Books Reviews – Auxiliary Memory

Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney

by James Wallace Harris, 3/31/23

I nominated Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney for my nonfiction book club because it was on some best-books-of-the-year lists at the end of 2022, and because it was about creative writing and literary people from the 1970s and 1980s. The book club members voted it in and Come Back in September was our March 2023 read.

However, I don’t think I can say, “Rush out and buy it.” It won’t be a bestseller, but I’d highly recommend it for a specific audience. If you have any of these qualities, you should read more of what I’ve got to say about the book below:

Your twenties and thirties took place in the 1970s and 1980s
You enjoy reading memoirs and autobiographies
You majored in English
You’ve taken or taught creative writing courses
You enjoy reading and writing poetry
You’re fascinated by the New York literary scene of the 1970 and 1980s
You love The New York Review of Books
You know about Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
You’re interested in Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag
You get a kick out of books with lots of name-dropping and gossip
You’re interested in punk rock from the 1970s and 1980s
You’re interested in black literature and writers
You’re interested in feminist writers of the 1970s and 1980s
You want to know about AIDs in New York in the 1980s
You can handle terse prose that is detailed and highly episodic

Come Back in September is mostly about Darryl Pinckney and Elizabeth Hardwick, two people who were completely unknown to me. Both have achieved a certain level of success in the literary world, especially in New York City, but are far from famous.

Even though Pinckney dedicated Come Back in September to the memory of Barbara Epstein, I feel the book is mainly about Elizabeth Hardwick – she is pictured on the cover. Epstein and her husband Robert B. Silvers, along with Hardwick were the founders of The New York Review of Books. Epstein and Silvers coedited the magazine from 1963 to 2006 when Epstein died, and Silvers was the sole editor until 2017 when he died.

Elizabeth Hardwick was Pinckney’s writing teacher and mentor. She also hired him as an assistant and helper. They became personal friends. Evidently, through that connection, Pinckney got a job working in the mailroom at The New York Review of Books and getting to know Epstein and Silvers. Much of this memoir is about his life at the magazine in the 1970s and 1980s. If you are a fan of The New York Review of Books, then I recommend Come Back in September. Pinckney went from mailroom clerk to typist to substitute assistant to reviewer, writer, and I believe even doing some editing.

Pinckney was born in 1953, making him two years younger than I am, but still very relatable in age. He accomplished goals I only fantasized about achieving. Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born the same year as my mother and died the same year as my mother too. So, I pictured Pinckney throughout his memoir as interacting with a woman my mother’s age. I tried picturing my mother, a white woman born in rural Mississippi, befriending a gay black man. She wouldn’t have been prejudiced against him, and I’m positive she would have loved the attention that Pinckney gave Hardwick. She would have considered him a much better son than me.

Most of the memories in the book are divided between Pinckney’s life with friends and family, and his life with the literary crowd, and most of those seem to deal with Hardwick. So, why does he dedicate the book to Barbara Epstein? Maybe she helped his career more because of her position.

While reading Come Back in September I kept thinking about all the things I was doing the same years while Pinckney was writing about them.

Pinckney first met Elizabeth Hardwick in 1973 and he opens his memoir with:

I made Elizabeth Hardwick laugh when I applied late to get into her creative writing class at Barnard College in the autumn of 1973. Not only could I, a black guy from Columbia across the street, rattle off a couple of middle-period Sylvia Plath poems when she asked me what I was reading—Blacklakeblackboattwoblackcutpaperpeople—I told her that my roommate said we would kidnap her daughter, Harriet, if she didn’t let me into the class. His sister was her daughter’s best friend. I’d met her at a party of his Dalton School friends. I was in.

Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

I walked her to the subway at 116th Street and Broadway. Plath had come around once for her husband’s class when they lived in Boston. Professor Hardwick remembered her as almost docile, nothing like the poems that would make her famous.

Professor Hardwick was fresh and put together. Her soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier. In her walk, she rocked gently, from side to side. She was on the job, in a short black leather coat and green print scarf, carrying a stiff leather satchel with short handles just wide enough for a certain number of student manuscripts. I hadn’t yet seen her bound up from a chair and break free, flinging over her silk shoulder a silver evening bag on its chain, saying to an astonished table of graduate students and free spirits who’d just agreed among themselves that poetry was everywhere,

—I’m sure you’re very nice, but I can’t bear that kind of talk.

And then dancing away from their party because she’d rather be at home looking forward to Saturday night delivery of the Sunday New York Times.

