August

Trust Exercise               Susan Choi

I thought this book had a magnificent opening.  The first chapters were clever and brilliant.  A fictional memoir of young actors at a Performing High School in a southern City on the East coast.  I was bowled over and so enjoying it.  Then she pulled an interesting move.  She advanced the story ten years, when one of the characters in the memoir interestingly doorsteps the memoir writer at Skylight Books.  The confrontation is between the “real,” what Karen the “character” girl thinks happened, and the fictional memoir by Sarah the memoir writer.  So far so good.  But it quickly gets confusing.   Where are we going?  Revenge?  Hatred?  Resentment?   It’s unclear.  Then a third character enters, Kevin, who also begin narrating.  I’m sorry.  Three narrators is a play.  She is undoubtedly brilliant and I shall try other books but I miss the first one she was writing here.

Intimations                   Zadie Smith

It seems slight, it seems light, but it is heavy and essential reading, with serious questions to ask ourselves about 2020.  She is quietly despairing of racism in this country and concludes “that my physical and moral cowardice have never been tested, until now.”   Delicious and deceptively simple these philosophical essays have great resonance, and set a benchmark asking the question where we should begin considering how much we owe to ourselves as self-centred evolving individuals and how much we owe to being part of a society in a pandemic at a time of great civic unrest.  The essays are scattered with little observational character gems that she drops effortlessly into her wonderful prose:  “Ben…makes baldness look like an achievement..”   A book to carry around, re-read and reconsider.

I’m thinking the Wordsworth allusion is to make us think of Mortality.  Which is really her subject.

November Road             Lou Berney

Recommended by Don Winslow.  This book really crushes it. Everything you ever wanted in a great fuck-off read.  In New Orleans in 1963 a low life is assigned to remove a vehicle from a Houston garage and dump it in the Ship Channel.  A Cadillac that has come from Dallas.  With a used Mannlicher rifle in the trunk!  Kennedy’s assassination is on TV everywhere.  Oswald is shot by Jack Ruby.   The guy realises he is wanted by everyone from the FBI down and must try and escape from all those who want him dead.  Very sweetly he hooks up with a battered wife and kids on the road to eventual, but subtle, redemption.

Gutshot Straight.           Lou Berney

I decided I need to read more of this guy and so I downloaded his first novel.  Written during the Writer’s Strike of the first decade of the millennium, the influence of writing for the screen can be seen in the characteristic short scenes which are whole chapters and the general smart pace of the piece, which is essential for a thriller.  Cut to Cut to… But he has a great talent.  And I’m starting his penultimate one…

July

Utopia Avenue      David Mitchell

The latest by a favourite writer, I loved this novel for most of the time.  Sometimes I think he is channelling me, he refers to so many places and events I recall.  Black Swan Green is set in Worcestershire where I played third wicket keeper for Redditch XI’s.  Then there’s Butlins, Skegness,  The Marquee Club, watching the psychedelic early Pink Floyd play at UFO in the Tottenham Court Road, I remember dancing for hours to those lava lamp oil projections, to Granny Takes a Trip, Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s, yes I was there,  but he is at least a decade younger.  This story tells of life back stage in cheap gigs on the road with an evolving British Pop group (Utopia Avenue)  in the Sixties.  Real people, like Bowie, Marc Bolan, Sanny Dennis etc pop[ in for the odd cameo. Three creative talents, all writers brought together into a group by Levon, Canadian entrepreneur friend of (real person) Joe Boyd. Elf, Jasper and Dean.  I was never quite convinced by Dean, the lead singer.  I couldn’t see him.  Elf is interesting, but Jasper (de Zoet) develops an inner poltergeist, which takes his life off at a tangent.   So while it was fun and terrific, and it was great to visit the Troubadour again and watch them making it, I don’t think he quite nailed it.  I’m not quite sure why, but I’m going to read the ending again and see what I think.

The Border          Don Winslow

The third and possibly the most powerful of an extraordinarily fine Cartel trilogy, the tale spans over 45 years of the powerful warring drug cartels, the men who lead them, the agents who fight them, the women they seduce and the cold continuous bitter-cruel killing that only escalates the more money the endless War on Drugs pumps in to the whole corrupt mix. This longest, endless and most unwinnable war undertaken by America, continues to corrupt civilization and destroy democracy while delivering daily death to US junkies, and misery to thousands of Mexicans.  It is clearly only slightly fictional and has so much relevance for and disgust with the current political kakistocracy in the US.  He has been writing this story for thirty years.  It is a huge achievement and a great read.  I kept asking myself, as  a contemporary novel, what is this like? It has the social reach of Dickens, the anger and the despair, the view of the helpless poor trapped by the hypocrisy of the greedy,  but in its savage view of the depths of human behaviour and betrayal it is more like Dostoyevsky, or even Webster.  Throwing kids off a bridge being the most notable of the many outrages he evidences.  For this reads, not like fiction, but like truth. Dickens uses comedy to sustain.  Mr. Winslow only occasionally. His books are deadly serious. Not afraid to lay the blame, his finger points to the highest in the land, the US President’s son-in-law is involved raising money from the cartels for his campaign.  It’s all there. The New York property draining away their financial security and the complicity of foreign banks to come to the rescue of a campaign that is happy to accept help from gangsters and Russian mob leaders. We read with belief, yes this is how it is, and despair, yes this is what will happen.  Corruption prospers at a trough.  Turn the tap and watch the piggy’s feed. We need to end the War on Drugs, legalize them and treat them as the social health problem that they are.  Amazing work.  Bravo.

June

The Novellas of John O’Hara

I was reading these in a nice Modern Library Edition (1995)  They are just great to dip into.  I dipped deep.  Great bedside book.

Push through…             Carey Harrison

The last in a quartet of remarkable novels that is his life’s work and a singular achievement.  I love the way he can handle large scenes with multiple characters, because he is also a very fine playwright, and can manage this very difficult skill.  He may be an old friend but he can really write.. but since he has been my friend since 1963 I will quote someone else: This novelist of such amazing dexterity, humanity, inventive skill. He reminds me of Durrell, of Burgess – yet with a sense of tenderness often missing in those showmen. I’ve since read as much as I can of this writer, unfailingly inventive – as I read his work, I often feel (as with Powys often, and Lawrence sometimes) that I’m reading a detective story that turns out to be about me.”  1968 he began what was to become a quartet of novels:  The Heart Beneath, beginning publication with Richard’s Feet (1990) Cley (1992), and Egon (1993), and completed in 2016 by How to Push Through, a project which the author regards as his primary life’s work.

The Newton Letter         John Banville

I reread a flawless novella from 1982 from John Banville.

The Comedians             Graham Greene

One of my favourite books. I love re-reading it. Greene explores the roles we all play in our lives. Even beginning with a joke, the three men who meet on a boat into Haiti are called Smith, Brown and Jones.  He is Brown, the lost soul, who loses his mother, loses his hotel, his mistress, but not his wife, ends up ironically as a Funeral Director.   He misses what others see in Jones, whom he foolishly thinks is a rival.  It is a very fine novel which I enjoy more and more.