Goodbye September

A good time for fiction ...

Driving into New York last month with family, we went around the car and listed our favorite and least favorite months. Predictably, all my favorites are bunched in winter but to the surprise of many my least favorite is September. It may be because it is my birthday month. It may be a hangover from my student days or the high anxiety that comes with the arrival of a new teaching year. While all this is true, the real suspect is the weather. September is fickle to say the least. You too often roast in Pasadena and waiting for that crisp fall day in New York can be a Godot moment. It disappoints. Finally, the movies are universally terrible as Oscar season remains a month away and culture as a whole seems to get buried in a back to school malaise. It is a good month for fiction.

The best book of the month was possibly the least fun to read but the most memorable and instructive. I stayed away from Trust by Hernando Diaz ever since the tidal wave of positive reviews began to arrive, leaving a Pulitzer Prize in its wake. I told people that, after a couple brief reads, it felt stilted and contrived, written by an academic about a world he clearly knew little about - finance. Finally, listening to him in Sun Valley pretty much sealed the deal as his diction was littered with English Department buzz words guaranteed to kill the “buzz”. But, September arrived. A humbling month in general littered with the anxiety of travel led me to suspect I had protested too much. I bought it and after an initial growing pain of doubt and a midsection that began to wear thin, I admitted I had been VERY wrong. While almost too clever, it is a stunning treatment of the silence that surrounds history and how and by whom that silence is manipulated. It is a powerful piece of feminist literature written not as a polemic but as a puzzle that is only fully revealed at the end. The writing, the structure and the four narratives are the stuff of post-modernism. This is the world of Paul Auster, John Banville and Don DeLillo. The post modern novel lives on a razor’s edge, its cleverness and all too conscious artistry always lies inches away from turning a piece of writing art into a pretentious waste of time. So many of the post modern enthusiasts end up writing and sounding like the kind of “gits” that sap literature of its potential to create wonder and insight. The Sun Valley Writer’s Conference was about the intersection where the reader and the writer engage. That intersection in the post modern world is too often occupied by only the writer and his artistic conceit. Though Diaz flirts with this and his invitation to the intersection is a bit chilly, the subjects (both the characters and the themes) prevail.

On the other side of the literary spectrum is the brief novel, Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane that I mentioned in my previous note. A trusted reader and critic who loves Lehane and knows the Boston of which she speaks, struggled with the “Marvel” or superhero traits of the unforgettable heroine, Mary Pat. That extraordinary name fits the equally arresting, terrifying world of Seventies South Boston that frames this gripping novel. All the characters work and if you “give” Lehane a bit of a break with the superhero evolution of Mary Pat (oh please … it might be my all-time favorite name), the book resonates in so many ways. Its relevance is rooted in Lehane’s graceful and nuanced treatment of the poisonous bigotry of the Southies. They are people and their hatred and fears are as human as they are inhumane. This is achieved with dialogue that erases the fourth wall of the printed page. It is a breathtaking literary version of cinema verite … Marvel and all.

Stuck on a little boat in a beautiful French canal, recovering from inferno heat, I needed another September novel. My cousin came to the rescue with a 2003 Pers Peterson novel, Out Stealing Horses. I had no background with this Norwegian writer beyond my cousin’s recommendation and the critically enthusiastic blurbs that I kept returning to as I tip-toed into this 264 page Scandinavian morality tale. Written with refreshing clarity and economy, Out Stealing Horses is a treasure. Maybe I was set up for it by the slowing of time that is a canal trip in a 30 foot fiberglass boat that barely squeezes through the flower festooned locks … or maybe I would have appreciated it’s literary merits in an airport. Regardless, Peterson writes a sometimes confusing but ultimately effective blend of a coming of age story and an old man’s memoir. His descriptions of the natural worlds of Norway provide both versions of his protagonist a canvas on which to paint a moving and honest series of sketches about what we want to know how we know it. The novel felt like a dip into the cold waters of the fjords … a long ways from the languid waters of a late summer canal trip in Brittany.

Thank you …