I’m loving your voice. What’s next?

first of all, on a personal note, the wife came here once and found herself whimsied by your review of FINGERSMITH. as you know, she purchased the novel on july 20, moments after calling you “honey” on my telephone. latonya works quite diligently these days finishing her art history master’s thesis that explores the impact images of josephine baker had on the paris art scene in the 1920’s. yeah, my wife is real bad smart. i think her plans to celebrate the end of this thesis involve cracking open a bottle of reisling and the cover of FINGERSMITH on our long living room couch one early afternoon in late august. she’s promised a written review to you.

okay, now to joan.

in this review, i particularly enjoyed the way you expressed your familial connection to joan. the first four paragraphs ushered me into a very intimate place with a reader and his author – a young man and his literary older sister. i’ll just admit here that i would have simply said, “when i read joan didion, i felt a deep kinship with her.” i may have followed with a line or two afterwards to tell why, but you actually caused me to take pause. i stopped in the middle of the third paragraph and thought – “wait: i know chadly has a brother who wore mc hammer pants to school one year on the first day, and he cried while his grandmother blessed their school year as he realized the ridiculousness of his pants…. but does chad have a sister?” i was slow to the metaphor. honestly, this may attest more to my own early morning aliteracy than the excellency of your own writing; however, being the humble hamster i am, i refuse to take the credit. you’re just that good. and i liked that part of this review. immediately, i felt my own need to know more about joan didion, to explore this woman who wooed a friend who has so wooed me over the years.

i also appreciate the way you “ranted” for us a full introduction to the works, thoughts and life of joan didion. if/when i approach her actual works, i now have a context, a shared handshake with joan didion at a cocktail party near the shrimp tray. i know that you demand authors to be interesting, to be present and inviting to themselves through their literature – i feel the same. if a writer is not compelling, i have a hard time suscribing to whatever their trying to push onto me. in this recent review i scratched up about flannery o’connor, i mentioned the way she leads me into her stories and my willingness to follow. i do not necessarily feel your sisterly joan connection with flannery, but i trust her as a storyteller and as a thinker, and i trust to follow her wherever she wants to lead me. this is not the case with all writers. the way you’ve introduced joan, she seems a writer worth following, a case in which the story at hand is only one more step towards a larger, more autobiographical journey where everything adds and piles up to create one gigantic image of a single person’s life. that sounds like a journey i’d be willing to take.

thanks for the hard work here. after the running of yesterday’s mail service, i now have five new books to read. i think i’ll chew on these before picking up joan. will keep you posted.

please, even if no one ever says anything on these posts, keep the book reviews coming. i love them.