Summer reading

Shelby Foote and Walker Percy became high school friends in Greenville, Mississippi, in the 1930s, and their correspondence began in 1948 when both were starting out on their writing careers (Percy tentatively, Foote boldly).

The first half of the book is all Foote, because he did not begin saving Percy's letters until 1970. But he more than fills the stage--lecturing his friend, advising him (especially on whom to read, mainly Proust), boasting shamelessly: "I've begun my book. It's going to be a great book; I feel ten inches taller than Shakespeare." This at the end of a letter that begins: "Good writers are not wise men, nor men with faith; good writing proceeds from doubt. It was Dostoevsky's doubt that made him great."

Percy is, not surprisingly, more subdued, but just as preoccupied with what he describes in one letter as this "strange business." There is little about family here, or current events, or life itself outside of art, though Percy tells of a book he's planning (Love in the Ruins) that deals "with the decline and fall of the U.S., the country rent almost hopelessly between the rural knotheaded right and the godless alienated left, worse than the Civil War. Of that and the goodness of God, and of the merriness of living quite anonymously in the suburbs, drinking well, cooking out, attending Mass at the usual silo-and-barn, the goodness of Brunswick bowling alleys...."

The meditations and apercus fly across four decades until the last letter from Percy, in 1989, and the address from Foote at his memorial service. And the sadness you feel over the end of this friendship lingers longer than if it had been a construct of fiction.

The one novel that I've especially enjoyed this year is also a collection of sorts, Paul Theroux's My Other Life (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95, 456 pp.). These loosely-linked stories recount, the author has explained, things that could have happened to him, though they also cover a lot that did: the Peace Corps work in Africa, the teaching in Singapore, the travel books, the midlife divorce. But the fact vs. fiction debate becomes irrelevant in the face of Theroux's writing. "Failure," he says at one point, "is a sort of funeral, and a person fleeing a collapsed marriage is both the corpse and the mourner." His is a perpetually interesting voice.

James Duffy

James Duffy is a writer and retired lawyer living in New York City.

Are You Ready to Step Out of Yourself?" the Irish Tourist Board asks in a current promotion. If you would answer yes, but lack either the time or the wherewithal to venture overseas this summer, I can recommend three novels and a memoir by Irish or Irish-American writers that may enable you to step out of yourself, even though you never leave your backyard hammock.

Angela's Ashes (Scribner, $25, 363 pp.), Frank McCourt's memoir of his boyhood, has already been reviewed in these pages [November 8, 1996]. It has been a national best seller (often in first place on the nonfiction list) and has won both a National Book Critics Award and a Pulitzer Prize. As every reader must know by now, the book describes the author's life to age eighteen, beginning in Brooklyn in 1930 and soon shifting to Limerick. The descriptions of life with his ne'er-do-well, drunken father and hapless mother, and of the family's poverty so grim and deep that it is hard even to imagine, are breathtaking. His daring risks with language are distinctively original, though I was reminded of both James Joyce and Tom Wolfe.