The Grouchy Editor

by Washington Irving

I’ve often noticed while reading old books (pre-20th century), that two themes appear again and again:  travel on the high seas, and anything pertaining to food.  We tend to forget, in our modern supermarket lives, just how much of human history was devoted to the pursuit and preparation of something to eat.  But when we read these old books we are reminded.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” – along with “Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving’s most celebrated work – is a case in point.  Its depiction of Ichabod Crane’s ill-fated courtship of the maiden Katrina and the attack of the Headless Horseman is justifiably famous, but what struck me were the author’s loving, nearly idolatrous descriptions of food.  It’s notable that although the plot ostensibly concerns Crane’s efforts to woo Katrina, Irving’s most vivid passages are about her father’s table – and not the girl herself (although even she is described as desirably “plump,” as though she would look good beside the turkey on a platter).  Vegetarians must hate this story.

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  by Agatha Christie

When I think of Agatha Christie, what comes to mind is an old English estate, with a murder or two, and a middle-aged (or elderly) sleuth on hand to unmask the villain.  In other words, I think of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.  With Christie, what I do not think of are wild motorcar chases on country roads, gun battles on city streets, and government papers that could trigger war.  That’s Alfred Hitchcock material, or an Ian Fleming plot.  And that’s part of the problem with The Secret Adversary, Christie’s second novel.  The story is out of her comfort zone, not so much a mystery as a frantic spy thriller.  

There is a reason that Christie’s young protagonists in this and four more books, “Tommy and Tuppence,” never attained the popularity of Poirot and Marple.  They are an amusing couple, but their adventures are wildly improbable, they enjoy amazing good luck, and they happen upon extraordinary coincidences.  There is action galore – but too few “little grey cells.”

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 by Charles Portis

I almost never read Westerns.  I think this is because some of the elements of Western life bore me.  I don’t really care about the difference between a Winchester and a Mauser, nor am I all that interested in horses, homesteads, and hangings.  But I’m beginning to think this oater aversion of mine is a mistake, because some of the best books I’ve read – in any genre – are Westerns.

I am referring to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and I am referring to this book.  In both novels, the hook is the characters.  In True Grit, it’s the voice of one character in particular, 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who narrates the story.  Mattie, who never met a contraction she would not like to flatten, is a bible-thumping delight as she interacts with some of the roughest characters of the old West.  One critic said True Grit “captures the naïve elegance of the American voice,” and I think that sums up the humor Portis mines so well, using the indomitable Mattie as his catalyst.

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 by John Berendt

Some of the best “nonfiction” books come with a nagging caveat:  How much of the story is factual?  That was an issue with James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and it has dogged classics like In Cold Blood.  An author will produce an enthralling narrative, but it will include some quotes or incidents that stretch credibility. 

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is an addictive read, brimming with colorful characters and vivid scenes from 1980s Savannah, Georgia.  But Berendt, who spent much of the ’80s hobnobbing with Savannah’s upper crust and slumdogs alike, evidently either possessed a photographic memory or an ever-present tape recorder.  How else to explain things like the author, out for a morning stroll, encountering a native, engaging in a lengthy, spur-of-the-moment conversation – and then reproducing the conversation verbatim in his book?  It doesn’t add up.

If you can accept this blurring of fact and fiction (and let’s face it, we generally do), Midnight’s story is thoroughly engaging.  Berendt dishes up one juicy anecdote after another about the peculiar Georgians he meets.  Here is his summation of Savannah:  “The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. … The ordinary became extraordinary.  Eccentrics thrived.  Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.”

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by Richard Bachman

In the introduction to this edition of The Long Walk, King attempts to explain his decision to create “Bachman,” whom he describes as his dark half, a writer more disposed to gloom and doom than the sunny, optimistic author most people know as Stephen King.  But I’m not buying it.  I defy anyone – other than King himself – to read any back-to-back Bachman and King books, without knowledge of the “author,” and then confidently declare which book was written by which version of the writer from Maine. 

Somehow this distinction seems to be important to King, but I doubt that his “constant readers” give a damn.  What does matter is story, and that’s where someone – King, Bachman, or the Ghost of Christmas Past – excels.  The Long Walk was published in King’s prime (1979) and chronicles a mysterious march undertaken by 100 boys walking without pause from the Canadian border to Massachusetts.  This bizarre societal ritual takes place in some alternate universe, but Walk for the most part steers clear of something that I believe trips up so many King novels:  the supernatural. 

