My Blog List
Thursday, March 14, 2013
=2013 Books Read=
The Biographer's Tale
by A.S. Byatt
This is a book I had no intention of reading. I was just sitting there on my couch and it fell from the ceiling right into my hands. I was watching television at the time, "Pawn Stars," I think it was, or some show with wildlife in it, perhaps a Kardashian sister. These things happen. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Anyway, I'd read A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden and enjoyed it immensely. Originally, and ever since, I've been looking for her Booker Prizewinning masterpiece Possession at the library but can't find it. Seems it's always checked out to some fellow Brooklynite or other. The Virgin in the Garden was a dense, challenging read in very tiny print. But well worth the considerable effort it took to squint my way through it.
Byatt is a thorny, wry, puckishly funny, prickly author of vast intellect. You get the sense that she'd cross a Viking battlefield to rewrite a sentence that didn't suit her. I saw an interview done with her on Youtube in which the young woman doing service as her interlocutor asked why she didn't write autobiographical novels. Why she always seemed to write about characters, lives, and time periods other than her own. Her answer was that in writing about subjects outside of herself she was able to learn things that she didn't already know. For Byatt, writing wasn't about self-discovery. It was about discovering the "other." She went on to observe that she often suspected that so-called "self-expressive" authors, those who drew on their own emotions and experience to write novels were, perhaps, trying to convince themselves that they had the emotions they wrote about. For Byatt, it is unnecessary to write about what she feels. Feeling it is more than enough.
I'm paraphrasing, of course. And I'm digressing, too. You could say that sums up my entire life: a parenthetical footnote lasting something less than a century. In this case, though, my meandering trickle of thought does bear relevance to the book at hand. Well, it's not at hand any longer. It's back on the shelf at the Brooklyn Public Library where you can take it out yourself the last time I checked. And I suggest you do.
It's about a young graduate student of postmodern literary studies, Phineas G. Nanson. Practically by the end of the novel's first sentence Phineas declares that he's sick of being a graduate student of postmodern literary studies. He's tired of deconstruction, sick of structuralism, sicker, still, of post-structuralism. He's lost his taste for the intellectual mind-games that never resolve a thing, the perambulations through halls of mirrors with no destination, the navel gazing, the endlessly sterile mystifications that don't just seem to be the inevitable unfortunate result of postmodern literary theory, but the desired end in itself. What Phineas wants is to pursue the study of something substantial. Something he can grab hold of. Something he can really sink his teeth into--intellectually speaking, that is.
What better field to pursue than biography? The objective study of the life of another person. A person who indisputably existed outside of oneself. An individual who was born, who lived, and who died. It's all right there on record. Right? And there's even an interesting subject right to hand. The once (modestly) celebrated, now all-but-forgotten biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes.
You can see it coming, perhaps? How by choosing a biographer as a subject for his biography that Phineas has fallen write back into the postmodern mirrored trap that he sought to escape. For by writing a biography about a biographer, Phineas is confronted by the same problems of relativity, of slippery identity, of truth versus relativity that made his former studies seem so vapid and insubstantial. The closer Phineas gets to Scholes Destry-Scholes the less there seems to see of the man. When he discovers some papers that the great biographer was working up--a sort of comparative study of the seemingly disparate lives of Henrik Ibsen, Francis Galton, and Charles Linnaeus (you'll learn who they are in the book if you don't know already)--Phineas is disconcerted to discover that Destry-Scholes wasn't as objective as one might wish a biographer to be. He distorted known facts (known facts: ha!), repeated what he knew to be his subject's fantasies and fictions, and added a few of his own. What Phineas discovers is that Destry-Scholes, even as a biographer, is writing as much about himself as he is about the lives of his subjects.
And, in writing about Destry-Scholes, so Phineas is writing as much about himself.
Is all writing, then, really autobiography on some level?
Was the answer that A.S. Byatt gave to that young interviewer all B.S.? Or just partly B.S.?
Can we ever escape the relativist, solipsistic maze? Or is it, as the postmodernists seem to imply, a necessary "evil"? And, if so, being necessary, being the very ground of our existence, perhaps not evil at all?
