The Thin Red Line

Moving on is a chance you take
Every time you try to stay Together
You say a word out of line and you find
The friends that you had are gone.
Forever
Forever"

Billy Joel "Say Goodbye To Hollywood"

Relating a tale from the Class of ‘82 in presenting a couple of books on condominium ownership got me galloping down memory lane to a time when life was lived to a soundtrack of Billy Joel (especially Glass Houses and The Stranger) Supertramp (Breakfast In America), Styx and a few others that are or aren’t still big names in music these days. And that’s a perfect frame of mind in which to read and review Billy Joel: The Biography by Mark Bego.

"You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for
Turn out the lights
Don’t try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know you may be right"

Billy Joel– "You May Be Right"

Biographies of living celebrities tend to come in only two flavors– the very softball sort that reads like the author was on the payroll of the celebrity’s PR firm, and who knows maybe he Was OR the Kitty Kelly Kremates variety where Everyone with an axe to grind has been painstakingly unearthed and the axe it does get ground sort, which will send any self-respecting celebrity rushing to hire a new PR firm. For Billy Joel fans, Mark Bego writes somewhere in between these extremes.

Reports that Joel can be bitter and rude and stories that he has been stingy and unfair to the band members whose hard work clearly contributed to his rise to major success in the music business are not glossed over and the people behind these reports are quoted at length and given the opportunity to provide a nuanced look at the complicated truth behind these hot rumors. For anyone who as I did grew up listening to the story of Brenda and Eddie, longing like Anthony to ditch the shitty job, jump in a fast car and Move Out this biography is Highly Recommended.

And of course, if this music does Nothing for you, you don’t need me to tell you you’d be bored silly so don’t bother.

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If you are not already a Robert Heinlein fan, Grumbles From The Grave is Not the place to start. A collection of Heinlein’s private correspondence edited by Heinlein’s widow Virginia, Grumbles is an extraordinary glimpse into the life of an exceptional author and a no-holds-barred look at the Business of writing.

Fans of Heinlein’s fiction may not be surprised to learn that the character he most resembled in real life is Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In A Strange Land, the unsentimental writer who makes a very comfortable living giving his editors and readers Exactly what they Want. From his very first efforts writing for Heinlein was first and foremost a business. He quickly developed a canny understanding of what editors want and will pay for and he Always gave them exactly that. He sold a Lot of books and made a Lot of money from writing which is something that is not easy to do. (Much like in the performing arts the huge money superstars like Heinlein are the rare exception to the sad fact that most writers and artists earn very little for their efforts, even when they are good.)

The flower power generation for whom Heinlein’s books and particularly Stranger, which became a kind of bible to them, were a rite of passage must read may be disappointed to learn that all of his writing about sexual liberation and plural marriages was written because it was a story they would buy and not because Heinlein particularly believed in it. By all accounts he had a very conventional and faithful marriage which bore much resemblance to the sort of marriage good boys from Missouri around the turn of the century were expected to make and keep to, rather than any of the muti-amorous arrangements with emotional depth that Heinlein was so noted for in his later works of adult science fiction.

In addition to hard core Heinlein fans this book is Highly Recommended to aspiring writers, those who are interested in earning an income from writing rather than those who write as art. While the publishing scene today is certainly very different than that prevailing when Heinlein wrote this correspondence with his various editors and agents, this inside look at how Heinlein handled the Business of being a writer can provide a number of invaluable lessons to anyone trying to earn money by typing words on a screen.

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I was a high school senior in 1981 when John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire was first published. I remember reading the first chapter or so while standing at a display in the entrance way of a bookstore at Lakeside Mall in Metairie Louisiana, sometime in the fall and putting the book at the very Top of my Christmas list.

In those days we celebrated on the 25th with my father’s side of the family, then on the 26th we piled into the car and drove about two hours to Baton Rouge to celebrate with my mother’s side of the family, where we did the entire presents galore and grand banquet routine all over again. Christmas two days in a row. Those were the days.

And so it was as the bloated company settled onto couches to watch football or nap, I dived into the present I had been waiting for and by the time dusk fell and it was time to begin the drive back home I had read fully half of Irving’s tale of the believably bizarre Berry family from Dairy New Hampshire who convert an abandoned school into a hotel, then toss aside their lives to move to Vienna, Austria to operate a hotel with a blind Jewish animal trainer who knows Nothing about the hotel business. And thus began a love affair with John Irving’s fiction that endures to this day.

