Hillary Frank, Better than Running at Night, 2002.

I love a good künstlerroman. I discovered Frank via This American Life, and a brilliant piece about a conversation overheard on a train ride. (You can stream it from here.) Better than Running at Night is her debut novel, a quick-moving character study of a young woman named Ladybug (Ellie) Yellinsky. Ellie is beginning her studies at the New England College of Art and Design (this is my only quibble: the school name is clever, no? NECAD—said phonetically, as her father does, it reveals both themes and endings just a little too clearly) mid-year, taking a fundamentals class in order to catch up with her fellow students who began the year in September. She struggles with making sense of what art is, both with her oddball teacher Ed Gilloggley and her two fellow class-mates — and then the next oddball non-teacher. At the same time, Ellie is figuring out what it is to live; she’s in a complicated relationship with another student, is trying to make sense of her relationships with her parents, and is trying to understand who she is, post-high school.

Told in short snippets, and illustrated by Frank’s drawings (she holds an MFA in drawing from the New York Academy of Art), the book is engaging. I read it in just a few short hours, drawn into both Ellie’s life and the lucid exposition of what art is and how the artist works and grows.

My summary might make the novel sound overly familiar, solidly placed within a predictable genre. It’s not: Ellie’s travails and woes never feel trite or overdone, but are entirely plausible. There’s a marvellous moment when Gilloggley shows his three students some of his own drawings in charcoal:

The last slide was of a woman lying on her stomach in bed, partially draped by a sheet. It was a side view, and one arm hung limply over the edge of the bed. A single finger grazed the floor. The arm said everything about how she felt.
After seeing Ed’s slides, I knew why I had come to art school. (182)

The book seeks to use Ellie’s life to make sense of art and life in a way much akin to Ed’s work; revealing Ellie’s emotions and response, her yearning to create, and her desire for a fulfilled life. It resists easy endings, and indeed resists offering detail after the dénouement. It’s a well written, lovely novel; I look forward to reading more of Frank’s work.

Peter Carey, Theft, 2006.

Theft is the only one of Carey’s novels that I’ve read. No Oscar and Lucinda, no True History of the Kelly Gang for me. Clearly I have no respect for people who have won the Booker twice? I dunno.

At any rate. It’s an uninspiring book. Alternating in direct, first person narration by two brothers--“Butcher”, a brilliant painter, and Hugh, a person who is not balanced--the novel is not easy to get into. The oscillation between their styles makes it more difficult than I would like to find the rhythm for reading the book, and once found, the plot does not, to my mind, provide enough sustenance for one to remain interested. It's not overly intricate, but too detailed in too much depth. It's a fun story, though, of art-world manipulation and theft.

What Carey does well is the characterization: both Butcher and Hugh are phenomenally self-absorbed, though Hugh less so, and care for the other brother deeply. Perhaps Butcher’s problem is that he cares too deeply for his art to care enough for his brother? Or perhaps that’s too trite an assessment: I’m still not sure.

What’s difficult, to my mind, is to tell a story so enmeshed in the world of art that pictures have to be real for the reader. Carey kept me interested in the various canvasses that inhabit the world of Theft, and interested me in them enough that I’d like to see them.

Having read this book, I’m not sure that I’ll be in a rush to go near Carey’s Booker winners. It was a quick weekend read, but not worth the three-days’ worth of library fines that I’ll incur when I return the novel tomorrow evening.

Zadie Smith. White Teeth, 2000. On Beauty, 2005.

OK, so first of all? I haven’t stopped reading. School, though, has meant that my reading has been more curtailed than I’d like. It’s also meant that I haven’t had time to post reflections on what little I have read. I’m hoping that may change a bit in the next while, and certainly my summer away from school will help.

Now, Ms. Smith. Wow.
I read White Teeth over Christmas. I greatly enjoyed it. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it, though, in retrospect. Smith's clear, deft narration smoothly weaves plots and characters together, but there's something that unsettles me about the book that I can't quite identify. An acquaintance wrote that about the novel that:

I loved Irie and the twins. I love how Samad's wife seems so unsympathetic at first, but that you slowly come over to her side. I loved KEVIN's acronym problem. I loved the part about the Satanic Verses. I loved the first chapter. I loved Dr. Sick and the WW2 flashback.

I didn't love how it sort of fell apart at the end, but that's ok.

I agree with Nav: the characterization was brilliant, but that the plot didn’t manage to stay at the same level throughout the novel. The final melding of the three families seems forced, and lacks the power of many of the other descriptions. A really enjoyable book, though.

I started, and did not finish, The Autograph Man. It bored me quickly, actually: I only read the first fifty or so pages.

On Beauty, though, is phenomenal. It is just… wow. The characters are better: fuller, no sense of stereotyping in any of even the minor supporting characters. Monty could perhaps be slightly more fleshed out. Watching the central family and its various, weaving interactions, is fascinating. It’s enough to send me to read Forster’s Howards End, which I’ve not yet read. (On Beauty is a reconstruction and adaptation of that story.) I’m going to have to read that, and then reread On Beauty.

