How Jack London Changed My Life

2012-01-03T12:11:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-10-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-09-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-09-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-08-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

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. *

2011-08-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-06-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

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!”

2011-06-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-05-31T11:42:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-05-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-05-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-03-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-03-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-01-25T14:26:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-01-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-10T13:43:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-11-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

Hunting the Fairies - Compton Mackenzie
No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Yu-Yu, an American widow of Scottish descent (and inordinately proud of it), visits Scotland with her nineteen-year-old daughter Deirdre. She hopes to spot the Loch Ness Monster and uncover arcane Celtic lore, but she’s also in quest of fairies and ghosts (which, in her inflamed imagination, abound in every glen in the Highlands). The native Scots are a hard-headed, practical bunch; they’re proud of their history (an intricate and gory one), their traditions and legends, and the Gaelic language (impenetrable to them). As for fairy music and ghostly apparitions, they indulge their gullible guests. Hugh Cameron of Kilwhillie is stodgy, stolid and somewhat hapless, but he’s endearingly human. The book is best when dealing with him; it sags when it focuses on the feather-brained pursuits of Yu-Yu and Deirdre. However, when Hugh interacts with the two women the contrast in personalities produces funny results (a plot complication is that Kilwhillie, a fifty-year-old lifelong bachelor, gets the notion of marrying Deirdre). This is deadpan humor at its best, though it has Monty Pythonesque undertones.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago (Portuguese)
I was interested in how an original thinker like Saramago would portray the life of Jesus. In the first chapter Joseph has sex with his sixteen-year-old wife. It’s not a union marked by affection; it’s simply an urge fulfilled. The beginning of the book is like that, very down-to-earth; the spirituality comes from how deeply Joseph and Mary believe in Judaism (though the supernatural plays a role early on, with the appearance of a mysterious angel). The novel is strongest and most authentic in its depiction of how people lived at that time in that part of the world. There was much brutality (the Roman crucifixions, the Jewish practice of sacrificing animals). The descriptions of brutality aren’t gratuitous; they’re a lament and an indictment. Saramago’s gospel goes counter to the sanctified version in many ways (his Jesus can be harsh and unforgiving; he has sexual relations with Mary Magdalene) but the author retains the supernatural element, and it grows in importance as Jesus reaches manhood. More angels arrive with cryptic messages; Jesus suddenly (and inexplicably) has the power to perform miracles; God appears to tell Jesus of the role he is to fulfill on earth (again, in cryptic terms). Things weakened as this aspect became dominant, and the fault doesn’t lie wholly in my unwillingness to accept the supernatural. Saramago stopped giving care to his craft. The book’s structure waffled, events were confusing and took on a hurried air, as if the author wanted to be done with the enterprise. Some scenes involving spiritual matters came across as ludicrous. A brief look at Saramago’s biography suggests where the problem lay. He was an ardent atheist, so it can be assumed that he didn’t believe in the supernatural. Yet he relates supernatural events as if they did indeed happen. He was writing counter to his beliefs, and it shows.

Wilderness Tips - Margaret Atwood
Some stories in this collection are nothing more than attitude and posturing. Atwood presents us with mannequins in bizarre costumes strutting down a runway, giving us knowing looks (or evil leers). “Wilderness Tips” is a prime example. Early on I was aware that I had read it before (no doubt in some “best” anthology). It’s about an amoral bunch of preposterous stick figures; halfway through (when I abandoned it) I had no inkling of where things were headed. All I recognized were the weird or outrageous poses that Atwood has her characters take. The story is tawdry, empty, and, despite its superficial smartness, stupid – there was nothing of substance to remember. The repugnant “Hairball” was just as bad. In three other stories (four I didn’t read) Atwood tries to do what Alice Munro does so well: start with an event that happened early in a character’s life, then follow its effects over many years, ending in the present. For this to work the ending must resonate, and that will occur only if the reader cares about the people; Atwood’s characters remained flat and underdeveloped. Only “Death by Landscape” was a success; it’s shrouded in an inexplicable mystery, one that lingers. I got this collection because Moral Disorder interested me; but Nell was real. I took a look at the author’s biography. Disorder came out when Atwood was sixty-seven (fifteen years after Wilderness). I also discovered that Atwood’s life closely corresponds to Nell’s. That would account for the depth (and evasiveness) of the more recent work. Atwood was writing about herself, not stage props.

2010-11-03T12:48:00.000-07:00

Paradise - Abdulrazak Gurnah
The novel begins: “The boy first. His name was Yusuf, and he left his home suddenly in his twelfth year.” The opening sentence is the only one that’s unusual in its construction; also, Yusuf is not just first, he’s the middle and the end. His experiences and feelings are the substance of the novel. He leaves his home village because his father exchanges him to settle a debt. Aziz, a wealthy Arab trader, takes the boy to work in his shop in a city on the Mediterranean coast. I have to assume that Yusuf is black (Gurnah never makes that clear). Aziz makes expeditions into the interior of Africa to exchange goods with the natives; on one of these trips (a disastrous one) Yusuf accompanies him. This is a look at a continent that is indeed dark – a harsh, forbidding land – and it shows the troubled interaction between races and religions. Islam plays a large role, though the universal force that motivates man is greed. There are acts of kindness, but cruelty is more prevalent. Yusuf is a muted presence; he’s a quiet, gentle soul. He’s also beautiful, pursued by members of both sexes (there’s a casual, though snickering, acceptance of relations between males). At seventeen he’s still a virgin; he isn’t assertive enough to pursue women who attract him. Yet Yusuf isn’t a blank cipher; he was a person I cared about, and I wanted there to be a place in the world for him. The last section of the book was a letdown. Gurnah introduces odd plot complications that weren’t in harmony with the solid reality of what had gone before. On the final page we lose sight of Yusuf: he impulsively runs off to join a column of Germans who had just completed a raid, confiscating men for their army (European colonization has come to Africa). Is it freedom he’s seeking? He won’t find it as a soldier under the command of the brutish Germans (and is anyone less fitted to be a killer of men than Yusuf?). Gurnah doesn’t show us what’s in store for his character; he needed to, even if it was painful. As for novel’s title, maybe the point is that Paradise is not to be found on this earth.

Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood
I tried to figure out what made the main character in these interconnected stories tick; I never could. Even her name is a muddle. In stories where a first person narrator is used she remains nameless; those told in the third person have her as Nell; in the last story, told in the first person, Atwood assigns the name of Nell to a horse (thanks, Margaret). Still, it’s obvious that every story is about the same person. They cover Nell’s life from age eleven to the brink of old age. The best ones (“The Art of Cooking and Sewing” stands out) deal with her early years. Even the few that don’t amount to a whole lot are interesting. The adult Nell is often emotionally in disorder; though she carries on outwardly as if she were fine, she’s beset by feelings of dislocation and menace. Tig (the man she lives with/later her husband) is relegated to the background; because of Nell’s ambivalent attitude toward him I wanted to see more of their interaction. But Atwood withholds; she gives us intimations of her character’s inner life – but only so much, no more. Rather than being annoyed, I was intrigued.

Wrinkles - Charles Simmons
Unique isn’t a strong enough word to describe this novel; I’ve never read anything like it. The prose is straightforward and there are no weird characters doing weird things. Its uniqueness lies in how it’s constructed. Each short chapter consists of one paragraph. They concern a topic – such as bosses or humor – and begin by telling who the nameless main character’s first boss was (his father), or what struck him as funny when he was a child; then we move chronologically through his life, exploring that topic until we come to the present, when he’s in his sixties. At this point he gives a summing up. Mostly his views reflect an elegiac resignation. Death seems imminent to him, which puts into perspective all that had come before. Some endings have real impact – they’re incisive and revealing. This isn’t a nostalgic novel; it’s an anti-nostalgic one. There isn’t a sentimental moment; the emotion most often elicited by memories is regret. Through the numerous and varied topics we get an honest portrayal of a man and his life. The life isn’t a happy or satisfying one, nor is the man admirable. This isn’t a fault (how many of us would emerge unscathed from a warts-and-all examination?). However, there are degrees of unattractiveness; the amount of grubby sex in the novel was a problem for me. Simmons should have omitted two-thirds; by making it play so large a role the main character came across as a bit of a creep. Still, I recommend Wrinkles highly – its innovative approach, and the success with which it’s executed, make it quite special.

2010-10-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

The Unspeakable Skipton - Pamela Hansford Johnson
In an opening Note Johnson states that she had “always wanted to write a study about an artist’s paranoia.” Skipton is a writer. I didn’t see a paranoid individual, though he’s certainly deranged. He has delusions of grandeur (he believes he’s a genius of the highest order); he’s arrogant – abusively so – and his heart festers with an overabundance of hatred. Most of the novel concerns his machinations to get money (since his writing isn’t appreciated by a world of fools). He’s an artist starving in the garret – literally. People (for whom he has extreme distaste) interest him only as potential sources of income, and he resorts to pimping, blackmail and thievery so he can buy food and pay his rent. This sounds grim, but it’s not. Not as Johnson presents it; she even manages to sustain a comic tone. The writing is topnotch – lively, sometimes moving with a headlong impetuosity. The characters Skipton interacts with are a colorful group and Bruges, Belgium is a wondrous setting. By the end – even though I was in the mind of a warped and unsavory person – I felt pity for Skipton. In order to convey pity I suppose Johnson also felt it. I hope she did; poor souls such as Skipton meet with enough derision in their lives. *

King Solomon’s Mines - H. Rider Haggard
A rip-roaring yarn. Close escapes from the jaws of death, monstrous villains, an epic battle that rages over several chapters, a fabulous treasure. Throughout the exotic and gory events Allan Quartermain, the narrator, remains down-to-earth and unheroic (he even admits that he’s a bit of a coward). His solid presence provides a needed balance to the high drama. Haggard knew Africa and its people well. I was interested in how a Victorian colonialist would depict the natives. He grants them a condescending respect, sometimes even admiration, but they’re not the equal of an Englishman. Good as it is, the book’s ideal audience is the young; if I had read it when I was twelve it would have knocked my socks off.

The Eye - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
This long short story could have wound up as a discarded idea. It was fated to fail; its premise is too unwieldy. Yet Nabokov uses smoke and mirrors to fashion a rickety plausibility. I think he was interested in the idea of a person viewing himself from outside himself – being merely a disembodied eye. The eye constantly sees the indifference and contempt the world has for him. In this outing Nabokov’s distinctive cruelty is tempered (in his Foreword he refers to the character as “poor” Smurov). I wonder if he could relate to Smurov; the parade of indignities he subjects him to have a masochistic aspect (was Nabokov rankled by the lack of recognition for his writing?). At the end Smurov retreats into the realm of the imagination. He insists that he has found happiness there; in dreams he can possess the woman he loves. His last (and pitiable) words: “What more can I do to prove it, to proclaim that I am happy? Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people . . .”

2010-10-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

Voyage in the Dark - Jean Rhys
In my reviews of Quartet and Sleep It Off, Lady I concluded that Rhys (an autobiographical writer) wasn’t able to capture who she was as a young woman. In this novel she succeeds – and I understand why the task was difficult. When the book opens Anna has left her childhood home in the West Indies and is working as a chorus girl in England. The job is far from glamorous. Anna can’t adapt to the climate or people (both seem cold and alien). She has an affair with a wealthy married man; she’s in love with him, but he abruptly breaks off their relationship. Other men follow, she drinks too much; things go steadily downhill. A sordid story, but the Anna that emerges arouses sympathy; she’s trapped in an emotionally predatory world. To a large degree her problems have their roots in the past. Her life in the West Indies was far from idyllic; she arrived in England damaged, full of diffuse fears. She’s depressed, directionless, needy; her most important need is for someone to love and care for her. Yet the men she comes into contact with are only willing to give her money (which she takes without compunction). The other people in her life – mainly chorus girls and landladies – stand out vividly. The book isn’t dreary or static, even though Anna is often in a deep funk. I found the use of stream of consciousness to be less successful than the direct narration and dialogue. But in these impressionistic sections Rhys is trying to convey that Anna is groping her way in the dark. As for her reaching a place of light – I didn’t see much hope for her.

The Book of My Life - Jerome Cardan (Latin)
Written in the late sixteenth century, this book attracted me because it was described as one of the first psychological autobiographies. Yet Cardan is not insightful, nor is he able to tell about the events in his life in an interesting (or coherent) way. He isn’t likeable or believable; he comes across as a deluded and boring old man. I began to skip parts, then I skimmed the book. Cardan was a noted mathematician and doctor, proud of his powers of logic, but – even for the times – he seemed overly influenced by the supernatural; his life story is full of superstitions, premonitions, guardian angels, et cetera, et cetera.

Thieves Like Us - Edward Anderson
Crime and love in conflict. Though in some ways this novel belongs firmly in the noir genre, it’s deceptively complex. It’s also moving. I wanted (very much) for Bowie to do the right thing. He loves Keechie and she loves him – Anderson succeeds in making that relationship, which we follow from their first meeting, entirely convincing. Yet Bowie is a thief at heart; he’s unable to let go of that life. Ultimately he makes bad choices – stupid, fatal ones. I was disappointed with this ending; I initially thought that Anderson blew it (actually, he did, to a degree – the events are improbable). But on reflection I understood that I was mainly disappointed in Bowie. I wanted the two people I cared about to live together in peace and happiness.

Successful Love - Delmore Schwartz
Unsuccessful stories. Schwartz starts out with a bizarre premise, then tries to say something meaningful. But the bizarre was gimmicky, the meaning wasn’t there. After reading four stories, I called it quits.

2010-09-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

Fun with Problems - Robert Stone
This short story collection should have been called Drunks, Druggies, Nut-Cases. But it’s a literary work by a National Book Award winner, so the title can’t be blatantly lurid. It has to have class (albeit of the quirky variety). Still, the book is far from a class act; I won’t attempt to do justice to its many failings. If you’re at the library, read the four page “Honeymoon” and tell me why an author with discernment or self-respect – if they wrote such nonsense in the first place – wouldn’t have tossed it in the wastebasket. Granted, the prose throughout is fine and the title story is good, in a slummy way (it’s the only story that can be called “good”; most are bad, and the two long ones are so tediously bad that I couldn’t complete them). The problem with Problems – a huge one, endemic in today’s literary world – is content. Freakiness, outrageous behavior, violence, obscenity – these make up the content of work by many young writers and some elder statesmen (like Stone). No person I can relate to appears on the pages of this collection because no real humans are depicted. Real people in real situations, though a subject of vast potential, have been largely abandoned. As for morality or compassion – forget it; pandering is the name of the game. So why did I read the book? I heard Alan Cheuse, on NPR, highly recommend it, and I liked Stone’s Dog Soldiers (written in 1973 and also containing the content I’m condemning here; but 27 years ago I was younger, and the novel was fresh and had vitality and drive; now I’ve matured, but Stone, though seventy, hasn’t; he’s just gotten angrier – the prevailing attitude in these stories is a mean and abusive one). In the blurb on the back cover Madison Smartt Bell writes “American fiction has no greater master than Robert Stone.” What hope is there if Cheuse and Bell (and many others who heap praise on this dismal book) can’t recognize its faults and have the courage to emphatically condemn them? A last comment, regarding Stone’s anger. He heavy-handily attacks caricatures: an insane Secretary of Defense, a rich Silicon Valley entrepreneur/fool; and, in a broader sense, he attacks an American society phony to its diseased core. But if he wants to see, up close, the disease that’s killing literary fiction, he simply needs to look in a mirror.

All the Days and Nights - William Maxwell
Since this story collection is the last work of fiction that I’ll read by Maxwell, a summing up (and a tribute) is in order. His difficulty with plot persists in the short form; he’s great at capturing an isolated moment or feeling, but he can’t tell a story; often he doesn’t try. In “The Front and Back Parts of the House” he describes the writing of his first novel; beyond the initial idea he hadn’t a clue where events were headed (the results of such lack of direction can be found in Time Will Darken It). He’s a strongly autobiographical author. When he didn’t have a close emotional involvement with his subject the results lack depth and resonance. His best work concerns people he cared about – wife, father, brother. Yet he doesn’t overtly express his feelings, nor does he take center stage. It’s by how he presents others that we come to understand Maxwell. What shines through is his empathy and compassion. Some stories are grim, but no villains are to be found. He shows anger only once. When he and his wife revisit “The Gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel,” where they had spent a cherished evening, they find that the beautiful, ancient and irreplaceable gardens are gone, a victim of Progress and the Almighty Dollar. My favorite in the collection is the poignant and evocative “The Thistles of Sweden,” about the early years of Maxwell’s marriage, when the couple were living in a brownstone walk-up in New York. “Over by the River,” which takes place later in their lives, has a suggestion of something dark and disturbing at prowl in the world (and in the hearts of Maxwell and his wife and children); the fact that the book begins with this atypical piece is perplexing and intriguing. As for his prose – it’s beautiful; Maxwell can make the act of reading words pleasurable. And he has such mastery that he’s able to accomplish with ease whatever he attempts. In “The Lily-White Boys” he lets the “material witnesses” of a robbery – the carpet, phone directory, wall clock, a Sheraton sideboard, a bottle of Elizabeth Arden perfume – have a conversation in which each plays a crucial role or has a bit of wisdom to offer. What other author could do this so charmingly? Even a description of the clothes someone is wearing is interesting because Maxwell is primarily concerned with the person inside those clothes. The collection ends with “twenty-one improvisations.” In his introduction Maxwell states that he wrote these short pieces to please his wife. Only a few are good, but I forgive him for this indulgence. Fittingly, the best of the lot is “A Love Story.” It’s about two moles whose lives are disrupted by the coming of bulldozers. It ends happily. Madame Mole shows affection for her husband by chewing on his ear. *

2010-09-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Wayfarer - Natsume Soseki (Japanese)
I have high regard for three Soseki novels – and then this. The plot makes no sense. Do the events and characters in the first section, “Friend,” exist simply to be dropped? Increasingly the book concerns the narrator’s brother, Ichiro; at first the issue is Ichiro’s unhappy marriage (with his wife playing a major role), but the marriage (and the wife) are dropped too. Supposedly Ichiro’s problem is very, very deep, and involves existential matters. What’s the meaning of life? – that type of thing. Ichiro supposedly has a brilliant mind and as a result he’s unable to live simply, unquestioningly, happily. The book ends (the last section is entitled “Anguish” and it was, for me) with a long letter which supposedly sheds light on the supposedly enigmatic and tortured Ichiro. I’m overusing “supposedly,” right? I didn’t buy any of it. Ichiro was an ugly-tempered, self-centered bore. He wasn’t worth my time. But he was worth Soseki’s time – because he was, I believe, the author’s alter ego. The perils of writing about oneself! Worst is that you reveal yourself (and you don’t even know it).

The Vicar of Bullhampton - Anthony Trollope
This novel is earthy (who could be more down-to-earth than the miller?). I believe that common people, rendered honestly and without condescension, are of great interest; so did Trollope. Bullhampton is described as “a small town or a large village”; its inhabitants, including the squire, are ordinary souls. The novel’s central concern is “The Woman Question,” and it’s presented through two very different characters. Mary Lowther’s dilemma has to do with whether she should marry a man she doesn’t love. He’s an excellent match and various forces push her towards the marriage. Her struggle in making this crucial life decision is depicted with all the doubts and conflicts she feels. Then there’s the miller’s daughter, Carrie Brattle, who’s a “fallen woman.” Her predicament is hard for a modern reader to comprehend. Because of one sexual misstep this unmarried girl becomes an outcast from society; even her father disowns her. I had a problem with how Trollope handled both these women. Mary is given an easy way out: she meets a man who stirs real love in her. Okay, but why the Perils of Pauline-type obstacles thrown in her way (and then conveniently removed)? We’re constantly left hanging with the question of “What happens next?” – (wait for the next installment to find out). As for Carrie, she clearly had Trollope’s sympathy, and he shows the hypocrisy and insensitivity of the so-called upstanding, moral people who find her soiled beyond redemption. But his portrayal of her is so flat! She’s often referred to as “poor Carrie” and she’s little more than an abjectly sad victim. Do these problems sink the ship? No, there’s much that makes this a successful novel. It’s rich, engrossing and written in a smooth, reader-friendly style. Towards all his many characters, even the deeply flawed, Trollope shows compassion. The eponymous Vicar is a good man who diligently tries to do the right thing. His efforts sometimes fail to achieve their goals; but he, like all the people of Bullhampton, is merely human.

Hemlock and After - Angus Wilson
I had mixed feelings as I was reading this. Admiration was offset by fault-finding. Wilson is very intelligent (he makes sure you know it) and his prose is graceful and inventive (though its intricacies serve mainly to impress). Then there were the people he assembles. The book is under 150 pages, but it has a list – one I had to constantly refer to – of twenty-five characters. Many are homosexual (as is the author). Almost all, of whatever sexual persuasion, are distasteful; some only indulge in backbiting, but one woman is outrageously evil. Wilson has a cultured taste for the kinky, and he displays an acidic cynicism. Kinkiness and cynicism can be entertaining – they are entertaining as presented here – but they can turn rancid. Perhaps Wilson realized this was happening to his wicked brew, because near the end he tries to impart a higher purpose to the proceedings; I was unconvinced by the sudden emphasis on self-revelation and compassion. Hemlock is a poison, and this book has a poisonous heart. Angus Wilson is surely an artist, but is he a person whose work I want to spend more time with?

2010-08-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

Fermina Marquez - Valery Larbaud (French)
Fermina is a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl who, along with her aunt and younger sister, makes daily visits to a nearby boys’ school where her little brother is a pupil. Her presence creates a ferment of emotions in the boys. Most view her from afar. The two who get close to her are Santos, a swaggering South American conquistador, very much a man of the world, and Joanny Lenoit, the school’s scholar, a boy younger than Fermina. Larbaud wouldn’t have succeeded if he had concentrated on Fermina and Santos (neither are multi-dimensional characters) or had included anything the least bit smutty. Sex is an implicit force, never overt. The bulk of the book is given to Joanny, who is extremely complex. His emotions range from feelings of inadequacy to dreams of a triumph on the scale of Caesar’s. Much that happens is unexpected; what amazes is how the unexpected is exactly right. Larbaud trusted to his instincts, and they didn’t fail him. He was able to convey a sense of the consuming power that a beautiful girl has over the thoughts, passions and imaginations of young men. *

In Search of Love and Beauty - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
I quit reading at the halfway point. Jhabvala’s characters, both major and secondary, were unappetizing, the plot lacked credibility. Everything revolves around Leo Kellermann, who’s supposed to be an overpowering presence, especially for women. He preys on them, sexually and financially, while successfully promoting himself as a guru with deep insights. But Jhabvala doesn’t give us any convincing evidence to make Leo’s power believable, nor does she display a snippet of wisdom from him, either in words or actions. He’s a selfish tyrant. He may have sexual magnetism – he’s the type of sensuous male who claims women, and they duly succumb. Louise and Regi, who are dominated by Leo, come across as fools (albeit pitiable ones). The title of the book is misleading – there’s no love or beauty, nor is there a search for it. What you’ll find is an abundance of spite.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Anita Loos
This book’s enormous success is deserved. It’s funny, fast-moving, and the voice of Lorelei Lee is distinctive. Loos hit on the right character, the right format (Lorelei’s diary), the right plot (almost none) and – most important – the right tone: innocence. Innocent? Lorelei? If you want to get serious, she’s an amoral gold digger; but who wants to get serious? Loos served up a bit of frothy entertainment. There’s a photo of her when she wrote the book (she’s very pretty, though her expression is challenging). Her introduction to this 1973 edition was done when she was eighty; she looks back at a book written fifty years ago. She’s still smart, funny, lively. Or she was; as I write this, Anita Loos is no longer with us. But Lorelei is.

