Literature? Meh.

Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten (1999) was David Mitchell's first novel.  I struggle to write about it on its own merits, because it has much in common with his later work, Cloud Atlas.  Both novels are works of literary architecture, constructed of discrete blocks which are connected by intricate and sometimes barely discernible threads.  As I was reading Ghostwritten, I often smiled, nodded, and thought, "Yup, there he goes again," as a character's name crops up in Kowloon and again in Ireland, or as a quasar symbolises two different (or maybe not so different?) things in Okinawa and Mongolia.

This is not, mind you, a particularly astute observation. It's on a par with a concert-goer at Bayreuth remarking that the operas all sound as if they were written by the same composer.  These comments don't do justice to either Wagner or Mitchell.

For one thing, building a novel from very tangentially connected plot lines comes across as a trendy gimmick unless it's done with Mitchell's skill.  Yes, he's used this approach with two of his books now, and although there are a few trademark Mitchell touches, each book is a masterpiece of originality and imagination.  In retrospect, Ghostwritten was obviously the warm-up act for the more elaborately-structured Cloud Atlas, but it is in no way a lesser book.  Mitchell dreams up an Irish physicist who yearns for control of her research, a Mongolian spirit who inhabits one nomadic herdsman after another in search of the creation myth, a woman who spends her life re-building her tea shack on the side of a holy mountain as China lurches through its series of regimes, a financial lawyer involved in shady trades in Hong Kong, and a young member of a Japanese doomsday cult, just to mention 5 of the 9 story-tellers. Mitchell lightly weaves glimmering threads of music, astronomy, politics, spirituality and terrorism through them, a familiar image or name popping up as if at random.

I like to imagine a David Mitchell devotee standing at a white-board with a fistful of coloured markers, devising a diagram of the places, themes, references and characters and ending up with something like the mad scribbles and arcs of a mathematical proof, or maybe a mandala.

When we tire of admiring the architecture of the story, we can start complimenting the prose. A young jazz-lover in Tokyo eschews the university for his job in a record store.  When a clique of school-girls minces into the shop, he sizes them up in an instant:  "Rich Shibuya girls are truffle-fed pooches."  One of them, however, stands apart from the rest, and finally she speaks to him in "a doomed, Octoberish oboe of a voice."

And voice is another one of David Mitchell's strong suits. He's giving us 9 narrators, most (but not all) of whom are human, scattered across the globe and across time, of different genders and ages. Each of them speaks in a distinct voice, and each voice sounds pitch-perfect.  Margarita is a Russian woman, formerly the lover of important men, now involved in a scheme to smuggle art masterpieces out of St. Petersburg. She works as a docent in the Hermitage, contemplating one painting in particular as she strolls about the room. (Don't you wonder what those docents are thinking about when you visit museums?)

I gaze into my next conquest. Our next conquest, I should say. Eve and the Serpent, by Delacroix. Loot brought back from Berlin in 1945. Head Curator Rogorshev was saying how the Krauts want it all back now! What a nerve! We spend forty million lives getting rid of their nasty little Nazis for them, and all we get out of it is a few oil paintings.

A Texan agent from the Pentagon delivers a chilling lecture to an Irish physicist on why her work is not her own and, as a result, her life will never be her own.

"War is making a major comeback – not that it had ever gone anywhere – and scientists like you win wars for generals like me. Because quantum cognition, if spliced with Artificial Intelligence and satellite technology in the way that you have proposed in your last five papers, would render existing nuclear technology as lethal as a shower of tennis balls."

Critics adore David Mitchell's work. I know several readers who are essentially David Mitchell groupies.  Hey, I would type his manuscripts any day and fetch his coffee. He's published five novels to date.  I'm rationing them.  It would feel criminal to gorge, to read them serially on a Mitchell binge.  His second book, Number9Dream, and his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, are still on my shelf, waiting for the perfect day to begin them. I also look forward to the perfect day to start re-reading all of them.  They all warrant it.

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

Some years ago, a friend came into work one morning looking very unwell. "Book hang-over," she mumbled, clutching her coffee cup. "I just finished The God of Small Things last night."

It'll take more than aspirin and strong coffee to get me through the aftermath of The Grapes of Wrath. When asked about the book, Steinbeck remarked, "I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags..."  


