Chapter 4: For Those Who Have Loved and Lost a Pet: Requiescat in Pace

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Writing through tears is every bit the cliché, but there you go: the truth will out, bard-like, whether clichéd or no.

We humans are sense-making creatures, lovers of pattern. Coincidental occurrences once easily ignored seem suddenly connected when propelled by just one overwhelmingly impactful event. For me, just this last week, that event was the loss of a dear pet, Kayda, a sometimes-stubborn yet always-loving standard poodle raised from a pup and who, in many ways, remained pup-like for all of her twelve-plus years, right up until Canine Degenerative Myelopathy (the Lou Gehrig’s Disease of her world) caught up with her.

Kayda was a wonderful dog, unique in many ways. I know that every pet owner says the same thing, but in her case it was true. This was a dog that taught herself how to retrieve, singly. She would grab her Kong (a hard-rubber toy that resembles a small, headless Michelin Man), walk over to the edge of our deck, drop it at her feet, and then knock it through the five-inch space between the bottom railing and the deck’s surface, propelling it over the side. Then she would run down the stairs, hunt out the toy, and bring it back up only to launch it over the edge again. And again. For a dog owner this was wonderful. I didn’t have to stand outside and throw it for her if I didn’t feel like it, something I rarely wanted to do when, say, the mosquitoes had grown duskly thick.

Her game stopped, sadly, a couple of months ago, at about the point where one of her back legs began to drag a bit and her breathing became more labored. That’s what happens with this particular disease: the nerves and muscles fail to converse effectively, and both autonomic and somatic functions quickly degrade. On what was to be her last day she had already gone some time without food, having first decided she no longer wanted her own food, and then progressively losing interest in rice, pasta, chicken, hamburger, and tomatoes—all previous favorites. No coaxing would get her to eat anything but some cheese, bits of hot dog, and her own favorite dog treats. When even these, too, failed to stir her, we knew what she was telling us. A mere walk across the room left her panting and she could no longer stand with surety. Her naps grew deeper and longer. It was time. 

I was with her at the end.

Grief is a drunkard’s walk, pretending direction yet guiding you toward one inevitable fall after another until, slowly, the effects wear off and you’re left with, first, mild sorrow and then, later (sometimes much later), ripe memory. Despite such predictability it surprises us every time, a last call when you need just a few moments more. There’s always something left to say or do, yet those things remain unsaid, undone, headlight-caught in the sudden helplessness of an unwanted ending. Diversion is sought, and soon. A meal out (for who wants to be home with memories?), or a movie (though not a comedy). A book.

And what Pulitzer-Prize winning book would require reading at just this time, if only to provide one of those narrative coincidences that so often strike us as clichéd?

The Yearling.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ coming-of-age story lives in two worlds, both literally and metaphorically. Coming in at over 400 pages yet often shelved in a library’s Juvenile section (where I found my copy), it is a challenging read thus categorized. Still, with various versions peppered with illustrations (N.C. Wyeth’s being the most famous), and with language and story firmly centered on a young boy just coming into his own, the tale’s pendulum swings undoubtedly to the small.

The book, until this project, had been one of those long-avoided; the story of a backwoods Florida family and a young fawn echoed too strongly of the horse stories that girls of my generation grew up adoring. I knew, as a child, that if caught out with such a book I would suffer endless taunting. Better, I knew, to stick with The Hardy Boys and The Hobbit.

I had as an adult seen the movie, largely because of the common guilt many feel when they know a story only as cultural gravitas but have never actually experienced it in any real form. One lazy solitary evening I noticed its pending appearance on TCM and, feeling somewhat Gregory Peckish, settled in to watch. I already knew, of course, how it all ended, how the fawn, grown, becomes an unintending burden and that the boy, also grown, becomes an intending man. Still, at the end, tears fell.

So, too, upon finishing the book, an admittedly uneven affair told moralistically, though with a fair balance of grey tucked between the black and white. Some characters remain flat, either kindly settled or aggressively tempered; others grow and change, learning or giving lessons as required by the narrative. In the end the book satisfies what early Pulitzer committees were looking for: not necessarily the best book, but a book with moral value, with an American catechism deeply etched.

