Shelf-Conscious

Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

2006-06-28T11:17:00.000-05:00

[review forthcoming]

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Buddhism, Pankaj Mishra

Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

2006-05-26T15:31:00.000-05:00

[review forthcoming]

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Bob Spitz, Music, The Beatles

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

2006-03-04T09:56:00.000-06:00

[review forthcoming]

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Zadie Smith

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

2006-03-03T13:15:00.000-06:00

[review forthcoming]

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Larry "Ratso" Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan

2006-01-21T10:17:00.000-06:00

[review forthcoming]

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Larry "Ratso" Sloman, Music, Bob Dylan

Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook

2005-12-31T11:15:00.000-06:00

[review forthcoming]

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Sam Shepard, Music, Bob Dylan

Rex Pickett, Sideways

2005-12-30T20:00:00.000-06:00

Substituting Pinot Noir for the New York Giants (without jettisoning the alcoholism), and an unsold novel manuscript for a love-hate obsession with Frank Gifford (without skimping on the existential despair), the opening of Sideways has all the woolly charm and seductive pessimism of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes. Before long, however, the novel veers on to a somewhat more predictable path: two buddies taking a road trip into California wine country as a last hurrah before one of them gets married.

The aspiring novelist is Miles, a screenwriter barely hanging on at the fringes of Hollywood, and the soon-to-be-groom is Jack, a TV character actor and sometime film director. Each has a self-imposed burden of custodianship over the other: Miles to prevent Jack from cheating on his fiancee, Jack to keep Miles from despondency over his ex-wife's new marriage and his fast-crumbling dream of becoming a published author. Both men fail miserably, but Pickett, although never taking us deeply into either character, displays a smart ear for dialogue, a gift for gallows humor, and a subtle poignancy that enables him to make a touching story out of their friendship and fears.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Rex Pickett

James Salter, Last Night

2005-12-29T10:04:00.000-06:00

Salter is frequently tagged with the label "writer's writer," which is usually just another way of saying that an author's crystalline prose style and/or chosen milieux are more appreciated by fellow artists than his or her storylines are appreciated by general readers. In the case of this collection of ten short stories, the label is apt. Salter's sentences are swift and savage, beautiful when not biting and often both at once. His protagonists typically display a certain sophisticated decadence; they are the sort of people who disrupt carefully calibrated social situations while in the process of ruining themselves with drink or marital infidelity, yet are still able to lash out cleverly at one another. But the incidents in these mostly brief pieces are too quickly sketched to make much of an impression—even the impression, so beloved of short story writers, that more is being left unsaid than appears on the surface. The one exception to this less-is-less quality is "Arlington," which has a military setting and a sudden, early change of narrative viewpoint that causes the story to turn itself inside out, elegantly, like a fine glove. The effect is exhilarating.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, James Salter

Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan

2005-12-28T16:43:00.000-06:00

The primary challenge facing any comprehensive biography of Dylan is to trace a consistent path through each of his many musical incarnations, uniting the high and low points of his career into a convincing portrait of the artist. Sounes succeeds at this for a while, but seems to lose the thread somewhere after the mid-1970s. So, while the raconteur of the Rolling Thunder Revue still feels connected to the mischievous early folksinger, the playful acoustic poet, the electric rabble-rouser, and even the gloomy, defeated minstrel of Blood on the Tracks, the progression from Rolling Thunder to holy roller and beyond marks a rupture in the narrative from which the book never quite recovers. By the end, Dylan has become a barely coherent shadow, a figure who, strangely unconnected from his own past, deserves a measure of empathy but otherwise hardly seems to warrant the reader’s interest. Still, Sounes has unearthed many new details about Dylan’s private life that were either overlooked by or unavailable to previous biographers, and that plus its captivating first half does make this book worthwhile reading for Dylan’s many fans.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Howard Sounes, Music, Bob Dylan

returned to the library, unfinished

2005-12-22T16:57:00.000-06:00

John Fowles, The Journals (Volume I: 1949-1965)