When the book came out in 1939, it hit raw nerves aplenty. Infuriated farmers branded Steinbeck a communist-socialist. Schools and religious organisations banned the book, some going so far as to burn it.  The Pulitzer Prize committee awarded it the prize for fiction in 1940. The fact that I'm slumped here in 2011, my nerves in rags, is just one more testament to the book's power.  

The novel is set in the 1930s, when the Great Dust Bowl had enveloped farms in Oklahoma and nearby states. Facing starvation and eviction, "Okies" headed to California in an exodus of staggering scale -- about 250,000 families all lured by rumour of work on farms and vineyards.  One character in the book sits beside his small shop on Rte 66, watching the desperate westward flow of families in barely-running vehicles, and he murmurs only one phrase over and over: "I jus' don't know what the country's a-comin' to." This was the time of industrialisation of America's farms, when farming became an industry, when tractors lifted a man's feet off the soil he was working, when farms no longer belonged to people but to banks. The members of the Joad family, Steinbeck's characters, are just one more overloaded vehicle-load of tired, hungry, frightened farm people to reach California and find themselves exploited and loathed.  

In the current euphemistic jargon, I suppose the Joads would be termed economic refugees, but I wonder how many Americans today read The Grapes of Wrath and feel a shock that so many fellow citizens suffered and died in squalid camps -- not in Bosnia or the Sudan, but in California.  Racial and ethnic injustices have been with the US from its beginnings, but the migrant Okies were white Americans. Their offense? Destitution. 


As I was reading The Grapes of Wrath, the black and white pictures of Dorothea Lange kept popping into my head. I wonder if anyone ever published an edition of his novel illustrated with her photographs.  I wonder if they ever met, those two great documenters of the Dust Bowl and Depression.  Their works complemented each other so well, it seems obvious that they shared the same passions and sensibilities.  Lange's best-known image, "Migrant Mother" (top), has haunted me from the first time I saw it in a school text-book, and I don't expect Ma Joad to vacate my memory any time soon, either.  

Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut

When I was growing up, one of the household rules forbade asking my father about his experiences as a medic in WWII France.  My mother said he never discussed what he did or saw there.  Not with her, and as far as she knew, not with other veterans, either.  I had a few friends whose fathers who had also fought in Europe or the Pacific and were equally tight-lipped about it.

As I was reading Mother Night, I really began to appreciate the difficulty in portraying war by those who were in it for those who were not.  The Nazis captured Kurt Vonnegut during the Battle of the Bulge, and he survived the Allied destruction of Dresden only because the Germans locked up his group of POWs in an underground slaughterhouse.  Yes, Slaughterhouse No. 5.  His was most definitely first-hand experience.

So how to describe the indescribable, the incomprehensible?  Hemingway took one approach, by paring his language down to the barest essentials. Vonnegut turned to black humour.  That, I've realised, is a walk on a high wire. Use humour unwisely, and you risk being read as frivolous or cruel. You need to portray the insanity of war while keeping your narrator relatively sane -- if he sounds as loony as the circumstances, he's got no credibility.  In Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Vonnegut finds this exquisite balance.

The People's Radio: It broadcast only German radio frequencies

Campbell is an American citizen who grew up in Germany, spent the war doing radio propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis in which he encoded spy messages for the Americans.  Is Campbell a devoted Nazi, or a devoted American?  Neither one.  He's a writer, devoted to his art and his German actress wife, Helga.

The story takes place years after the war's end, when Campbell is pursued by Israelis who want to try him for war crimes:  "I was high on the list of war criminals, largely because my offenses were so obscenely public."

Campbell, however, never took his radio broadcasts seriously.  He never really took Nazism seriously. Like, one suspects, the majority of Germans, he just wanted to get on with his life.

It wasn't that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can't say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.
They were people.
Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind. 

When the somewhat shady American spy-master approaches him,  Campbell insists that he an an apolitical artist, working at his "peaceful trade."  No one, the spy-master assures him, is neutral in war-time.

He shook his head. "I wish you all the luck in the world, Mr. Campbell," he said, "but this war isn't going to let anybody stay in a peaceful trade. And I'm sorry to say it," he said, "but the worse this Nazi thing gets, the less you're going to sleep like a log at night."
"We'll see," I said tautly.
"That's right -- we'll see," he said. "That's why I said you wouldn't give me your final answer today.You'll live your final answer."

