Reading

I was trying to read some book from somewhere, and it just wasn't grabbing me.  Can't even remember what it was, but it was tedious.  So I put it down and picked up another second-hand Penelope Lively find, Judgement Day.  The change was like leaving the listless warm South Carolina ocean of late August and jumping into a bracing New England pond in June.  Precise, economical writing, well-defined and sympathetic characters, and immediate psychological suspense.  It's just a story of a sophisticated London woman finding engagement in her new home in the seemingly narrow-minded suburbs, trying to help out the local church with its historical pageant.  There's an ineffectual parish minister, who is captured at once by Lively's description:

      He spent several years as a curate in North London, where he found himself out of his depth, made to feel a lackluster figure both by his more racy colleagues and the parishioners.  He was no good at Youth Clubs and disturbed black teenagers.  They made rings around him, as did the jaunty young vicar and his jeaned, chain-smoking wife and her brisk, emphatic community-worker friends.  When the Laddenham living came up he fled with relief.

The village' folk are drawn sympathetically but with a cool eye.  Most of the suspense built up is of a quiet kind: will Clare find a meaningful place in the community? Will the rector break out and do something amazing? What of the quiet, widowed Sydney Porter?  Is Clare's marriage truly happy?  Nothing is predictable.  And neither, says Lively, is modern life, in a village any more than in the city.  While the novel lacks the darkness of McEwen's fiction, villate life is not all tea and flowers.  Accident intrudes cruelly, and wanton human behavior. In a McEwen novel, Clare's child would not have been spared the accident that happens to another.  But it still strikes near her, and she and we are aware that none of us is safe, but that we have to go on and try to live by our lights.

Translated

I've just finished my first reading of David Treuer's The Translation of Dr. Apelles, his third novel (after Little and The Hiawatha) and absolutely the best (so far). I began reading his books because David Treuer was a small boy in Washington, D.C., and was our neighbor when my children were small. Now he's a professor of English and a writer who deserves attention. His first two novels were fine but also fairly straighforward stories of Ojibwes who lived in two cultures, reservation life in northern Minnesota and urban life in a Minneapolis that you never hear about on Prairie Home Companion, a city with neighborhoods of poverty and bleakness, where Indians build skyscrapers because they can get paid for dangerous work that whites don't want to do. Both novels enmesh you fully in the lives of the protagonists and their families. The plotting is skillful, with important information revealed in successive layers, so that the reader doesn't fully understand the backgrounds and motivations of the characters until the end. Treuer's writing is strong and original.
But this new novel (2006) is a departure from the earlier, more traditional stories. While Dr. Apelles is also an Ojibwe living in the city and dealing with some of the same attitudes and stereotypes, his story is a more unique one, of a solitary man simultaneously translating an ancient Indian manuscript about a young pair of lovers and falling in love in his own life. Since's I'm puzzled by how it all turns out, this is all I'll say for now.
Treuer has also published a critical guide to Native American fiction, of which more later.