THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL -- Philip Roth

Penguin Books -- tpb
New York -- ©1973 -- 328pp
ISBN: 0-14-007678-6

The Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history .. with drunken home-run sluggers, and a battle of midgets, this story takes a crazy spin on the sport of baseball.

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An American novel...definitely. Great? No so much so.

The writing of this is typical 1970's humor. Think M*A*S*H (yes, I know the book was published in '68, but the movie was released in '70, which helped popularize the book series) or the works of Kurt Vonnegut. It's a sort of intelligentsia humor. Sophisticated. Dry. Not a laugh-out-loud type of humor. And for me, this didn't work.

I have to be up-front. I'm not a huge baseball fan. I enjoy it a little bit more, now as I'm older and can look for some of the strategy, but I still find it a slow and mostly dull game. So...to have a book, full of dry humor around the sport of baseball, probably is not a good choice for me.

In large part, though, I had trouble visualizing anyone from this book. The characters were never real for, and without them being real, or characters that I could picture, I didn't really care anything for them. And for that I blame the author.

This is my second Philip Roth novel, and so far, I'm not particularly impressed.

SON OF LAUGHTER -- Frederick Buechner

HarperSanFrancisco -- hc
San Francisco -- ©1993 -- 274pp
ISBN: 0-06-250116-X

The story of Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham, told simply, realistically.

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I think that Buechner is an amazing author.

While I was disappointed with THE STORM (and I realize that I'm in the minority on that), this book was quite exceptional.

First, I didn't realize, before reading it, that it would be an historical fiction account of Jabob (of Jacob and Esau notariety). I have to admit that I might not have been as eager to read it, had I been aware of that. There's something about historical biblical fiction that has not held a great deal of appeal to me. That might change now, after reading Buechner.

Buechner's characters are 'real.' You get a sense of people that you can relate to, despite their having lived nearly 3000 years ago. I goute here my favorite passage in the book, which made me laugh and typifies the 'real-ness' of the characters:

I was like a man caught out in a storm with the wind squalling, the sand flailing me across the eyes, the chilled rain pelting me. The children were the storm, I thought, until one day, right in the thick of it, I saw the truth of what the children were.

One boy was pounding another boy's head against the hard-packed floor. Another was drowsing at his mother's teat. Three of them were trying to shove a fourth into a basket. Dinah was fitting her foot into her mouth. The air was foul with the smell of them.

They were (God's) promise. That is what I suddenly saw the children were. I forgotten it. They were the dust that would cover the earth. The great people would spring from their scrawny loins. Kicking and howling and crowing and pissing and slobbering food all over their faces, they were the world's best luck.

I started to weep. ...

What parent can't identify? All children are mankind's best hope for the future ... no matter what stupid, childish thing they might be doing at any given moment.

There is quite a bit of biblical information here, well time-lined, but the way in which Buechner manages to infuse it with a real ordinariness, and yet still hold our interest, is remarkable.

Definitely worth reading.

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS -- Tim Obrien

Houghton Mifflin -- hc
Boston -- ©1994 -- 306pp
ISBN: 0-395-48889-3

A man's run for U.S. Senate ends badly and shortly after, his wife goes missing in northern Minnesota.  What are the secrets he harbors?

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This is a book that has caught my attention over and over on the library bookshelf, so I finally decided that I would give it a read. As a Minnesotan, I enjoy reading books set in Minnesota. In that regard, this didn't disappoint.

But over-all, the book DOES disappoint.

O'Brien's writing is crisp and engaging, and I really appreciated his mixing up of styles, but the book does not open up the material well. By page 280 I still had not learned anything new that I didn't know back about page 50. The book takes too much time to reveal nothing.

Others have commented on the ending, and frankly, I didn't mind the ending -- I rather expected it -- but to have read so much, getting so little, and to end with nothing, well...I don't understand the point. There are lots of writers whom I enjoy for their style, but they usually have something to say as well, or at least have a character that you like.

This book just doesn't work. It'll be awhile before I try a Tim O'Brien book again.