SLAM

Nick Hornby apparently decided to write a young adult novel. I found it in the Teen Room at the library. It's about a skateboarder who gets a girl pregnant and has to deal with it. He writes well, you like the characters and as far as I could tell he resisted moralizing. There are some goofy bits and I don't know if an actual teenager would like it but it's OK, slight, yet OK.

A Severed Head (not mine)

Not sure why I picked up Iris Murdoch. But it was one I hadn't read and I was nostalgic for my excitement when I first read the Word Child or The Sea the Sea. The cover promised me a Terrifying Tangle of Erotic Impulses. Perhaps they were in 1961 but at this point it was more of just an improbable tangle.  Part of the whole premise is suspending belief that the main character would act so passively in a situation where his wife decides to be run off with his best friend. It is trying a bit too hard to be brazen and modern and ultimately rings untrue. Not her best.
Apparently a critic at the time said about it:  'With less philosophising and more shagging than Murdoch's other books, it is a joy to see this wonderful writer let her hair (and her knickers) down. '
Pull 'em back up I say!

The Return of the Chain Reader?

There is a reason this is called the Chain Reader not the Chain Blogger. I have still been reading  nothing of any merit that requires any mention. I read mostly genre fiction I think and, of that, mostly cozy mysteries. I read Hazel Holt who writes mysteries but also is the biographer of Barbara Pym. I vaguely remember reading some Patricia Moyes, some 40's women authors like Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one!). I read Emma Donoghue's Room which despite it's grim premise I quite enjoyed. And I read Freedom.

Yes he can write. And yes, it was very juicy and engrossing. But it didn't change my life. It reminded me a lot of that Joseph Heller book Something Happened that I read way back in high school. That awkward sense of TMI (Too Much Information!) prevailed.

As a statement of our times I much prefer the slimmer Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan. Freedom had every possible theme crammed into it: Title Nine, violence against woman, politics, the environment, 9/11. If you mention 9/11 in a book does that make it about 9/11? If one of the characters works in a coal company does that make it about the environment? Does all this introduction of weighty themes make the story more than just a book about some interesting characters? In the end maybe I am reacting to the reviews of the book as being about all these big themes and maybe Franzen's pretensions were smaller? I don't know at this point.

All I know is I prefer O'Nan's approach which was simpler--tell the small story about a sad cast of characters in a closing down Red Lobster in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere and it becomes universal. Freedom had so much weighing it down that it never went beyond what it was to me. A big heavy book. But maybe that's all he meant it to be.