On Tuesday, I had so much fun doing nothing but reading Maria Semple that, like Will, I wanted “again.” After I’d taken the boxes to the post office (easy-peasy), I had really nothing to do, or, rather, nothing to feel guilty about not doing. But what to read? I knocked off Eric Evans’s Lancaster Pamphlet about Pitt the Younger; although richly informative, it left me even more mystified by the precocity of Pitt’s political mentality, which enabled him to become Britain’s youngest prime minister ever. I considered John Lewis Gaddis’s book about George Kennan, which I’ve been slogging through since it came out ages ago, but I’ve half resolved to put that book down, as a sweet-faced hatchet job. Kennan is always weeping or moaning or having a breakdown or in some other way exhibiting unmanly behavior. The emphasis seems tendentious. The writing is also very dull. By design, I quite suspect.

I consulted with Ms NOLA, who recommended a few titles that, while they didn’t make me jump, I really should have bought had they been available as ebooks. (Among them, Javier Marías’s All Souls, which takes place at Oxford.) In the end, here’s what I did: I went to Amazon and selected Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, which I’ve read twice. Then I scrolled down to the horizontal band of books bought by people who bought The Keep. The authors of these books fell into three groups: the ones I’ve read (Ishiguro), the ones I would never read (Roth), and the ones I didn’t know anything about (Megan Abbott). Swinging through the Amazon on these vines, I eventually settled on Peter Cameron’s The City of Your Final Destination, a book that I knew that I owned in paper, but somehow hadn’t read.

It was a great treat, and I look forward (already) to reading it again someday. I was about to remark on Cameron’s lapidary style, but I was attacked by a doubt that lapidary might not be quite the word. Weighing and considering the online dictionary definitions, I realized that I was drawn to the word by its reminder of “lapping.” Cameron’s understated prose is beautifully cadenced, something that F L Lucas’s Style has taught me to appreciate more overtly. Although it never openly scans (breaks down, that is, into a classical meter, such as iambic pentameter), the following passage pulses, beneath its quite ordinary words, with the gathering excitement of an unexpected encounter.

The second intermission found them leaning against the Dress Circle balustrade, looking down upon the crowded Grand Tier promenade, discussing the sexual politics of trouser roles. There was an area below them separated off with a row of potted trees, beyond which people sat on conspicuous display at little tables idiotically eating desserts. Deirdre was about to make a comment about the absurd ostentation of this, when she thought she recognized a woman seated at one of the tables.

“…looking down upon the crowded Grand Tier promenade..”; “…beyond which people sat on conspicuous display…” — oh, for Lucas’s markings, which I don’t know how to reproduce on this machine. But when Deirdre speaks, the rhythm evaporates.

“I think I know that woman down there,” she said. “I want to go and say hello. Will you excuse me?”

“Sure,” said her companion. “I’m going to the men’s room. I’ll meet you back at our seats.”

“Okay,” said Deirdre. 

The woman is, as the reader fully expects, Caroline Gund, the French-born widow of an author about whom Deirdre’s former boyfriend, Omar Razaghi, once hoped to write an authorized biography. Deirdre met Caroline at her then home, Ochos Rios, in rural Uruguay, a place that she shared with her late husband’s brother (and his boyfriend) and mistress (and her daughter). Most of the novel takes place at that house, and its charms (and delapidations) are winkingly described, giving the place a charming but dreamlike uncertainty. From the moment she arrives at the house, summoned by Omar’s catastrophic reaction to a bee sting, Deirdre is not just a character but also a verbal bloc of antipathy to not just the irregularities but also the poetic possibilities of life at Ochos Rios. Whether or not she raises her voice, she is the prototypical braying American, and you can’t wait for her to leave the room. By the time you catch up with her at the opera, you might be ready to forgive her. But then she says that word that Caroline, very much the mistress of her second language, would never use, “okay.” Ladies don’t say “okay” at the opera. They don’t even think it. 

“Razaghi” may be an actual Iranian surname, but I kept reading it as ragazzo, Italian for “boy,” which Omar completely is, 100%. Until he goes to Ochos Rios, that is.

***

Kathleen is in a black car (perhaps it is silver), speeding along the Grand Central Parkway I should think, on her way to 99 Maple Avenue, in Bay Shore, a destination that the drivers seem to have trouble finding. Kathleen is no help. I still recall the first time I drove her home from law school. To the house that she was sharing with four other classmates, not far from campus and technically a part of it. “Which way?” I asked her, at a turn. Kathleen had no idea. She would get in someone’s car and be taken to and from Douglas House, paying absolutely no attention to the route. But of course I already knew where she lived. You may be sure of that. In case of difficulty today, I’ll have Google Maps up and ready.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 at 8:24 am.