Today, dear friends, a new story, Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis . The book won the Viareggio prize in 1962 and was adapted by Vittorio de Sica in 1970 to make the academy award winning film of the same name. It should be noted that Bassani, an accomplished prose and poetry writer, initially worked on the screenplay with De Sica but the two clashed and Bassani left the project. However, the film credits him as the original story’s author. Finzi-Continis  was, of course, written in Italian, and I am working with a wonderful English translation by William Weaver that captures, I believe, a lot of the story’s poetic prose and Italian cadence. Why read a book originally published over 60 years ago, you ask? Finzi-Continis  is a story, a story about relationships (see below), set against the real process of the Italian fascists marginalizing, excluding and finally deporting Italians who were Jewish, a process the reader will recognize is being done today in America against refugees and their children. So, is the story fiction? It is true that the author’s life shares many features with the fictional protagonist and narrator of the book. They are both Jewish men who lived through World War II; their fathers (who did not survive) were medical doctors who strove to be Italians first and Jews second. Both men, real and fictional, were in love with young women who played a lot of tennis, (Love/love). Bassani eventually married his inamorata, the protagonist, as we will see, did not, losing her to the Fascists. No less an authority than Tim Parks calls the story fictionalized autobiography. Elements from the author’s experience are transformed by placing them into a fully realized novel. Bassani is an accomplished writer who organizes his memories into a narrative structure. The cover of the 1977 edition I have shows a beautiful image of a garden bathed in golden light. Of course, this refers to the title, and the title refers to a major theme of the book—attempting to live in an enchanted refuge while surrounded by danger. We will get to this later, I promise you. There are actually a number of references in the text to this quality of light. Here’s one: “For ten or twelve days the perfect weather lasted, held in that kind of magic suspension, of sweetly glassy and luminous immobility peculiar to certain autumns of ours. It was hot in the garden, almost like summertime…the light; that last light invited you to insist, to continue volleying (they’re playing tennis) no matter if the play was almost blind. The day was not ended, it was worth lingering a little longer.” For those of us who have seen the film version, this golden light is captured beautifully, and it probably should be noted that in a story about a young man’s obsession with a young girl, the girl’s hair is constantly described in shades of golden blond. Indeed, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis  is, unlike Bassani’s other stories, about love, focusing on a decade long flirtation/attraction between the unnamed narrator and Micol Finzi-Contini, whom the narrator first meets when she is thirteen. He doesn’t see her during the last three years of her life and learns that she, along with her parents and grandmother and the narrator’s father, perished in a German concentration camp. Let’s stop there today, best beloved. Till next time. #TheGardenoftheFinzi-Continis #GiorgioBassani #AlanBray

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been considering some different aspects of Susan Minot’s fine novel, Evening . Today, I’d like to call attention to the moth. The moth appears on the cover of the 1999 edition that I’ve been reading. The only mention I’ve found of it in the text is on page 74: I’ll never get out now  she thought I’ll never get back down those stairs  a moth batted against the ceiling against the ceiling against the ceiling. (This passage occurs in a scene set in the book’s present wherein Ann is contemplating death. Again, we must note the importance in the text of punctuation ((or its absence)) and the use of italics and repetition. It gives the passage an intensely inner focus). Since the image of a moth is on the cover, we have to assume it’s being highlighted for a reason. Moths, best beloved, are often associated with “darkness, endings, and the unknown, but also with transformation, intuition, and the spirit realm. In different cultures, they can represent mortality, ancestors, and the cyclical nature of life, death, and renewal. They are also linked to the human soul, messengers from the spirit world, and wisdom.” Anyone who’s read The Teachings of Don Juan knows a lot about moths. Whiny voice: Moths eat your sweaters too. That’s why you need moth balls. Thank you, I’m not sure that’s relevant.  It does seem entirely fitting that a moth would appear in a story about transitions and death. The sentence cited above also conveys a sense of a living creature struggling to escape a confining space, which is exactly Ann’s predicament. Perhaps, this moth-thing also touches on the issue of marketing. One could believe that real authors are somehow above financial concerns but that is not the case. Authors like to earn money from their work. A conscious decision (probably the publisher’s) was made to accept the design of this edition of Evening, In addition to the white moth, we note the dark green background color to the photograph. The back cover provides a summation of the story, a version of it, at least: July 1954. An island off the coast of Maine. Ann Grant—a 25 year old New York career girl—is a bridesmaid at her friend’s lavish wedding. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, a man whom Ann has never met…  It continues and mentions that years later Ann is dying. Not to be snarky, but is this a fair description of the book we’ve been reading? Nope. This description attempts to put the book into a Romance genre, a woman’s book genre, and this “putting” seems to be an important aspect of how the book was marketed. I’m going to say it trivializes an exquisitely written story about life and death—not to say that Romance novels are trivial, but to say I don’t think Evening  fits into a narrower genre. Let’s see: “A romance novel is primarily defined by its central focus on the development and exploration of a romantic relationship between two individuals, with a happy, emotionally satisfying ending. The core elements include a love story, often involving challenges and obstacles, and a resolution that leaves the reader with a sense of hope and fulfillment.”   ‘Kay, Evening could be jammed into this, I just think it limits it too much. A simple objection is that Evening  does not have a happy ending. I don’t think it’s necessarily tragic, but Ann does die, and all her particular memories are lost. If a reader was looking for a Romance novel and picked up Evening , I think they’d feel they’d been misled. This makes me think of the ancient distinction between comedy and tragedy—a comedy is a story where the protagonist lives, a tragic story is one where the protagonist dies, essentially because of actions taken by this protagonist. Hence, our friend Dante’s master work is entitled, The Divine Comedy  although it is not terribly funny. In this system, Evening  would be a tragedy. I don’t know if it is, my friends. Every living creature dies, Ann dies (by implication) —is a natural process tragic? To me, tragedy seems like a sad and unfortunate event that could have been prevented. ‘Kay again. The clock on the clubhouse wall says it’s time to wrap up today’s philosophizing. Big news. I am going to take a vacation with Dena. The next post will be on May 16th, and it will focus on a new story, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Till then.   #SusanMinot #Evening #AlanBray

