Category Archives: books

[Thursday 3pm #3] ‘I don’t believe in God but I miss him’ : Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be frightened of

16 Thursday Apr 2009

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Nothing to be frightened of / Julian Barnes (2008)

I couldn’t put this memoir down. I didn’t mean to read it all but I couldn’t help it. I could discern no structure at all, but just followed Barnes for two hundred pages of reflections on death and God through the lens of his family. The whole memoir has the sort of wistfulness of the opening line quoted in the title of this post: ‘I don’t believe in God but I miss him.’

Despite the constant humour, it is a frightening book to read. I have never thought through so fully the consequences of not believing in life after death. Even in my moments of strongest doubts about Christianity, I haven’t sustained the outlook that death means the permanent extinguishment of my consciousness. No wonder he’s even more scared of death than me. I think it’s immensely brave of atheists and agnostics to live with hope, meaning and purpose. I don’t know how I would. (Indeed, at times Barnes seems to be suggesting that he has to suspend thinking about the way things actually are in order to live with meaning.)

The title is even cleverer than it sounds; it’s nothingness, extinction that he’s frightened of.

He mentions his wife only once, yet about the time the book was published, she died. I wonder if he wrote with a knowledge that she was dying. If he did, he is a remarkably disciplined writer, probably marshalling all the insights his wife’s dying brought him, but recasting them to protect her privacy. The amazing achievement of the memoir that seems to tell all, that so casually reveals so much about his mother, father, brother, self – and yet keeps hidden bigger parts of his life that he didn’t want to or couldn’t tell us about.

Perhaps my favourite passages were the ones reflecting on the art of writing from the perspective of not only our own deaths but the ultimate forgetting of our work. Every work, he tells us, must have a final reader:

For writers, the process of being forgotten isn’t clear-cut. ‘Is it better for a writer to die before he is forgotten, or to be forgotten before he dies?’ But ‘forgotten’ here is only a comparative term, meaning: fall out of fashion, be used up, seen through, superseded, judged too superficial – or, for that matter, too ponderous, too serious – for a later age. But truly forgotten, now that’s much more interesting. First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much. Eventually, the publishing houses forget, academic interest recedes, society changes, and humanity evolves a little further, as evolution carries out its purposeless purpose of rendering us all the equivalent of bacteria and amoebae. This is inevitable. And at some point – it must logically happen – a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a wrtier’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. (225)

Barnes then addresses his last reader, at first thanking them but then realising that by definition this last reader has not passed on his work to anyone else, and so cursing them. A sobering thought. This reasonably insignificant post, my one book, this entire blog, everything I have ever written will have a last reader. Is it you?


[Thursday 3pm #2] The marathon is on: reading War and Peace

09 Thursday Apr 2009

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I wasn’t going to tell you about this, because I was afraid you might hold me to it. I think I harboured secret intentions to give up a few hundred pages in. I don’t have a very good record with Big Books. I only made it halfway through Les Miserables, even though I thought it was wonderful. Last time I attempted War and Peace three years ago, my bookmark only made it to page 208.

I don’t even know why I impulsively decided to start last week. I was actually suffering the dreaded False Start disease in my reading: pulling books off my shelf, reading a few chapters and then having no desire to go on. Five books are still sitting discarded by my bed. And so what was my answer to this disease? An incredibly stupid one: pull out the biggest book on my shelf, so big it’s in two volumes. Fourteen hundred pages in total. I’m up to page 142.

If I’m going to finish War and Peace I’m going to have to train my mind. The marathon book requires that I keep my mind immersed in the moment, in the experience. As soon as I start calculating how many pages I’ve got left, I’m a goner, I may as well pull out.

Reading in general and the marathon book in particular require that I don’t treat the book like a marathon. Or a mountain. If the book’s a notch to add to my belt, an achievement to brag about, I’m reading it for the wrong reason.

This is what concerns me: how much of War and Peace am I going to remember? Am I going to carry some remnant, some impression of it in my head for the rest of my days? Or is too huge to leave a trace? Will it be like trying to hold a whole world in my head? Because I only read Anna Karenina six years ago, and all I can remember of that is that she throws herself under a train at the end. (Sorry to spoil it, if you’ve just invested months of your life getting near to that point.) Was reading it a waste, then?

Well, not entirely. Most of the point is in the journey itself, the experience of reading it. It would be wonderful to retain more of the book itself, but I’ll have to face the fact that I may not.

