Author: Howard McEwen

I’ve always said that The End of Something is my favorite (and the perfect) Hemingway short story. If anyone asked for something short to read, I’ve pointed them to that. But as I re-read the Hemingway Canon, this month, I re-read Hills Like White Elephants.

The story struck me hard. Maybe it’s where I’m at in life. I know too many men who have lived through this conversation, who have pressured girlfriends into it with wives waiting at home maybe. Who don’t want the hassle. Who say the write words but whose tone means something else.

I’m not sure why it struck me so hard. The End of Something reminds me of youth. White Elephants reminds me of adulthood.

When I was a teenager and first started reading serious literature and dreaming of becoming a writer myself I found discouragement everything. My own mind, the rolled eyes of my father, the red marks of English teachers. But the biggest undercut to my confidence was reading the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms. My God, reading this was intimidating. It’s brilliant. Rereadng it recently, I’m still in awe.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.

There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

When I was a teenager, my father and I went to Canada to visit family for a couple weeks. We stayed at the family lake property in a camper while the rest of the clan piled into the cabin. My dad finished his book and asked me for something to read. I had brought along two books. I gave him the one I had just finished, The Sun Also Rises.

I don’t remember what I was reading but after an hour or so I remember him tossing the book at me with a disgusted look on his face saying, ‘Nothing happens’.

Not much does happen but it doesn’t happen beautifully.

At that age, I was too young and inexperienced to understand the book and not educated enough to get its subtleties. I turned fault in my family into a virtue in this instance. My family had a habit of making any mistake or different into not just a mistake or difference but a judgement on your value as a person. I took my father’s dislike of this book as a judgement against me. However, I liked the book. I liked Hemingway’s way of writing – his short declarative sentences followed by his long repetitive, sometimes hypnotic ones. I liked the fact that, at that time, he wasn’t fashionable. I turned my father’s judgement around and read everything I could by the man. I wore it as a badge of honor and judged him lacking. Family, it’s insidious sometimes.

To be honest, I like Hemingway’s short stories much better but I’ve decided to revisit his novels. It’s been a couple decades since I’ve read The Sun Also Rises. Yes, I understand now my dad’s critique. Not much happens. I have a shorter attention span now. However, there is much more to appreciate than plot in this book. I would recommend reading it with a copy of Cliff’s Notes (it’s online) so you get the subtlety. If nothing else, Cliff let’s you in on all of the subtle illusions Hemingway makes to Jake’s impotence – people telling him to get up, elevators not lifting when he’s going to see a girl, policeman’s batons being waved at him when he’s with a girl, Heck, even the sun rises but not poor Jake.

There are simply wonderful passages you can read and re-read. There is wisdom in this book, written by a twenty-something war veteran. This book can teach you to write. It gives you a glimpse into a time. A look at PTSD circa 1925. 

Passages I highlighted:

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”

“My head started to work. The old grievance.” [Stewing over his wound]

“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”

“Irony and pity.” I’m going to use this for a novel title some day.

Several years ago, I tried to read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It’s the granddaddy of the New Journalism/ficitionalize non-fiction killer book. I hated it.

Capote obviously had a crush on one of the killers. Maybe not a sexual crush but he was fascinated. The victims were virtually ignored. It’s understandable in a movie where you have ninety minutes to scare people but in a novel you can at least make the dead human. So half way through, I stopped reading that book. I rarely read many murder-y books.

But I did listen to the audiobook of The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe. There was no reason except it was recommended to me and I was tired of podcasts and I needed something I could drop in and out of. 

Rowe’s book hooked me. The woman can write. She’s a bit flowery by today’s standards but today’s standards are flat as drywall. Read her slowly and, if not listening to the audio book, maybe read some of the passages aloud. They’re nice, they’re poetic.

Rowe does not ignore the victims of the serial killer. You know the names. You know their mothers and how they ended up where they did. You learn about their rust belt blue collar town and how it influenced them and nudged them into the hands of their killer. Yet, she doesn’t excuse them either. The victims were prostitutes. Rowe knows that there are some people that can’t be helped, no matter what their mother or sister or father does. No matter how many times they are arrested or what the kindly cop or social worker does. Rowe knows this because she sees the same instincts in herself. She writes about this without turning the book into a confessional, she touches on her own problems without drawing the reader’s attention away from the true victims, the eight women who were strangled by Kendall Francois.

