Thoughts at the halfway point of You & I

This is another book with plenty of questions marks in from Padgett Powell.

Just like the Interrogative Mind there are lots of questions being asked. But here there are answers as this is a dialogue between two men.

They are not old but neither are they young and their views range far and wide.

It's strange, fun and probably not going to come to much of a conclusion. But we will see...

book review: Generation of Swine by Hunter S. Thompson

"There is all the action you want, from time to time - but in the main it is a dull and dreary life, like journalism."

It takes a long time to get the style of this column and by the time you get it the next emotion is disappointment that he is not around now writing about the current Presidential race and the madness of US politics.

The reason it takes so long to get into the book is because it is badly dated and limited to a US national outlook that does not chime with a UK readership. The events being written about in the column that HST penned for two years for the San Francisco Examiner cover the years of 1987 and 1988.

Reagan is president and coming to the end of his period in the White House. He has become immersed in the Oliver North Iran/Contra scandal but because of his clear dementia he has little chance of being impeached. That leaves the mess potentially impacting the Bush run at the presidency and towards the end of this collection of columns it has become clear that Bush has sidestepped the scandal and looks set for the Republican nomination.

So much of the columns focuses on the runners and riders in both the Democrat and Republican parties with professional gambler HST giving the odds and the forecasts of what will happen.

But that and to a degree the mentions of topical foreign policy are not really the parts of the book that work now. They have not traveled well and I suspect even a modern day US reader would struggle to connect the references.

So having admitted that the content is usually dated, of limited value to an overseas reader you might wonder what on earth this collection of columns has to offer.

The answer is to do with style because what these fairly consistent length pieces do is pin HST down to a weekly deadline and a word count that forces him to be tight. Sometimes he is repetitive in the way he starts the columns indicating that he rather liked a pattern that perhaps killed off quickly 40 or 50 words. But it also allows him to show off his ability to deliver a heady mix of allegory, humour and accurate insight into people and events.

The allegory took me a while to get but that is the part that grows throughout the book and when you read these columns you realise that if it was talken literally then law suits and a swift end to the series would have followed.

This is not the best place to get a feel for HST, it's not even a good book in the sense of a reading experience but it has something to offer and there is a reward for trudging through the historical policitical references.

book review: Falconer by John Cheever

"He wanted to cry and howl. he was among the living dead. There were no words, no living words, to suit this grief, this cleavage. he was primordial man confronted with romantic love. His eyes began to water as the last of the visitors, the last shoe, disappeared."

This is not a particularly easy story to read. The tale of a man who kills his brother, is addicted to drugs and ends up in prison is not perhaps the ideal way to create a scenario and character that will lead to reader's hearts. But you find yourself on the side of Farragut despite all these things.

He describes how and why he became addicted to drugs - fed them during the war and then existence in a society that seems to be drugging the population in some form or other - and you find yourself half agreeing with him. Ironically it's prison that managed to make him clean after expensive clinics and therapists have failed to do the job.

There is also a well developed reveal of the murder with it clear that the relationship between the brothers is a strained one and the murder victim did to a degree ask for some sort of confrontation. That doesn't excuse the killing but it does allow you to side with Farragut when he describes it as exaggerated and an accident.

But that is all in the past and this story starts with the main character entering prison. The vivid description of the prison, the misery of confinement and the struggles to cope with the routine are all written brilliantly. As Farragut slips into a battle to keep his sanity and finds love in the arms of a prisoner who manages to escape the future looks bleak. His wife displays little chance of providing love and most of those prisoners and guards around him are struggling with their own emotional problems.

A riot at another prison ushers in a period of tension that provides Farragut with a chance to place himself in the heart of the community in F wing. He spends most of his time wandering through the memories of the past. Perhaps it is that process which encourages the sort of introspection that can lead to a life being turned around. Just as he breaks his dependence on drugs and methadone it is a more profound break with himself that prison provides.

Sure this is dark, sometimes brutal in its description of the world of the incarcerated and it has the power to shock. But what I will remember is the power of the writing, being taken on a journey that delivered from start to finish and an introduction to a writer I intend to read much more of.

