Boring old good and evil

The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch (1966) struck me as very similar to her novel A Fairly Honourable Deafeat, in that it's also very overtly about the struggle between good and evil, and it also has two male centres to represent the two ideals, with all the women and some beta-male types traveling between the two poles (pun intended) to create the action of the novel. It's impossible to miss, even if you tried: they're compared at some crucial moment as being one white and innocent, the other black and threatening. We are given no psychological insight into the evil man, he is learned through glimpses caught by others. He is very sexual, and uses sex variously for control, for revenge, for otherworldly communication. There is a bit more exposure to the good man and his thoughts, although as a person he is strangely undeveloped. His biggest characteristic is that he suffered a lot (concentration camps, refugee camps, then abject poverty in England) after having had a glorious and uber-privileged early childhood. By his own account, he stopped really living a long time ago -- he only tried to survive in a little corner, without possessions or purpose other than bringing up his son, who he isn't close to and who has no respect for him. 


The Time of the Angels (1966) is probably my least favourite of the four Iris Murdoch novels I've read, and I'm not usually a huge fan of hers anyway. I like the easy-read-but-not-empty feel of them. But they lack feeling and psychological depth. Murdoch seems to set her characters up as symbols for ideas, which makes them very artificial representations of human beings. She's very good at detail and complexity that makes things come alive, but all the characters are too much one way or another, too self-conscious and too-frequently philosophical in their conversations and in their desires.

Getting out of Hebrew school

The central theme of Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmoszgis (2005) is life as a Latvian/Eastern European Jewish immigrant in suburban Toronto. The stories are chronologically arranged: you follow the narrator from his first years in Canada, where he doesn't understand much of what's said at school and his parents are poor, struggling and confused by the language, to his adulthood where he seems to be a kind of suave, quirky writer guy.

I always like the theme of complicated relationships to cultural heritage. For the first half of the stories, I sort of assumed that he was describing a person who didn't have much genuine allegiance to any big idea of Jewishness. I was probably projecting; it's easy to see lots of futures in stories about a kid. But when he's an adult there's more suggestions of embracing the cultural identity, being into all the trappings, if not the God part. None of this comes out directly, but it's cleverly in the style of the stories being told about the older I. Little things like how he's doing research for an article on a boxer being inducted into the old-timers' category of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who, among other attributes, happens to be "America's first great fighting Jew." In an earlier story, "An Animal to the Memory" he gets severely reprimanded for knocking another boy to the ground and choking him with his hands while a rabbi makes a speech for Holocaust Rememberance Day. And he desperately wants out of Hebrew school.

A few weeks ago, arriving at my parents' house for dinner, I was immediately briefed on the discussion topic of the evening, an article published that day in a British newspaper, with the headline "Who is Jewish?" It described a recent decision of the Court of Appeal, which yesterday was upheld by the Supreme Court (what happened to the House of Lords? Apparently its judicial branch is no longer, as of October 2009, which I guess is good from a division-of-powers standpoint). The appellate courts found that a London Jewish school's admission policy discriminated on ethnic grounds. There's legislation that allows faith schools that receive government funding to give preference to students who are members of the group the school is set up to cater to if they have more applicants than spaces.  The school that was taken to court is a good school and gets twice as many applicants as it has new spots each year. The kid who took them to court is an observant Jew whose dad is ethnically Jewish and whose mother converted, in the Reconstructionist synagogue or something, which means that Orthodox Jews don't consider her Jewish. So the school treated him like any other goy and he didn't get into the school. Meanwhile any random born Jew whose never been to synagogue a day in her life would be put near the top of their admissions list.

The trial court found in favour of the school, reasoning that it was part of their faith practice to decide who was a member of their group. Court of Appeal said no, too bad - giving preference to kids of a certain faith can't equate promoting kids with certain birth-related characteristics. I was amazed that there would be a decision from the appeal so fast. Maybe the Supreme Court, having only been created two months ago, has so little backlog that it can be ready to hear new appeals almost immediately.

