Fiasco - Stanislaw Lem (Polish)
An unusual reading experience. A third of the book was completely beyond my understanding, a third I partially understood, a third was fully intelligible. I didn’t object to the incomprehensible parts because the novel takes place in the distant future, and I have insufficient knowledge of science to grasp the advanced technology. What grounded things for me was that the characters think and act like people of today (one of the points Lem makes is that human nature remains the same). Taken as a suspenseful space adventure, the book works well. We send a spaceship to another solar system; our goal is to make contact with the planet Quinta, which gives strong indications of supporting a form of intelligent life. This is a reverse of the novels/movies in which Earthlings are visited by aliens (usually bent on harming us). To the mysterious Quintans we’re the feared invaders. And, as it turns out, we fully fit that role. The climax, when Earthling meets Quintans, needed impact, but I was left confused and disappointed. I don’t think Lem could bring a credible resolution to the conundrum he had created, nor do I think this bothered him. The reason to read this erratic and eccentric book is to engage with the author’s mind. It’s not outer space that Lem explores but the nature of man and his future. His conclusions are thought-provoking and ominous.

The Devastating Boys - Elizabeth Taylor
“Flesh” is the standout success in this quality collection. After I read three stories (good ones) about women who are unhappy, insecure and timid, along comes brassy Phyl; her first words, to the barman at the resort hotel where she’s spending a post-hysterectomy vacation, are “Evening, George. How’s tricks?” She makes friends with a lonely widower who’s reinvigorated by her easy acceptance of life. Though Phyl is satisfied with her husband in London, she decides to have a one-night fling with Stanley. What harm will it do? Her husband will never know, and it will give Stanley pleasure. Infidelity as an act of kindness, and Phyl is definitely kindhearted. An attack of gout derails their plans; Stanley is mortified. In answer to his question, “How can you forgive me?”, Phyl says, “Let’s worry about you, eh? Not me. That sort of thing doesn’t matter much to me nowadays. I only really do it to be matey.” Though Taylor often writes about people leading muted lives, her range is impressive. The little girl who bustles “In and Out the Houses” isn’t as innocent as she initially seems; on her daily rounds she cunningly drops bits of gossip meant to create dissent and jealousy. And in the aptly-titled “The Fly-Paper” the reader is led into a trap; the ending is a shocker. The other stories stay at the level of good or pretty good; some are too slight, others trail off inconclusively. Yet in all of them Taylor establishes an intimacy between her characters and the reader. This was her gift.

The Bachelor of Arts - R. K. Narayan
Chandran, the main character of Narayan’s second novel, is a university student. He comes across as a likeable boy, nothing unusual about him. After he graduates he dawdles through life, without purpose or direction. Then he sees a girl on the beach and romanticizes about her to the point where he must have her as his wife. His feelings are perplexing to the western reader because the two never speak a single word to one another. Yet he’s madly in love. When her family turns down his marriage offer, Chandran is in such despair that he flees to the city of Madras and becomes a sanyasi (one who renounces the world). With a shaved head and dressed in a cheap loin clothe and an upper covering dyed in ochre, he wanders about accepting coins or food or a place to stay for the night. Often he goes hungry and sleeps in the open. My reaction to this plot twist was “Oh, no.” The Chandran I knew – the person Narayan had created – would never act in such a way. Without much ado Chandran recovers his senses, returns to his home town, gets a job, meets a new girl he cares for; all seems to be going smoothly. Then comes an ending so inconclusive that I searched for traces of a few missing pages. (I did a bit of research and found that events are carried forward in the next novel.) Despite these two glaring missteps, Narayan has a benevolence that’s appealing; his characters are real and likeable, his humor has no barbs, his prose is simple and direct. Still, there isn’t whole lot to this book. I found it most interesting when it deals with the cultural beliefs surrounding marriage. In Hindu India (circa 1930s), besides not getting to know one another, the horoscopes of the two prospective mates must match up; the amount of dowry offered by the girl’s parents plays a big role, as does each family’s prestige; people are judged by their skin color (a dark complexion is a drawback). Also, by age sixteen a girl is considered to be over the hill. Fourteen and fifteen are the proper marriageable ages.

The Fool Killer - Helen Eustis
A twelve year old boy relates his experiences (which take place in rural America in the late 1800s) after he flees his foster home. He speaks to the reader in a dialect not unlike Huck Finn’s: “When I come home, I knowed the Old Crab was waiting for me, and I would catch it.” Because of his youth, he’s dependent on adults; in his wanderings he stays with families or lone individuals. George is observant and thoughtful; he’s also very emotional and impressionable. An eccentric old man tells him of the mysterious fool killer, who’s “eight feet or over – tallern any man – and carries a chopper so sharp it’d cut through a fence post like it was a segar.” George develops an amorphous fear of this lurking entity. The person who has the greatest impact on him is Milo; George comes to idolize the man. They make plans to wander from place to place, always sleeping outdoors (Milo won’t sleep in a house), until they reach the Pacific. Milo abhors society, and they intend to live outside its restrictions. It gradually becomes clear that George has formed a bond with a deeply disturbed individual. The two are separated after a murder at a camp revival, and George is taken in by the Galts, a kindly (and childless) couple. George becomes part of a family where he’s loved; he leads a normal life. Then Milo reappears . . . This is a good tale, but what’s remarkable about it is the final short paragraph, when the reader suddenly sees things in a wholly different light. This can happen only if the author has planted the seeds to make that which is surprising and unsettling seem to be absolutely right.

Whistle Stop - Maritta Wolff
You don’t want to have the Veeches as neighbors. They’re trashy, noisy and continually embroiled in some commotion. Nine people are crammed into a small, rundown house, and they’re often at each other’s throats (sometimes literally). One of the occupants is the child of the eldest daughter, Mary. The father’s identity is never disclosed, but it’s strongly implied that he’s Mary’s brother, Kenny. The two definitely have an unusual relationship. So we’re talking incest, though Wolff never puts that card directly on the table. She glamorizes both these characters. Kenny refuses to be ensnared by any ties – a job, one woman; he’s like a strong (and sometimes dangerous) animal, confident in his ability to fulfill his immediate needs. Mary is beautiful, competent, and as self-contained as a sphinx. They live lives (separate ones) outside the confines of the house, and only stay there intermittently. The novel gives a full share of attention to each member of the Veech family during one summer; the young people are all dissatisfied and want to get away from the dead end little town they’re stuck in. This was Wolff’s first novel, written when she was in her early twenties, and the prose is far from polished. I wondered why an editor didn’t tidy it up a bit, then decided that maybe its messiness reflects the messiness of the lives being portrayed. The dialogue (“Now lookit here, I been telling you you gotta cut this kind of business out and I ain’t just been talking to hear myself, neither”) is true to how the uneducated Veeches speak. What matters most is that Wolff was an author with the right instincts. The book is alive, it moves (sometimes, in the action scenes, with velocity). Each character is a distinct individual, and I was involved in their predicaments. They make major mistakes, but I couldn’t be judgmental because I understood them too well. Though, in the case of Mary and Kenny, the deep fault lines in their personalities emerge. Mary casually neglects her daughter (who’s becoming a warped little girl) and Kenny’s legacy in the town takes the form of a horribly disfigured woman. The hidden tragedy at the heart of this novel may be incest. What lingers after the inconclusive ending is a feeling of sadness, like the sadness evoked by the whistle of a passing train.

Born Twice - Giuseppe Pontiggia (Italian)
Though subtitled “A Novel of Fatherhood,” this book seems autobiographical. I could do a bit of research and find out if Pontiggia had a severely disabled son, but why bother. The author had his chance to engage me, and he did so on only a few occasions. The short episodes that comprise the book are written in a prose that’s elegant, even pristine. Because the grim facts of disability are handled gingerly or avoided altogether, they make hardly a ripple on this immaculate surface. Of primary interest to Pontiggia are the thoughts and encounters of the father. On almost every page we get ruminations like this: “To challenge one’s limits as an end to itself (otherwise known as the fashionable imperative) derives from the fear of accepting one’s limits.” I soon reached the conclusion that this isn’t a novel of fatherhood; it’s a novel of self-absorption. The son – the ostensible focus of the book – isn’t given much attention; in most of his appearances he utters comments that are extraordinarily insightful (and thus suspect). The narrator has a wife, though not a marriage; in their exchanges she constantly expresses her disapproval of him. I could sympathize with her.

Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid
The author was born in Antigua; this book follows a girl’s life in Antigua from age ten to eighteen; it ends with her on a ship bound for England. She leaves her mother and father and all the people and places she had known without regret: “the world into which I was born had become an unbearable burden and I wished I could reduce it to some small thing that I could hold underwater until it died.” Until it died? I found no justification for such a venomous thought on the pages of this book. Annie’s early life is idyllic; she basks in the largesse of love and care bestowed upon her by her parents, particularly by her mother, and she comes across as a pleasant child. But in her mid-teens she changes into a deceitful, angry, malicious troublemaker. Most crucial is the deep hatred she harbors for her mother. Why? The woman is not the monster Annie perceives her to be. She’s strong-willed and wants to control her daughter; Annie, equally strong-willed, resists. Such clashes are normal; this one, in its implacable intensity, is not. When Annie is fifteen she has an illness that keeps her bedridden for many months; it’s some sort of emotional crisis, but its root cause is never accounted for; she simply recovers. Too much about her is allowed to remain murky; instead of insight into what makes her tick, we get embellishment and dramatization. The author empowers her with negatives; in presenting Annie as a hateful young woman Kincaid seems to be gloating about it. There was something perverse – and false – in this portrayal. When Annie left Antigua it was without my good wishes.

The Miraculous Barber - Marcel Ayme (French)
In the dazzling opening chapter, which takes place at a luncheon, we gradually realize that the man observing the people around him is having a stroke and is in a slow motion struggle to keep contact with a world that’s becoming increasingly distorted and fragmented. His death sets off an improbable chain of events. What matters in this book is not the ungainly plot but the characters, each of whom has some quality that’s just short of being fantastical. Ayme holds his avaricious, pretentious, vain, stupid, spineless, amoral, crazy characters up to ridicule, but his attitude is amused rather than cruel. Since the book involves politics, one is left wondering how a country made up of such bunglers can survive. The barber of the title provides the answer: he’s a man with no expertise (beyond cutting hair), but he’s running France from behind the scenes simply because he’s practical and decisive. If a reader takes this novel as a farce, he’ll find it entertaining, fresh, and smart.

