PDQ's Short Takes on Long Tomes
For the opening of the pdquaver.com website, I furnished my brand-new blog with several book reviews. I thought it would be amusing/challenging to model them on the sort of urbane, literate extended critiques one finds in the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, of which I'm a longtime fan. But while I'm fairly happy with the results, I found having to troll the books for quotes and plot-points (and the quickly-forgotten names of various characters)—not to mention the chore of assembling my thoughts in a pleasing fashion—uncomfortably reminiscent of those college essays I cobbled together at 3 AM. In short, it was less amusing than a bracing reminder that people are paid for this sort of stuff for a reason.
So until another book comes along to which I feel compelled to give that sort of nerdily exhaustive attention, I'm going to try assembling a few casual blurb-like reviews of books I've recently read—the sort of stuff you might say to a friend in passing.
And so: the first of "PDQ's Short Takes on Long Tomes” :
Of course, they all won't be hefty volumes (I just liked the name)—but this one was: Ben Hecht's A Child of the Century (Yale University Press) weighs in at 630 pages. First published in 1955, it's the idiosyncratic memoir of one of the great journalists/playwrights/screenwriters ("The Front Page," "Scarface") of the silent/early talkies era. Brilliant, passionate, given to flights of grandiosity but brimming with amazed delight at the mad human comedy to which he was blessed with a front row seat. And the reader gets a seat at the bar beside Hecht as he spins tales of working as a cub reporter in Chicago beside Carl Sandburg, partying with Fanny Brice, striking it rich (then losing his shirt) in the notorious Florida land scam, or witnessing the tragic last days of the great John Barrymore. A time capsule of a book to be sipped like whiskey, and savored.
"Hillbilly Noir" is a description I've seen pinned on the odd book, usually with amused condescension. But absolutely no snickering will be tolerated for the works of Daniel Woodrell. "Winter's Bone" (the movie version of which launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career) was a flat-out masterpiece. But that twisted tale of a young girl's desperate struggle for survival in the icebound Ozarks was darker than dark. So it was nice to find Woodrell capable of lighter fare in Give Us a Kiss (Back Bay Books, 194 pgs.). Despite the anodyne title, there's still plenty of blood feuds, guns, weed and whiskey, not to mention sudden eruptions of savage, expertly-wrought violence. But it's all wrapped around a sweetly poignant love story, laced with humor, candor, and bouts of strip-off-them-jeans passion.
Speaking of love affairs, I've got a thing for female British authors stretching back to "Peter Rabbit" and "Mary Poppins." Later, "Jane Eyre" and "Pride and Prejudice" led me to works by Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark and Jean Rhys; in recent decades I've devoured the oeuvres of Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson.
So how did I miss Diana Athill? A brilliant editor whose life spanned the 20th century, she's also the author of seven memoirs--all of which, on the evidence of her only novel, I can't wait to read. Set in the threadbare, tawdry milieu of postwar bohemian London—replete with cramped bedsits, shilling gas meters, and beer-fueled verbal jousting—Don’t Look at Me Like That (Granta, 187 pages) depicts a brainy young woman's emotional and sexual awakening with an honesty so witheringly self-revelatory I've never seen its equal; add a great editor's lucid prose and you've got a masterpiece.
Another sort of masterpiece (and another doorstop of a book) is Svetlana Alexievitch's Secondhand Time (Random House, 670 pages). Winner of the Nobel Prize, she's a sort of Slavic Studs Terkel, assembling first person accounts, by a multitude of disparate voices, in order to depict the true complexity of catastrophic historical events in messy, granular, often harrowing detail; her volumes on Chernobyl and the experiences of Soviet children during the Second World War are amazing reads. This one—about the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 (and its brutal transition from socialism to capitalism)—is a shocking corrective to any smug fantasies about a people "shedding their chains and emerging into the warm light of freedom”—and perhaps Ms. Alexievitch's most harrowing volume of all.