The Greyhound in the Leash - Joyce Horner
In the prologue Evelina is at her high school graduation and is listening (though her mind wanders) to the speaker, who gives out that old homily: their lives are still to be lived. “But when the time comes we can be only one of the things we dreamed of being; sometimes we end by not being any of them.” The speaker adds that they have “several possible selves . . . in some places, with some people, you turn into a different person . . . .” The novel is made up of four parts; in each Evelina is thirty-five. In the first three of her incarnations she has married very different men, and is shaped by those choices. In two of her marriages she was not in love, nor does she share an affinity of spirit. The men are good, in their fashion, and she’s not unhappy (though there’s a reappearing Charles Bryce to whom she’s physically attracted). Her marriage to Paul is a different matter altogether; there passion existed, and also an affinity. But that marriage was wracked by problems, mostly due to Paul’s dissatisfaction (not with her, but with how his life had turned out). No seductive Charles Bryce appears because he’s not needed. Evelina and Paul wind up separating. Whereas the loveless marriages survived, and offered security, the love of her life is someone she cannot live with. Part Four is brief: Evelina is unmarried (though in her past she had loved a man named Paul); she has a job as a librarian at an Institute. She has a close friend, Katherine (also a recurring figure throughout the novel, one for whom an independence existence was primary). Though this isn’t the ending Evelina may have wished for, she isn’t a tragic character; she’s open to the world around her and is content in a quiet way. Her life is similar to the one lived by the author (Joyce Horner was forty-six when she wrote the novel). I think she was trying to explore the way things worked out for her, and her approach is thought-provoking. It evoked my own private thought: Evelina remains stable and resilient in all her incarnations because she was brought up by loving parents. She had a solid base from which to embark on whatever life had in store for her.

The Family Moskat - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
This teeming, panoramic novel brings to life Poland from the early 1900s to the beginning of WWII. In weight and scope it has elements of greatness. But is there too much weight and scope? There are over 600 dense pages, and it’s prefaced by three family trees. I soon developed a strategy to deal with this deluge of names: concentrate on the people who are important. There’s Asa Heshel and the three women he loves (or can that emotion be attributed to him?); Abram, a capricious and monumentally flawed life force; the nefarious Koppel. All the others, though colorful, I relegated to accessory role players. Once those ground rules were in place, I found the book to be eminently readable. The plot covers too much ground to give any summarization, but some general statements can be made. One is how unhappy most people are. Especially in the relationships between the sexes, strife reigns, and in many cases marriage leads to divorce. Also of importance is the book’s historical aspect, especially in regard to how political upheavals affected the Jewish population in Poland. With the onset of WWI and the threat of Bolshevism, the first evidences of antisemitism appear, and it becomes steadily more virulent. Lastly, there’s the role that Judaism plays. Though the many rituals and religiously-dictated customs seem foolish (as they do to many Jews, who reject the old ways), they give sustenance to a people who are outsiders; through them they connect with all Jews everywhere, including those who are no longer alive. And the rules of conduct set down in the Torah, though rigid, are noble in nature; to break them is to violate the True Way. But there’s aberrant human nature to consider, and life to be lived, so the violations occur. Singer presents characters with all manner of faults, but because they are human I could relate to how they think and feel and act. In the late 1940s the novel was serialized for two years in the Jewish Daily Forward. Singer may have felt an obligation to recreate for this audience a world that was vanishing. He succeeded. *

Emma - Jane Austen
This is the fourth book by Austen that I’ve read – and the last. In the opening a weak-willed young girl accepts Emma as her mentor. Harriet is romantically interested in a farmer. A farmer! For Emma this will certainly not do, so she steers Harriet away from the estimable Robert Martin and toward a more socially acceptable mate (though one lacking in character). To me this was a shameful act of manipulation, and I wondered if Austen was making a statement about values. Could she be critiquing a world in which status, money, manners and dress are all important? No – for Austen status, money, manners and dress were of the utmost importance. Like the rest of her work, her main subject is affairs of the heart among wealthy villagers who have estates with names such as Hartfield and Donwell. The rest of the world, with all its messiness, is totally excluded. This may be one of the reasons for Austen’s appeal; she offers escapist reading, complete with happy endings. I don’t have much interest in her subject matter, nor do I find her parodies of characters like Mrs. Elton amusing. And, if one isn’t interested or amused, the intricacies of her prose, though it has a crystalline stateliness, is a bit difficult to follow. She’s also too wordy; this 539 page book could benefit by a cut of two hundred pages. Still, I kept reading because I rather liked Emma. She has flaws, one of which is an inflated view of her own merit; after a series of blunders, she comes to see herself in a diminished light. So she grows as a person. By the end of the book four marriages have taken place, including that of Emma and Mr. Knightley (in the last line, their union is described as one of “perfect happiness”). Harriet, who had all but disappeared from the novel, is one of those who marry – to Robert Martin. Emma (who had seen the error of her meddling ways) is glad for her, and wishes her the best; but, of course, they can no longer remain on terms of intimacy.