But, on to The Life You Save May Be Your Own:
Yesterday I read Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
It's haunting, possibly because O'Connor freely borrows key images from a number of her other stories: For example, the image of the car as a vehicle of freedom and justification is used in Wise Blood (with its main character Hazel Motes noting that a man with a good car doesn't need salvation); and the notion of Catholicism as a dismissable unadvanced and "old" religion by a character who hasn't the patience to think deeply about spiritual things is used in The Displaced Person and other places. And, as is common, the story includes a widow with an invalid or idiot adult daughter who is unmarried. (It's interesting how often O'Connor uses this image since she was a physically afflicted, unmarried adult daughter living with a widowed mother. It's self-deprecating, perhaps, and brings recognition of her own need for grace to the forefront of her stories.)
I’ll try to explain my on-going response while reading the story. I began reading it on the subway going to work yesterday morning. I finished it last night on the return home. I’ve been thinking about it this morning and decided to pull out one of my FO’C commentaries (not intentionally a biblical reference, but it’s helpful to have someone else’s reflections and insights when reading Flannery O.)
But, back to the visceral response: As I began to read the story, I realized that I didn’t know it, which was nice because I’ve re-read so many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. As I got into it, I wanted the story to get along. I wanted it to make progress. I had the impatience common to her characters and I didn’t care for the two main characters, Tom Shiftlet (which appropriately rhymes with Shiftless and he is a scoundrel) and Lucynell Carter, the widow-mother who owned the place that Shiftlet happened upon, who has her own selfish purposes as well. I didn’t like Shiftlet and I didn’t care for his long-windedness, although that’s a usual characteristic of Flannery O’Connor characters – they cover their brokenness by talking a lot about their all-knowing perspective on the world.
Sidenote: I think that I wanted the characters to be more humorous. Like the Grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, I wanted characters that made me laugh. None of the five characters in this story entertained me. They were uncomfortably odd.
Shiftlet is physically broken. Although he has skills, he is a carpenter and he fixes Lucynell’s car later in the story, he is a one-armed man, who early on in the story stretches out both arms in a way that signals the redemptive nature of where the story is headed: "He swung out both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross." But the image is lost on Lucynell and her daughter:
“The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists.”
The story goes on with Shiftlet making references to deep things that disturb his thinking and that Lucynell thinks are plain foolish. For example, Shiftlet talks about a surgeon in Atlanta who had “taken a knife and cut the human heart” and “studied it like a day-old chicken.” Shiftlet is correct in concluding that the motives of the heart are beyond science. And he makes a reference to European monks who sleep in coffins, a reference O’Connor borrows from a James Joyce story, “The Dead,” but the reference is lost of Lucynell who responds that “they wasn’t as advanced as we are.”
Later Lucynell has Shiftlet marry her daughter in a civil ceremony. But, although it’s "legal," it’s not satisfying to Shiftlet even though it “satisfies the law” as Lucynell tells him. Shiftlet responds that “it’s the law that doesn’t satisfy” him – which expresses a deeper spiritual need that he is currently not aware of.
There’s so much more to the story that I won’t cover here. He ends up in a café called The Hot Spot – where he feels more uncomfortable, and later he picks up a boy (note: good deed to cover up guilt and sin), a hitchhiker, who quickly recognizes Shiftlet as a moral liar and calls Shiftlet’s bluff on his waxing and jumps out of Shiftlet's car in disgust. (Hint: The boy becomes the vehicle of grace in the story.)
I hope that you’ll read it. If so, let me know how you respond to The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
]]>However, I still enjoy sitting down to read a book. I get pleasure out of “seeing” an image in my mind’s eye. And I’m glad that I have the concentration and interest to do so.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: An Education Course Puts Students in Director's Chairs
As a future teacher, Kara L. VanLoozen spends a lot of time thinking of ways to keep students from nodding off at their desks. With that in mind, her project for an education course at the University of Texas at Austin has a driving beat, cool special effects, and a story line that should keep even the most reluctant learners sitting up straight.
