Brother versus sister. James is in his '70s in the 1970s (have I ever shared my theory about guys who were hot in the '70s? The theory is that they are not hot any longer. D'oh! I'm trying to be a sane goodreader now). Sally has run out of money in her eighties (she'd be rich again in the '80s if she took the drug dealing tips from her trash novel)and is forced to move in with her miserly, life-hating brother. His hole forces her into her own hole inside his hole (er, house). Partly out of fear and anger, partly because she enjoys feeling put upon. It's back and forth between victim and victimizer. It's that cliche about women who hold onto every little thing until years later when they bring it back out to slap you in the face with how awful you are to them. James is just as bitchy of a woman as his sister. Both of them are mean little fuckers where it counts. The stewing is what makes them tick. Old America versus new America? I don't think it was probably ever the old America that old man James Page holds festering in his angry heart (America with anyone but white people. No one wanted money and everyone worked hard. Ha!). It was something to get angry about. His bitterments work well as door closers against his family and countrymen. Sally is the kind of bigot that is okay with everyone else so long as she knows that she is still better than they are. This is what comes from talking to yourself too much. There is more to James and Sally both in lives past than all of their versus mind games. BUT, the mind games sure get in the way of most everything else. Get ready for a lot of reading between the lines. And waaaaay too many commerical breaks (that would be the trash novel). Mariel versus satire. I read on amazon that John Gardner's (the first one) wife dared Gardner to write one of those quasi philosophical 1970s novels like the wives of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner put them up to writing "good" versions of popular works they enjoyed reading (don't know how that worked out for them). Okay... Sally's trash novel became a chore to read. Too much! I really felt that way about all of October Light because the interuptions became the whole program for much of the book. I was relieved to finish it. It wasn't a slow burn or a quick burn of rivalry between the sibling's countries as much as it was a skipped record. I did appreciate how Sally and James would go back to certain thoughts- Sally's husband Horace possibly having a crush on James's wife Ariah; James's guilt about his son's suicide- as if they couldn't quite admit to things, and would attempt to justify the harder truths. Truth versus the not whole truths. I really liked this passage: "Whether or not he could have said what he was feeling, and whether or not it would have mattered to the world or the company that runs it, the old man was right about the meaning of that doll. It was there to undo him, both him and his ghosts. Whether it was true, as he imagined, that once in his childhood he'd heard angels sing, and had seen them moving in the aurora borealis, it was undoubtedly true that the Muzak made certain he would hear them- if in fact they were still up there singing- no more." I felt the most then that James's resistance to television and mass consumerism could replace what was pure in his life. But then he despised the Snoopy doll held by his daughter's adopted son in his sleep... I remember more being a kid and making company out of toys of Snoopy and the like. He can take his indignation and stuff it. It isn't all about him. Her heart churned and for an instant she remembered how everywhere she'd looked, just after her nephew had taken his own life, the world had seemed inert, like a half-fallen, long-abandoned barn on a still, cold day. To them, it is all about them. The world stopped after the bad shit. This is from Sally's trash book: "It was one of life's mortally discouraging facts that if a psychiatrist understood you, he could beat you." Nooooo! Why do I keep reading books like this? This is Of Human Bondage all over again! Sally: "Books have no effect at all, no value whatsoever." It's like the Snoopy doll. It isn't the psychiatrist beating you. If one truth has to be the entire truth, one person has to be the fucking be all to everything... But that's wrong! "Where have we gone wrong?" (According to this book that was Tolstoy's question.) Sally asks herself this often. Weeeell.... I don't know shit. I'm thinking the difference between being a TOTAL asshole, and only being as much of an asshole as you can't help being, is thinking one thing = the answer to everything else. Keep on dancing your little Snoopy dance, Snoopy. Lucy can try and puzzle it out from her advice stand, if she's lucky (if she's lucky from Schroeder's piano bench). Sally's dead husband, Horace: "Yes, sir, it's the last