As far as Francois is concerned, she treats him as human but, unlike Capote, she never forgets what he is. She retraces his life from childhood, investigating and describing his abusive childhood but noting that other children had it just as bad and never turn to beating and killing hookers. She looks for answers with the cops who knew him, with teachers, friends and family members. But like all serial killers, there are no answers.

After reading The Dinner, Herman disappointed me with The Ditch. I’m glad I decided to carry on with him and read Dear. Mr. M.

I like Koch’s misanthropic authorial voice. Especially since much of it is aimed at his own country of the Netherlands. It’s not that I have any animus toward that country but when so many in this country want to praise the Benelux and Nordic countries for this Democratic Socialism, it’s great to hear that they have problems too from some of their own.

But that’s no reason to read this book, just an extra feature.

One reason to read it is the best use of the second person voice I’ve ever read. In fact, it’s the only good use of the second person voice I’ve ever read in a novel format. It’s not the entire novel – maybe 30%. It’s done well and is not a gimmick. It gives a haunting insight to one of the main characters.

Koch’s use of the second person dovetails in with another reason to read Dr. Mr. M. While it’s a mystery, the writing (or maybe it’s the translation) is of a literary quality. You don’t have to check your brain at the title page to enjoy Herman’s books. I don’t enjoy most thrillers or mysteries for this reason. There’s a certain dumbing down that occurs for books to hit the shelves of Costco or Wal-mast or the top of the Amazon algorithm. Not with Herman’s books. You got to bring a bit of your brain to the party if you want to enjoy them.

Finally, as with The Dinner, his plotting and the final revelation was a surprise and satisfying. Such a difference from The Ditch…I hated the ending so much!

Go read and enjoy Dear Mr. M.

Oh, Herman!?!?

After fan-girling over Herman Koch’s The Dinner, I immediately downloaded another of his novels. I didn’t look at reviews, I just rouletted the five that he has that are in English and landed on (or in) The Ditch.

It wasn’t a lucky spin of the wheel if you like plot to resolve with clarity.

If, however, you like wry insight and a jaundiced, contrarian outlook that pokes holes into contemporary culture and some politically correct sacraments, you’ll enjoy this book. The lead character, the sixty-year old mayor of Amsterdam, suspects his wife is having an affair. There’s no proof really, just a husband’s suspicion about the way his wife laughs at another man’s joke.

So he begins to keep an eye on her. We know she’s a foreigner – not Dutch. She’s unaccustomed to their cold, passionless ways. Is she Muslim? Eastern European? Greek? We don’t know, he never tells us. She comes from an earthier part of the world, he says, where things like marriage and adultery are taken more serious that in the progressive Netherlands.

On top of this, he has to deal with an alderman who wants to scar the city with windmills, and a father who wants to euthanize himself and, oh, a physicist best friend who is going to do an experiment that may end the world.

And it all just peters out at the end of the book without an clear resolution.

But alone the way, there are these great bon mots and astute observations that made my grumpy heart smile. Are they worth the trip? I’ll have to say, grudgingly, yes.

When you write without a genre, as I do, it can be a bit lonely.

You don’t have anyone to look up to or over to. There are no similar people who are doing what you’re doing. I can’t say I write action or romance. I can’t say I do police procedurals or spy thrillers.

To be honest, doing book after book like that would bore me. Seeing a future of one character in one genre would make me close my computer and open a bottle and turn on a TV.

So it’s nice to find someone else doing it. Like Herman Koch.

I read The Dinner which is about two couples having dinner…a whole novel about two couples having dinner. Seriously. There are flashbacks. There are trips to the bathroom and side conversations but that’s the structure.

Yet it’s more compelling than many of the cop dramas that I’ve read which starts out with a gruesome killing followed by us learning about the flawed cop who much overcome…yawn.

So when I finished the dinner, I picked up The Ditch. I’m 25% of the way through and…no genre.

I’m not alone anymore.