My, I am in quite the U.Va. mood today, or possibly this week. What kind of weird anniversary reaction am I having to the graduation ceremony season? At any rate: I also finished a book by Rita Dove last night--Through the Ivory Gate--which I came to in an odd way. A passage from it is excerpted (and edited, as I discovered) in the Official SAT Guide (which for some reason doesn't credit its passages anywhere, so I had to Google it. Some fascinating excerpt choices they make, those pranksters in Princeton, including Gogol, Dickens (Trabb's boy!), Garcia Marquez, Patricia Williams). I'd been reading and admiring the passage as my students struggled with it, and I got curious about its provenance, so I traced it and ordered it. Beautifully written in some respects--could follow that voice anywhere--but a disappointment. Or maybe I was expecting it to coalesce in conventional terms, which it assuredly didn't. The dialogue was fairly unconvincing, which was interesting, b/c she's so wonderful with what's often not verbalized: smells, the way light shimmers behind a scrim, what certain kinds of music can sound like, the textures and layers in a person's skin color, the way we can remember favorite clothing from our childhood in such detail.

Also, this is something I'm noticing: there must be some limit to the number of pages betwen mentioning a minor character and then reintroducing it while expecting the reader to remember who s/he is. I read the book over about 1.5 weeks, and it's right around 300 pages, which should not have given me enough time to forget characters from the beginning of the book unless they were abandoned for too long or not sketched clearly enough. I occasionally got confused in Chabon's book, too, but he's better at assigning idiosyncrasies that can almost serve as nametags.

Eh, what do I know.