L’Assommoir - Emile Zola (French)
The title refers to a type of bar where people go to get smashed – to drink to the point of physical and mental destruction. Gervaise, the novel’s main character, is affected by the alcoholism of her husband, but for most of her life she never drinks. Her hopes as a young woman are modest: to be able to get on with her work, to always have something to eat and a half-decent place to sleep, to bring up her children properly, not to be beaten, and to die in her own bed. None of her hopes are realized. Zola belonged to the school of Naturalism, which advocated a strict adherence to reality. I believed in his depiction of life in the Paris slums (this is raw stuff, sordid and vulgar even by today’s standards). But it’s Gervaise’s story and, near the end, as I followed her slide into the mire, I became increasingly detached. As a writer Zola was drawn to extremes, and extremes distort reality. He reduces Gervaise to an animalistic state; her corpse is discovered when people smell rotting flesh. I wasn’t moved because she had ceased to be the woman I knew and cared about; she had become a vehicle to make a point about the ills brought on by poverty. Zola also went to extremes in the other direction, toward a Victorian mawkishness; he includes two characters who are so saintly that they’re preposterous. But, despite its faults, this work aspires to greatness and in many ways achieves it. I wrote that I knew and cared about Gervaise; she’s as real as anyone in fiction. In the twenty years we spend with her all is not bleak: there’s her glory as she makes her laundry business a success, her contentment in the first years of marriage. Though she’s far from perfect, at her core she’s a good, kind-hearted woman. She’s also hard-working and determined, but she slips in her resolve. Just a slip, but it begins her slow, inexorable (and sadly overdone) dissolution. Throughout the novel are scenes that teem with life. The first of these takes place in the washhouse, culminating in an epic fight between Gervaise and Virginie. Gervaise’s saint’s day feast sprawls over thirty-eight pages. Zola is like a painter on the grand scale, except his settings and people emerge from the canvas in all their roistering vitality. He also ends the book on the right note. The undertaker’s assistant had made brief appearances. Being an agent of death, people see him as an ominous figure, yet he jokingly refers to himself as “the ladies’ comforter” because he brings to them the sweetness of eternal sleep. On the last page he speaks tenderly to the corpse of Gervaise as he lifts her, with fatherly gentleness, and places her in the coffin. At this moment she did, again, matter to me.

Look How the Fish Live - J. F. Powers
Seven good stories (if you disregard the three short ones, which are unsuccessful oddities). Five of them feature pastors, bishops, curates, etc. Powers is able to make these stories relevant to someone like me, who has little interest in religion, because his characters are first and foremost human beings. Though the religious life is treated with respect, it isn’t depicted as all-fulfilling. Powers writes about lonely (and often eccentric) bachelors who want to make close connections with others; instead they engage in a struggle of wills over petty issues, resulting in hurt feelings and resentment. My favorite story was “Farewell,” about a retired bishop trying to fill his days and to stay relevant; his plucky efforts are amusing and sad. Amusing and sad – Powers has the ability to evoke those feelings. The intricately-crafted buoyancy of his writing is on display in the opening lines of “Priestly Fellowship”: “The time to plant grass seed is in the winter, the man in the next parish had told Joe: just mix it with the snow and let nature do the rest. So Joe had done that – had believed a priest who rode a scooter and put ice cubes in his beer – and, toward the end of April, had ordered sod.” Powers never states that the grass didn’t grow; he frequently leaves it to the reader to fill in gaps, both small and large; this demands one’s attention, particularly in the dialogue, which can become a tangle of non sequiturs. To do justice to these stories, they shouldn’t be read one after the other; a sameness sets in because of their limited subject matter and the absence of women characters.

Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain
A woman bakes delicious pies, and out of that talent she builds a thriving business. Cain, who wrote this novel in 1946, when the memory of the Depression was fresh, cared about the money concerns of ordinary people. Mildred Pierce is an ordinary person; she has strengths and weaknesses, she acts well and she acts badly. Although there’s one aspect of her personality that’s aberrant: she’s obsessed with her daughter. It’s not motherly love, as Mildred wants to believe; she even has repressed sexual feelings for Veda. The roots of this obsession aren’t explored, but it seems that the girl’s proud, haughty nature, her determination not to be ordinary, made her someone Mildred looked up to. By her teens Veda is in the driver’s seat, and when thwarted in her goals she strikes out at her mother with a whip made of barbed words (“you poor, half-witted mope”). Mildred, no pushover, isn’t a match for a daughter unencumbered by tender sentiments. Though I found this sick relationship fascinating, it wasn’t convincing. The book delves into every aspect of Mildred Pierce, and in all other ways, in all her other relationships, she rings true. A book about a woman making her way in the business world can be engrossing, but Cain needed to inject an element of wildness into his plots, and calculating, amoral Veda provides it. As for the prose, the opening sentence can be seen as a stylistic statement: “In the spring of 1931, on a lawn in Glendale, California, a man was bracing trees.” Cain’s writing is devoid of ornamentation, admirably simple and straightforward.

High Sierra - W. R. Burnett
This novel was written nine years before The Asphalt Jungle. Though it’s much more crudely done, Burnett’s skill at portraying characters in different lights is again a strength. Roy Earle, just out prison, is thirty-seven but feels like an old man nearing the end of the line. He’s a career criminal with a reputation for being hard and dangerous. He is those things, but something has gone soft in him; the conflict between his callous and compassionate sides is at the core of the story. His relationship with Marie – one she wants for security – begins with Roy setting the terms: to him she’s “nothing but a lay.” The feelings they have for one another grow slowly, in a halting, uncertain fashion; love is unknown territory for them both. This is a sad book. Roy has made a mess of his life; he accepts that fact with stoical resignation. Marie, outwardly tough and self-reliant, is neither; at age twenty-five she feels herself precariously close to becoming a bum. They form a makeshift family, which includes a stray dog. As the net closes in on him, Roy sends a short letter to Marie; it ends with the words: “I will get back some way. Don’t worry, kid. Tell the little nuisance hello for me.” He signs the letter “The Old Man.” For a hard-boiled crime novel High Sierra gets sentimental at times, but this reflects the soft side of Roy. It got to my soft side too.

The Usurpers - Francisco Ayala (Spanish)
How do you review a book that you respect but didn’t enjoy? Perhaps recommend it to others who have a taste for what Ayala has done. These stories, rooted in fact, are set during the medieval and Golden Age of Spain; it was a time and place soaked in blood. The characters are captives in the insular worlds of their particular obsessions. All is ponderous, gloomy, barren of human warmth. With a sinuous, exacting prose Ayala weaves ornate baroque tapestries. Powerful tableaus emerge, yet they emerge slowly, and I often lost the thread of thought. Still, I read every story because I hoped to find one which I could feel a affinity for; my hope was realized in “The Bewitched.” It takes the form of a critique of an unpublished autobiography written by Gonzalez Lobo, an adventurer who returned from the New World with gold-filled galleons and who sought compensation from the royal court. The anonymous reader often complains of being frustrated, bored, perplexed, but there are sparks of something intriguing which keep him going. (I, of course, could relate.) Lobo finally gets an audience with the king. This scene’s abruptness confounds the narrator; after so much insignificant detail, the facts he wanted divulged are absent: “Regarding the audience itself, which should have been, precisely, the most memorable thing for him, he sets down only these words, which bring his lengthy manuscript to a close.” The six sentences that follow succeed in expressing, with conciseness and restraint, the need to withdraw in silence from the futility of ambition.

The Asphalt Jungle - W. R. Burnett
An author should be judged by how well he succeeds in what he sets out to do. Burnett set out to write a crime novel; he wrote one that grabs the reader’s attention and doesn’t let go. But it’s in the depth of his characterizations that he excels; nobody is one-dimensional. With Dix and Emmerich the exploration is particularly probing. In the beginning both men are shown in an uncompromisingly harsh light; their considerable flaws loom large. But over the course of the book they take on layers of complexity until, by the end, they’ve become people we can understand and pity. And then there’s Doll Pelky, a seemingly minor character. She clings to Dix: “She was crazy about this big tramp. Why – was no matter. She just was. If only he had a little kindness, a little understanding in his nature; not much, just a little.” This is a woman who has reached the end of the line, and that end is Dix. She had known only the rough side of life for thirty-five years, had been engaged in a “constant, tough, but inconclusive battle against the long, easy slide into the mire.” She had not taken on the “sordid fatalism” of the people around her. Doll has retained a core of decency. I was moved by her, and at the end I was left worrying about her. That feeling may best define Burnett’s accomplishment. *

Born in Exile - George Gissing
A cerebral novel, unsparingly so. Unlike the other two books I’ve read by Gissing, in this one he makes little effort to set scenes or develop well-rounded characters. For over 800 pages we’re immersed in an analysis of ideas, feelings, motivations. When people come together they talk, and whether it’s about religion or relationships, the discourse goes deep; when people are alone they think. The main character is Godwin Peak; though he’s exceptionally intelligent, he feels that his humble origins will forever exile him from the class of people he wants to associate with. The Warricombe family embodies all the virtues he aspires to be part of. To win the love of the daughter he turns to manipulation and hypocrisy. Even the love story operates on a high intellectual plane. Strong emotions are described, but there’s a lack of action to animate the feelings, so they come across as arid and bloodless. I wanted Godwin and Sidwell to simply share some pleasant time with one another, but they’re given no such respite. Gissing demands a level of concentration that I wasn’t up to. The book was published in three volumes, and I had to take breaks between each one to read something lighter. Yet I completed all 800 pages because I wanted to know how Godwin would wind up. As might be expected from a realist like Gissing, the ending is bleak. In Godwin’s last letter this austere and proud man admits to suffering from a crushing loneliness. The words that close the book come from his only friend: “Poor old fellow!” I felt the same way.

Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite - Anthony Trollope
Something unique from Trollope: a short novel. This is a strength, because he’s able to narrow his focus and concentrate on three people. A young woman falls in love with a neer-do-well; her father blocks her from marrying the man. Emily, George, and Sir Harry are engaged in a struggle so compelling that I was tempted to peek ahead to see what happened (I resisted). Actually, as we get to know George, he’s much worse than a neer-do-well. But Emily, though she becomes aware of his faults, has given herself to him forever. The characters are in vises, ones made up of moral choices and matters of the heart, and Trollope turns the screws tighter and tighter. At the end I reluctantly accepted Emily’s rigid refusal to budge in her resolve – “reluctantly” because I doubted that a young, sensible woman would give up her life for love, especially when she becomes aware that her love has never been reciprocated. This was, for me, the only weak point in the novel; it shouldn’t have been a tragedy, but Emily makes it one. I wondered how Trollope felt about her. Did she, in his eyes, embody a Victorian virtue?

