What Are You Reading

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

View attachment 517880
The Natural by Bernard Malamud, originally published in 1952


The Natural is rightfully considered not just a classic baseball novel, but also a classic American novel, as it explores themes common to the American experience, where individual success or failure is determined by a mix of merit, integrity and fate.

Corruption, greed, honor and sex are also all woven into Malamud's tale of a young baseball talent whose life and career get waylaid for years owing to a senseless act of violence only to have a later resurrection that is equal parts gratifying and disillusioning.

We meet the novel's protagonist, Roy Hobbs, when he is a young professional baseball prospect on a train to a much-anticipated major league tryout. After he has a chance face-off with baseball's greatest hitter of the era, we know that he is a pitching phenom.

A mysterious, attractive and mentally disturbed woman Hobbs meets on the same train later shoots him. She, we learn, has a history of harming promising athletes.

We then reconnect with Hobbs fifteen years later after he has just been signed to the struggling professional baseball team, the New York Knights.

In his return to baseball, Hobbs is now an oddity, a thirty-four-year-old rookie. After overcoming his manager's skepticism to play him, he becomes a star outfielder and hitter who propels the heretofore woebegone Knights into a pennant race.

What follows is a series of personal and professional challenges for Hobbs driven by both his internal demons and external forces as he tries to somehow make up for all those lost years.

Hobbs' natural talent is unquestionable, even at thirty-four and despite never having played major league ball before, he proves to be an elite player. He is devoted to the game mentally and physically, but the pressures and temptations of success begin to interfere with his focus.

Women are one distraction as Hobbs is attracted to the young, pretty, but selfish and greedy niece, the wonderfully named Memo Paris, of the manager, while he talks himself out of liking the older, less-attractive, but good-hearted woman who helps pull him out of a batting slump.

Money too is a distraction as Hobbs is poorly paid because his salary was set for the year before he became a breakout star and, in an era before free agency, he has little negotiating power with the miserly, creepy and corrupt majority shareholder of the team.

As the season approaches the closing weeks of the pennant race and pressures increase, Hobbs, worrying about money, his career and the younger woman, suffers some sort of mental and physical breakdown that could ruin his future.

In a move echoing baseball's famous Black Sox scandal, Hobbs is then tempted with a huge bribe to throw a decisive game; it's enough money to set him up in business post baseball. It proves to be a game that dramatically comes down to his last swing at the plate.

Malamud imbues The Natural with a fantasy-like quality that highlights the timelessness of Hobbs' struggle - a struggle of innate ability, individual drive and personal integrity versus human failings, corrupting influences and the randomness of fate.

Very little is black and white in Malamud's world. Even in a simple pitch or the swing of a bat, life, uncertainty and corruption can rear their heads and mar those seemingly "pure" acts.

In Roy Hobbs we see the American dream both as we wish it to be - a shining city on a hill - and as it is - a complex story full of hope, opportunity, merit, faith, corruption, luck and heartbreak. The Natural isn't the American novel, but it is an American novel.


N.B. While the core story remains, the well-done 1984 movie version of Malamud's tale is changed in meaningful ways.

And finally, regular Fedora Lounge readers of this thread might notice I was late with my "spring training" baseball book read and review this year as, well, life interfered with my regular timeline. That said, The Natural has been on my to-read list for too long, so it was fun to finally sit down with it and use it to "kick off," albeit a bit late this year, the baseball season.

In Macau I flipped thru a magazine whiles resting from poker and distinctly recall a Malamud article he himself penned about his private life. Seems his wife up and left their childless marriage, yet fate meets them a few years later. Polite small inconsequential mutually embarrassed small talk but then she asks about their house pet, cat or dog-think it was a dog, that always lay by the kitchen door waiting for her. As Malamud relates still held. And the atmosphere momentarily suddenly froze not simply stopped. A punch to the heart. Couples share so much, with heartache there is love and loss of the most lonely lost self. I believe I came across The Natural last week hunting down McQueen, anything Steverino, and this film box flashed past. Will be sure to look for it. Thanks Fast.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Mr. Malamud based the "psychotic female stalker" aspect of his story on two real-life cases -- the shooting of Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus by a disturbed fan in a Chicago hotel room in 1948, and the shooting of Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges by a spurned lover in a Chicago hotel room in 1932. Both Waitkus and Jurges recovered to have productive careers devoid of superheroics.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Page 42 and Stendhal's Lamiel is already good!

