The Human Stain is 1 of the Worst Books I’ve Read, Ever

by | Aug 9, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

The Human Stain by Phillip Roth. For me this was worse than watching paint dry. So much so, I think it'd have better been named

The Human Stain by Phillip Roth. For me, this was worse than watching paint dry. So much so, I think it’d have better been named “The Human Strain” instead.

I finished The Human Stain by Philip Roth this past weekend.

In many places, it feels like Roth crams four pages of internal monologue into 20.

The name for having to read this book could be The Human “Strain.”

I read this book on my Kindle and listened to other parts on Audible to help speed things along.

I don’t normally do that but there was so much gray on the pages my brain needed a break.

The Human Strain

All that said, I did like the story, and more importantly, I learned some important things about writing from reading The Human Stain.

That simply must be emphasized here.

There were times Saturday when I wanted to drive to Interabang Books in Dallas and buy a hard copy of the book to have to underline in it, so I can go back to passages in time and read them again and pull from them, possibly.

But then I got to sections, like when Delphine Roux has her thoughts … and thoughts … and thoughts … and thoughts … and thoughts … right before the climax of the book and I damn near put it down for good.

This is what one is taught not to do in writing schools.

And yet the book was the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award.

So like in all things, there are rules. But they are meant for everyone else.

Summary about the Human Stain.

There was a lot of head hopping in this book, things that Nathan Zuckerman could not have known to write it.

When he’s supposing in his head about a character, like the example above of Delphine Roux, an antagonist of protagonist Coleman Silk throughout the work, suddenly in the next sentence, we’re in Delphine’s head and we know all about her life in France before coming to America.

We know about the men she was with.

We know about her mom and her mom’s French history.

We even get to hear her mom talk. We know about a trip she took to New York.

We know how she sent an anonymous letter. We know how she contrived a b.s. story to tie into the death of Coleman Silk.

None of which Zuckerman could have known–yet he presents it in the story as fact.

The same for Les Farley.

The same for Faunia Farley. The same for Coleman Silk. The same for the guys who take Les Farley to the Chinese restaurant and out to the portable Vietnam Wall.

Yes, this is fiction, but I had a hard time with that when it’s been drilled into my head, “No head hopping.”

Half-Mast v. Half-Staff

Another point, Roth shows he has a vast knowledge of the classics, foreign languages, literature, the psyche of the human condition, etc, (and that’s a big, etc.)

But he makes the simplest of mistakes which makes me question all the rest of it.

The mistake?

He says, repeatedly, that the US flags have been lowered to “Half Mast.”

The only problem is that masts are on boats, and most flags in the US, particularly the ones on land, fly on staff.

So the proper use of the term is to say, “Flags are flown at half-staff.”

I wonder if his editors, being so overwhelmed with all the other profundity, simply didn’t bother to check.

“He must be right!”

Or had their minds been so numbed with the 4 pages into 20 monologues they were simply too fried to check out something so simple?

Raising the Stakes – Negation of the Negation

But I came away with a better sense of the proverbial “raising the stakes.”

Robert McKee’s point of the “Negation of the Negation.”

Coleman Silk has a secret and that secret ultimately isn’t his undoing, but drives the story to the dark corners it sheds light upon.

And that’s the beauty of what Philip Roth does with The Human Stain. Race, political correctness, morality, family relationships, secrets, all those themes are woven together and pushed as far as they can be taken. And that is what works in this book. That is what makes it a good read, and a beneficial read as I continue to work toward my goal of reading 101 literary works to help improve my own writing.

Conclusion

Read The Human Stain. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

After seeing Faulkner’s name, yeah, I can see why. 

(If I could think like that and the synapses and dendrites of my neural pathways were not searing from having spent forty-eight hours of heat-seared Texas summertime sunlight and unseasonably cool evenings surveying the pages of Philip Roth’s book searching for the meaning in his words and trying to find personal meaning and satisfaction in each single solitary one of them for my own beneficial use, I’d write a long and in-depth sentence explaining how that makes every bit of perfect sense to me and how when each new day begins for the rest of my life I will be a changed man because of reading such expansive thoughts that he included on his pages, well, you get the idea….)

