Summer Reading

I read four novels this summer and I am going to blog briefly about them before I forget too much. It was back in June, so I already have forgotten a fair amount anyway.

The first novel was - get ready for this - Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." I read it because there was an article in the Remnant criticizing it, and I have heard about it for years, so I thought it was time to read it. It is a novel about this teenager, Holden Caufield, who is a bit of a conceited punk - a smart aleck - who has been kicked out of various boarding schools. Unfortunately, he is rather funny, an amusing person. He leaves the current boarding school he is at after he receives a gift of some money from a relative, and ends up spending the weekend in New York City. I won't say much more - because I can't remember much more - except that it is a coming of age novel. He actually is not the worst person and has some concern about a younger sister and little children in general whom he wants to protect from the harshness of adult life. However, he comes to a conclusion that I just can't agree with - but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.

Next novel.

The reviewer at the Remnant said that a better coming of age novel is "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," so I read it. It is very well written and not as full of profanity as "Catcher in the Rye" but it has some problems. It takes place in a neighborhood in Brooklyn and follows a family with an alcoholic father and a hard working mother, but focuses on the young daughter from the age of 10 through 18. It begins about 1908 and therefore ends in 1918. It was made into a movie in the 1940's and has a "heart-warming" feel, kind of like the Waltons but with some key differences - and these are why I could not recommend it to a "young person." The movie, I understand, cleaned up all of these things. The Aunt (I think her name is Aunt Sissie) is a bigamist. The joke is that, "because she is Catholic she doesn't believe in divorce. That is why she didn't actually divorce any of the four men whom she married." Of course, she married all of these men in civil ceremonies in different jurisdictions, and if no one was motivated to look into this . . . Anyway, these marriages would have all been invalid in the eyes of the Church. She is a certain real character type - I can think of several real life women whom she resembles: a kind of bold, amoral earth mother type.

Actually the main problems I have in the book have to do with the notion that "experience" is key to life - any experience. In one passage, the daughter, at about age 17, has to deal with a young American soldier whom she is dating who wants her to sleep with him before he ships out to France. She turns him down, but thinks that he loves her. She later finds out that, shortly after that, he married his fiance! Heartbroken she tells her mother the whole story. Her mother then proceeds to say that, as a mother, she would say that she did the right thing by refusing; but, as a 'woman,' she would have told her that she shouldn't have denied herself this 'experience.' (I am trying to imagine my great grandmother telling my grandmother that in 1917. Nope. It doesn't ring true.) This and other similar passages seem to be the projections of a 1940's Ann Arbor coed, Betty Smith - the author, who ultimately picked up these 19th century Bohemian artist ideas from her liberal professors at the Univ. of Mich.

Third Book. "The Magnificent Ambersons" by Booth Tarkington. I was looking for his novel "Seventeen" which was also recommended by the Remnant reviewer as a good coming of age novel, but I couldn't find it. I settled for the "Magnificent Ambersons" as it was available and I had heard of it before. I was curious. This novel had a somewhat similar theme to that of the movie "Alfie." Not in that it was about a playboy, but in that it is also about a very self-centered headstrong young man - a spoiled rich kid, in this case - who has to get the stuffing beat out of him (figuratively, through bad experience) in order for him to undergo a moral conversion. This was Orson Welles' second movie, right after "Citizen Kane." I have never seen it. The story takes place in late nineteenth century America.

Finally, I figured, "well I'm in the nineteenth century, so I might as well read some Jane Austin. I read "Pride and Prejudice" and have spoken about it before so I won't say too much. I had never read Jane Austin before and had been given the impression, by a certain GNF, that it was the literary equivalent of those frilly things that some women wear. Character development and interaction aside, I was impressed by its architechtonic strengths - how's that for a masculine compliment! I could detect an almost symphonic structure in it.

Well, that's all for now until I get a chance to read at some length again.