At our first official teacher-student conference in dingy Barnard Hall, I made Professor Hardwick laugh again, because I recited the last paragraph of Lillian Hellman’s memoir An Unfinished Woman:

Although I do have a passing sadness for the self-made foolishness that
was, is, and will be …

—That fraud, Professor Hardwick said. She tried to do everything but have me killed.

Six years earlier there had been a Mike Nichols revival of Hellman’s play The Little Foxes at Lincoln Center, and she, Hardwick, had reviewed it for The New York Review of Books, calling it awkward, didactic, and full of cliché. She didn’t believe in the South as an idea, she said.

—Her use of black people, she said. You would die.

Agrarianism was a bore. Had I read Allen Tate? A poet I’d never heard of.

—You don’t need him. Faulkner?

The Bear.

—You do need him. But don’t ever do that again.

—Excuse me?

—Read Lillian. People were cutting me on the street. She got people to write letters. She told them, I’m not used to being attacked by someone who has been a guest in my house. I made up my mind that I didn’t care if I never went to another dinner party at Lillian’s. Dashiell Hammett was always trying to get away from her, for Patricia Neal.

I was discovering so much: Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Baldwin’s essays, Gertrude Stein’s autobiography. Every day, from hour to hour, there was something new, a name to put on my list of names to reckon with. One afternoon I walked by an open door and a guy with long blond hair was at his upright, preparing to play. The music had poignance and a couple of other people also paused. My mother loved the piano, but I had never heard of Erik Satie. Friends and professors had a lot to tell me.

Pinckney, Darryl. Come Back in September (pp. 3-5). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

I quote so much of the opening pages to give you an idea of reading Pinckney’s prose. I had to pay close attention, and often reread lines to pick up on what he was saying. Pinckney’s prose reminds me of poetry, which involves short lines, that are tense, terse, vivid, detailed, and hard to read. On a superficial level, Pinckney’s prose reminds me of Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights, which I’ve just started. Both books are told in a long series of snippets of memories.

Our nonfiction book club rates books, 1 to 10, at the end of the month. I gave it a 10 even though I had problems with it. I think those problems were mine and not Pinckney’s. I admire Come Back in September quite a bit, but it’s just not something I always cared about, but I never stopped valuing its quality. My hunch is that Come Back in September is far more brilliant than I’m capable of perceiving.

This memoir is an amazing bit of memory excavation. I write about dredged-up memories all the time, so I know how hard it is, and I admire it when I see it done so much better than what I do.

I had problems with Pinckney’s writing style at first, but once I tuned into his way of expressing memories, I could see what he was doing. I don’t know if it was intentional, or if that’s how he thinks. His prose is very granular. He depends on the accumulation of memory flashes rather than one long consistent narrative.

I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s technique. Vonnegut claimed to write his novels in 500-word chunks. Pinckney does something similar, but often his chunks are very short – just long enough to capture a significant moment of the past. Come Back in September covers the years 1973 to 1989 and is based on journals and letters, but I also expect deeply buried memories.

By our reading group’s rating scale, a 10 should be for books that we consider highly recommendable. I can’t say that’s true for this book. It’s highly recommendable if you are the right reader for this book, but I guess most readers won’t be. Still, I rated it a 10 for a group. I wasn’t the only one.

Now for the philosophical reading question. Should we always read books that are exactly like what we’ve trained ourselves to read? Even though my undergraduate degree is in English, and I’m a dropout from an MFA creative writing degree, Pinckney’s prose and subject matter were far outside of my normal stomping grounds. For the first half of the book, I had to push myself to read it. Eventually, I adapted and the second half became a page-turner.

I’m not sure if I will ever reread Come Back in September, but I think if I do, I will find a great deal more to get out of it. I’ve tried to find out more about Pinckney and Hardwick online. There’s a lot for Pinckney, he’s become somewhat successful over the years, but I believe Hardwick has become more obscure. I can’t find any videos of her at all, but within Come Back in September she expressed a distaste for that kind of attention.

A couple of years after the events in Come Back in September Pinckney published his first novel, High Cotton. It’s dedicated to his parents and sisters. Elizabeth Hardwick mentored and encouraged his writing during this time, so I was surprised she wasn’t mentioned in the dedication.

Another problem I had with the book, is all the big-name authors that Pinckney got to hang with back in the 1970s and 1980s are not ones I care about. How many people still read Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, etc.? Still, I imagine for people who do, this book will delicious inside gossip.

