The Long & the Short of Fiction: Bookmarks Update October, 2024

Friends: The frost is on the pumpkin, and we've already had our first snowfall in Vermont. The garden is in winter mode; the outdoor furniture has been put away; the woodpile has been replenished; the World Series is over; and I'm settling in for a highly anticipated late Fall and early winter of reading. Here are the books I read in October:

My reading this month had begun in the usual random manner with a novel, a memoir, and two books of poetry when two encounters set the direction for the rest of the month.

First, in a return to a practice I had begun shortly after retiring but which was interrupted by COVID, I am auditing an English class at Harvard College, and its required reading list includes three books I read this month. English 90LV, is taught by James Wood the Professor of Literary Criticism and a frequent contributor of book reviews to 'The New Yorker'. His two books about the novel, "The Fun Stuff" and "How Fiction Works" are widely read. This course, Consciousness in the Novel from Jane Austin to Virginia Woolf, involves close reading and textual analysis of the works of seven authors. I missed the first seminar sessions on Jane Austen due to travel, but have thoroughly enjoyed my re-reading and the discussions of classic works of Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. I am looking forward to re-reading two favorites, "To the Lighthouse" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" next month.

There are many definitions of a 'literary classic' that attempt to describe why we are still reading Flaubert's novel of adultery and death from the 1850's or Chekhov's story about a lady with a dog more than a century after it was written. One of my favorite definitions was proffered by M.H. Abrams. In his book "The Fourth Dimension of a Poem" written when he was 100 years old, Abrams describes a classic as "Agreement among diverse humanists as to the importance and value of a work at any one time, and still more, the survival value of a work---general agreement as to its importance and value over an extended period of time---serves as a sound way to distinguish the better from the worse and to identify which work is a classic. The consensus that emerges when an imaginative work is viewed from a diversity of critical perspectives and through a diversity of sensibilities and especially a consensus that emerges despite radical cultural changes over many centuries---is a reliable index to the fact that the work is central in its human concerns, broad in its imaginative appeal and rich in its inherent aesthetic and other values." The test of time and broad agreement on a work's centrality, imaginative appeal, and aesthetic value seem to be the keys to entry into this exalted realm. I also like the English poet Philip Larkin's criteria that he used when he was a judge for the Booker Prize in 1977. "Could I read it? If I could read it, did I believe it? If I believed it, did I care about it? If I cared about it, what was the quality of my caring and would it last? "

Austen, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Woolf---read any work by any one of them and experience what Harold Bloom describes in his wonderful book "How to Read and Why". "Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change, alas, is universal". Bloom's writing about reading is always worth revisiting.

The second influence on this month's reading was a book, "Great Short Books: A Year of Reading Briefly". I turned to this volume after several friends sent me an article from 'The Economist' entitled "Six Novels You Can Read in a Day" which defined short books as those with 60-160 pages (NB: Kenneth Davis includes short books as brief as 64 pages and as long as 200 pages.). I had bought Davis's book a year ago, but like so many of my book purchases, it ended up in the TBR pile. I ended up loving it.

It's a frustrating book in some ways---poorly copy edited, redundant, and uneven in the writing---but its presentation of the opening lines, plot summary, and bios of the authors of 58 short books proved to be a rich source of ideas for this month's reading and beyond. Of the 58 authors, I had read more than half but had only read 14 of the specific books he highlighted. In addition, the book introduced me to nine authors who were new to me, one of Davis's objectives in choosing books so as to "deliberately to encounter writers for the first time".

Davis extols the virtues of the 'short book' pointing out that "Brevity does not mean lack of artistry. Great short books pack timeless themes and powerful stories into profound but highly compressed narratives. As novelist Ian McEwan told a literary festival audience in 2012, "the novella is a supreme literary form...The prose is better, more condensed, more rigorous."

From this rich trove of 'short books', I chose five. My choices were partly dictated by what I found on the shelves of the Cambridge Public Library, but primarily for the authors. I had never read Elena Ferrante whose Neapolitan Quartet was recently featured as #1 on the NYT list of the best 100 books of the 21st C. I had also never read the Nobel Prize winning Doris Lessing or "Sula" by Nobelist Toni Morrison. Finally, to my surprise, I had never heard of Jenny Offill or Charles Johnson.

What emerged from these books set in locales from Nigeria to England, from the 1830's to the present, in the voice of a freed slave to that of an English professor was the observation that great writing is the key to a great novel whether it is short or long. Within a few lines, paragraphs or at the most several pages, well before the characters, the setting, and certainly the plot have become clear, I was enthralled with the language in each of these books despite their differences in style. Once more quoting Bloom who in turn drew upon Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson, one should read in order to 'find what comes near to you that can be put to the use of weighing and considering, and that addresses you as though you share the one nature, free of time's tyranny." Weighing and considering, indeed!

It is a testimony to the power and value of fiction and reading that these superb books are so different, varying from the stories of mothers' struggles with the demands of child-rearing, marriage, and career (Offill, Ferrante, and Lessing) to the burdens of slavery and racism (Johnson and Morrison). These 'short books' all merit your attention, but if I had to choose two to recommend, I'd go with Morrison and Johnson.

That brings me to the initial group of books I read in October. Colm Toibin's novel "Long Island" is about an Irish woman who flees her marriage and her husband's domineering Italian-American family to return to her small village and an earlier love in Ireland. It's a continuation of his earlier volume, "Brooklyn" and a fine book in its own right, though I was unhappy with the lack of a resolution at the book's end. In contrast, Rama Awdish's harrowing account of her near death experience in late pregnancy can be a difficult read. The value of "In Shock" is in how Awdish, an intensive care physician, translates her experience as a patient into promoting a new approach to the care of patients. She urges physicians to recognize, openly acknowledge, and share their feelings of stress, burnout, fatigue, etc. in order to better care for their patients. It's an approach that I wish had been in place when I was experiencing those feelings as a young doctor.

I read two volumes of poetry this month, one by the four time Pulitzer Prize winning classic American poet, Robert Frost edited by Jay Parini, and the other by my friend and esteemed writer, Ellen Steinbaum. Frost needs no introduction nor was there a need for an additional collection of his work, but the Parini volume has value. The 16 poems he chose and commented upon include Frost's greatest hits, but also a few of his lesser known works. They're all worth re-reading, even if memorizing them is way beyond this old man's ability. Steinbaum, living in an America that could not have been imagined by Frost when he read at John F. Kennedy's Inauguration in 1961, deals with the quotidian and moves smoothly from the tiny details of everyday life to universal truths and emotions in this her fifth book. Among Frosts's 16 poems and Steinbaum's 58 poems in "Leavings" are the following:

To continue with my homage to Harold Bloom, here is another one of his aphorisms: "Value, in literature as in life, has much to do with the idiosyncratic, with the excess by which meaning gets started."

And from Ellen Steinbaum's wonderful poetry volume, the epigrammatic words of the pop/folk singer Brandi Carlisle that introduce the book, "I may not be around this time tomorrow."

www.epsteinreads.com