This is a catchy title, perfect especially for a fiction blog entry. 

 Here is a humorous memoir of a family where the father is an aspiring novelist.  He received a lot of encouragement at a young age, and it went straight to his head.  Soon he quits his job in St. Louis to write his novel, and after a couple of years he moves to New York with his wife and three daughters to live in a literary community  This memoir is written by one of his daughters, Jeanne Darst.  As she writes, she found herself “living on a farm, which I would quickly discover had more New Yorker writers on it than cows and chickens.”  As a child, she believed that “things aren’t going that great now, but it’s all about to change, drastically, because Dad’s gonna sell this novel…”

 After a few years, the first novel is ready.  The publishers look it over, and although they all praise it highly none of them decide to publish it.     By now even though the family was formerly part of the St’ Louis aristocracy, they can keep barely afloat financially.   The father starts his next novel.

 “Writers talk a lot about how tough they have it – what with the excessive drinking and three-hour workday and philandering and constantly borrowing money from people they’re so much better than.  But what about the people married to writers?  Their kids? Their friends?  Their labradoodles?   What happens to them?  I’ll tell you what happens to them.”

 The mother has problems with depression and alcohol.   The daughters run free; Jeanne has her own problems with alcohol in high school.  After a few years no one is sure if the father is still writing anything or not.  “My Dad doesn’t have an iota of the depressive in him.  He just depresses other people.”  Jeanne’s father must be a kind person to allow her to publish many of these lines,  But it is these lines that make this memoir a success.  

 One gets the sense that “Fiction Ruined My Family” is a story that would hurt too much if we weren’t laughing.   In time the father and mother divorce but later they live together for long periods of time.   As Jeanne Darst graduates from high school and goes to college, she has problems with alcohol herself, and she wants to be a writer like her father.  . 

 “For a long time I was worried about becoming my father. Then I was worried about becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself.”

 “Ultimately, I sobered up and began actually writing instead of just talking about it, ever so narrowly avoiding repeating the exact—and I mean exact—mistakes of my mother and father. I became very much like them without becoming exactly like them. This was possible, I believe, through no moral superiority of mine and certainly no more talent than my father, but through the odd fortune of being able to see the truth and, having done that, use it to move forward. I have managed to become an artist and not lose my mind or cause others to lose theirs. I work in stories but I live in reality. Or at least, that the tale I tell myself now.”

 The previous lines are about as serious as “Fiction Ruined My Family” gets.   This memoir is full of wisecracks and funny stories about her family.

Once in a while I come across a phrase that perfectly describes an author.  Henry Clayton Wickham, in a review of “The Angel Esmeralda” in the Daily Texan, had the following line in regard to Don DeLillo.

 “People in his stories grope for one another to suppress the deep unease of human life.”

 Don DeLillo is a fiction writer who makes you feel ‘the deep unease of life’.  He keeps us readers off balance, and thus he is a ‘difficult’ writer.  His interests are wide ranging, and a reader can never guess what subject he is going to write about next.  He is the opposite of those comfortable writers from whom you know exactly what to expect when you pick up one of their books. 

 My first foray into DeLillo’s work was somewhat disastrous.  I remember how much I hated ‘Great Jones Street’.  My reaction to that novel kept me from reading DeLillo for several years.  However by the mid-Eighties I had read enough appreciative reviews of his novels that I returned to his work.  The three novels ‘White Noise’ and ‘Libra’ and ‘Mao II’ were all excellent, perhaps the finest modern novels I read during that time.  In 1997 DeLillo wrote what critics consider his masterpiece, the 827 page ‘Underworld’.  Unfortunately I haven’t gotten around yet to reading ‘Underworld’ which is considered one of the great novels of the Twentieth century, so I settled for this new book of short stories instead.

 Don DeLillo is not naturally a short story writer.  “The Angel Esmeralda” with its nine stories contains all the stories he has written over the last thirty years, and he had to write three of them in 2011 just to have enough.  The stories are certainly wide ranging in subject matter from nuns caring for the hopeless in a rundown drug-infested Bronx neighborhood (‘The Angel Esmeralda’) to a man in prison for investment fraud (‘Hammer and Sickle’) to two college student guys imagining a life for an old man they see on the street everyday (Midnight in Dostoyevsky’).  Probably my favorite edgy story in the collection is ‘The Baader-Meinhof Gang’ about a young woman’s encounter with a young man in an art museum. 

