Matt, glad you asked; Joyce Cary is an Irish-born, first-half-of-the-20th-century writer who, despite having appeared on the cover of Time and being the subject of a Paris Review interview ("I’m no life-force man. Critics write about my vitality. What is vitality? As a principle it is a lot of balls. The life force is rubbish, an abstraction, an idea without character."), appears to receive little love today, at least based on the totally informal survey done by plugging his name into my Google Reader feed list and noting the couple resulting relevant posts. Still, the existence of a fairly detailed Wikipedia entry must be worth something, correct? Or something. At least it's one more link for me to come back to when I'm done reading this book.

This book, The Horse's Mouth, which I discovered quite by accident one Friday night out with my girlfriend at a local bookshop; being the sort of fellow for whom the New York Review Books seal and binding has come to represent a certain something that I want out of literature, I was bound to pick it up. Being the sort of fellow for whom paint has recently become a medium and substance of no small personal and expressive interest, a NYRB-sealed book about a painter was one I was bound to purchase. Even if only with vague intents to read it. Some day. Some day like the day (yesterday) I got halfway through Sabbath's Theater and realized that, at least for the time being, I was quite over-Rothed. I'm over-Most things these days, seems like, seeming as it is I've put down half-read more books than I've picked up to begin with, and what have you. All to say that to feel not just engaged after fifty pages but more engaged than I was at the start of the book is to feel not just correct but net-gained, right about now.

Language like this doesn't hurt matters much:

There was a street market on the curb. Swarms of old women in black cloaks jostling along like bugs in a crack. Stalls covered with blue-silver shining pots, ice-white jugs, heaps of fish, white-silver, white-green, and kipper gold; forests of cabbage; green as the Atlantic, and rucked all over in permanent waves. Works of passion and imagination. Somebody's dream girls. Somebody's dream pots, jugs, fish. Somebody's love supper. Somebody's old girl chasing up a tidbit for the old china. The world of imagination is the world of eternity. Old Sara looking at a door knob. Looking at my old ruins. The spiritual life.

- from The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

...Which is really much less dense, much lighter than it feels, as prose goes. Not quite light as air, but certainly light as, oh, say, the light that bounces through watercolor pigments, off the page, and back to your eyes. Works of passion and imagination, indeed: to see the world like a painter. (Cary, from the back-of-the-book bio, was originally trained as a painter.)

This book is the final book of a trilogy, which the back of the book swore could be read independently of the first two, though I'm thinking I'm going to wander back around to the first two in the series soon after I polish off this guy, if it goes as well throughout as it has so far. I can certainly see Cary showing me some path away from the post-Pynchon flubber-bloody hung-over funk that's landed on my skull after finishing Against the Day. As the man of the hour says:

I got some real colors and a couple of brushes at last, and made for the studio. I felt I could paint. As always after a party. Life delights in life.

- from The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary