Late Winter (and not a moment too soon)

The weather here in Western New York has finally begun to turn. I’m sure that we will have more snow before spring temperatures arrive for good, but it’s such a relief to feel that warmth will be here after a long and monotonous winter. My first winter here wasn’t so bad; the snow didn’t start in Buffalo until the first week in January, and though it stayed until March, it was an experience. But this winter started in early/mid-November. Yes, it started snowing then, and it seemed to snow steadily until the end of January. January itself was a long run of whiteness and grayness. And because I was in transition back out of Chautauqua, and anxious to get back here, and because that car crash on the 8th of the month was such an unwelcome if fortunately-only-temporary turn of events, the first month of 2009 went on and on and on. And on... I am looking forward to the sight of the first leaf buds, which will be the real sign that spring is here.

A week ago I picked up a book by an author I’ve never read. The novel was Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel laureate, and it is an astonishing book. The cliché “I couldn’t put it down” applied. The story and the means in which it is told are simple, but as I was reading it felt like a great deal about Africa, South Africa, race, post-colonialism, history, and mankind were distilled into spareness. I don’t know how much Disgrace resembles Coetzee’s other books, and I mean to pick up something else by him again as soon as I can. I think it was the awarding of the Booker to Life and Times of Michael K. that I first heard of that particular prize. I intend to get to it soon. But I’m also trying to work my way through those titles I’ve never read on the New York Times list of “best American novels of the last twenty-five years”. I’ve read a number of them, but of the top five I’d only read Beloved. If I had to defend myself against the charge of neglecting greatness, I don’t have a defense handy. I was simply reading other things. I can say that at the time the hoopla accompanying literary events like the publication of DeLillo’s Underworld turned me off. It’s like the advance buzz that comes with a certain kind of movie; when I feel myself being bullied into going, I’m likely to go the other way out of sheer contrariness. But I’ve realized that if I don’t get cracking with some of these novels, there are a lot of them I’m going to miss out on, and that might be worse. Besides, the hoopla with most of them has subsided. Now I’m only have to face down the fearsome reputations of some of the books. Perhaps it will be easier to read about Rabbit now that Updike is gone. R.I.P.
I’ve read a lot of Philip Roth, and there is no question in my mind that he is one of our country’s greatest writers ever, but the stature of American Pastoral intimidated me. It was one of those books where I felt, “What if I don’t like it?” But I’ve been going through it at a pretty brisk pace, and it reminds me in superficial ways of Joan Didion’s Democracy. Didion’s compression in that novel now strikes me, compared to Coetzee’s in Disgrace, and compared to Roth's take in American Pastoral, as a kind of signature neurotic mannerism. I say that with great respect for the style's strength and power in her essays, reportage, and memoir. Another parallel: her Hemingwayesque style in her fiction, and its compression as compared with the extravagant prose of some post-war American male novelists like Mailer or Wolfe or Pynchon (I've read some of each but not all of them), reminds me of the most superficial as well as some of the deeper, essential differences between Dickinson’s poetry and Whitman’s. It is inarguable that Didion was trying to get at what happened in this country in the Sixties and early Seventies in her novel, although Roth clearly dug much deeper into the subject. Whether I decide to take on Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies remains to be seen. I rather doubt it. Rabbit awaits.