Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

November is Novel Writing Month. I have several friends participating, hell-bent on writing 150 pages before December strikes. They’re on strict word-count schedules and doing really admirable jobs sticking to them!

I, on the other hand, have been working on my collection of linked short stories since late 2007 and have barely cleared the 150 page mark. Hmmm. I could do the math, but I definitely do not want to know my words-per-day average.

Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked short stories by Elizabeth Strout, was assigned to me by Sara, who saw structural similarities with my project and thought the collection could give me some technical help while I plugged away at mine. And–it worked! This is why Sara’s a super star writing professor.

Olive Kitteridge, the title character of the book, appears in each of the collection’s short stories, sometimes as the protagonist, sometimes as the antagonist, sometimes as a peripheral yet symbolically important character. She is a large, lumbering old woman with “the strong passions and prejudices of a peasant,” (264).  She is also the type of woman to characterize herself so. For the people of Crosby, Maine, as for the reader, Olive is a hard person to like. Opinionated, curmudgeonly, at times obnoxious, townspeople wonder how her saint of a husband, Henry, could stand her and think it’s no wonder her beloved son, Christopher, deserted her. Her seventh grade charges are terrified of her years after their tenure in her math class has ended.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

One evening back in September, I waited in line with the wonderful writers Nicole M. and Ella B. for a brief audience with Lorrie Moore. We clutched our books (I’d narrowed my exhaustive library of her work down to only two: the new one, A Gate at the Stairs, and one of my copies of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?.) and crept toward the front of the line at a pace that could be described only as painful. We, we were fine, chatting away, but there was Ms. Moore, on stage, signing book after book after book, her hand clearly aching, her energy, though not her graciousness, clearly waning. After approximately an hour, we got to the front of the line. Thanks to the business-like bookstore staff, our names were written on post-its, so Ms. Moore did not have to even look up or speak to us if she did not so choose. I didn’t want to delay the process–there were still more people waiting behind me–so I came up with one line to spit out once my turn came. Thrusting my copy of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? forward, I said, “I used to have pages of this book photocopied and pasted to my bedroom wall.”

Ms. Moore froze. She looked up from my book, on which she had scrawled her name, and studied my face. She said, after a moment, “Really?”

Really.

But this post isn’t about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?. It is about the book Ms. Moore was promoting that night: A Gate at the Stairs–a book on which she took the time to scrawl, after my modest confession, this:

Ok, that’s a terrible scan but I sort of like it. She wrote, “For Nicole– Here in NY. All best to you. Lorrie Moore Sept. 09″ Good enough for me!!!

A Gate at the Stairs is a novel oft-described as long-awaited. I can’t say I’ve been waiting this whole time, these last eleven years between her last publication and this one–I’ve just been re-reading her other books, uncovering new layers, new puns, new joys–I’ve had plenty of new Lorrie Moore to read. Which is not to say I didn’t pre-order A Gate at the Stairs and use it as self-bribery, my dangling carrot, to finish Anna Karenina. I stared at the cover a lot, imagining what lay inside. When I finally allowed myself to read it, I really went for it, barely pausing, finishing it in a weekend. My reading experience culminated last night–I stayed up late reading it, and then even later when finished, too upset to sleep.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind…

My friends, family, coworkers, readers and probably everyone I’ve encountered on the subway in the past six weeks will be happy to know that I finally finished Anna Karenina. I started it because of impassioned recommendations from Katherine (years ago) and from Lindsay (at the beach this summer), because I was haunted by my failed attempt to read it when I last assigned it to myself during grad school, and because I couldn’t stop imagining a future job interview in which I’d have to admit to not having read it.

The first two hundred pages were rough going, despite the introduction of the evocative phrase ‘Things will shape themselves,’ which I quickly became obsessed with repeating in my head (Tolstoy 5). I was a little bored, though, and quite confused by the fact that each character had at least sixty-seven different names. That aspect of Russian literature is one that my father used to make fun of throughout my childhood, instilling in me an early bias against Russian writing. When he heard I was nearly done with the book a couple of weeks ago, he offered that I should be awarded a medal if I managed to finish. (Dad? Do I get to collect on that?)

My reading experience with Anna Karenina, though, was that the book improved exponentially with each hundred pages. I read the last six hundred or so in the time it took me to make it through the first two hundred, even with the slow-down of dog-earring passages, pausing to cry, re-reading scenes for maximum effect, etc.

Thematically and character-wise, there is so much to say and that I want to say about this book, but I am going to really restrict myself and concentrate only on a passage I encountered on pages 603-604 and how it relates to the rest of the novel.

Classics Interlude

I have been, and will continue for a little while to be, on a short hiatus from reading blog-appropriate work. Due to an upcoming exhibit on Jane Austen, in which I will be teaching, at the wonderful Morgan Library and Museum, I’ve recently read the phenomenal Sense and Sensibility. (My previous Jane Austen reads skewed towards the more obscure: Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park). Do I really have anything new to say about that work? Not so much. I’ll spare you. And now, I am trying Anna Karenina. Again. I know–it’s good. What’s my problem? I don’t know. Whatever it is, I hope I get over it and finish the book before the new Lorrie Moore arrives in the mail, because I won’t have the will power to do anything else once I get it in my hands.  Wish me luck.