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

I read Stendhal's The Red and The Black whilst Cambridge. Not much an impression made meself alas.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Page 92 and Stendhal's Lamiel is an excellent read!!

 

[Tiki Tom]

By a nice stroke of fate, I read the entire New Testament during Lent, and then followed it immediately with The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. The juxtaposition of those two books was completely accidental, but proved to be a brilliant choice.

First, the New Testament had me asking myself some big questions and also had me diving into the Old Testament to clarify references that I didn’t quite understand. (The Book of Job scared the ship out of me!) It’s amazing how superficial my understanding of the Bible —and hence a lot of Western literary tradition— was before this lent exercise.

Then came the confrontation with Dostoevsky in the Brothers K. As a card carrying church member and a believer, Dostoevsky famously considered himself in a better position to ask hard questions of Christianity then a mere atheist could ask. What a book! Everyone talks about the Grand Inquisitor section of the book and about Ivan’s angry doubting and rebellion, but I was more impressed with Ivan’s late night meeting with the devil. In the end, though, I was moved by the softly whispered response in the form of the Elder of Zosima’s corruption and the subsequent wedding at Cana scene (including the bit about giving a small onion!)… And, of course, by Alyosha’s quiet goodness.

Anyway, glad that I accidentally read the New T and the Brothers K in that order.

Having now read both War and Peace and the Brothers Karamazov, my humble opinion is that the second one is the better book. Very different books. But I hope the gurus at the Russian Desk in Washington have read both these books, as they are really a valuable window into the Russian soul and worldview.

Final comment: I wish I had made the effort to read the classics when I was a young man. It would have taught me a lot, but perhaps I was not ready for it.

Up next, some light reading: To Kill a Mockingbird. And then the next big one: Les Miserables. Light summer reading.

 

[Fading Fast]

By a nice stroke of fate, I read the entire New Testament during Lent, and then followed it immediately with The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. The juxtaposition of those two books was completely accidental, but proved to be a brilliant choice.

First, the New Testament had me asking myself some big questions and also had me diving into the Old Testament to clarify references that I didn’t quite understand. (The Book of Job scared the ship out of me!) It’s amazing how superficial my understanding of the Bible —and hence a lot of Western literary tradition— was before this lent exercise.

Then came the confrontation with Dostoevsky in the Brothers K. As a card carrying church member and a believer, Dostoevsky famously considered himself in a better position to ask hard questions of Christianity then a mere atheist could ask. What a book! Everyone talks about the Grand Inquisitor section of the book and about Ivan’s angry doubting and rebellion, but I was more impressed with Ivan’s late night meeting with the devil. In the end, though, I was moved by the softly whispered response in the form of the Elder of Zosima’s corruption and the subsequent wedding at Cana scene (including the bit about giving a small onion!)… And, of course, by Alyosha’s quiet goodness.

Anyway, glad that I accidentally read the New T and the Brothers K in that order.

Having now read both War and Peace and the Brothers Karamazov, my humble opinion is that the second one is the better book. Very different books. But I hope the gurus at the Russian Desk in Washington have read both these books, as they are really a valuable window into the Russian soul and worldview.

Final comment: I wish I had made the effort to read the classics when I was a young man. It would have taught me a lot, but perhaps I was not ready for it.

Up next, some light reading: To Kill a Mockingbird. And then the next big one: Les Miserables. Light summer reading.

Really enjoyed your comments. Thank you for posting them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Every intelligent person should have a working understanding of the Bible, regardless of what they feel about it as religion. If they did, fewer people would be able to get away with misusing and exploting it for their own purposes.

