What they were reading: Frank Conroy

"Night after night I’d lie in bed, with a glass of milk and a package of oatmeal cookies beside me, and read one paperback after another until two or three in the morning. I read everything, without selection, buying all the fiction on the racks of the local drugstore- D. H. Lawrence, Moravia, Stuart Engstrand, Aldous Huxley, Frank Yerby, Mailer, Twain, Gide, Dickens, Philip Wylie, Tolstoi, Hemingway, Zola, Dreiser, Vardis Fisher, Dostoievsky, G. B. Shaw, Thomas Wolfe, Theodore Pratt, Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Frederick Wakeman, Orwell, McCullers, Remarque, James T. Farrell, Steinbeck, de Maupassant, James Jones, John O’Hara, Kipling, Mann, Saki, Sinclair Lewis, Maugham, Dumas and dozens more. I borrowed from the public library ten blocks away and from the rental library at Womrath’s on Madison Avenue. I read very fast, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another. Safe in my room with milk and cookies I disappeared into inner space. The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own. It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. “I’m a novelist,” he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say."

-Frank Conroy, in his memoir Stop-Time

First Line Friday

As summer is directly upon us, today I am highlighting the first line of perhaps the greatest "summer novel" ever (in my humble opinion, at least).  It's a bit of an oddball novel, but I love it.  Here is the first line:

"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed."

Recognize it?  Of course you don't because it's not that great of a first line.  Namely, "the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed."  What?  Does anyone else think that phrase is awkward?  The town is at ease in bed?  Or did the writer forget a pronoun?  "The town covered with darkness and [Tucker] at ease in bed."  Either way, it sucks.  Sucky first line.  So let it be written.

What novel is this?

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

But, I am actually quite fond of the second sentence:

"Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow."

Love it.  The novel goes on to tell the story of the magic of a young boy's summer.  It's a simple concept, but amazingly poignant.  When you're a young boy, summer is magic. Simple as that.  No school, backyard soccer, marshmallows at dusk, bicycles and tents and sprinklers and popsicles and fences and skateboards and trees and footballs and freedom Freedom FREEDOM!

Diagnosing Dean Moriarty

“I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico.”

-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Neal Cassady was doubtless an interesting character. He was the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road,  as well as Cody Pomeray in some of Kerouac’s other works. He was the inspiration for Randle McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,  was credited by Allen Ginsberg as the ‘secret hero’ of his poem “Howl,” and he figures prominently in Thomas Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That’s quite a legacy. It’s the kind of legacy that makes you scratch your head and ask, “just what exactly was wrong with that dude?”

Now, I’m not a licensed psychiatrist, but as a former pre-med undergraduate, I’m the next best thing this site’s got, so let’s go ahead and diagnose him with Bi-Polar Disorder. 

Yeah, I know I'm not breaking any new ground here- just google Neal Cassady bi-polar for proof, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the symptoms of a manic episode, and see if we can find any evidence for them in the text of On the Road  specifically:

A manic episode is characterized by period of time where an elevated, expansive or notably irritable mood is present, lasting for at least one week. Three or more of the following symptoms must be present:

• Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity-  Check
• Unusual energy, Decreased need for sleep (e.g., one feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep) -  Check
• Excessive talk; racing thoughts-  Check
• Euphoria or irritability-  Check
• Flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing-  Check
• Attention is easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant items-  Check
• Increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation-  Check
• Impulsiveness, a reckless pursuit of gratification (shopping sprees, impetuous travel, more and sometimes promiscuous sex, high-risk business investments, fast driving) -  Check 

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s a pretty convincing  8 for 8. That’s a relatively open-and-shut case, even for amateur mental health practitioners.

Bezos v. Gutenburg

I don’t own an eReader or a tablet. My wife’s crazy plan (crazy-like-a-fox) to pay off our grad school loans in 5 years has definitely hit us hard on the disposable income front. So while I remain mired in antiquated reading technologies my mind has turned to the pros and cons of physical books. Here are a few, off the top of my head.

Things I love about books:

There’s only one format.

You can lend them to friends.

You can leave them to posterity.

Conversely, eBooks usually can’t be shared across devices, can’t be lent to friends, and can’t even be inherited by your kids. How screwed up is that?

