The Delighted States

It would take someone less desperate for knowledge than I to resist an invitation to THE DELIGHTED STATES, A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes. And, as Richard Eder notes in today's review, the "impossibly young face" of its inviter author, Adam Thirlwell.

He is something of a prodigy and, as such, unstoppable. In his torrent of digressive connections — he joins together Chekhov, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and Hemingway in the space of three dozen lines — there are times we feel we are losing headway and the page numbers are actually running backward.

But the plums are real, even if squashed by too much else. Mr. Thirlwell has several large themes that make their way insistently through his shoves and hops. One is an impassioned belief in the novel. “Although this is a history of ephemeral inventions,” he writes, “the novel’s history is also a history of objects whose value is durable and timeless.” Then he adds, “Sometimes I believe this.”

Despite the possibility of my having read zero of the books from which Thirlwell conjures his construct, I may be taking the book with me next week to New York. I will be there from the 26th to the 30th, if you'd like to have a coffee. For several weeks after that, I will be unavailable via internet.

Comments

[Loren]

I sent the order to Amazon today. Being a lapsed English major (i.e, having lived and enjoyed life outside of academe for many years) I have read the books mentioned and can't wait for the this book to arrive!
I've never regretted for a moment having put in the years as a lit grind, but one of the downsides is reading much of the literary canon at a young age... and reading it with a 'professional' eye in order to please our instructors, review committees, etc.
One of my favorite undergraduate profs made us promise to revisit many novels, plays and poems in middle age as it would be akin to reading them (again) for the first time. Obviously, this isn't likely to happen as time passes and blog-reading takes up so much of our precious time. > Seriously, I guess I'm more likely to read the wonderful "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" than revisit "The Prelude" here in the summer of 2008.
Many years ago a friend of mine said he envied me because I had not yet read "Lonesome Dove," and still had the pleasure ahead of me. He was right. I was lucky again when I read "War and Peace" the summer I turned 50. It was a profound experience. I'm so glad my 24 year old self never got around to it.
I hope that Thirwell spurs us to read the classics, and I'm really envious of anyone loose in the big world who will get to encounter them for the first time.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

That would be me, re: reading for the first time! I've read a lot, but am woefully lacking in the classics.
Okay, a request: I am going to be away, out of internet range, for at least two weeks in July, maybe four. I have writing to do, but the other 20 or so hours of the day, I will do little but read (and sleep). So, how about some suggestions as to what to read, with a skew toward the classics? I'm all ears (and eyes).

[Zev]

I can't help with the classics, but I would urge you to read Audrey Niffenneger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Wonderful book. If you haven't read Peter Straub's Mr. X, you're in for a treat. I'd also suggest John Crowley's Little Big, which I mentioned in the comments to an earlier post. And having taken MJ's suggestion in that comment string, I can now wholeheartedly reccommend Alan Furst's Dark Star.

[Loren]

I'd start with the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace. Don't get put off by the first fifty or so pages of names and in medias res technique. It's a very simple story -- a love story, involving just a handful of people. By the time the young officers are playing the drunken window game, you'll be hooked.
If you finish that, go for the gold with Anna Karenina.
Then, take on the greatest English novelist, Charles Dickens.
Bleak House is his masterpiece.
Pickwick Papers is a comic masterpiece, and was my mother's favorite book.
Other must reads:
-Crime and Punishment
-Middlemarch

then, saddle up for more Victorian novels....
Read Thomas Henry Huxley's essay on Agnosticism.
- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

An American must: My Antonia, by Willa Cather.
If you're lucky, you didn't have this shoved down your throat in high school. As an adult and as an American it is wonderful to read.
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P.S.
Speaking of books, let me push two more. Since I'm a first-year Boomer, I've always had a fascination with the world of my parents... especially the late 30's/early forties - the world from which I came, as it were. (A fascination with 40's-style glamour, Kodachrome hues, noir lighting... whatever)
Anyhoo, I just finished two interesting books about the final months and days of World War II:

-'Endgame, 1945' by David Stafford
&
-'Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-45' by Max Hastings

Growing up in the Fifties, I was a typical kid who knew everything about the course of that war as portrayed by "Victory at Sea," Cronkite's "The Big Picture" and later productions like the BBC's "World at War." That and the fact that most of my male teachers and coaches were vets who became educators via the GI Bill and had served in Europe or the Pacific. My peers and I were a little too smart to glorify war itself, but the tragic nature of its world and a certain nobility of its survivors was apparent and a little humbling. I remember that neighborhood friends would have German medals and patches or (better yet) a Japanese dagger or banner their dads had brought home from God knows where. I remember looking at the picture of one of my mom's young cousins who had been killed on Okinawa. I now know that he was killed at age 18 in April 1945 on his first battle assignment. His death made me wonder what it was like to serve and die in the final days of the war when everyone knew Japan and Germany had lost but the fighting and dying continued to the bitter end.
These books cover experiences in every theatre of war and in both armies, but Hastings' book really filled on the blanks for me about about the needless suffering of MacArthur's vainglorous crusades and the abject suffering inflicted on and by the doomed Japanese armies. For his part, Stafford fleshes out the sufferings of the Italian campaign, the debacle of Anzio, and the Nazi atrocities during the fallback from Holland, etc.
These books answer that question of what it was like: it sucked for everyone concerned.