Book review: Stoner

John William's novel Stoner was published in 1965, but has recently enjoyed a slight return to appreciation thanks to a reprint from New York Review Books. I'd stumbled across a couple of reviews of it over last few months, and since all of them were very positive I ordered the book and looked forward to it with much anticipation.

Thankfully, this was rewarded. Stoner is a quiet, well-observed novel of some considerable emotional heft. It's the story of William Stoner, a young man from rural Missouri in the early 20th century. Sent by his farming family to study the new Agriculture degree at the university, Stoner is instead entranced by the compulsory English literature course he takes, and changes degree (without telling his parents until graduation day). From there, he continues with postgraduate study and teaching, eventually making a full-time career of it. At the same time, he meets, falls for & marries Edith, and Stoner is the story of his two relationships: with his career and with his wife.

At a little under 300 pages, Stoner takes us through its protagonist's life from 18 through to the end of his career in his mid-60s, yet never feels rushed. It's a slow, quiet story, and thus finds the perfect marriage of form & content, since Stoner the man is also slow, quiet and low key. He finds his feet as a lecturer, becoming popular on campus, but also making an enemy of one of his colleagues in the department. Meanwhile, his marriage to Edith descends fairly quickly into a mutual disappointment (it is clear from early on that she doesn't particularly care for him at all), and thus Stoner finds his main satisfactions in life through his teaching.

Williams' prose throughout is spare, simple and beautiful. The main characters - Stoner, Edith, and his best friend Gordon Finch - are all well-drawn, although Edith sometimes edges a little close to being cruel to Stoner for its own sake. (Although this can be explained by the novel presenting his side of their relationship.) Lomax, Stoner's nemesis, seems mostly to serve as a plot device, rather than as a character in his own right, but again: his relationship to Stoner is essentially that of an obstacle.

There are several fine university novels, and for obvious reasons I am a fan of the genre. With Stoner, I think John Williams has written one of the best. NYRB has also published another of his novels, Butcher's Crossing, and soon after I finished Stoner I jumped online and ordered it. Recommendations from me don't come much higher than that...

Book review: The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was published in 1922. Like This Side of Paradise, there are clearly some autobiographical themes here, even to those who know little about Fitzgerald's life. Most obviously, central characters Anthony and Gloria are in some ways representative of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda.

Moving on a bit from his first novel, the focus here is on characters in their mid to late twenties, and the sense of tragedy which hangs over The Beautiful and Damned (from title on down) goes deeper than the atmosphere of Fitzgerald's debut. Anthony Patch is the only grandson of famed industrial-turned-moral reformer Adam Patch, and grows up in a life of moderate privilege with the expectation of more to come. Through the first part of the novel, we spend time with him and his friends, eventually settling on his up & down relationship with the beautiful & self-absorbed Gloria. The two get married, and essentially spend the rest of the novel spending more money than they have, getting depressed about that fact, and continuing on anyway. Anthony finds the idea of work anathema. In many ways his generation for whom the idea of working for a living was not an automatic assumption: think of Anthony as the American equivalent of one of Bertie Wooster's poorer friends, a class who don't quite have enough money to live without working but who nonetheless believe that earning a salary is beneath them.

Fitzgerald charts Anthony & Gloria's decline as they run through their resources with a remorseless eye. It's very hard to feel sympathetic to either of them - their good intentions of spending less or actually earning money through any kind of work never last longer than a day or two. Pure inertia seems to be their defining characteristic, as they find it easier to drink the days and nights away. And, in one of the novel's cruelest themes, they never really enjoy themselves either - their extravagance mostly consists in drinking near-constantly, but mostly in a desperate way, and in living in houses which are just outside their means, but which they are still underwhelmed by. Perhaps key to this novel is that the title has only the one definite article: it's not The Beautiful and The Damned, but The Beautiful and Damned. The Beautiful are, perhaps inherently, Damned.

The ending of The Beautiful and Damned, which I have no intention of giving away, is something I am a bit uncertain about: I'm not sure if it's a perfect conclusion or a bad flub by Fitzgerald. Either way, it completely reversed my expectations, so I guess that's usually a plus. Right now, having only just finished reading, I think he got it right, but I can see how one might make the case that it went the other way.

If all of this sounds unbearably depressing, it's saved by Fitzgerald's customary lightness of prose. Even in some early passages which describe the working class in terms that would make C. Montgomery Burns blush, Fitzgerald has an eye for the spot-on description or effortlessly memorable phrase. I particularly liked his description of a conversation between Anthony and his two closest friends early in the book: "They are engaged in one of those easy short-speech conversationsthat only men under thirty or men under great stress indulge in", and also a later passing description of a Lieutenant Kretching: "[He] was considered a good fellow and a fine leader, until a year later, when he disappeared with a mess fund of eleven hundred dollars and, like so many leaders, proved exceedingly difficult to follow". That has nothing to do with anything in the story, but it's an indication of the small things that great writers get right.