After taking six weeks to get through about one-third of this massive tome (the first of volume of two), I had covered only a little more than three years in the young adulthood of Fowles, who in the early 1950s was about as far as one can imagine from being the world-famous author of The French Lieutenant's Woman. To go by these published journals alone—which are but a fraction, its editor tells us, of the extant manuscripts—Fowles spent most of his time during this period complaining about his parents, whom he lived with after graduating from Oxford University; rhapsodizing about landscape; teaching school in France and Greece; mooning over a childish, mercurial young woman while on a trip to Spain; and claiming to be a misunderstood literary genius, despite very little supporting evidence. I admire his self-confidence, but I lost patience with the braggart Fowles was in his twenties and, as a consequence, will probably not bother to pick this book up again to see how he developed into one of England's finest contemporary writers.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, John Fowles

Rick Moody, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions

2005-11-23T16:45:00.000-06:00

Sentence for sentence, page for page, this is powerful and original work. Moody’s combination of nervous self-awareness and occasionally biblical eloquence gives his prose a rhythm and bite that few other writers command. Sui generis almost to a fault, the book is hardly a memoir at all, at least not in the conventional sense of sustained dramatic depictions of events from one’s own life. Only two relatively slender portions qualify: Moody’s brief psychiatric hospitalization and a trip he takes with his father to learn more about the Moody family history, in particular Joseph Moody, the nineteenth-century clergyman who inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Minister’s Black Veil,” in which a preacher troubled by vague notions of original sin takes to wearing a piece of black crape over his face in attempted expiation.

Less a memoir, then, and more a meditation on the concept of shame and its role in the formation of personality, the book’s only flaw is that its beautifully wrought parts never truly cohere. The kinds of personal problems Moody experiences, and which he seems to think link him in some way to Joseph Moody (whose own sense of shame is thought to be traceable to his having accidentally shot and killed a childhood playmate), or by even further extension to the crimes of America itself (such as the decimation of its native population and the despoliation of its land), are never discussed in enough detail or with enough objectivity to make such links explicit and interesting. Instead, we are treated to the turbulent thoughts of a fascinating mind, trying and failing to name the specific sins that lie behind its heightened but ultimately shadowy sense of guilt. In this sense, perhaps, the entire book is like the minister’s veil.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Rick Moody

Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

2005-11-18T16:45:00.000-06:00

It’s been ages since a work of art made me feel like I needed a shower—not a cold one, either, but a long, hot, cleansing one. The last time I can remember feeling this unnerved by an artist’s sleazy take on the world was when I saw the film Star 80, Bob Fosse’s adaptation of the true story of the murder of a Playboy playmate by her scuzzy, exploitative husband. But at least Fosse had some important messages to convey about the role of pornography in contemporary society and the primitive power imbalances that still so often pass for normal relations between the sexes. The only messages I could glean from Moody’s novel are that longing is seemingly indistinguishable from the longing for orgasm and that adult sex is just adolescent sex overlaid with existential despair. Neither one makes for very enlightening reading.

Set in New Canaan, Connecticut, on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving Day 1973, The Ice Storm is larded with numerous pop-culture touchstones of the 1970s that Moody includes in an apparent attempt to give the story some sociological heft. While these references are entertaining (mainly, I suspect, to readers old enough to remember them), they seem incidental to an underdeveloped plot told from the alternating viewpoints of four family members—father, daughter, mother, son—who ultimately all sound like the same character: a contemporary novelist, demoralized by (and angry at?) the atmosphere in which he spent part of his adolescence, who is possessed of a vague desire to somehow turn it all into A Novel of Grave and Significant Themes. Hey, that spells ANGST!

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Rick Moody

David Kamp and Steven Daly, The Rock Snob*s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge

2005-11-16T16:51:00.000-06:00

If, as the decidedly non-snobbish David St. Hubbins immortally said, there is a fine line between stupid and clever, there is an even finer one between satire and self-laceration. Such is the lesson this very funny—but also very informative—little book teaches. Kamp and Daly clearly know too much about rock not to be snobs themselves, and they offer up this mostly convincing take on a fundamental canon of rock arcana with a delightfully schizophrenic mix of loathing and love. Most inspired of all are the sentences they concoct to illustrate the uses of snob lingo in context, a few of my favorites being:

His aesthetic may be straight out of the Dust Bowl, but Tom Waits's strangulated vocals have a soupcon of Beefheart about them.

