27 February, 2002: Inversions
I adore Iain Banks' science fiction books (though I'm not such a fan of his non-genre work), and I've often wondered what book would be best to recommend to putative readers to introduce them to his Culture universe. Inversions, by virtue of never mentioning the Culture at all, is not that book, but that's about the worst thing I can say about it. (more...)
2:14 am 
22 February, 2002: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor is the first novel by Robert Coover that I've read. I've seen him speak any number of times, and I've read Pricksongs and Descants, his first collection of stories, so I was prepared for something interesting intellectually, formally experimental, emotionally arid, And probably sexist, too. I was only right on the first and last counts. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. is about a mild-mannered Walter Mitty of an accountant and his slow alienation from human contact in favor of a dice-based baseball game of his own devising. He has created a whole fictional league of 1920s-ish baseball, with multiple generations of players, a Hall of Fame, and a private mythology. He is, in effect, God, and it's unhinging him. As one magical, horrible season gets underway, he abandons his job, his only contacts with the outside world, and everything else, in favor of rolling the dice and seeing how the games come out. It's the kind of great idea I'd expect from Coover, but I'm surprised how compelling he made Waugh, if not the imaginary baseball players. And nobody will mistake this book for something by Tom Clancy, but there was very little of the back and forth jumps designed to disorient the reader and decenter the story that I encoutered in Pricksongs. I don't think of Coover, whose major association in my mind is the utterly uninvolving "The Babysitter", as the sort of writer who would take a man struggling with a life of quiet desperation as his subject matter, but there you have it. It makes me want to go look for The Public Burning, in which Coover takes on Nixon (a man struggling with desperation of a decidely less quiet nature.)
2:23 am
18 February, 2002: The Lyre of Orpheus
Robertson Davies wrote melodramatic novels, usually featuring sprawling family dramas and lots of rich curmudgeons arguing about philosophical, literary, and religious ideas. I run hot and cold on Davies; there are times when his oh-so-mannered novels make me want scream "Show! Don't tell!" and "Your characters are nonsensical!" and bury them in the backyard. Right now I'm in a period where this sort of novel is what I've ben wanting to read. The Lyre of Orpheus is the conclusion of the trilogy begun in The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone, concerning the very wealthy Arthur Cornish and the Cornish Foundation (established in Book 1 and funded with the legacy of Francis Cornish, the star of book 2), devoted to promoting Canadian art. Arthur is newly married to Maria, a grad-school dropout of Gypsy ancestry, and with the Cornish Foundation funding a production of the unfinished E.T.A. Hoffman opera Arthur of Britain, or the Magnimonious Cuckold, you can bet money that the marriage will be tested. There lengthy discussions of God, Art, and Love; some lucky characters find their one true love, others don't; there are horrible philistines to scorn; and the ghost of Hoffman (the composer and author of Kater Murr, among other works, best remembered today for his influence on Poe and his authorship of the story Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker is based on) hovers over it all, desperately hoping that the young grant recipient will do Arthur of Britain justice. That's about the standard order of things in a Davies book. I read it in a weekend, and it was just what I needed.
11:00 pm
11 February, 2002: In Pharaoh's Army
Tobias Wolff reminds me of a morally outraged Raymond Carver. His best stories have the same kind of minimalist purity that Carver seemed to deliver so effortlessly, but where Carver seemed to let a sneaking affection for his characters shine through, Wolff seems to feel a barely contained rage, as in his portraits of moral breakdown, "Leviathan" and "Hunters in the Snow" -- particularly the latter, with his merciless depiction of the characters' essential weaknesses. I'm not sure I could take an entire novel of Wolff lashing out at a world that fails to live up to his standards, but his memoir of Vietnam, In Pharoah's Army, is not as much concerned with others' failings as with his own. (more...)
11:11 pm
5 February, 2002: The Magicians of Caprona
With very few exceptions, I adore the work of Diana Wynne Jones. Perhaps this is because her characters are so frequently nasty, an invaluable trait in children's fiction, where authors frequent err on the side of the insipid. The Magicians of Caprona was the only book I didn't enjoy my first time through the Chrestomancy Quartet, perhaps because it's the least Jones-ish. Chrestomancy, as in Witch Week, doesn't appear until the book is well underway and is called in to clean up a mess; unlike Witch Week, the setting isn't England; the parallel universe fancies that are Jones' bread and butter get nary a mention. Instead, the book a vaguely Verona-esque city and two feuding families of magic-workers. I give away not a thing when I say that everything works itself out for the best. The second time through, I appreciated it more -- a few of the touches are nicely done (particularly the Punch and Judy show) and the main character's family is, if not as mean-spirited as real children or Jones' characters frequently are, believably self-centered and easily led. Enjoyable, but largely a filler book compared to the rest of the series.
9:11 pm