Book review: Pilcrow

So, the posting here has been pretty sparse lately, I realise. Semester starting and all sorts of other things going on will do that. I will try harder to maintain a more-regular posting schedule from now on...

First, credit where it's due: I read Pilcrow after reading the wonderful reviews of it & Cedilla (which we'll get to in a moment) over at the wonderful book-reviewin' blog Asylum. If you're interested in thoughtful reviews of interesting books on a regular basis, I recommend you keep an eye on that blog.

Anyway, Pilcrow is the first book in a (proposed) four-volume novel by British writer Adam Mars-Jones tracking the life of its narrator, John Cromer. (The aforementioned Cedilla, volume two, was published late last year.) Pilcrow is also the name of the paragraph-break punctuation mark that you're probably familiar with if you've done much of the accursed Track Changes in MS Word.

Pilcrow (the novel) begins - after a brief flash-forward to him learning to drive - with John's boyhood in 1950s England. He is a curious (as in, interested) boy, probably fairly typical in a lot of ways for 1950s English children. His father was a pilot in the war, and is emotionally reserved towards his family (again, fairly typically, I suspect, although there are also hints that his nature goes beyond this), and his mother is the dominant figure in his life - something of a snob, perhaps even a social climber. The early sections of the book lay out this life in a low-key way, setting the scene for the change that drives most of the rest of the story: when still quite young (five or thereabouts), John is struck with a rare illness that vastly reduces his mobility. Essentially, he loses all movement in his legs, and most of that in his arms. Confined to his bed, and needing near-constant care from his mother, John's life takes a significant turn.

Through the rest of Pilcrow, we follow John up until his mid-to-late teens. He eventually moves from his home to a hospital, where he stays for several years until moving to a school for handicapped children. During that time he undergoes the things that almost everyone does during those ages (emotional and intellectual developments, sexual awakening, struggles with friends and family), plus of course the issues brought on by his near-total immobility.

And that's about it, plot-wise. Thankfully, Mars-Jones is interested enough in the premise and characters of his story to not overstuff the plot. Through John's narration (from a later age), he are taken slowly, but always compellingly, through what it might have been like to grow up as John: the narrator's voice is wonderfully done, and the sizeable array of supporting characters are evocatively described. Few of them are as deftly-drawn as John's mother, although some of his schoolmates & teachers are strikingly well-observed (I have a special fondness for the spying/secret agent-obsessed Julian). Rather than an inherently-propulsive plot, what makes Pilcrow such a pleasure to read are the small details: Mars-Jones has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what John's life would have entailed. And he describes it all in a pitch-perfect voice - while John is perhaps more reflective than the average child, the combination of his reflection-encouraging circumstances and the fact that the book is narrated from later in his life means that Mars-Jones avoids the pitfalls of the rarely not-annoying implausibly brilliant child narrator.

Doubtless a 525 page book with a distinct absence of whiz-bang plottery is not for everybody - especially when the book sorta just ends, with three books to come (Cedilla, I should note, is even longer - 700+ pages in hardcover). But those who are willing to delve into John Cromer's life will find much to enjoy, from the consistently sparkling prose and well-imagined characters to the various set pieces throughout. Pilcrow is a novel to move through slowly, not a novel to race through, but neither did it ever feel like a slog. I'm now eager to get (& get into) Cedilla, even though that will still mean a few years (presumably) until the next volume comes out.

Book review: The Imperfectionists

Tom Rachman's first novel, The Imperfectionists, comes with some pretty weighty expectations: my paperback copy is covered with laudatory quotes from what seems like every reputable paper in the US. (It also features that other sign of successful fiction of recent years: an author interview & reading group questions at the back.)

I'm happy to report that The Imperfectionists lives up to the many fine reviews it has received. It is both compelling (in that I didn't want to put it down) and a finely-tuned character(s) study. Based around an English-language newspaper published from Rome, each of the eleven chapters focuses on a different member of the staff (or, in one case, a devoted reader). Thus, the central character of an early chapter is a minor player in later chapters (or vice-versa), and all links together. It is not much of a spoiler, however, to note that The Imperfectionists is concerned more with character than plot - this isn't like, for instance, when Dickens tells his story through rotating perspectives in Bleak House (another recent read). Each chapter could stand as a discrete short story, although undoubtedly they gain more from recognising characters from earlier chapters.

