Each year, I try to do what I call a Big Read along with the other normal-sized books.  Lately I’ve been trying David Copperfield, which is 900 pages or so but easy reading, compared to most. Giant reads like War and Peace that take years rather than quarters.  There have been others like Melville’s Moby Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, Bolaño’s 2666, Thomas Wolfe’s massive unedited version of Look Homeward Angel called O Lost.

Each event has had its pains and gains. No secret: there has been wading, hedging, skipping. For example I couldn’t endure the entire list of grisly events presented police-report style in 2666.  I chose to be selective. With Melville, I drifted in and out of sleep with his minutiae, his random straying from narrator Ishmael. Many parts of Ulysses are just too dense, too arcane (though I have since been trying to revisit it, chapter by chapter, as if studying a long and wonderful poem, and acquiring the Gilbert guide helps). Maybe Wolfe’s is the only one I read thoroughly and hung on in amazement, word-for-word.

Reading Franzen’s novel Freedom (in itself a pretty big book and one digested completely) prompted me to go to War and Peace. In the Franzen book one of his characters (Patty Berglund) escapes to a lake house and takes the occasion to finally read War and Peace. Her decision, according to many reviewers, is a significant device within the book (an expression of her need for clarity and a thematic parallel to love triangles), a matter discussed in various erudite reviews and blogs.  Maybe all that’s valid, but bottom line, it’s a matter of her being in the right place under the right conditions and with the luxury of time (freedom?) to tackle it. That’s something we all identify with.

Anyway, Volume I of W&P is now behind me. The plan was to stop there for a while and consider the merits of going ahead. Not much deliberation. I’ve even become used to its weight, finding the right spot on my midsection to read it comfortably in bed. So, my bookmark is well into Volume II, where at its end another pit stop will occur. There will be two volumes and six hundred pages more after that.  It’s colossal.

Like the Patty Berglund character said in Franzen’s book, I am surprised how readable W&P is. The book is far better than I ever imagined, so far, and my admiration for Tolstoy as a writer has jumped exponentially.

Two example sections below that I particularly like in Volume I:

“It was nine o’clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea down below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz where Napoleon stood with his marshals around him, it was quite light. Above him was a clear blue sky, and the sun’s vast orb quivered like a huge hollow, crimson float on the surface of that milky sea of mist. The whole French army, and even Napoleon himself with his staff, were not on the far side of the streams and hollows of Sokolnitz and Schlappanitz beyond which we intended to take up our position and begin the action, but were on this side, so close to our own forces that Napoleon with the naked eye could distinguish a mounted man from one on foot. Napoleon, in the blue cloak which he had worn on his Italian campaign, sat on his small gray Arab horse a little in front of his marshals. He gazed silently at the hills which seemed to rise out of the sea of mist and on which the Russian troops were moving in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the valley. Not a single muscle of his face- which in those days was still thin- moved. His gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one spot. His predictions were being justified. Part of the Russian force had already descended into the valley…”

– copied from the online Maude translation.

and

“What is it? Am I falling? Are my legs giving way under me?” Prince Andrei thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him now except the sky – the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it. “How quiet, calm, and solemn, not at all like when I was running,” thought Prince Andrei, “not like when we were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the swab – it’s quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven’t seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I’ve finally come to know it. Yes! Everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquility…”

– copied from the 2009 Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, the version I’m reading. It’s good, and sometimes a small crash course in French too.

This is a collection by Oscar Casares, an author I ran across when looking for fiction set in the Rio Grande Valley. Also uncovered was an older book, Americo Paredes’  unfinished novel “George Washington Gomez.” So far I’ve yet to finish the novel, which I’ll review here too. I read most of the Casares stories.

The Brownsville fiction is well-crafted, conservative writing. Casares unfolds some nice stories, produced in the tradition of short fiction as influenced by the University of Iowa. He controls the use of Spanish phrases, tactically placing them so they read with sensibility and purpose.