I always feel double about it: on the one hand, I'm totally and immutably Jewish. On the other hand, I don't relate at all to the idea of Jewish identity. I have no interest in joining groups that identify with Jewishness, even to protest Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. There are not two but three strands to the thing: the ethnic, the cultural, the religious. Accent, or things like "shut the light" fall more into ethnic than cultural, I think. I say "shut the light" because that's how I learned to speak, and not because of some practice I engage in willfully (though I like it that I say "shut the light" and have ever since sometime around the age of 20 I was made aware that other English speakers don't say that). The cultural is the stuff that most of my relatives are into, the special charities, the chosen-people history books, lighting candles, reading at Passover, and on and on. They're not religious, they're just really into some thing that is being Jewish. And it's because of the ethnic, not the cultural, that I always tell my father that he can't simply decide he's not Jewish anymore. That kind of Jewish is defined by who would want to kill you, and not by what you yourself aspire to be. And that part of the group identity I have no problem with, the kind that says, this is what I was born into. And I prefer it if the British government thinks that entitles me to no special consideration when it comes to attending a particular school.

Anyhow it occurred to me, thinking about Nathasha and Other Stories, that it might be a lot easier for a third-generation immigrant to separate ethnic and cultural identity than it is for a first-generation immigrant, whose sense of difference must pervade every social encounter in his new home.

The futuristic past

Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991) opens with a scene of a mass wedding in Yankee Stadium. A girl's parents sitting in the bleachers look through their binoculars to find their daughter among the six and a half thousand couples on the field, being group-blessed by their religious leader/marriage officiant. It's a very eerie scene, and for someone who isn't much of a history buff it seems very sci fi. Also, the title, indicating a future second Maoist or Mao-analogous era. I went along thinking I was reading sci fi until some hundred or so pages in where it mentions Moonies. I looked up the Moonies, and found out that they used to practice these mass weddings. The biggest one was at Madison Square Garden (incidentally, this is still going on -- according to the Telegraph, there was a 40 000-couple wedding just a few months ago; many of the couples were marriaged via simulatenous broadcast).

Mao II, it's later revealed, is the name of an Andy Warhol painting, not a reference to an imaginary future political leader.

The ambuigity of time period is intentional. A conversation between Bill, a reclusive writer, and Karen, the Moonie daughter who is no longer with the Moonies makes this explicit:

"I never think about the future."

"You come from the future," [Bill] said quietly.

But if the book is trying to make some kind of point about the place of cults in the world's future, it's a bit lost on me. The world-events juxtaposition is between the Moonies and the war in Beirut (though what the purpose of this juxtaposition is eludes me). The war is a big feature of the book, and especially a terrorist group that operates from Beirut. There's a recurring mention of Bill's theory that terrorism has made writing irrelevant. Writing used to be the act that shaped culture, but now terror is. The theory is not given a lot of credence by the other characters, but it might be a kind of central theme for the book. I guess.

In case it's not glaringly obvious already, the book left me a little cold. The writing is pretty in parts. The characters are okay but not extremely interesting - they all read a bit like stock characters, frankly: the girl from the cult, the writer who got famous and now doesn't want anyone to know where he lives. The structure is very pat (I won't describe it too much because I don't like to ruin endings, but the themes from the beginning are all taken up again at the end, in that way that is usual for short stories maybe more often than novels). My favourite parts are when Bill thinks about his bodily functions and his ailments. I kept waiting for it to get to other things I might find interesting: actual insights into the cult, for instance, beyond tidbits like, they do their laundry communally and then parcel it out so that you are always wearing someone else's underwear.

Descriptiveness

I've just finished reading a lovely story on the New Yorker online by Yiyun Li, called "Alone". It's bleak and seems like it's going to be a depressing story but then it isn't, it's just full of emotional content, which is the best thing for a short story to be, in my opinion.

It did, however, have a quality that a lot of short stories that I've read recently (I've been reading a lot of them (mostly in Canadian lit quarterlies, but also in collections and online). It's something I might not have noticed if I weren't also writing fiction in an active way at the moment, which makes me read with a detective's eye in addition to my usual desire to appreciate.

Walter took her to a café at the back of a gift shop. Apart from an idle man halfheartedly flipping through a book of local attractions, there was no one in the front of the shop, where miniature carved boats and model fish aged unwanted on the shelves. At the back of the shop, dim but for a single lamp hanging from the ceiling, there were a few unvarnished wooden tables. An old man at the counter nodded in greeting when he saw Walter. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the best time for those in the mountains to revel in the joys of hiking and fishing before the sunshine thinned to dusk, but in the shop time seemed to be stranded, day taking forever to turn into night. The browser picked up a snow globe and shook it; when his cell phone beeped he perked up and left abruptly.

