A couple of weeks ago, in an installment of National Public Radio’s “You Must Read This,” T.C. Boyle talked about John Cheever. Says Boyle:

Few prose writers can touch Cheever for the painterly precision of his descriptions, and the reward of them too — his characters, locked in the struggles of suburban and familial angst, regularly experience moments of transcendence and rebirth in nature.

I’d been thinking about Cheever lately, ever since pulling down Bullet Park from my bookshelf a couple weeks ago and being reminded of its great opening paragraph:

Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on the platform with a child on his shoulders. They are waving goodbye to some traveler, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying? On a siding beyond the platform there is a lighted dining car where a waiter sits alone at a table, adding up his accounts. Beyond this is a water tower and beyond this a well-lighted and empty street. Then you think happily that this is your country — unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations.

(Read more from Chapter 1 of Bullet Park here.)

I love using what Amazon calls “statistically improbable phrases” like “Paint me a small railroad station” when I’m trying to find a particular text on the web.  Try it yourself. The first hit you get is an interview on Powells.com with novelist A. M. Homes.

What is your favorite literary first line?
“Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark,” from John Cheever’s Bullet Park. For years I’ve wondered about the placement of the word “then.” What does it mean? Why is it there?

That’s a great point.  What does “then” mean, or rather do, in that sentence?  In fact, what does “paint me” mean?  I guess it means “imagine,” sort of.  And “then”?  For me, it carries just the faintest hint of a continuing conversation, and smooths out the otherwise abrupt transition the reader undertakes in the opening sentence or paragraph of any story: from knowing nothing about the world of the story to accepting that world not only as extending forward through time as we follow the events of the narrative, but extending also backwards in time, before the events of the story occur, and before we came along.  (See further and better musings on time in the novel here.)

Anyhow: Cheever’s style.  A gift to you and me, albeit indirectly, from some of the laziest bastards on earth.

Interesting bio for Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint up on the web site for the International Literary Festival Berlin, which starts next week:

After all, in this story of a man who in his quest for an “abstract life” turns his bathroom into his living room, Toussaint employs several narrative elements reminiscent of the nouveau roman’s aesthetics.  For example, he abstains from any psychological rendering of his characters, but instead he maintains a detached perspective of the minutiae.  Critics regard him as an exponents of the “nouveau nouveau roman”. His minimalist style, which seems to linger in phenomenological precision, always corresponds with a subjacent layer: “Just as my books are void of sociology and politics, philosophy and metaphysics are always apparent, even if not explicitly named. They are always a reflection on time and death.”

The bio mentions a book I wasn’t aware of:  Autoportrait (à létranger), published in France in 2000.  It hasn’t appeared in English yet, but I discovered an excerpt translated by Edward Gauvin on the Words Without Borders website.

Incidentally, as Mr. Orthofer recently informed us, la rentrée approche.  That’s the time of year in France when the kids go back to school, and not coincidentally a flood of new books hits the French literary marketplace.  Check out Amazon.fr’s la rentrée page to see some of the books coming out in France right now.

Back to the Berlin festival — what an amazing lineup.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a program this comprehensive. The author index is here.  Here’s just China, for example.  Wow.

From Owen Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan (1929):

It was March 1926 before we could get away.  My rifle, or at last the ammunition for it, had arrived only a few days before.  The rifle itself had been stolen in transit, but by great good luck I managed to buy a second-hand rifle of the same make and calibre.  I left Peking by the night train.  On that very afternoon a crowd of demonstrators had been fired on by the Chinese police, who killed a number of students, some of whom were girls, and a few bystanders.  The shooting had taken place within a few hundred yards of the house where we were staying.  There was an ominous, tense feeling throughout the city.  The gates were closed early and we had difficulty in getting to the station, outside the walls.

In the general and fluttering terror of the servants the only calm voice was that of my man Moses.  “This must be looked at in the right way,” he said. “It is a good omen.  The progress of people marked out by their destiny for a conspicuous fortune is always attended by remarkable public events and all kinds of calamities.”

Hey, it’s the end of the day and I have a spare 21 minutes.  Kind of like finding a ten-spot in an old pair of trousers.  Here’s some stuff of local interest:

* The fall literary season comes a-calling.  In a single day this week, we had schedule announcements from the Humanities Fest, Nextbook, the Poetry Foundation, and the University of Chicago’s Poetry and Poetics program.  I could definitely see Snyder.

* Those crazy kids at the LitShow have a nice lineup of authors this fall. They return to the air with Jonathan Safran Foer on September 17.

* I recently noticed that Timeout Chicago is now, after long last, offering some of its books coverage free online.  Pretty sweet.  I never knew Kenneth Fearing was a local boy.

* This week’s NewCity offers more details on Dybek’s return to Chicago. He’ll be Northwestern University’s first Distinguished Writer in Residence.

Finally, I shouldn’t care, but this kind of depresses me.  Dalkey started in Chicago, you know. 

From Rosinka Chauduri’s review of the R. K. Narayan Omnibus, in the August 4, 2006, issue of the TLS (not online):

Naipaul recalls how his father wrote to him during his first term at Oxford in 1950 and asked for something by Narayan, at which Naipaul repaired to Blackwell’s bookshop to look for him. There, standing in the second-hand section, Naipaul read the opening sentence of The Bachelor of Arts:

Chandran was just climbing the steps of the college union when Natesan, the secretary, sprang on him and said, “You are just the person I was looking for. You remember your old promise?” “No,” said Chandran promptly, to be on the safe side.

Naipaul continues, “I was immediately enchanted. I got to know that opening by heart, and for many years allowed it to play in my head when I was trying to summon up a new book, hoping that what would come to me would be as easy and direct and ironical, as visual and full of movement.” Trying to sum up the natural writer he believes Naipaul to have been, Naipaul concludes that he was

someone who overcomes difficulties by not seeing that they exist; and perhaps it never occurred to him that the way he used English to describe provincial Indian life was magical …. Narayan, with his glories and limitations, is the Gandhi of modern Indian literature.

I’m going to be in Oxford next month. Maybe I’ll stop by the second-hand section at Blackwell’s (do they still have a second-hand section?) and see the spot where Naipaul met Narayan.

Hey, hey – I just noticed that Jhumpa Lahiri has an essay on Narayan in the most recent issue of the Boston Review. Turns out October 10 is the 100th anniversary of Narayan’s birth.

If you’re just starting on Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts is a great choice. My personal favorite is his wonderful memoir, My Days.

ADDITION 8/14: A couple of other interesting links related to Narayan:

Guru Subramanian, “Narayan and me.”
Pankaj Mishra, “The Great Narayan.”