GatesyRead

The title ‘Sorry for Your Troubles’ suggests something Irish, and indeed it seems as though Richard Ford wishes the reader to follow him over the seas and back (though I, for one, feel he is strongest when the work is grounded among ordinary men and women of the United States). While I'd rather avoid sounding like a critic who likes the old stuff, the rough-and-ready nature of various strugglers in Rock Springs is hard to beat. Here there are lawyers and successful retirees (though, of course, troubles don’t stop with a solid safety-net, and lonely hearts are everywhere).  The first of the stories takes place in New Orleans. A middle-aged, married man Sandy McGuiness is out with business associates when he spies a slender woman in a brown dress, who returns his gaze with something like recognition. Ford switches to the past – thirty-five years earlier, when Sandy and Barbara (the slender woman in a brown dress) traveled together to Iceland. They’d bunked down in a rustic fishing h...

  Seize the Day is Bellow is a bite-sized chunk; not much more than a novella; a story set in a single day you could read in a single sitting. When I first read it, many years ago, 42-year-old unemployed salesman Tommy Wilhelm must have seemed like an ancient mariner. Now I see him as man who should be in his prime, tragically moored by circumstances largely of his own making. His father is a doctor and a success, but also a man lacking any compassion for his two children (and one imagines, formerly for his deceased wife). Maybe Wilhelm thought hard work was for suckers, because he fell for flattery, dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood, thinking show business could be his career. His handsomeness was one thing; an unusual speech impediment is another. At some point he falls into line, marries and becomes a salesman, until he feels an injustice has been done to him by the company and takes his bat and ball home. An obvious comparisons is to Miller's Death of a Salesman , ...

For a time I couldn't decide whether Martin Amis's  Inside Story was a chore to read, or a pleasure (it was both) -- but I persevered. Ultimately I would say it was a pleasure. Or perhaps, in keeping with the style of the novel, I should say something like this: “Geoff Gates, a reader who prided himself on some discernment, had decided that Inside Story was a novel worth bothering with. ”  The Wrap: You can read the way that the novel is equivocally praised in The Guardian by Tim Adams here:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/13/inside-story-by-martin-amis-review-too-clever-by-half.  Or roasted indulgently in the New York Times by Parul Sehgal here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/books/review-martin-amis-inside-story.html Here's some of my own thoughts on the book.  Observation One: ‘The Preludial’ (adjective for ‘Prelude?’) has the cute direct address of playful postmodernism (‘Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege’ [opening...

I’m not Scared was a great success for Niccolò Ammaniti, published in 2001 when the author was aged thirty-five. The story is narrated by Michele Amitrano, a curious child living in a dull, hot hamlet where nothing much happens. Exactly where and when Michele is when he recalls the events of that summer is unclear, but some time has passed (‘The wheat was high that year …’[p.1]; ‘ That morning we went off on our bikes’ [p.5]). The narrative opens with the children riding out beyond the boundaries set by their parents. As a storm approaches, they find an abandoned farmhouse, and Michele is dared to enter (an act of selflessness to save the dignity of a girl in the gang). As Michele finds a hidden underground recess, he thinks he has found a corpse. He doesn’t tell the others and returns home with the first terrible secret. Ammaniti’s portrait of boyhood is from a bygone era, when fathers wielded an authority stemming from an accepted level of violence. Beyond the household, worldly i...

\ If you are old enough you will remember the 1985 film -- a huge success, with eight Academy Awards nominations, and so on, and Helen Bonham Carter in her breakthrough role. I'd like to see it again, especially now that I've finally got around to reading the book. There may be little point in writing about a novel published in 1908 with all the critical studies over the decades. However, reading the novel at the start of 2022 has left me with a few thoughts to share.  The first is the simple pleasure of reading this novel after some time among the serious (necessarily so) books of contemporary literary writers. I refer in particular to my last two entries: Don Delillo’s Zero K (2016) and Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020). E. M. Forster's  A Room with a View operates very much like a two act romantic drama, with Act 1 set in Florence, and Act 2 set in Surrey (the setting is a house known as ‘Windy Corner’). A limited set of characters is introduced...

Serious writers have a way of getting under your skin, and like Don Delillo’s Zero K,   this novel takes a hard look at the way things are and doesn’t let the reader off the hook for a moment. If the satirical fable of Zero K centres on sleep as the answer to the woes of the world, Flanagan makes disappearance – of species, of body, of meaning – the heart of his message.   The Living Sea of Waking Dreams has a simple plot, one immediately relatable: three adult siblings gather around their dying mother and struggle to let her go. The protagonist, Anna, should hold the sensible middle ground once treatments to prolong Francie’s life become inhumane, but she is under the spell of the Terzo, a wealth manager who believes that money and influence can buy life. Anna’s other brother, Tommy, is a sympathetically drawn character -- a struggling artist, stuttering and sentimental. A dead fourth sibling casts a dark shadow: Ronnie, a teenage suicide, likely the result of his interac...

Some of my students bought me this book, knowing that I am a fan of Don Delillo, having heard me talk about End Zone and White Noise (see earlier reviews). Like these earlier novels, Zero K is set in end-times for the human race (while the race continues on as ever). Not nuclear catastrophe, however, but an overreliance on technology, growing autocracy, and climate change as background. The immediate story is how to escape via a fairly extreme version of the underground bunker. By choosing the time of their suspension via cryogenics, the ultra-rich hope to weather the storm of the coming apocalypse and wake to a better world. This all seems  like madness to the storyteller, Jeffrey, whose step-mother Artis and billionaire father Ross Lockhart seek to take this bizarre leap of faith (involving, as it does, the preservation of the body and brain as separate commodities). The first line of the novel sets the theme in motion: “Everybody wants to own the end of the world” (p.3). ...