Also, what good is a world without used bookstores? Here is my haul from this past weekend:

 In case you can’t make out the price tags, I picked up Winesburg Ohio, Ethan Frome, Franny and Zooey  and The Awakening- all for a mere $6.06. That’s less than a spicy chicken combo meal at  your local Wendy’s, and will feed your mind for days! Sadly, there is no “after-market” in the eBook world.

I also like having a two-page spread in front of me. In other words, I love not having to turn the page after every second paragraph, which seems to be pretty standard on most eReaders I've played with.

Finally, I love how they sit on the bookcase like trophies, little parts of me, serving as visual reminders of my personal growth.

Things I’m ambivalent about:

Old book smell- Sometimes it’s a nice, comforting fragrance that transports you to another time. Other times it just smells like hell.

Things I hate about books:

Hardcover editions- I hate the general feel of them, I hate how new ones always want to close, and how the old ones always want to open to the spots where their spine’s been broken.

Dustjackets- Honestly, what is the point of the dustjacket? If it’s doing its job (taking the nicks, scratches and scuffs associated with regular use), they look like total crap. And if they look like total crap, why would I want to keep them on my books? Oh, and if it’s really just supposed to keep the dust off the book, why isn’t it protecting the page edges along the top of the book- the only place dust tends to collect in most bookcase configurations? It’s a misnomer and an annoyance.

Deckle edges and rough-trimmed edges- Not universal by any means, but I hate 'em when I come across them. If you like brainteasers and hand-eye coordination exercises every time you go to flip the page, I guess they're okay. But I don’t. Give me a nice, smooth cut-page every time.

I hate how bulky and heavy some of them are- they’re a pain to lug around.

I hate how they accumulate. (Wait a sec, didn’t he say a minute ago that….?) Yeah, I did. But how many trophies can you really display before you’re a prime candidate for “Hoarders?”

Did I get any of these wrong? Which do you prefer?

Faulkner & Pronoun Ambiguity

I have all but given up on reading As I Lay Dying.  Faulkner called this novel his "tour-de-force," but I am willing to assert that it is a fundamentally flawed work.  Why?  Two words:

Pronoun Ambiguity.

Let me explain.  A pronoun is a substitute for a noun, such as using "she" after already introducing Addie Bundren.  The replaced noun (in this case, Addie Bundren) is the antecedent of the pronoun.  And here is where Faulkner fails.  Specifically, he uses pronouns with no antecedent.  Thus, "he" and "she" do certain things in certain paragraphs, but with no antecedent, the reader has no idea who the "he" or "she" is actually referring to.  This problem makes for a debilitatingly frustrating reading experience.

Now, you Faulkner fans will argue that Faulkner does this on purpose.  It's just his stream-of-consciousness thrown down on the page.  Right?  Well, perhaps.  But it leads to a flawed novel that is, in many passages, completely incomprehensible.

The following example is the first paragraph of chapter narrated by Darl:

"He has been to town this week: the back of his neck is trimmed close, with a white line between hair and sunburn like a joint of white bone.  He has not once looked back."

Who is Darl talking about?  Peabody? Jewel? Vardaman? I have no idea.  Just "he." This is my beef with Faulkner:  His damn pronoun ambiguity (to say nothing of the fact that we never completely understand who the characters are, and what relationship they have one to another).

It's a technically frustrating read.  And trust me, I'm trying.  But this is why I prefer Hemingway . . . so clear and concise and clean and beautiful.  Faulkner, on the other hand, is the literary world's equivalent of reading the tax code.  

And thus ends my unsuccessful journey with As I Lay Dying.

Poet's Corner

My high-school English teacher defined poetry as “crystallized thought.” As little as I’ve thought about poetry in the intervening fifteen years, I have always considered his definition to be a pretty decent one. It conjures up images of a weak, watery solution, boiled down to its purest essence- everything evaporating away except the poet’s most poignant pictures, thoughts and emotions.

And as long as a poem isn’t completely abstract and incomprehensible, I’m okay with nibbling these scattered bits and fragments, if they truly convey something meaningful. Then again, sometimes I just like a poem to tell a story. Here’s one that does just that. Hope you like it:

The Birthing

By Deborah Digges

Call out the names in the procession of the loved

Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness

to the day he stopped the car,

we, on our way to a great banquet in his honor.

In a field, a cow groaned, lowing, trying to give birth,

what he called front leg presentation,

the calf come out nose-first, one front leg dangling from his mother.

