Couple of quick grown-up fiction notes: 
 Last week, I read Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good, a book I’d meant to read when it first came out. It’s a comic (of course) novel about Katie Carr, a female physician, married with two children, in a miserable marriage to a newspaper columnist whose stock in trade is being the Angriest Man.
The Angriest Man experiences a rather startling conversion when he meets one GoodNews, a youngish, punkish fellow who has, it seems, the gift of healing (attained, he explains, during Ecstasy trips, as far as he can figure). The Angriest Man transforms into an idealist, GoodNews moves into the household, and everything Katie Carr thought she knew about being a “good person” is tossed up in the air. Although she was, well, having a rather desultory extramarital affair when the book begins, she balances it out in her head with the fact that she is a doctor, so she must be a good person, right? But GoodNews and her practically new husband are rounding up the neighbors to have them house homeless teens, contemplating a dramatically stripped-down lifestyle, and encouraging the children to invite the least-like children in their classes for tea. The whole situation grates at her, even as it challenges her and she finds herself tied in all kinds of emotional and spiritual knots as her desires to be good and to one-up her husband do battle within.

It’s Hornby, so there’s some funny stuff and withering observations within, but the whole thing remained rather an enigma to me. The characters were caricaturish and if what Hornby was trying to do was to satirize a culture which still has a vague sense that “goodness” is, well…good without knowing precisely what “goodness” is, he only halfway succeeded because, in part, there’s no deeply good person in sight. Everyone is basically on the same self-centered page, even GoodNews. But, given the last sentence of the book, perhaps that’s simply how Hornby sees things.
But I must say that the scene in which Katie, out of some vague sense of obligation, takes her daughter to a half-empty Anglican church in which the (female) priest breaks out in “Getting to Know You” from The King and I during her sermon did make me laugh out loud.
Encouraged by good words from various bloggers, etc, I read The Great Man by Kate Christensen. The Great Man was a now-deceased painter, now the subject of two biographers who interview the women in the Great Man’s life to get a hold on who he really was. The women are his wife, his mistress and his sister, with his twin daughters by the mistress also thrown in there. An interesting premise, and there was a bit about the Manhattan/Brooklyn/art world setting that I found interesting to read about, but unfortunately, I found myself skimming the last 75 pages or so. The charm of the book was supposedly that it frames the voices and lives of these women in their 70’s and 80’s, and places them at the forefront. True, but there was much about their voices and accounts of their lives I simply couldn’t buy – yes, these are sophisticated women moving in artistic  and intellectual circles for decades, but their inner and outer voices simply all seemed too contemporary for me – as if they were all channeling a 21st century 30-something writer. Even as they reflected on their pasts, their pasts and the times through which they lived just didn’t seem to resonate except as discrete moments, recollected for the biographer or each other.
I suppose the idea was that each of the women, in conversations with the biographers, internal processing and encouters with each other, are finally able to move past and beyond the Great Man and claim their own lives. but the mode of telling – mostly conversation and dialogue, reminiscing and reflecting – leached the thing of energy. Not recommended.
And now I’m into Russo, which should take me all week if not longer, and I’m enjoying it so far. Suite Francaise is next on the stack from the library, although I’m really kind of more in the mood for David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk for some reason.  I really have no idea why.