Book Reviews

Confidence
By Henry James
347 pp (Houghton)
Houghton, Osgood and Company (Boston)
Image: 1962 Universal Library edition.

For one who appreciates Henry James’ deeply developed psychological conflict but also likes a fast-paced story, James’ lesser-known novel Confidence (1879) has both. Published during the rising tide of Daisy Miller’s notoriety, Confidence delves into Jamesian complexity of character and relationships while retaining the fast-paced style that helped make Daisy Miller popular. Continue reading →

I picked up the Cheever collection that’s been on my shelf most of my lifetime and read another twenty or so of the stories. I didn’t remember much of an impression from my dabbling in Cheever thirty or more years ago. I discovered an amazing talent with sophisticated layers of insights into suburban modern life that I probably never noticed when I last read Cheever in the early 1980s.

Cheever is both jarring and sparkling, artistic and surgical, detached and deeply involved. Cheever draws the reader into very close proximity to his characters. He is writing about the city, the neighborhood, the living room with cocktails, and the individuals with entrenched social identities and qualities of the place and time. He brings them to life with the blazing banality of a moment in everyday life; with severe detours from comfortable banality; and very awkward scenes steeped in blasé, all with inventiveness depicting the uniqueness of the characters’ particular circumstances.

Cheever gives us brilliant accuracy in the details of the personalities, conditions, disappointments, hopes, emptiness, filled with universals of life that reach every human from anyplace and anytime.

I’ve had some great reading experiences in my long and storied life, and it’s nice to know I’m still finding more.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was an early favorite of mine as a teenager reading poems, stories, and novels getting my literary feet wet. I must have read it a hundred times during the next few days after first discovering it. Continue reading →

In my 50s I finally got around to reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. I can only conclude that it took a massive intellect and a massive artistic talent to write this book. It shows on every page.

Look Homeward, Angel reads like a Mellevillian epic saga of great events, focusing on seemingly “little” events: harsh-but-life-affirming everyday struggles of early-20th-century edge-of-the-mountain people in the South. The family seems dysfunctional, mainly because its dysfunctions are different from one’s own. But it is probably no more dysfunctional than most.

The particular Gant/Pentland family characteristics (dysfunctions included) make the people so real it is hard to believe I haven’t met them. Having recently finished the book, I already recall the characters like I remember people in my old neighborhood. The book redefined my illusive eidetic object I call “the past”: it was a flood of discoveries with enough familiarity to make every page an “Aha!” I knew enough about early 20th-century Southern culture to make a lot of connections, with enough uniqueness of place and character to be fascinating series of discoveries from beginning to end.

It takes a gifted and disciplined literary talent to take everyday problems and growing pains of a semi-rural boarding-house family, about a boy growing into manhood, and turn it into a rich, layered, multi-themed compelling “page-turner” like Look Homeward, Angel. The universals and uniqueness and joys and tragedies and victories and failures and quandaries are so seamlessly integrated, it is a moving and exhilarating journey.

As most English majors know, Wolfe’s style influenced later authors like Faulkner, Hemmingway, Walker Percy, Saul Bellow. That legacy alone tells you what a monumental talent was Thomas Wolfe. But that’s an empty credential until you put away the computer and the TV and curl up for the weekend with the book and enter the world of Look Homeward, Angel.