something about "Of the Farm" by John Updike

In Of the Farm, a contrived little family engages in some emotional thrust and parry during a weekend on some property in rural Pennsylvania. Joey, a thirty-five-year-old Manhattan executive, his new wife, Peggy, and her smart pre-teen son, Richard, have come to visit Joey's widowed mother, who still lives on the family farmland. Feelings of resentment and self-pity frustrate the gathering.

This slim, 1965 novella by John Updike was the first I have read by the American author. I have mixed feelings about it. Although the emotional scab-picking can seem indulgent in moments, tender feeling comes in the balance—and Updike, with elegant prose, can be forgiven for lingering in anticipation of those little resolutions.

something about "You Were Never Really Here" by Jonathan Ames

Joe's job is rescuing young girls who have been kidnapped and trafficked into the sex trade. You Were Never Really Here describes a job that will probably put Joe out of his misery.

Joe, a former Marine and FBI agent, gets hired to save the daughter of a corrupt politician in New York. But when he briefly disturbs operations at a brothel, Joe becomes a threat to a conspiracy and soon learns the stakes are higher than just a few months' income for a sex trafficker. The threatened trafficking organization murders the few important people in Joe's life. Joe, a deeply damaged human being, responds immediately by going on the offensive. He intends to brutalize his way to the crime boss who just destroyed the life Joe had come to accept. Now he has nothing left to lose.

"You Were Never Really Here," a slim novella published in 2013, was a huge departure for American author Jonathan Ames, whose work tries to be humorous. A gritty film version written and directed by Lynne Ramsay came out in 2017. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, who is real and the best actor of all time.

The book has a clumsy description of Joe early on. I wanted Ames to take us deeper. But, nevertheless, You Were Never Really Here was a highly engaging but too short read.

something about Truman Capote's novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

In Truman Capote's classic novella, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Holly Golightly often appears to be a mean, awful person. But she cries on Fred's shoulder the first time they meet. We quickly see that Holly is a contradiction, a "real phony." She feigns an aloof, carefree attitude to protect herself from rejection; she acts refined and educated to disguise the fact that she comes from extreme poverty. She is very vulnerable, which makes her very dangerous.

Capote is a sentimental literary genius because he knows how to cut edges around his open heart. During a crucial, heart-wrenching scene in which Holly reunites with her pitifully naive first husband, Doc, Capote inserts a scream from Holly's upstairs neighbor: "Shut up! It's a disgrace. Do your whoring elsewhere."

This novella's many wonderful lines include the following:

You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky.

And

So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived.

something about "Riders of the Purple Sage" by Zane Grey

I started reading Zane Grey's Western novella "Riders of the Purple Sage," but I could not stand the unworldly prose. Bits of it were salted goodness; most of it was sour. For example, the good:

The life of his eyes dulled to the gloom with which men of his fear saw the approach of death. But death, while it hovered over him, did not descend, for the rider waited for the twitching fingers, the downward flash of hand that did not come.

But the sour dialog included this:

"Oh! Don't whip him! It would be dastardly!" implored Jane with slow certainty of her failing courage.

And prose like this:

Jane's subtle woman's intuition, even in that brief instant, felt a sadness, a hungering, a secret.

There have been many Western-genre works that I have enjoyed. But, I decided, as I sometimes do, that I did not want to spend my time trying to push through this one. There are many other works worth the time.

Notes:
I had just started chapter three.
The word "sage" (and "purple") was overused and worked into the prose unnecessarily. 

something about "The Hellbound Heart" by Clive Barker

Horror novella "The Hellbound Heart," published in 1986, was the basis for the 1987 film, "Hellraiser," which became something of a horror franchise. The novella, written by Clive Barker, opens with a devoted hedonist solving a puzzle box that introduces him to the Cenobites, a religious order dedicated to extreme sensual experiences. The Cenobites immediately own Frank, the filthy bastard, and doom him to an eternity of unfathomable pain and misery--which, I guess, gives them pleasure. That event sets up a silly story about how Frank's sister-in-law, who became infatuated with Frank upon marrying his brother, discovers and almost rescues Frank, so to speak, by murdering a couple of guys. The writing style, plot, and characters were ridiculous. This is a twisted story, really, but aside from coming across a few good phrases describing some intense sensations, I felt silly reading "The Hellbound Heart."

something about "Billy Budd, Sailor" by Herman Melville

Billy Budd, Sailor is Herman Melville's last novel. It tells us the story of a handsome, well-liked, naive young sailor, Billy Budd, who was drafted into the British Royal Navy in 1797. While at sea, the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart, grows deeply envious of Budd and falsely accuses the young sailor of organizing a mutiny--an especially serious charge given that the recent mutinies in the Royal Navy have led to martial law at a time of ramped-up fears of French aggression. When confronted by his accuser in the presence of the ship's captain, Budd clocks Claggart, who drops dead. In the text, Budd's shocking, violent turn seems to erupt from a desperation born of his stutter, which renders him powerless to defend himself with words in the moment. A court martial ensues, and although nobody believes Budd was organizing a mutiny, the officers sentence the young sailor to death. To not execute him would risk encouraging actual mutiny and, therefore, national security. Melville's prose is characteristically and wonderfully eccentric, but the events and themes (law and reason?) in this very slim novel feel undercooked. It was published posthumously and should probably be considered unfinished. The book's latter portion reads like a coda rather than a conclusion.

Note: Is Claggart's accusation leveled out of maliciousness or out of a self-deceiving need?

something about "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy

This remarkable novella drags a well-heeled federal judge through the ultimate crisis.

