(no subject)

I finished Winesburg, Ohio last night. It was, as predicted, a very interesting book, yet I found it hard to fully engage with the book. The narrative tone is so detached, so far above the level of the action it describes, and I found that difficult. As the book went on, I began to feel that the narrative voice was a character in its own right, an actual narrator rather than just a tone or voice, one that stays aloof from the residents of the town and passes judgment on everything they think and do. I wanted to identify with the characters, to see them as human beings, but the narrator wanted me to see them as squalid. In the end I couldn't agree--they're not squalid; they harbor their secret desires, they make their mistakes and suffer for them, but they're no different and certainly no worse than any of us--and I think that fundamental disagreement prevented me from really loving the book. Nonetheless, there were aspects of the book that I liked quite a bit. I liked the way the book gave me a real, full sense of the world of this town: its insignificance in the larger world, its centrality in the lives of its inhabitants. I liked the way the stories built on each other, each of them adding more depth to the others than any of them would have had individually. In a similar vein, the stories I liked best were the ones that were most closely connected to each other, particularly those involving the strange love triangle of George Willard, Kate Swift, and Reverend Hartman. There was a power in that episode that was missing from most of the rest of the book. At times I liked the spareness of Anderson's style, although at other times I didn't.

As for the themes of secret-keeping and repression, they're quite prominent in this book although I'm not sure how much Anderson's treatment of repression relates to my own. He sure is good at revealing the ways in which people go about locked up inside their own heads, but somehow it's not evocative enough for me. I want something that handles these subjects with both greater subtlety and greater emotion than Anderson achieves.

I'm perpetually reading short stories in and around and among everything else that I read, and I don't usually bother posting about them unless I read an entire collection of them at once. Or unless I read something really exceptional, which I did last night. "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx. I've had Close Range on my to-read list for a while, and I will read the rest of the book soon, but I'm going to see Brokeback Mountain the movie tomorrow (Ms. E, who is leaving for California this weekend, and who knows me well, said, "You'll just go see it without me if I try to make you wait."), so I figured I had better hurry up and read the story. And was I ever glad I did. So terse and blunt and heartbreaking! God. I could never even dream of writing something like that. It was just one perfectly dead-on scene after another and then, all too soon, it was over. I'm just blown away by it.

And yes, I am very much looking forward to the movie. It's not like me to get so excited about a movie--that's usually Ms. E's role--but I swear there has never been a movie more perfectly tailored to me than this one. Not only is it a tragedy about cowboys, but gay cowboys. And not just gay cowboys, but gay cowboys scripted by Larry McMurtry! Oh my. While it would have been just wrong, wrong, wrong for Gus and Call's relationship to have been sexualized, or for Pea Eye to have harbored a secret crush on Dish Boggett, or even for Sonny and Duane to have shared a fumbling and undiscussed encounter, I have great confidence in Larry McMurtry's ability to adapt this story and retain its essence on film. Yes indeed, I really can't wait for this one. The fact that I expect it to be completely and totally hot doesn't hurt either.