Before continuing yesterday’s discussion of William Deresiewicz’s gem of a Jane Austen book, I want to ask for your help with a problem that I’ve been having — and, let me tell you, just getting ready to ask for help has been helpful; so, thanks! My problem concerns novels that I’m stuck in, and making piles of the books in my fiction bin demonstrated right away that the problem is not so bad as I thought it was. It kills me not to finish a novel, and my dread of doing so has had the perverse effect of multiplying, in my imagination, the number of books that might be cast aside. By my preliminary count, there are only seven, and only four of those really count.

I was going to ask you to help me with this even before I went to Crawford Doyle and bought — another novel. I went on purpose to do so. This morning, I read about Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (translated by Tim Mohr) in a blog that was new to me, and I gathered from the review that this is a book that I will actually like. I’m not reading it to be cool or to keep au courant. What did Jennifer Tyler say that sold me on it?

If you need to know anything at all about Rosalinda Achmetowna, just ask. She’ll be happy to tell you all about her grace and selflessness, her great beauty, and how exactly she manages to help her pathetic family muddle through life. Grossly and pathologically self-delusional, Rosa confidently sees herself as the savior of everyone else’s story.

I am someone who cannot help loving a character (even if I hate her) who’s pathologically self-delusional and whose name is Rosalinda Achmetowna. Traffic was so bad in the taxi coming home (it’s hot today, and I’m conserving my energy; what’s more, I was carrying a load of perishables from Eli’s) that I started to read Hottest Dishes, and it had me smiling right away.

As my daugher Sulfia was explaining to me that she was pregnant but that she didn’t know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap.

I’m beginning to think that what has denatured Anglophone fiction is the patina of niceness worn by everyone, even psychopaths. We have internalized the prohibition on saying what we think that we don’t even think it anymore. That’s why characters from former Iron-Curtain countries are so refreshing. They have no manners! They’re incredibly rude and they get away with it.

That night I suddenly got worried that Sulfia might die on me. It had been years since I worried about her, and I didn’t like the feeling.

Well, I can tell already that I’m going to read The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar with simple pleasure. Now, what about these other books?

As I say, there are seven in the pile of books that I’ve begun but set aside. Three of them “don’t count.” First, there’s Portobello, by Ruth Rendell, which I bought together with The Birthday Present, one of the author’s most exciting tales, involving a feckless MP and an automobile accident. (I wish I could tell you more, but I didn’t write it up, and I stopped holding on to crime fiction.) Portobello is not so engaging. It involves one of those untalented but delusional young men from disadvantaged backgrounds who intrigue Rendell a great deal more than they do me. Eugene Wren, a furniture dealer in the eponymous road (I think), is almost equally unattractive. There’s no question that the book suffers (in my eyes) by comparison with The Birthday Present, which reads like Alan Hollinghurst in comparison. If I ever do read Portobello, I’ll have to go back to the beginning and start over. This time, at least, I won’t be poring over the A-Zed looking for Blagrove Road, which is marked by the simple numeral “1” and identified in the “List of Numbered Locations” for Map 91, Square B2. Finding that took forever.

Another book that doesn’t count is Edith Wharton’s Glimpses of the Moon. I had no reason to think that this novel, first published in 1922, would be one of Wharton’s better ones, but I fell for the Pushkin Press edition, which is adorable. By the second chapter, I had the queasy feeling that Wharton was imagining herself as a lovely young desirable woman who just happened not to have any money. The love talk between Nick Lansing and Suzy Branch, who have just gotten married for the sole purpose of enjoying a respectable honeymoon, after which they’ll have spent everything they have and be obliged to seek other partners, is oddly corseted, and reminiscent of Henry James real last novels, the ones nobody reads: The Other House, The Outcry.

His wife instantly challenged this belittling of her capacity. “It took a good deal of argument to convince you that we could face the ridicule of Como!”

But Wharton will keep. I hope before I die to go on a Wharton craze, and read Hudson River Bracketed a third time. The third book that doesn’t count is Edouard Levé’s Suicide. It ought to be easy to say whether or not one has begun to read a book, but I can’t manage it in this case. That’s because I read the last ten pages. This is the novel, in the form of a suicide note, by an author who hanged himself before his final work hit the bookstores. I don’t know why, if I’m going to read it at all, I’m going to read it in English. Someone with a rule ought to have rapped my knuckles when I picked this book up.

