Now that I’ve finished Jonathan Littell’s monumental novel of World War II, The Kindly Ones — perhaps it would be better to say that The Kindly Ones has finished me off, overwhelming me with its deranging account of moral confusion (for what it would be wrong to say of the Nazi universe recreated in the novel’s pages is that it is amoral) — now that I’m done, but have nothing yet to say, except “Wow” and “Whoa,” I can at least note that what prompted me to pick up the book, after nearly four years’ neglect, was Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, which I read last month and wrote about, briefly, soon after.

Not that I can remember just what it was about Keilson’s fiction that sent me back to Littell’s. It may have been something like this: if Comedy in a Minor Key not only cheered me up but also left me smiling, how bad could The Kindly Ones be — and wouldn’t it be great to transfer two massive tomes (the French original and the much thicker translation) from the reading pile to a library shelf, perhaps library shelf in somebody else’s home? You’ll note that I never mentioned reason here; there was no reason in the world to proceed from the one book to the other. They didn’t appear to have anything in common — when I finished the Comedy, I’d read about 150 pages of The Kindly Ones — and I can now attest that, beyond a vague overlap in temporal setting, the two books have in fact nothing whatever in common. It is indeed “great” to move the two Littells to another shelf, but they won’t be leaving the house.

In a fever dream that Max Aue, Littell’s protagonist, suffers toward the end of the novel, shooting stars hit the earth and sprout monstrous seaweedy plants, which proceed to cover the surface of the planet. In Charlotte Mandell’s excellent translation, Jonathan Littell’s végétaux avides become “greedy vegetables.” It’s an intoxicating note.

Wow!

Whoa!

For most of the afternoon, which I ought to have spent preparing the house for the holidays and its meals, I’ve been slumped over my copy of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (in Charlotte Mandel’s translation). It is ludicrously untimely reading — its thousand pages recount the World War II experiences of a Nazi bureaucrat belonging to the SS — but instead of distracting me from the sound of sleigh bells, it intensifies the keenness with which I hear them. The massiveness of such a piece of great literature is always viscerally affirming. No post-modern accumulation of details this, The Kindly Ones accumulates its formidable heft minute by minute, as Max Aue slips and staggers beneath an insanity that is not his alone, but an entire nation’s.

Recognized as a masterpiece in France when it appeared (as Les Bienveillantes, in 2006), but dismissed almost neurasthenically here, when it appeared in English last year, Littell’s book forces upon the reader a shocking reconsideration of the Hitler years. Reconsideration, I say; not revision. Even though the novel’s point of view is resolutely fastened within the mind of a would-be intellectual, there is not a whisper of real support for the Nazi apologetics that the protagonist elicits from his interlocutors between the moments of atrocity and mayhem that burst through the narrative. What’s new is that point of view, which, however much that of a Nazi, is incontrovertibly that of a human being. There are readers for whom this humanizing tendency must be suspect, as a kind of pleading the Nazi case; I suspect that they’ll be the readers with personal recollections of the War.

For those born long afterward, however, humanization simply makes the whole nightmare worse. For the Nazis were not an army of alien zombies who appeared out of nowhere and started to make trouble. They were as rooted in the soil of history and circumstance as we all are, and that is the lesson of this long read: although the Nazis were, at the very least, monstrously wrong-headed, their wrong-headedness was nothing special. They had personal ambitions and weaknesses and grudges and they were easily intoxicated by Hitler’s promise of excitement. This excitement, in particular, gave them a ruthlessly efficient appearance, because we are always a bit ruthless about taking what we want when we think that we’re entitled to it; but as the inaugurators of a new world order, the Nazis were incoherent bumblers. They had no realistic long-term plans. And they were ridiculous. This was noted at the time, but shushed up when the extermination of the Jews came to be widely understood. There could be nothing ridiculous about the architects of death factories. But almost everything else about the Nazi experiment became ridiculous as mass murder became its principal obsession.  

I’m only halfway through; I’ve got almost five hundred pages to go. Much of that, I’ve gathered from what I’ve read about the book, will concern the death camps, and I expect it to be as difficult to read as the account of the SS aktionen in the Ukraine that fills the first couple of hundred pages. These “actions” were horrifically improvised liquidations of Jewish populations in the cities and towns that the German army swept through in its reach for the oil reserves of the Caspian shores. The Kindly Ones obliges us to consider the distress and psychological damage that was borne by the German troops charged with the one-by-one shooting of thousands of men, women, and children. We have understandably preferred to regard this damage as infinitesimally small, which it is, but only in comparison with the wretchedness suffered by the victims. We do not consider the victims here: that is the power of Jonathan Littell’s literary achievement. And precisely because the distress is now overwhelming in its own right, we the measure of the woe of the Holocaust is greater and darker. We realize, as we turn the many, many pages of the novel’s Allemande section, that a measure of comic relief that helped us bear up against the fact of the Holocaust will henceforth be denied. 