(Which brings to mind another possible approach to reading: I might start re-reading a lot more until more novels have lodged themselves in my mind, until I have absorbed their structure, their feel, their characters. Because the few novels I have read over and over again – the Tripods, The Collector, The Catcher in the Rye, Moon Palace – are the most rewarding, are the ones I can intepret life through. I have this hunch that it would be far better to know a handful of books intimately than to whiz through a hundred in a year. What do you think?)

I’ll finish with Percy Lubbock’s beautiful description of the attempt of the reader to hold the whole book in his or her mind:

To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure – that is the effort of a critic of books and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time to examine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts and shifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it? A cluster of impressions, some clear points emerging from a mist of uncertainty, this is all we can hope to possess, generally speaking, in the name of a book. The experience of reading it has left something behind, and these relics we call by the book’s name; but how can they be considered to give us the material for judging and appraising the book?

– The Craft of Fiction, p. 1

[Thursday 3pm #1] The tide of books

02 Thursday Apr 2009

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Saturday is the annual booksale for the seminary where I work. So this post starts out as an ad to try to get you along, but will turn into a reflection on books.

First the ad: 20 000 books on every subject, from 9am to 2pm at Vose Seminary, 20 Hayman Rd, Bentley, Western Australia. If you miss out on the big day, come along during business hours Monday to Friday until the 24 April and we’ll be selling the left overs.

Now the reflection. Working as a librarian and helping on the booksale, books, paradoxically, begin to lose their value. When boxes and boxes of books are donated every week, their physicality begins to get overwhelming. They become bulky, heavy objects, rather than the miracles of thought and language which they truly are. The physical problem of storing and handling thousands of books risks making me forget the respect I feel for each (or at least many) of those books.

Books were appreciated fully when they were hand copied scrolls, each copy representing hundreds of hours of labour – the production of the book echoed the writing of it. But mass production, the volume of books in the world today, the cheap paperbacks, they make books too common, too easy.

(I don’t actually want to roll back the clock to medieval times. It’s great that people no longer have to be rich to afford books. But this advance does come at a cost. And I am provoking myself and my readers to re-value books, to not let the miracle of books be diluted by their proliferation.)

The other problem is the tide of unworthy books which flood secondhand sales. Most bestsellers are fads, and fads fade, washing up on the shore thousands of copies of books which, now that the hysteria has passed, are recognised to be insubstantial . Alas, no books seem more unworthy than discarded popular Christian fads – anyone for a hundred copies of Left Behind or the Prayer of Jabez? (Secular books aren’t so far behind; imagine how many copies of The Da Vinci Code are already choking op shops around the world.)

I always find myself frustrated at people’s book buying habits: I want to ask people, ‘Why did you jump on that bandwagon? Couldn’t you see how crap that was without buying it? Thousands of years of books and you have to just go for the very latest thing, as if books were newspapers?’

But if people didn’t do this, if people showed what I regard as good taste, I wouldn’t have any reason to fool myself into feeling culturally superior.

I realise I haven’t expressed any of the joy I feel about being surrounded by so many books in my job. I love the quaintness of secondhand books, the moments in time captured just in the covers of even many of the worst books. I was looking at a delightfully camp book called ‘The Adventure of Stamps’ from the 1950s yesterday, with an Enid Blyton style drawing on the cover of three private effeminate school boys engrossed in a stamp album. I love the way old books make me feel like a time traveller, because someone in 1973 or 1904 was handling this precise book, with the same words and, besides some physical deterioration, the same appearance. It’s as if everything in between might not have happened.

The book shop : like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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Halfway through, I  am entranced by Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking. Take this passage about a bookshop:

Arriving at the bookshop, Alice browsed without pleasure. The books conveyed both intimidation and overabundant presence. They lined up like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies. There were new novels, in hardback, with expressionistic covers and virtuosic claims, and colourful paperbacks, each announcing a superior, unmatched talent. Tables sagged under so many new-minted words. So many leaves of meaning, so many sentences, strung together, in immoderately shiny covers. After slow deliberation, Alice bought a volume of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Although she had read it before, she felt it was a choice-against-disappointment…
(p. 81)

Strangely enough, I abandoned Henry James’s The Ambassadors for her book. One day perhaps I’ll have the patience, the sharpness of mind to untangle James, to keep him afloat in my mind. I do not in any way deny his genius.

