Robert H. Bell - Summer reading

For the past year I've been on sabbatical and blessed with time for reading promiscuously. My most exciting venture was rereading Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, $18.95, 1,079 pp.), David Foster Wallace's novel that inspired critical acclaim and a zealous following. Among a panoramic cast of hundreds, several characters come radiantly alive--perceived with the hippest of cool and compassion beyond irony. There is the Incandenza family for whom the epithet dysfunctional is ridiculously lame; there are Don Gately and the patients at Ennet House for struggling recovering addicts; and there is a bizarre international conspiracy involving Canadian terrorists, government officials, and various lunatics. Beyond category, Infinite Jest is epic in scope. Brilliant, hilarious, devastating, and seriously demanding, it is the American novel of the last decade that deserves to be read and reread, and compared to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Joyce's Ulysses.

A Ship Made of Paper (Ecco/Harper Collins, $24.95, 325 pp.) by Scott Spencer is a beautiful, passionate, heartbreaking novel about a love affair between a white man, living with a woman and her six-year-old daughter, and a black married mother. As Spencer demonstrated in his Endless Love, he is a writer of prodigious gifts, one of our most reliably deft and empathetic novelists. Here he dramatizes the potent, irresistible, disastrous consequence of midlife adultery. What makes A Ship Made of Paper so compelling, besides its uniformly limpid prose, is its sympathetic attention to all four of the protagonists.

The collected writing of William James is newly available in two recent volumes from the remarkable Library of America series. (One could do worse in this life than read nothing but Library of America volumes.) James's most brilliant work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is an American classic. A model of interdisciplinary research and writing, it is imaginative and clinical, eloquent and moving. James advocates a kind of pragmatic humanism that speaks to modern readers for whom the old verities seem alien or beyond reach. They will discover inspiration in James for their own quests for identity, meaning, and purpose.

Three books about James that I found of special interest are Kim Townsend's Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (Harvard University Press, $18.95, 318 pp.), Jacques Barzun's newly reissued A Stroll with William James (University of Chicago Press, $18, 344 pp.), and Richard Poirier's Poetry and Pragmatism (Harvard University Press, $34, 228 pp.).

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney's Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15, 464 pp.), is every bit as illuminating as his Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16, 464 pp.). Heaney writes gorgeously about the art of poetry and his favorite poets. He speculates magnificently about Ireland, history, politics, place, and culture as they are entwined with the reading and writing of poetry. Perhaps his most urgent conviction is expressed in the essay "The Redress of Poetry": "Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world." Inexplicably omitted from this splendid collection is Heaney's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an address that should be savored with the Nobel speeches of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison.

For movie fans, David Thompson's newly revised and updated The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 960 pp.) is more than a reference book or encyclopedia of cinematic information; it is a treasure trove of astute short essays on memorable films, directors, writers, and actors. Thompson is massively informed, tart, and cogent, and this volume is a cornucopia of perceptive observations and persuasive evaluations.

Another uncommonly insightful book, especially for anyone who cares about higher education, is Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave (Yale University Press, $14.95, 333 pp.). Kernan, longtime Yale professor, eminent scholar, and literary critic, was also dean of the graduate faculty at Princeton. In Plato's Cave is probing autobiography, pungent polemic, vivid social history, and compelling elegy. While Kernan regrets the decline of traditional humanism, his own work continues to instruct and inspire teachers, scholars, students, and readers.

Among recent novels that delighted, sustained, and provoked me during my sabbatical were Ian McEwan's Atonement (Anchor, $26, 351 pp.), Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (Picador, $15, 592 pp.), and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (Harperperennial, $13.95, 288 pp.). I also highly recommend Robert Fagles's vibrant new translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, published together in a Penguin paperback ($30.90) with excellent notes and introductions by Bernard Knox. Fagles's Homer seems to me even better than the versions of Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald. Another notable new translation of a classic is the masterly rendition of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Penguin, $16, 837 pp.) by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky.

For lovers of literature and great writing, at least, it was a very good year for a sabbatical.

Robert H. Bell is William R. Kenan Professor of English at Williams College, where he is founding director of the Project for Effective Teaching.

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