The Great Oregon Novel

What's The Great Oregon Novel?

To find out I contacted Literary Arts in Portland, an organization that runs a number of literary programs in Oregon.

Elizabeth Burnett, the Executive Director of Literary Arts, polled the staff.

The result? "On quick poll, the winner, hands-down, is Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion."

Here's the Wikipedia entry for the novel:

When the publication of his second novel Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964 required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed Furthur. This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Furthur Inquiry") was the group's attempt at making art out of everyday life. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Kerouac and to Allen Ginsberg, who in turn introduced them to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring Paul Newman and was nominated for two Academy Awards. (In 1972, Sometimes a Great Notion was the first film shown in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on a new television network called HBO.)

Kesey's first novel was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, perhaps more famous as the movie starring Jack Nicholson and winner of 8 Academy Awards.

For contemporary writers, Literary Arts sponsors The Oregon Book Awards, which are presented annually for the finest accomplishments by Oregon writers who work in genres of poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, drama and young readers literature. You can find a list of winners here.

And my favorite Oregon novel? Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, about which I'd like to tell you more, but: "The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club."

--Marshal Zeringue

For The Great Texas Novel, click here.
For The Great Louisiana Novel, click here.

Results in the search for German crime thrillers

On Monday I posted a general query about quality German crime thrillers and procedurals.

I also contacted Anja Seeliger, an editor at signandsight.com, an interesting site that monitors "arts, essays, ideas from Germany." I look in on signandsight every day and am usually rewarded.

Anja replied with some enlightening insights and great links:

Of course thrillers are very popular in Germany too. But as far as I know there are not many police procedurals. After years of old and ugly police officers in German tv series ("Derrick") the police in Germany is considered to be quite unsexy.

But of course there are some exceptions: Monika Geier (she has written three crime novels with a female police officer as leading character, all her novels are set in the German province), Astrid Paprotta, Friedrich Ani and the Austrian writer Wolfgang Haas. I have only read Monika Geier, whose books I liked very much. You find a bit more in English about the others here: http://www.litrix.de/magazin/panorama/ueberblick/en14147.htm
and here: http://www.new-books-in-german.com/featur48.htm

The authors, Tobias Gohlis and Thomas Wörtche, are the two best known critics of crime novels in Germany...both have websites:

http://www.togohlis.de/02impressum.htm
http://www.kaliber38.de/woertche.htm

Anja adds:

My preferred crimewriters - except of Monika Geier - are british (Liza Cody, Frances Fyfield etc.)

Many thanks to Anja Seeliger for the excellent leads and links. Check out her site at signandsight.com.

--Marshal Zeringue

Note: Special thanks to Friend of the Blog Cary Federman for recommending signandsight to me.

Philosophy and fiction: on "greed"

“Greed” is not only condemned in the Bible—“thou shall not covet…”—but by countless philosophers as well.

And yet, greed plays a considerable part in the foundation of our economic life and is certainly a major part of the reason many of us live a lot longer and more comfortably than did those in Aristotle’s time.

One could think about greed by scanning the Commandments, reading The Republic (where Plato confronts the legacy of aristocratic greed by designing a polis free from greed and injustice) or any number of other classical texts.

Or one could choose a story that illuminates the consequences—good and ill—of greed.

Until I can think of a contemporary novel that fits the bill, I’ll propose a parable from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Grushenka relates this parable to Alyosha in Chapter Three:

Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; 'She once pulled up an onion in her garden,' said he, 'and gave it to a beggar woman.' And God answered: 'You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.' The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. 'Come,' said he, 'catch hold and I'll pull you out.' he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. 'I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.' As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away.

Grushenka then says she is that old woman, and it's not quite clear if she is bragging--she simply wants to be known for something--or complaining about her character, a self-critique as an act of contrition.

Anyway, you can imagine some of the paths discussion of this passage would follow in freshman philosophy.

Some student might point out that it was indeed the old woman's onion, and that God had offered the deal to her only. So she was well within her rights to fight off the others grabbing for the onion.

Another might point out that these are souls, albeit souls in torment, and thus weigh nothing, so surely the onion could pull them all out if only the old woman didn't start fighting.

And was the fated outcome all part of God's plan anyway? That is, would God really make a mistake of tossing this woman in a lake of fire. Or if He didn't make a mistake, would He actually allow her a second chance (or is the false hope just another part of her torment)? What does all that say about Free Will?

