Richard Crawford, Summertime **

 I've been interested for a while in a biography of George Gershwin. As Crawford says in his introduction, there are "some two dozen strong." I bought Summertime because (a) I found it in the bookstore and (b) it promised to be an "account of Gershwin's life in music" by a musical scholar. I looked forward to learning about the development of Gershwin's style and how it differs from his contemporaries in both musical theater and classical music.

Unfortunately, Summertime tells me next to nothing about what makes Gershwin distinctive.  Many, many pages outline the (frothy) plots of Broadway shows, with only occasional sentences describing the music. What differentiates a Gershwin tune from a Jerome Kerns tune? No idea. Gershwin is said to have brought jazz into the realm of serious music, but what does "jazz" mean in this case? Syncopation? D7 chords? Clarinets? Crawford includes excerpts from reviews of Gershwin's classical output, from which I conclude that his work was more popular than respected. What aspects of contemporary serious music influenced Gershwin? On page 250, Crawford claims Alban Berg, "whose music differed go greatly in style from his own, as a "later influence," but never says how or mentions Berg again.

I would also have liked (and expected) to learn about the contemporary reaction to two white guys writing Porgy and Bess, an opera about the African-American experience. Some of the quoted reviews are embarrassing in the way they diminish the contributions of the cast: "The way in which [actors] have been instructed, directed, molded into a vast, responsive unit is little short of thrilling." It's a notable contrast to the credit given to, say, Fred Astaire in earlier productions. There's one short excerpt from a black reviewer, but it's passed over without commentary. Unacceptable for a book published in 2019.

The book is theoretically about Gershwin's music rather than his life, so I can't complain about the lack of information about George as a person. The anecdotes that do appear don't paint a very flattering portrait of the man, not matter if he was always the life of the party.

Frustrating. It's the rare book about a musician that makes me less interested in his work.

Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories *** 1/2

 Mavis Gallant is expert at conjuring a milieu, such as post-war Germany ("The Latehomecomer") or the French Riviera ("The Moslem Wife"). Her characters, major and minor, are effectively drawn. The narrative feels natural or, less charitably, secondary. Her sumptuous writing style sounds like it comes from the first half of the 20th century; it's always surprising when a story turns out to be taking place in the 1980s.

My favorite story was "The Remission," in which a British family moves to a small village in the south of France so that the father can "die on the Riviera." He doesn't fade as quickly as anticipated, and the family needs to adjust their plans to make a life in the new locale. An excellent portrait of the village, of the casual colonialism of the expatriates, and the sundry motivations of the characters. The story ends with an awesome moment at the (eventual) funeral, the lapse when:

every person in the room, at the same moment, spoke and thought of something other than Alec. This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say "No, thank you" or "Oh, really" or "Yes, I see," was enough to create the dark gap marking the end of Alec's span. He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.

John Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story **

 American Philosophy is a memoir and a survey of Harvard-based philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the midst of an existential crisis, the author stumbles upon the personal library of William Ernest Hocking, whose contents bring him solace and turn his life around.

The subject matter is off great interest to me: William James, links between American pragmatism and German idealism, the purpose of living, bibliophilia, beautiful libraries tucked into the New Hampshire woods.

The building was constructed of rough-hewn, multihued granite... From the outside I was able to make out the skylights in the roof, which probably filled the space with glorious reading light. ... It was one large room, partitioned into different working nooks by walnut built-ins... To my right and left, at opposite ends of the building, were two large marble fireplaces. ... Oriental rugs, mismatched and nearly worn through, covered the library's wide oak floorboards. The first-generation Stickley rocking chairs -- with their solid walnut slats and musty horsehair seats -- looked as if they hadn't held a visitor for years.

But man oh man, is Kaag a terrible storyteller! He can't convey a clear line of thought or action. On the first page, for example:

[Holden Chapel] was a place I became intimate with in the spring of 2008. I'd spent months scouring Harvard for the origins of American philosophy. ... The aisles at Widener Library, just steps from Holden, are altogether fifty miles long. In the autumn of that year, I'd walked their entire length. ... Still nothing. It was only November. ... But then, on an evening in the spring of 2008, I gave up.

Spring, then autumn and November, then back to the same spring? Just the first of many times Kaag jumbles together thoughts from before and after and now. He also builds paragraphs that drift randomly from descriptions of a philosopher's thought to incidents from that philosopher's personal life to Kaag's personal life. There are lots of interesting tidbits in the book, but it's not clear Kaag knows what to make of them. His ultimate conclusion -- that the great generation of American pragmatists cared deeply about how philosophy addresses the meaning of life and how they resisted the professionalization of philosophy -- is rather trivial.

