January 6 Great ExpectationsBut enough about me. Let's talk about my project. I'm here trying to choose my first book of the year. I've spent a good couple of days thinking about what that book should be, which means I've been scanning these shelves as well as sifting through the piles near my bed, the ones mentally marked Must Read, Might Read, and Maybe Someday. (I'm intermittently ruthless about the assignment of these categories, banishing Richard Russo's Empire Fallsfrom Must Read to Maybe Someday after six failed attempts to get interested in it. On the other hand, I moved Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuitfrom Might Read to Must Read after no fewer than six friends extolled its virtues.) I've already decided to take one biggish book instead of the usual three or four I often pack as insurance against being caught-can you imagine?-with nothing to read. I've already finished The Corrections-and besides, I have this idea that the New Year should begin with a New Book, preferably one that's light and maybe even funny.
The year 2001 was tough going for all of us, and I have this superstitious idea that if I start this year with something happy, it'll be a happy year. Eventually, I find, high up on the shelves, where the newest books often go, a copy of Funnymen, a novel by Ted Heller, who wrote the delightful Slab Rat,which I loved, despite the terrible review it got in The New York Times Book Review.Heller-son of Joseph Catch-22Heller-has a gift for black comedy (coincidence or genetics? You decide), and this new novel sounds intriguing: it's an imagined oral history of a comedy team made up of a Jewish comedian and an Italian-American crooner in the post-vaudeville era. It's a Martin-Lewis kind of thing, I gather from the jacket copy, and while I've never been a great fan of that particular couple, I find the phenomenon kind of interesting. And it weighs in at around 400 pages, so all my criteria are met. Funnymenit is, then, I think as I tuck it into my duffel bag. I should probably stop right here and explain that this wasn't the most ordinary of Vermont lodges we would be visiting. Our host, my friend Sabrina, is the widow of a stepson of the famous Russian writer and thinker Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
As mother of the author's first grandchild, Sabrina is still welcome at the compound in Cavendish, Vermont, where the Solzhenitsyns lived in exile for nearly twenty years. (They're now back in Russia, and the Cavendish digs are used by Sabrina and the two S. sons who live in the States.) The idea of visiting a famous Nobel Prize-winning author's home appeals to me, and besides, Sabrina has promised us skiing lessons and hot toddies and lots and lots of lazy hours to read by the fire. When we get there, the family's choice of exile venue begins to make sense: it's beautiful land up here, but isolated, and very, very cold. The two houses the author had built for him-one for the family to live in and one for the writer to write in-are connected by a basement passageway. There's something very Russian about the whole setup, and it even suggests a kind of architectural Stockholm syndrome: the expatriate author purposely building a home reminiscent of the Siberian prison in which he spent a couple of decades. In other words, it's the polar (pun intended) opposite of the warm, loquacious nightclub world Heller portrays in Funnymen.
Still, I'm looking forward to the visit and to reading Funnymen, and after a day on the slopes-or rather, a day in which Leo and I hovered as Charley took his first skiing lesson on the slopes-a hearty dinner, and a couple of drinks, I sit down on the simple sofa in front of the fire and open it. But suddenly, it's not so Funny. In the book, Heller is describing the honky-tonk vaudevillian.