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May 27, 2004

MEET THE MINOTS

We don't often link to New York Times pieces anymore, mostly because they're pretty readily available, but we had take note of the fact that the entire Minot family appears to be without facial features, because only Susan's "blond hair and sculptured cheekbones" are worth mentioning ...

First, in 1986, Susan Minot published "Monkeys" (Dutton), a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories about an upper-middle-class New England family of seven children. The father is an alcoholic, and the mother dies in a car accident.

The book led to a "family freeze-out," Ms. Minot, now 47, said. When "Monkeys" was published, she recalled, some family members found the book insulting to her father, though he did not object to it himself. With her blond hair and sculptured cheekbones, Ms. Minot, then 29, became a literary celebrity, an icon of the new minimalism.

Then in 1999 Eliza Minot, now 34, published "The Tiny One" (Alfred A. Knopf), a benign account of the same events — the accident, the expensive vacations, the mansions overlooking the sea — from the point of view of the youngest child.

And now the first-born son, George, 44, has written the darkest tale of all, "The Blue Bowl" (Alfred A. Knopf), published in March. It is a murder mystery about a Minot-like family, in which one of the sons is accused of killing their father. And once again some of the Minots are in dispute with one another about using events from real life in fiction.

Posted at 12:17 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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