A major distinction in literary works is whether a story’s plot is linear or circular. A linear plot expresses cause and effect—A leads to B leads to C, etc.. In effect, A transforms to C through the experience of B. A circular plot begins and ends in the same place, often with the main character returning to their starting point after undergoing significant experiences or changes . Transformed by experience, as it were. Evening  seems pretty circular, best B. The story is about a sixty-five year old woman, Ann, who is dying—it’s clear from the early part of the book that she’s dying; there’s no question of will she or won’t she die, only when. At the story’s beginning, in summer, Ann asks her physician, Dr. Baker, how long she has to live, he replies:   Let’s just say you won’t see the leaves change this year.   And at the end, this same Dr. Baker is called to verify Ann’s “expiration.” The story’s final scene occurs in the context of one of those imaginary dialogues Ann has with Harris Arden:   I won’t say goodbye. No, she said. Don’t. He did not come the next day, he did not come the day after. He did not come again.   Now this certainty is largely a result of making it clear that Ann has a terminal illness, but it also unburdens the reader from feeling that the author knows a secret the reader does not. It would be a very different book if Ann’s condition was vague, and if the reader was given some hope she might survive. But no. So, between the beginning and end of the story, Ann’s inner life is chronicled as she remembers incidents from her past. And this past is shown in some other sections by the narrator, and occasionally through other characters’ perspectives. And there is a present in the story, often shown the perspective of Ann’s adult children. So what are the significant experiences and changes that Ann undergoes and attains? The story covers Ann’s childhood and includes scenes from her three marriages, and scenes of her adult children facing her demise. There are scenes from the perspective of the private nurse who cares for Ann. There is even one written from Harris’ perspective in which he rationalizes his decision to stay with his fiancé, Maria, instead of being with Ann. A significant element is the death of Paul, one of Ann’s sons, and this loss seems not to be fully grieved in that it is presented briefly and in such a way that indicates unresolved shock.   Paul was barely twelve and that this had happened did not fit. It did not fit at all.   This passage occurs at the end of the two paragraphs describing how Ann learned of Paul’s death so it’s not clear whether the above passage represents her thoughts at the time she learned of his death, or her thoughts about the death looking back from the book’s present. Either way, there’s a quality of denial and numbness. But the bulk of Evening  has to do with two threads that intersect: the first is Ann’s brief love affair during a family wedding forty years before with Harris Arden, a man whom Ann later regrets losing to another woman. And there is the death of Ann’s cousin, Buddy Wittenborn, that occurs during this same wedding on the evening that Harris made mad love with Ann and then left her for good. (cad). This juxtaposition of sex and death creates an intensity for Ann as she lays dying. (Faulkner reference—no accident). The book tells us in an isolated line:   This was the last story she’d ever tell.   As we’ve mentioned, she imagines conversations with Arden whom she hasn’t seen for years (although, there is a mysterious passage early on that seems to show the real Harris showing up at the house where Ann is dying, but she’s asleep). My sense is that, although Ann was shocked by Buddy’s death, she is, after forty years, more emotionally caught up by the affair with Harris. Despite her three marriages, Harris was the man she always yearned for; the one who, at the end of her life, she thinks about the most. When Ann’s adult daughters ask her about who Harris was, as she’s been mentioning his name in her half-asleep state, she says, enigmatically:   Harris was me.   The sequence is important. Ann has passionate sex with Harris (and it is consensual, unlike another episode with another chap), Harris definitely leaves her for his fiancé. Then Ann is shown in despair over this loss. Then, she gradually learns that at the time she was lying on the beach in Harris’ arms, Buddy was accidently run over by a truck driven by Ralph Eastman (as I mentioned, this is foreshadowed early on). The young folks with Ralph desperately try to find Harris, as he is a doctor, but he is busy with Ann. So there is an element of guilt that Ann feels for taking pleasure and passion at a time of tragedy—although she really didn’t know till later about Buddy’s death. What is the transformation that Ann experiences as she shuffles through these memories of her life?   Hope had changed direction, toward the past.   This is an important, though temporary, turning point, in which Ann realizes that all her hopes are focused now on what might have been. There is no future. In a significant dialogue with the imaginary Harris, she reaches a key insight about her life:   …What else could I do? Nothing. You did the best you could. We both did. There wasn’t much of a choice, she said. We did our best. Maybe I should have done something, she said. Maybe I could have… What?… I don’t know. But something. Just not let it happen the way it did. Some things you can’t help. Think of how different it would have been, she said. You think so? Of course. I mean… She thought for a moment. I mean… What? You’re right, she said. It couldn’t have been different.   In this dialogue, she concludes that things could only happen in one way, the way that resulted in Harris marrying Maria and Ann marrying her three husbands. (not all at once). After years of thinking of what might have been, and the intermediary step of wishing she could change the past, she decides that what happened was the only possible outcome, that it’s pointless to want to change the past. She accepts death and dies. ‘Kay, till next time. #SusanMinot #Evening #AlanBray

