This is a book of quiet poems, quiet beauty: there’s something of magic and majesty in Merwin’s descriptions of stars, birds, planets, rivers, in phrases like “the green heart of the woods” (p 13). These are poems concerned with memory, with family, with nature, with sight—perhaps mostly with memory: “here surfacing through the long/backlight of my recollection/is this other world veiled/in its illusion of being known,” he writes, in “The First Days” (p 76), and, a few pages later, in “My Hand”: “see how the past is not finished/here in the present” (p 74). I like the grace of these poems, the pace of them, the uncertainty of some of the phrasing (short lines that can be read in multiple ways depending on whether you stress the break or not), the well-craftedness of the images, like the last few lines of “Barrade,” describing a train passing at night: “the strip of yellow windows passed/like days on a calendar/the long rays of their reflections/reaching across the naked earth/a moment and then never gone” (p 101).
I am such a sucker for city-romances like this, and also for David Levithan’s particular post-gay brand of optimism and charm, and also for the occasional slightly-breathless young adult novel. “I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?” is how Nick and Norah’s whirlwind night starts, and it continues with kisses and drama and hand-holding and a deliciously sexy scene in the Marriott Marquis and more kisses (in the rain!) and so many sweet moments as neurotic-and-kinda-uptight Norah starts to learn to trust herself/the moment/life.
When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music” and “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (which begins, “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering/if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch”) and “Personal Poem” and the one that starts with “Krushchev is coming on the right day!”. I love “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” too, and I like some of the poems about art: “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “Joseph Cornell” and “Digression on Number 1, 1948.” I like the sweetness and sexiness of “To the Harbormaster,” and the beautiful city-images—the whole first stanza of “Beer for Breakfast” (chestnut trees and blue skies), or this bit in “Having a Coke with You”: “in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other.” I like the concrete better than the surreal, and there’s more of the latter in these poems than I expected.
While I enjoyed this collection of six short stories about nighttime epiphanies, by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, Patricia McCormick, Sarah Weeks, and Gene Luen Yang, I definitely liked some of the individual stories more than others. Part of it, I think, is the length factor, or the intended-audience factor: I like short short stories (or even just short-ish short stories) best when they’re really clever and/or a little experimental. The shorter stories in this collection, though, are pretty straightforward. My favorite of the shorter ones, by Patricia McCormick, was simultaneously uncomfortable and excellent: it’s about a teenage girl whose stepdad is clearly inappropriately interested in her, and how she teaches herself to drive, then stands up to him without really planning to. More pleasing to me, though, were the two longer pieces, by Libba Bray and David Levithan, which is possibly predictable, given that I already knew and liked their novels. Bray’s story, set in 1980, is about a group of Texas teenage girls who drive to Dallas for Cheap Trick concert, but then find themselves unable to drive home. I like Bray’s writing style, which is energetic/almost breathless without being over-dramatic or force. And then there was Levithan’s story, about a New York City night of honesty, a girl who goes to a party she doesn’t want to go to but then realizes that she can just leave, go do something else instead, and a boy who gets tired of the rote conversation of “what’s up?”/”not much” and “how are you?”/”fine.”
The subtitle of this book—”Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade”—is more gossipy-seeming than the book itself is (though I think its gossipy bits, about Mabel Loomis Todd’s affair with Austin Dickinson, and Henry Ward Beecher’s possible affair with Elizabeth Tilton, are some of the best parts). Benfey writes both about specific people and their (sometimes loosely) intersecting lives, and about the broader culture: he argues that after the Civil War, there was a shift, at least among intellectuals, away from an earlier New England Puritanism and toward a conception of greater freedom in life (and in love). He writes about art and artists, about writers, about Martin Johnson Heade’s trips to the tropics and to Florida, and his hummingbird and orchid paintings, and about Dickinson’s hummingbird poem, and Stowe’s pet hummingbird, arguing that the general fascination with the hummingbird’s darting color and exquisite shape and “route of evanescence” (the phrase is Dickinson’s) has something to say about the changing route of society itself. It’s a pleasing book, though I sometimes found myself annoyed by the shifts in time and place, by things like the repetition of the same quote about the Newburyport salt marshes that inspired Heade, once on page 88 and then again on page 213. Mostly, though, it’s interesting, and I liked Benfey’s playful and intelligent narrative.