Back to Jones’s passage. I find the weight of new books published overwhelming (the pressure to keep up? I don’t even pretend). And this passage captures some of that experience for me. And then there’s that experience of going back to a book I know when I’m in a bad reading patch.

Between you and me : a review

26 Thursday Feb 2009

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Between you and me / By Amber Fresh (2009)

Let me tell you a secret: the last six years I’ve found it hard to enjoy poetry. Something changed in my brain sometime around 2003. But then there’s collections like this one that remind me how good poetry can be.

Amber is a Perth poet and this small collection evokes a certain scene in Perth so well, of poetry readings, of enduring a session at the Ocean Beach Hotel, of twenty and thirtysomething parties, of Coles carparks and of the inner suburbs.

Her poems have a casual, insightful humour which manages, paradoxically, to also be passionate and intense. Thus in ‘Casual as’:

While you were at the bar
trying to organise some
casual sex
I was in my room
writing a melancholy song for you
and drawing a comic about how we met

…

But that’s because
I didn’t know then
that you were at a bar
making other arrangements

That phrase ‘making other arrangements’ gets me every time I read it – such a brilliant piece of sarcasm and so terribly sad, using that rather old fashioned phrase to devastating effect.

These poems show an ability to express states of mind and stray, strange thoughts that I believed no-one else knew about it. Thus in ‘Did you do it’:

i hit myself in the face
to see what it would feel like

it felt like

did you do it?

Two poems deal in a fascinating way with faith; in “1 Corinthians 6:18”, the Holy Spirit is compared to ‘an X-men girl/ who turns boys to dust/ with a touch of her hand’. It’s an earnest, distinctive take on evangelical experience. In “Jesus is my homeboy”, the poet hears God tells her to take her doona to some people who will need it ‘on the corner of aberdeen and station street’. It’s a poem of quiet faith that doesn’t lose its sense of humour just because it’s talking about God.

The collection hangs together so well. I was left at the end feeling like I’d read a short novel, that I’d experienced a season in the poet’s life. It was a season that felt a bit like the film You and me and everyone we know, with that same quirky take on big questions, a bit like Leunig’s cartoons, and a bit like (I’m not sure why this came into my head) Leonard Cohen’s novel Favourite Game.

You can buy the book at Oxford Books in Leederville (I’m told it’s on the counter) or from Amber herself – amberinparis@hotmail.com. It costs around $15 plus postage.

Christianity as grace and mystery : Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

06 Friday Feb 2009

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Gilead / Marilynne Robinson (2004)

In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Ames has lived in the Iowan town of Gilead all his life. It is a digressive testament, journal-like, added to day by day. It starts out in the past, focusing on the conflict between his pacifist father and his abolitionist grandfather, both ministers of the same church he now pastors. The second half focuses on the present return of his prodigal grandson, Jack Boughton, and Ames struggle to love Jack. In the end, love wins out and Jack confides his secret to Ames.

Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It was twenty-four years since her previous novel and it feels like the sort of novel a writer might spend decades on.

It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) It is a novel which shows a lot of love for people and the world, even in their ugliness and brokenness.

Ames’ grace contrasts with his grandfather’s ‘activism’ and his father’s ‘holiness’. Robinson is contrasting three streams of Christianity – what Richard Foster would call in Streams of Living Water the social justice, holiness and incarnational streams. For Ames’ grandfather, Christianity means justice at any cost, and he steals and shoots to achieve it. For Ames’ father, having no part in evil is what counts, and he leaves the church for a time during the war to sit with the pacifist Quakers.

Robinson privileges Ames’ type of Christianity – a moderate, grace-filled faith of small things. There’s less certainty and more mystery.

There are few novels that are both so Christian and so accomplished. There are evangelicals writing consciously Christian novels which are Christianised popular fiction. There are great writers (Updike and Greene, both now deceased; Winton) with Christian tendenancies or some measure of faith writing novels which have some Christian themes. But there are few writers writing great literature that are so drenched in a Christian worldview.

And yet having said that, I didn’t connect to the novel as much as I wanted to. I think it just comes down to my personal aesthetics of writing, that this isn’t the kind of book I like to read best. Perhaps it’s the lack of particular kind of narrative drive I miss. Perhaps I like less saintly narrators with more ambition and sin to their name.

Last year, Robinson published a follow-up novel from the perspective of Jack. I’m looking forward to reading it.