I can’t be bothered with rock music anymore; all I listen to is Miles Davis’s Nefertiti and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Let’s put some mellotron over the fadeout to make it really Revolver-ish.

When I saw all those great Stax/Volt players backing up Belushi and Aykroyd, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, David Kamp, Steven Daly, Music

Graeme Thomson, Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello

2005-11-15T16:45:00.000-06:00

Relying on secondary sources almost surely familiar already to Elvis trainspotters (magazine interviews, radio documentaries, reissue-CD liner notes), and often falling back on tour itineraries, set lists, or studio logs when narrative momentum is lacking, Thomson nevertheless paints a coherent portrait of the once-and-future Declan P. McManus. Surprisingly, the picture doesn’t differ all that much from the effigy used by Costello’s detractors: a restless shape-shifter hungry for approval from the arbiters not only of rock but also of country, popular song, classical, and jazz. In Thomson’s view, of course, Costello is neither opportunist nor arriviste but an original and eclectic musical mind unwilling to be hamstrung by the limitations of any particular genre. Still, Thomson leaves the (in my opinion) essential question unasked and unanswered: If Costello is so effortlessly proficient at so many different styles, why is it that his relatively brief stint under the punk/New Wave banner resulted in work so much more visceral and lasting than that of not just the majority of his rock contemporaries but any of his other musical incarnations?

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Graeme Thomson, Music, Elvis Costello

Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

2005-11-14T16:48:00.000-06:00

Although I read this book for an exclusively personal reason (to learn more about the background and experiences of two people very near and dear to me), I found it to be extremely engrossing in its own right. Clemens, a white man in his 30s who grew up just inside the boundaries of a city whose population, well before his birth, was on its way to becoming predominantly black, writes with a mixture of nostalgia and mournfulness about incidents in his childhood that brought the races together in the best of circumstances (a grade-school football team) and the worst (numerous incidents in which young men took one of his father’s cars for a joyride).

As he matures, Clemens becomes fascinated with the literature of race—Faulkner, Ellison, Baldwin, Malcolm X—first as a way of slaking his curiosity about those whom his life circumstances had cast in the role of Other, and then, with increasing dismay, as a way of attempting to plumb the depths of what he perceives as their utter incomprehensibility. (Chief among the targets of his dismay is Detroit’s inflammatory five-term black mayor, Coleman Young.) Clemens never reaches a degree of understanding that satisfies him, and it could even be argued that he loses his own way during the process by becoming consumed with anger over the discovery that his future wife had been raped by a black man.

Overall, Clemens exercises his razor-sharp observational skills not only on his upbringing but also on the history of Detroit and the destructive effects it has had on neighborhoods, families, races, and classes. (In fact, some of his most incisive prose deals not with the racial divide but with the line between the professional classes of nearby Grosse Pointe and the working-class people, such as his mother, who made their livings cleaning Grosse Pointe houses.) In doing so, Clemens manages to make the sufferings of a specific urban landscape resonate with readers anywhere who take an interest in the life and death of American cities and the hearts and minds of those who dwell within them.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Paul Clemens, Detroit

Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

2005-10-20T16:14:00.000-05:00

Smiley, a novelist, actually has only one way of looking at the novel, but what a way it is! Her definition of the form isolates what she sees as its five fundamental qualities: “lengthy written prose narratives with protagonists.” (She uses the phrase so frequently that I eventually came to abbreviate it mentally as “Le Wripronarp.”) Her analyses of the history, structure, psychology, morality, and craft of the novel integrate the five aspects of her definition beautifully, and she illustrates her points with abundant examples from the more than one hundred novels she read as background for the project.

Along the way, Smiley discusses similarities in the thematic concerns of many classic novels, common threads that lead her to make the trenchant observation that novels are apparently a way of trying to answer the question of how society ought to treat women. (It sounds ridiculous stated so baldly, but Smiley makes an admirable case for it.) She also describes her experience with writer’s block during the composition of her novel Good Faith, and offers refreshingly unique and encouraging advice on how to draft a novel of your own.

