Book Review: The Devil all the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock

This book is about the sorry state of man in the world, his struggle against evil, religion, and death, as well as the rigors of everyday life. It’s about the futility of prayer and the uselessness of religion and the non-existence of God. Man is turned loose to kill and be killed, to suffer and die, all the while pleading

Book Review: Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

This is the violent tale of a boy of fourteen, referred to in the story only as “the kid,” except toward the end, when his referred to as “the man,” who leaves home and gets involved with the Glanton gang, which ran around Mexico and the regions of the U.S. bordering on it, to collect Indian scalps. The story is at least loosely based on a real gang of such men.


This is the most violent and brutal thing I have ever read. It makes “A Clockwork Orange” look like a

Book Review: The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

  


I begin by saying that I know The Fountainhead is some sort of holy icon to a lot of people. Even more than fifty years after its publication it is selling very well, and is quite popular. When I took my copy down to the shop here in Venice where I can trade in used books for credit toward other used books, the owner of the shop

Book Review: Ironweed, by William Kennedy

 


Ironweed, by William Kennedy, is one of the Albany Novels, so called because they take place in Albany, New York. The book is about a bum named Francis Phelan, and his bum friends trying to survive as homeless bums in the winter in upstate New York, i.e., one cold goddamn place. I suggest wearing a sweater while you read this, even if you’re at the beach, because the writing is so good, and the description of the cold so biting, that you will feel it.

Francis had a family, a wife and kids, but booze got the best of him, and he ended up on the streets starving and freezing his ass off. All of his bum friends are on the street for the same reason. His friend Helen, for example, is a talented singer, but she is a fucking drunk and could

Book Review: Across the River and into the Trees, by Ernest Hemingway

 


Across the River and into the Trees, by Hemingway, is a novel about a fifty year- old Colonel in the U.S. Army immediately after WWII, who comes to Venice to die. He as been there many times before, and it is where he wants to be. He falls in love with a young girl of about 17, and they have a bit of a relationship. In the end he dies while being driven out of town in his car.

I know that Hemingway is revered as a great writer, and rightfully so. But I did not like this book— it’s not his best work.

The title is a reference to the last words of Stonewall Jackson: “. . . let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” The colonel had been a general, but we are

Book Review: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, is one of the most famous and most misunderstood books in the world. From it came the term “beat generation,” and a lot of people think it gave rise to the beatniks and hippies. Maybe it did, but the interpretation of it that would do so was wrong.

Kerouac was on the road for about seven years, and claims to have banged out On the Road in about three weeks in 1951, typed on one continuous strip of paper created by

Book Review: Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

 


Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, (not to be confused with The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells) is one of the best books you will ever read. It is brilliantly written, is from the point of view of a man, and does not go heavily into love and sex. It is therefore high on the list of Man Lit. It is a riotous and violent ride, and one that is difficult to put down.

Ellison starts the story at the end, where our hero is in his lightbulb-filled room in the cellar of a building, telling what happened to him, and bragging about the fact that he is stealing the electricity for his room, which is his way of getting back at society.

He begins as a promising young black man in the south wanting to go to college, and ends up a somewhat older man living in the room I have described. We never learn the name of the protagonist of the story, which I suppose adds to the notion of his invisibility. He is not really invisible, but he feels that people don’t see him.

Through a series of events and misfortunes, none of which are his fault, he is kicked out of college, fails at several other endeavors, and ends up in the cellar full of light.

The book, written in 1947 and published for the first time in 1952, on the surface deals with the treatment of blacks in the United States at that time. There is a certain amount of description as to how that was, but the book does not go overboard, or become preachy. But the book to me is about much more than black men living in a white world. In fact, the hero could have been any of us. It was not, to me, a black theme, so much as it was a human theme.

Writers are taught never to give the hero what he wants, at least not right off. Ellison had apparently learned that lesson. Nothing the guy did worked out—he was defeated at every turn. No matter what he tried to do, he failed, or the result was different than he expected.

For example, when as a young man he was going to give a speech to a group of white men in the south, for which he would receive some sort of reward, he first had to take part in a “battle royal,” where he and a number of other black men were expected to fight nearly to the death. In the end they fought on an electrified grid. He manages to come through it and give his speech through bloody and swollen lips, but he finally does, and gets a beautiful briefcase and a full scholarship as a prize. During that whole scene, though, I found myself wondering why he didn’t just tell them to go fuck themselves.

He does go to the black college, but because of another white man, ends up being expelled. And so his struggles went, all the way from being kicked out of school to not being able to accomplish even the slightest thing without failure and struggle. Sounded quite familiar to me.

The story is full of symbolism, some of which I suspect was obscure, but some of it was right out there. For example, there is an old iron bank in his room, which was being used as a doorstop, and which happened to be fashioned to look like a black man. He smashes it, but then has to hide it in his briefcase, and finds that he is unable to get rid of it. He ends up toting it around in his briefcase for half the novel. The briefcase was perhaps a symbol of the white man’s world, into which he would have to any dream of equality, and the bank is the weight of the past as slaves. 

This man finds himself scratching and clawing and fighting every minute of every day just to survive. This is not only the realm of the black with respect to the white, it is also the lot of the poor with respect to the rich, the citizen with respect to the state, the employee with respect to the boss, etc., etc. His greatest enemy in the story turns out to be another black man. What does all this mean? That the black man’s worst enemy is himself?

So far as I am aware, this was the only novel published by Ellison during his lifetime. I read an interesting theory that the invention of the word processor made it impossible for him to complete a book because he was an obsessive revisor, and the computer made doing that very easy.

This book is a must read for any Literary Man.


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