 Most of the stories in ‘The Angel Esmeralda’ I ‘got’, but there were a couple that I didn’t ‘get’.  I listened to the last story, ‘The Starveling’ three times.  It is the story of a man who goes to the movies all day long every day.  The details of this story were interesting, but I’m pretty sure that I could listen to this story a hundred times and still not figure out what DeLillo means.

 Don DeLillo is a writer who isn’t afraid to take the risk of not being understood.   He doesn’t patronize his readers by giving them what they want.  I value Don DeLillo extremely highly, because he has written modern contemporary novels that have had a profound effect on me.  I think he does work better for the reader in novel form than the short form, because in the novel the reader can settle in and finally understand what DeLillo is getting at.           

 “The Angel Esmeralda” is one of three finalists for the Story Prize which awards a $20,000 prize to a collection of short fiction.

 I caught the Guy Vanderhaeghe express quite early in his writing career.  In 1985, I read a combined review of his book of short stories ‘Man Descending’ and his first novel ‘My Present Age’.  The review was meant as a kind of an introduction of this Canadian writer to United States readers.   The review was very positive, and I went out and got ‘Man Descending’.  It was as fine as the reviewer indicated it was, so soon I got ‘My Present Age’ which was also fine.  I have read all of his fiction books since then.  Here is another novelist who became a ‘go to’ writer for me, because I always trust that Vanderhaeghe will provide excellent fiction.  I am so enamored of his writing, I even learned to spell his last name.

 Those first two books were contemporary in setting, as were all of his books up until 1996 when his “The Englishman’s Boy” was published.  With that novel Vanderhaeghe switched to historical fiction, a genre he has stuck to since then.  At first I was skeptical, because historical fiction is not one of my most liked types, but as it turned out “The Englishman’s Boy” is one of my favorites of his novels.  Although the novel has an historical setting, the story allowed a lot of leeway for Vanderhaeghe’s vivid imagination.  When Vanderhaeghe next published “The Last Crossing”, I figured there was no way it could be as good as “The Englishman’s Boy”, but it was.  Only recently have I discovered that Vanderhaeghe is a trained historian.

 Last fall the third novel of this ‘trilogy’, “A Good Man” was published.  I don’t know why they call these three novels a ‘trilogy’.  The novels don’t share any characters, and they don’t even share the same setting.  All they have in common is that all three novels are historical novels which take place in the Old West.  Each of these novels stands alone and can be read independently in any order. 

 “A Good Man” takes place in Montana and Saskatchewan immediately after the Battle of Little Bighorn or as commonly known Custer’s Last Stand in 1876.  In the battle, the United States 7^th Cavalry suffered a severe defeat with 268 of their soldiers killed.  The people of the United States were in the midst of celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence when they heard the news, and they were shocked and humiliated.  The United States continued their war to force the Indian tribes into submission with a two-pronged strategy.  First the military continued to pursue and attack the various Indian tribes.  The other strategy was to cut off all supplies and thus starve the Indians on to the reservation.   Several of the tribes including Sitting Bull and his Lakota Sioux tribe were able to escape to Canada.

 One of the threads of “A Good Man” concerns these delicate negotiations between the United States, Canada, and the Indian tribes.  Sitting Bull is one of the main characters of the novel.   Since several of the characters are Canadians, we see events from Canada’s point of view. 

 Besides the historical context, the novel is also the story of Wesley Case, former soldier and Mounty and aspiring farmer, and school teacher, Ada Tarr, school marm.  Yes, there is a good love story as well as a crime thriller. 

Sitting Bull

How does “A Good Man” compare with the other novels in this ‘trilogy’?  I think Vanderhaeghe was a bit hampered by the necessity of sticking to the facts in “A Good Man”, because he is dealing with well-known history.  I believe this muzzled his imagination to some extent.  Especially relating to the Sitting Bull storyline, Vanderhaeghe had to steer carefully. Still it is disgusting enough how the military on both sides, especially the US side, treated the Indian tribes.  I do believe “A Good Man” is a very good novel, but not quite at the superior level of the other two novels.  If I were grading the three books, here are the grades I would give.

                                  The Englishman’s Boy   A

                                  The Last Crossing          A

                                  A Good Man                    B+

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1921)

No writer has ever defined a decade more vividly than F. Scott Fitzgerald did the 1920s.    He even coined the name for the decade, the Jazz Age  

 “The uncertainties of 1919 were over – there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen –America was going on the greatest gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it.  The whole golden boom was in the air – its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old American prohibition.  All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them – the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants.”