Dostoevsky himself apparently loved this parable and saw it as an expression of the natural brotherhood and communitarianism of the Russian peasant. Greed, in this interpretation, is not only not good (i.e., productive) but it is also against the natural order of things.

But we Westerners, to varying degrees, think that greed is good: it's the foundation of our economy. Greed is a private vice that has considerable public benefits.

Discuss.

--Marshal Zeringue

Know of a work of contemporary fiction that’s a good spark for discussion on the topic of greed? Email me.

For earlier posts on the "Philosophy and fiction" theme, please see this item and this item.

What German crime thrillers am I missing?

I follow a few detective series, including: Michael Connelly's Los Angeles-based thrillers; Dennis Lehane's Boston-based Kenzie-Gennaro series; those of James Lee Burke, many of which are set in my home state of Louisiana.

Two of my favorites are Ian Rankin's "John Rebus" series set in Scotland (call them "Tartan Noir") and, set in England, the "Charlie Resnick" series by John Harvey.

I've even read some of the Henning Mankell's "Kurt Wallender" mysteries ("Swedish Noir"), now very popular in translation in America.

But I have no clue who might be the German (or Spanish or Italian or Japanese) counterparts of Rankin, Harvey, Connelly, and Mankell.

So, starting with the Germans, I'll do a little detective work of my own, snoop around, and report back soon.

Who is the premier writer of German police procedurals and crime thrillers?

Got any leads? Email me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryan Curtis on The Great Texas Novel

Bryan Curtis is deputy culture editor at Slate. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and educated at the University of Texas at Austin. Some of my favorite recent articles by him are about Larry the Cable Guy, New York Times columnist Frank Rich, and magician-comedian-writer Penn Jillette.

In addition to a few promising leads for my search for The Great Texas novel, Bryan offered a couple of contenders of his own:

I can't claim to have surveyed Texas lit as thoroughly as I would have liked. Not that there's that much to like--Larry McMurtry wrote a semi-famous essay a few years ago about how puny the state's literary achievements were. The most frequent cites for "best novel" are McMurtry's own early books (The Last Picture Show, most prominently) or Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place, which is a roman a clef about the author's years working for Lyndon Johnson. (If you like All the King's Men, you'll love this. It's much better-written.)

I know about McMurtry but The Gay Place was new to me. Maybe it shouldn't be, what with some high praise from people who ought to know about these things.

Willie Morris called The Gay Place a "symphony of politics and sex and ambition and the immense Texas landscape [that] remains the great authentic modern novel we have yet of the state."

David Halberstam ranked it alongside All the King's Men in a rave review in the New York Times Book Review in 1961 and predicted it would be read "a hundred years from now."

More recently, Mark Costello refers to it in this review as a sort of reference point for Waterloo by Karen Olsson, a 2005 novel soaked in Texas politics.

For the reprint version of The Gay Place, Don Graham, J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor at The University of Texas, wrote a very insightful introduction that is available online.

(About the title, Graham writes: "The title, of course, sounds faintly archaic now, the word 'gay' having undergone a permanent sea change within just a few short years of the book's publication.")

Thanks to Bryan for the help and the insights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five novels that made Penelope Fitzgerald's list

Penelope Fitzgerald, as I've noted before, is one of my favorite writers.

The year before her death she shared with Salon.com a short list of books that touched her.

"With each one of these novels I thought, as soon as I'd read the first page, This is it," she wrote. "It's difficult to argue about this, although I've sometimes had to, but in reading many hundreds of novels, some of them very good, I've had the sensation quite rarely."

--Marshal Zeringue

Best adapted screenplay?

In 1994 Vintage Books came out with a 36-page collection of ten W.H. Auden poems titled Tell Me the Truth About Love. Soaring demand for the poems was not a consequence of Auden's death—he had already been dead 20 years—but because one of the poems, "Funeral Blues," written in 1936 as a song for a play, was memorably featured in the hit movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Auden's literary executor, Edward Mendelson, said that four months after the movie's premiere he was still getting "phone calls three times a day asking, 'Where can I buy that poem?'"

(A bookstore?)

If Brokeback Mountain wins the Oscar on Sunday night—and it should, say the oddsmakers--hopefully interested readers won't attempt to contact E. Annie Proulx. They can pop over to their favorite bookstore and pick up Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the collection in which "Brokeback Mountain" appears.

Here's what Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote about the work back in 1999.