Evening uses several styles of narration to show different experiences of time. The chapter entitled A Pale Bay begins: She kept the curtains back in the day and in the night. Her parents had slept with the shades down and on the rare occasion Ann dared enter their room it was always pitch black…Her mother wore a sleeping mask over her face cream, and earplugs. Ann’s father snored. In this section, the narration is fairly conventional and unlike other parts of the book. It is third person, simple past, and reads like a storyteller entity telling us a story from Ann’s past. It does not read like one of Ann’s recollections from her death bed. The storyteller seems to want to give the reader some context for who Ann is. This passage, which we can guess presents a time of perhaps 1940, goes on for several pages and tells a story of Ann’s childhood. After a line break, time leaps to 1954. “The smell of bacon, the kitchen door. Ann Grant was nearly knocked over by a golden retriever as she opened the screen.” This passage remains in third=person, simple past but has a different feel than the one regarding Ann’s birth family. It is more immediate; it contains a lot of dialogue which the childhood passage does not. Heavy use is made of sentence fragments. Here ’s an example from the 1954 section: You look like a painting, said Harris Arden, opening the door. So he said that sort of thing to other girls. Of course he would. Why wouldn’t he?    That last line represents Ann’s inner-ness—something that is presented more formally in the childhood section: Smells good, said her father as Ann steered him to his chair, trying to disturb as few pieces of furniture as possible. He sat down then got up immediately and picked his way out of the room as if leaning into a gale. In this passage, which represents a child Ann trying to help her drunken father, the reader has to infer Ann’s inner state of fear and worry, rather than, in the previous style, experience it more directly, as her jealousy over Harris is shown. After another line break, the story is back in the present: Her breathing was shallow The I.V. rose above her like a flagpole festooned with transparent ribbons.   Here, the narrator begins by commenting on Ann’s breathing—the narrator, not Ann because, of course, a person wouldn’t think this about herself—that "her" breathing was shallow. The section leads to an intensely subjective passage of Ann apparently experiencing a sponge bath given to her by a nurse, but her consciousness slips to remembering other experiences of being undressed: Let’s slip this off. This arm first. That’s it. A warm sponge moved over her shoulders. Strange how little people were naked. Won’t you take off your coat can I take that for you here let me thank you not at all would you mind if I undid this what are you doing This passage is reproduced as it appears in the book—without punctuation and with italics. There is another line break, and we have: Someone was sobbing down the hall in one of the guest rooms then it turned into waves. The sea, she thought, the sea…She shot herself out of a cannon and flew from the house. Here, Ann remains in the book’s present and is apparently under the effects of strong medication. She imagines herself flying free of the house and going on a magical journey through Boston to Maine. Next, she is back in 1954 amidst the wedding preparations and Harris Arden’s presence. Then, a brief passage which is probably not clear at a first reading. It shows a memory from perhaps fifteen years later—around 1960—just before Ann learns of the death of one of her sons. And then we return to 1954. The chapter continues in this fashion, using different styles to show different time periods. There is a present time passage shown from the perspective of one of Ann’s daughters and there is a passage showing a dialogue between Ann and Harris (what I’ve previously called the “he/she” dialogue): Ask me again. What? To look at you What do you mean? The way you did. We’ve discussed this style a bit already. It is mostly dialogue, unmarked in terms of the names of who is speaking. It is intensely subjective and personal and represents Ann’s innerness as she imagines a conversation with someone who is not there, someone whom she hasn’t seen for decades. The reader must imagine the characters speaking to each other as there is almost no scene setting or beats that would indicate how the characters feel, where they are, what they’re wearing, their facial and postural expressions, anything. And this is in contrast to many of the other narrative styles. Perhaps this style can be said to be “out-of-time,” meaning it could occur in almost any time after Ann and Harris met. A hallmark of Evening  is the way time is presented as being fluid. We are shown a character in the present—or technically, the recent past, as the events of Ann’s death are presented by a narrator after the fact—who time-travels around her life, from fifty-five years earlier to thirty-five years, to twenty years, etc. There is an equivalency between these different sections in that there is no strong distinction made between the book’s present and the various past times. These are not “flashbacks,” in the conventional sense of the term. There is no guidepost saying, “Now we are in the year 1954.” The guideposts that are present are the differences in style and voice that I have mentioned. Careful reading will reveal how these different styles of narration help to establish these times as distinct from each other. By careful, I mean careful, my friends. Last time, we discussed readerly and writerly texts and I “cut the diamond” by asserting that Evening  belongs to the readerly persuasion. All this time-traveling in distinct styles is a fine example—the book demands the reader work to understand. Till next week. #Evening #SusanMinot #AlanBray

This week, dear friends, we begin an exploration of a new book, Susan Minot’s 1998 novel, Evening . If one reads back of the book blurbs and plot summaries, one gathers that this story is about an older woman dying of cancer and looking back on her life, particularly her love life—not the sort of book I personally would be drawn to. However, the summary and related marketing efforts fall short of describing a beautifully written story that I believe is about time and memory. In a sense, it defies a unitary description, because it demands each reader to construct her/his own set of meanings. It was no less a human than Roland Barthes (name-dropping) who developed the distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts. Readerly texts are more common; they offer a straightforward narrative with minimal ambiguity. Meaning tends to be a given, as in “all politicians are insincere.” The reader accepts the truth of such beliefs in order to enjoy the passive reading experience. Writerly texts, on the other hand, demand active participation from the reader to construct meaning. There is ambiguity and openness, and a focus on the way the story is told—language and style, as opposed to simply conveying generally accepted information. Let’s take our old friend, the Dick and Jane stories as an example of a readerly text. The meanings in the story tend to be given. Spot is a dog, and everyone knows that dogs love to play. So Spot loves to play. Dick is a boy and boys are adventurous, so Dick is adventurous. And so on. Of course, close analysis of the readerly/writerly distinction tends to break down the conceptual either/or clarity. Any story requires the reader to make meaning; it’s just that many stories come with comfortable, pre-packaged meanings that don’t require much work. Evening  is—you guessed it—not one of these. Evening  is essentially the story of Ann, a woman in her sixties who is dying from cancer. She spends her time in bed, surrounded by her adult children, and nurse and a doctor who makes house calls (?). She