I had only two quarrels with this mostly marvelous compendium. First, Smiley has an eccentrically mathematical approach to explaining a novel’s standard structure (exposition, rising action, climax, denouement). According to Smiley, the exposition should take up the first 10 percent of the text; the rising action should somehow begin to accelerate or refresh at a point about 62 (!) percent of the way through the book; and the climax should come at about the 85- to 90-percent mark.

Second, I think Smiley makes a nearly fatal mistake by devoting the latter 300 pages of this nearly 600-page volume to brief essays on each of the one-hundred-plus books she read as background, arranged in chronological order of the novels’ first publication. The examples she used in the earlier chapters were perfectly chosen and more than sufficient to make her points, so encountering them again in the context of longer descriptions of each book feels redundant and even irritating. Also irritating is the way Smiley seems to lose her objectivity as she progresses from past to present, so that when she gets to novels that were being published during her own career she sometimes seems too eager merely to quibble with them rather than, as with the earlier novels, discussing them in terms of their innovative qualities or their relationships to other works. These choices almost (but not quite) lead Smiley to squander all of the good will she earned from the reader in the book’s first half. The essays could just as easily, and more effectively, have been spun off into a separate book—perhaps a guide for reading groups?

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Jane Smiley, Literary Criticism

Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

2005-10-05T15:38:00.000-05:00

I’m not completely convinced that (as the saying goes) writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but Marcus, though a fine and knowledgable critic, does his share of hoofing in this book, whose ostensible subject is the circumstances surrounding the recording and release of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in 1965. Because his fierce erudition so easily leads him down any number of garden paths in search of ways of describing the effects individual pieces of popular music have on their listeners or on the cultural contexts in which they spring up, some of this book feels improvised—and not necessarily in a good way. But when Marcus is writing about the watershed the song represented in Dylan’s development as a songwriter, the way it took shape in the studio, or the public’s initial reaction when it was debuted on radio and then performed at the Newport Folk Festival, the book takes flight like a novel, or perhaps a poem, or possibly even “Like a Rolling Stone” itself.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Greil Marcus, Music, Bob Dylan

Helen Humphreys, Wild Dogs

2005-09-26T12:35:00.000-05:00

Although her storytelling devices are sometimes reminiscent of Faulkner and her subject matter of Russell Banks (especially the Banks of The Sweet Hereafter), Helen Humphreys’ voice is all her own—which is even more of an accomplishment given that she presents her story using multiple narrators.

Humphreys’ subject is the loneliness and despair that torment the inhabitants of an unnamed northern town. Six strangers, whose dogs have joined a feral pack that lives in the woods surrounding the town, become friends through the act of standing beside the woods every night in hope that one or more of their pets will decide to emerge and return to the warmth of human cohabitation. A failed romance between two of the characters—one of whom, oddly, we are not told is male or female until about halfway through—and a climactic act of violence loom largest in setting the mood for this brief novel, but there is more than enough other sadness to go around for each of the characters who populate this bleak landscape. A haunting and moving book.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Helen Humphreys

Muriel Spark, The Finishing School

2005-09-23T16:06:00.000-05:00

Muriel Spark is known for her work in the novella form, and her latest is yet another in that tradition. But The Finishing School seemed like it ended almost as soon as it started—all premise and no payoff. In this case the premise was a good one: Rowland Mahler, frustrated novelist and self-important teacher at a finishing school he runs with his wife Nina, grows increasingly (and literally insanely) jealous of one of his students, Chris Wiley, a prolific 17-year-old working on a speculative historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots.

Once she has established her sizable cast of characters (Rowland, Nina, Chris, numerous students, school employees, neighbors, and even a couple of publishers Chris woos with his still-incomplete manuscript), Spark can't seem to find much more for them to do than mutter sardonic comments at one another. Luckily, at 181 tiny, sparsely printed pages, this little book won't last long enough to bore anyone, but neither is it much of a diversion.

(P.S. Doesn't the cover design resemble Dai Sijie's somewhat?)

