What is most astonishing in Garrett’s narrative technique is his generosity to the narrators. While most novelists write from a single point of view, whether their own or that of a fictional character or of liberal philosophy’s impartial spectator, Garrett allows his people to speak for themselves and to justify their (often miserable and sometimes worthless) lives.
This was published originally (if I recall correctly) in an issue of The Texas Review. George Garret, knowing how highly my wife and I regarded The Succession, asked me to write the piece, perhaps because he had trouble finding anyone else.
It’s time to move on to another book discussion. Here are some possibilities.
Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes.
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, which deals with household and family management.
Several of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idyls….
This podcast initiates a series in which Dr. Fleming, with Rex Scott and Jim Easton, grapple with the literal meaning of every word in the prayer we are given as the model by Jesus Christ. This first podcast introduces the topic and sketches out the methods we shall be using.
I have decided, more or less, to abandon Facebook. I told my virtual friends I’d give it a month of one-way silence, and I intend to do that, but social media are a terrible distraction. I’d rather read my stack of old Braccio di Ferro comic books. It is not just that most FB posts are stupid–they are–or ill-informed–even more so–but the invitation to people to admire their own ill-considered thoughts, to stare into the mirror they have created and admire their own imperfect complexions.
I don’t have much to say about what happened yesterday. The people who organized the demonstration and those, like the President, who merely agitated for it, must have known that whatever took place would play into the hands of the incoming administration and the media that represents them. Even if not a single law had been broken, they would have been portrayed as sore losers who cannot accept the results of a free and fair election.
Mexico and the United States are both known as violent countries, but there are important differences in the style—and the incidence–of criminal violence. Both are complex countries with varying ethnic and regional traditions.
For over 20 years, whenever the US Congress is debating a stricter immigration law, hundreds of thousands Mexican-Americans take to the streets. The demonstrators, often waving Mexican flags, demand rights for the illegals and accuse conservative Republicans of racism. The substance of much of their complaint is that Mexicans, illegal as well as legal, have made an indispensable contribution to the American economy, and yet they are treated with disrespect and hostility.
Coming out of his seclusion, Mickey announced a monster meeting in a field outside of Chequamegon. He did not have time to build a stage, but there was a nice little stream flowing through the field. One side of the ground was flat with room for hundreds of people to stand or spread out picnic blankets, and on the other side, there was a steep bank, which Mickey mounted, to make his pitch, which is why his speech has gone down in history as the “Sermon of the Mountebank.”
This review of David Donald’s Lincoln ( New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1996) was commissioned and published by the Spectator (London), for which I wrote with some frequency, once upon a time before the world ceased pretending to exist.