At the start of ''Brokeback Mountain,'' the volume's strongest story, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ''high school dropout country boys with no prospects,'' find themselves passionately attracted to each other sexually one summer while looking after sheep on Brokeback Mountain. But they know that in Wyoming ''them guys you see around sometimes'' have had their heads beaten in with tire irons. So they try marrying women and living normal lives, and seeing each other only on annual so-called fishing trips.

''Years on years they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the Gallatins, Absakoras, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and over again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback.'' Two cowboys making love.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philosophy and fiction redux

Last week I posted the first salvo in a series on philosophy and fiction. There will be more on the site in the future from philosophers, theorists, and maybe their students, who have learned something about philosophy from novels.

This post isn't about any particular idea from a novel but rather an elaboration on the general idea of using fiction to do philosophy, this time as practiced by the philosopher Colin McGinn.

In my first post I wrote how I read Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire in a freshman philosophy class. The idea was we might think in a new way about how to live the good life if we consider how immortality might alter our perspective.

McGinn, ruminating on Paul Auster's Timbuktu and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone, suggests we might think about the good life differently if we considered it from the point of view of a dog (Auster's book) or elephants (Gowdy's).

I have been trying studiously to imagine a world dominated by smells rather than visual scenes. Both dogs and elephants, as here depicted, take note of how un-olfactory us "two-leggers" are--maybe, indeed, that is the root of so much of our easy cruelty, our distance from the realities of flesh and death and fear. Vision is a relatively clinical sense, marvelously rich in data presented, but it lacks the earthiness of smell, the reality of chemicals, and the air that contains them. How much harder and weightier to kill something with the stench of its mortal fear in your nostrils than if its blood is just a scarlet liquid with no olfactory resonance!

Novels like these, McGinn argues, expand our sympathies in other ways. In Auster's book,

Mr. Bones spends most of his time relieving the unhappiness of his human friends: first, the lonely homeless poet Willy Christmas, who dies with his dog by his side; then Henry, the young Asian boy with the coldly strict father (who might, Mr. Bones fears, one day serve him up in a Chinese dish of some sort); finally Polly, the housebound suburban mother with the remote and rigid husband who won't allow the dog in the house. The dog is separated from each of his "masters" in turn, and their need for him is at least as his for them. Enabling us to see these humans through a dog's eyes helps us gain a fresh perspective on human society and human limitation. Just think of the amount of untold comfort animals have given humans; then remember the infinities of pain, fear, and death we have inflicted on them.

It is not only moral philosophy (how to be good) and political philosophy (how we should live with others) that this fictional animal-world can help us with; McGinn also uses it as a platform for thinking about consciousness:

Philosophers…have often debated whether animals have thoughts, with Descartes famously insisting that only the human head is host to real thinking. Language has been taken to be the mark of rationality, and rationality as the precondition of thought. I have never seen the force of this position: The consciousness of animals (at least some of them--take chimps) is as thought-laden as many a human's. What else could be going on in there?

But even being "thought-laden" still leaves a pretty big gap between humans and other animals. The interesting question is not if animals think but what non-human animals think about. That is, humans are capable of all kinds of idealizations and abstractions—what is heaven? What is a plane figure formed by connecting three points not in a straight line by straight line segments? Do animals have this capability? McGinn—like most of us—doubts it. (Please—no email from dissenting dog-lovers.) The difference is important, though it doesn't make us better off than animals in every way:

Neither dogs nor elephants are comforted, or troubled, by thoughts of the perfect life beyond the grave. Reality is just what they see around them, not some shadowy adjacency. I think animals understand death and I think they also know they will die (they just need to make an elementary induction from what they witness all the time). But I don't think that they envisage a life beyond this life. Frankly, I envy them. I can conceive of such a life, and I am attracted to it; but I just don't believe there is any such thing.

Who knew there could be so much to think about based on a couple of novels built around the inner- and social-lives of dogs and elephants?

McGinn's reflections leave off with a gift—or is it a challenge?—to the philosophically-inclined wannabe-novelist who is looking for the germ of a story:

I happened to be speaking to Oliver Sacks the other day about one of his favorite animals, the octopus. These animals are short-lived (two years he told me), can grow to an enormous size, and have a highly developed nervous system. We know little of them because they live so deep, but there is every reason to believe they have a rich mental life. What do they think about? Can they imagine? No doubt they remember and can compare the present with the past: What pangs of emotion are produced in them by this fundamental cognitive capacity? What metaphors, if any, shape their conception of their watery world? I wish someone would come along and tell me an octopus story but perhaps that is beyond the imaginative capacity or a merely human writer. It might end up sounding like you or me equipped with long tentacles and a live-fast-die-young mentality. Dear octopus, tell us your story--we are all ears ...

