Summer reading

Commonweal, June 20, 1997

Suzanne Keen

Suzanne Keen writes frequently for Commonweal and teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

In this season of book-recommending, the titanic power of Oprah Winfrey has rendered some highbrow taste makers a mite peevish. Most of the friendly souls who yearly share their reading lists with us welcome the sight of a paperback fiction best-seller list in which serious literary fiction outnumbers the Grishams and Higgins Clarks. Here and there, however, in the quarterlies and in the academy, I catch the tone of beach house owners in a bad hurricane season: Oprah's blowing us away, again! I'm not with the excited meteorologists on this one, but content to wobble out on the sea wall in a slicker, shouting into the wind: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (NAL/Dutton, $5.99, 337 pp.), read by tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people this year? Hit us again, Oprah!

If Oprah reminds us that "serious" literary fiction can be fun and stimulating enough to be read eagerly by large numbers of Americans, she also endorses books that are readable and engrossing. In that spirit, I proffer the following suggestions.

If you caught "Ivanhoe" on TV recently, you may have felt an impulse to renew your acquaintance with Walter Scott. Old Mortality, which can be found in Penguin and Oxford ($11.95, 616 pp.) paperbacks, or in a used bookstore, makes a great place to start. My husband urges me to tell you to hang in there for the first thirty pages or so--Scott's great war story and study of the character of religious enthusiasm doesn't falter once the action starts. Old Mortality sets the standard for historical fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: It has gripping adventure, brushes with the famous, and complex characters.

If you especially enjoy historical fiction, I would also recommend two more recent novels, Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders (Fawcett; $14, 608 pp.), and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (Norton, $12.95, 629 pp.). The novels (about medieval Greenland and the slave trade, respectively) have very little in common except for their compelling accounts of the way humans think about racial otherness. Both conjure up long-gone worlds in their vivid evocation of the details and materials of everyday life: a slave ship, a red dress, a carved spoon. Their elegaic intensity obliterates any of the whiff of the formidable research that must have gone into their composition.

Though it isn't strictly speaking a historical novel, Seamus Deane's wonderful Reading in the Dark (Knopf, $23, 245 pp.) brings a poet's lyrical gifts to the task of capturing a closer historical period, of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Booker Prize committee really missed the boat on this short-listed novel, Deane's first full-length work of fiction. Perhaps because it superficially resembles a recent Irish-authored Booker winner, Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (in both books a little boy discovers imperfectly concealed truths about his family), the committee honored an altogether less impressive book, Graham Swift's Last Orders (Random House, $12, 294 pp.). I can't discuss the plot of Reading in the Dark without spoiling the surprises upon which the novel depends, but many of the lyrical vignettes that make up the story made my hair stand on end. This novel is worth buying in hardcover, if you can't find it in a library.

If I were putting together a reading list with the theme "Family Secrets," I would certainly include not only Seamus Deane's book, but Gloria Naylor's best novel, Mama Day (Random House, $12, 320 pp.). Set mostly on an imaginary island off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia (but belonging to neither state), Mama Day tells the story of the descendents of Sapphira Wade, a slave woman and sorceress. Naylor masterfully creates a raft of memorable characters, and imagines a world with its own history, customs, folkways, charms, and dangers. If you have been following Oprah's reading list, Mama Day makes a stimulating companion to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

To cap off a summer of reading either historical fiction, or novels about family secrets, you might enjoy a book that fits both categories, and which happens to be one of the funniest novels I have read in a long time: Louis de Bernieres's Corelli's Mandolin (Vintage, $13, 437 pp.). The lives of Greek villagers and Italian soldiers during World War II provide the material for excruciating comedy and poignant ironies. This novel may have gone out of print, but I found copies for sale at the amazing internet bookstore, Amazon Books (http:// www.amazon.com). It is also available on audio cassette, and, if you have a commute that wouldn't be rendered life-endangering by paralyzing bouts of laughter, Corelli's Mandolin would make a fine choice for a book on tape.

If the mere thought of starting a novel makes you feel faint with exhaustion and guilty in advance for not finding time to finish it, perhaps a slighter volume would appeal. I thoroughly enjoyed perusing The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family (University of Iowa Press, $12.95, 124 pp.), edited by David Selwyn. Especially if you have read and re-read the tiny canon of Austen novels, this collection of poems helps to recreate the world of word-play, riddling, charades, and verbal fun in which their author lived. I especially relished the riddles.