The nice thing about "forced" vacation (i.e. when the business you work for closes for three weeks) is that you get to be slothful and do nothing except visit friends and read books. I could add "watch TV" but for some reason I never really watch much TV, only in the evenings. Some people can turn on the box in the morning and watch an entire 12 part series in one day. Maybe it's the shadow of my mother saying "go outside and play" but watching television during the day always seems way more lazy, slothful, wasteful and indulgent than I have the need to be. It isn't, of course, but it just SEEMS that way to me, sadly. So unless it's a baseball game or some earth-shaking news story, my TV normally doesn't get switched on until the sun has set.
Books, however, are another matter entirely. I have often spent one entire day reading an entire book and have never once felt slothful or anything but happy. I can read from sun up to bedtime and feel like it was a good day.
Jane Smiley has released the third in her American trilogy series. The first, "Some Luck" was excellent, a great look at life in the Midwest, beginning in the early 20th century and ending after World War Two. Great characters, a wonderful sense of the land, descriptions of Iowa and farm life that read as true and as real as a corn stalk. There was pride in farming, in living hard, in simplicity. I devoured that one.
"Early Warning" was the second one, and it ended in the mid 1980's. More offspring, more marriages, lots of cousins to keep track of, much busier. I liked this one a lot as well, especially because the life was one I could identify with, at least the age of the country if not the setting.
Today I finished the third novel, "Golden Age." It ends more than ten years from now, in 2019. This was my least favorite of the three. Part of the problem, for me, was that there were simply too many characters to juggle. Thank goodness there was a family tree in the beginning of the book, I would not have remembered who was who without it. At times I felt like Smiley had a list of events that had occurred in the past 65 years and she had to get each one in, no matter how obscurely. Nancy Reagan, check. Bill Clinton and Monica, check. Monsanto, check. World Trade Towers falling, check. Yes, one could argue that so many of these things shook the structure of America and couldn't be ignored, even in a fictional account, but it was a bit much. There was a lot more greed in this one as well, characters that were simply mean, cold, self-centered. I didn't mind that, it was a definite contrast with the hard-working farm ethic, but it made for a sadder tale. And that's undoubtedly what the author had in mind: America is not what it was in 1920.
I recommend all three, of course. How could a reader not like Jane Smiley, even if that reader didn't like a few of her characters? Simple sentences such as these keep you reading long after you have tired of a rehashing of the mortgage fiasco in the early 21st century: Was it strange that he had given so little thought to the future, that he was so engrossed in the next few steps that he had forgotten about the cliff at the end of the path? It felt good, possibly, to be dismissed and given up on. He thought, Being given up on is the nature of freedom, isn't it? And then thought that maybe this was the first real thought of the rest of his life."
I also read the latest book by James Lee Burke, "House of the Rising Sun." I have mentioned him before. Burke writes a sort of detective fiction but that makes it seem trite and unimportant. To me he is one of the best fiction writers alive right now, no matter what the subject. If you read him, you know about his love of the south and of Montana and how that love translates to the written word. If you don't read him, you are missing out.
And for a true dose of junk food in the form of a book, the latest Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child is totally satisfying. I have read all the Reacher novels and the previous one, "Personal" was very disappointing. With hesitation, I picked up the new one, "Make Me" and was relieved to find it as preposterously entertaining as his earlier novels. There is no merit to this series except entertainment; the writing is average, the characters are repeated (with new names and faces) quite often, the plots are similar. But I can read one of these books in two nights and I don't feel like I have wasted the time. (Many people would feel that, however.) A bit of entertainment stirred into the pot of really good writing is like a dollop of sour cream on top of that bowl of really good chili: not necessary but hey, why not?
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