I’ve been so lost in the factuality of the story, with its swerves between banal office politics and unspeakable barbarism, that I did not, until about twenty minutes before reaching the end of the Sarabande, see how literally the title is intended. The Kindly Ones are, of course, the Furies, and their most celebrated appearance in classical literature is at the trial of Orestes, who avenged the murder of his father by murdering his mother. Twenty minutes before I got to the end of the Sarabande — a relative brief respite from war that Max Aue spends in Berlin, Paris, and Antibes — a faint neural pealing grew into a tintinnabulating fanfare: Littell has underpinned his epic of hatred and frenzy with one of the West’s foundational studies of guilt: the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

Cristina García’s novel, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, is pretty plainly not my sort of book, but there was a line in John Vernon’s fairly nice review the Book Review that I took to be a bit more declarative than it was. “García … attempts to deepen her characters with each successive pass of their stories.” Attempts! I’ve just re-read the review, and I might as well just refer you to it again. The writing is very good, but the characters and situations have a stock feel to them — and I really haven’t read very much Latin American fiction! Set in a hotel in what feels like Guatemala or El Salvador, the chapters follow a band of initially unrelated characters through a tumultuous week. It is difficult not to think of Grand Hotel, not only because of the slice-of-life feel to the glimpses into the characters’ lives, but also because those lives are lacking a certain inner substantiality. I can’t say that I cared for any of them. A hotel waitress referred to as “the ex-guerilla” is perhaps the most sympathetic, but she’s troubled by the bitterness of her activist history (and the ghost of her brother). A lady lawyer of German extraction who arranges for the sale of infants to prosperous Americans is agreeably hate-able. The story of the sad-sack Korean factory owner comes to a surprisingly happy ending. There — I oughtn’t to have said that. I’m glad that I read the book, mostly because I can say that I did, and didn’t mind doing so. But I’m constitutionally unable to relish the highly-colored narrative arabesques that threaten to send Ms García’s stories over the top.

Much more sympathetic were two novels that I read over the weekend. Yes, two. One was Jane Gardam’s God on the Rocks, and the other was Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado. Both books are astringently funny, but the one is as English as the other is American. The spirit of Ivy Compton-Burnett hovers over God on the Rocks, which came out in 1978 and has only now made its appearance in the United States. There’s a hyper-real feeling to the dialogue, as if every remark not only carries several levels of meaning but is also directed at interlocutors unseen as well as seen. This is another way of saying that the dialogue does not feel straightforward — which is precisely what Sally Jay Gorce’s tumble of talk feels like. Sally Jay is Ms Dundy’s ingénue, in her third month in Paris just out of college. It’s difficult to believe that Jean-Luc Godard did not pattern Patricia Franchini, the Jean Seberg role in A Bout de Souffle, after Sally Jay; but then Sally Jay is an avatar of sorts, an embodiment of postwar American larkiness. Her picaresque adventures have the rough cut of memoir that has been only slightly touched-up, and indeed the author remarks in an afterward that “all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.”

The novel is narrated in the first person throughout — Sally Jay’s voice is as distinctive as Auntie Mame’s — but the third part of the novel is told as a series of diary entries, in which the heroine does not know what’s going to happen the next day. Here she recounts an exuberant evening spent with a matador/film star and his entourage.

Dinner was a riot. We threw pellets of bread across the tale at each other and made airplanes out of the menus and sent them sailing around the dining room. Then we had a really great idea. We were going to put a pat of butter on the end of knife and use the knife as a catapult to see if the butter wouuld stick to the ceiling. But Larry stopped us, so we flipped water at each other with our spoons instead.

Bax and Larry thought we’d gone crazy. I don’t know what the Quadrille thought, except it was clear that anything old Wheero wanted to do was OK with them. They were all twice his age, but if he’d been the King of the Underworld, they couldn’t have been more under his thumb. Unwritten law of the bullring.

We drove off to Bérobie in the lavender Cadillac with the hood down, Wheero and I sitting on top, our feet on the back seat, waving to the cars that passed and nearly falling off at every corner.

We found the little bar we’d been to the other night and started playing some more games. We took the labels off beer-bottles and put them on everybody’s wallets, sticky side up, and thre them at the ceiling so that the labels stuck there and the wallets came clattering down all over the drinks on the table.

I can’t say that such high jinks are to be found on every page of The Dud Avocado, and the madcap reminiscence of Robert Benchley is pretty much unique to this passage. But the novel is almost always this much fun to read.

