Re-reads

The Blood of the Lamb – Peter De Vries

The last third of this novel is an emotional experience. Not just for me, but for you too, if you have a heart. Don Wanderhope portrays his daughter Carol and his relationship with her. At age ten she contracts leukemia and, after many remissions and relapses, dies two years later. A child of that age is a golden creature, and De Vries captures her and his responses to her illness. He does it with restraint, understatement. This kind of work would suffer from an outpouring of emotion from the author; the reader must generate those feelings from what is offered. Don does have episodes of anger, but they’re mostly directed at a god who is absent, who offers no help or solace. A child should not go through such an ordeal, should not be so early robbed of life. That she endures it with a simple grace is part of her nature. Is this novel hard to take? Well, yes, but it has value. It must be noted that De Vries wrote it shortly after his own daughter had died of leukemia. Just as the first two thirds cannot rightly be described as autobiographical, the Carol section does not faithfully correspond to De Vries’ life: unlike Don, he was married and had three other children. In Lamb those characters are stripped away, and Don faces things alone. I won’t review the novel as whole; it has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s that last third that matters, to a degree that few works achieve. 5
 
Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
This is a nostalgia piece, written by a man who would die, at age forty-one, six years after it came out; the cause of his death was rampant alcoholism. But in this book he was sixteen and seventeen, a healthy, physically fit and emotionally strong young man on the threshold of life. Despite the success he would later achieve with his plays, I believe that his three years in a Borstal Prison were the high point of his life. Brendan was arrested because he was found in London with a suitcase full of ingredients for explosives. (This was during the years of the violent conflict between England and Ireland over the issue of Irish independence; Brendan was a fervent member of the IRA.) BB isn’t a bitter book. Though there are instances of cruelty, deprivation, violence, those are largely overshadowed by the positive aspects: the comradery, the generosity, the rough kindness. Not just from one boy to another, but from those who run the prison. Some “screws” are brutes, but most are fair-minded, a few even caring souls. And among Brendan’s fellow inmates, there are boys who are dangerous. But, all in all, Borstal was not a bad place, which is to the credit of the British. I don’t believe there are many women who will read this book, but maybe they should; it’s instructive in showing the male psyche, particularly the need for love and the sensitivity to slights. In a way, Brendan was made for prison life: he was tough, stoic, diplomatic. A born leader. And smart. The Catholic schools in Dublin are to be congratulated: they produced a working class boy who was fluent in Latin. BB is an unrestrained outpouring of memories; it’s a spree of words, particularly dialogue. For me this often went on too long. But it’s Behan’s book, his experiences, and they do come alive. Last observation: has any small country produced as many top-notch writers as Ireland? 4
 
Castaway – James Gould Cozzens
A short book, under a hundred pages, with an interesting premise. A man (Mr. Lecky) is locked in a large department store. In the ensuing days nobody else enters the store. What occurred to bring this situation about is never divulged. Lecky is like Robinson Crusoe on his island, though he has at hand, on the many floors of the store, all that he needs to survive. We follow his efforts to get by. But soon a major problem emerges: someone else is in the store (this man is always referred to as “the idiot”). Lecky immediately considers him to be a threat to his life, and sets out to hunt him down and kill him – which, after much bumbling, he succeeds in doing. That accomplished, we get more pages about “getting by.” As I noted: an interesting premise – and Cozzens manages to make it a colossal bore. The problems are twofold. Lecky never takes on human dimensions that I could relate to. I never cared about the guy, never felt close to him. The only feeling he evoked is dislike (with some puzzlement thrown in). The puzzlement stems mainly because Cozzens seems to be making a point about Life, but I never had an inkling of what that was. The ending is supposed to be a revelation, but my only revelation about it – and the book as a whole – was, “What a mistake.” (delete)
 
Night Train – Martin Amis
Though this novel is not on my MMB list, it was sitting on the shelves with other books that are. And I recalled that I had liked it in some way. But this time around I had major problems. For starters, why does an upper-class British author, the son of the famous Kingsley, write a police procedural mystery set in the USA and told in the first person by a tough woman detective named Mike? The research going on behind the scenes to create a sense of authenticity is way too conspicuous. And, BTW, in case you’re wondering, Mike is not a lesbian; she lives with a guy, though she has no on-page interaction with him; he’s just a name. (So does he exist?) Peculiarities abound. But there’s the Biggie, the central element in the plot: a twenty-seven-year old woman, who has absolutely everything going for her, commits suicide (three bullets into her mouth). Why? – this novel is a whydunit. Mike, who had known Jennifer since she was a child, follows the trail of her life searching for the fly in the ointment. I waited for the reason for the suicide to emerge, increasingly impatient (and annoyed). But all leads led to dead ends. Instead Amis served up a heavy dose of verbiage of a deep and cryptic philosophical nature. There’s no “Aha!” moment because Amis had no solution to the premise he constructed. This book is woefully misconceived and leads to nothing but a cop out.

