The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

     If memory serves, it was "The Lovin' Spoonfuls," a 60s group that had a hit record with the tune, "Did you ever have to make up your mind?"--a jouncy ditty that laid out the dilemma of choosing one love over another.  "To say yes to one and leave the other behind."  Well, the challenge of choice is true not only in romance but also in reading.  Indeed, there is no more fundamental decision to be made than what not to read.  No one can or has read everything (not even Harold Bloom) and so we should make good choices.  Whom do we choose to keep company with and from whom do we turn and walk away?

     It can be an uncomfortable and uncertain decision.  Fortunately, with books we are allowed to sample.  In romance, keeping company for that purpose would be, shall we say, un-gallant.  Recently I have had two attractive candidates come into my ken.  One, which I shall term "the Devil," and the other--"the deep blue sea."  The former is the novel C by Tom McCarthy.
                
     Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and reviewed by virtually all the major "high culture journals," C packs a postmodern punch.  And reading it invests one with literati street cred or at least savoir faire.  But as reviewer Randy Boyagoda, writing in the June issue of Commonweal puts it, "Why join hordes of plebian [sic] bookworms reading a new Jonathan Franzen novel about the foibles of ordinary, recognizable people, when we could instead be among the few initiates able to appreciate the vertiginous and mysterious mind-world of Tom McCarthy's fiction, a place where everything is connected and nothing matters?" Despite the stark warning of those last two words in the quoted passage, I chose to dally with the Devil.  I sampled C but we didn't go all the way.

     In the midst of this entanglement, my eye was caught by a title in hardback on my shelves.  It's All Right Now by Charles Chadwick is a hefty novel published six years ago that received some brief attention at the time but has since receded from the literary memory of most.  As a matter of fact if you want to test someone's familiarity with modern novels ask them if they even know of (must less have read) this book .  I'm as undiligent as they--even more so--because I knew the book was there on my "to be read" shelf but always found a way to postpone the date.  The book stuck with me in part because of a minor but intriguing claim to fame entirely separate from its content.  It's All Right Now is a first novel by an author ten years my senior.  I found it remarkable that someone of that vintage would publish a first novel.

     It will come as no surprise that I have chosen Chadwick over McCarthy.  I give his book the nickname 'the deep blue sea" because of its orientation toward interiority.  The protagonist, Tom Ripple, is as British and as "blue" as they come.  What he sees makes him so.  A London suburbanite and a family man, Tom regards himself, his spouse and children, and himself with reams of rue.  He is frequently fatigued, plagued by languid lust, contemptuous of his employ and his boss.  He longs for quietude and strives to understand human motivation and behavior but can only arrive at an overwhelming sense of futility made bearable by irony and wit.  In short he's my kind of guy.   But he may not be yours.  If you're not delighted by the disconsolate, you can always hitch a lift on the "vertiginous and mysterious mind-world" of C.   I'll stick with my crotchety, craven alter ego.