Bibliophilia: A Novella and Stories

Griffith relies alomost entirely on the absurdity of his premises and his adept wordplays to drive his narration, but there is very little plot. You'll enjoy it if you're someone who loves playing with the English language and finding new meaning in the words, but this will still be a read-a-chapter-before-bed book.

this is a book that i give to people and don't get back. it's just so brilliantly written -- i can't blame folks, really. the title novella "bibliophilia" is stunning, and has become one of my undying all-time favorites.

Michael Griffith's Bibliophilia is the most masterly novella to come along since George Saunders' Pastoralia. Less surreal than Saunders, Griffith is funnier and, sentence for sentence, more muscular stylistically than Saunders. Reviewers compared Griffith's terrific debut novel, Spikes, to Nabokov and Saul Bellow, but Bibliophilia is unlike anything I've ever read. Its drop-dead smarts, super-duper vocabulary, and off-the-cuff scholarship would be over the top if not for his richly developed characters. Rather than giving us the stereotypical spinster librarian, Griffith presents us with Myrtle, an unhappily married laid-off legal aide who was once a raving sexpot and is now earning wages by prowling the stacks, looking to break up students boffing one another. Griffith's portrait of Myrtle's coworker, the Egyptian college student Seti, is the high point of the book. Nothing in Spikes prepared me for Griffith's rendition of Seti; he is one of the -- in Forster's sense -- "roundest," funniest, most ponderable, and memorable characters in recent American lit. I have no idea how Griffith, from Orangeburg, SC, got into Seti's consciousness so surreptitiously, making us laugh at his goofs, mispronunciations, misunderstandings, without reducing the guy to a laughing stock, a stock character. At the end of the novella when Seti and Myrtle come together it is like a confluence of the Nile and the Mississippi; it is a profound mud fest guaranteed to keep you laughing, even crying, out loud. Several short stories follow Griffith's novella as encores, and each, especially "Zugzwang," is a gem. I was delighted with Spikes; now Bibliophilia confirms my suspicions: Michael Griffith is a major American writer you absolutely must read.

Griffith's take on the atmosphere of a library is well-executed, as are his descriptions of the daily torments and turmoils experienced by his novella's academic librarian protagonist, Myrtle. Bless her, worried about the standards of academic materials in the collection while simultaneously patrolling the stacks for students in flagrante dilecto, she sallies forth with a sense of duty tempered by dubiousness as to the direction her career is taking. Immensely readable, anyone desiring a pithy burst of fun this summer should give Griffiths a whirl.