 In the year 1920, Fitzgerald hit the big time.  His first novel ‘This Side of Paradise’ was a tremendous success.  In 1919 Fitzgerald had made $800 by writing; in 1920 he made $18,000.  His stories were in demand everywhere.  Now that he earned enough money, Zelda married him, and together they lived the high life.  Ironically those were also the years of Prohibition in the United States.

 I recently listened to an audio book of five Fitzgerald stories:  ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ (1921),  ‘The Bridal Party’ (1930) , ‘Babylon Revisited’ (1931),  ‘The Lost Decade’ (1938), and ‘Three Hours Between Planes’ (1941).. 

 ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ may be the most contrived story I’ve ever read.   Benjamin Button is born a 70-year old man, and as time passes he becomes progressively younger until he becomes a baby.  Aging backward…  The story reminds me of the Bob Dylan lines “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.”  While the Dylan lines have deep meaning, the Fitzgerald story is mainly for laughs.  I found this the least effective story. 

 ‘The Bridal Party’ is probably the most quintessential Twenties story.  A rich American guy is getting married and rents a ship to take the whole wedding party to Paris for a celebration that lasts five days.  There an ex-American who happens to be an old childhood friend of the bride hooks up with the wedding party.  The ending of this story is also quite contrived but somehow plausible for both the groom and the old boyfriend. 

 ‘Babylon Revisited’ also takes place in Paris.  It is about a father who due to excessive drinking and partying loses his daughter, and he has now given up the party life and wants his daughter back after her mother has died. 

 “The Lost Decade” is about a man who basically lost ten years of his life due to excessive drinking.  It is a rueful story written and published near the end of Fitzgerald’s life

 ‘Three Hours Between Flights’ – During the three hours between flights, a man tries to re-ignite an old flame.  This story was published posthumously. 

 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote hundreds of stories, most of them published in popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Although many of these stories were written mainly to pay for the Fitzgeralds’ exstravagant spending, many are close to their own lives and have a bittersweet effect.  They cover not only the excitement of the era but also its excesses.  The later stories are very much about the after-effects of the high-living Twenties.  At the time of his death, Fitzgerald considered himself a failure.  Eight years later, there was a Fitzgerald revival, and he then was considered one of the United States’ great writers.

 Writers from various nations write various types of fiction.  Here is almost everything you should know about fiction written in English.  

 Writers from England will give you stories told in smooth  refined Royal fashion.  If you want just the opposite, read Irish writers.  Writing from Scotland is crude, lewd, and rude. United States writers will lie or mislead if there is any money in it for themselves.  But Australian writers will always tell the blunt ugly truth even if it hurts.   The Candian writers are quite lucky that I still haven’t figured out where they fit in. 

 Ever since I read “The Fortunes of Richard Mahony” by Henry Handel Richardson, I’ve known this truth about Australian novels.  In that novel, Richard Mahony is a respected doctor in a small Australian village who  goes insane in his thirties as the result of the syphilis he had contracted when he was young.   Richardson explores in excruciating detail his aberrant bizarre behavior resulting from his dementia and the severe effects it has on his family, the neighborhood’s ostracism of the family, and so on.  The doctor’s patients soon all drop away, and the family is reduced to poverty.  Henry Handel Richardson later wrote that the character Richard Mahony was based on her own father.  

  “How I do hate the ordinary sleek biography. I’d have every wart and every pimple emphasized, every murky trait or petty meanness brought out. The great writers are great enough to bear it.”

                                                           Henry Handel Richardson

 At the beginning of  the novel “Gilgamesh” by Joan London, Frank meets Ada in London.   They get married and move to Western Australia to start up a farm.  In the hands of a United States novelist or more likely scriptwriter, this would be the heartwarming story of a loving couple bravely fighting the odds to conquer the Australian wilderness, meanwhile raising a perfectly adorable family.  In the hands of Australian writer Joan London, Ada can’t ‘take the life’ and soon retreats into her own world spending her time wandering around the house talking to herself.  The two daughters Frances and Edith mostly have to raise themselves.   Frank expresses his disgust with Ada more than a few times.   “Gilgamesh” is a real Australian novel.  