“Fun” is decidedly not a word that comes to mind in connection with God on the Rocks. Set on the eve of World War II, in a Yorkshire sea-side town that’s so middle-class respectable that even the weather seems bourgeois, it’s a story of lost loose ends being tied up and then tied up again. At the heart of the narrative, a cold and ambitious woman has long before forbidden her son to marry the daughter of a local shopkeeper whom he has known since childhood. Now, in the novel’s present, the mother is an invalid, and to spite her socialistically-inclined children she has turned her home into a lunatic asylum, where one of the patients is a painter who will some day be recognized as great — or at any rate one of those blue plaques will be mounted on a nearby wall. Now the old lovers reconnect, and turn out to be somewhat different from what they might have expected. The shopgirl has married a religious bank manager, with whom she has two children. Indeed, what keeps all of this information from coming straight to the fore is Gardam’s focus on eight year-old Margaret’s impressions, which underscore the futility of trying to “protect” intelligent children from the facts of life (in the broadest sense of that term). Only gradually do the adults achieve the spotlight.

I can imagine someone’s coming away from God on the Rocks with the impression that it’s about the strangeness of love, but to my mind it’s not about love at all, but rather about the things that often stand in the place of love — desire, affection, duty, failure of imagination. As for love, it’s what’s really on the rocks.

At a tea to which Margaret is taken by her mother, the unprecedentedness of which is obliquely but almost oppressively apparent, the adults suddenly fall into a puzzling exchange of remarks.

Margaret looked from face to face like a person at a tennis match. She knew — though heaven knew how — that this game had been played before and very often and very happily. The tennis match idea stayed with her and she had a queer picture of her mother and Mr Frayling playing tennis with careful slow strokes on a summer evening with the shadow of the net growing long across the grass. Some people stood watching from a distance. Perhaps some old photograph.

“Do you and Mummy play this?” Charles Frayling asked her with his head on one side, as if to catch her answer exactly. sToll muddled with tennis, she looked at her mother.

“I don’t think we do, do we, dear?” Elinor said.

“Not ever.”

“Try,” said Charles. “It’s called the grand great word game.”

“The great grand word game,” said Elinor.

Later, Margaret informs the company that her father does not like to hear her mother addressed as ‘Mummy.’

It’s easy to see why God on the Rocks wasn’t brought out over here in the late Seventies. Its Englishness is an acquired taste, its indirectness a jeux d’esprit that might strike the uninitiated as merely withdrawn. It is impossible to imagine Sally Jay Gorce reading it without wondering if it might make better sense if she held the book upside-down.

It’s no use; I can’t tear myself away. I spent an hour poring over the Google Maps view of Edensor, trying to identify the Old Vicarage — in vain. I’m pretty sure that I located Edensor House, though. That’s where the Marchioness of Hartington lived when she received Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, in 1948 — the only photograph that I’ve ever seen in which Her Majesty the Queen looks (painfully) overdressed. Do admit: the memoirs of Deborah Mitford, dowager Duchess of Devonshire, can’t be put down. Wait For Me! is one of the most aptly titled books that I’ve ever encountered, because that’s what you’re going to do once you’ve got the book in your hands. You’re going to wait until Debo has told you everything that she has to say.

That’s what you’re going to do if, like me, The Sun King, Nancy Mitford’s book about Louis XIV, was one of the first books that you owned. (It was also, arguably, the first coffee-table book.) If, in your twenties, you found Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels to be a profoundly simpatico but life-affirmingly positive account of family dysfunction. If, in short, you’ve known about “the Mitford Sisters” for a long time, longer, even, than Charlotte Mosley has been annotating the family correspondence. (Charlotte’s mother-in-law, Diana Mitford, was the beauty who left a Guinness for Sir Oswald Mosley — almost as rich — and a wedding chez Goebbels.) You’ve forgotten more stories about these six girls and their crazy parents than most people ever know about their own families. You feel as though you must have met Nanny Blor herself in some dim childhood playroom.

What makes the Mitfords fascinating has changed over the years. As girls (they were born between 1904 [Nancy] and 1920 [Debo]), they were madcaps out of Waugh; when their mother opened the newspaper and saw a “peer’s daughter” headline, she knew that the story would probably concern one of her brood. Then Nancy began writing novels, and became something of a literary lodestone. She knew everybody and everybody knew her, and she couldn’t wait to get out of England. So she went to France and became what her sisters called “the French lady writer.” This was a sweet way of suggesting that Nancy could be really nasty and unloving. (Just how unloving, her sister Diana wouldn’t find out until decades after Nancy’s gratuitous testimony stuck her in Holloway Prison, during the War. Perhaps if Nancy had been a boy, she wouldn’t have been so envious of Diana). When Nancy lost interest in dreaming up novel plots, she turned to great figures of the good old days in France, and found them to be wittier and better-dressed versions of the aristocrats whom she’d grown up among. Voltaire. Madame de Pompadour. Louis le grand. Frederick the Great.  She wrote about these characters as though she had lived down the hall from them at college (as if, indeed, she had had any kind of education), and her impertinence was delicious. Don’t confuse impertience with disrespect: Nancy Mitford genuinely admired her subjects, and that’s what makes her four histories so supremely delightful. What’s impertinent is her intimation of intimacy, which is wholly, modestly implicit. There’s a passage in which Nancy says that doctors are no better today than they were in the Seventeenth Century. That’s as close as she gets to interposing herself into the narrative. These were the books that made her famous.