Continental Drift - Russell Banks
Banks set out to write a major novel, a commentary on American life and life in general. After 400 pages he closes with the words “Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.” (Italics the author’s, for he’s addressing the reader.) Banks tackles something important – the values and dreams that determine the course of our lives – and does it in a way that’s engrossing. The problem I had emerged gradually, and it involved the main character, Bob Dubois. Early on I began to dislike him; then I didn’t respect him; then I didn’t believe in him. His emotions – anger, discontent, confusion, longing, frustration, etc. – got to be overwhelming. I did like his wife and thought that she deserved a better man than conflicted Bob. Especially since he hasn’t grasped the concept of being faithful (made worse because I had to endure icky sex scenes). One of Bob’s infidelities involves a black woman; the relationship is supposed to have depth but seems injected into the plot so that the author can pontificate on the subject of race relations. Banks belongs to the pile-it-on school of writing. Bob becomes a walking assemblage of problems and issues, and the predicament he’s in deteriorates to drastic depths. The ending is improbable and overwrought; it was meant to elicit sorrow, but I merely thought Bob was being incredibly dumb. So, sorry to say, this was a novel (and an author) that I became alienated from; those closing words – “Go, my book . . .” – struck me as mighty pretentious. Another major plot line involves Haitians trying to get to America. This, again, shows the scope and importance that Banks aims for (plus he’s out to impress with his knowledge of Haitians). The suffering of these people is conveyed in all its horror (more piling on, but I suppose it’s justified). However, the main character, Vanise, gradually becomes zombie-like, and I couldn’t relate to a zombie. Her teenage cousin, Claude, was the person I most admired, and his death – which occurs offstage – the only one that moved me.

The Sheltered Life - Ellen Glasgow
In Part I Glasgow has a nine-year-old girl observe the adult world; the reader sees problems that the child has inklings of. Though emotions were exaggerated, this section was fairly successful. I went into Part II with good will, but all I got were the musings of the elderly grandfather. His thoughts – about Life, unfulfilled hopes, memories of a lost love, etc. – are expressed in a hypersensitive (and obscure) way: “Was this second self of his mind, as variable as the wind, as nebulous as mist, merely the forgotten consciousness of the poet who might have been?” He rambles on like this for dozens of pages. I not only quit reading the book, I won’t be reading anything else by Glasgow.

The Man Who Owned New York - John Jay Osborn, Jr.
This might have been a nice little diversion if the author hadn’t set up expectations that aren’t met. Take the title. The man who owns New York is Marsiglia, but the role he plays is so trifling that he could have been omitted from the novel. In the first paragraph it’s stated that the main character, Robert Fox, “is losing his mind.” It turns out that he has a few minor problems, but he’s just fine. The woman he loves has inherited some “black part” to her emotional makeup, but it turns out that she’s eminently well-adjusted. The young associate lawyer-on-the-rise, initially depicted as eerily “perfect”and “robotic,” turns out to be a nice guy with problems. The villain, a dangerous nut case, is handled stupidly by supposedly smart people. They want to keep matters out of the newspaper and away from the police, but their actions lead to a fatal shooting in a town house where an auction is being held; the repercussions that would surely follow are swept under the rug by the author. In fact, by the end of this book Osborn has swept far too many false leads and loose ends under rugs. This would be irresponsible housekeeping; it’s also irresponsible writing.

Miss Gomez and the Brethren - William Trevor
Another gathering of lost souls from Trevor. This novel’s problem involves the central character. Miss Gomez remains inaccessible throughout; she makes radical changes in her thinking and behavior, but the groundwork to support these shifts isn’t there – things just happen. The corporeality she lacks is fully present in Mrs. Tuke; much of the book is concerned with her, which is its saving grace. In many ways she’s a horrid person, but always comprehensible; she tries to escape from what she is and what she does by self-deception, romance novels and gin. Mr. Tuke is another fully-realized character, sad and muted, beaten down by life (and his wife). Mr. Batt, the aged and deaf boarder at the Thistle Downs, moves through a world that has become inexplicable to him. These three people mattered to me. The same can’t be said for the ethereal young lovers, Alban and Penelope; they suffer from the same insubstantiality I found in Miss Gomez. The setting – a street in London that’s being demolished – imparts an apocalyptic air to the dramas being played out.

Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky (French)
Nemirovsky experienced firsthand the 1941 German invasion and occupation of France. In this novel she assembles a large cast of characters, from wealthy Parisians to village farmers, and shows them living under conditions of great stress and upheaval. The first section, “Storm in June,” is fast-moving and kaleidoscopic, effectively capturing the chaos and terror as people flee Paris. In the slower-paced second section, “Dolce,” she explores the varied responses of villagers to an established occupation. Both sections are successful, though there’s an unavoidable – and tragic – flaw to this novel: it wasn’t finished, nor was it fully revised. The author, being Jewish, was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died at age forty. She had resided in France since she was sixteen; when the Nazi invaded she wrote with the shadow of the Final Solution hanging over her head. She was often on the move, seeking a safe haven for herself and her two children. At the end of the book are appendices with her letters and a notebook. We learn that she was aware of the likelihood of her death. Writing this ambitious novel (she projected it, when finished, to be a thousand pages long) provided her with an intellectual and emotional respite from her plight and a purpose – beyond survival – to her days. She recognized the faults of her work-in-progress; she even lists them at one point, and closes with the words “In general, not enough simplicity!” She was right; but circumstances prevented her from solving the problems. What she did accomplish is remarkable and, considering its provenance, important. The novel almost went unpublished. Her daughters, ages four and twelve when their mother died, made it through the war (their father was also put to death). They had in their possession the manuscript, written in pencil, the words tiny (to conserve paper). When they were adults their attempts to read it failed; too many painful memories were rekindled. But, as old age approached, they knew they must take on the project. So, sixty-four years after Irene Nemirovsky wrote the words that make up Suite Francaise, the world and the people she created come to life.

The Catfish Man - Jerome Charyn
Jerome Charyn (which is the name of both the author and the novel’s first person narrator) wore me out. I made it two-thirds of the way into this quirky and rambunctious trek through Jerome’s life, but I rebelled when I started a chapter that began: “I didn’t have to dream of that blond boy. The image of Marcos holding him by his ears, that’s what stuck to me. I thought of killing the Phantom, beating him on the head with a shovel while we were out on the bayou, getting the mayor his frogs.” No more, I decided, and the feeling I had was relief. An author gifted with a fertile imagination can’t let it run wild; an author gifted with a mastery of the language can’t let glibness take over. In the long run – if there’s nothing else – the results of such prodigality become trivial and tiresome. What’s most telling is that I never cared about Jerome. When I quit reading I hadn’t an iota of curiosity about what happened to him; he wasn’t a person, just a crazily-colored pinata for Charyn to bang away at.

Selected Stories - V. S. Pritchett
I read only half of the stories; I became convinced that mild enjoyment was all Pritchett had to offer me. He’s a prose stylist of note, but most of his effort went into creating sentences that are dense and rich. The stories themselves are lightweight diversions; they have limited scope and don’t tackle subjects that matter much. I finished too many with a “So what?” feeling. Only “The Key to My Heart” truly engaged me, mainly because of the appalling and appealing Mrs. Brackett. To experience Pritchett’s talent at its peak, go straight to his memoirs, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil.

Old School - Tobias Wolff
There couldn’t have been a large audience for a novel almost entirely about literary matters. Even the first person narrator isn’t fully fleshed out; his dominant dimension is that of writer and reader. All this was fine with me, for I’m a bookish soul myself. Plus, I found Wolff’s immaculate prose pleasurable. Most of the action takes place at an exclusive boys’ prep school, a beneficent place loved by the narrator. The plot revolves around the visits of three authors: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. The boys compete to write a poem or story that will be judged best; the winner gets a private audience with the author. In their appearances in this novel a wily Frost puts on a folksy act, Rand is a judgmental bully, and Hemingway gives a rambling telephone interview in which he offers no-nonsense advice and brings up old grudges. In the depiction of these dead authors, I had my first problem with the book. How could Wolff know what any of them would do and say? Would Ayn Rand carry on so outrageously? As for the two men, they’re caricatures of their public images, and as such come across looking foolish. Moving on (past that speed bump) our narrator’s story is deemed best by Hemingway, but he doesn’t get to meet the Great Man because it’s discovered that the story he submitted was plagiarized. Unable to write anything of his own, he had found a girl’s story in an obscure periodical and had copied it word for word, with just the names and sexes of the characters changed. As he carried out the plagiarization, the boy believed the story to be his own; when, days later, he’s confronted with evidence of what he’s done, his response is “Even with the proof in hand, even knowing that someone named Susan Friedman had written the story, I still thought of it as mine.” Here my second, more serious, problem arose. Wolff tries, with verbal sleight of hand, to present a grubby act of dishonesty in an innocent light. I didn’t buy this for a second; only temporary insanity could account for the boy’s not knowing exactly what he was doing at the time he was doing it. After the boy is expelled we’re taken on a sketchy tour of his life. He becomes, like Wolff, a successful author. This was no surprise. The autobiographical nature of the novel is not concealed (the dust jacket photograph shows the cafeteria of the prep school that Wolff attended). Seen from this perspective – that character and author are one – the plagiarism scene needs to be revisited. When the boy/Wolff first reads Susan Friedman’s story, he’s struck by its honesty; her character, like him, is leading a life of deception. He gets it: “the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost; sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.” When I read those words what came to my mind were the words that occupy an entire page before the novel begins: “I cannot begin to thank Catherine Wolff and Gary Fisketjon for the incalculable help they gave me in their many readings of this book; my particular thanks as well to Amanda Urban for her help, and for all her encouragement and support over the years.” Why did Wolff devote a prominently-placed page of thanks to Fisketjon and Urban, two of the most privileged people in the literary world? Seems like sycophancy to me.

