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June 15, 2004

SECOND LOOK

Jonathan Yardley's excellent series of second looks continues with this reappraisal of Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

The paperback copy on my shelves is a 46-year-old Bantam Fifty (because it cost 50 cents!) that fell apart about 20 pages into what I reckon as my third reading of it. I bought the book new in 1958 as a college student, read it then, and read it again in the early 1970s when I briefly presided over a church discussion group on religious themes in contemporary fiction. On both of these readings my response was highly favorable, if not outright passionate; my third reading is positive as well, though the novel's limitations -- chiefly its excessively programmatic treatment of religious themes -- come through rather more clearly to me now, perhaps because I have long since lost the adolescent fervor that, as Savigneau correctly points out, draws so many readers to McCullers's work.

"The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" is a very good novel, though, and in one respect it is astonishing: McCullers began work on it when she was 20 years old and published it, in 1940, when she was 23. Born Lula Carson Smith in 1917 in Columbus, a town in southwestern Georgia that inspired much of her fiction, she went to New York as a teenager, stumbled across a teacher at Columbia University who seems to have given her the great gift of literary discipline, met and married Reeves McCullers, an aspiring writer who had large ambition and small talent.

Posted at 12:10 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

    Bs

    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

    Rider_4

    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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