THE LOST WEEKEND by Charles Jackson

 Re-finished Mo 2/22/21 

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I finished on Mo 2/24/97 at FitClub West.

Don Birnam's Five Day Binge. 

Wick- Don's concerned brother

Helen- Don's selfless girlfriend

Set on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan.

Homosexuality's implied as a possible reason for Don's condition.

The book was unfavorably compared to 'UNDER THE VOLCANO' by Malcolm Lowry. I have the movie in my Netflix queue and I have the novel somewhere in the collection. I might buy it on Kindle for $2.99.

The book's page at Wikipedia:

ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Weekend_(novel)

From a review of the film at Netflix

In November of 1944, when Charles Jackson spoke to members of Alcoholics Anonymous on the topic "Why I Wrote ‘The Lost Week-End,’” he said there was “a sore need . . . for such a character study as that of Don Birnam. . . . The public needed to be shown the true tragic nature of the alcoholic.” Many A.A.s wondered whether Jackson himself was an alcoholic. He cryptically replied that while the events of the story were fictional, his understanding portrayal of Don Birnam was because “I have a good memory.”

Not nearly as good as 'A MILLION LITTLE PIECES' by James Frey, but 'THE LOST WEEKEND' was one of the first times that AA's position was fully stated in a fictional story. 

I like the 'addiction genre' of literature and this one was worth a look, but not a leader in the field.  

FEAR OF FLYING by Erica Jong

 Finished Fr 2/12/21

This is a classic book and one of my ancient paperbacks. There is nothing on the flyleaf, so I guess I never read it. 

Isadora Wing is attending a psychiatric conference in Vienna with her husband and actively engaged in a sexual affair with another analyst. 

Brian was Isadora's first husband and he was a genius who went over the edge into schizophrenia. Bennett, her second husband and the man she is cheating on, is of Asian descent. Adrian is her English analyst and lover. He is the embodiment of 'Pan'- a sexual and pleasure seeking individual.  

Essentially the book is a 'call to arms' for women who are trapped in stagnant or unfulfilled marriages.

She advances the theory of the 'zipless fuck'. Women should have the same rights as men to engage in sex without emotional attachments.

It's an easy read and I thought that it was well written. The book came out in 1973 and I wonder if things have changed that much. I guess it depends on where you are. In metropolitan areas I think women are in a more equal place with me. However, in religious areas and in very rural sections of the country the values of Mayberry are still holding strong. 

A link to the book at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Flying_(novel)

TALK TALK by T.C. Boyle

 Finished Su 2/6/21

This is one of my hardbacks that I bought at West Branch on Fr 11/14/08 and I finished the book that December. This was my first exposure to Boyle and I said that I would read more by this author. 

I read Boyle's 'DROP CITY' in December of this year. 

'TALK TALK' is about a young deaf woman who is a victim of a credit card fraud and identity theft. Dana is a teacher at a school for the deaf in California and her boyfriend, Bridger works in the graphic design and movie special effects field. The criminal, 'Peck' lives in splendor with his Russian girlfriend and her four year old daughter in Marin County.  

This book is set just slightly before the Internet became all pervasive and the way the crooks get your information is by robbing your mailbox. Then they can get the necessary information by reading your Visa bill or a utility bill. Actually all they need is your name and address and then they can request a change of address. Hopefully they can get the information before the legitimate owner notices that he is not receiving mail. 

Dana and her boyfriend, Bridger travel across the country to upstate New York to try to catch the thief, William 'Peck' Wilson.

***Many within the deaf community do not see themselves as handicapped. They see deafness as only a 'difference' and not a disability at all. 

***I had a problem with the end of the novel. Dana and Bridger might not be together at the end. It's not clear and I was a bit confused.

From a review in The New York Times:

"No one writes better about the wages of American sin. Or, if not wages exactly, sin purchased on credit, and that probably stolen."

THE LAWS OF OUR FATHERS by Scott Turow

We 2/3/21- Before a birthday visit to the Brandenburgs to celebrate their new house on Red Oak Lane.

 From the review at Publishers Weekly:

"Laws of Our Fathers is a rich, complex and ultimately profoundly moving tale that, like all Turow's work, is quarried from the mysteries of human character rather than simply from the sometimes too-easy drama of the courtroom. It begins in the gritty setting of an inner city slum and in the mind of a soul-dead black gangster. An ambush is being laid and when it is sprung, the wrong person, an elderly white woman, the wife of a state senator, is dead. Was her hapless son somehow involved in the murder plot, and what role did the senator play? The hot-potato case comes into the court of Judge Sonia (Sonny) Klonsky (remembered from The Burden of Proof), and the courtroom soon looks like Old Home Week as it becomes clear that Sonny, black defense lawyer Hopie Tuttle, state senator Loyell Eddgar, and observing newspaper columnist Seth Weissman all knew each other back in the wild student days of the '60s. The courtroom scenes that follow are swift-moving and surprising, especially since Turow has the nerve to depict a ""bench trial,'' in which a judge alone hears evidence, so there is no playing to a jury, and the scenes are worked out dramatically person to person. But the legal aspects of his novel, highly dramatic though they are, are not what most interests the author. The book is in fact basically about family relationships: the passionately leftist Eddgar's with his wife and son; Seth's with his austere, penny-pinching father, survivor of a Nazi death camp; and Sonny's with the memories of her wild communist mother and with her own precious, late-in-life young daughter. Most fine novels have a keen sense of the passage of time, and Turow's grasp of the revolutionary fervor of the '60s and how it has later calmed into rueful, if still compassionate, acceptance, is masterly. A fine stroke too, is his use of the funeral eulogies for Seth's father to sum up, touchingly, what these often embattled and misled people have learned with such difficulty in their lives. There are minor flaws: the multiple personal perspectives in the narrative are not always as well differentiated as they might be, and Sonny's on-again, off-again feelings toward Seth become somewhat repetitious. But these are quibbles in the light of Turow's grandly ambitious achievement: to focus the profoundest struggles of two generations through one sordid, emblematic crime. First serial to Playboy; movie rights sold to Universal; author tour.

It was a complex story set in contemporary times and then forty years earlier during the student movement in California during the sixties. The book is over 800 pages and lots of moving parts. I would read anything by Turow.