A fatal sign, he said, while rolling up the sleeves

of his dress shirt and climbed the fence.

I watched him thrust his arms entire

into the yet-to-be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering

in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.

With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother

and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing

against the new one’s shoulder

And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out

into the world together,

Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,

until a bull calf, in whoosh of blood and water,

came falling whole and still onto the meadow

We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands

The mother licked her newborn of us, oblivious

until it moved a little, struggled.

I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,

And his tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry

while he set out to find the farmer

When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,

leaving our coats just where they lay

we huddled in the car

And then made love toward eternity

without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.

There are so many good lines in there, it's hard to choose highlights.  (I transcribed this from YouTube, so hopefully I got the line breaks and punctuation right.)  But what about the rest of you? What poems have punched you in the schnoz lately?

Haiku-ption Contest #7

If you’ve been around a while, you know the drill. If you’re new to this site, just leave us a comment with your best caption for the picture below, in seventeen simple syllables. Entries are voted on by the general public, and the winner takes home an incredibly satisfying, nice, warm feeling. Fire away!

The airplane’s black box

Didn’t tell the full story.

This was no birdstrike.

Six down. Many more to go.

Yesterday, our sixth month slipped quietly into the record books. Thanks to all of you who continue to drop by. Above are the authors we’ve highlighted this month, and below are the 5 most popular posts from the last 30 days:

• “ThePunishment of X4” and “The Man With the Miniature Orchestra”
• LiteraryDeath Match: Jane Eyre vs. Wuthering Heights
• ABig Fish, Wrapped in a Small Book, Inside a Short Video
• Review:The Death of a Disco Dancer
• “TheTrench” by Erri DeLuca

And of course, the 10 wackiest search terms that have led readers here:

• Vintage spanking boys  >>>>  Has something to do with the picture on this post.
• Mad Men writer pen name  >>>>  Lots of people found what they were looking for here.
• Keeping Up with the Joneses writer new York  >>>>  That would take you to this little diddy.
• Brag about his Pulitzer  >>>>   Eudora Welty, belcher extraordinaire
• Robert Downey Jr. long hair  >>>>  Ah, the author look-alike series.
• A taste of blackberries  >>>>  We’ve mentioned this exactly once.    
• Assonance  cartoon  >>>>  I really hope they used our Dr. Seuss visual for whatever they needed
• Dirty Igloo Water Dispenser  >>>>  No dirty dispensers, but “water-proof” and “igloo” take you here.
• Sockless Ad   >>>>  Will take you to a sockless Albert Einstein
• Lesbian Cowgirl Book  >>>>  Tucker’s descriptor for a Cormack McCarthy title.

First Line Friday

Today, I am going to pull a classic first line from a classic book, and to do so, we're digging deeper into history than we ever have for First Line Friday . . . clear back to 1605 and Miguel De Cervantes' novel Don Quixote De La Mancha.

I've always loved this first line. It's timeless.  It's completely functional even 400 years later:

"En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivia un hidalgo do los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocin flaco y galgo corredor."

OR, in one of my preferred English translations:

"Domiciled in a village of La Mancha, the name of which I purposefully omit, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen who usually keep a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound for coursing."

To me, the Spanish version is far superior to any English version which I have found.  The English versions seem burdened and lacking in flow.  But even in English, I have an affinity toward this first line that has survived centuries.

In Defense of the Books You Hate: On the Road

I’ve had some fun at Jack Kerouac’s expense here and here, but I have to admit I’d never actually read the man until this past week. The Subterraneans  has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for about 10 years because I’ve always wanted to make that first Kerouac plunge with On the Road.  With the film adaptation of the book coming out this month, I finally got my hands on a copy. Still, the mild curiosity I’ve always held about On the Road  was balanced by a healthy dose of skepticism about a book that seems to inspire more scoffing than praise these days.

Truman Capote once panned Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous prose’ by saying, “It isn’t writing at all-it’s typing.” John Updike famously parodied On the Road  in a New Yorker  hit piece called “On the Sidewalk,” in which two kids on a tricycle and a scooter ride off “into the wide shimmering pavement” through a bed of irises. At the end of the story it is revealed that the childish main character is actually 39- right about Kerouac’s age at the time. Updike’s lambast even got a mention in Kerouac’s New York Times obituary.

