“In a Strange Room” by Damon Galgut (2010) – 207 pages

 The main character in the three stories in “In a Strange Room” is a man called Damon Galgut.  This has caused some critics to question if the book is fiction or not.  After reading the book, I have no problem with the book as fiction, for certainly these are stories as much as any other fiction.  Surely these stories might have been based on events that occurred in Galgut’s real life, but what fiction is not based to a lesser or greater extent on the writer’s own life? 

One facet of these stories no one has questioned is the quality of the writing.  Sentence for sentence, Damon Galgut’s style is direct, simple, and assured.  It is a pleasure to read these stories at the sentence level.  I suspect that from now on, every year Galgut publishes a novel, it will at least be long-listed for the Booker just on the distinction of the writing.  “In a Strange Room” made the Booker 2010 shortlist.    

This book consists of three stories, all of which involve traveling.  In the first story, “The Follower”, the main character follows a rigid proud German mountain climber for several trips.  In the second story, “The Lover”, the main character meets up with a group of other travelers in southern Africa, and he is strongly attracted to one of the men of this group, Jerome.  In the third story, “The Guardian”, the main character takes along a woman friend Anna who has severe mental problems and does not follow the directions of her doctors.

There is one device that Galgut uses repeatedly in the stories which if it weren’t for his assured writing style, I would have thought was a grammatical problem or mistake.  Throughout all of the stories he repeatedly switches between referring to the main character as “He” or as “I”, sometimes almost in the same sentence.  Here is an example.

“He sits at a table by himself’ like a stranger, and when he’s done he comes over. I’m going to Margo, I tell her, to do some shopping. “

These switches in referring to himself are a quandary, but there is one sentence in one of the stories that might explain. “I am a spectator of my own behavior”.  Exactly.  When he describes himself in one of his roles, follower, lover, guardian, Galgut uses the second person pronoun.  When he is making a personal comment on the main character, he uses the first person pronoun.  I’m not sure this device is entirely successful, but I had no trouble following the stories.   

There is a certain reserve in all of these stories that somehow lessened their impact for me.  It is as though the main character is always traveling to other places to get away from himself.  If the main character could break through this reserve, there could be more humor and emotion.

Many novelists of the 1990s are still publishing regularly.  Here are some excellent novels by writers whom I haven’t heard much about lately.

“Homeboy” by Seth Morgan (1990) – Seth Morgan was an heir to the Ivory Soap fortune.  This allowed him to purchase huge amounts of cocaine and other drugs.  He was Janis Joplin’s boyfriend when she died; later he got in trouble for an armed robbery and the severe injury of a woman who was a passenger on his motorcycle. He took up fiction writing in prison.  “Homeboy” is a savagely comic novel of the San Francisco underworld of junkies, pimps,  drag queens, and hookers.  I read “Homeboy” and strongly recommend it if you like this kind of book.  Seth Morgan died in a motorcycle accident in October, 1990 at the age of 41, one day after receiving a DUI.

“Land Girls” by Angela Huth (1994)  – While most of the young men are off fighting World War II, three young London women go out to rural England to work on the farm.  This is the story of Pru, Ag, and Stella as they adapt to hard work and find humor, romance, and happiness on the farm,  This good-natured novel has stayed vivid in my mind.  Angela Huth’s other novels and her short stories are all extremely good.

“Going Native” by Stephen Wright (1995) – How to even describe this wild novel?  “Going Native” is about the “round-the-clock bombardment of inanity and violence that has so thoroughly invaded mundane existence as to render it cartoon-like.” – Necrofile.  Each chapter of this novel contains new vagabond off-slant characters.  If you thought the post-modernist fiction movement was over, you haven’t read Stephen Wright who is probably the best.  He takes a long time to write each book; his last novel “The Amalgamation Polka” was written in 2004.  I’ve read all of his novels and eagerly look forward to the next.  Wright puts the ‘novel’ in novel.  This novel is for the adventurous.

 “The Archivist” by Martha Cooley (1998) – an exciting novel of ideas about a librarian researching poet T. S. Eliot’s letters to an American woman while Eliot’s wife Vivienne is in a mental institution.  There are parallels between the life of the archivist and the life of T’S Eliot that are explored as are many of the intellectual issues of last century.

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 “Henry and Clara” by Thomas Mallon (1994) – This is an historical novel about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln told from the perspective of the two people who shared the theatre box with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln.  This novel far exceeds the average historical novel in the vivid portrayal of its characters.  I have enjoyed several of Thomas Mallon’s novels, although I doubt we would agree on many political issues.

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“Father and Son” by Larry Brown (1996) Larry Brown was a fire fighter in Oxford, Mississippi, took a creative writing course, quit his job to write.  This novel is the story of a man on the day he is released from prison and tells the story of his return to the horrific acts that got him put into prison in the first place.  This is the darkest form of realism, of miserable people committing despicable crimes. Perhaps the best way to describe Larry Brown is that he was the exact opposite of Thomas Mallon.  Larry Brown died in 2004 at the age of 53.

“The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” by Jonathan Coe  (2011) – 336 pages

 With personal computers and cell phones, anyone can have an active social life without leaving their room, without seeing anyone.  Maxwell Sim has seventy Facebook friends.  So why is Max so lonely?

For one thing Max is separated from his wife and daughter.  Max is not the brightest bulb in the lamp.  Before she left, his wife thought it might be good for Max if he became interested in literature.  He asked her for some suggestions, and she said he might like one of the Rabbit books.  Max heads down to the local library and comes back with Watership Down. 

Now that Max and his wife are separated, he finds the best way he can communicate with her is to assume the identity of ‘SouthCoastLizzie’, Liz Hammond, and join a moms’ discussion group on the Internet in which his wife participates.  Max’s wife and Liz hit it off a lot better than she and Max ever did.

Max’s former job title was “After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer”.  What he really did was handle returns in a department store.

“The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” is basically the story of Max as he travels from Watford, England to Australia to visit his father and then back again, gets a job and a Prius,  meets a lot of people.  Nothing very major or significant happens in the novel, but the writing is very funny. Early in the novel, Max tries to describe this woman he meets and ends up saying “Sorry, I’m just not very good at describing people.”  Then he attempts to describe her clothing, but gives up saying “I am not very good at describing clothes either – are you looking forward to the next three hundred pages?” 

