I didn't put them together on purpose!

Today I was going through my shelves, looking for books to unload at the church book sale, and I noticed that next to my how-to cleaning books is a copy of TRUE GRIT. Ha. I crack myself up.

Bohemian Life

I was disappointed in the nonfiction book AMONG THE BOHEMIANS by Virginia Nicholson. She's the great-niece of Virginia Woolf. The book had an interesting premise: How artists and writers fought to free themselves from the extreme confines of the Victorian Era by adopting a Bohemian lifestyle, and how modern life has been influenced by the early 20th century Bohemians.

Nicholson arranges the chapters thematically: sex, food, children, housekeeping, etc. and illustrates these themes with examples from some famous literary and artistic (and some not as famous, but usually running in the same circle) lives. Because she uses so many examples and it's the same people, some of the chapters feel repetitive and claustrophobic. In spite of that, I sympathize with Nicholson's fervor to throw it all in. She's coming at this project as a sort of "literary anthropologist", if such a term can be allowed.

AMONG THE BOHEMIANS is not the great read I expected it to be, but I did learn more about the practices, morals, and mores of the Victorian Era, and much about the homely details of day to day existence during that time. In addition, I learned about many Bohemians that are just fringe-famous, but often fascinating in their own right. This would be an interesting book to throw in if someone was teaching (or taking) a literature course on Bloomsbury.

Slammerkin

I took Manfred, Jr. downtown the other day to get the new comics that are out for the month. He gets them from a dealer who has a collectibles business and a bookstore. All of it is claustrophobically but deliciously crammed in a long narrow storefront about the size of a 7-11.

While Manfred, Jr. was picking up the comics, I scanned the fiction section. It's also the "let's-pile-crap-HERE" section, so I always have to squeeze in, which makes me mindful of my abandoned diet. I spotted a copy of SLAMMERKIN by Emma Donoghue, which Sara Nelson recommended in her book SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME. I wrote the title in the back of my reading journal. Books that I've read are at the front of the journal.

$4.95. I came, I saw, I was conquered. I followed Manfred, Jr. to the register, bought the book and we both left contentedly. Later that day, I finished STAR MONEY and immediately began SLAMMERKIN.

Wow! What a terrific novel! It's difficult to say which is more the main character, Mary Saunders or 1760s England, because both are so vivid, it feels as if they've been unleashed onto the page! Donoghue must have done a hell of a lot of research. The neat thing is that it doesn't show; there's no aridity or stiffness about the prose or the dialogue, which captures the way people in that place and time spoke back then.

The Great-Grandmother of Chick Lit?

I'm just about to finish STAR MONEY by Kathleen Winsor. It was her follow up to her first and most popular novel, FOREVER AMBER. Winsor became rich and famous with the publication of the book as well as the subsequent sale of the movie rights, but judging from STAR MONEY (a novel about a young woman who writes a bestselling novel) she took a lot of crap from the critics and the reading public as well. Her biggest sin was being young and quite beautiful, so the abovementioned didn't take her seriously, and mocked her book for being a bodice-ripper. Worse, people berated her for writing about sex. As humorist (and my very favorite literary critic) Florence King pointed out, "They ignored her excellent writing and meticulous research."

STAR MONEY seems very much like the great-grandmother of Chick Lit, and surprisingly, I don't mean it in a bad way. Shireen Delaney, the heroine of STAR MONEY is much like the Chick Lit heroines: She is sharp, witty, and intelligent, but she has a penchant for falling in love with jerks. Most of the time, she sees through them with a withering accuracy, but then they'll say or do something that makes her melt down, coming to her senses once again hours later in the stark daylight. So far, her overreaching philosophy has been that whatever it is ails them, not her.

I'm really enjoying this novel, and wish it could be reissued, but they'd probably market it with one of those icky hot pink covers that keep me away like a force field.

Joe Jackson

"Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street..." Now, that's an opening line worthy of a novel! From the very first time I heard "Is She Really Going Out With Him?", I was a Joe Jackson fan. When he did the song on "American Bandstand", he introduced it by saying, "This is for anyone who's ever had acne." The fresh-faced dancers on the show laughed lightly, politely. I knew they didn't get it.