But more striking to me than either of these criticisms is the literatti’s collective dismissal of On the Road  as a childish romp fit only for the trash heap- the same one where they’ve thrown their old copies of Catcher in the Rye  and Atlas Shrugged  and any other books that tend to cast a spell on the under-twenty crowd. In their wisdom and erudition, they prove that they've outgrown the aimless, childish exuberance of On the Road  by smiling quaintly at anyone who sees it for more than a youngster’s literary rite of passage.

What a crock. This is a book that left me absolutely buzzing- and I say that as a pretty conservative 34-year-old father of three. Let’s tackle the writing first. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book with such a palpable current to it. I don’t mean to say it’s a page-turner that will keep you up all night, yet each time you wade in, you find yourself swept away in  Kerouac’s captivating river of prose.

His vivid descriptions force the reader to step back and look at things in new and unexpected ways. Instead of putting his finger on Hemingway’s ‘mot juste-’ the one, true word that perfectly describes the situation at hand, Kerouac just hurls a bunch of them at you, each with its own angle, its own color, and its own flavor. So, for example, a simple phrase like “sad characters” becomes “poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness.” Pretty great, right? To me, this style is not flighty or reckless- it’s like gazing through an ever-changing kaleidoscope. And it's downright mesmerizing.

But how about the story? Isn’t it just a loser’s travel log? A bum’s manifesto? Or a hap-hazard, hedonistic attack on American social norms? If you choose to look at it that way, I guess it is. In his New York Times review, David Dempsey wrote: 

“As a portrait of a disjointed segment of society acting out of its own neurotic necessity, On the Road,  is a stunning achievement. But it is a road, as far as the characters are concerned, that leads to nowhere.”

I think he’s right, actually.  But I think that’s the whole point. The book is infused with an emptiness and a sadness that seems to come to a crescendo at the end. Despite Sal’s book-length fixation on Dean (or Kerouac’s lifelong fixation on Neal Cassady, on whom Dean was based), I read On the Road  to be a pretty pointed criticism, at least in part, of Dean’s manic search for ‘IT’ that left friendships, marriages and even children in its ruinous wake. 


And that’s not an accidental message. He foreshadows it in the first few pages, builds on it with MaryLou’s, Camille’s and Inez’s experience, and ends the book with his own abandonment, delirious and sick, in Mexico. That, to me, is what makes On the Road  so much more than a bohemian travel log. It’s equal parts documentation, celebration, and condemnation of the sometimes misguided rebellion of Kerouac’s generation.

At the end of the day, appreciating On the Road  doesn’t make you a shiftless beat generation wannabe, any more than appreciating Lolita  makes you a warped child molester. Read it for what it is, and by all means enjoy the ride.

Review: State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

So, State of Wonder.

The story was engaging and there were definitely some very nice twists at the end. The writing was beautiful and the characterization was great. And the Amazon setting itself, is worth your time. But despite all of that, the book left me in a state of, well... what’s the opposite of wonder?

I guess I can file my reaction under ‘personal reading preferences unfulfilled.’ You see, I generally like my fiction to be believable and realistic. I’m not a big sci-fi or fantasy reader, for example. If you’re practiced in the art of suspending disbelief for the length of a book, you’ll love this one. If you’re like me, you’ll probably enjoy it, but come away saying, “meh…”

Maybe I was spoiled by reading David Grann’s The Lost City of Z   last year. In that  book you get the real Amazon- the one that chews you up and spits you out (if you’re lucky), the one that inspired the name “The Green Hell.” Patchett’s take on the Amazon is the romanticized rainforest of modern fairy tales, where an isolated patch of yellow-barked, pink-flowering trees that hold cures for the world’s greatest diseases remains completely secret just a few hours from a metropolis of 2 million people, and even closer to warring tribes that would have discovered and destroyed them hundreds of years ago.

But that’s not all. What are the chances, say, that a pharmaceutical company would send a hapless cholesterol researcher, alone, to the middle of the Amazon jungle to find a missing scientist also employed by the firm? Okay, let’s give this one to Patchett. Let’s say that might really happen. Then what are the chances that they send another  hapless cholesterol researcher, alone, to the middle of the Amazon jungle to find the missing scientist after the first cholesterol researcher died and/or went missing? You see where I’m going. There are other plot elements that bothered me, but while they stretched the realm of incredible coincidences, they were  at least believable.