Thoughts at the halfwaypoint of Falconer

When a book is described as 'The great American novel' it sets expectations. Naturally you start reading expecting to be impressed by the writing but it perhaps makes you read it with an open mind. If a book is great it's rather pleasing to come to that conclusion yourself rather than being told from the start.

Still getting past the blurb, and not having read any Cheever before, my mind was still fairly open. It didn't remain that way for long as the description, character and plot started to emerge.

This is a really good read. From the moment it starts describing the statue above the entrance to the prison and court house you are drawn into the dirty desperate world of the convict. That Farragut has killed his own brother is made clear from close to the outset as is his drugs problem. It also becomes clear that as a former college professor he is not the usual type that ends up in the Falconer Correctional Facility.

That Facility unfolds before the reader as Cheever takes you through the halls, cells and visitor rooms. he does so brilliantly.

bit by bit Farragut starts to face the prospect of losing his sanity. The drug addiction is a major problem but so is he sense of abandonment from people, life and love. He takes another prisoner as a lover and by the halfway point seems to have settled into some sort of equilibrium. But whether or not he can stay there is another matter.

A full review will come on completion soon

Reading on the fly

It can be cold, a baby can scream for what seems like hours and the food can be inedible. But one guaranteed joy of flying a fairly long distance is the chance it gives you to read.

As the hours stretch out before you the chance to lose yourself in a book without the worry that the phone or internet will distract you is something rather wonderful.

These days it's very rare for me to fly but when it happens I pack the books and enjoy every second of the reading time.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Generation of Swine

This is a collection of columns that Hunter S Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner over a two year period back in the 1980s.

As you can imagine because these were topical weekly columns written for a local readership they have not all aged or translated well to a wider more modern readership.

What dates it fairly quickly are the regular political references to politicians and campaigns that have in some cases faded into the ether or were not things that managed to make a dent on the memory in the first place.

The second issue is trying to relate to a column that is referring to news events that barely registered a blip on the UK news radar even at the time of them happening.

So aside from these problems what you are left with is the writing. it is the usual HST fare with fabulous tales of drinking, madness, guns and politicians.

In some cases you find it hard to believe what he says took place actually happened - starting with the first column where his girlfriend gets a tattoo just so he has something to write about - but that of course is the way you have to read this stuff. You need to believe it happened, or at the very least suspend your disbelief, because if you go with him then this is very entertaining.

But I'm finding half way in that it is the problems with the way this collection of columns really hasn't aged well that is causing me problems and finishing it will be a relief.

book review: The Rich Boy by F.Scott Fitzgerald

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where they we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are."

Fitzgerald knows how to tell a story. He knows how to introduce a reader to am world of the very rich. But he also knows how to deliver in the short story format, which is something he does again here well in these three stories.

The title story follows the life of Anson Hunter, a very rich man who struggles to value true love. Finding someone to love him is not too difficult but realising its real, not something that can be bought and replaced, is something he understands only after he has lost it. B ut this is a man not used to losing anything so he carries on looking to find or even better the love he has thrown away.

just as you think he has realised his mistakes, particularly when he is confronted by the past, he throws off the depression and listlessness that might befall people without his background and sets off again on the merry-go round of courting someone unable to give him the genuine love he needs.

Love is the theme again in The Bridal Party as an American living in Paris comes face-to-face with his old lover. Michael Curly stumbles across Caroline as she strolls along with her fiance and over the course of a few days he manages to befriend her again after a gap and declare his love. Her husband-to-be loses his considerable fortune in the 1929 stock market crash just as the wedding draws near. But this is still not a chance for Curly to get his girl back.

He comes into some inheritance but he doesn't have the luck or the imagination of the rich man who has fallen on hard times who looks like not only bouncing back immediately but also getting his girl.

"This show will cost Ham about five thousand dollars, and I understand they'll be just about his last. But did he countermand a bottle of champagne or a flower? Not he! He happens to have it - that young man. Do you know that T.G. Vance offered him a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year ten minutes before the wedding this morning? In another year he'll be back with the millionaires."