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O’Connor
A reappraisal of O’Connor is in order. I had read this collection many years ago; in this rereading several things struck me with considerable force. Foremost was the anger that infuses all but one of the ten stories. In three of them anger leads to murder; in three others a violent death occurs, with anger swirling around the event. In five stories grown sons live with their mothers; the feelings they have for her range from resentment to contempt to hatred. Love, though not totally absent in this book, is rare and meager, as is beauty. Sexual passion is nonexistent (while virulent passions abound). As for relations between the races, blacks and whites occupy hostile worlds. O’Connor’s niggers (for that’s how they’re referred to by most of her white protagonists) are either deceitful or murderous. Her whites are Southern Gothic hicks or self-pitying and hapless intellectuals; she treats both with scorn. These are the facts, based on the words she wrote, and what do they reveal about the author? What can be expected from a young woman cheated out of the life she hoped to lead by a ravaging disease? Her bitterness and anger flowed into her fiction. With steely-eyed cruelty O’Connor gloatingly exposed her sorry characters and their sorry lives. Also on display is her fascination with the grotesque (she would have loved the supermarket tabloids that have cover photos showing babies born with the heads of barnyard creatures). I’m rejecting the religious angle, which is commonly evoked when talking about O’Connor. When she inserts it into her stories it seems imposed. “Revelation” suffers from some mystical mumbo jumbo at the end; the rest of the story is lucid and direct, the conversations in the doctor’s waiting room are recorded with such accuracy that the reader could be sitting in one of the chairs. At the core of the story is a young woman’s anger, an anger venomous enough to erupt into violence. In this reappraisal how many times have I used the word “anger”? It’s a detriment when untempered. The first paragraph of the weakest story, “The Comforts of Home,” contains this sentence: “Rage gathered throughout Thomas’s large frame with a silent ominous intensity, like a mob assembling.” This rage culminates in murder; it’s all just too unrelenting. It’s significant that the two best stories – “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “Parker’s Back” – close on a note of compassion. Maybe O’Connor would have moved more in this direction – toward compassion – if she had been allowed to live. To turn from content and judge the stories solely on an artistic basis, O’Connor too often messes up her endings. Sometimes it’s by the previously-mentioned imposition of religious significance, sometimes by the garishly awkward way she describes murders and other violent acts. She wasn’t a moderate writer; she dealt in extremes. This can be compelling, but when she goes too far incongruity sets in. She exposes self-deception in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” but she does it in a heavy-handed way; when she took a less cumbersome approach, as in “The Enduring Chill,” she was more successful. She was often outright funny, and her dialogue (where most of her humor is found) was pitch perfect. As for the prose itself, she put much effort into making her writing effortless to read; she achieved a smooth-flowing clarity. She could capture a personality or a scene so that it attains solidity; she does it in part by selecting the animating detail (from “Revelation”: “The only man in the room besides Claud was a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on each knee, whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead or pretending to be so as not to get up and offer her his seat”). Her work, so simple on the surface, has drive and energy. Lastly, even in her weaker stories O’Connor entertains; it mattered to her to do so. She was a writer with unique gifts, but one who is misrepresented; it was a misrepresentation that she encouraged. I think, deep inside, she knew the truth about herself and struggled with her dark side. But it’s that dark side which emerges with force on the pages of this collection, and it ultimately triumphs. *

The Scapegoat - August Strindberg (Swedish)
I had trouble figuring out what Strindberg was up to. His main character, Libotz, is an innocent who’s victimized at every turn. This victimization is so baseless and unrelenting that I wondered if Libotz was paranoid. But for an author to depict paranoia, he must show that a character is misinterpreting the world. No such angle emerges. The people of the village Libotz settles in are exceptionally malicious, and his father is an outright monster. Among these evildoers plods good Libotz, their scapegoat. This scenario lacked credibility, and I began to suspect the author of presenting a distorted view of life. My assessment was supported in Richard Voweles’ introduction (which I read after I had finished the book); he comments on Strindberg’s persecution complex and sense of martyrdom. When the focus shifts from Libotz to the other two main characters things liven up, simply because evil people are fascinating. The writing is spare and strong and sometimes striking (going to visit his father, Libotz passes a boulder that “resembled an intestine from the bowels of the earth”). Such bleakness could have been depressing, but it wasn’t because I didn’t take things to heart. Vowles notes that Strindberg’s first two novels were realistic observations of life; in his later work he turned inward, to look at himself. I’d like to read one of his earlier books, but I’ll avoid the introspection.

Jacob the Liar - Jurek Becker (German)
Though the events in this novel take place in a Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, Becker concentrates not on atrocities committed but on people who have a complete dimension outside that of victims. Their experiences and feelings, which are made real and immediate, cover a wide spectrum; there’s even joy in this book. The story is told in an innovative way: an unnamed occupant of the ghetto (one who survives) takes the role of omniscient narrator. From what he observed, or what he learned secondhand, he uses his imagination to go into the minds of the characters, to recreate events and conversations. He also interjects his own feelings in his own voice. This was a complex undertaking, yet it flows smoothly (for which credit must go to the translator, Leila Vennewitz). I was moved by these people: Jacob, who lies in order to give hope; Sasha and Rosa, the young lovers clinging to each other; Lina, carrying on as a child despite the brutish world she lives in. At the book’s close the narrator feels he must provide an invented ending; afterwards he follows with “the true and unimaginative ending that makes one inclined to ask the foolish question: What was the point of it all?” For, despite what we might wish, in the true ending all the lives are extinguished. Of course, there is a point to this novel. It’s meaningful to show people holding on to their humanity in the face of inhumanity, and this Becker does superbly. *

Wall to Wall - Douglas Woolf
The author seems to get vicarious enjoyment out of his protagonist’s road trip through a wonderland in which he has adventures aplenty and everybody he meets is a colorful eccentric. The journey begins on the west coast, where Claude works as a helper at a mental hospital, and ends on the east coast, where he visits his mother in a mental hospital. These bookends, in which troubled people play a role, suggest a serious work of fiction, but Claude is persistently footloose and fancy-free. His adventures come without his suffering any significant inconveniences; even the women he has sex with, though needy, ask nothing of him. Claude winds up seeming irresponsible. Woolf can’t have it both ways; he can either portray life realistically or send Claude on a far-fetched lark (which I might have enjoyed). I was a conflicted reader and was tempted to abandon the book on the grounds of frivolity. Then, at the halfway point, a character with depth finally appears. Vivien is strange, but she’s not just another oddball; I appreciated Claude for seeing value in her. Their sex scenes, combining carnality and emotion, are quite effective. Unfortunately, Vivien is around for only fifty pages before Claude drives off. The next people he meets are Saint Jones and his nympho daughters, and here things degenerate into silliness. Woolf is a talented but self-indulgent writer. Both qualities are present in his twisty prose: “The corrugated house, one large haphazard cavity, was savagely alight with several moon-size bulbs that hung from cords far too long for this low room, so that one faced everywhere a choice between slink and scorch.” Is this interesting or intrusive? Or just show-offy? All three, I’d say.

False Starts - Malcolm Braly
It couldn’t have been easy for Braly to write this “Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons.” He had to look back at the wreckage of a life spent mostly behind bars. He was first incarcerated at age eighteen and was released – this time for good – at age forty. During his previous brief interludes of freedom he was unable to hold a job and his relationships with women were fraught with difficulties; he turned to meth and petty theft. These thefts were so inept that he was inviting capture, a fact that was not lost on Braly. As he engaged in a self-inflicted wasting away of his life, he aspired to do something noteworthy, thinking that “afterwards I would always be defined by this affirmation and I would never again feel useless and stunted and soiled.” He would finally be “worthy of love.” If he had never found a talent his life would have been bleak indeed. But in his thirties he began to write crime novels; his ability to make a living as an author was a factor in his being released from prison. He would go on to produce something that met with serious acclaim: On the Yard. His memoir closes with him basking in success: “That evening our apartment was filled with friends who came to watch me watch myself on the Tonight Show . . . I had found a life here in the Magic City, a life among peers, and I had also found some part of the love I had always yearned for.” So there’s a happy ending to this autobiography. Yet, though I found Malcolm Braly to be perceptive and honest (and a good writer), I felt remote from the boy and man. The parts I’ve quoted show intimacy, but there’s an emotional detachment in the way he tells much of his story. The book’s main value lies in its study of prison life (though, as Braly acknowledges, that life has been replaced by something far meaner). He gives us the day-to-day routines, the toll prison takes on one’s spirit, the people he interacted with in the cells and mess halls and on the yard. Though he may have found peers in his new life, for many years his peers were cons like him.

Sudden Rain - Maritta Wolff
This isn’t nearly as successful as The Big Nickelodeon, though it has that novel’s propulsive readability. Wolff uses lot of dialogue, which is good, but this time the characters sound alike, and they use language that’s gushy. I wonder how many times the word “marvelous” appears. Or “absolutely.” Things are “absolutely marvelous” or “absolutely fierce,” and a person is an “absolute love.” “Divine” also rears its ugly head. There are too many modifiers; someone can’t just be imposing, they must be “terribly imposing.” You get the idea. The novel is about relationships, in and outside of marriage, but the characters often struck me as coming straight from central casting. The ending leaves everything – every one of the tangled relationships – unresolved. I felt mildly gypped – not terribly and absolutely gypped, because I didn’t care that much what happened to these people. But, despite my gripes, I did read all four hundred pages. And I need to note an extraordinary scene, one which shows how skilled a writer Wolff could be. A character is murdered – a random killing – and the economy and force with which this event is portrayed make it stunning.

Without a Hero - T. Coraghessan Boyle
Another one of my forays into modern literary fiction, another example of how freakishness has become the new gold standard. An offbeat or bizarre idea comes first, then it’s developed into a half-baked story. Real people in real situations don’t interest authors like Boyle. His characters merely serve their freaky roles in a freaky narrative. I started about half the stories; some I didn’t finish because I was overwhelmed by boredom. One I abandoned was “The 100 Faces of Death, Volume IV” (the title of a video that shows people being killed in grotesque ways). At that point I had my fill of Thomas John (T. Coraghessan’s given name). I was left wondering what motivates him – a mercenary cynicism? He certainly plays the freakishness angle for all it’s worth, using that unpronounceable moniker and trying to look like Dracula for his book jacket photos. When I consider how highly regarded he and others of his ilk are in today’s literary world, I think of Kevin McCarthy’s frantic words at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”: “They’re here! They’re here!”

Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane (German)
This novel, written in 1894 by a 75-year-old man, contains elements that I found original and completely successful. What Fontane chooses to omit is critical. A striking example is the way he presents Effi’s affair; though we’re in her mind for most of the novel, we’re denied access to what transpires between her and Major Crampas. There was intimacy, but of what sort? We’ll never know. Crampas’s last words, which he speaks to Effi’s husband after he’s been mortally wounded by him in a duel, are “Will you . . .” Will you what? We’re faced with enigmas, but they’re the kind that make you see life as an inexplicable and poignant mystery. Nobody is a villain, nobody is without flaws. No one is consistent. You can question every conclusion or justification any character makes. At the end Effi says that her husband “ . . . was as fine a man as any one can be who doesn’t really love.” But is she mistaken? Did Innstetten, despite his harsh actions after he learned of her infidelity, love Effi? In this tragic story there’s beauty and sentimentality and moments of untrammeled joy. And wisdom too – one doesn’t live to Fontane’s age without coming to some conclusions about life, and the last two chapters are worthy of a careful second reading. *

The Big Nickelodeon - Maritta Wolff
This is a page turner. I was engrossed in the large cast of characters and their tangled predicaments. Wolff relies mostly on dialogue to move the action along and to bring her characters to life (each has a distinct voice). In the first chapter a dead body is discovered on a California beach; on the last page the identity of the person is revealed. Wolff’s talent is such that this rich, sprawling novel flows effortlessly. Reading it is sheer entertainment – and more. A view of life emerges, with people striving, often not sure what they’re after, sometimes pursuing the wrong goals. Ultimately they’re hostages to their needs and their natures.

Mockingbird - Walter Tevis
Though reading this book was not at all laborious, the plot and characters are so complex that they defy any tidy summing up. Tevis explores what it is to be human. He presents a futuristic world headed toward extinction (not with a bang but a whimper); even biological humans have lost their humanness. Bentley has to slowly discover his; books are the means by which he gains access to feelings which had been drugged and indoctrinated into dormancy. Mary Lou, a rebel who escaped such indoctrination in her youth, is relatively intact. The robot Spofforth was created using the brain of a human as a model; he fleeting feels – and is disturbed by – random emotions and memories belonging to this person. In its depiction of a social-engineered world in terminal disarray, the book makes you think, and that’s its major virtue. Tevis was less successful in making me feel. He tries to show the evolution of Bentley as he opens up to emotions and learns to love. Yet this aspect seemed forced and awkward. In The Man Who Fell to Earth and Queen’s Gambit Tevis convincingly conveyed deep alienation, but he couldn’t breathe life into scenes of human engagement. I find this baffling and sad.

Old Red and Other Stories - Caroline Gordon
There are quite a few successes in this collection. The best are about Aleck Maury. He’s a great character, and I wonder if he was based on Gordon’s father. How else could she have such empathy for an aging sportsman with an elemental need to hunt and fish? In the Maury stories she creates a richly textured world that is slipping inexorably from Aleck’s grasp. With masterful understatement she makes this conflict of love and loss palpable in “The Last Day in the Field.” Bittersweet loss is also the theme of “All Lovers Love the Spring,” in which Gordon follows a woman’s random thoughts, and in doing so a whole life emerges. The weakest – and longest – story is “Emmanuele! Emmanuele!” It’s populated by intellectuals and the plot is intricate; both seem contrived. Gordon was an author with limitations – she had to care deeply about her characters and she had to keep the plot simple. When she stayed in those parameters she was capable of beautiful work.

A Summer Place - Sloan Wilson
A good, solid, engrossing novel. It begins with a troubled relationship between two young people; they part and go on to marry others. Many years later, when Ken and Sylvia meet again, the sexual spark is reignited, though now they’ve matured and know their love is real. They divorce their spouses and marry. At this point Ken and Sylvia stop being the focus of the story. The children from their first marriages take center stage. It’s as if John and Molly are reliving the passion their parents had felt. This could have simply been a romantic novel, but the emotional dynamics have complexity. The people that Ken and Sylvia divorced are still the parents of John and Molly, and they play a complicating role. Wilson shows how deeply the young people were damaged by growing up in loveless, dysfunctional families; whether they can unite to overcome the damage, or whether it will tear them apart, is left up in the air. Instead of presenting a sugarcoated view of life, Wilson opted for honesty, and I respected this.

The Queen’s Gambit - Walter Tevis
I liked and cared about Beth. Her story begins when she’s put in an orphanage at age eight. It’s not a hellish place, but it’s barren of emotional warmth. Beth visits a misanthropic janitor in his basement lair; he plays chess and grudgingly teaches her the game. It’s soon obvious that she’s endowed with a genius for chess. Much of the book is taken up with tournament matches. I couldn’t understand the moves being described, but I shared Beth’s feelings as shifts of power occur. Against the caliber of opponents she faces, chess is mentally and psychologically grueling and demands an obsessional dedication. Beth doesn’t have much of a life outside the game. Also, in the orphanage the children were given tranquilizers, and Beth continues to rely on them to alleviate a pervasive tension. When she’s eighteen she turns to alcohol with a vengeance. I didn’t entirely believe in the self-destructiveness of her drinking, nor how effortlessly she’s able to give it up. The book ends with her defeating the Russian grandmaster who had twice defeated her. Yet I was uneasy about Beth’s prospects for happiness. Chess can absorb and empower her, but it can’t fill an emotional void that has existed since her days in the orphanage. At age twenty she’s had a few sexual relationships (both with chess players), but they lacked the intimacy she needs. This wasn’t entirely the fault of the men. Beth has set up barriers that separate her from other people. I see the possibility – if her life continues to be loveless and friendless – of depression settling in and the drinking resurfacing. The fact that I was troubled at the end of the book means, of course, that Walter Tevis is a very talented writer. There’s much emotion in Beth’s emotionally muted world. When she returns to the orphanage (after the death of the janitor) she goes down to the basement where she first saw chess pieces. I was surprised and impressed by how moving this scene was. In an understated way, vistas are opened.

A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence
I was totally out of sympathy with this novel. Rachel’s story is told by means of an interior monologue in which she sometimes expresses herself with a solemn eloquence that struck me as coming not from the character but from an author trying hard to impress. To be in Rachel’s mind is exhausting. She talks to herself a lot: “Stop. Stop it, Rachel. Steady. Get a grip on yourself. Relax. Sleep. Try.” Yes, Rachel, please stop and please, please get a grip on yourself. She’s besieged by a torrent of raw emotions and often seems on the verge of hysteria. Rachel teaches school in a Canadian town; she lives with her manipulative mother. The focus of the novel is her first sexual experience, at age thirty-four. We have to endure lines such as “Put it in, darling.” Yet we never learn how it feels for her when it is in. Since we’re spared nothing else about her (including her dreams and fantasies), why is this omitted? The affair, which was long desired, merely creates more problems for poor Rachel – we get a heavy dose of her doubts, awkwardness, anxiety, etc. She’s not coping at all well with life, but instead of feeling sympathy, I felt annoyance. Laurence, who did such a wonderful job in The Stone Angel, goes overboard with this character. There’s no distancing, just untempered earnestness. With relief I quit reading.

The Man Who Fell to Earth - Walter Tevis
This book seems to have fallen by good fortune into my hands. I pulled it from the library shelf because I recognized the title – a movie had been made of it (one I hadn’t seen and knew nothing about). I read the opening paragraph and admired its unadorned precision, so I took it home. I suppose it belongs in the category of science fiction (a genre I have little patience with), and its message has to do with the now overly-familiar threat of annihilation by nuclear war. But the book is about people, and Tevis’s major accomplishment is to make the main character – an alien – understandable. I was engrossed in T. J. Newton’s story, his actions, and, most of all, his feelings. At the end I felt great respect for this Anthean who left his planet on a desperate mission, and who carried it out for so long with such skill and bravery. That he winds up disillusioned and lonelier than one can imagine is a tragedy, and I was moved. I was moved by an alien! – when so many human characters in fiction fail to elicit that emotion in me. Tevis writes with authority and intelligence; he’s able to explore complex matters with admirable clarity. But it’s the bright, crackling freshness of the novel that impressed me the most. This is something truly unique. *

The Earthly Paradise - Robert Thom
From beginning to end, without respite, this novel’s intensity level is set too high. Thoughts and feelings aren’t only expressed through extravagant actions and dialogue; the author uses descriptive prose to add to the intensity (“The words cut into him. He felt it at the base of his skull and in his spine.”). People become caricatures displaying the particular emotion they’re feeling. Yet these emotions become suspect because of huge and unsupported about-faces that take place; I didn’t believe in any character (the saintly and wise deaf mute was preposterous). Still, despite its strident, garish and silly aspects, the novel has momentum. The author could probably do good work if he gave up his pretensions. Thom tries to delve deep into the tortured human heart, but he needs to simply portray people as they really are.

A Summons to Memphis - Peter Taylor
The book’s premise, which emerged early on, intrigued me: a father prevents all three of his children from marrying the people they love, and in doing so derails their lives. I was interested in finding out what made this tyrannical figure tick. I can tell you now that nothing is revealed. One example: the narrator, Phillip, tells about the great love in his life. The girl he wants to marry seems satisfactory in every way, but Phillip’s father travels to Chattanooga to talk to the parents; after his visit the girl is shipped off to South America. What did he say to the parents? And why? We never find out. Questions I wanted to be answered are left unresolved; this was especially irritating since reading this book was a slog. Phillip doesn’t have a clue as to how to tell a story. He uses stilted language, he’s repetitive, he’s circuitous, he goes into long digressions on clothes and society and manners. He’s as dry as a stick; even his purported grande passion can’t soar on the wings of young love. He’s a bore, an anal retentive type who gets hold of an insignificant detail and won’t let it go. The book is filled with five page stretches where nothing of substance happens. My exasperation turned into an intense dislike for this character. He’s spineless, a coward; he insulates himself from any responsibility and hardly any contact with his family. When he’s summoned to Memphis by his sisters – who stayed and dealt with their father – he describes the one day experience as “hellish.” Poor Phillip. He flees back to New York. He depicts his sisters as grotesques, but how did they get this way? They deserve compassion and insight; instead they’re ridiculed. Phillip winds up being a cheerleader for the old man, promoting him as a figure to be respected. What an inane book. And it’s Peter Taylor, not his narrator, who’s entirely responsible for it.