2010-07-13T12:29:00.000-07:00

The Tomorrow-Tamer - Margaret Laurence
These stories take place in Africa. In some the main character is British, in others African; in all the two cultures interact. But Laurence is a writer of fiction – a very good one – so we experience this troubled interaction through people and the situations they’re in. She presents two very different ways of seeing the world with the non-judgmental attitude of an anthropologist - one way is not right, the other wrong. Laurence is a Canadian, white, but the white characters are no more fully-realized than the black ones. She understands both, she enters the sensibilities of both. She lived for many years in Somalia and Ghana. One can live in a place and not understand it; Laurence understood. But in using words like “anthropologist” and “culture” I may have given a false impression. Human feelings are at the core of every story. My favorite is “The Perfumed Sea,” about the love between two most unusual characters.

Akenfield - Ronald Blythe
Blythe was a novelist who wrote a sociological study of a small farming village in England, circa the late 1960's. He gives us the words of fifty residents; that’s what the book is, people talking. I’m sure the phrasing in the monologues was altered somewhat, though the minds that emerge are those of distinct individuals. We have insight into a variety of personalities, we get various (and varied) world views. A farm-worker, a wheelwright, a schoolmaster, a blacksmith, a thatcher, a magistrate, a sheep farmer – these are some who come forward to tell their stories. In the older folks there’s a remarkable depth of knowledge about their craft (all the jobs involving manual labor are far more complex than I had imagined); also, they have intense pride in their skills. In the young, growing up in a time of mechanization, those qualities – depth of knowledge and pride – are disappearing. I mentioned that Blythe was a novelist; only a novelist could have written a sociological study that captures the complexity and scope of life. Life in its two forms – that of the community and that of each of the fifty individuals. He does so in an absorbing and unobtrusive way. But, like so many skilled craftsmen, writers of his caliber are disappearing. It’s sad to think of that; but every bit as sad to think that there’s no one to whom I can give this book – no one is interested in Akenfield or Akenfield. So I’ll close (in resignation) with the last words from the last person to speak – the gravedigger: “I want to be cremated and my ashes thrown in the air. Straight from the flame to the wind, and let that be that.” *

Apartment in Athens - Glenway Wescott
Written in 1945, this is anti-Nazi propaganda. Which is no criticism; we need propaganda in time of war. My gut reaction shows how well Wescott succeeded: I hated Kalter, the German who comes to live with a Greek family and who confiscates (and destroys) their lives. But the book is more than propaganda. It’s primarily an exploration of the thoughts and emotions of the four member of the Helianos family, particularly the husband and wife. In many ways the marriage has been rocky; the couple are mismatched. Partly due to the stress of their German visitor, they form a deep bond. Who writes about lovers approaching old age, long-married, aware of the faults of the other, no longer physically attractive, no longer feeling sexual passion? Mr. and Mrs. Helianos are not heroic in a conventional sense, but Wescott has written a book of heroism. What triumphs is simple love. *

2010-07-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Odd Women - George Gissing
Gissing’s “odd women” are the unmarried ones. What’s their plight in Victorian England? And what’s the plight of women who marry only to escape spinsterhood? Written in 1893, by a man, this is a feminist novel. I don’t think any modern feminist can fault him – unless they want simplistic black and white scenarios. The cast of characters is large and varied; some people act badly, but even the deeply flawed are comprehensible. The prose has a straightforward clarity; it plods along at a comfortable pace. What matters with Gissing is the quality of his mind; he was a complex thinker who went deep into a subject. This quality is evident in how he was able to surprise me. On important occasions I expected something to happen, but it didn’t happen the way I had foreseen. This was no trick; what does happen is exactly what would happen; I was (shame on me) expecting the formulaic version. Gissing wrote at the close of the Victorian period, and he questions the still-prevailing values of that time; what’s remamarkable is how his honesty and incisiveness make him relevant today. He doesn’t allow his plot or characters to wander far from the subject he’s tackling, so he’s an issue-oriented author. As for the issue of concern here – the relationship between the sexes – he sees it as inherently fraught with difficulties.

The Sea of Grass - Conrad Richter
This would be a long short story if you took away the repitition and the overly-abundant adjectives. What would the story be about? A cattle baron – the imperious Colonel – holding sway over his empire of grass (about to be invaded by hordes of nesters). His marriage to the beautiful and fascinating Lutie. Both characters are depicted as larger than life; Richter is trying for a legendary, elegiac quality. He fails. To be true to its subject, this novel should have been lean and mean and much less adoring of the Colonel and Lutie. They don’t deserve adoration. Lutie abandons her husband and three small children (one fathered by a man other than her husband), but she’s still a “lady.” The Colonel is portrayed as tremendously imposing, but he’s unable to impose his will in any instance. These two are treated with hushed awe by the narrator, Hal, a nephew of the Colonel. But Hal, for all his wordiness, doesn’t get into the gritty matters I wanted to know about: the relationship between the Colonel and Lutie, the dynamics of the infidelity, Lutie’s whereabouts for twenty years. One could say that Hal wasn’t privy to these intimate matters. True – but then why use him as the narrator? Because the result is a novel about a cattle empire that has no beef in it.

The Red Box - Rex Stout
Another entertaining mystery. Archie played a minor role, and I missed his liveliness. Also, this time out the plot was too complex for me to unravel its many intricacies. But I figured out some, and that made me feel good; when Nero Wolfe connected the dots I didn’t feel cheated (I’m not as smart as he is and I know it). A note of interest: in the three Wolfe mysteries I’ve read all the murderers commit suicide; in two cases Wolfe provides him/her with the means to do so, and in the other he knows that the man intends to kill himself and does nothing to stop him. Dr. Kevorkian would approve.

2010-07-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

The Famished Road - Ben Okri
At the halfway point I thought I might be reading a great novel. At the end I thought I had read a very good one. Why the drop-off? I think Okri worked entirely from instinct and inspiration. He was intoxicated by these impulses; he didn’t discipline them but let them take him where they would (even when they led him into a stagnant swamp). He repeated himself, he prolonged scenes beyond their effectiveness; he wasn’t clear about the role his larger-than-life characters play, so they flounder at times. Still, I stayed involved throughout. What’s strongest is the human aspect – the feelings the three members of the family have for one another (the role of spirits, therefore, takes too large a role for my taste). Okri created a teeming world, a look at Africa in magic realism terms. What the book retains to the end is a crude and inchoate power. *

Sagarana - Guimaraes Rosa (Portuguese)
Rosa takes us to the fecund world of the Brazilian backlands and the larger-than-life characters who inhabit it. His prose is like an exotic plant growing wild. The stories, too, are allowed to grow wild. As a result they lack focus; this is most evident in the weak endings, which simply trail off. Only “Duel” has impact; it holds the line it sets out on, with the conclusion being the deadly outcome of the beginning. I wouldn’t want Rosa to harness his prodigious talent, only rein it in a bit.

The Native - David Plante
The complex emotions in this book are conveyed in a smooth prose that’s economical yet atmospheric. Plante concentrates on his characters’ dark sides; some cope with it, some welcome it, some resist it, some resign themselves to it. Do I understand this darkness? Intuitively I felt what Plante was getting at. He creates four memorable people interacting. I believed in them, I cared about them. Crucial scenes have impact. This is a solid, substantial work artfully compressed into a novella. *

2010-05-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

Dusty Answer - Rosamond Lehmann
I was overwhelmed by the deluge of emotions pouring out of the main character. So many words about so many complex and shifting states of mind! This hypersensitive teenage girl is neighbor to an assembly of young people. Older than her, they exert a strong influence; they strike her as extraordinarily beautiful, or tortured, or mysterious – or something else dramatic. When Judith goes to college she meets an extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating female student, and they’re immediately attracted to each other. Judith keeps ties with the neighbors, one of whom is the enigmatic and elusive Rodney. Though Judith loves Jennifer, she also loves Rodney, who’s a homosexual. And so it goes. I read this book (or, rather, I read halfway through it) because I liked Lehmann’s The Ballad and the Source so much. But Dusty Answer was the author’s first novel, written when she was 26. Lehmann wrote Ballad when she was 43. Ballad deals in extremes too, but it had discipline and was grounded on the periphery of real life. No doubt the success of Dusty Answer was due, in large part, to its taboo subject matter. But it’s an immature and emotionally chaotic book, one that over-romanticizes the world.

Casanova’s Homecoming - Arthur Schnitzler (German)
Casanova at age 53 is a shabby remnant of the handsome and dashing seducer of women. His fame is remembered only by those of his own age. Though full of self-delusion, Casanova also reluctantly recognizes that, with the passing of his youth, he’s facing dissolution in all its forms. This short novel focuses on his efforts to possess a young woman who feels nothing but contempt and disgust for him. Casanova gets his wish, but it’s through paying money to her lover; disguised as that young man, he spends the night with Marcolina. To me, this is a preposterous plot device. Yet Schnitzler uses it as a means to an end. Throughout the book Casanova is fleetingly visited by images that have the mystery and weight of symbols; during his night with Marcolina he’s submerged completely in an ominous dream world. What this all means, I can’t say, but the novel gives off a disturbing sense of moral putrefaction.

Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
These stories (with one notable exception) are mere fluff. Fitzgerald can be partially excused for their lack of substance by the fact that he was in his mid-twenties when he wrote them (only his early work appears in this collection). What’s perplexing is that he was paid top dollar for these inanities; his popularity doesn’t reflect favorably on the reading public of the time (the Roaring Twenties). The introduction, by an academic, is the funniest thing in the book; in his lavish praise the word “wit” appears a number of time. Now that’s funny. Fitzgerald shows no sense of humor, no intellectual sharpness; the mind that concocted these stories was a juvenile and frivolous one. Okay, the exception – “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is quite good. I read only half the stories; after struggling through five pages of the incredibly stupid “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” I refused to go on. Maybe there was something else as good as “Bernice,” but I had no stomach to pursue it.

2010-04-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

All the Names - Jose Saramago (Portuguese)
Despite the title, all but one of the characters in this novel are nameless. The protagonist is Senhor Jose – no last name. The woman he searches for is “the unknown woman.” There’s “the lady in the ground-floor apartment.” Saramago takes the nameless of the world as his subject. Senhor Jose doesn’t have any heroic dimensions; but anybody, explored in depth, becomes significant. The plot – a sort of metaphysical mystery – is convoluted (and inconclusive in any concrete sense). Saramago has an innovative style, dense and intricate. At times I felt lost. But throughout the book the same warning is reiterated: when you venture into dark places you must take with you Ariadne’s shining thread. I did find myself emerging, with a feeling of relief, from areas of morass and back into a world I could comprehend. Though what I comprehended often had a dreamlike aura (such as the graveyard scene, with the shepherd and his silent dog). This novel, written by a 75-year-old man, exists on a borderland between life and death, and death is the dark place no shining thread can lead one back from.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors - Roddy Doyle
This was painful to read. Which speaks to how effective Doyle is in letting Paula tell her life’s story. She emerges as a flesh and blood character – somebody I cared about. It isn’t until page 162 that we’re given more than glimpses of what she went through. The last 60 pages are filled with graphic descriptions of the horrific physical and emotional assault inflicted on Paula – again and again and again – by her husband, Charlo. I was left with a number of disturbing questions, and one bleak conclusion. Why did Paula marry a man who was notorious for being violent and dangerous? When the beatings began (shortly after their marriage, during her first pregnancy), why didn’t she leave Charlo? Why did she endure the abuse for seventeen years? Why did she allow her children to grow up in a house filled with brutality, pain, fear? Why didn’t someone intervene and help her? Was everyone – family, friends, neighbors – blind? The evidence of what was being done to her was on her face. How could the doctors and nurses in the ER, to which Paula was constantly being taken, not have known what was happening? She wanted desperately for one of them to take her aside (away from the lurking, solicitous presence of Charlo) and ask, “How did you really get these injuries, Mrs. Spencer?” No one did. Why? Was Dublin in the 1980's in the Dark Ages? Maybe these questions have answers, ones I can’t comprehend (or accept). But, at any rate, here’s my bleak conclusion. Paula is telling the story after Charlo is dead; she’s carrying on with a difficult life. She can be upbeat, hopeful. But there’s no hope for her. She’s too damaged emotionally. She has a severe drinking problem, one she’s trying to control. She’ll lose the battle. This is a sad and upsetting novel. The burden of it won’t easily be lifted, so reader beware.

Roughing It - Mark Twain
It’s hard to describe what this book is, because it’s so many things. Twain set out for the western territories in 1861, when he was in his twenties. In Roughing It he relates what he does and sees in the next seven years. The book is quite long and contains a wealth of material that is of anthropological and historical interest. I believe in the truth of Twain’s observations and conclusions; the book reveals the falsity of much that is commonly believed about the Wild West. For example, there are no quick-draw encounters on the main street between the Good Guy and the Bad Guy. The bad guy kills by ambush, shoots men in the back. Yet the populace holds these cold-blooded thieves and murderers in high esteem. We have Twain the moralist looking at a lawless society and finding it deplorable. But the anger directed at various injustices is often delivered with humor. In his view of human nature Twain is a cynic along the lines of Voltaire, though he’s thoroughly American – his voice is the colorful, raw, earthy voice of our new country. As for that humor, never have I read anything by him where it was so brilliantly on display; it sometimes skewers but is often simple, innocent fun. It can be found in a unique use (or misuse) of a word, or in a long account in the vernacular (Jim Blaine’s story about his grandfather’s ram is a masterpiece). An irony is that the book is classified as an autobiography; that’s one of the things it is not. Throughout his adventures (or, more often, misadventures) Twain discloses almost no intimate feelings. But I respect his reticence. I found him a thoroughly entertaining companion.

2010-03-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

Some Buried Caesar - Rex Stout
Another excellent Nero Wolfe mystery. The breezy and amusing Archie is more interesting than the one-dimensional Wolfe, and it was wise of Stout to have him as the first person narrator. Unlike many mysteries, no information is withheld from the reader and no improbable plot twists pop up at the end. Stout plays fair by providing us with the clues we need to solve the crime. The writing has a light, casual touch; Stout didn’t labor over these books, but Archie wouldn’t either. The rustic setting works nicely, the varied cast of characters comes to life. Stout is especially good in his portrayals of women (Lily Rowan is a treat, sexy and fun). Though dealing with murder and sex, Stout avoids gore and sleaziness. What we get from the Nero Wolfe mysteries is sheer enjoyment. Of what worth is sheer enjoyment? Must a novel aspire to Greatness to be taken seriously? I don’t believe so. If it succeeds in what it sets out to do, it’s a success. If it fails, it’s a failure. Rex Stout – like Ian Fleming – succeeded to a high degree in what he attempted. Sometimes we simply need to be entertained.

Double Indemnity - James M. Cain
This was Cain’s second novel. Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of its virtues is sparseness (was Cain our first minimalist?). There are no long descriptions of people and places. And, really, do detailed descriptions matter to a reader? Don’t we simply forget them? Cain uses dialogue to move his plots along; emotions are conveyed with the fewest words possible. These two novels offer lessons in how to engage and hold a reader’s attention. Postman is better by far; it’s more visceral, the plot more efficient, the feelings of the two characters more convincing. In Indemnity I didn’t understand what motivated the narrator to embark on the murder scheme; I didn’t believe in his pure love for the daughter; the plot twists at the end were improbable. As for the last chapter – it goes beyond the unexpected into the truly weird; I wanted to reject it but found that the madness of the situation – in which Cain posits a fatal bond between the damned – had a perverse power.

The Defense - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
I previously wrote that “plot obfuscation and stylistic ornamentation are mostly just clutter.” I was thinking of Nabokov when I included the qualifier “mostly.” His plot twists are intriguing, his ornamentation is brilliant; they enrich his work. But he has to enrich a discernible plot and comprehensible characters. The Defense was a tricky undertaking, and that’s because Nabokov’s protagonist, who we first meet as a boy, is severely autistic (this was written in 1930, when autism was not widely recognized, yet all the symptoms are present in Luzhin). How far can you go in exploring the inner life of such a person? Luzhin is a chess genius; but chess, for him, leads to obsession and madness. The novel shifts away from the black and white squares and delves into Luzhin’s relationship with a young woman. This woman is endowed (or burdened) with a hyper-compassionate nature. She initially displays a lighthearted interest in this highly unusual man, but she inspires in him a sudden and consuming blind devotion. It’s not blind in its completeness, but in its incomprehension; Luzhin cannot understand or even relate to another person. She, in turn, cannot leave someone so in need of her. The ending, in which madness prevails with a vengeance, flounders badly. This supports my belief that Nabokov didn’t know what to do with his peculiar character. Not surprisingly, ornamentation and obfuscation are this novel’s main features. They’re good, but they’re not enough.

Confessions of an Advertising Man - David Ogilvy
This is a book about business. It’s practical, thorough, well-organized, honest and intelligent. Though Ogilvy values quality work, his primary goal is the making of money – both for the companies he represents and for him personally. He doesn’t shy away from depicting the dog-eat-dog ruthlessness of the world he operates in. Ogilvy is a taskmaster. He expects the people he employs to produce; if not, out they go. There’s a photograph of him on the cover; his eyes are cold and hard. Young people considering a career in business should contemplate that gimlet gaze. Ogilvy has a clear, concise, lively style, as would be expected of a good copywriter. He reveals, with surprising frankness, how advertisers go about persuading the public (or, put more bluntly, how they manipulate us); this is instructive – and cautionary. The book was written in 1963, and Ogilvy is prescient when he looks to the future. He considers the over-saturation of ads on TV to be objectionable and suggests government regulation. He sees danger in the unrestrained promotion of materialistic goods and values. He also believes that advertising should not be used in political campaigns. He would no doubt be appalled at the state of affairs today.

2010-03-10T11:24:00.000-08:00

Fools of Fortune - William Trevor
The atrocity that lies at the core of this novel is handled with skill. Trevor describes little of the event – the reader is initially not clear as to what happened – but slowly the facts emerge. More than facts, the human implications grow over time (especially in the way the mother is affected). An act of such destructiveness will never loosen its grip on the victims – it has a life of its own. Trevor is very successful with the character of Willie, in a first person narration that makes up the bulk of the book and covers Willie’s life from boy to young man. The novel is initially confusing (a common feature of Trevor’s work – one that may have discouraged many readers). Most confusing for me was that Willie addresses what he’s writing to a “you,” but it isn’t until far into the novel that we know who “you” is. When she meant something to me I wanted to reread the sections where Willie talks directly to Marianne, but that would mean searching back through the pages. Also, it turns out that we’re reading a letter that was never sent, written by an old man. The design of the plot is unwieldy. After the Willie section Marianne takes over the first person narration. Maybe, in trying to make the voice of a young girl contrast with Willie’s, Trevor overcompensates; she comes across as a bit soppy. Next he presents their child, Imelda, in the third person. Imelda’s reconstructing the past in her imagination, using scraps of information, isn’t convincing; nor is her madness; nor is Willie’s lengthy exile; nor is the idyllic coming together of the lovers in old age. The book sags disappointingly. I think Trevor felt strongly about this material, and at the end he tried to force his feelings on the reader. That never works.

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness - Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)
This book consists of four long stories. I couldn’t read more than two pages of the first – it was experimental, very weird, and I hadn’t the energy or inclination to struggle through it. “Prize Stock” was readable and engrossing (and provocative in its depiction of the black airman as an animal – he’s the “prize stock”). On display are some characteristics of Oe’s writing: the story is raw, gross, primal; he drives emotions home, hammers at the reader. He’s an over-the-top author, pitched almost to the point of hysteria (which is what many of his characters feel). I find it hard to go all the way with Oe; my reaction often is that things don’t warrant the stridency. His work is autobiographical, and two stories concern the event that came to dominate his life: the birth of his retarded son. (Call the boy autistic if you wish, but Oe uses much more blunt and cruel terms than “retarded.”) They too were readable and interesting, but their bizarre premises and awkward plotting make them oddities. I think I’ve read Oe’s masterpiece – A Personal Matter – and I should give up on him.

The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence
The Stone Angel fulfills the highest purpose of fiction. The clarity of the writing reinforces my belief that plot obfuscation and stylistic ornamentation are mostly just clutter. Laurence presents Hagar with such honesty and in such depth that she became someone I was emotionally involved with. The novel is framed so that we see an entire life unfold from the perspective of old age (Hagar is ninety). Her determination to be independent – something that she hung to willfully since she was a young girl – is eroded by infirmities; this she cannot abide. Old age is a loss of dignity, a loss of control, a disintegration of body and mind. The petty forms these losses take are shown to be of great importance. How we wish to hold onto even our simplest powers! Hagar’s struggle has a nobility; that she loses this struggle is inevitable, but she fights to her last moment. And what of the life behind her? Hagar probably never said, to anyone,“I love you.” Not to her father, her husband, her sons. Much that she did and said was hurtful, critical, harsh. Her life is filled with missteps, lost opportunities, disappointments, and she’s to blame. But I could understand her; in her father she had a bad role model, and we’re locked into a way of responding. During her final weeks she tries to express feelings of compassion (particularly to her beleaguered son), but her attempts are faltering, given grudgingly. She cannot do more, and that’s the tragedy of her life. *

2010-02-10T13:51:00.000-08:00

Mourning Becomes Electra - Eugene O’Neill
I don’t read many plays, partly because I believe they’re meant to be seen and heard. But I watched the DVD of a 1960 TV production of The Iceman Cometh (all three and a half hours) and was so impressed that I wanted more of O’Neill. His view of the human condition is dark, even oppressive. People do terrible things for which they’re haunted by guilt. It’s a guilt so remorseless that one can’t live with it. O’Neill is an engrossing writer; he entertains. Even when he frames a play as a Greek tragedy, as he does in Mourning, his characters and situations are understandable and relevant. The play has its melodramatic moments, which make it somewhat dated. Also, O’Neill throws too much into the stew pot; characters have rapidly shifting emotions and their motivations aren’t always plausible. Still, the passion of the writing prevails. O’Neill had a deeply-held vision of life and from that comes the power of his work.

The Poorhouse Fair - John Updike
This was Updike’s first novel, and I wish he had an editor who had say, Look, John, this could be good if you’d flesh out the characters and situations in your mind more fully – it’s a spindly construction, this book, if you take away the poetry – which you should do. Write your poetry, but don’t, please, write poetic novels. I’m talking about this sort of thing: “Near the eclipsed sun a cirrus cloud like a twisted handkerchief was dyed chartreuse; the phenomenon seemed little less eerie for being explicable, as iridescence.” You indulge in precious prose constantly, you constantly have characters think too deeply. It makes for slow going, John, and I couldn’t read more than half of this. Don’t try to impress the reader with your stylistic skills, your deep insights into the human heart, your sensitivity. Make your writing solid, grounded. You’re talented – I can see that most clearly in your dialogue, where people are allowed to talk naturally. But you’re on the wrong path here. . . . (And so on.) Updike obviously was never told these things, so off he went on his career, and it wasn’t until the last two Rabbit books that he took my imaginary editor’s advice and produced a pair of great novels.

Three Tales - Gustave Flaubert (French)
“A Simple Heart” is simply wonderful (the parrot at the end is a great touch), but the other two tales are lifeless exercises – handy-work, I suppose, for an uninspired writer. They’re flat and boring (“Herodias” is impenetrably confusing) and not worth discussing. The story of Felicite, however, seems heartfelt. Flaubert, a complex man, looks at the life of a simple soul, an uneducated servant, and sees worth in it. Maybe happiness comes from simplicity: accepting things as they are and finding purpose in a life full of daily tasks; believing in one’s religion. No questioning, no craving. Flaubert tells Felicite’s life story without embellishment; we get only her thoughts and feelings and actions. I don’t usually quote authors on their work, but here I’ll make an exception. In a letter Flaubert gave a synopsis of “A Simple Heart,” then closed by writing, of this tender story, “I am tender-hearted myself.” And then he added: “Now, surely, no one will accuse me of being inhuman any more. . . .”