There are several set pieces in the novel which are like short stories in themselves which only peripherally relate to Max’s story   

I’ve wanted to read Jonathan Coe for a long time.  There is nothing earth-shatterring or deep in this novel. This novel is not going to change your life, but it is a pleasant humorous way to pass the time.  If I were grading this novel, it would get a solid B.

Reading “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” got me to thinking about the difference between the way England treats its literary  novelists and the way the United States treats them.  In England, there is a large audience for literary novels.  The leading newspapers cover the publication of a new novel as a significant event.  A fairly large number of novelists are held in high esteem, the public eagerly awaits their next book, and the profession of literary novelist is valued. 

In the United States, there is no large audience for literary novels, so these novels have to be hyped to the max in order to sell at all.  Thus every few months, there has to be another hyped ‘Great American Novel’ which usually turns out to be awfully lame.  The whole literary scene is rather desperate in the United States, There are very few literary novelists in the United States that are held in high esteem, who have an eager public awaiting their next work.

I’m sure in England there are many readers who value Jonathan Coe’s humorous approach, but he has not developed a United States following yet.

“Frenchman’s Creek” by Daphne du Maurier (1941) – 280 pages

“Frenchman’s Creek” is adventurous, romantic, and completely implausible. But that’s OK, because “Frenchman’s Creek” is a fantasy, an English woman’s romantic fantasy.

a young Daphne du Maurier

Twenty-nine year old Lady Dona St. Columb longs to escape from her boring stuffy upper-class English society, her young children, and her somewhat  of a twit husband. “Frenchman’s Creek” is about Dona’s escape. Many exciting things happen to her, but probably the most fantastical element of the novel is that Dona never feels a twinge of guilt or regret.

One thing I admire about “Frenchman’s Creek” is that it is so different from du Maurier’s other novels. I’ve read “Rebecca” and “Jamaica Inn”, and they were both dark, suspenseful, and sinister. “Frenchman’s Creek” is not at all sinister; this swashbuckling adventure is about as sunny as a novel can be. It has been made into a movie twice. The novels of du Maurier are always cinematic; “Frenchman’s Creek” is especially so.

This is du Maurier’s most romantic story, and I probably would not have chosen it if I had known. Still I thoroughly enjoyed this novel as well-written light fare. It was a fun book that has its share of humor as well as adventure and romance. The characters are all vividly drawn, especially Dona St. Columb.

The novel takes place at Navron on the English coast near Cornwall which is where Daphne du Maurier lived much of her life. Many of her novels and stories take place near Cornwall.

I had always thought that even though England and France are very close geographically, the people of these two countries kept quite separate from each other. Yet over the last few months I’ve read four English novels where the French and the English interact closely with each other. These novels are “Trespass” by Rose Tremain, “Leaving Home” by Anita Brookner, “Gemma Bovery” by Posy Simmonds, and now “Frenchman’s Creek” by Daphne du Maurier.

If you are seeking answers to the deep philosophical questions about the meaning of life or want to confront humdrum everyday routine, don’t read “Frenchman’s Creek”. If you want to be entertained with a fun implausible romantic adventure, you will be delighted by “Frenchman’s Creek”. It does not contain one speck of gritty, dour realism..

“Buying A Fishing Rod for my Grandfather” – stories by Gao XingJian (2004) – 125 pages – Translated by Mabel Lee

“A fragile man who has managed not to be crushed by authority and to speak to the world in his own voice.” – Gao XingJian’s description of himself

It would have been nice if the stories in “Buying A Fishing Rod for my Grandfather” were easily accessible and in their own way likeable, so then I could wrap this book and Gao XingJian up in a nice little package and move on.  However the fiction and the world of Gao XingJian are by no means that simple.  Gao XingJian’s primary influences as a writer are the absurdists like Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Eugene Ionesco.  I’ve read a fair amount of Samuel Beckett, enough to know that he is or was one of the world’s great fiction writers, but I still don’t really understand him. 

The same is true of Gao XingJian who spent much of his life writing absurdist dramas on the order of Beckett.  XingJian’s play “Bus Stop” is about a group of people waiting for a bus for over ten years.  This play was condemned by Communist party officials who called it “the most pernicious work since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China”.  High praise indeed.

Even though I’ve read this entire book and have even read a couple of the stories twice, I still don’t feel that I have a grasp of the writing style to do Gao XingJian justice.  This is the first book that I’ve read that describes everyday life in Red China.  One quality that so far has stood out for me in his writing is that he writes of humans as another part of nature like the animals and birds are.   In western literature humans are usually given a place above nature, but in Gao XingJian’s writing humans are just as subject to the laws of nature as any other animal is.

At this point some of the dialogue in his stories seems enigmatic to me.  Take the following example from the story “In the Park”.

“She’s waiting for someone.”

“Waiting for someone is awful. Nowadays it’s the young men who don’t show up for dates.”

“Are there too many young women in the city?”

“There’s no shortage of young men, it’s just that there are too few decent young men.”

“But this young woman is very good looking.”

“If the woman falls in love first, it’s always unlucky.”

“Will he turn up?”

“Who knows? Having to wait really makes a person go crazy.”

Instead of a fuller analysis of XingJian’s writing style, I would like to give you a picture of his amazing life.  Gao XingJian lived in China from 1940 to 1986, and for his entire writing career, he was persecuted as an intellectual and embroiled in controversy.  In 1967 during ‘the Great Leap Forward’ political movement, his first wife reported on him to the authorities, and he felt compelled to burn everything he had written up to this point.  The authorities still sent him to a rural re-education camp for six years of hard labor.      

“It was only during this period, when literature became utterly impossible, that I came to comprehend why it was so essential.”

 Even in the post-Mao period, Gao XingJian got in trouble with the authorities, and in 1986 he emigrated to Paris, France.  When he criticized the Chinese authorities in regard to the Tiananmen Square protests, his Chinese citizenship was taken from him.  In the 1990’s, he wrote the two novels “Soul Mountain” and “One Man’s Bible”.

“It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.”

 In the year 2000, XingJian was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.   He is also an artist, and he makes enough from his paintings to support his fiction writing habit.  He designs the cover art for all his books.  Although I did not fully understand all of these stories, “Soul Mountain” is still on my list of books to be read.  As with Samuel Beckett, I will keep trying to master his work.

“Everyone has to have either this or that problem; if he can’t find any problem, he loses all reason for living.”

