What The Neighbours Did, And Other Stories (by Philippa Pearce)

Read for my resurrected book club with my friends in Chicago, the League of Unreliable Narrators! This is a middle-grade short story collection full of tiny gems of stories that reminded me strongly of the stories we used to read in Junior Great Books -- like "All Summer in a Day" or "The Veldt."

These ambiguous, Joycean little stories are set in a small British village, focus primarily on boys, and are out of print. They should not be -- they are wonderful. And they were tremendously fun to talk about! I highly recommend "Fresh" and "Return to Air" -- if you can find them.

The Dog of the South (by Charles Portis)

This was the latest selection for our long-distance book club, the League of Unreliable Narrators. This is one that Chris had already read and loved, but I had never read. (I'd never read any Portis.) It also qualifies for the Read Harder Challenge in the category of "book published in the decade you were born," since it was published in 1979. 

This book is hilarious, with some pitch-perfect dialogue and one of the best closing paragraphs of all time. It's a bit of a shaggy dog story with -- appropriately enough -- a slightly unreliable narrator. Ray Midge's wife runs off with another man, and Midge heads down to Honduras to track them down. He runs into many interesting characters. Adventures ensue.

The Dog of the South really is a book that is about the experience and not the destination. It's about the many lines that I underlined -- for example, when Midge sees a pelican get hit by lightning and says, "I was astonished. I knew I would tell this pelican story over and over again and that it would be met with widespread disbelief but I thought I might as well get started and so I turned to the woman and the boy and told them what I had seen." These funny run-on sentences and strange moments are what The Dog of the South is all about.

One question we pondered at our meeting: metaphorically, who is the dog of the south? Is it Midge? Reo Symes? Is it a literal dog, with booties on its feet? Is it the marriage of Norma and Midge? Is it a dead pelican? All or none of the above? A question for the ages.

Thumbs up!

Reread: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (by Carson McCullers)

I read this book over a decade ago and hated it. I thought the Jesus metaphor was ham-handed and I hated everyone in the book. But in the years since, I'd basically forgotten almost everything about it, and kept being reminded how much people loved and admired it. I figured it was at least worth a revisit. And so it was that it became the latest selection of my virtual book group, the League of Unreliable Narrators.

I'm happy to report I appreciated it much more the second time around! The Jesus metaphor stuff was fun to rediscover -- I realized it is not ham-handed, because of the way McCullers twists it. It's more of a critique of how humans project their own needs onto God and religion. (My reading this time: Singer is still Jesus, Antonapoulos is God, and faith is illusory but possibly valuable anyway.) Probably the best part is what McCullers dows with the resurrection/redemption coda -- in that there is no clear redemption or resurrection at all, for any of the characters. Neither is it hopeless. It just... is.

I cared far more about Mick and Dr. Copeland (and Portia) than any of the other characters. I really didn't care about Blount at all, for example. (And I kind of wish there had been three "disciples" instead of four -- I needed a Trinity to really hammer home my interpretation. You are the worst, Blount.) (Yes, that was a Hamilton reference. I can't help it.) 

An interesting side note about McCullers: she was a raging alcoholic who drank from morning until night. Puts a little spin on the fact that all her characters seem to find solace in alcohol, doesn't it?

(As for the book group discussion, which was delightful as always -- Chris made a great comparison to The Old Man and the Sea, which I also hated. Now there is a ham-handed Jesus metaphor.)

Two Girls, Fat and Thin (by Mary Gaitskill)

A selection for the League of Unreliable Narrators, my long-distance book group with Chris and Wendy. And as I told them, "I didn't not like it." A rousing endorsement!

One of the focal points of the novel is a frankly hilarious satire of Ayn Rand. You all know how I feel about Rand. Having read The Fountainhead in particular, all the details made me laugh. But let me assure you this is not a ha ha funny book. There's a lot of background of childhood sexual abuse, for example. And honestly, probably too much childhood stuff in general -- I think the flashbacks comprise almost half of the novel, and are less compelling, after a point, than the present day.

The central story is of course about two women, one fat (Dorothy) and one thin (Justine). They meet when Justine interviews Dorothy about the work of "Anna Granite" (the perfect fake Rand name) and Dorothy's time as part of the Definitist movement. We then get about half a book's worth of flashback to their aforementioned abusive childhoods. We then get back to the present day, where Dorothy (my favorite) is pretty much continually eating or thinking about eating junk food in an unfortunately over-the-top way, and kind of obsessing over Justine (in a way that's not over-the-top enough). Justine is making bad choices regarding men.  The story of Dorothy and Anna Granite is told and ends abruptly, and then we get some explicit and semi-rapey sex.  Which Rand also loved, how meta.