 As part of his work for the Nazi propaganda machine, Campbell dreams up the idea of the Free American Corps -- a group of American POWs who fight the Russians ("the Mongol hordes") under a German banner.  This corps, Cambell admits, "was not a howling success. Only three American POWs joined. God only knows what became of them."  Campbell also (and with equal incompetence) devised the uniforms and logos for this absurd venture, and his father-in-law remarks upon the unit's device.

There were thirteen stars around the head of the eagle, representing the thirteen original American colonies. I had made the original sketch of the device, and since I don't draw very well, I had drawn six-pointed stars of David rather than five-pointed stars of the USA. The silversmith, while lavishly improving on my eagle, had reproduced my six-pointed stars exactly.
It was the stars that caught my father-in-law's fancy. "These represent the thirteen Jews in Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet," he said.
"That's a very funny idea," I said.
"Everyone thinks the Germans have no sense of humor," he said.  

Much as he would like to believe otherwise, Campbell's efforts as a sane man trying to impersonate a Nazi do have an impact.  An appalling impact.  His became the voice of an apparently sane Nazi.  His father-in-law, who had never been very fond of him, gives Campbell one particularly chilling compliment at the end of the war.

"You could tell me now that you were a spy, and we would go on talking calmly, just as we're talking now. I would let you wander off to wherever spies go when a war is over. You know why?" he said.
"No," I said.
"Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us," he said. "I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler -- but from you." He took my hand. "You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane."  

And there it is, amidst all the excruciating irony and humour -- the moral of the story, which Mr. Vonnegut hands us in the very first line of his Introduction:

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is:  We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.  

The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington

Published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the following year. Booth Tarkington is one of only three authors to have won the prize more than once; the other two are John Updike and William Faulkner.  (Tarkington's Alice Adams won it in 1922.)  Although he was more prolific that either of the other two writers, Tarkington's name is less familiar than theirs to readers today.  If Orson Welles hadn't produced a film version of The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, the title might have fallen into total obscurity by now.  And that, although it would be sadly ironic, would be apt, since the book is about one family's departure from the sight and memory of the people who had once admired their magnificence.

In an unnamed midwestern town at the beginning of the 20th century, the Ambersons are the wealthiest and most prominent citizens, Major Amberson having erected his mansion on an enormous plot of land on Amberson Boulevard.  Nearby, he built another on the same scale for his daughter, Isabel, her husband Wilbur Minafer, and their son, Georgie.

At the age of nine, George Amberson Minafer, the Major's one grandchild, was a princely terror, dreaded not only in Amberson Addition but in many other quarters through which he galloped on his white pony. "By golly, I guess you think you own this town!" an embittered labourer complained one day, as Georgie rode the pony straight through a pile of sand the man was sieving. "I will when I grow up," the undisturbed child replied.  

For Isabel Amberson, the sun rises and sets on her angel, who grows into one of the most self-absorbed and least self-aware spoilt brats in fiction. It seems to Georgie that other people exist for his convenience, and his mother's pandering does nothing to disrupt this world view. He gets the occasional challenge from other boys, but the greater challenge comes from Lucy Morgan, a sensible young lady who often seems to find George's arrogance entertaining.  George pursues her with his unshakable senses of entitlement and superiority.  He is an Amberson, after all, and in that town at that time, the name is big.

Lucy's father, Eugene, is not an aristocrat but a gifted inventor who rumbles about the town in his own early version of the horseless carriage, a mechanism which George ridicules, insisting that there's no future in it.  Although he has a university degree, George seems to feel that putting it to use by aspiring to some sort of career would be downright ungentlemanly.  When George repeatedly asks Lucy to marry him, she asks him what he plans to do.  The question baffles him, and when Lucy points out to him that her father is a respected man in the town, George goes on the offensive.

"He has his way, and I have mine. I don't believe in the whole world scrubbing dishes and selling potatoes and trying law cases. Why look at your father's best friend, my Uncle George Amberson -- he's never done anything in his life, and --"
"Oh, yes, he has," Lucy interrupted. "He was in politics."
"Well, I'm glad he's out," George said. "Politics is a dirty business for a gentleman..."

"I expect to live an honourable life," he said. "I expect to contribute my share to charities, and to take part in -- in movements."
"What kind?"
"Whatever appeals to me," he said.
Lucy looked at him with grieved wonder. "But you really don't mean to have any regular business or profession at all?"
"I certainly do not!" George returned promptly and emphatically.

