Not the least of which is that readers must engage in the very activity the novel is about in order to appreciate the glorious mechanics of it all.

Namely, tinker.

Before we poke and fiddle at this claim, let’s get our bearings first.

George, 80, is a trader and repairer of antique clocks.He is dying in his home in New England, surrounded by his wife, children and grandchildren. As his body fails, he begins to hallucinate. His consciousness is “a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.”

During this great unraveling, George fixes his attention on a single shifting tile, his dad, whom George hasn’t permitted himself to think about since his dad abandoned the family years ago. Bodies and minds after all are not the only things that deliquesce. “Everything is made to perish,” including the clothes we sew, the homes we build, the friendships we make—and most poignantly the families we form. They all “leak” out of existence, eventually.

The novel, then, has as its emotional core the pain of abandonment and the beauty and anguish of impermanence.

One of the most striking features of the novel is Harding’s boldly inventive style. He changes narrative modes throughout in kaleidoscopic fashion. He alternates story lines between George, our protagonist, and George’s dad Howard and even George’s grandfather the pastor. Although it’s tempting to see three distinct story lines here, they’re really three strands that form a single thread of patrimony.

What wonderful things our forebears bequeath us!

A signed copy of The Scarlett Letter, a manuscript of free verse poetry, dispositions, proclivities and clichés, i.e., “it’s not man’s lot to be at ease in this world.”

A pastor’s love of words is transformed into a son’s love of poetry which in turn is transformed into a grandson’s love of antique horology.

In addition to alternating story lines, Harding shifts first- and third-person points of view and relies on interpolations of seemingly unrelated texts. In tinkers you’ll find long passages from The Reasonable Horologist by the Rev. Kenner Davenport, 1783, lengthy selections from a prose poem about nature, a substantial fragment from a sermon, and even instructions on how to build a nest using your fingers as beaks.

If these formal challenges weren’t enough, Harding deploys two systems of tropes throughout the novel. On the one hand, there’s the language of mechanism, of gears, cogs and springs of antique clockwork and the language of dynamism and chaos, on the other, of swirling thoughts, feelings and perceptions. Although these tropes threaten to work at cross purposes, ultimately they do not.

The closing two paragraphs of tinkers are as moving as anything I’ve ever read. As readers of tinkers will appreciate, Harding’s universe is a great “cataclysm of making and unmaking,” where buildings dilapidate and memories fade. Its purpose is to return hands, teeth, elbows and eyes to their starting point. At the moment of death, George is reunited with his dad in memory (a stunning Christmas scene that’s perfectly done) and reunited with him in death as he returns to the “unknowable froth.”

Paul Harding deserves to be warmly congratulated on a remarkable piece of writing.

The English Major

In True North, we’re treated to a phenomenology of consciousness that spans three decades. The story is told in the voice of a thoughtful, privileged yet aggrieved man named David who is haunted by his family’s history of predatory behavior, both sexual and economic. His growth and development from a state of natural egoism to a moral point of view is the subject of the novel.

Like any thinking and feeling person, David experiments with the pleasures and moral properties of physical labor, trout fishing and reading. In Truth North texts are everywhere: old newspaper clippings, magazines, journals, letters and manuscripts.

Because Interpolations aspires to literary appreciation, let’s take a look at the verse and prose fiction that grace the pages of True North.

A Jane Austen novel makes a brief cameo when David’s sister slams it shut with these words, “We come from a long line of snotty criminals on both sides. Dad’s an alcoholic pervert and mother’s a goofy pill head.”

David reads The Possessed for extra credit in high school and recalls the scene where Krylov bites Stavrogin’s ear in a dark room. David gobbles up Brothers Karamazov, too, and realizes he’s “all three brothers plus the idiot half brother in one” when he only desires to be the holy Alyosha.

Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Travers is mentioned fondly because Travers is a Michigan supreme court justice, mentioned fondly not because he’s a judge but because he’s from Michigan, where the novel is largely set.

David reads The Stranger but is stifled what with his “propensity to fall into characters until I was close to suffocation.”

In TV and music, David sees nothing but soma ala Brave New World. He struggles to read “the ponderous Thomas Mann” and prefers Cather and Faulkner over Hemingway because of Papa’s depictions of war. He finds Robert Frost tedious even though his mother likes him, and thinks Lolita “the best revelation of its nature,” “its” being the obsessive fixation of older men on young girls. David reads Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos, Henry Miller’s Sexus, and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, a reminder that “even great artists have to write a little pornography to make money.”

The pages of Dante are turned, so too are the pages of Chaucer, Whitman and Longfellow who “cribbed” Hiawatha from Schoolcraft and Louis Agazssiz. David gives a long circular read of Ginsberg’s Howl; he “gets” Wordsworth’s Prelude but not the “inscrutable” Rilke, and ingests Melville, Trollope, Chekhov and a bloke named Isaac Singer.