It's well enough written and it's in keeping thematically - there's a lot of water in the story. But while the rest of the piece is gripping and unique, this whole paragraph seems meandering and also dull. The store isn't important enough to warrant this much attention. Even the caf/ is not particulary important. And that would be fine if the description was amazing and gave you not only a feeling of context but also that you were reading something that made you visualize in a way that you don't often, but the carved boats and model fish don't do that for me at all. I'm getting worked up about it not because I mind an average-quality paragraph in a great short story, but because I feel like the reason it's there is that there's an unnecessary emphasis in establishment short-story writing on lengthy description of surroundings. I'm guessing I'm in a minority in disliking this descriptiveness in itself, but I can't help it.

Some of it gets much much more distracting, like this passage in an excerpt from the memoir Happy, by Alex Lemon, published in a recent issue of Tin House (vol. 11 number 1 to be exact), wherein the protagonist teenage boy's brain surgery, for which his family has had to travel to Miami by plane, might be canceled because of a hurricane:

Ma and I walk the vacant streets. Yoo-hoo-colored water fills the ditches, and trash grips the fences. An empty Coca-Cola can tinkles across the sidewalk.

Independently, nothing is wrong with these sentences. But now I'm thinking about bottled beverages. Is that what we want? It can't be unintentional, can it? It really bugs me. The Yoo-hoo is fine, that actually is kind of a useful description, but then the coke can is in there just to be descriptively thorough, and isn't in any way helpful to me in creating the image, and, more importantly, totally jarred me out of my reading flow.

As I'm thinking about this I'm more and more thinking almost everyone would disagree with me (at least on the theory, if not on the coke can). Maybe it's a weakness in me. I skipped the descriptive passages in my first reading of The Hobbit (I was seven; I think I also skipped most of the songs). Incidentally, my dislike of Tolkien's mountain descriptions made me love The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I haven't read or even seen a copy of this book since I was maybe twelve so I'm not sure I should vouch for it this long after (I'm so often disappointed when I go back and read things I loved fifteen years ago), but at the time I thought it had a perfect way of dealing with descriptions - they're edited out of the new version of an older volume (which at the time I thought was real but have since decided was fictional; I'd really like to re-read that book).

Yeesh

Looking through an issue of Artforum at the library today, I came across an ad by a publishing house that was selling one of its books on some artist as "a search engine" for his work. What?

Enchantments

Last week I read The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie (2008). It's a fantastical novel with a three-page bibliography. It's set 600 years ago or so, but doesn't qualify as a historical novel in my view, since it's the story of a story told by a liar, so it's got no reliable history in it. Still, Rushdie obviously took into account a lot of detail about Renaissance Florence in order to give the liar some detail to discuss, and similarly made sure to research Indian history in order to create a complex fantasy version of Akbar's kingdom. Anyhow, it was an easy read, almost a page-turner (unlike Midnight's Children which I liked a lot better but which I read much more slowly). It left me unsatisfied. I don't want to give away the ending at all, but for me there was something about the uncollapsed make-believe that left me feeling a little empty, unlike, say, Atonement or the movie The Usual Suspects, which bring you through a fantasy but close off, or complete, the fantasy, not leaving you feeling like the author got lost somewhere along the way. I might sound like I'm trying to stuff everyone into the same narrative framework, and maybe I am despite myself. There is something unsettling though, about a story that sets you up to be deceived and then in the end tells you you weren't being deceived at all, that this unbelievable mass of coincidences and self-serving (to the fictional story-teller) stories of the supernatural were in fact all ... maybe not true, but not worth exploring as stories. The way the story concludes is at odds with every clue and some explicit pieces that are given the reader along the way.

Kid Stuff

At my parents' yesterday, I found a library copy of Paula Fox's The Stone-Faced Boy sitting in the front hall on top of a clean-laundry basket (paused for a rest on its way upstairs), nestled into a pink bath towel. I lay back on the couch and read it, start to finish, in a little over an hour - no great feat since it's well under a hundred pages. I liked that it had that real novella character, more like a short story in the way you can down it in one gulp, but with the greater time for back-story and characterization details that a novel has.