Pinckney leaves me mostly interested in Elizabeth Hardwick. I’ve started Sleepless Nights, but so far I don’t like it. It’s too poetic. She shunned plots. I can read books without plots, but I need engaging characters and marvelous settings to make up for them. So far I haven’t found them.

Hardwick’s novel and Pinckney’s memoir are both about collecting memories and depending on the totality of those collected flashes of memories telling a story. That worked for Pinckney but it took a while, that may also be true for Hardwick.

Jim

Famous Group Friendships

by James Wallace Harris, 2/23/23

The TV show Friends was a huge success for many reasons. However, there is one important reason few people mention that I want to reference for this book review. Group friendships don’t happen often in our lives and they usually don’t last long — yet they are often the ones we miss most when they are gone. Group friendships are usually created for us, by the classroom, churches, sports teams, the military, the office, arts and crafts groups, or hobby clubs. I fondly remember several such friendships and miss them. I even dream about them.

Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf and Jena 1800 by Peter Neumann are about a very special group of friends. Friends who made history. Friends who inspired how we think today. Because they were German and their relationships happened over two hundred years most people won’t know their names. However, those friends influenced people who became famous in the English-speaking world. We remember those friends as the founders of Romanticism. Interestingly, both Magnificent Rebels and Jena 1800 came out in 2022. Magnificent Rebels is longer, and the story is told more like a novel, and Jena 1800 is shorter but focuses more on the concepts, but both tell about the same people. I recommend reading Magnificent Rebels first to see if you like the people, and if you do, you’ll probably want to read Jena 1800.

As a kind of warning I must ask, do you really want to read a book about a bunch of Germans from the 18th century with hard-to-pronounce names? Names that are hard to remember because so many of them began with the letters Sch – Schlegel, Schelling, and Schiller. And there were too many damn Friedrichs. I admit this made the book hard to read but it was worth the effort.

Here’s the thing, I knew practically nothing about these people. I’ve heard of Goethe and Hagel, but haven’t read anything by them. The reason why I read Magnificent Rebels is that I read Andrea Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humbolt’s New World and was completely blown away. And I don’t even remember hearing or reading about Alexander von Humbolt before. Wulf opened up a whole new historical territory for me to explore.

For most of my life, I’ve read and studied English literature and science from the perspective of English history. I’ve read very few European novels and haven’t studied their history and culture. I knew about the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats), but I didn’t know or had forgotten, they were inspired by the German Romantics. Being introduced to this new knowledge was the first reason I enjoyed Magnificent Rebels.

But the second reason, and by far the more important reason, is I love reading about counter-culture friendship groups that spark a revolution. If you enjoy reading about the Beats, the Lost Generation, the Bloomsbury Group, the Transcendentalists, the Futurians, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, or even the personal computer pioneers of the 1970s, then adding the German Romantics should be a pleasure.

Both books focus on the German romantics that lived in Jena which is in Germany. But their homeland wasn’t modern Germany. The books mainly cover 1796-1803, after the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic Wars when Europe was in upheaval. At one point in this story, Jena is occupied by Napoleon’s army who sacked the city taking any food, valuables, and wood.

I admire books about a group of people who do something so exciting that biographies are written about the group and the individuals. Magnificent Rebels makes me want to read more books about the German Romantics, but also books by and about all the individuals involved. Here’s a scorecard for the main personalities in the book, and the ones I’d want to study more. There were many other people mentioned in Magnificent Rebels.

The first block list the young people that had all the love affairs. The next block is Geothe and Schiller who were best friends and mentors to the German Romantics. They were older and represented the previous generation. The final group was the philosophers and scientists who were friends of the first group, but who were also successful in other fields.

Caroline Schlegel and Wilhelm Schlegel were married but had a best-friends kind of arrangement. Wilhelm accepted Caroline’s love affair with Fredrich Schelling. Friedrich Schlegel was lovers with Dorothea Veit, who was married. That affair was far less accepted.

To me, both Caroline and Dorothea are the most interesting people in Magnificent Rebels. In a way, because they were women, they had the most to rebel against.

The German Romantics remind me of the 1960s counter-culture. The German Romantics weren’t exactly the hippies of the 1790s, but there are comparisons. They were rebellious, flouting sexual conventions, and excited about everything new. For a while they did everything together, reading poetry, going to plays and concerts, discussing philosophy, attending literary salons, hiking in nature, and defying what was expected of them. They almost had a little commune. The men taught at the university in Jena and promoted new ideas that attracted students from all over Europe. But the women were thinkers and writers in their own right.

