Over the Notch to Mt. Holyoke. . . .

Last Tuesday night I went with several other people to hear Susan Cheever talk at Mt. Holyoke College. The weather was perfect, the drive gracious and chatty, and Cheever was funny, open, and entertaining. Afterwards, I held up her book-signing line while we chatted a bit about her most recent book, American Bloomsbury. I only had a chance to glance at it, but it seems to be in the mode of popularization fiction--that is, biography in the hands of a novelist. In fact, you could call it a group biography, which Susan did: she was fascinated, she said, with the shifting and complex relationships surrounding the Transcendentalists of Concord--Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, the Hawthornes, and particularly the elder Alcotts and their ungovernable brood, including, of course, Louisa May. It's just out in paperback last week, and I wonder if any of you have noticed it; it does sound like a fun background read (and Cheever is a pretty good researcher, so she knows the major critical approaches to the Transcendentalists).

It also reminds me of two fictions based on actual people (are historical figures featured in novels a la Doctorow becoming ever more popular?): Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club (which SunHee assigned to Capstone a few years back, and I had a keen time yakking about one day for that class), a novel that features Longfellow (who was translating The Divine Comedy just after the Civil War), James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendel Holmes, James T. Fields, and a walk-on appearance by my old grad school favorite and meal ticket, William Dean Howells. It's a murder mystery, uncannily enough, that centers around a serial killer in the Boston area who frames his murders according to the various tortures inflicted on the unfortunate sinners in the Inferno. The other is more recent and even closer to home: Jed Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder. Catch this: its protagonist is a young assistant professor of Psychology recently hired by G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, and whose task is to greet Freud and Jung at the docks in New York and escort them to Worcester for the famous conference. But a murder interrupts their journey. This novel is striking for its attempts to characterize a reluctant and somewhat haughty Freud who is but gingerly braving the wilds of the American continent--but who does solve the murder before he has to appear at Hall's university.

There's some bedside reading for you guys. Love those mysteries, no?

By the way, if those links work, woo-hoo! I learned something! If they don't, damn! back to the drawing board.

Finally, magic number = 2. That's a deuce, BH. One-sixth of a dozen. Half a quartet. (But I do have to congratulate you on making the Wild-card. Til we meet again. . . .)

Jay

Update 1: All well, so the MN is still two. C'est la vie. . . .