This trip (when I’m not driving)…the reading is current issues of The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly as well as this:

The Man on the Donkey, H.F.M. Prescott’s historical novel of Reformation England.

The Atlantic caught my eye because it offers a double treat in the summer fiction issue: stories by both Richard Russo and Tim Gautreaux, two of my favorites. Read both between Indy and Terre Haute, and I’ll admit I liked the Gautreaux better. Russo’s story had its very strong points, but it lacked something I can’t put my finger on here at 12:47 AM – I hate to say it felt almost formulaic. I could never really latch onto the characters as real people. They felt like…characters pushed around to make a point. They needed a novel to flesh them out, particulary the literary superstar Bellamy, who interested me very much.

But the Gautreaux – oh, Professor Gautreaux does not disappoint here. Gautreaux is the master of gleaning transcendence from ordinary life, of digging into the way that all kinds of people think, love and live, and how those choices and mistakes open up something bigger. "The Safe" is a wonderful example of this – simple in the summary – a junkyard receives an enormous old safe from the wreckage of a sewing machine factory, and the question arises…what could be in it? I won’t tell you a word more of it, but just know that in the rich descriptive detail, in the concise yet telling characterization, we’re immersed in a world, we believe it, we’re moved by it, and end the story glad to have met these people, and ready to find some of what they found in the midst of our own particularities. God bless him.