4 Short Muriel Spark novels

 The Driver's Seat:

The Girls of Slender Means

The Only Problem

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Nightcrawling vlog

 

Foregone Books

 I did a video about the Russell Banks novels I have read.

He died on Jan 7, 2023

The Overstory By Richard Powers

 This is an ambitious novel. It is possible to feel the author’s frustration in not being able to express what ideally he would like to:

Page 383: 

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

He comes close to his goal. But novels need these human characters that we can latch on to, that we can connect with, characters whose language and emotions we can understand.
Yet the main, dominant character in this novel is the trees. And not even any single tree. We do get introduced to single trees, mostly at the beginning part of this epic journey, but they themselves are part of a larger interconnective collective. We are told that they are together in this and that in fact it has been discovered, finally, that they communicate and interact in ways silent, and until recently, invisible to us. They are also attached to the ground, it is all connected, and we share 25% of our genes with the trees.
We come from the trees. Not in the sense of evolving from tree-dwelling primates, but that we are of the trees themself, a branch, a curious, isolated and lonely offshoot. A tree branch that takes itself as something else, something altogether separate without the empathy and intelligence to see that we are in fact IT.   

The first part of The Overstory comes on as separate stories. We are introduced to a character in each chapter most often with a tree involved and often in childhood. Is this in fact a novel at all or just a series of character studies calling itself one?

But like the humans who take themselves as separate from the trees, in the second and third sections of the book, these characters are brought together. They are brought together by the trees. We are among the people who see the trees, who feel the trees, who are vigilantly up in trees. They are people who care about the vanishing of the trees. The disappearance of beings hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years old. They want to help.

The question and the main dilemma for these good hearted characters is, how to help? Does defensive human action work in countering destructive human action? Or is there just too much human action?
What should we do or not do to be non-destructive. Is destroying ourselves, the beings who live via this industrial destruction, the answer. But if we are of the trees which are GOOD, how can we be BAD? This simple dualism can’t possibly point the way.

There is a certain open-endedness to these questions in this novel. Perhaps the spiritual mindset of the individual reader can only see it as they can. It could be read as “trees good, humans bad” and left at that.
But this is not the ultimate intention of the work. The intention is to show and call for connection, reconnection, by whatever means necessary. There might not be all that much to do right now other than stand down as much as possible and wait it out to a point when earth, trees, and humans can become one again, as they already are. The novel is never hopeless in regard to the resurgence of the trees, it’s just the humans who will blunder to doom and get themselves out of the way.

“. . . and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
The “lost people” do have compelling stories that make this a page turner at the same time as a lesson in the connectedness of everything.
While naturally missing the target that it is impossible for a novel to hit, it is an unusually and beautifully crafted great work.

Don’t Crowd Me by Evan Hunter

Having just read and enjoyed Last Summer, I thought I would try another of his books. 

This one had an old school pulp fiction cover painting and runs only 175 pages. It is also an early work which, compared to Last Summer, from 15 years later is a product of the writer learning a craft. 

I don’t claim to have much knowledge about this mid-20th Century pulp fiction. I read some of the hits of the genre, such as Horace McCoy’s noir masterpiece They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, but not so much of the less revered stuff like this one. 

Don’t Crowd Me is about a NYC advertising executive in his late 20s on a solo vacation in a camping situation on an island upstate in Lake George. It’s a rather complicated plot involving greed and lust. It’s all very manly. Reading it made me think of the 1950s men’s magazines that my dad got occasionally. They always had these lurid cover paintings depicting some dramatic moment of physical struggle. A solo man battling elements, savage animals and/or humans. He is usually stressed to the limit with bleeding wounds, but struggling on. The painting always depicts the moment of physical battle where it all will be decided, the cliff hanger, “Will he make it!?!” Most likely he usually does. I don’t really know since I never read any of the stories in those magazines. 

Don’t Crowd Me feels like this type of manly fiction. It also feels like something written rapidly for fast sale in an already established genre market. All that is fine. Evan Hunter is young and finding his way here, maybe the rent was due. This is a sort of outlandish B movie type quickie project. 

