Dear Diary: Miam
As Mondays go, it was a good day. I never left the building, but that’s to be expected when I’ve had a busy weekend. I meant to plant the flats of pansies and geraniums that I bought at Nicky’s last week, but then I meant to do a lot of householdy things. It’s easy to plan dutiful afternoons in the morning. The difficulty comes at lunchtime, which is invariably spent over a book. Usually, I can close the book and get back to work, but not today. Today, I just changed places, from the upright seat at the writing table in the bedroom, where I ate lunch, to the reading chair just opposite. I simply didn’t want to put Vestal McIntyre’s Lake Overturn down.
I read a lot of good books. Even though I’m probably working a smallish corner of the contemporary literary-novel scene, the books that I like have little in common with each other. Let me pluck a few titles from the air: The Corrections, Telex From Cuba, Then We Came to the End, Netherland, The Great Man, Breakable You (these two latter titles do have something in common, actually). Let’s not forget the stupidly underrated Lulu in Marrakech. (Must write that one up!) Now, Lake Overturn.
I loved Mr McIntyre’s collection of eight magnificent stories, You Are Not The One. I’ll admit that I liked the New York stories a bit more than the Idaho stories, but that’s because I’m a hick. When I heard that the author’s first novel would be set in his native state, I pouted. I really did! A bit of personal history that was published in an issue of Open City last year, although very well done, threw me into a state of verdinemia, the malady caused by a shortage of greenery. (Southern Idaho is very dry.) But Lake Overturn is so rich in human complication that I never had a moment to register the rebarbative environment, which, in any case, the locals seemed to be perfectly happy with.
Sometimes novels make me want to visit places that weren’t on my list. Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games — a title that I ought to have mentioned earlier — made me want to visit Mumbai, which is the last thing that I’d have expected. Lake Overturn has not kindled a desire to visit the greater Boise metroplex, where the novel is set, but Mr McIntyre’s prose has ignited a passionate indignation. All that terrific praise for Updike, Roth & al that I’ve been reading for decades and that I have always found overheated: it’s true of this young writer’s work. The only writer of my age who seems comparably gifted is Richard Ford.
So much for the blah-blah-blah part of my criticism of Lake Overturn. Now I’ve got to hunker down and find a few substantive things to say about it. Mr McIntyre has done his share of the hard work; now it’s my turn.
Let me just say that I’ve already forgiven Kate Christensen for her blurbatorial comparison of Lake Overturn to Middlemarch. It’s a lot smarter, as these comparisons go, than the one between Netherland and The Great Gatsby. Whereas I have no interest in conjecturing Fitzgerald’s response to Joseph O’Neill’s (even more that Fitzgerald’s) understated masterpiece, I am fairly certain that George Eliot would have turned the pages of Lake Overturn with as much interest as I did.