“The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” by Heidi W. Durrow  (2010) – 264 pages

“The girl certainly had enough words in her for all of them. Who knew what she’d grow up to be, but it certainly would be whatever she wanted.”

“The Girl Who Fell from the Sky”, the compelling new novel by Heidi W. Durrow, is the coming of age story of Rachel, an adolescent girl.  Rachel was born in Chicago, but due to tragic mysterious circumstances she is now living with her grandmother in Portland, Oregon.  In the early part of the novel, the chapters switch back and forth between Portland and Chicago in the 1980s.   No, this is not yet another Scandinavian crime thriller from Stieg Larsson, although there are elements of mystery in this novel.  Rather than Stieg Larsson, the superb similar last-named American novelist Nella Larsen is the inspiration for this novel. 

Some terrible things happen to Rachel and her family, but the tone of the novel is buoyant with a hard earned optimism since Rachel is the type of person who will bounce back if at all possible.  She has much help along the way starting with her Grandma.  When Rachel gets into various kinds of trouble, Grandma sits her straight more than a few times.   Then there are those who Rachel meets in school and other places.  Some lead or follow her into trouble, but then there are others like Aunt Loretta and Drew and Lakeisha and Jesse and Brick who help her.  At the age of eleven, Brick runs away from Chicago and travels across the country, because he witnessed the most important event in Rachel’s life.  Here is how Rachel describes Brick.

“He has his mother’s eyes, I think. He has a way of seeing that his mother gave him.”

The plot is original, the characters will stay in your memory, and you probably have not experienced life from this perspective before.  “The Girl who Fell From the Sky” is a spectacular debut for Heidi W. Durrow.  It is a fine-tuned juggling act as she develops all the interesting characters who are in this novel.

This powerful first novel is the winner of the Barbara Kingsolver Bellwether prize.for 2010  It is currently moving up the charts.  I first learned of Heidi W. Durrow when I stumbled upon her original website Light-Skinned-ed Girl while I was researching novelist Nella Larsen.  I was moved by Durrow’s efforts to get a proper gravestone for Nella Larsen,  Now Heidi W. Durrow has her own author’s website.

“The Burial at Thebes – A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone” translated by Seamus Heaney  (2004) – 74 pages

 When it comes to new editions of the great early Greek plays,  I have my favorites – Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, and now Seamus Heaney.  It is no mere coincidence that these writers are all poets, poets whose writing is simple and direct and forceful.

 I had previously read Seamus Heaney’s version of Beowulf, so I already knew that he could do excellent work with a new version of an ancient script.  About the only thing I can’t fully understand is why this book is given the downer title of “The Burial at Thebes” rather than the simpler “Antigone”.   Perhaps Heaney thought that the focus of the play is not only the woman Antigone, but also King Creon.  Perhaps Heaney thought that this play is part of a trilogy of plays about Thebes, and thus Thebes should be in its title.

Antigone and Ismene are children of Oedipus, “daughters of the man who fathered us on his mother”.  For breaking the natural law of the gods, Oedipus’ entire family is doomed.    Two of the sons were killed in the war between Thebes and Argos that has just ended.  One brother Eteocles fought for Thebes, and for him King Creon ordered an honorable burial.  The other brother Polyneices fought against Thebes, and King Creon ordered that his body not be buried but left out in the open for the dogs and birds and other animals to feed on.  Anybody who was caught trying to bury the body would be sentenced to death. 

 So the question is “Should you obey your King or should you obey the laws of the gods?”  If you obey the laws of the Gods, you disobey the King.  If you obey King Creon, you disobey the gods.     

                       “I will bury him myself

                        And if death comes, so be it.”  

                                         Antigone

King Creon’s son Haemon asks the King to reconsider his order.

                       “I ask you reconsider. Nobody,

                        Nobody can be sure they are always right.

                        The ones who are fullest of themselves that way

                         Are the emptiest vessels.  There’s no shame

                         In taking good advice.  It’s a sign of wisdom”  

                                                           Haemon 

Reduxion Theatre production of “Antigone” - Oklahoma City

Seamus Heaney’s language in “Antigone” is clear and powerful.  The play is highly moving.  The issue of the play, whether to obey your leaders or your conscience or your god or gods, is just as important today as it was 2500 years ago.  In an Afterword to the play , Seamus Heaney expresses one of his considerations when he decided to translate Antigone in 2003.  President George W. Bush had set up the same type of either/or situation as King Creon.  Either you supported the war in Iraq or you would be considered an enemy of the state in the war on terror.  Many people remain deeply troubled by the large numbers of Iraqi people as well as other people who were killed or severely injured in the unnecessary Iraq War.

“Antigone” is a powerful play, and this Seamus Heaney version  reinforces my love of early Greek literature.

“Room” by Emma Donoghue (2010) – 321 pages

 Irish writer Emma Donoghue must have spent many long hours listening to a five year old, because she gets the voice of Jack, the narrator of her novel “Room”, exactly right.  As parents know, there is a huge difference between how a four year old speaks and how a five year old speaks, between how a five year old speaks and how a six year old speaks.  If Jack did not sound right for his age in even one of his sentences, the novel could have been a failure.  Fortunately that does not happen. 

I listened to “Room” on audio, and the woman who read for Jack sounded very much like a five year old.  In this case, I think the audio enhanced the experience of the book.

Up until the age of five, children take for granted that their family situation is ‘normal’ no matter what that situation is.  Little children have no real experience of what other families are like.  They are completely dependent on whoever is taking care of them.  One of the beauties of this book is how Jack’s mother is able to provide him with a whole world even though they are locked in this small room. It is an act of love, and at the same time she is saving herself from despair by caring for Jack. 

Donoghue’s description of the room and all their activities in the room is so vivid and real, the room probably became more real for me than my own surroundings.  This is one of the most moving accounts of the bond between mother and child I’ve yet encountered.   The boy Jack, of course, takes all these things for granted, and only we the readers recognize how difficult it is for the mother to provide this whole world for her child under these extreme conditions.

I think “Room” has a better chance to become a classic than just about any other novel published in the last five years.  First the plot is completely original.  Second this novel appeals to both literary readers as well as to the general public.  Literary readers can delight in the perfection of the voice, while the general public will get caught up in this unusual story.  Currently the Minneapolis Public Library has a waiting list of 756 people in line to check out “Room” which is the longest waiting list I’ve seen.

