The word “novel,” at root, means “news,” and no novelist, even if he explore no further than the closets or back stairs of his own home, can be without some news he wishes to bring. —John Updike

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

English novelist L.P. Hartley said that “the past is a foreign country,” but the foreign country for me has always been the present. In school, never a quick study outside the classroom, I couldn’t quite catch up to the cool kids, and eventually let that train go by and settled myself comfortably about 12 years in the recent cultural past, which seemed more stable and amenable to negotiation. Thus, a time-slip in 1976 landed me in 1964, smouldering and pulsating with the Yardbirds at the Marquee Club. Now I was really behind, and facing in the wrong direction to boot. Adulthood eventually demanded its tribute, though, and the ensuing decades brought a tsunami of technological and social change that found me, like the character in Nigel Dennis’s hilarious 1955 novel Cards of Identity, “staggering indignantly backwards into the future.”

Today I’ve made my peace with the present, but the lure of the past, like my penchant for synchronicity, is something I need to be mindful of. So when a close friend, well versed in contemporary lit, advised me recently to “stop living in the last century, book-wise,” I listened. “Read what the cool kids are reading for a change,” she said. “The worst that can happen is that you find it all boring. But then at least you can tell us why.” A challenge had been laid down. I accepted, and we agreed on two recent prize-winning bestsellers.

So I juiced up my jaunty Pocketbook™ e-reader and launched myself into Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022), a conscious echo of David Copperfield set in contemporary Appalachia. Sounds gimmicky, I know, but it was surprisingly engaging, if a bit overwrought and overdetermined in places (much like Dickens). It was only after I’d finished that I found out Kingsolver was born and raised in Appalachia, which no doubt accounted for the authentic feel. As the protagonist suffers a football knee injury and becomes addicted to Oxycontin and other painkillers, there are some harrowing but, one supposes, necessary scenes. It’s at times an uncomfortable read, but I certainly don’t regret plowing through all 205,000 words. Just glad I didn’t have to copy edit it, at that size.

The second book was Nathan Hill’s Wellness (2023), definitely more of an urban epic, with some pithy sociological and intellectual tangles to sort through (the title is from the name of a company in the novel that does research on placebos). Parts of it reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s early novels—if Pynchon had been writing with the goal of becoming an Oprah’s Book Club Pick.  It’s a clunky sort of machine, the pieces of which don’t always fit together that well, a fact that interfered with my enjoyment but apparently not that of the general literary crowd. There are Pynchonesque gems, though, like the chapter describing how Facebook algorithms work to distort and derange the life of one elderly computer addict. And at 195,000 words, it landed me squarely on the 400,000-word mark for the two books, almost as if they were a matched set of quite informative contemporary fictional-sociological treatises. Which, for me, they were. And I wasn’t bored!

Then one day soon after in the library I stumbled upon Deep Cuts, which, as we’ve seen in our previous post, also carries news of our present century.

Thus have I found myself, despite myself, transformed within a very short time into a veritable beacon of the NOW.

SYNCHRO SNACK—IN THE NOW

To pick out our new Proust Quote of the Week, I decided to flip to a random page of the first volume of my three-volume Random House box set in hopes of magically finding something suitable. When nothing jumped out at me from the first, second, or third selected page, I retreated instead to a notebook of mine from 1992, the year I started reading À La Recherche. A little flipping and scanning through the pages of my hand-copied quotes yielded a dandy. The page number I’d specified in the notebook, 169,  was from the paperback Penguin Classics edition we all read from in those days. Curious as to whether my hardcover box set would have the same pagination, I looked up page 169 there, and, yes, it did. But when my eyes darted up to the first line of the page I recognized this as the first page I’d flipped to earlier. The quote I was going to use was there all along! My random aim had been true!

PROUST QUOTE OF THE WEEK

[Our new quote brings us a familiar Proustian trope. A youthful Marcel has just experienced a little epiphany while reading and, instead of pausing and reflecting on it, rushes outside for a high-spirited walk in the woods whereby his newfound inspiration is soon dissipated in exuberance. Here, retrospectively, he’s reminding himself (and us) that often we think we’re doing something when we’re actually doing something else. Or doing nothing at all.]

The confused ideas which exhilarated me . . . had not achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation. Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them.

SONG OF THE WEEK

This week’s song brings an even stronger connection to Calgary than last week’s. I was lying on my couch one afternoon in 1984, listening to a Polydor sampler (The Guitar Album). When this track began to play, I sat bolt upright and, I dare say, slack-jawed (as long as we’re bandying clichés of amazement about). Little did I know that barely two years later I would be watching her live, and dancing like an ecstatic dervish, at the legendary King Eddie Hotel downtown. She was Ellen McIlwaine, and Calgary was to become her home base in the coming decades. I won’t attempt to do her justice in a single paragraph, but you can find out more here, and see and hear her whole story here. All of us at the Eddie were smouldering and pulsating with her that night in 1986, and in this unforgettable track from her second album, We the People (1973), she is the very personification of the song’s title, Sliding.