2010-01-22T11:50:00.000-08:00

Passing On - Penelope Lively
Another bad parent. The opening scene is the mother’s funeral; the novel concerns her two children, both in late middle age, who stayed with her for most of their lives. This mother, Dorothy, is an evil person – if trying to destroy your children by undermining any confidence and positive self-image is evil. She largely succeeds. The son, Edward is incapable of coping with life. Helen, for whom coping is an ingrained reflex, is a 52-year-old spinster (which is what Dorothy wanted her to be; no young romance for Helen!). Helen is intelligent, sensitive, perceptive. Why did she stay? She could have done what a third child, Louise, did: fought her mother tooth and nail and flown the coop as soon as possible. Helen realizes that she became reconciled to the role of mediator. Both Helen and Edward, by not being strong-willed, by believing in their inadequacies, let their mother turn them into timid, tentative people. With Dorothy suddenly absent the brother and sister are beset by longings for what they never had – mostly sexual love. Neither finds this kind of fulfillment. Edward, a homosexual, makes a suicide attempt after impulsively groping a boy. Helen gives up on a glib widower who will never reciprocate her feelings. At the end the two sit together in the home so long dominated by the virulent presence of Dorothy. What next? “They saw that there is nothing to be done, but that something can be retrieved.” I didn’t see anything to be retrieved. Both will simply accept life as it is for them, trudge along to their deaths as best they can. The novel is sad; I cared for Helen (Edward is hard to relate to, being near-catatonic). The only flaw is that, though Lively had something to say, she gives substance to this short book with a lot of padding. She lets the same thoughts run on too long (too much about the widower) and introduces plot elements that are contrived (Louise’s problem son moving into their house, and his transformation into a good kid, is the most glaring example). Still, this is a fine work that, once again, illustrates a fact: a parent can be intentionally destructive to their child. In Dorothy’s case, how should her children spell Mother? “ ‘M’ is for the many ways you hurt me . . .”

The Kingdom of the World - Alejo Carpentier (Spanish)
A snake of a book. It slithers here and there with power and ornate beauty. It’s one of the deadly species, as befits a story about the brutal history of Haiti. Not that the author intended to give a coherent account of events. Instead he presents the nature of tyranny: the poor are mistreated by all who dominate them, be they white, black or mulatto. The main character, Ti Noel, is a young slave in the beginning (sometime in the mid 1700's). To enter the mind of a boy who is one generation removed from Africa is to go into a sensibility with unshakable mystical beliefs. The reader is placed in the position of accepting that way of seeing things – which is difficult. But we are not only in Ti Noel’s mind; the point of view shifts unpredictably from one person to another. Events begin, then are dropped; we start a chapter to find that things are a certain way but aren’t told how that came to be like that; we’re in Cuba, we’re in Italy. At the end Ti Noel is a mad old man who escapes into a kingdom of the imagination; he remains inexplicable. Carpentier has not tried to write a novel that is appealing; there’s an intentional lack of human warmth. But he does succeed in evoking a stony, forbidding and unfathomable world.

The History of Henry Esmond - William Makepeace Thackeray
I was mildly enjoying this despite the use of so much French and Latin (left untranslated for ignorant me) and the fact that it’s a historical novel written in the 1850's (I had no knowledge of the personages and events that form the background action). But Thackeray has a pleasing style, and I liked Henry – as a boy. However, the boy didn’t develop into a complex, interesting man. Also, the author was serving up standard Victorian fare. Extreme emotions abound: a woman cannot simply be beautiful, she must be more perfect than a goddess; eternal vows will be upheld to the death; manly tears flow copiously. And so on. Probably villains are refreshing in books of this type because they break the boring stereotypes of staunch virtue. So I quit halfway through. I was disappointed in Thackeray, who subverted Victorian values so brilliantly in Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon.

2009-12-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (French)
A brutal novel. It gives off no moral light. Emma Bovary’s adulteries are its focus because they – the transitory intoxication of the senses – are the tawdry focus of her life. But unfaithfulness is merely one manifestation of her corrupt nature. She lies, she manipulates; her profligacy drags her husband and daughter into poverty. As for that daughter, Berthe – Emma doesn’t love her, can hardly tolerate the child’s presence. The novel is full of stifling dissatisfaction, cynicism, disillusionment, despair. The one aspect of Emma that makes her an object of pity is her suffering. She suffers, though not as a victim; and in her final imperious rejection of life there’s a heroic dimension. The characters around her are, in Flaubert’s eyes, merely humans – far from admirable. Pettiness, hypocrisy, selfishness, stupidity are on full display, and the greedy Lheureux attains the lofty status of evil. The one good character is Emma’s husband, Charles; on her deathbed she tells him “You are good,” but his goodness does not touch her; she’s making a cold statement of fact. Soon after her marriage she comes to loath him – a dull man, so mediocre. And such a dupe, ridiculously easy to deceive. Partly he’s a dupe because he totally misconstrues Emma’s true nature; in this way he’s like her, with her romantic and unattainable dreams of glamour and romance (which curdle into bitterness and resentment). At the end of the book Flaubert seems to revel in crushing Emma with hammer blow after hammer blow. Not only is she punished; the innocent suffer too. Charles’ cherished memories of Emma are shattered when he finds love letters from Rodolphe and Leon. Berthe – after her father’s death and in the wake of the financial ruin brought on by her mother – is sent to work in a cotton mill. There’s a perversity in Flaubert’s destructiveness. He wrote, famously, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Could Emma embody all the pernicious and corrupt qualities he found in himself? And could his destruction of her be directed, masochistically, upon himself? At any rate, the novel he created is a work of art. It gives off no moral light, but we’re given a vision of life, and it smoulders. *

Fer-de-Lance - Rex Stout
The narrator of this mystery is Archie Goodwin, and he carries the reader along in his jaunty way. We get a good portrayal of the redoubtable and massively eccentric Nero Wolfe, mainly through the words he speaks. Wolfe calls himself a genius, and I wouldn’t dispute that. He doesn’t waste words; what he says consistently cuts to the heart of a matter. Wolfe is a private detective; he uses his brilliant mind to solve crimes. The novel is no more than what it’s intended to be: a whodunit. This isn’t a genre that has much appeal for me; often I’m disappointed in the denouement. Here, too, I was pleasantly surprised. I thought I knew who the murderer was far before the end of the book (and I was right). The twist is how justice – Nero Wolfe’s form of justice, for he orchestrates it – is carried out. The Genius takes the role of God. I believe the punishment he doles out is fitting; but, as Archie points out, it also conveniently absolves the reclusive Wolfe from the odious task of leaving his apartment. “Indeed,” murmurs Wolfe.

Leah, New Hampshire - Thomas Williams
I read most of the stories in this collection many years ago, and three made a lasting impression: “Goose Pond,” “The Buck in Trotevale’s” and “Paranoia.” The last one is a stringing together of incidents that are menacing and violent; it’s strong stuff. There’s a lot of killing in this book, in the form of hunting and fishing. These are not outdoorsy tales. The killing of an animal is exactly that – a killing – yet Williams is drawn to kill, and though it gives him pleasure he also feels regret and revulsion. I’m placing Williams as the protagonist in these stories; he’s clearly an autobiographical writer. Besides the pervasive violence, there’s difficulty in understanding and dealing with women; though he needs them, they often seem dangerous and domineering. Of the six stories that were new to me, one addressed the woman issue, and it does so memorably. In “Voices” a man visits his dying mother in a nursing home; while there he makes phone calls home to his wife. Both women are problematic for him; but it all began, he realizes, with his mother, a willful, selfish, outrageous woman. What was the result of his upbringing? He sees himself as a man without courage. The story succeeds in its understated approach. Too often Williams succumbs to a pitfall of autobiographical fiction: he overdramatizes himself.

2009-12-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

Serenade - James M. Cain
A mess. Cain even changes the terms he establishes with the reader. The story begins in Mexico; a typical Cain tough guy on the skids gets involved with a prostitute with a plan. Next thing we know the tough guy turns out to be a world famous opera star; he regains his voice and the book becomes mainly about classical music, with the prostitute relegated to the background. Next thing we know – and this is the most startling aspect for a Cain novel – the tough guy turns out to have a homosexual side. Things get melodramatic, even ridiculous (the prostitute reemerges with a vengeance). So why did I read to the end? Cain’s writing has energy and conviction; he entertains. And it’s fascinating to watch an author throw the conventions of storytelling out the window of a speeding car.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips - James Hilton
Sometimes an author’s ambitions are modest, but he executes his plan perfectly. This is a small novel – small in size, small in subject (the life of a British schoolmaster). I had little interest in reading it, but it won me over, as it did millions of others. Hilton was wise in not elevating Mr. Chipping above his rightful place; the only thing to be cherished about him is his steadfastness (and is this not a highly-valued British trait?). Hilton’s skill is most evident in his handling of Chips’ short marriage (his wife and baby die in childbirth). Kathie is sketched in, but she comes alive; I felt her vibrancy. This is a sentimental novel, but throughout Hilton avoids the maudlin. What he gives us is a quiet but moving account of a quiet life. And how often – if it’s so easy to do – is a reader moved? A last point of interest: Chips is never an object of pity; he is, despite the loss of Kathie, despite the unremarkable march of his days, a happy man.

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
This book has many strengths, but they’re mostly found in its first third, where the prose is inventive and engrossing and the characters – Desdemona and Lefty – appealing. There are flaws even in this section: Eugenides doesn’t satisfactorily resolve dilemmas he creates (such as the too-easy escape from a burning Smyrna); some of the plot twists are far-fetched, scenes run too long. Still, the strengths held up in the second third of the book, about the young Callie – another appealing character. I also liked the social history of Detroit that was woven into the narrative. But when Callie turns fourteen sex becomes the issue. In her relationship with the Obscure Object the flaws became fissures, then widened into cracks. With Cal on the run the novel crumbled. The plot twists turned preposterous, the prose overwrought and ragged. All credibility was lost. Possibly the issue Eugenides tackled – hermaphroditism – was one he was unable to deal with. Despite the clinical research he provides, he’s evasive. I never found out what it’s like to be a hermaphrodite (how do the male and female sexual organs coexist and function?). I’m not asking for sensationalism – just honesty. The much-belabored emotional quandary of Callie/Cal seemed forced and false. Nor did I believe in the 41-year-old Cal (who narrates the story) and his budding romance. Too bad – because Eugenides has talent.

2009-11-23T12:18:00.000-08:00

The Cunning of History - Richard L. Rubenstein
Rubenstein presents the Holocaust in a new light. He doesn’t consider it an aberrant outburst of rabid hatred. Rather, it grew out of already developed trends in western civilization. The titles of two chapters are “Bureaucratic Domination” and “The Modernization of Slavery”; both bureaucracies and slavery have long been with us. A bureaucracy is unfeeling and efficient. The slavery introduced at Auschwitz was, due to the almost inexhaustible supply of labor, a work-to-the-death affair. Before these two elements could become operative, the victims had to be made non-citizens; Rubenstein stresses that the Nazis violated no laws, for the victims had no legal rights. There’s much in this book that’s thought-provoking and informative (notably, the death camps were used as factories by major German firms, which shows the inherent inhumaneness of capitalism). Rubenstein is pessimistic about man and his future. We want to believe that “It can’t happen here.” But if it happened elsewhere, he argues, why are we immune, given the right pressures and a leader and a population willing to carry out, with bureaucratic efficiency, its own Final Solution?

A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro
This is Ishiguro’s first novel. Despite its smooth prose and interesting characters, it’s misconceived. An author has to play fair with the reader. Ishiguro gives us misleading information, he omits crucial facts that would detract from his purpose. At the end, when the elements need a believable resolution, all that emerges is a false narrator. The novel was a wild-goose chase. False narrators can be used effectively, but the reader must at least have a growing suspicion of what’s going on – and why. Otherwise it’s not the narrator who’s being untruthful, but the author.

Anna of the Five Towns - Arnold Bennett
Anna is intelligent and has a will of her own, but she cannot stand up to more forceful personalities – primarily her father. He’s more than a frightening study of a miser; his selfishness extends beyond the want of wealth. He’s emotionally tight-fisted. He doesn’t love Anna, he’s never felt love for anybody and never will, nor will he feel the absence of love in his life. In his portrayal of this man Bennett showed how well he understood the power of selfishness. As the plot evolves Anna tries to let her compassionate nature prevail, but she’s drawn into being part of someone’s destruction. Another force working on her is her future husband; he’s a decent enough man, but his commanding nature and self-assurance make him vaguely akin to her father. Though under the sway of dominant characters, Anna is emotionally drawn to the weak and helpless. Here lies the only misstep Bennett makes: the closing revelation that Anna loved the pitiable Willie doesn’t ring true. Fittingly, this story of destruction takes place in an industrial landscape devastated by man’s devouring pursuit of money.

2009-10-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

A Mirror for Witches - Esther Forbes
This is a case study of a witch. Doll Bilby believes, as did people of her time (the 17th century), in witches. Her choice to side with the forces of evil evolves, in large part, because she’s an outsider, lonely and abused; she turns to a fantasy world for her needs. The narrator of Doll’s tale isn’t sympathetic to her; the point of view is condemnatory. Yet we see how faulty the narrator’s words are; mostly we see this person’s ignorance and cruelty. Doll, the witch, is kinder and more compassionate than the good Christians who want her to burn. Forbes succeeds in capturing the mind set of another time. Yet it wasn’t that long ago when this ignorance and cruelty reigned; I wonder what forms those human tendencies take now.

The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor
Taylor’s stories are long and leisurely. He often constructs his plots in an unusual way; in this sense he’s an innovative writer. The problem with eight of the twenty-one stories is that they amount to a lot of words about nothing much; this collection’s wide variance in quality is entirely due to subject matter, not craftsmanship. Why Taylor so often chose a weak basis for a story, I can’t fathom. But when he got subjects worthy of his skills – something with substance, complexity, depth – the results rank with the best in American fiction: “A Spinster’s Tale,” “Their Losses,” “A Wife of Nashville,” and “Miss Lenora When Last Seen.” Only “Miss Lenora” was humorous. Taylor wasn’t a writer of tragedies, but he knew that life mostly doesn’t work out as we would have wished.

The Towers of Trebizond - Rose Macaulay
Matters involving the Middle East and religion play a large role in this novel. Much remained obscure to me. Still, I read on. I discovered that the region around the Black Sea has an amazingly rich culture and history. The narrator, Amy, is a useful guide, rather noncommital and bland (she divulges little about herself – the main thing being that, back in England, she’s having an adulterous affair). She’s tagging along with her Aunt Dot and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Aunt Dot rides a white camel everywhere, Father Pigg is consumed by the superiority of the Anglican Church. No character is developed in depth. I accepted the book as eccentric and mildly comic. However, the author botched the ending. Amy adopts a chimp and takes it back to England, where she trains it to be as human as possible; I thought this was pushing the oddity angle too far. Then Amy, while driving with her lover, Vere, has a fit of impulsive anger at the traffic (she’s never shown anger or an impulsive nature anywhere else in the book) and causes an accident that kills Vere. Dark brooding follows. For the mood to turn so serious doesn’t work – not when all that preceded it had been superficial.

The Donkey Inside - Ludwig Bemelmans
I was hoping for another Hotel Splendide. In that book Bemelmans concentrated on people, both patrons of the hotel and the staff of the restaurant. But in this one – a travelogue about Equador – he mostly gives us descriptions of the landscape and the architecture. He does it well, but I don’t care much about those things. People are largely absent, and when they appear they don’t ring true. In an Author’s Note at the end (not that I read to the end – I stopped halfway through) Bemelmans reveals that the characters are composites - aspects of various people he pasted together. The book was first serialized in magazines. I hope Bemelmans made some money from this venture; I can’t figure out any other compelling reason for him to have written it. Four of his paintings are included, and they’re the only real treats.

2009-07-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

My Father and Myself - J. R. Ackerley
The problem with this book is that it doesn’t have a subject to focus on. Ackerley admits that he knew little about his father. They had an amiable but emotionally distant relationship. What intrigues Ackerley is the possibility that his father, a world-class womanizer, engaged in homosexual relationships as a young man. This can’t be proved, so the question, though raised, is never resolved. As for the “myself” part of the book, Ackerley mostly writes about his unsatisfying homosexual life. In doing so he’s unsparing in detailing his intimate faults. Is such honesty to be lauded? I guess it is. But I wound up having no sympathy or empathy for him. I didn’t want to know about his bad breathe, impotence, etc. I found the vulgarity, presented in an elegant prose, distasteful. Ackerley worked at the BBC for many years, but we have nary a word about that job; instead he tells about cruising bars to pick up sailors. As for his family, we get researched snippets about his father, and some attention is given to his brother and mother (almost nothing about his sister). He doesn’t seem to have much feeling for any of them; his prevailing attitude is one of aversion. What emerges is an unsavory, unhappy man, and I didn’t find the time I spent with J. R. to be pleasant or profitable. Notably, his one true love is a dog.

Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut
An idea was as important as character or plot for Vonnegut. This novel delves into how easy it is to express the views of a racist (just try it and you’ll see). The protagonist is a man who isn’t an anti-Semite but acts like one – and does a great job of it (during WWII). In radio broadcasts from Germany he inspires hatred for Jews. That he’s actually an agent for the USA was, for me, a false twist; it detracts from Howard’s guilt by giving him a justification for his actions. Beyond the thought-provoking idea, the book was okay. It weakens at the end; Resi arrives and brings out Vonnegut’s maudlin side (her suicide for love) and Howard’s angst is overdone.

The Marquis of O — - Heinrich von Kleist (German)
Kleist wrote these stories in the early 1800's, and he sets many in medieval times. We get romanticism, brutality, swooning, manly tears, frothing at the mouth, fanatical religiosity, the supernatural. But despite this subject matter there’s something clinical about Kleist’s writing. It has a hard, sharp edge; this acts as an antidote to the overwrought emotionality. The stories are good, but most are far too long. Length hurts the intriguing premise of “The Marquis of O — .” “Michael Kohlhaas,” in particular, would have been better if cut by a fourth – it could have been a masterpiece. It’s about a need for revenge that sweeps aside any other consideration; it becomes madness, with the exhilaration of madness.

A Modern Instance - William Dean Howells
Howells blew it. He had something good going, and then he made a false turn. I stopped reading the last fifty pages of this 400+ page novel; I didn’t care about the characters anymore. And I had cared a lot about Bartley and Marcia. They were a believable and interesting couple. They were mismatched, but theirs was a symbiotic relationship; love was one of the elements binding them. I wanted to know where their differences and dependencies would take them. But Howells turned against Bartley (even making him grotesquely fat). He gives center stage to two prigs who moralize about Right and Wrong (and find Bartley to be a despicable cad). If Howells wanted me to respect them (or care about their noble pontificating) he failed; I sided with Bartley. He was no more than a flawed human being like you and me (and Marcia). When Howells discarded Bartley and Marcia’s relationship, the novel lost its vitality and purpose. Questions arise: Howells had done an excellent job of creating these two characters, so why did he abandon them? Why did Howells hate Bartley so much?

2009-06-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

From Death to Morning - Thomas Wolfe
The opening part of this miscellany is called “The Story of a Novel” (the novel is Of Time and the River). This section can serve quite nicely as a cautionary tale for a young writer. It shows the pitfalls that come from too fecund an imagination, an obsessive-compulsive need to capture everything in words, a desire to reveal profound answers to life, a romantic belief in the artist as a tormented soul. Missing is restraint, discipline, a sense of structure – anything that imposes limits. Wolfe’s gargantuan outpouring of words strikes me as somewhat insane. The editor who worked with him was Maxwell Perkins; what an ordeal he went through. The stories that make up the rest of the book display the weaknesses inherent in the author’s nature. Two of them, though not outright bad, have too much description; the words don’t capture the essence of the moment, nor do they serve any purpose to the plot (what plot?); things become repetitive, as if the author were insisting, “Understand, damn it!” In two other stories emotionality is allowed to run amok, and the results are unreadable. However, I don’t believe the time and toil Perkins put into this author’s work was a waste. Because Wolfe had much talent. The structure of “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” reined him in. The man talking to us is not a poet, he’s a down-to-earth guy who had an encounter that he found compelling, mysterious. Wolfe lets him tell his story in his voice; it’s presented directly, simply, in a narrative that flows beautifully. “Chickamauga” is named after the Civil War battle. An old man relates his war experiences; here too the need to be the voice of the person, and no more, put limits on Wolfe’s extravagance. These two stories show how good he could be, which is very good.

Furious Seasons - Raymond Carver
What’s memorable in a piece of writing? That question came up in regard to this collection. Four times I realized, after a page or two, that I had read the story before. I had only a dim sense of what they were about. I didn’t reread them, but I wondered where the fault lay. What do we remember, and why? There are novels I cherish, ones I read long ago, but as for specific content – what happens to whom – I’m hazy. Once they were meaningful, so the authors had done their job. “Long ago” – time is naturally a factor. A short story has to make a lasting impression with far fewer words than a novel. Some do. Maybe only stories that are both great and unique establish a secure place in my memory; they move in to stay. Those four Carver stories I mentioned didn’t. Two short-shorts I read for the first time don’t deserve to stay; they’re just plain bad, and two others were mediocre. The impressionistic title story is confusing and murky. And then – bam! – I come to “Pastoral.” It’s about a man on a lonely fishing trip, and it evokes the end of something (Carver was good when dealing with loss). This one deserves to be remembered.

2009-05-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

The Boarding-House - William Trevor
Trevor has repeatedly, in his novels and short stories, taken lost souls for his subject. Lonely, odd, sometimes deranged people. Although all are to be pitied, many engage in acts of unkindness (a line from the book: “the solitary man is a bitter man and that bitterness begets cruelty”). Others are vicious, even dangerous. The stage on which their stories are enacted is often a circumscribed one; in this novel Mr. Bird, the owner of a boarding house, selects people as tenants precisely because they’re misfits. I see Mr. Bird and William Trevor as one and the same. Both assemble their cast, put them under one roof, and let the eccentricities multiply. Mr Bird’s “Notes on Residents,” with their incisive observations, are part of the narrative; they could be an author’s notes. It’s interesting that Trevor presents Mr. Bird in an ambiguous light. His motives are suspect; there’s something shady about the way he manipulates his residents. I’ve always believed in Trevor’s compassion; I still do, but now I wonder if it’s that simple. At any rate, the results are entertaining. Trevor writes clear, smooth prose (though it has a dated quality; why would an author, in 1965, constantly use the word “ejaculated” instead of “exclaimed”?). Trevor is not the only British novelist who has built excellent novels around weird characters acting weirdly. Others notables are Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh. I recently reviewed J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, which is quite like The Boarding-House (Farrell’s eccentrics occupy a hotel). What is it with these Brits? And what is it with me, that I find such books so engaging?

Blindness - Jose Saramago (Portuguese)
A visceral novel; it comes from the guts of the author. This type of book works only if it’s done so artfully that the urgency of emotion is transferred to the reader. Saramago succeeds. I entered the nightmare world he creates. I experienced the squalor of the asylum, I felt the elation of the women washing clothes (and themselves) in the downpour on the balcony. But the best example of my involvement is how deeply I wanted the doctor’s wife to commit a murder; when she does, and makes a good (and grisly) job of it, I felt satisfaction. I can’t think of a stronger female figure in fiction than the doctor’s wife; she’s heroic. Saramago delves deep into the sordid and disgusting, but he’s describing the total breakdown of society, and he shows us the results. His scenario made me wonder: How low can man descend, how many trappings of dignity can he lose, and still struggle to survive? In the last chapters Saramago attempts to find meaning in what he’s created, but he flounders; this is one of those works that defy a summing up. Finally he lets matters trail off in an indeterminate way. Which is the right ending. We get questions, and that’s enough, if the questions are such good ones. *

2009-05-11T06:47:00.000-07:00

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Forester had a considerable gift for narrative. He could move a novel along, engross the reader. How is that done? By writing clearly and simply, being able to recognize what’s interesting and leaving out boring filler (like lengthy descriptions of landscapes, people’s appearances, emotional intricacies); and, most important, having a story to tell and characters that are engaging. Easy? Hardly. What raises this above a mere page-turner is that it shows the development of a unique individual. In the beginning Horatio Hornblower comes aboard ship, an unsure boy of sixteen. But in the first chapter he makes a drastic decision that he’ll stick to with iron resolve. I found this a bit hard to accept until I realized that this boy is unlike others. At the end of the novel he’s a strong, confident man. Hornblower will go far in his naval career - I fully believed in him and his abilities. The book also describes the tremendous demands made on men who go to sea, especially those in command; it’s a hard, often brutal life. However, I will not follow Horatio from Midshipman to Admiral. Though I was engrossed, the subject matter (nautical matters, naval warfare) holds little interest for me. Which is an added tribute to Forester’s writing, because I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The Blush - Elizabeth Taylor
These are “nothing” stories (except for “The Letter-Writers,” which confirms that Taylor is capable of excellent work – I greatly admire two of her novels, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey of the Claremont). When you finish a “nothing” story you wonder why you spent time reading something so insubstantial and why the author spent time writing it. Taylor may have been trying to capture the small (but significant) moment. But the significance wasn’t there, so the story was merely small. I didn’t bother to read the two longer ones.