It’s 1943 and Nicola Tesla is eighty-six and living in obscurity in the Hotel New Yorker: in this novel, a snooping chambermaid whose father’s best friend claims to have just built a time machine befriends him; he talks to the pigeons on his windowsill; the ghost of Sam Clemens writes Tesla’s biography. The New York details of this book are wonderful: it opens with Tesla thinking about dust, all the pieces of other lives floating around: “some buckwheat flour blown in from a Portuguese bakery on Minetta Lane and a pellicle of curled felt belonging to the haberdashery around the corner” (p 1). The other thing about this novel I liked is its sense of romance: the story of Louisa, the chambermaid, and a mysterious man she meets on the train who claims to know her from elementary school, and the story of Walter, Louisa’s father, meeting his wife at the opening of the public library, their walks through the city together, the sense of wonder and awe. There’s wonder and awe in the Tesla parts of the book too, and in the sciencey parts and the speculative parts, but mostly in the romantic bits and the city bits (which perhaps says more about my personal biases than about the book!).
It’s easy to be enchanted by a city you’ve never been, and Gopnik was enamoured of Paris before he’d so much as visited it. His first trip only served to solidify his ideas of the city’s charms: “The trees cast patterned light on the street. We went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had the best meal I had ever eaten, and most of all, nobody who lived there seemed to notice or care. The beauty and the braised trout alike were just part of life, the way we do things here” (p 7). When, as an adult, Gopnik moved to France, the romance continued: “The romance of Paris was my subject, and if it is a moony or even a loony one, it is at least the one I get, a little” (p 10). So there we have two of Gopnik’s concerns, beauty and romance, and there also part of why his writing appeals so much to me. And a third: the city as city, the city’s life. What he writes of Paris is, or could be, I think, true of many big cities: “What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you. A city of vast and impersonal set piece architecture, it is also a city of small and intricate, improvised experience” (p 8).
This collection of essays is often amusing (as when Gopnik buys the wrong kind of Christmas lights), often tender (both towards Paris and his young son) and often lovely, though there are the dull spots, too (for me: the essay about the World Cup and the tale of a family-run restaurant recently bought out). What I liked best was the shimmer and sparkle of Paris, and how Gopnik captures them: the wonder of Deyrolle, the famous old taxidermy shop, or the way the Eiffel Tower’s lit up for the millennium, all brilliance, “like champagne,” as his son says.
A central concern of this volume is the gap between what a name conveys to us and what the person who bears that name is really like: how the meanings of a name change from one time of our lives to another, and how all those successive meanings may hold little or none of the reality of a person’s existence. (Our narrator has already learned this lesson with regard to place-names, and now he realizes that it applies to the human realm as well.) It’s that same delicious gap in knowledge and perspective: what we know and feel now versus what we felt and knew (or thought we knew) at some point in the past: this gap that comes up over and over again in Proust.
Perhaps my favorite section was that set at Doncières: the cold air of this small town and its streets and hotels, the view from our narrator’s window early in the morning, the warmth of the lighted windows he sees on his way home at night.
This was the sort of book I am not sure if I would have liked as a kid (I can’t remember if I liked adventure-ish books or found them stressful or else just never really read them, other than A Wrinkle in Time), but that I totally enjoy now. It’s full of adventure and riddles and smart characters, funny moments and scary moments and moments of bravery: in short, a book to stay up late reading. It’s the sequel to The Mysterious Benedict Society, in which four very smart children banded together against a very smart villain; in this one, the friends reunite for a global scavenger hunt that turns out to be more serious than they’d expected. I love Reynie and Constance, with their clear assessments of people, and Kate’s pluckiness, and Sticky’s determination: of course, the scavenger hunt teaches the children lessons about themselves and the world, but it’s all such fun, not too heavy-handed.
In this sequel to The Penderwicks, summer vacation is finished and the Penderwick sisters are back in school. Their autumn is going along pleasingly…until their Aunt Claire visits them, and gives their father a letter from their mother, who had died several years before. The letter encourages Mr. Penderwick to start dating again, and the girls—and Mr. Penderwick himself—are none too pleased at the prospect of the disruption of their routines. So Rosalind, Jane, Skye, and Batty launch the Save-Daddy plan, which involves sending their father on a few horrible dates: so horrible, they hope, that he’ll be put off the idea altogether. But Mr. Penderwick has a plan of his own, and things turn out differently from how everyone (except Batty) thought they would. As a reader, the romance plotlines are pretty obvious—it’s clear who should end up with whom and seems silly that the characters themselves don’t figure it out sooner—but of course, that’s some of what’s nice about romantic plot conventions, knowing where things will end up and then watching them get there.