Fiction therapy

Things I have read lately…fiction helps me keep my sanity in tough times.

The late film critic Stanley Kauffmann was a good novelist too, and A New Desire is an absorbing book about a former professor trying to get into the business world in the 1950s. He is involved with two different types of women. What I liked about this were the characterizations and the interior dialogue that analyzed in detail the emotions set off by business negotiations and love relationships.

Hostage for a Hood is by the heist novel specialist Lionel White. It’s available on Kindle ebook and I recommend it. I read my fragile vintage copy and was entertained thoroughly by this intricate story of an ordinary housewife who stumbles into a robbery situation and ends up as a hostage. White could tell an intricate crime story with the precision of a well-made timepiece. Very satisfying and exciting.

Now I am in the middle of Stoner by John Williams, the fictional story of William Stoner, an English professor at the University of Missouri in the first half of the 20th century. He is married to a strange woman whose cruelty to him, in a domestic rather than criminal fashion, strikes me as more devastating than any of the shady erotic manipulations of “broads” “skirts,” and “dames” in the 1950s noir novels that I also love. I’m near the end of Stoner and I’m glad to see the professor is, at the moment, involved in a tender love affair with one of his former students, now a teaching colleague. Stoner is a good guy and deserves a break from the bitch at home.

Stoner is a book I’ve wanted to read for years, and I bought a copy right before NYC locked down in late March. I only finally got to reading it now, and I’m really enjoying its psychological insight and exquisite writing.

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P.S. 11/1/20

I finished reading Stoner last night and it was overwhelming in its emotion, its forgiveness of human frailty, and in its picture of an ordinary man’s life in all its unavoidable messiness and bewildering failures and quiet triumphs. Highly recommended if you enjoy an honest look at life.

You might ask, what do books like Stoner or A New Desire or Hostage for a Hood have to do with the theme of this blog, Erotica Is My Trade? Simply, by reading beautifully done works like this, and the various other books I mention now and then elsewhere on the blog, I enrich and educate myself in my own craft of writing. It is very relevant indeed.