I recommend "The Bible to be Read as Living Literature," published in 1936 -- it's a reformatting of the KJV into conventional chapter, paragraph, and sentence structure. Nothing about the text is changed, but it's a lot easier to read and follow in this type of format. It's a great introduction that can lead to all sorts of explorations of better and more accurate translations. Goodspeed's "American Translation" from 1931 is a good place to begin with these -- it's translated into 20th century US idioms, rather in sixteenth-century English, and gives you a much better sense of what the text actually says.

 

[Fading Fast]

Every intelligent person should have a working understanding of the Bible, regardless of what they feel about it as religion. If they did, fewer people would be able to get away with misusing and exploting it for their own purposes.

I recommend "The Bible to be Read as Living Literature," published in 1936 -- it's a reformatting of the KJV into conventional chapter, paragraph, and sentence structure. Nothing about the text is changed, but it's a lot easier to read and follow in this type of format. It's a great introduction that can lead to all sorts of explorations of better and more accurate translations. Goodspeed's "American Translation" from 1931 is a good place to begin with these -- it's translated into 20th century US idioms, rather in sixteenth-century English, and gives you a much better sense of what the text actually says.

I grew up without religion and have never practiced one, but read the Bible (the Old and New Testament) many years ago and couldn't agree more with Lizzie, it is an incredible piece of literature (really many pieces) and makes many things in Western Civilization clearer. Once you've read it, you'll notice that it is referenced directly and indirectly every day and in many ways. Plus as she notes, you'll recognize when it's being inappropriately weaponized.

 

[Tiki Tom]

I confess that, after my Lenten reading assignment, for a while I was quite keen on quoting Mathew 23, in which Jesus criticizes religious posers and hypocrites and those who nitpick the scriptures but miss the big picture. Thankfully, I have since calmed down again and only spout off about religion on very rare occasions.

 

[Fading Fast]

Time and Time Again by James Hilton originally published in 1953


Author James Hilton is known today for the famous movies, The Lost Horizon, Random Harvest and Good-bye, Mr. Chips, made from his most-popular books.

Being a reasonably prolific author, though, Hilton also wrote several engaging novels that never made it to the big screen.

Time and Time Again, his last novel, explores the life of a British diplomat as a way to examine England in the first half of the twentieth century. The Empire was in decline, but its reach was still global and its cultural standards, albeit changing, were still influential.

While those big themes are in play here, the novel works because you come to care about its protagonist, Charles Anderson, a upper-middle-class Englishman who tries to do right, by the standards of his day, in a rapidly changing world.

Anderson couldn't be more off-message to our current cultural obsessions. He's a white Englishman of privilege serving an Empire now denounced as racist. Yet every era has its views, values and prejudices and ours will age with the same bumpiness as did Anderson's.

This leaves Time and Time Again (an awful title supposed to evoke the "history echoes" meme) and Charles Anderson as a revealing time capsule of a prior era, free of our modern biases and agendas, but chock full of its own biases and agendas.

Anderson, symbolically born in 1900, just missed serving in WWI, studied at Cambridge and, after achieving the appropriate grades and passing the very difficult but required entrance exams, embarked on a career in diplomacy.

Before that, though, his father, a quixotic character himself, the "eccentric" English gentleman, has to "untangle" his son from a romantic involvement with a girl of "the wrong class." The father and son's relationship, not surprisingly, never fully recovers.

These early episodes show that "privilege" only took one so far as many to-the-manner-born boys failed the exams necessary for top careers or made poor marriages. The Empire, for self preservation, was still focused on raising leaders and not on promoting self expression.

For Anderson, it's on to a respectable but not-spectacular career in diplomacy, a marriage to an "appropriate" woman who helped him advance, the storm of WWII and an awkward relationship with his son that, to his chagrin, echoes the one he had with his father.

In a neat twist at the end, Anderson's diplomatic career becomes an exciting window into the Cold War when the brutality of the Soviet Union intrudes on his usually calm official world.

That early sign of the aborning Cold War provides the perfect bookend to the first half of the twentieth century, to Anderson's life and to Hilton's novel.

Hilton shines at personalizing his characters by showing the small details, an old photograph stuck in a wardrobe mirror frame, that can mean so much to a life. You might want to think Charles Anderson is unimportant, but Hilton forces you to think otherwise.

