The Ides of March - Thornton Wilder

So what have we here? An epistolary novel by an author who was highly respected in his lifetime but who has since fallen into total neglect. A history which the author admits, on page 1, has been dicked about with - to the extent that the outrage which hangs over everything else here, actually happened a decade and a half earlier. The author even goes so far as including anonymous attacks on Caesar which actually come from the Spanish Civil War - a slight anachronism of a mere two thousand years. The result?


Brilliant. I loved it. There is so much going on here. We have the arrival of Caesar's lover, Cleopatra, in Rome. We have the connivance of the local femme fatale Clodia Pulcher and her crazed brother. We have Caesar's fortnightly journal-letter to his old friend Turrinus in self-imposed seclusion on the Isle of Capri. I have never heard of Turrinus - is he perhaps another invention? In the novel, though, he becomes a constant, slightly eerie presence. It is hinted that he was horribly mutilated during Caesar's Gallic campaign, hence his seclusion - yet during the novel it becomes apparent that he is willing to receive visitors, some of whom he hasn't seen for decades. We see nothing of his replies to Caesar though the contents of letters to others are referred to. Does he really exist or is he another of Caesar's devious, secretive schemes?


The letters tend to be formal, and Wilder adds notes to enforce the illusion they are real. Yet he manages to create vivid characters in them. Cleopatra comes across very well, her exoticism demonstrated, and Wilder has fun with the women of Rome trying to decide if she is beautiful or not. Also stunningly brought to life is the young iconoclast poet Catallus and his premature death.


For me, the final perfect touch was the use of a direct quote from Tacitus - the only 'real' document in the dossier - to cover Caesar's assassination.


I don't know about other works by Thornton Wilder, but Ides of March is good enough in his own right to warrant restoration to the canon of great Twentieth Century American literature.

Stoner - John Williams

Stoner is the Great American Novel that had to bide its time. Published in 1965, it had to wait more or less fifty years for its classic status to be recognised.


It explores familiar territory - the campus, secluded scholarship, the lost grandeur of the South - and it takes the two World Wars as its chronological frame.


William Stoner exceeds expectations when he gains admittance as a student to the University of Missouri in 1910. He comes from dirt-poor farming stock and initially studies agriculture. Then his eyes are opened to the wonders of English Literature - in his case the late Latin lyricists. Thereafter, he never leaves the university and never really revisits his youth, save to bury his parents and sell the farm. The University is his life, teaching his passion.


Classmates leave to serve in France in 1917. Stoner thinks long and hard and decides to stay. Twenty-four years later, of course, he is too old to serve, a married man with a daughter. And here we really comes to the central issue of the novel. Stoner is a good man, but he is not a good husband and lets himself get sidelined as a father. His life is study but he is a poor student of life. Williams' great gift is the creation of character. Stoner's wife Edith is a fragile Southern beauty and slightly deranged. Stoner loves her and she wants to love him, but they can't manage it, so they eke out an uneasy compromise and over the years they make it work. The daughter, Grace, on whom Stoner dotes, finds teenage pregnancy her only way out. The father of her child, a student at the University, does the right thing by Grace only to be killed in the war. Thereafter Grace takes to drink.


Stoner's great love turns out to be another student, Katherine Driscoll, a free spirit and thoroughly grounded young woman. The only way to keep her is for him to leave Edith and leave the University. As a good man and a dedicated teacher, Stoner can do neither. He becomes embroiled in a feud with his head of department that lasts to the end of his career. And, ultimately, Stoner does what the protagonist in every Great American Novel has to do: he makes his peace and dies. And what a death! Gradually fading away with his long-forgotten text book in his hand. Magnificent. Profoundly moving.


How much of this is autobiographical we do not know. We know that Williams, too, was an academic and, like Stoner, he wrote far too little. Other than that, he is a mystery. His name is about as plain as it gets, and so is his prose style. But what his achieves with simple words is far more than the likes of Henry James achieved with all his frills and flamboyant vocabulary. Williams achieves deep truths and phenomenal beauty.