This project at the University of Texas appears, in my mind, to “throw in the towel” and accept that students can’t concentrate.
My cynical side concluded, as I first read this article: Oh, they’ve taken a page from the Mega-Church play book, which uses as many visual aids, lighting effects and tricks as possible to keep folks “alert” through their short, yet casual and entertaining, services.
]]> As a future teacher, Kara L. VanLoozen spends a lot of time thinking of ways to keep students from nodding off at their desks. With that in mind, her project for an education course at the University of Texas at Austin has a driving beat, cool special effects, and a story line that should keep even the most reluctant learners sitting up straight.She and other students in the course were asked to express their views on a timely social issue in the form of a three-to-five-minute film. They used Apple laptops to create the works, which incorporated video clips, photographs, narration, and musical soundtracks.
Ms. VanLoozen's digital documentary traces the evolution of her views on the Iraq war as she grapples with questions about the lives lost and the tactics used. It ends with a patriotic burst of yellow ribbons, U.S. flags, and a message to support the troops, regardless of one's views.
"This let me be creative and figure out new ways to incorporate technology into my teaching," says the Texas junior, whose video included interviews with friends and news-media images of soldiers and Abu Ghraib prisoners. "It also showed me how important it is to learn as much as possible about an issue before forming an opinion."
The assignment, in a College of Education course on methodologies of teaching for social studies, was a collaboration between two faculty members and a technology specialist. Mary Lee Webeck, an assistant professor, and Brent Hasty, an assistant instructor who is working on his doctorate in education, wanted their students to immerse themselves in a civics topic in a way that would make it come alive for them as well as for their future students.
As digital video has become cheaper, and easy-to-use editing tools have hit the market, more college professors have begun incorporating video projects as learning tools. "Students are at home in more visual environments," says Diana Oblingera, vice president of Educause, a nonprofit association that promotes the use of technology in higher education. "It's becoming increasingly common for professors to use digital stories as a way of getting students to synthesize information and express themselves."
Here at Austin, the class project started out low-tech. Last semester Ms. Webeck and Mr. Hasty asked students in their social-studies-methodology courses to complete a series of journal entries and compile scrapbooks describing their evolving views about the 2004 presidential election or a particular topic in the election.
After attending a faculty workshop on ways to integrate technology in the classroom, the two decided to take advantage of the university's requirement that education students purchase laptop computers. Working with Karen French, an instructional technologist, they came up with the idea for the digital-storytelling project.
Students first completed a series of online tutorials that taught them how to locate and import images from the Internet into a video-editing program, arrange the material, and insert titles, transitions, and special effects.
They were required to keep journals and submit storyboards outlining their video projects. Over the semester, they also completed a series of activities designed to get them thinking about -- and collecting footage on -- the issues they had chosen to follow.
The students analyzed television news clips, studied the way children thought about the chosen topics, and examined their historical, economic, and anthropological contexts.
The documentaries give viewers "historical empathy" for their subjects, Ms. Webeck says. "It's one thing to see a picture of a lynching in a textbook, and it's something entirely different to read an excerpt from the diary of a woman whose son was being dragged off, or to read newspaper accounts from that time," she says.
Among the topics the students chose were promoting better sex education, fighting obesity, and avoiding performance-enhancing drugs. The video about teenage sex grabbed viewers' attention with hip-hop tunes and flashy graphics. Other videos, using a dizzying combination of music, moving text, and voice-overs, were a challenge to keep up with.
Students munched on doughnuts and breakfast tacos as they judged their classmates' videos during a recent class session. One student said she wasn't comfortable eating while watching a documentary about Terri Schiavo, and two left the room when a classmate showed an anti-abortion video that included images of aborted fetuses.
