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 rating than 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.