Hilton also has a talent for weaving the pivotal geopolitical events of the era into his story. He chose a diplomat knowing that even a mid-level one would often be tangentially involved in the key moments that change history.

Time and Time Again isn't a classic or a must read. Yet it still has value today as an engaging page-turner that, importantly, provides a nearly time-capsule peek into a prior period's norms, fear, prejudices, successes and failures, all without our modern biases intruding.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Fast-Virginia Nicholson wrote Singled Out, which examined post World War I Great Britain after 700,000 British males
had perished in France, leaving a national two million unmarried women surplus.
This book's introduction is stark and brutally honest when a female school directress tells 1917 graduates to realize
the men they might have married are dead and most if not all would probably never wed.

A most trenchant look at war's aftermath.

 

[Fading Fast]

Hope of Heaven by John O'Hara originally published in 1938


John O'Hara was a successful and respected author in his day whose popularity and literary reputation has faded over the years, especially recently, as our culture has shifted its attention away from his main subject matter of Wasps in the twentieth century.

As a keen observer of social and class status and human relationships, O'Hara today is a window into the past free of modern biases, but of course, full of its own era's prejudices. This makes his novela, Hope of Heaven, a time-capsule of 1930s Hollywood.

It's a look, though, from the vantage point of the lead character, John Malloy, a successful novelist and playwright. He, like so many authors of that time, lured by Hollywood's high compensation, became a screenwriter rotating through several of the studios.

Malloy works a little, drinks and parties a lot and has an on-again-off-again relationship with a younger woman, Peggy Henderson, who works in a bookshop and lives with her college-student brother.

Life is good for Malloy with the money coming in and no responsibilities other than himself. He's middle-aged, though, and he thinks he might want to get married (again), but Peggy keeps putting him off.

Their bumpy relationship is the backdrop for the more visible plot of Peggy's not-seen-for-years father showing up at Peggy and her brother's doorstep. The father abandoned the family when the kids were young, but periodically still sends some money their way.

He's been a scammer his whole life, but one now seemingly trying to make amends with his family. Yet his arrival throws the tenuously peaceful world of Malloy, Peggy and her brother into disarray.

The eventual dramatic result, and it is dramatic, of the father's return forces Peggy to take a very hard look at her relationship with Malloy, especially as he keeps pressing for marriage.

While the father serves as the novel's "change agent," (in Tolstoy terms, the stranger who comes to town) as he shakes up everyone's life, the value, though, in Hope of Heaven isn't its plot, but its well-developed characters and period insight.

On the personal/social side, what stands out is the casual attitude the men and women have toward, well, casual sex. Peggy and Mallow sleep together without it being a big deal to either of them. Many of their friends share a similar attitude.

They do have to hide it a bit owing to the norms of the day, but not that much. Also, Peggy takes it less seriously than Malloy. She even makes clear, one time, when he comes back from a trip that she was most anxious for him to return so they could have sex.

For readers today used to that era's movies, where characters twist themselves into incredible knots avoiding premarital sex for fear the earth will stop rotating on its axis, it's a refreshing reveal that human nature and libidos, then, were not that different from modern ones.

Life, overall, feels closer to ours than in the period's censored movies. Not only do not-married couples live together, the young drink and party regularly. And, like today, people strive to get better paying jobs and better (or different, anyway) spouses/lovers.

It's all set in the orbit of Hollywood's studio system where authors like Malloy make very good money for doing very little work as his name on the screen credits, like the names of other successful authors who became screenwriters, is often what the studio is buying.

Hope of Heaven is a good story, but it is left open ended as the resolutions after the climax feel temporary. One could see another novella being written (which didn't happen) showing where the characters are in their lives in five or ten years from now.

It is in these characters where we also see O'Hara's writing shine as he creates well-rounded and complex individuals that you recognize and care about. You hate some, love some and just notice others, but they almost all feel real.

The era, too, of the 1930s comes alive in O'Hara's hands. Young stridently left ideologues meet to lament the state of the world, while scammers, like Peggy's father and another character who lives on a large amount of travelers checks he stole, focus on the good life.

