Jim Grimsley

The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m mindful here that the rating is about how much I liked the book, not necessarily how good it is. That it is a good book, a great book, is already established. That it was a groundbreaking book is clear from reading anything about it by its many critics, Sartre among them. I don’t dispute any of that. The insistence that the pursuit of evil, of criminality, is a proper literary topic did not begin with Genet but he certainly displays a passion for it. I admired the prose once I gave over to the flow of the book, the fluidity of its shifts in time. Its lyricism is phenomenal. At one point Genet points a finger and says you, the reader, are probably outraged by this book, but I did not intend it as an outrage. I had to stop and wonder what he meant by that, and did not believe his assertion; I think he puffed himself up about the outrage, I think that was the point. The author is a strange beast, intensely self-absorbed. Knowing that this book is autobiographical made me read it differently. In Querelle, for instance, I was not disturbed by the feeling of an underworld. I read the book as a dream, a reverie, a kind of fantasy, and thought it grand. But this book touches onto reality and so I struggled with what Genet claimed for himself, his insistence on telling me his world was different from my world, his morality different from mine. I wasn’t exactly sure why he had to say so over and over again, and I wondered whether it was true, since the kind of predation and thievery he extols is pervasive, and is certainly not limited to the people he knew as petty thieves and shake-down artists. The commonplace morality of virtue that he disdains is neither as easy nor as mundane as this book asserts. I had a queasy reaction to the passages about the luring of homosexuals into hotel rooms and surprising them by taking their money, beating them, and worse. It was all too conventional to take advantage of the weakness and vulnerability of these people, and not particularly heroic. So I wondered where was the dazzlement, exactly. There is the one passage late in the book when he discusses, after his writing has been published and his fame has begun, planning to rob one of the writers he has met. If this were simply a novel I could judge the character more distantly, and might find this moment to be effective. But this was actually Genet speaking of himself in a work that is supposed to describe his life. This is a man I am glad I never met in a dark alley.

There is a certain kind of book that makes me crazed. Well, exaggeration, of course. But which irks me. The chatty, wise first person narrator. Constantly pausing the drama to give me observations on LIFE. “I do like bean burritos,” I said, and the whole morning distilled, the sun through the window, the breeze, the smell of old tortillas, and I thought to myself, what am “I” but an idea of myself, and what is liking but a small emotion of comfort, and what are beans but something sprouted full and ripe from the good earth, and as for burritos, well, the good people who taught us how to eat them also gave us their way of life, their dreams, the omniscience of their communal desires. Which is all well and good, of course, except that presented with a burrito I want to eat it and not to contemplate it, because they are no good cold. When a first person novel decides to talk to me directly and offer me opinions, memories, snippets of poetry, wry puns, along with that sonorous rhythm of rhetoric that makes any sentence sound like a platitude, I feel as though I am being shoved slowly flat against a wall. Here is a book that is desperate to convince me about its existence, the value of its prose. These are the books that are obsessed with telling you what their protagonists think, hour after hour, in the middle of every kind of moment – staring at a woman whose husband has died and being reflected backward into perfectly composed memories about the husband – walking into a bedroom and remembering walking into another bedroom and perhaps then remembering that walking into that older bedroom triggered another memory of walking into yet another bedroom at some other time, and all of it ripe with pondering, lyrical if possible, in which the character, who is speaking on behalf of the author, runs on and on about what life means and what the struggle of day-to-day comes from and what it leads to, crests and troughs of empathy and understanding and metaphorical dazzlement. The sort of sentence that makes the reader pause in epiphany, fingertip on lip, and close the book for a moment, blazing with enlightenment. Oh yes, it’s just that way. A certain amount of this kind of claptrap is understandable and palatable and occasionally I am actually struck by a sentence to the point that I have to stop and think about it. But it is usually a turn of phrase or a moment of drama that strikes me. Not someone’s opinion. Especially not the five hundredth opinion of the reading session, stuffed into every paragraph and cluttering every action. There is a dreadful need of so many writers to explain their characters or, worse, to have the characters explain themselves.

Augusta Locke: A Novel by William Haywood Henderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the pure pleasure of reading prose this book is at the top tier; the writing is strung through with paragraphs that are glorious, evocative of landscape, making me feel as if I am walking through a country that I actually know only barely. It would be tempting to say that the landscape overwhelms the book, but my own brief experience of Wyoming was much like that. The geography dominates everything. The countryside insists on itself in every possible way, and you live in a feeling of space that is incomparable; all this Henderson depicts in minute splendor. The novel succeeds in spite of its story but does not quite abandon story in the way that some books manage to do when they focus on language. I have changed my rating several times while typing this. I suppose it is hard to understand a character who can simply walk away from her mother, yet remain prone to reveries about her, and never make the least effort to find her again. There is the irony of the fact that Augusta’s own daughter leaves her in the same fashion. The characters are so very articulate in their spare way. The dialog in general feels composed and organized in a way that does not evoke their voices, though there are some beautiful and understated scenes throughout. The story has a monotone quality. It makes very risky choices about coincidence. The story drifts away at the ending; I’ve read so much about Gussy and still don’t know who she is; she feels like a part of the landscape, scoured by all that wind and weather. These may well all be positives, in fact. It’s a book I will have to think about for a while. But I wish the drama were a bit stronger.

Noble Norfleet by Reynolds Price
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have read at least a dozen books by Reynolds Price, including the first two novels that were so incandescently drawn, A Long and Happy Life and A Generous Man. I will review one of those later, maybe, to counteract my review of this book. Coming from late in his career, this book is memorable for the unconstrained nature of the plot, the sheer strangeness of it, and the sense that the book is sometimes meandering and sometimes babbling. He survived cancer to write some important novels beyond his heyday. This one is simply off-key in most ways, from the sexual content to the sad vision of race and gender it presents. Not indicative of what Price could do when he was working with all his focus.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, the book clocks in at 1500 pages and begins with an epigram that says, “The secret of being a bore is to say everything.” If you choose to read a book that’s this big, you should give way to the fact that it expands on everything, lolls about, repeats itself, and eventually includes to do lists and ballot counts from a district of Bengal and bouquets of rhyming couplets. This book expects to have its say and does. I have read fantasy written at this length that suffered from a similar pattern that, for me, this book falls into: the pool of characters broadens to the point that the reader flinches at the mention of every new name because, well, they all have a story. The moment of meeting a new figure in the story introduces increasing levels of fatigue. Characters are reduced to mannerisms for the most part, with significant exceptions like Maan, who lives big and charms everyone and rages with emotion; he is a big, messy, complicated person. Lata, who is the female character occupying the foreground, is equally weighty but so eminently sensible; she falls in love in a sensible but passionate way, emerges from her unsuitable love without more pain than is reasonable, and sees that this is a kind of love that she would prefer to do without. The messy passion of Kabir is less helpful and happy than the steady affection of Hanesh. I took up this novel after seeing the mini-series, which actually does the book justice in most ways. The stories Seth is telling are not so complex that they require the room he allows them so that the book condenses quite well. But the novel in all its breadth is quite worth the time, if you are a fan of enormous thick books. It attempts to be a look at the whole of life as it was lived in this imaginary city over the course of a year or so, to tell the story of its neighborhoods, religious conflicts, politics, government, court decisions, social upheaval, shoemaking, business in general, everything – and it does in fact do this with impressive thoroughness. But the stories go on so long and undergo so many permutations that in the end they no longer feel shaped, and at the end of the book one wonders why it doesn’t in fact go on forever. Because one has long since given up on any notion that it will end.