  I’ve been having a long-standing (too damn long!) problem finding novels that engage me. I can’t rely on the prize winners. For example, in the past five or so years I’ve started many books that have won prestigious awards and have not gotten far before deciding that they weren’t worth my continuing. I wander the stacks of the two libraries available to me and find a wasteland.

The end result is that I feel abandoned by fiction, something which has sustained me daily since I was twelve.

What to do?

I haven’t reread books that are included in the Most Meaningful Books list at this site. One reason is that I don’t want to be disappointed. If a book meant something to me when I was thirteen, or twenty-two, or thirty-six (etc.), shouldn’t I honor the taste of the person I was, the one who found it rewarding? Lastly, I realize that I was easier on books in the past. But a sourpuss decimation? No, that doesn’t appeal to me.

Still . . . I’m desperate for something good to read.

Which is why I turned to The Unbearable Bassington by Saki (H. H. Munro). I probably, as a guess, first read it sometime in my late twenties. How would it hold up?

It held up exceedingly well.

I’ll continue to delve into those old books (I own them all: I buy any book I find worthy of keeping in my library). But I’ll only turn to those I read prior to the time when I began writing reviews. (My first post was in 2008.) 

And I’ll write brief reviews of them (even if I have to be negative). 

I’ll designate these as “Re-reads.”

Re-reads

The Unbearable Bassington – Saki (H. H. Munro)

First, the prose. Smoothly elegant, unique, inventive. Many sentences employ an amusing or surprising twist. This could be tiresome — if it wasn’t embedded in the situation. Take this early example, describing Francesca Bassington: “Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room.” This sentence serves a purpose – it gives us a look, in a skewed way, at a central character’s personality. Her son, Comus, is unbearable because he devotes himself to his pleasures. While Francesca has money worries (she’s in danger of losing her precious house and its drawing room, along with her position in London society) he shows not the slightest inclination to seek gainful employment. Francesca’s only hope for him is that he marry a rich woman – and one is a prospect. But Comus doesn’t do what is needed to win Elaine’s hand – he’s too selfish, self-centered. The results are a tragedy for all three involved. The book, so light-handed for so long, becomes a tragedy. I consider this to be an unappreciated masterpiece.

The Cat’s Pajamas – Peter DeVries

What appealed to me about this book? It’s wildness, it’s absurdity? A man commits a faux pas on the first page and tries to make up for it; thus an inexorable descent begins. This professor of creative writing, happily married, winds up living in a shack with an idiot boy and an alcoholic dog and making a meager living selling bottles of fresh air door-to-door. It’s all weird, improbable. I never understood what was driving Hank Tattersall to act in a self-destructive way. Though, in losing all social respectability, he thinks of himself as happy, which may be part of his general self delusion. Anyway, the ending is so memorable that I started the book knowing what the last scene would be – I remembered how horrible it was. Yet it’s handled blithely (which, somehow, makes it worse). I think DeVries was engaging in blithe cruelty.

Other Voices, Other Rooms – Truman Capote

I was in my teens when I read this, so there were things about it that were strange – and fascinating. It was probably my first exposure to the Southern Gothic genre, with its cast of highly bizarre characters. Plus, the pervasive element of homosexuality would be new to me. I may also have been impressed by the extended flights of lyric prose. The last quality was less to my liking this time around; Capote was better when he was in a grounded mode. He was in that mode when writing about a young Black woman, Zoo (short for Missouri). She was the character I felt closest to, and her fate moved me. I also liked Joel, the thirteen-year-old main character, and I believed that his dreamworld experiences at The Landing, deep in the backwoods of Mississippi, would change his life. For a novel written by someone in his mid-twenties, this is a remarkable work. I recalled my younger self not understanding the ending; on this reading I still didn’t. Who is the figure in the window, the one Joel goes to? Randolph?

(End of this session of re-reads)