The story itself I was less sure about for the first thirty or forty pages. The writing had nothing bad about it, nothing that bothered me and or made me want to re-write sentences, but it was also not particularly excitingly brilliant, and right at first I found the protagonist, that stone-faced boy, a little unbelievable. He has lost the ability to show any affect, in his face or his voice or actions. The affect is all there inside of him, rather simply described -- he wished he could laugh, he wished he could cry, and so on. But the defence mechanism has taken on a life of its own and he is quite desperate to get rid of it.

He felt like smiling. Surely, he could smile out here in the dark, where there was no one around to see him. He took off his mitten and touched his mouth. It was not smiling.

Then a reflection prompted me to start enjoying it with a particular emotionality. I was a very unhappy kid, as far back as I can remember, and certainly from when I started school and had to interact with lots of other little kids, who I found mostly scary and brutal. Now, I don't think too much about my day-to-day unhappiness when I was six, since it was twenty-three years ago and I fail to remember most of it anyhow. But I'm reminded of it in a kind of embittered way when I'm confronted with some images of childhood (like the really cute kids who run around in the elementary school playground outside my window - which, believe me, it makes me feel terrible to have any negative feelings about), because it can seem like almost everyone, whatever life held in store for later, remembers childhood as a time of joy and abandon. But here was the stone-faced boy, feeling quite a lot how I remember feeling, trapped, at the mercy of uncomprehending and merciless others, and fearful. It made me feel that companionship feeling when you find people who share characteristics you're embarrassed about having yourself. Even though it was twenty-three years ago.

And I kind of enjoyed its central symbol, though it's the kind of facile symbolism, like that lightning-struck tree in Wuthering Heights, that usually really bugs me. It's given to him by his great-aunt: a geode, a rock with a small crack in it through which he can see that the inside is hollowed out and filled with in-facing crystals.

I finished the book, like I said, in about an hour and a half, and the end gave me that nice satisfied feeling, and I turned the next page and read Paula Fox's little biography there. Turns out, she's mostly known for kids' books. She started with the kids' books, for which she got several big awards and stuff, and then wrote some adult books, of which it mentions two. Which made me wonder: which is this? When I think about it, everything about it would be suitable for a kid whose reading level is just a little advanced. And it has those hallmarks of kids' fiction: a boy with a quasi-magical problem or characteristic (his face won't move) and a simply expressed emotional issue (think Jacob Two-Two or Curious George), super simple symbolism, parents who are no help at all, a quest (I didn't tell you about it but it's there), and a warm fuzzy resolution.

Age, and genre, categorizations are artificial and useless when it comes to well-written books. I find it funny that people are very resistant to using the genre or age labels when it's a book that they think of as good literature: meaning people don't like it if you call The Chrysalids or 1984 fantasy/sci fi, or The Catcher in the Rye young adult lit, which it surely is. And it seems like the reason they don't like it is because they so believe in the labels (and therefore do not read sci fi, say, which makes 1984 definitionally not that). I'm not into that, but I suspect my response to The Stone-Faced Boy would have been different in some way if it had been presented to me as a kids' book but that's a weakness in me as a reader. Incidentally, someone in some marketing department somewhere decided it would be better for me not to know that up front: the cover is decidedly un-kid-like. It's a colourless close-up of a sculpted white clay eye, and kind of creepy if anything. I'm guessing there was once a very different cover.

So I'm shouting it from the rooftops: I read a kids' book yesterday and it was totally at my level.

Climbing a ladder to the moon

As faithful readers of this column will know, a little while ago someone posted a comment that I should read Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Conveniently, this same person had once sent her brother a copy of the book, and since I live with her brother, the book was already on my bookshelf. And I'm very happy she did, because I loved the book. I was maybe particularly primed to like it because, also as previously mentioned in this blog, I like reading pop science and over the years have built up some knowledge of physics and astronomy, the little my mathematically-limited head will allow. Not that this book requires an independent interest in science. It looks at its subject - events in cosmogony, physics and early biology - in a completely poetic way.

