Critic's Choice
Elaine Newton's fans love being lectured
BY NANCY STETSON nstetson@floridaweekly.com

ELAINE NEWTON PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PHIL Elaine Newton

Summer's typically a time for light reading — books you bring to the beach or poolside, then forget as soon as you finish the last page.

Faithful fans of Elaine Newton's popular Critic's Choice series at the Phil, however, spend the dog days immersed in complex novels, grappling with plots and themes in anticipation of the next season's lectures.

"These are books you can sink your teeth into," says Ms. Newton, whose 19th season of Critic's Choice begins Thursday, Nov. 13, and continues through April.

Every year, at her last lecture, Ms. Newton releases a list of approximately two dozen novels from which she'll choose the next season's titles. Then, in early summer, she announces the six that made her final cut. The list is posted on the Phil's Web site and is also available at the Naples Barnes & Noble bookstore.

These are the books that Ms. Newton's fans read all summer, whether they're at the beach, on the lanai, up north, on a plane.

Ms. Newton puts careful thought in choosing each year's selections. "I don't want to betray their trust with a book that isn't worth the effort they're going to put into it," she explains. "It must be a book that says something… and raises crucial questions for them."

And they have to be good reading, too. "I'm very conscious of the vocabulary and style and craftsmanship," she says. So a book could be "wonderfully plot driven, but if the characters aren't alive and deeply felt or understood," she won't select it. "If the telling is not worthy, then what's the point?"

Lectures to love 

Her lectures are so popular that Ms. Newton, professor emeritus of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Ontario, has to give the same one three times in order to meet the demand. When the Thursday sessions, which meet in the Daniels Pavilion, began selling out (there's one at 10 a.m. and another at 1:30 p.m.), the Phil decided to offer a Saturday option as well, in the larger Hayes Hall.

You might think you've read a novel — until you hear Ms. Newton delve into its themes, characters, plot, structure, history and inspiration. Through careful exploration, she unwraps its many layers to reveal the beating heart of each work.

Constantly on the lookout for new novels, she often picks books that wind up winning literary awards, sometimes multiple awards, and making various year-end "best of" lists.

"I read dozens and dozens and dozens of novels," she says.

Sometimes titles come to her by word of mouth. "Someone will say to me, 'Have you read…'" she says. "I heard about 'Out Stealing Horses,' for example, from a friend in England who said it was all the buzz in London."

This season's titles come from all over the world. Here, in the critic's own words, is a summary of her choices for this season.

"Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan

Nov. 13 & 15

"Loving Frank" is essentially a romantic but also tragic love story based on Frank Lloyd Wright's "scandalous" relationship with radical feminist Mamah Borthwick Cheney. It's a true-life story, and it's remarkable what Horan does with it.

In the first place, she resurrects Mamah Borthwick Cheney from a footnote in Wright's history, and makes us see her as this fascinating woman who has always been obscured by the focus on Wright. Horan asks some interesting moral questions. The story has allowed her to focus on issues of abandoning motherhood and leaving a stale or arid marriage… the risk that involves, and the vilification that followed her everywhere, how it affected her, and why did she risk so much?

Then it talks a lot about gender roles, women's rights, the difference between European and American feminism in the early 1900s — one being more political, the other more social in its orientation. But in the end, the book is about the real ways that loving someone does and can change life, hence the title.

The two of them believed so in the value of their love and in their right to be together… but it's not a love-conquers-all story. Horan's done a really wonderful job of it.

And you get a real understanding of the architectural principles, the philosophy behind Wright's work. I believe he represents American values in his architecture. It concretizes the values that he held very strongly.

"Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name" by Vendela Vida

Dec. 6 & 11

She's a very interesting writer, Vendela Vida. I was very pleased to come across this. The title intrigued me, and I picked it out.

It's about a young American woman who, when her father dies, discovers another man's name on her birth certificate. The man she thought was her father turns out not to be her biological father. Worse, in terms of betrayal, her fiancé, whom she's known since childhood, has known this all along.

