Girl Detective

Top Ten Books 1 and 2 were #s 98 and 99 on my book challenge for the year, the graphic novel collections by Alan Moore, illustrated by Gene Ha with layouts by Zander Cannon. I re-read this series before reading the new Top Ten graphic novel, The Forty-Niners, by Moore and Ha, which was #100. Then I enjoyed all of them so much that I pulled out the Smax mini-series by Moore and Cannon and re-read that to get to #101. These are some fine graphic novels.

First, about the original Top Ten series. This is a police/mystery procedural, set in Neopolis, a city where everyone has super powers. Top Ten are the police force who try, and mostly succeed, in maintaining order. Moore’s story is marvelous. The multiple plots threads are complex and intriguing. The characters are many and yet still fleshed out. Ha’s scratchy, detailed art perfectly conveys the chaotic nature of the story, while Cannon’s behind-the-scenes layout makes the complex story flow clearly. Top Ten begins with Robyn Slinger’s first day on the job. Partnered with a big, surly blue guy named Smax, Robyn is immediately part of the multiple cases the force is handling. The twelve-issue series had multiple arcs, and maintained them all throughout as Robyn and her fellow police officers figure things out.

Top Ten: The Forty-Niners is a graphic novel original that tells the story of the early days of Neopolis, and centers on of one of the characters from the earlier series, Steve Traynor, aka Jetlad. It’s set in a mythical post-WWII time. Ha’s art is different–softer, with more pastel to reflect the nostalgia and the promise of the new era. While it can’t compete with the complexity of the longer series, this is still an outstanding story with lovely art and great characterization.

Smax has an entirely different tone. It is set in the immediate aftermath of the original series, and follows Robyn as she accompanies her work partner Jeff Smax to his homeworld to attend the funeral of the “uncle” who raised him. Smax comes from a pre-industrial world where magic still figures prominently, with fairies, elves and more. Cannon’s whimsical art style is suited both to the magical milieu of the story as well as its humorous tone. While there are dark parts to the story, the ending, as is true of the Forty-Niners, is not for the conservative. Smax is a fun, funny romp of a story, filled with visual in-jokes.

Both Smax and The Forty-Niners are good companions to the original Top Ten, fleshing out some of the background. After having read all four, though, I am reminded that the original series is probably one of my favorite comic series. Ever. It was certainly my favorite book from Moore’s line of America’s Best Comics. (Yes, I did like it even more than League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The storylines were more complex, the characters more engaging, and the endings more satisfying.)

#97 in my book challenge for the year was Mr. Was by Pete Hautman. This was an involved and involving mystery, family history, and time-travel saga. Time travel tales are hard to pull off, but Hautman weaves his story in and out of time skillfully. There are interesting, complex characters who come in and out of the interesting and complex plot. I had a few questions about names, two that were remarkably similar, and one that someone should have recognized, but these were minor plot issues in an otherwise impressive, economically told tale.

#96 in my book challenge for the year was No Limit by Pete Hautman, a young-adult novel. It was previously published and out of print under the title “Stone Cold”. It was retitled because most teens assumed that the book had to do with the wrestler with the same nickname, Steve Austin. It was republished because of the recent increase in poker popularity and awareness, particularly for no-limit Texas Hold-em. It was a quick, entertaining read about a sixteen year old boy who gets hooked quickly into poker. As he learns and wins, it’s easy to see why he continues to gamble. He is able to succeed mainly by learning to read other players’ “tells,” or their mannerisms at the poker table. While this is interesting, it is likely to be dated now that poker has gained a wider awareness. He has a goofy, hapless friend who does less well. The ending is a surprise, but is not unearned, and perhaps the best part of the book. Hautman neatly avoided both easy moralizing and the obvious ending. The dynamic of the main character and his friend, though, is nearly identical to that in Godless, one of Hautman’s more recent, and I think better, novels.

