There are many books (more than some reviewers will admit to) that are a great read the first time around. But most don't hold up under a second reading.
Then there are other tomes that, for one reason or another - when we first read them, where we first read them or who we were with when we first read them - work the second time, but only just. We know when we finish that there won't be a third time.
Now some people would find the above discussion all but irrelevant because they never read the same book twice, much less three times. But I have found during a lifetime of reading that certain books, like certain films, wines and even people, get better and better with age and familiarity.
Three books I can heartily recommend that have stood up to multiple readings are "Dispatches" (1977) by Michael Herr, "Sympathy for the Devil" (1987) by Kent Anderson and "Classic Crimes," a selection from the works of William Roughead (published 1977, although Roughead, a Scottish lawyer and criminologist, wrote most of the entries in this volume in the 1920s and '30s - he died in 1952).
"Dispatches" and "Classic Crimes" are nonfiction; "Sympathy" is a novel. "Dispatches" and "Sympathy" concern the Vietnam War; "Classic Crimes" is composed of a series of painstaking, compelling reconstructions of real-life murders and the trials that followed, mostly in England and Scotland during Victorian times.
Roughead is the most distinguished stylist of the three writers. Henry James, many lit profs' choice as the greatest novelist ever, and many common readers' (to steal a phrase from Virginia Woolf) choice as the most boring novelist to ever commit pen to paper, loved Roughead. And told him so. "You write so well," James wrote to Roughead at the beginning of a correspondence that ended only with James' death. That he does.
True-crime writing today is a literary slum painted in gaudy, necessarily bright colors. Crimson red for the blood that modern true-crime readers often seem to wallow in. Pink for the sensationalistic way the sex involved with many celebrated crimes is handled. And purple, for an over-the-top, poor man's (and poor woman's) attempts at Hemingwayish hardness on the page. Roughead bothered with none of that. He was a lawyer, and he was fascinated by crime and criminals. But he was also a writer and a stylist who luxuriated in the absolutely original turn of phrase.
Describing a suicide connected to a murder in the rural Scotland of 250 years ago, Roughead in only six words at the end of a sentence makes his point unforgettably: "Her eldest son grew delirious and hanged himself.... As the length of the drop was insufficient he came down and delved below his feet to make it proper for him, which shewed considerable force of character." I'll say.
"Classic Crimes" is full of such pawkily bright little details, and as a bonus throws in an understanding of times very different from our own. There were no consumers then, only citizens of varying degrees of stability and warmth.
"Dispatches" is a war memoir by a young (then in his early 20s) correspondent who didn't have to be in Southeast Asia, but couldn't pull himself away. It is a great book, and that is a term I seldom use. But don't take my word for it.
"The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time," John le Carré wrote.
"I was overwhelmed .. it was so good I felt like putting it down and cheering," Robert Stone, the author of "Dog Soldiers," not a bad Vietnam book itself, wrote.
"In the great line of Crane, Orwell and Hemingway," Ward Just, another well-known novelist, wrote.
They are all correct, and if anything they understate Herr's brilliance. "Dispatches" captures the nature of the Vietnam War, the first rock-and-roll conflict. And, like Roughead describing murder and suicide, Herr reaches levels of starkly beautiful intensity while writing about something that many would say isn't beautiful at all.
A million people can tell you you'll never understand war unless you're in one. But in a few sentences, Herr, describing an American soldier who has been sent out to make certain 37 dead Vietnamese soldiers are really dead (by firing live ammo into their corpses) shows you why you'll never really understand.
"I knew I hadn't seen anything until I saw his face. It was flushed and mottled and twisted like he had his face skin on inside out, a patch of green that was too dark, a streak of red running into bruised purple, a lot of sick gray white in between, he looked like he'd had a heart attack out there. His eyes were rolled up half into his head, his mouth was sprung open and his tongue was out, but he was smiling... The captain wasn't too pleased about my having seen that."
Herr took eight years after leaving Vietnam to get "Dispatches" down and out into the world. Kent Anderson, a Vietnam combat vet (two tours) and Green Beret, took twice that long finishing "Sympathy for the Devil."
Anderson's book is, in my mind, the most powerfully written novel about war ever written.
He isn't the stylist Roughead was; he isn't the poet of the unbearable Herr is. But his pages sing and are singed with authenticity.
You almost go to war with Anderson. And his description of his protagonist (Hanson) trying to return to civilian life (and failing), before going back to the only place he now feels at home - combat in Vietnam - is a great piece of writing, on a par with the famous Hemingway short story "Soldier's Home."
Anderson has published only one more novel, "Night Dogs" (1996), where we catch up to Hanson, who has become a Portland street cop (something Anderson himself did after leaving the U.S. Army). More than one well-known crime-fiction writer has said, in print, that "Night Dogs" is the best police procedural ever written. I wouldn't go that far, but it is almost as good a book as "Sympathy for the Devil," and to me that is really saying something. But don't start with "Night Dogs" even if war novels usually don't work for you. "Sympathy" is the first book if you're going to read Kent Anderson's two.
If you are a reader who agrees with that great writer of antiquity, Horace, that real writers instruct and entertain, this trio of powerful, beautifully written books will not disappoint you.[[In-content Ad]]
