My Reading Life

I've not read Pat Conroy's fiction — his basketball memoir My Losing Season was enjoyable — and after this accounting of his prose style and literary heroes, I probably won't be rushing off to read the doorstop-sized Beach Music or others of his novels. But give Conroy this: He knows his books can be too lush, too filled with advectives and adverbs, too overheated, and he simply doesn't care. A child weaned on Gone with the Wind and Thomas Wolfe was never going to be the next Hemingway. Conroy tosses around metaphors like they are gold doubloons, when at best they are those coin-shaped chocolates wrapped in golden tinfoil.

Have a Nice Day

Dubravka Ugresic, Croatia's greatest living writer, wrote this collection of newspaper articles, subtitled "From the Balkan War to the American Dream," in America after leaving her inflamed homeland in the early 1990s. Asked why she did not stay to record the wars of ex-Yugoslavia, she answered simply: "I'm afraid of blood." The essays dissect life in New York and Connecticut in the clear-eyed method of the outsider: with no illusions, many generalizations, and all the while aiming for connections to the deserted homeland. Some of the pieces have a microscopic, Dos Passos quality of observation. Others are lyrical. There is even humor. Through it all, Ugresic manages to achieve the rare effect of unintentional moral superiority.

Broken Glass

Part of the enjoyment in reading Alain Mabanckou's novel Broken Glass comes in finding the dozens of literary references that seed the text. Titles like The Feast of the Goat and The Autumn of the Patriarch pop up as part of the narrative; expressions like "strait gate" suggest other books (Gide in this case); and the narrator himself, Broken Glass, is a kind of Hemingway-Faulkner, drinking and writing with equal fervor. There are no periods in the text; it is separated only by commas and type breaks. Other writers who have managed this trick successfully (Thomas Bernhard, Friedrich Durrenmatt) have a new member of their club. The tale, set in Congo-Brazzaville, includes all kinds of damaged and striving characters in all kinds of desperate situations. A pungent, not a pretty, book.

Turtle Diary

Russell Hoban's novel consists of alternating first-person chapters about two loners, a middle-aged male bookshop clerk and a middle-aged female writer, who are connected by their desire to set zoo turtles free into the sea. Sensitive, sharp, and not without humor, it is both a fine study of character and of life's meanings. The turtles simply are, which is a lesson the humans come in time to learn.

Wilt

For many readers, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is the archetypical man of angst. I prefer Henry Wilt, the Tom Sharpe creation who debuts in this novel. Wilt teaches at the "Tech" (Lord of the Flies to plumbers), has a dimwitted and nagging wife, and gets mixed up with an inflatable sex doll (Judy) with outrageous and hilarious results. The sharp elbows on display in Sharpe's first novel in 1971 are still there in Wilt, published in 1976, but the author has now come fully into his own and buffs the prose to a high sheen.

Riotous Assembly

The four-barrel elephant gun that makes an appearance early in this Tom Sharpe novel devastates everyone (and every tree and shrub and hillock) in its path. That is a good metaphor for what Sharpe is about in savagely satirizing South African apartheid society. But the modern reader should not laugh too loudly or tut-tut too sternly: Innocent people condemned to death, unwarranted surveillance in the name of fighting terrorists, and official cover-ups are not unknown in the more "enlightened" quarters of the globe today.

Verdi's Shakespeare

Garry Wills examines Verdi's three operas based on Shakespeare: Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff. The best stuff is where he explains the workings of the theater in Shakespeare's day and the painstaking efforts of Verdi to match singer to character. When it falters, the book becomes merely an annotated plot summary of the works.

Henry and Clara

Thomas Mallon's skill at spinning fact into fiction in his latest novel, Watergate, led me back to this 1994 work. In it, he uses two characters on the periphery of history to paint a portrait of an era, a war, and a family. The characters of the title were in the Lincolns' box at Ford's Theater on the night of the assassination. Henry and Clara is a big, old-fashioned novel written in Mallon's winning style.