Being Sunday, there are no buses running in Muncie. I woke late, but this was intended. I have made a trip to the office for ice, I may go back to get quarters to do my laundry, but I foresee me going not much further today.
Some reading done already today, and an idea I want to promote: short shrift. What we should give to the Freedom Caucus, White supremacy, and nose rings.
Will trumper be added to this list, 8 More Words for Inept People?
The Guardian's book reviews arrived in the inbox, but I only read The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier review – riveting French thriller. The French do things a little differently.
Only two of French writer Laurent Mauvignier’s 12 previous novels have appeared in English: The Wound (2015), about the Algerian war of independence, and In the Crowd (2008), which followed four groups of characters en route to Brussels ahead of the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus, drawing grisly voltage from the reader’s foreknowledge of the Heysel stadium disaster.
Although Mauvignier’s new novel, The Birthday Party, deals wholly with fictitious events in the present day, its remorseless narrative logic likewise has us reading from behind our hands, as we watch its ensemble cast stumble into catastrophe. Patrice, a farmer in a remote French hamlet, has driven to the nearest town to stock up for an after-work celebration for his wife, Marion, turning 40; their daughter, Ida, is on her way home from school to get cake ready with an elderly neighbour, Christine – whose dog we’ve just witnessed being butchered by intruders who are about to take them both hostage.Four hundred pages of agony remain. Our compulsion is basic but extreme: why is this happening? And what’s going to happen next? Amid the moment-by-moment dread emerges a knotty tale of two obscurely connected families, one superficially happy, the other luridly dysfunctional, as the pressure-cooker scenario brings the buried secrets of Marion’s premarital life – arson, abuse, murder – bubbling to the surface.
Sound like fun - which is what a thriller is supposed to be. This only adds to the allure:
Mauvignier’s ability to keep the shocks coming – to say nothing of his knack for renewing a cliche or two, whether he’s writing about Stockholm syndrome or sex work – are among the qualities that make this riveting novel so nastily effective. Managing dynamic action as well as split-second psychological shifts (a rare feat; think peak Ian McEwan), the whole shebang culminates in an extravagantly choreographed set-piece blow-out of nigh-on unbearable jeopardy. And even if its abundant pathos comes at the somewhat high price of overweening narrative omniscience, this macabre twist on the marriage-portrait novel ultimately invites prudence and humility on the thorny question of how much we can ever know about those closest to us. Hardly a new insight, for sure, but rarely can it have been demonstrated quite so explosively.
My mother would change the channel whenever LBJ came on the TV, she could stand how he talked. Along with the news I watched as a child, I had a bias towards LBJ. Then I started reading Robert Caro's biography, and I have a more sympathetic view - after all, I have lived now through Richard M. Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald J. Trump. This explains my reading a Guardian interview, LBJ OK? Historian Mark Lawrence on a president resurgent:
Lawrence continues: “One of the ideas that an awful lot of people hold about LBJ, and I think it’s not wholly incorrect, but it’s problematic, is that he was this vulgar, crude man who used four-letter words and demeaned his subordinates and threw temper tantrums.
“There’s no question that Caro” – Robert Caro’s biographical masterwork – “is the go-to source for the uglier parts of his personal style. But I think you can also make an argument, and Caro I think comes around to this view in the later books, that LBJ managed to combine whatever elements of that old caricature hold up with a genuine sense of compassion for ordinary people.
But I found this the most interesting statement:
“I think that’s precisely what’s lacking now. The situation is so polarised that you could bring LBJ back from the dead and he’d be an utter failure in this political context, because his skills would have been meaningless in the context of 2023.”
We are so screwed.
What I plan on reading today:
- Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223 from The Paris Review; a writer I have read much about and only one or two short stories.
- I found Pitchfork, a music magazine site, I read Neil Young Shares Eulogy for David Crosby, “The Soul of CSNY”, and I signed up for the newsletter.
- Imitation of Life: On Passing Between
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