There is some plot, however: the paper (never named here), is, like all others really, in financial trouble. Begun in the 1950s by an American businessman for personal reasons, the paper's history is told in short sections at the end of each chapter, from its founding through its heyday in the 1980s and subsequent decline as a result of competition from the internet and other technological advances (a recurring point is that, by 2005, the paper still had no website). It should be noted that Rachman worked for a few years as an editor at the International Herald-Tribune, so he clearly knows the world of this paper well. The Roman setting is also used well - the fact that most of the paper's staff are ex-pat Americans living in Italy but still working in an English-speaking environment contributes to the isolation brought on by the fact that they are working at a dying instance of a dying medium.

So while that theme plays through The Imperfectionists, the novel's real strength is the characters who populate it. Rachman paints all of them at least somewhat sympathetically (although some are more likeable than others). Most of the chapters end of a faint note of irresolution - not in an unsatisfying way, but emphasising that each chapter tells only a little slice of each person's life. I am a bit of a sucker for novels which alternate between different narrators/character POVs (purely off the top of my head, see most of David Mitchell's novels, or Paul Murray's Skippy Dies, but there are many more examples). It is, however, a hard trick to pull off - even aside from the question of which characters will provide the readers with their POV, the author has to balance all sorts of considerations like how often to switch, how various characters will be portrayed by the different narrators, how much the stories need to/should overlap, how best to represent the different voices of the characters etc etc. Part of the success of The Imperfectionists is that Rachman has done this perfectly - as I said, any part could stand alone, but each has also been composed with the others in mind, so that little pieces fall into place from earlier chapters, and also set up later developments. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the planning of this book - if done even slightly less well, the overall effect would be vastly reduced, I think.

Anyway, now that I've added in my small way to the rave reviews for The Imperfectionists, all I can suggest is that you read it!

Book review: This Side of Paradise

Late last year, for reasons that have much to do with the fact that they were all given beautiful new designs by the good people at Penguin (the image to the right gives some idea, but doesn't really convey the shiny metallic nature of the dustjacket), I purchased a complete set of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books: four novels, one unfinished one, and a collection of his short stories. At that point, a many-years-ago reading of The Great Gatsby was the extent of my Fitzgerald-readership, so I thought I would read them all, in order, and briefly review them. I've been working through the short stories (it is a 600-page book), and yesterday evening I finished his first published novel, 1920's This Side of Paradise.

In many ways, This Side of Paradise is a typical first novel. According to the introduction (which I skimmed afterwards - I hate reading these first, mostly because they tend to assume a familiarity with the work), it does contain some directly autobiographical themes, but I probably could have guessed that anyway. Amory Blaine is the only son of a fairly wealthy family: his father is background at best, as mother and son essentially ignore him, moving around the world for the first few years of Amory's life, inhabiting a world of quiet privilege and ad-hoc education. After his mother takes ill, Amory returns to the US, lives with an aunt & uncle, and begins his formal education at an exclusive boarding school. Self-centred (& a self-proclaimed genius), he remains unpopular for several years, before finding other like-minded scholars to befriend. He also comes into a close, substitute-father relationship with a priest, Monsignor Darcy. We follow Amory through his school and then university (at Princeton) days, and on into the war and the workforce (advertising, although he consistently half-tries to write poems and stories), dropping in on his conversations with friends, classmates, teachers, girls and Darcy.

Amory Blaine is not a particularly likeable character - which is reflected in how most other characters relate to him as well. Inherently snobby, solipsistic and self-dramatising, his intelligence is referred to, rather than seen. He has several love-affairs, all of which peter out for one reason or another, and few of his friendships remain strong for long - tending, instead, to be brief, all-consuming and then pushed aside for the next great influence (Monsignor Darcy remains his longest-lasting relationship).

While it is very much an example of a younger writer finding his feet,This Side of Paradise is nonetheless an intriguing start to Fitzgerald's career. He conveys Amory's world perfectly (possibly because it was also his own), keeps the book moving at a steady pace despite the lack of a particularly dominant central plot, and the prose falls with the casual elegance which would come to define Fitzgerald's style as a whole. He also doesn't condemn Amory too harshly for his failings, instead recording the follies of youth with a sympathetic touch. I knew little about This Side of Paradise when I started it, but it has made me look forward to working through Fitzgerald's remaining three & a half novels.

Albums of 2010: Write About Love

(So, as it turns out, starting a new series on my blog a week before Christmas was a bad idea. But I'll try to regain some momentum by finishing off my little reviews of albums from 2010 I liked, and then get back into some book reviews and other stuff...)

