The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Yet another for the new-to-me book club, which is turning out to have great selections (although I was already reading this one when G. decided to pick it for the club). This was at least my third attempt with this one, and I’m not sure why I could never get into it before. It’s a deceptively easy read, hiding a deep, meaty novel behind a simple southern coming-of-age facade. I found myself thinking about it constantly during the time I was reading it, and for a week or more afterward.

Mostly the question that bugs me is whether this novel believes in God, if you’ll pardon the phrasing. I decided that I did not think that Singer was a Christ figure, exactly, but you can see him as a god figure if you mean that in an atheist sense. Each of the three characters who mythologize Singer has some big all-encompassing obsession that separates him or her from other people: Mick has music, Copeland has his “one true purpose,” and Blount has socialism. Singer winds up being not so much their connection to the divine, but their connection to humanity — except it is a very false and selfish connection, since they see him as a mirror rather than as a person. So to see Singer as a Christ figure is to see Christ/god in really very atheistic terms, as a human creation to fill a lack in the self.

I will definitely be reading this again. This is one of the great American novels.

(I listened to the reading by Cherry Jones, which is excellent, and also skimmed the actual book in preparation for discussing it with the book club.)

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Remember when I read that first collection of her stories and immediately loved her and thought that I’d better never write another word? Yeah, same thing here. I understand the reviews that complain that this novel is too disjointed, but I think those reviews are dumb. I loved this little book; I think Moore gets all the details of girlhood exactly right.

This is also for my new book club.

Mother Night. I should be ashamed of myself that this was my first Vonnegut. I read it for my new book club, which meets at a bar by my house. I think books and beer might be even better conceptually than books and pie. I enjoyed this book a lot, although I wasn’t as sure as the other book club members that the point of the novel was “judge not lest ye be judged” or whatever. I am not sure about that. I am sure, however, that it was dumb of me to lump Vonnegut in with the white-men-on-drugs like Thompson or Robbins or Kerouac or Burroughs, all of whom I am thoroughly sick of. I will read more, I promise.

The Years With Laura Díaz. I am reading this for the book club, but I am way behind because it is turning out to be a really difficult read for me. It’s not hard to understand; I am just having trouble reading it in chunks longer than thirty pages or so. I am also feeling a little skeptical about the translation.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. I love this just as much as I loved it last year. This was one of the books I forced on my poor husband during a road trip last week, and he liked it, too. The book club will begin discussing this one next week. It is a great read, and although it probably does not reveal much that is new information about slavery to a reader now, I still consider it an important read if only to see how political discourse has been watered down and tamed and made more polite since Douglass wrote.

John Scalzi is clearly deserving of an honorary membership in the Books and Pie Club. Of which I am no longer actually a participant, but I can still spot a promising deconstruction of children’s literature when I see one.

After a brief hiatus the Usual Suspects Book Club is returning in January. This year, instead of having a vote on what we plan to read every few months, I decided to just be bossy and make assignments for the year. I selected the books from my own 2005 reading list and from lists posted by others at the forum. Here is the schedule in case you are interested in reading along:

• January: Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party
• February: we’ll be reading erotica in February but the leader for that discussion has not yet chosen a book. (Last year we read a bad romance novel in February; this year we want to go straight to the sex.)
• March: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• April: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave
• May: Carlos Fuentes, The Years With Laura Díaz
• June -July: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
• August: Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
• September: Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
• October: Wang Chen-Ho, Rose, Rose, I Love You
• November-December: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

The Funeral Party. I loved this. At just 154 pages it is barely a novel, and in fact there is something about the way she sketches her characters and places them in a setting that reminds me of a James Joyce short story. The story is terribly sad — a flaky but good-hearted Russian artist in New York is dying at home in the last stages of a disease that seems to be ALS, and his friends and wife and lovers gather in his apartment to see him off. The group is a collection of Russian immigrants, and the story takes place just as the Soviet Union is breaking up. So at the time when they are losing the man who has been the center of their community in New York , they are also conflicted and riveted by the events in their homeland.

I can’t speak for the original Russian, but Cathy Porter’s English translation is just beautiful. Here is one of my favorite passages, one of the moments where Ulitskaya steps back from her characters and writes in more general terms about the lives of the Russian émigrés:

All the people sitting here who had been born in Russian differed in their gifts, their education and human qualities, but they were united by the single act of leaving it. The majority had emigrated legally, some were non-returnees, the most audacious of them ran away across the borders. Yet however their life in emigration had worked out, however much their views differed, they had this one thing in common: this crossed frontier, this crossed, stumbling lifeline, this tearing up of old roots and putting down of new ones in new earth, with its new colours, smells and structures.

As the years went by, even their bodies changed their composition: the molecules of the New World entered their blood and replaced everything old from home. Their reactions, their behavior and their way of thinking gradually altered, but the one thing they still needed was some proof of the correctness of what they had done. The more complicated and insurmountable the difficulties they faced in America, the more necessary this proof was for them. Consciously or not, the news from Moscow about the growing stupidity, lack of talent and criminality of life there during these years provided the proof they needed. But none could have imagined that what was happening in that far-off place which they had all but erased from their lives would be so paintful for them now. It turned out that this country sat in their souls, their guts, and that whatever they thought about it — and they all thought different things — their links with it were unbreakable. It was like some chemical reaction in the blood, something nauseating, bitter and terrible.