But there were other issues, too. In a sideplot, the main character begins taking Lariam, a Malaria preventative with neuropsychiatric side effects. It raises the horrible specter of nightmares she had as a child, while visiting her father in India (these nightmares were also caused by the drug, though she didn’t know it at the time). This same recurring nightmare, is retold time and time again- ad nauseum- as she prepares and sets off for Brazil. The kicker? She stops taking the Lariam, and the whole thing becomes inconsequential to the story. Grrr.

I don’t know. I never give stars or numeric scores in my reviews- you’re either intrigued by what I say, or you’re not. I guess if I was asked about this book, I’d say that I liked it. I’d even recommend it- but no more strongly than I’d recommend John Grisham’s The Testament,  which explores the Pantanal of southwestern Brazil, and certainly no more strongly than I’d recommend The Lost City of Z.  Now that  is a book about the Amazon that will leave you in a state of wonder.

Anyone else read State of Wonder ? Do you disagree? Should I have started with Belle Canto  instead?

Casting Call Round 3

Time for another author look-alike post. Previous entries can be found here and here. Let’s get to it.

Though he's cast in shadow here, there’s something in the laugh lines, angled eyebrows and prominent cheekbones of Aldous Huxley, that reminds me an awful lot of a young Frank Sinatra.

Here’s Ivan Doig and the old man from Home Alone (Roberts Blossom). Give either one of these guys a snowshovel,  galoshes and a garbage can full of salt, and it would scare the crap out of me.

I’ll admit this one’s not an exact likeness, but work with me here: focus first on the lips…

…and then on the concerned-eyebrow face, and try to tell me there’s no resemblance between Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moranis:

And while we're on the subject of crazy eyebrows and exact likenesses, did anyone ever see Robert Frost and Andy Rooney in the same room together? Ever?

Finally, some might say Nathaniel Branden is the “heir” to Ayn Rand. Others will argue for Alan Greenspan. Me? Steve Buscemi all the way:

Got any of your own? Add them in the forum, here.

Literary Death Match: Jane Eyre vs. Wuthering Heights

Transcripts of previous bouts can be found here and here.

Welcome once again to Literary Death Match, the ultimate brawl in bookish blood sports. Today, we’re poised to make a little history as we welcome the works of two storied female  authors to battle it out for the crowd. Up for grabs is the title of “Best Book by a Brontë Sister.” It’s Jane Eyre  vs. Wuthering Heights, and things are about to get crazy- they may even get out of control, and thousands of fans at ShelfActualization Arena are also hoping they get just a little bit “catty.” Let’s send you that way now, to Mike Thackery and Tom Galbraith, who will be calling the match for us there.

Write like Kerouac in just 5 Easy Steps

1) Start with any sentence:

I took a big swig.

2) Now add a whimsical phrase to give it some unexpected flavor.

I took a big swig in the air.

3) Now insert about three (but no fewer than two) adjectives in front of your direct object or the object of your prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, blowing, drizzling  air.

4) Now replace at least one of those adjectives with a word not normally associated with the object it describes. Proper place names work well, but really it can be anything.

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air.

5) If you chose not to use a proper place name in the previous step, tack it on to the end of the sentence in its own prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska.

See? Kerouac! It’s easy. Now let’s try it with a more complex sentence:

1) Start with any sentence of your choosing:

I heard a laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

2) Embellish your direct object:

I heard a great  laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

3) Do it again, and don’t shy away from hyperbole:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world,  and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

4) Now insert your adjectives:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer wheat  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

5) Now swap out one of your adjectives as before:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

Piece of cake. Now you try.

The Stunning Beauty of Bookstores

We shared the stunning beauty of books here. Today bookstores  take their turn in the limelight. Check out Flavorwire’s 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world. Here are some of my favorites:

The "cathedral" of bookstores:

The "grand theater" of bookstores:

And "the college professor's office" of bookstores:

Find all 20 here:

First Line Friday

If you review my previous First Line Friday posts, you may notice a pattern: I like short, zippy, poignant first lines.  So, in an effort to diversify my preferences, I'm going with a longer first line today:

"It was the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk - who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classic professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of the faculty - confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college."

