The Current Reader

In Harry Leslie Smith’s engrossing memoir, 1923: A Memoir: Lies and Testaments, he examines his life in post World War I Britain, growing up and surviving during a time of poverty and social upheaval.  It is a story told with wit and soul.  I was personally moved by it and was very pleased that Mr. Smith agreed to answer questions about his work and life.

tCR:  Thanks for taking the time to respond to these questions.  I’d first like to ask you, how hard was it to write about such an emotionally wrenching time of your life?

HLS:  It was an incredibly difficult undertaking. For most of my adult life, I repressed my past suffering and tried to erase it from my consciousness. Unfortunately, the past whether it has been kind or cruel to you has a way of dogging you throughout your life.   After the death of my wife ten years ago and then the recent death of my middle son; it was necessary for me  to fully accept and understand the events which made me the man I am today.

tCR:  Was it difficult to remain objective or was that a concern?

HLS:   It was very difficult to remain objective while writing this book.  It took seven drafts and I am still not completely satisfied with my portrayal of my family’s past.

tCR:  Did you have any concerns about writing about your family and how they would perceive the book?

HLS:  I think anyone who sets out to write about their family is going to have concerns about how their relatives may perceive a book about their ancestors.  I was fortunate, in one sense, that most of the people I describe in 1923 have been dead a long time. Over all, what is left of my family has been supportive of my book.

tCR:  You weave the details of world history into your narrative so easily.  Are you a history buff?

HLS:  I am a history buff and I thought when I set out to write 1923 that it was necessary to include historical context to my early life. I believe it gives the reader a better understanding of my family’s decent into poverty. I also wanted to frame my experiences in the Second World War within the larger historical picture occurring all around me.  I also believe that the times spent with my father pouring over that illustrated encyclopaedia as a boy developed my love of history.

tCR:  Were you inspired by anything in particular to write your memoir?  Are there any memoirs that you have read that inspired you?

HLS:  As I mentioned, previously, writing 1923 was a catharsis for me.  I needed to take all of those haunting episodes of my early days and put them into an historical perspective as a means to accept both my accomplishments and my many limitations as a human being.  I can think of three memoirs that have moved me in indifferent ways. (Siegfried) Sassoon’s Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man because it is about a world lost to the poet through the destruction of the First World War. (Arthur) Koestler’s Arrow In The Blue which is just an exciting read through the author’s early life.  It is all bravado with only small glimpses of the real man behind the curtain.  Finally, I would have to say Jung Chang’s Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China which has some of the most poignant descriptions and emotions of a society destroyed by China’s Cultural Revolution.

tCR:  Did you revisit any of your childhood places while writing this book?

HLS:  I have returned to some of the places I resided in as a child. I even managed to make a trip back to the bleak farm house on the moor where we lived after my father was forced from our family. I had other members of my family with me and pretended to be quite upbeat.  When I was back in my hotel room I wept over those horrible days.  The pub is even still around, although it has been converted into condos. The mine has long since closed. The whole village of Barley Hole was buried in slag when the pit closed but the pub was spared.

tCR:  How did you become a writer?

HLS:  I started writing in the RAF and kept a journal throughout my service and afterwards in Britain.  I have been writing for years but I think I am somewhat like the businessman in the Thomas Mann short story who never had the courage or discipline to display his talents because he feared both financial loss and humiliation.

tCR:  Other than writing, what else is a passion for you?

HLS:  Travel, Tai Chi, gardening, and social justice

tCR:  After reflecting on your life so carefully, do you think that Britain has done more now to alleviate the suffering of poverty?

HLS:  Great Britain has come along in alleviating the poverty I experienced in my youth.  At this very moment, I think Britain, in fact the whole developed world, is turning its back on fighting poverty for short term goals. It seems to me one thing Britain has not alleviated and made worse is the hopelessness many young people feel today. I think this hopelessness comes from feeling trapped by educational cut backs which prevent both financial and emotional advancement. And I also think they are becoming increasing alienated because our society rewards narcissism over introspection. What Britain needs and we never got was a politician like FDR who understood people crave hope and they require jobs to build that hope in themselves.

tCR:  I understand you are working on another book.  Can you tell us what it is?

HLS:  Yes, it is called The Empress of Australia and about my life in post war Germany and my return to Yorkshire. Some of the characters from the first book are in it including my mother and sister. Empress of Australia also introduces new characters and deals with different challenges I encountered. I can say that people will find me in the new book a little more cynical and a lot angrier at what Britain had done to her youth during the depression and following the war.

