Correction: Erik Larson’s 2003 nonfiction book was misidentified in a column that ran in Sunday’s Style section. The correct title of the book is The Devil in the White City.
Google says it was Frank Zappa who said, "So many books, so little time," but I'm thinking that has to be a misattribution. Not that Zappa couldn't have said it or because it seems out of character for that most erudite autodidact (how can he have been dead for more than 20 years?). But it feels much more antique.
I would have guessed Oscar Wilde. It seems more likely that it's just one of those truisms that's been floating around for centuries, a received idea apprehended more or less collectively.
But unlike a lot of old sayings that feel true, this one actually is. Books pile up on my nightstand and my desk. I have every intention of reading -- or at least reading in -- them. But new books arrive and push them farther down the queue. The natural occasion for writing about them expires. Publicists are disappointed, authors fret (or fume), first editions are remaindered and pulped, civilizations coarsen and fray all because there isn't time to pay attention.
I believe this. Not many people read much more than they have to read, in part because it's impossible to multi-task when you're absorbed in a book's alternative world. Reading requires a temporal commitment, a piece of your life that cannot be spent texting or posting to Facebook or binge watching House of Cards. I tend to spend the last waking hour of the day reading and try to grab a few minutes here and there during the day. In theory, I could sit at my desk at work and read the latest Kazuo Ishiguro (The Buried Giant, Knopf, $26.95) but in reality it's problematic. (If a newspaper office was a conducive environment for reading, it would also be a good place to write; in fact, the myriad distractions which tend to make these places fun and energizing also make them unsuitable for intellectual enterprise.)
Every so often, I use this space to talk about books I haven't finished. Or maybe haven't begun. Maybe that I aspire to get to someday soon. These are the ones I don't want to get away.
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Let's start with what I have read. Erik Larson's Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (Crown, $28) is a compelling nonfiction account of one of the key events that precipitated the U.S. entry into World War I, the sinking of the British ocean liner (with hundreds of Americans aboard) off the southeast coast of Ireland bound for Liverpool on May 7, 1915. Larson tells the story in what seems to have become conventional fashion. He shuttles between stories of the passengers and crew of the doomed ship, the wily U-boat captain who happens upon it, the super-secret British intelligence group that's tracking the U-boat but (like the Enigma code-breakers portrayed in the film The Imitation Game) can't or won't share information that might have prevented the disaster and a lovelorn Woodrow Wilson mooning about the White House.
Despite the story's foregone resolution, Larson does an admirable job of sustaining suspense and sketching the personalities involved in the the attack and the politics that allowed it (Larson stops short of endorsing the paranoid theory that First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill actively conspired to leave the ship defenseless, though he allows that Churchill wanted America in the war and understood that a submarine strike on an American merchant ship could expedite things). While this book isn't as remarkable as Larson's 2003 serial killer story The Killer in the White City or as meticulously researched as 1994's Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis, it's a quickly paced, imminently readable exploration of an old story you may only half-know.
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Staying with nonfiction, Ragan Sutterfield's This Is My Body: From Obesity to Ironman, My Journey Into the True Meaning of Flesh, Spirit, and Deeper Faith (Coventry, $22.99) is an admirably restrained and self-aware memoir of faith and fitness. The author -- an Arkansas native who is currently in training to become an Episcopal priest -- traces his history from an overweight evangelical Christian boy to a farmer with a failed marriage (his ex-wife's desire for him didn't evaporate all at once but "was a progressive deletion") to a triathlete.
While Sutterfield might be a little young to have attempted such a project -- the book is slim yet feels padded -- he's got both an uncluttered style and an insistent intelligence that he plies like an archaeologist's trowel, carefully exposing his own vulnerability and, in a calm, honest and unself-aggrandizing way, his genuine strength.
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This column has previously taken up the case of authors writing through transparent pseudonyms and what it means when a literary fellow like John Banville stoops to write crime fiction as Benjamin Black. But Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt feels an awful lot like Price, though maybe you could argue that The Whites (Henry Holt, $28) is a little more plot-driven with more dialogue and slightly less character development, but to me it feels like it was written by the same guy who wrote Clockers. And that's not a bad thing.
The title alludes to Moby Dick. The "Whites" are the personal nemeses of seven New York cops who, in the 1990s, formed the Wild Geese, an anti-crime unit in the East Bronx. Each one of them had a particularly heinous criminal who "committed criminal obscenities ... and walked away untouched by justice." Now all the Geese are retired except 42-year-old Billy Graves, now consigned to the night watch, who at the end of a long St. Patrick's Day evening catches a horrific murder at Penn Station. It turns out the victim is one of the Whites. Soon other big fish are turning up dead. If it were all a coincidence, it wouldn't be a mystery, would it?
Anyway, Price, who grew up in the Bronx and was a writer on HBO's series The Wire, has a good feel for the offhand grotesqueries of police work (late in the book a citizen is "shot" by his own lawn mower) and the novel is a wickedly quick read. But Price is not just a programmatic storyteller. The best reason to read him isn't for the episodic storytelling, but the haunted language. An ex-athlete turned next of kin is "deep into his sixties but DNA-blessed with the physique of a lanky teenager ... his flat chest the color of a good camel hair coat. But his eyes were maraschinos, and his liquored breath was sweet enough to curl Billy's teeth."
The crime novel -- what the French call a policer -- has become a kind of obligatory exercise for the literary novelist with aspirations of making a living. This is one of the best books of that type you'll read -- or think about reading -- all year.
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Speaking of thinking about reading, the book I've been most meaning to get around to is Schubert's Winter Journey by Ian Bostridge (Knopf, $29), a handsome, compact yet heavy volume of essays on Franz Schubert's song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) by the celebrated British tenor. Winterreise, a piece for voice and piano, was first published in 1828 and is a setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Muller. Bostridge's essays are -- I've heard -- wonderfully discursive pieces that place the piece in historical context and explore the nuances of performance. I know next to nothing about opera singing, but I'm planning on dipping into the text ... someday.
Finally, I've asked my wife, Karen, who has been writing about books herself since the '80s, for brief reviews of what she's been reading lately. She says Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Tyler's 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread (Knopf, $25.95), "is less than enthralling: The lives of four generations of the not very exceptional Whitshank family revolve around the comfortable house they occupy in the Baltimore suburb of Roland Park. Honestly, nothing much happens that doesn't happen in all sorts of average American families. But Tyler's expression of everyday-ness is so honest and believable that a reader can't help but get entangled in the ordinary but nevertheless remarkable lives of Abby and Red, Red's parents, Junior and Linnie, and Abby and Red's children Amanda, Jeannie, Stem and Denny, and the children's children, revealed in compelling nonchronological order."
And "The Nightingale (St. Martin's Press, $27.99), a historical drama of a French family in 1939, gets off to an intriguing start -- a pair of sisters set out on decidedly different routes to cope with the German invasion of their country -- but gets muddled in its sense of self-importance with little to back it up. Author Kristin Hannah seems unwilling or unable to use subtlety in chronicling the experiences of rural Loire Valley wife and mother Viann and her firebrand younger sister Isabelle, who is drawn to the French Resistance. Prepare to take sides -- not in regard to the war, but in the case of the sisters, whose personalities, use of dialogue and challenges seem to be culled from a checklist of cliches."
So there. My conscience, if not my nightstand, is clear. For now.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 03/08/2015