First the movie: Midnight Run. I’ve probably seen this film five times and it always makes me laugh my ass off. This clip has one of my very favorite movie lines of all times. It’s at the very end. Clip is just over a minute — 1:06.
Not that you need to know, but Charles Grogan plays an accountant who unwittingly works for the mob in Chicago. Once he finds out, he steals millions from them and gives it to charity. He’s been indicted and is out on bail.
De Niro plays a former cop, also from Chicago, who left because he was unwilling to take bribes. He now works as a bail bondsman in Los Angeles and has been tasked with bringing Grogan in.
The books: a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait and short stories by George Saunders, Tenth of December.
I finished The Marriage Portrait but found it to be a bit of a slog. I love this writer (this is the fifth book of hers that I’ve read) and I will continue to read her, but here she indulged in too much description of nature and interior moods. It didn’t help that the two time lines made you work a bit to keep track of things.
The NYTimes reviewer agreed with me, although he is much more critical. He wrote, “it … went in for lush atmospherics, for a lot of rustling leaves” and “[m]urder and unwanted sex are primal drivers of narrative … [but] the characters are so one-dimensional and overwrought that the force of neither driver lands.”
It’s strange to come to this conclusion when some of the descriptions that were TOO MUCH were written with gorgeous prose.
It was interesting, by the way, to read a novel that does what I have been criticized of doing. Have I mentioned this before? I like atmospherics and can go on for pages (the light on the river, dusk gathering in the dewberry bushes, etc) leaving the plot (what plot?) to languish. In my third major edit, I searched the word “clouds” in order to strike out more than half of the (endless) descriptions of the sky.
Now Saunders I read because he really knows how to play with form (think: Lincoln in the Bardo). He does so here with a lot of skill, even inventing a grammar for one of his characters (see below). Didn’t love these stories however and that may be a question of preference — the reliance on dystopian plots and details just didn’t grab me. Sometimes I’m a fan of that. Not here.
What were two of the best books you read in 2023?
Kristin Harmel .. I liked her The Book of Lost Names and am about half way through her book The Forest of Vanishing Stars. I also liked A Good American by Alex George.
Fantastic! I don’t know any of these titles.
In January of this year, I felt the need to delve deep into my feelings of strong connection with Celtic myths and mysteries and my increasing elder hood. I wanted to devote the year to the pulse of creativity that I felt coming from a deep place within myself. Four books that centered me, engaged my mind, heart and soul were Dr. Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted, Foxfire, Wolfskin and other stores of Shape Shifting Women and Hagitude, as well as John O’Donohue’s Walking in Wonder. A burst of creative fierceness from reading these books resulted in the creation of four of my naturally dyed cloth landscape collages, one after the other, while simultaneously reading these books. Perhaps more would have come if my husband had not become very seriously ill starting in March.
During the six months of his illness, it was difficult to delve into more of these types of books so I relied on light romance novels or re-reading a whole slew of books by Maeve Binchy. (My husband is doing much better, now but still has lingering issues but nothing that cannot be handled.)
In particular, If Women Rose Rooted and Walking in Wonder stayed with me, although in the background. I am gradually ending this year by returning to them for more in=depth reading for they verify some of my beliefs and act as way finders..
From If Women Rose Rooted:
“There is a juiciness to creativity, a succulence or a sensuality which both produces and is soothed by creating something….creativity is pleasing to women on a very deep level, whatever form it might take- whether it’s the feel of clay in our hands,the colors that work on us as we knit of sew, the meaning .that we find in the words we write, or the emerging feel of movement as we dance and the music moves through our bodies.”
From Walking in Wonder:
“A human life is guided,balanced and poised by the light of the mind and spirit of the person…There are great primal thresholds in life, and one of the most beautiful and most encouraging and most healing is the threshold of dawn, when darkness gives way to the light and novelty and wonder of a new day.”
Thank you for the long luscious quotes. I do hope you can get back to it. I get the Maeve Binchy binge (even tho I’ve never read her). My equivalent lull-media has been reruns of The Closer, although at this point I’m kind of sick of main character’s hysterical outbursts and may need to find something else.
Would love to see pictures of your landscape quilts. Big thanks for the book suggestions .. I’m happy to hear your husband is doing better. It’s so hard when the ones we love struggle. Sending hugs!
Mmm…I don’t know that I’ve actually completed a book this year. Boy, that looks sad in print! Dabbled in many though.
“I searched the word “clouds” in order to strike out more than half of the (endless) descriptions of the sky.” – I laughed to myself reading this and picturing my blog where it seems to be all clouds, all skies…al the time! lol
And not surprisingly, the bridge/sky pix in your blog are some of my favorites.
Love reading about your writing and others here, and readings. Gotta see “Midnight Run”!
2 Books : #1 Demon Copperhead #2 Red Sparrow (I had to put it down for a couple years b/c I feared it would be relentless violence); finally finished it. Recommend it nonetheless. Recommend: The White Road (it’s about the making of porcelain).
Oh, what you can learn about humanity from going Greyhound? Lol there’s a book title for someone?
Marriage Portrait was my January read (pity the authors that followed). After Hamnet, I was ready for her style. It’s easy let her lushness lull you into gliding over some of those passages without noticing that they are minefields of meaning often connecting inanimate objects with emotional states. Did you see it coming? I didn’t. Then came the Magicians Assistant – an annoying blip. It was a while before I picked up another book. Paint it Black by Janet Fitch was an example of all that word salad leading us to an empty cardboard box in a closet. Amy Harmon’s The Unknown Beloved was good enough to keep me in the room. We talked about that one. I tried Saunders more than once and can’t remember why I didn’t try harder. I’ve learned to *not* force a book down because I should. Rigthht now I’m liking The Trackers by Charles Frazier. The main character is an artist during the depression. He is working on a post office mural as part of Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art Project.
Love that condemnation of Janet Fitch! Haven’t read any of these except the first. I felt annoyed by the over inclusion of descriptions including and maybe especially of Lucrezia’s painting. It made me realize it is absolutely not interesting to read about someone painting. There were a couple of surprises and like I said some of the descriptions of the natural world were amazing — there were just too many of them.