All of this takes place in the shadow of the motion-picture studios, which made Hollywood and its surrounding areas one of the most economically successful parts of the country during the Depression.

Hope of Heaven is an easy page turner with engaging characters that reveal many of the norms and attitudes of the period. It shows how complex and similar to our times the 1930s really were. Plus, for a modern reader, it's as close to a time machine as one can get.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Good review. Thank you. Particularly interesting to read how sex was really viewed/lived in the 1930s, as opposed to how the Hollywood censors portrayed it. Over the years, I’ve internalized the (no doubt false) stereotype that people —and especially women— had near saintly levels of self control back in the 1930s. Also good to see John O’Hara’s name again. The only thing I ever read by him was Appointment in Samarra. Didn’t realize that he was so prolific and successful. Now that I’m of a certain age, I’m always unsettled by how young many writers of that generation died.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Page 162 and Stendhal's Lamiel is still good! And suspenseful, too.

 

[Fading Fast]

Good review. Thank you. Particularly interesting to read how sex was really viewed/lived in the 1930s, as opposed to how the Hollywood censors portrayed it. Over the years, I’ve internalized the (no doubt false) stereotype that people —and especially women— had near saintly levels of self control back in the 1930s. Also good to see John O’Hara’s name again. The only thing I ever read by him was Appointment in Samarra. Didn’t realize that he was so prolific and successful. Now that I’m of a certain age, I’m always unsettled by how young many writers of that generation died.

Thank you. I've come to really enjoy O'Hara. Like you, I've read "Appointment in Samarra," but also "Butterfield Eight," "From the Terrace," "The Big Laugh," (obviously) "Hope of Heaven" and probably one or two I've forgotten. They are all good in their own way and, what I also love about them, are a window into the past.

I was, for a long time, guilty like you were of seeing the past through movies and, in my case, my father and grandmother. There is value in those windows, but their view, like all views, are also distorted. Fedora Lounge and reading books and newspapers from the era, plus modern-day popular history books has really helped to broaden and, I believe, make more accurate (less distorted, anyway) my understanding of the past.

 

[Tiki Tom]

As some of you know, this year I have been trying to read the classics that I missed when I was young and was too busy chasing jobs, grades, girlfriends, experiences, kids, etc.
I just finished “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Of course, going in, I knew broadly that it was about racial injustice in the South in the 1930s and I was prepared to discover that I would approach it with a certain jaded “I know that already” view.
I was very pleasantly surprised by the freshness of the book. For starters, it’s told through the eyes of Scout Finch who is an eight year old little girl who is precocious and very funny. If one of the marks of a good book is characters that develop and grow as you turn the pages, than this book is very good indeed. All of the main characters are put through some changes in this book.
Another thing that I was not prepared for: I wish I had read this book when I was embarking upon fatherhood. I found myself watching Atticus Finch closely. Here is a man who lays out what is important in parenting. There is a reason that people hold up Atticus Finch as a role model.
The first 50% of the book was amazing. Personally, I was not particularly impressed by the courtroom scenes. But, then, the final quarter of the book offered impressive surprises and character insights. I confess that it was a page turner that really had me hooked. And, yes, at the end you could see that Atticus was —after all— only human.
For me, the best chapter of the book was the one towards the middle that showed the extraordinary bravery and moral strength of Atticus… Ironically, it was also the chapter where you could most see the seams and stitches of the author’s labors.
All in all, I was very impressed with the book and would say that it very much deserved its Pulitzer Prize. I doubt that I will ever forget Scout, Atticus, and Jem.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Next up:

 

[Fading Fast]

Next up:

View attachment 523223

So, a review by the end of next week.

 

[Tiki Tom]

LOL. Maybe by Halloween.
I was dumbstruck to see that it is almost 1,500 pages long. I thought I had conquered Everest when I finished War and Peace (1,200 pages). Alas, No.

On the other hand, if you go by the Amazon reviews, the book is a stunningly moving revelation and positively one of the top five ever written. At page 20. So far, so good.