On Books

Prose worth perusing OR Prose-worthy pursuits

Meaty tomes from the year to add to your lofty stacks

A child flies a kite near AK Steel’s Middletown Works plant in Middletown, Ohio. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis offers a vivid tour of the stark world Vance grew up in.
A child flies a kite near AK Steel’s Middletown Works plant in Middletown, Ohio. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis offers a vivid tour of the stark world Vance grew up in.

You are not alone.

The latest data from the Pew Research Center found that 73 percent of Americans read at least one book in the past year. "Americans read an average [mean] of 12 books per year, while the typical [median] American has read four books in the last 12 months," their latest (2015) report states.

This means that roughly 27 percent of the respondents were willing to admit they hadn't read a book in 2015. I would guess there's little overlap between nonreaders of books and readers of a newspaper column devoted to books, so I feel confident assuming you've read a book or two in the past year. I feel fairly confident in assuming you wish you had time for more books.

You're probably highly aware of what you're missing and constantly looking for suggestions of what world to fall into next. So this is a way of calling attention to a few of the options available, a fellow traveler's notes on this year in books. And a reminder that others understand.

FICTION

Nathan Hill's highly lauded 620-page debut The Nix (Knopf, $27.95) is an audacious and at times brilliant comic ramble. It features a would-be presidential candidate who bears a striking resemblance to our president-elect, but it's more importantly an exploration of family dynamics and American sanctimoniousness.

I missed some of the autobiographical details embedded in Ann Patchett's plain-spoken but somehow mysterious Commonwealth (HarperCollins, $27.99), in part because I've never read much of her nonfiction, and I'm pretty sure that enhanced my enjoyment of this sprawling, sometimes untidy history of a sprawling, untidy family. This is literary fiction that reads as easy as the latest Jack Reacher (Night School -- a mild disappointment). It's only after you've put it down for the night that it starts to feel mysterious.

A similar dynamic is at work in Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton (Random House, $26), a gentle novel about the development of the aesthetic of a writer who remembers a time decades ago when she was hospitalized for a mysterious illness and her mother, whom she had not seen for a long time, came to stay with her in the hospital. The reasons the mother and daughter were not quite estranged make perfect sense to anyone who feels they have had to escape their upbringing -- there is some shame mingled in with the pride of having done something necessary, all on your own. It is not as if she doesn't love her mother, or that her mother doesn't love her -- although the mother is too practical a woman to engage in that sort of extravagant emotionality -- but it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to explain why escape is necessary.

After you have read a few books you start to understand that sometimes the author is trying to make you feel certain things that you're not compelled to feel, that they are searching for little triggers they can push. My Name Is Lucy Barton doesn't seem like that. It's an earnestly told story you're reading because the teller needs to tell it. The writer in the story is not courting your empathy or high regard. Nor is the writer of the story.

There is a moment where a successful novelist gives the writer in the story some advice: "You will have only one story. You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one."

On the other hand, you can borrow one. In masterful Julian Barnes' latest The Noise of Time (Knopf, $25.95) the borrowed story belongs to Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer whose voice was suppressed and eventually co-opted by Josef Stalin and made to play the stooge. Through the power of his imagination, Barnes restores to the man the dignity and rage implicit in his music. In a passage late in the book, Shostakovich contemplates the anti-Communists who pretend to empathize:

"Those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. They wanted martyrs to prove the regime's wickedness ... . How many martyrs would it take to prove that the regime was truly, monstrously, carnivorously evil? More, always more ... . What they didn't understand, these self-nominated friends, was how similar they were to Power itself: However much you gave, they wanted more."

Thematically a companion piece to his 1985 novel White Noise, Don DeLillo's Zero K (Scribner's, $27) is as brisk and affecting as a Teflon-coated bullet. It tells the story -- through the eyes of his semi-estranged son -- of a self-invented billionaire's attempt to escape the inevitable through cryonic suspension. If, as DeLillo taught us in White Noise, "all plots tend to move deathward," this late work (DeLillo is 80) arrives as a reassuring burble as the author limns a world of miracle and wonder, where "ordinary moments make the life" and people can be selfless and cities susceptible to ancient magic. The white noise -- the hum of being -- has somehow turned comforting.

To say Richard Russo is a guilty pleasure is to slander a Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim winner, but he writes with such devastating clarity and tells stories so full of human warmth and generosity that you might begin to worry about how much you miss his world when the exigencies of work, food and sleep require you to put it down.

His latest, Everybody's Fool (Knopf, $27.95), is a sequel to 1993's Nobody's Fool, a remarkable novel that introduced us to one of those great American characters. Donald "Sully" Sullivan is an irascible, divorced World War II vet who at 60 had settled into a role as resident prankster barfly in the small upstate New York municipality of Bath, the shabby sister village of nearby college town Schuyler Springs. Sully was, Russo wrote in the earlier novel, "a case-study underachiever ... divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable -- all of which he stubbornly confused with independence."

A few years along, he still is. An American Everyman in the class of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom or Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, you'll want Sully's story to continue.

