Nicholas Spice on Everyman: “Everyman has none of this propulsive linguistic exuberance [identified in previous books]. Its energy is of a quite different kind. It is a funerary portrait, a short account of a man’s life cast in the bias of a preoccupation with bodily decay. The story is told in retrospect, the mood is valedictory and morose. Most stories we read or listen to are told in the past tense, but we forget this and experience them as though they were happening now; wondering what happens next is what keeps our attention. In Everyman nothing happens next, not just because the protagonist is buried in the opening scene, but because what we learn of his life comes to us mainly through what he remembers.”

Thomas Mallon on Harper Lee: “More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound, a forced mixture—sometimes in the same sentence—of Scout’s very young perspective and a fully adult one. Phrases like ‘throughout my early life’ and ‘when we were small’ serve only to jar us out of a past that we’ve already been seeing, quite clearly, through the eyes of the little girl. Information that has been established gets repeated, and the book’s sentences are occasionally so clumsy that a reader can’t visualize the action before being asked to picture its opposite: ‘A flash of plain fear was going out of [Atticus’s] eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.'”

Houston Chronicle: “‘When college is over, you’ll think about it for the rest of your life,’ he said Saturday. Grisham joked that adulthood is overrated, and said professional life is stressful and unhealthy. One solution, he said, is to stay in school.”

Let me set John Grisham, Esquire straight. The telltale sign that Jay Gatsby is one unbearably sad dude:

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

Where many other bloggers have offered specific BEA reports of what transpired during last week (meaning, you know, actual encounters with human beings and the like), leave it to book editor-turned-blogger Bob Hoover to expose the real issues, which is apparently not the confluence of authors and publishers and exhibitors, nor the sightings or the conversations, but the food served at all the various parties (see May 23, 2006 entry; again, permalink unprovided):

The gold standard (for me, at least) was the HarperCollins affair at the Smithsonian Castle Saturday night where the prosciutto ($23 a pound where I come from) was spread out in yards like ribbon.

Well, thank you, Bob. So glad you bothered to go into detail on the interesting social climate.

Of course, it’s possible that Bob’s still getting his sea legs at this blogging thing. Then again, Bob confesses that he had intelligence of the Knopf party time and location, but didn’t bother to storm the gates. I must posit something: Would a real journalist refrain from crashing the gates?

Certainly Jeremy “VIP Mothefucker Ringleader” Lassen had no such qualms.

As Mr. Orthofer has observed, it’s Pulp Fiction Week at Slate. Of course, by “pulp,” Slate refers not to Robert E. Howard, Lester Dent or Erle Stanley Gardner, but to distinguished authors like Dashiel Hammett. (I suppose Stephen Crane, who self-published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in part to cash in on the lurid popular fiction markets of the time, must be declared a disreputable “pulp” author as well. Never mind that Maggie is also one of the key novels of its time that dares to chronicle prostitutes and street life. But I digress.)

Further, Slate has asked a list of luminaries to provide their favorite beach books. Among some of the more interesting revelations:

• Rick Moody recommends the Motley Crue autobiography.
• New Yorker critic Joan Acocella actually recommends The Da Vinci Code.
• Michael Kinsley believes Evelyn Waugh to be “pretty mindless” and considers Trollope “the most mindless of the big, fat…19th-century brits.”
• Joyce Carol Oates avoids beaches and thus evades the “beach book” question.
• A “recommendation” from George Saunders that must be read.

[UPDATE: One damn thing that I missed (and surprisingly Sarvas) and that Sarah caught was John Banville on the Parker novels.]