George, in search of an appropriate pastime, asks his grandfather for the money to buy another carriage horse so that he might pursue tandem driving.  The Major is reticent to hand over the money, and George attributes this to senility rather than any sense of financial constraint. The notion that the Amberson wealth might be affected by time and change is one of countless ideas never to cross his mind.

When reality (in the form of other, lesser people) intrudes, George resists, angry that the riffraff are trespassing, but this grows increasingly difficult as the city grows, immigrants (heaven forbid) arrive, and styles and fortunes shift. At the time of his father's death, George notes that the newer section of the cemetery seemed a "more fashionable and important quarter than that older one which contained the Amberson and Minafer lots."  His subsequent thought on the matter is a classic example of his insistence that being an Amberson is of much greater import than doing anything at all.

...a feeling developed within him that the new quarter of the cemetery was in bad taste -- not architecturally or sculpturally perhaps, but in presumption: it seemed to flaunt a kind of parvenu ignorance, as if it were actually pleased to be unaware that all the aristocratic and really important families were buried in the old section. 

An irate and perpetually self-absorbed George puts a stop to his widowed mother's plan to marry Eugene Morgan. In the following years, the automobile's popularity and Morgan's success steadily increase, and the Amberson empire cracks, decays, and finally topples.

Like many of the citizens in the Ambersons' town, the reader is just waiting for George to get his come-uppance. He is a loathsome snob, and Tarkington gives him only a few redeeming scenes.  If George had gotten his just deserts and nothing more, though, the book would never have received the acclaim that it did. It would have been shelved as one more righteous morality tale.  But George's tribulations do change and at least partly redeem him.

I couldn't help comparing George Amberson Minafer to Anthony Patch, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned.  Both young men are presumptive heirs to a fortune, and both embrace idleness as a virtue.  Patch, however, is a more complex character, written with a much sharper pen. We know that Fitzgerald and his character share many traits, including fondness for liquor and literature. I get the sense that Booth Tarkington loathed George and had little in common with him. Maybe an author will treat a character in whom he sees much of himself with more finesse and depth.

George may not have Anthony Patch's verve, but one day he notices that his city has renamed Amberson Boulevard to Tenth Street, and he does grasp, at last, the fundamental message of Tarkington's novel:  Just as his name has passed from the city's memory, so will those of the people who took his place. Everything is transitory. And in 1918, when change came at fraction of today's pace, that realisation probably came as a shock.

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

I found a bunch of reasons (none of them good ones, as it turned out) to resist reading Neil  Gaiman's Neverwhere.  What is it -- science fiction, or fantasy, or a kids' book of some sort?  No thanks.  Within the first five minutes of listening to the audio book, I was glued to the MP3 player for the duration.  Mr. Gaiman is one of a handful of authors who is brilliant at reading his own works aloud.  He's got a terrific range of voices, whether his characters are alive or dead, human or not, or some combination of the above.

I read The Graveyard Book in print;  it's whimsical and morbid and thoroughly delightful.  (Note: The Independent voted it one of the 20 Best Audio Books, with the author narrating.) As the tale begins, a man named Jack has killed a father, mother and one child with his razor-sharp, bone-handled knife, and he's on his way up the stairs to dispatch the toddler.  Just in time, said infant toddles out of his crib, out of the house, and over to the nearby graveyard, thwarting Jack and throwing the cemetery's inhabitants into a tizzy.  Mrs. Owens, who departed this life some centuries before, is the first to find him.  She summons Mr. Owens.  "Strike me silly," said Mr. Owens, "if that isn't a baby."

Mrs. Owens, being the warm, fuzzy, maternal sort of spirit, lobbies to keep the child and raise him in the cemetery.  Others, including Caius Pompeius (who came to Britain during the Roman days and liked the roads very much), raise the obvious problems with raising a living child in the cemetery.  The terrified and newly dead spirit of the child's mother begs the ghosts to save her baby, startling the Owenses half to death. Or whatever.

You might think -- and if you did, you would be right -- that Mr. Owens should not have taken on so at seeing a ghost, given that Mr. and Mrs. Owens were themselves dead and had been for a few hundred years now, and given that the entirety of their social life, or very nearly, was spent with those who were also dead. 

