Once more unto the beach, dear friends, once more

It is the end of summer as we commonly recognize it in this part of the world, so also the end of this year's summer reading. I did much better than last year, but I still didn't finish the list. (EDGAR SAWTELLE, I am so sorry.) But I did a lot of reading overall, and then there's INFINITE JEST, which is not finished yet.

The last book I read was Richard Yates' COLD SPRING HARBOR, and I've been struggling with what to write about it. I loved REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and expected to flip similarly over this book, but Internet, I did not. Yates' last novel, concerning two families united by marriage on Long Island, felt unfinished in that it set up several conflicts and did nothing with them; the most vivid character is a divorcée who is practically a grotesque and described as "dying for love," but even her storyline does not get any kind of resolution. It was a slice of life, but not a flavorful one. I'll still give more Yates a chance, though; I would like to eventually have read all of his books (including the collection of short stories I bought earlier this year).

Got any great reading memories to share from this summer? I remember a particularly cloudless day along Lake Michigan, watching my sisters nosing through their Chabon and Sittenfeld paperbacks and imprinting galley ink onto the whitest strip of my sunscreen-covered arm.

Summer Reading #4: Mark Harris, PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION

Entertainment Weekly writer Mark Harris posits in PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION that the 1968 Best Picture race was emblematic of the war of ideals that was going on in Hollywood at the time, between auteurs working on location forging new forms and the grinding gears of big-budget lot-shot features. There is a valid debate that that war is still going on, but mostly, I agree! Of course, if you are the type who is interested in this book already, you probably agree with him too.

Harris follows the five pictures -- "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate," "In the Heat of the Night," "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" and "Doctor Doolittle" -- roughly from conception to Oscar night, starting with Robert Benton and David Newman, who were best friends working at Esquire when they started writing the "Bonnie and Clyde" screenplay. They're great characters, but the first 150 pages otherwise are pretty thick with meetings; I believe Hollywood is like that but Harris could have fast-forwarded a little, because when the book gets really good is in the trivia-dense stories of casting, making and promoting these very different films. The one I'm most looking forward to re-watching after reading Harris' take on it is "The Graduate" and it's probably worth mentioning, the book spoils all of them to some extent ("In the Heat of the Night" least, but still substantially), but you should have seen four of them anyway.

Which brings me to the one I hadn't seen, and in some ways the most fun to read about: Conceived as an heir to the big-budget musical successes of "My Fair Lady" and "The Sound of Music," "Doctor Doolittle" is set up as an emblem of the movie industry's waste and talent vacuum, but even so it was plagued with problems from the beginning. Rex Harrison was a giant asshole (albeit a funny one), locals attacked the set with rocks while they were filming in St. Lucia, and directly quoting page 200, "the rhinocerous got pneumonia." I think the next time something in my life goes massively, expensively wrong, I will throw up my hands and say "Looks like the rhinocerous got pneumonia."

Readers who like movies will probably bring some information about the movies besides "Doolittle," from film classes or otherwise, because they are acknowledged to be great -- it's not a spoiler to point out that all of them made it onto the AFI's top 100 movies list. But no one learns anything about "Doctor Doolittle" because it sucked so much, yet probably went through the least labor pain in getting studio support because it was going to make boatloads of money for the Zanucks at Fox. Details of the publicity campaign could inspire a cold shiver, so similar are they to the tricks employed today on our big-budget blockbusters.

PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION starts slowly but it's worth it, even if you already know that year's Best Picture winner. (I couldn't remember, so I didn't look it up. Suspense!) Despite the early muddiness, it's quite readable -- never falls into the EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS trap of mentioning so many movies per paragraph that one comes away exhausted with a long list, but allows you to walk away with an entertaining take on '60s cinema and some great anecdotes.