It’s good stuff, but there’s not much dirt under the fingernails. I wanted to learn more about the underbelly of places like Matamoros, Alice TX, Nuevo Progreso, Reynosa, McAllen. I’ve spent some time in the Valley and across the Bridge and get the sense of something stewing underneath the surface. It’s a rough and tumble part of the country, straddling two cultures and unknown subcultures. It’s why I would assume any writing about it would take risks and  have a more investigative aspect or at least some edginess. But the stories strike me as more suburban, on the safe and quaint side.  Some pieces, like the bowling ball story, have the guided familiarity of an American sitcom.

I’m corrupted by Junot Díaz and Roberto Bolaño. Still, I think Casares’ story-writing, solid as it is, could use a dose of hot sauce.

One of the dust jacket blurbs on the Modern Library hardback version came from Norman Mailer who said he wouldn’t change two words of Capote’s novel.  Meaning, obviously, the story is near perfect in every sense. It was no exaggeration. The purity of the writing is like “The Great Gatsby,” a novel in which every word and every sentence rings true and exudes a smart sort of elegance. Old Norman also said “Breakfast” was destined to become a classic, and maybe it has, though the film version tends to come first to people’s minds. If the novel hasn’t been studied enough, it must be because the same sort of stuffy academic moralists who won’t give Holden Caulfield his due won’t give it to Holly Golightly either.

What are the characteristics of this book otherwise?  It’s fresh and feels contemporary. It’s a story of identity, ego, finding one’s niche, and the close relationship between noble aspirations and being a con. Character study par excellence. Both funny and sad in parts. Spot-on descriptions and engaging dialog, and an alluring voice from a sensible and credible narrator. Structurally, we are placed within the walls of Joe Bell’s bar and as readers we can stay right there and  have a martini and learn the whole scoop. The revelations will come to us fast and furious, packed into a brilliant series of packages, all smartly wrapped in thematic weight and expository brevity.

It’s still modern and still hip. I had forgotten what a stylish and resonant story it is. I think it’s an important part of 20th century American fiction. I don’t think the picture’s complete without having read it.

A family of women and girls, widowed, abandoned, and otherwise living as outcasts, struggle to exist in a bleak town in the Northwest mountains. Death by water plays a part, as well as migrancy, trains, family ties, subsistence, darkness, clutter, conformity, freedom, and more.

If you meditate on the cover of this book, you’ll get a feel for one of the story’s central images.

This is another monumental piece, larger than its parts, with writing that is brilliant and sublime. It is a close cousin, I think, to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both novels create dark worlds, tragic storylines, and characters of biblical proportions. In depths that scholars can analyze for years. Both novels have astounding lyrical descriptions of landscape and sky. Both cut to the marrow of raw human existence. If there is a simple difference to point out here, it’s that Housekeeping is more accessible and not as savage; readers are more likely to stay with it.

I wondered if I would stay during some slow sections in book middle. I was tested by the family of girls and their insistence on creating their own obstacles. But in the last sections, the pace picks up again once Sylvie makes the supreme mistake of catching the law’s attention. Fighting against the odds, her “housekeeping” compensations don’t make amends, and all that’s left is for her and Ruth to abandon the house.

When they flee, a harrowing scene is described. One relating to the cover. It affected me as much as any Stephen King cellar scene. It’s just one example of the power of Marilynne Robinson’s writing. It may well send me to the store or library to check out her book Gilead.

A novel about a college professor’s identity set in a small Berkshires community in 1998, the year of Monica Lewinsky and the advent of Viagra. That’s how Amy Hungerford opens her discussion of the book in her Yale lecture series on YouTube.  Then the details are enumerated, and she proceeds to make her academic case based on the data, which is the novel itself. It’s her enthusiasm and insight that led me to this book, and to re-visit others she has lectured about (Franny and Zooey, Lolita, Blood Meridian).

This is the first Roth I’ve read in years, and the first one I’ve read that has narrator/author Nathan Zuckerman. I liked Nate right off. I knew I was getting an honest narrator when he admitted to something as private as his own prostate problems and urinary leakage, which manifests in the scene where he dances with Coleman Silk.  His accounts are reliable and without hysteria. My concern was that Nate’s “I” voice vanished early and was gone for almost two hundred pages. There were long, dense sections in third person describing Silk’s college days and romances. Eventually this is made clear near the end: all of the back stories were reported to Nate by a third party. And Zuckerman confirms that this indeed is “the book” Silk asked him to write. Still, and it’s a testament to how well Nate is drawn, I missed him during all those pages.

