J.M. Coetzee

I'm not sure if books are the kind of thing we talk about here anymore, but in case anyone's wondering I am in a deep Coetzee phase. In the last two months I've read Summertime, Disgrace, Foe, and The Master of Petersburg; I'm reading Elizabeth Costello now. I am wholly absorbed, can't, it seems, get enough. He can do anything he wants with me once he starts.

The Careful Use of Compliments: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel

Good heavens, am I ever behind on this blog. Let me begin to make amends by talking about my latest Alexander McCall Smith book, The Careful Use of Compliments. This is the fourth novel in his Isabel Dalhousie series. Isabel is a single, independently wealthy scholar and editor of ethical phiosophy living in Edinburgh. Like the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series, which takes place in Botswana, the novels are as much about places as they are about the people who live in them, so the manners, history, and mores of Scotland and Ediburgh are constantly under observaiton. When the series started the subtitle was "An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery," but McCall wisely acknowledged early on that the "mysteries" Isabel confronts are very mild affairs, and only the barest pretexts for the real action: Isabel's thoughts on the world. Isabel is always thinking, mostly about her ties and obligations to other people, real and imagined. Lots actually happens in the books, but it's kind of easy to miss because so much more happens as Isabel thinks about stuff. McCall seems to prefer female protagonists, and while he gives them full relationships with men, he is really interested in the interchanges between women: Isabel bounces of her niece Cat and her housekeeper Grace; Mma Ramotswe (No. 1 LDA) spends most of her time sparring with her employee Mma Makutsi. It would be hard to overstate how much I like these books. I forgive them any and all novelistic faults because it is just such a pleasure to spend time with McCall and his insatiable curiosity about and empathy for the lives of others.

Various Books

Re-reading has always been a thing of mine, and never more so than when I'm under the weather. I recently took a (fourth?) trip through Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which seems to me as perfect as a novel can well be. I also watched the BBC miniseries based on it, with predictably mixed feelings. On the one hand, I didn't understand or agree with a number of their choices in the adaptation; on the other, there were a few key places where their representation showed me ways I'd been misreading the novel. For LoB heads: the lead actor is very cute, just right for the part, and Leo is fantastic, but they got Wani Ouradi all wrong, from beginning to end.

I also trotted through The Fourth Bear, the second in Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime series. I got into Fforde years ago because of his wild and strange and funny and literary Thursday Next series, beginning with The Eyre Affair. The Nursery Crime novels are newer, and the first of them, The Big Over-Easy, was so awful I almost didn't bother with The Fourth Bear. But I'm so glad I did! Fforde seems to have gotten his mojo back, and I couldn't have enjoyed myself more.

Finally, I'm reading the latest No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novel, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive. This series is one of four (!) that Alexander McCall Smith writes simultaneously, and I am deeply addicted to them all. If you're curious to know what the outer limits of human productivity look like, check out his vita some time.

Catch-Up

I know, no one's reading this any more. But for my own satisfaction I'll note that I recently roasted a chicken (with tarragon, no less!) for Father's Day. I followed the directions in Nigel Slater's Appetite. I do love Slater, who in addition to cooking delicious things photographs his own books (most appetizingly) and writes in a brisk, sensible, encouraging tone that makes everything seem do-able.

I have also been re-reading Barbara Pym's entire canon, as I do pretty much every year. If you haven't encountered her slim, witty, brilliantly observed novels of English village life pre and post-WWII, you are missing a huge treat. She is absolutley the best.

Still too nauseated to knit.

The Emperor's Children

What a wonderful novel, and how slow I've been to appreciate it rightly. I'm on my second reading of this celebrated novel by Claire Messud. It follows the intertwined fortunes of a group of Manhattanites, most of them in their early thirties, as they try to build lives just after the dot com boom and just before 9/11. The first time I read it I was stymied (I now see) by two factors. a) I had a hard time taking seriously a novel about 30-somethings in Manhattan. I have no excuse for this prejudice, but it definitley put me on the defensive from the get-go. b) I had just finished reading something I loved and was in no mood to fall in love with anyone else.

What a loss to me! This book could not be smarter about its characters, or subtler in its prose. Messud is frighteningly observant; no detail of a character's surroundings, habits, thoughts, etc., remains unexpressive in her treatment—she has these people down pat. And yet, she has endless compassion for each of them. She notes faults and flaws and self-deceptions without any contempt or stacking of the dice.