However, like with the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, things fell apart, often because of egos. It’s hard for two people to maintain a friendship, and group dynamics are infinitely harder to maintain. When the Jena set broke up, it felt like the Beatles breaking up. What we think of as The Sixties was really only from 1964-1969. The Sixties really began with The Beatles arriving in America in February 1964 and ending with Altamont in December 1969. These two books about Jena cover a similarly short period.

Magnificent Rebels and Jena 1800 both try to capture a certain era of exciting social transformation that happened in a small town with a few colorful people seeding changes that spread across the world. I also compare them with the Beat Movement of the 1950s.

JWH

Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson

by James Wallace Harris

Why do we love some books more than others? Why are some books so enchanting? Why is it so hard to always find the perfect book to read? Especially when we’re old and jaded and have read thousands of books.

I just finished Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson and I want to explain why I loved it so much. I mostly read science fiction, but lately, I’ve gotten tired of the genre. Well, not completely. I recently found a science fiction novel that completely enchanted me too, but it was an old science fiction book that came out in 1939, the setting was England in the thirties, and wasn’t sold as science fiction. See my review of The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff.

I just finished Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson and it pushed all the buttons that make me love books. Am I so burned out on science fiction that any decent story from any other genre would charm me to pieces? I don’t know.

Can I examine these two books and draw any conclusive conclusions that would help me always find a great book to read? And what is great? I might think Miss Buncle’s Book and The Hopkin’s Manuscript are great novels and other people might think they’re both snooze-fests.

Both books are set in England during the 1930s and I have to admit that I’ve been watching a lot of TV shows and reading other books about England before 1960. Maybe I’ve just found a new fictional setting that I like better than those offered by science fiction right now. But why England? And why older books? (I should admit that I still like older science fiction books. Maybe my reading problem is the 21st century.)

Is this a case of reading the right book at the right time? Would they have been so entertaining if I had read either of these books when I was in my teens, twenties, forties, or fifties? Is part of the equation for finding the right book include the age, gender, and philosophical outlook of the reader? I worry about recommending books because even when I love a book, I’m never sure someone reading my review will.

One reason why I’m sick of science fiction is I’ve read too much of it. But I’ve also got tired of the future, especially the far future. But the present isn’t very appealing either. I think I’m looking for comfort books. For cozy novels. And Miss Buncle’s Book fits the bill perfectly.

Normally, I wouldn’t pick a book aimed at women readers, but in the last year, I’ve read quite a number of books by women authors aimed at women readers. I had just finished reading a science fiction book by D. E. Stevenson, The Empty World and while researching her I found this video from The Comfort Book Club:

The enthusiasm of the YouTube host and her mother, as well as the testimonials from the show’s viewers, convinced me to give Miss Buncle’s Book a try. I’m so glad I did.

This 1934 novel is set in the small village of Silverstream. That might be in Yorkshire because we’re told Barbara Buncle has a Yorkshire accent. Barbara has a problem. The depression is on and her investments are no longer paying dividends. She needs money and decides to write a novel. Unfortunately, she has no imagination and writes a story about all the people in her village, just changing the names. She submits the book with the pen name of John Smith and it gets accepted. The publisher loves it, thinking that it’s either a very gentle satire or the work of a very simple mind. However, the publisher renames her novel, Disturber of the Peace.

Slowly the citizens of Silverstream discover the book. Even though it’s set in Copperfield and the characters’ names are different, they recognize themselves. Barbara Buncle has a knack for realistically painting portraits in words. Some of the village folk find it a pleasant read but others are outraged, especially Mrs. Featherstone Hogg, who is livid that the novel reveals she was once a chorus girl. She wants to find out how John Smith is and have him horsewhipped.

Miss Buncle is so mousy that no one suspects her. Several of the Silverstream citizens make it their business to ruin John Smith. But we’re also shown many villagers who are good people. The plot gets quite involved and it eventually becomes a book within a book within a book story when Miss Buncle writes a sequel.

Having this book within a book plot is rather clever. The humor is relatively dry since the story is told realistically even though the action gets rather far-fetched. Its humor is not like P. G. Wodehouse, but I imagine Wodehouse fans will love D. E. Stevenson too. If you like the TV series All Creatures Great and Small and the James Herriot books they were based on, you’ll probably like Miss Buncle’s Book. Miss Buncle’s Book is the first in a series of four. The blog Books and Chocolate thought Miss Buncle’s Book had the same appeal as Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson.

But why did I prefer Miss Buncle’s Book now over my standard fare of science fiction? The writing in science fiction has gotten rather baroque in both prose and ideas. Miss Buncle’s Book is very straightforward and simple, yet very detailed. The characters are far more appealing and realistic compared to what I see in 21st science fiction.