The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald has a sketchy style. She puts on paper only the bare minimum needed to tell her story, and she moves from scene to scene without much fuss. A sketchy style can work if the author selects what’s meaningful; that which matters can then emerge. But little emerged for me, and not even the main character mattered. I only read half of this novella.

Penguin Island - Anatole France (French)
This isn’t a novel. It’s a unique and imaginatively conceived study of the progress of man, starting from his primitive beginnings. The word “progress” is meant ironically. Irony, cynicism, wit – all are used with remarkable skill. The author has cobbled together a miscellany that’s made whole by an insight into human weaknesses (and thus the weaknesses of society). France sees no hope that things will change, man being what he is. Time has proved him to be right. The book was written in 1908; this date is remarkable because what he describes applies directly to our world today. There’s no point in trying to explain the book’s structure or content; it defies explanation. It is what it is: a monument to clear-sightedness. It should be read by all thinking people. *

2009-05-08T06:01:00.000-07:00

Collected Short Stories of Aldous Huxley
There are over 400 pages of them, and they vary widely in quality. Some are masterpieces (“The Gioconda Smile”), some are clunkers. Huxley generally does better in the longer stories (exceptions: “Nuns at Luncheon” and “Sir Hercules”). He’s mostly in his cynical, cruel mode (which gets repetitious when it appears too often), but he sometimes shows compassion; the results are usually successful, though, surprisingly (for such a cynic about human nature) he can overdo the emotions. Even the prose varies in quality. It’s mostly intelligent writing, but there’s some sloppy work. I wish this was a 200 page The Best of Aldous Huxley.

The Ballad and the Source - Rosamond Lehmann
This novel is made up of three monologues. They’re framed as conversations, but Rebecca (who’s the listener) only serves to ask leading questions. This struck me as artificial (particularly since Rebecca is only ten when the first exchange takes place; how could she ask the questions that lead the speaker on – and on and on?). Also, the story and characters are all exaggerated, outsized, even melodramatic. There are detailed descriptions of flowers, dresses, and a concentration on feelings. Seems like a woman’s novel, one I didn’t like, right? Wrong. This is a remarkable work. The three voices are those of very different people, but Lehmann captures each perfectly (the book is written in flawless prose). I became caught up in the ambiguous, dense, sinister, tragic story which slowly takes shape. The middle speaker, Sibyl, is at the core of everything. Her version of events is not to be fully believed, though it’s unclear how much is falsified. She emerges as a driving force – but driven by a desire to make people and events conform to how she wants them to be. At times I thought Sibyl was evil, at other times I felt (as does Rebecca) wonder at the strength of her will. The ending is extraordinary: there’s a death (and I felt the loss); then, in the last paragraph, Rebecca has a dream. Nightmare is a more fitting word; Harry finally reveals the secret behind his silence and Sibyl emerges from where she’s been hiding in Rebecca’s heart. We suddenly understand how deeply this adult tale has affected the girl. *

The General in His Labyrinth - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish)
On the first page the General is dying. When I stopped reading, on page 170 (with 100 pages left), he’s still dying. In other words, when dealing with the present the novel was stagnant. There was a lot of going back in time to include historical material (which meant little to me). So I read the last paragraph (beautiful) and called it a day. Not that the book wasn’t good – it was. And I was interested, but the “interested” gradually became “somewhat interested.” I think the foremost novelist of South America felt it was his duty to write a novel about South America’s greatest leader, Simon Bolivar. Being Garcia Marquez, he couldn’t write a simple tribute – his Bolivar has flaws, though what predominates is the man’s tremendous determination. Also, Garcia Marquez focuses on the shabby end to glory. The book was an easy read (no labyrinth in the prose), but the “somewhat” prevailed.

2009-05-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

A Time to Kill - Ennio Flaiano (Italian)
This novel was published in the USA under the title The Short Cut, which I prefer. If only the young lieutenant had not taken the short cut! But he does, and I was drawn with him into a nightmarish vortex. Moreover, I followed the lieutenant’s thinking; I accepted his baffling actions because they were what someone driven beyond the brink – eventually into madness – would do. The ending is enigmatic; he’s suddenly (miraculously) free of all entanglements. But . . . No, it’s not that simple. He’ll never be free; you don’t free yourself from your inner demons so easily. The novel is filled with ambiguities. Although the events described are comprehensible and the scenes have the substance of reality, I was often – while feeling complicity with the lieutenant – bewildered. I even wondered whether the events he related in the first person really happened that way. Flaiano provokes those kinds of doubts. Is this a virtue or a failing? I’m not sure. All is inconclusive, even how I feel about the book. I only know it was an experience. Not a pleasant one, but an experience. *

Father Sets the Pace - Gontran de Poncins (French)
I wonder if the author read Clarence Day’s Life with Father. The structure of this book is so similar, even in the chapter headings (“Father Takes the Train,” etc.). Yet while Day’s portrayal of a family tyrant was sweet-natured, Gontran de Poncin’s father emerges as a man of overriding selfishness. He loves nothing but his comfort and his horses. He insists that his every need (and he had many) be indulged to the fullest. His son presents episodes (in prose that is wonderfully smooth) with a light, humorous touch, but the cumulative effect is to lay bare a man’s lack of humanity. He “sets the pace” in French society – that is, he’s the epitome of the cultured gentleman. He believes not in doing (accomplishing things of any sort) but in being (witty, well-dressed, etc.). His son feels an element of respect for one so self-centered, so sure of what he wants and so manipulative in getting it. Many times in the book Gontan comments that his father never should have gotten married; he also never should have been a father. In fact, he isn’t a father, in any sense. This is a trenchant character study. *

Apologies to the Iroquois - Edmund Wilson
An article by Joseph Mitchell called “Mohawks in High Steel” comes first, but after reading a few pages of it I skipped to Edmund Wilson’s section (which makes up 95% of the book). Mitchell’s part was dry; Wilson’s prose was a pleasant contrast. He writes sedately, with no fireworks or attempts at creating pretty sentences, but he provides a personal touch and has the ability to recognize what’s interesting. He reports – with clarity, fairness and intelligence – on how the Iroquois are faring in the larger society. In the process he disposes of stereotypes. Apologies was written in the late 1950's; the Iroquois were making progress to assert their individuality and legal rights. At the end I was left wondering how they’re doing now.

2009-05-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
I thought the beginning was engaging – the section about the nerdy, fat young Oscar’s futile search for love (or at least some sex). But that was a short section, and gradually, page by page, Diaz destroyed all my good will. Oscar is abandoned (he returns, but minus any vitality). Diaz fabricates one preposterous character after another; Junior is the phoniest of the lot, and midway into his chapter I called it quits. The book is a crudely-made patchwork quilt with a lot of lumpy stuffing (all those historical footnotes). Repetitive, gimmicky, juvenile, pretentious, vulgar, lacking credibility. Diaz can use the language well (and inventively); but what does that skill matter if used to no worthwhile purpose? The book grated on my sensibilities and bored me – profoundly. Lastly, regarding how Dominicans are depicted, especially the morally-challenged women. Where’s the Dominican Anti-Defamation League when you need them?

Free Fall - William Golding
There’s power to this book, a dense center, heavy and oppressive. It’s constructed as a search; Sammy wants to find where and when things went wrong for him. Golding jumps backward and forward in time; I could visualize, even feel, each episode of Sammy’s life. Yet how difficult it was for me to attain this contact! I finally gave up trying and conceded that I couldn’t make sense of a lot that was happening. Another problem is that everything is pitched at an unrelenting intensity; I wanted relief. The conclusion wasn’t satisfying. Sammy drove a woman mad – did that terrible thing – but at the end of our search we find that it was just Sammy acting as his nature and the circumstances of his life dictated. That’s it? On the final page Golding returns to a prison camp episode and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. To have to concede the ending of a novel – that’s a deal breaker. I think Golding (a Nobel Prize winner) was encumbered by the ambition to be profound, but he felt that he needed obscurity to attain it.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other - Darcy O’Brien
This boy’s life is definitely not like any other’s. Born to wealthy movie star parents, the first chapter is an evocation of an idyllic time in his childhood, when the family was happy. But that collapses in the second chapter, and the mother/son relationship is depicted as very dysfunctional – sick, really. It’s her fault, for he’s just a boy (trying to take a man’s role). As the story unfolds his mother is revealed in all her callous selfishness. Increasingly I found the book distasteful – so many bizarre, crazy, horrid people, none of them with any morals. Even the high school girl the boy has a crush on is screwing every guy in sight (except him). Our main character walks through this nastiness with little emotion. I stopped believing in him because he didn’t react in believable ways. Then, a sea change. In the last three chapters the truth surfaces, forcefully. We find out what the young man has been feeling all along: he finally expresses his implacable hatred toward his mother. The final words, “I went into the world well-armed,” refer to the knowledge he’s gained; he’s become hardened. Yet this strong closing doesn’t rescue the novel. O’Brien should have been developing what emerges at the end; instead he pandered to the tawdry. It’s strange to read a book that begins and ends so strongly, with all in the middle false.

2009-04-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

Peasants and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov (Russian)
I never appreciated Chekhov fully – now I do. This is a great collection of stories. Edmund Wilson edited it, and he writes in the introduction that Chekhov intended his stories to be grouped in specific ways. But his work is usually presented haphazardly, greatly undermining his overall concept. Wilson is faithful to Chekhov’s intent. These are late stories (by an author who died in his forties), and many are very long – two are almost 100 pages. Not all are about peasants, but peasants are a fact of life even for people with money. Chekhov seems ambivalent about them; he has sympathy for their plight (especially for helpless women and children), but many are portrayed as brutish, malicious, ignorant, dishonest, drunken. The wealthy characters have flaws too, mainly hypocrisy and indifference; they often suffer from a sense of helplessness, a feeling that their lives have no purpose. Good people of both classes appear in these pages, though there’s little happiness (or happy love). I was a bit perplexed when I finished some of the stories – they had no definitive ending. But they explore the human condition so deeply that the inconclusiveness becomes a statement. Life doesn’t have tidy conclusions. Pity for us poor humans – that seems to be the point. *

The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington
I believe that Tarkington had complete knowledge of where he was going when he started this novel. George Amberson Minafer’s comeuppance (which, when he’s a boy, is deeply desired by the people of the town) comes about through flaws in his character. At the end he gets his comeuppance – he gets it “three times filled and running over” – though by then no one cares. (One of the novel’s themes is the passing of all things – wealth, fame, life.) This psychological study is not only about the consequences of overriding pride, but of overriding love. Isabel loves her son too much, to the point of destroying his ability to question whether he might not always be right. This results in tragedy. The book, for all its lightness of execution, is a tragedy. At the end George sees his faults – he perceives with clarity the terrible crime he has committed, and he knows he can never be forgiven for it. I felt these things, which is a tribute to the author. The book is written simply, everything is made clear, it glides along. Tarkington can turn a phrase to great effect, but he uses this ability sparingly. He’s not that interested in scene-setting; his strength is in character study, often conveyed through conversation. He created a strong, appealing female character: Lucy, who loves George, but cannot give herself to him because she sees his faults too clearly. Yet she – and I – could also see George’s virtues. I never hated him; and, after he recognizes his fallibility, I believed that he deserved the redemption that Tarkington grants him. *

2009-04-27T06:48:00.000-07:00

Light and Darkness - Natsume Soseki (Japanese)
This novel took considerable discipline and resolve to write. There’s little action, and what there is concerns everyday matters. In rigorous detail Soseki examines the minds of two characters through their talk and their thoughts. I had to take the novel in small doses – it’s that concentrated. But this approach reveals the desires and fears and everything else that concern and motivate a husband and wife. Vanity and selfishness dominate. I suppose this is the darkness of the title – the darkness of the human heart, shown not on a dramatic stage but in commonplace encounters. And the light? The last word on the last page is “unfinished.” Soseki died before he completed the novel, at age 49. It’s thought that about fifty more pages remained to be written. I can’t imagine what light Soseki could bring to his story. *

Troubles - J. G. Farrell
The author died in his forties. A shame, for he was gifted with the ability to entertain. That said, the trouble with Troubles is that Farrell employs tactics that don’t stand up to scrutiny. He uses eccentric characters that exist merely to amuse and baffle. The setting – a crumbling, once-glorious hotel in Ireland – is falling apart, grotesquely. The novel is filled with crises. The Major, the main character, stoically tries to keep order in the mess around him. He has a crush on Sarah, who’s confined to a wheelchair. Why? We never find out, but soon she’s walking just fine. She acts erratically towards the Major, sometimes sweet, more often sour (mean and hurtful, actually). What’s her problem? We don’t know. But she drops him – hard – and any normal man would make an exit and get on with his life. But the Major hangs around until some Sinn Feiners attempt to kill him (in a quite horrible manner). The demise of the Majestic Hotel comes when the mad butler sets fire to it (it goes up in grand fashion, including burning cats leaping out the windows). Sarah marries a brutish military man, the Major drifts to London. On the last page, after many years have passed, he’s still mooning over her. I have no idea why.

2009-04-24T05:50:00.000-07:00

My Brother - Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid must be praised for her honesty; she expresses feelings that are “unacceptable” (most notably, hatred for her mother). Her brother and his illness (AIDS) are depicted very well, as is the world of Antigua. Unlike her brother she escaped her mother and that stifling island, but only physically; though her life in the United States has the trappings of happiness she shows how hard it is to shake off one’s past influences. Kincaid’s prose style is a cross between Gertrude Stein (simple and repetitive) and Henry James (she follows a thought through many convolutions). I think she wanted to impart an incantatory quality to her complex and conflicting emotions. It didn’t work for me – at least not in reading it; I originally listened to the book read on tape by the author, and the style worked quite well. In my review of the autobiographical Lucy I was left with questions about what would become of the young woman; some of those questions were answered in My Brother. The answers aren’t pleasant or easy ones. Nor is a look at her biography; she divorced the man she was married to in My Brother. This is not surprising; she worried about the effects her old destructive feelings would have on her present-day relationships.

Penhally - Caroline Gordon
This book has strong virtues and stronger flaws. The main virtue is the author’s ability to write well: she can construct full-bodied scenes and the narrative voice flows beautifully. But taken as a whole – as a chronicle of the fall of the house of Penhally – the novel lacks structure. After an excellent beginning Gordon seemed hellbent for a conclusion. One generation is covered in about five pages. The irascible Nicholas, present in the opening section, is a forceful character, but many who follow are indistinguishable from one another. The relationships (cousins, slaves belonging to this and that person, great-grandfathers, etc.) got so complicated that I gave up trying to sort everybody out; my reading became inattentive. As a multi-generational saga, the ending rings decidedly false – a bullet in the heart is dramatic, but it isn’t believable from the character the author had created. Last word . . . About Gordon’s use of ellipses . . . Was she trying to set a world record?

The Incomparable Max - Max Beerbohm
He was incomparable. His writing is the epitome of elegance. It surely took work to create such finely-honed prose, but the effort is not evident. I don’t read for an author’s style, but this book was an exception. I wasn’t interested in a lot of what Beerbohm writes about; his ideal audience is upper-class Brits. He also belongs to the post-Victorian age, and his subject matter involves people and matters I knew little or nothing about. Some essays I skipped, and the long last story, “The Happy Hypocrite,” is the weakest thing in the book (the strongest are two stories from Seven Men, which I had already read). Outstanding were the pieces on his brother and on King George the Fourth. In “Diminuendo” he gives the reason why his literary efforts were limited, and all writers should find his thoughts of interest. Throughout these essays and stories, the man’s intelligence and originality shine forth. My only quibbles are that the prose occasionally turned from elegant to ornate, and some pieces were too learned - way over my head. Still, Max is bracing company, entertaining and eminently likeable. One feels better after spending time with him.

2009-04-21T06:49:00.000-07:00

The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil - Nikolai Gogol (Russian)
“The Overcoat” stands firm as a masterpiece in world literature. But of the other stories only “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt” impressed me; it was funny, gentle and insightful. “The Terrible Vengeance,” though it had energy, was over-the-top, full of superstitions and the supernatural; it could have been a tale from the Dark Ages. “The Portrait” and the section of “Nevsky Avenue” that was concerned with an artist were too fervent; when Gogol got onto the subject of the artist he let his passions boil over, and the results are rather foolish. He was better dealing with common folk. As for “The Nose,” I don’t get its appeal. Swift had a man go to an island where the people were tiny, but all was logical. “The Nose” never overcomes its ridiculous and unwieldy premise. Satire? Of what?

Royal Highness - Thomas Mann (German)
A stately, dignified, slow-moving book. All these elements are part of the nature of the main character. Mann succeeds in depicting the stifling life of royalty. When Prince Klaus finds a woman he loves there’s a sense of awakening. Imma is an unusual, fascinating and formidable character; she cares for Klaus, but she finds something missing in him. When Klaus becomes engrossed in the dire financial problems of his country, he proposes marriage to Imma (her father is immensely wealthy). The novel has a fairy tale element, with the Prince winning the maiden by asking her for the money that will save his country. What Imma needed was for Klaus to stop being a useless royal prop, to show initiative and act with conviction. All this is believable. A word about Mann’s technique. The book is engrossing, in a slightly plodding way, but there are scenes – key ones – that stand out vividly. One major moment involves Klaus’ withered left arm; we wonder, for many pages, what Imma’s reaction to his lifelong infirmity will be. We find out, in a scene that is strange and moving. *

They Came Like Swallows - William Maxwell
Maxwell divides the book into three parts, each from a family member’s point of view. First comes Bunny, the little boy; his section uses an expressionistic style to convey his imaginative, emotional way of seeing things. Bunny experiences the mother as a vital presence. But she dies from influenza (the novel takes place after World War I). His father and brother try to cope with the loss of the beloved center of their lives. Twelve-year-old Robert reacts with a muted stoicism; the father moves about numbly, in a daze of grief. Her death is a wound that will never heal for any of the three. Maxwell’s strength – the creating of mood, atmosphere – is used to great effect. *

2009-04-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

Invitation to a Beheading - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
I believe this novel – a masterpiece that ranks up there with Lolita – is simply about life, and it presents a disturbing picture. Cincinnatus is in a cell, awaiting execution for an undisclosed crime (that of being alive). He wants to know, in the beginning, the date of his execution; the answers he receives confuse or mislead him. Later a definite date is set (“You have inoperable cancer, Mr. Jones.”). If we think of it in those stark terms (mostly we avoid thinking of it) Cincinnatus is man stripped of all but the essentials of existence. In this state he yearns for three things: compassion, romantic love and understanding. The last is the most important. For how can another person give you meaningful compassion, how can they love you, if they don’t understand who and what you are? The terrible (and terribly grotesque) cruelty of the book (Cincinnatus is not harmed physically at any point) is the utter lack of understanding everyone exhibits toward him; instead he meets with callous indifference. He tries to express his true self in writing, but that’s futile. No one will read his words; besides, he can’t put into words what he wants to say. So he’s emotionally alone (and is that not the human condition?). The surreal ending is intelligible if we consider that the world exists for each of us through our senses; the world ceases when we do. When Cincinnatus’s head is severed a vestige of his consciousness continues on for a moment as everything around him crumbles to nothingness. *

The Stepdaughter - Caroline Blackwood
A psychological study that’s pared down to the bare bones. Blackwood was wise to keep it very short. The novel is based on a weak premise: a woman (identified only as J) is writing letters to Nobody; in them she explains her situation and her emotional state. She’s very depressed and angry. Her ugly stepdaughter consumes her thoughts. The book is interesting, but it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny. I didn’t buy the change in J’s attitude toward a stepdaughter she loathes and resents (when the girl disappears J suddenly becomes caring and compassionate). Also, J has a daughter of her own living in the apartment, and this child is ignored in the book. Only one scene, on one page!

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich - Danilo Kis (Yugoslavian)
An original work, but, for me, inexplicable and boring. I was so lost that I thought I was reading separate stories (it’s a novel, dummy). Nothing held my attention – no character is developed in depth, there’s no coherent and consistent narrative. There’s a lot of history (with names that meant nothing to me), a lot of political goings-on (which confused me), a lot of diversions, a lot of brutality. The book has a dark, oppressive atmosphere. I suppose it would mean more to those acquainted with the society that Kis was writing about.

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
I don’t read much non-fiction. I prefer to inhabit somebody’s imaginative world. But Orwell is Orwell; his personality infuses this book, and that was what I was seeking. In the introduction Lionel Trilling makes two statements that I agree with: Orwell was a virtuous man, and he told the truth. This book doesn’t clear up the labyrinth intricacies of the Spanish Civil War because Orwell limits himself to what he observed (which can be confusing; he even warns the reader that a chapter will be rough sledding, and it was). The most interesting aspects are the human ones. Orwell tells of the boredom of war, of the excrement, the rats, the lice. He tells of the comradery that builds up between men. He sees a cause worth fighting for and exposes the ways in which that cause was violated. At the end he returns to find England in a deep, deep sleep, and he fears that it will be jerked awake only by the roar of bombs.

2009-04-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

Wayfarers - Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
This long novel begins when Edevart is in his mid-teens, ready to strike out on his own. He’s not regarded highly in his village, mainly because he hasn’t done well in school. But there are varieties of intelligence, and Edevart is quite capable. He’s strong and good looking; he’s virtuous, honest, naive. We follow his journey to manhood. We experience the people and events that form him. One of the main influences is August, a wayfarer by nature (homeless, never settled, never content); August creates change wherever he goes with his restless inventiveness. But it’s mainly Edevart’s first love, Lovise, who affects his life. The idyllic weeks they spend together prove indelible, even though, as time passes, he becomes disenchanted with her. She’s basically a good, caring person, but she’s not the simple and pure soul he first loved. She, like August, becomes restless – another wayfarer. By the end of the book Edevart’s character has darkened considerably; the virtue, honesty and naivety are diminished. Back in his home village, idle and restless (that word again), he receives a letter from Lovise, who’s in America. The book ends with Edevart disappearing; we know he has gone to her. Happiness does not await him, of that I’m convinced. Hamsun is cautioning against change. Happiness (or at least contentment) lies in being satisfied with where you’ve been set down in this world and holding on to old values. Hamsun was in his late sixties when he wrote this book; these are an old man’s conclusions. What’s so impressive is how he was able to create the feelings of a young man. And he can string together the ordinary events of life and give them freshness and vigor. The story is told in a simple, straightforward manner – the way the master chose to do it. *

Joe the Engineer - Chuck Wachtel
Refreshing. After starting (and quickly abandoning) a string of literary novels that were done in carefully-wrought prose, full of deep thoughts and feelings, I came across Wachtel’s vibrant novel, written simply, brimming with events and people. Joe is a strong character, as are the secondary ones (particularly his wife and his co-worker, Joe Flushing Avenue); the gritty Queens locale is authentic. Joe is a dissatisfied soul, unhappy with life (marriage, job); he has serious character flaws, and it seems that his deeply-ingrained cynicism won’t allow him to change. The novel has drawbacks. It’s overly vulgar, sometimes resorting to bathroom humor. And the ending is weak. The fight at the funeral parlor has a Keystone Cops quality, which is all wrong. On the last page everything is left indeterminate; we don’t know what the future holds for Joe. This vague trailing off doesn’t work. Still, an enjoyable read.

Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly - John Franklin Bardin
I liked the premise (woman released from mental hospital after two years; reason for her hospitalization unstated) and the precision of the writing. But the prose took on an overheated tone; elements that had been initially intriguing – the whereabouts of the harpsichord key, the question of Basil’s involvement with another woman – were fixated on but not developed. The person’s mind we’re in was murky with mysteries. I’m sure, if I had read further (and I would have twenty years ago), her dark problem would be revealed. But I no longer have the patience; when annoyance sets in, I stop reading.

Gimpel the Fool - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
A mixed bag. Sometimes you pull out a pearl (“Gimpel the Fool”) and sometimes a maggot (“The Mirror”). The problem with the latter story – and others like it – is its extreme cruelty. When Singer delves into the supernatural his imagination conjures up elaborate horrors. Still, even these stories, though repugnant, are unique and have a warped power. Singer was a complex man; he could convincingly show a compassionate and gentle side. “The Little Shoemakers,” “By the Light of the Memorial Candles” and “Joy” are wonderful. Singer explored basic questions, and he mostly concluded that life is an inexplicable mystery. He ends “Joy” with a character saying, “One should be joyous.” A philosophical outlook. But, considering the anger behind the cruel stories, one has to wonder how successful Singer was in finding joy. *

2009-04-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

Where I’m Calling From - Raymond Carver
How good was Carver? Very good, at times, and five stories in this collection belong with the best in American fiction: “Are These Actual Miles?,” “Careful,” “A Small, Good Thing,” “Blackbird Pie,” and “Boxes.” His prose is simple and inviting, but he always tried to say something of significance. His characters are mostly male losers, either alcoholics or recovering alcoholics; their relationships with women are going badly, as are financial matters. I believe these people are worthy of attention, their predicaments are important. Carver treated them in a non-judgmental way – after all, he was one of the losers; there’s an authenticity to his work. Some of his later stories dwell on his guilt and remorse concerning his first wife, and in “Blackbird Pie” he makes those feelings palpable; the ending is wrenching. When Carver tried for profundity (which he had a tendency to do, as in the message-laden “Cathedral”) his work suffered; he was at his best when he dealt with the hard facts of dead-end lives. It was then that Raymond Carver could tell us what he knew.

The Healing Art - A. N. Wilson
I read his Wise Virgin recently, and loved it. This book, written two years earlier, was a big letdown. I saw through Wilson’s manipulations (on page 35 I suspected that the X-rays had been switched; I was right). What else fails here? The religious angle is leaned on too heavily. Pamela wasn’t a convincing character; the way she reacted to her impending death was implausible. Wilson throws in people who are stridently odd; there’s no basis for plot twists (such as the sexual liaison between Pamela and another woman). When John arrived on the scene – another oddball – I had enough. The author is presumably promoting redemption and love (as he did in Wise Virgin) but in this book he was notably mean in how he portrayed some characters. Also, the sex scenes were awfully grubby. As for my question – What fails here? – I think the answer lies in the heart of the author. (Will the real A. N. Wilson please stand up?)

2009-04-09T07:51:00.000-07:00

The Chronicles of Clovis - Saki
I can imagine H. H. Munro writing one of these stories before heading off to the club. They’re mildly diverting – the prose is good, sometimes even elegant – but there’s little substance. Saki’s indulgence in wickedness and cruelty (though not of the distasteful variety) isn’t my cup of tea. If you want to read Saki’s one masterpiece, get your hands on The Unbearable Bassington.

Aiding and Abetting - Muriel Spark
Unfocused – the novel hasn’t much structure – but I went with the flow. Spark’s characters are interesting; in her eighties she still has a sharp eye for human foibles and she presents them in an economical prose (no extraneous words). Though she didn’t have much of a story to tell, she was a writer, so she wrote this book. I like her writing, her way of seeing things, so I read and enjoyed it.

The Home and the World - Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali)
This novel, by a Nobel Prize winner, comes from a different sensibility, one I could never relate to. First I became impatient, then critical. The dialogue is artificial – carefully worked out philosophical pontificating - and the woman whose affections two men are vying for is vacuous. Her husband is all morality, a wealthy Bengali noble, but he does nothing with his money to relieve the suffering around him; it seems to him (and to Tagore?) that it’s a given that the poor suffer; that’s the way it’s meant to be. The moral husband is competing with a male character who embraces amorality. The only thing I found insightful is the husband’s deciding that, by placing his wife at the center of his universe, he gave her the power to make him suffer; he understands (at least intellectually) that the world is larger than her. But there was so much in this book that I couldn’t sympathize with that I put it aside with relief.

2009-04-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Subtitled “An Autobiography,” this book has passion and intelligence. It opens when Jane is ten. We follow her through hardships, and along her rough road in life we come to know and care for her. The bulk of the book is taken up with her romance. Rochester is a striking presence - complex, forceful, mysterious, commanding. But we believe that Jane, in her quiet, unintimidated way, is his equal. As he comes to value her we believe in that, too, because she’s worthy of respect. We see his good qualities slowly, grudgingly, emerge under her influence. So the love story works. But the novel went astray in the last hundred pages. Previously it had been solidly grounded. Then, in the chapter in which the aborted marriage takes place, Rochester first goes into a long explanation of how the madwoman came to be in the attic; I didn’t buy it, didn’t believe that this woman was such a total monster and he such a benevolent dupe (Jean Rhys didn’t either, and so we got Wide Sargasso Sea). Rochester also heaps adoring praise on Jane, detailing her virtues; he rhapsodizes about his love for her and his inability to live without her. And I thought: Too much. No longer are we on solid ground. What we’re getting is Charlotte Bronte’s overindulgence in pride, her fantasy about her worth, put into the words of Rochester. Jane makes the decision to flee him; she’s rescued from death’s door by “fairy people.” In her life that follows we see more pride in Jane, even of the judgmental sort. The character of St. John is a puzzlement. He’s a cold-hearted, iron-willed prig, but to Bronte he’s someone of great value; she even gives him (and his self-sacrificing, censorious religiosity) the last page of this long book. Did she see him as more important than Rochester? The latter is greatly diminished; when Jane returns to him he’s blind and maimed – this once-powerful man has been emasculated. “Reader, I married him.” Good. I just wish you had done it a hundred pages earlier.

Fish - Maurice Engel
This is an odd fish. The first person narrator, Harry Karp, suffers from “vagueing”; his attachment to the world is so tenuous that he sometimes slips out of it (in one of these episodes he’s involved in a serious car accident). The story is an account of how he becomes engaged in life, mainly with Gretta and her ailing son Michael. There’s a meandering quality to much of the book, which may be appropriate to the meandering, unfocused mind of Fish. But what he sees, he sees well, and his observations – the substance of the novel – are interesting, unique and intelligent. The prose generally flows nicely, though in places it was hard to follow; maybe the Henry James-like style is a symptom of Fish’s vagueing. The boy, Michael, is an odd kid (odd characters populate this odd book), but likable and convincing. Not so his mother. She’s interesting, but their affair struck me as a mistake. Gretta is ambivalent, subject to inexplicable mood swings; she seems somewhat deranged (with the possibility of getting worse). I’m glad I strolled around with Fish, but I wish, for his sake, that he had picked a more stable woman to begin his new life with.

2009-04-03T05:48:00.000-07:00

David Golder - Irene Nemirovsky (French)
This novel recounts the last days of a man who dedicated his life to the pursuit of money. Nemirovsky doesn’t condemn the cold, stony David Golder – he’s the most sympathetic in a cast of characters composed mostly of leeches. When we meet him his physical suffering and fear of death bestow upon him a humanity. In the grasping world presented here a few people still value simple sensuous pleasures; the chapter that takes us with Joyce and her lover is a needed diversion from the rest of the book, which is dominated by the gloom of Golder’s life. This gloom becomes monochromatic and overpowering. When the cruelties pile up (such as when Golder’s wife tells him that his daughter, the one bright thing in his life, is not his) the novel loses balance. Negativity (the first word of the book is “No”) is too extreme. Also, the ending is melodramatic; the author tries to give Golder a hero’s stoicism and to make his last moments reverberate (he hears his mother calling to him). Nemirovsky was too good a writer not to come close to succeeding. She was in her early twenties when she wrote this; I wonder what bred such a grim view of life in one so young.

Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel - William Trevor
The people in this book are mostly life’s losers, and many are deluded, but Trevor treats them all with compassion. This is an intricate, strange novel, but it works (eg., the revelation about the Terrible Thing that happened at the hotel is handled in a way that’s surprising but believable). The characters form a dense tableau of thoughts and spoken words as each pursues his or her way to get by in the world. They may not be ideal ways, but even the repulsive Morrissey is made comprehensible. Though Ivy Eckdorf is dangerously crazy, her transformation in the last chapter is moving: in her madness she creates a fantasy world – one of happiness – for all the people of O’Neill’s Hotel. This is an intelligent novel; it’s a profound one, too, in that it shows poor suffering humans entangled in their lives. *

Botchan - Natsume Soseki (Japanese)
This second novel by Soseki was hugely popular in Japan. It’s an easy read, but only mildly engaging. It’s superficial, the humor is juvenile, the main character is a one-dimensional blowhard. I’ll stick to Soseki’s later work, which was complex, dark, and deep.

The Call of the Toad - Gunter Grass (German)
A well-written bore. The widow and widower and their cemetery plan aren’t very interesting – at least not in the oblique way it’s all framed. An author (Grass, I guess) potters around with reams of material the widower has sent him. He reconstructs their story, but his many interjections and digressions slow everything to a toad’s pace. I stopped short of the halfway mark.

2009-03-31T06:19:00.000-07:00

The Silent Cry – Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)
A huge disappointment after A Personal Matter. Doubts set in at the halfway mark and were fully confirmed by the end. The book is over-populated, over-written, over-plotted. There’s much agonizing, and Oe constantly leads the reader to believe that profound revelations will be revealed. They never materialize. What we get is pretentious, awkward, false in its portrayal of people. And, worst of all, foolish.

Friend of My Youth - Alice Munro
Many of these stories meander around the emotions of women; they’re baggy, unfocused and too long. Munro experiments, goes through stages, and this was one of her stages. Despite being baggy and unfocused and long, “Wigtime” and “Differently” succeed because the characters and situations are engrossing and a strong mood of melancholy is evoked. “Pictures of the Ice” is the most straightforward story (which is the approach Munro should stick to). It begins with an enigmatic premise; the ending resolves the enigma perfectly. Three very good ones.

Warlock- Oakley Hall
Hall takes the stereotypes of the wild west – characters and situations we’re overly familiar with – and deepens them, gives them complexity. The humans behind the stereotypes emerge. The west is a great (and harsh) backdrop to explore right and wrong, good and evil; Hall is concerned with moral choices, difficult ones. This is a long book, with many characters, many plot threads. Hall never fails to interest and to provoke thought; he also surprises. Most notable is how moving and memorable his people are. Foremost is Johnny Gannon, always in a lonely struggle with himself. *

Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe
Achebe wrote this more than twenty years after his previous novel, and he had clearly lost it. Lost what? – his ability to write well or his desire to do so? This novel is sloppily done, from the construction to the prose; the characters are wooden and unconvincing (especially the female character). What pervades this book is a sourness. I think Achebe’s sourness was justified (he was writing about the politics of Africa), but he presented his story artlessly. I stopped reading at the halfway point.

2009-03-28T05:57:00.000-07:00

The Three-Cornered Hat - Antonio de Alarcon (Spanish)
A short folk tale, told with liveliness and simplicity. The characters are one-dimensional representations of an aspect of human nature. What mattered for me was the book’s portrayal of true love – one grounded on trust and affection. I also liked the donkeys braying to each other.

A Crown of Feathers - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
For many years Singer made his living by selling his work to Yiddish newspapers. He had to entertain, and he did. I wonder who his audience was – men? Women are frequently portrayed as threatening, both physically and personality-wise; many have facial hair (one has a full beard). The relationship between the sexes is fraught with discord; it can even, in some cases, turn murderous. Such hysteria, strife! Thankfully, these aspects are not present in most stories. In many a person is relating a tale to someone else (often to Singer), so there’s a lack of immediacy to events. Also, Singer’s endings don’t have the impact which could turn a good story into a very good or even a great one. Despite these minor failings I was engrossed and entertained. Singer is not a frivolous writer; he tackles the big questions of life. It's when viewed cumulatively that this collection takes on a strange power. Nothing here rises to the level of “Gimpel the Fool,” though the title story came fairly close. “Crown of Feathers” works on an instinctual level, as if characters and events are compelled by hidden forces. The Devil plays a role; he tells Akhsa “The truth is that there is no truth.” *

The Big Money - John Dos Passos
This is the last of the USA trilogy; the three books make up over 1200 pages. Dos Passos wrote, in a preface to the series, that America was “mostly people speaking.” He gives them a voice; the bulk of this book, and the other two, follows lives. The narrative drive and the feel of authenticity to these lives is amazing. Men, women, rich, poor – they think, they feel, they do things, they talk. The time span of the trilogy – three decades – and the variety of the characters make this as close as we’ll come to the Great American Novel. It has a strong element of protest – there was much injustice in the USA – but this doesn’t limit the books; all are about people. The Big Money does what the other two do, and does it as well or better. Dos Passos set out on a path he believed in; it was exactly the right path. *

2009-03-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Shards of Memory - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Difficulty in recognizing who’s telling the story (I never figured this out), too many characters (every one of them odd), no focus (what’s this all about?), and for the first hundred pages the characters don’t come to life (wooden, or, in the case of the Master, contrived; I never accepted the power he had over people). Then Henry is in a car accident and becomes a cripple. Suddenly everybody is set into motion – they seem to have life breathed into them. The late-blooming love between Baby and Graeme is poignant. I wanted the relationship between Henry and Vera to work. So I cared. But, still, the author never had full control of her material; she leaves all sorts of important matters unresolved. Much is missing in this novel; but of what’s there, some is quite effective.

The Grandmothers - Glenway Wescott
Although the subject matter (pioneer life) appealed to me, I was annoyed and bored by this book; I quit reading halfway through. The problem was the author’s youth (Wescott wrote it when he was twenty-six). A poet living in Europe is recalling his youth; as a boy he was obsessively (and implausibly) interested in his family. He tells the stories of their lives. One after another they line up – here’s Great-Aunt Nancy, here’s Great-Uncle Leander – and the poet, with his great power of perception, enters the consciousness of each. It rang false – and pretentious. Also, there’s a fussy tidiness about the book – the perfect prose, the lives proceeding in a stately way to old age or death. This book has a premise of authenticity, but I think the author, in his youth, was deluding himself.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
Hogg was born in 1770, when religion had a consuming fervor. His main character believes that he’s been chosen by God, before time began, to be one of the anointed. Thus he can do no wrong. What’s the nature of this Chosen One? Robert is morally corrupt, despicable in every way. After being told the news of his anointment, a strange young man attaches himself to Robert; we soon realize he’s the devil. They commit terrible acts. Robert’s only redeeming aspect is how he suffers at the end. He’s wracked by doubts, besieged by demons, shunned by all humans. He’s in hell. Fascinating stuff; this work sprang from a mind foreign to us. It can be seen as a critique of religion – or, rather, religious fanaticism. The problem is, it goes on too long; my fascination turned to distaste. I yearned to be clear of the craziness. Yet I persisted to the dismal end. An ugly book, almost repulsive. Amen.

2009-03-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

Bloodshed and Three Novellas - Cynthia Ozick
The first novella, “A Mercenary,” was about Jerzy Kosinski, so it interested me. I both admired and was annoyed by Ozick’s ornate language and her labyrinth approach to events. But since her point about Kosinski was obscure, annoyance won out. “Bloodshed” should be marked “For Jews Only,” and the ornateness of the writing reached Byzantium proportions. “An Education” was simply written, in keeping with the characters, who are simpletons. What was Ozick up to in creating a story about highly-educated dummies? I suspect she was writing (as was the case with “A Mercenary”) about people she knew – and she was ridiculing them. I read a few pages of the last novella, but it was going to take a lot of effort, which I wasn’t about to expend. Ozick is a writer with a threefold agenda: to show off her verbal skills, to explore the Jewish experience, and to settle scores.

The Night Visitor and Other Stories - B. Traven
I read the title novella long ago, and thought it was a wonderfully-wrought nightmare. The other stories are good (or pretty good; none are very good). Traven’s characters have an engaging voice, he tells a story well, and he makes a point. His flaws are that he’s heavy-handed and often lets scenes go on too long (though this is part of his rambling, conversational style). He’s a man who had a wide variety of life experiences; the authenticity of “The Cattle Drive” is due, probably, to Traven’s having actually been on a cattle drive. I was disappointed with the long final story, “Macario.” It could have been special, but Traven didn’t have a handle on where he was going; it’s lack of logic became a problem. “The Night Visitor” also lacked logic, but the events seemed driven by inevitability. I should reread that story to find out if it still stands up, but I won’t. Why reappraise work that once meant a lot to me? *

Nineteen Nineteen - John Dos Passos
This is a social protest novel that needed to have been written, especially in the early 1930's. It also contains slices of life that are universal and belong to no time period. Dos Passos had an amazing ability at narrative; he could capture, through accretion, the essence of his characters. Some lives become boring, or confusing; this is especially true of Eveline. But her life is aimless; she feels that and so do we. Dos Passos was especially good with rough, uneducated, aimless young men – in this case Joe Williams. The life (and death) that affected me the most was Daughter’s; seldom does a character get to me so deeply. I found the Camera Eye, Newsreel, and biography sections, done in an experimental style, to be speed bumps, but they were surely relevant when the book came out. (I never knew how bad things were in our country during the WWI years – now I do; they were very bad.) For what it accomplishes this novel is above criticism. It’s the second of the USA trilogy. I read the first volume (The 42nd Parallel) forty years go; I remember thinking highly of it (so why the long wait?). *

2009-03-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Dirty Snow - Georges Simenon (French)
The French title translates to The Stain on the Snow, which is better. But this novel is so bad that the word “better” shouldn’t be used in a review of it. Simenon didn’t plot his books – he just let things happen – and he wrote them in one sitting and didn’t revise. I think I read the only gem that came out of such a poor work ethic: Sunday. Since then I’ve been looking for another gem, but I’ve officially given up the search. In this novel the central character, Frank, does things that he doesn’t understand, and neither do I. To the virgin Sissy he has an irresistible appeal (I have no idea why). I had enough when I got to the scene where he rigs it so that another man can have sex with her (the room will be dark, so she’ll think it’s Frank). Stupid, huh? The people in the story are mechanical windup toys. To William T. Vollman, who wrote the Afterword, Frank is an enigma, and Vollman finds great significance in this. What nonsense!

Portuguese Irregular Verbs - Alexander McCall Smith
A pleasant read. Diverting, mildly funny.

Coming Up for Air - George Orwell
Orwell had no sense of compromise. He depicted the world and its people as he saw them, and what he saw was not pleasant. In this book we’re in the mind of George Bowling, a fat, forty-five-year-old married man with two children and a mortgage. He has false teeth (the book begins, “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.”). He’s a salesman, just barely getting by financially. He doesn’t much like his wife, nor his children, nor his job, nor his life. He doesn’t believe in anything spiritual, thinks the present day world is much worse than the one of his boyhood, and foresees the future (Orwell wrote this on the verge of WWII) as even more bleak. He goes back in memory to his childhood, and this is a beautifully written evocation of the past (though the world of young George isn’t glamorized; life is often ugly and emotionally arid). George gets hard to take – where are his higher feelings? Love, charity, kindness? They only appear in flashes. But – here’s the tough part – it dawned on me that George is simply a human being like us all; instead of being fed platitudes about human nature, in George we get the unvarnished truth. At the book’s end he visits his boyhood town, and if the reader expects any of the pretty codas they’re accustomed to – a reunion with the love of his young manhood, his catching that big carp in the deep, hidden spring – we must remember who we’re dealing with. Mr. No Compromise. The sweetheart is a hag, the deep spring has been drained and is now being used as a dump. The way of life is worse than when George was a boy; impersonal progress has transformed the simple values people lived by. He returns home; he had lied to his wife to make the trip, and she’s on to the lie; on the last page he’s enduring a tirade of accusations (of unfaithfulness, mainly, which is not true); he knows this badgering will go on for months. And that’s it. Orwell leaves us with nothing. Nothing but an unlikely hero of fiction, walking through his life and taking us with him. *

2009-03-16T07:01:00.000-07:00

Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese)
In this short novel about love and sex (in their darker aspects) Kawabata concentrates on his main character’s thoughts – to the exclusion of much else. Though the short sentences convey an open, airy feel, reading this is a claustrophobic experience; one is caged in a gloomy and brooding mind. There’s also a pretentiousness in the way objects – a bowl, a cloud – are supposed to have deep meaning. The book lacks a valid ending; there’s no justification for Kawabata’s dropping matters in so inconclusive a way.

Go Down, Moses - William Faulkner
Faulkner and I have permanently parted company. I hold three of his novels in high esteem – Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, and Sanctuary – but I won’t be attempting Absalom, Absalom or anything else by him. “Was” (and why would a story have such a title?) is, with its clothes off, a comedy that falls flat; it’s juvenile and not funny. I had to take its clothes off because Faulkner writes with rampant self indulgence. Language, characters, emotions, even the setting are overblown. His prose creates a convoluted density that’s hard to plow through. Next I turned to “The Bear.” Much better, though encumbered with those self indulgent faults I noted above. The slow going had me constantly looking to see how much more I had to read. Why was there still so damn far to go? Then I decided that life is too short to bother with an author who turns reading into a task. With relief and no regrets I put the book aside.

Lanterns and Lances - James Thurber
This was Thurber’s last book. He was in his sixties, almost completely blind (he writes of composing sentences in his mind, and I suppose he dictated them to someone); and, as he states in one of the pieces, he was a victim of “decreasing inventiveness.” It also seems that he was drinking a lot. This book of essays and miscellany shows the effects of these factors. The prose is nice, and some of the pieces are mildly humorous, but there’s a meandering quality. An aimless puttering around. Thurber muses a lot about words, and I can’t believe that many readers would find this of interest – at least not to the length he draws it out. But why criticize the man? Thurber was trying to write when there was almost nothing in the tank; I’m sure he knew this. I felt a sadness. One high spot was “The Wings of Henry James.” The approach Thurber takes is unlike a review (he has some opinions, but they’re not the main point he’s getting at); it’s erudite but not scholarly, and ranges far and wide. It’s the best essay on an author’s work that I’ve read. His review of the stage version of “My Fair Lady” is also excellent. I was glad that he got so much pleasure from the show.

2009-03-13T04:53:00.000-07:00

Beds in the East - Anthony Burgess
In this final volume of the trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) the problem character, Victor Crabbe, remained a problem to the end. He was never a convincingly real human being. When he was married to Fenella – in the first two volumes – he was constantly having sex with other women. In this volume, when she’s left him, he’s chaste. In both cases, his behavior is not made comprehensible. Burgess set up a long-ago love that haunts Victor; in the last pages of this book it’s revealed to Victor that the woman never loved him. The means Burgess uses to present this revelation is a cheap and bogus coincidence. Shortly thereafter Victor (who has become grotesquely pitiful) falls in the river and drowns. Though we’ve constantly been in his mind for nearly 500 pages, this episode is seen from someone else’s eyes; the person observing Victor’s death doesn’t care about him. Burgess’s callous, offhand destruction of the character he had such difficulty portraying (because, I believe, Victor and Burgess are one and the same) may reflect self-loathing and self-pity. At the end one woman briefly mourns him: “Poor Victor,” she thinks, “poor, poor Victor.” And then she’s off to dance.