I wonder, though only slightly given a long-standing agnosticism, what brought The Yearling before me at just this time. Was it a story I needed just now? A comfortable companion, something on which to project emotion? Perhaps. More likely, though, it was just a pattern I found in coincidence, a call heard because listened for. In either case (and with a heavy sigh) I admit it’s impact on me, one no doubt greater for my own experiences and, therefore, one more likely remembered, a focus, perhaps, as I stumble through grief, as I write through tears.

Read since last post:

• The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939)
• The Town, Conrad Richter (1951)

Currently Reading:

• A Fable, William Faulkner (1955)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936

COUNT: 20 read, 67 to go

Chapter 3: In Which I Deplore the Use of Certain Words, Offer my Opinions on Coffee Party USA, and Compare my Father to a Notable Hemingway Character

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As a writer there are words I don’t much like to use, and not just the ones you might expect. I loathe, for example, the word “prestidigitation,” largely because it hides the magic it portends, and because “magic” is, by itself, both simpler and more beautiful. “Euphony” is another I don’t much like (because it’s not) and “logorrhea” sets my teeth on edge. “Eschew” pops to mind, ironically, as well.

And “futility.” Because it sounds as sad as it is.

Today is Father’s Day, coincidentally trailing by two days my father’s birthday. He would have been 79, a calculation quickly performed when I automatically thought to call him and, while reaching for the phone, found those thoughts redirected instead toward that oft-avoided word. Futility.

Over the years (and the many miles that separate one coast from another) we talked far less often than either of us wanted to. I have a tendency to live too easily without the touch of family, and he had a stubborn streak that insisted on outreach as a son’s responsibility. There were times when more than a year went by with only greeting cards exchanged.  It’s more than a year this time, too, and will continue to be.

The memories that come most to mind are, as expected I suppose, the early ones. In particular I remember sailing with my father, how he’d rent a small single-mast for a few hours and we’d head out onto the Pacific. Though never far from shore we seemed a world away, cresting what I realize now were tiny waves, tacking first right and then left, taming a taunting wind that there, on the water, held a personality never possessed on land.

Throughout his life my father almost-struggled his way from day to day, never quite the business success he wanted to be, or the salesman he imagined himself, or the father and husband that limned his desires. He was loved, and loved back—always and excessively—and he often seemed happy. But still he seemed pitted against a series of unseen forces—economic, emotional, perhaps even karmic—that forced futility, forced a sense of “nearly,” of “not quite.” Like Hemingway’s Old Man, who finally captures his life’s dream only to have it disappear one bite at a time, my father, too, watched the inexorability of metaphorical sharks take small but steady pieces from his life, right up to the last, the skeleton remains. A series of careers, some more successful than others. Three wives. Six children, one lost much, much too early. Constant struggles later in life to repair a roof, to help with college tuition, sometimes even to pay the mortgage. Still, my father had a wistful optimism, one that manifested itself in wanting to live bigger, stronger, louder than he knew he really could. Or should.

Yet from futility can come the small essence of success.  Children and grandchildren. Friends.

My father’s futility grew from the personal and so, despite the long odds, he always knew that the proper amount of self-sacrifice and hard work could win out. It didn’t, often, and certainly not at the end, but sometimes it did. Then there’d be steak dinners and premium beer. A new flat screen. A new car perhaps, with an upgraded hand-me-down to the son or daughter needing it most. Not so these days for many, for me. Not so the futility I feel. The futility I feel is larger, wider, more subsuming. It comes tinged with melancholy and is fueled by an anomie so self-supporting that one wonders if it will ever lift. We live, you see, in different times than my father, in times colored and flavored by hatred that travels at light speed. It is a futility not of the lost opportunity, but of the never found. We find ourselves now surrounded not only by friends, but by those who desire us hurt. Sometimes they even wear the same names, the same faces.

Recently a few dozen friends and colleagues, people who had worked together and whom I had worked with for the last couple of years, fell victim. Members, regular and board, of the Coffee Party USA are currently at war over the future of the organization, a non-profit ostensibly dedicated to fact-based, civil dialog on “transpartisan” issues: money in politics, the need for cooperation rather than conflict, the willingness to not just sit with those across the aisle, but to ignore the aisle all together.

In a desolate display of groupthinked mismanagement, the board embarked on an unconventional fund-raising plan, one poorly vetted and containing multiple conflicts of interest. When discovered by the members-at-large, they grew justifiably outraged. Given the principles of the Coffee Party (and, in theory, the brand of person attracted to the movement) the next steps should have been predictable: the differing opinions would seek reconciliation in a way that protected the organization, made the necessary changes to prevent such things from happening again, and moved positively forward.