 Much of “Gilgamesh” is taken up with the incredible journey of 19 year-old daughter Edith and her toddler son Jim to Armenia.  On the way there they stop in London to visit relatives.  I would argue that even though Western Australia is much farther from London, Armenia is the more remote place.   For one thing, Armenia, in southwestern Asia, is landlocked, so one travels by land to get there.  For another, all writing in Armenia is in Cyrillic script, and to me Cyrillic script is the most obscure thing in the world.   

 “I don’t believe you, Madge said.  “Where is Armenia again?” …Word got around, but nobody really believed that Edith had gone to Armenia.  Wherever on earth that was.  More likely she had taken up with some fancy man she met in the hotel.  She was a ruined girl.  They supposed she would never come back  It was as if she were dead.”

 No, Edith and her little boy Jim really did go to Armenia, by bus, by ship, by train.   I want to say a few words about the writing style of Joan London in “Gilgamesh”.  The entire novel is written in blunt matter-of-fact short sentences that always convey the tough truths.  In this novel, the reader has no idea what will happen next, and the succinct objective writing style of Joan London supports this effect.    

 Don’t let the title “Gilgamesh” dissuade you from reading this novel.  True there are some references to the epic poem ‘Gilgamesh’, the oldest known poem written over 4500 years ago in Iraq.  However this is very much a modern novel which will leave you impressed with the style and honesty of Joan London..

 In the mid 1960s after having published five novels in English, Nabokov went back to one of his old Russian novels, “Despair”, which was originally published in 1934.  He revised and translated it into English, and “Despair” was re-released.   A movie version of the new version of  “Despair” was made by Rainier Werner Fassbinder in 1978 which just this week is now on re-release in a restored print. 

 “Despair” is a parody of the style of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, often referred to as ‘Dusty’ in the novel.  Dostoyevsky’s prestige was rising in the Western literary world in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and Nabokov did not think this new fame and acclaim for  Dostoyevsky was merited, so he went to work revising his old “Crime and Punishment” and “The Double” parody, “Despair”.  Nabokov ranked Dostoyevsky in the category of  “mediocre and overrated people”. 

 The plot of “Despair” revolves around the false double.  Our self-deluded German hero Hermann Karlovich meets a hobo named Felix whom he believes is his exact doppelganger.  Besides the ‘double’ plot, there also is a story line involving Hermann’s not-very-discreet wife Lydia and her implied lover, the lousy artist Ardalion.  Hermann thinks he is this great observer of people, but he can’t see what’s going on right in front of him.  One of the running jokes of the novel is that Lydia and Ardalion are doing all these sleazy romantic things, and Herman never once suspects them. The humor in the novel is broad and outrageous. 

 Nabokov had very strong contrarian opinions about Dostoyevsky and a lot of other literature.  He wrote the following.

 “A good third [of readers] do not know the difference between real literature and pseudo-literature, and to such readers Dostoevsky may seem more important and more artistic than such trash as our American historical novels or things called From Here to Eternity and such like balderdash.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 The parody of Dostoyevsky’s style was lost on me, so I must be a member of the one-third of readers Nabokov was talking about. I have read a lot of Dostoyevsky but I suppose in a too reverent fashion, not as something to be joked around with.  Nabokov thought Dostoyevsky’s writing was a “melodramatic muddle and phony mysticism”.  Here is a Nabokov statement about Dostoyevsky’s novels.

 “I dislike intensely “The Karamazov Brothers” and the ghastly “Crime and Punishment” rigamarole.  No, I do not object to soul searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddle search.” 

 In Russia, Dostoyevsky is an old familiar face, a classic author whose style everyone knows and makes fun of.  We here in the West see Dostoyevsky as a revered literary figure, but most of us are not comfortable enough with his style to appreciate a parody of it.  Also how much of Dostoyevsky’s style in his novels is lost in translation?

In the Fifties and early Sixties, Nabokov had a spectacular run of novels in English with “Lolita”, “Pnin”, and my personal favorite “Pale Fire”.  For me, “Despair”  was not as enjoyable as these other novels.   Perhaps because I did not get into the spirit of the parody, I did not appreciate the humor as much as I otherwise would have. 

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 After reading “Ghost Lights”, I’ve added Lydia Millet to my short list of ‘go to’ writers.

 What is a ‘go to’ writer?  Simply these are the writers I go to when no individual other novel strikes my interest.  My prime example of a ‘go to’ writer is Graham Greene.  Greene’s novels are always reliably well-written, contain stories that are inherently interesting, and are wonderfully good natured.  They are usually a combination of the adventurous and the domestic, the humorous and the dramatic.  All is told in an even-tempered low key manner that rides well for the long run. I must have read about 25 Graham Greene novels by now.  