The students laughed when Rebecca S. Frankel used visual puns like a baseball cap and a tree branch to illustrate points in a movie about Texas's controversial 10-percent law, which grants automatic entry to the University of Texas to anyone graduating in the top 10 percent of his or her high-school class. When the topic is as potentially dry as capping admissions to various branches of a university, says Ms. Frankel -- a junior who hopes to teach elementary-school math -- anything that can liven up the presentation helps.
"I'm always looking for ways to make it easy to relate to the material," says Ms. Frankel, who, as a student teacher, had her kindergarten students learning math by having several of them hop while the others counted the number of "bunnies" in the room.
A few students appear bleary-eyed from all-night editing sessions to finish their films.
"I spent an hour trying to get my text to slow down, so be prepared to read fast," cautions Samantha E. Schoolar, whose movie examines the role that fathers play in a woman's decision on whether to have an abortion.
Mr. Hasty, the instructor, seizes the chance to illustrate a broader lesson. "That's definitely a metaphor for what you'll experience teaching," he tells the students. "You'll have so much material to cover, and you'll have to modulate your speed and keep yourself from racing through it."
Preparing a 45-minute lecture requires many of the same editing skills the students used in making their short videos, he says.
He sees other parallels as well between creating a movie and preparing an effective lecture: In both, the material should be engaging, entertaining, and well paced.
Diana M. Flynn, a senior whose movie examined the pros and cons of including disabled children in regular classrooms, personalized her video by incorporating the story of a child with Down syndrome who tested his teachers' patience but ultimately won over his teachers and his classmates. After importing a video clip to her Apple computer, she edited it and added music and commentary.
She was inspired to make her movie by a learning-disabled cousin who died a few years ago after suffering from juvenile arthritis.
Ms. Flynn, who plans to create more movies as a teacher, says she would like to assign a movie as a class project.
"I'm thrilled that I was able to learn the technology and create something that's uniquely mine," she says.
]]>This report is from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
New York]]> "The concerned citizen in search of good news about American literary culture will study the pages of this report in vain," writes Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, in the preface to "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America."The populace of the United States may be divided by race, age, gender, region, income, and educational level. But according to a report released on Thursday by the National Endowment for the Arts, there is at least one thing that brings us all together: No group reads as much literature as it once did. If present trends continue, our aliteracy will only deepen over the next generation. After all, the steepest decline in reading has occurred among young adults, ages 18 to 24.
The report -- an electronic copy of which is available on the endowment's Web site (requires Adobe Reader, available free) -- draws on interviews with more than 17,000 adults conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in August 2002 as part of its Survey on Public Participation in the Arts. Similar surveys were conducted at the request of the NEA in 1982 and 1992. Mr. Gioia calls the poll "as reliable and objective as any such survey can be" and "a comprehensive factual basis for any informed discussion of current American reading habits."
Some 300 people gathered on Thursday in an auditorium of the main branch of the New York Public Library to hear Mr. Gioia's presentation of the report's statistical data and a panel discussion of its implications.
Announcing the unhappy news at a public library would be a fitting and poignant gesture in any case. All the more so at the institution that served as a de facto university for the self-education of generations of immigrants and their children. It was in a reading room not far from the auditorium that, during the 1930s, Alfred Kazin wrote On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, first published in 1942. As more than one person in the audience at Thursday's gathering said, the cultural situation revealed by the NEA survey called to mind a very different book -- Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985).
The findings in the report show a steady drop, over two decades, in the percentage of Americans who read books of any sort -- with a much steeper decline in the consumption of literature. (The report defines literature as fiction, poetry, and drama, without regard to genre or quality.) In 1992, for example, 60.9 percent of those surveyed indicated that they had read a book of some sort during the previous year. By 2002, that figure had shrunk to 56.6 percent, a decline of 7 percent.
When asked about literature in particular, the change was even more marked. In 1992, 54 percent of respondents indicated they had read a literary work of some kind. That proportion fell to 46.7 percent in 2002, a decrease of almost 14 percent. Besides declining twice as fast as book reading in general, literary reading appears to have taken an especially hard hit over the past decade. From 1982 to 1992, it decreased by a mere 5 percent -- a rate that has accelerated, the report suggests, with the "cumulative presence and availability" of "an enormous array of electronic media."