Shortly after The Sun King appeared, Jessica Mitford (the fifth of the six) came out with The American Way of Death. A book with less in common with The Sun King cannot be imagined — except that it, too, is impertinent. Flagrantly so. Jessica had already published the profoundly disrespectful Hons and Rebels, but her new book was, as its title indicated, American, and it was of those riveting exposés (The Making of the President 1960 and Silent Spring were contemporary examples) that announced the new world order of the 1960s. Jessica’s sisters did not take to calling her “the American lady writer,” possibly because she was a card-carrying Communist who seemed, despite all protestations of love and affection, to dislike them. Jessica heartily disliked England, even as she floated on a personal confidence that only an Englishwoman of her background could have possessed.

By this time, in other words, the Mitfords were literary. There were two of them, Nancy and Jessica. They were discovered to have interesting sisters. One was dead. Unity shot herself when England declared war on her beloved Führer. (She lived for nearly ten years, in reduced mental circumstances.) Another — Diana — was a virtual Nazi, having married the head of the British Union of  Fascists in 1936. So: Communists and Nazis. Very inter-esting. And then there was the duchess.

Deborah Mitford and Andrew Cavendish did not anticipate a ducal future when they married, in 1941. Andrew had an older brother, Billy, and guess who he married! None other than Kathleen Kennedy, doomed sister of our own JFK. (It really doesn’t stop with these people.) Billy, like Jessica’s husband Esmond and the sisters’ own brother Tom, perished in the War. That’s how Andrew Cavendish became the Marquess of Hartington. (Which is exactly like being the Prince of Wales, but with respect to the ducal Devonshires. You’re next — if you live.) When Andrew and Deborah became duke and duchess in their own right, they were poor as churchmice, with a colossal tax bill that must have seemed something like today’s American national debt. The common wisdom about great houses like Chatsworth was that they ought to be pulled down, and lots of grand houses were pulled down. But something about the new owners committed them to fight for their inheritance. In her memoirs, the duchess generously says that it was her husband’s doing. But she acknowledges that the world believes that it was hers, and it’s hard to imagine how the whole thing could have been pulled off without Deborah’s inborn entrepreneurial zeal.

We have come a long way from writing books — something that the duchess was famous for not doing until she took it up (just as she put it out that she couldn’t speak French and wore nothing finer than Barbour coats). Nowadays — long after Nancy’s death (in 1973) and Jessica’s famous books — Debo has blossomed into a sort of alternative Queen. Actually, she’s a replacement for the Queen Mother (to whom she refers, in her letters, as “Cake,” having been tickled by the late royal’s eagerly remarking at a reception that “she’d been told that there would be cake.”) Like the Queen Mother, the dowager duchess is one of those grandes dames whom the common people adore with medieval zeal, but exactly how the youngest daughter of a middling baron acquired this royal touch is even more intriguing than her sisters’ careers as notable scribes. She’s that rarest of creatures, the conservative who, by ruthlessly distinguishing the important conventions from the silly ones, can marinate herself in everything that’s admirable about the comme il faut, while daringly rejecting everything that’s fade.

The appeal of Wait For Me!, for one such as me, is that Deborah writes about the people in her life with a deep civil humanity. There are none of the caricatural arabesques that make Wigs on the Green and Hons and Rebels such fun. Deborah has very little to say about people whom she doesn’t like, which almost makes you wonder if she can really be Nancy’s or Jessica’s sister; but then you run into a crack about modern manners that makes you sit up straight. The people whom she does like are good, capable types who get up in the morning with clear heads and a sense of the day’s work. This means that they’re either dependable employees or reliable friends, and it’s obvious that you don’t get to be the chatelaine of Chatsworth without a mastery of the art of cooperation, even if you’re the one giving the orders. There is also the charm of watching a pretty but determinedly unremarkable girl become a monument with a sybil’s blue-eyed gaze. Deborah Mitford’s memoirs make the mystery of the Mitfords thicker and deeper than it ever was.   

Apologies are in order for last night’s somewhat testy paragraphs about circling like a dog. It was one of those late-night mistakes; too tired to write about what was really on my mind (that’s what I’m doing now), but determined not to write about what was bothering me (never finding the time to write about what’s on my mind, a topic that I find at least Ï€ times more irritating than you do), I turned my attention to a problem that I’m actually well on the way to solving. Perhaps that’s what made it possible to make use of the metaphorical frustration of endless circling: the end is in sight.

