Introducing Prufrock's Fiction Columnist

John Wilson on his reading life and T. C. Boyle's new novel, "Blue Skies"

I am thrilled to welcome John Wilson to Prufrock as our new fiction columnist. John was the founding editor of Books & Culture and is currently a senior editor at Marginalia Review of Books and a contributing editor at the Englewood Review of Books. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Commonweal, First Things, and many other publications. He is one of the sharpest critics working today, and it is a real honor to run his new monthly column here. —Micah

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This first installment seems like a good opportunity to “Meet Your Columnist,” not least for publicists who might want to send books my way. I’ll be writing about fiction across the board (including so-called “genre fiction”), now and then via a biography or work of criticism (such as David Bordwell’s Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder).

You should know a bit about me—especially relevant is my age (I’ll turn 75 in June). Why does that matter? Well, of course, readers of this or that age are hardly uniform in their literary taste, the outlook on life that informs their reading, and so on! But someone who began reading fiction as a boy in the 1950s, and who started college in 1966, will come to books published in 2023, say, with a toolkit very different from that of readers who are about to turn 25 or 45, quite apart from the bedrock reality of individual human experience. I was blessed to have more than my share of exceptional teachers, all of whom were themselves formed in literary settings different from my own, even as they played a crucial part in my education.

When my brother Rick (he’ll turn 73 in December) and I were boys in Pomona, California, our Uncle Ed (our mom’s brother) loaned us a couple of oversized bound volumes of the British boys’ magazine Chums, published in the 1920s and early 1930s, when our maternal grandparents were missionaries in Shanghai. They had been given to my uncle by a British soldier stationed there. Our favorite pieces were the long serials: Cordillera Gold, The Yellow Death, Master of the World, and so forth; there were also a lot of stories featuring motorcycle races and other such matters, which Rick especially loved. Of course the magazine was loaded with the prejudices of the time (including many caricatures of Americans of one undesirable type or another, many of them arrogant fools or knaves).

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Rick and I often read in these massive volumes stretched out on the floor of our living room, which had built-in bookshelves running under the long front window and the corner of the room; other shelves were diagonally across the room. Mom loved to read—mystery stories especially, which she would check out at our beloved Pomona Public Library, but many other things as well. In time I read most of the books on her shelves: paperback mysteries (including some Dell “mapbacks,” a few Perry Mason novels, several by Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart and so on) cheek-by-jowl with small clothbound hardbacks from an inexpensive series of America literary classics, including Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper (I found Poe particularly fascinating). The same shelves accommodated a substantial number of books relating to biblical subjects, most of them our grandmother’s; she lived with us and helped to raise us. And when our mom got a set of the World Book Encyclopedia for us, room was made for those volumes, with which we spent countless hours.

In addition to books, we had magazines—again, best read lying on the floor. Many of these included short stories as a matter of course, even the “women’s magazines” our mom subscribed to (and which I routinely read, though selectively!). No one told us, but we were in fact living in a golden age for magazines, and I was in love with them. Turning their pages was not simply a form of “escapism,” though there certainly was some of that. The pages of The Saturday Evening Post, wrapped perhaps in a Norman Rockwell cover, included their share of grim news, as did the daily newspaper, but more potent thanks to the photographers and  designers and writers and editors who put the magazine together. These uncompromising images reminded me of movies my brother and I watched on the family’s tiny black-and-white TV, especially during the blissfully long days of summer vacation: movies I would learn (many years later) to call “film noir,” there higgledy-piggledy with the other offerings of daytime television! I mention this in part because I have seen many scholarly accounts of the 1950s that leave an absurd impression of large swathes of America in that decade, supposedly sealed off from ugly realities.

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But—reminding myself—what is the use of a column about fiction that doesn’t include recommendations of a book or two, at least, if not a fuller account? If you are not among those who are enraged by the very mention of “climate change,” consider acquiring a copy of T.C. Boyle’s new novel, Blue Skies (pub date, May 16). Both as a novelist and a writer of short stories, Boyle is among the best now at work. (Here is my review of his previous novel, Talk to Me.) I read him without fail even though his take on our common lot is in some respects quite different from mine.