Thais

Thais is best known today as an opera by Massenet. Its source is Anatole France's 1890 novel about a monk whose consuming desire to reform a courtesan leads him into a pit of degradation. The tale is set in Egypt during the reign of Constantine, a time when Christianity had yet to establish its dominance. Thus, the skeptic France has one character asking: How are we supposed to believe in Christ when even the peasants no longer believe in the old gods?

Woodcutters

Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters finds the author in a familiar spot: sniping from the sidelines, this time at an artistic dinner (his italics). In the course of the evening the narrator considers friendship, the arts, suicide, and the wisdom of the aged. His spite and revulsion ultimately devolve to another familiar spot: a kind of love.

Hope: Entertainer of the Century

Hope by Richard Zoglin is as close as anyone is likely to come to a definitive biography of Bob Hope. If it falls short, perhaps it's the subject's fault: When you get past the manic energy and self-promotion, spiced up by greed and adventurous sex, there really isn't much inside the man. Did Hope create the monologue? I will take Zoglin's word for it, but Carson will go down as its master practitioner. Yet Hope was a success in all media: vaudeville, Broadway, radio, television, movies, even books. There was a comic book about him that ran for 18 years. His joke writers deserve much of the credit (or blame) for his success, but he could ad lib, dance and sing. The numbers his TV specials pulled will never be surpassed: The medium is forevermore too fragmented. He worked like a Trojan, and quit too late. Zoglin's portrait is hardly affectionate, but is more credible for that.

Intruder in the Dust

The reader of Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust gets, in addition to a compelling and tightly plotted murder mystery, a course in philosophy and metaphysics. Who else but Faulkner, in describing a jail door closing, could do this (or want to): "... the heavy steel plunger crashing into its steel groove with a thick oily sound of irrefutable finality like that ultimate cosmolined doom itself when as his uncle said man's machines had at last effaced and obliterated him from the earth and, purposeless now to themselves with nothing left to destroy, closed the last carborundum-grooved door upon their own progenitorless apotheosis behind one clockless lock responsive only to the last stroke of eternity ... "

"Cosmolined doom" is a phrase that could easily have gone undiscovered until "the last stroke of eternity," but the reader is glad that it wasn't. There also is here, as always with Faulkner, a rich supply of similes, for me a proving ground for writers. The ability to invent a perfect one and place it so it flows naturally is an uncommon skill of which Faulkner is world champion.

Then the themes: children and an old woman doing what others cannot, or will not: doggedly pursuing justice; the racial elements and characteristics that are so subtly explained that they must be correct even if the reader realizes that they are (merely?) folk wisdom; and the oldest crime but one in the Bible.

Intruder in the Dust makes a compelling argument to ignore everything written in the last 50 years and go back to Faulkner, to Dreiser, to Tolstoy and Goncharev, and back to Balzac and further to Boccacio and Cervantes, to ignore this know-it-all world and sink into a more dignified past. Did I mention that Faulkner's style is infectious?