Reading Rainbow: The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

Full disclosure: I finished this book two months ago. I'm not sure why it has taken me this long to get around to this post, but it has. Do not take the fact that it has taken me roughly 10 weeks to get around to this as a reflection of how I felt about the book in any way.

In short, I loved this book. This was my first venture into the writings of Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day (the sequel to The Sportswriter). He had come pretty highly recommended from a few friends whose literary tastes I trust. Their recommendations are going to be more highly regarded going forward.

The novel follows Frank Bascombe, a writer who has abandoned being a novelist for writing about sports, a subject he is largely indifferent to. It is set against Easter weekend, the weekend marking the anniversary of his son's death at the age of nine and the point at which his life was thrown into a tailspin. Frank is essentially detached in every way imaginable. He even seems to be detached from himself. As he visits his son's grave, heads to Michigan with his girlfriend on a work-related weekend getaway, returns to nondescript suburban New Jersey to have an unhinged friend drop in on him, and his relationship with Vicki disintegrates at a family dinner, Frank Bascombe wanders dreamily through these episodes. Luckily, Ford toes a line that keeps Frank from erring into a territory in which he could come across as irritating or frustrating.

To say that I simply loved this book would be doing a disservice to how I really felt. While reading, I became engulfed in the book. His style floored me. I continuously marveled at his ingenuity in turning a phrase, in the unpredictable ways that his sentences would twist and turn. There seems to be nothing tethering him to the standard usage patterns of the English language. Reading his prose was, quite simply, awe-inspiring. For me to actually want to sit back, take some time, and savor the style of a writer is rare, yet that is precisely what I found myself doing while reading The Sportswriter.

To put it another way, I was so taken by The Sportswriter that I went out and bought four other Ford books as soon as I finished it.

But you don't have to take my word for it...

Reading Rainbow: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Nonplussed.

That is the word that best sums up my feelings when I think about why I actually bothered finishing this book.

From the beginning, it was a chore.  Rushdie's train of thought never ended up matching up with mine.  Elements of his style struck me as both irksome and pretentious--namely his lack of comma-usage when listing of things in a series.  The cultural chasm between me and Rushdie's post-Independence India seemed hopelessly untraversable.

More importantly, though, it felt like I had kind of been there already.  Between having read Middlesex and One Hundred Years of Solitude fairly recently, the multi-generational magical realism on display didn't feel especially fresh.  Granted, Middlesex came about 20 years after Midnight's Children, but that's not the way I came to it, and One Hundred Years of Solitude was penned 14 years prior to Midnight's Children being published.

Mostly, though, the book never grabbed me.  I appreciate that it was trying to use its narrative to serve as an allegory for the burgeoning Indian Republic, but it didn't make me give a shit about it at any point.  Most of the characters were irritating more than anything else, including Saleem Sinai, the narrator, and the construct by which Saleem has omniscience seems a little too precious.

If anyone feels differently about the book, I'll gladly respond to comments.  I was definitely underwhelmed.

Reading Rainbow: American Pastoral by Philip Roth

For reasons that are entirely beyond explanation, American Pastoral marked my first foray into the writings of Philip Roth. I majored in English. I read fairly heavily--certainly by today's standards. When I am moving at my best reading clip, I read about a book per week. Yet I had never read anything by "the greatest living American author".

Whether or not that oft-attached modifier is apropos, I have yet to come to decide for myself, but American Pastoral had enough going for it that I can at least see the grounds by which one may make that argument and not be insanely off base.

American Pastoral tells the tale of how a senseless act of violence can ruin a family. It picks up as Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's alter-ego) is attending his 45th high school reunion and happens to have recently crossed paths with Seymour "Swede" Levov, the blond-haired Jewish high school sports god from his youth. The Swede lived a pretty charmed life and did everything right. He married Miss New Jersey. He successfully took over his father's business when he came of age and moved out to the Jersey countryside to raise his family. At the reunion, Nathan discovers that The Swede died shortly after the two had met and that in 1968, the Swede's daughter had set off a bomb in the idyllic small town of Old Rimrock, killing one in an attempt to bring the war home

From there on, Zuckerman explores the Swede's past in an ultimately futile search to bring reason and understanding to his daughter's act of violence, which is--in totality--senseless.

There is a love that Roth clearly has for all of his characters. An impartiality, too. His journey into the destruction of the American dream is stirring, heartbreaking, and mesmerizing. While his prose does occasionally run long, with adherence to standard sentence structure furthest from his mind both in the writing and editing phase, his thoughts never get so labyrinthine as to prohibit the reader from coming out on the other side. It certainly is not light reading, but it never gets anywhere near the laborious nature of, say, Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce.

American Pastoral took me a little longer than I would have liked, but I certainly do not intend to put off reading the next Roth book I have picked up recently, The Plot Against America, even with the knowledge in hand that it may not be the quickest of reads. So if you have not read American Pastoral, I think it works well.

But don't take my word for it...