On Sunday, I finished reading my book club's most recent selection, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. What a powerfully written book! Every sentence rings with passion and anger. I loved the writing. Baldwin has a tremendous sense of rhythm; that, coupled with his nearly biblical diction, lends tremendous force to his story. I can hardly believe that Baldwin was only 27 when he wrote this. The book is so self-assured, so confident in its own power and seemingly so unconcerned with audience that it seems like it should have been written by an author much more established in his career. At the same time, much of the story comes straight from Baldwin’s own experience, and in that the book seems like the soul cry of a very young man, a man who must burn a path through his history before he can move forward. Baldwin himself said that, “Go Tell It on the Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,” and reading it I can see the truth in that statement.

Go Tell It on the Mountain was a book that I admired rather than enjoyed. I could appreciate John’s tremendous struggle with religious belief, but I could never truly feel the anguish it caused him. The part of the book that I liked best was the middle section, “The Prayers of the Saints,” in which the stories of John’s mother, father, and aunt are told. I love the way, halfway through the book, Baldwin uses this section to reveal the secrets that everyone has been carrying: their old hurts, their undisclosed guilt, the wrongs they’ve done or think they’ve done, the things they’ll never speak of to each other or to John. I also found these stories remarkable because, after hearing so much about the great faith and religious conviction of these characters, we suddenly see the extent to which each of them has been damaged by religion. In many ways, Go Tell It on the Mountain seems like a dark counterpart to Gilead. Where Gilead was all about the quiet uplifting power of faith, about religious belief as a source of sustenance in one’s life, this book shows the other side: the power of religion to condemn, to isolate, to foster guilt, secrecy, and hypocrisy.

So. A powerful book and a thought-provoking book, but not an emotionally engaging book. I wonder if I would feel differently about that if my own experiences were closer to those described in the book.

And now for something completely different…

In addition to Go Tell It on the Mountain, last week I also read the final installment of “Gentlemen of the Road,” Michael Chabon’s serialized adventure story that has been running in the New York Times Magazine for the past few months. I loved it. I’m not sure how well it would work if you read it all at once like a novel (or a novella, actually; it’s not very long), but it works beautifully as a serial. Each chapter was perfectly calibrated for maximum drama every week, and the story was stuffed full of swashbuckling chaos: swordfights! Elephants! Assassinations! Whorehouses! Secret identities! Daring rescues! Grizzled old warriors and revenge plots and cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger—everything you could ask for in a story of this kind. At first I found the style off-putting, with its gargantuan sentences and high-falutin’ vocabulary, but once I got used to it I realized that it was just part of the fun. And fun is what the whole thing was. If the point of this was to get me excited for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it worked!

You can read the first chapter here, and you can find the rest by searching the NYT archives.

And now I’m reading The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. I started this a couple months ago, but put it down during the time when I was all stressed out over grad school decision making. I came back to it now because after a run of rather heavy reads (back-to-back books about the war in the Balkans, then a book about tyranny and oppression in Nigeria, then all the race and religion of Go Tell It on the Mountain) I was feeling ready for a book about gay men having sex with each other. I swear, this book is enough to make me concerned for the future of the human race, because in the world according to Hollinghurst, heterosexual men do not seem to exist.

Anyhow, the book concerns the absurdly overprivileged Will Beckwith, the grandson of a lord who has too much money to worry about working, so instead spends his days cavorting around London and trysting with men everywhere he goes. (moiethegreat: it suddenly occurs to me that you should recommend this book to Adam. Now what could have made me think of that?) Will quickly finds himself embroiled in two plotlines: one concerning his affair with a younger West Indian man who may be in trouble with the police, and one revolving around a doddering old lord whose life Will happens to save one day in Hyde Park. It is as yet unclear how these two stories connect to each other, but I suspect they will in time. The book moves along nicely and can be quite funny when it wants to be. I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far.

