This collage thing though. Yes, it is that, but, and I am by no means a knowledgable music person, but more than collage, the book seems to me like a musical score, a film soundtrack perhaps. I’m going to go with a soundtrack I have heard analyzed and say it is like the music for the Lord of the Rings movie in which there are motifs and instruments and moods attached to locations, races, and things. Like Hobbit moments always have flute and a few notes, always the same, always introduce them. Does that make sense? So the book is like that. There are refrains, thoughts, ideas, sentences, pieces of sentences that get repeated over and over. Sometimes they disappear for a long while only to turn up again fifty pages later. And, like in the film score, while they are the same they are also always, ever so slightly different because after those recognizable notes the theme goes in a new direction or the notes are played in a new context which changes their meaning ever so slightly. So, for instance, refrains that get repeated: “He knew that she had left him,” “Quanta,” “Can we live this way,” “And in the matter of the Irish thing,” and the one I find to be most sad, “Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?”

Pitch Dark was originally published in 1983 after the success of Adler’s first novel, Speedboat. Adler was, is, first and foremost a journalist but had a fourteen-month stint as a film critic for the New York Times in the late 1960s. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Kate Ennis in Pitch Dark is also a journalist. She never is in one place for long it seems. And sometimes Kate gets mixed up with Adler. There is a point in the middle section of the book where Kate has been staying in the house of the Irish ambassador while he is away and she decides that she needs to leave Ireland right away because she is certain people are after her (this is all paranoia). At the airport she decides to buy a ticket under a fake name:

I should make the name as much like my own to account for the mistake. Alder, I thought. But that does happen so often. I was afraid they might make the same mistake and be on the lookout for just such an Alder.

But the narrator’s name is Kate Ennis which is nothing like “Alder.” Then even later in the book she and Jake, the man with whom she is having the affiar:

One of the times he was on his island, and before she ever left, she wrote a story. He said Kate, will I like it. She said, I don’t think so. He said, I won’t read it then, if you don’t want me to, since it is not in your name.

And then another recurring refrain:

Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine.

It is never clear who is saying this, Kate in reference to an intrusion by Adler, or Adler in reference to Kate, insisting that she and Kate are not the same.

Are you interested? Are you curious? I hope so because there is more. I think what this book is about is dislocation, groping in the dark, and storytelling. If I keep going this evening, this post will get far too long, so tomorrow night I will elaborate.

Speaking of garden, what a week it has been! After last weekend’s creative madness, this week has been much calmer, yet there is still plenty happening. Tuesday we had instant summer with a record-breaking temperature of 98F (36.7C), this after we had had a light frost two days before! The rest of the week was still warm but in the comfortable zone. But it was dry and we had to water all our sprouts and new plants daily. Mother Nature decided to help us out Friday and gave us rain. Yesterday too. Now this afternoon even more with the added bonus of a tornado watch, meaning conditions are right to produce a tornado so pay attention to the sky and be alert for the warning siren. I am more worried about hail and straight line winds than a tornado, but they do touch down in the city now and then so it is nothing to scoff at.

Good thing I like peas!

Yesterday afternoon was warm and humid and perfect for planting warm-weather seeds. I planted: pumpkin, yellow bush beans, purple bush beans, scarlet runner beans, cantaloupe, summer squash, cucumbers, and cabbage. I also planted nasturtium in all the garden nooks and crannies. Besides some morning glories and sunflowers that we pre-sprouted in our greenhouse and will go out later this week, everything is now planted.

All the apple trees burst into bloom this week. Bossy and Bingo in the front yard are loaded with blooms. In the backyard,

Future apples

Awesome combo

Jeff Brennan, your average IT help desk geek, lives in a working-class town, driving an old jeep and spending Saturday nights with his friend playing video games, drinking and eating curry each in the comfort of his own apartment thanks to Skype. Jeff is not a genius, not a big up and coming, but just an average, not unlikeable guy mucking his way through life. Every Sunday he goes to visit his Granddad who raised him after Jeff’s parents died. Just when Granddad finally thinks that life will now be easy he gets a curveball in the form of his wife having Alzheimer’s. Daisy never speaks a word, can’t care for herself at all, pretty much just sits with a perpetually blank look on her face. Jeff keeps a worried eye on them, looking for signs that Granddad can’t take care of himself and Daisy any longer.