This is a heavyweight champion writer of the world novel. It’s literature of the highest order. While the topics are contemporary, the storytelling is old-style. We are told and we are give rationales and nuances and then told again. Not once did I yearn for the modern template of action and dialog and limited exposition. In fact, it made the writers workshop commandment “show don’t tell” look sort of superficial and anemic.

The wise character Ernestine makes a brief appearance and bemoans modern people’s lack of patience and resolve, a situation in which quality and substance are lost in the name of expedience. Sounds like prose writing too, in a way.  She says this much better than me and in shorter space. We know that sort of syndrome from what we’ve been “shown” in the story. But there’s nothing wrong – in fact it’s fortifying – when she “tells” us.

In addition to being about desire and identity, the story is filled with choices. The last chapter demonstrates that. There is a choice to be made about confrontation. As Nathan faces Lester we expect either to see a murder or detente.

Another choice, locally. Whether to read other novels in the Zuckerman series, like American Pastoral.  That is the only gray area Roth leaves me with at the end. The rest is black and white.

The clerk at B&N was about my age. Her eyes bulged behind her glasses when I asked if the store had a copy of this book. The computer said it did, so she took me on a walking tour trying to find it.

“I haven’t heard anyone mention that title in forty years.”

I wondered if the clerk’s mom had kept a copy hidden in her nightstand as mine did back in the mid-1950s when this bombshell book came out. Maybe she too snuck a look for the dirty parts.

The clerk didn’t find the book, which I ordered later from Amazon. She was polite and never asked why the hell I would want such a thing.  You know, being a middle-aged man and all.  I’m not sure I had an answer on the ready. I guess I could say that the book stands in time as a period piece and as a breakthrough in women’s freedom to express, and so forth. Or I could have said I’m interested in all fiction and for some reason I’m in the mood to read some soapy pulpy stuff. Presented in an accomplished novelistic way, of course. Yeah. I wanted to see how the best of breed managed it.

Keeping up with the cast of characters made it a slow read at first. The writing is solid and unpretentious, functional. I never found it sappy like a lot of that era’s fiction. Even so, the episodes tend to stretch the obvious and telegraph themselves. I began to skim in the last one-third. The characters perpetrate about every human foible you can think of. The dirty parts are far from dirty anymore; they have a quaint memorableness to them.

The author believed in her novel enough to risk becoming a pariah and eventually she ruined her liver over it. I defer to the more conscientiously written reviews out there and especially to the Vanity Fair piece on Grace Metalious, a pretty interesting read.

An admission: this is the first King novel I’ve ever read.  It comes highly recommended as being King at his best.

The obvious: the scary factor. King readers know it, but  I had to read and see. It’s all  true:  King can create a spook moment that will have you hearing noises in the house and looking at the night windows wondering if someone is out there.  The “Bones” novel has a scene in which Mike Noonan, protagonist cast as an author of novels, descends the cellar steps in his old (and haunted) lake house in Maine. Each step the terror grows. I had to get out of bed, move around and get the chills out of my spine. Last time I had a similar reaction to a fictional work was when I squirmed in heightened anxiety watching the last scenes of “Blair Witch Project.”

My used hardback version runs over 500 pages. It is a bit messy toward the end. An editor could take a few of the over-extended scenes (like those with Mattie in particular, and the climactic scenes with Devore and at Mattie’s backyard party) and cut them down with no harm. But I wasn’t bothered. I know from reading King’s book “On Writing” that he is a practitioner of writing organically. He puts characters in a scene and a certain situation and lets them go their own way. Let them work it out, let them lead the writer.  It is a mystical place for a writer to be, and I think the results sometimes can tend towards excess.

King’s characters are vivid and skillfully presented. I’m likely to remember all of them, from the evil Rogette to the PYT Mattie.