Like Sufjan Stevens, Belle & Sebastian had gone several years without releasing an album by 2010. Also like Stevens, there had been diversions along the way, most notably 2009's God Help the Girl album of songs written by bandleader Stuart Murdoch, and featuring most of the group (albeit with vocal duties handled by outsiders), as well as the 2008 release of The BBC Sessions. So it may not have seemed like it, but by the release of Write About Love, four and half years had passed since the last studio album by Belle & Sebastian - by far their longest break (and approximately as long as the break between posts on this humble blog...).

Unlike The Age of Adz, however, Write About Love does not see B&S breaking much new ground - think of it more as a refinement of the last few albums, with some influence from their earlier period as well. (Bluffer's guide to B&S's musical evolution: first two albums & associated eps were quiet, subdued indie pop; the next few years saw increasing orchestration and variety, but within a largely similar sonic framework; and from 2004 onwards a distinct '70s pop influence started to dominate proceedings.)

The album opens with Sarah Martin's 'I Didn't See It Coming', the first time one of the band's non-Murdoch members has been handed opening-track duties. And 'I Didn't See It Coming' is easily Martin's best song to date - a gorgeous melody, and wonderful vocals from her & Murdoch. 'Come On Sister' is similarly upbeat, and points to the album being similar in feel to its predecessor 'The Life Pursuit'. Track three, 'Calculating Bimbo', quietens things down, however, and also provides this album's first character-sketch-as-lyric song (a speciality of Murdoch's).

My favourite track off Write About Love (& one of my favourites by anyone in 2010) is up next: 'I Want The World To Stop'. It's an unashamedly pop song, with Murdoch's vocals, superbly supported by some of the others, atop the band firing on all cylinders. Unfortunately, it's followed by the underwhelming Norah Jones duet, 'Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John'. While Murdoch's & Jones's voices play well off each other, and the production is as lush as B&S will ever provide, it definitely feels like a Norah Jones song, not her on a B&S song. An interesting diversion, yes, but not much more than that.

The second half of the album kicks off with a bang with the title track, as catchy a pop ditty as you're likely to hear. Guest vocalist on this track Carey Mulligan chips in behind Murdoch, subtly undermining him:

I know the way
(So you know the way...)
Get on your skinny knees and pray
(Maybe not today)

Guitarist Stevie Jackson's lone songwriting contributing to Write About Love is 'I'm Not Living in the Real World', and it shares the off-kilter pop feel of many of his songs. Two quiet songs follow, 'The Ghost of Rockschool' and 'Read the Blessed Pages'. Both are pleasant without being particularly memorable (the latter sounds a little as if it is about former bandmember/Murdoch ex- Isobel Campbell - but that might not be accurate or fair). If I had a criticism to make of modern Belle & Sebastian, it's that the slower songs seem to have lost their bite - while slow, quiet songs on the band's first few albums tended to be some of the highlights, these two (along with 'Calculating Bimbo' & 'Little Lou...') are a little too '70s radio pop for me. A decade ago, who could have imagined that the peaks on the new Belle & Sebastian album would be soul-inflected pop songs that you could dance to, and the hushed ballads would feel out of place? That's testament to the band's growth, of course, but it also feels odd to be underwhelmed by the quiet tracks here.

Luckily, the last two songs restore some of the tempo: Martin's 'I Can See Your Future' may not stack up to 'I Didn't See It Coming', but it marks her continuing development as a songwriter, and 'Sunday's Pretty Icons' sounds like a quintessential B&S album closer - upbeat, a little optimistic, and eminently hummable. (Itunes bonus track 'Blue Eyes of a Millionaire' is also worth springing for, being a simple & sparse but lovely slice of acoustic guitar-driven pop.)

Write About Love does not mark a huge leap forward for B&S, as, say, Dear Catastrophe Waitress did. But it's a concise, punchy albums with at least three songs ('I Didn't See It Coming', 'I Want the World to Stop', 'Write About Love') that stand amongst the band's best, and hopefully also signals their return to regular album-making & touring...

'I Want The World To Stop' (YouTube)

Albums of 2010: The Age of Adz

As the end of the year approaches, I thought I'd cast an eye over some of my favourite music released this year. This is not intended to be the Definitive Guide To 2010 or anything - I've not listened to anywhere near enough of this year's music to be able to make that claim. It's just a series of reviews of stuff I like. Keep checking in over the next week & a bit for more entries...