is using opioid painkillers and is frequently in a twilight state of consciousness. The story is told mostly through Ann’s perspective, although there are sections from her daughters’ perspective, and even one through that of the nurse. Ann is in the present at times, but quite a bit in the past, particularly in a period when she was in her early twenties and unmarried. At a family wedding, she had an affair with a friend of the family, and the wedding was also tragically marked by the death of a cousin. Of course, it is a given in Evening that Ann will die by the end of the book, and that is what is shown—by implication. There’s no will she or won’t she die, we’re told she will up front. ‘Kay, all pretty digestible, right? You might be thinking, what’s all this Roland Barthes stuff? Huh? It is true that the basic story is unambiguous. However, the way the story is told calls for considerable work on the reader’s part. After some fifteen pages of preparation and introduction—which includes an intriguing quote from William Faulkner—the first chapter of Evening  contains three distinct sections. First, there is a conversation between two people, only identified as “he” and “she” in which these entities appear to talk about their relationship. This conversation will appear throughout the book and is never exactly defined or contextualized, leaving it up to the reader to determine who is involved. Second, there is a straightforward prose section that presents the story of a young woman named Ann who arrives at the Boston train station from New York City and is met by three young men, Ralph Eastman, Buddy Wintterborn—both of whom Ann knows well, and Harris Arden (great name), who is a stranger to her. Ralph is driving, which is a foreshadowing of later events. After three pages describing this scene, the story/narrator tells us: It was 1954 and Ann Grant was twenty-five years old. Ann meets Harris, and we are told right away that she is smitten: She felt as if she’d been struck on the forehead with a brick. (Please note—she’s not injured here; she’s metaphorically smitten by Harris). Then after a line break, a third section occurs. Here, we have apparently moved forward in time, although this is not clearly stated. It begins with a voice saying, Have you moved her? And a person named Ann opens her eyes, so was asleep before this section. She is addressed as Mrs. Lord and has a visitor, Dr. Baker. I should mention that one of the aspects of the book’s style is that quotation marks are not used—it must be inferred that characters are speaking. So we begin to make meaning of ambiguity. Probably, the Ann in 1954 and the contemporary Ann are the same person and the Ann in the third section, Ann Lord, is remembering the 1954 experience where she met Harris Arden. We might even infer that Ann is the “she” of the first section conversation, and just possibly, Harris is the “he.” (This becomes a bit clearer later on). Part of meaning making is making connections, and it makes sense that a story would be about one central character—Ann. It makes sense but is not guaranteed, my friends, but we’ve developed a working way to understand the book. After another line break, there is a new section that is occurring in the book’s present—the time of a bed-ridden Ann being visited by the doctor. This section is also in third person, simple past tense, and is largely dialogue, like the “she” “he” section. However, this section seems to be the narrator/implied author showing a conversation between Ann’s daughters and an aunt. Here we get a sense of the narrator’s voice explaining family relationships: (For clarity, I’m going to insert quotation marks). “They’ll be another break, said Aunt Grace…Aunt Grace was an unlikely ally of Ann Lord’s. Her younger brother had been Ann’s second husband.” (The context here is that Aunt Grace is expressing her belief that one of Ann’s daughters should come to see her, despite the daughter’s getting a career break). And again: “So different from his father, said Aunt Grace. Teddy was Ted Stackpole’s son. His father couldn’t stand sick people.” (Here, Aunt Grace is commenting on Ann’s son Teddy, who seems resolute in the face of his mother’s illness). Then we have a new section that begins: “She lay on her back staring up at the canopy. Her thoughts went round and round and it was like spinning staring up at the trees the way she used to do when she was young.” This section shows Ann in the story’s present experiencing memories of the day in 1954 that was earlier shown. Then: “She opened her eyes not knowing where she was. The room had gotten dark. The pain rose in her and she remembered.” (She remembers her current state of being terminally ill), Gradually, she drifts back to 1954. After another line break, she’s fully back in 1954, immersed in Harris Arden and his importance to her life. The chapter ends with another “he” “she” dialogue section. These sections have a very “present” feel, and it’s tempting to understand them as occurring in Ann’s mind as she imagines Harris being with her in the present and talking—in the present but as he was when she last saw him, a young man. ‘Kay. I think we can begin to see, among other things, how time is handled in Evening . The present and pasts of Ann’s life are equally weighted. Till next time. #Evening #SusanMinot #AlanBray

As we read and re-read Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector , we may ask ourselves, what is the book’s major theme, my bro? (This is assuming that we call ourselves my bro). An answer lies in the story’s beginning and end. As I have mentioned, the very first scene shows Billy ordering that a prosthetic mask be made to hide his wounded face. The last scene, some two hundred and seventy-six harrowing pages later, shows Billy working with Chun Ho, the woman who seemed to accept him the most in the story, in her laundry business. The implication is that they are a couple, committed to one another, and this represents a transformation for Billy, who begins the story not trusting others (except Jessie, more on this later). He and Chun Ho pass a couple of men, and Billy thinks: “I wondered what they made of what they saw; a tea-colored woman with an oval, impassive face and a man beside her whose face was a mask of another sort. In silence, these masks, then, which were turned toward them, permitted those who wore them to be regarded in the light of the bystander’s curiosity, and, quite probably, their scorn.”             Masks, best beloved. Masks are key. People hide their true selves behind masks, both literal and figurative. Masks are ubiquitous in the world, worn by everyone from the literary adventurer, Zorro, to contemporary ICE agents who wish to conceal their identities.             Billy lives an anonymous life, post-war, post-injury. His neighbors know him to be armed with “a face they cannot read.” Since Billy hides behind a mask and sometimes a veil, others are deprived of the information an intact face might provide. His mask is a protection against others seeing his true self without his permission. This true self is, in Billy’s estimation, horrible to behold.             