But the novels that really irk David are the one’s that reflect his nature like mirrors. He finds Cather in the Rye intolerable because of the “insufferable resemblance” he bears to the novel’s preening wimp of a hero. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man grates David because his “obsessions were similar to the young men who wished to become novelists or poets.” And he is nagged by Don Quixote because of the “disturbing similarity to his own project,” namely writing an ecological and economic history of his family’s malfeasance as a form of penance.

Happily our hero eventually finds his true north. But how he does so can only be learned by cracking open the novel.

Just like David would.

As for my favorite reads of 2011, here they are:

Farmer by Jim Harrison, a slim novel filled with beautiful descriptions of rural life. A cowhide rug is to Farmer what liver is to Portnoy’s Complaint. Except only a wee bit different.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates explores inauthenticity without employing this jargonistic term. Thankfully.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. As I said in a comment to Karyn on her very fine blog, Whitman’s poetry is so grand I don’t care if it’s verse and not prose fiction. It can even be termed statistics for all I care.

Herzog by Saul Bellow solves the problem of existence. This can’t be shown. Only felt.

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis is an American odyssey rife with humor. Portis’ storytelling voice is his great, abiding gift to anyone who cares to read him.

Embers by Sándor Márai is simply exquisite. Five, 10, 15 years from now, I will remember 2011 as the year I read Embers. Just fantastic.

Paradoxically Foe by Coetzee and Vanity Fair by Thackeray make honorable mention precisely because I only enjoyed them retrospectively and well after the fact.

Although I haven’t mentioned non-fiction on Interpolations before, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is a very fine book. He argues that a low-fat, high-carb diet is unhealthy because it leads to insulin resistance, obesity and the diseases of civilization. For brief articles by Taubes, I direct you here and there.

Have a great holiday season!

These words come from Frost, of course. After Apple-Picking is a favorite poem of mine. One summer as I languished at my girlfriend’s parent’s house—a grim unfortunate affair where I wallowed in my own muck—I spent the morning reading Moby Dick and the afternoon memorizing lines of Frost. I moved among the oaks and chaparral distractedly; I petted the wet nose of a cow; and a single line insinuated itself into my mind forever.

I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired.

There they are again, those wonderful words. I’m tempted to greet them as if to say, Why hello, you surprised me again after all these years. An unexpected bloom from a seed planted long ago. Thank goodness for the fecundity of even blighted soil.

I’m not overtired of life like Frost’s apple farmer. But I am overtired of reading and thinking, and writing about my reading and thinking. In particular I’m tired of plots. They bore me to tears.

After my bit on Embers, I vowed never to write about them again. Ever.

So imagine my huff when, after tweeting, ”A suspicion dawns—J. Harrison is an underappreciated stylist. Proof: Farmer,” Amateur Reader tidily responds, “Write up Farmer for me. It’s short. I’ll read it.” Harrumph.

Adventures in the profane

I really enjoyed Farmer a lot and think it’s a brilliant stylistic gem; I respect and admire Tom a lot, too. But I absolutely refuse to utter one bloody word about plot except to say that our 43-year old protagonist who is a farmer and a teacher crushes his childhood sweetheart’s dreams by conducting an intense sexual affair with his 17-year old student. He hungers for adventures in the profane. What else do you need to know? Not you, Tom, but you, generic you?

One of the best aspects of Farmer is the writing. It’s filled with wonderful descriptions of farm life, of hunting and fishing, and of the constant roiling reality of sex. Harrison delivers sharply drawn images and surprising insights, from “long circular howls” (i.e., of a coyote not a 17-year old student, mind) to the Proustian remark that “Sickness often creates a space to live in, freeing the mind from the habitual if only for a day or two.”

I appreciate the utter lack of moralism in the novel, too. Love and duty, sex and passion, and of course infidelity—we are nominally monogamous animals after all—are facts of nature. These things happen as a matter of course like a hard frost that flattens fields and orchards. There’s little or no use in complaining about the ways of the world. About the farmer’s selfish and hurtful actions, a neighbor says, “It was a bad thing to do and our lives are filled with bad things.”

Intersection of books and life

But the best thing about Farmer by far is the odd synchronicity that happened last Saturday while I was reading the book on the front stoop of my house in the warm sun. Here’s the passage; the “him” is our farmer-protagonist.

An idea that fixed him to one spot was that life was a death dance…. The ocean creatures he read of illustrated the point so bleakly. To devour or be devoured. But their sure instincts kept them alive as long as possible, as did those of the wild ducks before him, or even the geese. Even the brown trout, the simplest of the trout family, were mindful of the waterbirds, the king fisher and the heron….

Just then a red-tailed hawk dropped from an elm on a squirrel on the street front. Something happened because the squirrel was firmly clutched in the hawk’s talons and then suddenly was free scampering to the other side of the street, its tiny claws clicking frantically on the asphalt. The squirrel hid under a truck dead center and flattened itself to the ground and would cower there for an hour. Miffed, the hawk took flight and several crows a block away gave chase and harassed their quarry in a deafening chatter.

Sure instincts make geometers and do-gooders of us all.