frontier. You'd think we'd all get together and try to speak one language, wouldn't you? It would improve understanding, advance the cause of peace. Well, we never will," he'd said, shaking his head, still grinning that private, insufferable grin that wasn't mean to be understood. Fuck psychiatrists pinning you down. Anyone pinning anyone down. Horace grew quieter, stopped speaking to Sally. Sally began not being able to speak enough, to anyone. James resented her talkity talk, as if she were trying to beat him verbally with what he beat her with literally (sticks and guns would break her bones and words also hurt). So Sally accepts that it is "natural to be watchful and suspicious". Books are the letting down the walls because they are not asking anything in return. OF COURSE they are good for something. Their whole problem was this pinning shit. My heart can't take this. Too much time in here. I need a vacation! And NOT with drug smugglers! I'm going to rate this three stars because I was so very relieved to finish it. Have you ever had an uncomfortable conversation with a family member who drags up shit you don't want to relive? And you KNOW full well what they are saying but they go over and over again beating the same thing to death anyway? October Light is a whole lot of that. Yeah, they aren't my family. But I still felt that queasy feeling in my stomach. It's not that I'd like something less for making me feel bad (at least it hasn't stopped me in the past). The partial truths are too much truths? Too much philosophical stuff? Too much side taking in all of their heads. I feel like turning Horace and going quiet on Sally and James. I'm glad I was only alive for a little under three months of the 1970s. P.s. October Light reminded me a lot of Sam Shepard's play True West. Two brothers fight it out about true life, true to life stories, changing 'scapes, dead family history. They pretty much try to kill each other. P.s.s. I'll like this more when the relentlessness falls away to reveal the hideaway and restless truthy times.
As the novel opens, 72 year old James Page has just shot his sister's television. Sally Abbot, his penniless widowed sister, has returned home to the Vermont farmhouse in which she and James grew up. The two are polar opposites in nearly every way and beome engaged in a bitter battle of idealogy. James locks Sally in her bedroom, where she begins to read a trashy novel about drug smugglers, spaceships, and philosophy. This novel within the novel is a springboard to provide glimpses into the family events which created such stubborn and sad people. Through the siblings, Gardner brings into focus the rural community and extended family. The greater pciture is one of how liberals and conservatives view themselves and others, and the moments in life that transcend all pettiness. Gardner is one of my 5 favorite authors. If you are familiar with his writing, you know his novel Grendel, the weakest of his books (I think). He was a professor of early English lit, so it is underswtandable that he wrote the book. He is at his best when he writes about the human condition.
What do You think about October Light (2005)?
This book concerns an old woman named Sally Abbott who's been chased upstairs by her brother, James Page, an American puritan-type, who believes in "good hard work" and is always biting down on his pipestem til it snaps and so on. She's been chased into her room by him with a stick of wood he grabs from the fireplace. While she's up there, she starts reading a book about ganja smuggling, and the narrative goes back and forth between segments of the ganja smuggling text (involving a weird old man
—Zack
aClassic by John Gardner who I never read, and was killed when the head of our writing dept at SUNY binghamtonTwo elderly siblings are forced to live together for economical reasons. The brother is old fashioned and close minded . the first thing that happens is he shoots the tv because of the liberal ideas its spewing.Then he chases her up the stairs with a weapon and locks her in. She decides she won't come out.Their stalemate is the story. The book seems dated, yet ahead of its time. Another good potential discussion for a book club.
—Debbie
That Gardner was brilliant and actually practiced what he really preached was not a surprise to me as a BIG fan of his books on writing. What amazed me, besides the quality of his metaphors, his scheme, was the joy and fun I had in reading it, and I think he had in writing it. A book of living people, so much that after I got off the bus having just finished it, I expected to see James Page. Gardner gives and gives with all he has. Read it. As customary as it is to add some small slap after such great praise, any faults the book may have are cosmically dwarfed by the whole thing and certainly mandarin of me to even mention.
—Al