M, the character based on Herman Melville, is fascinated by Billy’s mask, as mentioned. An irony is that in Melville’s famous Moby Dick , Ahab exhorts his men to “strike through the mask,” meaning get at the truth. A further irony, of course, is that Billy is hiding his true intentions from M, in order to manipulate M’s feelings, both of being against slavery and of being a failure, although this “masking” becomes more and more difficult for Billy to maintain as the story progresses. His strong emotions about Jessie—and in a parallel story, Chun Ho, are revealed to the reader, and the women accept him.             Jessie and Chun Ho—the two female characters who Billy is intimate with—apparently in more ways than one. Sex with them feels genuine to Billy. Jessie is described as a beautiful and elegant prostitute, a Creole woman with elaborate tattoos (Queequeg? anyone). A curiosity of the story is that Billy never seems to question her apparent affection for him, that is, why would this woman be so interested in him sexually? He does pay for her affections, yet her behavior seems to be more enthusiastic than money can buy. Billy and the reader learn that Jessie hides her own self behind a mask of beauty and sexuality.             Chun Ho is the Chinese American woman who Billy pays to wash his clothes (that is her business). There’s probably some kind of metaphor here for clothes washing representing Billy removing his mask, which he does, allowing Chun Ho to give him a bath. And this leads eventually to a scene of eroticism! A wet scene, my friends. Everyone gets wet. Chun Ho hides herself behind language, not knowing English well, and what the story often describes as her “mask” of indecipherable facial features. Perhaps for cultural reasons, she reveals herself very gradually, and Billy is smitten with her. Her young children call Billy “gui” which we are told means ghost-man in Mandarin, and ghosts are a related theme. Billy learns that the Confederates during the war refer to him as a ghost who kills The story of The Night Inspector  is essentially about deception, a grand double-cross, if you will. The protagonist Billy, and Jessie, must hide their true intentions to achieve their goals. SPOILER ALERT! Jessie involves Billy in a scheme to bring formerly enslaved children to New York City from Florida in order, she tells him, to free them. His role is to provide money and to enlist M, who is a U.S. customs inspector and will help by providing legal permission for the ship to land the children in New York harbor. Billy also enlists the help of Adam, a former slave who is familiar with the New York waterfront, telling both he and M that they are performing a mission of mercy. Billy believes this; another related theme in the story is that of children being menaced by bad adults. However, Jessie tricks them all, betraying the trust that Billy placed in her. The children are being brought north to be slaves, possibly sexual slaves, and Jessie and her allies will profit from this arrangement. Things go horribly wrong when Jessie gives the children laudanum to make them sleep during the long voyage; by mistake, she gives them too much and they die. Billy winds up feeling betrayed and responsible for betraying M and Adam. Of course, when faced with problems, violence is his usual recourse, and he takes bloody revenge on all who wronged him. At this point in the story, those who matter to him—M, Adam, Sam, Jessie, and Chun Ho—know his true nature. More could be written about this complex book, but all good things must come to an end (is that true?). Next week, we’ll begin a new story, Susan Minot’s Evening . Till then. My bro. #FrederickBusch #TheNightInspector #AlanBray

So, best beloved, who and/or where is the implied author in Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector ?   The who? Long time readers of this blog may remember how I’ve pondered this concept in regard to other stories. The idea of the implied author, as originally set forth by Wayne Booth, is that in addition to a book’s narrator and the real, human author, readers may experience a third entity in a story, the implied author. The implied author is the assumed creator of the story’s narrative choices, ideas and style, and being sensitive to this entity can reveal how a story constructs meaning and how it positions the reader. If a real author, in this case Frederick Busch, has published other texts (he has), each one may have a separate implied author. Finally, the implied author is not an objective feature of a story, like the names of the characters, but a subjective, individual choice that each reader makes, i.e. each reader may hear a “different drummer” when it comes to identifying implied author. This is unnecessarily intellectual. Stop right now. What about this particular story? The Night Inspector ’s narrator is Billy Bartholomew; he tells the story in a first person, simple past narrative that, as we have said, makes minimally marked leaps in time. As M, one of the characters, says, “We live in several moments, several places, at once.” The book’s “real” author is Frederick Busch, who one could learn about in a biography. One might imagine that he was a war veteran with experience of violence, that he was familiar with human emotions of hatred, grief, and the desire for revenge. It’s clear he was a fine writer.   Are all of Mr. Busch’s books the same in terms of use of time, historical focus, and style? No. Let’s compare one of Mr. Busch’s short stories, Are We Pleasing You Tonight ? published in 2000. The Night Inspector  came out in 1999. In Are We… , the narrator is Peter, a restaurant owner who speaks in first person, simple past tense, implying that he is looking back on a story and telling it. So far, then, this Busch chap sat at his keyboard and wrote a short story and a novel with the same structural features. The characters are all American and literate. Sounds like this implied author thing you’re going on about is the same in both stories. Very well. Wait! my friends. Stop! —as the other guy said. The language of the two pieces differs. As mentioned, in The Night Inspector , contractions of English speech are rarely used, imparting a nineteenth-century feel to the prose. Are We…  contracts a lot: “;it’s a gorgeous wine. So’s the Arneis.” This usage gives the story a modern feel. French language phrases are peppered through Are We… : “daube Aixoise, ca va, café filtre,” and numerous names of wine. And this seems appropriate usage for the owner of a French restaurant. In contrast, The Night Inspector  makes use of many nineteenth-century slang terms: the bald-headed hermit, fizz and sizzle, and of course, the ornate vocabulary of the character M. M—a fictional character based on the real Herman Melville, represents a major difference in the two texts. Are We…  is situated in the recent past and does not refer to real historical characters or events. Night Inspector does, with extensive passages referring to the American Civil War and the real writer Melville recreated as a major character. As mentioned, the concept of time is handled in different ways. In Night Inspector . time jumps between paragraphs with no change of tense. In Are We… , the time of the story stays primarily in the present but when it does shift to the past, it is heavily marked: The protagonist, Peter, goes to the back door of his restaurant and smokes a cigarette. Then, he apparently recalls events of that day’s morning. “At eight in the morning, in the kitchen of my house, four miles away…I’d made the café filtre  and opened The New York Times .” There follows several paragraphs of remembering. Then, a new paragraph; “I put the cigarette out against the wall…” So we see that Are We…  uses a more typical style of marking leaps in time by changes in verb tense.   