That is what I would call an immense first line.  It provides a lot of information . . . a whole novel's worth in one sentence.  But, in spite of my preferences for short first lines, I have a certain appreciation for this first line. It seems to work.  It's somewhat burdensome, to be sure, but all in all, I can appreciate it.

Dost thou disagree?

Review: The Death of a Disco Dancer, by David Clark

When we reviewed Wasatch  back in early February, the publisher of that collection, Zarahemla Books, offered us a review copy of David Clark’s novel, The Death of a Disco Dancer.  I was a little hesitant to accept, due almost entirely to what I think is a pretty lackluster cover. (I am a shallow, shallow man- If only we had a nice, catchy adage to warn people against judging inner content by outward appearances that would apply to the book world.) Ah well, more on that in the postscript below.

Anyway, I was finally able to clear the deck for Disco Dancer  this past week, and couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised.

This book will lull you into thinking you’re reading a reverie of sophomoric highjinks, funny enough to keep your inner 11-year old in stitches. But before you know it, you’re steeped in a poignant coming of age story that deals with themes of love, family, faith, forgiveness, and death. Clark alternates between the main narrative, the summer joys and pitfalls of Todd Whitman’s Arizona youth, and intercalary chapters set in the present-day, as Todd and his siblings gather to say goodbye to, and bury, their mother. The intercalaries provide further meaning and a touching backdrop to the main story of the novel.

That main story centers largely on the excitement and fears of growing up, and that timeless question of what to do when your dementia-stricken grandmother starts showing up in the middle of the night and supplanting the cherished faces of her past with pictures of disco fiend John Travolta. I’m not even joking. A number of different plot lines converge under the dulcet strains of Kenny Rogers’ “Lady” during the Hello Dance on Todd’s second day of Junior High. It is the perfect emotional climax for the story, and one that brought my own past vividly before my eyes.

The main narrative is also peppered with a number of side stories that deliver color and context to the few months of action we see playing out in the book. Early on, the vignettes carry an air of Family Guy cutaway gags, inserted for their own purpose rather than to move the story forward- a ghost story at a Fathers-and-Sons Campout, and a detailed run-down of activities forbidden in the pews during church services are just a couple of examples. But on the whole, these asides help to flesh out the world where the story takes place.

As for that world, the Mormon milieu that might make some readers wary, I’ll just say that there is no tortuous exposition or preachy explanation to be found anywhere. This book will appeal to anyone who’s ever been eleven years old. And since it’s the story of a pre-pubescent boy, there’s nearly as much mention of the Dallas Cowboys and the Phoenix Suns as there is of the family’s religion. Any question you might have about certain terms or topics can be answered by the short glossary Clark provides at the back of the volume. It’s a book that should not be pidgeon-holed as something it is not. What it is, is a compelling peek into the world of a 1981 pre-teen, who’s doing his best to figure life out as adulthood barrels towards him.

The Death of a Disco Dancer  is a poignant and entertaining read, with characters you can't help but care about. And as we pointed out yesterday, Clark’s easy, colorful prose is at once hilarious and heart-rending. Do yourself a favor and read it.

***Postscript: Please, please, please don’t judge this book by its ‘Dean Wesley Smith-esque’ cover. Looking at it, you’d think you were picking up an absurdist horror parody or a cheeky forensic science romance. I’ll be the first to admit, the cover is terrible. The book is anything but. Read it and see.***

From the Pen of David Clark

We've talked about the science of powerful prose here and here, and we regularly share examples of lines that have smacked us over the head during our reading. But today's lines come from an author you might not be familiar with. Take a look at how David Clark swings so effortlessly between the profane and the profound, starting with a description of an album cover, and continuing with  a handful of other excerpts. As usual, all emphasis is mine- the bolded phrases are merely those that crackled with electricity as they entered my brain:

"There was a guy with the cocky expression of a gunfighter frozen in a flamboyant disco pose on a dance floor made of colorful, illuminated blinking squares. He wore a closely fitted white suit with flared slacks and a black spread-collared shirt. His left butt cheek and left arm were cocked to one side, apparently ready to fire off an explosive pelvic thrust. His right arm was extended emphatically skyward like an exclamation point, as if directing the very powers of heaven to take note of the unholy disco  carnage he was about to  unleash. Inset above him on the album cover was a large photograph of three hairy white men in suffocatingly tight white jumpsuits smiling gaily and benevolently down upon the ultraserious dancer."
 