It's been, as nearly every review has reminded us, five years since Sufjan Stevens' last 'proper' album, the much-lauded Come on Feel the Illinois. Since then, he's released a boxset of Christmas music EPs, an album of Illinois out-takes, and the orchestral piece/film The BQE, and also admitted that the 50 States Project was probably not going to get past the first two entries. In August he suddenly released a 60 minute EP, All Delighted People, and then a week later announced the October release of a full album, The Age of Adz. From that first press release on, Stevens made it clear that this album would be heavily electronic-based, largely eschewing the banjo-led folk-pop-rock that dominated his three most famous albums (Greetings From Michigan, Seven Swans, Come on Feel the Illinois). On the other hand, his second album (Enjoy Your Rabbit) was an electronic-based instrumental affair, so there was some precedent.

Still, most casual Sufjan Stevens will probably find The Age of Adz difficult to immediately love. Not only has he significantly changed his sonic palette, but here we see an album of intensely personal songs. Some time after hearing The Age of Adz I read that Stevens was badly - & somewhat mysteriously - unwell for a period in 2009, but that came as no great surprise to anyone who'd listened to the album at all attentively. (Or, for that matter, noted that the penultimate track is called 'I Want To Be Well'...)

The Age of Adz begins softly, with the piano-&-vocal 'Futile Devices', probably the most familiar-sounding song here. While he has, mostly, smothered his songs in old-school synths & electronics throughout, Stevens' ear for a simple, beautiful melody has neither deserted him nor been deliberately discarded. In more ways than one, 'Futile Devices' serves as an effective introduction to the album, given that the devices he describes as futile are words. Next up is the squelchy electronics of 'Too Much', and the big title track. 'Age of Adz' features all manner of sounds competing with each other, creating a disorienting feel.

'I Walked' was the first song released from The Age of Adz, as a free download from Stevens' website, and is one of the album's highlights for me. Sparse, especially compared to its predecessor, 'I Walked' is a nakedly vulnerable song, with Stevens' voice catching on the line "But at least I deserved the respect of a kiss goodbye" (one of several indications throughout the album that Stevens' romantic life hasn't been entirely painless in recent years), in a way that hasn't yet ceased being heartbreaking every time. 'Now That I'm Older', 'Get Real Get Right' & 'Bad Communication' form a mid-album mini-suite noting Stevens' determination to take stock of himself and move on.

That impression is strengthened with 'Vesuvius', in which he takes the drastic step of addressing himself:
Sufjan, follow your heart
Follow the flame
Or fall on the floor
Sufjan, the panic inside
The murdering ghost
That you cannot ignore

The song itself builds from a quiet, piano-only, start, adding layers of backing singers, low-tech beats and increasingly multi-tracked lead vocals. And The Age of Adz's theme of trying to be happy despite things not going well is hit again in 'All For Myself':
Improving all the time, I am
Improving as I kiss the hem
I promise I won't be a trouble at all
For I'm okay, I'm in the red

After which we get to the album's monumental final two tracks: the aforementioned 'I Want To Be Well', and 'Impossible Soul'. The former is another explicit (in more ways than one!) plea for life to get its act together. It climaxes, after numerous repetitions of the title phrase, with the repeated claim: "I'm not fucking around", Stevens' first recorded lyrical swearing. His nice-guy persona makes 'I Want To Be Well's finale all the more effective and emphatic.

And then we have 'Impossible Soul', 25 minutes of everything that every happened. (One review I read suggested that this song contained more ideas than many bands' entire careers...) It begins quietly, and beautifully, with a passage that will warm the hearts of Illinois-lovers feeling lost on this album. That builds and builds, before breaking down completely at about the ten-minute mark. From there, Stevens single-handedly redeems Autotune's existence, filtering his voice for the next few minutes over a sparse backing before the track once again builds to its triumphant conclusion:
It's a long life, better pinch yourself,
Put your face together, better get it right
It's a long life, better hit yourself
Put your face together, better stand up straight
It's a long life, only one last chance
Couldn't get much better, do you wanna dance?
It's a long life, better pinch yourself
Get your face together, better stand up straight

The album finishes (in its cd & download versions, the vinyl shifts this bit to the end of side three, following 'I Want To Be Well', for space on side four reasons) with a quiet coda, not dissimilar to Illinois's 'John Wayne Gacy Jr', and coming full circle from 'Futile Devices'.

The Age of Adz is not an easy album, emotionally or musically, and I'm sure it will not attract everyone who loved Stevens' last few albums. It is, however, a wonderful album, highlighting personal turmoil but also building a defiant response to that. And Stevens is one of the most talented composers and arrangers in modern music - as well as possessing a beautiful voice and considerable instrumental versatility. The Age of Adz gets my highest recommendation.