The Living is Easy

In heart of summer I find myself--like all good Hoosiers--dreaming of fall. For this reason, my husband and I are in a flurry of home improvements designed make living easier in the winter, when we hope to do little more than snuggle on the sofa with books, tea, and knitting at hand. The garage is clean, the utility room is outfitted with a stackable washer/dryer unit that should prevent the drainpipe from freezing, and a new closet door is awaiting installation.



The big project for the summer is new window installation. Our house is 35 years old, and the windows are the originals. Not many things manufactured in the '70s were designed to withstand the test of time (this includes many books and films), and our windows are no exception. While relaxing in my rocking chair last winter, I noted how the curtains puffed in with the gales buffeting the house. Worse, snow filtered in between the sill and window frame. I vowed we would not spend another winter with those windows. So, it is July and I still don't have new windows. The reason: estimates. I don't like paying for estimates, and I don't like the hard sell I'll get from some of the national window retailers. Even so, it must be done, but to do this I must put down the book I am reading and get to it.



What have I been reading? Katherine Anne Porter's Collected Stories is the most memorable. Her work, like Cather's, is as refreshing as a tall glass of water. Her prose is muscular, but entirely feminine, even when she writes from a masculine point of view. One excellent example is "A Day's Work," a short story about a down and out man of Irish extraction who vows to pursue employment in any form, even if it's dirty. Lacey Mahaffy, his wife, is an albatross around his neck. She serves as his conscience and keeper, taking in laundry to keep the family in money. The violence in their lives is understated, but evident; Porter never loses while "playing chicken with sentimentality" here and the result is chilling.



A beautiful rendering of the macabre and grotesque is "Holiday," a story about a young woman vacationing (for reasons unstated) with a German American farm family. Her friend Louise describes the place as picturesque but the narrator soon learns that "amusing stories" about the place "turn grim on you a little while later when by chance you saw and heard for yourself." What the narrator sees and hears teaches her about the cost of this supposedly simple life. The food-laden table, rolling pastures dotted with sheep and cattle, and the half-tame winding river all come at the cost of back-breaking labor and human individuality. The intrusion of death itself provides an excuse for no more than a day's vacation from the misery of routine.



Finally, Porter's take on the ugly American is convincingly rendered in "The Leaning Tower," where an American dilattante visits Berlin on a whim just prior to World War II. His bumbling efforts at art are matched by his bumbling efforts to socialize with the wary German, British, and Polish men living in his boarding house. This world-in-a-house sets the scene for an epiphany on the part of the American, whose clumsy naivete makes him not charming, but dangerous in a time of complex international tensions.



Other reads of the summer so far: The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier, one of my current favorites. His is the freshest, oddest voice out there (by out there, I mean in mainstream publishing). This collection is strange and beautiful, and often I finished the stories sighing, "Ahhh." My favorite is "The Lives of the Philosophers."



A flatter, more self-conscious attempt at strangeness is An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Clearly this author took to heart the oft-stated advice to grab the reader (or editor) in the first line. Hence the title. The premise of book is diverting enough: A young man accidentally burns down Emily Dickinson's home, thus becoming a hero to disgruntled citizens who decry the celebrity of authorship in this country. The humor of the situation wears thin after awhile, and the narrator is too guileless to be believed for long. However, near the middle of the book a thoughtful discussion about the meaning of story nudges the reader to perhaps see this narrative as metafiction, but cues like this one are not consistently provided in the book. All in all, a fun but light read.



Very funny, but not light at all is Dave Sedaris's When You are Engulfed in Flames. I snorted all the way through this book, even though I'd read many of the essays before in the New Yorker. One not-so-humorous essay, "The Man in the Hut," made me uneasy. Not because of the hut man's alleged crimes, but because of Sedaris's ostracism of a clearly incapacitated person. Even so, Sedaris's impulse is completely human and understandable, if not laudable, which is what often makes his writing so complex, honest, and cringeworthy. My favorite essay was "The Smoking Section."

After reading McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye, I decided to take on another Southern work that is more likely to stick to my ribs--Faulkner's Sartoris. Usually, I love McCullers's work, because she, unlike many famed Southern writers, often wins that game of chicken with sentimentality. Here, however, she fell into the potboiler trap. The book is sensational. Aside from a few wonderful, canny observations and descriptions, it really isn't her best work in terms of character development or plot.

I've just begun Sartoris, not the longest book on my list of summer reads, but Faulkner's prose is so dense I'll need help just to hold the thing close enough to my eyes to read it. I'll still be reading it a month from now, but there are much worse ways to pass the dog days.