Bonus feature:
It was both delightful and scary to discover "Doctor Doolittle" is currently available in Netflix's Watch Instantly catalog. Would it be "Southland Tales" bad, so bad it needs to be watched all the way through, or "Gigli" bad, incapable of being watched in longer than 10-minute segments? I made it through about 30 minutes before I was so bored I turned it off. It's not terrible -- it reminded me of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in parts, a childhood favorite despite the creepiest villain this side of Darth Vader -- and I laughed at the song about how Doolittle feels the need to be a vegetarian. But even doing household chores at the same time, I found it unbearably slow. (In other words, it was "The Majestic" bad.) I would say read the book, don't watch this movie.

Summer Reading #3: Edith Wharton, ETHAN FROME

Edith Wharton: Author. Society matron. Inventor of Seasonal Affective Disorder?

A stranger comes to a small town in Massachusetts and meets the sad and disfigured Ethan Frome, of whom a wise local says, "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters." Does he have a tragic past? Oh, does he!

Book-long flashback: Ethan is a poor farmer and the light of his life is a fresh flower of youth named Mattie Silver, who unfortunately is also his disabled wife Zenobia's caretaker. (That's how he met his wife as well; she came to nurse his ailing mother and he couldn't bear to see her leave. Sir, you have a type!) Ethan and Zeena haven't been happy for ages, but predictably she is Not Pleased to see her husband do things for Mattie, like finish her chores or shave regularly. As the song goes, it's tough to have a crush. Then one day, Zeena goes to the doctor a few towns over...

I figured I wouldn't take to ETHAN FROME because of its rural setting, but the difference between Ethan Frome and the similarly torn Newland Archer isn't geography, it's money. The cold hand of poverty clamps around this threesome and squeezes. Ethan dreamed of entering a trade once, but then his parents went crazy and he had to take care of them, and then his wife got sick; we're told he isn't a good farmer and she's a spendthrift. Newland can buy distance from Madame Olenska with livery cabs and European tours, but there's no getting away for Ethan; at the end of the day, he still has to come back to the same house as Mattie. (And she can't afford to go either, her father having died and left the family so destitute she was forced to sell her piano.)

At one point Ethan passes a graveyard with Mattie and is comforted by the thought that she will eventually lie there beside him when they're both dead. A graveyard. It's a remarkable passage, but that's not Puritan, that's downright medieval.

I didn't really enjoy this book, but I am glad I read it, and not just for the score-settling. I hadn't specifically planned to read it in the summer, but it helped with the bleakness factor. (Incidentally, and perhaps inappropriately, if you are feeling a Frome-ish level of dissatisfaction with your life, please get help. Life is too short to live in Starkfield.) When I returned it to the library I found a collection of Wharton short stories set in New York, which I think will suit me better.

Summer Reading #2: Joseph Berger, THE WORLD IN A CITY

When I got this book as a gift last year I expected a light cultural romp among different neighborhoods of New York City -- but I also got an intelligent examination about the modern immigrant experience. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Times writer Joseph Berger approaches his series of essays about different neighborhoods as traveler and sociologist, and manages to have it both ways.

Berger's thesis, threaded through his accounts of interviews and travels in different New York neighborhoods, is that since the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 -- which abolished the system of national quotas -- American immigration has changed in ways that have eradicated the older patterns in which new Americans settled. (It's pretty disturbing to think that 50 years ago the huddled masses yearning to break free were still controlled according to some ethnic balance sheet.) In New York City in particular, areas largely known for having one particular ethnic character have grown and shifted to accommodate new groups, from Italian barbers of East Harlem cutting the hair of new Hispanic immigrants to Afghans living alongside more established Indian communities in Flushing. Newer immigrants can video chat with their families in South America or watch the Pakistani national cricket team's test matches on satellite, but still face the challenges of maintaining cultural identity while adapting to new living arrangements here.

Berger's position in this is not at all objective, to be clear; the child of Russian Jews displaced by the Holocaust, he emigrated to New York as a young child and lived in the Grand Concourse neighborhood, once known as a lower-middle-class Jewish enclave, and where he reports for the book on Ghanaian immigrant communities saving up for property not in their adopted homeland, but in their ancestral villages to which they hope to retire someday. His extensive reporting acknowledges that even in a melting pot there are insoluble bits, whether among new arrivals (like the tension among Bukharan Jewish families when the women become the primary breadwinners) or between established and newer communities (like complaints against Korean shopkeepers in Douglaston who post signs in Korean without translation), but sees the melting taking place and enriching the city -- not exactly a revolutionary position but one with which I think many New Yorkers would agree if questioned.