I suspect that this is but one way to read this fascinating novel. In truth, it is not an easy read and I suspect that a lot of it went sailing right over my head, especially inasmuch as I didn't devote as much time to picking it apart as it probably deserves. As a novel about a writer writing a book, Byatt employs a lot of entertaining metafictional devices, which surprised me, as she can sometimes strike one as a rather conservative, stodgily traditional writer. But in The Biographer's Tale she's playful and entertaining, even light-hearted, which is to say, light-hearted for her. It's the kind of book that pretends to contain research gathered for Phineas's book: which means, in this case, photographs and drawings. They are a nice break. As is the humor. And the occasional erotic hijinks and descriptions of insect battles. It's the kind of book where you learn a lot of ancillary stuff that Byatt learned during her research, which is one of the reasons she gave for writing about other lives...even if she wryly suggests in this novel that, in the end, we can only really write about ourselves.
A.S. Byatt is indisputably somewhere in these pages. She's said so herself without saying so at all. And that is a large part of what makes this novel so infinitely beguiling.
by A.S. Byatt
This is a book I had no intention of reading. I was just sitting there on my couch and it fell from the ceiling right into my hands. I was watching television at the time, "Pawn Stars," I think it was, or some show with wildlife in it, perhaps a Kardashian sister. These things happen. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Anyway, I'd read A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden and enjoyed it immensely. Originally, and ever since, I've been looking for her Booker Prizewinning masterpiece Possession at the library but can't find it. Seems it's always checked out to some fellow Brooklynite or other. The Virgin in the Garden was a dense, challenging read in very tiny print. But well worth the considerable effort it took to squint my way through it.
Byatt is a thorny, wry, puckishly funny, prickly author of vast intellect. You get the sense that she'd cross a Viking battlefield to rewrite a sentence that didn't suit her. I saw an interview done with her on Youtube in which the young woman doing service as her interlocutor asked why she didn't write autobiographical novels. Why she always seemed to write about characters, lives, and time periods other than her own. Her answer was that in writing about subjects outside of herself she was able to learn things that she didn't already know. For Byatt, writing wasn't about self-discovery. It was about discovering the "other." She went on to observe that she often suspected that so-called "self-expressive" authors, those who drew on their own emotions and experience to write novels were, perhaps, trying to convince themselves that they had the emotions they wrote about. For Byatt, it is unnecessary to write about what she feels. Feeling it is more than enough.
I'm paraphrasing, of course. And I'm digressing, too. You could say that sums up my entire life: a parenthetical footnote lasting something less than a century. In this case, though, my meandering trickle of thought does bear relevance to the book at hand. Well, it's not at hand any longer. It's back on the shelf at the Brooklyn Public Library where you can take it out yourself the last time I checked. And I suggest you do.
It's about a young graduate student of postmodern literary studies, Phineas G. Nanson. Practically by the end of the novel's first sentence Phineas declares that he's sick of being a graduate student of postmodern literary studies. He's tired of deconstruction, sick of structuralism, sicker, still, of post-structuralism. He's lost his taste for the intellectual mind-games that never resolve a thing, the perambulations through halls of mirrors with no destination, the navel gazing, the endlessly sterile mystifications that don't just seem to be the inevitable unfortunate result of postmodern literary theory, but the desired end in itself. What Phineas wants is to pursue the study of something substantial. Something he can grab hold of. Something he can really sink his teeth into--intellectually speaking, that is.
What better field to pursue than biography? The objective study of the life of another person. A person who indisputably existed outside of oneself. An individual who was born, who lived, and who died. It's all right there on record. Right? And there's even an interesting subject right to hand. The once (modestly) celebrated, now all-but-forgotten biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes.
You can see it coming, perhaps? How by choosing a biographer as a subject for his biography that Phineas has fallen write back into the postmodern mirrored trap that he sought to escape. For by writing a biography about a biographer, Phineas is confronted by the same problems of relativity, of slippery identity, of truth versus relativity that made his former studies seem so vapid and insubstantial. The closer Phineas gets to Scholes Destry-Scholes the less there seems to see of the man. When he discovers some papers that the great biographer was working up--a sort of comparative study of the seemingly disparate lives of Henrik Ibsen, Francis Galton, and Charles Linnaeus (you'll learn who they are in the book if you don't know already)--Phineas is disconcerted to discover that Destry-Scholes wasn't as objective as one might wish a biographer to be. He distorted known facts (known facts: ha!), repeated what he knew to be his subject's fantasies and fictions, and added a few of his own. What Phineas discovers is that Destry-Scholes, even as a biographer, is writing as much about himself as he is about the lives of his subjects.
And, in writing about Destry-Scholes, so Phineas is writing as much about himself.