It didn’t happen. Instead, the modus operandi of the age set in; futility, writ large, rang its Pavlovian bell and dozens responded. People with a history of calm, civil, and rational interactions turned rabid. The good-intentioned were vilified. Entire groups were demonized, declared “less than.” Lawyers engaged. Harassment, first threatened, arrived. Documents were leaked, then counter-leaked. Innuendo become the raison d’etre of those involved. Had it not all become so vile, so mean, the irony might have proved funny. But it wasn’t. Real people are being damaged. And others—also real people—gleefully inflict that damage. I’ve watched the hatred set in, hatred so hardened that many former associates will never be friends again, will likely never even speak to each other again. Attempts to end it have been nothing but a clichéd exercise in futility, as if futility is something actively exercised rather than something now merely inevitable.

And so I turn, further from the hatred, from the futility, and back to my own small world. Perhaps I’m the lesser for it. I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.

Today I wait for my own son’s visit. He’ll arrive late tonight, unable to depart until finished with work. While not a coast away, he lives far enough from me that any visit requires planning and an overnight stay. We see each other more often than I saw my own father, but still not often enough. I go there and he comes here once or twice annually now. He calls with more regularity than I ever phoned my dad, and we chat about work, music, or physics (a hobby of his). Sometimes he’ll tell me about something he saw on The History Channel, particularly if it has to do with one of the many modern-day enigmas that fascinate him, like JFK’s assassination or how the Fed controls the money supply. It’s fortunate that he calls, since I have somehow absorbed my own father’s practice of waiting rather than initiating, a habit I fight against when I remember to. A day goes by, then a week, then sometimes another before I realize that I don’t want him looking back, wondering rather than knowing about my life’s little futilities. These are the ones, it turns out, that matter to me, the ones I have energy for, the ones of importance. These small-f futilities, I now realize, are simply life.

The sadness I still feel, though, comes from wondering why everyone doesn’t just focus on the small, on ourselves and those around us, those things that are, in the end, the most important. We need only to realize that the small can become the large when repeated often enough, and by enough people. Why must we respond when given our lines on a larger stage? Whose ends do we serve? Whose words do we speak, words that—given choice, we would ourselves loathe for the hurt they give? If we would all just think about those small relationships, and the value of their simple reality, then perhaps the words we would hear would not be those we abhor, but instead those that matter. Friend. Ally. Companion.

Person.

 

Read since last post:

·         The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)

·         The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron (1968)

Currently Reading:

·         The Town, Conrad Richter (1951)

Still Hanging Around:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 19 read, 68 to go

Chapter 2: In Which I Muse over the Greatness of Literature, Pay Harold Bloom a Compliment, and Wonder if I’m Lonely

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest. 

 

Debates over what makes “great” literature are as predictable as ants drawn to a sugar cube, attracting pundits, reviewers, critics, and a ton of I’ve-read-a-lot-of-books people to the sweet yet empty calories of armchair literary criticism. To see what I mean, (and for a bit of fun) just head on over to Yahoo! Answers and find the thread on “What makes great literature?” where a young avatar is looking for help in writing a “5 page paper on the topic.” The thread includes some interesting observations (I like, in particular, the notion that the consensus of the professorial elite has much to do with what is and isn’t considered great), but quickly devolves into pithy responses like this one: “I like to read certain books because they make me angry or sad or feel cheated with shitty writing…. That being said, I read mostly cookbooks and watch South Park almost daily.”

Interestingly, the professorial elite fare only slightly better (though with dramatically improved grammar). James Averill of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says that “I do not pretend to have an answer to this question” of what makes literature great, but then goes on to write that “great literature appeals to the emotions.” (So I guess he does have an answer!) That response isn’t all that different from the one given by our cookbook reader, even if it does win on style points.

David Foster Wallace, late and great, put it more simply: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”  I like that. Simpler and to the point.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the mannered spectrum, Harold Bloom, the well-respected if rather stuffy literary critic, will tell you that “[w]hat matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering,” a roundabout way, as I read it, of saying that pain is perhaps the key component of truly great literature. 

*****

There are many types of pain, some incredibly subtle.

