D'oh! I'm trying to be a sane goodreader now). 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.

How often man is a master of his own troubles – the more wayward one becomes the deeper one sinks in bitterness.īrother versus sister. All men, he has come to understand, are victims, objects in fact no more rational than planets good men, he’s discovered by his books, are as much the victims of random concussions in the universe as are bad. He has discovered beyond any shadow of a doubt that all life is mechanics, that faith, hope, and charity are the desperate stratagems of people who would blind themselves to truth. In fact I stayed unplugged almost throughout the entire text regardless of the good readability of October Light.Ī stupid man, perhaps, and a vile toad even among stupid men, but nevertheless, well read. You understood exactly why everyone did everything-or imagined you did-so that when something went false it seemed not merely silly but-what? A kind of cheat, a broken confidence.Ĭaught between inanity of the farcical pulp fiction and the foolishness of the obstinate as a couple of mules aged siblings, I felt as if I’ve been caught between a rock and a hard place so I couldn’t connect with the novel quite for a while.

They might be a little like characters in movies-a good deal in her paperback reminded her more of movies than of life, and perhaps that was why, as she’d known from the beginning, it was trash, really, or at least not the kind of book Horace would read-but there was something, even in a novel like this one, that was more like life than any movie could be. Wheels within wheels… Stories within stories… Now that the television has been shot down dead by her brother, the heroine has nothing to do but to read indignantly a trashy thriller in isolation…

October light by john gardner