This is not the first Emma Donoghue novel I’ve read.  Her novel “Slammerkin” is also excellent.  “Slammerkin” is an 18^th century historical fiction.  I give Donoghue a lot of credit for mixing it up between the historical and the contemporary. 

 “Room” would make a wonderful movie, but I don’t see how they could find a five year old who could  play such a big role and say all the lines.   Somehow I expect Hollywood will figure something out.  Maybe they will get Tom Hanks to play the five year old.

“Foreign Bodies” by Cynthia Ozick    (2010) – 255 pages

“Foreign Bodies” is an updating of the Henry James novel “The Ambassadors”.  In  James’ “Ambassadors”, a United States business magnate sends his ‘ambassador’ over to Paris, France to convince the magnate’s son to come back to the States.  When this ‘ambassador’ gets to Paris, he finds that the magnate’s son is having the time of his life delighting in the refined elegance of the French culture and a romantic attachment, and the son does not want to leave.  Cynthia Ozick’s novel takes place about fifty years later in 1952, and things have vastly changed.   France has endured two devastating wars.  Uprooted people, many who have lost family members in the war, are wandering from city to city in Europe, and many ultimately end up in Paris.  Paris, far from being the city of enlightenment, has become the city of darkness and decadence. 

 In Ozick’s novel, the ‘ambassador’ sent to Paris is the magnate’s sister, Bea Nightingale, who hasn’t seen her brother for many years and has never seen her nephew.  She travels from New York to Paris to California and back to Paris.  “Foreign Bodies” starts with that jaunty feel I’ve come to expect from Cynthia Ozick.  Some of its short chapters are a tourist’s view of Paris, some are straight narration, and some are short letters between characters in the novel.  I like the variety that moves the novel along.

 For about the first one hundred pages, the novel entertained quite well.  After that, my problem with “Foreign Bodies” was that none of the main characters intrigued me enough to sustain my interest.  Instead of a jaunty ride, the novel became a grueling slog during the second half.   Let’s look at the characters.  First there is Bea who is a vocational school teacher who is mainly just an observer anyhow, but not a perceptive or insightful observer.  Also there is the business magnate father who in all ways is an obnoxious loudmouth.  He is so crudely drawn, that he could be a caricature. A caricature implies humor, but there is no humor in “Foreign Bodies”.  There is the neurasthenic mother.  Then there is the feckless son  (Does ‘feckless’ mean without ‘feck’?) who is rude and aimless with no redeeming qualities.   The son’s girlfriend who is a refugee from Romania is pretty much in a zombie state from losing her family during the war.  Then there is the son’s sister who seems to just hang around.  Finally there is Bea’s ex-husband from whom she has been divorced for about twenty years.  He wanted to be a composer, but ended up doing what he is told providing Hollywood movies with music background.  

 The trouble with “Foreign Bodies” is that the main character Bea Nightingale hasn’t seen any of these people for many years, and she doesn’t seem to care any more about them than I do which is very little. 

I think the best format for Cynthia Ozick is the long short story or the novella such as “The Shawl”.  Also “The Puttermesser Papers” showed she could handle humor well, and “Heir to the Glimmering World” proved that she could sustain a complete novel.   However “Foreign Bodies” does not work.   It feels more constructed than lived.

“An Eye for an Eye” by Anthony Trollope (1879) – 201 pages

“A man’s love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit.” – Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope, having lived in both Ireland and England, wrote novels about both places.  “An Eye for an Eye” is an interesting mix in that it takes place in both countries.  

The Earl of Scroope and his wife the Countess are looking for someone to inherit the lordship and the Scroope Manor after their own son died of dissipation in France.  They settle on their oldest nephew Fred Neville.  Fred Neville is only too happy to one day become the Earl of Scroope, but he asks to spend one more year with his calvary regiment stationed along the coast in Ireland.  The Countess of Scroope doesn’t like this at all, fearing Fred will only get into trouble over in Ireland.  Fulfilling the Countess’s worst fears, Fred soon meets and falls in love with the sweet and beautiful Irish girl Kate O’Hara who lives with her mother in a little cottage near the ocean.  .

A lot of the fun of “An Eye for an Eye” is watching the Countess’s worst nightmare come true.  The Countess has her own spy in Ireland, Lady Mary Quinn, who sends her regular reports about what Fred is up to.  As soon as the Countess finds out about Kate, she invents a pretense to get Fred back to Scroope Manor.  The Countess invites a suitable young woman Sophia Mellerby to Scroope Manor to entice Fred, but Fred wants no part of it, only itching to get back to his regiment and his wild Irish Kate.  So the Countess as well as the Earl of Scroope only get more worried and angry. 

One could say this is a very stock situation, fodder for a thousand Victorian melodramas.  However Anthony Trollope makes the story come alive.  From our perspective, it is easy to sneer at the Earl and Countess of Scroope for their prejudice against the Irish and for their trying to prevent Fred from making his own decisions.  However Fred is a self-indulgent young guy, and does he really know what he wants to do with his life?  I wonder if parents still intervene when their children seem to be making the wrong choice of life mate.  Are children still reckless and willful, and do parents still want the best for their children?  Somehow it seems today that everyone thinks that the kids are always smarter than their parents, and it doesn’t matter what the old people want.  But there are still young people with money and young people without money. 

The Earl and Countess of Scroope.  ‘Scroope’ is a humorous name, and the name does help us to sneer at them a bit.  I’ve read Trollope’s “The Warden” and “Castle Richmond”.  This time I wanted a short dip in Trollope, not a long wallow, and thus picked this relatively short novel rather than one of his longer novels.

One of the reasons Anthony Trollope is still widely read is that you can trust him to know exactly how each of his characters would think and act, given their place in society and the family.  You can always depend on him to get the people in his novels right.  Sometimes Trollope is called the great novelist of money.  Yes, he did know the importance that money plays in people’s lives, not as an object itself but as a reflection of what it means for people’s self-image, property and place in the community and their society.  He was not particularly innovative, deep, or orginal in his novels, but AnthonyTtrollope was better than anyone in capturing the way we really are.   

“An Eye for an Eye” is a rich study of English and Irish life that left me completely tuned in up to the end of the book.  Only in its last few pages does the story turn into overwrought Victorian melodrama. 

“It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution. “ – Anthony Trollope.