The beauty of Cosmicomics is that it takes some concepts that are incredibly counterintuitive, like the Big Bang, or the curvature of space, and tells you about them in a very intuitive, kind of traditional, narrative way, from the perspective of someone who was there at the time (our narrator is old Qfwfq, who has managed to be present at many opportune moments in the history of the universe, even some mutually incompatible ones, which only shows some of his talents). Many writers make use of scientific concepts for literary ends, especially, I've found, quantum theory - like that terrible book I gave up on in my last post, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, but also some really good things, like the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Cosmicomics is like none of those. It inhabits the beginning of the universe, the creation of the galaxies, the "fluid, shapeless nebula" that will later become the planets of the solar system, and gives you ways to think about concepts you've probably been told of before but were never able to square with your human perception of physics.

Each chapter begins with the statement of a scientific theory, and then moves into Qfwfq's telling of what it was like. The first chapter is a totally beautiful story about a group who rows their boat out to the moon at a time when the moon is close enough to the earth that you can get onto it by jumping off the top of a long ladder (the moon's gravitational force helps you at that last stage). Some of the chapters reminded me of Kipling's Just So Stories, for instance the one about the Big Bang where everyone present was occupying a single point in space until a woman several of them were in love with said she would make them some noodles if only she had some more room to roll out the dough. Some of the chapters also reminded me of the first two chapters of Genesis and of other creation myths, especially one in which Qfwfq and a friend are playing a game of marbles which turns, quite naturally, into a game of creating galaxies.

I was less captivated by the chapters about the dinosaur and the mollusk. It's a much more usual kind of thing, the literary anthropomorphism of animals. But the literary anthropomorphism of primordial goop requires a much rarer imagination and writing talent. That isn't to say that I didn't like those chapters. The entire book, quite aside from being an impressive feat, is beautiful and magical and light and airy and a really fun read.

When do you stop reading a bad book?

They were right: you can't judge a book by its cover. Or by its first page. I read a full ten pages of Infinite Jest before buying it. The next 990 (including 150 pages of endnotes) I read out of bloody-mindedness. Those ten pages were surely going to be redeemed. But they weren't, at least for me (I know that there are some who would zealously disagree). But in the case of this book, I'm not sure I'm going to repeat the same mistake of sinking more hours in when I'm 90% sure I'm not going to get back to liking this book (hm, it just occurs to me that this sounds a lot like what I was saying in the last post about Proust; I am a bit of a quitter by nature).

The book currently in question is called A Game With Sharpened Knives (by Neil Belton), a title which strikes me as hovering between just okay and kinda cheesy, but it didn't dissuade me. It's a historical novel about Erwin Schrodinger, who interests me (I like reading pop science). And I liked the first paragraph, which begins:

It was nine sharp. The secretary who had summoned him the day before had announced the hour of his appointment as though she were giving an order to open fire. After three weeks the most ordinary conversations had taken on a military snap, and manic urgency had become the new politeness.

That's okay, right? Funny, clear, actionful. And the next few pages are okay, all about how Schrodinger is forced to leave the university where he's teaching in Austria because the Nazis have just invaded and they don't like him. Anyhow, then the thing degenerates into just horrible long, confusing paragraphs in which theories are alluded to but never explained (it's hard to know but I think if you didn't already know quite a lot about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, important parts of the book would make no sense at all).

And Schrodinger is depicted as this incredibly self-indulgent and lame boring guy.  I think part of the badness of the writing comes from Belton's need to explain every detail of Schrodinger's thought process, how he's scared, why he's scared, what he thinks about his wife, why he wants her to comfort him in this way and not that way. What he thinks about the people living across the street from him. I guess overwriting anything kills it. Schrodinger has a lot of affairs, which could make for interesting plot, but it's in a really childish and silly way and not sexy at all. He just goes on and on about how his libido can't be controlled. Anyhow, maybe Schrodinger was really boring, I don't know, but if he was, then you shouldn't write a novel about him. I've read 90 pages and I'm giving up.

