Jesse's Reading List

Greatness, unfulfilled. Why, I ask, did Bauby waste his too-brief life in the shallows of a fashion magazine? Why didn't he suffer his stroke sooner, less fatally, so that he might have blinked his way through decades instead of months and arrived at a more substantial oeuvre? Two months of hard summer work in July and August of 1996 are the major remnant of this man's life. The reams of glossy paper that consumed much of Bauby's writing life are truly dead, just more dominoes long-ago fallen in the endless stream of anorexia and sex that floods supermarket checkout aisles, never to be remembered. Bauby wields exceptional ability, rendering tableaux that shimmer with honest pathos. What more might he have accomplished had he lived? Ignore the cover snippets. The Diving Bell is not "one of the great books of the century;" nor is it "gripping;" nor "a testament to freedom and the delight of the human mind." It is a beautiful adolescence brought

Stegner's last novel is suitably garrisoned to hold its ultimate position, armed with subject matter ranging from family, to career, to love, to friendship, to art, to death--in precis, with the memorable stuff of human life. And then there is that even deeper matter, the one that evades explicit mention, and would almost escape notice entirely (as it so often does) were it not for the title and its prefatory source, a stanza from Stegner's good friend Robert Frost: I could give all to Time except--except What I myself have held. But why declare The things forbidden that while Customs slept I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There And what I would not part with, I have kept. And what are these "things forbidden"? Stegner, I believe, could have laid out an easy answer for us, drawn from natural gifts, gifts conditioned by years of pain-love-experience. That is the common precedent, and one not forsaken by many great men. Tell 'em, old man, tell 'em. You