THE WORLD IN A CITY is by definition insider-y, and I don't know how much people who aren't interested in the specifics of different neighborhoods of New York (for example, the difference between Jackson Heights and Rego Park) would enjoy that territorial aspect. But it works as an off-the-beaten-path sightseeing guide as well; the suggested sites at the end of every chapter are occasionally obvious, but emphasize local restaurants and places of worship, which at least would give you a place to kick off your adventures in outer Brooklyn or the south Bronx.

Summer Reading #1: Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

This one has been on my to-read list forever because I read THE NAMESAKE, really liked it, read INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, also liked it, then saw the adaptation of THE NAMESAKE and really liked that too. So when I didn't really get into the first story I thought, "Whoa, differences," and set the book down for a week or two while I was reading other things. I'm glad I went back to it, not least because I have to return it to the person from whom I borrowed it.

As in her previous books Lahiri writes in her milieu of immigrant Indian families and the second generation adjusting to adulthood in what is usually the upper-middle-class Northeast. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but UNACCUSTOMED EARTH largely dwells there like the others while dropping little insights that have nothing to do with being of that particular population. I found myself nodding to "Nobody's Business," the story of a Cambridge grad student who becomes almost unwittingly involved in the romantic life of his housemate, for the way it juxtaposes the specificity of his situation (falling in love the same year he is desperately trying to pass his oral exams on the second attempt) with the odd situations created by having housemates whose lives peek out in odd ways. Close to that in terms of my favorites was the sibling relationship and gulf of disappointment described in "Only Goodness."

The first and title story "Unaccustomed Earth" is very finely tuned -- the story of an older man who goes to visit his daughter and her family in Seattle soon after her mother has died -- but it didn't contain that little turn which I was looking for, the small moment of surprise or epiphany which I was looking for. I'm not saying that every short story must have it, but even though it's pretty long for the form, this story never surprised me, and I wished it would.

More Jhumpa Lahiri

• The new issue of Granta, a magazine I should be reading, has an interview, Interview-style, between her and one of her favorite writers, Mavis Gallant (whom I know primarily from her story "When We Were Nearly Young" once published [subscribers only] in the "New Yorker").
• Here's an NPR piece featuring her from last Thanksgiving about what it means to be American.
• And here's three reasons you should read Lahiri from a blog whose title I salute, Great Books By Writers Who Aren't Dead Yet.

Summer Reading 2009: Third time's the charm

It just wouldn't be summer without a wildly slightly ambitious bunch of titles -- mostly this list, with a few additions. (Only ambitious because, and I don't know why I'm even bringing this up, I finished one of the books on last year's list. And I still haven't read THE POWER BROKER.) Some paperbacks, some hardcovers, all awesome? We'll find out.

Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH (finished 6/11)
Joseph Berger, THE WORLD IN A CITY (finished 6/17)
Edith Wharton, ETHAN FROME, but let's keep this just between us (finished 7/12)
Mark Harris, PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION (finished 8/14)
Richard Yates, COLD SPRING HARBOR (finished 8/15)
Jonathan Coe, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS
John Lahr, SHOW AND TELL
Markus Zusak, THE BOOK THIEF
Sheila Weller, GIRLS LIKE US
Herman Wouk, MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR
David Wroblewski, THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
Henry James, PORTRAIT OF A LADY

I'm also toying with participating fully implicated in Infinite Summer, a new project (found via 52 books) sponsored by The Morning News aiming to get a group read of David Foster Wallace's best known novel going this year. I am attracted by their claim that if you start INFINITE JEST on June 21st and read 75 pages a week, you will finish the book in September -- in other words, the jest is finite. And if you think that will be the only horrible joke I would make about reading the book should I take the plunge, you are mistaken.