Walk’s ending is abrupt, and the teenagers suffer a bit from “Dawson’s Creek Disease,” in which the boys are implausibly wise beyond their years – quoting Keats, making literary allusions, debating philosophy – but the story itself is absorbing, suspenseful, and original.

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 by Mark Twain

Mark Twain endures, I think, in part because he was a fascinating mass of contradictions.  Twain is celebrated for his humor, but read this pessimistic quote from his autobiography:  “The main-spring of man’s nature is just that – selfishness.  Man is what he is … [he] tarries his little day, does his little dirt, commends himself to God, and then goes out into the darkness, to return no more, and send no messages back – selfish even in death.”  And this quote:  “These tiresome and monotonous repetitions of the human life – where is their value?  Susy [Twain’s daughter] asked that question when she was a little child.  There was nobody then who could answer it; there is nobody yet.”  The man obviously had dark thoughts.

More apparent contradictions:  Twain was a champion of the “little guy,” yet his friends were business titans and presidents.  He was a sharp social critic, yet could react petulantly to criticism of his own work.  This autobiography, planned for release 100 years after Twain’s death, is at once comforting and disturbing, as is the man himself.  Helen Keller described Twain as someone who thought of himself as a pessimist but was in reality an optimist.  I’m not so sure about that.

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by H.G. Wells

Of the handful of H.G. Wells classics I’ve read, The Island of Dr. Moreau is probably the most thought-provoking – and the least entertaining.  It’s morbidly interesting because, unlike the space aliens in The War of the Worlds or time travel in The Time Machine, the themes Wells explores are grounded in reality:  evolution, nature versus nurture, religion, and man’s relationship to his fellow animals.  But Island is nowhere near as much fun as the author’s other science-fiction stories because its protagonist, Prendick, does not hunt, chase, or flee from Dr. Moreau’s monstrous creations (a hybrid of humans and beasts); mostly he just observes them.  And these observations are not so much thrilling as unpleasant, a depressing reminder of all that is wrong with human nature, and science run amok.

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by Richard Connell 

Connell’s prose reminds me of Cornell Woolrich.  At times his writing feels amateurish, but like Woolrich, the man knows how to build suspense and tell an original tale.  At just 35 pages, Game is really just a short story, but Connell packs more action into those pages than Tolstoy does with ten times the length.  The plot:  An American falls off a yacht in the Caribbean and is swept to shore on a mysterious island.  Once there, he becomes the “guest” of an aristocratic Russian hunter who informs the American that they will go hunting together – with the Russian as hunter and the American as prey.  It’s melodramatic hokum, but it works.  My only complaint is with the Hollywood ending, which feels false.

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by Jane Austen

There are two ways to read a Jane Austen novel:  with modern-day sensibilities, or by just going with the flow.  I recommend option number two.  Austen is such a witty writer that it’s easy to forget you are essentially devouring soap opera, and are getting caught up in the feelings, intrigues, and status of characters who are, after all,  a bunch of privileged snobs. 

The men in Austen books never seem to actually work and often fall prey to the sins of “idleness.”  The women are no better, wasting their time on gossip and self-pity.  Meanwhile, their servants and other lower-class citizens are barely worth a mention.  However … if you do go with the flow and can bring yourself to identify with Austen’s pampered people, it’s a rewarding experience.  Also, it’s not often I can claim that a book published in 1811 made me literally laugh out loud – but this one did.

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by Gunter Grass

Over the past 15 years, I’ve read about 460 books, and all of them – fiction and nonfiction, short and long, classic and trendy – had one thing in common:  I began on the first page, and I finished reading on the last page.  Not so with The Tin Drum. I had to put this book aside after reading 52 pages.  I simply could not stand author Gunter Grass’ style.

Last year, a good friend of mine died, and after his death I learned that this 1959 German novel was a favorite of his.  I was aware of the book’s impressive pedigree:  An Oscar-winning film adaptation was released in 1979, Grass was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize and, according to the new translation’s afterword, “It remains the most important work of German literature since the Second World War.”  I was prepared to love the book.

I detested it.  To me, Grass’s prose screams out, “I am a writer – look at me write!”  Drum’s “groundbreaking” style (switching from third-person to first-person, magical realism – god, how I hate magical realism) and its cutesy characters … all of it seems like undisciplined Vonnegut.  It is tedious reading, and self-indulgent writing.  I really wanted to finish The Tin Drum but, like the book’s hero, the minuscule Oskar Matzerath, I’ve learned that life is simply too short.

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