Honour and dishonour: the fate of two contemporaries, Cormac McCarthy and John Updike

04 Wednesday Feb 2009

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The contrast between the fates of two great American novelists, Cormac McCarthy (1933-) and John Updike (1932-2009) is a picture of the ironies of fame and writing.

McCarthy was for years a cult figure, a reclusive, difficult writer who some writers and critics proclaimed as a dark genius but who the public stayed away from. He was named at one stage as ‘the best undiscovered novelist of his generation’. For me, his masterpiece Blood Meridian and his brilliant Border Trilogy were secret countries I was so proud to have visited when the world at large knew nothing of them.

When he finally published another novel in 2005, No Country For Old Men, one reviewer stated that at 72, it was probably the last we would hear from him. But he came straight back with the post-apocalyptic novel The Road in 2006, and, far from the swansong of an obscure writer, Oprah Winfrey picked it up for her book club. Suddenly middle aged ladies across the USA and Australia were reading the dark Texan master and discussing him over glasses of champagne.

Things didn’t stop there; the Coen brothers made one of their most critically acclaimed films ever from No Country and when the film of The Road finishes production, McCarthy hype will be at fever pitch.  All this from a man who writes of a cruel world which wipes out hope from the bravest men and knows no happy endings. McCarthy’s success is incongruous; he is meant to be the writer’s writer, the test of a reader’s pedigree. But what a perfect late career he has had. I think any writer would choose a path like his, as against what happened to poor Updike.

Updike achieved fame and critical success early; Rabbit, Run was published when he was just 28 and was the first of his brilliant Rabbit quartet. The world was amazed by the brilliance of his prose and no-one through the sixties and seventies depicted upper-middle America with such elegance and warmth.

Yet it must be nearly impossible to stay on the right side of the critics and also be prolific. Who has ever managed? The critics seem to like the enigmatic writer releasing the occasional novel after years of silence; much more exciting than the steady prolificy of an Updike, a new novel year after year. It became a requirement that critics accuse him of being tired or tiresome, of never breaking new ground, of being all beautiful prose and no substance. There’s something to the accusations; he did write about adultery a little too much, but he was also constantly experimenting with very different genres, from his own attempt at science-fiction – Toward the End of Time – to Terrorist. He didn’t just write about adultery in New England!

So after the praise heaped on his masterpiece, Rabbit at Rest (1991), it was all downhill for Updike. It was as if he had died with Rabbit. He kept on writing, he kept on publishing, he kept up his good humour and warmth for the world and for upper-middle America, but it didn’t reward him back. And then, ignominy of ignominies, after the lukewarm reviews of his final (humous) novel, The Widows of Eastwick, the last award he received was a lifetime achievement award for writing the world’s worst sex scenes. Unjustified, when even if he wrote too much about sex, he wrote about it with originality, beauty and humour.

Which writer, on the balance, would want to be in Updike’s shoes? Lauded early and gently scorned late, always compared unfavourably to earlier works. Poor Updike; he believed in the goodness of the world; he had a gently humorous touch even as he wrote of his fear of death and the mundane struggles of middle class life. And unlike McCarthy, he didn’t get a happy ending to his career.

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Paul Auster’s Moon Palace : an overview

03 Tuesday Feb 2009

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(Moon Palace is my second favourite novel of all time. I just finished reading it for the third time and I wanted to write an outline of the novel for future reference and to help my own understanding. I hope to write another post exploring why it is so important to me.)

This story of how Marco Stanley Fogg’s life ‘began’ is told in first person; at one point he specifies that he’s writing in 1986, fifteen years after the narrative ends. We don’t learn anything of these intervening years save a single scene; it’s the first twenty-three years of M.S. Fogg’s life we learn about.

M.S. tells his childhood quickly, giving us summaries and a few brief incidents. When his mother is killed in a traffic accident, he is adopted by his Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor is a member of a band called the Moonmen and has a big influence on the young M.S.. He gets him thinking, gets him reading and teaches him that names have a power; they aren’t just co-incidental – the baseball player Glen Hobbie will never make it big, because his name implies amateurism; M.S.’s name itself carries much better significances – the explorers Marco Polo, Stanley Livingstone, Phileas Fogg. M.S. himself goes on to reflect on the initials M.S. which become his name and the idea of his life as a manuscript, a narrative in progress. When he heads to Columbia University, his uncle gives him his collection of 1492 books. The boxes form the furniture of M.S.’s apartment.

