August 4th, 2008 bhenricksen
When this year’s Pen/Faulkner Award went to Kate Christensen’s The Great Man, the decision was announced as a departure. Rather than look for artistic subtlety or social significance, the committee simply chose the book they most enjoyed. In doing so, they picked a novel by a woman–not for the first time, but still a departure from the norm.
Christensen’s novel combines satire and comedy of manners in a story of a deceased painter, Oscar Feldman, as he’s remembered by his wife, his sister, and his mistress–or one of his mistresses. In the decade of abstraction (the 1960s), Oscar stuck with representation, painting nudes of whoever would take it off. Now, five years into the grave, he is about to be memorialized by two young (and male) biographers. Their inquiries elicit the memories that are the novel’s substance. Read the rest of this entry »
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July 8th, 2008 bhenricksen
There’s always someone at the party who never admits he hasn’t read a book. You mention The Romance of the Rose, and he nods knowingly and gazes out the window as though transported. And too often these guys get the girl. Deeply annoying. On the other side of the page, an old friend of mine who still plugs away as a college lit. professor once said that his job is not to read the great books, it’s only to know what’s in some of them. An honest man, and all he got was divorced.
As I age like fine wine, I’m less and less compelled to finish a book. Here are a few I’ve abandoned: Read the rest of this entry »
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June 28th, 2008 bhenricksen
It used to be the conventional wisdom that a movie always dumbed-down the novel it was based on. When film was a new medium, film makers assumed audiences needed to be led by the hand. But even a few decades down the line, we had those awful versions of A Farewell to Arms (Rock Hudson!) and The Great Gatsby. Read the rest of this entry »
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June 11th, 2008 bhenricksen
The window of my study looks into the backyard, which slopes downhill to my wife’s pottery studio, hidden by various trees and shrubs that have been keening under rain and eternal clouds for way too many days now. I remember sitting on a screened porch forty-some years ago with a girl who said, “I think whenever it rains, you can remember every time it’s ever rained.” Of course we didn’t have as much rain to remember then. Read the rest of this entry »
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June 8th, 2008 bhenricksen
There’s a branch of literary criticism that studies the role that readers play in determining or completing the literary work. You can talk, for instance, about how Jane Austen’s awareness the audience’s expectations might have helped to shape Emma. On the other end of the writer-reader alliance, you can talk about how the way readers are wired determines their understanding of a story or poem. In a wonderful novel by Italo Calvino, If On a Winter Night a Traveler, a character representing the reader constantly tinkers with the plot.
The critic Wolfgang Iser argued that all literary works contain “gaps” that must be filled either consciously or otherwise by readers. This line of speculation is influenced by a large volume of psychological and philosophical writing about perception, and fancy words such as “phenomenology” are batted back and forth. Below is my contribution to this discussion.
Lovely Reader,
I will say a poem to your eyes
someday when we are by a lake
and raindrops whisper secrets in the trees.
You will move me somewhere with your eyes,
perhaps a shore where small ships nod
and oceans breathe contentedly.
The poem will be summer wind in grass,
or sounds the insects make at night,
and it will walk the pathways of your eyes
To find the sea and board a ship
that journeys where the oceans roll
in eyes that make the poem whole.
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May 24th, 2008 bhenricksen
Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into an excellent film with Morgan Freeman. I’ve just finished reading the novel, finding it charming and moving. Rather than focusing on a single protagonist, Baxter coaxes together a wonderful ensemble of characters, each recounting his or her own amorous tale.
The unifying device is the notion that each character is speaking to the author, Baxter himself, as he seeks out people to tell him about their encounters with Cupid. Baxter is deft in creating the unique voice of each character, and perhaps he’s at the top of his game with the character of Chloe, a latter-day flower child who broke my heart and then put it together again.
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May 19th, 2008 bhenricksen
Lost Hills Books became a reality last December, when the two titles featured on the website arrived from the printer. I promptly sent copies to a person living in my town who writes book news for a magazine. She and I are members of a large, regional writers’ group, and of course I thought I might receive a response. Nope. Recently, I emailed her to ask if the books had been received and if she might be able to mention them in print. She replied that she doesn’t read unsolicited books and that mine had been passed on to charity. Splat.
As a check on my perspective, I’ll tell a story I’ve told on myself before. I taught English at Loyola University New Orleans in the 1970’s, and somewhere around 1977 Walker Percy agreed to drive over the causeway from Covington a couple of times a week to teach a creative writing class in our department. His presence was a gift to the university and a definite feather in our cap. Department members promised to see that things went smoothly for him, which included insulating him from people who might show up seeking favors. Walker had been a bit of a recluse in Covington.
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