Last weekend my wife capitalized on a spur-of-the-moment invitation and traveled down to New Jersey for a mini-family reunion of sorts, hosted by her son (my stepson). Due to various factors (including a rapidly aging pet we prefer not to kennel) we couldn’t both attend, so I stayed behind. I’m not unused to such solitude; my wife travels five or six times a year for periods that range from a few days to sometimes two weeks and I, being an introvert (or “hermit,” as she styles it) quite look forward to the time alone. This time, though, felt different.

There wasn’t much I had to “do” (in the “Honey-do” sense). The lawn had just been mowed (she does that) and the kitchen recently cleaned (me). I needed to pick up a couple of cans of dog food, and there was load of laundry basketed and waiting, but other than that I was on my own and, with a pile of praised Pulitzers before me, seemed all set to enjoy a wonderful couple of days. Nestled in family-room leather, I settled in.

Great books do have the flavor, the color of human suffering, Harold. You’re right.

I hit four books this week; all of them were wonderful, and all of them held an overpowering sense of loneliness. They spread across nearly three-quarters of a century, varied in style, plot, and theme, yet each weighed on me so deeply that, at times, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to move. The fates of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey left me feeling like I wanted to reach through the pages and provide solace, warmth, and caring, to give each of them a kind word, a sense that fate was not merely fate, but that their lives had purpose, gave meaning to others. The simple tour driver in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies,” seemed pathetically lonely and sad; as I ended the story I felt a heaviness in my legs and arms that I hadn’t noticed before. And Scarlet Sister Mary, ultimately broken down by herself and her community, broke me down as well; tears muddied my view of the last few pages.

I wanted to share this feeling, this experience, with my wife, but she was in New Jersey, and for the first time in a long while I was less bewitched by solitude. Instead, I was lonely.

I read somewhere that the true definition of a successful marriage is when two people can be alone together. The occasional smile passes between them, along with a quickly shared story. Beneath it all is a wondrous love built on appreciation and flaws, on hands held and words exchanged, on glances and touches and quiet and noise and children and parents and time. And time. These books had made me feel that I wanted to be alone together, and not alone alone. I wanted the weekend to be over. Literature and absence combined into an isolating womb. I missed her, and was glad when the dogs’ barking signaled her car coming up the driveway, coming home.

*****

Right about now I’m wishing to read one of the funny books on this list. Unfortunately they don’t come with indicative titles. Is Tinkers funny? Or A Summons to Memphis? I can’t be sure. I do know to stay away from The Edge of Sadness or The Old Man and the Sea. Or anything by Faulkner. If I hadn’t already read it, I’d probably go right for A Confederacy of Dunces; that title seems somewhat amusing. And it is funny. It really is. Only Ignatius J. Reilly really is quite lonely, after all. 

Read since last post:

·         The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty (1973)

·         The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)

·         Scarlet Sister Mary, Julia Peterkin (1929)

·         The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1928)

Currently Reading, Despite Wanting to Read Something Funny:

·         The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)

Just Realized I Hadn’t Read, but Only Saw the Movie:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

Currently Causing Hallucinations:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 17 read, 71 to go

 

Chapter 1: In which I Reveal more of my Anal Retentive Personality than I Originally Planned to

Once I had decided on the project—and even before I’d tracked down a copy of Honey in the Horn—I needed to get organized. For me, “organized” is a euphemism for creating lists, making plans, and overthinking every possible obstacle, working myself into a lather over the smallest and most irrelevant details. (How “organized” can I get? I once created a Gantt chart for my own wedding just so I’d know to avoid the critical path. It turned out to be getting the rings on time.)

I googled over to the PulitzerPrize site and downloaded the complete list of winners, dropping the cut-and-paste into a Word document. I also took the time to insert the Pulitzer Prize page header, not because it provided any useful addition, but simply because it looked impressive. I then began a sequence of steps to see what I was getting myself into.

Step one involved figuring out the height of my virtual book pile. The awards were established in 1917, with the “Novel” category one of the original eight, along with Editorial Writing, Reporting, Public Service, History, Drama, Biography/ Autobiography, and the unclearly named Special Awards and Citations. However, there was no award given in 1917. So it all really began in 1918, at least as far as fiction goes. That gave me a 97-year span to cover. (There were some awards in 1917—a biography of Julia Ward Howe won, for example, as did New York World reporter Herbert Bayard Swope for his series on the German Empire.)

