Where Joy Resides by Christopher Isherwood

Silly question: How did Isherwood get away with writing so much "fiction" in which the narrator is named Christopher Isherwood? This book offers selections from Goodbye to Berlinand Prater Violet as well as essays and stories that span the author's career. I wanted to introduce myself to the creator of the green-fingernailed flapper Sally Bowles, and this turned out to give a rough idea of his work and his life all in one go.

From the young writer slumming it in Berlin, to "The Single Man" the almost-old established academic living in an L.A. suburb, Isherwood writes in a realist, descriptive, flawless fashion. He's a great raconteur of interesting things that have happpened. And once in a while this very funny Brit jumps out from the pages and reminds you that what you are reading is the result of an author's art and his craft:

  "I was off. My mother poured fresh cups of tea for Richard and herself. They exchanged milk and sugar with smiling pantomime and settled back comfortably in their chairs, like people in a restaurant when the orchestra strikes up a tune which everybody knows by heart.
  Within ten minutes, I had set up and knocked down every argument the dentist could possibly have been expected to produce, and many that he couldn't. I used a lot of my favorite words: Gauleiter, solidrity, demarche, dialectic, Gleichschaltung, infiltration, Anschluss, realism, tranche, cadre. Then, after pausing to light another cigarette and get my breath, I started to sketch, none too briefly, the history of National Socialism since the Munich Putsch.
  The telephone rang.
  'What a bore!' said Richard, politely. 'That stupid thing always interrupts us just when you're telling us something interesting. Don't let's answer it. They'll soon get tired...'"

What is cool is that he doesn't fall into a trap of flashing his wit at every turn, instead he'll come up with something profound, arrived at by way of and then, and then, and then. It's a lovely real-life way to stumble on such things: the sudden appearance of a bitchy side in Sally Bowles; his realization that he loves Prater Violet's German film director - both his charge and mentor - like a son loves a father; his clear-sighted analysis of his relationship with his parents in "Kathleen and Frank". And he's done a death scene in "The Single Man" which is clinical in its description, yet manages to be extremely touching. And I will not ruin it by quoting it out of context as I just did with the other. This book is a good combo of sensitive observation, reported in a surface style, if that make any sense whatsoever.

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