Today I was reading one of those horrible year-end reviews articles in the Boston Globe, and in the long list of people who died in 2008, I saw the name of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French novelist.

Somehow back in 1989, I no longer remember how or why, I read Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jalousie. The novel mostly consists of very precisely-described scenes, often things half-seen through the wooden slats of the jalousie windows of a banana plantation in a French colony somewhere in the tropics; and through these descriptions, written landscapes and still-lives as it were, Robbe-Grillet revealed one man’s intense jealousy towards his wife’s friendship with another man.

It was the right book at the right time for me. I saw that you could write precisely and carefully about one thing, while you were really telling your reader something else altogether. I learned that some things can only be precisely described in this oblique manner.

Later, I tried to read some of Robbe-Grillet’s other books. They were dry and pointless, sometimes to the point of being silly. I have never tried to go back and re-read Jalousie, for fear that I would find that it, too, is a dry, pointless, and silly book — I would rather remember it as the right book at the right time, that taught me exactly what I then needed to learn about writing. So even though I will never read his novels again, here’s a new year’s toast to Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. August 18, 1922, d. February 18, 2008).

He was called an oral historian, but I think of Studs Terkel as a documentarian — someone who devoted his career to documenting the lives of ordinary human experience. I thought his book on the Great Depression was his best work, and the human stories in it moved me profoundly.

Now he’s dead, at age 96. Obit at the Monitor. If there is an afterlife, I have no doubt that Studs Terkel is even now planning how to document the experiences of ordinary dead people.

Mystery author Tony Hillerman died yesterday. New York Times obit is pretty good. Hillerman set many of his mystery books on the Navajo reservation, and his main characters were Navajos; there are a number of scenes dealing with navajo religious events.

From a religious point of view, Hillerman’s books are of particular interest because his characters deal with the tension between traditional religion and contemporary life. One of his characters, Jim Chee, adheres to the traditional Navajo religion, but as (what I would term) a religious liberal; that is, Chee figures out ways to adapt and accommodate religious traditions to contemporary realities. There are other Navajo characters in Hillerman’s books who either reject religion completely, or cling to traditional religion in a fundamentalist way, or reject their traditional religion in favor of more attractive religions that come from the dominant superculture around the Navajo microculture. Each of these religious options — religious liberalism, rejecting religion completely, fundamentalism, conversion to another religious tradition — face each one of us today. Few of us have to confront with the problem that also confronts Navajo people:– to what extent is traditional religion an essential part of their ethnic and cultural identity, and how far can they change that religion before the change leads to cultural extinction and complete assimilation into the dominant Anglo culture?

While Hillerman’s books are “just mysteries,” and therefore suspect from the point of view of “high art,” I have found them to be some of the most thoughtful meditations on the role of religion in contemporary life. For that reason, and for his memorable characters and good storytelling, I’m going to miss Tony Hillerman.

My friend Elizabeth, whom I met in college and who now works for the Department of labor in Washington, visited us today. “Well,” said Elizabeth, “we could either go to the beach, or go to bookstores in Cambridge.” We looked at each other. It was a beautiful fall day, a perfect day for a walk on the beach. We drove to Cambridge.

We started in Central Square. Pandemonium Books had Doris Lessing’s new novel Cleft in paperback. “I always liked her science fiction better than her mainstream novels,” said Elizabeth. So I bought it, along with a magazine and a game and a Terry Pratchet book.

We walked up to Harvard Square and stopped at Revolution Books. I was hoping to find a used paperback copy of Marx’s Kapital because my old copy has started to smell moldy, but they only had the first volume. I got the latest copy of a communist newspaper instead; I figured they’d offer a perspective on the global financial crisis utterly different from the Republicrats (or is it the Demolicans? anyway, the party that has the purple elephant and donkey as their symbols).

Next stop was Harvard Book Store. I found a 1962 paperback edition of a Perry Mason mystery novel, The Case of the Duplicate Daughter, with an outrageous pink cover showing two young blonde women — the cover alone was worth the two bucks I paid for the book. I also got some books for work: Rethinking the Gospels: From Proto-Mark to Mark, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism, and a couple of others.

From there we walked to McIntyre and Moore Booksellers in Porter Square, which I still think is the absolute best bookstore for used scholarly books in the country. I didn’t get much — just The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833 (another book for work), and a book on subcultural music. Elizabeth, however, bought a lot of books, including an early Beat novel, two books on Quakerism, and a book that traced the intellectual effect of yoga on English-language literature.

“That’s how I first learned about yoga, through literature,” she said to the nice man who rang up her purchases and arranged to ship the books to Washington for her. “I would never find a book like this in Washington, the anti-intellectual capital of the world. What other city could I find a book like this?”

“Maybe Berkeley,” I said. “Cambridge, or Berkeley.”

Having struck our blow against anti-intellectualism in America, we left McIntyre and Moore Booksellers and walked to the subway station. I staggered a bit under the weight of all the books I was now carrying in my canvas bag — human nature may be weak in bookstores, but your arms have to be strong.

I’m reading Paul Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules, his book in which he spends a year travelling around the Mediterranean.

He is in France now, derogating the French for banning all foreign words. You can almost hear him thinking: silly French people, banning all those foreign words, when they could be like those of us who speak English and who have a huge number of words available to us, most of which we stole from other languages. And then a few paragraphs later, he slips in a beautifully obscure word, as if to show those French how delightful it is to use words appropriated from other languages:

The dream of the Mediterranean is not the Albanian coast or the docks of Haifa or the drilling rigs at the edge of Libya. It is the dream of this part of France, the sweep of the Riviera as a brilliant sunlit lotophagous land….

lotophagous, a., rare Lotus-eating, resembling the Lotophagi. Hence lotophagously adv.
  1855 EMERSON in Corr. w. Carlyle II. 244. I have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of Anthony Wood; which and the like of which I take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. 1882 PIDGEON Engineer’s Holiday I. 83. Thus lotophagously sailing, we landed one morning on a beautifully wooded point. [from the OED]