Now for the harder cases. I’ve actually read about half of Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling. I’ve also read the last couple of chapters. The part that I didn’t read takes place mostly in a prison — a topos that I strenuously avoid. Carpenter’s writing is very strong, but his subject matter — severely undereducated down-and-outs in California, way back in the Fifties — is unbearably sad. Not sad in the have-a-good-cry sense, but sad in the sad-sack sense; the waste of human potential is unpleasantly acrid. I am going to set this novel aside, which means shelving it with all the other NYRB editions. If I run into someone, in person or online, who raves about it and who persuades me to take another look, I’ll pick up where I was.

Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award last year. Like Tinkers, which won the Pulitzer earlier in the year, it turned out to be almost impossible for me to like. “Come to find out if you asked by powerful means for more than the animal had to give, you could not manage the results.” I can’t read sentences like that. It’s difficult and it’s hard: plain, unlovely, and, most of all, uninteresting. The last clause is terminally unmodulated. I got through the first race (the first of the book’s three sections) torn between incomprehension and uninterest. The moral of the story is that I will never trust prizes again. I’m not saying that prizes don’t count. But I need more — the recommendation of a trusted critic. As I recall, I read only one book on last year’s Man Booker list, and it wasn’t even truly adult fiction, David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Not a bad book, really, but somehow a shameless one — a graphic novel without the pictures. In any case, I am going to give Lord of Misrule away.

The Fates Will Find Their Way, by Hannah Pittard, is not a long book by any means, and I’ve read about a quarter of it. I was interested in it because it’s written in the first person plural, a voice that Joshua Ferris and Ed Park used to such great effect in their books about cubicular ennui. From time to time, individuals in the group step out from the narrators’ circle, as it were, and into the narrative spolight, so that, presumably, they can’t, at least for the moment, be part of “we.” And yet… The problem with The Fates Will Find Their Way is that the narrative group is not very interesting, and also it doesn’t know very much. It’s made up of a bunch of teenaged boys who are fixated by the disappearance of the lovely Norah Lindell. There’s an arresting passage not far from the beginning that — well it would be arresting if it weren’t a tissue of speculation, a hollow-sounding might-have-been spun by nameless boys — about what might have been Norah’s last hours, or maybe not. As I discovered reading Francine Prose’s lovely but to me unmoving Goldengrove, I find the conceit of beginning the book with the extinction of a lovely young life to be annoying. It’s a terrible thing in real life, and I don’t believe that reading about it makes it any more bearable.

Pittard might have held on to me if she hadn’t made what hits me as a tactical error: she never names the “leavy enclave” (I’m quoting the dust jacket) in which her suburban moon-o-drama takes place. Given her blurred narrative source, this is not the time to argue, fictionally, that all suburbs are the same. I think that Pittard ought to have taken pains to detail an actual American town, naming real streets and setting her pool parties in real houses. Her decision not to do so makes the novel weightless. Dreamy, perhaps; but not in a way that recommends the book to me. I wish that I were as determined to send this book to HousingWorks as I am to unload Lord of Misrule, but it’s difficult to imagine getting rid of a book that’s on my shelves at the moment in order to make room for this one.

The final hard choice is Wilhelm Genazino’s The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt. This was enthusiastically recommended to me by a member of the staff at Crawford Doyle to whom I have already apologized for having trouble with it. I’ve got about fifty pages to go — somewhat more than a third. I suspect that Genazino’s charms are untranslatable. His title, as distinct from New Directions’ choice for Philip Boehm’s translation, is Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag, which even if you don’t know what it means scans beautifully and naturally. It happens to mean “An umbrella for this day,” which, together with the dactylic rhythm, invokes the Lord’s Prayer — an apt allusion for the story of man who seems to live on the most exiguous resources. “An umbrella for this day” isn’t much better than “shoe tester of Frankfurt”; I can see the publisher’s dilemma. What might very well be witty and genuinely droll in the original text comes off, in English, as quirky and even creepy, as a forty-something man caroms among the women in his life — given his unprepossessing character, it’s hard to believe that there are any — while, yes, testing luxury-brand shoes. This testing shoes business is either an occluded joke or a strange German manufacturing practice. I couldn’t tell which, and I don’t much care. Nevertheless, I have resolved, as of this writing, to soldier through the rest of the novel and to keep it. Even if I don’t much like it, I gave it a try because someone I talk to fairly regularly liked it.

There’s more; I haven’t even gotten to the books that I haven’t yet opened. But this is enough for today, and it was the hard part You’ve been a great help! Thanks!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.