I'm having luck, recently, finding masterpieces. Stoner is definitely another.

Hope of Heaven - John O'Hara

Like his contemporary Nathanael West, John O'Hara was a master of the novella in an age when the fashion was for full-length novels.  So here he has to bundle the title novella with a load of his short stories.  The stories are all very well - typical New Yorker fare - but my interest is in the novella.

The year is 1938 - Hope of Heaven came out the same year as the much better known Pal Joey.  Malloy is a scriptwriter in Hollywood.  He has money, he has a girl - not a Hollywood girl but a sensible girl who works in a bookshop and who lives with the brother she has to all intents and purposes raised.  Then one day gets a call from a guy who claims to know his brother back home in Gibbsville.  This Don Miller wants to meet up with Malloy but never quite gets there, and when he does he turns out to be called Schumacher.  The real Don Miller lost his travel cheques; Schumacher found them and has been living off them ever since.  He thinks someone's after him, a detective hired by the insurance company.  Malloy has no interest in the guy or his problems.

Meanwhile Peggy's long-lost father pitches up, an ageing charmer with an anecdote for every occasion.  Malloy sees through the facade but takes a shine to him all the same.  And thus the seeds of tragedy are sown.

O'Hara is a tremendous writer, idiosyncratic yet amazingly readable.  His characters are all utterly convincing and he takes them down unexpected byways.  Seriously, strongly recommended.

A Rabbit Omnibus - John Updike (2)

Rabbit Redux...  Ten years on from Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Angstrom's life falls apart again.  This time it's Janice who leaves him, seduced by the slick charms of Greek car salesman Charlie Stavros.  Rabbit finds himself footloose and fancy-free in the 1969 summer of sex, moon landings and Black Power.  Before long he and thirteen year-old Nelson are sharing their suburban home with wealthy dropout Jill and her dealer Skeeter, the Black Christ.  Rabbit's mother has Parkinson's and wall-eyed Peggy has also been abandoned by her spouse.  Enter Mim, Rabbit's sister, the wannabe movie star turned escort, doing what she does best to restore balance to the world of Brewer.

Brilliantly plotted, exquisitely written.  Updike perfectly captures the era when America began to lose faith with itself.

Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

I had not read Chabon before picking up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000 - winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2001).  I had seen the film of his Wonder Boys and hated it mightily.  Then I saw that this was about American superhero comics, which I loved as a kid and still retain a fondness for, so I had to have it.

A marvellous book, combining the Golem of Prague and gay Hollywood actors circa 1940, amongst many other themes.  It's something of a monster itself - 636 pages of tightly-wrought, pitch-perfect prose - but I didn't find a single bum note or a passage I speed-read through.  I wallowed in it.  I luxuriated.  The characters were so well crafted that they could do anything and I would still root for them.  Chabon does not do goodies and baddies.  Here, everybody is basically good and a little bit bad.  Even walk-ons like Sammy's feckless midget strongman of a father take root in your imagination.

One of those books I can't recommend highly enough.  Gimme more!

A Rabbit Omnibus - John Updike (1)

Okay, I should have read the American master years ago, but what can I say?  Better late than never.  This Penguin collection isn't, of course, the complete Rabbit, but the first three instalments, Run, Redux, and Rich.  I'm reading them separately amid my other reading, and will review them here in the same way.

Rabbit Run then, from 1960.  The story of a twenty-something who can't quite come to terms with adult responsibility.  He runs away, literally, three times.  Such a simple story with a handful of characters yet executed with such minute detail that it's like a compressed War and Peace.  There are no stereotypes here, no good guys or villains.  Everyone, down to Nelson the toddler, is three-dimensional, drawn with empathy and compassion.  Thus the tragedy, when it comes, is shattering.  I don't do plot spoilers in this blog, so let's just say I have never, in half a century of reading, come across that particular tragedy in any other novel.  It is one of those everyday catastrophes that we simply don't talk about - and here too, once it has happened, nobody really talks about it.

A stunning read.  A genius at work.