Drive your plow, pt. 2

Now that I’ve finished reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, I can identify other Books as its Aunts and Uncles:

• J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (in Elizabeth Costello)
• Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fatale

Reviewers point out that Drive Your Plow is like a Novel by Agatha Christie. Well, it lacks the most important Characteristic of those Novels, which is Self-Effacing Narrative Voice.

Voicewise, Drive Your Plow is much more like the two aforementioned Works (which, though not Arrogantly narrated, are not Self-Effacing).

But yes, Drive Your Plow is a Whodunnit.

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There is one Christie Novel that may be ancestral to Drive Your Plow, and that is the great Endless Night. Its Title, also, is from Blake:

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

(These Lines, from “Auguries of Innocence,” are mentioned in Drive Your Plow.)

Drive Your Plow is a Good Read, but I’ve seen a lot of it before, in other Books.

The meeting of needs

I thank (a) Mary & Martin for reading the previous entry and, this evening, bringing us a new coffee pot (and some footlong sandwiches from Subway); and (b) Nora, Karin’s friend, who already had donated a used coffee pot. Our pots overfloweth. Indeed, dozens of people have shown generosity to us upon hearing that Samuel would be born. What we expected to be one of our leanest periods has been a quite comfortable one.

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I’m rereading Agatha Christie’s Third Girl (1966), one of her least celebrated books. It’s notable for its disparagement of the Sixties’ youth. I find it raucously entertaining. Poirot’s friend, the detection novelist Ariadne Oliver, Dame Agatha’s alter ego, is made to surveil suspects across London and even receives a blow upon the head. Agatha was in her “old lady” phase when she wrote this, but she hadn’t yet gone into steep decline: her next book, Endless Night, would be one of her most acclaimed.