The main character, Steve Richmond, comes off as a bit of a provincial New Yorker at a time when a holiday out of town meant upstate, the Catskills, or as in the novel, Lake George. This is 1950s NYC destination. Now with heavy promotion by the airline industry and the tourist promo commercials they fly off somewhere far.
There is a certain townie element in the novel. The town people in Lake George are seen at the very beginning to be deeply interested in getting as much money as possible from the vacationers. The camp described is rather crude, with no showers. They jump in the chilly lake to freshen up. It’s seems kind of old USA democratic in a way. There is a wealthy couple who owns a jewelry company. I say “democratic” because they are the type of people who would be flying off somewhere more exclusive rather than hanging out with just anyone at this upstate camp. They are also at the center of the plot. 

There is a lot of manly stuff going on. Little of it really believable. After all this guy is up there for a two week vacation during which he has sex with two attractive sisters, but not at the same time. Toward the end he gets very badly beaten up, with a rock, is left for dead. After awakening and stumbling back to camp he gets seduced by a seemingly irresistible woman. Yes he has been beaten and when he gets to a mirror sees that his beating was so bad on his face that bone is exposed, but fortunately his lips were spared by the beating so he can still kiss, etc. 

(Funny how they trained us 50s and 60s boys to think we are getting away with something as a way of keeping us interested in sexual activity for the furtherance of the tribe and keeping the species going. Get in fights, win, and fuck. It seems simple and it is really just keeps us tied to family and work. Its too bad sex isn’t fullfilling enough on its own without some kind of nasty persuit and capture story attached to it to, I guess, make it more interesting.)

Don’t Crowd Me is not really very good. But it clips along rather nicely. It’s not badly written. Just fast commercial product that is only interesting because of the writer, the old time vacation setting, and it’s odd peek into the manly entertainment in a bygone era. 

By Blood: A novel by Ellen Ullman

This is an unusual concept novel. We have a first person narrator who in the course of the story reveals very little about himself other than being from somewhere other than the San Francisco setting.  He also has some problem in the past.

He rents an office. Next door is a head doctor, a psychiatrist or psychologist. One patient doesn’t like the white noise machine that is used to keep the sessions private. This enables our narrator to overhear and he gets very attached to what he is hearing.

The skill of the storytelling prose allows one to suspend natural disbelief in the situation and it’s duration.

The novel is also about issues of adoption and extreme adoption in this case coming out of the events of the Nazi holocaust, exile, and extermination of the Jewish people. While telling that fictional story Ullman addresses actual historical happenings in the period just after WWII, the liberation of concentration camps, and the impulses and personalities of Zionism leading to the establishment of Israel.

The novel is a personal story in the setting of these past earth shaking events. It is a period piece written in 2012 but set in the 1970s.

It flows nicely. Somewhat of a slow suspense piece which holds interest.

I came to Ullman via seeing her interviewed about her new memoir on Booktv Cpsan 2.

Dangling Man by Saul Bellow

This was Bellow’s first novel.

It is set in Chicago during WWII.
The character, Joseph, writes about his life in first person journal entries. He is in his 30s. He is dangling because he might get drafted into the army soon. Since he might be drafted he is not working. He is married and his wife is working. He is basically just hanging out. They are living in a rooming house.They lost their apartment because of a dispute he had with the landlord.

It is a short novel of one of those extended times between things, before something big might happen. In this case being called up into a war that one might get killed in. The novel is mostly internal dialogue of someone in one of these in between times, and a very stressful one. It is also a portrait of a man without an exterior structure to control his time and actions. It is a place that many find difficult to find comfort. It is easier to just let someone else tell one what to do, show up here, at this time, do this job for this long, eat at this time, etc. He is dangling outside of that structure for a time, that place where one has to be self motivated, or self contained enough to be at peace when the order of the day is to run with the crowd. The novel shows that this can be a difficult place where one needs to be very strong, assured of oneself enough to go on.

There is not much mention of the war.  A war, that at the time of the novel’s composition no one knows  what is going to happen, how long the war will go on, how many will die, or who will win. The book contains that tension that hangs right there alongside that dangling man. It is an extreme time of “we are all together” which can be harder than usual on the temperamentally alienated.

Joseph visits family. His prosperous brother tries to give him money which creates tension. He visits his wife’s family, more tension. There is conflict in the rooming house, and between him and his wife, in the role reversal of the man being the breadwinner.

Aren't we all dangling on the edge of life on the mysterious precipice of death?
What does one do while dangling?

Good novel from a man who was later awarded The Nobel Prize (The Dynamite Prize).