Damned

I read Chuck Palahniuk's Diary before starting this blog and couldn't tell you a thing about it, except that I remember an appealing trenchancy. Damned is likely to stick in the memory longer, being an account of 13-year-old Madison Spencer's trip to Hell. The story begins as a Breakfast Club, with Madison in "detention" with a jock, cheerleader, geek, and punk. She is the daughter of a Hollywood power couple who jet off to Bhutan or Burundi every few weeks to adopt another sibling. Palahniuk is mordant and funny throughout: The English Patient plays endlessly in Hell, and Madison believes she's there because of a "marijuana overdose." The girl possesses both great wisdom and the limitations of a 13-year-old, a combination that can be jarring at times, but most readers will want to roll with it. Just think Joan of Arc.

One for the Books

Joe Queenan's One for the Books contains few, if any, bad sentences, a wealth of judgments (some questionable, like his decision to not read Manhattan Transfer), humor, and something worthwhile on virtually every one of its 244 pages. Opening at random to page 82, you find this about the novels of Anita Brookner: "They are a bit like Chieftains records: Unless you're a hard-core fan, you probably don't need more than one of them in your collection."

Johnny Carson

Henry Bushkin's portrait of Johnny Carson during the 18 years that he was the TV star's lawyer reveals a darker side audiences never saw. Carson's mother, Ruth, comes in for much of the blame for her son being unable to return love, care for his sons properly, or maintain a marriage. She was a cold, selfish woman by many accounts. Bushkin's fly-on-the-wall biography is both frank and affectionate.

The Plague

At once a work of philosophy, theology, and psychology, The Plague is above all an examination of the human heart. People become their true selves in extreme situations that peel back the accretions of convention and delusion. Camus is ultimately an optimist on the subject of human nature, making this work a provoking, affirming flame.

The Racketeer

The expansion of the federal criminal code and the overreach of federal authority are background themes in this John Grisham page-turner. Reliably entertaining.

Get Ready for Battle

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's portrait of an Indian family, circa 1960, is elegant and wise with a dash of humor. The characters in Jhabvala's book are characters, somehow bigger than life but firmly circumscribed by reality. She also makes use, sparingly and therefore effectively, of overlapping dialogue when people talk around and past one another, giving these scenes a dramatic and comic intensity. And she simply writes beautifully, as here: "The shops were all lit up with electric bulbs and the barrows with flares of naphtha light, and there was music blaring out of various radios, sweet-sad music played at top volume, and horse-drawn carriages came trotting through with a merry jingle of bells from the harness of underfed but bravely plumed horses."

The Fall

One cannot escape guilt; one can only dilute one's own guilt by judging the whole world guilty. Whether this program as a practical matter will produce serenity or insanity isn't clear. (The narrator's scale tilts toward the latter.) But if serenity is just another word for obliviousness, and insanity is another word for for intensity, which is preferable?

Camus lays out a catalog of modern ills as backdrop to his tale, including this that resonates today: "We no longer say as in simple times: 'This is the way I think. What are your objections?' We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communique: 'This is the truth,' we say. 'You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right.' "

Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir

Ezra Pound supplies anecdotes, letters from the front, an explanation of Vorticism, and 30 illustrations in this memoir of sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. It is actually less about Gaudier than about Pound making the case for vibrancy in art as against superficial "prettiness." Pound can throw a poisonous dart, as when he calls the Tate Gallery a "sink of abomination" that has, by refusing a Vorticist's work, "rushed further into the sloughs of stupidity."

Ladies and Gentlemen

Adam Ross's outstanding novel Mr. Peanut led me to this collection of short stories. The work can stand with Cheever in tone and characterizations; there's not a single dishonest or tactical sentence; and the reader gets the added bonus of some surprise endings (the best kind: those that in hindsight aren't surprising at all).

Bookart #4

A sharp 1926 design from Boni & Liveright.