“After Claude” by Iris Owens (1973) – 206 pages

“I left Claude, the French rat.”  That is the first sentence of “After Claude” spoken by the main character Harriet.  A good description of Harriet would be that she is a cross between Joan Rivers with her sharpest, nastiest tongue and the comedienne Sarah Silverman.  I will let Harriet describe her own story.

“I am essentially a light-hearted person who tries to see the humor in this freak show called life.”

It’s almost a miracle to me that New York Review Books (NYBR) has now re-published “After Claude”.  The novel caused a stir when it was published in 1973 and got a lot of very positive reviews, but the book and its author, Iris Owens, have long since been nearly completely forgotten.

Iris Owens had an interesting background.  After graduating from Barnard, she went to Paris with her heroin-addict boyfriend and became a writer of erotica for Olympia Press.  Using the pen name Harriet Daimler, she specialized in rape fantasies.  The pornography she wrote for Olympia Press is still available at Amazon with such titles as “Darling”,  “Innocence”,  and “The Woman Thing”.  She had such a brutal caustic wit, she was the only writer that Olympia Press, specialists in this kind of material, told to “tone it down”.

Many novels such as “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “Confederacy of Dunces” were written in the 1960s and 1970s with anti-heroes.  Finally we have found the long missing anti-heroine; Harriet in “After Claude” is someone who can slouch right up next to those male anti-heroes.

“After Claude” is a comic masterpiece, but it is not for everyone.  Here are a series of disclaimers.

Do not read “After Claude”, if you can’t stand to have the joys of female friendship disparaged.

“If there’s one thing on this earth that irritates me, it’s when a dumpy, frigid, former nymphomaniac assumes that my tongue is hanging out, thirsting for marital bliss.”

Do not read “After Claude”, if you find it offensive to hear Jesus called “a Jewish fag”.

Do not read “After Claude”, if you don’t want hard-working flight attendants and nurses to be degraded.

“Tell me, do you believe that stewardesses and nurses are pathologically promiscuous as a result of their occupations constantly confronting them with death?”

Do not read “After Claude”, if the following revolts your sense of cleanliness.

“A bum in Dr. Kildare’s blood-smeared ducks shuffled over and mechanically wiped the table with a cloth that looked as if it had been dipped in extract of smallpox infection.”

Do not read “After Claude”, if you don’t want to read about “that brain-dead segment of the population called women”.

I think everyone who wasn’t offended by the above will adore this book.   The woman who wrote the introduction to “After Claude”, writer Emily Prager, was no longer on speaking terms with Iris Owens when Owens died in 2008.  Somehow that seems appropriate for “After Claude”.

To read a more comprehensive and insightful review of this book, please read the BookForum review by Gerald Howard.  BookForum is one of only two book reviews I still get in the mail.

“This is How” by M. J. Hyland  (2009) –  376 pages

 M. J. Hyland has a way of penetrating the minds of her main characters that goes deeper than most writers.  With her short sentences and exact details of their daily lives at the moment, Hyland allows you to see clearly what is going on inside the minds of these persons, and it is not always pretty; sometimes it is ominous.

In “How the Light Gets In”, we are in the mind of a sixteen year-old girl exchange student from Australia living in Chicago.  In “Carry Me Down”, it is a twelve year old Irish boy whose mind we enter.  In “This is How”, it is a young English man named Patrick who is just starting out on his own independent life.

Speaking of exact details, I’m not going to reveal details about “This Is How” except to say that the novel starts out in a boarding house in England. 

Suffice it to say that “This is How” is a fine novel that will leave you totally involved with the story.  So M. J. Hyland has now written these three excellent novels.  Leave it to me to suggest to Hyland a major change to the structure of one of her next novels.  Let me elaborate.

In each of her three novels she has gone deep inside the head of her leading person by showing his or her life in detail.  The central conflict is within the head of that one person.  This has been a very rewarding technique for her and us, but it is time to try something a little differently.

I would like to see Hyland develop two main characters, each of whose minds she probes.  This could be done with alternating chapters between the two persons.  At some point within the novel, these two people would come into conflict, and we would understand exactly why since we know what is going on inside each person’s head.   Each of these persons could have a valid world view, but the detailed circumstances of their lives would cause them to clash.    

I’m not going to make any suggestions at all as to the setting of the story or the details of the lives of the protagonists.  So far Hyland has excelled in showing the conflicts within one individual.  I would love to see her use her same technique to delve into the conflict between two individuals. 

She also should work on her book titles a bit.

“The Slaves of Solitude” by Patrick Hamilton  (1947) – 242 pages

 It happens; it is not always just paranoia.  Two or more people in a small group will gang up and work in league to defeat, humiliate, or embarrass someone else in the group.  It’s human nature.  Miss Enid Roach in “The Slaves of Solitude” has that mix of fierce independence, stubbornness, and painful sensitivity that incite two other residents of her boarding house to team up to oppose her.

The time is 1943, and we are in Thames Lockdon which is some miles from London.  There has been a lull in the German bombing, and thousands of United States soldiers are there preparing for next year’s reclaiming of France.  These United States soldiers are looked on as the saviors of England and are  popular with the single women.  Somehow even thirty-nine year-old Miss Roach gets involved with her American soldier, Lieutenant Pike, who takes her to a park bench along the river where they kiss.  “On the whole she disliked this at first, but after a while she found that she disliked it a great deal less.”  Miss Roach also befriends a woman from Germany, Vicki Kugelmann, who has been the victim of anti-German prejudice whom Miss Roach invites to stay in her boarding house.  That is when the real trouble begins.    

Up until the time Vicki Kugelmann moved into the boarding House, Miss Roach only had to contend with Mr. Thwaites who has hounded her for years. We all know a Mr. Thwaites, “a lifelong trampler through the emotions of others” who especially has it in for Miss Roach.  Vicki Kugelmann, far from being Miss Roach’s defender, teams up with Mr. Thwaites.  Vicki makes a play for Miss Roach’s American soldier, and she has this kittenish too familiar way of talking to Miss Roach.  “You are not sporty.  You must learn to be sporty, Miss Prude.”  If this type of humiliating talk wasn’t enough, she also casually uses Miss Roach’s own comb which is the worst sin of all.  Before long Miss Roach “knew she hated Vicki Kugelmann as she had never hated any woman in her life…Then it was that she knew that it was war to the death – malignant, venomous, abominable, incessant, irreversible.” 