Tolstoy does not flatter our protagonist in The Death of Ivan Ilych. In an efficient account of Ilych's professional and social advancement, we learn that the man is shallow, conceited, and vain; he is a social climber and, having climbed, immediately became condescending (though not unkind) in his privilege.

One of the remarkable things about this novella is that these traits do not make Ivan Ilyich a villain; instead, they make him average.

In the story, Ilyich's health declines and he suffers exquisite pain in his illness. Incapacitated, the pointlessness of his life imposes on him. And the degree of suffering mystifies him because he has only ever done what he thought he was supposed to do: develop a career, get married, have kids, get established. But doing what was expected could not spare him an agonizing, slow death. In the end, the inauthenticity of his life leaves him lifeless.

My favorite parts--all of these include a comment on averageness and unoriginality:

On Ivan Ilych's parentage:

He was the son of an official who had worked his way through various ministries and departments in Petersburg, carving out the kind of career that brings people to a position from which, despite their obvious incapacity for doing anything remotely useful, they cannot be sacked because of their status and long years of service, so they end up being given wholly fictitious jobs, anything from six to ten thousand a year, and this enables them to live on to a ripe old age.

On Ivan Ilych decorating his fine new house:

But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming--everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class.

On Ivan Ilych's trip to the doctor early in his mysterious illness:

He was made to wait, the doctor was full of his own importance--an attitude he was familiar with because it was one that he himself assumed in court--then came all the tapping and listening, the questions with predetermined and obviously superfluous answers, the knowing look that seemed to say, "Just place yourself in our hands and we'll sort it out, we know what we're doing, there's no doubt about it, we can sort things out the same way as we would for anyone you care to name."

Note: The Death of Ivan Ilych was published in 1886. Tolstoy was supposedly suffering a personal crisis of meaning.

something from "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" is one of my favorite pieces of writing. The story's themes of isolation, conformity, and human folly echo loudly. But it is Melville's humor that I heard clearly during my most recent reading. My favorite passage comes when the lawyer, after dismissing Bartleby on a Friday, returns to work Monday morning to find his scrivener still occupying the office. The lawyer, narrating, begins thinking through his next move:

“Not gone!” I murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous ascendancy which the inscrutable scrivener had over me, and from which ascendancy, for all my chafing, I could not completely escape, I slowly went downstairs and out into the street, and while walking round the block, considered what I should next do in this unheard-of perplexity. Turn the man out by an actual thrusting I could not; to drive him away by calling him hard names would not do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea; and yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me,—this too I could not think of. What was to be done? or, if nothing could be done, was there anything further that I could assume in the matter? Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively assume that departed he was. In the legitimate carrying out of this assumption, I might enter my office in a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him as if he were air. Such a proceeding would in a singular degree have the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly possible that Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions. But upon second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubious. I resolved to argue the matter over with him again.

something about "The Age of Grief" by Jane Smiley

I enjoyed this collection of short stories more than I have enjoyed any fiction work in a while. The protagonist of "Long Distance"--my favorite here--reaches a moment of realization that his life had already plateaued. The New York Times review put it well--"he can no longer pretend there are endless possibilities." This story finishes strongly. "The Pleasure of Her Company" also worked well; in it, a single woman befriends a couple that just moved in next door. She learns later that the couple liked having her around because she distracted them from the disintegration of their relationship. Smiley ends this one with a gut punch, too. The title piece is good despite its relatively lesser conclusion. The protagonist's emotional shifts and withdrawal emerge from modestly set narrative points. "Dynamite" and "Jeffrey, Believe Me" are my least favorites, but even those were good reads.

about "A Christmas Memory" by Truman Capote

In this short piece by Truman Capote, a seven-year-old narrator lovingly remembers the last Christmas he shared with his intellectually disabled, elderly distant cousin. That season, the pair followed their tradition of making fruitcake and giving gifts. Capote's unadorned writing colors the events with innocence.

In the years following that Christmas, the boy goes away to school and his cousin succumbs to old age and dementia. In the wonderfully sentimental passage below, Capote masterfully captures the heartbreak one feels when a loved one passes:

Life separates us. Those who Know Best decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer camps. I have a new home too. But it doesn't count. Home is where my friend is, and there I never go.

And there she remains, puttering around the kitchen. Alone with Queenie. Then alone. ("Buddy dear," she writes in her wild hard-to-read script, "yesterday Jim Macy's horse kicked Queenie bad. Be thankful she didn't feel much. I wrapped her in a Fine Linen sheet and rode her in the buggy down to Simpson's pasture where she can be with all her Bones...."). For a few Novembers she continues to bake her fruitcakes single-handed; not as many, but some: and, of course, she always sends me "the best of the batch." Also, in every letter she encloses a dime wadded in toilet paper: "See a picture show and write me the story." But gradually in her letters she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the Buddy who died in the 1880's; more and more, thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather!"

And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.

Note: "A Christmas Memory" was published in 1956.
 

A thing about the novella "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson

Starting around the turn of the century, this fiction novella chronicles the adult life of northwestern laborer Robert Grainier. Denis Johnson's colloquial, often spartan prose endows Grainier and his story with simplicity. At this time the pace of change in life and society was gaining speed but Grainier, for the most part, remains insulated from all that in living his unexamined reclusivity from a woodsy outpost. But he isn't in hiding; in his life Grainier finds love, is found by tragedy; he comes to know the ache of time, the fury of nature; and from the margins he sees innovation and flirts with moral decay. Reading, we aren't driven by the plot or even the characters. Train Dreams feels like a writing exercise and succeeds with the down, diminished beauty of its prose.

Might be looking for more by Denis Johnson.