All of this is an extremely roundabout way of saying that I've found another Joe Jackson to admire! I'm currently reading A FURNACE AFLOAT, which is about the 1866 disaster in which a clipper ship called the Hornet burned at sea. The crew and passengers all survived the blaze, but they were crowded into small lifeboats with minimal provisions for 4,300 miles until they were finally rescued.

All of Jackson's books look wonderful to read. He's also wrote LEAVENWORTH TRAIN: BITTER JUSTICE IN THE VANISHING WEST which is a true crime story. He also co-authored DEAD RUN: THE SHOCKING STORY OF DENNIS STOCKTON and LIFE ON DEATH ROW IN AMERICA.

Lucy Crown

I finished LUCY CROWN a couple of days ago. What a terrific book. It makes me lonesome for books that I read when I was a child. I like huge chunks of dialogue, in which one person is "speechifying" and gets it all said at a crucial part in the novel when the reader's head is buzzing madly with predictions and questions. I like it that Irwin Shaw seemed to understand that. A writer should be a reader, first.

I'd only had a nodding acquaintance with Shaw's novels. I remember being in early high school when RICH MAN, POOR MAN (the miniseries) came out, so I decided to give the book a try. I remember liking it; I don't remember why I abandoned it after the first section.

Fast-forward almost 30 years, and I'm browsing at the library and I see a title: LUCY CROWN. I have a weakness for novels named after the main character, especially if the main character is female, so I read the first page, then I read a page in the first part of the book in which Lucy is arguing futilely with her husband. It all looked scrumptious, so I stuck the book back on the shelf. I knew that soon I would develop a jones to read this book. I didn't have long to wait: About a week and a half later, I stumbled into the library, over to fiction, over to the S's and claimed my book.

In an earlier blog entry, I'd written that the book seemed arch and too John-Cheeverish to suit me, but I plugged along and was rewarded. When Shaw hit Chapter 5, he went into high gear and never looked back.

A point that Shaw handles brilliantly is that he has men all over the book describing Lucy and how beautiful she is, and how they'd no longer be the mortals they are if they could just get her into bed for one night. Ordinarily, this is enough to put me off, but he balances it all so expertly by showing what a dumb ass Lucy is about her life and relationships. Adding another layer, he shows that she *does* have a brain, but she's using it in ways that make the reader want to scream WTF?! especially where her twelve-year-old son, Tony is concerned. On the other hand, the reader understands completely where she's coming from. Shaw has seen to that, but he's got a nice light and deft touch with Lucy's psychological underpinnings. He gives a few brief details, then gives the reader credit for being able to connect the dots.

For a book about infidelity, this book is refreshingly free of sex; it all takes place 'offstage', so there's not the obligatory sex scene. When the reader sees Lucy at her most primitive, it's got nothing at all to do with sex, only self-preservation.

In addition, World War II plays a role in the middle of the novel, and when LUCY CROWN was written, in the early to mid 1950s, it was a recent event. This gives these passages a great deal of solidity; the reader doesn't have that niggling feeling that the writer sweated over his research and dropped in as many details as possible to give the writing verisimilitude.

I really don't want to discuss the ending, but suffice it to say that Irwin Shaw takes a God-like stance towards his remaining characters and gives them mercy.

Right after I finished LUCY CROWN, of course I had to find other readers, to see what they thought. So I hopped on the internet and found an article that mentioned that Irwin Shaw was a frequent guest at Richard and Andrea Simon's home. They were the parents of pop singer Carly Simon. During this time, which would have been Carly's preadolescence, Andrea Simon took revenge on Richard Simon (whose apparent weakness was other women) by having an affair with a very young man in their employ, and this liaison was allegedly conducted right under Carly's young nose.

Irwin Shaw said, gee, I have an idea for a novel.

Reading about the fictional Tony is bad enough because I have a male only child, but reading the novel with Carly Simon fixed as a character gives it creepy undertones. Also, Shaw seemed to want to make sure that the Simon family knew fully about his inspiration; Carly Simon's sister is named Lucy.

I kind of wish I didn't know this additional information. Little bit of an ick factor at work here.

Whew! Finally!

I finally, finally got a copy on interlibrary loan of THE SUM AND TOTAL OF NOW. It costs a dollar and it's due back June 9. I still want my own copy, though, so I can complete the trilogy.