 Another good example of a ‘go to’ writer for me is Anne Tyler.  I’ve read nearly all her novels over 45 years and am looking forward to her next (“A Beginner’s Goodbye”. which will be published in April). 

 Lydia Millet brings these same ‘go to’ qualities to her new novel “Ghost Lights”.  It starts out as a domestic drama, but soon becomes a dark yet humorous Central American adventure story.  The main character in “Ghost Lights” is a middle-aged husband and father.  To have a main character much different from oneself is all in a day’s work for a ‘go to’ writer. 

 “Who was he? He was a middle-aged IRS employee, a father, a cuckold.  He was an idiot.”  

 Much of the novel takes place in the Central American country of Belize.  While reading the novel I learned a little known fact.  The spoken language of Belize is English. Belize, formerly British Honduras, was a British colony.  While in Belize, our main character meets a German family of tourists which are good for some comic relief.  Another quality of the ‘go to’ writer is that the writer can achieve high drama and low comedy in the same scene in a way that seems almost effortless. 

 A ‘Go to’ writer doesn’t have to go overboard to achieve his or her stories’ effects but is supremely confident, and we readers relax and let the writer’s steady hand at the wheel guide us.  Lydia Millet is comfortable enough in her own talent that she can be absurdist and realistic at the same time. 

“Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don’t walk a line where you’re struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you’re not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. ” 

                  Lydia Millet, in an interview with BOMB Magazine

  I’m adding Lydia Millet to my ‘go to’ writer list on the basis of only one novel.  I could be severely disappointed by the next novel of hers I read, but I somehow don’t think that is going to happen. 

 Do you have some ‘go to’ writers?  Who are they?

  Considering that Larry Watson’s most famous novel, which I have also read, is “Montana – 1948”, this new novel could have been called “Minnesota – 1962”.  Instead it is called “American Boy”, the story of a small town teenage boy who finds out that the people and events in his town aren’t always as clear and straightforward as they seem.   The story takes place in the imaginary Minnesota town of Willow Falls.   

“American Boy” is a classic coming-of-age story of youthful emulation and disillusionment.  This is a very common theme of fiction.  It is Larry Watson’s writing mastery that makes “American Boy” a superior fiction and an outstanding novel.  Each chapter of “American Boy” is only five or six pages, but each chapter can stand alone as a well-defined short story itself with its own opening, climax, and denouement.  The writing is spare, crystal-clear, and to the point. It seems almost as if the words were etched rather than typed.  Watson paints a vivid picture of what life is like in this little town of Willow Falls, the class differences, the eventful days of a small-town doctor, the dreams and desires of a teenage boy moving precariously into adulthood. 

“We were exposed to these phenomena in order that we might learn something, but then the lessons we learn are not always those we are taught. . . .”

 I do have one minor qualm with the novel, and that is with its title.  There are a lot of American boys, and most of them are not small town white boys.  The title ‘American Boy’ belongs to all of these boys, and no one has a special claim to it. 

 The writing of Larry Watson captures perfectly life as it was lived in the early 1960s.  There is a depth to these small town characters that goes way beyond any stereotypes.  The setting may be classic American, but the plot catches up to the moral ambiguity of modern times. 

“American Boy” is an excellent novel that rivals Larry Watson’s other highly praised novels which are reviewed at KFC and the Mookse.   

  “American Boy” is a quick read, well worth the time spent

Dagoberto Gilb is a big guy who knows his way around both a construction site and a publishing office.  He was born in 1950 in Los Angeles, his mother Mexican-American; his father German.   Before and during college, he had several laborer jobs.  He graduated from college in 1974 with a double major in Philosophy and Religious Studies and went on to complete his Masters in Religious Studies in 1976.  After that in order to make a living he worked as a carpenter in  high-rise construction.  During his off time, he wrote a novel, never published.

 Gilb was working as a carpenter in the museum of the University of Texas at El Paso when he met the late writer Raymond Carver in 1977.  Gilb switched from writing novels to short stories due to Carver’s influence.  Carver offered to sponsor Gilb at the University of Iowa Creative Writing Program, but Gilb turned the offer down.     