One day Jeff accompanies his environmental activist friend, Marcus, to a protest. Marcus ends up falling and injuring his arm. A woman, Marie, who was also at the protest and saw the accident happen, goes with the two of them to the hospital.

Marie is an American from California living in London. Environmental activism runs in her family you could say. She is beautiful and gets hit on a lot but she only wants one man: Jeff Brennan. Not Jeff Brennan average Joe, but Jeff Brennan, the recluse and number one political blogger in the UK. She is in love with him and they have never even met. When she finds out she is sitting next to Jeff Brennan at the hospital, neither Jeff nor Marcus correct her assumption that Jeff is that Jeff. Because the blogger is a recluse, no one knows what he looks like.

And so launches an increasingly complicated existence for Jeff who now has to pretend he is the other Jeff in order to keep Marie. And Marie is more than willing to help cover over the glaring inconsistencies between this Jeff who doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about politics or the environment, and blogger Jeff who she has fallen in love with just from reading his blog posts. Oh what tangled webs.

Virtual Love is a story about love, real, genuine love and love that is totally made up from false beliefs and assumptions and fed with lies. The deep and abiding love between Jeff’s grandparents makes a stark contrast for the virtual love between Jeff and Marie.

It is also a book about identity. Jeff is trying to teach his Granddad how to use the computer and takes him to Facebook and explains creating a profile. Granddad notices Jeff’s profile is rather different than real life Jeff and comments on it which leads to an interesting exchange:

‘And how you choose to portray yourself with me, the dutiful grandson, drinking tea and chatting politely and asking if we’re doing okay, is that your real identity?’ ‘Of course, Granddad.’ ‘So it’s just on the net that you’re not real.’ Your response was a weary sigh. ‘It’s not that, it’s just that I have different identities for different places. I experiment.’ You started to stand up. ‘Look, let’s forget about it. It doesn’t matter.’

Identity on the internet can be rather fluid, but when Jeff wades into identity theft, he discovers that how he portrays himself in real life isn’t as easy to control as it is online and by the end even Jeff doesn’t know anymore who the real Jeff Brennan is.

And then there is time. Granddad and his antique clock that he winds every Sunday and cleans once a month, firmly roots him in the world. The clock’s ticking is a constant reminder of the passing of time. Granddad moves at the pace of the tick, tick, ticking clock. Whereas Jeff and his friends are always online and losing track of the passage of time, looking up from their computer screens a few hours later and wondering what happened. The ticking clock never fails to stir up memories for Granddad. One wonders how losing so much time online will affect our memories later in life; there will be nothing to remember–we risk becoming like Daisy even without having Alzheimer’s.

The book is structured in chapters that alternate voices. We get chapters from Granddad, Marie, Jeff, a friend of Jeff’s, Jeff’s boss and a coworker, as well as the blogger Jeff Brennan. It makes for an interesting story and keeps the pace moving right along. It also provides a nice surprise at the end that I didn’t even guess was coming. And that wasn’t the only surprise. But for those you will have to read the book yourself.

I was thinking I didn’t do such a good job of finishing books I had going in April, but looking back I did really well. Though I am still reading How We Became Posthuman by Katherine Hayles and Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. I am going to have to make a big push to finish at least one of them this month because I am tired of telling you I am still reading them and you are probably tired of me telling you the same.

A book I mentioned last month that I was going to read, To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov, I have decided not to read after all. I read the introduction of it today and it just didn’t pull me in and I have so many other things to read I didn’t see the sense in pursuing it further. So instead I started reading New Grub Street by George Gissing. I haven’t gotten far but it seemed to hit the spot.

