Jim Grimsley

Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These are powerful stories carved out of real stuff. Everything I respect and love about writing is embodied here. Jones can write a first line that gives a full frame to every story, often with a note of forewarning, even forboding. “On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.” This is the opening to “The First Day,” one of the most perfect stories I have ever read. Heartbreak is there from this beginning, and yet the story that follows is never sentimental, never over-reaches; simply one detail follows another, perfectly encapsulated. Every story in the collection is at this level. “Young Lions” is a fearful exchange. “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” is a lucid exploration of parenthood, but also the story of a world contained within the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of its setting. I have read some of these stories over and over again, always seeing some sentence I had never noticed before. There is simply and truly no one who writes better than Edward Jones. Nor any one who writes stories of more importance.

Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very old novel, the actual date of its writing in dispute, its authorship also in dispute, written out by hand, copied so many times that the state of the manuscript itself is the subject of much scholarship; the novel was revised by a writer in the Ming dynasty who, according to the translator, improved the novel greatly in form. It is a magnficent piece of work; like much that is magnificent, it exists in its own terms. Its ambition and scope sit like a mountain on the literary landscape. There is truly nothing else like it. The story of the collapse – or rather the long, slow death – of the Han dynasty and the emergence of three stable kingdoms from the wreckage. There are at least a thousand characters in the book, many of them major, all playing a vivid, palpable role in the proceedings, whether for a paragraph or for many chapters. The bulk of the book takes up the long conflict between Cao Cao, a noble who captures the last of the Han emperors and uses him as the center of a northern kingdom, and Liu Bei, a distant relative of the Han who attempts to defend the dynasty and reunite the many parts of China that have fallen away from the emperor’s rule. This is not a modern novel in which characters deliberate about their actions and reveal themselves in psychological detail; this is a saga, an epic, in which the people are indicated by their deeds, their pronouncements, with an occasional reference to their private moments, their thoughts, their longings. Such a vivid piece of writing, it was exhausting at times to read it, coming in at over 2200 pages in four volumes. This is a book to study, one of the central texts of Chinese history and culture, helping to define the nation’s ideas of legitimate rule, politics, honor, and military craft. There are moments of startling savagery: a meal in which the host, starving in a time of famine, cooks his wife to serve her up for dinner; the killing of a eunuch in the bedchamber of an emperor in which his murderers eat his raw flesh. There is no other experience in reading like this one. The kind of novel that a writer devotes decades to producing, the bulk of his life’s energies, perhaps – though the reputed author is also said to have written The Water Margin (Outlaws of the Marsh), a book that is equally long.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book came to mind after reading another attempt at a surreal novel; Whitehead’s tale of two opposing schools of elevator maintenance has stayed with me over the years as an example of how a book can make its own reality. In exploring this idea the writer stays true to the partly magical idea that an elevator can best be understood by feeling it rather than by examining it. But at the same time the world expands to include the history of the dichotomy between the empirical and intuitive schools of elevation, and then to embrace, from a different angle, the idea of racism and its effect on both versions of the truth. I can’t find my copy of the book at the moment so I can’t quote names of characters, but the protagonist’s journey is lucid, detective-like, and meaningful. Much as I liked the novel, it felt to me that the ending faltered, employing maybe too much mechanics, too much exposition; but this is a very slight problem in a very good book. This novel stands as an example of what modern writers do with elements of fantasy to make the real, mundane world more vivid.

Cecilia by Frances Burney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the most recent reading project I have undertaken, having heard that Jane Austen admired this novel; it is a late 18th century novel about the inevitable young woman of immense virtue, beauty, and wealth, and the extraordinary lengths to which she must go in order to marry as she chooses. Her uncle, who left her a fortune, made the money contingent on her husband taking her surname; the man she comes to love has an obdurate father who will not consider such a possibility. The book is a phenomenally good read in spite of a couple of quirks brought about by the style of fiction written in the era. Burney’s best passages are her comic sequences; the conversational passages that include the tradesmen and lower class folks are wonderful and funny. The funniest sequence is the slapstick-worthy episode surrounding Cecilia’s first attempt to marry her beau in secret. On the way, in secret, to the wedding, she encounters nearly everyone she knows in London. The wedding does not work out, of course; Burney has a heavy-handed touch with plot, throwing up obstacle after obstacle to nearly every move Cecilia makes during the course of the novel. The result is is a potboiler at high steam; occasionally the pot boils over, however. I was forced to skim some of the higher emotional passages where the lovers part forever with long, intense speeches praising one another’s virtue. And the last hundred pages (of nine hundred or more) were almost unendurable as Burney repeats much of what she has already done in terms of overripe speech and plot. She wrings out the last drop of sentiment and melodrama from the conclusion. Nevertheless the novel is worthy and the satirical dialogs (Lady Honoria wins the championship) are acidic. She had a great ear for comic speech, did Burney. One has to wonder if the higher-flown passages of conversation are in any way an accurate depiction of the way people spoke to one another. I am glad to have read the book and might essay another of Burney’s novels in time.

The Scholars by Wu Jingzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book when I was in college and recently picked it up again to reread. No fear that the book would hold up; it’s one of the six great books of Chinese literature, a set of classics that have been taught for generations. There’s really nothing else I’ve read that compares to it in terms of subject or style. This is an hilarious depiction of snobbery, academia, and pretension; also of sincerity, generosity, and humanity. The whole of the Chinese world falls into these pages. Well, that sentence sounds a bit pretentious, since I don’t know the whole of China; but the book is exhaustive and convincing in its depiction of every sort of daily life from the era. The structure of it is intricate and unusual; it’s described as being more like a collection of stories than a novel, but the real structure is more complicated than that. We meet a character, follow his life through a problem, maybe for an extended period of time, and then something happens – often a meal, a drinking session, a feast, a poetry-writing contest – and a new character enters. There is a kind of fadeout of the old episode and then we follow the new character. As though as readers we are meandering through the world ourselves. The world itself is fascinating. In every context there is a means of reinforcing the social hierarchy; at dinner parties, for instance, the guests sit in ranked positions. There are constant discussions of who should bow and who should not. Characters exist in terms of family obligations, friendships, social position, and debts. And food. There is so much food. After three days of reading I’m starved for pork dumplings. This is the kind of writing that Isak Dinesan refers to as “tale” rather than modern story; the inner lives of the characters are absent except for occasional glimpses. The story is driven by events, by the plain outline of what happens, and in this way covers an enormous territory. It falters in the last third in my opinion; the episodes become less certain and more muddled. But it is a magnificent book. This particular edition has gorgeous woodcut illustrations in it depicting the various scenes. A treasure.