Take it away…

--Marshal Zeringue

A note on Colin McGinn:
McGinn, who recently joined the faculty of the University of Miami, is one of those thinkers who does cutting edge philosophy that only specialists understand and who also discusses ideas in a way accessible to curious amateurs. His The Making of a Philosopher is one of the more enjoyable nonfiction books I've read this century and I highly recommend it. (For fans of the movie The Matrix, I also recommend the McGinn essay at this site.)

The Making of a Philosopher reminded me of R.G. Collingwood's An Autobiography, a slim book I read over 20 years ago and have mostly forgotten except for its clarity in showing how an original idea develops in a first rate mind. McGinn's evolution as a philosopher started with his training in psychiatry; Collingwood's developed along with his archeological studies and fieldwork.

A literary thriller for fans of Syriana

In 2005 one of my favorite films was Syriana and one of my favorite books was The Unknown Soldier by Gerald Seymour.

If you like one, my bet is you would enjoy the other. And even if you are unlike Roger Ebert and didn't like Syriana, I think there's a good chance you might enjoy The Unknown Soldier.

Both have multiple story lines which intersect in interesting ways, and both are international thrillers with plot lines that are, unfortunately, all too plausible.

I don't read many books, fiction or nonfiction, involving terrorism--seeing it the daily papers and on the news is enough--but this novel is very nicely plotted with well-crafted characters.

Jonathan Yardley reviewed The Unknown Soldier for the Washington Post. You can read the whole review here, but I want to underscore his final paragraph:

The Unknown Soldier is being marketed as a "thrillingly suspenseful novel from one of the world's masters of espionage fiction," which is accurate enough and presumably will do it good in the bookstores, but it sells the book short. Like the work of other writers to whom Seymour is somewhat predictably compared--Charles McCarry, Robert Littell, Alan Furst and, of course, John le Carré--The Unknown Soldier is more than a thriller. In time, events will outpace it, and the specifics of its plot will lose their immediacy, but the deeper matters with which Seymour concerns himself will retain their pertinence and importance. Today's and tomorrow's events are the framework around which the novel is constructed, but it is about people, not bombs. It is about why people do what they do, believe what they do, love and hate as they do. Psychologically it is acute and sensitive. If this is merely "genre fiction," then perhaps we need to take a closer look at what we rather smugly call "literature."

Rather than go on about the book, I'll suggest this 1-minute video of the author describing what the book is about.

Both of Seymour's parent's were published writers--which is why, he has said, he never thought of becoming one himself as he was growing up. Instead he became a war correspondent and only turned to fiction when another journalist, Frederick Forsyth, hit it big with The Day of The Jackel. "That really hit the newsrooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller."

If he got off to a delayed start he's not dawdled since: Seymour has published over 20 novels in the last thirty years.

--Marshal Zeringue

Note: Special thanks to Friend of the Blog Kurt van der Walde for recommending this novel to me.

The greatest Booker Prize injustices

Q. If you could abolish one thing in the book world, what would it be?

A. Literary prizes — they wrongly encourage seeing literature as a contest or a news story. They’ve got to go.

--the novelist Jonathan Coe, with wonderful timing, in a TV interview aired just before his life of B.S. Johnson won the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize.

So it may be crass to pay undue attention to literary prizes. Nevertheless, I'm usually curious how they turn out. (I watch the Oscars, too.)

And the award I watch the closest is The Man Booker Prize, open to any full-length novel written by a citizen of the (British) Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published in the award year. The novel must be an original work in English (not a translation) and must not be self-published.

A complete list of winners and short-listed novels can be found here.

I've read fewer than half the novels short-listed for the Booker, and I've never read all the short-listed novels for any given year. The closest I've come is having read four of the six 2005 nominees and four of the six 1990 nominees.

Not having read all the nominees does not prevent me from sharing some thoughts on past contests, however.

2005. I liked the winner, The Sea by John Banville, and his 1997 The Untouchable is a favorite of mine. But I also enjoyed Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and, had I been a judge, I probably would have voted for Julian Barnes' Arthur & George.

2001. I didn't read the winner, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, though I do very much like and admire three of his earlier novels. Ian McEwan's Atonement, which may be the best novel written in the last 25 years that I've read, lost out. The petty side of me is outraged, but I guess the reasonable thing is to first read the Carey book before giving vent to my disappointment.

