Notes From My Knapsack 6-10-07
Jeff Gill

Summer Reading Program Time

Some folks like to read in the depths of winter, when the sun sets early and the chance to curl up on the couch makes an opportunity for books on the endtable.

Others claim beach reading is a great opportunity, which has never made sense for me. Sand in the bindings, water all around, and sunscreen on the fingers make for oddly discolored pages.

Considering the kind of doorstop-sized, steamy-covered books that usually get called “beach reading,” a little unintentional vandalism might be OK. Summertime just feels like a period filled with lots of slow spots where books can fit in, even if not the beach.There is plenty of fiction to stretch your mind and expand your experience that doesn’t involve embarrassing covers. Everyone else promotes non-fiction these days, so I'm just going to talk novels here.

You can have some reading in your backseat of the car, your knapsack (!), or whatever carryall you carry through the summer – and we all have a bunch of stuff to carry about in the summertime, so a book is an easy addition.

What’s out there to read, though? A ways back I praised Elizabeth Crook’s “The Night Journal,” and it is now in paperback. This is a semi-modern setting in Texas and New Mexico with extended flashbacks and reappearing letters and photos from a century and more ago. You get some US history, a murder mystery, and adventures from Utah to Mexico across the Rio Grande.

“Suite Francaise” is in paperback as well, and the story of the novel (actually, two novellas) is as gripping as the story in the novel. Irene Nemirovsky was a French Jew who not only saw the dim outlines of the Holocaust coming, but died in it, leaving the beginning and outline of a projected five novella sequence that took place in, what was for the author, “real time.”
Nemirovsky’s daughter survived, and was given the manuscripts after the war in a suitcase. She didn’t realize what she had, and thinking it would be too painful to read through her mother’s letters and journal, kept them without either reading or destroying the contents.

You don’t have to read recent fiction. Trollope and Dickens and Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, that is, aka George) are all waiting for you right where you left them, next to the Brontes and Jane Austen and Jane’s misplaced later brother Patrick O’Brian, he of the Aubrey/Maturin series of twenty seafaring novels set in Austen’s day.

I have a major weak spot for Iris Murdoch, who wrote some amazing novels before she got a movie made about her death, let’s not forget. “The Bell” and “A Fairly Honourable Defeat” are mind and heart grabbing stories that reward a slow, second reading.

John Irving is the uncle you swear you won’t invite over next Thanksgiving, but then do anyhow because the whole event isn’t as fun without him. “A Prayer For Owen Meany” makes up for a great deal of his latest work, but I like to recommend “A Son of the Circus” which even many of his fans haven’t gotten to. Richard Russo is working on a new novel with portions set in Venice, Italy, which makes a certain contrast with post-industrial rust-belt cities where his books tend to set up shop; I can’t wait, but I’ll have to. Might be time to go back and re-read “Empire Falls,” which got him a Pulitzer and an HBO movie.

Wendell Berry and Jon Hassler are two major Midwestern writers, and either might say that “major Midwestern” is an oxymoron, but hey, I’m from here. This is my world, and those two describe elements of it beautifully. The problem is that you have to be pre-slowed-down. These aren’t books like Gail Godwin or Carol Shields that help you gear down; Berry & Hassler assume you’re already trotting at their easy going pace, and then slow down some more.

Marilynne Robinson has precisely two novels in print, but she’s rightly considered one of the best prose writers working in American fiction; “Housekeeping” and the recent “Gilead” are both in paper covers, and cover some of Russo’s and Berry’s terrain. Oddly, I think of her work alongside (mentally) with Susan Howatch, whose Starbridge and St. Benet’s series’ of books are all set in the context of faith at work. Robinson writes about Iowa and the non-pretty, working class Pacific Northwest, while Howatch is firmly rooted in the cathedrals and parishes of the Church of England. David Lodge does much the same for English Catholics trying to be faithful and hopeful in work and academia, though his most recent novel is a semi-bio of Henry James.

Without even getting to Robertson Davies or Dostoevsky . . . is that enough to hold you ‘til autumn?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a book review of your own at knapsack77@gmail.com.