Reading While Walking
I had a lovely metro ride into work this morning. The usual delays allowed me an extra couple of pages of reading and I got caught up in a rhythm and ended up walking and reading all the way to the office, which is, incidentally, a few blocks away. At one point I was coming up to a major intersection and occasionally glancing up so as not to walk into an oncoming commuter bus, I looked up and a woman was walking towards me with her nose buried in a book, but then she quickly glanced up and gave me a quick "hey, I'm not the only freak who walks and read" smile. Reader-walkers unite!
The book that had me so ensconced is A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans. This is his first novel and it concerns the spooky story of George Davies. As an adult his young marriage is about to fall apart because he is crippled by an inability to touch his newborn son. The ensuing therapy brings up some buried memories of fraught and strange childhood. In fact, Evans spends most of the book fleshing out the younger Davies who lives in a pre-pubescent prison in a sleepy southern college town. After his father's mysterious death in Central America George starts seeing and hearing things. Is this an eleven year old's painful psychotic break, or the continuation of a family tradition of demonic possession? Regardless, it is a compelling story and just the thing to start off some summertime reading.
On another note, we've still got the New York Review of Books Buy 2 Get 1 Free Sale going through the end of the month. And one of my astute, young charges has agreed to expand on a short blurb he wrote for his favorite NYRB title The Warlock by Oakley Hall. Mark Hanson hails from the Courthouse store where he manages with a firm, but loving hand. So without anymore introduction I present to you Mark's words:
Long out of print until the New York Review of Books reissued it in 2005, Oakley Hall’s 1958 novel Warlock ranks among my personal favorites in our latest Buy Two, Get One Free sale. The novel essentially retells the saga of 1880’s Tombstone, Arizona and the shootout at the OK Corral, with the fictional town of Warlock as the setting. However, Hall refrains from simply rehashing and retracing, instead creating a work with much broader cultural and literary implications.
In a typical Western novel or film, one always feels the impact of the sheer, unpopulated space in view. But in Warlock, we see a town teeming with and almost choking on a vast array of vivid personalities. It is a town trying to pull itself up by the bootstraps from a formative stage of near anarchy to the standards it must reach in order to become a legitimate, recognized township. Through this lens, Hall deftly exposes the underbelly of the American subconscious.
A couple other elements that separate Warlock from other, more traditional Westerns are its highly erratic structure—complicit with the plot and the subject matter—and the fact that it is written in the style of a pulp novel. As well as exploding the possibilities of the genre, which exemplifies a kind of early American postmodernism, this further enables Hall to explore the formation of our national identity and the many competing voices that comprise it. In Warlock and in many other titles in the NYRB collection, we have fine examples of works that have seen their ramifications absorbed into mainstream thought over time, but now have the chance to be appreciated anew as the staunch and impacting works they always have been.
The book that had me so ensconced is A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans. This is his first novel and it concerns the spooky story of George Davies. As an adult his young marriage is about to fall apart because he is crippled by an inability to touch his newborn son. The ensuing therapy brings up some buried memories of fraught and strange childhood. In fact, Evans spends most of the book fleshing out the younger Davies who lives in a pre-pubescent prison in a sleepy southern college town. After his father's mysterious death in Central America George starts seeing and hearing things. Is this an eleven year old's painful psychotic break, or the continuation of a family tradition of demonic possession? Regardless, it is a compelling story and just the thing to start off some summertime reading.On another note, we've still got the New York Review of Books Buy 2 Get 1 Free Sale going through the end of the month. And one of my astute, young charges has agreed to expand on a short blurb he wrote for his favorite NYRB title The Warlock by Oakley Hall. Mark Hanson hails from the Courthouse store where he manages with a firm, but loving hand. So without anymore introduction I present to you Mark's words:Long out of print until the New York Review of Books reissued it in 2005, Oakley Hall’s 1958 novel Warlock ranks among my personal favorites in our latest Buy Two, Get One Free sale. The novel essentially retells the saga of 1880’s Tombstone, Arizona and the shootout at the OK Corral, with the fictional town of Warlock as the setting. However, Hall refrains from simply rehashing and retracing, instead creating a work with much broader cultural and literary implications.In a typical Western novel or film, one always feels the impact of the sheer, unpopulated space in view. But in Warlock, we see a town teeming with and almost choking on a vast array of vivid personalities. It is a town trying to pull itself up by the bootstraps from a formative stage of near anarchy to the standards it must reach in order to become a legitimate, recognized township. Through this lens, Hall deftly exposes the underbelly of the American subconscious.
A couple other elements that separate Warlock from other, more traditional Westerns are its highly erratic structure—complicit with the plot and the subject matter—and the fact that it is written in the style of a pulp novel. As well as exploding the possibilities of the genre, which exemplifies a kind of early American postmodernism, this further enables Hall to explore the formation of our national identity and the many competing voices that comprise it. In Warlock and in many other titles in the NYRB collection, we have fine examples of works that have seen their ramifications absorbed into mainstream thought over time, but now have the chance to be appreciated anew as the staunch and impacting works they always have been.
1 Comments:
OOh, my mother always told me not to read while I was walking. (But then, she also told me not to read at table, and she was wrong then, too.)
I can't remember what book I was reading... one boy proposed an adventure of some kind to the other boy during a meal, and the second responded "After I finish my chapter," and that was fully understood as a reason to delay. That's my kind of kid!
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