"These were not hands of rest or pleasant parlor conversation; these were hands of planting, picking, plucking, scrubbing, shearing, slicing, sewing, boiling, bathing, mending, canning, chopping, and kneading- of doing. These were hands upon which life itself depended." 

"At first the breezeless warmth of the dumpster felt reassuring, almost cacoonlike, but I soon realized that it acted as a perfect Dutch oven for its putrid contents."
 

"The initial shock and the lingering nausea, like a migraine in your nut pouch, left you powerless to retaliate for at least fifteen minutes." 

"We continued on past the sculpted dead-end hollows and box canyons with their juniper and piñon pine and the varicose veins of cottonwood scrub tracing every gully and wash that had a trickle of water, through the quiet farms of Hatch and Hillsdale and the comparative bustle of Panguitch's Main Street."
 

"I noticed the texture and complexity of the web of wrinkles that shot out from the corners of her eyes and then curved and twirled in their own unique patterns down her cheekbones and across her jaw."

Pretty great, right? If you're intrigued, come back tomorrow and we'll review the book for you...

Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism

In case you hadn’t noticed, the publishing world is ga-ga over E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that was born as an erotica fan-fiction derivative of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

Take a moment to soak up that sentence, by the way, because it’s likely the last time we’ll touch on either of those series in this space. But it should work wonders on the search engines, and it does give us a timely segue into the juicy topic of plagiarism. Yes, that’s right- not even the high-brow world of classic literature is immune to charges of literary larceny. Consider the following:

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is said to have ripped off two 1920s sci-fi novels (The City of the Sun & The Honeymoon Trip of Mr. Hamilton) by Polish author Mieczyslaw Smolarski. I don’t speak Polish, but in the Slavic language I do  speak, “smola” means bad luck. Based on the relative fame and success of mssrs Huxley and Smolarski, I’d say the Polish author was appropriately named.

Oscar Wilde privately admitted to lifting from J.K. Huysman’s A Rebours, telling fellow author Max Beerbohm “Of course I plagiarize. It’s the privilege of the appreciative man.” That’s a bit like telling someone “Of course I stole your shirt. I liked it very much. You’re a man of fine taste, sir.”

Wallace Stegner found himself embroiled in a plagiarism scandal when his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose  was criticized by descendents of Mary Hallock Foote, a woman whose letters and memoirs inspired the novel and were mixed with Stegner’s original narrative to create it. In this case, I think I stand with Stegner, since he’s operating in a bit of a grey area. For one thing, he was working with one of Foote’s descendents, who gave him permission to do what he did. For another, he offered to let her read the full manuscript, which she refused. Now, were some of the excerpts a little longer than he originally promised? Sure. But they’re also the weakest part of the book, as I’ve observed here.

Here’s one final example, brought to our attention by Readthe100. It’s one I’ll pass on to you without judgment. (In other words, I’d love to hear what you, the readers, think about it):

Did T.S. Eliot bogart “The Wasteland” from, well… “The Wasteland?”

A Reading Check-up

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve already put a third of the year behind us. Time to check in on our reading resolutions, no? Below is my quick progress report; you can add your own in the comments.

Goal #1 Read more women:  So far so good. I’ve been hovering right around 50% women authors all year, and I imagine I’ll end up somewhere north of 50% by the end of 2012.

Goal #2 Read an Agatha Christie novel before I see it adapted on screen: Check. Review can be found here.

Goal #3 Read a foreign language novel in the original: No progress yet, but then again, it’s only April. Get off my back, dude.

Now for the tallies:

Books read so far:  13   (on pace to beat last year’s 32)

Pages read so far: 3,701  (current pace puts me 250 pages below last year’s 11,358)

They break down something like this: eight novels and one novella (73% of total), two short story collections (18% of total), one play, and one play-short story combo (9% of total). All of it classic or contemporary literary fiction.

And here’s the list:

1. The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro 
2. A Bell for Adano, John Hersey 
3. Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta 
4. Wasatch, Douglas Thayer 
5. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James 
6. Curtain, Agatha Christie  
7. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust  
8. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte  
9. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte   
10. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan   
11. The Vegetable, F. Scott Fitzgerald  
12. The Fifth Column & Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway  
13. The Death of a Disco Dancer, David Clark

What about you? What have you read this year? Which books have  knocked your socks off?