Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen)
The Austenathon continues with what many consider to be her best novel. It is close to perfect (with a slight lag at the end where Austen does what novelists of her time had to do: tie up all the loose ends). Even allowing for that Homeric nod, novelists of any time have a lot to learn from Austen in general and this novel in particular at both the sentence and the structural levels. Likewise, the manner in which she weaves together harsh reality--marriage has as much to do with money and position as with love--and romantic comedy is seamless (and seems to have nothing to do with cinematic romcoms). Looking forward to continuing my traverse through her works.
Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon
This is the best of the Hammett novels I've read, mostly because Sam Spade is the best of his characters (so far: I still have the Thin Man to go). The best novels of this sort are often character driven. It's having encounters and experiences through the eyes of the protagonist that pushes us on, not the urge to solve a puzzle. Like his Los Angeles counterpart, Philip Marlowe, Spade is cynical, often unpleasant, but, in his way, noble. Hammett writes in a 1934 introduction to the novel, "[Spade] is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For the private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent stander-by, or client." Exactly.
- Jenkyns, Richard: A Find Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen
The subtitle gives it away: this is an appreciation of Jane Austen, and the book is all the better for that. Jenkyns clearly loves the author's work, and he is able to explain why. That is much harder to do than to explain why one dislikes, or even hates, a work. Actually, the more one detests a work, the easier it is to write about. Jenkyns's style is appropriate to Austen. His prose and argument is witty, clear, and perceptive, just like the object of his study. His insights will illuminate each volume of the Austen canon.
Austen, Jane: The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen: Volume I: Sense and Sensibility
It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can never go wrong with a Jane Austen novel. Or if it’s not universally acknowledged it should be, though like most novels worth rereading, Austen’s books give different kinds of pleasure as one reads and rereads them at different stages of one’s life. My reaction to Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s study of different ways of being in the world, at the age of 63, is exquisite pleasure. Though it’s pretty clear that Austen means to come down on the side of sense, it may be true that the less sensible of the two sisters who embody these qualities tipped the balance in a way Austen may not, originally, have intended. “Angular,” one critic calls the novel. I’m still thinking about that.
Hammett, Dashiell: THE DAIN CURSE
Hammett's detective, sometimes known as the Continental Op, is fleshed out from the character we met in Red Scare. Most count that one the better novel, but I enjoyed The Dain Curse more, thanks to that richer picture of the protagonist. The dialogue also seemed snappier, and the plotting is tight. Most books of this sort move from start to finish in an ever-rising crescendo with a coda tacked on at the end where things are explained for those who might have missed this or that detail. Hammett, however, seems to structure his books differently. There are distinct movements, each with its own crescendo. The movements are, of course, related and follow logically from one to the next. His novels are, in the best sense of the word, symphonic.
Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Dover Thrift Editions: Biography)
Thomas De Quincey has been criticized for making the pleasures of opium seem greater than the pains. I once received a prescription for three days worth of opiated cough syrup, and I can see how compelling the pleasures can be. The cough syrup didn't, alas, give me the power to produce prose like De Quincey's, whether he is describing walking the London streets as a homeless and hungry youth, painting his notion of happiness (a snug cottage in winter), or detailing the architectural, aquatic, and orientalist dreams that plagued him when the drug had started to turn on him. Is it any surprise that De Quincey was friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
Hammett, Dashiell: Red Harvest
I suspect that Raymond Chandler will always be dearer to my heart that Dashiell Hammett, though both are important and delightful American novelists. One reason may be that those of Hammett's protagonists that I've encountered thusfar are not as appealing as that tarnished knight, Marlowe. Still, Hammett is a fine writer capable of passages of real beauty, and in his time working as a detective for the Pinkerton agency he picked up some resonant slang. He employs it in the book, and lots of it would flummox me without some helpful context. I'll be reading and rereading more Hammett. Will my ranking of him relative to Chandler change? We'll see.
Smoot, Jeff: Hangdog Days: Conflict, Change, and the Race for 5.14
Skateboarding, surfing, and rock climbing are three sports I will almost certainly never do. Yet for some reason, these pastimes and the people who practice them fascinate me. I follow skateboarders online, the best memoir I've read in the last several years is William Finnegan's Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, and I've just finished Hangdog Days by Jeff Smoot, a history/memoir of (mostly) American climbing. Smoot's writing chops are nowhere near Finnegan's, but still, it was interesting to enter that world for a few hundred pages. I was glad to have read it, and look forward to the first great skateboarding memoir.
Berger, John: I Send You This Cadmium Red
This book is a record of a correspondence between John Berger and artist John Christie, a collage of letters, images, quotations, and the art books that Christie makes. Color is the motif that gives the book whatever unity it has. About halfway through, I found that I had stopped reading and was, instead, skimming, stopping here and there, arrested by an image, a quotation, a snatch of a letter. My favorite part of the book was three short poems by Berger, and I suspect I would have paid more attention as I paged through the book if more the writing had been his. In fact, though, Christie is the more loquacious correspondent, and his letters tended not to hold my attention. It was a pleasant book to page through in the way that coffee table books--it's almost that large--can be, but no more than that.
Wasson, Sam: The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
The '70s, which I lived through in Hollywood, was truly one of Hollywood's golden ages, and Roman Polanski's Chinatown is emblematic of that golden time. Unsurprisingly, in the story of its making, even surrounded by icons like Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, and producer Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson takes center stage, and one sees that he really is the last Hollywood movie star—with all the glamor and excess that implies. In spite of the excess, Nicholson seems the sanest of the major players who made Chinatown a reality and seeing how dysfunctional his collaborators were, it's a wonder the film got made at all. I'm glad it was, though, and in spite of Wasson's sometimes clunky prose it's a riveting story
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