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Summer reads

From portraits of a political man to contemplations on silence, there's something for just about everyone

E L Doctorow's Homer and Langley (Little Brown) is a short novel about the Collyer brothers, who live in the family mansion in New York, and witness the great changes of the twentieth century. As his name would suggest, it is narrated by Homer, who is blind, and who, after their parents die and housekeepers are driven from their home, is looked after by his increasingly eccentric brother, who returned from WWI in not quite the same condition in which he left.

E L Doctorow
E L Doctorow
Doctorow is one of the States' best novelists, brilliant at creating characters and sustaining their distinctive voices through a novel. He is also brilliant at using a microcosm to convey a more general picture of the times. In his last novel The March, the sack of Savannah during the American Civil War spoke volumes about the horror and strangeness of war. Homer and Langley's house, which Homer describes as "Fifth Avenue on the outside and something of an inspiring warehouse on the inside" (due to his brothers' projects and hoarding), becomes a kind of museum for a fading class, and for all the twentieth century's technological marvels that are never-endingly superseded. It speaks of relentless innovation and relentless waste, and the retreat from community into thing-cluttered privacy. The book also speaks of the century's loss of faith in God, replaced by the autonomy of scientific innovation, and shattered by the previously unimaginable scale of war the technology has allowed.

Bill Clinton will unfortunately always be associated with "that woman, Miss Lewinsky", but he is an intriguing, complicated figure, and also one of the most genuinely religious presidents America has had. He seemed genuinely interested in enhancing the lives of the average US citizen.

Clinton
Bill Clinton
Plenty of books have been written about his presidency, including his mammoth autobiography, but Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes (Simon & Schuster) may be the most intimate portrait yet, largely because of the nature of its writing. The initiative came from Clinton, who invited Branch, the author of a multi-volume work on Martin Luther King's civil rights movement, to participate in an "oral history project" — basically regular taped interview sessions held late at night in the White House (that were to form the preparatory notes for Clinton's memoirs). Because this was more than just observation, and because it was held in the White House at night, rather than in the Oval Office, there is a conversational, ruminative tone about the book. Even though it is filled with detail, it conveys less of the minute-by-minute pugilism of politics, and more of Bill's own philosophical analysis of his wins and losses.

If you think there is little to say about silence, think again. Sara Maitland is a British novelist and reviewer who wrote a wonderful book with a terrible and terribly American title, Awesome God. Her non-fiction mixes razor-sharp nature writing with mature and surprising spiritual observation, like the American Annie Dillard. Like Dillard, Maitland can move from rich etymological musings to quoting Thoreau, Church Fathers and Wittgenstein. And like Dillard's Holy the Firm, her A Book of Silence (Granta) is about the effect of place on her life and writing. Maitland moved to a remote cottage on the moors of Skye to contemplate the mental and spiritual effects of silence, something we are encouraged, she says, to think of as "mad or bad". But silence has richness, rather than mere emptiness, argues Maitland, and her engrossing book prompts one to think that we should all seek more of this rare and precious commodity.

Summer Reading

While we're talking books that mix autobiography, travel and spiritual writing, A Bookman's Tale (Canterbury Press) is Ronald Blythe's sixth delightful collection of weekly columns from the UK's Church Times, in which his interest in faith, rural life, gardening, history and literature (or, as he puts it, "my world: one, farming and the Church; the other, the arts") intermingle. Although he is not so well-known outside the UK, he is famous for a book about rural life (published as a Penguin classic), has written introductions for many classic works, and is head of the society of John Clare the poet. He is a writer and a reader, hence the book's title. "Bound friends" are "piled around". He tells us, bemusedly, "my head is like an attic", and he combines his knowledge with a keen writer's eye ("writers are terrific lookers"). What some might see as opposites — "intellectual" and "earthy" perhaps — are not at all incompatible, and the combination makes for beautiful vignettes.

Nick Mattiske

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Last Updated ( Sunday, 06 December 2009 )
 
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