The problem is, in a word, reviews. I don’t write reviews. A review is a notice designed to steer the buying public to or from books, plays, movies, and other optional entertainments. Ideally, a reviewer communicates her interest and enthusiasm (or their opposites) without giving away too much of the novelty that the buying public rightly craves. Even more important than getting the facts right, for a reviewer, is knowing the language and expectations of his readership; without this, the reviewer will say either too much or not enough. Reviewing is a service industry, designed to help people save and spend time and money wisely. It is not to be confused with criticism.

Don’t think me sniffy. Reviewing is very hard work, and you’d think that it would be in the interest of arts providers to see that it is done well. They don’t, and the job is generally pretty badly done. Week after week, I peruse the pages of The New York Times Book Review and am amazed by the lack of rigor and even attentiveness. As I parcel out my complaints in this area elsewhere in my digital domain, I’ll say no more about it now, except to note that every now and then someone slips in what is effectively a good blog entry. I’ll come back to that.

What I have to say about the books that I read (and the movies that I see, but not so much the plays and concerts that I attend), snaps naturally into two kinds of writing, each lying on one side or the other of the well-done review. For my Web sites, Portico and now Civil Pleasures, I write what used to be called “appreciations.” These are intended for people who have read the book in question and are curious to see what others have to say about it. The appreciation is in many functional ways an inversion of the review: spoilers are not a problem, but frothy enthusiasm is out of place. The accent shifts from the fun to be had to the source of the fun.

Appreciations may not be harder to write than book reviews, but they require a good deal of thought, and plenty of rumination, too — by which I mean that you can’t expect to appreciate a book the day after you put it down. Judgments must settle and clarify. In most cases, the book has to be read a second time before it can be written about comprehensively — comprehensiveness being, I hasten to note, the last thing that the consumer of a book review is interested in. What I’ve really been circling, this past year, is the problem of finding time for that second reading, not to mention the writing-up itself.

The other kind of writing is about me, not the book. It’s about how I feel the day after putting it down — or, even better, the minute after. This isn’t as easy at looks, but it is the sort of thing that I can usually write off the top of my head. Why haven’t I done it more often? Well, I’m still catching up to the iPad, and to what I call “reading the Internet.” In the bad old days, blog entries had to be kept short, no matter how easy they might be to read. The difference between the blog entry and the Web page became for me the difference not between improvisational and deliberate but between short and long. Writing short doesn’t come naturally to me. As is already evident right here.

In any case: calling for New Forms! (With hopes of being less futile than Konstantin Gavrilovich), I offer a roundup of some books that I’ve read recently.

¶ I’ll begin with the book that I mentioned last night, Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, translated by Damion Searle. The German original (Komödie in moll) appeared in 1947, but has only just been rendered in English. The time is right, I think. Until very recently, Comedy would have been read as a Holocaust book, and readers might have objected to its mordantly smiling tone. (Keilson, it must be noted, is of Jewish background; he is also still with us, at the age of 100 — 101 next month.) Very little can be said to people who have not read the book through (it’s quite short, a novella with the heft of a novel).

By the third page, we have learned all the basic plot elements (save one, a detail that gives the book a propulsive kick about twenty pages before the end). Toward the end of World War II, somewhere in a coastal city in the Netherlands, a stranger who has been hiding in an upstairs room of the home of a married couple has now taken ill, and is about to die — of natural causes! A somewhat hasty search indicates that the stranger’s being a Jew is not stated until page 25, but anyone who requires that disclosure is too young to be reading this novel on general grounds. By page 25, by the way, the stranger — his hosts call him “Nico” — is long dead. And yet, thanks to the author’s agile shifts of time frame, never obtrusive but never missed, either, we’ll hear a lot more from Nico, and in a way he has the last word. But the book is not about Nico. It is about his beneficiaries, Wim and Marie.

Wim and Marie are good people, and at no point in the story do they do anything that isn’t morally unexceptionable. There is nothing special about them — Keilson almost goes overboard in stressing their ordinariness. (But only almost.) They do fret a bit, Marie especially. It turns out that doing the right thing — hiding a Jew in their home is presented as a “patriotic” act — is complicated, and it’s easy to trip over complications. Let’s just say that, not being saints, Wim and Marie expect, however unconsciously, to reap a reward for saving Nico — or at least for doing everything that they can to save him. Comedy in a Minor Key is about how circumstances force Wim and Marie to confront their expectations, and, in the process, lose their innocence. It occurred to me as I was brisking through the last pages of the novel that Keilson has retold the Adam and Eve story, only without the damning transgression (quite the reverse), and without the exile from Paradise. But Wim and Marie do eat from the tree of knowledge, however unknowingly, and the result is that Paradise goes up in smoke as if it never existed.

