Othello – William Shakespeare, c. 1603 ★★★½

Shakespeare's Least-Great Masterpiece

Shakespeare’s tragedies are recognized to be enduring classics above and beyond even the most celebrated literature. Of them, Othello maybe has the strongest case for contemporary resonance. The themes of irrational enmity and racial hatred have certainly not dated it at all.

But the case for Othello doesn’t ring as solidly to me as Shakespeare’s other three top tragedies: Hamlet, MacBeth, and King Lear. The main plot is constrained and deterministic. Its characters are relatively few and mono-dimensional, lacking for life. The comedic interludes are slight to the point of pointlessness. While Shakespeare tragedies deliver a kind of catharsis amid the Act V tears, here you get just bitter silence.

You get a great villain, one of the greatest of all time, and scenes of deep complexity and wit worth turning over in one’s head. But I never enjoy this one like I do the others. It only commands my respect.

White Noise – Don DeLillo, 1985 ★

Embracing the Chaos

Some books I read for enjoyment, others for a challenge. Then there are books like White Noise I read as a kind of secular penance, because every now and then I need something to more or less kick my teeth in.

Punishment literature, I call it. Post-modern literature is the more accepted term. It’s not my scene, but there are post-modern books, even a couple by the same author, that I can find pleasure in reading. White Noise is such a death-obsessed, narrative-splintered drag that I can’t even fake a baseline appreciation for it.

Jack Gladney is a college professor who chairs a department in Hitler Studies at a geographically isolated college. He is married to Babette, with whom he shares responsibility for a number of children (who are either his or hers but not theirs) and an all-consuming fear of dying.

A Handful Of Dust – Evelyn Waugh, 1934 ★★★★★

Achieving Perfection Imperfectly

There may be no such thing as a completely perfect novel. Yet few achieve greatness despite missing perfection quite like this one. What makes A Handful Of Dust a classic are the same things that catch readers like me short on a first read. It’s the grittiness that grabs you.

Take a set of cold, seemingly unknowable characters. A radical tone shift from comedy to drama. A dire third act with an O. Henry twist out of nowhere. An abrupt finale that can’t be anything but anticlimactic.

If I was a book publisher in the 1930s with this manuscript in my hands, I would have sent Evelyn Waugh back for a rewrite, probably grumbling at him on his way out. Thus the world might have missed out on one of the century’s greatest literary works.

From Approximately Coast To Coast…It’s The Bob And Ray Show – Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, 1983 ★★★

Taking On The Eighties

A new decade brung with it a second collection of Bob & Ray sketches. By this time the comedians had become enshrined in that temple of culture, National Public Radio, who platformed the pair throughout the 1980s less for ratings than as a kind of public service.

Would the duo who built their reputation darting from one commercial broadcaster to another every other year or so become stuffy and dull with their non-profit status?

It doesn’t seem that way. The material here is at times sharper and funnier than what was in the first book, though you do feel time beginning to pass them by with their continued parodying of overstocked surplus sales and soap operas.

Kiss – Ed McBain, 1992 ★½

A Policeman's Lot

Solving murders, it turns out, is a lot easier than stopping or prosecuting them. In this late installment of the 87^th Precinct police procedurals, series hero Steve Carella gets shoved hard against the limits of his job.

Author Ed McBain inches ever-closer to full-on despair. Whether it be criminal justice, race relations, or the capitalist rat race, Kiss is a novel reeling in misery. Perhaps because of this, it lacks the usual series springiness, stretching out a thin plot for over 350 pages.

At least the author was inspired enough to write original song lyrics to justify the book’s title. But like the book, it’s not a song you remember.

Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain – Justin Kaplan, 1966 ★★★½

Balancing a Man and a Myth

The central thesis of this critical biography is a tricky one laid out in its title, that being the dual identity of its celebrated subject. As author Justin Kaplan explains it, there were always two sides when dealing with Mark Twain.

He was an avowed atheist who took part in seances and embraced Christian Science, a celebrated voice of the South who lived in Connecticut, a critic of business who eagerly embraced the Industrial Age, a consummate insider who could never resist mocking authority.

“He wanted to belong, but he also wanted to laugh from the outside,” is how Kaplan puts it.

Mostly Harmless – Douglas Adams, 1992 ★★

Going Out with a Bang and a Whimper

Parallel universes and alternate timelines get quite a workout in this final installment of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” comedic sci-fi saga. It begs a question: Can a series that always leaned hard on the utter randomness of the universe get too random?

Short answer: Yes.

Mostly Harmless is the most frenetic, depressing, and conceptually catawampus entry in the series. It delivers that boldly anarchic flavor “Hitchhiker” faithful have savored for decades. Where it falls short is tone; an uncharacteristic despairing heaviness pervades the text. For the first time, Adams’s universe is suffused not with whimsy but dread.