 “What [Carver] was telling me, what I came to learn over the next decade, was the way the system works. You go to Iowa, you turn your story into a professor, who’s a famous writer. And that famous professor-writer gets you to an editor. Whereas I was under the misconception that you put things in the mail, and some editor reads it and (something) happens, if it was good. I don’t know where my life would have been if I’d known what [Carver] was talking about. On the one hand, I suffered for not getting published. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have the material I have now.” -  Dagoberto Gilb from IdentityTheory.com

 His first full book of stories, ‘The Magic of Blood’, was published in 1993.  It won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Foundation award and was a PEN/Faulkner finalist.  Since then he has published several books which have won various awards, and his stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, and many other places. 

 Shortly before Dagoberto Gilb started writing this latest collection of stories, “Before the End, After the Beginning”, he suffered a stroke in 2009.  All of the stories in this collection are excellent, but I am going to concentrate on the first story which is based on Gilb’s experiences in the hospital immediately after his stroke.  That story is the first in the book and is called “please, thank you”.  It was first published in Harpers.   

 The story begins when the narrator arrives at the hospital after his stroke.  Some of the staff talk to him in Mexican as if his family had not been in the United States longer than most of them.  He gets mad at the hospital staff maybe because he’s upset he had this stroke in the first place. It has left him semi-paralyzed on the right side.  Gilb calls his narrative approach ‘first-person stupid’. I would say it is the interior monologue many of us would have under the same circumstances. 

 The hospital has staff members present 24 hours a day for the stroke patients, and these persons aren’t high-paid doctors but regular working people of different ethnic groups and attitudes.  One is Mexican-American, one is Chinese, etc.  Some are odd like the late-at-night guy.  Gradually our narrator realizes that they are all working to help him get better after his stroke.  As the story progresses, our narrator becomes calm and confident enough to help one of the staff to deal with her own personal and family affront.   So our narrator goes from rage to being a helpful thoughtful person again.  This is a moving transformation effectively told. 

 Many of the stories in “Before the End, After the Beginning” have this same kind of emotional kick.  Dagoberto Gilb writes stories about working people that will touch you profoundly.  One can definitely recognize the influence of Raymond Carver in this work, but the stories have their own distinctive power.

“A distressingly large portion of the world doesn’t do you any good whatsoever. In fact, it does you bad.”

The new novel by Charles Frazier is a grim Southern gothic tale set in the sparsely populated Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina during the early 1960s.  Much of the action occurs in places with names like Hog Pens Gap or Picken’s Nose.   

 “ …violence is best accomplished spur-of-the-moment. Let it happen out of nowhere… like there’s no past and no future, nothing but the red right now…”

 At the center of the story is Bud, the sorry scary villain.  Bud is a one-note character with no more depth than the slasher Jason in the movie ‘Friday the 13th’.  Bud is the bogeyman; whenever Bud pops up, brutality is sure to follow.  Frazier makes no attempt to explain him; Bud is just a selfish cruel natural force who is there.  Many novels attempt to explain the motivations of the villain, but Frazier apparently was more interested in creating a creepy crawly villain.

 “Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don’t.”

 Certainly there is a long tradition of bleak gothic novels where even the cruelty of people is depicted as a force of nature, but the danger is that a drama without motivation will turn into a melodrama.  The story may be compelling but not all that interesting.  Frazier attempts to blame the fact that Bud is not locked up on legal technicalities, but it is more likely that it’s the Southern tradition to let good ole white boys run loose with their weapons and their cruelty.  Bud isn’t the only character in ‘Nightwoods’ beset by willful stupidity and cruelty.  Both parents, Link and Lola, of the main female character Luce have their share of problems.

 ”…it wasn’t even as if love factored much. Luce didn’t expect to love the children, and she sure didn’t expect them to love her ever. That was a lot to ask in either direction. But there was something she was feeling toward them, and it had to do with their survival.”

 ‘Nightwoods’ contains lyrical elegiac descriptions of the mountains, the lakes, and the natural surroundings of this western area of North Carolina; many of these descriptions depict nature to be as squalid as the people who live there.   

“At dawn, cold mist, pale metal colors. Gray and yellow and blue. Then various degrees of early light as the sun burns through the fog. Each twig and fir needle in its own case of ice. …”

  Sure, there are natural-born killers running loose in a lot of different places.  You only need to glance at the newspapers from just about anywhere to know that.  It just does not make very involving fiction to watch people being terrorized by them, because we all would be terrorized.     “Nightwoods” is not a novel of literary depth.  It reads more like the script for a lovely Southern slasher film.