Wait, wait. You’ve proved your point in this snooze-fest—the two texts by the same author are different. So what? They’re two different texts! That is the point. They are different but are written by the same author. The theory of the implied author is that the human author creates a different persona to write each story she/he writes. This persona guides the reader’s perspective, emotions, and understanding, often by aligning them with a character, viewpoint, or theme. The narrator of Night Inspector , Billy, is a violent man who sets out to use people for his own ends, feeling, I believe, entitled to do so because of his wartime injuries. However, because of the way the story shows him, the reader cares about this possibly unsympathetic character as he transforms into a better person, albeit still murderous. The way the book does this—the way the implied author does this—would require considerable analysis, however one clue is simply to observe how close the story sticks to Billy. The closeness makes the reader care because for all his faults, Billy comes across as intensely human. Another way is the pervasive theme in the story of trying to save children in peril. Are We…  makes use of a similar strategy; the story stays close to Peter and shows how, beneath his blasé exterior and his condescension toward his clientele, he is struggling with considerable pain over a loss, barely keeping himself together. He overhears this passage, which mirrors his own self: “…every time, in spite of my best efforts, I remember the dishonesty and disloyalty. How can I forgive them? And I try. You compartmentalize your life, and soon you get locked in one of those compartments. And I was locked in another…” Till next time. #Frederick Busch #The Night Inspector #Alan Bray

Before we go further in our explorations of Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector , let’s comment on the structure of the book. If we must. The Night Inspector  is written in first person simple past tense. It begins: “’No mouth,’ I told him.” This implies the writing is occurring at a future point in time, and that the writer is centering the narrative on himself. By contrast, “’No mouth,’ he tells him,” would imply a writer showing action by another entity in the present. Oh, well then, it’s auto-fiction. Incorrect. Auto-fiction is a genre that combines autobiography/memoir and fiction. Yes, but— Auto-fiction generally features a protagonist whose life story is similar to the author. Frederick Busch was a distinguished writer and teacher of fiction who died in 2006. Billy Bartholomew is an American Civil War veteran, a sharpshooter whose face was shot off in battle, and, although it is not indicated, would have died around 1925. (if he was real). ‘Kay?   Why is this significant? Central components of style, tense and perspective establish time and character. It’s easy to take them for granted. We begin a work of fiction and orient our reading by understanding these markers intuitively. We are trained to do so as we learn to read. The Night Inspector  is written as a fictional memoir with the protagonist, Billy Bartholomew, looking back from an unspecified present on actions that occurred chiefly in 1867 but also earlier, before and during and after the Civil War, and in different places. Thus, the narrator says, “Did you know that in my time there were miniature broughams drawn through Central Park by teams of goats?” By “in my time,” he is referring to the time of the story, which, as said, is a fifteen-year period. (I’m estimating). Time and place are very fluid. Shifts are not always marked in a traditional sense by line or paragraph breaks. The first scene, which occurs in the present time of the story, is followed by a scene which goes back say, five years, and recounts Billy’s early days as a Union sharpshooter. The place is unmarked, but we can certainly infer that it is not New York City In this case, there is a paragraph break; however the tense does not change. The new section begins: “I did hear of several who used a buffalo gun…” The reader is expected to make sense of this, knowing that we first encounter a badly wounded Billy being fitted with a prosthetic device, so this first scene must have occurred after he began life as a soldier. Other time shifts are marked even less. Thus, the scene describing Billy’s early days as a soldier ends with: “I was, finally, a hunter, and I killed them.” Without anything more than a new paragraph, we next read: “At Yale College, where I was to study theology ancient and modern…” This scene occurs farther back, pre-war., and continues backwards in time and in yet again a different place: “Although I must say, Uncle Sidney Cowper did not dislike me…” This reference to the time before Billy attended Yale probably occurs around 1850, when Billy’s father has died and his brother, Cowper, moved into the family, residing in rural New York.   We return to the present time and place of the story with no more than a new paragraph: “At Yale College, I learned enough to learn enough, and I was therefore situated in Cheerie’s Chop House on an evening in 1867…” And this scene shows Billy’s first encounter with M. So, in the course of four pages, we the reader are expected to travel in space and time, the one constant being we experience everything through the perspective of Billy. And, I think it’s fair to say that with a little effort, we always know where we are in time and space. Really. Where are we? However, the effect is intentionally dizzying. It forces us to cling for dear life to Billy, who is, let’s say, at least a compromised narrator. He is, in the course of the book, a man who commits great violence, although he is ultimately redeemed.  What else can be said about the story’s structure and style? The prose is distinctive in that Billy’s narration does not use contractions, and this gives the story an historical accuracy. Contractions are used in quoted speech, although sparingly. Contractions in English began appearing in writing dated from the sixteenth-century, although they were certainly used before that in speech. They were often regarded as a marker of education, and that is why Billy’s non-use of contractions—rarely even in his quoted speech, indicates he is educated. This is also true of M. The standard for literature during the nineteenth century was not to use contractions except to indicate that a character was less educated. I think too, that the lack of contractions in The Night Inspector gives a seriousness to the characters. This is a serious book, meaning there’s not much comedy to be found. The tone is serious, my friends. Finally, the text is peppered with expressions like: “although I must say,” “thank you one and all,” and “I reckoned” —all recognizable as common during the nineteenth century. Kay, till next time.