Other People’s Worlds - William Trevor
The main character in this novel is a charming psychopath named Francis; he sees people as objects he can use to fulfill his needs. In his wake he leaves a trail of misery. But Francis isn’t simply an evil person. Trevor shows how, in his youth, this victimizer was the victim of prolonged sexual abuse. Francis lives in a distorted world; his actions are responses to compulsive emotions, always carefully hidden behind a smile. The book focuses on three people who fall under his influence. Doris, with whom he had a child, cannot see things as they are; like him, she distorts reality – with the aid of copious amounts of alcohol – to suit her illusions. Their twelve-year-old child is inappropriately named Joy. Julia, a middle-aged widow, is easy prey for Francis. On their wedding night (one without sex) she becomes aware of the ugliness and cruelty that she’s been sheltered from all her life. But Julia, unlike Francis’s other victims, has emotional resources. She realizes that her world – which has been blessed with niceness – can have a purpose. On the last pages she imagines a tranquil scene in which four people are gathered under a tree; one is a child. Yet she sees the scene mistily. Why is this life-affirming ending presented so nebulously? If Julia is to rescue Joy, why doesn’t it happen? The scenes of Doris’s descent into alcoholism and rage-filled madness are frightening, and to enter the mind of Francis is a creepily disturbing experience. Trevor should be given credit for making me respond viscerally to his exploration of the depths, but more than a glimmer of hope was needed to offset the bleakness.

Four Plays - Eugene Ionesco (French)
To do it justice, a play should be seen performed on stage. Despite that, I read these plays (or parts of two), so I’ll dutifully review them. “The Bald Soprano” makes no sense. This was intentional; what goes on is meant to be absurd. I found it somewhat amusing and thought it could, if done with brio by actors, be very funny. “The Lesson” is more structured; things progress in a logical (albeit maniacal) fashion. I liked its wildness and thought it was the best of the four. “Jack or the Submission” was not at all funny; I quit halfway through, in a disgruntled mood. I also made it halfway through “The Chairs.” It was absurd to waste any more of my time on it. The Theater of the Absurd had a point to make about life, but it was a limited one. Okay, we live in a nonsensical world. But nonsense, if not presented in a funny or intriguing way, can be boring. All these plays have boring stretches, but in the two I abandoned the boredom was stupefying.

The Barbary Light - P. H. Newby
I was interested in the main characters (a man, his wife, and the woman he’s having an affair with), but Newby imposes so much baggage on their story – obfuscation, false leads, about-faces, ruminations over matters such as identity – that he detracts from what’s good in the novel. We constantly get dead-end sentences like these: “What mattered was what you did. And how did you know what you did?” The person thinking these thoughts is Owen. I could never get a grip on what his problem was (for one thing, it keeps changing); instead of being enigmatic, he winds up seeming improbable. I also couldn’t understand how two attractive and intelligent women could be deeply in love with him. The flat-as-a-pancake ending, which provides no insight or resolution to all the complexities, suggests that the author was in as much of a quandary as Owen. When events are presented in a straightforward way, the characters and scenes have freshness and vitality. But in this book Newby thinks too much, to no good purpose.

Three Plays - Harold Pinter
These early Pinter plays feature elements that he would use again and again. In a “A Slight Ache” the three characters (one never speaks a word) act oddly – odd enough to create mystery and an atmosphere of menace. A husband and wife talk to each other but don’t communicate; their disjointed dialogue makes no sense. The play ends with the oddest plot twist of all. In “The Collection” the characters communicate, but it’s not clear who’s telling the truth and who’s engaging in elaborate lies (no reason is provided for why anyone may be lying). As soon as things seem to be resolved one way or another a character does something to muddy the waters. There’s a liberal sprinkling of menace and an inconclusive ending. In “The Dwarfs” Pinter ramps up the oddity to the point where the characters are lunatics; they go into long, senseless monologues filled with violent imagery. So there they are, the three elements which would become Pinter trademarks. Each has appeal for an audience. Oddity fascinates, menace titillates, and not making sense creates the impression that there’s hidden meaning to be unearthed. Did Pinter produce good work using this bag of tricks? Yes, but in these plays it all smacks of gimmickry.

Mary Olivier - May Sinclair
Sinclair divided this novel into five books: Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Maturity, Middle Age. I liked Mary best as a child, mainly because I believed in her craving for love and her ability to experience a primitive happiness. But there are problems in her family (which slowly emerge for the reader), and they encumber her life. She winds up caring for a selfish, narrow-minded mother. Her potential isn’t snuffed out, but it’s not allowed to blossom. She reads a lot of philosophy (abstract speculations about the true meaning of Life take up far too many pages). Her few romantic encounters are brief and chaste. The uneventful days plod along, turning into years. I felt sorry for Mary, but increasingly uninvolved in her story. A major problem was Sinclair’s highly stylized prose; everything is made to seem so damn meaningful. This became tiresome. At the book’s end the author got thoroughly carried away and buried poor Mary under a torrent of overwrought words. Before her death (depicted as a ethereal drifting off) she finds and gives up her soul mate. But I no longer cared.

Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
This could have been a short story if Warner had left out the dawdling. Lolly is appealing, and I found it mildly pleasant to dawdle along with her, though eventually I became restless at the book’s lack of focus. Then things took an abrupt shift, with Lolly rebelling against the circumstances of her life. However, this shift wasn’t foreshadowed. Up to that point she seemed fairly content; she was happy to stay with her father until he died, and during her years with her brother and sister-in-law and their children we aren’t privy to Lolly’s dissatisfaction. She comes across as rather bland. Suddenly she decides to go to a remote place called Great Mop and live (as Laura, the name she prefers) without any responsibilities or ties. Then she becomes a witch. The novel is subtitled The Loving Huntsman, and that’s how Satan is portrayed. No menace, no evil. There’s no talk of her selling her soul (though she surely did). It must be assumed that she was granted freedom from entanglements, but she was accomplishing that quite well without the devil’s help. The scene with the most passion is the conversation at the end of the book between Laura and Satan; she expresses the futility and emptiness of the lives of most women, and why they turn to a huntsman who desires their very souls. After their talk Laura sets out for home; it’s late, and when darkness falls she plans on finding a place to slumber – “a suitable dry ditch or an accommodating loosened haystack.” My reaction was to wonder how Sylvia Townsend Warner would like to spend the night in a ditch. I wasn’t won over by the fantastical elements of this novel. Nor did I think the author took proper care of her mild and daft creation. This is evident even in the title. Lolly Willowes has a nice ring to it, but Laura associated the name Lolly with her despised role as Aunt Lolly. She wanted to be called Laura.

Champagne for One - Rex Stout
After delving into a series of unsuccessful literary novels (most of which don’t get reviewed) I need to clean my palate with a Nero Wolfe mystery. Stout removed all embellishment from his prose; we simply get Archie’s voice, and he’s not the arty type. This outing wasn’t as cleverly constructed as others I’ve read in the series. The premise is intriguing, but it defies a solution. A deus ex machina is needed, and it comes in the form of a fortuitous discovery made by one of Wolfe’s operatives. Also, the motive for the murder isn’t convincing enough. Still, as Stout knew, the enjoyment in these mysteries stems from the interaction between Archie and Nero, and that aspect is as satisfying as ever.

Mary - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
This short novel was Nabokov’s first, written when he was twenty-six years old and newly-married. It displays more of his flaws than his virtues. Ganin had a brief love affair with Mary; an improbable coincidence may reunite them after a five year separation. Nabokov tries to evoke their love through Ganin’s memories; but Ganin is unappealing and Mary (who exists entirely offstage) never comes to life. I cared more about the old poet and the lonely young woman who live in Ganin’s rooming house; they were flesh and blood characters. The ending – in which Ganin is to meet Mary at the railroad station and whisk her away from her repugnant husband – is a copout. On the last page he abruptly decides that she should remain as no more than a memory and he heads for another railroad station to make his getaway. Recently I started The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (written fifteen years after Mary) but didn’t read enough of it to do a review. In both novels Nabokov tried to capture elusive emotional states and to describe the inanimate world in fresh ways. He believed that the magic of his prose and perceptions could carry the day. This was his major flaw. He needed vital characters in compelling situations. He needed Humbert craving Lolita.

Saint Augustine’s Pigeon - Evan S. Connell
In reviewing Connell’s Double Honeymoon I called it “a terrible mistake from an author I greatly admire.” His books that I admire are Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, Son of the Morning Star, Diary of a Rapist and The Connoisseur. They need to be duly noted, because this collection of selected stories includes many terrible mistakes. There are only two full-fledged successes. In the four page long “The Marine” a pilot who had not yet left the United States asks an injured Captain what it’s like on the front lines. In the monologue that follows we get a harrowing look at how war allows a warped person to indulge his gruesome urges. The other success is an essay on the subject of celebrity (with “numerous digressions”); it was pleasurable to follow Connell’s inventive mind along its labyrinthian paths. As for the rest of the book, there are many short pieces, some interesting, some a waste. What baffled me are the five long stories. Two are about a character named J.D., a man who wanders the world; he occasionally returns to tell his stay-at-home school friends of the wondrous things he has seen and experienced (including love affairs with exotic women). J.D. came across as one of Walter Mitty’s more foolish incarnations. Then there are three very long stories featuring a character named Karl Muhlbach. In struggling through them my wandering attention was caught by a line describing a telephone conversation: “. . . it goes on and on, a long, dreary, stupid, inconclusive affair.” These words aptly described the story I was reading. All the characters – not only Muhlbach, though he’s the worst of the lot – could be aliens from the planet Boffo. My bafflement has to do with how Connell could get Mr. and Mrs. Bridge so right and then show no understanding of human nature (nor any inkling of how to tell an engrossing story). The answer may lie in the psyche of the author. Connell observed the Bridges with scientific detachment; in precise images he captured stages of their lives. Though the images are artfully created and arranged, his scrupulous intelligence was the main factor at work. With Karl Muhlbach Connell tried for intimacy. This character appeared in both The Connoisseur and Double Honeymoon. The first book was successful because it focused on Karl’s obsession with pre-Columbian art; the latter failed because it was about a sexual relationship. Connell, a brilliant but very odd man, was at a loss when presenting the firsthand feelings of humans in everyday situations. He needed to work from a place of detachment, either in the subject matter or the way the story was framed.

