Summer Reading: Back to the hills with Ernest Hemingway, to London with Samuel Pepys, the Sudan with John McPhee, and much more.
Uebbing, James J.
James J. Uebbing James }. Uebbing, editor of Robert Lax's Love Had a Compass: Journals & Poetry (Grove Press), reviews books for Kirkus. A classmate of mine from graduate school has re ...
...A classmate of mine from graduate school has re cently published a novel— which, I hasten to point out, I have not yet read—describing the life of an elderly Manhattan fop who goes to parties for a living...
...The original author, like the tipsy guest who seems to have crashed the party and has no one to talk to, will tend to grab your arm and try not to let go until he has finished his story...
...On vaCommonweal 2 8 June 18,1999 cation I usually take five or six for a second reading...
...so I will simply mention it here as a perfect example of the sort of book I am speaking of...
...I have already described in these pages [April 9] Hwee Hwee Tan's Foreign Bodies (Persea, $24,284 pp...
...While most people look forward to holidays as a time to catch up on their reading, I look forward to doing a little rereading...
...This year I have four...
...A hundred novels read at random, therefore, will usually be remembered like a hundred people met at a large party: a few will be quite offensive, many will be boring, the great majority will be decent but utterly forgettable, and several will be quite nice...
...which became a best seller when it was first published in France two years ago...
...Tan's account of deceit and salvation within the orderly hell of Singapore is remarkable not so much for its story as for its telling, which is arresting largely because of the narrator's sure and certain—and, I believe, quite credible— conviction that she is describing the literal enactment of God's will as it is played out at the bar of a criminal court...
...But, of necessity, the most interesting ones will usually be the oddest...
...Usually you can get away in a minute or two if you ask where the bathroom is or shake the ice cubes in the bottom of your glass...
...The voice of God also figures prominently in Lawrence Cosse's witty thriller, A Corner of the Veil (Scribner, $23, 272 pp...
...the critics themselves, who seem to have worked out their peace with the status quo and prefer more of the same...
...Originality is brash and often somewhat deranged...
...The real disappointment with contemporary fiction is that most of its practitioners seem to have lost their nerve...
...These will not often become friends, but they will stay in your mind and will go the furthest toward convincing you that the evening was not entirely a waste of time...
...Purdy's mother and Myerson's daughter both leave their husbands to uncover the mysteries behind their griefs, which has, of course, as much to do with themselves as with the dead...
...The writing programs come in for a good deal of criticism in this regard, and it is true that the workshops tend to prize a peculiar style—simultaneously overwrought and bloodless—as proof of a "literary" sensibility, but much of the blame rests with the publishers, editors, and (alas...
...Reviewing novels is a similar enterprise in many ways, and not just because both activities are usually intended and pursued as recreations rather than careers...
...and Julie Myerson's Me and the Fat Man (Ecco, $23.95,224 pp...
...The quieter dramas of family life are at the heart of James Purdy's Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (Morrow, $19.95,144 pp...
...As a book reviewer, I read two-hundred-odd novels a year...
...The novel is an intensely personal literary form, after all...
...But neither family is exactly sedate, and both of them are haunted across the span of many years by a dead woman: in Purdy's work the rebellious daughter of an eccentric and staid Chicago couple, and in Myerson's story the hippie mother of an emotionally unhinged Englishwoman...
...even more so than poetry, novels operate through the gradual revelation of personality, and they usually succeed or fail precisely to the degree that they compel a sense of fascination—rather than agreement or awe—in the reader...
...But sometimes you will have to hear him out to the end, when you will discover that you were interested after all...
...Cosse questions both the meaning and the ramifications of religious faith by envisioning its demise—not through gradual apostasy, but as a result of the sudden discovery of an irrefutable proof of God's existence...
...As the proof (discovered by a latitudinarian Jesuit editor) quickly spreads, the government becomes alarmed at the loss of fear (and ambition) among its citizens—including the prime minister, who abandons politics and takes up gardening—and works out an uneasy alliance with the church (which finds itself equally alarmed at the prospect of its own irrelevance in a converted world) to halt the swelling tide of belief...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 12
