I’m a late adopter, so I only recently started listening to books on my evening walks with the dog. What a great innovation! I recently listened to Less by Andrew Sean Greer, the first comic novel ever to win the Pulitzer. It follows the misadventures of a sweetly neurotic writer named Arthur Less who, to avoid being in town for the wedding of his ex, cobbles together a round-the-world itinerary of suspect literary invitations. Is it still the mark of a crazy person if you see her giggling to herself as she comes down the street? Of course, after listening, I then had to buy a paper copy of the book so I could go back and savor the spot-on metaphors that Greer laces throughout. Of Arthur, the narrator says, “by his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.” A group of elderly women is described, “each with her own peculiar spiked or curled white hairdo, like a dahlia show.”
This reminds me of another comic favorite, Straight Man, by Richard Russo. The endearing protagonist, William Henry Devereaux Jr., aka Lucky Hank, heads the beleaguered English Department at an undistinguished state school, the fictitious West Central Pennsylvania University. Rumors are afloat, as they are every spring, of new budget cuts so drastic that even tenured heads will roll, and the various faculty and administrators begin busily plotting to save their own jobs, to form alliances and sabotage their enemies. It’s Survivor, as played by a group of inept intellects too disorganized even to choose a leader, and in this vacuum, Hank, the loose cannon of the department, has risen to power (such as it is).
These two novels are not merely wacky screwball, though; both authors deftly explore the humbling plights of midlife, the career that never took off, the betrayals of an aging body. This is comedy taken bittersweet, wise to the underlying sadness of life but nonetheless full of kindness.
And allow me to make one last suggestion in a more serious vein: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz. This is one of those novels that grips you from the first page and pulls you into a new world. And the language is so fresh, so incisive. Diaz has reinvented the traditional American migration story with his lyrical tale of a Swedish immigrant who travels against the tide, heading east from gold-rush San Francisco in hopes of finding his brother in New York. The author’s imagination shreds the old clichés and makes the reader see afresh the strangeness of a foreign land, the brutal loneliness of being an immigrant, and the wonders and odd people that give the phrase ‘Wild West’ new meaning.
Don't miss a reading, a film or a show — subscribe to Creative Loafing's weekly Do This newsletter!
This article appears in Dec 13-20, 2018.