Books on Monday: A Window Across the River
In the past, I’ve made a point of not reading novels by the same writer in succession. A pair of reasons as stoutly interconnected as Scylla and Charybdis warn me against it. First, one wants to avoid the risk of burnout. Most writers, like most people, have little characteristics that, while they may be heartening to re-connect with after a spell of absence, may also become taxing and tiresome with prolonged exposure. The second reason is the opposite of the first: one wants to space out the goodies. If an author doesn’t cloy, he or she is much too rare a catch to squander all at once.
But I’m sailing through these perils at the moment, already embarked on Brian Morton’s most recent novel, Breakable You. Two weeks ago, I read Starting Out in the Evening. Last week, it was A Window Across the River. Although they share the writer’s scrupulously understated prose, lightly seasoned with very dry wit, the novels are tonally quite different, and far from having too much of a good thing, I was so curious to see what the latest novel was like that I don’t think I could have concentrated on anything else. (Mr Morton’s first novel, The Dylanist, is out of print. Copies are available through Alibris, but I’m holding out, at least for the moment, for a conforming reissue by Harvest Books.)
In any case A Window Across the River is one novel that all modern-day fiction writers and their readers really must read, because it addresses, squarely and intelligently, the problem of authorial appropriation: whose life is this, anyway?