Patrick Hamilton has a way of making the stories in his novels come vividly alive.  No wonder so many of his books and plays have been made into movies.  The four main characters in “The Slaves of Solitude” – Mr. Thwaites, Lieutenant Pike, Vicki Kugelmann, and of course Miss Roach – are all memorable.  Hamilton’s novels have the immediacy of plays, and it was as a playwright that Hamilton originally excelled.  His first great play was “Angel Street” which was made into the movie “Gaslight”.

The entire novel “The Slaves of Solitude” is told through the eyes and mind of Miss Roach.  This is the first Hamilton novel I’ve read where the main character is a woman, and he pulls it off very well.  Miss Roach is a unique sympathetic character. 

Sometimes when reading English novels, one tires of reading about Lords and Ladies, manors and fox hunts.  Patrick Hamilton was one of those English novelists like Alan Sillitoe, Colin MacInnes and of course Charles Dickens who wrote about the people on the streets.  Unfortunately Hamilton died at the relatively young age of 58 due to health problems related to alcoholism.

“Poor Man’s Orange”  by Ruth Park   (1949) – 274 pages

 Can fiction writers change the real world?  Yes, if their fiction is powerful enough and contains the truth of how the world actually is.  Ruth Park’s two novels of the late 1940s, “Harp in the South” and “Poor Man’s Orange”, shocked Australians in their dramatic depiction of the hard life in the Surrey Hills tenement houses of Sydney   Many newspaper letter-writers were outraged and claimed these novels were a “cruel fantasy”, because Sydney had no slums.  Later Sydney did tear down these slum houses only to replace them with high-rise tenement buildings which apparently Ruth Park liked even less. 

 I have now completed “Poor Man’s Orange”, and I will say that this second novel is just as strong as the first, “Harp in the South”.  “Poor Man’s Orange” is a continuation of the trials and tribulations of the Darcy family At the beginning of this novel, there are six persons living in the tenement house, Hugh Darcy, his wife usually called ‘Mumma”, their daughter Roie and her husband Charlie, their other daughter Dolour, and the neighbor Patrick Diamond.  Just as in “Harp in the South”, many terrible and a few wonderful events occur to these people, some related to living in the tenement and others which are inexplicable and happen to us all. 

In the first book, Hugh Darcy was pretty much a loveable drunk who still came through for his family.  In “Poor Man’s Orange”  we see a darker side of him.  Some of his acts are despicable and cause his family terrible embarrassment.  To me, this honesty only made the story of the Darcy family seem even more real    Ruth Park does not soften reality, and she has the strength to let even one of the Darcy family have severe faults  It would have been easier to sentimentalize this story, but Ruth Park is a tough-minded writer who doesn’t let that happen.

Ruth Park and D'Arcy Niland

Since each character in “Poor Man’s Orange” is a struggling human being, you deeply care what happens to each one of them.  If Ruth Park had a special character in the Darcy family that she most strongly identified with, I would guess it is Dolour.  I frequently thought while reading both novels that Dolour was a stand-in for Ruth Park.

 Although Ruth Park did live with her husband author D’arcy Niland in the Surrey Hills tenements for a few months, the novels are by no means autobiographical.   In fact she spent much of her early life living in tent-camps in the forest while her father worked on bush roads and bridges as well as in sawmills. 

“I cannot emphasize sufficiently the importance of my early life as a forest creature, The mind-set it gave me has dominated my physical and spiritual being. The unitive eye with which all children are born was never taken away from me by the frauds of civilization; I always did know that one is all and all is one.”

                         Ruth Park, “A Fence Around the Cuckoo”

Ruth Park died about a month ago, December 14, at the age of 93. 

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“American Splendor” by Harvey Pekar  

 “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”  –  Harvey Pekar 

The “American Splendor” comics are not about superheroes.  Harvey Pekar who died last July due to an accidental overdose of prescription drugs was the chronicler of the mundane and the dispirited.  The comics for which he wrote the words and for which several artists including Robert Crumb drew the pictures were sold in underground magazine shops, ‘head’ shops, etc.  They never did have very good sales, and Pekar kept his job as a file clerk in a government office up to the end of his life.   He documented his everyday life as a file clerk in Cleveland in his “American Splendor” comics.  Now Pekar’s comics have been packaged in high quality trade paperback book form, and the books are quite popular.

I have just read the first ‘American Splendor’ collection which was all written in the Seventies, the post-Hippy era.  This was an era when everything was ‘awesome’ or ‘far out’.  Most men wore their hair long, some elaborately styled but most rather ragged and shaggy.  Feminism was in full force, yet women were still called ‘hot chicks’ or ‘foxy ladies’.  This was the time of disco and the one-night stand, and the drugs were plentiful.  Pekar and the artists capture the full scruffiness of the era in these short stories.

Each of these stories which are all only a few pages long chronicles the common incidents in Harvey Pekar’s life.  Lots of the pictures are just him facing toward us explaining something about his life.  Many of the pictures are of him walking the streets of Cleveland or talking to other employees during his file clerk job. His main interest outside work was collecting jazz records and many of the stories are about that.  Sometime the pictures are just Harvey walking down the Cleveland streets thinking about how he can get some famous recording.

 Harvey Pekar was very much a depressive, and that certainly comes out in these stories.  Yet also at the same time in the stories he does meet and go out with a lot of different people.  Pekar is very observant and picks up on the way different characters talk and their small quirks, all of which go into the stories.  Some are about women he dated, and Pekar is honest enough to tell the story even if they didn’t end very successfully for him.  Honesty is the quality that comes across most clearly.  Nothing here is prettified; this is real life.

 This collection is very good in its portrayal of life in the Seventies, a time when couples were more likely to shack up than marry, and there were a lot of post-college men and women living in single apartments.  The collection ranks for me right up there with “The Ice Storm“ by Rick Moody in its description of the Seventies.  Who can forget that scene in “The Ice Storm” where during the suburban house key party, all the men throw their car keys in a hat, and all the women without looking draw out a set of keys, and each woman spends the night with the man whose keys she draws.  Ah, the Seventies.             

After reading the “Maus” series, the “Persepolis” series, Posy Simmonds’ “Tamara Drewe” and “Gemma Bovery”, and now “American Splendor”, I am running out of graphic novels to read.  I’m not interested in manga or anime, superheroes, vampires or zombies.  Just about anything else would be of interest.

I’m hoping that some of you can come up with some more graphic novel recommendations.  Thanks.