 

A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey–Book Review

by | Aug 6, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List

A Long Way From Home: My Review of Peter Carey’s best-selling book

I enjoyed reading Peter Carey’s A Long Way From Home, though I must say from the beginning when it gets to the fork in the road, I was a little split.

A Long Way From Home book cover of Peter Carey's best-seller.

A Long Way From Home book cover of Peter Carey’s best-seller.

The story was, too.

Carey’s writing is superb and this is one of those award-winning books. It is very much worth the read and enjoyable. There is something smooth about how Carey writes, though I will also admit, I had to jump-start my reading of this book three times to get fully into it. That means I picked it up three separate times and tried to get going with it, set it down cos I just could not get into it. But the third time, my ignition started, and we were off to the races, literally.

A Long Way From Home Summary

The story is about a husband and wife in rural Australia in the 1950s who embark on a journey around the continent in their Ford with 200 or so others. To navigate, they take with them their next-door neighbor, who has recently been let go for hanging a bratty school kid out the second-floor window for being a smart ass. (And I thought I had it bad when I was at Dallas Schools and had to explain away things when a teacher taped a kid to his desk one late May.)

So off they pop and go on the trip and the Bobbseys, the married couple have their differences, but for a glimpse, it looks as though the navigator/school teacher and the missus might have a go at it, but then they don’t. Nonetheless, the hubs gets his head filled with the notion that something happened, and the navigator is sacked. He then winds up in a camp of sorts, teaching Aborigines, which, come to find out, are truly his blood relatives. That he’d been born there, sent away, adopted by a German couple, and this is post WWII and that’s what the smart-ass kid had been bugging the teacher about–being a “Kraut” when he was really not.

To me, that’s where the story went sideways. It was a little too convenient. Too contrived. But it helped bring the story full round and helped the character see a new side of himself, helped him rid himself of demons that had been bothering him all his life, and made for a nice character arc.

A Long Way From Home: Conclusion

Again, I liked the story.

But it began with a couple getting into the Redex Race, and then it was about something far different by the end.

That’s my main criticism.

My Reading List

In 2016, I began reading like a madman. In those days, my revisions to one of my manuscripts were in full swing and I intended to get a better idea of what was selling in the way of novels.

There’s only one good way to accomplish such a feat–reading everything in sight.

And so I did, and still have a stack of books with me constantly that are in a To Be Read pile.

I encourage you to check out my Reading List.

A Long Way From Home is on Donald J. Claxton | The Timberlander’s Reading List

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah–Book Review

by | Aug 2, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List

Kristin Hannah The Great Alone

I’ve read Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, the first book by her I’ve read. It’s been suggested that I should also read The Nightingale, but I’ve not had the time to do so, yet. The Great Alone has spent 19 weeks now on the New York Times Bestseller Hardcover Fiction list. Once something reaches the 15 week mark, there abouts, I read it to study it.

The Great Alone

Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone didn’t make me want to move to Seward’s Folly, but it is a good read, though there was some interesting work done with POV.

There were some things about this story that I liked. There also were some things that bothered me, considerably. Most of all, the point of view. I’m calling it third/first person omniscient. For me it was weird to read this book. We were in the main character’s head the whole book, except on sub chapter, where we head hopped into another’s, and then we were back only in the lead character’s head, but we weren’t first person in her head, we were third person in her head. But then, even though the book was telling the story from years ago, the late 1970s and the 1980s, there were times when Hannah would say things like, “today,” or “here.” So it was today, but it was years ago all at the same time, and we knew all that was going on in the lead character’s head, but we weren’t in her head. She wasn’t talking to us, the readers.

I also jumped out of the book when Leni, the main character, and her mother, decided after her mother shot Leni’s father in the back, to haul his body off and dispose of it rather than calling the police. There were still about 120 or more pages to go at that point and I’d invested about 300 or more, so I was in, but at that point, I really wanted to stop.

Some of the reviews on Amazon think the ending fit together a little too well, too. That didn’t bother me as much. I was glad to see the denouement  coming together so I could wrap up the book with a bow and it be over. This was a YA book, so it had to have something of a happily ever after ending, don’t you know.

Hannah’s writing is good. Her storytelling, the descriptions of being in Alaska were vivid and raw and made me feel like I’d made the journey and were living there. I don’t have a feeling like I want to rush to Seward’s Folly and stake a claim, but it was a good book to have read.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald–Book Review

by | Aug 1, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald is fun book to read about the wild woman from Montgomery, Alabama.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald is fun book to read about the wild woman from Montgomery, Alabama.