1923: A Memoir: Lies and Testaments by Harry Leslie Smith
322 pages, iUniverse

Creating a great memoir is a delicate matter.  When relying so heavily on personal recollection, it is easy to mire the story in detail and bring the focus down to street level. The mark of a great memoir is the sense of elevation, of perspective, especially when the story told is one of sweeping historic events that framed one life. The selection of details and the areas of focus are the most important elements in the telling of a life,  and these elements are also the most difficult portray effectively while still allowing freedom of imagination.  Harry Leslie Smith’s elegiac and moving memoir, 1923: A Memoir: Lies and Testaments, is a sweeping narrative with startlingly accurate characterizations and dialogue.   The reader is elevated to the best vantage point, and a new dimension is created to witness the writer’s life in its fullest scope. Read the rest of this entry →

The Fates Will Find Their Way By Hannah Pittard
256 pp, Ecco
Reviewed by Michael Hingston on the National Post

Nobody knows where, exactly, Nora Lindell disappeared to, but the boys from her high school know one thing for sure: She’s not coming back.

The first pages of Hannah Pittard’s exquisite debut novel lay out all of the clues at their disposal. She went missing on Halloween — that much they agree on. But every other memory conflicts with someone else’s, with each boy absolutely positive that his is the correct version. A bus station is mentioned. Then an abortion clinic. Hot dogs. Movie theatres. Pay phones. Two of the boys swear they saw her climb into a stranger’s Pontiac Catalina. Another, feeling excluded, claims to have had sex with Nora the month before.

Before long, the departed 16-year-old has become a cipher, a repository for all of the boys’ repressed desires, feelings and fears. Not so much the sexual ones — they’re pretty upfront about their constantly redlining hormones — as those that run deeper, more elemental. Nora becomes a stand-in for everything that never was, but maybe could have been, had things worked out a little differently.

Read more on The Afterword on the National Post

The Swimming Pool by Holly LeCraw
320 pages, Doubleday

A review by The Boston Bibliophile

The Swimming Pool is just a really great read. Somewhere between a soap opera à la Melrose Place and an examination of modern family dysfunction, it’s the story of Marcella Atkinson, a ravishing Italian beauty still desirable in her middle age and a murder shrouded in mystery. As a young woman she’d had an affair with Cecil McClatchey, a wealthy Southerner who vacationed in her Cape Cod town along with his family. One night Cecil’s wife Betsy is killed, the killer never found. Now, years later, Betsy’s murder haunts her fractured family; Marcella, divorced and mother to a beautiful, blossoming daughter of her own, embarks on a steamy affair with Cecil’s son Jed, while her daughter takes a summer babysitting job for Jed’s sister Callie, a troubled new mother.    read the rest of this entry

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently the forthcoming You Think That’s Bad.  (Knopf, March 22, 2011.)  His third collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize.  Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the ALEX Award from the American Library Association.

Equally important as his critical recognition is the praise he receives from fellow writers for his imaginative and challenging prose.  I spoke with Jim this week at length about his latest novella, Master of Miniatures and his art.  Here are some of the questions that we discussed.

tCR: Your latest book, a novella entitled, Master of Miniatures is about post-war Japan, its motion picture industry and the affects of natural and man-made disasters that ravaged Japan, among other things.  What was the impetus to write about such diverse subjects?

JS: I’m always looking to enlarge that tiny arena of my own autobiographical concerns and obsessions, or at least to get at them from a different angle or through a different lens.   And I’m also always looking to stretch the possibilities, when it comes to the exercise of empathetic imagination.   Since that’s what I think literature is all about.

tCR: In Master of Miniatures, you write about an actual person, Eiji Tsuburaya, the innovative special effects director of Japanese film. Are there any rules that you abide by when writing about actual people?  Do you tend to treat those characters differently than those that are purely imagined?

JS: There are many rules I abide by when writing about actual people.   I try to stay within the bounds of actual events, for example: I don’t have anyone go anywhere significant or do anything significant that he or she didn’t really do, if I can help it.  (Sometimes I might conflate trips, or events.)   Where I do give myself latitude is with such a character’s inner life.  But even there, I try to stay true to what I’ve learned.  What provides me with enough room to maneuver as a fiction writer in such cases is the amount of mystery that always remains, even after someone’s seemingly been chronicled in biography or autobiography.

tCR: You have written about a wide range of topics in the past: the Who, Krakatau, the Hindenburg, school shootings to name just a few.  What do you look for in a topic to write about?

JS: It has to stay with me, after I think I’ve finished engaging it, and even after I’ve moved on to other subjects.   That allows me to interrogate why it has stayed with me.   And those questions start to generate the story.

tCR: What is your relationship with the reader?