M.S. hasn’t finished university when news reaches him of his uncle’s death. Money was always going to be tight, but by the time he’s paid off Victor’s debts, he knows he is living on limited time, that he has to do something or he will not have the money to finish. And yet in an irrational act of quixotism, a kind of bravery or solitude or stubbornness, he decides to do nothing, to see what will happen to him.

His concession to his situation is to sell off his uncle’s books, but he reads each one before he sells it. Since the books were stacked chronologically, the sequence of titles resembles the sequence in which his uncle read them – except that the boxes themselves are not in order – and in doing so, he feels he relives his uncle’s life. (This might seem a small point, but it is the touches like this that are part of the brilliance of the novel for me.)

When he runs out of money, he goes to visit his friend David Zimmer (who, of course, reappears in Auster’s The Book of Illusions). Zimmer has moved on, but he bursts into a breakfast party held by the new tenants. They feed him; he eats ravenously and meets his ‘twin’ – Kitty Wu, who is wearing the same t-shirt as him.

Soon he is kicked out of his apartment. He goes to live in Central Park. He gets sick, holes up in a cave and is on the verge of death when Kitty and Zimmer finally find him. Kitty has been looking for him for some time; she never felt so sorry for anyone in her life, she tells him, than when she met him that one time at breakfast.

He recovers in Zimmer’s apartment for several months and is rejected for the Vietnam draft. Zimmer urges him to go and pursue Kitty; she’s in love with him and she’s waiting for him to make the next move. Kitty and M.S. become lovers, discovering in each other true soulmates.

M.S. needs money; he answers an advertisement and becomes a companion to one Thomas Effing, an elderly bad tempered man who is either blind or pretending to be blind. M.S. moves in to Effing’s house, leaving Zimmer behind. At this point Zimmer disappears from the narrative and M.S.’s life, which seems extraordinary – why didn’t Kitty and M.S. keep up with him, at least? In the only flash-forward, M.S. tells us that the only time he’s seen Zimmer since was four years ago, in 1982, when he saw him, his wife and kids walking down the street and stops and talks to him for twenty minutes.

(We don’t read about this incident in The Book of Illusions; the only link to M.S. we learn about in that novel is that one of Zimmer’s sons – who die soon after in a plane crash – is named Marco. Surely Zimmer would have told M.S.? I don’t think Auster had realised he was going to do this when he wrote Moon Palace; if only he could go back and adjust it.)

After some space devoted to the great love between M.S. and Kitty, Kitty moves out of focus for a chapter as M.S.’s adventures with Thomas Effing come to the fore. I make the mistake of picturing Effing as the Big Lebowski, the one in the wheel-chair, from the Coen brothers’ film, but this is wrong. Both are grumpy and insane, but Effing is a tragic figure as much as a comic one.

M.S. takes Effing for walks, and must describe the world to him, quickly and precisely, noticing all the details he has taken for granted. Then one day Effing declares he is going to die in two months and it’s time to get started on his obituary. Effing tells his life story, a story which parallels and resonates with M.S.’s. Effing was born Julian Barber in a wealthy family. He was a painter and disliked his ‘frigid’ wife. He sets off into the Utah wilderness with the heir of another rich family to paint the unique light. Their guide is unscrupulous and when the young heir falls down a ravine and is fatally injured, the guide refuses to stay with him or to take him back. Effing stays with him as he dies and then wonders what to do.

Fearing his name will be mud because of the death of the heir but perhaps also sensing the opportunity, Effing decides to not return, to stay out there in the wilderness. Just on the point of death, he finds a murdered hermit in a cave. He decides to take over the hermit’s life, and paints his best paintings ever, knowing that no-one will ever see them, painting them only for himself. He learns that the hermit was murdered by a gang of robbers and that the robbers will be back. When they return, he’s waiting for them, killing all three and taking their loot. Rich again, he heads back to civilisation, exiled from everyone he once knew and living under his new identity of ‘Thomas Effing’.

In time, he learns that he actually fathered a son the night before he left for Utah and he observes the man’s life from afar. His son’s name is Solomon Barber and he is a history academic.

His time nearly up, Effing wants to give away the original amount of money he took from the robbers. Despite his bad health, he forces M.S. to take him into the streets where they give away the money. On the last night, it’s pouring with rain but Effing insists on continuing and M.S. realises he is determined to die. Sure enough, he catches pneumonia and holds onto life only until two minutes past midnight on the day he had nominated as his day of death.