It turns out that 1917 wasn’t the only year in which “No Award” took home the prize. Only two years later, in 1920, emptiness won again: no Pulitzer praise for anything Novel. Then all is good until 1940, after which several more blanks appear, eleven in all. This discovery leaves me torn. On the one hand, I find it hard to believe that on eleven separate occasions not one single American fictional work merited kudos from the Pulitzer team. Looking at 2012 alone—the last year for which No Award earned the preferred majority of votes—it seems there were quite a few rather excellent candidates  Among those possibly considered? The highly praised The Art of Fielding, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and Karen Russel’s Swamplandia, to name just a few. With all the books published each year (and a measly $50 entry fee), how could there ever be a year in which not one submission is deemed worthy of the Pulitzer?

On the other hand, that’s eleven fewer books I need to read. I’m now looking at only eight-seven. I already feel just a tad bit on my way.

The obvious second step was to determine how many of these books I had already consumed. My reading habits, voracious as they are, mean that I’m never without a couple of books underway, nor without a couple of more on order. My iPad is filled with dozens of books unread, and I too often travel to one or more of my local bookstores, visits I find simultaneously exciting and depressing: I love browsing the shelves, but am constantly frustrated by the vast number of books I still want to read, yet likely never will.

Unlike my foray into the works of Nobel Prize winners (in which I could choose any book I wanted from each author), the Pulitzer project is far more specific. The books that won are the books that won, and make up the reading list. No substitutions allowed. Still, I expected that a goodly chunk would have crossed my path at some point, making the to-read list noticeably shorter. I found, however, that my step-two list was quite a bit shorter than I’d hoped. These are the few I could cross off:

·         A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2011)

·         The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx (1994)

·         A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1992)

·         Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler (1989)

·         Beloved, Toni Morrison (1988)

·         A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1981)

·         To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1961)

·         The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1940)

Damn. I was sure it was going to be more than that. Eight lousy volumes. That leaves me with seventy-nine books to read. Or, as I was beginning to think of it, seventy-eight, plus Honey in the Horn.

It was clearly time to get to work. Step three, then, was to figure out how many unread books I already owned. Back to the list for a detailed perusal, and this is what I found:

·         The Hours, Michael Cunningham (1999)

·         Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2002)

 

So much for all those trips to the bookstore. I’m beginning to wonder if I read more crap than I would like to admit.

My final step—the one that feels more like a compulsion than any of the others—is to color-code everything on my list. Bold and black for everything already read. Blue for everything owned but not read. Green for every unread volume that’s been ordered, but has not yet arrived. And above it all a series of counters: how many left to acquire, how many left to read, how many already read.

With the pre-work complete, I was ready to begin. Though I’d found and ordered Honey, it hadn’t yet arrived. So even though I had planned to begin with Gillian’s plate of limas, there was time to kill, and miles to read before I slept. Might as well get started. 

 *****

Copyright laws, like many things, evolve.  With origins in Britain’s 1710’s Statute of Anne, copyright laws now extend not only nationally, but internationally. Here in the United States our first federal copyright act hit the books in 1790, allowing for fourteen years of protection. An 1831 law extended that term to twenty-eight years which, after a 1909 change, could be renewed for an additional twenty-eight-year period. It wasn’t until 1976 that a serious and significant change arrived, extending copyright protection to seventy-five years, or fifty years beyond the author’s demise. Those that predate the latest law were in the public domain.

Years ago, while still back in high school, I used to reserve summers for catching up on the classics. Let that sink in for a moment, if you will: a teenage boy, still sporting a bit of acne and wondering what he wanted to be when he grew up, voluntarily chose to read books that most others considered, at best, annoying English assignments. Those summers are where I first encountered Dostoevsky and Shaw and Cervantes, where I lost myself in Dickens and Verne and Eliot. I went after them because I felt they were books I should read. I soon discovered they were quite good. Excellent, in fact.

As a compulsion it continues to this day, though no longer confined to summertime. I constantly dive in and out of the classics, floating from Austen to Zola and back again. (Except for Proust. I can’t read Proust. I’ve tried four times and have never gotten past the first thirty pages of Swann’s Way.)

When e-books came along and I found myself gifted a first-generation iPad, finding and reading even more of these books became incredibly easy. Thanks to the aforementioned copyright laws, I could download them for free from the iStore. So I did. With this project now before me, back to the iStore I went, where I found what I’d hoped for: a whole host of early Pulitzered titled were available for nothing. I had the list. I had the iStore. I had copyright law on my side.