Javier Marias, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me **** 1/2

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a prime example of a book I love but I expect would exasperate most other readers. It starts (and, spoiler alert, ends) with an unexpected death, and the narrator insinuates himself into the dead woman's family, but those coming to the book for its plot will soon get lost in the winding train of thought. The narrator ponders what it all means rather than what happened.

Let me quote Ema from Goodreads, who says it better than I ever could:

Marías talks about death, about memory, about guilt, about the power of names. He also talks about the life of a story, prone to be transformed with every additional mouth that will pass it on. The plot of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is merely an excuse for the writer to travel down the meditative path, to reach depths of thought that left me wondering and made me feel exalted. So many truths that I haven't thought of before, so many approaches that now seem obvious. He made me look at my possessions and ask myself: do these objects hold any interest to other people, or is it just me who justifies their existence and utility? And do I really need all these things around me?

I can't get enough of this kind of novel, where an eccentric or downright crazy narrator eloquently circles around his or her personal obsessions. I especially loved the first third, wherein our narrator haunts and is haunted by Marta (the woman who died).  

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks ****

This is a book about the power of language – strong style, single words – to shape our sense of place.

I have picked up Landmarks in book stores several times in the years since it was published (2015), but knew that I'd need to be in the right state of mind to appreciate it. Sheltering in place in our backyard on a quiet summer afternoon: perfect.

The book doesn't have a narrative or complicated argument, just precise natural descriptions in colorful language. ("Even in high summer, snow still lies in the deepest corries, sintering slowly into ice.") Each chapter describes a piece of idiosyncratic literature that shapes the way people perceive a particular type of British landscape (moors, mountains, waterways, farms), and is followed by a glossary of regional terms related to that landscape ("didder  of a bog: to quiver as a walker approaches  East Anglia"). The glossaries can be as entertaining as the prose chapters, with their combination of fun-sounding words, vivid definitions, and technical terms alongside dialect.

Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage *****

In the introduction to my original list of book reviews, I made a dismissive crack about stories concerning "the intimate bond between sisters," suggesting that my masculine taste didn't cotton to accounts of characters' relationships and feelings. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage proves the folly of my prejudice. Only one of the stories in this collection features sisters ("Queenie"), but all of them are about relationships and feelings.

The turning point in a Munro story, the surprise twist, comes in an emotional reaction rather than an event. The title story, for example, has two teenage girls fabricating a correspondence between a housekeeper and a man who lives in far-off Saskatchewan, leading the woman to believe that marriage may be in the cards. You can see disaster approaching. But even though the plot goes exactly where you think it's going, the woman responds to the situation in an unexpected way. Resulting in a happy ending!

Munro's characters are navigating the competing needs for companionship, and independence. The narrative set-up often feels familiar from other writers, but even the weaker stories include an impressive a-ha moment. I wasn't enjoying "Post and Beam" until Lorna's bargain with the universe two-thirds of the way through; the adulterous plot of "What is Remembered" is clichéd but I loved how the inciting intimacies were comfortable spouse-like rapport rather than titillating glances.

I guess the Nobel folks were on to something.

Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace **** 1/2

The Price of Peace is advertised as a biography of John Maynard Keynes, which make is surprising when Keynes dies about two-thirds of the way through. It would perhaps be more accurate to call it a biography of Keynesian economics; the final third shows how economists of all stripes absorbed Keynes' ideas.

In the early parts of the book, I felt like the author was assuming we were familiar with Keynes' thought or had read the 30 volumes of his Collected Writings. Over time, though, I grew to appreciate Carter's clear summaries and how they showed where Keynes' ideas came from and how they evolved. He always teases out their implications.

For example, I always associated Keynes with the idea that governments should run deficits during recessions as a way of stimulating the economy. That is indeed one of Keynes' innovations. The Price of Peace taught me how this principle undermined previous economic orthodoxy (by focusing on demand rather than supply), how it fits into Keynes' worldview (which tried to balance a conservative view of property rights with a liberal view of social organization), and how it has been co-opted by economic theories that differ widely from Keynes' own.

The most fundamental Keynesian idea is that markets are not naturally occurring phenomena that automatically correct themselves, but are created and managed by governments. For any given economic issue in a society, there are multiple ways to ameliorate them, each of which favors different segments of society. In other words, economics is not a neutral science or toolset but rather is inherently tied up in political questions.

Carter presents Keynes is a sympathetic light and interprets his ideas generously. His descriptions of competing frameworks seems fair even if he clearly disagrees with them. The final chapter, though, is a paean to Keynesianism as "liberal internationalism" that blames all our current woes on neoliberalism. Someday, I would like to read a more detailed book about Keynes and His Critics.

I also enjoyed how the book told the story of the World Wars from an entirely economic point of view. Nothing about the Somme but plenty about how the Allies managed the world supply of wheat and their debts to each other.