Frederick Busch’s novel “The Night Inspector” begins with the protagonist, Billy Bartholomew, directing a craftsman in the construction of a mask. Billy, as mentioned, is a Civil War veteran who was horribly disfigured—the skin on his face is gone, as well as his lips and part of his nose, and he wants a mask to hide these injuries. The mask had slits for eyes, nostrils and mouth, and is constructed of pasteboard. Why is this significant? you ask. Why are you talking about this? Well. It leads we the readers to Herman Melville. In Melville’s “Moby Dick,” Captain Ahab says, “All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks.” Whoa! Billy Bartholomew first encounters Herman Melville through Mr. Melville’s writing, at Yale where Billy is a student. We can speculate that Billy read “Moby Dick,” because he says so, as well as “Pierre, or the Ambiguities.” Again, Billy tells us he does when he introduces himself to the famous author: “I have read the Ambiguities and its analysis of your profession. I have read the Whale, I think it a blinding brilliance, the epitaph of our economy.” Bill observes Melville before he meets him: “I had noticed M on Broadway as I walked the town at dawn and as he was going to his job. I knew his visage from a Boston paper. Then I had observed him; I had, during the War, been excellent at seeing how a man moved through his terrain.” And then Billy finds himself in the same restaurant where Melville is eating: “M dined that night at eight…I stood. I was wearing the mask, not yet the veil. I walked slowly across the sawdust of the wooden floor…I moved into the man’s soft, myopic vision. Even his beard looked soft…”Sir,” I said. He looked up and squinted, as though I was dozens of yards away. I could study the pores of his strangely youthful skin.” This is the Herman Melville of 1867, not the younger man who had written two extremely successful seafaring novels, “Typhoo” and “Omoo,” and then in 1851, published what is now regarded as his masterpiece, “Moby Dick,” which was a critical and popular failure at the time. By 1867, Melville, who had several children and a wife, had largely stopped writing and regarded himself as a failure. He worked at the U.S. Customs as an inspector of goods arriving by ship on the Hudson River. Melville, or M, as Billy calls him, is depicted as a man who is not appreciated for his literary genius, or much of anything. He is bitter and alcoholic. He seeks some kind of meaning in his life particularly after the death of his son, Malcom, a death M blames himself for. Billy seems to appeal to him, as Billy appreciates and recognizes his work. M is also shown as being fascinated by Bill’s mask. In the reality of this work of fiction, we can imagine that the man who wrote this: “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” would be amazed to encounter a man who wears a real pasteboard mask. Billy writes: “…he had become enchanted, I thought, by my mask. He would have to be. He had spent his squandered or cursed career as an author in writing men who struck through the mask or curtain or surface of things not to do harm by the striking per se , but to learn what lay on the other side.” There is great irony here because, behind his mask, Billy does not experience himself as an example of humanity at its best. On the contrary, he believes himself to be a pariah, an outcast, a human whose essence frightens others, a murderer. Billy, I think, fears that if Melville really saw what lay beneath Billy’s mask, he would be horrified.  Billy and M become increasingly entangled with one another; M’s son wishes to join the military, and M asks Billy if he can provide his son with a gun. M buys a pistol from Billy, gives it to his son Malcolm, who then shoots himself with it under ambiguous circumstances, i.e., the death is not clearly a suicide. M and Billy are grief struck and blame themselves. Billy, as mentioned, is involved with a prostitute named Jessie, who involves him in a venture to bring formerly enslaved children out of the south to New York. We will address this adventure at length in a later post, but it is relevant here to say that Billy involves M, who is a willing participant in an illegal but morally correct action. The climax of the story involves M witnessing who Billy really is, an extremely vengeful and violent man who destroys clearly evil people. In effect, M strikes through the mask and sees the truth on the other side. Till next week, friends.

The present time of “The Night Inspector” occurs in the period after the American Civil War, 1867, although it also covers the time of the war itself, as well as the time before and just after. The present takes place in New York City’s lower Manhattan. However, the book is not a genre piece of historical fiction. Certainly, much care was taken by the author to present the historical past with verisimilitude (there’s a fine word). Mr. Busch draws on an expert knowledge base about the war and about the conditions of life in post-war, 1860s New York City. But this is a story driven by the richly detailed lives of the characters, their memories, hopes and dreams. They are characters whom one could find in any time and space. The story concerns a Union veteran of the war, Billy Bartholomew, who was horribly wounded and who wears a leather facemask to hide his disfigurement. He was a sharpshooter, an “assassin,” as many of his comrades call him.  They shun him for his craft of concealing himself up a tree and shooting Confederate soldiers who venture near. He often was assigned particular men (and women) to kill, stalking them very successfully till his wounding. Before the war he attended Yale. (He must have had good SAT scores.) Billy is a troubled man; he experiences traumatic memories of killing his victims. Due to the nature of his activities, he was not seen as heroic. His horrible wounding (his face was shot off) adds to his sense of being an outcast, and at the book’s beginning, he lives a lonely existence in a squalid room, walking the streets of lower Manhattan at night and sleeping away the day. His only companion is a prostitute named Jessie, but in the course of the book, he meets a character he calls “M” (more on this to come) and eventually re-connects with an old army friend, Sam Mordechai. He saves an African-American man, Adam, from a beating and tries to befriend him. Much is made in the story about the mask Billy wears, how emotions are difficult to conceal but a mask does the job. There is a connection between Billy’s real mask and the idea of “striking through the mask” in Melville’s “Moby Dick.” More on this to come. Last time, I wrote about the phenomenon of re-reading, about the differences between a first and second reading of a story. As I’ve begun re-reading “The Night Inspector,” I can offer some relevant thoughts. Overall, I’d say a second reading is slower. I find myself taking time to appreciate sentences and ideas. The first time through, I was focused more on figuring out the point of the story. And this is very much in line with theories of reading, (isn’t that convenient) specifically with the first reading being associated with mimesis, fitting the story to the real world, and the second, what the story means to the reader. (Was I trying to fit my experience to the theory? I don’t know, best B.) Foreshadowing is apparent the second time around. On page two, we find the following in a paragraph in which Billy is writing about the difficulties of loading a heavy rifle while up a tree: “Never consider a feat undone if the reward is of a size. We move what we must, whether barrels of meat or kegs of dead flesh, when at the farther end of the transaction there lies a crate of dollars.” What first appears as poetic allusion here becomes, once the whole thing has been read, a premonition of the climax. The first time through, I didn’t really focus that much on this, the second, it leaped out and smacked me like the flipper of a great white whale (was that really necessary?). The point is that what at first seems metaphor becomes real barrels and kegs. By the way, you say. Doesn’t the story have to do with the famous author Herman Melville? That’s what you keep hinting at).. Yes, shipmate, it do. The story does involve the real human, Herman Melville, makes use of real events in his life, fictionalized them, and treats him as a character in the story. Billy refers to him as “M,” and Melville refers to everyone as “Shipmate.” Interesting. Yes, we will get there. In a similar way, the first scene that involves Billy’s paramour, Jessie, introduces a crucial plot point that the story eventually resolves. And this was immediately clear to me the second time through. However, the first time, I did not see it. The idea of Jessie enlisting Billy’s help to rescue children seemed important, but it was not clear how important it was. I was intensely curious about the story and wondered if it was more a tale of recovery from wartime trauma than something based in the present. Despite frequent leaps to the past, the story is firmly in the present. This brings me to a critical point. Around page fifty, the character of Herman Melville says, “We live in several moments, several places, at once.” This is how time is handled in the book, not as consisting of a present from which the characters “flash-back” to the past. The distinct time periods in the story, particularly Billy’s experience of the war, are equally weighted with the story’s present in terms of immediacy. What about Melville? my bro. Let’s get into Melville next time. Till then.   Housekeeping: As it’s been a while since I’ve been posting, some subscriber’s emails are not correct. Please re-subscribe if necessary.

