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July 19, 2005

MORE FATHERS AND SONS

Best wishes and all good thoughts to Mark and his family. Yesterday’s post about his father’s illness was saddening and sobering. Most of us will have to face this at some point (if we haven’t already). It’s never easy. My dad’s been gone for 25 years, but I remember every minute of his time in the hospital. My mom and I went into efficiency mode—What do you need, Pop? Books? Magazines? TV off, or on? Painkillers? Pillows? Water?—while trying to pry honest information from the doctors and nurses—while also trying to have a few meaningful conversations with each other and with Dad. Under the circumstances, nerves can get raw. Everywhere you look, the past rears its lovely-ugly head. You are reminded in the most primal way that these are the people who made you. Whatever has happened in the years since childhood, there's no escaping the knowledge that your parents were your first love.

It’s no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that Mark’s thoughts would turn to books. In the comments to his post, several excellent novels were suggested as relevant reading. A number of people mentioned Gilead; despite the diatribe last time I guested, it is indeed a perfect father/son story. A spin through the bookshelves turned up more possibilities. With one notable exception, the novels listed below are not particularly cheery, or uplifting, but they tell the truth, which, to my mind, is more comforting.

    Death of an Ordinary Man  by Glen Duncan
    This was one of my favorite novels this past year. The conceit is similar to that of The Lovely Bones, but Duncan’s storytelling is more sophisticated. The narrator, a young father who hasn’t quite figured out where he’s landed after death, is compelled to follow his wife and kids through the terrible aftermath. Beautifully written, with a thought-provoking conclusion.   

    Joe by Larry Brown
    There’s a father in Joe who is as evil as they come (he sells one child outright and pimps another). But the real father/son bond is between young Gary (who’s never even owned a toothbrush) and the title character, Joe, a hard-working, hard-drinking ex-con who takes the teenager under his wing.

    So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
    The father’s role in this story is one of failure: lost in grief after the death of his wife, he is unable to comfort his son. Much of the novel circles around how the narrator copes. Intertwined is the story of a second boy, a playmate whose father shoots a neighbor while in a jealous rage, then kills himself. The novel, with its calm, precise prose, forces you to think about the consequences of abandonment.   

    Girls by Fred Busch
    This is a tough one to get through. The narrator, a small-town campus cop, loses his baby daughter under suspicious circumstances, then takes on a search for a local teenager who's gone missing. Busch is so talented, and so thoroughly in command of his story, every single word pays off.

    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
    In all of literature is there a more magnificent father than Atticus Finch? A man of more unalloyed decency? I read this book as a child, and wished for Atticus to crawl out of the pages, to stand beside me and set his hand on my head.

Posted at 01:02 PM |

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Comments

birnbaum

I would also recommend Fred Bush's sequel to Girls, North.

Posted by: birnbaum | July 19, 2005 at 07:21 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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