My long journey in Proustland

I've just finished Part I Du côté de Guermantes and started Part II. Guermantes is the third volume of À la recherche du temps perdu which I've been reading for years now (not like two years, more like six or seven). It really feels interminable, and in the last year (by which I mean, during the time it took me to read Part I of my current volume) I started thinking maybe I wasn't into it anymore, or that at least I might switch to reading it in English (which would be less like hard work, more like entertainment). Du côté de chez Swann is one of the best things ever created on earth, but all this talk in the last few hundred pages about different levels of nobility and who is too good to show up at who's tea parties and so on, it was starting to feel like it wasn't my thing. Now though, it's back to the domestic scene, with his grandmother having fallen ill, and it's amazing again. He's really the best writer of prose ever.

At this rate, I'll be finished just before my fortieth birthday.

Lives and Deaths of the Rich and Literary

I've just finished Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography, by Hermione Lee (2005). I read her biography of Virginia Woolf and liked it, so I thought I'd try this. It's a fun little book, not overly serious, about the pitfalls of biography writing, which mostly consist in being seduced by myths surrounding the subject, or just being generally melodramatic. She looks at a few death scenes and quotes some pretty funny passages in which the biographers guess at the interior monologue of the dying person, often trying to use words from the person's poetry or novels to describe their poignant feelings.

Lee writes interestingly on public perceptions of famous figures in different eras, looking particularly at the book The Hours and its film adaptation, which gave a popular, but distorted, image of Virginia Woolf's suicide and of her nose (which was made pretty ridiculous by its imitation in the form of a prosthetic on Nicole Kidman). She tells some good anecdotes and the book did make me think about how hard it must be to write biography, to create an orderly account of someone's life (usually dealing with large gaps of information) and to make it interesting without inventing meaning where none exists.

"a wandering people with a passion for gigantic bedsteads and massive refrigerators"

I went to one of my local second-hand bookstores (Welch's on St. Viateur near Jeanne-Mance) a few days ago with my sister. I wanted to buy five new books so I'd be stocked for a little while, but Rachel got impatient to go after I'd only chosen one, so I picked up two more books and contended myself with three instead of five.

One of the two semi-randomly chosen books is John Cheever's Oh What a Paradise it Seems. I had never read any Cheever before. I was looking for more recent fiction, which this wasn't -- it was published in 1982. But I like a short book and this was an even hundred pages.

As I started the book I was reminded of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, which starts:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax.

It goes on that way for several pages, and then returns to the second person metafiction for every other chapter throughout the book. Oh What a Paradise it Seems begins,

This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night. The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses -- Dombey and Trey -- can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyound the orchard.

The fact of the horses being named and insisted on and then never referred to again even obliquely also reminded me of the Calvino book. And Cheever's third chapter starts off with the narrator telling us he wishes he were writing a war novel. They're overall very different books with different emotional content, but there was some kind of echo for me. If on a winter's night was published in Italian in 1979 so maybe they share some ineffable worldwide feeling of an era, too.

Oh What a Paradise is about an old man, we aren't told how old but his age is insisted upon, who has an affair with a beautiful woman (she is appraised by the old man as between 35 and 40), has a rebound affair with her doorman, and mounts a campaign to save a skating pond. I have a long-standing distaste for fiction about old, undistinguished men who wander around effortlessly seducing young and beautiful women. Actually old is just an exacerbating characteristic, the genre bugs me when the men are undistinguished and middle-aged, too. In this case it's beautiful women and men, which is a bit of a twist, but doesn't lessen my irritation which is something to do with male writers who think that they're the best thing ever and think that everyone else thinks it too. But I told myself that this book wasn't exactly aiming at realism, and on that basis I calmed myself (not entirely successfully, you might think).

What is it aiming at? I would not want to assert that every novel has an overarching theme or moral, but this one seemed to. Something about the sadness of industrialization and a plea to reverse the destruction of natural oases, and (as a corollary?) the sadness of growing old and possibly losing those movie-perfect romantic moments one had in one's youth. It was published the year Cheever died, and more than six months after he was diagnosed with cancer, so the nostalgic tone has good claim to being genuine. The New York Times Book Review called it "perfect Cheever" (and added "it is perfect") but on the other hand Wikipedia, that unimpeachable source of information, says it wasn't one of his best and was charitably reviewed because they all knew he was dying. I guess I'll have to read something else of his before weighing on that. The book has some great lines (like the one I quoted part of in this post's title), but I didn't finish it wishing it was more than its 100 pages.