The Story of Lucy Gault and literary ramblings

I continue to make my way through the novels of William Trevor, this time his 2002 The Story of Lucy Gault. As to be expected, it wasn't a page-turner. Trevor crafts and portrays beautifully but ultimately he's not plot-driven. Most of what goes on is interior to the characters. I tend to liken him to Vermeer in that it's all about the play of light on surfaces, but in Trevor's case it's the surfaces of souls. I will no doubt continue reading him but won't start another novel next week.

In other literary news, I was at a fundraiser yesterday evening where a lot of excellent food from Kokyu was served: fish tacos, coconut-fried shrimp, pork-belly and brisket sliders (not on one little bun, that's two separate sliders). Money was being raised for Jeff Jackson, with Roy Cooper present to pump up the crowd. It was hot and I ate a lot, so towards the end of the function I felt like sitting down and I sat with an older fellow (yes, older than me) who's a poet after retiring from something else and another guy who looked vaguely familiar. I was talking to the poet about his routines and I asked if he wanted maybe to be the next Wallace Stevens, in the sense of being a poet whose career really takes off late in life. The two guys then went off trying to one up one another in telling the best Wallace Stevens stories: Wallace picks a fight with Ernest Hemingway and gets pummeled. Wallace drily insults Robert Frost. And so on.

The poet guy did choose to make a snide remark about Stevens's role in insurance companies and not knowing what management did and how he and his team of merry programmers would try to ignore management as best they could. I was tempted to point out to him that it was only when people started to question the value of my work that I realized that I was getting somewhere in life because it is the nature of things that more complex managerial and leadership work is harder to grasp and harder to do and that's why people grip their lunch pails with ever whiter knuckles and thereby limit their scope and potential. Instead I said nothing.