Recent Reading

This account goes back to sometime around Christmas, and is not really in any particular order. There are some spoilers, but no major ones.

Going, by Sumner Locke Elliot. Kindly either given or lent me by papersky, an innocuous little hardcover in good condition. Very early on, I flipped to the copyright page and looked at the date. Nineteen seventy-five. It fits neatly into the category of if-this-goes-on science fiction, being set in a version of the United States where, returning over the border, you have to salute the flag and say you love God; where people are euthanized at the age of sixty-five; where the place is ruled by amalgams of Nehemiah Scudder and Horatio Alger; where dissidents are subjected to various kinds of chemical brainwashing and wear paper dresses; where the air has been scrubbed so clean that you can't smell anything. I was deeply freaked out by some of this. In the first place, it's not my experience that American religious fanatics give a single solitary rat's ass for the quality of the air; and even if they did, I can't imagine by what method you would get air that didn't smell of anything, as if the entire outdoors were a gigantic space station with lifeless recycled air. (I never really believed in those either, but they were something of a staple in sf for a time.) I also had a lot of trouble recalling that it was set in the U.S. It kept reminding me of all those Peter Dickinson novels about people saddled with huge rotting estates who always have house parties. I suppose it's quite likely that the kind of upper-crust New England family that comprises most of the main characters is very similar to those Dickinson characters. In any case, I kept saying, "But, but, but -- " about all this background material. But the characters, especially the protagonist, were just magnificent. I believed in their world because if I didn't I couldn't read about them. The protagonist is having her 65th birthday at the beginning; the story of that day is told interspersed with flashbacks to how things got to this state. It's funny and terrifying and pathetic and tragic and almost nauseatingly suspenseful. The insights finally granted to the protagonist addressed a different level of "But, but, but -- " that I'd been uttering about economics and class structure; the ending is suddenly profoundly nuanced, stepping outside the natural preoccupations of the sympathetic characters.

Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott. I found Anne Lamott's book on writing, Bird by Bird, long ago, and liked it so much that I resisted reading her fiction for years. I am painfully aware that good writers may speak nonsense about the process of writing, and bad ones speak wisdom. It's very trying. I finally picked up Crooked Little Heart because I was very much in the mood for a kind of writing that I vaguely refer to as "lots of daily life," and while I ordinarily read mystery novels for that, I didn't feel like blood and death and recrimination. I had read the author's Operating Instructions, which is a diary of her son's first year, and abundant with just that kind of daily life, and I thought she might put the same kinds of detail in her fiction. (I didn't just reread Operating Instructions because it's very emotional and painful and I wasn't up for that, either.) Indeed she did. I really can't judge the book, having fallen haplessly in love with it for its quirky metaphors, borderline-sane but very-real characters, and its profound love for its setting. I first visited California in September of 2003, as patient readers of this journal will hardly have been able to forget. The book is set in Bayview, which Eric tells me he would describe as a suburb of San Francisco. It has the birds and plants I saw; it has a pivotal scene at the Russian River, which we visited; it is full of the experiences I had, only viewed by people who live there. It also had a tremendous lot about girls' tennis that didn't bore me to tears, which is quite an accomplishment. And oh, how it knows about teenagers.

Wizard's Holiday, by Diane Duane. A lot of what Diane Duane does as a writer is done exactly as I like. Except for that in Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, I like the language. I love the characters. The pacing and emphasis work for me; the notions of where the core of emotion is, what's important; and the details of daily life, too. But on a higher level I have a lot of difficulty with her stuff. Sometimes this matters more than other times. I didn't have trouble with the metaphysics or the internal morality of A Wizard Alone, for example. With this one, I loved reading it, I had a splendid time, right until I put it down and thought. Then I felt twitchy. It reminded me simultaneously of Perelandra and of The Dubious Hills. This may just be that both of us were influenced by Lewis. It also made me think in a very uneasy way of Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land. There are aspects of that character, or more precisely of how that character is used by the author, that make me deeply uneasy. He has an absolute moral sense, he knows when people are just wrong, inalterably wrong, and so he can kill them. But at least he's in a satire, if a somewhat wobbly one. Kit and Nita know exactly what's right too, and they are not in a satire, and I don't think they are necessarily right. They are, of course, in their own universe. But something in the way it's done bothers me profoundly.

Enough for now, I think. I don't see that these ramblings are likely to be of much use to anybody else thinking of reading these books.

Pamela