Michiko and Me and the Bourgeoisie
Lots of fiction goodness over at the Times.
Their choices for the ten best books of 2009 include Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It (reviewed by Curtis Sittenfeld). One of the stories from the collection, “Travis, B.,” is available online courtesy of Penguin:
Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.
When he was fourteen, he started riding spoiled and un-broke horses, to prove to her that he was invincible. They bucked and kicked and piled up on him, again and again. He developed a theory that horses didn’t kick or shy because they were wild; they kicked and shied because for millions of years they’d had the instinct to move fast or be lion meat.
“You mean because they’re wild,” his father had said when Chet advanced this theory.
Michiko Kakutani is only half-impressed with Alice Munro’s latest collection, Too Much Happiness:
In recent stories… there has been a more pronounced tendency on Ms. Munro’s part deliberately to stage-manage her people’s fates, resulting not only in more conventionally suspenseful narratives but also in tales that can feel implausible and contrived.
Of the new collection’s stories, I’ve only read the ones that appeared first in the New Yorker, and “Child’s Play,” which was in Best American Short Stories 2007. As much as the “willful melodramatics” Kakutani cites, what struck me was a marked simplicity in regards to time compared with the stories in, say, 1998’s For The Love Of A Good Woman. The chronology in “Jakarta” and “The Children Stay” (in the earlier collection) defy physics. Sentence-by-sentence, the narration slips between present and different pasts with such agility that the stories, when you’re in the midst of them, have the delightful effect of seeming to occupy several times at once—as effective an evocation of consciousness as I’ve read.
Leah Hagar Cohen’s review in the Sunday Times Book Review is here.
Courtesy of the Morgan Library, we can look at Dickens’s revision process in A Christmas Carol. The Times reader who spots and posts the “most intriguing textual change” gets invited to tea at the Morgan Library. Yes, rather.
