Bowl of Cherries

by Millard Kaufman, 2007
326pp
10/06/07 - 10/18/07

This book smells. Not a musty old book-smell. This book had an odor more like a rank cheese, or an active young boy who has not yet acquired proper hygiene habits. The odor summoned memories of certain children's books checked out from the local branch library when I was a kid. To be fair, the scent has diminished substantially since I brought the book home, but it's still there; you don't have to bury your nose between the pages to find it.

I mention the whole odor thing because McSweeney's "Rectangulars" imprint is remarkable, not just for the quality of literature published, but for quality in every aspect of the books they print. I can only surmise that San Francisco was particularly choked by a thick haze of bad incense on the day the galley proofs came to the office.

If I were asked to hold my nose and describe Bowl of Cherries in a single word, I suppose it might be "picaresque." Which adjective is perhaps too-easily overused in summaries and book reviews. This novel's protagonist/narrator, however, is not particularly charming, and though it does move a bit around the map, the action feels lackadaisically tugged from one place to the other, with little urgent purpose dictating the movement.

Judd Breslau, the narrator, is one of these improbably gifted young men of fiction. I was reminded of Hal Incandenza, not just because of his impressive vocabulary, but also because of his brilliance coupled with lack of purpose. When Judd is drummed out of Yale at age fourteen, and is sitting in his graduate advisor's office, I half-expected him to begin screeching.

It's a little curious that Kaufman makes his narrator a teenager, given that Kaufman himself is ninety. Breslau could have been ten years older and still have been a bright and youthful character. I realize that certain themes of wasted potential & the struggle to find purpose are identified with adolescence, but perhaps Mr. Kaufman doesn't realize the extremes to which adolescence has been stretched. I.e., thirty is the new twenty-one, or whatever Parade Magazine and the rest say.

This book is best when at its most bookish. In it's impressive first few pages. Breslau's narration takes us through Mesopotamian history, from the Stone Age to present day in the space of a page or two. Elsewhere he displays a casual familiarity with history & great thinkers, effortlessly expressed with some great words (e.g., "fettle"). I was interested in reading the adventures of this young intellectual. Through most of the book, though, Breslau behaves as a pretty ordinary young man, particularly when driven by a young man's hormones.



It should be obvious by now that I have no problem discussing a book without thoroughly addressing its plot. Likewise, I have no compunction about dropping spoilers, not that this book's flashback-narrative structure leaves much room for "spoliation." I do have one comment to make about Bowl of Cherries' plot: the unexpected reemergence of the narrator's absent father at a novel's end is every bit as ineluctable as the firing of the gun introduced in a play's first act.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

by James Hogg, 1824
248pp
09/07/07 - 10/06/07

Sometimes a book takes too long. I liked this book, but spent two or three weeks wishing I was done with it. Part of this is owing to the book itself: older novels tend to go slower for me, likewise novels that are driven largely by internal, psychological action. My own circumstances contributed as well: I moved to a new town and started a new job; sometimes even people who make time for reading find that there's simply no time for reading. To be sure, I'm glad I read the book, and at no time was I willing to put it down without finishing it, but it's a shame when the reading experience is tainted by impatience like that.

When I started this book, I was on an 18th Century kick (though written in 1824, the book is set mostly in 1704), which began with Tristram Shandy, and carried me through a re-watching of Barry Lyndon, as well as a few others.

Maybe my thinking here is influenced by having recently read Tristram Shandy, but in some ways this reads more like a contemporary novel than an 18th Cent. Scottish gothic novel. There's a weird theme of "doubling" here. People repeatedly have some sort of mirror images: the main character is presented as his brother's nemesis; at the same time he is paired with a shape-shifting figure who seems to be his spiritual twin, but who assumes the form of his brother. The first hundred or so pages of the novel are told in the third-person, from a perspective sympathetic the main character's brother. Most of the book, though, is a text-within-a-text, the "confessions," which begin by re-telling the same events from the protagonist's perspective. It's as though the character was a drop of ink on a page that is folded in half vertically, then horizontally, etc.

The protagonist here, a young man named Robert Wringham, is a religious zealot of the Antinomian variety. Apparently the doctrine of predestination was the subject of heated disagreement in early Eighteenth Century Scotland; Wringham is brought up in the radical fringe of Calvinism (I'm not clear what denomination this makes him, or if it's at all analogous to any contemporary church). Which, taken to its extreme, Calvinism is a kind of scary idea. Wringham is convinced of his status as one of the Elect. To him, the notion that his earthly deeds might cost him the Salvation that was ordained before Creation is the basest heresy. Thus Wringham is lead down the path to sin and murder by the Devil, who appears to him as a strange changeling whose beliefs about predestination exceed Wringham's own.

There's probably an apt literary category to deploy here. I don't know it. But I would place this book alongside other contemplative, psychological--not necessarily existential--works as Hunger, The Stranger, and Notes from Underground. Even though there is a fair amount of plot--murder, rivalry, demons--the primary focus remains on the narrator's deliberations. What makes this book more "readable" than many such books is its sparing use of humor (e.g., Wringham, told that his supernatural Tempter is "a prince," concludes he is in the presence of Peter I of Russia), as well as the equally-understated presence of the supernatural. Hogg rather nonchalantly inserts a downright Lovecraftian incident of demonic torment in the space of a page or so, before returning to an extended exploration of the narrator's doubts and vacillations.



I suppose I'm pretty big on brand-loyalty when it comes to publishers. This is the third book I've read from the NYRB Classics line, and I've been consistently impressed. They tend to select quality books, often in some degree of neglect. Their cover designs are great, as well as the little touches: typeface, paper weight, stiffness of cover. My favorite bit is the way the inside covers are always some vivid color, coordinated to the cover design.

This book had a brief glossary of archaic Scottish dialect in the back--Hogg, though Scottish himself, made his Scottish peasants sound more caricatured than Moira MacTaggert. The inclusion of a glossary made me pleasantly nostalgic for middle school Language Arts.