#95 in my book challenge for the year was Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. After I read and enjoyed Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club last year, I resolved to read all six of Austen’s novels; I’m halfway there. Northanger Abbey tells the story of an average girl, Catherine Morland, and how she becomes involved in Bath society and her entanglement with two families, the Thorpes and the Tilneys. Catherine is an often painfully naive main character, and the book frequently read to me like a middle-grade novel with its simplistic, passionless encounters between the sexes. What was more intriguing was Austen’s defense of the novel as an art form, as well as her critique of those who take escapist reading more seriously than it deserves. The hero of the book, Henry Tilney, was not a favorite of mine. I found him something of an ass, condescending to women, thinly characterized, and not that interesting. This was a short, easy read, worthwhile in some aspects, but without the stronger authorial control of the two, later-written Austen novels I’ve read, Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

#94 in my book challenge for the year was Revision by David Michael Kaplan, recommended in a workshop I took with writer Faith Sullivan at the Loft Literary Center earlier this year. This is an enormously helpful book that elucidates one of the toughest aspects of writing. His general advice is to get a first draft of a story down however you can, then spend lots of time and effort polishing it. Interestingly, this advice is antithetical to the medium in which I’m discussing it, a weblog. In general, I doubt there’s a lot of time-consuming polishing going on in the blogosphere. Kaplan’s book is simple, practical, and useful. It provides impetus and inspiration for launching into the next round of revisions on a work.

#93 in my book challenge for the year, In a Lonely Place was a recommendation from my husband G. Grod, who read a recommendation of it by Frank Miller, the comic book creator of Sin City. Miller embraces a lot of the conventions of 40’s pulp noir. Hughes, however, did not. In a Lonely Place is narrated exclusively by the bad guy, Dix Steele, and Hughes carefully ensures that the reader is engaged by the story but does not identify with him. Dix’s misogyny is never in question, but the violence is always implied. The book is part of a series of women writing noir, and has an excellent afterward that contextualizes the work and allows the reader to reconsider details of the novel within a feminist framework. I was glad for the thought-provoking afterward, as it encouraged me to keep thinking about things I rushed through reading because the story was so compellingly told.

#92 in my book challenge for the year, Sexy by Joyce Carol Oates was much darker than the young adult novel by Oates I’d read previously, Big Mouth and Ugly Girl. While it has similar themes of persecution and rumor, it is told entirely from the point of view of its main character, Darren Flynn. He is good looking and an athlete, but uncomfortable both about the attention his looks attract as well as his working-class family. Darren is a complex, interesting character, and at the end of the book Oates does not offer up easy answers for the many difficult questions she’s raised.

#91 in my book challenge for the year (am I going to make it to 100? I just don’t know!) was Big Mouth and Ugly Girl by Joyce Carol Oates. I’ve been so impressed recently by talented “adult” authors like Alison McGhee and Pete Hautman who have written books for the young adult market, and Oates’s book is another fine example. It’s about two high school misfits, Matt and Ursula, whose respective nicknames make the title. Matt gets in trouble because of his mouth. Ursula’s part of the story is told from her point of view, with insight into her perception of herself as Ugly Girl, and how that serves her. As their stories unfold and intertwine, both characters develop believably and in environments that are richly detailed. There is some ugliness in the book, but of the kind that a good young-adult author doesn’t shy from, and it’s redeemed by hope and character development. Good writing and good characters, and an auspicious introduction for me to the works of Oates, who I have not read before.

Or, more pithily, Biff, by Christopher Moore, was #90 in my book challenge for the year. It intrigued me when I first read about it, but I had just begun not to write down books, but to accrue enough recommendations or sightings that I could remember them without prompting. Biff definitely got enough recommendations from the media and from trusted reader friends that it earned a place on my reading list.

Biff has been resurrected by an angel in order to write a new gospel, one that fills in the blanks left by the Big Four. As noted in the title, Biff is Christ’s, or Joshua’s, friend since childhood. They get into trouble together, they fall in love with Maggie, and they bumble through a buddy tale in which they travel far, meet the three wise men, learn kung fu, confront demons, and more. Unfortunately for Moore, we all know how the story ends, and it isn’t well. The book is at its best imagining what might have happened in the thirty years after the birth narratives and before Joshua began preaching in earnest and on the record. The book is eminently quotable, with some genuinely hysterical scenes, as when a caffeinated Joshua decides to heal everyone he can in a marketplace. Moore’s book points out some of the common misconceptions and re-imagines them–the wise men aren’t kings, Mary of Magdalen isn’t a whore. This is a fun, funny, clever book. I didn’t find it life-changing, or overly thought-provoking, though.