Is all writing, then, really autobiography on some level?
Was the answer that A.S. Byatt gave to that young interviewer all B.S.? Or just partly B.S.?
Can we ever escape the relativist, solipsistic maze? Or is it, as the postmodernists seem to imply, a necessary "evil"? And, if so, being necessary, being the very ground of our existence, perhaps not evil at all?
I suspect that this is but one way to read this fascinating novel. In truth, it is not an easy read and I suspect that a lot of it went sailing right over my head, especially inasmuch as I didn't devote as much time to picking it apart as it probably deserves. As a novel about a writer writing a book, Byatt employs a lot of entertaining metafictional devices, which surprised me, as she can sometimes strike one as a rather conservative, stodgily traditional writer. But in The Biographer's Tale she's playful and entertaining, even light-hearted, which is to say, light-hearted for her. It's the kind of book that pretends to contain research gathered for Phineas's book: which means, in this case, photographs and drawings. They are a nice break. As is the humor. And the occasional erotic hijinks and descriptions of insect battles. It's the kind of book where you learn a lot of ancillary stuff that Byatt learned during her research, which is one of the reasons she gave for writing about other lives...even if she wryly suggests in this novel that, in the end, we can only really write about ourselves.
A.S. Byatt is indisputably somewhere in these pages. She's said so herself without saying so at all. And that is a large part of what makes this novel so infinitely beguiling.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Saturday, March 9, 2013
=2013 Books Read=
Ghosts
John Banville
What a great writer John Banville is--if only one can get oneself to read him.
I tried half-a-dozen times to read this book before I took to it. I knew it would be good. I knew I would like it. But I kept starting it and putting it down. I read a half dozen other books instead.
What was the problem?
Reading Banville, I found, was like sailing. If you could only catch the wind right, he carried you along without you having to do another thing. The sailing was smooth and effortless. The beauty and power of his language swept you out to sea. You sat there amazed. The horizons were limitless. The journey exhilarating.
But if you couldn't catch that wind, you foundered. Everything was difficult. You were stuck close to the dock, exasperated, your skiff turning circles like a dragonfly with a broken wing, sloshed by the incoming tide.
Well, at least that's how I imagine it is with sailing. I've never been on a sailboat. In any event, it's the best description I can come up with for how I found reading Banville.
He's been compared to Joyce and Yeats, but I found him more comparable to Beckett. The bleakness. The world-weary misanthropy. The broken-down characters for whom life is just to high a hill to scale. The same humor. Yes, Banville, like Beckett, is a funny writer. If you have that sort of sense of humor. I do.
He's like Beckett, but with more plot. Though the plot in Ghosts is minimal. A group of pleasure-seekers on a small boat find themselves stranded on an island. If you're high-brow, you think Shakespeare's "The Tempest." If you're like me, you're reminded of "Gilligan's Island." They are of all different character types, the strandees. You've got the pretty young thing, the cynical photographer, the elderly duffer, a pair of buffoonish buddies, a sinister lothario. They seek temporary shelter in a big ramshackle house inhabited by a decrepit servant, an ex-convict, and a once-renowned art historian.
To say much more wouldn't be to ruin the plot, what there is of one, as to be somewhat irrelevant and off the point.
What is the point?
It's Banville's facility with language, his ability to weave a haunting meditation on human life that is by turns extravagantly beautiful, spare and violent.
Banville is not for everyone. No more than sailing or sushi or walking on eggshells is. But he's worth giving it the effort. Even if it means picking up his book six or seven times before you get the feel for it. If the wind catches you right, you're in for quite a ride.
John Banville
What a great writer John Banville is--if only one can get oneself to read him.
I tried half-a-dozen times to read this book before I took to it. I knew it would be good. I knew I would like it. But I kept starting it and putting it down. I read a half dozen other books instead.
What was the problem?
Reading Banville, I found, was like sailing. If you could only catch the wind right, he carried you along without you having to do another thing. The sailing was smooth and effortless. The beauty and power of his language swept you out to sea. You sat there amazed. The horizons were limitless. The journey exhilarating.
But if you couldn't catch that wind, you foundered. Everything was difficult. You were stuck close to the dock, exasperated, your skiff turning circles like a dragonfly with a broken wing, sloshed by the incoming tide.
Well, at least that's how I imagine it is with sailing. I've never been on a sailboat. In any event, it's the best description I can come up with for how I found reading Banville.