I recently read Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler and was surprised by some of it, discouraged by other parts, and amused at others.

Throughout 2018 I have been reading everything I can find about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.

A study of the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways

From my reading list, where I’m seeking to read 101 works of literary fiction, I’ve devoured several of Scott and Ernest’s books already.

And I’ve read A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s book where he talks about the Fitzgeralds, (some say this book has been disproved)

I’ve also seen the Amazon Season One series of Z: The Beginning of Everything, which is based loosely on this novel about Zelda.

Seeing the relationship between Scott and Ernest through a woman’s point of view certainly cast new light on Scott’s writing career.

Suggesting Hemingway was a homosexual?

In this case, Fowler has taken an interesting twist, to suggest that Hemingway doth protest too much in his machoism and was really a closet homosexual.

If you Google such, there is a fair amount of discussion about this topic on the Internet, all written long after Hemingway’s death.

In many ways, I wonder if this isn’t led by those who were holding grudges for having to read Hemingway and Fitzgerald in high school and college and this is their way of getting revenge.

Conclusions about the conclusions.

Nonetheless, the book is fiction and Fowler admits at the end that she merely is speculating based on what she’d researched and drawing her own conclusions about many aspects of the lives of the three.

The book is worth reading.

It shed light on Zelda I’d not seen before.

Fowler suggests that the blame for Scott not writing was more so on Scott than where Hemingway laid it, on Zelda.

That probably is more fair to Zelda, though I have to admit, I’ve tried to live in a home where there is chaos and drama and when it’s there, getting much writing done isn’t possible.

Give the book a read.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Writing Advice–STAY NUDE!

by | Jul 25, 2018 | Creative Writing, Novel Writing

Ottessa Moshfegh signs my book with a funny quip

New York Times Bestselling Author Ottessa Moshfegh was at Interabang Bookstore in Dallas last night promoting her new book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

The book is number 15 this week on “The List.”

When Ottessa signed my book, she offered me encouragement to keep writing and to “Stay Nude!”

What did Ottessa Moshfegh mean when she told me to “Stay Nude!”?

Ottessa Moshfegh signed my copy of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” with a message to, “Stay Nude!”

Now you’re obviously wondering what in the world this could mean. Let me explain.

During the Q&A with Interabang‘s book club master Lori Feathers, the audience was permitted to ask Ottessa questions.

When it came to my turn, I had a writing-style question in mind.

Reading Moshfegh’s book, Eileen

You see, I recently read Ottessa’s first book Eileen with great interest. It is quite an odd book, with a deeply puzzling protagonist. The woman, Eileen, is troubled, there are few kinder words to offer.

Full-frontal nudity of the soul

In the writing program at Southern Methodist University, The Writer’s Path, the director of the program, Suzanne Frank, often told us that writers often bare their souls in novels. That we transform large parts of ourselves into our protagonists when we write. Suzanne has called it, “Full frontal nudity of the soul.”

And so, my question to Ottessa Moshfegh was simple. Between Eileen and the protagonist in her new book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, how much of what we’re reading is “Full frontal nudity of her soul.”

She didn’t even reflect very much before she blurted out the answer: “You’re definitely getting some side boob action.”

I blushed.

The book signing

So when the time came for Ottessa to sign my book, we talked about writing styles. She knows I’m a writer as well. I’ve even sent off a query to Bill Clegg at The Clegg Agency and I’m waiting for an answer. The conversation was fun. I enjoyed meeting her, we said our farewells and I walked away happy to have met her.

When I got to my car, I opened the book out of curiosity to see how she had signed it. “To Donny, best of luck with your writing. Stay nude! Ottessa Moshfegh.”

She understood my question in a much deeper sense than she’d allowed in her answer. I’m reading Peter Carey’s A Long Way From Home at present but hope to start My Year of Rest and Relaxation before the weekend starts.

And of course, do some writing. I have a new mantra for when I’m in front of my typewriter making the magic flow onto the page. STAY NUDE! Thanks, Ottessa for the encouragement. You do the same, though I don’t think you’ve had any problem.