#89 in my book challenge for the year was Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. It would be easy to review the book in a word: wow. As regular readers might know, though, I am not prone to under-writing. Alias Grace was recommended to me years ago by a trusted friend, and has sat accusingly on my bookshelf since. I found its size daunting, which made it all the more ironic when I read the first hundred pages, stopped to read another book for a deadline, then picked up Alias Grace again, and re-read those hundred pages again just because I could, because I wanted to, because they were that good. I flew through the rest of the book, so rapt with the story that I gave scant attention to the awe-inspiring mastery of Atwood’s prose.

What amused and sometimes discouraged me most read was how Atwood brazenly flouted conventional wisdom on how to write a novel. Phrases from writing instructors echoed in my head: don’t switch verb tense; don’t vary point of view; be wary of flashbacks and dreams. Atwood did all these and more. She is writing proof that rules are meant to be broken by those who can, and a novel need not be experimental and weird to break the rules. Alias Grace is a tremendous story written with astonishing skill, with Atwood’s trademark ambiguities that give so much credit to the reader for interpretation.

A few years ago my husband G. Grod and I subscribed for two seasons to the most well-known local theater. We saw some good shows, but two seasons was enough for me. In the end, all the plays seemed the same; the creative director had homogenized them to the point of blandness. This put me off theater for quite some time. Recently, though, I was seized with an urge for Shakespeare. With a baby due in less than three months, I will not soon have three hour chunks of time to do with as I wish. I was lucky in that I could choose between an all-male production of Measure for Measure at the aforementioned theater, or an all-female production of The Tempest at Theatre Unbound. The latter seemed an obvious choice.

The program for the production noted something else obvious, though it hadn’t occurred to me. Even though theater no longer insists that all its players be male, the number of roles for women is still quite small. Staging an all-female production gives more women the opportunity to play more Shakespeare.

The room was small, and the staging consisted only of a small number of props and some versatile drapes. This was a wise choice, as it let the audience focus on both the play itself and its gender-bending production. It was also a brave one, since The Tempest is a play with so many supernatural elements that it would be easy to justify an extravagant staging.

As with many productions some performances were forgettable, while others were striking. Caliban was played with such ferocious intensity that s/he was painful to watch, while Ariel was played with such humor and physical grace that s/he drew all eyes when on stage. The performance that most made me think, though, was that of Prospero. The actor was skilled, but her manly suit could not mask a motherly mien. To have the meddling father of Prospero embodied in a mother’s physique made me realize that the meddling is creepy no matter which parent is doing it.

Another upside to seeing The Tempest is that it is a short play. It is not one that is usually edited, so that when you see the production you are usually seeing the entire text enacted. I re-read the play for the performance, which was #88 in my book challenge for the year. A good and learned friend recommended the individual Arden editions to me years ago; they have since been my volumes of choice. My husband G. Grod prefers his Penguin omnibus, but I like one play at a time, even with scads of footnotes to a page, even when those footnotes are politely vague:

Act IV, Scene I, line 236. Now is the jerkin under the line…Malone records a suggestion that the jest is less decent than any of these conjectures.

My favorite line from the play has never been a famous one. It is spoken by the drunk:

I am not Stephano, but a cramp. (Act V, Scene I, line 286)

It was a particularly apt one, since the next morning my uterus decided to express outrage over who knows what, and began a series of painful but ultimately non-harmful cramps that landed me in the hospital on monitors for five hours. I’ve been resting and hydrating since, and all cramps have abated. Like the characters in The Tempest, I seem to have weathered this particular storm.

#87 in my book challenge for the year, The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns was lent to me by my friend Becca. It is told by 10 year old Frances, whose family falls upon hard times and must struggle to adjust. It is a novel of childhood, of pre-WWII England, and both a horror novel in some of the details it relates, as well as a romance for its happy ending. It is well-written, and the child’s voice is compelling, but I found the creepiness and the happy ending were strange bedfellows.

On the inside back cover of Consumer Reports, there is usually at least one example of a fraudulent or misleading magazine solicitation. My husband’s favorite is the one that was a check. When you endorsed it, you authorized someone to charge you for the cost of a subscription, which was, of course, greater than the amount of the check. I’ve had a spate of solicitations, recently, some more insidious than others.

One, from Cook’s Country, I would like to think is just an administrative error. It took me some time to renew my subscription, I did it online, then our next issue had the “YOUR LAST ISSUE” brand on it. I double checked to make sure we had indeed paid them; we had. So I ignored it, and hope that no more solicitations would be forthcoming. In my other interactions with Cook’s, they have been sometimes slow, but scrupulous, especially about renewing our online subscription.