The final story, The Last of the Belles, is also about love and the mess that some people get into. An army base in the deep south is distracted by the three local beauties that compete for the hearts of the soliders getting ready to go off and fight in France. The main character is introduced to one, Allie Calhoun and develops a friendship with her. It remains platonic and he becomes an observer to the way Allie flirts with several men looking for the one that might be worth marrying. Thoughtful and strong types are replaced with the adventurous and arrogant but she remains closed off to them all.

Years later the narrator heads back and discovers she has married a local rich man. As he searches for the long since knocked down army base, he is perhaps also looking in vain for the lost youth he wasted being a friend of Allie Calhoun.

You don't have to like the characters that Fitzgerald writes about, or harbour ambitions to be that wealthy, to understand that the themes he is writing about are universal. Loving and losing is something that people of all backgrounds so. It's just that in the world of the very rich there is a weakness from the failure to understand love is not a commodity that can be paid for. That weakness makes it more tragic when someone like Anson, who seems to have it all, in fact has very little which is becoming even less as he faces a lonely old age.

The name Fitzgerald is always said in the same breath as The Great Gatsby, but as this book proves yet again people should read his short stories.

Thoughts at the half way point of The Rich Boy

Fitzgerald is best known for The Great Gatsby and the title story in this collection of three short stories introduces someone who also has great wealth.

With wealth seems to come unhappiness, a restlessness that prevents Anson Hunter from finding happiness. He has the looks, the career, the income and the life he wants but his inability to commit to the one woman he really loves means he cannot find the love he seeks.

The result is that Hunter becomes even larger than life, turns more to the bottle and struggles even harder to inspire the love he seeks himself in others. It works and another relationship is formed but again he lets the woman go and ends up reading about the marriage in the society pages.

Despiute the great wealth tyou are left feeling a slight symapthy for XX. Not too much because he has inspired his own problems, but enough to make you realise that being rich does not always mean happiness.

There are two other stories in this book which I am looking forward to and will mention those in the full review, which should be posted tomorrow.

book review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

“If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.”

There is something rather hynotic about finding out what happened to people from your past. It explains the success of sites like Facebook and Friends Reunited as people look for clues to what became of their old flames and friends.

There is also a dual attraction of getting to fast forward through someone's life if the absence of contact has been a long one and so you can go from college friend to their middle age in just a clik and a read of their activity.

That dual desire is something that gets tapped into here at both levels. Minor characters who we meet perhaps just for one chapter get their life story told for us before they go, so for instance we find out that people chase or fail to get their dreams, before we get back to the main few characters.

The two main people the book focuses on are Bennie,l a record producer and his PA Sasha. They both have problems, his perhaps one of growing old in a young person's world and her's a kleptomania that points to deeper problems from her past.

Starting with those two sharing alternate chapters the style is to roll it out to reveal more of their pasts as different characters come into play. So as we find out about Bennie being in a band we are in turn introduced to the main band members. That then reveals the influences on Bennie and fill in the blanks of his past.

Likewise with Sasha we get to see her through the eyes of old boyfriends and family as she spends a troubled youth scraping by around the world using theft and guile to survive.

Their are coincidences, moments that perhaps seem too convienent but then again that's what makes the story work so I'm not complaining.

There is also a sense that moments that shape us when young can stay with us forever and that is both a positive and a negative. The world is changing and that also provides problems for Bennie and Sasha. The music industry isn't what it is and at the end the 'pointers' who download and listen to their music on devices using their fingers are the ones dominating the landscape.

The book has recieved a lot of praise but I'm not sorry having delayed reading this because it provided a chance to come to it in the quietness after the first rush of reaction had died down.

I enjoyed it, found some of its perhaps a bit too structured, but overall will remember it for its challenge to look at your own life and think about the story you are writing for those friends and old acquaintances to stumble across on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Bookmark of the week

Another one from the National Gallery in London. This is simply called Tiger by Sam Everitt.

Thoughts at the half way point of a Visit From the Goon Squad

Think of a daisy chain of people all holding hands that eventually meets back in a circle.

This feels like that as it charts the lives of record producer Bennie and his PA Sasha.