A quick excerpt:

Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. It is not necessary to pick up a shovel in order to unearth your rubbish bins. This is because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full or water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give. (27)

Ms. Smith goes on my Keats List, for that kind of writing.

Thomas Merton, Geography of Holiness: The Photography of Thomas Merton, (ed. Dema Prasad Patnaik).

Wayne Allen very kindly leant me this collection of Merton's photography.

Merton--whom I'm very fond of--sometimes frustrates me by making me incredibly jealous of him. This book is yet one more example of that. Merton's shots exhibit a clear understanding of lighting: he captures shadows that both obscure and reveal, drawing attention to intriguing negative spaces, while washing important subjects almost out of the picture. Plate 28 [Darjeeling (the Kanchenjunga)], for example, almost makes the mountains that dominate the landscape disappear into the clouds, calling the viewer's attention and focus to the tiny trees that dot the mountain in the middle-ground.

Always the photographs ask you to consider details; the shots draw you in with the sense of line. In plate 29 [Darjeeling (Terraced Plantation)], the winding road contrasts sharply with the ridge-contours of the planting, pulling the eye to the very small cluster of flowers in the foreground.

Plates 59 & 60 (both of the monastery of Christ in the Desert, NM, a place I'd very much like to visit), are of shadows from pegs emerging from an adobe wall: the mottled colours of the wall soften the jutting pegs & sharp, spear-like shadows that that they cast. Both photograps are of an enclosing feature, but both reveal a tremendous lightness and openness that invite reflection.

While some of the photos are of exotic locales, Merton also reveals an eye for the beauty that is around him: chairs on the porch of his hermitage, fields, roots, rocks, a wagon wheel, doors... He frames each shot in such a way as to present life and action in the stillness of the photograph, and his eye for composition makes me jealous indeed.

These are a gorgeous series of photos, and I'm grateful indeed to Wayne for sharing them with me.

Alberto Manguel speaks of his Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate as being made of "haphazard notes and indecisions" (292). This assessment is true and yet fails to do his book justice.

I'm still not sure what his ultimate goal was with this book. He writes that he "began this book thinking that I would write about our emotions and how they affect (and are affected by) our readings of works of art," and that he feels that "I seem to have ended up far, very far, from my imagined goal" (xi). Yet what cohesiveness the book does have exists because of that initial goal. Certainly the book otherwise seems scattered. In his A History of Reading--one of my very favourite books about books, and a must-read for anyone who likes to read--Manguel is blessed with a subject that has a built-in organising principle of chronology. When writing about emotions and art, that's less true. His response to this conundrum is to consider images as sources of: story, absence, riddle, witness, understanding, nightmare, reflection, violence, subversion, philosophy, memory, and theatre. Picking a central image for each chapter, he surveys treatments of these concepts in visual media, and essays to provide a sense of the scope of visual response.

The first few chapters read almost like I would imagine a textbook of art appreciation to read: they outline how the viewer might consider form, content, and effect, and wonders how external information--be it biographical, historical, what the artist has said about the work--should be weighed in one's consideration. When I got to chapter six ("Marianna Gartner: The Image as Nightmare"), though, the book, while not abandoning its informative nature, shifted in a way that I have trouble explaining. Manguel's writing no longer seemed at all textbook-y. The chapters became more intriguing, raising more questions than they answered. I wish I could better articulate this shift; however, I find it nearly impossible to talk about.

I bought the book because of A History of Reading. Reading Pictures was on remainder, and it's nigh impossible to say no to a $4.99 book by an author you enjoy, especially when you're even remotely interested in the topic. While I feel little more confident when it comes to approaching an image by myself, and attempting to make some sense of it, this was an enjoyable book. If you like art, you'll at least be intrigued by the relationship between words and images that, while almost always implicit in this book, contributes the majority of my lasting impressions of the book. After all, as Manguel says:

...I would say that if looking at pictures is equivalent to reading, then it is a vastly creative form of reading, a reading in which we must not only put words into sounds into sense but images into sense into stories. Of course, much must escape our narratives becasue of a picture's chameleon quality and because of the protean nature of a symbol. Image and meaning reflect each other in a gallery of mirrors through which, as through corridors hung with pictures, we choose to wander, always knowing that there is no end to our search--even if we had a goal in mind. A line from Ecclesiastes sums up, I think, our dealings with a work of art that moves us. It acknowledges the craftmanship, it intimates the inspiration, it tells of our helplessness to put our experience into words. It is worded like this in the King James Version: "All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing; nor the ear filled with hearing" [1.8]. Hence of a work of art can no doubt be understood, because it is, after all, a human experience. But that understanding, in all its illuminating and ambiguous revelations, may be condemned, because of its very nature, to remain for us just beyond the possibilities of our labours. (149)