Another, from Everyday Food, is a little more suspicious. Friends recommended the magazine, and I decided to give it a try and signed up for a new subscription online. I got the magazine promptly, but I also got a bill. And another. I checked to confirm that I paid them; I did. If I get one more bill I’ll probably cancel the subscription. The magazine is fine. It’s a nice digest size, and it has recipes that are easy to shop for and prepare. Unfortunately, as my father is fond of saying, everything is a compromise. I’ve found that the recipes compromise convenience for flavor. This is a magazine for good ideas, but I’ve not yet made a recipe good enough to make again. I was already uneasy about giving money to the Martha Stewart empire. While the magazine is good, it’s not good enough to excuse sloppy or deceptive billing.

Finally, last week I received a “bill” from Yoga Journal, a magazine I subscribed to a couple years ago. It’s a lovely magazine, with good paper quality, good yoga information, and many stories about the spiritual side of yoga that is often forgotten in its trendiness as exercise. Apparently, the spirituality does not extend to solicitation practice. The item I received said it was an invoice for a three year subscription for $65. Funny, I don’t recall having contacted them to request a subscription. I discarded the “bill”.

These are all good reminders of why I’ve cut my magazine subsciptions to almost nothing. Not only are you getting a magazine, you’re getting all their solicitations and sometimes solicitations from others. Subscriptions are a tempting deal. They are inexpensive compared to individual issues. They also play to your fear that you might “miss” something if you don’t get every issue. What I’ve found, though, is that my life is a lot simpler and less cluttered when I don’t have magazines and their solicitations piling up. And I have more time because I don’t have to check whether I’ve paid or not. If I don’t have a subscription, then I don’t owe them anything. I can pick up single issues on a whim, and I buy them rarely enough that they never add up to the cost of a subscription. I must, though, admit to having taken some magazines away from recent doctor appointments. This is not a practice I can really condone as a way to avoid subscriptions.

#86 in my book challenge for the year was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, who is better known as the author of 101 Dalmations. This book was lent me by my friend Becca, who says she read it when young and re-reads it regularly. I was sad when I finished the book that it’s taken me so long to read it for the first time. I envy Becca her long history with it, because it’s a sweet, restorative book. It is narrated by Cassandra Mortmain, the daughter of a one-shot-wonder author father. Their family rents a crumbling castle in not-very-genteel poverty. Their lives and fortunes change when the castle is left to a wealthy American. The book is by turns amusing and sad, and Cassandra’s coming of age is both believable and inevitable. I was surprised by how satisfying I found the ending. As the book led up to it, I couldn’t see how the author was going to pull it off, but she did. This is a wonderful book, short of some cliches along class and country issues, and especially good if you’re feeling in need of something cheering.

Rosa Parks died a few weeks ago, and her death was covered in all the major newspapers. Parks became an historical figure when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested.

Beyond that, I bet most Americans could recite many details: she was poor, she was tired, she dared to sit in the white area of the bus. A provocative book I read a few years ago, though, noted that most of these details are either embroideries or untrue. But that doesn’t mean Rosa Parks was a sham, it simply means she was different from the iconic legend that has grown around her.

The book is Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert R. Kohl. In the chapter on Rosa Parks, Kohl notes that she was not poor, but of middle income. She was an active member of the civil rights movement. She, and others like her, were waiting for opportunities of civil disobedience to bring injustice to the attention of the media and the public at large. She was also not sitting in the “white” front section of the bus; she was sitting in the back. The rules at the time said that if a white bus rider asked her to move, she must. She refused, and was arrested. Her arrest was followed swiftly by a boycott of the Montgomery buses by African-Americans that so damaged the local economy that change quickly followed.

In his book, Kohl asks the compelling question of why the myth of Rosa the poor, tired individual was the one that got perpetuated, and why so few people know or remember the boycott, which was critical to changing the laws. He argues that it is as powerful a story, and perhaps more useful as a lesson about injustice, to learn that Parks was a member of a group that was actively seeking non-violent ways to overthrow the unjust laws they had to live with. It is also interesting to note the the actual circumstances around her arrest were more unfair than those that are more popularly known. Wouldn’t it be a better lesson, Kohl argues, to show that working together and planning can bring results?

