lives who tell unadorned stories.  They each have new books this month, and characteristically each is blunt, tender and wise.  I know (believe me, I will be 69 in June) that aging white guys are out of favor in the literary world, and I don't begrudge that sentiment or the years of feeling overlooked that created it, but these two coots can still bring it, and they deserve our attention.

Russo, who turns 68 in July, has spent much of his storied career writing about small towns in the Northeast and their complicated inhabitants. His characters are funny, heartbroken, frequently inebriated, loaded with misplaced wishes and fully aware of their own short-comings. In addition to Mohawk he has written seven other novels including the Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls, and Nobody's Fool, and then just last year, Everybody's Fool.  The latter two are set in the fictional North Bath, NY and feature one of the great irascible charmers of American fiction, Donald "Sully" Sullivan, who was immortalized by Paul Newman in the 1995 film of Nobody's Fool.  

His terrific new collection of two novellas and two stories is called Trajectory.  Emotionally we are on familiar ground as his characters struggle to make sense of both the present and the ever-intruding past.  But these characters differ in that they are more firmly middle class types, teachers, retired professors, a high school principal, a writer/screenwriter, and in "Intervention", a seller of real estate recently diagnosed with cancer.  With Russo's characteristic warmth  the stories weave through webs of memory, silent long-held grudges, misunderstandings and complicated family issues. They each resolve uneasily, but with a hard earned bead of hope. 

 Here is an example of how he does it from near the end of the first story, “Horseman.”   A college instructor struggling with a student who plagiarized realizes it has brought up, again, a much examined period from her own student days.  Through the present struggle she starts to form a new perspective on her past.

In the other essay she'd find what Bellamy had noticed in hers, an absence.  An implied writer.  A shadow.  A ghost.  "But I do exist," she'd told him that day, however meekly, fearing he meant to convince her that even that wasn't true, when in reality he was merely urging her to discover that last elusive thing, a self worth being, worth becoming and finally worth revealing.  Yes, even though she knew what awaited her in those essays, she would at last read them.  She owed Bellamy that much.  He'd given her an assignment, and she intended to finish it.  After which, she suspected, he would haunt her no more.

In 1986 when Russo published Mohawk, Richard Ford, now 73, published his third novel, The Sportswriter. The title character's name was Frank Bascombe, and in him Ford found his most universal voice.

He wrote three other books with Bascombe at the center, and one of them, Independence Day, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. 

Ford's new book, Between Them, is a memoir of his parents.  "My Mother, In Memory" was written shortly after her death in 1981, and "Gone, Remembering My Father" is recent, finished a year ago, 55 years after his father's death in 1960.  These are beautiful haunted pieces.  They are filled with half-answered questions, surmise, and finally, a deep sense of mystery about these people who choose to have a child, him, quite late in the marriage.  Ford clearly loves his parents deeply and is grateful for the life he has that they provided, even indirectly.

He is a lover (as are many great writers) of the short stories of Anton Chekhov who in story after story validated the lives of ordinary men and women.  In this beautiful book, Richard Ford does the same for his parents.  He leaves an unsentimental record of two otherwise overlooked lives. Here is how he ends the memoir of his father,

But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father.  Much of these things I've written here.  Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their father's orbit and sight.  My father did not experience this.  And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it.  The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that "...my loss was that I never spoke to him as adult."  Mine is the same--and also different-- inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become.  And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss-- we must all make the most of the lives we find--there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue--qualities that merit notice in us all.  For his son, not to have  left this record would be a sad loss indeed.