I finished Werewolves in Their Youth a day or two ago, and my assessment remains pretty much the same: good, solid stories, but certainly not as good as Chabon's best work. I was unimpressed by the sameness of the collection. There were too many stories about depressed ex-husbands trying to figure out why their marriages had collapsed, or bored young couples trying to figure out why they had married each other in the first place. Not surprisingly, the stories that I liked best were the two that differed from that formula. "Spikes" does feature a depressed ex-husband but it's also about baseball, and if there's one thing Chabon can do, it's write about baseball. The last story in the book, "In the Black Mill" is by far the biggest departure. It's ostensibly authored by August van Zorn, who is apparently a very minor character who makes an appearance in Wonder Boys. Wonder Boys is the only Chabon novel I haven't read, so that didn't mean a whole lot to me other than the fact that, by writing in the voice of van Zorn, Chabon very consciously abandons his own usual style. The story is an old-fashioned sort of tale of suspense and horror, and Chabon demonstrates a surprising knack for that kind of writing. The story is just fun in a way that the rest of the stories in the book weren't.

And now I am reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Ms. E and others have told me that I ought to read it and I tend to like Booker winners, so my hopes are high. I have hardly read enough of it to comment, but it's been quite engaging so far...

In other news, Ms. E and I are housesitting this weekend, which means we're going to get paid a hundred dollars to spend the weekend living in a mansion with two chocolate labs. I can think of worse ways to make money. So here's a survey: what should we do with the hundred bucks?

I finished Summerland last night. What a great read. Just pure fun from start to finish. Chabon's writing was great, as always, and it was interesting to see him try something so different from his other books. He did an amazing job with his young characters. They really seemed to think and talk like kids. I'm always impressed by that kind of thing, because it's something that I struggle with a lot in my own writing. That child-voice does not come very naturally to me. I also liked the book because, while it is certainly in the tradition of other young adult fantasy works (the quest, the motley band of characters, the battle between good and evil...), it's a lot more lighthearted than things like Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, or LeGuin's Earthsea books. This is not to say that Summerland is better than those other books; I just liked the way Chabon took the same elements as those authors and, by using a totally different tone, created a book that feels very different. I don't think I'm doing a very good job of explaining myself.

Comparing Summerland to other books in its genre made my realize that it's once again getting to be time to read the Earthsea books, but I wanted to read something for adults before I dove right into it. So I started The Centaur by John Updike. I haven't read a whole lot of Updike beyond the Rabbit series and various short stories, but I thought the Rabbit books were really phenomenal and have been meaning to read more of him for some time. The Centaur was selected rather at random, just because I happened to find it in used bookstore a month or so ago. I am not really far enough along at this point to say much about it, aside from the fact that I find it strangely entrancing...

I started reading Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh yesterday. It may not be Kavalier and Clay, but boy is it good! It was Chabon's first book, and his style seems slightly more self-conscious here, but I think that's to be expected in a first book. Also, it was written in the eighties, and definitely feels like a product of its time. I don't think it's dated, exactly, but there is just a sort of eighties-lit feel to it that I can't quite explain. Maybe little bit of a Jay McInerney influence or something like that.

Regardless of all of that stuff, I'm really enjoying the book. I don't know how Chabon, a married man with a family, got so good at writing these heartbreaking homosexual romances. My word. He just perfectly crystallizes that sense of longing between two men that slays me every time. For some reason, I seem to have been surrounded by male homosexuality lately: Kavalier and Clay, Yossi and Jagger, the Regeneration trilogy, and now this book, which I didn't even know had a gay theme at all! Anyhow, Chabon does a great job of conveying Art's conflicted feelings about Arthur.

I'm still trying to catch up to what I'm currently reading, but I'm almost there. After finishing Written on the Body, I read Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin. I found it to be a bit of a disappointment. The idea of being able to visit different planes of existence while waiting for you plane in an airport is clever, but I didn't find the results to be particularly special. The stories read like little travelogues or anthropologists' reports about the different planes. Much of LeGuin's writing has something of an extraterrestrial anthropological bent to it, but she usually does a better job of mixing that in with an engrossing story. LeGuin is so good at creating characters that I thought it was a shame that almost none of these stories had strong characters to revolve around. It's entirely possible, however, that I wouldn't be nearly so disappointed by this book if I hadn't just read the wonderful Birthday of the World.

And now, without further ado, I will tell you what I am currently reading. It's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. What a fantastic book. If I could make my book half so heartbreaking, I will die happy. I don't think I'm going to be able to very coherent about the book right now, because I'm still in the middle of it, and all I can think is, "Oh, Sammy! Oh, Joe! I love you both so much..." But I am particularly in love with Sammy. His story is just heartbreakingly tender and sweet, and then full of so much painful and unnecessary self-denial. That kind of thing is right up my alley. I will post more once I finish it, but all I can say right now is that the book is amazing!