Re-reads

The Duke of Deception – Geoffrey Wolff

This book elicited a strong reaction in me, so for that alone it’s significant. It’s subtitled “Memories of My Father,” and is classified as a memoir, with Wolff’s father playing the major role. The Duke was a deceiver of epic proportions. His life story (as he presented it), his upper-class mannerisms, his possessions – all false. Oh, the possessions were real, but they were unpaid for. It seemed that he had an aura of authority and wealth that earned him trust from merchants and other victims who were all to ready to accept worthless checks and put items on credit. As for those possessions, they were the best. The best automobiles money can buy, the best clothing, watches, jewelry. The restaurants and hotels he frequented were top tier; he put his meals on his “tab,” he walked out of hotels without paying for his stay. All bills and requests for payment were blithely ignored. He was a man with talents beyond scamming. He got jobs (using a resume that included Yale and the Sorbonne in Paris, neither of which he attended) in aerospace industries, not as an engineer but as a facilitator. Because he was good with people, he was good at those jobs; but he would eventually tire of them and begin to be a no-show. And he would be fired. I could go on (and on and on) about his shortcomings, but it’s his relationship with his son that’s at the core of the book. And here he excelled. He was a good, loving father when Geoffrey was young. A father many would wish for. He spent a lot of time with the boy, taught him things, praised him. And gave him lavish presents. When, in his early teens, Geoffrey caught the boating bug he received the finest in motor boats. When Geoffrey could drive, he received a fancy sports car. Of course, these were unpaid for. But still. It’s the reservoir of love Geoffrey has for his father that becomes a conflicting element in this book. Because, as Geoffrey grows older, he begins to see his father’s flaws, his fakery, his inadequacies. He begins to question the man, and the Duke reacts with anger. Things sour between the two. What bothered me was that, while Geoffrey becomes judgmental, he carries on like his father, as if rules of conduct didn’t apply to him. He borrows money that goes unreturned, he’s deceptive in his dealings with people and institutions; he’s a faker who assumes appearances to impress people. He’s sent to exclusive schools (one in England) and he wastes his time there. Never studies, seldom attends classes. Instead, he parties, drinks far too much. He wrecks his cars. Speed limits? – who cares, he would go 140 MPH if he felt like it. Though how a change came about in Geoffrey’s behavior/attitude is not part of the story, his bio shows that at some point he straightened up and started living an honest life. He graduated from Princeton, wrote books, taught at universities; he got married, had two sons (to whom he dedicates this book). His father’s final years were brutal. If he was to be punished for his faults, he received such punishment in full measure. He was in and out of jails and mental institutions. His body was found two weeks after his death in a shabby room, amid squalor and empty bottles of liquor and empty barbiturate pill boxes. The smell emanating from the room alerted someone passing by to the fact that the police needed to be called. Obviously no friends checked up on him; he had no friends. He had appealed to his son (in an aggressive manner) for help – that he come live with him. Geoffrey wouldn’t allow this to happen. He had his life on the right track, and there was no room for a mess like his aged father. I can’t blame Geoffrey for this decision; his father was beyond help. In closing: If Geoffrey loved and cared for his sons, as his father had loved and cared for him, and if he taught them to avoid all the bad behavior – which he had eventually learned to avoid – then he got valuable lessons from the Duke. 4

Fat City – Leonard Gardner

Billy Tully, at age thirty, has reached the dead end of life. At times he gets an inclination to revive his career as a boxer, but he was never that good to begin with. Now he can only take and deliver punishment, and see who can survive. There’s no glamorizing of boxing: it’s brutal, ugly and, as Billy thinks at one point, insane. He turns to it to make a buck; his other jobs, such a field work (topping onions, etc.) is also brutal in the demands it makes on the body and the spirit. The setting for the novel is Stockton, California, a place you never want to be. At least not the area Billy occupies – skid row. Ratty rooms, bars. Yes, Billy is a heavy drinker – what can be expected? Out of loneliness he briefly gets involved with a woman – also a drinker, but, unlike Billy, an insanely abusive one. Billy emerges as a decent man in a very bad place, and with no discernable way out. There’s another character, a twenty-year-old named Ernie Munger. He and Billy meet at a gym, spar a bit – but, besides youth, Ernie has no gift. He gets a girl pregnant and they marry, though he doesn’t love her. He seems, in his aimlessness, his lack of resources, to be headed to the same fate as Billy. And what is Billy’s fate? He simply disappears; he’s there in a late chapter, then he’s gone from the narrative. I believe a novel so relentlessly bleak has worth because there are many lives like those depicted in Fat City, and their story should be told. The author was almost one of them. Much of what happens to Billy in the book happened to Leonard Gardner: growing up poor in Stockton, boxing, field work, an early marriage that didn’t last. A talent for writing saved him. But, in a very long life (the last time I checked he was in his nineties), he wrote only this one book, when he was thirty-six. He wrote screenplays, notably for the excellent movie version of Fat City, directed by John Huston. 4

Sunday – Georges Simenon (French)

Authors who write a suspense novel which is constructed so that everything points to a surprise twist at the end must be aware of a major pitfall: that twist must not only be believable, but it must offer a jolt to the reader. If it doesn’t deliver that effect, the work is a failure. For half this short book Emile plans to kill his wife Berthe, using arsenic in her food, but all along we feel that things won’t turn out as he expects. Over many months we follow as he carefully – very carefully – devises the perfect crime (which has to occur on a Sunday, when the local doctor is out sailing). Though we’re always in Emile’s mind, I had trouble understanding his motivation for murder, and Berthe remained a mystery. But, still, the writing was clear and concise, the setting – a small town on the Riviera – was well rendered, and the events moved along. So I waited for the payoff with a sense of anticipation. Waited until the last two pages. And what I got there was illogical and dumb. Berthe knew what he was up to all along, and had her own diabolical plan in place? Please – there was absolutely no basis to suspect that. Simenon’s nose dive into the pitfall I mentioned can be attributed to his approach to writing. In an interview in the Paris Review he stated that he didn’t plot his novels and had no idea how things would turn out. This shows in Sunday, in which he found he had no ending. As for why I once thought it was a success – well, there’s a real mystery (as is the fact that Simenon is considered to have been an important writer). Out of curiosity, I went back in Jack London and found four previous reviews of his novels. I thought one of them was fairly good. Of the others, none of which I finished, there’s a recurring complaint: “lacks logic . . . characters act without sufficient motivation.” One of the reviews closes with two words: “What balderdash!” Unlike Leonard Gardner’s one heartfelt effort, Simenon wrote over 400 novels. Delete