It has been a long break, best beloved. A long time since I’ve set forth on a voyage toward a book. Over a year ago, I signed off, vowing to return, and so I have. The number of readers who have visited my site in the interim has overwhelmed me. Thank you. After such a break, I should take some space to state again what this project is about. I am a writer and a reader. When I like a work of fiction, I want to think about why it works for me. So, in these pages, I write about novels, sometimes short stories, that I like—I have no interest in writing snarky putdowns of books I dislike. Those I do not read. I generally write about books I have read more than once, and I may describe endings in such a way that a warning of “spoiler alert” will be warranted now and then. I want to look at the structure of a book, how time is handled, the style, the development of the characters. Why read a book twice? you ask. Some books do not need a second read. Stories that are strongly focused toward an ending, like mysteries and thrillers, may give their greatest pleasures the first time, when there’s suspense, less so when the suspense is gone. Recently, I’ve been reading a book called “Re-Reading,” by Matei Calinescu, which presents some interesting ideas about the differences between a first-time read vs. re-reading. Reading a text for the first time is distinct from re-reading because the first time, you do not know the ending. Re-reading on the other hand, allows you to appreciate the story more as a whole made of parts, the chapters, sections, paragraphs, etc. Knowing how a story ends allows you to understand how the parts go together. The first time one reads a story is more of a linear, line-by-line experience of “where is this going?” In recent weeks, I’ve read several books for the first time, including the one I want to talk about today. I found myself intrigued by not knowing the ending and wondering what it would be. This curiosity, along with the quality of the writing and the strong characters, kept me going. Of course, this pre-supposes that one is reading a fiction that has that classic structure of characters transforming—where are they headed? What will become of them? What is the character arc? Because a first-time reading is more linear, i.e., step by step, we are more conscious of time when we read it. We may look ahead, checking to see the total number of pages in the story and how many remain. “There are one-hundred seventy-three more pages, when am I going to find out what happens? It’s going to take days.” Are particular books “worth” re-reading vs. others that are not? If so, how do the “re-reading” candidates indicate that status to the reader? We must attempt to answer these important questions, my friends. Maybe not today. Let’s look at a particular book, Frederick Busch’s 1999 novel “The Night Inspector.” But in regard to the above remarks, I have only read this book once (so far). And yes, especially in the second half, I was hooked by the plot and read on aggressively to find out what happens. A different experience for the old maestro, who has re-read Anna Karenina five times! (Stay away from train tracks!) Also, in my discussion of this book, I will not reveal the ending. Gasps. Or maybe I will. Ha! This is definitely a book for those of the adult persuasion. At regular intervals, it portrays graphic acts of violence and sexual acts. Be warned, gentle souls. More gasps. In “Re-reading,” Mr. Calinescu describes the claim that all reading is re-reading, that the idea of an innocent reading, devoid of pre-conceptions, is, well, a fiction. There are always reasons why we select a book to read. A friend may recommend it, telling us how enjoyable it was. If we’re somewhat oppositional, we may choose to read a book because someone pans it. We may read a review that recommends we run to read the story under discussion. We may have read other books by an author, appreciated them, and want more. If a story deals with real historical events that we are familiar with, we may read in order to see how the author handles them. All these cases provide us with pre-conceptions about the book in hand. However, Mr. Calinsecu also presents the idea that there is a distinction between a first and second read. A first read involves deciphering the single, linear text and understanding how it refers to the real world. (mimesis, if you will. We will!). A re-reading involves interpretation of sub-text, a deeper understanding of the book’s meanings. Semiosis, best B. A more personal process; instead of trying to fit a story to reality, we attempt to fit the story to our own system of meaning and belief. Well. The clock on the clubhouse wall says it’s time to stop. In all seriousness, I try to keep these posts around one thousand words so that I don’t get a lot of complaint. Next time, we will get more into The Night Inspector. I will begin a second reading and offer thoughts on the difference between first and second. Till then.

Last week, we began taking a look at Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? I had intended to continue with that fine story this time but I've been kind of busy, best B. I started this blog back in April of 2020 as a pandemic project, and it's been a big success for me. In that time, I think I've only taken one week off and had maybe two delays, so yay! But today, I'm going to have to hit the proverbial PAUSE button and work on some other things. I'll be back. Till then, thank you and happy holidays!