Small Things Like These (2021) - Claire Keegan

 Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a difficult book to review without inadvertently straying into spoiler territory almost immediately. It comes in at fewer than 130 pages in total, putting it firmly in novella territory, and elimination of spoilers from the conversation leaves little but generalities to talk about. The problem is not with the generalities themselves; they are all positives. It’s more that without ruining the book for those yet to read it, it’s impossible to get much into the novella’s actual plot. 

But here goes an attempt to give you enough of the bare bones of the plot that you can decide for yourself if Small Things Like These is a story you want to experience for yourself.

It’s 1985. Bill Furlong, a coal merchant who makes regular deliveries to his customers, lives and works in New Ross, a town in southeast Ireland very much culturally dominated by the Catholic Church. Bill is a decent man, the father of five young daughters, and he works hard and long to provide for his family, especially now during the Christmas season when even just a little extra income can make all the difference in the world to their lives. Everyone knows him and respects what Bill does for the community while often taking a personal financial hit in order to ensure that none of his neighbors suffer during the harshest winter months.

And this is a harsh winter. It’s cold and gray outside, the shipyard has been closed for so long that people are struggling to pay their bills, and they depend on coal deliveries to keep their families warm through the worst of it. Bill is working harder than ever, but has little to show for his extra efforts.

Then just a few days before Christmas, Bill has his world view shaken while making a last minute coal delivery to the local convent. What he learns about the harsh reality of life inside that convent leaves Bill with a decision to make that is powerful enough to change not only the course of his own life, but that of his wife and five daughters, forever. Now the question becomes will he look away for his and his family's own good, or will he have the courage to do what he  knows is the right thing. 

Small Things Like These has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it actually did win the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. There is even a 2024 movie adaptation of the novella staring Cillian Murphy that I would like to see now because of its great reviews. 

For something so short, this one packs quite a punch. Especially that last sentence.

Read a Book Today - Somebody Has to Do It

 I can’t vouch for the methodology behind the survey that generated this chart, but it pretty much reflects the numbers I’ve been seeing over the last few years from numerous other sources. The takeaway headline is easy to spot: The top 4% of readers by themselves read almost half the books read in this country in any given year. But the saddest takeaway, by far, is that 40% of U.S. adults don’t read a single book per year. Not. Even. One.

I suppose that’s at least partially attributable to the fact that we have so many choices today when it comes to learning new things or just entertaining ourselves. The internet is a treasure trove of learning possibilities that offers free college lectures, documentaries, movies and television shows, online degrees, instructional videos covering everything imaginable (YouTube is indispensable when it comes to these), etc. But come on. 

According to the arts.gov site (National Endowment for the Arts), the reading slide started back in the early 1990s, and has never really stopped. There is, in fact, some indication that the downward trend may have started as early as 1982 with small, unremarkable yearly drops over ten years that really became more noticeable in 1992 when the yearly percentage drops accelerated to a degree that they could no longer be ignored. Another startling NEA statistic claims that “daily leisure reading” had dropped from its 2004 peak of 28% down to 16% by 2023. That is a drop of over 40% in less than 20 years, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it happened during the Netflix age. 

The scariest thing about this trend, though, is that it is proving true across all age groups, even children. 

So what if the problem is that it is just too much work to read for pleasure if you find it difficult even to read at all. Average reading scores in schools have been slipping for a while, and it looks like that trend, too, is going to be a long one. It is said that the average reading level among all adults in this country today is at roughly a 6th grade level. I don’t know about you, but that scares the heck out of me - and it explains a whole lot about what’s wrong with the world today. 

When the Light Goes (2007) - Larry McMurtry

 

When the Light Goes is the fourth book in Larry McMurtry’s five-book Thalia, Texas series. The main character in the series is Duane Moore, who was a high school student when introduced in the first book in the series, The Last Picture Show. In this one, Duane is in his sixties, and he’s feeling a bit mortal even if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself yet. 

Duane's wife has been dead for two years, his son has taken over the family oil business, and Duane has pretty much become an eccentric recluse who just rides all over the county on his bicycle. And then Duane senses himself coming back to life a little when his son hires a brilliant young geologist who specializes in finding productive oil reserves in fields thought already to have been played out. It doesn’t hurt that she’s as attractive to Duane as she is brilliant.

But Duane is not a young man anymore, and his heart has other ideas about his immediate future.

McMurtry published only two novels after When the Light Goes, and by this point he was starting to explore end-of-life and legacy issues in his fiction. Duane urgently needs open heart surgery if he is to survive much longer, but he is largely ignoring the problem despite his steadily worsening condition. Despite the age difference between Duane and Annie, their love story is mostly a heartwarming one, and McMurtry is honest and blunt about whatever problems (be they sexual ones or compatibility-based ones) the age difference does cause. 