“Hygiene and the Assassin” by Amelie Nothomb  (1992) – 167 pages – Translated by Alison Anderson

 Amelie Nothomb’s audacious novel “Hygiene and the Assassin” is about Nobel literature prize winner Pretextat Tach.  Some of the novels the ficticious Pretextat Tach has written are “Pearls for a Massacre”, “Crucifixion Made Easy”, “Prayer on Breaking And Entering”, and “Dying without Adverbs”

Like those of other Nobel literature prize winners, nearly every sentence that Tach says is taken as a pronouncement.  Journalists from nearly every major newspaper and literary magazine or review want to interview him.  But even Nobel prizewinners aren’t always what they seem;  Pretextat Tach is a mean-spirited and pretentious man, and above all he hates women.

 Tach’s literary hero is French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine.  Everyone who holds literature in high esteem must come to terms with Celine.  Celine wrote at least two of the great novels of the twentieth century, “Journey to the End of the Night” and. “Death on the Installment Plan”.  Yet in many ways Celine was a despicable person. who was a fascist and rabid anti-Semite.  The lesson Celine’s life teaches us is that being a fine writer does not necessarily make a fine person.

 Back to “Hygiene and the Assassin”, Tach has announced that he only has two weeks to live, and journalists from all over the world have requested private interviews with him.  Five journalists are chosen.   Nearly the entire novel “Hygiene and the Assassin” is the dialogue of these five interviews. Tach makes short work of the first four interviewers, all men.  Sensing that these men have only a casual limited interest in literature at best, he attacks them and they leave defeated.  The fifth interviewer is different, a young woman named Nina who has closely read all of Tach’s novels and proves more than equal to going up against the Nobel literature prize winner. She earns the rabid misogynist Tach’s grudging respect, because he was bored by the first four lightweights they sent in.  She successfully counters Tach’s hatred of women not with clichéd feminist arguments but with her own unique intelligent reasoning.    

 Although “Hygiene and the Assassin” was only translated into English in 2010, the novel is actually Amelie Nothomb’s first novel which she wrote when she was 25 in 1992.   What an original, daring, and stimulating first novel this is! I get the idea that Amelie Nothomb with this novel is saying to the world that not even Nobel prize winners intimidate her. To make her first novel almost entirely dialogue is a high-wire act by Nothomb that completely succeeds.   I was hanging on every word of the dialogue, especially in the conversation between Nina and Tach,.   I rate “Hygiene and the Assassin”  as one of Nothomb’s best novels along with “Fear and Trembling”, “The Character of Rain”, and “Loving Sabotage”.  Forget the dismal New York Times review of this book as it must have been written by one of those lightweight journalists above.  There are plenty of very positive reviews of “Hygiene and the Assassin” out there.

Although Amelie Nothomb is starting to be read here, she is still much better known in the rest of the world than she is in the English-speaking countries.  I suspect she herself will soon be the deserving subject of Nobel literary prize speculation after Haruki Murakami gets the award.  She’s been averaging one novel a year for almost twenty years now, so I’m hoping she will have a new novel for us this year.               

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“The Heart of the Matter” by Graham Greene (1948) – 255 pages

“Doing nothing, badly.” – Graham Greene  

No writer did comic desolation better than Graham Greene.  I recently re-read one of his classic novels, “The Heart of the Matter” which takes place during World War II in a west African British colony which fortunately for it remains nameless.  The war is far away; the British empire is winding down, almost finished, but the people here, especially the British, don’t know it yet.     

 Major Scobie, our main character in “The Heart of the Matter”, is the number 2 man in the customs office.  Even when the number 1 man leaves, he does not get promoted, because then there would be no one who could do the important customs work that Scobie does.  It doesn’t bother Scobie very much that he is passed by for promotion, but it upsets his wife Louise.  Louise and Scobie have reached that stage in their marriage where they annoy each other constantly, but it is comfortable except when Louise calls Scobie by her pet name for him, ‘Ticky’.           

 It is extremely hot in this colony, a breeding ground for all kinds of bugs and vermin.  Termites and other wood-boring insects eat the exposed wood in the houses which then allow the cockroaches and many kinds of beetles to enter the rooms.  Soon enough, small lizards and mice also get in.  One of the favorite pastimes of the colonials is inventing games which involve killing bugs. There is really very little for anyone to do here except at the post clubhouse where the post bar and restaurant provide a refuge, except that you might run in to obnoxious British colonial types like Wilson.

 The actual natives of the colony all work as servants for the British for next to nothing, and the British colonials call all the native men ‘Boy’ no matter what age they are.   There are two Syrian businessmen, Tallit and Yusef, who control most of the trade in the colony, and these two are very competitive.  They report on each other, accusing each other of smuggling diamonds which is one of the main moneymaking opportunities here.  One smuggling ruse is to get someone’s pet parrot to swallow the diamonds.  All Scobie can do to determine if the parrot is actually carrying diamonds is to cut the parrot up and see what is in its craw.  Of course there may not have been any diamonds in the first place.

Graham Greene has a way of describing these circumstances that makes me laugh, so when the story switches from comic desolation to real desolation, it is difficult to keep a straight face.  Scobie’s Catholicism plays an important role in this novel, and you can tell that Greene takes his religion seriously.  Somehow this serious religious talk doesn’t fit in real smoothly with the rest of the story, but it only lasts for a few pages, and by the end of the novel Greene is comfortably back to his normal tongue-in-cheek style.

I read several other reviews of “The Heart of the Matter”, and no one else recognized the comic aspect in the novel. These other reviewers found the novel dramatic, even depressing, but not humorous.  “The Heart of the Matter” finished number 40 on the Modern Library list of the Top 100 novels of the 20^th century.  Just like Scobie, Graham Greene was bypassed, in Greene’s case for the Nobel literary prize.

The directions for this game are simple.  Ten book titles are listed on the right.  Ten authors are listed on the left.  The idea is to match the book to the author.  Just remember that authors such as Leo Tolstoy and Ruth Park have written many books.  If Leo Tolstoy is listed, don’t necessarily expect to see ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Anna Karenina’.  If Ruth Park is listed, don’t necessarily expect to see ‘The Muddle-Headed Wombat’.  The correct answers can be found in the first comment for this post.

