Wishing We Were at the Beach...

We don’t know where you hang your hat, but out New York City way, it is hot. Surface of the sun hot. Hotter than Marilyn Monroe-reading-Ulysses hot. Such weather makes us long for balmier climes—and the books we would read were we there. And while we know “beach book” has a certain connotation (mindless thriller, mindless romance, mindless sci-fi, mindless chick lit), the Ape has a particular affinity for reading books set on or around the beach while reveling in a little supine sunbathing. Here are a few recent favorites:

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead does a remarkable job of capturing that elusive quality of summering on the shore as a kid. Days are long, but the summer itself remarkably short. Idle curiosity can turn serious in a flash, just as the long years of childhood can change, in one season, into a rush of adolescence. Whitehead manages to dodge the easy wistfulness of many such novels though by giving us such a strong sense of place—the summering enclave for well-to-do African Americans in the 1970s. It’s another strong outing for Whitehead, who now has written four wildly different novels. And while this one doesn’t quite have the virtuosity of The Intuitionist or John Henry Days, Sag Harbor is no vacation from it either.

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard 

It's said of Prince that he can play virtually any instrument in virtually any style. Annie Dillard, it would seem, has a similar felicity with the written word. She has written glittering essays, introspective, moving memoirs, and serious works of theology and philosophy. In 2008, she announced that she'd be retiring from professional writing with the publication of her second novel, The Maytrees. And what a finale it is. The novel follows the meeting, courtship, marriage, divorce, reconciliation and death of the title couple on mid-century Cape Cod. The setting gives Dillard a chance to display her particular gift for setting, and the story itself manages to elicit empathy without resorting the rancor or mawkishness of so many failed relationship stories. As a bonus, Dillard has a penchant for the arcane word, which adds a certain pleasure of discovery to the already sparkling prose.

Spartina by John Casey

The Ape confesses a certain fascination with maritime literature. Fishing, boats, nautical navigation, knots—we can’t get enough of the whole lot of it. Spartina is the name of the boat that Dick Pierce has been trying to build for years and is a metaphor for his life—solid, unfinished, and needing attention he is somehow unable to give it. Casey is quite good both with the details of the life of a Rhode Island fisherman (or at least crafty enough to fool the uninitiated) and with the quiet complexity of middle age. Spartina is a kind of cross between The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (though much less dramatic) and Empire Falls by Richard Russo (though with better prose). This is a personal favorite and an author that deserves a wider readership, which seems strange considering that Casey won the 1989 National Book Award for this novel.


(PS-We’re always looking for more great littoral literature, so drop us a hint in the comments if you’ve got a recommendation)

Ask the Ape!: Paris Edition

Here’s the first edition of what I hope will be a regular feature here: Ask the Ape! (in which readers ply the Ape for bizarrely specific, wildly idiosyncratic, and utterly mundane answers to questions about literature)

Dear Ape-
I love Paris. Miss it dearly and wish I were there right now---and all the time really. What would you suggest to sate my Paris jones?
                                                          Bisous, M. LaFarge

Ah, April in Paris. “I never knew the charm of spring”….anyway. Well, there’s a bunch, way too many to do anything like justice to the question, and I’m going to leave out the obvious (Les Miserables, Moveable Feast, A Sentimental Education, etc). Here are two picks:

A Sport and Pastime by James Salter
Soooo, I’m cheating already. This one isn’t set it Paris, but rather in the countryside outside of it. Sue me. I include it here primarily for the opening chapter, which follows a young American ex-pat on his train ride out of the city for the fall. First line: “September. It seems these luminous days will never end.” Are you kidding me? Have mercy. The rest of the book is stunningly beautiful (and steamy to boot). A quick warning though; Salter doesn’t do the whole la vie en rose thing. The central relationship is difficult and the book is short on sentimentality—but the result is all the more resonant.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Recycling one from the Swiss Army Knife list, but it’s a great little Paris book, set in one of those apartment building-enclaves that inhabit my dream-Paris. Truth be told, I only picked up this one because I saw so many people reading it on the F train and I felt out of the loop (the F train being, after all, a fairly good barometer of middlebrow literary taste). And despite a plot that could reasonably be accused of pandering, I really enjoyed it. Barbery's nimble prose prevents her forays into watered-down phenomenology and aesthetics from stopping the narrative dead in its tracks. For it is the personalities of the two protagonists, a 12-year-old girl and a 50-something woman, that make TEOTH eminently readable. (I need a literary equivalent of the oenophile’s "quaffable," which I understand to mean something like "pleasing to drink." Suggestions can be sent to needsnewhobbies@pointless.info). I think the characters are so good that I'd rather the book just follow them for a while rather than put them through the paces of an unsatisfying plot that, in the end, takes a short cut to pathos. One other aside: why does the 12-year-old have to be 12? She has the inner life of a much older person to the point that it strains credulity. Perhaps it's just that I've had enough of the weirdly precocious child character. Where did this start? It seems a relatively recent innovation. I need a patient zero so we can contain this outbreak. Anyway, good characters, lush prose, an immortal city. Not too shabby.