Lotte in Weimar - Thomas Mann (German)
The Lotte of this novel is the beloved portrayed fictionally in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Now sixty-three, she visits Weimar with the expectation of again meeting the author she had known in her youth. This premise interested me because of the human element. Unfortunately, the human element got lost in complexities. Mann builds the plot around visitors who come to Lotte’s hotel room. They engage in long monologues (one covers over a hundred pages) that deal with the character of Goethe and the essence of genius. Ideas are presented with a rigorous and austere intelligence. Even the prose is lofty; listening to Goethe’s son, Lotte thinks that he speaks in an old-fashioned, artificial and pedantic way; but, since such language is used throughout the book, she could be commenting on Mann’s own style. His insights are perceptive (Goethe is portrayed as a parasite who, in his relations with young Lotte, laid his emotions like a cuckoo-egg in a nest already made and then flew off). But too much undiluted intelligence becomes tiresome; Mann’s weightiness, his refusal to be direct and simple, wore me down. When a chapter begins with the reader plunged into the mind of Goethe (“Alas, that it should vanish!”), I had enough; I had even lost faith that anything of interest would emerge from the long-delayed meeting of Lotte and the Great Man. Actually, I had lost faith in Thomas Mann. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, appeared in 1901; in it he immerses the reader in the stuff of life – weddings and divorces, births and deaths, money matters and gossip. Lotte was written forty years later, while he was living in the United States (in self-imposed exile from Hitler’s Germany). Unlike the twenty-five-year-old who wrote the early masterpiece, age and insularity must have caused Mann to lose contact with the times and with ordinary people. Instead he turned his attention to grand subjects: biblical figures, the Faust legend, geniuses. He also considered the majestic power of Literature to be a legitimate subject for a novel. I’m one of the few left who value great writing, but only when its primary concern is human nature.

Aleck Maury Sportsman – Caroline Gordon
In old age Aleck Maury recalls an episode that occurs early in the book: “I knew suddenly what it was I had lived by, from the time when, as a mere child, I used to go out into the woods at night with a negro man. I remembered it – it must have been when I was about eight – looking up in the black woods into the deep, glowing eyes of the quarry and experiencing a peculiar, transfiguring excitement.” Ever since he had been seeking and finding that excitement – which is, for him, a sense of being fully alive. His solitary quest demands selfish dedication. Though he has feelings for his family, they make inroads on time – precious time! – that could be spent on the water or in the field. The vast majority of these pages are filled with scenes of hunting and fishing; his dog Gy gets more space than his wife and children, and his job as a teacher matters not at all. Since his story is told from the perspective of old age, it’s permeated by an awareness of loss. When young Aleck sees his uncle, who was always first in the field, unable any longer to mount a horse, a sense of foreboding rushes over him. He will suffer the same fate. First a bum leg prevents him from hunting, then he becomes too heavy to easily get around; worse, he feels a lessening of enthusiasm: “Delight . . . I had lived by it for sixty years and now it was gone and might never come again. . . .” This is something he cannot face, and he has no resources to fall back on. Yet at the end he rallies to make a last assertion of his independence – he will live only by his terms. Caroline Gordon had a personal investment in this portrayal, for Aleck Maury is based on her father. She’s present in the book as Sally; but, until the last pages, there’s not one sustained scene between the two. Is she condemning him for his absence from her life? I didn’t get that impression. Rather, she seems to respect the choice he made: few people know what their passion is and follow it so resolutely. Gordon’s stories about him are more artfully done than this novel; the descriptions of hunting and fishing are too detailed (by the way, how did she get to know as much about those subjects as her father?) and time is covered haphazardly, often in leaps and bounds. But those faults are irrelevant. What matters is the author’s complete and effortless empathy. *

Riceyman Steps - Arnold Bennett
The title refers to a place – a slum in London – where Henry Earlforward lives in a dilapidated building which also houses his used bookstore. His servant Elsie and a woman he marries, Violet, make up what is mostly a three character novel. Henry and Violet are perplexing because who they are and how they act aren’t in conformity. I never understood why this eccentric bachelor – a man in his late forties – decides to marry, and why sensible and independent Violet accepts such an odd duck. Whether love (or sex) plays a role in their relationship is left ambiguous. Elsie, on the other hand, presents no complexities: simplicity and goodness and a desire to work define her. An aspect of Henry’s personality that’s developed convincingly is his “soft obstinacy.” I could comprehend why others are dominated by a will so mild and yet so immovably and inhumanly strong. Though it’s Elsie’s nature to be submissive, Violet loses all but remnants of her once-vigorous self-sufficiency. Also convincing is Henry’s fanatical miserliness; despite the considerable fortune he keeps in a safe, he deprives himself and others in the house of food and heat. In one sense this is pathological, but hoarding money – gazing at it, holding the lovely, crisp new notes and gold sovereigns – is Henry’s passion and, as such, gives him pleasure. When he becomes ill he refuses to go to a hospital. It’s not only the expense; he sees it as a place where individuality is crushed, and this is a dreadful prospect for someone of his nature. I consumed this book, fascinated by its amalgam of commonality and perversity. Bennett’s attitude is godlike; he’s both pitying and amused by the emotions and travails of his three characters. It never occurs to them that they’re insignificant cogs in an enigmatic universe; they’re too busy with their share of working it out. Which is called life.

Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann (German)
This massive novel is framed as a biography of a deceased composer, written by a lifelong friend. Unlike Goethe’s Faust, it’s not about a man who sells his soul to the devil. In a key document (which comes into the hands of the biographer/friend), Adrian Leverkuhn writes of his encounter with Satan and of the pact they enter into (he’s granted twenty-four years of genius). As presented, one can only conclude that this encounter happened entirely in the mind of Adrian. This strange man has character traits – primarily a coldheartedness – that alienate him from humanity. His friend claims that, unlike Adrian, he’s a humanist. Why, then, does he (or, rather, Mann) punish the reader by delving into matters that only a scholar could comprehend? As I labored through the dense sections on theology and music I had to console myself with the belief that I was getting the gist of what the author was trying to convey. Other parts are intelligible, even engaging (without them I couldn’t have made it to the end). And some scenes are beyond impressive. Yet in the last hundred pages there’s a weakening of the grip that Mann had always kept on his material. Most crucial is that the voice of the narrator becomes overwrought; with the appearance of Echo he falls into a sea of sentiment. Watching the child read he thinks, “thus must the little angels up above turn the pages of their heavenly choir-books.” In a world ruled by the daemonic such purity must die a ghastly death (related with drum rolls of doom). Syrupy sentiment, resounding doom – Mann loses his sense of moderation, and, like a wounded bull, he becomes vulnerable. My reaction to his last lengthy excursion into the intricacies of musicology was dismissive: “You do go on!” When copious tears are shed, I was unaffected because too much heavy-handed obscurity had alienated me from the emotional life of the characters. In trying to account for the failure of Doctor Faustus a few factors may be relevant. As Mann worked on the novel destruction was raining down on his beloved Germany (a nation that had, in a sense, made a pact with the devil). And, like his narrator, he was in his seventies; possibly he was looking back at a life in which he had devoted himself to his art to the exclusion of all else; he might have seen himself in Adrian Leverkuhn. If so, the tears could well have been real, but Mann was fated to cry alone.

The Suicide’s Wife - David Madden
“She woke, felt his finger in her.” You can decide for yourself whether this opening sentence is inviting or distasteful; for me it was the latter, particularly since no lovemaking follows. The man simply withdraws his finger and gets out of the sleeping bag he’s sharing with his wife. In silence he leaves the house; he later turns up dead, an apparent suicide. Why did he kill himself? – Ann hasn’t a clue. Her husband seems to have been an enigma to her. They have three children, the oldest twelve years old, but it’s as if they had no intimate relationship. She’s upset and baffled, but beyond that she doesn’t have the deep feelings one would expect, such as remorse or anger. Apparently he never cared much about her and his kids (he leaves them with hardly any money and a car in terminal disrepair). This passive, insecure woman tries to learn about “the man around whom her life had been expended” by turning to his colleagues at the college where he taught. There she meets a creepy professor who raises the possibility that a mentally unstable student had murdered her husband. Rather than finding this an intriguing plot twist, I suspected that Madden was merely trying to extend the book to a minimal length; he had already included some dead end detours and a lot of filler – much space is taken up with Ann’s efforts to learn how to drive (repeated shifting and stalling; a page and a half that comes directly from a manual for a driver’s license test). Would insight – the only thing that could save this novel – emerge at the end? I had no faith that it would because the premise isn’t realistic: a twelve year marriage can’t be presented as a void. At any rate, the repugnance I felt from the first sentence became overpowering (Ann has a vaginal infection; you don’t want to know the details, but Madden supplies them). I abandoned this morbid book halfway through.

Female Friends - Fay Weldon
It’s unusual to quit on a 237 page book when you’re fifty pages from the end. For one thing, there has to be a reason why you got so far. I was initially impressed by the unique structure and perspective; the writing was topnotch and the three women varied and interesting. What eventually wore me down was that Weldon kept going over the same ground. All the women are victims of their bodies (which bleed, get pregnant, undergo unwelcome changes, etc.); more important, they’re victimized by men. Men dominate them, if only by being absent from their lives. And the men in this novel are a bad lot; a few are grotesquely bad, yet the women willingly engage in sex with them, have their babies, marry them, serve them, obsess about them. Weldon presents life as grubby and mean; this is true even when she adopts a flippant tone: “Grace has abortions. Like having a tooth out, she says. She looks forward to it. All that drama, she says, and distracted men, and the anaesthetics are lovely, and you wake up with no sense of time passed. What luxury!” An unwieldy cast of secondary characters (at least a dozen to keep track of) didn’t help matters; most are dismal and distorted people trapped in aggressively bizarre situations. Love? – not to be found, even among the three “friends.” What was lively and unique on page ninety had become unpalatable by page190. I couldn’t swallow another bite.

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 a long section of “Nevsky Avenue” 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. Kafka had a man turn into a giant beetle, but all was logical. “The Nose” never overcomes its ridiculous and unwieldy premise. A 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. From boyhood Prince Klaus’s personality has been stifled by the constricting life of royalty. When he finds a woman he loves there’s a sense of awakening. Imma is unusual, fascinating and formidable; she cares for Klaus, but she finds something missing in him. There’s a fairy tale quality to this love story, with the Prince winning the maiden in a highly unusual way. His nation is in dire financial straits, and tied to his marriage proposal is the stipulation that Imma’s father use his enormous wealth to help pull them out of their plight. This is exactly what she needed: for Klaus to stop being a royal prop, to show initiative and to act with conviction. All the emotional and psychological forces at play are believable. The book is engrossing, in a reserved way, though there are key scenes that stand out vividly. One major moment involves Klaus’s 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 told from a family member’s point of view. First comes Bunny, the little boy; the expressionistic style of writing in his section conveys the imaginative, emotional way he experiences his mother. 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. Maxwell’s strength – the creating of atmosphere and mood – is used to great effect. We understand how this death is a wound that will never heal for any of the three. *