These are books by two deeply humane and uncluttered writers.  They have been working at the craft for many years.  They do "make the most of the lives they find", and we are the better for them

Lessons in Shakespeare or "Will in the Bard-O"

There are new books this Spring focusing on three of Shakespeare's greatest creations: Sir John Falstaff, here principally observed through the lens of Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2; Hamlet, in this case both the character and the play, and Rosalind, the heroine of As You Like It.  All three books are hugely entertaining and deeply knowledgeable.  Collectively they serve as a great whistle wetter for the coming APT season. (There, you see what happens when writing about Shakespeare?  A delirious giddiness takes over and it seems perfectly apt to say "whistle wetters")



Harold Bloom, 87, long a champion of Falstaff, offers one more passionately argued paean to Sir John"s central importance in Shakespeare's creation of deeply human characters.  Bloom tells us he first fell for Falstaff at age 12, and it was nearly 20 years ago in his seminal book on Shakespeare, subtitled "The Invention of the Human" when he laid out many of the arguments found in this new slim volume.  He has sharpened his arguments, and the book serves as a wonderful introduction to both Henry IV and Henry V  as well.  Here is Bloom at his fiery best.  

"Falstaff is as bewildering as Hamlet, as infinitely varied as Cleopatra.  He can be apprehended but never fully comprehended.  There is no end to Falstaff.  His matrix is freedom but he dies for love."  You may not agree with all of Bloom's assertions in this book, but his erudition and passion for his subject are irresistible.

In 2012, Dominic Dromgoole, the former Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, had the patently insane idea of taking a production of Hamlet to every country in the world.  Two years later, on the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, the journey began.  Over the next two years, culminating with a closing performance on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, his company of 12 actors and 4 stage managers performed in 197 countries only missing North Korea and Syria.  Dromgoole's wonderful book documents this seemingly impossible accomplishment.  We learn much about the play, more about the personalities and places and particular hardships, and crucially,  the belief in the power of a cleanly told and vivid story.  Here is Dromgoole after watching the final performance before the actors departed,

The show was there, the story was told, and it had a gracious modesty in  world.  Too great a immediate success would have induced a grandiosity which would have been a nightmare to tour.  'See, see how great we are' is not an attitude to take on the road - it's not an attitude for anything really...... The show was not perfect, but it worked.  It told the story, it carried the language and delivered it, and it presented the life within the story.  This is not always what people mean by theatre these days.  There is a difference between a car that works, and an exploding car with balloons on it.  A car that works ferries people from A to Z, conveying them from where they begin to a different place, and along the way it shows them scenery, whether beautiful, sad or strange.  A lot of theatre these days seems to be watching a car festooned with balloons explode, then bursting into applause and waiting  for a blogger to deconstruct the event.  Having been taken nowhere.  Our show didn't dazzle or explode, but it worked.  And it felt ready to wander.

The final book is a biography of a fictional character.  Rosalind is one of the greatest heroines in the English language and in her 417 year life span to date she has inspired many other brave, articulate and passionate fictional offspring.  She is wonderfully complex, playful, deeply emotional, highly skilled verbally, and full of intellect and longing. It is the longest woman's part in Shakespeare, and one that every serious Shakespearean actress hungers for.

Angela Thirlwell blends sharp scholarship with a Bloom-like love of Rosalind to create a memorable mix of theatre history and passionate exploration of both the role and actresses who have played her.  In 1962 as an early teen Thirlwell saw Vanessa Redgrave play the part and fell in love with both the character and the play.  Over all the subsequent years she has seen many actresses take Rosalind on and interviews many of them.  This gives the book an engaged energy of performance that makes it different from other similar studies.  On page two of her Prologue Thirlwell lets us know, deliciously, what will follow.

I love Rosalind because she is merry and mischievous, impetuous, empowering and brave.  Her play is about love.  It's for everyone and anyone who has ever loved, either unrequitedly or to joyous fulfillment.  Every kind of love is in this play, from carnal to divine: not only heterosexual love, but also homoerotic love, the love between friends, between women, love across generations, brotherly love and  sibling rivalry, the love between parents and children.  Rosalind faces up to love inside out and it spectre of rejection that all lovers fear. 

Taken together the three books are a besotted graduate seminar in Shakespeare and so much more.  Don't be late for class!