The interesting thing about what Duane goes through, is that McMurtry himself lived through a very similar situation at age 55 when he had quadruple bypass surgery. He was connected to a heart-lung machine for something like five hours, and came out of the experience a broken man. He felt that he had truly died on the operating table, and that his old personality had shattered and was never coming back. McMurtry even hung the term “largely posthumous” on himself - and he believed it to be an apt label. He went into a deep depression and spent over a year lying on his sometime co-writer Donna Ossana’s Tucson couch and staring out the window. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t write, and was completely unable to read for pleasure. Ossana probably saved his life by finally getting him to co-write Streets of Laredo with her at her kitchen table. But whether McMurtry ever completely got over the experience is another question.

I suspect that the fictional relationship between Annie and Duane was one very meaningful to McMurtry, and I think that adds some significance to When the Light Goes that the novel would not otherwise deserve. This is not one of McMurtry’s best books, but it is one his fans will want to read in order to extend the Duane Moore story for one more chapter, if for no other reason.

Latest Book Haul: From How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder to Around the World in Eighty Days

 After buying almost nothing for most of a month, I’ve been on a little e-book buying spurt the last couple of days. I’ve purchased a combination of recently published books, older books, and back catalogs from some of my favorite authors. Among them are:

I can’t even begin to count the number of short stories I’ve read over the years, but I can’t recall a single one by Lorrie Moore. Lately, though, I’ve run into her name everywhere I look, and it’s all extremely positive about her skills as a storyteller. So now I have to see what I’ve been missing. I’m not sure how many stories are in this collection, but the book is almost 700 pages long, so plenty enough to satisfy my curiosity. (2009) 

I’m on kind of a nostalgic quest to find the style of science fiction that I enjoyed as a kid, mostly stories about aliens and the exploration of distant planets - and most definitely not the Star Wars kind of shoote-em-up thing. Godfall (2023) seems to fit. Instead of the massive asteroid that seems to be headed for a direct hit on Earth, a three-mile tall alien corpse gently falls into a small town in Nebraska. Then, after the local murders begin, the sheriff in charge of keeping order in that small town has to figure out the link between the murders and the dead alien. This is book one of a trilogy. 

I’ve heard lots of good things about How to Commit  a Postcolonial Murder, and thought it might make a good change of pace read. It’s a recent debut novel, but I’m hoping the AI impact on it is minimal and that Nina McConigley actually put in the work herself. It’s the story of two Indian-American sisters who decide that their uncle, fresh from India, needs to die - sooner rather than later - for a good reason.

I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to read this Sherman Alexie memoir, but I grabbed a copy after my recent review of his short story collection Blasphemy. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is said to be a raw account of Alexie’s childhood in which he addresses the culture of sexual violence on the Spokane Indian reservation on which he grew up - including his mother’s rape as well as his own double rape. I’ll have to be in the right mood for this one, but I hope to learn more about how this kind of sexual aggression is so commomnly passed from generation to generation. (2017)

I have fond memories of reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days when I was a kid, so I decided to pick up this 100th Anniversary Collection Edition. It was brought back to mind last month when I stumbled on an adaptation of the novel being featured on Prime Video right now. I only watched the first episode of that new series, but the book has been on my mind ever since, so I grabbed a copy. (1873)

I read a lot of pulp fiction when I was in my teens, including the more popular westerns of the era. One writer I kept coming back to, because his books seemed more realistic to me even then, was Alan LeMay. The Smoky Years is a 1935 novel that he wrote about the range wars that caused much of the violence associated with the peak of the cowboying days. It tells the story of a cattle baron trying to hold on to his empire while being challenged by a newcomer to the area. The characters are of LeMay’s usual gritty variety, and in the end The Smoky Years turns out to be a revenge story. In addition to this LeMay title, I picked up copies of: Thunder in the Dust, West of Nowhere, and Winter Range. (I already have copies of his two classic: The Unforgiven and The Searchers.)

Unless the buying bug hits me hard again, that’s all the book-buying I intend to do in April. But May’s a whole other month...

Haruki Murakami, Russel Banks, and Larry McMurtry Hit the Reading List

Over the past couple of weeks, my currently-reading list has shrunk all the way down to four books. And even one of those is my perpetual-read, the Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow of which I reached the forty percent mark just today  - with still over 600 pages left to go. I have, though, added three very different books to my current reads, and I’m enjoying each of them:

I’ve only read Haruki Murakami once before, and that was his 1Q84, a kind of dystopian, parallel universe take on Orwell’s 1984. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is very different from that one. Tsukuru is a young Tokyo college student whose four lifetime friends (two boys, two girls) back home suddenly ghost him. He gets a brief message to that effect from one of them, and they disappear from his life. Now at age 30, he is still scarred from the experience and looking for answers. 