2000 and 1999. I read only the winners--Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (2000) and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999)--and thought they were excellent. Disgrace may be the bleakest, most soul-crushing great novel I've ever read.

1998. I read the winner, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam as well as two of the other nominated novels, and liked them all. I was glad to see Amsterdam win; the interesting angle for me in 1998 was that McEwan published another novel, Enduring Love, and I had a slight preference for it over Amsterdam.

Part 2 of this post is coming soon.

Meanwhile, do you have a bad Booker beat? Share your story/rage: email me.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Great Louisiana Novel

The best novel set in Louisiana is Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. It takes place (mostly) in New Orleans in the late 1950s during Carnival week--and, coincidentally, today happens to be Mardi Gras.

But the Great Louisiana Novel is the second best novel set in my native state: All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947.

Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, characterized All the King's Men as

certainly one of the finest American novels. The story of the archetypal Southern populist Willie Stark and his tortured aide, Jack Burden, is emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically unforgettable.

Warren did not describe his story as a political novel. He wrote, "The book was never intended to be a book about politics. Politics merely provided the framework story in which the deeper concerns, whatever their final significance, might work themselves out."

But it is about politics; complex, vivid characters digging up dirt, following orders, seducing and scheming. Perhaps uniquely in American novels, "All the King's Men" portrays people with big, complicated public lives who have even bigger, more complicated inner lives; "deeper concerns."

And here's a summing up that plays a little reckless with the terms "fascist" and "henchman" yet gives Warren his due:

All the King's Men was the most widely read [of Warren's novels] and generated the strongest critical and popular reception. The novel chronicles the rise and fall of a homegrown fascist, Willie Stark, as told by one of his henchmen, Jack Burden. Its first readers praised its treatment of the political processes of democracy as practiced in the South of the 1930s. More recent studies have stressed its innovative structure and its philosophical subtlety. It is the novel in which Warren's special gifts are most in evidence--his sense of history, his inventive language, and his ability to dramatize a large cast of characters against a vividly realized background. --From American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Perhaps Willie Stark is "a homegrown fascist" but his character and career is closely modeled on that of Huey P. Long, Depression-era governor of Louisiana, a radical populist much beloved by many Louisianans—like my grandfather, who ate little more than potatoes during those years—who admired and benefited from Long's progressive measures.

* * * * *
The criteria for the Great [Your State Here] novel—I'm making this up as I go—are (1) the writer must be a native of or closely identified with the state, (2) the novel must be a great (or, at least, acclaimed) literary achievement and (3) capture a signal period in the state's history.

For the Southern novels/states, that signal period might well be identified by failure or struggle rather than success, growth or optimism. As Walker Percy said in 1962, there was so much good writing from the South "because we lost the war"—because defeat forced the white South to confront human fallibility in ways the rest of the country never had.

Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky and spent only a part of his life in Louisiana, yet he did live there when he wrote All the King's Men. It is a deservedly acclaimed novel: #36 on the Modern Library's list 100 Best novels. And it depicts the life of the most famous and most influential governor in the history of the state.

By the criteria I set, is it fair to declare Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (#6 on the Modern Library list) to be the Great Mississippi Novel?

And what is the Great Alabama Novel? My guess would be To Kill a Mockingbird. (While a huge popular favorite not only in America but in places like Japan and Australia as well, the general critical acclaim isn't as high as for the other books mentioned here.)

And the Great New York Novel? I would propose William Kennedy's brilliant Albany series, the first of which, Ironweed, makes the Modern Library list at #92.

--Marshal Zeringue

Would Orwell and Marx have blogged?

There's a lengthy article over at the Financial Times about the promise (over-hyped) and peril (over-hyped) of blogs.

The article is too long for me to actually recommend, but I thought it was worth sharing the answers of a few prominent bloggers to the query: Would "Karl Marx or George Orwell, two enormously potent political writers who were also journalists, ... have blogged if the medium had been available to them?"

“We’re sure Marx and Orwell would have blogged,” said Heather and Jessica of gofugyourself.com. “When it comes right down to it, blogs reach the greatest amount of people in the least amount of time, and they reach the very people Marx and Orwell wanted to speak to most.”

“Orwell, definitely,” said Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds. “Marx would have had to acquire a bit more ‘snap’, I’m afraid, to have made it as a blogger.”

