OF A GOLDEN AGE

This book, this book. I’m not even sure where to start or how to do it justice.

Most people recognize Bernard Malamud only if you say, “He wrote The Natural.” I’ve never read the book but I do love the movie (one of the last truly great Redfords, back-to-back with Out of Africa), and I can comfortably say the book stands apart from most of Malamud’s other work. He’s considered one of the giant greats of American Jewish literature of the 20th century and deserves the accolade, but I really dislike the way writers who express religious or ethnic ties are put into genre boxes the same way science fiction or romance writers are — Jewish literature, African-American literature.

But are there stylistic ties between our identities and our writing? In The Tenants, Malamud feels out the relationship between Jewishness and writing, blackness and writing. Harry Lesser is a thirtysomething Jewish writer with a successful first novel; he has spent nine years since shaping his second novel and living off the money from the first. He is the last tenant in a lower Manhattan apartment house scheduled for demolition but feels he must remain there until he finishes the book. He realizes there’s a squatter — Bill Spear, Willie Shakespear in print, a black writer from Harlem who’s furiously chipping away at his own novel.

Spear makes fun of Lesser for being an inexperienced square, for living and dying by form instead of feeling. But he is wounded when Lesser reads his draft and tells him it’s sloppily written. Spear and Lesser spend the rest of the novel developing more and more extreme feelings toward each other, and the feelings are wrapped up in each’s personal identity as a black man, as a Jewish man, with some unquestioned stereotypes about the other.

Lesser is a mess. He’s writing a novel about a novelist who’s writing a novel, and his subject is also thirtysomething, single, struggling with the same book for a long time. When Lesser explains the plot, he says the writer in the book is trying to define love for himself by writing it so that he may live it. Lesser is doing the same thing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates offered interesting thoughts on courtship and relationships this week. In the post, TNC politely scoffs at a David Brooks piece lamenting the shift from family-selected, slower-paced matches to a more frenetic, presumably less-committed environment.

Do people mostly meet through texting today? Are schools, friends and work largely irrelevant? Is it true that there are no social scripts for young people? Or is Brooks merely unfamiliar with them? Did people not meet at jazz clubs back in the 50s, at the Drifters show, or at the beach? And taking Brooks’ point, has the actual essence of dating changed that much? Are young people better or worse of for it?

I never dated in high school and didn’t really go on “dates” in college — since we were all in such close proximity, things were very fluid and undefined, for better or worse. The germane point in Brooks’ piece is this:

People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships.

He makes it sound very commodified and crass, whereas I’d say the ambiguity does way more emotional harm than anything else — It’s always been considered bad behavior for people to date around without being honest about it, but as relationships are less and less defined, those lines blur and allow each person to interpret as he or she wishes. And you know what they say about assuming.

I love this photo from the Sartorialist. Of all ways to wear such bright color and pattern, this man has done a great job balancing his neutral pants, hat, and jacket with the patterned vest and then the flashy scarf — but really, it’s the blue mirror aviators that bring it all together. In black and white he’d look very classic like Ernest Hemingway, but he’s working technicolor in the new millennium and I think it’s wonderful.

I am a tall woman, and I’ve carried an oscillating 10 to 60 extra pounds since graduating from high school. A friend and I were talking about books one day, and she said something about She’s Come Undone, assuming I’d read it. When she found out I hadn’t, she said, as though handing me a precious truism, “Any woman who’s ever had any kind of issues about her weight should read this book.”

The book’s heroine Dolores goes through an unbelievable amount of twists and turns, in a story trajectory that reminded me of John Irving’s World According to Garp. After a scary, terrible adolescent trauma, she and her mother both feed Dolores’s feelings until she is represented and embodied by her obesity. The book follows her process of worsening, bottoming out, and recovering.

Author Wally Lamb uses Dolores’s hindsight as an effective narrative tool — the book’s several large sections usually begin with Dolores looking back and summarizing the actions that have taken place since we last caught up with her, then describing them in detail over the course of that section. It feels very natural, reading a series of personal news digests that somehow came to life. Lamb’s writing has a cinematic quality because of the way he presents dialogue as the primary story mover, but the really winning element is Dolores’s inner monologue. She is acidic and full of doubts, never putting anyone down more than she does herself. And this, I suspect, rings true with many women who experienced insecurity or live with it still.