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Muriel Spark

Dai Sijie, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch

2005-09-19T12:38:00.000-05:00

I’m a fan of slapstick movies and literary novels, but I think this is the first time I have come across a genuinely slapstick literary novel. Muo, our poor protagonist, gets heaped with more embarrassing and/or accidental miseries than Buster Keaton on his worst day, the strangest of these probably being the earliest—in terms of page count, not plot line. (One odd aspect of the book is how freely it plays with chronology, although to little real effect.) On a night train somewhere outside of Chengdu, stretched out below his bench in an attempt to get closer to a teenage girl who has crawled under there to sleep, Muo experiences a spontaneous orgasm upon touching what he thinks is the girl’s foot but which turns out to be the handle of the broom she had used to sweep the floor before lying down.

Like much else in this entertaining book, it would take up too much space here to explain how Muo finds himself in this specific predicament. But here is the general drift: Muo, a French-trained psychiatrist, returns to his native China to bribe a judge who has the power to release his unrequited university love, Volcano of the Old Moon, from her imprisonment for anticommunist activism. The judge’s price? One night with a virgin—which explains Muo’s pursuit of the girl on the train, as well as of many other women during the course of this short, highly readable novel.

It doesn’t however, explain the orgasm, which can be put down to the fact that Muo, for no particular reason I could glean, also has a foot fetish, and that’s where I felt the slapstick detracted from the book’s larger theme, the poignancy of Muo’s yearning romanticism. Dai clearly wants Muo to be a sympathetic, well-rounded character, but there is something hollow at his center, even as Dai attempts to give him a complex interior life. I’m not quite sure why this should be. Maybe it has something to do with the lack of congruence between Muo’s inner turmoil and his role as a foil for the book’s other, much less complicated figures? Whatever the reason, a novel that could have been both touching and hilarious ends up being only the latter.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Dai Sijie

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

2005-09-12T13:20:00.000-05:00

I expected so much more from this novel, Murakami’s latest to be translated into English, than I felt it delivered. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of my favorite books, and I have read each of Murakami’s other translated works of fiction with varying degrees of aesthetic satisfaction but never anything less than pure pleasure at the reading experience itself, until now. Kafka on the Shore reveals a different Murakami than the one I am used to. Instead of an extremely nimble and idiosyncratic use of fantasy elements, an overreliance on cheap surrealistic gore and sex. In place of characters who fascinate by their unique and stubborn lack of conformity with conservative standards of accepted behavior, ones who fit only stereotypical patterns of nonconformity (teenage runaway, torch-carrying bereaved lover, the transgendered, the mentally challenged). Instead of an unpredictable plot—or a refreshing apparent plotlessness, which may amount to the same thing—a schematic alternation between two parallel narratives that will (of course) dovetail somewhere toward the end.

One narrative depicts the exploits of Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy who flees his domineering father, takes a job in a private library, and is somehow fated to enact a quasi-Oedipal psychodrama: his father dies under mysterious circumstances, and he enters into familial but also sexual relationships with two women, one of whom is a stand-in for the mother who abandoned his father when Kafka was young, the other a stand-in for the older sister she took with her when she left. The second narrative details the story of Nakata, survivor of a mysterious childhood incident that took away many of his mental faculties but left him with the ability to hold conversations with cats. Along the way we are presented with jarring scenarios that wouldn’t feel out of place in big-budget horror or science fiction films, and the whole thing ends rather abruptly, with only the least interesting aspects of the story resolved. The single reminder that this is the Murakami who wrote Wind-Up Bird, Norwegian Wood, or Sputnik Sweetheart is the absolutely trademark sense of utter melancholy that pervades the book, but without the rest of Murakami’s strengths to back it up, it seems that melancholy alone just isn’t enough to power an entire novel.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Haruki Murakami

returned to the library, unfinished

2005-08-31T09:39:00.000-05:00

John Irving, Until I Find You

Unfinished? More like barely begun. Irving’s novels were such an important part of my formative years that I almost feel guilty for passing over his newest one, even though I also feel that the days when he did his best work are long behind him. Apart from simply running out of time (most of which I spent on Chadwick and Eco—see below), I found that I just didn’t have the patience to become engrossed in one of his neo-Dickensian sagas right now. I hope to give it another try later.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, John Irving

Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel

2005-08-29T13:29:00.000-05:00

Eco takes such evident pleasure in the creative process that it’s hard not to be caught up in his excitement and to marvel at the ease and lightness of his prose (or at least that of the translation from the Italian, by Geoffrey Brock). You can almost hear Eco chuckling as he sets to work establishing his premise, one that other novelists can only admire with jealousy because it’s the kind that can be done just once: What if a sixty-year-old man awoke from a coma a partial amnesiac, his sole memories those of the popular culture—the novels, comic books, movies, and popular songs—he has consumed since he was a child?