He's been compared to Joyce and Yeats, but I found him more comparable to Beckett. The bleakness. The world-weary misanthropy. The broken-down characters for whom life is just to high a hill to scale. The same humor. Yes, Banville, like Beckett, is a funny writer. If you have that sort of sense of humor. I do.
He's like Beckett, but with more plot. Though the plot in Ghosts is minimal. A group of pleasure-seekers on a small boat find themselves stranded on an island. If you're high-brow, you think Shakespeare's "The Tempest." If you're like me, you're reminded of "Gilligan's Island." They are of all different character types, the strandees. You've got the pretty young thing, the cynical photographer, the elderly duffer, a pair of buffoonish buddies, a sinister lothario. They seek temporary shelter in a big ramshackle house inhabited by a decrepit servant, an ex-convict, and a once-renowned art historian.
To say much more wouldn't be to ruin the plot, what there is of one, as to be somewhat irrelevant and off the point.
What is the point?
It's Banville's facility with language, his ability to weave a haunting meditation on human life that is by turns extravagantly beautiful, spare and violent.
Banville is not for everyone. No more than sailing or sushi or walking on eggshells is. But he's worth giving it the effort. Even if it means picking up his book six or seven times before you get the feel for it. If the wind catches you right, you're in for quite a ride.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
In Defense of Cheap Sketchbooks
Well, here I am, back to using what is quite possibly the cheapest possible "sketchbook" in the world--the school writing tablets you get at discount stores for a dollar (sometimes 50 cents) a piece. The lousiest type of paper outside of newsprint and whatever they use to wrap dead cod at the fish store.
Recently, I treated myself to a couple of really nice Moleskin watercolor books. But I just can't get myself to use them with the same anything-goes spirit that I use these throwaway tablets.
It's not that I don't feel that I deserve to use fine materials, that I'm somehow unworthy, or that I'm afraid to "ruin" them with anything less than perfection. Okay, there is that, but it's not only that.
It's not that I grew up in a single-parent household where money was tight and we were taught to keep anything we did have in as pristine and unused a condition as possible for as long as possible (--just try doing that with a piece of paper!) Well, this is true, too, but it's not the all of it, either.
Maybe I don't respect myself enough as an artist, or take myself or my work seriously. But I do, maybe even too much so.
So what is the problem? What is the antagonism between me and fine materials?
Maybe, I've begun to wonder, if the problem isn't a complicated combination of all of the above and the equation somehow resolves itself in this way: that when I use fine archival papers I feel that I need to be certain that I have fine, archival stuff to put on it. And I don't. Or I might. But I can never know until after the work is done.
Sometimes, of course, I know beforehand: like when I'm pasting library receipts or recipes into my sketchbook. Or pressing lipstick prints onto the pages. Or making quick sketches of stuff I ate. Or jotting down lists of things I did on this or that particular day, or phone numbers I need to remember, or advertising slogans that caught my attention. Quotes from authors I've read, sketches of authors I'm reading, pictures cut out of magazines...none of this is "archival quality" work and I don't feel right putting it on archival quality paper. Doing so, I feel like I have to talk myself into the idea that I'm doing something important, archivally important. Something meant to last, to stand the test of time. And I'm not. Nor do I have to be.
Using crappy paper, I'm making a sort of Declaration of Creative Independence. I'm saying: "I'm not doing anything important with a capital 'I'. I'm not doing anything for the gallery, the museum, for Posterity. I'm taking myself seriously; I'm taking my "now" seriously, and nothing more. I'm enforcing my freedom to do what interests me in the moment because whatever I'm doing this moment is guaranteed not to last much longer on the recycled garbage I'm creating upon. I'm thinking now of the Chinese poet who sat at the back of a drifting boat writing verses. As each one was finished, he put a match to it and set the paper to burn on the river.
I've come to understand that this is the best way I can enforce honesty and integrity into my work and my life. The best way I can make my life and my work one--and make of their union an end in itself which, as I've come to see it, would constitute at least one good reason for living.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Saturday, March 2, 2013
=2013 Books Read=
The Three Button Trick and Other Stories
by Nicola Barker
Hi Nicola
How are you? Doing well, I hope. I just finished reading your book The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and it put me in mind to drop you a line. I finished it, cover to cover, in two days. I know the collection isn't long, but I'm not a fast-reader either! So, to read that quickly, I have to be fairly engaged. Well, as it turned out, I also had a lot of time to read yesterday. The hubby and his mates popped down to Atlantic City to see a vintage car show and auction. I don't know why I'm talking in English slang as I'm not English. Probably an after-effect of reading your stories! Anyway, I was alone most of the day so I had plenty of time on my hands.