The Puzzleheaded Girl: Four Novellas - Christina Stead
Honor is certainly puzzling. Her odd nature and actions (such as appearing at the doors of people she barely knows, asking for money or a place to stay for the night) engenders both a mystery (what makes her tick?) and sympathy for someone seemingly proud and self-sufficient yet obviously in dire need. However, in order to generate pathos Stead needed to provide insight into her character’s mind, but Honor remains inexplicable; her story covers many years and eventually she becomes a sort of jack-in-the-box, popping up in an increasingly disheveled state. Lydia, of The Dianas, is another oddball – hyper, bordering on the frantic; she hurtles from one man to another at a headlong pace. Inklings of what lies behind her behavior seem to emerge near the end (something intriguingly dark), but Stead veers away from the darkness and wraps things up with an improbable happy ending. The Righthanded Creek (“A sort of ghost story”) is a mishmash of heavy atmospherics. Stead abandons one family living in the haunted cottage (in the middle of a crisis) and introduces a new one (no explanation offered). In Girl from the Beach George (another frantic character) tries ineffectually to deal with problems involving women and money. It’s a romp through the chaos of a man’s life (I hope Stead knew that she was writing a comedy). None of these novellas can stand as a finished work. They have the feel of castoffs, ideas pursued but dropped; the weak endings seem tacked on. Still, I found each one entertaining. Stead’s idiosyncratic prose is engaging, and some scenes show her prodigious gifts. Creek contains a powerful and chilling monologue in which a man describes his addiction to alcohol; in his words I felt the real ghost emerge, the one that devours and destroys from within.

Salem Possessed - Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum
The authors don’t describe in detail what went on in Salem during the witchcraft craze. Instead they explore the underlying factors – moral, economic, psychological – that gave rise to the events. They support their conclusions with extensive research. A shift from traditional Puritan values to capitalistic entrepreneurship was occurring, and change can create turmoil and conflict. In Salem the clash resulted in tragedy. I found the authors’ analysis not only valid, but relevant to the pressures at work in our present-day society. We have much in common with Salem.

A Middle Class Education - Wilfrid Sheed
This is a long, substantial, complex novel – and a very good one. On a superficial level its about young men at Oxford’s Sturdley College. John Chote is the central character; when the novel opens he has just received a scholarship to study in the United States. John is no model student; he and his friends spend their days and nights drinking, gambling, playing pranks and womanizing (or pretending to womanize). They value humor above sincerity; everything is fodder for the sarcastic remark. But this book is far from a campus frolic. As Sheed digs deeper into the inner workings of his evasive character (especially when John is marooned in America) I felt what was hidden behind his facade of jokes: a stultifying depression. Sheed refuses to end the book with any sort of resolution. After his college years are over John faces a world which offers no hope for happiness. It’s not the world’s fault; John is his worst enemy. I think Sheed knew his character too well to provide any easy answers.

The Admiral and the Nuns - Frank Tuohy.
I admire Tuohy’s writing style but not his sensibilities. Most stories in this collection were murky and oppressive and had no discernible point to make (except, possibly, that life is a grubby affair). Too many characters were either emotionless or borderline hysterics; I couldn’t understand or care about them. The joyless sex that the morally-challenged males have with prostitutes got tiresome. After reading a few short pieces that were nothing more than filler, I called it quits. Only one story was fully successful. The match being arranged in “The Matchmakers” is between cocker spaniels; a man and woman become acquainted for the purpose of mating their dogs. Tuohy handles this premise cleverly, and there’s a gentleness to the story that wasn’t evident anywhere else. Also, both characters were likable.

Asleep in the Sun - Adolfo Bioy Casares (Spanish)
I finished this novel because I was perplexed, and perplexity can tease one on. Everything happening – every damn thing – seemed slightly distorted. I wanted to find out what all the craziness was about. Yet in the last thirty pages the absurdities were pushed to the point of silliness (how about a mad scientist putting the souls of dogs into human bodies?). The book turned out to be a pointless joke, and I was snookered into wasting my time on it. It’s not surprising that Casares’s mentor was Borges, that trickster who was proclaimed a genius by constructing elaborate word puzzles that defy a solution. Yet there’s always a coterie of admirers for the Emperor’s new clothes. This novel was reissued by the New York Review of Books. James Sallis, a writer of second-rate mysteries, does the introduction, and he finds meaning in the flagrantly meaningless (the novel explores “the theme of identity,” etc.).

Debbie - Max Steele
Max Steele wrote Debbie (later reissued as The Goblins Must Go Barefoot) when he was in his twenties; it was his only novel. Why no others? It seems a loss. Because Debby is one of those works that make you wonder “How could somebody do this?” His insight into human nature would have been remarkable for a man in his fifties. He enters the mind of a woman who has the mental development of a child (Debbie can’t read or tell time). As is true with children, she’s extremely self-centered and responds to people and events with an intense emotionality. Steele shows how complex those labeled as “simple” really are. When her story begins she’s staying at the Stonebrook Home for Delinquent Women. She had been there six years, ever since the state, in the form of the hated Nurse Janet, tracked her down. Debbie had two children, one an infant. She loved them, but they were living wild, like animals. The children were taken from her and she was sent to Stonebrook. In the first chapter a new life opens for her. She moves to the home of the Merrills, to work as a maid (though she’ll soon be considered a member of the family). As filtered through her perceptions, we follow this family during the difficult decades of the thirties and forties. Debbie’s thoughts and feelings focus most strongly on Mrs. Merrill and the youngest child, a boy like the one she had lost. There are good times for Debbie and for the Merrills, but their lives are not easy, nor are there happy endings for anyone. Mrs. Merrill, through her actions, loses what she most desired, and the amorphous fear which lurked at the core of Debbie comes to dominate her. I found this disturbing. It’s as if Max Steele, in the first pages, had inserted an intravenous drip in my vein, and from it passed raw emotion. *

The Mesh - Lucie Marchal (French)
This is a psychological study of a repugnant family (even the dog is disgusting). Mother, daughter, son, and son’s wife are engaged in a struggle to dominate, to possess. Marchal ventures into Simenon territory with this look at mental aberration and moral corruption. She’s fairly successful, though her characters and their actions are too extreme. She goes overboard into fetid waters.

The Nightingale - Sholom Aleichem (Yiddish)
Aleichem was a gifted storyteller. His simple, direct prose is inviting. The exotic world of a Jewish shtetl, with its foul-smelling mud streets and small, dark houses, comes to turbulent life. His characters and the predicaments they find themselves in are engrossing. There are no pogroms or raids by Cossacks in this novel; the troubles that befall the Jews of Mazepevka come from poverty and the human flaws that their pervasive religion cannot eradicate. Love, kindness and generosity are present, but there’s also greed, backbiting, jealousy, and various other destructive feelings and behavior. We’re not in the uplifting world of “Fiddler on the Roof.” But no group of people, if depicted honestly, would emerge unsullied. Aleichem is honest, and for this he should be commended. He does seem to be condemning the Jewish practice of arranging marriages. Esther, who embodies the virtues of kindness and generosity, is pressured by her family to marry a detestable – though wealthy – widower. I felt how odious this marriage would be for her. Especially since she loves Yosele, has loved him since they were children. Yosele is the cantor’s son, the nightingale of the title; he can sing with an exquisite sweetness. Though he reciprocates Esther’s love, this is no love story. The fault lies entirely with Yosele. He doesn’t appear to be a complex character, but, near the end of the book, when one looks back, trying to account for his actions, it becomes clear that Yosele has always been mentally unstable. Early on his emotionality seemed part of an imaginative, creative nature; but it darkens. When he returns to Mazepevka, just as Esther is about to take the marriage vows, we’re presented not with a lover come to rescue her but with a madman. I was surprised at how unobtrusively Aleichem leaves us with nothing. The last words in the novel, before the withering epilogue, come from the coachman: “If you think about it, you come to realize it’s a rotten world.” *

Therese Raquin - Emile Zola (French)
Zola wrote this novel when he was in his mid-twenties, and if I were advising him I would have recommended that he abandon the idea of being a novelist and take up shoemaking. Of course, that would be bad advice, but this is a bad novel. It’s strident and overwrought, both in how the characters carry on and in the prose. Zola may have felt that by presenting a gloomy, grim, ugly world – and doing it unrelentingly – he was being a realist; but the people in this book are too extreme to be real. Zola assaults the reader with a torrent of shrill adjectives; he was obviously writing in a frenzy, carried away by his story of illicit passion, murder and guilt. There’s no artistry, no thoughtful restraint, and the results are as silly and melodramatic as a dime novel. Its luridness made it a cause celebre in France at the time. I stuck with it to the halfway point, hoping it might get better, but it just got worse.

A Long Desire - Evan Connell
The eleven pieces in this book are about people who embarked on obsessive searches. Most of these individuals desired wealth (though prestige comes a close second); six of the quests involve discovering a passage to India or finding riches in the New World. The lure of gold can drive man to endure appalling hardships and to commit atrocious acts. The majority of these searchers fail to reach their goals, and the outcome for many is a gory death. I was struck by their determination, brutality, resourcefulness and greed. Also, their gullibility. My gut reaction was often, What folly, what madness! There are boring stretches in which Connell simply presents researched facts; when he enlivens the facts with a novelist’s flare the results can be engrossing and even fascinating. My favorite episode was about the crazed search for El Dorado. My favorite character (and, I believe, Connell’s) is the only woman: Mary Kingsley, a proper Victorian lady with an insatiable desire to explore exotic places. She wasn’t after gold, just experience. She endured hardships with an unflappable spirit; nothing fazed her – not cannibals nor crocodiles. And she always observed tea time.

The Watchful Gods and Other Stories - Walter Van Tilburg Clark
The Watchful Gods is a short novel. A boy wakes up on his twelfth birthday; he very much wants a rifle. He gets his wish and immediately goes hunting; he kills a rabbit, he feels remorse. Layered onto those bare bones of a plot are his interactions with his family, his fantasies about a girl, et cetera – normal boy stuff. But there’s much more to Buck, and it changes this from a simple story to a very complex one. He has a strong spiritual/mystical side; he feels the presence of gods who are involved in his life. Some are good, some are malevolent (there’s also an indifferent god presiding over all). And there are sprites – spirits of happiness. By killing the rabbit, Buck believes that he has sided with the malevolent god; he tries to right the wrong he’s committed in an elaborate burial ceremony. Buck’s spirituality is linked to nature, for which he has great affinity; large portions of the novel are made up of descriptions of the natural world. Clark had something to say, but he layered so much onto the bare bones that his character (and any point he wanted to make) got buried under too many words. An indeterminate ending doesn’t help matters. In the stories Clark also had a larger purpose in mind; most are good, and one unobtrusively rises to greatness. “The Indian Well” opens with a long description of nature, but here the words relate to living creatures – road runners, lizards, coyotes, antelope, rabbits. And then man. A man and his mule arrive at the spring; they’re the latest in a long line of travelers, stretching back, it seems, to time immemorial. Clark describes the ordinary events and the drama of this lone man’s stay. After a year he leaves (this time more alone); at his departure “the disturbed life of the spring resumed.” This story evokes the great (and harsh) cycle of existence, and man’s uneasy place in it.