My Mother’s House/Sido - Colette (French)
Colette wrote these books when she was in her seventies. She looks back at her provincial childhood, and most particularly at her mother. It was a happy childhood, and her mother was a unique person who stirs strong feelings of love and admiration in Colette. These feelings are evoked beautifully in My Mother’s House. It’s composed of vignettes that don’t tell a story; they aren’t even chronological. They simply capture moments. Notable is her mother’s embracing of all life – plants, insects, people. She’s able to truly see and appreciate, and we see and appreciate how special that gift is. The descriptions of nature are deeply felt and matter to the story. In the background there’s a shadow of loss. The life of the city was calling Colette; she will leave the world where she experienced pure happiness. But this is merely suggested in a few sentences; what the author is doing in these books is celebrating a life and a time. In the preface she writes “I have come late to this task. But where could I find a better one for my last?”

2009-03-10T07:35:00.000-07:00

The Ferrari in the Bedroom - Jean Shepherd
As a young man alone in New York, I considered Jean Shepherd to be my friend. This friendship was carried on via the radio – me listening to his nightly monologues. The man meant a lot to me; he brought good cheer to my life. This is a book of his essays, and I often caught a sense of that voice from long ago. He was a better talker than he is a writer – I don’t believe he had the patience to put a lot of work into his writing. His monologues had a fluidity and freedom that’s missing from his prose. I also found in this book a more cynical person than the one I heard over the radio. Six of these pieces are very good, and seven others are good. There are a number that don’t come off, and some duds. But who cares! Jean Shepherd gets a pass. It was a pleasure to spend some more time with my friend. *

The Enemy in the Blanket - Anthony Burgess
This is the second volume of the Malayan Trilogy, and it has the virtues of the first, though a bit watered-down. The problem I cited in my previous review has become more serious. I don’t like Victor Crabbe. I also don’t believe in him. His problem in being a good (and faithful) husband to Fenella has to do, supposedly, with his love for his previous wife, who died in a car accident; she drowned in a submerged car, while Victor escaped. Romantically tragic - but really? I didn’t buy a word of it. Why couldn’t Burgess, with all his skills, make this story more convincing? Anyway, Fenella leaves Victor (despite his vows that he has changed and truly loves her), and I applauded her decision. As for the watered-down aspect, the colorful world of Malaya with its gaudy characters are not so vivid as in the first novel. Still, I’ll read volume three.

The Custom of the Country - Edith Wharton
Edith was good with the thumbscrews. In this character study she applies them to Undeen, a woman who values empty showiness – jewels, parties, dresses. She has no regard for things of enduring worth. A diamond bracelet means more to her than her son or her long-suffering parents. To get what she wants (and wanting is her only passion) she uses her beauty to climb the social ladder in New York and Paris. Undeen is willful, selfish, cold, calculating, but she’s also real. At times I felt sympathy for her; she is, in her way, a cripple, lacking in something essential. There are problems with the novel that bring it down a few pegs. Ralph’s suicide seems unsupported, simply convenient to the plot, and there were too many coincidental meetings between Undeen and Moffett (another strong character, though I wasn’t convinced by his rise to power). Also, Wharton pretty much ignores Undeen’s son; this could be interpreted as reflecting how Undeen ignored him. But when Wharton gives Paul center stage in the last chapter it’s an oddly flat scene; I don’t know if the author herself had feeling for the boy. The ending – with Undeen, who now has almost everything, left wanting that which she cannot get – doesn’t carry enough weight. Her story should close on a more emphatic note than discontent. Still – a strong novel that has a lot to say.

2009-03-07T06:40:00.000-08:00

The Late Mattia Pascal - Luigi Pirandello (Italian)
Another philosopher full of ideas but unable to integrate them into an effective narrative. I liked the book initially – the ideas were lively, good voice, interesting premise (a man being granted, out of the blue, his freedom from everyday existence) – but a long swath in the middle is weak. To keep matters moving (sluggishly) Pirandello introduces a host of improbable story elements; all the while the hero is having existential fits (the book is filled with exclamation marks). Things pick up again at the very end, when Mattia returns to a life that’s coherent to the reader. Though Pirandello had some interesting things to say about freedom, the whole enterprise wound up seeming frivolous, even silly.

Time for a Tiger - Anthony Burgess
Tiger is a brand of beer, and beer (or booze of any kind) is what Nabby Adams single-mindedly craves. As a portrayal of an alcoholic, Nabby seems overdone, though he’s a lovable hoot (and never has anybody been blessed – or cursed – by a more adoring dog). The main character of the book, Victor Crabbe, is lacking in some vague way; I say “vague” because I don’t know what Burgess left out, but Victor remains stiff, withholding. Victor’s wife, Fenella, is appealing; there’s a core of sadness in her that I responded to. Alladad Khan is a wonderful comic figure. These four, and many other well-drawn minor characters, carry on in Malaya, which is depicted as an exotic and fascinating potpourri of nationalities and languages and views of life, all in conflict. The mood Burgess creates is teeming, threatening, colorful, oppressive. It’s a pleasure to be in the hands of an intelligent writer who’s trying to entertain. I don’t believe in magic potions, but the effects of one on Victor and Fenella is done so well I accepted it – gladly. I liked the ending and was happy that it wasn’t the ending. This is the first volume of a trilogy. I’ll take another visit to Malaya. And maybe I’ll wind up understanding Victor.

Abel Sanchez and Other Stories - Miguel de Unamuno (Spanish)
In the title novella Unamuno concentrates on two emotions: Envy and Hate. Terrible emotions, diseases of the mind. Unamuno varies the action and the ways in which he approaches Joaquin’s mania, so the book never becomes stagnant. He also makes Abel, the object of Joaquin’s lifelong hatred, a complex and ambiguous figure (not a pure man/innocent victim). This is a psychological novel, and a wonderful one. The ending, when Joaquin tells his wife that he never loved her – that he could have been saved if he had – is a wrenching perception. As for the two stories, “The Madness of Doctor Montarco” didn’t amount to much, but “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr” was quite interesting. It too is distilled to its essentials. It’s about religious faith, about believe in God and an afterlife. Manuel, a priest, doesn’t have faith. He knows the desolation and despair of non-believing, so he does all he can to make the villagers believe with all their hearts. He also teaches them, mostly by example, the need to work hard, to be kind and generous, to avoid gossip. Thus, he is a saint. Unamuno had the mind of a philosopher; he goes deep into a subject, gets his point across, but he does so with clarity and simplicity. *

2009-03-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

The Call of the Wild and Selected Stories - Jack London
Call is one of the books that set me onto the path of reading, so there was no need to reread it; it’s inviolable. All the stories take place in the Yukon. Some are no more than good fare for boys. “An Odyssey of the North” was the weakest of the lot – silly, melodramatic, written in an archaic style. But when London took on the study of man surviving (or not surviving) he rose to greatness. “To Build a Fire” follows in relentless detail the events that culminate in death. What makes it so effective is that London shows no feeling for the man – he could be a bug under a microscope; this emotional coldness is perfectly fitting, because London was writing about uncaring nature. In “Love of Life” we are close to the feelings of the struggling man. His ordeal is presented so graphically that we have to endure it. In both these stories the prose is hard, direct, stark. When London tapped into his darkest fears, out came two masterpieces. *

Territorial Rights - Muriel Spark
Spark assembles (improbably) a large cast of characters in Venice. All are interesting in a repellent way. A mystery takes shape. I read on until the mystery was revealed and then I called it quits. The plot didn’t much interest me, and the characters were not people I wanted to waste more time on (they weren’t that interesting). When Spark relies on bizarreness, when her distaste for humans takes over a novel and there’s no character for the reader to care for (and thus about), she’s just coldly typing up another novel.

Famous Writers School - Steven Carter
Carter had a clever idea, but it became a mishmash, with the author tossing in new twists to try to keep it alive. His characters can’t emerge from his format. The story that dominates the proceedings was, for me, generic (gothic horror/mystery novel, with a crew of murderous, amoral cretins). But Carter is juggling two other story lines. It came to seem unwieldly to the point of foolishness. I stopped halfway through.

The Sleeping Beauty - Elizabeth Taylor
For the first forty or so pages I thought I was reading a well-written woman’s novel. Then, in a few pages, everything shifts, becomes sinister, twisted, dark, complex – becomes strong stuff. But in the last forty pages Taylor retreats; the ending is pat. I even decided that, to enable her to have this ending, she had gone back in the book and had provided Vinny with a previous marriage. So the novel fails. But before it does I was impressed by how she depicted the sudden and transforming power of passion; the selfishness of people (and how far they will go to protect their structured worlds); the tenaciousness with which a mother can hold onto a child; the way we face aging and loneliness. All very good. Maybe the task of dealing with these matters proved too much for Taylor.

2009-03-01T05:56:00.000-08:00

The Housebreaker of Shady Hill - John Cheever
How good was Cheever? Very good as a prose stylist. The problem is that too many stories are infused with yearning. Yearning for beauty, sexual love, youth. This yearning is elusive and inchoate; it cannot be satisfied. This theme, when repeated, becomes tiresome. In the worst story of the lot, “O Youth and Beauty,” the wife shoots her drunken husband as he sets out to run the hurdles in his living room (he had been a star athlete). Unfortunately, I wanted a lot of the unhappy people in this collection to be shot. The best story is the shortest and simplest. In “The Worm in the Apple” the miserable and malicious people of Shady Hill closely observe a happy family; they’re waiting (and wanting) to find the worn at the center of their life. It never appears.

Exile and the Kingdom - Albert Camus (French)
Camus was a philosopher who wrote fiction - and did it very well in The Plague and The Fall. But in most of these stories the philosophical aspect takes precedence. The characters and plot are of secondary importance to an overriding Idea – one that often remained vague to me, so I didn’t get the point. I suspect that the idea was vague to Camus too.

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories - Machado de Assis (Portugese)
Unique stories. Many dwell in the mind and emotions; often they’re about people with obsessions. The long title story is an exploration of sanity. Who is sane, who is insane? Machado frames those questions from an intriguing perspective, and does it with cynical humor. The writing is lovely (the stories were not all translated by the same person, yet the prose remains the same, so it must be Machado’s); I felt as if I were being carried along on a strong river current in the night. But because Machado attempts to capture an isolated emotion, the experience he gives is limited. I can’t categorize this collection – but Machado defied categorization as a writer.

The River - Rummer Godden
Initially I liked this book, but I started to get annoyed. Irritated with little Harriet’s contemplating the Big Issues of Life (she’s a budding writer of great talent). Captain John, with his tragic war injuries and his melancholy presence, struck me as right out of a movie (a young Ronald Colman would be good in the role). Then came Harriet’s brother and the cobra – and here I had enough. Who could possibly not know, many chapters before it happened, that the boy would be killed by the snake? Godden’s characters and situations were staged in an obvious way.

Jane and Prudence - Barbara Pym
Good Pym. She has the ability to involve the reader with her “ordinary” characters (actually, all people are odd, if one looks closely, as does this author). Of the two women, Pym didn’t quite “get” Prudence; I never believed in her affairs (which were not fully explored – how far did she go with these men?). Jane was much more solidly grounded. The men in the book were vain, selfish and fatuous, and that was unfortunate (come on, Barbara, you can be more fair than that!). Pym knows the sadness and loneliness of life, and how we must cope; she coped by absorbing herself in the harmless occupation of writing quiet, humorous, perceptive novels.

2009-02-26T07:24:00.000-08:00

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
This novel is sabotaged by the author. Rushdie’s brilliance as a stylist and the inventiveness of his mind are on relentless display; he overwhelms his own work. The characters and plot can’t move, they’re buried under his ego. And why does Rushdie constantly (over and over!) interject remarks about what will happen later in the story (when something will take on more meaning)? About halfway through I quit reading; I felt I was waist deep in a bog of authorial conceit.

An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
It’s a tragedy that Dreiser didn’t appreciate the virtue of conciseness. Not that I want him to be a minimalist. But the reason I stopped reading this novel (short of the halfway point – but it’s over 800 pages!) is that he belabors everything, and does so in a lumbering prose. I knew I had enough when I expected the next chapters to be more of the same emotions hashed over and over. Couldn’t an editor have clued Dreiser in to the fact that when he had revealed a state of mind he didn’t need to repeat it twenty times? He had a strong story to tell, but in Tragedy we get the material in its crude form, all of it. Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie, also long (though half the length of Tragedy), was more artfully done. In Tragedy scenes are constructed like heavy blocks of stone, whereas in Carrie, though a full and detailed picture of life is created, it was done with deftness. Instead of getting better as a writer, Dreiser became long-winded and boring.

Germinal - Emile Zola (French)
Darkness pervades this novel like a heavy shroud. Though unpleasant for a reader, that darkness is true to Zola’s subject. We’re deep in the coal mines; when above ground we experience the joyless, grueling lives of these people. He shows them as brutes, as noble, as both. What shines through, like a light at the end of a long tunnel, are those things that many yearn for: love, kindness, tenderness. The novel has problems – sometimes Zola slips into the maudlin, and the closing chapter is surprisingly weak (where is Catherine?). But the work was conceived with passion and constructed with craftsmanship. For a social protest novel to survive, it must have real people. Germinal does. I was moved and sometimes surprised by them. The ending in the collapsed mine was an ordeal I had to go through. A tragedy written by a realist and a humanitarian.

2009-02-22T06:24:00.000-08:00

The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Trollope is true to his title. He depicts the world of upper class Londoners in the1870's. Greed, false values, decadence, hypocrisy, prejudice (and a variety of other vices) play a large part. There are at least ten major characters and as many secondary ones. All are drawn with intelligence and insight; they're real. I especially admire how these people are not all one thing; they have both good and bad qualities, strengths and weaknesses. The women are distinct, given an individuality equal to the men’s. Trollope embraces complexity and ambiguity; it took a remarkable mind to create this novel. Every country, in every stage of its history, needs a Trollope. (Interestingly, the Londoners of the time didn’t like the book; did it cut too close to the bone?) Trollope provided a happy ending for most of his characters (in the form of marriages that would, ostensibly, be ones of lasting contentment). Well, happiness is to be found at one’s hearth. But the driving force is Trollope’s cynicism about society and man’s nature. The vices prevailing in Victorian London aren’t unique to that time and place. I consider this a great novel, even though there wasn’t one character I cared intensely about. But I was engrossed, and I loved the direct, simple prose. I mentioned the complexity and ambiguity. Those qualities aren’t in the writing; they’re in the characters Trollope creates. *

A Single Pebble - John Hersey
A unique and thought-provoking short novel. It concerns a trip on the Yangtze River aboard a huge yak in the 1920's; the narrator is an American engineer who’s planning the building of a dam. The people he meets and the experiences he has during the harrowing trip deeply affect him; I could see why. There’s something powerful about this scenario. The characters are vivid, particularly Old Pebble. We’re introduced (like the narrator) into a different sensibility, a different view of life. The faceless trackers, who are the lowest of the low, emerge with a bit of the universal about them. Hersey uses too many words to describe the narrator’s feelings (which are vague and shifting) and he presents characters who are one thing on one page and something else on another. It’s hard to anchor one’s feet solidly. But that, in retrospect, is one of the novel’s strengths; in the last pages Hersey refuses to tidy everything up and put a bow around it. He leaves it messy and confused – which, in its way, is a statement about life. *

2009-02-19T06:10:00.000-08:00

The Golovlyov Family - Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (Russian)
This is an oppressive novel, heavy with negative emotions. Characters carry the burdens of their distorted selves, which makes them grotesques (but grotesques distinguishable as real people). They face a great, frightening void where their souls should be. Though religion consumes them, it’s used in the worst way – to support hypocrisy. This can be seen as a critique of a certain way of thinking and conducting one’s life – the absolute wrong way. In that sense, this is a moral book. But how unyielding! It’s an excoriating Calvinistic sermon. I felt the ending wavered, showed a lack of direction. How to end a book about emptiness? A difficult task, one that eluded Shchedrin, for he turns a bit melodramatic, which he had previously avoided. Still, a remarkable work.

The Gaudy Place - Fred Chappell
The structure of this book is a disaster. In the early chapters there was vivid writing about engrossing lowlife characters. But I began to ask myself, Where is this going? Good question, one that the author never successfully dealt with. The final chapter was a last chance to pull everything together, but it was the worst in the book. It was as if Chappell had given up on the whole misshapen project – the nonsense at the end is a violation of any good things he had done. He has talent as a prose stylist, and an ability to enter into the minds of authentic-seeming characters, but can he write a coherent novel?

Dream Children - A. N. Wilson
A big disappointment from an author I admire. He may have thought he was serving up a wicked brew, with bizarre characters and a provocative situation, but he was indulging in cheap manipulation (with an ample dose of cruelty). Characters morph as different perspectives are introduced (the point being, I suppose, that people see things through the obstructing filter of their emotions and belief systems). But there has to be a core of authenticity. This was especially lacking in Oliver Gold; he was a puppet being jerked into various freakish poses by the author. What caused me to stop reading was the ugliness rampant in this book; I could no longer stand to be with these horrible people as they did horrid things.

2009-02-15T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Vet’s Daughter - Barbara Comyns
Weird. The almost childish presentation (through the first person sensibilities of Alice) contributes to that effect. The characters and their actions are relentlessly strange, often menacing; the father is a monster. Then Alice starts levitating. Comyns served up too many oddities for my taste; nobody was real, so I began to read inattentively. At the end I had no idea who the man with the ginger mustache was.

The Arrow of God - Chinua Achebe
The Nigerian author has written one of those books which I consider necessary. He gives the Western reader insight into a sensibility foreign to us. We’re presented with a world of gods and spirits and rituals and societal customs. The native priest Ezeulu is a complex and imposing figure, at times commanding respect, at others eliciting aversion. He’s a man of strong will and wisdom, but pride and inflexibility will lead to his downfall – and to the downfall of the native religion. The novel is about the end of the old ways, as embodied in Ezeulu; I had the feeling that Ezelulu knew this was coming and made way for it with his actions. Christianity, with its more potent god, becomes dominant. The last sentence has the people offering the yams they harvest not to Ulu but “in the name of the son.” *

Lions, Harts, Leaping Does - J. F. Powers
Powers is a unique writer in both his subject matter and prose style. He writes about the Catholic clergy but is concerned with their daily lives. Lives which often involve pettiness and annoyances and meanness and stratagems. Stratagems for getting a desk for one’s room from a stingy pastor. Annoyance at an irritating housekeeper who has taken on the unwanted role of wife. The spiritual aspect is present, because these men do consider their actions and thoughts and feelings in a religious light. But they’re regular people, and sadness and arid disappointment permeate most of their lives. Even the humor has a bitter edge. Religion doesn’t bring peace and serenity (or does so only with great effort). The prose is carefully crafted, with a cadence that the reader needs to get in step with. Though lovely, it becomes an object of attention (this is true in some stories more than others; I prefer the direct style). Powers strays occasionally outside the religious world, and he seems quite at home there; more expansive, actually. There are too many constricting boundaries when writing solely about cloistered lives. Read these stories; but also read Powers’ wonderful novel, Morte de Urban.

The Unvanquished - William Faulkner
I read half of this book because I was only mildly engaged in the characters and plot. Seems Faulkner was only mildly engaged too. He tries, for the most part, to write clearly (he published all but the last chapter in popular magazines). He uses humor, particular with the “nigger” boy, Ringo. There’s one long riff of prose that’s full-blown Faulkner – a convoluted cascade of words, many of them obscure – and I thought: What bad writing! The scene is supposed to be descriptive, but it describes nothing. Maybe he was parodying himself. But sometimes he’s a parody of himself without trying to be. Was he a genius? Yes, in some of his work, but his genius bordered on the ridiculous.

2009-02-12T07:44:00.000-08:00

You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town - Zoe Wicomb
These interconnected, autobiographical stories follow the life of Frieda. They begin when she’s a child in South Africa and end when she’s a young woman living in England, soon to have a book published (the one we’re reading). None of the stories have England as a locale, so Frieda’s life there is not described. Although there’s much about race (Frieda is “mixed” in the time of apartheid), it’s not politics that mattered for me but the portrait of a person, the people she interacts with (mainly family), and a place. All emerge in a prose that’s inventive and dense (though not daunting). When Frieda observes – which she does constantly – it’s with a subjective intensity. The strongest image to emerge is that of Frieda herself: her self-doubts, anger, intelligence, reticence, ambivalence, isolation. In this portrayal Wicomb refuses to “win the reader over.” Reality, often hard-edged, sits at the core of every story, strong, solid, stubborn. Everything asserts: I am here. I am not pretty. I am not simple.

The Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Clark explores big themes in this novel. The cat (not the one that’s killed at the end of the story, but the mythical “black painter”) is a symbol of evil. Evil cannot be killed. It takes many forms. It’s in the deadly desire of the predator. It’s in the snowstorm that kills with nature’s indifference. Most importantly, evil is in the human characters. To counteract that Clark suggests that a withdrawal from life (which the almost-saintly Arthur does) or passionate love (as Harold and Gwen have) can blunt the evil. But, overall, this is a dark novel. The explosive tensions between the characters in the snowbound ranch house are the equivalent of savagery; with words people tear at one another. In the long Part Three, when Curt goes to hunt down the cat, human evil is pitted against animal evil. Clark describes this hunt in detail, and he conveys a powerful sense of the forbidding world Curt is struggling to survive in. The novel’s structure is unique. There are long, italicized dream sequences which portend the future. There’s the early death of a person who seems to be the main character. Much of the novel has a spiritual aspect, not in a religious sense, but as if a spirit world exists, and it exists most strongly in Joe Sam, the old Indian. In the midst of this darkness, the love between Harold and Gwen casts a pure light. The ending is moving and enigmatic. *

2009-02-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

The House in Paris - Elizabeth Bowen
Bowen works in the tradition of Henry James. Everything is labored over with exacting care; simplicity in any form is not allowed – not in the prose, the descriptions, the emotions. Particularly the latter. An emotion is not allowed to just exist; it’s explored extensively, often going into areas beyond me, as if my perceptions of the human heart are limited. To read this type of writing is tiring. The book is “precious.” Finicky care produces that effect. Spontaneous, ragged life is killed off by too many perfect words. The pity of it is that there was the core of a good story. The children (Bowen is good with children) interested me, as did the old lady. But then we shifted to Karen and her impending love affair. I stopped reading at this point; I couldn’t face the complexities, especially since Karen struck me as a phony creation. Or, to put the blame where it belongs, Bowen was burdening that character with her stultifying care.

The Sweets of Pimlico - A. N. Wilson
This first novel by an author I greatly admire, though readable and fairly enjoyable, is so inconclusive in every way that reading it amounts to an exercise in futility. The characters, even when on center stage, are inexplicable. Why do they do things, how do they feel? What the hell are they? Nothing can be pinned down, not even their sexuality. Is Mr. Gormann an ex-Nazi who had been active in homosexual orgies? That’s never resolved. Does the main character, Evelyn, really love the old man, and he her? Can’t really say. Who will get Mr. Gormann’s money? That’s a stumper. Why is Evelyn thinking of marrying a homosexual drunk with a mean streak? Don’t ask me. Is her brother having sex with Angela or Angelo? The last letter of a name in a letter is unreadable, so that’s a mystery too. The ending resolves nothing – adamantly so. And about Evelyn, whose head we’re “in.” She has sex with her brother (a pretty big deal) and it’s presented in a casual way. Is this woman capable of real feelings? Despite Wilson’s narrative gift, I was aggravated by this book.

