Tag: novels

The Divide. Nicholas Evans, 2005

The Divide. Nicholas Evans,
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005

Nicholas Evans is the author of the bestseller “The Horse Whisperer”, turned later into a not so bestselling film of the same name. I could not make myself see the film or read the book because I find the idea of a horse-shrink preposterous. Choosing to read “The Divide” is not a nod to popular literature – it was prompted by a need to find out why this author is so popular. I remembered an Amazon.com reader’s comment about the style of the first book, which had made me laugh: “An example of (Evans’) bad writing? –“And he felt no shame nor saw any in her, for why should they feel shame at what was not of their making but of some deeper force that stirred not just their bodies but their souls and knew naught of shame nor of any such construct?” I could not find anything that funny in the fourth book of Evans, but still the prose is second rate. It patches together descriptions of natural beauties (so cliche that they can’t turn into anything visual or stir an emotion) and a very dumbed-down version of a “psychology of marriage” or “coming of age psychology”. I can’t deny the author the intelligence of plotting – he kept me reading till the end. He has tapped the great source of popular yarn – the existential fears of female readers: the first one being the fear for the wellbeing of their children, the second one – that they will be abandoned by their husbands for not being passionately responsive to their sexual demands. And indeed, the main female character looses her daughter and her husband to cause fear and trembling in the weak sex.
The title of the novel is such a transparent metaphor, still I have to admit that picking up the novel from the bookshelf has to do with the title as well – the “Divide”….Who would not want to read about what divides people, families, lovers, etc. And again, the characters are very cliche – for example the two women – the one that is abandoned and the seducing one. The first one is a bookstore manager, who wears cream v-neck sweaters and white shirts, the second one is a turban and green dress wearing painter, who is also into yoga and finding her inner self (or something like that).
The second half of the novel dedicated to the eco-terrorist plot line totally lost me. The Patty Hearst story can definitely generate more profound literature but in Evans’ case it did not.

Summer Crossing. Truman Capote, 2006

Summer Crossing. Truman Capote, 2006

A new book from Capote in 2006, 22 year after his death! – That is a gift from eternity! It is amazing how the book survived and how good it is! Capote began writing it in 1943, which practically makes it his first novel (his first published novel “Other Voices, Other Rooms” dates from 1948). Then, before entirely abandoning “Summer Crossing” (and declaring the manuscript lost) he worked on it — on and off– for the course of a decade.
The book tells a girl’s coming of age story but unlike other mediocre writers Capote’s coming of age is not just about sex and sexuality. It adds an unexpected and profound streak to it – class. The novel’s heroine Grady is a teenage socialite from the Park Avenue/Hamptons crowd who falls in love with a Brooklyn Jewish parking attendant. She had never spent a summer in New York but this time she had convinced her parents (who are off to southern France on their regular summer crossing of the Atlantic), that she will be OK alone in the city. Left alone Grady plunges with abandon in the relationship with the handsome lowlife boy from Brooklyn only to find out (especially after a visit to his home and meeting his mother) that this love is impossible. After a first encounter with passion and inexplicable attraction, Grady is tired, bored, and has acquired a sense of belonging – a belonging which love, or whatever it is, can never transgress.

Capote’s style is as good as ever. He makes literature within the framework of a sentence, a phrase, just putting two word together…Just look at this description of New York in the summer: “Hot weather opens the skull of the city, exposing its brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.” Or a glimpse of the Central Park zoo — “The cat house of a zoo has an ornery smell , an air powered by sleep, mangy with old breath and dead desires. Comedy in a doleful key is the blowsey she-lion reclining in her cell like a movie queen of silent fame; and hulking ludicrous sight her mate presents…Somehow the leopard does not suffer; nor the panther: their swagger makes distinct claims upon the pulse, for not even the indignities of confinement can belittle the danger in their Asian eyes, those gold and ginger flowers blooming with a bristling courage in the dusk of captivity.”
To be able to write like that…