1.  Gunter Grass                                        A.  Rebecca

2. Carson McCullers                                  B.  The Wicked Pavilion

3.  Nelson Algren                                       C.  Dog Years

4.  Henry Roth                                           D.  The End of the Affair

5.  Elizabeth Taylor                                   E.  Vile Bodies

6.  Graham Greene                                    F.   The Harp in the South

7.  Daphne du Maurier                              G.  A Walk on the Wild Side

8.  Ruth Park                                              H    A Game of Hide-and-Seek

9.  Evelyn Waugh                                       I.   The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

10. Dawn Powell                                        J.   Call It Sleep

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 “Mr. Wonderful” is the ironic title of this graphic novel about a blind first date between Marshall and Natalie, both in their thirties.  Much of the book was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine. 

 Marshall hasn’t had a date for the six years since the divorce from his wife who “had some issues with fidelity”.  His friends Yuki and Ted set him up with Natalie, and while waiting for her in the designated restaurant meeting place, Marshall is filled with self doubts and grandiose dreams.  Natalie arrives forty minutes late, apologizes, and the date begins. 

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Much of the story is taken up with Marshall’s interior monologue.  Just how honest and truthful should he be and still not scare her away?  Natalie tells Marshall her back story. Marshall is ready to go into his story when the little mediator inside his head, who is actually pictured as a small fairy version of himself in a cloud above his head, says “Schmuck!  What are you doing?!  Don’t bum her out with your sob sister crap!  What’s wrong with you?”

 One of the nice things about “Mr. Wonderful” is the variety of the artwork which spices the story up to a considerable extent.

 Marshall, with all his self-doubts and inner criticisms and self-consciousness, is reminiscent of the Woody Allen character in the early Woody Allen movies like ‘Play It Again Sam’.  It does lend even more humor and realism to the dating situation.  However we’ve seen this first date setup a thousand times before.  Many events occur during the date which I won’t go into.  You can find out for yourselves. 

“Mr. Wonderful” is neither great literature nor a great graphic novel.  However, it is a pleasant diversion, and being a graphic novel, the book does not require much time or effort to complete.

These are the same rules as last year.  I’m restricting the Top 10 list to books which were published since 2000 and then listing afterwards a few of the older books which I found rewarding during the year.  Like last year, I don’t think the newly published fiction should have to compete with time-tested classics.

Here is the Top Ten list.

1.  “The Old Romantic” by Louise Dean  (2010) – This novel is a wicked joy with the meanest and sharpest dialogue of the year.

 2.  “Rules of Civility” by Amor Towles  (2011) – I guarantee that this most charming of novels will make you wish you were in New York City in 1937-38.

 3.  “Room” by Emma Donoghue (2010) -  What can I say that hasn’t already been said?  A five-year old boy and his mother locked in ‘Room’.

 4.  “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes (2011) – A London schoolboy grows up and learns not to trust the life story he’s been telling himself for many years.

 5.  “Swamplandia” by Karen Russell (2011) -  A delightful story of the BigTree family and their alligator wrestling amusement park in Florida. 

 6.  “We the Animals” by Justin Torres (2011) – A dramatic family story that has a visceral impact which will leave you thinking about your own family.

 7.  “Netsuke” by Rikki DuCornet (2011) –  A novella of relentless sexual obsession from the viewpoint of the guilty party.

 8.  “The Tragedy of Arthur” by Arthur Phillips (2011) – If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then this humorous novel flatters William Shakespeare..     

 9.  “In the Garden of Beasts” by Eric Larson (2011) – Not fiction, a “novelistic history”; a story of love, terror, and a United States family in Hitler’s Berlin. 

 10.  “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” by Heidi W. Durrow (2010)  – A compelling original coming-of-age story that takes place in both Chicago and Portland.

Now as promised here are some excellent novels I read in 2011 that were first published before the year 2000.

“cloudstreet” by Tim Winton (1991) – The crowd-pleasing wild story of two Australian families, the Pickles and the Lambs, who share the same house. 

 “After Claude” by Iris Owens (1973) -  Perhaps the bitchiest novel ever written about an anti-heroine named Harriet.

 “Hard Rain Falling” by Don Carpenter (1966) – A tough realistic novel about two young guys in Portland, Oregon who are outside society, outside the law.    

