November Selection 2007
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for November meeting, 2007
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff's exceptionally good new novel starts out at an expensive American private school. The pupils are largely drawn from the ranks of "America's heirs presumptive", but the staff run the place along liberal, "meliorist" lines. Snobbishness is frowned on. Eccentricity is tolerated, and literary achievement is prized as highly as sporting success.
The school is a kind of Eden - or so, at least, it seems to the young narrator, a scholarship boy who has learned to conceal the truth about his background by copying his peers' amused disdain for outward shows of gentility.
The first half or so of Old School introduces us to the narrator's adolescent worries and literary ambitions. It's 1960. Hemingway-worship is still very much in the air, and Wolff gives us some generous, laugh-out-loud samples of the boys' pseudo-worldly shots at writing fiction ("You bitch," said Montague. "You perfectly beautiful bitch."). The school holds writing competitions judged by a visiting writer, with whom the winner gets a triumphal one-on-one. And since the visiting writer is usually a pretty distinguished figure, these competitions are passionately contested.
Visits from Robert Frost and Ayn Rand, the fire-breathing right-wing novelist, provoke frenzied scribbling and numerous misunderstandings. Then it's announced that the next guest of honour will be none other than the Dean's old buddy Ernest Hemingway. The narrator - whose previous efforts have been too self-protectively bogus to make much of an impact - commits himself to writing a genuine, self-revelatory story in order to win an audience with the great man.
This might all sound too school-bound and self-consciously literary to make a very enjoyable novel. Old School isn't like that - although it's so well written that it's easy not to notice that the narrator never tells us his name. Wolff is a famous memoirist and, as the narrator puts it while reading Hemingway's stories, a "certain confusion of author and character" enriches the book's debate about fiction and truth-telling. But the effect is clever rather than clever-clever, and while the narrator thinks he's learning about literature, the story he tells is insistently about life.
More to the point, the novel is very funny and very moving, with a nicely judged coda that opens it out in an elliptical but satisfying way. Though less ferocious, Old School is comparable to the work of Philip Roth. This reviewer was tempted to send Wolff a fan letter.
The Telegraph, Christopher Tayler
"Old School" is a novel in stories by one of the absolute masters of the short form, Tobias Wolff. (Even Wolff's two immensely powerful memoirs, "This Boy's Life" and "In Pharaoh's Army," have always felt to me more like short story collections than autobiographies.)
The Boston Globe, Chris Bohjalian
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita, light of so many lives, fire of so many loins, has become so much more than merely the book Nabokov wrote. The story of the young nymphet, Dolores (Lolita) Haze, and her seducer, Humbert Humbert, lives beyond the confines of the novel. In all the fuss about the story (and the films and Lolita-variations that keep appearing) Nabokov's novel is sometimes forgotten. This is unfortunate, because Nabokov's novel is a remarkable work of artistry, among the finest written in English in the second half of the twentieth century. The story is well-known: Humbert Humbert has a thing for young lasses, "nymphets" as he calls them, certain maidens "between the age limits of nine and fourteen" whose allure certain "bewitched travelers" can succumb to. Succumb he does, marrying Dolores Haze's mother, becoming the girl's sole guardian, travelling across the country with her, losing her. It is a tragic love story, a paean to America, a sordid tale humanized, a work of comic genius. Most of all it is Nabokov's writing: artfully crafted the book is a delight to read (and re-read -- as is necessary to uncover some of its secrets). What happens in the book is terrible -- and its focus, which is, after all, around a man of about forty engaging in sexual relations with a barely pubescent girl, is particularly nasty -- but Nabokov humanizes his characters, and though what Humbert does is unforgivable the reader is entranced by the story. It is a peculiar thing that Nabokov has wrought here, but it is brilliant. Few novels are both as sad and as amusing as this one, with Nabokov mixing and managing both tragedy and comedy perfectly.
complete review.com
"(A)bove all Lolita seems to me an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy."
Charles Rolo, Atlantic Monthly
"Lolita, in the context of the reception it has been given, remains nevertheless a savage indictment of an age that can see itself epitomized in such horror and run to fawn upon the horror as beauty, delicacy, understanding. But I hope that this is not so, that Mr. Nabokov knew what he was doing. It is so much more exhilarating to the spirit if the evil that human beings have created is castigated by the conscious vigor of a human being, not by the mere accident of the mirror, the momentary unpurposeful reflection of evil back upon evil."
Frank S. Meyer, National Review
And now, 50 years later, it’s hard not to see Lolita as a marker for the end of the world (including the larger way in which education has been abandoned) and the shattering of complex artifacts of civilization like the novel. I’ve found no novel in the years since 1955 with so many mixed feelings, or such a natural grasp of a strange, special story and its universal meanings. This is a book in which the caress of words breaks adoringly on the skin-bright beach of the new land, refreshing it briefly but not disturbing its snooze. And so it becomes language’s last gasping tribute to silence or the loss of words.
David Thomson, The New York Observer
Technically it is brilliant, Peter-de-Vries humor in a major key, combined with an eye for the revealing, clinching detail of social behavior. (...) This is still one of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year.
Elizabeth Janeway, The New York Times Book Review
(Humbert's) plight is comic, and it is as high comedy that it is presented. (...) Virtuosity, so much admired in some other arts, is at present unfashionable in literature. Can it be that those who feared the book and banned it felt that something really horrifying -- something far beyond the anthropoidal simplicities of Peyton Place -- lurked beneath the gleaming surface of Lolita ?
Robertson Davies, Saturday Night
There comes a point where the atrophy of moral sense, evident throughout this book, finally leads to dullness, fatuity and unreality (...) The only success of the book is in the portrait of Lolita herself.
Kingsley Amis, The Spectator
Lolita is a markedly original book, with dozens of brilliant comic passages in it: but (James Branch Cabell's) Jurgen may serve as a cautionary tale to those critics who in their worthy wish to attack the rigidities of modern censorship have been deceived into calling it a great novel.
Times Literary Supplement
Some useful book club links (external links: open new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities
November Selection 2007