It’s been several years since I read the book, and I passed it on to a teacher friend of mine. I no longer have it to refer to, so I fear some of these details are a bit fuzzy. What struck me when I heard about Parks’s death was the clarity with which Kohl’s passionate argument came back, and the intriguing duality of Parks the real woman and the legend, both fascinating, both brave, and both integral to change in America. The one I admire more, though, is not the mythical one who had a bad day and reacted, but the smart one who knew that there can be strength in numbers. She saw an opportunity, seized it, and history was not the same. That, to me, is the more compelling person, and the more compelling story.

Harold Bloom has a written a new book in which he says something that has been quoted a great deal already:

I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom.

The quote is short, pithy, and really pretty good, which is probably why it’s being quoted all over the blogosphere. I will paraphrase what I take away from it, which is that a work much be beautiful, provocative, and wise. I think Bloom’s criteria are good ones, especially in conversation with the questions I asked in a recent entry on novels, is there such a thing as a Great Novel, and if so, what are the determining factors?

Bloom’s criteria, though, don’t make the question of what is a great work and what is not any less subjective, because whether a work has aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom is a matter of opinion. For example, I noted that I did not think Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth, belonged on the Time best-novel list. One of my readers, Duff, disagreed. White Teeth has many strengths, among them a canny portrayal of individual voices from disparate cultures and insightful relationships of family and friends. I think these things give it cognitive power and wisdom. But I found its ultimate plot, which centered around a mouse, to be conventional and overly tidy. Because of this, the book lacked aesthetic splendour for me, and I consider it good, not great.

Bloom’s criteria, then, can be useful in discussing and disagreeing on what works have merit. Bloom earned many enemies when he trashed the Harry Potter books in a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Can 35 million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? Yes!.” I’ve enjoyed reading the Potter books, yet I can’t honestly say they have aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, or wisdom. I find them fun to read, and cleverly plotted. I’ve enjoyed the evolution of the characters over six books. But there are greater books out there, ones I eschew when I read a Harry Potter novel, so Bloom has a point. He’s an intelligent person, so this should not be surprising.

Yet when I read Bloom, my hackles rise, and I want to dismiss him as a hide-bound racist who perpetuates on an intellectual level the kind of fascism he decries on a political one. In an interview with Bloom at Eurozine, he says, right after he makes his comment about the three criteria he uses

And those are not the standards now applied in the universities and colleges of the English-speaking world. Nor are they the standards applied in the media. Everyone is now much more concerned with gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, skin pigmentation, and twenty other irrelevancies, whereas I am talking about what I have never talked about before, and that is wisdom.

Throughout the interview, the link to which I found at Arts and Letters Daily, Bloom refers to the female interviewer as “Dear” and “dear child”. He names writers who exemplify wisdom to him. All are male; nearly all are white and dead. I don’t disagree with him on many of the writers he names, especially his author of particular expertise, Shakespeare. In the interview he has some fascinating analysis of Hamlet and the experience of reading Hamlet. I did find it curious that he didn’t talk about the experience of seeing the play but only of reading it. But when he says things so absurd as that he is one of the few teachers left who truly care about teaching, and when he refuses to recognize the worth of work by authors who are not male, I question whether any of what he says can be of value.

In the interview, Bloom quotes another influential but problematic author

Nietzsche said: “Jedes Wort ist ein Vorurteil”, which I would translate as “Every word is a misjudgement”. He also said in Twilight of the Idols — and I quote it again and again teaching about Shakespeare — “Anything that we are able to speak, to say or formulate, is something which is already dead in our hearts” — we can’t even feel it anymore, you know.

The quote reminds me that I don’t have to write clearly about how troubling and problematic I find Bloom and some of his views. It’s better if I don’t have clarity, and continue to wrestle with it. Like Nietzsche, Bloom has written some great things, some troubling things, as well as some things that have been used by others to maintain outdated and exclusionary status quos about whose value has work. Great work has been and will continue to be produced by all people, male and otherwise. Reading work by authors whose lived experience is different from one’s own allows one to expand one’s consciousness, one’s awareness of the subjectivity of great work, and one’s empathy. Bloom calls this irrelevant. Here are a few books that have earned permanent spots on my bookshelf, and that are good examples of why I think Bloom’s white male focus is wrong.

Finding books that both our two-year-old son Drake and his parents like to read is sometimes a challenge. Also, sometimes a book has a good story, but so-so illustration, or vice versa. So books that we all like and that are beautiful both to look at and to read are something of a trifecta.

