A very small university, Larken catered to the privileged painters, writers, critics, poets, and performance artists of the future. The teaching was not so much rigorous as expansive, the teachers stretching their courses to the point of deformity in order to encompass the whimsy of the students.

Rebecca Miller’s novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, conspiratorily rushed into a feature film a year after its publication, does my favorite thing: It creates and loves on a strong, intelligent woman protagonist. It also delves into the mind of her twentysomething daughter who is equally strong and intelligent with reactionary traits from her experiences as Pippa’s daughter.

Pippa is middle aged, married to a thirty-years-older man who has moved them into a “retirement village” where Pippa instantly becomes the youngest person she knows and feels surprisingly burdened by her newfound freedom and limited possessions. She looks at her husband and sees his newfound frailty and is reminded of the difference in their ages, I guess, although it is never illustrated why she feels this way or what her feelings really are.

He alludes to the way he rescued her from her earlier life, and in a framed middle section of the book we see the life he means — in which Pippa’s mother is a diet-pill addict with complex neediness issues and Pippa breaks free in an extreme way that almost alienates her as a relatable character. Paradoxically it gives her power, both personally and narratively, as she swirls through her life and lets a lot of things happen to her. Her one life-changing action excuses several years’ worth of passive nonresistance, and eventually, Pippa’s choice of a settled family life is a stark exercise of control over her own life.

I liked this book mostly because of Miller’s beautiful writing, which is thick with descriptive language but not choked by it. Her tone and choices completely suit Pippa’s mindframe as she experiences bored first-world problems in her new life as an unemployed housewife with children who’ve moved out. Nothing about Pippa’s life is familiar to me — especially not her reckless, horrifying life as a pre-matrimony twentysomething — but I still loved her and related to her dilemmas.

This book is kind of like the magazine Real Simple, which I also love, even though it has nothing to do with my life, even though the idea of curbing your busyness by buying hired help or expensive organizational furniture is alien to me. Because who isn’t pulled a little by the idea of a simple, elegant life full of single fresh flowers in spotless vases, of “easy” meals of shrimp or lamb chops alongside fresh asparagus? There is not glamor in a plate of spaghetti, unless, like Pippa, you put caught-daily Long Island clams on it.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Oliver Sacks’ wonderful piece on “face-blindness” in the latest New Yorker contains a worthy Chuck Close shoutout that filled my heart to the brim. (Prosopagnosia refers to the inability to commit a face to memory, resulting in forgetting people you know, especially out of the usual context of classroom or workplace.)

The artist Chuck Close, who is famous for his gigantic portraits of faces, has severe, lifelong prosopagnosia. He believes it has played a crucial role in driving his unique artistic vision. “I don’t know who anyone is and essentially have no memory at all for people in real space,” he says. “But when I flatten them out in a photograph I can commit that image to memory.”

Maybe three dimensions are too many for Close’s brain to digest, like a set of equations with too many variables to be soluble. Contrast this with Terry Gross’s recent interview with stereo-vision newcomer Sue Barry. As a cross-eyed child, Barry went through surgery after surgery to attempt to fix the way her eyes looked, but they never achieved the ability to move in seamless sync until she was well into middle age. Before, the world looked flat to her the way a depthless Magic Eye drawing looks to normal viewers. Afterward, she could finally, you know, see the sailboat.

Of 691 NYT obituaries published in 1990, only 92 of them were of women — almost exactly replicating the 2010 numbers.

So what’s going on? Are the world’s prominent women — the ones deserving of NYT obituaries — simply living forever? In the last two decades, has there been zero growth in the number of notable women who’ve died?

I can see both sides of this, but the numbers warrant some examination. Would it be morbid to admit I look forward to a more equal obituaries section in the future?

Few books summarize themselves in a few lines better than this one:

No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, [Delphine] wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman [...] A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who’d lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she’s awfully quick, but she’s solid and reliable.

This is a book of one-way loves that sometimes meet and sometimes don’t. It is also a story of small-town life before, during, and after the Depression; during and after both World Wars; and for a few close families of outsiders. Erdrich writes from some of her experiences as the descendant of German immigrants to the midwest and of butchers and of vaudeville. Her writing is rich and articulate without seeming stuffy, and matches nicely with the almost Steinbecky setting of this book, the dusty, wheaty flats of North Dakota.

It also has shades of Carnivále, HBO’s groundbreaking and therefore short-lived show about a Depression-era traveling show. To watch a small town is like watching a close-knit group of travelers, because everyone is moving forward together and in inadvertent lockstep by necessity. When one store succeeds or fails it can take the town with it; a tragedy in one family can make ripples through everyone’s lives. It’s difficult to write about this closeness and the way it bears out without becoming melodramatic or even maudlin, and Erdrich really shocked me with her skill. She even brings in a VERY LAST SECOND SURPRISE and it is the most natural, moving, sensible closure I can imagine for the novel.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Roger Clemens was indicted for perjury last week, and I wish there were a more vibrant term for just how perjurious his perjury really was. Clemens has been accused of cheating and doping a lot of times and has denied it, fervently, in colorful terms and in a vaguely threatening way. Like if you said it to him, he’d tell you to F off, and did you wanna take it outside? Did you?

Well, no, Roger, I don’t, because I know you’re doped up and already one of the stupider public figures. On All Things Considered they re-aired some old tape of Clemens’ ridiculous denials and didn’t even have to write editorial material around it — like classic George W. Bush statements, they speak for themselves and require no embellishment. Clemens’ former teammate Andy Pettitte, who has long been a favorite player of mine for no real reason EVEN THOUGH he’s a Yankee, confessed his own drug use and made comments about Clemens’ as well. To this Clemens responded with the following soundbyte re-aired during All Things. I’d read it aloud for full effect:

CLEMENS: I think he misremembers the conversation that we had. Andy and I’s relationship was close enough to know that if I would have known that he had done HGH, which I now know, that he was knowingly knowing that I had taken HGH, we would’ve talked about the subject.

[NPR's Tom] GOLDMAN: Now, Robert, we should add that the indictment does not include charges against Roger Clemens for assaulting the English language.

[NPR's Robert] SIEGEL: Yeah, they could sentence someone to parsing that sentence.

Knowingly knowing that Clemens denied his doping for so long, I’m happy he’s in a heap of trouble.