The name on the birth certificate is of a Sami shaman, in northern Finland, in Lapland. She goes off to the land of ice and snow and reindeer in search of her father — but of course, she's also trying to understand her origins, and reconcile her past with her present, and find out what kind of future she wants to make for herself. She's really wresting with the issues of identity and family and obligation.

Set in a dark, cold, unfamiliar hallucinogenic environment, it has the quality of something very unsettling and dreamlike, almost. Very atmospheric. The landscape is harsh, and it's cold and forbidding, eerie. But that's part of the beauty of it also. She is chilled inside by what has happened in her life.

It's a quest or a journey story, but very different because of the country where it's set and because there's sort of an eccentric quality to the whole thing. The voice on the page is wonderful. It's very poignant, but there's a lot of wit… It's a debut novel, too.

In the end, she's getting at some very important issues about how much we are influenced and determined by the past, and how much we can in fact create our own selves and our own future. Must we be the product of our past, or can we start all over, and what does it entail? Those are the issues asked.

It's just extremely well done. This is a voyage of discovery… the darkness in which she goes is literal as well as figurative.

"Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson

Jan. 22 & 24

Every year, I take one novel that I know is going to be a challenge, and this year it's "Tree of Smoke." It won the National Book Award and was one of the five best novels of the year, according to the New York Times. 

Having said that, let me say: It's long. It's very long… over 600 pages. And it's a wrenching epic about the Vietnam War. I'm teaching it because I absolutely am convinced that it's about more than Vietnam, that it's also about Iraq. And it owes to Hemingway and it owes to James Bond, because it's about the CIA; and it owes enormously to Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." And also to Marcel Proust. It's really an act of literary bravado, an amazing achievement.

I do have to admit that only the reader can decide if it's worth 600-plus pages. For the first hundred pages you resist it; everyone I know struggled with it. You do consider abandoning it. But after the first 100 pages, it kicks in. When it grabs you, it becomes mesmerizing, gripping and yes, horrifying.

When I realized the kind of commitment I had to put into it, it was too late, because I was hooked. But I also knew that the huge demand it made of the reader is utterly worth it…

It unfolds in chapters linearly, from 1963 to 1970, following a diverse cast through those years. Then at the end, a coda set in 1983 allows you to understand that the effects of the war will be long lasting… Anchored by masterful writing, it's a vast, surging work. Bookmarks magazine said it's going to be the new American war classic.

You couldn't give this book to just any audience. This audience has to just trust that it's worth it.

"Mr. Pip" by Lloyd Jones

Feb. 26 & 18

"Mr. Pip" won the Commonwealth Best Book Award and was nominated for the Booker. It's about the early 1990s on a tropical island off the coast of Papua, New Guinea, during a hideous civil war full of atrocity that we don't really know much about. It's about the one white man on the island who remains after everyone has been evacuated, in order to teach the children. The only book he has is Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations."

He replaces these adolescent kids' future, and his point is to expand the children's imagination… to use the fiction as a way to take them to another place. Not to escape to another place, but he wants them to be able to put themselves in another place, in order to understand life through other people.

It's a very original and humorous novel, but it's suffused with humanity. Very effective, I thought. He also recounts a lot of the horror of the war, hideous horror.

So it's about the pleasures of reading, the significance of reading, but it's also reading as a subversive activity. They save themselves through reading. Jones uses "Great Expectations" a lot, the narrative structure and the characters.

Again, it looks at the whole business of the ambiguity of memory and the role of the writer using memory. This is very spare, the nature of story telling and reading as an act of survival, juxtaposed against this world of atrocity.

(The protagonist), Mr. Watts, says, "To be human is to be moral, and you can't have a day off whenever it suits you." That's the kind of book it is. It's a fine piece of work.

If you go

>>What: Elaine Newton's Critic's Choice lecture series

>>Where: The Philharmonic Center for the Arts, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd., Naples; Thursday lectures are in the Daniels Pavilion, Saturday lectures in the Hayes Hall

>>When: Thursdays at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 10 a.m., on Nov. 13, 15, Dec. 6, 11, Jan. 22, 24, Feb. 26, 28, March 26, 28 and April 16, 18.

>>Cost: $180 for the series. $30 for an individual lecture.

>>Info: Call 597-1900