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

I’ve been searching for Lydia Peelle on the internet. Unfortunately, when I met her at Bryant Park the other week, I hadn’t yet bought Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing and so wasn’t able to fully express my gratitude to her for having written it. At that point, too, I only knew I’d read one of her stories before, the title one, in One Story. After I brought home her gorgeously printed paperback and delved into the eight stories within, I realized I’d actually read three of them in various “Best of” anthologies. While I didn’t remember Ms. Peelle’s name, I certainly remembered the stories. So, although I doubt it, since she’s not on Facebook and doesn’t seem to have her own website, I hope Ms. Peelle is the type to relentlessly google herself, because, since I can’t write her a fan letter, she can take this post as one.

The collection kicks off with the excellent “Mule Killers,” in which a girl is described as having “onion-pale hair,” a phrase that, I kid you not, has stayed vividly in my head since I first read it in 2006. Ms. Peelle read the opening paragraph of this story in Bryant Park and I think it sold her a great many books.

My favorite story in the collection is not one that I’d read before.

Our Books are Still Better than We Are

Happy one year anniversary, Our Books are Better than We Are! To help me celebrate, I think everyone should leave a comment (here on the blog, not on Facebook!) about the best book they’ve read lately.

My celebratory post on one of the best short story collections I’ve read in about my entire life, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle, is forthcoming.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

I am rife with anecdotes for this one.

Last week, I was sitting at a bar, drinking a beer and reading the first story in Wells Tower’s short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned while I waited for some writer friends to come join me. When they arrived, they greeted the sight of the book in my hand with a kind of noise somewhere between a groan and a growl.

YES! I said.

YES! we all agreed.

We wanted to hate the book. To a group of people who spend their days eeking out sentences it seems like we can only hope to have each other read, watching the praise, press and rapturous accolades bestowed upon this guy’s debut accumulate over the past few months was pretty intense. Two of us (myself included) admitted to marking one of Mr. Tower’s May readings on our calendars, just so we could check him out, only to ruefully let the day pass by. Most of us thought he made up his name. I requested the book from my library and had to wait two months to finally get my hands on it, leaving me wondering how this guy got so many people in Queens even–of all places!–to line up to read his work. UGH! But then, you know, I got the book, and I started it, and well, it is really that fucking good.

I tried to savor the collection, couldn’t, finished it almost immediately. Then, I went–again with some writer friends–to the Bryant Park Reading Room to see a conversation with Wells Tower and Lydia Peelle, moderated by John Wray (who, you recall, I also wanted to hate–I am a hater, this is becoming clear). And, as would have been a surprise to me before actually reading the book but wasn’t after I read it, Mr. Tower was charming, funny, self-deprecating, literate, thoughtful and really, really likable. After the event, I admitted I’d read a library copy of his book so I had nothing for him to sign, which he actually seemed totally happy about (I guess writers like libraries) and then, like some weird teenage fan, I used the word “awesome” about sixteen times to describe his work. He was very nice, and humble. Sigh. So, from one extreme to the other.

Now, on to the book itself.

Please Step Back by Ben Greenman

I had the pleasure of attending an event a couple weeks ago in honor of Ben Greenman’s book Please Step Back. A man in a wacky yellow jacket from a website that chronicles world records attempted to have Ben set a record for the longest story written in one minute (he failed). Todd Zuniga from Opium magazine interviewed him and had him complete a  literary Rorschach test. Audience members spoke about their literary projects (including our own Underwater New York–www.underwaternewyork.com). And, Ben read the beginning of his novel, inspiring me to purchase it and read the rest.

As I learned at the event, the germ of Please Step Back began as a biography of the musical artist Sly Stone. Then, the same thing happened to Ben as often happens to me when I attempt to write nonfiction–he wanted to make stuff up. So, eventually that project morphed into this one, which, though it contains grains of Sly Stone’s life, is fiction. 

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

Ever since reading The New New Journalism in Alice Truax’s class (what is new new journalism? you wonder–well, mostly it’s just a snappy title for a book of interviews with literary nonfiction writers)–I’ve wanted to pick up a Jon Krakauer book. It does take some doing  for me to read nonfiction when there is so much unread fiction out there, though, so I put it off for more than a year. But luckily, the opportunity to start in on Mr. Krakauer’s oeuvre recently presented itself.

Due to some crazy Midwestern weather, my journey to Chicago the other week took about 7 hours, which ruined, among other things, my vacation reading time line. I’d brought only one book with me (Sag Harbor), planning on reading it on the flights there and home, but by the time I was ready to return to New York, I was mere pages away from finishing the novel. So, I plucked Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith off of Genevieve’s book shelf and delved in to one wacky narrative.

Darin Strauss on being a writer today

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/tough-days-literary-fiction-darin-strauss