JS: Cordial, I hope.   A little challenging and aggressive, too.   See the titles of my last two collections.

tCR:  What is the most enjoyable part of the writing process for you?

JS: Oh, God.  Who knows?   Maybe that fatuous moment early on when I feel like I’ve finally done one small thing right.

tCR: If you had to choose, which is more important to you:  artistic vision or readers’ entertainment?

JS: I don’t have to choose.

tCR:  What is your definition of literary fiction?  Is it a separate genre?

JS: Literary fiction is that fiction that helps us dismantle and reassemble our sense of ourselves and our societies.   As opposed to that kind of fiction that seems designed to encourage us not to think, and seeks to ratify those fatuities we already have in place.

tCR: What do you think about the current censorship issue regarding Huckleberry Finn?

JS: I’m almost never in favor of censorship.   And censoring Huckleberry Finn — Huckleberry Finn! — seems laughable, and pathetic.  I don’t think we’re headed towards greater openness, or tolerance, as a society, though.   To put it mildly.

tCR:  Do you think that regional writers actually exist in the United States currently?  Has that form of literature died out?

JS: I think there are plenty of regional writers, if we’re defining them the same way: writers whose primary preoccupations have to do with issues particular to a particular place.

tCR: Are there any current trends in literature that you find exciting?

JS:  That people are still reading, and reading with intelligence and care.   I’m always grateful for that.

Master of Miniatures by Jim Shepard
Solid Objects, 56 pages

I wasn’t sure what to make of this novella by Jim Shepard when it arrived in the mail.  When I free-associate about the movie that is central to the story, my mind immediately conjures up Channel 44’s Creature Feature with Dr. Paul Bearer (anyone out there from central Florida?) and its afternoon and late night double feature, which often included the monster in question, Godzilla, as we know it here in the United States.  The soundtrack to this reminiscence is, inevitably, Buck Dharma’s lashing solo in “Godzilla” by the inestimable Blue Öyster Cult.  Heat rays, Monster Island, Mothra, Gamera, Rodan, on to Ultraman, G Force, Speed Racer, etc., etc.

This book is not about that nonsense.

Instead, Jim Shepard has created an ingeniously-told multi-faceted gem of a book.  It is a tight, somber study of post-war Japan as reflected in the life of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects innovator responsible for the science fiction film classic, Gojira, re-titled in the United States release as Godzilla.  This imagined telling of Tsuburaya’s life, his education, family and career offers an unusual perspective on a country that had been physically and spiritually destroyed by war. Read the rest of this entry →

The Holidays are upon us again, but fortunately, this has been a banner year for new books. 
Memoir, journalism, humor, literary fiction, all have been well-represented in this year’s best book lists.  Since beginning The Current Reader this summer, I have tried to put together reviews and recommendations for new books that I felt are truly special.  It is impossible to read every new title available and I know that I have missed some great new books, but I hope that readers will be able to use my recommendations as part of their process for buying their next books.  Reviews of most of the recommended books are posted on this site.
Please find the following recommendations for holiday buying and feel free to suggest books that I may have overlooked.   
Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!

Fiction
Several great books came out this year that were wildly popular and received much praise.  I have included my picks for books that I felt deserved the same attention.

Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
Her second novel is a jagged little pill of a book about a beautiful, but damaged woman on the edge. Sexy and smart.   This book is screaming for a film adaptation. 

Perfect on Paper: the (mis)adventures of Waverly Bryson
by Maria Murnane
Her first novel and it is a pitch-perfect tale of a contemporary twenty-something’s search for love and happiness in the wilderness of the dating world.  Romantic and funny.

The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney
Intellectual literary thriller set in Paris’ art underworld.  Brilliantly constructed and conceived.  A fast paced, accessible drama with characters that spend as much time contemplating existence as they do leading exotic and erotic lives.  Selected by the New York Times for the 100 Notable Books of 2010.

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
His second book is better than his first, in my opinion, and delivers a resonant, emotional punch that lingers.  Transformative literature at its finest.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Wells Tower achieves the impossible in this collection of short stories:  a perfect debut.  Flashes of Harry Crews’ beauty and brutality, but with the unmistakable voice of an original.

Also recommended:
Eye of the Whale by Douglas Carlton Abrams
Drowned Sorrow by Vanessa Morgan
Room by Emma Donoghue
Following Polly by Karen Bergreen
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Non-Fiction (Memoir)

Life by Keith Richards
A well-considered and detailed look at the life of the volatile singularity that is Keith Richards.   Reflections on a life in music, an explanation for his unique guitar sound, and an excellent recipe for bangers and mash. 

