So from time to time I’ve been kind of ahead of schedule with War & Peace. I’d gotten to the part where Napoleon’s army is starting to disintegrate, where Rostov has just met Princess Marya, the sister of Andrei Bolkonsky, Andrei being one of the most interesting characters I’ve encountered on paper in a long while. He’s easy to hate until you begin to like him. His wife (“the little Princess,” whose main characteristic is her weird mouth and her mustache) dies during childbirth, then, rather quickly, he falls in love with Natasha Rostov, who loves him in equal measure until Anatole Kuragin comes along and attempts to elope with her. And Pierre Bezukhov decides to go into battle in spite of his harsh criticism of it – by this point he has become a freemason to cope with his marital misery – but he goes into it as a tourist, as if the war were an amusement park. He is shocked by how graphic death by sword can be. Pierre is interesting as well. He may be married to Anatole’s sister, but what really stirs his heart is Natasha and, even more so for my money, his friendship with … Andrei. It’s all quite delicious.
Much to my surprise, I hope War & Peace never ends, but surely it will, so to slow that process down and to be as current as possible when the book club does meet, I’ve strayed from my vows to book monogamy and had a few affairs along the way, two of which I recommend.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter would be an amazing accomplishment even without knowing that its author, Carson McCullers, had not yet turned 25 when it was published – that’s right, not written, published. If you aspire to write quality fiction, and you’ve passed 40, or 30 for that matter, reading it is a bit of a slap in the face, but an enjoyable one. It’s all good but the scene that stands out in my mind is when one of the white characters goes to the black doctor’s house, where trouble is brewing, and is treated, in a private, black-owned and black-occupied home according to the same rules that apply in public: blacks defer to whites, removing themselves from the table and standing against the wall when the white man, a total stranger to them all, is seated and served coffee not in chipped, stained cups but in the best china in the house. Many generations, sketched in three, maybe four deft, capable sentences. The scene is written with such a lack of urgency or outrage or condemnation for that matter that the particulars of it did not occur to me until two or three pages later, at which point I went back and reread it.
I think I’m becoming a bit of a slut for Ian McEwan. Like Saturday, Amsterdam is about fairly ordinary people. A composer and a newspaper editor have been friends for years, and both have had affairs with the woman whose funeral opens the novel. Most of the story takes place in London but it ends in a hotel in Amsterdam, in a way that I think would seem contrived in the hands of most. The language, though, the language. I’m sitting here trying to think of a clever way to describe the way Ian McEwan uses language, or the seduction of it, and I can’t, so I won’t.
Joy Williams is a writer whose work I have admired for many years. When I was in college she published a story called The Blue Men, about a grandmother and her grandson living a fractured life in Florida, where the boy’s father and the grandmother’s son was awaiting execution on death row. One night they’re driving; the grandma loses control of the car, it flips over, then rights itself and they continue on their way. A sheriff witnesses this and follows them for a couple of miles in complete disbelief. When he finally pulls them over he asks the grandmother why she didn’t stop. “We thought it was a dream,” the grandmother says, “so we kept going.” And that one line of dialogue, which has resonated for me for more than two decades, is my main objection to The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams’ novel about three teenage girls in Arizona. In the map within my mind, the prime minister of the country called Short Stories is Joy Williams, and reading a novel by her – and this is strictly my opinion – is as unlikely as reading a short story by Leo Tolstoy.
