Conspicuous Consumption

   The first section of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf  is is all about the Steppenwolf, aka Harry Haller, and offers, in these opening pages, a simple notion of identity: Our identity is composed of, or at least Haller believes that his identity is composed of, two battling parts: the Dionysian and the Apollonian. I'm using Nietzsche's terms, because much of this book seems to be a rehash of some of that philosopher's thought. Later this theory of a bifurcated identity is altered to say that we each have not two sides, but many. This is the book's great reveal, but the combination of a self-obsessed character and facile philosophy and psychology in the opening pages almost made me put it down before I got there. It gets better when we get a glimpse outside Harry's head: A new character, Hermine, appears. She seems to understand Harry for what he is, and calls him out on at least some of his nonsense while also teaching him the popular dances of the day. This is nee...

   Patrick Wright has chosen to focus his massive account of the last ten years of Uwe Johnson's life, spent in Sheerness , on the place. The detail we absorb from Wright about this neglected and depressed locale—I seem to remember it being referred to as "the back end of the Thames"—is staggering. It seems trite to say that the places we spend our days make us who we are, but how many biographers take that seriously? Most seem content to tell us what their subjects do while more or less ignoring where they were. Wright, adopting the opposite approach, focuses most of his 750 or so pages on the bleak, depressed place Johnson made his home. In those pages we do get the facts of Johnson's life, but much more we get the facts of Sheerness, Sheppy, and the bleak place that was England in the 1970s.  The book's great strength is its discursiveness. From Sheppy and Johnson, Wright journeys widely., and as much as we enjoy reading about our subject, especially in the sub...

 The race continues. Can I keep going long enough to finish Michael Connelly's ongoing series of Harry Bosch novels or will I die before Bosch? The good news is, after The Crossing , the 18th in the series, I still enjoy the books enough that I want to give it my best shot (though it wouldn't make me sad if Bosch's story continues even after mine has ended).  Bosch is now officially retired again—he's already retired once, but then come back under a special program allowing retired detectives to return to duty. He is, however, suing the LAPD for forcing him out: He still doesn't like retirement. Mickey Haller, a defense attorney who, it was revealed several novels back, is actually Bosch's brother, something of which neither of them had been aware, contacts him and asks him to work for him as an investigator.  Haller has his own Connelly series, so this book is a crossover. I have a vague memory of reading one Haller book, and not being eager to go back for more...

 It is tempting to read  Stoner,  the story of a man in an unhappy marriage, thwarted in his career, and not quite able to be the teacher or scholar he wants to be, as relentlessly bleak. And yet, in the course of the protagonist William Stoner's life, he manages to experience the aesthetic bliss that one can find in the best art, to experience love (also passionate sex), albeit outside his marriage, and also to experience paternal love in the early years of his relationship with his daughter. The view of life Williams presents us with is in no way idealized; it is a realistic account of the good accompanied by the bad, a combination with which most us will be familiar. Stoner is, for most of the book, a university professor. There is nothing in the account of his life and career that is surprising or exciting. It is, in short, mundane. Reading Williams's account of it, though, we find ourselves affected by something that lies just beneath the surface. As in, for example,...

 Having now read the first two Reacher books in quick succession I am coming to the conclusion that the series has a great strength which is also a weakness: Jack Reacher.  This entirely rootless and ruthlessly competent man is an incarnation of a fantasy that appeals to many of us. The sections of this novel that feature him are a treat. The problem is, there are sections where the POV character shifts, and they are uniformly less interesting than the Reacher sections. One scurries through them to get back to the main attraction. The main attraction will certainly draw me back, but maybe not right away. In Die Trying Reacher is dealing with a right wing group based on the sort of wackos that used to infest the less populated parts of Michigan and the American West. Reading the novel, published in 1998, takes one back to a simpler time when we could view these militia types as fringe wierdos and usually not much more. Alas, that was long before they and their sympathizers inf...

      After telling her that he thought The Waves was a masterpiece, Virginia Woolf's husband and first reader, Leonard, added that he "thinks the first 100 pages extremely difficult, & is doubtful how far any common reader will follow." I'm not sure if I qualify as a "common reader," but I maybe I am, because Leonard was spot on: It took me about 100 pages to learn how to read The Waves . The rest was pure pleasure. As I move through Woolf's novels, I am delighted to find that she never seems to have let herself get into a rut. In each novel she tries something new. In The Waves it is the presentation of six characters (and a seventh whose voice we never hear) through internal monologues—the stories they tell about themselves at different stages of their lives. Woolf shows us, by the end that, though they are individuals, they also form a sort of grid: they are all part of each other. Waves, we remember, are each separate from the other, but are b...

  Becky Cooper has worked at The New Yorker  and has written a good many articles for them (mostly about food and restaurants) including the four-parter that she would expand (and expand and expand) into this book. One of the great things about The New Yorker is their willingness to go long, whether that means devoting a significant chunk of one issue to an in depth exploration, or spreading that exploration over a few issues. Their commitment to long-form journalism is what keeps many of us reading it. There's such a thing, though, as giving a story that needs space too much space, and that is the problem with Becky Cooper's We Keep the Dead Close . In sharing with us seemingly every detail of her amateur quest to figure out who murdered a Harvard graduate student named Jane Britton, and throwing in the plight of women in academia over the last half-century, #MeToo, our propensity to tell stories and make myths about inexplicable events, and even her own relationship with a ...