And her sentences! Some of them go on forever, and are in other ways pretty damn Jamesian, but never leave me with that horrible "omigod I hate arty novels" feeling. They are like the novel itself: twisty, complicated, funny, and just right.

Cold Comfort Farm

I know, I'm late to the party on this one. Thank heavens for my neighborhood friend who, every now and then, simply presses into my hands a book she thinks I need to read. She is never wrong, and has never been righter than she was with this smart, funny, sharp, outrageously contemporary 1934 novel about a young woman with a good head on her shoulders who straightens out the hopeless set of literary sterotypes that surround her. Any literary critic should pay particualr attention to Mr. Mybug's impassioned argument that Branwell Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights; it is a caution to us all. For added fun, check out the edition with the cover illustrated by Roz Chast.

Mounting Desire

Nina Killham's first novel, How to Cook a Tart, was a total pleasure. Part mystery novel, part satire of our culture's obsession with food, it moved right along, had lots of good ideas for recipes, and featured a protagonist, Jasmine, about whom one cared. Fun! I read it maybe three times. So when I remembered that she had a second novel out, I was thrilled; how could it go wrong?

Oy. Let's just say that even I can't be enthusiastic about "Mounting Desire," a total muddle of a (maybe?) satire on our cultural obsession with sex, featuring a parody (I think?) of a virginal male romance novelist and his quest for true love. This novel doesn't know which end is up. There are few pangs as sharp as the thwarted urge to be thoroughly entertained by a book.

But "How to Cook a Tart" is still great.

PopCo II

Ahem. 300 pages in, 200 to go, and I am the wee-est bit less enchanted by Scarlett Thomas than I was last time I posted. I'm not giving up, but I rather wish I were back reading The End of Mr. Y again.

Real Food

My guide to food. I love this opinionated book. Written by the woman who runs the New York City green market, it is a well-researched manifesto advocating for, in essence, a traditionally balanced diet including lots of animal fats. I'm in heaven! It also introduced me to coconut oil, a staple in my kitchen as any reader of this blog has no doubt noticed. I know, I know—we were all told coconut oil has a billion calories and will kill you quick. But that is the hugely processed kind used in commercial cooking; I'm talking about the good stuff. Not only delicious and wonderful to cook with, but insanely good for you as well. Buy a tub today!

PopCo

My second novel by Scarlett Thomas. I find Thomas engrossing; novels are for her ways to think out loud about ideas, though she is also quite interested in people. This one focuses on Alice Butler, the disaffected employee of PopCo, the third largest toy company in the world. What quantum theory was to The End of Mr. Y cryptography is to PopCo, and both have plots too strange and meandering to describe. I think the quality that appeals to me most in Thomas' writing is (this will sound strange) her self-forgiveness. She is thirty-five and on her seventh novel, a track record that makes sense given the suffusing quality of play and permissiveness in her work. I don't mean that she's a bad or a sloppy writer, and I'm sure she works like a demon. I just mean that one can feel the absence of a censoring angel sitting on her shoulder; somewhere along the way she gave herself permission to write and write and write (though for all I know she may have to fight every day to retain that permission) and it makes her books a pleasure to spend time in.

Intuition

by Allegra Goodman. How annoying is Allegra Goodman? She's in her mid-thirties, with three (or four?) children, a PhD from Stanford and a job at Harvard, along with three (or four?) best-selling, critically lauded novels. Never mind--this is a fantastic book (I'm half way through). It follows the personal entanglements and fevered politicking that ensue when a small research lab gets remarkable results in a cancer study. One appealing thing about the novel is its probing look at the complications that come along with prodigious gifts (a subject on which Goodman surely speaks with authority). The novel is funny and smart and empathetic and totally convincing.

The End of Mr. Y

Now this is an odd book. A first person present-tense narrator (not my favorite voice for a narrator, but relevant to the plot, as it turns out) discovers a cursed book. The plot is in fact too strange to be summarized, but a pleasure to watch develop. Scarlett Thomas (the author) has been reading in quantum theory and literary theory, and both play prominent but un-pedantic roles in the story. So what if certain charcters are developed only to disappear; I devoured this novel and ordered all of her others.