Book Review: Had A Good Time by Robert Olen Butler

Had a Good Time

Author: Robert Olen Butler

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Date of Publication: August 9, 2005

Pages: 288 (Trade Paper Edition) 

     This is another stellar set of stories from a terrific writer.  Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.  Had a Good Time is another intriguing book of expertly crafted short stories, each with a very interesting starting point.  The author collects vintage, turn of the century post cards.  He uses the photo and greeting from a different card from his collection as a jumping off point for each story.  This is reminiscent of his collection Tabloid Dreams, in which he used a bizarre but actual headline from a supermarket tabloid as a starting point for each story. 

    In each story the author recreates a vignette of early 1900s America, from small towns in the South to remote farms in desolate South Dakota.  Each story is a carefully constructed character study with many poignant as well as humorous moments.  My personal favorite is “The Ironworker’s Hayride” where a very shy young bachelor is convinced to go on a blind date with a girl who has a wooden leg.  The ensuing hayride and this man’s internal debate with his conscience are hilarious.  This one story alone is worth the purchase price of the book.

     While the author describes scenes with realism and creates memorable characters, the best parts of these stories are the dialogues.  Several of the stories, set in the South with children as main characters, evoke memories of verbal exchanges in Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.  In others, the plots move along solely through dialogue.  In others, the spoken words set tone and create atmosphere. 

     Robert Olen Butler teaches creative writing at Florida State University.  If you are interested in how a truly masterful writer creates a short story, visit his web-site “Inside CreativeWriting”.   He has a day by day posting of his work on a story, from inception to completion, including edits and revisions.

     This is a very entertaining collection.  The stories themselves are very interesting, but the thought processes behind each one are even more so.  Had a Good Time by Robert Olen Butler is available in hard back from Grove Press.

Book Review: Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough

Pieces of Light

Author: Charles Fernyhough

Publisher: HarperCollins 

Date of Publication: January 7, 2014

Pages: 320

"Memory has its own special kind of truth.  It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also, but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events;  and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
- Salman Rushdie

     Developmental psychologist Charles Fernyhough begins the final chapter of Pieces of Light by saying: "I set out to write about some science, and I ended up by telling a lot of stories."  Indeed he did.  In a little over 200 pages this author has concisely summarized current  memory research.  He enlivens the anatomic and statistical facts with colorful anecdotes and stories which help the reader comprehend what all of this research means on a practical level.  In the process, the author encourages us to think differently about memory and : "Thinking differently about memory requires us to think differently about some of the 'truths' that are closest to the core of our selves."

     In his introduction, Fernyhough states "We need our memories, and we find ways of hanging on to them.  According to the conventional 'possession' view of memory, we do that by filing them away in a kind of internal library, ready to be retrieved as soon as they are needed."   He then goes on to say that "The view that I want to explore in this book is that memory is more like a habit, a process of constructing something from its parts, in similar but subtly changing ways each time, whenever the occasion arises."  It is this reconstructive view of memory that he explores throughout the book.

     In successive chapters the author explores how reconstructed memories are very susceptible to distortion by information provided after the event and by bias.  He distinguishes between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events) and how memories from our own lives involve an integration of these two types of memory.

     He also writes about the evocation of memory by certain stimuli.  In particular, he talks about how certain sensory stimulation can evoke very strong memories (or "involuntary memories").  The classic example of this in literature is Proust's memories of his grandmother which were brought about by the smell and taste of Madeleine cakes in his book In Search of Lost Time.  

     This concept of memories as reconstructions has many critical implications.  The legal system is taking this into account.  More and more, the courts are discounting the reliability of eyewitness testimony in favor of more verifiable evidence.  Memory manipulation is a great concern, especially in the arena of child abuse.  There is great interest in this concept of memory reconstruction in the treatment of memory disorders including amnesia, dementia and post-traumatic stress syndrome.  The chapter on PTSD is particularly interesting, especially since this is a relatively new diagnosis (first included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1980s).  The successful use of therapy to refocus the memory of  PTSD patients is fascinating.  

     This book is reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell's books in that both authors use data and facts which then are augmented by "real world" narratives.  Fernyhough goes further, however, using many personal anecdotes and family stories.  The chapter which describes his interviews with his 90 year old grandmother are touching as well as enlightening.  I also really enjoyed the segments in which Fernyhough uses literature (Proust, of course, as well as many more contemporary authors) to show how different views of memory are portrayed.  Fernyhough also has the advantage over Gladwell in the fact that he is a scientist and a practitioner in the field rather a reporting journalist.  This author obviously had a thorough command of the information and has a real talent for explaining it on a level that the non-psychologist and non-neuroanatomist can comprehend.  

     This is a very enjoyable study of modern memory research which deserves a wide audience.