I am about fifty pages away from finishing Pitch Dark by Renata Adler. It is a short but complex book, requiring full attention. It is my NYRBs Classics subscription books from March. The NYRB folks send such good, rich books that it is impossible for me to keep up with them. I suspect I will get even farther behind since the April book which I will be starting not long after I finish the Adler is The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715 by Paul Hazard. It is an intellectual history and I am very much looking forward to it.

I’ve also been reading Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds. It is very good. Did you know she won the poetry Pulitzer for it not long ago? I’ve got Edward Thomas’s poetry waiting in the wings.

The in-progress pile also contains Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre and the Making of an Edible Oasis in the City by Eric Toenmeier and Jonathan Bates. The book is about how the two bought a duplex in the city and proceeded to turn the yard into a garden paradise. It is very encouraging for my own gardening efforts and I am enjoying it very much.

Soon to be begun is The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. This is a book I’ve been wanting to read for years but hadn’t gotten around to. What finally got me to read it now is the Slaves. We will be discussing the book starting June 8th so there is plenty of time left to join in if you want to read it too!

Oh, and how could I forget? I am also in the middle of reading Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf. Danielle got the book as part of her Melville House Art of the Novella subscription and since it too is a book I have wanted to read for ages, I asked if she’d mind me reading along. I’ve not gotten so very far, sixty pages maybe, and so far so good. But then I had no doubt about that!

I get a three-day weekend at the end of the month because of the Memorial Day holiday and I am hoping to spend a good part of it with a book in front of my face. I can hardly wait!

The book is written in chapters of sorts and then in each chapter there are collections of related discussions. Shields likes collage and each chapter is just that. Nonetheless, the collage manages to, in the end, create a whole pattern. The book being a memoir one might expect that there would be many personal stories but there aren’t. Most of the collage pieces are about books and authors Shields likes or students and classes he has taught. But, as he begins the book, “All criticism is a form of autobiography.” Through his discussion of other people, we learn about what is important to Shields: truth, language, reality, loneliness, connection.

And then we learn that Shields stutters. Stories about stuttering start to weave themselves into the discussion of language and love and literature. Shields, it seems, in order to gain control over words that were so very hard to speak, became a writer. In literature he has control but also admits that the control is an illusion because even on paper language always ultimately fails. So instead of writing freeing him from the prison of his stutter, it has trapped him just as firmly but in a different way:

because I stutter I became a writer (in order to return to the scene of the crime and convert the bloody fingerprints into abstract expressionism). As a writer, I love language as much as any element in the universe, but I also have trouble living anywhere other than in language. If I’m not writing it down, experience doesn’t really register. Language has gone from prison to refuge back to prison.

Shields’s move to a collage style, he says, has a direct relation to his stuttering. And so this memoir is also a sort of explanation of his style, a sort of apologia for his previous book, Reality Hunger. He talks briefly about why he thinks novels are no longer relevant and why and when he came to that realization. He discusses genre and how books should be genre-bending. And of course, he practices what he preaches. As he talks about the literature that is important to him, about his change in writing style, about what he thinks literature should do and be, he tries to write a book that does what he says a book should do.

It is all very thought-provoking and enjoyable and I added quite a few books to my TBR list, but there is a certain distance Shields creates and as passionate as he is about literature and writing, the book is missing a heart. I suspect that missing heart is what has caused me, as I mentioned at the beginning, to see the book as diminished after sitting with it for a few days. It is too bad really. I like what Shields is doing and I think he is a good and fascinating writer. I disagree that the novel is no longer relevant. I enjoy reading books like Shields writes but I could not survive on a steady diet of them so I am glad there is still plenty of variety of books rooted firmly in their genre and bursting out of them. Because really, Shields could not write the kinds of books he advocates unless there are books against which they are written. Without genre, one cannot write against genre.