In the central section of the book, the narrator Giambattista Bodoni (nicknamed Yambo), an antiquarian book dealer, returns to his childhood home to sift through the pop-culture artifacts he has saved there since the end of World War II, to see if these can reawaken the rest of his memories. And as we follow Yambo on his quest, the book itself allows us to participate in it by means of numerous color reproductions of the material Yambo revisits. Italian translations of Mickey Mouse comics, illustrations from boys’ adventure novels, stills from Hollywood movies, Fascist propaganda posters, front pages of Partisan newspapers—all these and more are presented and described in loving detail, weaving above Yambo’s personal story another, larger story that we all share regardless of when or where we were raised. With one jarring exception, the illustrations cast a spell over the reader just as much as they do over Yambo, enchanting us into feeling the urgency of his quest. (The exception: A reproduction labeled as a promotional poster for the film Road to Zanzibar is clearly an image of the U.S. DVD case.) For almost all of us—and this is the great secret at the heart of Eco’s endeavor—what we read, watch, and hear of the great world around us is no less significant in shaping our selves than are the unique experiences we undergo as members of individual families and towns.

Towards the end of the novel, Yambo regains his personal memory by unexplained, almost supernatural means; the most likely scenario is that, shocked into unconsciousness again after discovering a first folio of Shakespeare among his childhood artifacts (something so rare that Yambo immediately recognizes he can sell it for "a gazillion lira"), his mind is free once more to roam unhindered among the events of his childhood. This gives Eco the opportunity to tell us two extended stories about Yambo’s teenage years: his role in engineering the escape of a band of Russian prisoners from the hands of the Black Brigades, and his unrequited crush on a high-school classmate. The first of these stories is gripping, but the second is much less so, despite its being accompanied by phantasmagoric montages created from bits and pieces of the earlier pictorial artifacts. Worse, Eco ends the novel at the climax of this second story without ever allowing Yambo to return to his wife and children or his bookstore. (Has Yambo died? Eco leaves the question unanswered.) Still, the pleasures of the rest of the novel more than make up for the frustrations of its final chapter. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is the most sheer fun I’ve had reading a book in quite a while.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Umberto Eco

Charles Chadwick, It's All Right Now

2005-08-24T11:18:00.000-05:00

Is it possible to sustain for almost 700 pages the conceit that one is not writing a novel but merely recording impressions from an ordinary, unremarkable existence? Charles Chadwick nearly pulls it off. In four sections set during the early 1970s, the mid-1980s, the early 1990s, and the turn of the millennium, and purportedly written some time after each group of events has occurred, the narrator Tom Ripple gives an account of his life with no clear goal in mind, it seems, other than to pass the time, first at work and then during a protracted retirement. Marriage, children, television, neighbors, job, divorce, relocation, dating, parties, friendships, pastimes, church, shopping, illness, death, plus reflections on religion, history, music, philosophy—all are covered in great variety and detail, with little to link them besides mere chronology. As the years go by, Tom attempts halfheartedly to gain some perspective on his experiences, and it is this that Chadwick uses to give the book its shape and tone: often poignant, sometimes downright mournful, tinged with hopefulness, but ultimately inconclusive about what Tom's life means to him.

It was this inconclusiveness that, however faithful to reality, made It's All Right Now ring kind of hollow for me. To be told after so many pages only that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discern meaning in the passing of time seems finally to be a way of dodging one of the highest callings of which art is capable. True, the patterns we find in our lives are usually manufactured—stories we tell ourselves to get through the days and years—but in a novel such a lack of ambition feels impoverished, even perversely defeatist. Tom Ripple learns to take comfort where he can find it (in music, nature, and other people), and so did I as a reader of Chadwick's book, which contains many, many passages of lovely writing. But I finished it still yearning for a kind of enlightenment that Chadwick seems to think is unattainable in a work of contemporary fiction.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Charles Chadwick