Long Books

Over on Instagram, someone posted about Verghese’s Covenant of Water and asked what long books people have read this year. I decided to pick five:

Ours by Philip B Williams is beyond plot description other than to say it focuses on mysticism, magic, and Black spirituality in a very poetic manner. The language is stunning. Can I suggest you follow this book with Percival Everett’s The Trees.

Charlie Hustle by Keith O’Brien. One of the heroes of my childhood, Pete Rose, gets the epic warts and all biography he deserves. Emphasis on warts.

Ann Beattie’s New Yorker Stories. I had a hard time picking between this one, Joy Williams' Visiting Privilege, and Lydia Davis Collected Stories. Truly great stories that capture some important aspects of the boomer generation that are also well written and satisfying.

John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. If you were aware of what is now called literary fiction in 1982 you would have read Gardner as well as Saul Bellow, James Michener, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joseph Heller, E B White, Bernard Malamud, J D Salinger, and John Cheever. (Yes they are all white men.) Small town (Batavia NY) police chief has long talks with the mysterious Sunlight Man after arresting him. Reminds me a bit of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; both books capture a way of thinking that was once common but has now largely disappeared.

John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. My second deep dive into this poetic masterpiece that captures American culture circa 1989 with truly poetic language. Consider this quote from Bailey’s epic biography of Philip Roth:

We weren’t idealistic about much,” said Updike of his coevals, “but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition—not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.” Roth likewise longed to emulate such “saints of the imagination” as Flaubert, James, and Conrad, and pointed out that his and Updike’s was “the last pre-television generation” who believed that fiction occupied a sovereign place in American culture, that a serious novelist strove to “meet the measure of one’s colleagues” in claiming the attention of their best readers. “To think that I had to run alongside that remarkable stallion all my writing life,” he said of Updike…