Some books are enjoyable to read but not to think about. Others are unenjoyable to read but pleasant to think about. And some are both. These are the elect. Sándor Márai’s novel achieves eminence by combining disarmingly simple prose with endless interpretive possibilities. Endless.

Welcome to Embers

They flicker everywhere — in the hearth, pulsing faintly. They gutter in candle sconces on the wall. They flare in hearts, bodies, and minds. They erupt in the agony of war. And then they turn to ash, eventually.

The year is 1940. Henrik, 75, is an old aristocrat in Europe. He receives a letter from Konrad, a beloved friend he hasn’t seen since Konrad betrayed him 41 years ago. Henrik sends a coach to retrieve him for dinner. They greet each other and repair to the dining hall.

“I ask you to listen to me,” Henrik says. He gives a stunning recapitulation of their lives. Every major event is included in its proper order, from childhood onwards, right up to the fateful day 41 years ago, when Konrad, on an early morning hunt, raises his weapon to kill Henrik but forgoes his shot; and dinner later that night, when Henrik’s wife, Krisztina, blanches at her husband’s presence and talks to Konrad about the tropics; and Konrad’s flight the next day from Europe to the tropics; and Henrik’s discovery of Krisztina’s diary only years later after her death.

Wound, waiting, revenge

This extraordinary scene begins in the evening as light bleeds into darkness and ends in the morning as dark bleeds into lightness and culminates with Henrik’s burning question, “Did you and Krisztina collude in a plan to kill me?”

Before Konrad can answer, Henrik reveals Kristina’s diary bound in yellow velvet and sealed with wax, unbroken and unread all these years. It’s assumed to contain the truth.

“Would you like us to read Krisztina’s message together?” asks Henrik.

“No,” says Konrad.

Henrik throws the diary into the embers of the fire and is consumed.

About the other question, “Will you give me an answer?” asks Henrik.

“No, I shall no longer answer that question either,” says Konrad, implying he would have had Henrik preserved the diary.

Silence is eloquent

Embers is a deeply puzzling work, with its play of light and dark, speech and utterance, presence and absence. Oppositions are often entangled. One term is not always clearly distinguishable from the other.

There’s something fundamentally unknowable about people, about the essential truth of who they are. For their intentions are often hidden or unclear or uncertain. Not only to the outside observer but to the very observer whose intention pulses, flickers, and gutters in his own mind or heart.

Because the mystery of love and friendship is the major theme of Embers, Márai is right to end the novel on an unanswered (or answerable) question. The reader is left blinking in a state of incomprehension.

As mystery is part of the content and meaning of life, so it is part of the content and meaning of Embers, too.

“I ain’t never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row,” says Mack, a lovable vagrant and well-intentioned swindler.

“I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about,” he adds.

In addition to chapter headings, Mack wants good clean honest dialogue, too, the kind that lets readers see what characters look like from the way they talk.

Steinbeck, with his gift for dialogue, certainly obliges on this front. It’s easy to hear the different qualities of men at work in their speech. ”Maybe that’s what he was afraid of,” said Doc. “Lee wrote to me about it. I couldn’t advise him — I was too far away — so he was safe.”

“You can’t never find out what a Chinks got on his mind…” said Mack. “Why do you suppose he done it…? It was those goddamn movies that done it.”

Once or twice Steinbeck loses control of Mack who, inexplicably, sings a Shakespearean song: “Doc, let’s concealment like a worm in the bud feed on his damask cheek.” Hardly plausible but at least we know something’s eating Doc, our protagonist.

Set in Monterey, California, Doc is a marine biologist and a kind and intelligent man. He returns to Cannery Row after the war and discovers that its quirky denizens have changed—and that he’s changed, too. He’s lonely and restless and discontent. He feels himself a failure—he’s without a woman, and an idea for a scientific paper is stuck in his head, and won’t be knocked loose.

Like Cannery Row, the action of Sweet Thursday is advanced by a simple mechanism: Doc’s friends want to do him a good turn, so they throw him a party, but things go terribly and comically awry. Steinbeck offers a very slight complication to this mechanism. Although there’s one party, there are two groups of friends trying to achieve different goals. One group is raising money to buy him a microscope so he can get to work on his paper, while the other group presents Suzy, a sweet, stubborn prostitute, as his bride so he can find love. The quest to unify mind and body results in double trouble.

Although Cannery Row is a better novel than Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck does make an interesting use of place and location, and the activities commonly associated with them—the grocery store where food and beer are bought; Western Biological Laboratories where science happens; the Palace Flophouse where the homeless sleep and tell stories; and the Bear Flag where men and prostitutes have sex. Not at home in the world, Doc drifts uneasily between these places, confused.

Of all the locations in Cannery Row, the most intriguing one is the old abandoned boiler. That’s where Suzy takes up residence to reinvent herself. And that’s where Doc finally courts her in earnest. Unlike other places in Cannery Row, the boiler is unique because it’s not associated with any characteristic activities.

It’s set apart from them. Like a chrysalis where one become who one is.

As both Suzy and Doc discover.