However, I think the most important factor is the novelty of the setting. Science fiction and fantasy settings have gotten old and tiresome. Right now I’d much rather visit a small English village than Mars, or the future, or an interstellar spaceship. However, I wouldn’t mind if a Martian or a human from the future was visiting a 1930s English village.

If you’re a Scribd subscriber, they have the first three Miss Buncle books on audio. They are also available for the Kindle at Amazon and audio at Audible.com. There are nice paperback editions of the first three books from Persephone Books.

JWH

Historical Bible Study Counteracts Irrational Faith Better Than Books by Atheists

by James Wallace Harris, 12/22/22

Most Christians acquire their faith in childhood. A growing proportion of Christians drop most of their early beliefs as they get older and better educated. But a significant proportion of Christians cling to childhood beliefs their entire life. Faith in the irrational can be extremely strong, no matter what evidence to the contrary is given.

Why do some people hold onto their cherished childhood beliefs with such tenacity? We know that a baby taken from a Christian culture and raised in a Muslim culture will become Islamic rather than Christian. Beliefs children are exposed to in their early years, imprint on them stronger than beliefs acquired later in life. It is very hard to deprogram early beliefs, even silly and irrational beliefs. Why is that?

One theory is cognitive dissonance. That theory studies the psychological stress caused by people experiencing conflicting information, usually caused by having old beliefs exposed to new and contradictory information.

For some people, accepting new information can undermine their psychological stability so it becomes imperative to go to any extreme to preserve the beliefs that define their sense of reality. Decades ago, a number of books became popular promoting atheism, with some becoming bestsellers. They may have had an impact because the percentage of people attending church has been declining faster in the last decade. On the other hand, many Christians left the mainstream churches and joined evangelical churches which advocated even more extreme Christian beliefs. In contrast, other believers just doubled down on their faith.

Many from that demographics became anti-science in several ways and politically skeptical. They deny climate change, vaccines, the medical profession, scientists, and even democracy. I’ve wondered if it was to maintain their Christian faith. Their cognitive dissonance is so great they are being forced into extreme views about how reality works. To some family and friends, these people are embracing disturbing irrational beliefs. This is further polarizing our society. If we are to solve our civilization’s problems we’ll need to heal this cognitive schism. To fix our relationships with each other and the Earth we must agree on what is real.

This divide will be the defining crisis for Christianity in the 21^st century. If Christianity wants to regain its validity, its message must be universal. Christianity should have some core values that all denominations embrace, and even non-Christians will admire. Christianity needs to coexist with science, philosophy, history, and all other areas of knowledge. It can’t keep breaking up into smaller and smaller denominations and sects that claim they each own the truth, especially when those truths are so crazy sounding to the average person.

I’ve been discovering a different approach to Christianity in the last decade, which has been an emerging academic discipline for a couple of centuries. That is the historical study of Christianity and its texts. People who embrace both the sacred and the secular are pursuing these studies because it’s the most fascinating cold case in history. Who was Jesus, what did he really believe, and how did Christianity develop. The major focus is on the first century CE. What happened then and how do we know it.

And one of the primary methods for analyzing this period is the study of the New Testament. Most Christians, even the ones who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible seldom study the New Testament with such scrutiny. This kind of Bible study used to only exist in seminary schools – now it’s becoming a popular self-study. However, not all scholars pursuing this history are doing it with the same level of discipline. Many true believers have become Biblical archeologists to prove the validity of their faith even when it conflicts with secular truths. But what’s interesting is Bible study has become a powerful force for eroding faith in the irrational. There are several former evangelicals who are now university scholars that don’t believe what they once believed. And we’re discovering that the Bible does match up with history in many ways, but often not in the ways the faithful want.

Whoever the historical figure we call Jesus was and what he said is hidden by two thousand years of revisions and creations. Jesus, and that wasn’t his real name, is portrayed differently by the Apostle Paul, and the writers of the four gospels. The human being we call Jesus probably didn’t consider himself divine or claim to perform miracles. Everything we think we know about Jesus was invented by ordinary people decades after he died. They gave him an origin story and superpowers to compete with other figures of their times. Did you know that Augustus, the Roman Emperor, was also called a son of God? The followers of Jesus had to top that. And they kept topping every other competing belief system at the time. Their best recruiting promotion was to promise ordinary people everlasting life. No other religion promised that at the time.