Recently I was shelving in Biography when I happened upon a copy of Irving’s memoir The Imaginary Girlfriend, which somehow despite being an Irving fan I had never seen before. It’s a light and short read, at most the third the pages and emotional heft of an Irving novel. Many circumstances and settings disclosed in Irving’s memoir have strong parallels in his fiction, his own struggles with dyslexia as a faculty brat at an elite prep school mirror much of the narrator’s struggle with dyslexia and his friendship with the odd scholarship boy, Owen Meany and his year abroad in Vienna clearly foreshadowed that city’s major presence in both Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp.

If Hotel New Hampshire was the book where I discovered John Irving the storyteller, The Cider House Rules was my introduction to John Irving the passionate and eloquent advocate. The story of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an idealistic young obstetrician sent by the Maine Board of Medical Examiners to establish an orphanage in remote rural St. Cloud is in my opinion the most sustained and eloquent argument for allowing women Choice in the matters of pregnancy. While Larch and his staff sometimes refer to "the Lord’s work" and "the Devil’s work" to distinguish between operating rooms being used for deliveries (an orphan) or abortions but privately they all agreed that it was All "The Lord’s Work". For they had all seen the horrible and often deadly and irreparable harm from back alley and DIY abortificants women turned to when they didn’t have the choice of taking the train to St. Cloud’s and asking for the orphanage.

All of rich and detailed characterization and finely detailed plotting that characterized his earlier work was still there but now he is channeling Dickens inveighing against work houses and the novel succeeds as both as art and as political treatise.

Irving’s blending of art and advocacy reached its apex in my opinion in A Prayer For Owen Meany, a long and eloquent answer to the Vietnam War, as well as a novel rich in themes such as childhood, loss, faith and friendship. The story of John Wheelright, the Torronto English teacher at a religious girl’s boarding school and the earlier years of his life, back when his life had evolved around his very unusual best friend, Owen Meany growing up in Gravesend New Hampshire in the 1950’s and coming of age in the Vietnam War era.

As always, Owen Meany is richly plotted with more twists and turns than you would ever expect in a prep school company town. Or maybe you would. I never went to prep school so I don’t really know. I do know that John Irving is one of the great novelists of our era who will in time be properly mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Mark Twain when the subject is great novelists in English.

If you’re already a fan, do yourself a favor and re-read a John Irving, you’ll be agog all over again how good it is. And if you haven’t already read these books. GO! TO THE LIBRARY!! NOW!!! and get started. Not To Be Missed.

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A question I have frequently been asked since starting this blog is "how do you read so many books?" or "do you really read all of those books you write about?". I have often answered that I read fairly quickly and that it’s not always necessary to read the entire book before writing a useful and engaging blog post about it.

But a sad truth that I am learning, as I become more committed to improving and professionalizing this blog is that with all the hours I spend online these days, I have much less time for reading. And I find myself wondering how you, my blog readers, feel about this. Do you think it’s OK for me to blog about books that I have not finished reading? Please take the poll or leave a comment and let me know. I’m genuinely interested in what people think about this.

(more…)

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Kevin Clash and Elmo

Most of the time a book’s genre dictates its format. Mysteries typically begin with murder followed by investigation and then solution. Cookbooks start with appetizers and end with dessert. And biographies usually take a birth to death (or birth to present) approach. But Kevin Clash, the man behind (or more accurately when performing on Sesame Street beneath) my favorite Muppet is different. The chapters in his biography, My Life As A Furry Red Monster, are arranged by emotional virtues: Love, Joy, Creativity, Tolerance, Courage, Friendship, Cooperation, Learning and Optimism.

More often than not when books step outside the established format, they fall flat on their faces. But this one works. Largely ignoring chronology, Clash relates anecdotes of growing up in a small house in Baltimore filled with kids, love and laughter as a shy child obsessed from a very early age with creating puppets and performing with them for the neighborhood kids, then later at local events and on a local television show and finally with Jim Henson’s team on the mega-hit PBS children’s show with each vignette illustrating the chapter’s particular theme. The tone is light and engaging and the less than 200 page book is a quick, easy read. Recommended.

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I’ve recently added a few new site to my blogroll on the right and am proud to recommend:

Eavesdrop Writer by Vienne is a wonderful blog in which the author relates snippets of over-heard conversations as grist for the creative writing mill. Her powers of observation are remarkable as is the skill with which she presents scenes she has witnessed in public. Her blog features a very active Comments section in which Vienne is charming and truly gracious to all of her visitors.

Jim Bashkin is a scientist and book-lover whose blog Nearly Nothing But Novels focuses mostly on crime fiction with a few literary classics thrown in. Jim’s detailed book reviews are intelligent and informative, his site well worth a daily visit.

And finally, Jim Murdoch is a novelist whose blog The Truth About Lies features observations on language, literature and the writing life. His tone and style are very engaging. I greatly enjoyed his posts about owning 27 dictionaries and musing on the assignment of gender to neutral nouns in the romance languages. A real treat.

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