         1.   Lorrie Moore                             A.    The Englishman’s Boy

        2.  Arthur Phillips                             B.   Norwegian Wood

        3.   Fay Weldon                                 C.  Saint Jack

        4    Siri Hustvedt                              D.   This is my Daughter

        5.   Paul Theroux                              E    Prague

        6    Guy Vanderhaeghe                   F    How the Light Gets In 

        7.   Haruki Murakami                      G.  Who will Run the Frog Hospital ?

        8.   Edward P. Jones                        H.    The Blindfold

        9.    Roxana Robinson                     I.    The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 

       10    M. J. Hyland                               J.    Lost in the City

“Last Night at the Lobster” by Stewart O’Nan  (2007) – 146 pages

“Last Night at the Lobster” is a novella about the closing of a Red Lobster in New Britain, Connecticut.  Headquarters said it wasn’t making enough money.  The manager of this Red Lobster, Manny DeLong, is going to be transferred to a nearby Olive Garden but only as an assistant manager.  He can only take five of his current 45 employees along with him to the Olive Garden; the rest are out of a job.  He’s already told them, and now four days before Christmas it is the last day this Red Lobster will be open, and Manny must make do with those employees who choose to show up for work. 

One of the nice things about “Last Night at the Lobster” is that you get a first-hand manager’s take on all the inside details of how a restaurant operates.  There are the cooks and other food preparers, the food servers, the dish washers, the bartenders, and the host or hostess.  Each person must do their job and help each other in order to make sure all the customers are properly taken care of.  It’s the manager’s job to keep everyone working together and as happy as possible.  You see everything through Manny’s eyes.  His job is complicated by a snowstorm, and he has to keep the parking lot and sidewalk safe for the customers, and he is the only one available to do it.  Also one of the waitresses, Jacquie, is his former girlfriend for whom Manny still has a lot of strong feelings.

Then there are the customers.  There are little kids who throw food, eat the wrong things, and vomit on the floor on their way out.  There are the parents who don’t watch over their kids.  There are people who expect perfect service but leave nothing or under tip.  There are customers who complain about every little thing.   There are customers who take all the sugar packages out of the dispensers home with them.  It now seems to me almost miraculous how these restaurants keep running each day.

So many stories and novels have independent Mom and Pop restaurants in them.  I suppose these restaurants have a charm and romance about them, but they are not the reality.  The reality today is that probably about eighty percent of the restaurants are franchises like Red Lobster, Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, etc., etc.  I suppose some writers are scared that if they used a real franchise in their story and wrote anything at all negative about them, a pack of franchise lawyers will show up at their doorstep with lawsuits in hand   Stewart O’Nan gains points for realism and credibility for locating his story in a Red Lobster.   Besides he gets to mention the fake stained glass lamps over the tables, the Lobsterita which is the Red Lobster’s margarita, and the plastic marlin sculpture that decorates the restaurant.

This novella gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from me.  Since the story takes place four days before Christmas, “Last Night at the Lobster’ could be called a Christmas story.  The Christmas lights and tree are up in the restaurant and the snow is falling.  With the Red Lobster closing, I can’t say the story is uplifting,   but it is exhilarating to watch all these different people working together to keep the customers happy.  It’s happening everyday in hundreds of thousands of restaurants around the world.

“Fun with Problems” – stories by Robert Stone  (2010) – 195 pages

 Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Stone could well have been the most respected fiction writer in the United States at the time.  Two of his novels, ‘Dog Soldiers’ and ‘A Flag for Sunrise’ were held in high esteem.  Wikipedia speaks of “Stone’s trademark brand of acid-tinged existential realism while exploring broad political and social questions.”  Although Robert Stone was a realist, he wrote in a sort of drug-induced stream of consciousness that fit in well with the Sixties and Seventies.  In the early Sixties, Stone had gone west with Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey and became a member of Kesey’s early hippy group, the Merry Pranksters.  Although I’ve read both of the above-mentioned novels, I hadn’t read Robert Stone for a long time, so I decided to try his new book of short stories, “Fun with Problems”.

Stone’s writing is still drug and alcohol saturated.  His characters have usually been in and out of drunk tanks and drug rehabilitation centers.  They frequently suffer from a bipolar condition which may be a mental illness or just a side effect of the alcohol and drugs.  His main characters usually have no illusions about other people’s goodness, and they especially have no illusions about their own goodness.

The first three stories of ‘Fun with Problems’ are excellent, showcasing Stone’s talent at its best.  This is the usual case in short story collections, because the book never would get published if the author didn’t have a few good stories.  They might as well put the good stories first so the reader gets a positive opinion right away.

The problems start with the fourth story, “The Wine-Dark Sea”.  This story is divided into two parts that have little relationship to each other.  I soon came to the conclusion that these were actually two chapters of a novel that Stone had started and then given up on.  As a story, it was terribly disjointed, and little effort was taken to turn it into a coherent story.  I’ve seen this before, the started and discarded novel passed off as a story.  Publishers usually let only their most esteemed writers get away with this sort of thing. 

Many of us can recognize a great story collection, but how do you recognize a mediocre or lame story collection?   As I mentioned, nearly all story collections start strong for the first fifty or so pages.  But then the reader senses a diminishing, a gradual or not-so-gradual falling off of the stories.  I believe nearly all story collections are arranged in order of the descending quality of the stories, although occasionally a strong story will be selected for the last story to give the reader a good feeling at the finish. 

So having the fourth story in “Fun with Problems” be a lame discarded beginning of a novel did not bode well for the rest of the book.  Even in the best story collections when you get between two thirds and three quarters of the way through, the stories aren’t quite as good as the early stories.  The fifth and sixth stories of  “Fun with Problems” continued the disappointing downward spiral of the book.  Things revived a little with the last story, “The Archer”, but by that time I’d lost my willingness to just go along with the author in his excesses. 

I should mention that the reviews of this collection were generally positive, although there were a few like mine that criticized it.  One of the reviews I read of “Fun with Problems” praised Stone’s brutal honesty in these stories.  Most of the main characters in these stories are rather proud of their alcohol drinking, their drug-taking, and the women they link up with, so I wouldn’t call it brutal honesty for them to admit to these behaviors.    When these same main characters criticized nearly everyone else, it seemed to me more like the cheap cynicism of the drunk or druggie rather than brutal honesty.

In the longest story “High Wire” the main character is a movie screenwriter.   For the last eighty or so years, many of the better United States fiction writers have gone on to screenwriting to the detriment of their writing careers.  Not sure if Robert Stone has done any screenwriting.