James Hynes

Today, and today only, I am stepping away from my Dawkinsian, Hitchensesque, Harrisite atheism to proclaim my belief in God. That's because today He/She/It did something right and gave my fabulously talented friend Katie Christensen the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for her amazing novel, The Great Man. Buy it, read it, love it. Nuff said.

But wait...there's more! Here's an article from today's Washington Post, with a really lovely photo of Katie, taken by (awww) her husband.

For a different take on No Country for Old Men, from a native Texan and a considerable novelist in his own right, read my buddy John Marks over at the Purple State of John. (I'll let him explain the title of that blog.) John and I got to be friends during the long hot summers in Iowa City in the late 80s, when we were at the Writers' Workshop together. We were the only horror movie fans in Iowa City, apparently, because we were often the only two people in the Astro Theater during screenings of 976-Evil and Hellraiser. Hellraiser I, that is, though I believe we subsequently saw II, III, and IV, together, too. Not like it's anything to be proud of. If you've ever read any of our books—and you should—this obsession with low-rent horror explains a lot.

Another shared obsession is (god help us both) The Lord of the Rings. Lately, I've been working toward finishing a novel that is rather more serious, and even a little grimmer, than what I usually write, and perhaps for that reason, I've been reading and watching a lot of fairly grim stuff, from both ends of the -brow spectrum (high to low, in other words), and all points in between. Along with the aforementioned No Country for Old Men, I also recently read McCarthy's The Road, which makes his previous grim masterpiece, Blood Meridian, play like Singin' in the Rain. (Oprah, what were you thinking?) In between violent and melancholy Cormac McCarthy novels, I've been reading my way through the first volume of the Library of America edition of the novels of Dawn Powell, on the recommendation of another Iowa pal, the novelist Kate Christensen. (You can read Kate on Powell here). I've read the first two so far, Dance Night (which is like Dreiser with all the excess boiled away, and with much better prose) and Come Back to Sorrento, which is gorgeously written but merciless. I love these books, and maybe will write something here about Powell when I've read a couple more, but they are, minus the violent psychopaths and cannibalism, almost as dark about human nature as McCarthy's books are. Top that off with the apocalyptic horror films I've seen lately, 30 Days of Night and The Mist, which I saw late Thanksgiving night, and I was just about ready to slit my wrists.

Which brings me back at last (whew!) to Lord of the Rings. By the Friday after Thanksgiving, having lost much of a night's sleep to the viciously ironic ending of The Mist, I needed something that traveled through darkness but came out into the light again at the end. So I took the phone off the hook, gave the cats extra food, and settled in to watch all three LOTR films in their extended versions, straight through. Took me a day and a half--The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers on Friday and then The Return of the King on Saturday. Which was glorious and redemptive and thrilling and heartbreaking, and led me finally to take down and start reading Tom Shippey's J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Academics who study Tolkien (like novelists who admit to admiring him) are rather outside the mainstream, and Shippey comes across as a little defensive in his forward. And even I'd admit that, while I really do think Tolkien is an important author of the 20th century, he's not the most important. (In case you're wondering, I don't think anybody is; it's a silly and pointless argument to enter into.) But if you can get past that minor point of tendentiousness, Shippey really knows his literary history, his Tolkien, and his Anglo-Saxon, and I'm learning a lot. His account of The Hobbit, which is as far as I've gotten, is wonderfully shrewd, and has added greatly to my appreciation of the book. More on Shippey, perhaps, after I've finished the book.