The wonderful Charles McCarry from his “To The Reader” note at the end of Shelley’s Heart on the novel (one of my loves) and politics (one of my hates):

In fiction as in life, people do not always reveal the whole truth about themselves on first encounter, and the novel, like the Congress of the United States, makes its own rules, by which it abides at its own convenience.

Critic and literary historian DG Myers writes that “McCarry may be the best political novelist that the United States has ever produced.” I agree. His pen is as lethal as any sword. Thanks to Overlook Press for not overlooking McCarry.

The NY Times’ Dwight Garner on Paul Bowles and The Sheltering Sky:

Rereading “The Sheltering Sky” today is to be reminded of its dark, largely sublimated power; from its first pages the novel is like a pile of kindling to which a match is about to be applied. Bowles’s sun-baked prose, while never showy, is consistently and ruthlessly evocative. North African vegetation is described as “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred.”

I’ve reread The Sheltering Sky more times than I can remember—more times, I imagine, than any other novel—and despite its darkness (or perhaps because of it) Bowles’s post-war novel of yanquis adrift in North Africa remains one of my favourites, top ten. For many writers, “darkness” is merely gratuitous, a vanity; for Bowles, darkness was the only way he could honestly examine lives:

If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully . . . You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.

With a worldview like that, you’ll never be let down.

Ford Madox Ford offers this unblinking view of human society in Parade’s End:

You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society.

Who dares disagree with that?

From John Buchan’s 1916 novel, The Power-House:

Take the business of Government. When all is said, we are ruled by the amateurs and the second-rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament—pardon me—would disgrace any board of directors. Our rulers pretend to buy expert knowledge, but they never pay the price for it that a business man would pay, and if they get it they have not the courage to use it. Where is the inducement for a man of genius to sell his brains to our insipid governors?

Sometimes it’s refreshing to read how things really haven’t changed one iota over the past century.

Jeanette Winterson, in her Times exploration of novelist Italo Calvino, explains why reading fiction isn’t simply important to human growth, it’s paramount:

There is a fear now, voiced by neuroscientists such as Susan Greenfield and Norman Doidge, that by training the brain on the concrete—vocational education, the simple reward system of video games and mass entertainment, the simplification of language towards information and away from metaphor—that we are breeding dull, mechanical people who cannot manage abstract or conceptual thought and who are baffled by imagination.

I can never thank my parents enough for instilling in me the desperate love of reading.

A wonderful line from Domenico Starnone’s First Execution:

A first draft is the closest thing there is to life itself as it rains chaotically down upon our heads.

Philip Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, was published 50 years ago this week. I first read it in tenth grade English class at New Canaan High School. Twenty-eight years later the title story remains a favourite, and the doomed love of Neil and Brenda still tugs at my heart:

What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn’t any longer. And I knew it would be a long while before I made love to anyone the way I had made love to her. With anyone else, could I summon up such a passion? Whatever spawned my love for her, had that spawned such lust too? If she had only been slightly not Brenda . . . but then would I have loved her? I looked hard at the image of me, at that darkening of the glass, and then my gaze pushed through it, over the cool floor, to a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved.

Sometimes we need not only thank the author who wrote something that remains so indelibly with us but also those who introduced us to such works. Thanks, Dr Benjamin. Yours was the first class that taught me how to read and therefore how to write.