Well, the weather was fairly awful, nothing like what the forecasters had promised: it was grey and cold as the bottom of a frying pan stashed in an unheated hall pantry. The long pleasant walk in the sun I was so looking forward to taking--that was out. I spent most of the morning in the warm kitchen baking a coconut custard pie for the hubby (his request). It was my first attempt at the coconut custard. Shall I give you the recipe? Let me know. For now, though, here's the key: use coconut milk. You'd think that was a no-brainer but most recipes I've seen tell you to use plain milk.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, between doing a little writing and vacuuming and attending to some intimate matters of personal hygiene the details of which I'll spare you, I had plenty of time to finish The Three Button Trick and Other Stories. Let me say straight off (well, I'm not quite saying it "straight off,"am I?) that I enjoyed it. Also, I understand how hard it must be to have to defend work that you did twenty years ago. Good grief! I wouldn't line a cat bin with stuff I wrote two decades ago! Thank god, I often console myself with thinking, but I suppose it's something of a silver lining that no one ever thought enough of my writing back then to publish it. For that matter, no one thinks much of it now either, so I guess I'll have that much less to regret twenty years from now. I'm getting off the point again. What I'm trying to say is that no doubt you've grown a lot as a person and a writer in the last couple of decades.
Which is not to say that these stories aren't good. They are. You know, most of them, anyway. No one can hit a home run every time up at the plate, not even one of those muscle-bound guys on steroids. For the most part, the tales here are smart and quirky and slick, pretty much what you might expect from a smart young woman writing for a slick magazine targeted for a readership of other smart young women. I really don't see them as even approaching the work of Martin Amis or Julian Barnes as the copy on the back of your book boldly and immodestly claims. (I know you have nothing to do with that). Maybe you're more recent work justifies such comparisons. I know you've come close to a Man Booker Prize a couple of times by now. Personally I couldn't say. I'm not so sure I'm going to take the time to find out either because you write such super-long novels nowadays and I just find that kind of investment impossible to justify (unless your Tolstoy or something). Well, we'll see. Right now I'm not inclined to giving Darkmans a try, but who knows? I change my mind--what's left of it anyway--a lot.
Back to The Three Button Trick and Other Stories, though. A lot of the stories seems to turn on a clever gimmick of some sort, like the title story, and "Back to Front," where the guy is born with all his insides on the wrong side of his body and "Inside Information" about the unfit, unwed mother with the talking fetus. G-String would fall into this category. I know it's supposed to be funny, but I kind of thought it was just silly. Others are real gross-outs, like "Symbiosis: Class Cestoda"--a story about a woman with a unique eating disorder involving (yuck!) tapeworms! I'll never forget it, though, especially when I'm eyeballing that extra piece of coconut custard pie. Do you really think it would work, The Tapeworm Diet? Some of these stories wouldn't be out of place in a horror anthology, especially the more literary sort of horror anthology. Hey, you're not related to Clive Barker by any chance, are you?
I think your "Wesley" stories were clearly the best in this collection. They were shocking, too. I'm thinking especially about the one with the finger-eating owl. Sometimes I think your propensity to shock can "cheapen" the literary merits of your story, but I don't think that's the case in the Wesley stories, where the violence seems so much more integrated than it sometimes does.
Actually, on second-thought, (I told you I changed my mind a lot) I'm thinking again of the title story and I'm going to say that this might, in fact, have been the best story in the book. Aside from the shock, it brings together a lot of what is best in your stories...or what I think is the best of your stories. It's also rather heartwarming, even though it is mainly a story about jealousy and infidelity and selfish people behaving rather badly, it's ultimately a tender-hearted love story. How can that be people might wonder? Well it's hard to explain...and that is what makes it such a good story.
Well, I guess that's about all I have to say about The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and I'm also guessing you're thinking it's more than quite enough! Thanks for keeping me company yesterday. I wish I could offer you a slice of coconut custard pie. It came out super-creamy, super-deeeelish!!! Do let me know if you'd like the recipe.
