Category Archives: Fiction

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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A man finds a couple million dollars of drug money and is pursued by killers who want what he found. One of the killers is strangely philosophical to the point of being inhuman. A county sheriff investigates and eventually decides it’s time to retire. It’s not a happy story.

The book moves quickly. The Texas locale and dialog are wonderfully rendered. The sheriff’s words and thoughts are particularly well-done. Even so, the movie added something, especially the performances of Javier Bardem as the otherworldly psychopath and Tommy Lee Jones as the troubled sheriff (the actor grew up in that part of Texas). I’m going to see about reading more of McCarthy’s work.  (1/21/11)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

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Jean Brodie teaches at a private school for girls in Edinburgh before World War II. She selects her favorite girls for special attention, sharing her private life with them and exposing them to her distinctive ideas about life, art and politics. She is “a woman in her prime”. Her favorite students, “the Brodie set”, are the “creme de la creme”.

This is a short, entertaining novel. The best parts are the words spoken by Jean Brodie to her students, and the thoughts expressed by some of those students on mysterious subjects like “sexual intercourse”. The book was made into a good movie years ago. One difference between the book and the movie is that Jean Brodie is more attractive than Maggie Smith, the actress who portrayed her. This matters somewhat to the plot.  (1/19/11)

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

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This is a novel about a white, middle-aged professor in South Africa who has an affair with a student and loses his job. He goes to live temporarily with his daughter on her small farm. They are robbed and assaulted by three black men. The political or sociological aspects of the story — gender relations in an academic setting, racial relations in modern South Africa — didn’t interest me very much. I did, however, identify with the professor. He’s a difficult character with an uncertain future. He doesn’t regret the affair, isn’t sure what to do with himself, doesn’t get along very well with his daughter. He seems very real.  (1/12/11)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

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I read this in college and was disappointed because the horrible events deep in the jungle weren’t revealed in much detail. Then there was Apocalypse Now, a version of Heart of Darkness that had its own strangeness and now colors any reading of the older work. Reading this again after 40 years, I’m again disappointed. Much is said about Kurtz, but not enough is revealed. It’s the problem with any work that purports to be about an extraordinary figure. The author can keep saying how extraordinary some character is, over and over again, but it is much more difficult to show that character being extraordinary.

You can argue that leaving the details to the imagination creates a more powerful experience for the reader (people say that radio dramas were scarier than the ones on TV), but in this case more details would have helped.  (12/18/10)

The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

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Cain wrote these two novellas in the 30s. Each is about a man and a woman who knock off the woman’s husband. Both are written in the first-person, from the man’s perspective. There are few descriptive passages, just fast-moving narrative and lots of dialog. The men and women meet and quickly start plotting their crimes. Neither story ends happily. And neither story is very plausible. (Maybe greedy, passionate people trying to commit the perfect murder always come up with plans that are too complicated.)

One bit of commentary from Double Indemnity: “I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman”. That sums up the situation for both these guys.  (12/10/10)