I have to point out that this is one of the best-titled books ever. It is a comedy, and the comedy is in a minor key. There are no laughs, but almost every page brings a smile. We’re ready for Keilson’s ironies; we’re beginning not to be ashamed of how poorly we understand ourselves. Unpacking Keilson’s immense narrative skill can’t be attempted, though, until the finale has been digested a bit. In most suspenseful books, you want to know how the story comes out. In Comedy, you’ve got to see how it comes out before you know what the story really was.

When I mentioned this book to a doctor the other day, she told me that she has in-laws who were “in the camps,” and that they’re very prone to making odious distinctions about suffering: people who were hidden through the war didn’t, in their view, suffer as much as people in the camps did. I wrote down the information on a prescription form — for her, not for her in-laws. They’re past saving: what could be more American than competing about suffering?

¶ Walks With Men is a comeback event for Ann Beattie. (Isn’t it?) Where “a novel” would appear on the cover, it says “fiction” instead. It’s about the same length as Comedy in a Minor Key, and that’s about all that the two books have in common. I read the book a few weeks ago, and too much time ahs passed for me to make any positive statements about it, but I can say that it took me for a walk down memory lane, back to the good old days when the exhibition of a pleasant personality provoked the scorn and contempt of people who considered themselves intelligent. Ms Beattie’s narrative style is similarly unhelpful. If her tone of voice weren’t so bland and impersonal, her book would be one long act of rudeness. It reminded me how angry I used to be at my bright college friends for wearing the tedious and annoying patina of disaffection. Beattie suggests that it would be thick to allocate the attention that she pays to the parts of her story to their relative importance. 

Jane Jay Costner, a writer who had a splash and then a big success not longer after getting out of college — we’re in the Eighties — tells us how she fell in with another writer, a man called Neil. Walks With Men ought to be all about Neil, but it’s not; there’s also the man whom Jane left in order to be with Neil. Plus a couple of cutups who live in Jane’s building in Chelsea. Jane almost leaves Neil when she finds out (from his wife) that he’s married, but she doesn’t. Neil gets a divorce and marries Jane. In what feels like a very short time, Neil tells Jane that he is going to disappear, becoming legally dead. In the forty pages between the wedding and this announcement, about ten pages go to a drama involving Jane’s old boyfriend, and even more than that are divided between Neil’s wife (sans Neil) and Jane’s goofy housemates. Pffft! Neil’s gone. Perhaps this is how it ought to be, given Neil’s fondness for astute-sounding aphorisms. Perhaps an editor worried that any more of Neil would cause readers to tear the book apart with their bare hands. Worse, maybe someone told Ms Beattie that Neil is funny. Well, he is, in a pathetic sort of way.

• When you travel to Europe, never wear a fragrance from the country you’re in. In France, wear a perfume made in Italy.
• Notice who the cinematographer is. In the future, see movies based on that.
• When depressed, look at Halsman’s photographs of people jumping, especially the Duchess of Windsor.

Walks With Men reminds me of the time when pompous buffoons gave the exhibition of a well-stocked mind the bad reputation that it has to this day. Back in the early Eighties, when Ann Beattie was The New Yorker‘s must-read short story writer, I despaired of ever being so sophisticated. Now I just cluck my tongue. I can’t say that I minded finding out what Beattie is up to these days.

¶ The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson. Why did I read this book? It had just won the Man Booker Prize when I found it on a table at Crawford Doyle, out in paper already. I can’t have had any idea that it would remind me David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury — two writers named by James Wood in his withering New Yorker piece — but I did feel that reading a comedy about Jewishness would be daring and different. Different because I avoid ethnic fiction, although not so rigorously as I used to do. Daring because I grew up in a Westchester suburb where no one would sell a house to a Jew, and my shame moots any and all attempts to make judgments “about Jews.”

I happened to like Jacobson’s tone of voice right away, and I was happy to spend time in his company. But his story is not even clear enough to be dismissed as “shaggy dog.” Don’t worry about my summarizing the plot for you, because I wouldn’t want to misrepresent the book as having one. This isn’t to say that nothing happens — but it’s pretty much one-damned-thing-after-another, until we have the pleasant sense of knowing his characters — three men and two women — about as well as we need to know them. The screech of gears at the very end, where Jacobson hastily improvises a dramatic finale, was so loud that I couldn’t make sense of what was actually happening.

I could see quite clearly that The Finkler Question would have driven me crazy as recently as ten years ago. Age has definitely altered my tolerance. Jacobson’s characters spout a great deal of flash-frozen protein about Israel and anti-Semitism, but they do it so well, with such zesty panache, that I just smiled along with them. The absence of a real plot was a good thing, too; it tended to diminish the characters’ responsibility for their actions — very much as friendship does.  