Esau and Jacob - Machado de Assis (Spanish)
Too clever by half. Machado was capable of creating characters and plots (in his idiosyncratic way), but in this book he indulges in intellectual games. The narrative is tediously convoluted and constantly interrupted by the author’s sly comments or his deep (and cryptic) thoughts about Life. The worst of it is, I love Machado’s work. This was one of his last books, when he was much-honored in Argentina. Maybe fame went to his head.

2009-02-06T07:34:00.000-08:00

Time Must Have a Stop - Aldous Huxley
There are two Huxleys. One I love to read, the other I can’t tolerate. There came a turning point in his thinking. He had been writing acidic comedies in which people carry on absurdly; self-delusion and hypocrisy are scrutinized. I think he reached a moral crisis. Is this all there is? He turned to spiritualism. He was going to lead people to what he discerned as an enlightened way of thinking. Unfortunately, when he goes into his spiritual mode, I decline to follow. Half of this book was brilliant early Huxley, and at its core was Eustace. A wonderful creation. A sybarite, cynic, non-believer. In fact, he despises Belief. Halfway through the book he dies. But he doesn’t die. Huxley has him exist in a world between life and death. Eustace won’t give in to the Light (the bliss of death and Nothingness) because he’s too strongly attached to gross existence, to having an individual identity. Eventually he makes his appearance at a seance; although this could be high humor, Huxley treats it seriously. My problem with the enlightened Huxley is this: what are his credentials to instruct me on the Truth of existence? I respect the man, but I think I’ve read all the cynical Huxley (those early novels I love), so I’ll read no more.

Fancies and Goodnights - John Collier
Diversions. Well done and entertaining, but of little substance. And I don’t have a taste (as Collier most definitely does) for jinns, witches, spells, etc. I read about half the stories. The shame of it is that Collier – when he planted his feet firmly on the ground and dealt in deadly logic – could produce a wickedly wonderful little piece like “De Mortuis.”

Mon (The Gate) - Natsume Soseki (Japanese)
With patience and calm authority (I’m reminded of the meticulous care Japanese artists take in flower decoration) Soseki leads the reader to feel the love that a married couple have for one another. Sosuke and Oyone come alive, fully. But quietly! They’re so quiet a couple. Soseki accomplishes his purpose through simplicity, dwelling almost entirely on the mundane. There are no declarations of love, no lovemaking scenes (no kiss, even), and the woman plays a subservient role – and yet we know. The problem I have with the novel may stem from its belonging in a different culture and time (it was written in the early 1900's). Sosuke and Oyone had sexual relations before marriage and this apparently ostracizes them forever from family and society. They are guilt-ridden by their sin. This dark cloud makes the isolated world they live in a gloomy one. Even Sosuke’s chances of having a good job have been ruined. But Soseki does not tell us how the world learned of their indiscretion (and why, if they knew the consequences of what they did, wouldn’t the two keep it secret?). The ending is enigmatic and unsettling (for what I’ve described as a love story). Sosuke goes to a zen retreat to try to find peace. He’s asked to give an answer to a koan: “What was my face before my parents were born?” He comes up with an answer (one the zen master considers contemptible); he repeats the same answer when asked for it again, but we are never told what this answer is. That Sosuke fails completely at the retreat is believable (I could relate), but his homecoming to Oyone is not joyful. It’s as if the fact that he has her does not matter so much. The novel ends with Oyone saying, “Spring is finally here.” As he clips his fingernails Sosuke answers, “But it will soon be winter again.” Is he fated to live in gloom? What of his love? These questions illustrate how deeply I was involved in the lives of these two characters. *

2009-02-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker - Tobias Smollett
An epistolatory novel has built-in obstacles. The plot happens offstage; the reader gets secondhand emotions (eg., Lydia’s love lacks passion). Still, I was impressed with Smollett’s intelligence in initially sidestepping these obstacles; characters and plot were there, in a limited form, and the book was fairly entertaining, amusing and colorful. But Smollett seemed to grow weary. I found myself reading a travelogue made up of long descriptions of Scotland, and I signed off.

I Am a Memory Come Alive - Franz Kafka (German)
This “autobiography” is assembled from Kafka’s letters and journals and diary entries. It’s interlaced by observations of others. What to make of Franz Kafka? I can only say that I became oppressed by his wretchedness. His tortured correspondence with Felice is wearying (poor girl!). He recognized that she was a poor girl, being emotionally involved with someone as conflicted as he was. His writing was primary in his life – it was his life. Yet he had little time for it, having to work in an office. He was racked by physical problems – frailty, insomnia, headaches. Finally TB set in (he died at age 41). It’s a wonder that he produced so much work. He was very hard on himself as a writer, so he tended to find little that he wrote satisfying. He was also hard on himself as a person. I couldn’t relate to Kafka’s convoluted thinking. He existed in an introspective world of great intensity. Nothing, for him, was simple. It all got to be too much for me; I couldn’t finish the book.

The Horseman on the Roof - Jean Giono (Italian)
I was first impressed by the strangeness of this book. The writing is lucid, but the reader is plunged into a cholera-ridden world where the normal rules of conduct are no longer in effect. People have lost their humanity; they act in bestial ways. I thought of the Black Plague in Europe; the novel’s setting seemed medieval, rife with superstition and fear. The descriptions, in gruesome detail, of every aspect of cholera are unrelenting. Each new encounter is eery, filled with wariness and threat. Even the landscape was unearthly. The main character, Angelo, is something of a cipher. He acts, thinks, but he remains shadowy. When he meets his friend Giuseppe there’s a sudden emergence of his personality – and he turns out to be a swaggering fool. The two friends talk on and on, but it’s mostly juvenile nonsense. A political angle emerges, and I have no interest in the movement for Italian independence. Anyway, I had enough of cholera. I opted for no more horrible deaths, no more corpses being eaten by rats and nightingales, no more wild-eyed crowds.

2009-01-31T08:30:00.000-08:00

Flowering Judas - Katherine Anne Porter
This, Porter’s first collection, is by far her weakest. Many of the stories have Mexico as their setting, and she doesn’t belong there. The stronger ones take place in the USA. “The Cracked Looking-Glass” (locale: the Connecticut countryside) is about a woman married to a much older man. Porter probes deeply into the psychology of her two characters, she uses ambiguity, she surprises. The next story, the long (so very long) “Hacienda” is set in Mexico and is about nothing much; people come and go and talk, all to no purpose. Without a subject that she knew intimately, Porter was merely a writer with good technique.

The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
A book that had to be written, had to be read. Sinclair does a workmanlike job of hammering home his points. The book has power, drive. It’s an angry book. Its anger is not directed solely at the unsanitary conditions in meat packing houses. Sinclair was angry about man’s inhumanity to man. Angry about Greed being the overriding principle in society. Not just those at the top are indicted; Sinclair shows how the inhumanity filters down so that the little man is gouging the man littler than he is. Unfortunately, at the end Sinclair turns to proselytizing. Jarvis, once a strong, believable character, becomes a passive shell to be moved about. Previously Sinclair had gotten his points across by embedding his message in real people and their situations; even when the writing was crude and strident, the novel had authenticity. I think the most artistically effective ending would be to have Jarvis, once a decent, compassionate man, become a heartless brute (Sinclair goes there, but he backs away). Instead we get long speeches espousing Socialism. Still, this is a novel that changed society. People who read it demanded government inspection of food; they were worried about what was on their plates. As for the inhumane, greed-driven capitalistic system – that was not an issue of concern.

Summer’s Lease - John Mortimer
The endings of whodunits usually leave me unsatisfied (as did this one). Yet there’s another side to Summer’s Lease – the story of a family who rent a villa in Italy. I found them believable and interesting (especially the irreverent grandfather). The happy ending (physical passion revived) seems tacked-on, and the author glosses over a solution to the mystery; it doesn’t matter to the narrator, because she’s now happy with her husband and children. It didn’t matter to me either. Nor, I think, to the author.

2009-01-28T05:31:00.000-08:00

Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts
This is solid and well-written, and Roberts doesn’t pull any punches as to what being shipwrecked on godforsaken Boon Island does to people (it’s not pretty; cannibalism is not pretty). However, I never finished the book. It’s too nautical for my tastes. Roberts knew his subject, but he writes a lot about technical matters that I didn’t understand. So I was often just reading words. And though he goes into the psychology of the men, there’s a stoicism to his approach and in his portrayals, and as a result I didn’t feel close to anyone’s emotional life.

The Day of the Owl - Leonardo Sciascia (Italian)
This was Sciascia’s first venture into the novel. His fiction can be classified as literary mysteries; he probes the social and psychological aspects of his one consuming subject: the Mafia in Sicily. He was a writer on a mission – to show how the Mafia functions. The two books I’ve read by him both begin with a murder of someone of no obvious significance; we are then taken through a labyrinth to the source. The problem with this novel is that the social message (about the Mafia) is predominant over plot and characters. The exception comes at the end, in the long interview between the police Captain and the old Mafioso; two people emerge fully. The rest of the book is composed of brief sketches. Also, Sciascia should have simplified his prose; there’s too much obfuscation. In a later novel, To Each His Own, he corrected all the mistakes he made in this one.

Wise Virgin - A. N. Wilson
I didn’t think I was going to like this book because, initially, the three main characters were distasteful. Yet Wilson is writing about transformation – by love. The people soften, deepen; their dignity and worth emerges. The reader is moved in this direction with patience and subtlety. I found no falseness in the transformation; in fact, it dawned on me slowly that my feelings toward the characters were changing. This is a book with something meaningful to say about life. It ends with two couples – one young, the other old(er) – at the point where they believe they will love forever. And they just might. But that’s not the end. Wilson pulls off something amazing. In the last four pages he goes into the mind of a peripheral character. The insight we get into this person, the contrast between his lonely, empty life and those of the happy lovers, the poignancy of it – all is deeply moving. The last sentence is amazing. So I wound up not merely liking Wise Virgin – I loved it. *

2009-01-25T05:54:00.000-08:00

Nine Stories - J. D. Salinger
I first read this collection in my teens. Fifty years later it still seems freshly-minted. Salinger arrived on the scene as a unique talent. Inventive, funny, entertaining – and always aware that a story should have a higher purpose. My two favorites (this time around) are “The Laughing Man” and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” The first shows Salinger’s skill at entering the mind of a boy; the higher purpose is the boy’s initiation into the dark and painful complexities of adult love. “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” is a tale of adultery – its effect on the victim – presented in an indirect way (Salinger tended to approach things from a odd angle, which is part of the originality of his writing). The story consists mainly of a telephone conversation (another Salinger strength was convincing, lively dialogue); the conversation ends – but the man calls back and we’re given an emotional coup de grace. The two least successful pieces show Salinger’s weaknesses. He would try to get cute, and when it doesn’t come off it falls embarrassingly flat. In “For Esme – with Love and Squalor” he gets cute with the too precious Esme and her brother (thrown in for comic relief, unsuccessfully). The worst story is “Teddy,” and it displays a tendency that would ruin Salinger’s writing. There’s being meaningful (a virtue) and there’s being profound (a mistake). The precociously intelligent, spiritually advanced, prophetic little Teddy isn’t real or likable (in fact, he comes across as a windbag). Still – all in all, a remarkable debut collection. *

Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic)
This is the first of a trilogy, but I won’t be reading the others. Not that this book doesn’t have virtues. It’s substantial and truthful, the prose flows nicely. It presents the thinking of people who are foreign to me, living in a culture full of contradictions. Foremost is the father, with his extreme religiosity and his casual breaking of religious rules (his drinking and womanizing); his imperious (even brutal) control of his household, where he’s feared by wife and children. Subservience rules lives, especially those of women. A large portion of the book concerns the ban on a man and a woman even seeing each other before marriage, much less getting to know one another. About two-thirds of the way through I found that there wasn’t one character I liked (was this intentional on Mahfouz’s part?). When the revolt against British occupation became a big factor, I lost more interest. Maybe Mahfouz’s accomplishment was to offer a critique of the culture he lived in; if so, he succeeded.

2009-01-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

The Girls - Henry de Montherlant (French)
This isn’t a novel; it’s page after page of extreme self-indulgence, a mish-mash of the author’s ideas, philosophy, etc. Letters, journals, narrative, all slapped together. Everything goes on too damn long, and repetitively. Not one person was believable – not the love-struck women, not the conceited Costals. In fact, that’s what the book is: a grand conceit, false to the core. It’s the first of a tetralogy of novels. God help us! That this author could have done something as excellent as The Bachelors seems miraculous.

The Case of Mr. Crump - Ludwig Lewisohm
Anne Crump. One of the most vivid monsters in fiction. What’s frightening is that there are many Annes, have always been, doing their destructive work. Mr. Crump (Herbert) has the misfortune of being snared by her in his youth; he’s never able to free himself. What does her monstrosity consist of? A vileness of spirit; a nature coarse, deceitful, greedy; she has a need to destroy anything pure. And she is indomitable. Her will to conquer is enormous, stronger than Herbert’s will to escape her polluting presence; escape is something she will not allow. Lewisohm no doubt knew – and suffered at the hands of – such a person. He couldn’t have written this book if he hadn’t. He knew an Anne so well that he was able to examine her closely. She’s presented in many manifestations, though her essence remains incomprehensible. Herbert cannot understand her and thus is unable to combat her; maybe a male brute would be able to deal with Anne, but her type preys on weak, vulnerable males. What I’ve described is a considerable (and unique) accomplishment. It’s written with fire, passion. But for much of the book the author keeps the passion under control. There’s a clinical intelligence guiding and measuring his words (this is reflected in the title). The novel’s problems begin near the end. The tone becomes strident, melodramatic. A young beloved appears on the scene, but she’s an unbelievable prop (her name, Barbara Trent, suggests her artificiality); the perfect spiritual bond between her and Herbert is described in purple prose. Herbert’s murder of Anne, smashing in that hated head with a poker, is presented as “Justice” – Herbert wins by destroying evil. But he doesn’t win. He’ll go to prison; Anne had him imprisoned for fourteen years, now he’ll go into another prison, also one of her making. He won’t have his beloved Barbara Trent. Lewisohn needed to continue telling his story with restraint, but he lost it. Still, this book is a cautionary tale and should be read as such. Anne is not a caricature. She’s commonly found among us, doing her malevolently destructive work. And on these pages she lives.

The 39 Steps - John Buchan
A mystery/adventure novel, and it would be nice to read a good one. Unfortunately, this is so full of improbabilities that it became nonsensical. Stuff for boys. So why read more than half?

2009-01-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

Everyman - Philip Roth
A novel about the end of life, about illness and death. There’s no stridency, no details about the many medical procedures; the tone is elegiac. It’s not fun reading, but it’s not grueling. And I believe it’s a book that should have been written. It’s about loss – of losing this world (losing it by inches) – and fear at the prospect of becoming Nothing. But life’s bountiful riches are captured beautifully in Everyman’s memories of his youth. There are flashes of the raunchy Roth – sex scenes (memories) and an angry, obscene rant; these were flat-out mistakes. They jarred with the muted sadness, which is the right tone. Roth, looking at mortality, accomplished something honest and unflinching.

Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Yes, Dickens was a genius. His creative abilities were prodigious. But I quit this book at page 460. I gave it enough time to engage me emotionally, but it wasn’t happening. Dickens’ failing was that he overdid everything. No encounter, no interior of a room, no character’s appearance is short-changed. His genius spreads it all out before us. I had trouble following the convoluted plot and the excessive number of characters. Most crucial, I didn’t believe in these characters. The ones I was supposed to sympathize with are too, too good. They are caricatures of goodness. Some flaws, please! Dickens hits you over the head with emotions; they gush out (as do the tears) to the extent that mawkishness sets in – Dickens can be sickly sweet. His genius was untempered by discernment and selectivity.

A Far Cry from Kensington - Muriel Spark
The author, one of my favorites, died recently. In commemoration I took up this novel. Sadly, it’s the worst one by her I’ve read. Not that it doesn’t yield some pleasures. I liked her cynical insights into the world of publishing (where there are Names and Authors; the first is valued and the other is not; aspiring Authors who submit unsolicited manuscripts are, Spark writes, sending their work “to sea in a sieve”). The problem is that the book is autobiographical and was written to settle an old score. The enemy is skewered again and again (he’s constantly referred to as a “pisser of prose”). This is a hatchet job, but it’s Spark who comes out bloodied. She tries to portray herself as a worthy person, but even the kind acts of Nancy/Muriel don’t convey warmth. The love affair between Nancy and William is also unconvincing; they’re supposed to live happily ever after, but I didn’t buy it. Hate can be a sound basis for good literature, but beware of what you reveal about yourself.

2009-01-14T07:28:00.000-08:00

The Spider’s Web - Paul Bowles
This should be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the Moslem mind. Young Amar is a wonderful character, alive and appealing. His way of thinking is just plain different, and Bowles captures that difference extremely well. This, and the exotic atmosphere of Morocco, are the main virtues of the book, and they are considerable ones. Bowles is less successful with his two Americans – the prose gets verbose in the realm of ideas; too much thinking of deep thoughts. And the sudden “romance” that flares up between Stenham and Lee was pure baloney. She hates his guts (the reader can understand why) and then suddenly, with no good reason, she’s madly in love. Motivation is missing! The author couldn’t follow up on his own reversal – there’s not one intimate scene between the two. Bowles, despite all the talent in the world, always managed to botch things up, usually near the end of his books. However, this time the last chapter is strong, making a point about uncaringness, lack of connection. And, as I said, Amar is wonderful and the cultural/political issues this novel explores are relevant today.

The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud
I had greater respect for Malamud before I read this collection. Many stories are mediocre, some are downright bad – sloppy, pointless. He experiments with the bizarre quite often – always unsuccessfully. And his crudity in handling sex was hard to stomach. “The Magic Barrel” is still magic, and stories that capture the life of the small Jewish shop owner are good; but, all in all, this is a big disappointment.

Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth
The title novella introduced a writer with a bright, fresh voice. Roth captures the glow of young love – no easy task. One needs to create an appealing female character, and Roth definitely does that in the person of Brenda Patimkin. I liked her better than the conflicted Neil. The Patimkin family are a colorful bunch. There’s much humor in the book and it doesn’t have a boring page. Faults? The ending – I thought Roth sabotaged the affair with the diaphragm business (a case of the author tinkering with a plot line to achieve a goal). I also never believed that Neil was going to be a librarian, mainly because I took Neil to be Roth. It was Roth who was putting a bittersweet end to his summer love affair so that he could move on to bigger things. The novella is accompanied by five stories. None are totally successful. “Eli, the Fanatic” is a mess, floundering on much too long; it needed severe editing. Roth includes Jewishness as part of all the work in the book, but especially in the shorter pieces, where it’s at the core; I think this narrows and detracts. The stories are little more than padding – it’s Goodbye, Columbus that matters. *

2009-01-10T08:21:00.000-08:00

Regeneration - Pat Barker
Too monochromatic. This is an anti-war novel, and it repeats an old formula – an atrocity, which is the cause of a patient’s trauma, is revealed. Very gory stuff, served in large doses. The romance of Sarah and Prior came alive, but Barker didn’t devote much time to it. Back to the trenches and extended talk of misery. I went AWOL.

Black Weather - Berton Roueche
I like noir, atmosphere, psychological studies involving everyday people, and this book seemed to offer all three. Yet it yielded nothing of worth. The ending was a big joke on me – I looked and looked for a last page. Alas, it wasn’t there because Roueche never wrote it.

Jill - Philip Larkin
This was written when the author was twenty-one, and that says a lot. He had talent, but he had no idea what to do with it (at least not in a novel). The book is a humorous memoir of Oxford, a depressing study of a misfit, a fantasy, a nightmare. It doesn’t add up. But individual scenes are good, and the character of John emerges from all the confusion (probably, I suspect, because he was Larkin).

A Walker in the City - Alfred Kazin
This memoir didn’t connect with me. I never felt close to the boy, never saw him clearly. There’s too much intellectual filtering going on. Kazin, a noted critic, lacked a novelist’s instincts; he couldn’t breathe vibrancy into himself.

The Stories of Katherine Mansfield
A stylist of great originality. Her prose scintillates; she uses stream of consciousness successfully; she’s an impressionist painting in words. She’s also a miniaturist, capturing the isolated moment, the momentary feeling. Plot is not her thing; but that’s what I want in a story, and in about half of these there’s not even an implied one. The most atypical piece in the book – “The Woman at the Store” – was the best. It’s a harrowing horror story, plotted and executed with calculation and subtlety.

2009-01-07T05:16:00.000-08:00

The Hive - Camilo Jose Cela (Spanish)
A novel made up snapshots in words (most less than a page long); each depicts people carrying on with their lives in Franco’s Spain. There are over 160 different characters; some reoccur, some appear once, some are dropped in the midst of a dilemma (how about an unsolved murder?). To keep track of all these people is daunting. But Cela (a Nobel Prize winner) is an interesting writer, and he has a vision of life that he gets across. That vision, as regards human nature, is unrelentingly bleak; there’s hardly a good person to be found in those 160, but many are greedy, cruel, amoral, hypocritical, crazy, etc.

The Story of an African Farm - Olive Schreiner
I liked the parts that were grounded in everyday life, but the author seems to be obsessed with religiosity; she philosophizes for pages (in hard-to-understand language). Too much of this other-worldliness sank the book for me.

Up in the Old Hotel - Joseph Mitchell
Mitchell wrote these articles and profiles for the New Yorker. He was a reporter searching for material that would make a good story; there are Hits and Misses. No doubt about his ability to write smooth, clear prose, but half the time he was uninspired. And not all his subjects interested me. The clincher – what caused me to stop reading the book – was his portrayal of Joe Gould. I was interested in Gould, but Mitchell wasn’t; he wasn’t even a compassionate observer. Too many pages were about the munitia of their contacts. Mitchell was bored with Gould, the loser, the moocher, and wished he was elsewhere than in the company of the guy. It’s sad to have an unsympathetic person writing what is, more or less, an extended obituary.

2009-01-04T09:23:00.000-08:00

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian)
Dostoevski deals with the essentials of life, particularly with moral questions. He presents his ideas in an understandable way (he wrote to communicate with the common man). On the most basic level, he entertains – we want to know what happens next. He can surprise, he uses ambiguity in startling ways, he writes with passion. He gives the devil his due – literally. The evil aspect of man is on full display, though nobody, good or bad, is treated superficially. One problem is the operatic level of the emotions. Sometimes characters come across as fanatics, hysterics. Maybe the Russian personality is prone to extremes (also, the events these people are involved in would produce intense emotions). The ending leaves much unresolved. Yet The Speech at the Stone is so strong and encompassing that, when it’s over, all is completed. *

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Alan Sillitoe
A look at the British working class, and it rings true. Arthur Seaton stands solid at the center of the novel. He has so many faults that I rather disliked him. This presents a problem for a novelist, who needs a sympathetic reader. Ultimately, what wins out is the factor of honesty – okay, I decided, that’s Arthur, take him or leave him; whatever, he’s real. Sillitoe’s writing flows nicely, particularly the naturalistic dialogue. Besides the swaggering Arthur, we have an equally strong female, Brenda; when Doreen arrives, I felt that she was a weak link, but as Arthur gets more serious about her she takes on substance. All in all, an engrossing, thoughtful and rebellious book. One nagging flaw has to do with plausibility. Arthur and Brenda carry on their long term affair with little effort to conceal it; though he gets the beating he deserves, it comes awfully late in the game. Is her husband a fool, are people so reluctant to gossip? Anyway, as Arthur likes to say, It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. *

Home Free - Dan Wakefield
In the first two pages a college student (Gene) and an older professor (Lou) go to bed after a few lines of dialogue. I could never free the character of Lou from the easy lay she was. Gene seems equally shallow, and a weakling to boot; I didn’t respect him. Wakefield tries to recreate the aura of life when you’re young, in love, have dreams etc., but it doesn’t come off. The friends they have are colorful concoctions, not real people (the “Coaches” fall flat). At the point of the inevitable breakup and the effect on Gene, I stopped reading. I didn’t care.

