10:04 by Ben Lerner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just put down Ben Lerner's 10:04 which is the semi-autobiographical story of a young author who is on sabbatical from college teaching and may or may not have Marfan's Syndrome (which Lincoln had). He is trying to impregnate his best friend, Alex,not his "girlfriend," but a platonic friend whom he met in college. She is 36, unemployed and wants to have a child and he is elected as good father material. The plot rambles through Brooklyn on their walks and Manhattan to the fertility clinic. He acts as big brother to an 8-year-old Latino boy named Roberto. He sells a book contract for a strong six figures ( “about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held.”) and flies to a residency in Marfa, Texas where he hibernates, walks, writes a poem rather than his novel. The themes of walking and of art and poetry run through the book, along with his fear of a dissecting aorta, another symptom of Marfan's. He watches the movie "Back to the Future" during two threatening hurricanes (Irene & Sandy) which is where the title originates. The language challenges: he does not cry but has a "lacrimal event." He suffers proprioception, a sort of unconscious awareness of the body's internal stimulii to external events. And I experienced the usual challenges of reading in bed, unwilling to get up and look up the words because I am smitten with the story, the writing, the references to Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Robert Creeley, the obscure National Book Award winner William Bronk, the teaching/writing couple whose "house [was] so full of books that it seemed built of books," movies like The Stranger with Orson Welles, the exhibit of the Institute for Totaled Art (rescued from an insurance company warehouse). It is a book which is worthy of its challenges and I will be first in line for his next one. I loved it. Slate reviews it expertly here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/bo...
Or bookforum here http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_...


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The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another beautifully written book about an Iowa clan over the last decades of the 20thC.  Thompson's ear for dialogue is flawless and I found myself reading aloud passages to my nearest at every opportunity.


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My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore

My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I read this many years ago, it's evocative descriptions of Hawaii and growing up there stay with me and it remains one of my all-time favorites.  As www.dovegreyreader.com so perfectly described it in her 1/27/2011 review:
I always think as I read a book like My Old Sweetheart that I want to read many more books like this. Spell-binding and measured books with a store of quietly held revelations kept in reserve, that make me gasp a little, novels that countenance no interruption and make you look up to think and then feel quite surprised to find that the world is still there happening around you. This felt like a book of blessed quietness, it has a quality of stillness and fragrance about it, created  in part by the heady languor of the heat with its power to oppress and stifle, but also to radiate and infiltrate. There is a certain  light that shimmers here, and a moment when Anna and Lily swim to an underwater cave that actually transported me there....yes, holding my breath to dive and feeling that slight sense of panic about getting out again, even if I was sitting here in my thermals.


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Review of Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mantel's is the kind of writing which leaves you thinking why bother with your own scribbles. She is so good.  The ghost of her stepfather flickers on the first page, then a hundred pages in we are alerted to the apparition seen in the garden at the age of six or seven; this is the ghost which haunts the rest of her memoir: "I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, in not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are." She remembers the people she knew including her family and her "best friend" who was mean to her,  the Catholicism of her early years, her confused little person thoughts, games played by name and the size, color and story of many classic books. She recalls every place she has lived and the pains of marital breakups and moving. She writes about her grueling medical history with just enough detachment and wit that you can keep reading and marvel at her metaphors:  "I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being..." And after a diagnosis finally arrives. "I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the inhabitants have vacated years ago." Her descriptions can be reread over and over: On their first marital lodgings: "We couldn't get the stately family wardrobe upstairs, so it stayed down, its fine mirror reflecting the flickering of the silverfish as they busied cheerfully about their lives." It is the work of a master writer.


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Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith by Carlene Cross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith was a class assignment which I resisted, it not being a topic of much interest but within thirty pages or so, I found the book to be a page-turner. The author is a good and descriptive writer with a sense of humor.  I appreciated her thorough nature as she enhanced her biblical study with historical research. Her missionary junket behind the Iron Curtain was tense and suspenseful and the ways in which her marriage to a Northwest Baptist preacher evolved was a shocker, confirming my suspicions about fundamentalist conservatism and misogyny.  Her exploratory journey into and away from the confines of this secretive, scary extremism is an enlightening and entertaining trip to another world.


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Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just

Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another quiet, beautifully written tale of "moral ambiguity" from Ward Just about life and politics in the nation's capital with forays to Eastern Europe through several characters.  While not as suspenseful as others of the author's books, I found the book compelling as the aging photographer protagonist contemplates his life and his accomplishments.  Equally interesting are the well-drawn characters of his ex-wife and her father, a Czech dissident soldier who appears late in the story but captivates the characters and the reader.


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Fine Romance by Cynthia Propper Seton

A Fine Romance by Cynthia Propper Seton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Many critics praised Seton's work, calling her "a latter-day Jane Austen, writing a comedy of manners." Her third novel, A Fine Romance, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1976. In addition to writing, Seton lectured on literary and feminist topics and taught at the Indiana Writer's Conference."

So many fine books and authors just slip away yet they gave me such pleasure on first reading.  I'm not a re-reader but I remember and treasure authors like Seton for their lasting position in my literary life.  If I were to run a reprint publisher, she'd be one of the first.


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