If you have five seconds to spare..

Coming back from PDX, I finished Any Human Heart and it was very good. It is a classic examined life story. The framing device is that a young British writer begins writing journals in high school and continues to write them til death. So we get the callow youth, the rising writer, the disappointed writer and so on. The journal format gets rid of pesky forshadowing and also shows a more realistic development of relationships. As you can imagine, it is all about highs and lows and the emotional reaction to each. Boyd does a really nice job there. The book reminded me of Updike's Rabbit books in that it traces a complete life and in that they both feature tons of sex. The main character is quite the horndog. A lot of the reviews make a big deal of the fact that it is also a history of the 20th century. I found this a little annoying. He is supposed to be a minor literary figure, but he seems to run into all kinds of historical figures, like Hemingway, Picasso, the Duke of Windsor and so on. If anyone wants this one, tell me.