I came across Mo Willems’ books during a search at www.amazon.com. I find amazon’s links to “people who bought this also bought this” is useful to learn about books and music that I haven’t heard of. Many people dismiss amazon and its links out of hand–”oh, anybody can write a review, how can you tell anything by that”. But I use the links to browse, and I can often readily identify more and less reliable reviews. I usually only attend to the editorial ones, anyway.

There are four Mo Willems pigeon books–two hardcovers and two board books. In Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, the pigeon begs the reader to drive while the bus driver is away. It’s an interactive story that allows a toddler to yell “No” with abandon, unless s/he’s feeling sympathetic to the pigeon. In The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, a cute duckling heckles the pigeon before it can consume the serendipitous weiner. The board books are shorter and sturdier than most, and quite charming. The Pigeon Has Feelings, Too! shows an interchange between the pigeon and the bus driver. The Pigeon Loves Things That Go caps toddler-fascinating vehicles with a clever appearance by the duckling.

Willems’ two other recent books, Knuffle Bunny and Leonardo the Terrible Monster, are very good, but did not inspire the mad repetition Drake demanded of the pigeon books. Willems worked at Sesame Street, and was the creative mind behind the strange but charming and short lived cartoon Sheep in the Big City. His simple but engaging illustrations combined with the clever, odd humor make for a great set of books.

#85 in my book challenge for the year, All Rivers Flow to the Sea has all the trademarks of McGhee’s impressive collection of novels. It is sad and beautifully written. It focuses on new characters in her fictional town of Sterns, NY, but includes characters from former novels as well. This is a young adult novel whose main character, Rose Latham, struggles with grief as her sister languishes in a coma. Rose’s flawed coping behaviors, as well as the persistent people around her, are sharply touching and real. As with all of McGhee’s books, her characters continued to hang out in my mind after I finished the book, and I’m so glad to have them. They are wonderful company. I saw McGhee at the Twin Cities book fest recently, and she described her original three novels, Rainlight, Shadow Baby and Was It Beautiful?, as “saddest, sad, and sadder.” I’m not sure where she would place All Rivers Flow to the Sea on that continuum, but I think it falls into sadder, while her middle-grade novel Snap was sad. Someone asked which book she recommended reading to start. She said Shadow Baby, since it was not only an audience pleaser, but less sad than some of the others. I say, read them in order. Start with Rainlight, which is the saddest, but still my favorite. They’re all of a piece, and they’re all wonderful.

#84 in my book challenge for the year, Mothers and Other Monsters was recommended at Blog of a Bookslut. It is a collection of speculative short fiction by McHugh, a much-awarded speculative fiction writer who has formerly published novels. There are stories about Alzheimer’s, ghosts, parents and children, other worlds, and werewolves. What is most impressive about this collection is its strong writing across a huge variety of settings and topics. I usually prefer novels to short stories, but this collection kept me engaged, and better yet, it made me think.

The collection included excerpts from two of McHugh’s novels, Mission Child and Nekropolis, the former of which I’ve read. I liked but didn’t love it when I did; I remember it as distant and chilly–not emotionally engaged. Reading the segment, here, though, made me want to revisit it. I wasn’t as drawn in by the segment from Nekropolis, a more recent novel that got many impressive reviews.

#83 in my book challenge for the year, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a Great Novel, if such a thing exists (see last entry.) It certainly is one of the best novels I’ve read, at least this year, if not ever. Robinson has written only one other novel, Housekeeping, though she has written other books. Many wondered if Housekeeping would be the only novel by Robinson, since there was a gap of more than twenty years between them. A writing instructor of mine told the story of the publishing editor who stood in the doorway of a colleague’s office. “Guess what I’m holding?” the editor asked, reverently. “Marilynne Robinson’s second novel.” Gilead is a series of letters written from an older (seventy-ish) father to his young (seven-ish) son, meant to be read when the son is older. I can’t conjure enough adjectives to do this book justice. Lovely, timeless, seamless, touching. That the letter conceit works, in addition to telling history, new story and characterization, is a stunning feat of writing. I am accustomed to reading at a fast clip. This book defies quick reading. It is rich, complex prose to be savored. Housekeeping made the Time best-of list I wrote about yesterday. Gilead belongs on that list, too.