Let the downloading begin.

I began with Booth Tarkington’s two entries, Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons. I had never read anything by Tarkington before, probably because I thought he was Sinclair Lewis. They both write about early twentieth century Midwestiness, so it’s understandable that one would get them confused. Plus, they both have bizarre names.

Tarkington, it turns out, had quite a bit of talent, even if Alice Adams has a somewhat forced and too-happy ending. Ambersons, though, is pure brilliance. The slow and steady dissolution of a once-stately legacy (as seen through the eyes of a main character alternately enviable and despicable) reminds me of today’s Mad Men, the brilliant television drama addressing similar themes as generations shift across the 1960s.

The same iStore freebie technique got me the 1918 winner, Ernest Poole’s His Family, and Edith Wharton’s much better The Age of Innocence (1921).  I settled in and devoured them easily. Four books knocked off in less than two weeks. Not bad. Nothing feels as sweet as progress toward a goal, even when said goal is both silly and self-imposed.

At about this time Honey in the Horn arrived. The weathered paperback was longer than I’d hoped, logging in at over 500 pages of densely packed type. While I didn’t anticipate enjoying it, I did assumed that, despite Ms. Flynn’s dire warnings, I’d whip right through the purpled prose, moving quickly on to better fare. But it was even worse than I expected….

 

*****

 

Read since last post:

·         His Family, Ernest Poole (1918)

·         The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1921)

·         Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington (1922)

·         The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington (1919)

Currently Reading:

·         The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty (1973)

Still Gathering Dust in the Corner:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 13 read, 74 to go

Missed the previous posts? Start here....

Prologue: It's Gillian Flynn's Fault

I remember, somewhere around the age of six or seven, sitting at a faux-wooden dining table, oval-shaped with seating for four, and dinner almost concluded. My older sister had already been excused, and my stepfather had retired to the living room where, comfortably entrenched in a recently purchased Naugahyde recliner, he settled in to watch The Huntley-Brinkley Report. I, with a nauseating portion of canned lima beans still littering my otherwise empty plate, sat across from my mother, who was damn well going to make sure that I finished every last one. 

 *****

 

I’ve just read several chapters of a book that made me feel exactly the same way. 

Honey in the Horn won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize in the “Novel” category (later renamed “Fiction”). It’s the story of Clay Calvery, “a hard-mouthed young hellfry” and takes place in Southern Oregon back in the homesteading days of the early twentieth century. The New York Times Book Review lauded it as “honey in the literary horn,” and described it as a “gallery of frontier Americana like none other on earth.” 

That last I’ll agree with. I certainly find it “like none other on earth.” I’ve read some bad novels in my day and this one’s up there near the top—despite having one Joseph Pulitzer’s venerated Prize.

So, you may ask: Why am I reading it?  Because of Gillian Flynn.

 *****

Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order.

I am a self-described “serial obsessionist,” someone who lives a life of sequential immersions, moving from topic to topic based on whim, fancy, and serendipity. I have a compelling need for projects, something to which I can attach a goal, an achievement. When I don’t have one I get fidgety (my wife would say “cranky”) and I find it difficult to relax over even the simplest of tasks.

Case in point: Not long ago I spent a couple of days recovering from some minor surgery. I faced, briefly, a mostly sedentary existence. My wife suggested I just try to relax. Read a bit. Watch some television. Do some writing. 

Said recovery conveniently occurred right around the time of Doctor Who’s 50^th birthday party. I had never seen a great deal of Doctor Who, but knew it as a cult classic and recently popular revival. As a science fiction fan I had always meant to get around to it and, since great celebratory gobs of the Doctor and his companions were now available OnDemand from BBC America, the opportunity seemed rather fortuitous.

I sat down to watch a couple of episodes and was quickly hooked. (Don’t ask why; when it comes to the Doctor, you either get it or you don’t.) I then proceeded to devour all ninety or so available episodes (the full seven seasons of the revival, along with the various specials that had aired during that time), then realized there was even more. I nestled in and watched the two-hour retrospectives of all the earlier Doctors (there have been quite a few of them since, as many know, the Doctor “regenerates” into a new form every few years, allowing one actor to replace another actor rather easily). 