Are there any clues to what the historical Jesus said and did? Maybe. One intriguing approach is the Jesus Seminar.

Many of the people who are doing historical analysis of Jesus and Christianity have examined a tremendous amount of information. Getting where they are coming from requires reading countless books. And it requires learning the disciplined approaches of professional historians. Yesterday, I discovered a video on YouTube that covers some of this territory in a very concise matter. It’s a good introduction to what I’m talking about, although some of the faithful might not like their light, even flippant approach.

After that, I recommend reading the books of Bart Ehrman or watching his YouTube channel. I find his books to be a more efficient method to take in information than watching hours of his YouTube interviews. In 2016 I wrote a review of some of his books for Book Riot. Back in 2014, I reviewed five of his books for this blog.

Trying to decipher who Jesus was is an enticing historical mystery to solve, and I think from the YouTube videos I’ve been seeing, it’s becoming very popular. I’m guessing that it will reshape Christianity. I’d like to think the teachings of the historical Jesus had certain unique philosophical insights but it’s almost impossible to know them until we can distinguish what he might have said from the fiction created about him during the first and second centuries.

JWH

Reading Elizabeth Strout

by James Wallace Harris, 12/15/22

My fiction of choice has always been science fiction, but I’ve recently had my fill of that genre and started reading contemporary and literary fiction. I got hooked on the books of Elizabeth Strout and Anthony Powell. I’ve finished Oh, William! today, my sixth Strout book in six weeks, and started my seventh, Lucy by the Sea. She only has nine novels, so I will run out soon. Hopefully, I’ll be satiated and can try somebody new, but I’m hooked on her now. (Concurrently, I’m on the fifth book of the twelve in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series, but that’s another story for another time.)

I began my addiction to Elizabeth Stout with Olive Kitteridge, a “novel” composed of 13 short stories. I saw the HBO miniseries based on the book years ago, but when I tried to watch the show again after finishing the book I realize it wasn’t the same experience. My image of Olive is not Frances McDormand’s version even though I liked her version very much.

I also read the sequel Olive, Again which adds another 13 stories to the Olive Kitteridge saga. We meet Olive in her sixties in the first book, and we last see her in her eighties in the second book. I’ve seldom read books about old people, but now that I’ve become old myself they have become very appealing.

Of the Strout books, I think I’m the most partial to the Olive stories, but I also love the Lucy Barton books too. There are four in that series, My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh, William! and Lucy by the Sea.

I feel both series are kind of experimental. Olive’s story is told in short stories, where some stories only have cameo appearances by Olive. Lucy narrates her story in the first, third, and fourth books, but in the second novel, we hear about Lucy from other people. I found that perspective fascinating after the first book. I listen to the books on audio, and in the books where Lucy narrates, they each feel like one long monologue. The only standalone Strout story I’ve read is Abide With Me, which has a best-seller-type third-person structure.

What’s striking about both series is the sparse, clean prose that feels like a hyperrealistic painting. I believe that’s why I like these books so much after all the science fiction I’ve been gorging on. They are hard, concrete, and mundane which contrasts sharply with the otherworldy fantasy of science fiction.

I got hooked on Strout because of my friend Linda. After I read Olive Kitteridge I started mentioning Strout to my friends and I learned that Anne (Old Anne) had already gotten hooked too. She was reading Strout in publication order and insisted that I should start over and do the same. I didn’t agree. When I mentioned to Annie (New Ann) that we were reading Strout, she wanted to read her too.

Along the way, Linda told me that she heard a Kelly Corrigan interview with Nick Hornby where she asked him what was the last book he was most impressed with, and Hornby had said Oh, William! (For now, I agree too.)

You can search online for the recommended reading order for reading Elizabeth Strout and find opposing opinions. I don’t know if it matters, even within the Olive and Lucy series. For example, if you only read Oh, William! it would work fine as a standalone novel. But I was happy that I read them in series order. Starting Stout with her first book is fine, but I feel her later books are the best.

One reason why I don’t think reading order is important is they all have the same theme. Stout likes to explore how we really don’t know each other, especially our parents, siblings, children, and spouses. And we also don’t know ourselves either. Her books inspire me to pay more attention to the folks in my life and myself. Don’t worry, they aren’t heavy. Strout succeeds with lightness.

I’ve been listening to the Elizabeth Strout books, but I liked them so much that I’ve been buying hardback copies to study. I even ordered a copy of Best American Short Stories 2013 where Strout was the guest editor. I want to see what kind of fiction she admired.

Are any of y’all fans of Elizabeth Strout?

JWH