On the sentence level, this book is stunning. I have a friend who is a big Gaitskill fan and I can see why. From the story of a subway ride: "As I waited my turn I scanned the magazines and papers, the horrific headlines and happy faces that help give form to our inchoate and vulnerable mass psyche." A few chapters later, Wendy and I both underlined "Her voice held a tea party in the garden while a child was murdered in the house."  There are many of these moments.  But ultimately I felt the novel to be a bit fragmented, a little less than the sum of its parts.

As I told the League, part of the issue for me was expectations. The novel opens with a Nabokov quote, Justine's last name is Shade, and Dorothy has this homoerotic fixation on Justine. It is too Pale Fire-ish to be a coincidence. (Justine Shade = John Shade, I mean come on.) In addition, Dorothy's parts are told in first-person and Justine's in third-person -- does this mean Dorothy is telling Justine's story? And how does Anna Granite fit in? Does she even exist?  Not to spoil too much, but the Pale Fire nods do not mean the book shares Pale Fire's structure. Although I really enjoyed the ending of Two Girls (particularly Dorothy's interaction with Bryan), I was kind of disappointed that Dorothy didn't wrap things up by declaring herself the king of Zembla.

The Shipping News (by E. Annie Proulx)

The League of Unreliable Narrators book club's latest selection. As per tradition, this is one Chris had read before and I had not. Special guest Wendy also joined us for this one!

The Shipping News is about a somewhat pathetic character named Quoyle who moves with his two daughters and aunt to Newfoundland after his horrible, evil wife (he does not notice she is horrible and evil, even though she literally sells their children to a child molester) dies. He begins working on a newspaper called The Gammy Bird that I really wish existed, particularly its restaurant reviews.  (Sample review: "The Fish Strip Basket was supposed to include Dinner Roll, but instead we got Slice of Bread. The fish Strips were very crispy and good. There is a choice of packet of lemon juice or Tartar Sauce. We both had the Tartar Sauce.")

This is a book with a unique writing style. The fragmentary sentences and shifting points of view kept me intrigued through. The voices, the setting, and the characters are all unique -- the names of the characters are uniformly wacky, which give the book a bit of a fabulist feel. The tone of it was difficult to pin down -- even with the wacky names and the amusing restaurant reviews, I found so much that was ominous and foreshadowy at the beginning, so many references to drowning, I definitely expected it to build to a dark climax. Which it kind of does. And then it doesn't.

Spoilers ahoy: The one character who does finally drown then magically comes back to life, and everyone has a happy ending -- even Dawn the newspaper girl, happy with her new life in St. John. I was let down by this, frankly -- I was... hoping for? ... a slightly melancholy ending, not a happily ever after style one. Not that I wasn't happy for Agnis and Mavis, because heck yes I was. But it felt a bit too nicely tied up in a bow. Or in this case, a fisherman's knot.

(Incidentally, we also worked on choosing Shipping News-esque names. My finalists are Hex Jetstream, Poplar Undertow, and Martha Sundial -- but I can't decide which I like best.) (Chris and Wendy, please post yours, I forgot to write them down.)

The Trial (by Franz Kafka)

This was the inaugural selection for my book club, the League of Unreliable Narrators. (The book club is conducted over Skype and consists of me and my friend Chris.) Chris had read it multiple times, but I had not read it at all, and we selected the Breon Mitchell translation. We had lots of intense late-night conversations about Josef K. and his trial and the nuances of the translation and what is Kafka trying to say anyway and how did he feel about religion and isn't the fact that it's unknowable what makes it so amazing and holy shit that ending. 

My primary takeaway is the complexity of this book. Josef K. is not sympathetic; he doesn't act in the most self-interested way that the reader might be able to identify with. But the character who arguably does, Block, is not particularly sympathetic either. But least of all is the system they are both enmeshed in. And there are parables inside parables inside parables. So much of it has a dreamlike quality--I have this pet theory that the final chapter is Josef K.'s suicidal hallucination, based on absolutely no evidence.

I don't feel like I can write a cogent blog post about this novel, really. I'll be turning it over in my head for a long time. It's excellent and elusive, and so fun to talk about into the wee hours with a good friend.