Walking on the Moon

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all. The elevator pitch for this was that Percival Everett wrote a version of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective. And it is that, as much as it’s any one thing.

I think a fair amount of the fun of James is riding along with Everett and figuring out what he is up to. I will say that I think he does a good job capturing the flavor of Huck Finn, which is such an oddball of great literature that I’d be hard pressed to describe that flavor with any precision. My review above mentions that in Huck Finn “there are many moments of lyrical beauty; laugh-out-loud bits of humor; huge moments of grappling with good and evil.” I think all that is true in James as well.

Strongly Recommended.

I had read Lady Chatterly before, but I went back to it because Bukowski spoke so glowingly about D. H. Lawrence in Ham on Rye. I see some of what Bukowski sees.

I couldn’t really come to Lady Chatterly without its reputation looming. It has both a reputation as an explicit story and as a literary work. By modern standards, it is not terribly salacious, but Lawrence does talk frankly about sex and the people who have it. And I think he does have meaningful insights to share, but there is a lot to say. And I have learned to be skeptical of narratives about women’s lives written by men.

I hope that Lawrence doesn’t believe he’s written the last word on intimate relationships, though sometimes it sounds like he might. A lot of the book is anchored in the time and place, though I think a fair amount of his observations are fundamental. I also think the universe of people in love is larger than he considers. All together, I find the book easy to criticize, but hard to dismiss.

Recommended.

Sister, Sinner is the a biography of a sort I don’t see often enough. Claire Hoffman picked someone who cries out for biography and walks through that life in a lively way without putting making it too obvious to the reader what she thinks. I am impressed that she can make me very interested in Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, realize that she is a very important figure in the history of America, of Los Angeles, and in the history of Religion in America, and still let me decide what I think of all that.

McPherson (Semple McPherson? And there’s another husband in there later… I’ll stick with McPherson) definitely led a life. She built a Pentecostal church out of fervor and charisma. Then using the mass media of the time – radio and newsletters – made it a nationwide church movement. And then there is either a kidnapping or a faked kidnapping. And then Los Angeles politics gets involved. And when it all seems to die down McPherson refuses to let it. It is a wild story just in the facts of it.

Hoffman digs in. Everything she describes is well sourced. McPherson was a celebrity of the day on a par with British royalty or Hollywood stars, so there is copious contemporaneous news coverage as well as detailed church records and some tell-all books. Hoffman sifts it all into a narrative, but leaves the ambiguities there for the reader to weigh.

Strongly recommended.