The figures in the new report show considerable variation in reading habits across demographic categories. Higher income and educational levels correspond to higher percentages of literature consumption, for example. Gender made a difference, too: 55.1 percent of women reported in 2002 that they had read literature over the previous year, while only 37.6 percent of men did. And among respondents identifying themselves as white, 51.4 percent reported reading literature -- nearly twice the rate among Hispanics, at 26.5 percent. The corresponding figure for African-Americans was 37.1 percent, while those tabulated as "other" came in at 43.7 percent.
A Vacuum Among the Young
More striking than any variation across demographic lines, however, is a remarkable consistency that has emerged over the last two decades. Each segment of the population is reading less than it once did.
"Due to higher overall levels of education in America over the past 20 years and the correlation between literature participation and education," the NEA report states, "one might think there would have been an increase in the popularity of literature since 1982." But analysis of the survey data shows that "literary reading rates decreased for men, women, all ethnic and racial groups, all education groups, and all age groups."
The steepest decline -- and the one that the report notes with most alarm -- has occurred among young adults. In 1982, respondents ages 18 to 34 were the group most likely to report the recreational reading of literature. Over the intervening decades, they have become the group least likely to do so (except for some segments of the population over 65).
The change has been particularly striking among those ages 18 to 24. The report says that, over the past two decades, the share of the adult population engaged in literary reading declined by 18 percent, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to percent in 2002. But for the 18-to-24 cohort, the drop has been faster, sinking from 59.8 percent to 42.8 percent, a decline of 28 percent.
"Reading at Risk" states that the trends among young readers (or, perhaps, nonreaders) suggest that "unless some effective solution is found, literary culture, and literacy in general, will continue to worsen."
"Indeed, at the current rate of loss," it says, "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century."
Problems but No Solutions
Beyond noting that "arts agencies and policy makers may want to target Hispanics for programs to raise literary reading rates," the report contains no specific policy recommendations. When asked this week about that seeming oversight, Mr. Gioia responded, "That was a deliberate decision on my part. My sense is that the National Endowment for the Arts shouldn't try to tell the culture what to do, or not to do."
Mr. Gioia said that the report can have its best effect by provoking a national debate on the situation. He stressed the importance of the report's finding of high correlations between the reading of literature, on the one hand, and museum attendance, support for the performing arts, and volunteer work for charity organizations, on the other.
"We find that literary reading correlates -- not in a rough sense but almost in an identical sense -- with civic and cultural engagement, " said Mr. Gioia. "So the decline that we see in reading has not only cultural consequences, but social and civic consequences that are very frightening for a democracy."
Sven Birkerts, the author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994), cautioned against interpreting the decline in purely quantitative terms, "as in, time given to the screen is time away from books." He cited the pervasive cultural changes wrought by "the great momentum that underlies our turn to all things digital," as he put it in an e-mail message.
"If it's perceptibly harder for me, a dedicated humanist type, to decelerate into a thick book I'm interested in -- harder because I, too, want my results more quickly, in less linear form -- I try to imagine the average 17-year-old who has just been assigned some brick of a novel by her sadistic senior English teacher."
Mr. Gioia said that the NEA would be holding meetings around the country to discuss the report with groups such as the Modern Language Association, the American Booksellers Association, and professional organizations for librarians.
"If literary intellectuals -- writers, scholars, librarians, book people in general -- don't take charge of the situation, our culture will be impoverished," Mr. Gioia said, describing that situation as a crisis. "When you look at the figures for young readers, that says to me that we don't have a lot of time."
Seeking a Call to Arms
The gathering at the New York Public Library was an early taste of what such a national discussion might be like. "Each of us has anecdotes" about the current state of literary culture, said Mr. Gioia in his presentation. "But quantifying it shows that the trends are worse than you imagined."