Yesterday, in the course of a bit of home improvement, the antique modem that has served us for over ten years boiled to death. There is never a good time for such things to happen, but I have to say that I managed rather well, at least after a bit of preliminary whining. I didn’t sleep very well, but just before I got out of bed I formulated a list of four things that I ought to do in the morning, trusting that arrangements to replace the modem by lunchtime would solve the connectivity problem. (Meanwhile I was able to rely on the two MiFi cards that we stock, against just such disasters.) I set to work at once, and completed three of the tasks on the list, doing the greater part of the work on the fourth as well. If I had not managed the morning so well, I should never be sitting here this evening nattering on about what I’m reading.

¶ Darin Strauss’s Half a Life is a more modest book than the promises trumpeted by its blurbs suggest. It is not “staggering” (Elizabeth Gilbert); nor is it, really, a “story of hope” (Carrie Fisher). This is all to the good, and for the reason that the memoirist, whose car collided with an errant bicycle when he was eighteen, killing the cyclist, a younger student at his high school, states at the very end: “This tragedy isn’t mine to own. It’s hers.” With a resolve that brings the stern Puritan fathers to mind, Strauss refuses to aggrandize the terrible thing that happened to him, and in the end, as we’ve seen, he disclaims finding any meaning in it. What happened to the girl, Celine Zillke, was terrible. (Strauss himself was as blameless as it is possible to be in such an accident.) But it happened to her, not to him. What happened to him was something else, something that it took “half a life” to come to terms with.

The accident has formed me. I can no more discard it than I can discard having grown into adulthood. But I am grown now. And because I am, I can say no. I can say no to the hectoring, blistery hurt. I can say to myself: It’s all right to take in the winter beach and grass smells, and crackle back across the sand of the raod, and smile at the faces you love.

Half a life, in other words, to realize that he himself was still alive — too much so ever to regret it with any sincerity.

Half a Life is very much a book — a codex. The blank pages that lie between its short texts act as cinematic fades-to-black, pressing the reader to allow the closing moment to dilate a bit before displacing it with the next. The effect is serious without being pretentious; in a book as oppressed by mortality as this one, silence is the most eloquent reminder that personal catastrophes are often, and perhaps usually, meaningless. The “ordinary” version of Half a Life would be a search for significance. Strauss is searching only for peace, and what is meaningful is that he doesn’t begin his search in earnest until he has a family to protect from his still-disordered feelings about the accident. He can’t share what he went through, of course, but he can tell us as carefully as possibly what it felt like (and this would entail not saying too much). That is what Half a Life does. The experience that Darin Strauss has imprinted on the pages of his book is a good deal more precious than meaning would be.

¶ I’ve just begun Richard Jay Hutto’s A Peculiar Tribe of People, a book about a gruesome murder in Macon, George, in 1960, that my Internet friend Brooks Peters recommended. The recommendation itself is part of the charm; this is the sort of book that, when I was a boy, a convalescent would be given as a gift. We don’t do convalescence anymore, but it’s still very pleasant to retire with a book like this, as irresistible as a dish of cocktail peanuts.

Hutto’s book is also the sort of book that simply wasn’t written when I was a boy, because of what let’s coyly call “the sexual element.”

¶ The Cunningham billing is false advertising; I’m not going to say very much about By Nightfall right now. The book impressed me as a kind of Old Master character study, like one of the Bronzino drawings that the Museum exhibited last year. The story, with its stinging little climax — a surprising, eccentric detail that turns out to be the focus of the work — is less a drama than a complete and coherent gesture. And once you see it that way, what might have seemed a slight bit of fiction becomes a magnificent portrait. 

This week, I resumed reading. I didn’t have the time for it; I didn’t wait to have the time. I just sat down on one of the love seats in the living room and read, instead of doing other things that needed doing. It was rash; it was like spending money that I didn’t have. But it was essential. Much of the time was stolen from a bad habit of resigned prudence. Sitting down to read was bold and defiant. I took notes.

¶ I finished two books, books that I’d nearly finished months ago. They were drawn from a pile of five such books; I chose them because they were the ones I was nearest to finishing. One was Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land. A lot of great stuff happens in that book toward the end. Judt has said the things that you expect him to say, but now he begins to say things that are surprising. An admiring endorsement of something that Edmund Burke said. It’s important, Judt goes on to say, for the Left to engage with history. Not with history as a mechanical process leading to right now, but history as a gathering of people who are no longer alive but whose intrigues and passions have a lot to do with why we find ourselves where we are. Now Tony Judt is one of those people who are no longer alive. While he was stalled in a final stage of ALS, not dying, his plight was horrible to think about. Trapped in an unresponsive body! I thought that dying would be a release. It may well have been one for Judt. But it wasn’t one for me. The world is a poorer place without him, dictating somehow, in a room sixty or eighty blocks south of here.