Take care,
m.
by Nicola Barker
Hi Nicola
How are you? Doing well, I hope. I just finished reading your book The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and it put me in mind to drop you a line. I finished it, cover to cover, in two days. I know the collection isn't long, but I'm not a fast-reader either! So, to read that quickly, I have to be fairly engaged. Well, as it turned out, I also had a lot of time to read yesterday. The hubby and his mates popped down to Atlantic City to see a vintage car show and auction. I don't know why I'm talking in English slang as I'm not English. Probably an after-effect of reading your stories! Anyway, I was alone most of the day so I had plenty of time on my hands.
Well, the weather was fairly awful, nothing like what the forecasters had promised: it was grey and cold as the bottom of a frying pan stashed in an unheated hall pantry. The long pleasant walk in the sun I was so looking forward to taking--that was out. I spent most of the morning in the warm kitchen baking a coconut custard pie for the hubby (his request). It was my first attempt at the coconut custard. Shall I give you the recipe? Let me know. For now, though, here's the key: use coconut milk. You'd think that was a no-brainer but most recipes I've seen tell you to use plain milk.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, between doing a little writing and vacuuming and attending to some intimate matters of personal hygiene the details of which I'll spare you, I had plenty of time to finish The Three Button Trick and Other Stories. Let me say straight off (well, I'm not quite saying it "straight off,"am I?) that I enjoyed it. Also, I understand how hard it must be to have to defend work that you did twenty years ago. Good grief! I wouldn't line a cat bin with stuff I wrote two decades ago! Thank god, I often console myself with thinking, but I suppose it's something of a silver lining that no one ever thought enough of my writing back then to publish it. For that matter, no one thinks much of it now either, so I guess I'll have that much less to regret twenty years from now. I'm getting off the point again. What I'm trying to say is that no doubt you've grown a lot as a person and a writer in the last couple of decades.
Which is not to say that these stories aren't good. They are. You know, most of them, anyway. No one can hit a home run every time up at the plate, not even one of those muscle-bound guys on steroids. For the most part, the tales here are smart and quirky and slick, pretty much what you might expect from a smart young woman writing for a slick magazine targeted for a readership of other smart young women. I really don't see them as even approaching the work of Martin Amis or Julian Barnes as the copy on the back of your book boldly and immodestly claims. (I know you have nothing to do with that). Maybe you're more recent work justifies such comparisons. I know you've come close to a Man Booker Prize a couple of times by now. Personally I couldn't say. I'm not so sure I'm going to take the time to find out either because you write such super-long novels nowadays and I just find that kind of investment impossible to justify (unless your Tolstoy or something). Well, we'll see. Right now I'm not inclined to giving Darkmans a try, but who knows? I change my mind--what's left of it anyway--a lot.
Back to The Three Button Trick and Other Stories, though. A lot of the stories seems to turn on a clever gimmick of some sort, like the title story, and "Back to Front," where the guy is born with all his insides on the wrong side of his body and "Inside Information" about the unfit, unwed mother with the talking fetus. G-String would fall into this category. I know it's supposed to be funny, but I kind of thought it was just silly. Others are real gross-outs, like "Symbiosis: Class Cestoda"--a story about a woman with a unique eating disorder involving (yuck!) tapeworms! I'll never forget it, though, especially when I'm eyeballing that extra piece of coconut custard pie. Do you really think it would work, The Tapeworm Diet? Some of these stories wouldn't be out of place in a horror anthology, especially the more literary sort of horror anthology. Hey, you're not related to Clive Barker by any chance, are you?
I think your "Wesley" stories were clearly the best in this collection. They were shocking, too. I'm thinking especially about the one with the finger-eating owl. Sometimes I think your propensity to shock can "cheapen" the literary merits of your story, but I don't think that's the case in the Wesley stories, where the violence seems so much more integrated than it sometimes does.
Actually, on second-thought, (I told you I changed my mind a lot) I'm thinking again of the title story and I'm going to say that this might, in fact, have been the best story in the book. Aside from the shock, it brings together a lot of what is best in your stories...or what I think is the best of your stories. It's also rather heartwarming, even though it is mainly a story about jealousy and infidelity and selfish people behaving rather badly, it's ultimately a tender-hearted love story. How can that be people might wonder? Well it's hard to explain...and that is what makes it such a good story.
Well, I guess that's about all I have to say about The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and I'm also guessing you're thinking it's more than quite enough! Thanks for keeping me company yesterday. I wish I could offer you a slice of coconut custard pie. It came out super-creamy, super-deeeelish!!! Do let me know if you'd like the recipe.
Take care,
m.
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