BSI December selection

In All things, All at Once by Lee K. Abbott tries to live up to its title and doesn’t always hit the mark. Many of the stories are filled with main characters the reader never quite likes or tolerates: males cheating on wives and girlfriends; males whiskeyed up or wounded emotionally and spiritually from life, war or birth.

While the reaction to Abbott’s male characters may cause readers to feel the short story collection is uneven, the writing is good and solid. He creates a definite sense of place— mainly the Southwest, New Mexico—and time, whether the story takes place in the Sixties or now.

Likeable or not, most of Abbott’s characters feel real with their tendency to ramble, wheedle, talk and talk and talk. They talk about their fears of going crazy as in "The Way Sin is Said in Wonderland" ; about visits from extraterrestrials as in "The Talk Talked Between Worms"; about visitations from angels as in "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings"; and of course about women as in "Ninety Nights on Mercury".

Some of the short stories are connected, sharing characters, place or events freely as does real life with real people. These interconnected stories are the gems of All Things such as "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings" and "The Way Sin is Said in Wonderland". The stand-alone stories, "Dreams of Distant Lives" and "Gravity", also gleam with the characters' hard won strength and the excellence of Abbott’s creation.

Lee K. Abbott currently teaches creative writing at Ohio State University  in Columbus, Ohio. He has written six other books of short stories: The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting: Stories (1980), Love is the Crooked Thing (1986), Strangers in Paradise (1986), Dreams of Distant Lives (1990), Living After Midnight (1991), and Wet Places at Noon (1997).

Reviews of Abbott ‘s work and interviews with him appear here, here and here.

His work has often appeared in The Best American Short Stories and in publications such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Southern Review and The North American Review.

Ultimately Abbott’s stories are, as Williams Giraldi describes, “an orgy of style, one that performs the magic trick of being at once inebriated and exact—his narrators akin to world-class drinkers who can down a fifth of Jim Beam and still stand straight".

DATE November selection

Suspend your ideas about what makes a novel.

Heredity of Taste by Natsume Soseki is mythology and the personal musings of its narrator, which easily feels like the author's unadorned voice.

Soseki’s first and only anti-war novel opens with the mythological grandeur of a Wagnerian opera, then immediately recounts the human cost and aftermath of soldier Kosan’s death in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, narrated by Kosan’s unnamed friend.

Heredity of Taste is split into two parts. After a prologue of gods meddling into earthly affairs, Soseki presents an elegiac rumination on Kosan’s death and the victorious homecoming of his fellow soldiers at the central train station in Tokyo juxtaposed against the might-have-beens of Kosan’s life and an unknown young beauty encountered grieving at his grave.

The second section offers a somewhat hard-to-follow but fascinating dip into historical Japanese social hierarchy, western psychology, karma, ancestors and a dash of a detective-mystery story as the narrator tries to uncover the young woman’s identity.

One key to understanding Heredity is to substitute “attraction” for ‘taste” in its title. Another aid to understanding Heredity is the excellent introduction in the Tuttle Classics edition written by Stephen W. Kohl, Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. Kohl provides both historical and author context for Heredity’s setting and themes.

A fuller analytical discussion of Heredity of Taste can be found here.

Natsume Soseki is the pen name of Natsume Kinnosuke. Soseki, Japan’s Charles Dickens, is considered the foremost novelist of the Meiji period, which lasted from 1868 to 1912. He was pictured on the Japanese ¥1000 note from1984 to 2004.

Soseki’s most famous works Kokoro and Botchan are available online full-text and in English. Many of his works dealt with individual or personal desires versus group responsibilities and ties.

Although written in 1906, Heredity of Taste has a modern experimental feel. It proffers a microcosm of Japanese national character and gives a glimpse of a country on the cusp of melding the past with the future.

BSI November selection

October Light by John Gardner is not a light, easy read.

On the surface the novel centers on feuding geriatric siblings, James Paige and Sally Abbott. Younger brother James allows his down-on-her-luck widowed sister Sally to live with him, but after butting heads over politics and the morality of television, locks her in a room with a book.

Gardner uses October Light (and the novel-within-the-novel), set during the bicentennial, to comment about liberal and conservative American politics, racial bias and gender inequity as well as America’s past and future.

The novel is by turns ridiculous, laugh-aloud funny, intriguing, boring, genius and obscure--which is exactly how many critics and readers described its author, John Gardner (not to be confused with the British thriller writer, John Gardner). [Discussion questions can be found here.]

Once known as a sarcastic bad boy of literary criticism, Gardner is best known for his books On Moral Fiction and Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s perspective.

October Light won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award. Currently the National Book Critics Circle, a non-profit organization, consists of more than 900 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns.

Gardner spoke of his critique on the literary establishment (and their response) in On Moral Fiction in an interview with Don Swain and Gil Gross for Wired for Books little more than a year before his accidental death.

While it is difficult to truly recommend October Light, there are gems of excellent writing and great wit to be found in its pages. Gardner’s use of James and Sally’s intestinal complaints to symbolically illustrate the differences between liberal and conservative political thought as well as the laugh-out-loud first meeting of Father Hernandez and Sally through the bedroom door is worth the price of October Light’s numerous rambling passages.