2009-01-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

Heat and Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
The author does her usual competent job. All the characters were interesting, though a bit fuzzy. It’s this fuzziness that makes the book no more than competent. Motivations don’t quite convince; relationships are a bit dubious; acts are only partially accounted for. Not that they ring false; they just aren’t deep and grounded. The novel’s format is twofold: a journal in present time and the journal writer’s letters which reconstruct a long-ago episode. But the author doesn’t provide insight into the emotional life of anyone – not even her first person journal writer. I can’t say that what Jhabvala does is a failure – this is an engrossing work. But the withholding that’s so prevalent kept me at arm’s length.

Stories by Frank O’Connor
A real stylist at work – working carefully, polishing until he has it right. There’s even a distinct lilt and cadence to O’Connor’s writing. He explores the Irish sensibility (making it as exotic as a South Sea Islander’s, particularly in regard to the relationships between the sexes). The problem is that too many of these glimpses of life are humorous local color pieces; they’re not full-fledged stories. When there is a solid plot and characters O’Connor can be wonderful. The best story is “Guests of the Nation,” in which he tells of a horrible act while making the inexorable proceedings seem friendly and light – until the end. Also outstanding are “The Majesty of the Law,” “The Luceys” and “My Oedipus Complex.” Some stories miss due to garrulity, a storyteller’s love of hearing himself go on (to the point where he overdoes it). But this collection as a whole left me with a feeling of enjoyment, satisfaction and an appreciation of the importance of style in writing.

Lolita: A Screenplay - Vladimir Nabokov
A dalliance. Strangely, I don’t recognize the Lolita in this one. Could I have missed the whole point of the novel? Kubrick never used this script, but I hope Nabokov got a nice paycheck.

2008-12-29T08:24:00.000-08:00

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel - George Meredith
A Victorian novel done in Meredith’s intricate style – the prose is like delicate metal latticework (the author was so intelligent that he demands a lot from the reader). This is interestng as a psychological study. Did the impetuous, foolhardy pride Richard displayed as a boy compel him as a man to go through with a duel he could have avoided? The book has depth and ambiguity, and that’s good. The problem is that the main characters are almost feverish in their emotions (did people in Victorian times really carry on this way?). The minor players stay earthbound and succeed there very well.

The Finishing School - Muriel Spark
This is a long short story packaged as a novel. The author, nearly ninety, doesn’t have the wicked bite of years ago; she’s mildly amused by the nonsense she sets into action. Her subject is publishing and the relationships between writers, focusing on their machinations to achieve success. Though cynical (I liked her use of the word “crap” to describe the novel that has long been the mysterious center of attention), this is no New Grub Street. Still, I enjoyed my leisurely stroll with Dame Muriel.

A Personal Matter - Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)
Dark, passionate, driven, this is a cathartic journey in which Oe succeeds in digging deep into a character (Bird) and at the same time giving us a dilemma worthy of the intensity. The novel moves the reader to turn the page but also compels him to go places emotionally. Oe presents his intimate story in a straight-forward, easy to read style, though the matters he explores are densely tangled, almost too complex to deal with. There’s a lot of sex, much of it distasteful, but it’s integral to the subject matter. Nothing Oe does is gratuitous; he cared far too much. This novel is raw honesty, but raw honesty is very difficult to convey artfully. Problems with the book? The ending is too abrupt. Maybe Oe couldn’t do justice to the tangle he had created without another fifty pages, and he wasn’t up to that task. Himiko, an extremely appealing, well-drawn female character, is given the short shrift, which I kind of resented (because I cared about her). But I forgive Oe for these shortcomings. He wrote a great novel. *

2008-12-26T07:13:00.000-08:00

Like Life - Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore comes across as the best student in an MFA class. Her prose is inventive and fresh. She has a life view (a distasteful one, but with force behind it). She can entertain and give the reader the creeps. Her use of humor is startling, because of its darkness. All these talents (which she sometimes overuses, as if dazzled by her gifts) don’t consistently result in successful stories; the characters and situations and resolutions seem half-baked. The exception is the wonderful “You’re Ugly, Too,” in which she gets it all together – all those strengths she has – to write a compelling and frightening story of someone in the process of falling apart emotionally. Moore tells it almost as one would a joke. It works.

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish)
Disappointing. I initially found Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to be entertaining. The premise – which involves the abandonment of reality – interested me, and I was somewhat amused by the humor. It was slapstick, often crude and silly; not to my taste. Cervantes set out to appeal to the common sensibility of the time. I had expected something more lofty, and I felt relieved that the going was so easy. After a number of variations on the same theme, Cervantes turned to the stories of people whom the pair meet. These stories were very long and suffused with extreme romanticism. I saw no hint of parody – they were related in a straightforward way. I can’t stomach ornate and extreme romanticism, with all the talk of womanly virtue, all the manly tears shed; when Cervantes launched into another long tale I stopped reading. If he had continued with one adventure after another involving Quixote and Panza, I don’t think that could have sustained my interest either. The book may be a major step in the development of the novel, but too much has been made of it. For example, the famous battle with the windmills takes up about a third of a page, and it’s not even described; it happens off stage.

After the Fireworks - Aldous Huxley
Huxley is at his acerbic best in this novella. His main character is intelligent, cynical and acutely self-aware. Huxley explores the moral and emotional disaster that awaits an older man who enters an affair with an attractive young girl. Age will lose in the encounter, and Huxley describes it with relish and cruelty.

2008-12-23T08:32:00.000-08:00

The Counterfeiters - Andre Gide (French)
A book which engages the intellect. Ideas and feelings are observed meticulously. In the beginning there was more action and color, a spirit of adventure, and I enjoyed it; but in the second half it began to feel arid and leaden. And the faults loomed large. The use of a writer’s journal to record events leached the narrative of liveliness. Gide used too many plot coincidences to get characters where he wanted them; people appear and disappear; their motivations, even their personalities, shift. The homoerotic undertone never emerges. Ideas and feelings pile up haphazardly while still being scrutinized laboriously. The seriousness and intelligence of it all became ostentatious. There’s an iron-like rigidity to this book, due to its intellectual rigor – but the rigidity excludes the necessities of good fiction. Geniuses can go their own way, but I don’t think Gide was a genius.

The History Man - Malcolm Bradbury
An entertaining book, odd in purpose and structure. There’s much talk about abstract concepts and sociological ideas (though the characters doing the talking are flesh and blood creations). The dominant force is Howard Kirk, achieving his devious ends with an unflappable drive. I caught whiffs of evil from this master manipulator. I wanted him to get his comeuppance – and, maybe, at the end, he does. This ending is good, leaving one with conclusions and life histories to be mulled over beyond the last page. A problem is that the characters, once established, don’t change much, and even the secondary ones are unappetizing (while spouting theories about social and personal justice, they cannot act decently and seem to have no consciences). There’s a repellent feel to this book. But the repellent can be entertaining – up to a point. Bradbury was smart enough to put a halt to the proceedings before I became alienated.

2008-12-20T06:08:00.000-08:00

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
A book constructed out of electrical wires. There’s something inhuman about it. Even Billy Pilgrim doesn’t come across as a fully comprehensible person; I know him only in bits and pieces. This, I believe, was intended by Vonnegut; in writing about something inhuman he relied on evasion – the sci-fi aspect is a distancing from harrowing realities. The time travel and alien abduction are possibly products of Billy’s imagination – his escape from reality. The humor, the repetitions, the short sections that make up the text, the skipping around in time – all keep the reader from feeling grounded. The horrific bombing of Dresden is presented in an apocalyptic light; the effects on the survivor flicker erratically. This is a unique and effective work, one I respect. Yet I felt a lack of connection with what I was reading. There’s no intimacy to be had with electrical wires.

The Dwarf - Par Lagerkvist (Swedish)
The Nobel Prize winning author impressed me initially; I thought this was an interesting philosophical novel, using a most unusual perspective. By the end I thought it was a foolish novel. The negativity and destructiveness of the dwarf were overdone and became tiresome. Events – such as the poisoning at the feast – were unrealistic. The prose often took on a shrill tone. And it was all so damn dark that it became oppressive. There was not one character to relate to or care about. Pessimism can be bracing, but this was the kind that’s depressing – not a glimmer of humor or freshness or exhilaration. Total negativity cannot be absorbed for long in a relationship, nor in a novel.

The Middleman and Other Stories - Bharati Mukherjee
The author takes on a variety of personas – wife, Vietnam vet/psycho, immigrant. She isn’t ladylike, which one expects of a female Indian writer; she’s mod, tough and sometimes sets out to shock the genteel reader. But her stories – or the five I read – could not, consistently, pass the “So What?” test. There’s a pulpy garishness to her subject mattter and approach – the events depicted in “The Middleman” belong in a comic book. Other stories, as if to display her versatility, are sensitive, more sedately written, but I still felt a superficiality.

Stepping Westward - Malcolm Bradbury
This book initially was like comfort food – the characters and situations were satisfying in a mildly pleasant way. But “mildly” is the crucial word; even the humor wasn’t funny enough. I could have read on, but the factor that tilted the scales was when Bradbury stepped westward to America. He’s very good with the Brits but has a tin ear for our speech and little understanding of how we think and act. We just aren’t like that, old chap.

2008-12-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

The Children of Dynmouth - William Trevor
Timothy is at the center of this book, holding it together with his frightening strangeness. I read with creepy fascination as he doggedly, calmly, irresistibly moves toward fulfilling his delusion. It’s the mechanics of that fulfillment which are too pat: each person Timothy pursues has a convenient secret that he can exploit; the book moves down a predictable path. Also, someone nearly as strong as Timothy would provide a balance to the book; as it is, the rest of the cast are mainly Timothy’s prey. I never understood Timothy, and understanding is Trevor’s strength. I believe that the character - who is devoid of compassion - was alien to his creator. Trevor could only convey hatred and fear for such a person.

The Octopus - Frank Norris
With this book Frank Norris set out to write a great trilogy. He took on a theme of social importance, he painted his epic on a broad canvas. He assembled a large and varied cast of characters. Scenes such as the barn dance are sweeping, teeming panoramas. The prose, though it’s engaging and moves smoothly, is crude, as if hammered out at a breakneck speed by a skillful workman (as opposed to a literary work composed by an stylist). At times the emotions come across as maudlin. Vanamee, with his mysticism, is a tricky character. Yet it all works. Even the crudity is a virtue – the novel’s sense of being hammered out in haste gives it momentum. The maudlin quality is acceptable because the emotions depicted are true; we care about the death of Mrs. Hooven and her daughter because the author cared about them and made us understand them and their plight. Vanamee’s spirituality is necessary to lift us above the harsh realities that fill most of the novel. What can be missed is Norris’ subtlety and intelligence. He doesn’t work in black and white; although greed, in the form of the railroad, is the octopus grasping with all its tentacles, the ranchers don’t wear halos. While reading this novel I was often moved and surprised (most notably by the transformation of Annixter – a great character). The complex, shifting world that Norris created is anchored by simple truths – he placed primary value on love and compassion. In this first novel of his trilogy Norris succeeded fully in what he set out to do. *

2008-12-14T08:46:00.000-08:00

The Middle Ground - Margaret Drabble
Kate is an appealing character, complex and quirky; she not only came alive, she was someone I wanted as a friend. She interacts with a wonderful (and varied) accompanying cast. The book has a pleasing density, and though not every character or situation or idea was fully developed, it didn’t matter; loose ends are allowed, because they’re part of life. That's what Drabble captures – life in both its light and dark shades, with its humor and sadness. She had the right character to pin everything onto, and she went at her story with verve and style and skill. *

Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
This is an inside joke, a send-off of a type of literature; not being acquainted with the literature (or manner of thought) being parodied, much was lost on me. In fact, I often felt lost. Peacock didn’t help matters by using esoteric vocabulary as a humorous device. Still, I got enough of the gist of things to be somewhat entertained. And the oddity of the characters was amusing. The book was mercifully short, under a hundred pages; I don’t believe I could have stayed with it for much longer.

The Farmers’ Daughters - William Carlos Williams
Most of these stories involve Williams’ practice as a doctor among the poor immigrants of urban New Jersey, so illness and its treatment is a main element. The “ugliness” that’s depicted (with a no-nonsense bluntness) is merely a part of life. What’s inside people – their character – is what matters. Williams comes across as intelligent and tough, sane and solid. He uses a jumpy, shorthand style of prose; actually, Williams states that the stories weren’t done with much care – he would “bang out” one in a break in his busy medical practice. Most aren’t really stories – they’re sketches or fragments. The much-anthologized “The Use of Force” is the standout success; it rises up from the subconscious, and I wonder if Williams knew that he was writing about a sexual assault.

2008-12-11T06:05:00.000-08:00

Wisteria Cottage - Robert Coates
Coates enters the mind of a warped and dangerous person. To do this convincingly is an achievement, but the real value of the novel lies in the empathy and pity I felt for Richard. He’s a victim of his terrible mental affliction, and, being in his mind, I shared this affliction. I awaited his shifts of distortion (and I saw the logic in his thinking); I felt his irresistibly rising anger and his despair. Coates’ ability to create empathy makes the book more than a study of a killer; it’s a work of compassion. And, perhaps due to my understanding of Richard, his acts are more terrible. A powerful, strange and disturbing book. *

Clayhanger - Arnold Bennett
This is a solid and well-constructed novel, but it’s an example of how those virtues can be stifling. Bennett carefully does everything right, but there’s no spark compelling the characters and action forward. The pace is a plodding one. When events became predictable I lost all interest.

After Such Pleasures - Dorothy Parker
Parker wrote in the heyday of the American short story, when authors were paid well because they produced a desired commodity. She displays the virtues of writers of this era – her stories are highly readable; they do not tax or disappoint. They offer fifteen minutes of entertainment. One of Parker’s strengths is her wit; she had the deft touch. Still, none of these stories rose to excellence. They’re lightweight. Was Parker capable of digging deeper? She could (and did), but in this collection her objectives were modest.

Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov
What I liked: an interesting main character, Krug (I admired his mind and personality); a study of Krug’s love for his dead wife and his son; a meditation on mortality and the great scheme of life (with no answers provided); a comical look at a totalitarian state malignantly malfunctioning. In the last aspect this is strong stuff, displaying how horrifying humor can be. The two drawbacks were the obscurity of much of the writing; the book is full of Nabokovian word games. Also, Nabokov indulged his cruel streak too fully in the nightmarish ending. A child being tortured? Repellant in the extreme, and this ultimately turned me against the book.

2008-12-08T08:42:00.000-08:00

Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763
It’s important to note two things: Boswell was twenty-two when he wrote this, and he embarked on it to fulfill an agreement with a friend – they would exchange their daily jottings. Therein lie the weaknesses of this journal: youthfulness and writing under obligation. Despite its faults, Boswell has a brilliant mind, and he’s mature beyond his years. Also, the style and anecdotal structure of the journal is the form that Boswell will use in his great biography of Samuel Johnson. But back to the weaknesses: on many days Boswell doesn’t have much of interest to write about; there are too many teas, strolls, etc. – nothing of consequence transpires (whereas, with Johnson, there was always a bubbling of ideas). Also, Boswell ran out of steam at the halfway point; the task he set himself clearly became a chore. An interesting aspect of this work is the honesty with which he presents himself and his actions; as a result, I didn’t particularly like him. He seems foppish and hypocritical. The hypocrisy of the Victorian Age has been much remarked on; here we can see it – as when Boswell has sex with a very young prostitute in the park (an outdoor brothel at night) and, the next day, finds the church service uplifting. He doesn’t seem to make the connection. The book captures the flavor of London and its people (at least those of the upper class). But, when Boswell ran out of steam, so did I.

Notes from a Cold Island - Frederick Exley
This is the second part of an autobiographical trilogy that began with the wonderful ode to failure, A Fan’s Notes. Exley starts out by telling the reader that he’s having trouble with this book. And indeed he is. It’s a patchwork composed of disparate elements. There’s his dissolute life on Singer Island in Florida, a long interview with Gloria Steinam, a very long semi-biographical study of Edmund Wilson, an account of his stay at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, etc. The book is cobbled together. It’s a mess, though maybe it reflects something about Exley. He lives with a debilitating depression; he’s drinking himself to death. But on Singer Island he writes about his many loving friends, a colorful crew who do fun things (in particular, they cook epic meals – Exley is great at describing food); he has all the sex he could wish for (and which I could do with less description of; plus, I wondered how a middle-aged man with a long term drinking problem could carry on so lustily). Maybe Exley found it too onerous a task to write intimately about the dark side of himself when he’d already spilled his guts (and he is, by nature, an author with no other topic but his sad self). Despite the problems, Exley’s instincts are good; he can hit the mark – the heart – when he takes aim (as in the last paragraph of the book, when he bids us a fond and bittersweet farewell). I can’t imagine what Exley has to say in the third installment.

2008-12-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning
The second of the Balkan Trilogy. As with the first (The Great Fortune) the setting is Bucharest, this time as it falls apart from forces within and without (the action takes place during World War II). The main characters are Harriet and Guy, and unfortunately they’re not particularly interesting. Guy remains vague; this is autobiographical, and Manning seems to be walking on egg shells when dealing with her husband (probably because he’s an ass). The action is mostly concerned with Guy’s job; the imminent war gets second billing. Yaki is still the most alive, multi-dimensional character. Bucharest is still a fascinating place.

Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning
This last novel in a trilogy has the Pringles in Greece, with Guy’s difficulty getting a job the main focus. He’s still vague (sigh). There’s a suggestion of Harriet having a fling with a handsome young fellow, but we know she’s too proper to do it. The book takes on aspects of a romance novel, and Yaki is gone, so I stopped reading about the bland and tiresome Pringles.

A Man of the People - Chinua Achebe
The problem with this novel is that Achebe mixes politics with romance, and the romance part is weak. Nanga, the corrupt political boss, is a forceful, repellant character. The narrator is a good (and amusing) observer – until he falls in love. Since the emphasis changes to the love affair, the book suffers.

The Collected Stories of John O’Hara
There are lessons to be learned from O’Hara: how to entertain (all the stories capture and hold one’s attention); how to use dialogue (it’s naturalistic and reveals character); and how to make an ending resonate. There’s a revelatory jolt at the close of the best of these stories, such as “Can I Stay Here?” What’s been revealed lingers with you. This isn’t a trick ending; it flows from under the surface of what has gone before. The problem is that O’Hara often doesn’t have that moment. All else is there – the entertainment, the good dialogue; but, without an ending of consequence, the story is merely good; there aren’t enough very good ones in this collection. The longest (actually a full-fledged novella) is the worst piece of writing in the book. Surely the editor, Frank MacShane, could have made a better choice. On the flip side, “Over the River and Through the Woods” belongs in any anthology of the best American short stories. Young writers should read O’Hara and recognize his virtues.

2008-12-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

Arthur Rex - John Berger
I have no interest in the Arthurian legend, but I was absorbed for all 500+ pages of this book. It’s a considerable achievement – one that makes you think, “I could never do this in a million years.” The scholarship, the consistent use of the vernacular of Arthurian times, the vigor and vividness, even the enjoyably fantastic gore. Also, a moral (knightly) point of view is presented – as if man is slowly, haltingly emerging from barbarism to virtue; but Berger shows us that this effort is doomed to failure, man being what he is. The one fault is that the characters, being legendary and much larger than life, aren’t people one can relate to emotionally (although the aging and death of Arthur and Lancelot are moving). A unique work that’s worthy of respect if not love.

The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
Starts out as a rant, an attack on society’s cherished beliefs, particularly love and marriage. This part seems a bit strident, though interesting (and some of the rant is valid). Then it becomes the study of a bad marriage, and we’re into the themes of incompatibility and jealousy. Whereas the beginning had originality, this latter section trod familiar territory, and the strident tone became grating. I wasn’t even convinced of the authenticity of the man’s actions – he’s too distraught.

Leaf Storm - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish)
The long title story was extremely atmospheric – dark, heavy, haunted. Full of strong images. But when I was done I felt a lack of resolution. Maybe it was about misplaced compassion. Maybe – there wasn’t enough focus to reach a conclusion. Not helping things was the use of multiple points of view. Faulkner’s influence is apparent (with his faults, mainly obfuscation). As for the five shorter stories that make up this volume, they’re good, particularly “Nabo.”

2008-11-28T05:20:00.000-08:00

The Takeover - Muriel Spark
A comedy of bad manners. Amorality reigns. An entertaining book, but I expect more from Spark. The problem is that her characters – every last one of them – are deplorable. We await the next terrible thing they’ll do, but that’s all we expect. They’re one-dimensional props for Spark to use in wild plot machinations. They’re certainly not real human beings. Sometimes events get silly, as in Hubert’s botched performance as a high priest. Maybe Spark is showing us a world in which moral values have vanished. But there has to be a positive moral character as a counterbalance. Or a day of reckoning for the evil ones. But at the end evil (in the form of Hubert, who’s probably the worst of the bunch) escapes unscathed. I think Spark was indulging herself in this book. The question is, what was she indulging? She seemed to be having a suspiciously good time with evil.

Bright Day - J. B. Priestley
Initially engaging, this became tedious. The original virtues remained, but the characters, the situation – both of which were sound – became stagnant; the same plangent note (the loss of youth, the loss of what was beautiful) was repeated over and over. When you constantly interrupt your reading to look at how much of the book you have left, and it seems to be more than you hoped for, it’s time to put it aside.

Scandal - A. N. Wilson
Falls into the category of “wicked fun.” An expert job; this author is skilled and intelligent. The one weakness was the character of Hughie; his mooning over Priscilla was too much of what was unbelievable from the start. Actually (you don’t notice this while you’re reading the book) none of the characters are realistic. They’re all caricatures. And none of them are truly likable, though you don’t strongly dislike any of them. I was entertained, and I’ll look for more books by A. N. Wilson.

2008-11-24T14:42:00.000-08:00

Confidence Africaine - Roger Martin du Gard (French)
Very strange, beginning with the fact that this hardbound novel is an 8000 word story. And is it fiction? The author/narrator frames it as a true story told to him. Then there’s the subject matter: incest. Pains are made to present it in an ordinary light, as something understandable, almost inevitable. No censure or guilt. Passions are involved, but they’re related in a detached, clinical way, as mere facts leading to sexual relations between a brother and sister. We aren’t in the event but observing it from outside. The author is like a doctor describing a case of interest. But Martin du Gard is a novelist; he made choices, and they were sound ones. The oddity of this story and the way it’s told creates an uneasiness in the reader. The inner story is hidden, but we sense it lurking in the shadows. On the last page, in the last paragraph, the author goes into those shadows; the ending is the most powerful (and artful, passionate) moment in the story. I felt, forcefully, the ugliness coiled at the heart of this matter. *

Good-bye Wisconsin - Glenway Wescott
This book illustrates the perils of over-writing, over-thinking. Wescott works so hard at creating gorgeous and complex prose, finding the original and striking metaphor or simile, that it becomes a burden to read him. As for the deep thinking – emotions are followed through their intricacies, profound matters are explored. It’s fine to do this, but it should be embedded in a plot and characters, not imposed on it. The only story that succeeds completely is about people who are stupid – “The Runaways.” Since they’re stupid, Wescott was limited; and, despite his talent, he needed limitations.

Selected Tales of Ivan Turgenev (Russian)
Some of these tales are from A Hunter’s Sketches, and I won’t read that book. An overabundance of description, including detailed (very, right down to the smallest mole) portraits of Russians. No plot – the characters do something, the story ends. The three novellas were much better; they had strong characters and plots, with description used effectively. Turgenev tried to capture the dawn of love and the emptiness at its loss. A difficult task, and he didn’t quite succeed; full involvement in the emotions never happened (at least not for me). Still, “First Love” and “Clara Milich” are quite well done. I thought “Mumu” might be the best of the lot until Gerasim kills his dog – which wasn’t part of the true story that Turgenev based this on; in his alternate version the act is motiveless. And alienating.