Many of the women I know and love have learned to eat their insecurities, figuratively — to digest them until they no longer guide our lives. After that, the memory informs the way we live our lives but does not dictate it, and although the insecurity can flare up, can take us over in brief bouts, we’ve learned to recognize it. In its own way, that is an enormous gift, one for which I am unspeakably grateful.

Do you ever read something and there’s one line or maybe two that sticks in your mind long after? In She’s Come Undone it happened to me about two thirds through. Dolores has gotten a job in a photo plant. “Developing pictures further reduced my craziness — shrunk it down like a tumor. It was a matter of perspective, I began to see. The whole world was crazy; I’d flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.”

I know they say actions speak louder than words, but they don’t know C. Andy. Back in my Mad magazine days, one of my favorite features was Jokes with No Punchlines; for your consideration, here is a Punchline with No Joke, lifted directly from a brief telephone conversation.

“In my defense . . . It’s a very durable tambourine.”

Natalie Portman is a prominent celebrity vegetarian, appearing via testimonial in the vogue Babycakes cookbook and sometimes stirring up trouble with her statements about meat. I appreciate that she sticks with it and lives her convictions, and as evidenced by the appearances of Portman and vegan Zooey Deschanel this season, the chefs hit a dead panic when faced with any alternative diet. Heck, some of them resist instances when they aren’t allowed to use the specific meat they want . . . The ones who are way, way into pork are even a little disturbing.*

And yeah, the chefs majorly disappointed in the challenge, putting out unappealing food that — especially after a month when hundreds of good-looking vegan food blogs trotted out their best material — really missed any connection with a vegetarian mentality. More than that, it furthered some of the impressions vegetarians and vegans often get from mainstream foodlife, which is that, you know, most chefs resent us or think we’re nuts.

I laughed when Kelly threw a one-off remark about this disappointing episode on her delicious-looking post about butternut squash lasagna, which is a Giada De Laurentiis recipe. And then . . . Vegan Dad completely one-upped Top Chef with a beautiful dish: polenta with white beans, braised kale, and roasted pears.

* Sorry, Michael Symon, I still love you!

LEFT: Looking out from the buttresses on the 25th floor of Tribune Tower.

CENTER: A chalk Bubbles by the front steps of the American Indian Center of Chicago.

RIGHT: Typeface at the Columbia College printmaking studio.

I like the similar colors across these three photos. They have a palette like (season 6 of Project Runway) Christopher’s doomed Santa Fe dress, and something about sandy brown with light blue is always pleasing, probably because they’re very mild, washed-out versions of complementary colors.

Oh, trapped-man fiction! Narratives about trapped people (woe is me, my loveless marriage, dead-end job, enormous personal burdens) cover well trodden ground and can only ring true if they’re really well done. A writer like Chuck Palahniuk establishes a niche by pushing trapped-man out into the narrow extremes of the bell-shaped curve, but Ethan Frome represents a much more subtle version of the stock plot.

Edith Wharton, typically a literary voyeur on the bourgeois, shook up her routine with this short, sharp novel. It may as well be titled What’s Eating Ethan Frome? because his unhappiness is the bricks and the mortar of the story: We are told what has made him unhappy over the course of a framed flashback then see the same unhappiness after decades of steeping.

The frame itself is interesting: An unrelated observer meets Ethan Frome after hearing a lot of stories about him, because Frome has a small town kind of tragic fame for the way his life turned out. In other words, it echoes the style of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but with an element of rumor more consistent with Wharton’s other work.

You won’t walk away from Ethan Frome feeling upbeat, not even remotely, but it’s a very thoughtful, pragmatic kind of bummer. The relentless tragedy of Shakespeare or the Greeks, or in certain weepy movies, can feel meaningless because of the plain unavoidability of the fate. It’s a lesson from the getgo. There is no real lesson for Ethan Frome, and this grays up the story in a wonderful way.