Effing leaves M.S. a sum of money and for a time Kitty and M.S. enjoy a blissful, carefree existence living together. M.S., meanwhile, writes to Solomon Barber, who is keen to meet M.S..

Sol realises as soon as he meets M.S. that M.S. is the son he didn’t know he had. While a professor he slept with M.S.’s mother – his nineteen year old student – in the morning they were discovered in bed together and the scandal caused Sol to be dismissed. She went back to her hometown and refused to speak to Sol again. Sol doesn’t tell M.S. any of this, figuring there is lots of time, that the right moment will come. He does, however, move to New York and become friends with M.S. and Kitty.

In the meantime, the bliss of M.S. and Kitty’s love is destroyed. Kitty gets pregnant; she wants an abortion and M.S. desperately wants the baby. M.S. frames it as his mistake, that he was foolish to be upset about her wanting the abortion. When he gives in and she has the abortion, something breaks in his heart. He can’t bear to be with her; he moves in with Sol for a ‘break’. Sol tries to get them back together; Kitty waits for M.S. to return – but he cannot.

(One can only speculate on Paul Auster behind the text here. And as much as I shouldn’t, I will. Perhaps like M.S., as an American liberal, he believes in his head that abortion is a necessary choice, not something to mourn. Yet perhaps he had an experience like M.S. where his heart felt it was a terrible thing and wouldn’t match his head.)

Sol hatches a plan to get M.S. out of his funk. They are going to find the cave in Utah where Effing lived for a time and hid his paintings. On the way, they stop to visit M.S.’s mother’s grave. Sol starts sobbing at the grave and reveals the truth to M.S.. M.S.’s first reaction is anger and Sol blinded by tears stumbles away, straight into an open grave. His back is broken and he spends weeks dying in the hospital, attended by M.S. day and night.

When Sol dies, M.S. rings Kitty; she’s the only one who might understand. She listens, and is sorry for him, but she won’t have him back. She has someone else; she says he nearly killed her and she’s had to harden her heart to survive. (As much as one might understand this, it’s actually only been three months since M.S. moved out; I can’t help thinking that the truest love would have waited longer than that.)

Having lost everyone, M.S. tries to find Effing’s cave. He finally discovers the area was flooded; all he can do is hire a boat and ride over the lake, knowing he is as close as he will get. When he returns, his car with his inheritance has been stolen. With just his wallet in his pocket, he starts walking. He walks all the way to the west coast, and when he gets there he stands in the Pacific Ocean watching the moon rise. And that’s the end of the story.

Updike at rest

30 Friday Jan 2009

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I was sad to read in the paper yesterday that John Updike died on Tuesday. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking how he was immortal, publishing yet another book, a sequel to the Witches of Eastwick. I thought he had another ten or twenty years with many more novels to come; I didn’t know he was battling for his life.

He was my second favourite writer for a time. I came to grow a little disenchanted with him, but still rated him very highly. I have the illusion of being friends with him, or at least him being a kindly risque uncle I’ve had long conversations with.

I’ve been thinking of his line, ‘After all, you survive every moment except your last,’ as a comfort for my fear of death. But that was when he had survived it all too.

Now there’s no chance of a sixth Rabbit book. It would have been set in 2009, if he had continued the trend. I know it seemed unlikely, given he killed off Rabbit two books ago, but I always thought my hopes would come true and I would have another slice of the Angstrom world.

I will have to write a longer piece about his work and my interactions with it, but I’m at an internet cafe in Richmond and I’ve got to go.

Reading Madeleine L’Engle’s From This Day Forward

29 Monday Dec 2008

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A memoir of her marriage. In several ways I’m enjoying it, but the first section is awkward. It is too anecdotal; the contrast with the immediacy and feeling of the second section is stark. She’s too removed from the events of the first section and she’s telling it like a grandmother to her grandchildren.

What’s more, she has this habit of defanging whatever she says, reducing it to nothing, explaining it away, leaving me saying ‘why’d you mention it in the first place?’. Eg:

Sometimes on my way home after a show I would be accosted by a drunken solider or sailor, but I would just smile and move out of the way and I never had any real problem. If someone started to be ugly, there was aways somebody else to say, “Is he bothering you?” (p. 36)

Dreadful writing. I believe in you, Madeleine, I believe you’re going to wipe away the bad memory of this sentence and ones like it.