Mr. Gioia, a poet and literary critic, mentioned that for 15 years of his literary career he had "kept body and soul together" as a business executive -- and that he knew his way around a statistical analysis of trends. Armed with a laser pointer, he went through the major graphs and tables from the report. Figures that seemed dismal enough on the printed page looked positively alarming when projected upon a giant screen.
In the audience, one could hear the occasional gasp -- especially at seeing the downward slope of literary readership among young adults from 1982 to 1992, followed by a much sharper dip from 1992 to 2002. "This," Mr. Gioia said, "is the visual trend of an activity that is going out of existence."
But not everyone listening to the presentation responded with alarm. During an intermission, Andrew Delbanco, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, called the event "a jeremiad," referring to a genre of sermon regularly practiced by the Puritans, in which the sins of the community were recited and lamented.
"Traditionally," Mr. Delbanco said, "the form ends with a moral call to arms, rousing the congregation to put things right." He said that it sounded as if Mr. Gioia might have some notion of what would be required to correct the situation, and that he was curious to hear what this might entail. (Mr. Delbanco, who is writing a book about Herman Melville, did not deny that the statistics were depressing, but his sardonic manner implied that devotion to literature in the United States today requires an Ishmael-like acceptance that the ship has already sunk.)
After the intermission, a panel discussion that Mr. Gioia led suggested some of the directions that public discussion of the report might take. One consequence may be that people already enamored of literature will want to proclaim that fact all the more clearly, in defiance of the prevailing trend.
Paula Dietz, editor of The Hudson Review, recalled her own experience of reading as a child and quoted Henry David Thoreau as saying, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!" Similarly, the novelist Andrew Solomon quoted Franz Kafka on how a book should serve as "an ax that breaks up the frozen sea inside us."
It was not clear from such remarks just how to persuade people not already wielding a literary ice-ax that the frozen sea required them to do so.
Other panelists offered remarks that were somewhat more practical, occasionally verging on the political. Mitchell Kaplan, president of the American Booksellers Association, proposed finding ways to get writers on book tours to visit public schools. Young people, he said, need to grow up "seeing that books and literary authors are alive."
James McBride, author of the best-selling memoir The Color of Water, said that the public must "demand that government give librarians -- who are the last line of the defense of reason in this society -- more money and more freedom." That remark drew a warm response from the audience, which Mr. McBride acknowledged: "I see the librarians out there going, 'Yeah.'"
Richard Reyes-Gavilan, a supervising librarian at the New York Public Library, pointed out that the electronic media have become a basic part of the menu of information sources that libraries offer to the public -- which, in turn, can make them an attractive place for young people. He quoted an e-mail message from a colleague who said that a "teen center" at one library was attracting adolescents who "eventually get bored with the technology, so they take a look at the books."
It might be discouraging to think of literature as the distraction of last resort, Mr. Reyes-Gavilan said. "But if we have to trick people into reading, we're happy to do that."
]]>you have to make your vision apparent by shock: to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
- Flannery O'Connor (In her essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country" found in Mystery and Manners.)
This has been a difficult post for me to write because the story is so complicated - not the story line, but theologically complicated. (A reviewer called it "theologically puzzling.") One of the multiple "bottom-lines" of the story is that Harry Ashfield, a boy, who is four or five years old, drowns himself in the "River of Life, made out of Jesus' blood." At a certain point near the end of the story, "his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn't know he'd been looking for. Then all of sudden he knew what he wanted to do." Which was, "He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to baptize himself to keep on going ... until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river."
There are other characters:
Mrs. Connin is the baby sitter who takes Harry to a healing and baptism service at the river. She is a practical woman, who expresses her distaste for the abstract art in the Ashfields' apartment. The art on the walls of her house are filled with pictures and calendar, including a picture of a man who "had long hair and a gold circle around his head and he was sawing on a board while some children stood watching him."