“Orwell maybe,” said [the original Wonkette, Ana Marie] Cox. “Orwell was pathologically productive. He never doubted himself, that’s for sure. And maybe he shares that trait with many bloggers.”

The odd couple; or, My favorite two books of 1995.

In my about the blogger post I claim to be "fairly confident of being the only person who believes the two best novels published in 1995 were The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald and American Tabloid by James Ellroy."

While those two books are very different in style and writing and subject matter, I actually can imagine a great many readers admiring both of them--because they are such quality books--but I would be surprised if they were #1 and #2 on anyone else's list.

Incidentally, other notable books of 1995 include:

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker.
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth.
Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin.
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson.
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson.

How about you: have you got an odd-couple of favorite books from any particular year (or decade)?

--Marshal Zeringue

Philosophy and fiction

If you haven't been around a university lately you might be surprised to learn that novels are often used to get students to think about philosophy.

The idea is that you can tell people how to live the good life (see, for example, the Ten Commandments), but these first principles often lack the power of a good story (see, for example, all those parables in the Bible).

Many years ago I took an introductory philosophy course in which we read Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, an excellent way to start an investigation of how to live the good life and how one's view might be altered if he was immortal.

I'm no philosopher but if I was ever to teach an introduction to philosophy course I think I would assign Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers. Pnin may be his most accessible work, and it's the one he wrote between his two masterpieces, Lolita and Pale Fire.

And, like the two better and better known novels, Pnin is about cruelty (or callousness, a distinction worth making, as this intelligent critique suggests). Pnin is also about compassion, which might seem banal to point out since it's the antonym of cruelty; but Lolita and Pale Fire are also about cruelty and less manifestly about compassion.

So, we have a novel one might use to teach about immortality and another that can be mined for a discussion about cruelty/compassion.

I wonder what other novels are getting a workout in philosophy class....

--Marshal Zeringue

UPDATE: see the March 2, 2006 sequel to this post.

Twice-told tales

I’m always curious about novels that re-work a classic story … and do it well.

Here are just a few off-the-cuff examples of novels I loved that owe a heavy debt to a classic work:

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a brilliant novel that echoes Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, which tells the story of the convict in Dickens’ Great Expectations who sets in motion that story but is largely absent from its pages.

Marianne Wiggins’ John Dollar, an all-girl version of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. *

And of course there is the (somewhat playful) homage that Joyce's Ulysses pays to Homer's Odyssey.

In future posts--and in this article--I hope to revisit these particular novels and to come up with other interesting examples of contemporary fiction based on classic stories.

One case that I don't really regard of this category is Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which many reviewers insist is patterned on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway even though McEwan has denied any such inspiration.

--Marshal Zeringue

*An interesting note. Terrific books that they are, I would be surprised to hear someone say that Smiley's or Carey's books were superior to their inspirations. I would even be surprised to learn that Smiley or Carey thought that. But novelist Anne Tyler, writing in The New Republic, has indeed made that claim for Wiggins' book: "John Dollar is a grisly story, all right. It's the kind where you're reading cheerily along and you suddenly say, Wait. They did what? And you go back and read again to make sure, and the truth finally hits you with a sickening punch to the stomach. But precisely what gives the punch its oomph is that you were, indeed, reading cheerily along, up until that unexpected moment. Lord of the Flies was more predictable, more relentless; it was, in my opinion, not half as thoughtful a piece of work."

About the blogger

Marshal Zeringue is the founding editor of the Campaign for the American Reader network, including Lit Lists, New Books, Author Interviews, The Page 69 Test, My Book, The Movie, The Page 99 Test, Writers Read and HEPPAS Books.

About the blog

The goal of this blog is to inspire more people to spend more time reading books. I'll try to do that by shining a little light on books that I like and think others might find worthy of their time and attention.

I'll also ask some interesting people about what books they find interesting or useful.

Most of us don’t need any encouragement to read more—we need more time.

Yet encouragement does work for many people; and if you doubt that claim, I have two syllables for you: O-prah.

And it’s not only Oprah, who created regular readers out of a mulitude of the otherwise idle, who has this power. Many of us read what we read because someone recommended it to us.

With regular postings we hope not to merely recommend worthwhile books but to intrigue you, to give you some reason to seriously consider these books.

Not every book discussed will be to your taste—we’ll range from the high-lowbrow to the low-highbrow, and cover fiction as well as nonfiction—but I hope enough of what you see here will stimulate your interest.

Marshal Zeringue