Non-Fiction (Sports)

The Baseball Codes by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca
A rare look at the unspoken rules of America’s favorite pastime.  Loaded with entertaining and funny anecdotes from the players themselves.   Brilliant sports journalism by two of the best writers in baseball.  A must for fanatics as well as casual fans.

Non-Fiction (Current Topics)

WAR by Sebastian Junger
A raw and unflinching look at modern combat as told by one of the best journalists working today.  Not a policy primer or call for change, but a rare look at the true meaning of war on the personal level.

Poetry

Solar Poems by Homero Aridjis
A beautiful new collection of poetry by one of the world’s most lyrical poets.  Luminous and moving, this is an excellent choice for readers looking for an accessible and emotionally powerful book of poems.

Humor

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern
A son’s recollections of his life at home with his politically incorrect, but loving father.  Freaking hilarious.

Also recommended:
Whiter Shades of Pale by Christian Lander
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris

Life by Keith Richards
Little, Brown and Company, 576 pages

Keith Richards’ memoir, Life is a thorough and engrossing portrait of a man with an overabundance of passion for life.  More than the music, the parties, the whirlwind of fame and over-indulgence, it is his unrelenting need to keep moving that is the key to understanding his life, which he describes in clean, clear prose with a pirate’s sly humor.  We get all the things we would expect in a memoir of a music legend like Richards: childhood beginnings; the making of the band; his heroes and all of the tribulations of chasing success.  The difference between this book and the others that have come before is Keith. He’s an elemental force of nature.  He never sleeps.  He marks time by how many hours remain until he is on stage again or in the studio.   And always he kept a devil-may-care attitude, seemingly above all the noise of band squabbles, scrapes with the law, and shady promoters and managers.  In a genre that is littered with boring and self-serving image control propaganda, what comes out in Life is the unique and volatile singularity that is Keith Richards. Unlike Eric Clapton’s honest, but apologetic memoir, which became mired in the details of gigs and family, Richards maintains his sense of astonishment at his circumstances throughout.  Reading Life is like spending a long day at the pub with Keith, listening to him hold court as he tells story after story about a life lived too fully.

Read the rest of this entry →

Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God by Greg Graffin
It Books, 304 pages

No God? No Problem: An Intern’s Look at Anarchy Evolution by Scott A. Fraser of The Savvy Reader

When I was asked to write a blog post for Greg Graffin’s Anarchy Evolution, I knew it would be a difficult balancing act. The trick was clear. How to do justice to a book that’s about distrusting authority while working as an intern for the book’s publisher? If I were to hold back from making criticisms in order to preach the company line it would undermine part of what the book is about. But if I didn’t please my bosses, the piece would never see the light of day.

I found myself wondering what Graffin would think. Like the PhD holding punk rocker, I too have a strong streak of the contrarian…Of the anarchist. I don’t trust those who don’t have some of this instinct. I’ve been let down by “authority” too often to go, sheep-like with the flock.  So, at the risk of having this essay tossed in the bin, I’ll just be honest and get started.

I enjoyed Anarchy Evolution. As pop-science, it was highly accessible to those of us with arts pedigrees. I’ve always liked the study of evolution and zoology, but never had the scientific chops to pursue it formally. When Graffin talks about his scientific work he does it in a way that is long on explanation and short on jargon. Perfect for someone like me who gets the concepts, but would be horribly out of place in a lab. Likewise, Graffin’s anecdotes about his musical career are amusing and don’t require intimate knowledge of punk music. I did make a point of rocking out to some Bad Religion clips on Youtube, but it just isn’t for me.    Read the rest of this entry

Click here to take a look inside Anarchy Evolution

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris
Illustrations by Ian Falconer
Little, Brown and Company, 176 pages

David Sedaris has a love/hate relationship with people.  He clearly loves the species enough to study it as seriously as he does, but on the other hand, he clearly detests us.  It is understandable.  We are a detestable lot.  If you watch us long enough, and it won’t take long, you’ll inevitably catch one of us spitting on the sidewalk or slapping our toddler while still strapped into his stroller.  However, David Sedaris, humorist, is aware that portraying our kind as we truly are is not exactly comic gold.  His solution: use anthropomorphized animals.  In Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Sedaris creates a parallel universe of animals that carry on like humans.  In this slender volume of modern fables, the animals are the vulgar, vile analogs of us, only now Sedaris gets to mete out punishments to those deserving retribution without seeming overly misanthropic.  It’s like Aesop as envisioned by Edward Gorey.

Read the rest of this entry →