Shortly after that passage she moves back to her character, describing how they all share a recurring nightmare about returning to Russia and becoming trapped there, unable to find the papers that would allow them to go back to America. I love this part:

Alik had had an amusing variant of the dream. He was back in Moscow, everything was bright and beautiful, and his old friends were celebrating his return in a large flat, which was familiar yet dreadfully neglected. This friendly scrum of people then accompanied him to Sheremetevo airport, but it was nothing like the heart-rending farewells of past years when everything was for ever, until death. When the time came for him to board the plane, his old friend Sasha Nolikov suddenly appeared and pushed some dogs’ leads into his hands. On the end of them a pack of variously coloured little mongrels jumped about, with husky blood in their veins and with curly tails like pretzels. Sasha disappeared and all of Alik’s friends departed, leaving him alone with the dogs. There was nobody he could give them to, and the check-in for New York was already closing. Then an airline official came to tell him the plane was in the air, and he stayed with the dogs in Moscow knowing that this was for ever.

It is just a beautiful little book, and I will have more to say about it in January when we discuss it in the book club.

Absalom, Absalom!. This is my favorite book in the whole world, and I think it is the best and most important and complete book written about America and the mythology of the south. That’s a bold statement, isn’t it? I defended it in the chat transcripts from our Faulkner seminar. I think Faulkner’s exploration of the whole Gatsby dream and the man-versus-nature ethos is really fascinating. Thomas Sutpen doesn’t conquer the wilderness and build a dynasty out of nothing; he “tears violently” a plantation from the earth. That’s good stuff. We had some disagreement about whether Faulkner was as big a sexist as some of his narrators are, but I think the women here are silent and ghostly on purpose, because they are trapped in the mythos of the south, and that’s no way to live.

During our chats I wound up wondering if Faulkner conceived this book as an answer to Gone With the Wind, because a side-by-side comparison is pretty fascinating. In Faulkner’s world, Scarlet O’Hara could not exist, not because she is so unlikely but because Margaret Mitchell’s pretty fantasyland is so unlikely. Absalom is about sex and rape and violence and the ownership of black men’s and all women’s bodies; it addresses the poison behind the southern myths. The book is brilliant and beautiful and ugly and really hard to read, but it is my favorite book and Faulkner is my favorite author and I forgive him for using “effluvium” seven times in three hundred pages.

We have just finished our Faulkner seminar over at TUS, and I have to call this one a huge success. We had so much fun with Faulkner that the participants are now starting up a sort of Great American Novel reading club, inspired by a couple of recent threads: Huck Finn versus Beloved, and . the Great American Novel. The latter started as a discussion of The Grapes of Wrath and wound up turning into a discussion of the criteria for declaring a book the Great American Novel. The most popular contenders: Beloved, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, and my own choice, Absalom, Absalom!.

It was a good thread, and between that discussion and the Faulkner seminar we seem to have sparked an interest in literature of the south. Some of the regulars are putting together a mini seminar on Beloved, and we are going to read more Faulkner in the spring. I suspect we will see some O’Connor and Welty and McCullers showing up in discussions, as well.

Père Goriot. I read this last year but I am now listening to an audio version because the book club will start discussing it tomorrow. I thought this would be a good book to hear read aloud, but even though I have read it before all the characters are kind of jumbling together. Then again, I remember the same thing happening when I read it the old-fashioned way, so maybe the early chapters of this book are just confusing.

Absalom, Absalom!. Also for our Faulkner seminar. We will begin discussing this one in mid-August.

I have in the past cited this as my favorite book of all. I will see if I still feel that way after this reading.

The Sound and the Fury. Yet another TUS reading seminar. We are on week two right now, making our way through the Quentin section. I finished the book a few weeks ago, my fourth reread. This is one of my favorite books of all time, but this time through I can’t help but compare it to Joyce. My first reaction is to say that Joyce possessed more technical brilliance but Faulkner is ultimately more effective and affecting, but then my second reaction is to wonder how much of my first reaction is based on the fact that I am an American and thus Faulkner is more accessible to me on every level — linguistically, historically, emotionally.

I don’t know. I just know I love this book.

Ulysses. We finished this just around Bloomsday, which was unplanned but kind of neat. I am not sure I have much to say that I didn’t say already in our final chat session. Obviously I admire the book a whole bunch, and there were parts I almost loved. I disagree with the recent criticism about Joyce failing to touch the heart, because I think he does; you just have to work pretty hard to get to there. He is, in the end, writing a rather simple story about human connections and failings and the way that we wind up most alienated from those to whom we ought to have the deepest connections; this is possibly the most depressing work ever written about marriage, and maybe the only thing that ever needs to be written about marriage. But all the brilliant bullshit surrounding that story kind of leaves the reader as alienated as Bloom and Molly, which is possibly part of the point, but also probably the reason that readers admire this book but don’t really love it.

I am sure that I will read this again some day. I am very, very glad that I had the group to get me through it.

The Sound and the Fury. The Faulkner duo has been selected as the next TUS book seminar, and since Amy and I will be pairing up to lead that one, I thought I’d better do a quick reread.

I’m not going to talk about this book over here just yet, but I do find it interesting that, as difficult as the Benjy and Quentin sections are if you have no idea what’s going on, on rereading they move very quickly and are not difficult at all. I reread the Benjy section in under an hour this time through. (I think this is my fourth time on this one.)