As you read about them and their pasts you then pick up the story from another characters history. This goes on in a way that creates its own rhythm.

It's a fun read in terms of living back through the years when vinyl mattered and punk rocked.

Quite where it will end is hard to predict but the journey getting there is an enjoyable one.

Reading plans for the rest of the month

It might have started to become obvious but the reading plans for this month are all around American writers. I have to travel to the US for work next week and so am taking a few books with me that represent writers from that country.

The trip has been on my mind for a while so it perhaps influenced the decision to take off the shelf and dust down the Vonnegut and McCarthy I started the month with.

Whenever I go away if possible I try to take a writer to read from that country and ideally from the place I am going to. In this case I sadly didn't have the time to research and plan to take books by writers from Boston but hope that a range of American writers will provide an interesting backdrop to my stay.

book review: Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

"It was quiet in the room. After a while the man behind his desk lowered his hands and folded them in his lap. Mr Ballard, he said. You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it."

What you get with McCarthy is a world that is undefined. You don't get the specifics of time, the lack of quotation marks means speech blurs into thoughts and actions and it's not always clear where the line between wrong and right starts and ends.

The result is a reading experience that challenges you to stick with a main character who over time becomes a serial killer and a necrophiliac. Lester Ballard is introduced as a man about to lose his home to auction. After that he becomes a wanderer and lives in a shack until he stumbles across a couple that have committed suicide in a car. Their last act before the fumes overtook them was to make love and it is the naked couple that Ballard discovers.

You can tell he is struggling to control his emotions as he goes to and from the car stealing money, drink and eventually after several return visits entering new dark territory by stealing the female corpse. This becomes his possession both sexually and in terms of company as he dresses her and lies with her by the fireside in his shack.

Accused wrongly of rape a spell in jail reintroduces Ballard to the local law enforcement and you sense he will meet them again later as his killing spree grows.

He doesn't stumble across a couple dead in a car again so he has to put the death into the situation shooting out with his rifle and taking the female corpses back to a cave he lives in after his shack burns down.

As he slides into madness and starts wearing female clothes he becomes even more isolated from reality. This is deepened by deep snows, then a flood which cuts Ballard off from the town. That gives the madness time to take hold but his luck runs out when he tries to shoot the owner of his old home and comes off second best in a rifle versus shotgun fight.

But Ballard never quite faces up to his crimes and just as in other McCarthy novels the question of whether he should have felt guilt is one that the reader is left to wrestle with.

"You think people was meaner then than they ware now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town.
No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the from the day God first made one."

Although very readable this is not a pretty work of fiction in terms of subject matter and the images you are left with are earth, caves, corpses, rifles and the worse kind of sex. I'm trying to work out quite what enjoying this read means about me.

Chance for unpublished authors with ebook prize

Reading the Metro on the way into work saw a news in brief mentioning the Kidwell-e-Ebook Awards (that rolls off the tongue) which is a new literary prize.

The awards are part of a two day ebook festival taking place in August. More details of that can be found clicking here

I guess some will shrug their shoulders and bemoan the addition of yet another lit prize to the calendar but if it does promote as intended unpublished as well as established authors it could be interesting.

Over the second half of last year I managed to read some books that were either first publications for some writers or in a couple of cases things that had not yet received mainstream publication. Those writers were very keen for their work to get an airing and so for the unpublished and new writers this prize could offer a real showcase for their work and that will be a positive.

Got to be careful here as I am yet to join the ebook revolution so can't really talk too much about that side of reading but you would hope the awards would take in to account innovative use of the format and quality. The worry is that with digital data available it could just become a 'who got the most downloads' award.

Anyway that's my comment on the news, combined with some useless musings.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Child of God

Going into the world of Cormac McCarthy is always dark, earthy and usually disturbing in the graphical portrayal of violence and sex.

Child of God delivers all of that but you find yourself sticking with the main character Lester Ballard as he loses his house, becomes a peripheral player on the edges of society and reason and ends up living in a shack in the wilds.

Lester is not a good guy but as he is first introduced he is as thee rest of us a 'child of god'.

Quite what will become of the semi vagrant Lester out in the woods with his rifle is what keeps you reading.