A book I cared a lot about that hasn't got a lot of attention is James Sallis' Willnot (Bloomsbury, $26), a slim (208 pages) and violent story set in a sleepy Southern place with a weird, dark gravity that seems to hold even the wildest atrocities close. (When a pit of bodies is discovered in the woods outside of town, it barely leaks onto the national news.) Its conscience is a gay general practitioner and surgeon named Lamar Hale, who in a lesser book would be the sort of intrepid hobbyist sleuth who saves the day. But this is not that sort of book, and Sallis -- a poet and critic who might be best known for having written the novel that became the movie Drive -- is not that sort of writer.

Shaker by Scott Frank (Knopf, $26.95) feels more witnessed than read. It's a kinetic, remarkably paced joyride through a broken Los Angeles (in the aftermath of the inevitable big earthquake) that plays like the best episodes of The Blacklist. There's nothing about it that's particularly grounded in reality, but it has great characters (which Frank is able to sketch with a line or two) and the complicated dark momentum of a Jim Thompson novel. Chances are it's better than the inevitable movie.

Others that you should consider include Michael Chabon's just-published Moonglow (HarperCollins, $28.99), a wistful novel masquerading as a memoir that's being advertised as "a pack of lies"; Paulette Jiles' breezy post-Civil War historical novel News of the World (Morrow, $22.99); and Louise Doughty's thriller Black Water (Sarah Crichton, $26).

From local authors: Arkansas native Stephanie Storey's crafty Oil and Marble (Arcade, $24.99) is a historical thriller set in 16th-century Florence about the rivalry between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; my good friend Bill Jones' Petit Jean: A Wilderness Adventure (Plum Street Publishers, $24.95 hardcover, $14.95 paperback); and Fayetteville-based Thomas Cochran's Uncle Drew and the Bat Dodger (Pelican, $14.95).

And there's former Congressman Ed Bethune's A Pearl for Kizzy (Create Space, $17.95), about which I shouldn't say too much because my wife, Karen, and I played a small part in its creation. (She edited it; I wrote a song for one of its characters.) Bethune (Gay Panic in the Ozarks) is a real writer whose 2011 memoir Jackhammered remains one of the most extraordinary memoirs I've read.

NONFICTION

With Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, $28), Matthew Desmond arrives as the next rock-star sociologist. He tells the story of eight Milwaukee families, black and white, and their landlords. Desmond spent a year living alongside his subjects, first in a mostly white trailer park, then in an apartment building where most tenants were black.

String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis (Library of America, $19.95) is a collection of five nonfiction pieces Foster Wallace wrote about the sport, all of which have been collected in other volumes. Its highest and best use might be as a gift for a tennis fan who is intrigued by Foster Wallace but who has never made it more than a few pages into Infinite Jest (set in part in a tennis academy). As a casual fan of the sport and someone who once wielded a Jack Kramer racquet, I found it fascinating.

Henry James, Autobiographies, edited by Philip Horne (Library of America, $37.50), is not a quick or easy read. It's tempting to recall how James dismissed Gustave Flaubert's 1869 novel L'Education Sentimentale, which compares favorably to (and seems a huge influence on) James' fiction, as "elaborately and massively dreary" and like "masticating ashes and sawdust."

Working in the same meticulous mode as Flaubert, who once described style as achieved "only by atrocious labour, a fanatic and dedicated stubbornness," James was a dedicated enemy of "American simplicity." While James' prose is like complicated Scotch, an acquired taste easily dismissed by those unmotivated to put in the hours of sensory training, for those who do crash into this dense dark thicket there's something thrilling about being inside his head as he explains himself. What we learn is not so surprising. Henry was an awkward child, constantly revising and acquitting himself as a miniature adult. There's no Rosebud here, no childish things to be put aside. The James children were given to understand and appreciate the privileged place they held. They were insulated from the harshness of the 19th century; they were not raised to become doctors or writers or anything in particular.

"What we were to do instead was just to be something," James writes, "something unconnected with specific doing, something free and uncommitted, something finer in short than being that, whatever it was, might consist of."

In Bruce Springsteen's entertaining and semi-revelatory (the Boss is candid, but doesn't kiss and tell) Born to Run (Simon & Schuster, $32.50) he writes: "I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By 20, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who 'lie' in service of the truth ... artists, with a small 'a.' But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell."

It's as good as a rock star memoir as you're likely to read, in the same league as Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink (Blue Rider Press, $30) from last year.

I'd also highly recommend Lloyd Sachs' marvelous analysis of an artist's enterprise, T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit (University of Texas, $26.95); Whisperin' Bill Anderson: An Unprecedented Life in Country Music by Bill Anderson with Peter Cooper (University of Georgia, $29.95); and Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin (Library of America, $45).

Both J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, $27.99) and Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land (The New Press, $27.97) have been widely discussed (with good reason) this year. I'd also recommend Volker Ullrich's Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (Knopf, $40); legendary editor Robert Gottlieb's memoir Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28); Simon Sebag Montefiore's The Romanovs: 1613-1918 (Knopf, $35); and Douglas Smith's Rasputin: Faith, Power and the Twilight of the Romanovs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35).

POETRY

I loved Ishion Hutchinson's House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23); three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24); C.D. Wright's posthumously published collection ShallCross (Copper Canyon, $23); and Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015, by Kevin Young (Knopf, $30).

Philip Martin writes regularly about books in this space. His collection of poetry, The President Next Door, was published last year by Et Alis Press. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtangels.com.

Style on 12/11/2016

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