With a sly wink in Hillary Clinton's direction, Mr. Gaiman shares with us one sage spirit's opinion about raising orphaned, living children.

"For good or for evil -- and I firmly believe that it is for good -- Mrs. Owens and her husband have taken this child under their protection. It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will," said Silas, "take a graveyard."

What to name him?  Every ghost in the place thinks he resembles some relative or ancestor of his, so Mrs. Owens puts her foot down and names him Nobody.  Nobody Owens, or Bod for short.  He is given the free run of the cemetery, tutored in various subjects by various ghosts, and briefly befriends a little girl, Scarlett, whose parents bring her to the graveyard to frolic out of doors.  When she tells her parents of her new friendship with Bod, they smile indulgently and tell each other that having imaginary friends is normal for a child of Scarlett's age.  Meanwhile, she tells Bod that her father teaches particle physics, or at least he does so when they can find enough people who want to learn it.

"What's particle physics?" asked Bod.
Scarlett shrugged. "Well," she said. "There's atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that's what we're all made of. And there's things that's smaller than atoms, and that's particle physics."
Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett's father was probably interested in imaginary things.  

One day Miss Lupescu arrives at the cemetery to tutor young Bod, bringing with her containers of beet soup with dumplings.  Bod is keen on neither her food nor her didactic methods. He protests.

"I have teachers. Letitia Borrows teaches me writing and words, and Mr. Pennyworth teaches me his Compleat Educational System for Younger Gentlemen with Additional Material for Those Post Mortem. I do geography and everything. I don't need more lessons."

Miss Lupescu is not impressed.

"Name the different kinds of people," said Miss Lupescu. "Now."
Bod thought for a moment. "The living," he said. "Er. The dead." He stopped. Then, "...Cats?"
"You are ignorant, boy," said Miss Lupescu. "This is bad. And you are content to be ignorant, which is worse. Repeat after me, there are the living and the dead, there are day-folk and night-folk, there are ghouls and mist-walkers, there are the high hunters and the Hounds of God. Also, there are solitary types."
"What are you?" asked Bod.
"I," she said sternly, "am Miss Lupescu."

Miss Lupescu proceeds to teach Bod how to call for help in every language, not limited to those spoken by living humans.  This proves to be a surprisingly useful bit of memorisation, and Bod's opinion of Miss Lupescu's knowledge (if not of her cooking) goes up. The Graveyard Book lifted my already fond opinion of Neil Gaiman to new levels, too.

Sunset Park, by Paul Auster

When I finished this novel (by virtue of reading what must be one of the longest, comma-riddled, run-on sentences in recent literary history), I expect my brow was furrowed like a shar-pei puppy, and my one utterance was a puzzled "Huh."  Bewitched? Mmm, a bit. Bothered and bewildered,  definitely.

Although each section of the book focuses on one character or another, the narration is nearly always by an omniscient, anonymous 3rd-person voice, speaking in the past tense, which feels a bit cool and detached to me. In one of the later sections, the narration switches to a 2nd-person voice, as if the character is addressing himself.  It's a little more personal, but I still felt excluded as the reader, and I wonder why Auster made these choices.

As the book opens, the character who is most central, Miles Heller, is working in Florida in a "trash-out" job. The year is 2008, the economy is in shambles, and Miles and his colleagues go from one vacant house to the next, removing the personal possessions so the house can be sold. While his less scrupulous workmates take items of value, Miles takes photographs of them.

Each house is a story of failure -- of bankruptcy and default, of debt and foreclosure -- and he has taken it upon himself to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here, that the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present int he discarded things strewn about their empty houses.  The work is called trashing out...

Failure, regret, and economic and emotional depression are the themes that rule this novel. Miles, we learn, is a very intelligent man, having fled his family home in New York following the accidental death of his step-brother, for which he blames himself. In Florida, he has fallen in love with an exceptionally gifted teen-ager, Pilar. Miles, however, is not a paedophile -- he and Pilar met when he discovered her reading The Great Gatsby in a park, and their subsequent relationship, while not platonic, is as much about mentoring as it is about lust. Pilar's greedy older sister, however, threatens to turn Miles over to the law for statutory rape (the age of consent in Florida is 18) unless he showers her with stolen loot from the trash-outs, so Miles returns to New York to bide his time until Pilar's 18th birthday.  Only a few months -- I felt as hopeful and confident as Miles that the time would fly, and they would be together.  They seemed like one of the most intriguing and compatible couples I've run across in fiction in years. Why shouldn't it work?