 “The Vet’s Daughter” by Barbara Comyns (1959) – A unique primitive novel about the veterinarian from Hell and the rest of the family.

 “The True Deceiver” by Tove Jansson (1982) – A simple menacing novel which is like a cold dark morning in Finland.

That’s all, Folks..

 ”The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.”

 During this ‘too close to Christmas’ lull in fiction publishing, I decided to re-read the old Sinclair Lewis classic “Babbitt”.  “Babbitt” is frequently called a satire on the emptiness of middle-class United States life and its pressure toward conformity, but the story is so realistic in its details that sometimes it seems deadly serious. 

 “Babbitt” tells the story of about a year in the life of George Babbitt who is a successful realtor and a strong booster of his home city, the fictitious Zenith.  The time is the 1920s when the slogan was “the business of America is business”.  George is a member of several civic organizations and is well-respected as long as his every thought conforms closely to those of all the other business leaders of the city.  He has the typical middle-class family, a wife and three kids.  George is a really good public speaker and is ready to assume a greater leadership role.

 Then a violent event occurs which changes everything for George.  His close friend and old college roommate Paul Reisling murders his argumentative wife by shooting her during an argument.  George questions his current life and goes bohemian, partying with flappers, taking up with an artistic mistress, and becoming a  socialist.  Of course he is ostracized and shunned by all his old business leader friends.  .

 I suppose since the changes to George are quite broad and occur so rapidly, the novel could qualify as satire.  However having worked for an insurance company, a retail company, and several other private companies, I can testify to the absolute compliance to conformity of ideas required to be successful in the United States business world even today.   I remember my first job after college working for a private auto insurance company sitting at the break table when I was called a Communist ‘pinko’ by a couple of the other insurance underwriters.  I, being young at the time, probably did spur that reaction on purpose.

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 Which brings us to the Occupy movement.  Only time will tell if the young people of today and others of the Occupy movement will have any success against the Robber Barons of the 21^st century, the Kochs, the Murdochs, etc. Or as the Occupy movement itself would say, “Can the ninety-nine percent of the people reclaim their share from the one percent who own and control everything?”

 Sinclair Lewis knew the crushing conformity of the business world through and through, and he had considered Socialism while young.  Is there any fiction writer today who is as familiar with the current business world as Lewis?   

  “In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.”

                                      Sinclair Lewis

 As many of you have probably heard by now, “Ed King” is a modern retelling of the Sophocles play Oedipus Rex, that ancient tragedy of a doomed family. 

 This is a great idea for a novel, because the idea of fate is just as valid today as it was in ancient Greece.  We still haven’t pinned down the exact link between one’s behavior and one’s destiny and one’s family’s destiny   Many believe there is a link, and that fate is not just a random series of events.  Many believe we are sinners in the hands of an angry god.    

 This new novel takes place in the three West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California.  The story begins in 1962, the year of the Seattle World’s Fair, and continues through the beginning of the personal computer up to the Internet era of today and beyond.   It’s the life story of Ed King from his conception.

 So what is the sin in “Ed King” that sets off the events that occur over the next fifty years?  The answer is in the first sentence of the novel.  “In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month.”  She is the fifteen-year old English au pair girl, Diane, who was hired to take care of Walter’s kids while his wife is in the hospital for a nervous breakdown.   As with ‘Oedipus Rex’ the key to the Ed King story is the adoption of the baby, so the kid cannot recognize his real parents.  Even today it is not that far-fetched that an adopted child could sooner or later run into his real parents.

 In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx.  “What is the creature who walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?” Oedipus replies, “Man, who crawls on all fours as an infant, walks upright later, and needs a walking stick in old age.”   In the novel, Ed King invents a new search algorithm, starts an Internet company Pythia, and becomes a billionaire.  Just as people now say, ”I googled ‘Sophocles’”, in the novel they say ‘I pythed ‘Aristophanes’”.

 So does David Guterson succeed in his re-telling of the Oedipus story?  To a large extent he does succeed.  The events in the novel are vivid and well-told, and I will probably remember this novel long after I’ve forgotten many others.

The long winding road of Ed King’s life fits together well as a story, though somehow the prosaic events of the last fifty years do not resonate with the same tragic drama as the Oedipus story.   The original Oedipus is a risqué, tragic sex story, yet that part of the story in this American re-telling seems almost banal without the catastrophic implications.

  The ideas of an individual fate and a family fate are not as powerful as they once were.