The Julia Glass Experience

I'm sure it's wrong of me to be so brief, but I've just finished The Whole World Over by Julia Glass and offer this paltry review. The book is:

Keenly, minutely observed. Exquisitely written. Each sentence fresh, each metaphor new and perfect. Stories interwoven naturally, not cleverly. No seams showing. Yet: I didn't care, I cared, I cared, I cared, I cared, I didn't care, I wanted it to be over. And: some character names not only didn't fit, but annoyed me every time I saw them. Nevertheless, if you're a reader, read it, if only for the assured and beautiful writing and crafting.

I read Glass's Three Junes years ago and both enjoyed and admired it, yet today I remember nothing about it. I read a synopsis online and thought, 'Really?' How could I have feasted for days at a banquet that size and not remember a single thing I ate?

Whereas I suspect I'll savor Olive Kitteridge, this year's favorite read, forever.

Olive Kitteridge, I Love You

If I haven't finished reading Olive Kitteridge, does that mean I can't stop and praise it? I'm only reading it slowly so it won't be over. I'll read it a second time, hoping the bones will show and I can study them.

Solitary Man and My Singular Objections

I've had an intestinal flu for the last few days, so I've been lying abed watching movies. You can't imagine my delight when I discovered that Solitary Man was playing on cable. Now I could record it and watch it free of charge and, being sick, free of guilt. Which I did. Last night.

Here's what I know for sure: You can't spend the first eighty-five minutes of your movie showing the audience what a dick you are, then sit on a bench in the final scene neatly telling them why. Writers of fiction are constantly being admonished to show, not tell. Aren't writers of screenplays bound by this, and more so?

John Cheever, Enchanted Realist

The years of my life are often marked by whatever I read or listened to that year that impressed me most, and I recall each year fondly on that basis. Last year it was War and Peace, which I expected to enjoy far more than I actually did, sad to say. The year before that, it was Raymond Carver's entire oeuvre, along with first wife Maryann Carver's book, What It Used to Be Like -- a frank recounting of her long, destructive marriage to the alcoholic Carver -- whose real-life incidents figured into Carver's stories often very directly. The year before that it was Lolita. I had never read it and was absolutely bowled over not just by the beauty and skill of Nabokov's prose, but by the way in which he made me complicit in his awful crimes. The year before that it was the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, which was so thrilling, it practically mandated that I finally read War and Peace, which, as I said, turned out to be less thrilling by half.

This year it's John Cheever, and what a happy reader he's made me. Though I've not yet graduated to his novels, I'm reading the excellent, prize-winning The Stories of John Cheever, as well as his exquisite journals. Philip Roth is the one who called him an "enchanted realist," and it's as good an epithet as I could want. The thing that awes me is the degree of specificity he brings to his setting, and then to his characters, and then to his story, and then to his understanding of human nature. It goes without saying that one can't deal in specificity of this sort without a keen intellect, a wide, writer's vocabulary, and a ruthlessly observant eye.

Here's a passage I enjoyed from last night's story, "The Lowboy:"

Some people make less of an adventure than a performance of their passions. They do not seem to fall in love and make friends but to cast, with men, women, children, and dogs, some stirring drama that they were committed to producing at the moment of their birth. This is especially noticeable on the part of those whose casting is limited by a slender emotional budget. The clumsy performances draw our attention to the play. The ingenue is much too old. So is the leading lady. The dog is the wrong breed, the furniture is ill-matched, the costumes are threadbare, and when the coffee is poured there seems to be nothing in the pot. But the drama goes on with as much terror and pity as it does in more magnificent productions.