In New York, Miles connects with his long-time friend, Bing Nathan, who invites Miles to become the fourth squatter in an abandoned, incongruous, wood-framed house in Sunset Park.  From one side of the house they can see the Statue of Liberty (symbol of hope), and from the other the enormous Green-Wood Cemetery (land of no more hope).  The four young house-mates are academic and artistic types. In earlier decades the idea that they would be squatting in an abandoned house might have seemed unthinkable, but times are grim now.

Alice is working on her PhD thesis, completing the chapter on the film The Best Years of Our Lives, the ironically titled classic about the miseries and struggles of GIs returning from World War II. In another section of the novel, Miles' father, Morris, watches the film on a trans-Atlantic flight.

He wound up watching The Best Years of Our Lives, something he had seen once a long time ago and therefore had utterly forgotten, a nice movie, he felt, well played by the actors, a charming piece of propaganda designed to persuade Americans that the soldiers returning from World War II will eventually adjust to civilian life, not without a few bumps along the way, of course, but in the end everything will work out, because this is America, and in America everything always works out. 

Considering that Morris' small, boutique publishing house is on the verge of bankruptcy at the end of its worst year ever, and his Brown University-educated son is living as a squatter, the irony is lacerating.

Morris' ex-wife and Miles' mother is an actress, in New York at the moment to play the part of a woman buried up to her neck in sand in a Becket play, Happy Days.  Morris reflects on her career with the same sense that America might not be holding up to its advertised promise.

...that was the world she came from, an ethical universe patched together from the righteous platitudes of Hollywood films -- pluck, spunk, and never say die. Admirable in its way, yes, but also maddening, and as the years moved forward he understood that much of it was a sham, that inside her supposedly indomitable spirit there was also fear and panic and crushing sadness. 

The miasmic sense of doom spawned by the financial melt-down makes sense to me as a reader.  What I find more puzzling are the personal senses of failure and defeat that seem to engulf both Miles and his father.  Yes, there was the tragic death of Bobby, Miles' step-brother, which occurred when Miles shoved him, and Bobby tumbled into a country road only to be killed by a car that sped around a bend. This would be traumatic for any family, but neither Morris nor Willa, Miles' step-mother, blames Miles for Bobby's death. Morris consistently berates himself for having generally failed Miles; Miles just as consistently berates himself for having failed his family. And yet, when we look at the family that Auster has drawn for us, they are as close to ideal as reality will allow.

...he can remember actively liking his brother, perhaps even loving him, and that he was liked and perhaps even loved in return. But they were never close, not close in the way some brothers are, even fighting, antagonistic brothers, and no doubt that had something to do with the fact that they belonged to an artificial family, a constructed family, and each boy's deepest loyalty was reserved for his own parent. It wasn't that Willa had been a bad mother to him or that his father had been a bad father to Bobby. Quite the reverse. The two adults were steadfast allies, their marriage was solid and remarkably free of trouble, and each one bent over backward to give the other's kid every benefit of the doubt. 

Following the story's sudden, violent climax, Miles concludes that the sun really has set on his life, on his hopes for any sort of worthwhile future, and he rattles out his despair in that one long, rambling final sentence.  Here, too, Auster leaves me scratching my head, because although Miles' situation is far from rosy, I don't find it anywhere near as dire as he does.  While Auster's telling of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire rings brilliantly true to me, his snap-shots of personal anguish and guilt don't add up. I can't understand why the people he has put in front of us are as tortured as he says they are.

This is a book I would like to read with a book group. I would love to know if, for examples, New Yorkers find the personal emotions more sensible, or if men do. In the meantime, thoughts of Miles and Morris will be popping into my head at odd times, I'm sure.  Maybe I'll figure them out on my own.

P.S. Morris recalls the day when a very young Miles talks to him about To Kill a Mockingbird.  The boy noted that in the novel, the falsely accused black man, the lawyer who tries to defend him, and the lawyer's son all suffer injuries to their right arms.  Miles concludes that injury is a requisite step on the road to manhood, an inference that his publisher father admires greatly. Maybe when men don't suffer any real or catastrophic injuries on the road to manhood, they create them from whatever struggles life has given them.  Just a thought, and not one, I think, that Mr. Auster or his publisher would admire greatly.