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
There’s a grimy feel to this novel, and that’s its main virtue. Hammett’s unembellished prose efficiently captures the disreputable denizens of Poisonville. Dinah Brand stands out, fascinating and formidable; I almost kept reading just to get more of this tough dame. Almost. I quit the book at the halfway point, after a couple of ridiculous shootouts. My doubts began early on, when the nameless private eye states that he knows who murdered a guy. Huh? I had no clue who did it (things had gotten complicated quick). It turns out to be a character who appears for only two pages and who’s presented (by the author) as the most unlikely suspect of all. This isn’t playing fair with the reader. Then a boxer knocks out an opponent who’s supposed to win (the fix is on) and immediately gets a knife in the back of the neck. This knife is thrown from somewhere in the back of a crowded arena. I’m supposed to swallow this nonsense? The real crime that needs solving is why the Library of America devoted two volumes to the work of Hammett. A more worthy writer got robbed.

The Radiant Way - Margaret Drabble
I consumed this book like comfort food (though it wasn’t junk but carefully-prepared dishes like smoked ham with onion sauce). It gave me a warm feeling of comradery, which is the strength of TV series featuring an enduring set of friends (though this novel’s three central characters are too discerning to waste their time watching the telly). These characters are Alix, Esther and Liz. Alix is the most grounded; Esther is enigmatic, otherworldly; Liz vacillates between contentment and turmoil. The novel opens with a New Year’s Eve party given by Liz and her husband at their posh Harley Street home; as 1980 is rung in Liz learns that her husband is leaving her for another woman. What follows covers a span of five years; the women’s lives are altered in many ways, some good, some bad. England itself (there’s a strong element of social commentary) is greatly altered, much for the worse. This is an ambitious, complex, intelligent book. It’s also a messy melange. But I have no desire to explore its faults. For nearly four hundred densely packed pages it kept alive in me those feelings of comfort and comradery, and feeling sweeps aside criticism. I thought Drabble might be going seriously off course in the book’s last fourth, but she righted the ship and sailed it into its berth – to a place where it belonged. *

Death of a Doxy - Rex Stout
Archie takes center stage, and he’s as lively and engaging as ever. My problem with this Nero Wolfe outing is that the murderer’s identity is based entirely on an alias he uses in an extortion note. Does the name Milton Thales mean anything to you? It didn’t to me, but to Nero Wolfe it pointed directly to one person. If this character hadn’t choosen that particular name there would be no evidence against him. That’s flimsy. A mystery should present a preponderance of evidence that enables the attentive reader to identify the bad guy. Stout usually does this, but not here. Also, in the three Wolfe mysteries I’ve previously read the guilty party commits suicide; in this one he’s murdered, though the police rule his death to be a suicide. Case closed.

The Break-Up of Our Camp and Other Stories - Paul Goodman
On the first page I knew I was reading something unique. It wasn’t merely the stylistic innovation; there was an insistence on staying in the mind of the main character. This mind is the author’s; Goodman was a philosopher, a psychologist, a sociologist, a poet; it was his nature to dig deep. The setting for the stories is a summer camp for Jewish boys where Matt/Goodman is a counselor and head of the drama department. Woven into the plots are philosophical and sociological considerations, and the psychology of Matt and those he interacts with is explored. If you follow the thinking (which isn’t that hard to do) you arrive at the point Goodman is trying to make. The first story is exhilarating. “The Canoeist” is a lone Canadian who rows up to the camp, hungry and tired. Initially he’s treated hospitably, and he makes a place for himself among the boys (and the girls in a nearby camp). He says he’ll be leaving soon but keeps putting off his departure. Gradually the boys begin to exclude this outsider, then to barely acknowledge his existence. He responds by setting out in his canoe late one stormy afternoon; the boys watch him as he battles the wind and rain, slowly disappearing from sight. This is an important incident, and no aspect of it is lost on Goodman. In later chapters the canoeist returns, not in the flesh but in the imagination of the members of the camp; he has become a mythic figure. As for stylistic innovation, Matt tells the story in the first person, but we also get the thoughts of the canoeist (“I like it here” he thought. “Everybody is singing and laughing.”). Goodman was an original; he broke new ground. I’ve written a lot about a very slender volume – Camp contains six stories, and one is three pages long. But Goodman deserves attention. Someday I’ll tackle his magnum opus, The Empire City, though I find the prospect daunting. Too often he lets philosophical and sociological aspects predominate over character and plot. Fiction can’t breathe if it’s encumbered. I wonder if Goodman, for all his intellect, was aware of that simple fact.

The Trouble of One House - Brendan Gill
The “trouble” of the title is, in one sense, the early death of a woman who loved her three children and husband; all Elizabeth aspired to do in life was to love. The characters around her can’t be summed up in such simple terms. Elizabeth could be the life-affirming center of the novel, but she remains on the periphery, a shadowy presence (she is a shadow in a photograph she took of her children – the last thing she sees). Those who are conflicted and complex stand out boldly. Besides the members of the Rowan family there are seven major characters and half a dozen secondary ones. All come to life: they breathe, they sweat, they feel. Though most are fully comprehensible, a few act in ways I found inexplicable (which was a problem for me; bafflement isn’t a satisfying feeling). Some people occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Elizabeth; they’re not only incapable of loving, they’re bent on destroying others (thus providing another level of trouble). They aren’t caricatures; they’re people we know, they’re ourselves. Gill’s prose is exemplary; scenes are done with assurance, the dialogue rings true. This isn’t a tidy novel, nor a consistent one, yet it works; everything seems interconnected. I discovered a fact that may account for the underlying unity. Elizabeth’s son, Michael, is five years old when she dies; Brendan Gill lost his mother when he was five. He must have remembered her as a shadowy figure, though one that left a lasting impression. As Gill grew to manhood the diverse world of complex characters stood out distinctly. His ability to capture that world is his major accomplishment. But he needed to include love: Elizabeth insisting from the shadows, quietly and perhaps futilely, People, it’s so simple.

The Delicate Prey and Other Stories - Paul Bowles
This collection contains Bowles’ first published fiction. I had previously read (and didn’t reread) “The Delicate Prey” and “A Distant Episode.” The cruelty in the latter story left a lasting – and disturbing – impression on me. “Prey” is also marked by cruelty (castration, live burial of a man so only his head is exposed). These acts are described in an offhand manner, as if the perpetrators found them as pleasurable and inconsequential as having a good meal. But it’s the author who conveys that attitude, which makes me think there was something warped in Bowles’ nature. Despite my feelings of aversion, I’m drawn to his unique sensibility. And he was talented; the stories cited above are effective because they’re done with skill. In this collection we get the sensibility but not much skill; some stories offer up their aberrations in a slipshod way. Of the ones I read (half I didn’t) only “You Are Not I” and “Pages from Cold Point” were interesting. “Pages” deals with homosexuality, a subject the author usually avoided (or dodged). Any relationship in Bowles’ work is devoid of a positive form of intimacy; cruelty, not love, was his speciality. He almost always used a foreign setting. Bowles lived most of his life in Morocco – a place where, I suspect, he was free to indulge his questionable tastes to the fullest.

The Bitter Box - Eleanor Clark
The extreme oddity of this novel kept me off balance. At first I thought it was badly written. But I kept reading because there was something compelling in the story of Mr. Temple. Eventually it dawned on me that Clark knew exactly what she was doing. She puts us in the mind of a very odd man and makes us see and feel things as he does. Mr. Temple is isolated, socially inept, repressed, emotionally unstable. This instability is precariously close to insanity (of the dangerous sort; one of the emotions he has long repressed is rage). On the first page he impulsively leaves the bank where he has worked as a teller for over a decade; he’s driven from his cage onto the city streets by an urge inexplicable to him. Much is inexplicable to him. His mind latches onto images (some blossom into the ominous or the beautiful), his conversations are disjointed, his reactions to people and events come in fits and starts. This is confusing (too confusing for me at times, even though confusion is what Mr. Temple feels). His flight from the bank – he’ll return the next day – is an interruption of a regimented life which he can no longer tolerate. His experiences in the following months are especially intense because, at age thirty-one, he has experienced very little. Mr. Temple is on a journey into the murky depths of himself; the journey doesn’t end up at any place good. A dismal death seems imminent for him, and his inability to comprehend his nature persists. On the last page there’s a suggestion that he may have accepted his vulnerability and compassion. Maybe. I was never on solid footing with this novel. But I was caught up in the emotions. Eleanor Clark accomplished something powerful and moving.

The Comforters - Muriel Spark
When I began this novel I knew it was Spark’s first, but after I finished it I discovered that she wrote it when she was thirty-nine. Thirty-nine! I thought she was in her early twenties; this isn’t a mature work. She relies on characters that range from peculiar to extravagantly bizarre (there’s a witch, folks, a real witch). The three main threads of plot are never woven together. One character hears voices that repeat her thoughts and words; we’re to believe that the book we’re reading is being produced by this disembodied source. Spark can’t make sense of what she proposes, so it’s total nonsense. Then there’s a sweet old grandmother who’s head of a ring of diamond smugglers; I felt I was back sleuthing with the Hardy Boys (which was, actually, rather enjoyable). The relationship between a young man and woman is chaste; Spark avoids a subject that was always a problem for her: love and sex (after reading enough of an author’s work you get to know them). Also in the mix is Catholicism, though the emphasis is on diabolism. The prose has a nice sparkle and the book moves along in a pleasant, lulling way – if, like the author, you ignore the improbabilities (which extend to the title; I have no idea what it’s referring to). I was blessed by starting out with two excellent books by Spark (Momento Mori and The Bachelors); the string of novels I read after those were either diverting or disappointing. This was interrupted by the lightning stroke of The Driver’s Seat, which may reveal more about the strange Ms. Spark than anything else she wrote.