In a few ways, Mrs. Connin reminds me of Mrs. McIntyre, the woman who owned the farm in the story, The Displaced Person because neither has a tolerance for nonsense over practical things.
Mr. Paradise is the most interesting character, in my mind. He isn't a Believer but he goes to watch the "healings" because he isn't healed. He has a cancer on his ear. (Is this O'Connor's sign of his hardness of hearing?) He watches Harry head to the river and sees him jump in and eventually drown. He's horrified by the sight.
I wonder if Harry's moment of grace - being taken by the river - is the same moment of grace for Mr. Paradise. I wonder if his seeing Harry go to Paradise, leads him there too.
This wonderfully engaging and puzzling story is well worth the read.
]]>I read Flannery O'Connor's short story, The Crop, on the flight to Los Angeles last week.
Briefly, it's about Miss Willerton, a would be writer. Early on we get a sense that she's not a terribly reflective or creative person as she thinks about writing her next story while cleaning crumbs from the dining room table:
It was a relief to crumb the table. Crumbing the table gave one time to think, and if Miss Willerton were going to write a story, she had to think about it first. She could usually think best sitting in front of her typewriter, but this would do for the time being. First, she had to think of a subject to write a story about. There were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one. That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about than she did writing.
As O'Connor tells the story, The Crop moves into the story that Miss Willerton is writing, and it's a very good story. Miss Willerton's story is complex, interesting and filled with passion.
However, at an advanced point in writing, Miss Willerton leaves her story and goes grocery shopping, where she encounters a couple who are very much like to fictional couple she had created in her story. She's disgusted by these people and abandons what is probably the best writing of her life.
The point that O'Connor makes is the foolishness of a pride that unjustifiably leaves us thinking that we're better than the everyday life that surrounds us.
Of course, this is too simplistic of a conclusion. But O'Connor often points to the blindness of those who think that they see.
]]>The Blooker Prize is awarded in three categories:
Fiction • Non-Fiction • Comics
This year's finalists have been announcedl
Yikes! I rencently decided to go ahead and spring for The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. However, according to Amazon, the collection is already out of stock and won't be available until sometime in April when it's reprinted.
I found one copy being auctioned on eBay.
]]>
My friend Darrin in Wheaton, IL found this link and sent it on to me this afternoon. I missed this particular program from NPR's Speaking of Faith with the topic: Faith Fired by Literature.
This particular program is a conversation with Paul Elie who wrote The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, which tells the interwoven stories of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy.
]]>I picked up What We Believe but Cannot Prove last week in Boston. It got my attention because of the philosophy class I'm teaching this semester. The short articles are interesting to read.
The articles are in response to The Edge Question, which you can read about on line.
Most of the responders are skeptics and often make very large satements. Many of them are scientists.
I like this book because the articles are short and be discussed easily.
]]>Nothing happens in the books... I'm creating a person who's a lot like the person who's reading the books.That's probably why I enjoy reading NIck Hornby-Nick Hornby
I picked up A Long Way Down in the Newark Airport yesterday morning. I'm dog-earring a number of pages that I want to revisit as I make my way through the novel.
These are poignant characters who at times express angst that we all know that we could feel deep inside ourselves. Hornby gets to the core of why people hurt from loneliness and need a community to feel worth loving and that their dreams have value.
I think that I like this book because it touches the same nerve that Don DeLillo's White Noise gets to. (I think that White Noise is brilliant.)
A Long Way Down is about four strangers who meet on the roof of Toppers House, North London's favorite suicide venue. It's New Year's Eve and they each arrive to do themselves in and each of them has a story. They leave the roof as a group and their stories begin to unfold and complicate. I'm about 100 pages in but not deep enough to tell you more.
However, already I can tell that these four characters are not "Hallow Men" (to borrow from T.S. Eliot) ,
Shape without form, shade without colour,They have texture and places inside them that could nurture hope like the ex-wife in Grace Paley's "Wants":
Paralysed force, gesture without motion
I'm short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something.