¶ The other book was a collection of essays about comfort in the Eighteenth Century. The writer, Joan DeJean, is what Agatha Christie called a “noticing sort of person,” with an enviable habit of registering details. I wish that I could push her further, though. Her work would be stronger if she were more mindful that comfort is not at all necessarily casual, and that the abyss between the carefree and the careless is unbridgeable, and that all the opposition in the world to solemnity does not unite them.

¶ This evening, I read a few chapters of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, By Nightfall. I could easily spend the rest of the night with it. The hero is a forty-something gallerist who lives with his wife in Mercer Street. “Hostile child, horrible adolescent,” Peter has grown up to be — well, not altogether unsympathetic. But the book’s New York is not my New York. It’s recognizable, even familiar in a way. But I don’t know people like Peter. There was a time when I regretted that, when I wished that I knew the people in his world. Now, I am almost glad that I don’t. I meet them at parties and make small talk and it stops there. We smile over our mutual snobbery, which has nothing to do with birth and position but which is a matter of differing ideas about what constitutes foolishness.

Interesting, that. In all those discussions of universal values and self-evident moral imperatives, nobody ever makes claims for a common sense of foolishness. One might almost suppose that the oppopsite of “foolish” is “sexy” — if it were not terribly foolish to confer upon sexiness a vitality that it altogether lacks.

My instinct, diligent little reporter that I am, is to copy whole paragraphs into this entry, typing them all out myself, and to say, “Here, isn’t this amazing?” A weak but effective form of literary criticism. If I have nothing to offer, that simply makes more room for the author.

Is it as good as The Corrections? Yes, it is as good as The Corrections. It is as least that good — so fear not. The question is a dumb one, although I’d find it a lot more interesting if people asked, instead, “Is it as good as Strong Motion?” Strong Motion is Mr Franzen’s second novel. I’ve read it twice, and loved it twice. It is as good as The Corrections and Freedom and, just possibly, better: it is not in the least little bit satirical. There are no laughs in Strong Motion, except for the kind of laughs that Dostoevsky so unwittingly prompts. Ha ha.

Imagine that you’re the first person you know to have read Middlemarch. What on earth do you say? When we talk about Middlemarch, we assume that there are only two classes of readers in the world: those who have not read Middlemarch and those who acknowledge that Middlemarch is a great novel. The class of people who have not been impressed by reading Middlemarch is — for them — embarrassingly small. It will be a while before Freedom attains so serene a reputation; there are plenty of critics among us who argue that Jonathan Franzen is a bourgeois hack. But it seems that those critics all live in California, and that we’re not likely to run into them here in New York City. In New York, it will be as with Middlemarch. But what does one put forward in the way of praise? Virginia Woolf’s line about Middlemarch — that it’s a novel for grown-ups — is a marvel of stand-up comedy bravado. It applies just as well to Freedom, but it has been used. What do you say?

I’ve read the favorable reviews in the Times and in The Economist, but none of them quite reaches what I really liked about Freedom, which is also present in The Corrections: the seriousness of event that makes crime novels gripping, only without the crime. Freedom reads as though there were a body on the floor. And there is! It’s the body of dissapointed aspiration that embarrasses even first-years at UVa.

Later, as his troubles began to mount, it would seem to him as if his very good luck, which his childhood had taught him to consider his birthright, had been trumped by a stroke of higher-order bad luck so wrong as not even to be real.

Tell me that there’s not a murder in that thought! Freedom is as compelling as any first-rate whodunit, even though both the “who” and the “it” are as obvious as sunlight. It’s the “dun” that turns the pages. Actions open up into sub-actions like metastatically dividing cells. What, exactly, did Patty Emerson do to Walter Berglund when she took up with him, even though she had the hots for his best friend, the rock musician Richard Katz? That it was wrong, we’ll all — even Patty herself — agree. But how, exactly? And what did it amount to? Did Patty not love Walter? You have to read to the very end to find out, just as in life. Even more mysterious is what went wrong between Patty and her beautiful son, Joey.

In the end, though, I’m going to have to quote paragraphs, because the beauty really is in the writing, in the colossal success of Freedom‘s artistry. It has been nine years since The Corrections, and I like to think that the first half of the intervening time was spent dreaming up the Berglunds and the other people in their world, while the second half involved the arduous arrangement of brilliantly composed narrative blocks.

One of my tasks for the coming week is to translate (reformat) my close reading of The Corrections, a project that, embarrassingly, took years to complete, from Portico to Civil Pleasures. Poke me, please.Â