Liars and Saints

 We live in the wilderness--sometimes, this is cute. It's cute when groundhogs frolic in our backyard. Or bunnies. Or when my daughter tries to talk to the birds. I'm reminded of the woodsy interludes in "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty." The moment when Aurora shares her deepest feelings with a barn owl. Things are less cute when I consider the problem of waste disposal. One of the most horrifying things I've ever seen is a "garbage can invasion" on a Friday night. My spouse and I were returning from a film. One raccoon popped out of the trash can. Then--I swear--I saw ten or twelve more. One after another after another after another. Spilling from the can's bowels. I'm led to think of that moment in "Alien," when an encephalopod "births itself"--the "cost" is one young man, and specifically that man's abdomen. Like many other issues, garbage in my town is an opportunity for virtue signaling. A prefer...

 My daughter is falling for books. Not reading. She has no interest in phonics (and in this way she reminds me of me). But she likes to listen--especially to the tales of Jack and Annie in the Magic Tree House. I love what Susie herself does with words. She knows that her doctor--Dr. Buono--is friendly, so she has invented a kind of shorthand; the doctor is now "Dr. Elmo." Susie knows that a hotel is a source of excitement, like "show and tell." So a hotel is now a "hoe and tell." Aware that dragons are a common wellspring of terror, Susie sometimes speaks breathlessly about Boris Karloff and "Victor Dragon-stein." So I appreciate Donna Leon's recent thoughts on words--she has written about how words become seductive (below). One of the best kids' books I know of is--literally--nonsense. It's James Marshall's "A Pocketful of Nonsense," and it features Marshall in a "Dr. Seuss" mode. There was an old man of Blac...

  I love Donna Leon's recent book "Backstage" -- because it spotlights a writer writing about writing. This is possibly my favorite kind of book. (Leon's earlier essays, "Wandering Through Life," were just autobiographical anecdotes. I'd rather see her talking about narrative.) Leon's brilliance is most obvious when she tackles a nursery rhyme, "Jack and Jill": Leon uses the rhyme to examine the kind of work a reader does as he reads. The reader fills in gaps. Jack fell, not because of drunkenness, but because he is a clumsy kid. Jill's fall is surely linked with genetics. Since Jill is Jack's sister (probably), she is just as uncoordinated as he is. Leon then parodies various schools of literary criticism. A Freudian scholar might focus on the vaginal "hole" -- the well, which will be penetrated by the pail. A Marxist scholar might see an allusion to socioeconomic structures buried in the word "crown." Then Leon...

 One of my favorite writers, Donna Leon, just turned eighty. A college writing teacher, Amy Bloom, introduced me to Leon; back in 2002, I think Leon was already publishing one novel per year, and the trend has continued all the way to the present. Leon seems refreshingly unpretentious; she has said she will continue to write mysteries until the process is "no longer fun." Then she'll stop. Among Leon's starry admirers was (the late) Ursula LeGuin, who observed that Leon's writing "never becomes perfunctory." It's a great comfort to me every March to visit Guido Brunetti, Leon's fictional detective, and to "see" Venice, which is both an unbelievably beautiful place and a corrupt swamp, an overrun zoo, a weight sinking into the sea. I'm never unhappy to meet with Brunetti's foolish boss, his fiery wife, his cunning secretary. And I especially like Brunetti's wryness and intelligence; this guy understands that the world is brok...

 What a joy it is to sink into a book that feels close to *a sure thing* ....You know you're in good hands even before the end of the first chapter. That's the feeling Donna Leon delivers book after book after book, and we've just received her thirtieth Guido Brunetti volume this month. Guido is an unusually thoughtful detective living in Venice, in the modern day; he reads Tacitus, and he fears that his little town is sinking into the sea. He has a solid marriage to a sassy Henry James scholar; he has adolescent children who worry about vegan dieting, and about the environment. At the office, Guido can chat with Elettra, the rule-bending genius administrative assistant, and he can spar with Patta, his insufferable boss. These characters are so well-defined after thirty years, you do actually feel that you live in their neighborhood. I'm not too far into "Transient Desires" -- the new Brunetti -- but I'm already enjoying the weird details that distinguish ...

Two things: (1) If you're a Donna Leon fan, know that the new novel, "Unto Us a Son Is Given," is just as twisty and rich with subtext as many of the earlier entries. (And if you haven't read Leon, then check out these smart mysteries! Maybe start with Leon's masterpiece, "Acqua Alta.") (2) HILARY MANTEL'S BOOK THREE IS COMING! "The Mirror and the Light," the final work about Cromwell, will be out in March 2020. At long last!