By this time, obviously, I was well recovered. But no matter: the obsession was in full flight. Soon, the available On Demand episodes weren’t enough. I headed over to Amazon, where my “Prime” account gave me access to many, many more episodes for free. I watched Tom Baker (the 4th Doctor) with his long scarf and jelly babies, then screened a few episodes of the 7^th Doctor with his odd hat and anti-hero companion. I tracked down the 8^th Doctor’s single appearance—a TV movie with Eric Roberts apparently meant as a pilot for an American version. Then I found the spin-offs. I watched every episode of Torchwood and several of The Sara Jane Adventures. And the spoofs (including an absolutely hilarious one with Rowan Atkinson). 

My surgery now lay well in the past, but not so my new obsession with all things Doctor; I headed over to Barnes and Noble and began buying a few Doctor Who books. Then I joined several Facebook groups dedicated to him. I even wrote a small poem in the style of Dr. Seuss. I titled it “Horton Hears a Doctor Who.” My fellow Facebook fanatics deemed it well-“liked.”
 

Etcetera, etcetera.

Lest anyone think that my obsessions are always so frivolous (though I’m not saying that Doctor Who is frivolous!), here’s a more substantive example. 

I once spent about two years immersed in Christian theology. That particular journey began when my wife asked me to attend church with her, something I had never done. (My only previous church appearances were for the obligatory rituals: weddings, baptisms, and funerals.) I agreed but knew (without ever consciously thinking about it) that if I was going, I was going all in. In this case that meant books. Lots of them.

I started with the basics, reading the Bible twice through, along with a few exegeses and an analysis of the Synoptic Gospels. Then I really got going. I read Iraneus, Tertullian, Origen, Arius, and the Cappadocian Fathers. I read Saints Anselm and Augustine. I read Ambrose and Cyril and Jerome and Gregory and Hildegard and Hugh.  I even read Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a man whose very name included words I didn’t understand. 

I went forward in time a bit and devoured Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Sienna and Julian of Norwich before slipping forward toward Luther and Calvin—and then further forward into Barth and Bultmann, Neibuhr and C.S. Lewis, Chesterton and L’Engle. I scheduled time with my wife’s pastor (by now mine as well) to discuss various theological dilemmas.  All the while my wife looked on in awe: “I just wanted someone to sit next to me and sing the hymns,” I believe she muttered.

But those examples pale next to my biggest, most energetic obsession, the one that informs the effort now beginning. 

That one began a few years back at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel where, about to embark on a ten-hour flight and realizing I had nothing to read, I picked up a copy of Seeing by the Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. I’d never heard of Saramago, but the airport bookstore’s selection of English-language books was pretty thin, and since I wasn’t much into bodice-rippers or Dan Brown, only a slight number of books were potentially interesting. I figured that I probably couldn’t go wrong with someone who’d won the Nobel Prize.

As I turned the last page somewhere over Newfoundland, those very special neurons fired and it occurred to me that there were many works of great literature I would never get around to reading, would perhaps never even know about.  I decided right then that it might be fun to read a book by anyone who had ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  And I did. All one-hundred-and-something of them.

By now you can probably see where this is heading.

*****

So where does Gillian Flynn fit into all of this? Why is it her fault that I’m slogging through Honey in the Horn?

A few years back The New York Times Book Review, in an effort to respond to its readership (though some might say “in an effort to pander to its readership”) introduced a column entitled “By the Book” in which famous authors are asked facile questions like “Who is your favorite author?” and “You’re hosting a literary dinner party. What three writers are invited?” In the May 11, 2014 column the interviewee was one Gillian Flynn, the noted author of Gone Girl. In the interview we learned that Ms. Flynn is overly fond of Flowers in the Attic and is absolutely (some might say “annoyingly”) over the top about Joyce Carol Oates.

But what struck my attention was a quote from her answer to this question: “What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?” 

“Several years back,” she replied, “(and by several, I probably mean 12), I decided to read every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in chronological order.”

Gillian Flynn, I love you. No, truly. I love you. You may be the only person in the universe who truly understands me.

So there you have it; a new obsession triggered.

 *****

I’m not going to worry, though, about chronological order. Instead, the first thing I’m going to do is tackle Gillian Flynn’s plate of lima beans. I've found myself an old, used, two-dollar copy of Honey in the Horn, ordered it up, and now I'm diving right in. Might as well just get it out of the way. After that, the rest will seem easy.

So thanks, Gillian. (Can I call you Gillian?) It’s all your fault.