I have to tell you that the language is prickly and spiced up; some readers may be sensitive to that.
I'll be back with more as I hear more of their stories.
]]>I've posted better-crafted blog-type entries on my Gather page.
]]>Being Good is a quick read that maintains high tension from start to finish. It’s a page turner that will keep the reader from doing other things.
Slav O Se is a great character: funny, smart, engaging - and a potentially exploding disaster around each corner, but he always manages to pull through with aplomb and on his own terms.
Being Good is a novel that was written for me to read. I’m a “school person” in that my entire career has been in “prestige collection” colleges, universities and prep schools. In just a few pages into Being Good I sent the author an e-mal to find out more about his background because he so accurately “nailed” aspects of independent school culture. At times it was laugh out loud funny. Interim headmaster Thistlethwaite is characteristically old school and out-dated, but the character works well in this novel.
A subtext of the novel takes on is a conversation as to where the line between school-life and private-life for school personnel should be drawn. That’s a large conversation that most likely would not go Slav O Se’s way in real life. But Slav’s triumph is a satisfying and hoped-for outcome in Being Good.
I am left with one haunting question at the end: Why is the creepiest character in the book – besides Thistlethwaite – named Anderson?
I appreciate Todd’s offer to send an electronic copy of Being Good to bloggers and I’m happy to post my thoughts on his novel.
technorati tags: Being+Good, Todd+Anderson
]]>I was drawn into the novel because it started in Maine, a place that I love. And I was fascinated that an author would pick East Providence as a setting for a novel.
There are other key characters along the way, including Norma, a very independent girl-next-door who was in love with Smithy, but whom Smithy viewed as a nuisance growing up. And the people that Smithy meets on his trek from Rhode Island to Venice Beach, California.
I liked The Memory of Running. It became particularly engaging at the mid point. I have to admit that I was more interested in the bicycle trip the first half of the novel and preferred that storyline to the high school tribulations of Smithy and his sister Bethany. The novel alternates between stories chapter by chapter. But both stories come together nicely at the middle and at that point it’s a “can’t put down” novel.
That was the case with me. I started the novel some time ago, put it down, and picked it up again for my flight from Los Angeles to Boston Wednesday afternoon. I finished the second half in a day, sneaking chapters in between presentations at the conference I’m attending right now. It’s a good novel for traveling because the chapters are short and the story is easy to pick up again.
Underlying the attraction of this novel are very human characters. Their triumphs, hurts, flaws and needs are very real and believable.
I’ve been to all fifty-states. Because of my familiarity with the country, I was particularly impressed by the detail McLarty provides of obscure places as Smithy travels off-the-beaten-path across America. The details are amazing. I have seen the desperate look of East St. Louis, Illinois. I’ve been to some of the towns in Colorado that amazed Smithy by their beauty. And I can image the route from Fontana and Pomona to Sunset Boulevard and on to Venice Beach, although I wouldn’t want to travel that by bicycle – or automobile. The attention that McLarty gives to description makes this a very alive book.
Not only does McLarty tell the stories of his characters in the book, we hear stories within the stories from the books that Smithy reads crossing the country.
I highly recommend The Memory of Running.
]]>
This isn't the first time that I've written about writer Harry Crews.
It is the first time that I've read him.
I bought Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader this afternoon. This book includes the autobiographical A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, The Gypsy's Curse, Car and a selection of essays.
Crews is very readable. He grew up in Georgia, the child of sharecroppers.
Readers of this weblog are aware of my devotion to Flannery O'Connor and her writing. Crews writes about similar characters. (There isn't much diversity in poor people in the rural Deep South when it comes to characters.) However, his characters aren't as funny as O'Connor's. Perhaps that's because he's not making his characters up.
Crews is writing about the real people who have shaped his life. (I'm reading Childhood, which is autobiographical. Perhaps his made up characters are funny when I get to his fiction.)
Here's the beginning of Childhood: The Biography of a Place:
My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.]]>