I’m a fan of Russell Banks novels, but even though I got hold of a review copy of Rule of the Bone way back in 1994, I’m yet to read the darn thing. So here goes. HarperCollins describes the book this way: “The new rule was basically don’t bother your parents and don’t bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you, because to them, to all of them you’re just another homeless stoned dropout dealing small-load boom to the locals.” From what I’ve seen from Chapter 1, the unnamed narrator is fourteen when the story begins, so I suppose this is a coming-of-age novel of sorts. 

Larry McMurtry’s When the Light Goes is the fourth book in his “Thalia, Texas" series, a series also called by some the “Duane Moore" series. Duane is the central character in McMurtry’s famous The Last Picture Show, and by the time this book opens he’s gone from around 17 years of age to about 65 years old. Duane, though, is still pretty much 17 in his head, and he still calls his own shots in life. This one ends with Duane undergoing major heart surgery, an experience that McMurtry himself had a difficult time getting past emotionally. I’m curious to see how McMurtry handles this part of the novel, considering the terrible depression that resulted from his own experience with the surgery.

I’ve also purchased a handful of e-books I want to talk about, but I’ll save those for a later post. Including the back catalog of one of my favorite western writers, Alan LeMay, it’s turned out to be a pretty big handful. 

Blasphemy (2012) - Sherman Alexie

 

Blasphemy is a collection of thirty-one short stories written by a favorite storyteller of mine, Sherman Alexie. It should be noted, however, that Mr. Alexie got caught up in that whole “Me Too” movement back in 2018 after perhaps as many as fifty women came forward to say that he had sexually harassed them. The ensuing fallout was real and deserved: scholarships with his name on them got renamed, for instance, and although Alexie publishes weekly on Substack these days, I don’t know of a single major publication of his since his 2017 memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. I have been told that some bookstores refuse to carry even his previously published work now. That’s quite a fall from grace for someone who has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway, the PEN/Faulkner, and the PEN/Malamud among other awards. 

Myself, I have been able to separate the man’s work from his personal life (at least to this point), but I think it is only fair to mention all of this because I know that many of you, perhaps even most of you, will not want to do the same. Thus the full disclosure.

Some of the stories in Blasphemy were previously published in magazines such as Harper’s, Narrative, and The New Yorker. Each of the stories features Indian (as Alexie himself calls his people) characters and settings, most of them being of the Spokane tribe. Alexie himself grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation about an hour from Spokane, Washington. 

Alexie has a special talent for creating fully-fleshed characters within the space of just a few pages, often using a cutting sense of humor and irony to make the characters or their situations more relatable to his readers. Here are a few examples of his style: 

“So I felt sorry for the protestors who believed in what they were doing. They were good-hearted people looking to change the system. But when you start fighting for every Indian, you end up defending the terrible ones, too.” (From “Cry Cry Cry”)

 

'“I saw you in my head,” Frank said. “You’re supposed to be dead. I saw you dead.”

“You have blurry vision,” said Harrison”’  (From “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church)

“After Norma left me, I’d occasionally get postcards from powwows all over the country. She missed me in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and California. I just stayed on the Spokane Indian Reservation and missed her from the doorway of my HUD house, from the living room window, waiting for the day that she would come back.”  (From “The Approximate Size of my Favorite Tumor”)

'“Your father was always half crazy,” my mother told me more than once. “And the other half was on medication.”’  (From “What My Father Always Said…”)

The stories in Blasphemy range from lighthearted ones to deadly serious ones, and some of them can be difficult to categorize because Alexie always manages to see a good bit of dark humor where you might least expect to find it. Some of the stories are set on the reservation, some in Spokane, and a few in Seattle, but no matter where they take place, Alexie’s characters are all fighting the same fight for survival. And the odds always seem to be stacked against them. 

 For example, in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” he says of his main character:

“The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams."

And in “Protest” he offers this observation about a character:

“Jimmy’s last act was to disappear, and that was probably the most Indian thing he had ever done."

A Sherman Alexie short story is always interesting despite the inherent despair that he so often writes about. Alexie can be particularly revealing when writing through the eyes of a white character interacting with the Indians he knows so well, an approach he often uses, and one that works well for him.

So there you have it. If you still want to read Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy is a good place to start. He is, I think, still an important writer for readers who want to get a close, frank look at the Native American culture of today. That he let himself down, and disappointed his people to the degree that he did is sad for all concerned - especially for his victims, most of whom were fellow Native Americans.