A Certain Slant of Light

After I finished Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway I had to sit with it a while before deciding, rather cautiously, that indeed I did like it, although I did not always enjoy the process of reading it.

Actually, I liked most things about the process of reading it: the main character Emmett and his relationship with his much-younger brother, Billy, a sturdy and earnest eight-year-old; the girl next door, Sally, whose acerbic voice made for one of my favorite POVs in the book; in fact, the rotating POVs in general, which gave a kaleidoscopic view of the story, and also allowed glimpses into nooks and crannies of mid-twentieth century America that we would have missed if the book stuck strictly to Emmett’s POV.

And I very much enjoyed the book’s portrait of America in the early 1950s, which is not a time that historical fiction often visits. (I like the old standbys like World War II as much as anyone, but it is nice to get off the beaten track every once in a while.) Towles has a gift for evoking times and places, and the premise of this book (a road trip on the Lincoln Highway) gives him a virtuoso canvas on which to evoke many places, and even (in the form of flashbacks) a number of different times.

HOWEVER. There was one fly in the ointment, and unfortunately he was a big fly - a horsefly, if you will - as his actions propelled much of the plot. That fly is Emmett’s former jailmate, Duchess.

So when the book starts, Emmett has just been released from a work farm for juvenile offenders. The warden drives him back to the family farm (which has just gone under on the mortgage, but that’s fine with Emmett, whose plan was already to get the heck out of Nebraska) and drops him off… at which point Emmett discovers that two of his jailmates escaped in the trunk of the warden’s car.

These are Woolly (a sweetheart, exactly as fuzzy-brained as his name suggests) and Duchess, a charming conman, who has come up with a plan to steal Woolly’s not-inconsiderable inheritance out of a safe at Woolly’s family’s summer home in the Adirondacks. He tries to entice Emmett into giving them a ride by promising to cut him in on the take.

When that doesn’t work, Duchess steals Emmett’s car, which just so happens to contain all the money Emmett has in the world to make a new start with his little brother Billy.

( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If I didn’t actually believe in my responsibility to tell Americans the truth about Turkey, nevertheless I did feel it was somehow wasteful of me to study Russian literature instead of Turkish literature. I had repeatedly been told in linguistics classes that all languages were universally complex, to a biologically determined degree. Didn’t that mean all languages were, objectively speaking, equally interesting? And I already knew Turkish; it had happened without any work, like a gift, and here I was tossing it away to break my head on a bunch of declensions that came effortlessly to anyone who happened to grow up in Russia.

Today, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things - and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them spends less time on Russian literature than the title might lead you to expect, but as a memoir it’s wonderful. Whether she’s studying Uzbek in Samarkand or attending a Tolstoy conference as Yasnaya Polyana, she has a gift for meeting oddballs and delighting in absurdities, which makes for a fascinating, digressive, arrestingly peculiar book.

I also finished Carroll Watson Rankin’s Dandelion Cottage. I turned out to be quite wrong in my matchmaking prognostication: it turns out that ( Spoilers )

I discovered through Wikipedia that Dandelion Cottage is based on a real house, which does indeed look delightfully cozy, and is a lovely sunshiny yellow as any house called Dandelion Cottage ought to be.

And speaking of cozy house books, I also finished D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage, which was a delight. I sometimes think it’s too bad that Miss Buncle’s Book tends to be most people’s entry to Stevenson these days - it’s a delightful book too but much frothier than many of her other books, which are still light in atmosphere but have a bit more heft to them.

This one, for instance - a romance between a mother with grown children and a man rebuilding a life after years away in the war - has a very gentle atmosphere, but the losses and hardships of the war hang in the background. It’s a book about adjusting to a new normal as it becomes clear that the old normal, although it may be approximated in some ways, is never coming back, and as such felt very topical right now, and it was such a pleasure to see the characters trying their best to capture joy.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m about a quarter of the way through Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, a road trip novel set not long after World War II. ( Spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve somehow ended up with THREE trilogies that I’ll need to order through interlibrary loan to complete: D. E. Stevenson’s Vittoria Cottage trilogy, Mary Bard’s Best Friends series, and of course D. K. Broster’s Jacobite Trilogy. (I realize the last is available online, but there are some books that simply demand to be read on paper.) Well, it should keep the interlibrary loan office busy!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, a picaresque tour through the heroine’s five temporary jobs over one year, is a pleasure from start to finish. It occurred to me as I was reading that I haven’t read too many books that are actually about the experience of work (as opposed to interpersonal drama that happens to occur at work), and how refreshing it was to read something so different from my usual fare.

With Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram, I’ve read all of Sally Belfrage’s books. In fact I read this one only because I was so close to scoring Belfrage complete bibliography, which is perhaps a questionable motive for reading a book, but in this case it really worked out.

After Belfrage’s two closest friends both decided to devote their lives to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Belfrage went out to India to visit their ashram. Belfrage’s great strength as a writer and reporter (although it is also, not infrequently, a weakness) is her impressionability. She’s a skeptic, in this book more than in any of her others, but a skeptic who easily takes on the coloring of her surroundings (orange, in this case, is the prescribed color for Bhagwan’s followers). She is moved by Bhagwan’s great force of personality; when she attends his talks she feels utterly swept up by the flow of his words, as if he is talking directly to her.

She is not, in the end, converted, so she can’t describe the conversion experience - but then, if she had been converted, she probably wouldn’t have written the book at all, so there would have been no description of anything in any case. But she does move from bafflement (why are her friends uprooting their lives to move to India? One of them abandoned her children!) to a place of understanding - even though fundamentally she still disagrees with their choice.

What I’m Reading Now

Just before I started reading Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility, I stumbled on a comment complaining that the book is a peak example of female-narrator-written-by-man. Would I be feeling that quite so hard if I hadn’t been primed by that comment? It’s hard to say, but I definitely am feeling it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I enjoyed There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job so much that I thought it might be worthwhile to check out other work by this translator (Polly Barton), which led me to Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are. Quoth the description: “Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales - shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells - and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.” Doesn’t that sound fun?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a quiet yet absorbing SF novel about a little coffee shop in an alley in Tokyo where one of the seats can transport a patron through time. But there are rules: nothing the time traveler does will change the present; once they’re in the past, they must stay in the seat; and they have to finish their visit before their coffee grows cold, or they will remain in the seat as a ghost.

If the book had placed more weight on that last rule it could have turned toward horror, but the author instead focuses on the intimate, emotional aspects of these journeys. Although time travelers can’t change anything that happened - if someone died, they will stay dead - their trips through time can change their attitude toward what has happened and their behavior in the future.

I also read Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which May argues that our current cultural expectation (May is writing from England, but this is true in America too; possibly this is an Anglophone thing?) that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I agree with this thesis whole-heartedly. I thought the book would have been improved if May cut down on the excursions into memoir by about two-thirds, though. This is my perennial complaint about modern nonfiction. If the book isn’t actually meant to be a memoir, then adding memoir very rarely adds anything.

Here is a quote that I liked, though, from one of the non-memoir portions, when May muses about the widespread human tendency to project the qualities about ourselves that we like least onto wolves: “In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.”

What I’m Reading Now

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow?” I was going to complain, but actually I am glad no one did, as I think I’m reading this book at exactly the right time. It’s a slow-moving (yet absorbing) book about a Russian count whom a Bolshevik court sentences to life imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel, and how he finds meaning and interest in his life within those confines. A good read for pandemic times, when many of us are finding ourselves living (at least for the moment) more confined lives than we anticipated.

I also started reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work, because it was in the same collection as Diana and Persis and I did not realize that the collection only included the first six chapters, plus the concluding chapter. Why! Why would you print only a part of the book like that? Fortunately ebooks exist, but I cannot IMAGINE how frustrating it would be to have read this in the pre-ebook days of 1988, when the collection was published, and discover that there are THIRTEEN CHAPTERS MISSING.

Last but not least, I’m continuing on in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Allan Armadale (1) has just become fast friends with a mysterious stranger who (as Collins gleefully points out) MIGHT be Allan Armadale (2).Would Collins really have the face to lampshade the possibility if the mysterious stranger really IS Allan Armadale (2)? MAYBE. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally getting Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game!!!! And Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights will be arriving around the same time. WHAT DO. I feel the library could have staggered the book’s arrival more effectively…