Complete Stories of O Henry

O Henry (1862-1910)

I get the feeling that some literary snobs might look down on O Henry. To them I bite my thumb. O Henry is just super fun to read. His stories focus on a time, place, and class of people that might not be found in the history books too often, but working class people in New York or in the west make for some great characters. Generally you get a great setting, mostly New York, a colloquial talking character and a twist at the end. The narration is also playful and creative. This guy's the master. Start with "The Last Leaf" and go from there.

Rating 9.5/10: Nothing will cheer you up or bring a tear to your eye in 15 minutes better than an O Henry story.

Bel Ami

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

Vampire Guy as Georges? Could work I guess. 

I know Guy from his short stories, most notably "The Horla" so I was expecting some twisted mental anguish with a little touch of the supernatural. So boy was a surprised when I got a realistic novel about Third Republic France and the ins and outs of social advancement in journalism. Georges Duroy is our main character, a small time former soldier who gets a grunt job at a newspaper through a chance encounter with a former military friend. Georges is swept up into the world of intrigue and high society and that's when Bel Ami gets really French. Dinner parties, torrid love affairs, rendez-vous with married women and the seduction of everyone in sight typify Bel Ami. Each conquest Georges makes, and there are many, is mostly strategic and only somewhat romantic. We see him progress from a rank amateur writer to a slashing gossip columnist and political reporter, he makes the same change in his love life. He initially seduces women for love or at least the thrill, later in the book he makes his moves with calculated conniving. His attitude is best summed up by his first wife, Madelaine. When he's given the Legion of Honor, an event that would have been unthinkable just a few years before, he scoffs at it, thinking he deserves more. "You're never satisfied," she says (roughly).
     The think I find most French about this book is that Georges, who's a bit of a dolt and heavy handed with his sweet talk never gets caught and keeps reeling in these smart, rich, uppercrust women. I kept expecting him to get caught and challenged by a jealous husband, found in flagrante delicto by one of his other lovers and murdered, but no, he goes about his merry way becoming richer and richer, casting women aside when he sees a chance to improve his position. It's not very satisfying, but it's probably a more realistic portrayal than if Georges would have got his comeuppance.

Rating 8/10: Lots of really good stuff in here. Georges shark-like focus makes this book pretty dark, but what else do you expect from Guy de Maupassant. After all, the guy's grave reads, "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993)

If I was a good writer instead of a middling historian this is the kind of book I would write. Stegner uses the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, a Gilded Age artist who moved out west with her engineer husband, and creates a fictional story around them. In the hands of Stegner these letters gain context and reveal a place and time in America. By layering this narrative with that of Lyman Ward, the fictional professor emeritus, and grandson of the fictionally renamed artist Susan Burling Ward, we not only get to view Susan & Co.'s lives through the prism of the early 1970s, we get a glimpse at the great character that is Lyman Ward.
      Lyman is wheelchair bound and struggling to stay out of a nursing home. His delves into his grandmother's life, submerging himself to the point where he's more involved in it than with his day to day life, as a way to prove that he's still relevant. What we end up getting is Lyman commenting both on the era around 1900 and the early 70s and their relation to each other. Lyman's assistant, the free-loving Shelley, questions the prudery and stuffiness of the Victorians. It is here when Lyman describes how foolish we are to look back in time and assume our ancestors are foolish. Where we see prudery about Vicorian sexual mores and discourse, they saw propriety. Lyman argues that the Victorians would feel that modern Americans are just as repressive and reluctant to talk about death out in the open as they were about sex.
      The story is also one of movement. Susan moves every few years from one ramshackle mining camp to another. Her husband, most of the time through no fault of his own, leaving one failed project after another in his wake. This is sharply contrasted against Lyman who literally is stuck in his grandparents' old house and doesn't want to go anywhere.
     Stegner masterfully weaves Susan Burling Ward's letters into Lyman's memories, revealing why she acted the way she did and making her a much fuller character to both the reader and to Lyman.

Rating 10/10: Brilliantly done.

Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)

If nothing else Winesburg is an interesting experiment in form. There are two things that link together the twenty-four stories: George Willard and the small town of WInesburg. George lives in the main hotel which his family owns but he is also a newspaperman. If you read a paper from back in the 1910s you might notice that WInesburg is kind of like those publications. It's similar in that the reader learns bits and pieces of everyday life and maybe a bit of gossip about the townspeople, what Anderson does that's interesting though, is delve deep into each character's psyche. It's not George as reporter telling us these things, it's like the town itself if gleaning information from it's residents. And Winesburg itself is a major player in the book. It's got the get up and zip typical of early 20th century towns but at it's core there seems to be a depressing pall hanging over everyone.
This enthusiasm on the outside and deep psychological distress on the inside is reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis book but this seems much darker. So that's what I liked about Winesburg, there's a lot that I wasn't so keen on. The flow of the stories didn't make this book easy to read. Generally we get a picture of George growing up in relation to whoever's story is being told, but there are times when we jump around many years. It's hard to get a really good feel for George, though, because each individual story doesn't really have a beginning, middle and end. They're more just character sketches, really awesome and penetrating character sketches, but not especially fun to read twenty-four in a row. Publishers were hesistant to move forward with Winesburg because, well, it's super depressing. The only way to be happy in life is to get the heck out of town. That's what George does at the end, but there's no feeling of connection to him because we don't really know the guy.

Rating 5/10: Not sure this should be a story collection. Maybe Anderson needed an editor to tell him to connect the stories better, that'd be my advice. But that doesn't change the fact that there's some extraordinary writing in here and I'd be eager to read something else by Anderson.

Henderson the Rain King

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

Now this is a novel. Bellow manages to weave brilliantly complex characters with both philosophical discourse and a rollicking plot. Eugene Henderson is a brash, privileged, wealthy North easterner. He is manic, troubled and to an outsider could be considered insane. He takes shots at cats, rails against his wife, shows up in French churches hammered and wants to become a doctor in his early sixties. Henderson is endearing rather than annoying because we get to see what's going on in his head. As crazy as his act is, it kind of makes sense.
Henderson is telling his story after the fact. He's returned from Africa and is back in the US. He has a voice in head that keeps saying, "I want! I want!" He isn't satisfied and he doesn't know what it will take to fill his yearning. He meets a guide named Ramilayu who serves a protector and voice of reason. Henderson comes into contact with two tribes from whom he learns about life and what he needs to live. There is a lot of philosophizing in the Henderson , I'm talking pages and pages worth. But it's not only readable, but it's enjoyable because the characters are interacting with each other and revealing a lot about themselves in the process. Dahfu, king of the Wariri, plays on Henderson's personality to trick him into becoming the Rain King. This intense relationship forms the basis for the second half of the book.

Rating 9/10: Loved it. Also, exploding frogs.

The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy, old reliable. Some pastoral England, a good love story, a realistic look at relationships and sex free of Victorian restraints and you've got a Hardy novel. All these are present in Native but it can't overcome one thing, this novel is frightfully boring. I'm talking stultifyingly, Math for Liberal Arts 101 at eight AM boring.

We're in Egdon Heath, a small town located in the desolate rolling hills of mythical Wessex. Sounds like a cool setting, right? Bonfires on hills, rolling fog, crazy storms, yeah, I can get down with that. The problem is nothing happens for the entire first half of the book. We meet some characters: the feckless Thomasin, conniving wishy washy Damon Wildeve, the nosy Diggory Vann, and the scheming Eustacia Vie. Eustacia is sort of intriguing, she wants out of Egdon, and is desperate for the bright lights of Paris. That's why when Clym, the Native of the title, returns from a lucrative job in France, she's all about meeting him and hitching her star to his ascending wagon. Keep in mind this is 200 pages into the book and we haven't even met Clym.

So we end up with Thomasin and Wildeve as a couple and Eustacia and Clym as a couple. It's obvious from the start of these relationships that Thomasin/Clym and Wildeve/Eustacia should be the matches. What follows is a series of farcical misunderstandings so ridiculous Georges Feydeau rejected them. Simple details are left out of conversations, meetings are missed by minutes, people infer things that are patently wrong, and then a bunch of people die. In a door slamming farcical comedy these misunderstandings are funny, in a tragedy it just seems kind of dumb and pointless.

Rating 3/10: Shouldn't be a classic. Too boring, not one likable, or really even interesting character.