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 treats them in a non-judgmental way – after all, he was one of the losers. 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 Carver could tell us what he knew.

The Healing Art - A. N. Wilson

What doesn’t work in this novel? Let me count the ways. I saw through Wilson’s manipulations (on page thirty-five I suspected that the X-rays had been switched; I was right). The religious angle is leaned on too heavily. The way Pamela reacts to her impending death is implausible. Wilson’s characters are stridently odd, and there’s no basis for plot twists (such as the sexual liaison between Pamela and another woman). When John arrives on the scene – another oddball – I had enough. The author is presumably promoting redemption and love (as he did so successfully in Wise Virgin), but in this book he’s notably mean in some of his portrayals. Also, the sex scenes are grubby. The old question arises for me: How can an author’s work vary so radically in quality?

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). Though religion consumes them, they face a frightening void where their souls should be. They rely on hypocrisy to justify their actions and attitudes. 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, it’s a moral book. But how unyielding! It’s an excoriating Calvinistic sermon. I felt that 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 I was diverted by vivid writing about engrossing lowlife characters, but soon I began to ask myself (with increasing irritation), Where is this going? Good question, one the author never answered. The final chapter was his last chance to pull the whole misshapen project together, but it was the worst in the book – the nonsense at the end actually negates any good things that came before. Chappell possesses the tools a writer needs, but I have doubts about his ability to use them to construct a coherent novel.

Dream Children - A. N. Wilson

Wilson 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 individual belief systems). But there has to be a core of authenticity. This was especially lacking in Oliver; 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.

The House in Paris - Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen works in the tradition of Henry James. 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. 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 whose work I’ve enjoyed 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, 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? Since the last letter of a name in a letter is unreadable, 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) but it’s presented in an offhand way, free of any conflict. 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 fully capable of creating characters and plots (in his idiosyncratic way), but in this novel 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, written when he was much-honored in Argentina. Maybe fame went to his head.

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 (cannibalsm raises its very ugly head). However, I never finished the book. It’s too nautical for my tastes. Roberts knew his subject, but he includes a lot of technical matters that I didn’t understand. So I was often just reading words. And though he goes into the psychology of the men, the stoicism to his approach and in his portrayals kept me from feeling close to anyone’s emotional life. Maybe the men were stoical; still, for me the human element was missing.

The Day of the Owl - Leonardo Sciascia (Italian)

This was Sciascia’s first venture into the novel. It’s a literary mystery in which he probes the subject that consumed him: the Mafia in Sicily. He was a man on a mission – to show how the Mafia functions. He begins with a murder of someone of no obvious significance; we’re then taken through a labyrinth to the source. The main problem is that the social message (about the Mafia) is predominant over characters and plot; too often we get brief sketches which lack depth. The exception comes at the end, in the long interview between the police Captain and the old Mafioso; two people emerge in all their complexity. Another problem is Sciascia’s prose; he needed to simplify it. In a later novel, To Each His Own, he corrected all the mistakes he made in this one.

Wise Virgin - A. N. Wilson

Initially I didn’t think I was going to like this book, primarily because the three main characters were distasteful. Yet Wilson is writing about transformation. 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 existence 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. *

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 not real human beings but one-dimensional props for Spark to use in wild plot machinations. 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 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

This novel delivers the wicked fun to be had from reading a British tabloid story featuring politicians and prostitutes. None of the reprobates, lowlifes, and losers ensnared in this tawdry farce are sympathetic, though nobody engenders feelings of moral censure. Wilson didn’t try for depth; he aimed merely to entertain, and he does so with skill and intelligence.

The Bystander - Albert Guerard (French)
This is the kind of precarious endeavor in which the slightest misstep will cause all to collapse into absurdity. But Guerard succeeds – the book seems true and frightening. Everything hinges on the first two pages, in which a feeling must be imparted convincingly enough to support all that follows. Mysteriously, this sequence, which is presented simply, succeeds. From this beginning we’re able to make sense of the first person narrator’s delusions, his self-imposed debasement. The fault with the novel lies in fact that the narrator is rather repellent, so being in his mind and sharing his emotions gets to be grueling.

Christmas Party - Karl Wenclas
King calls this a “zeen novel” and it should be fairly judged by that standard. The prose is rough-edged, there’s a simplicity to the people and the scenes. This is not a sophisticated piece of writing. But the objective is to engage the reader, not to tax him. Overall Wenclas succeeds in looking under people’s facades, at their dreams and their needs (mostly for love and a sense of meaning to their lives).

Love’s Cross Currents - Algernon Swinburne
An epistolary novel, with all the limitations of that form. I got sick of the rarified tone, the use of French, the indulgence of people rambling on and on without anything happening. I had no interest in the fragile china dolls that populated this book. So, of course, I happily quit reading it.

Incline Our Hearts - A. N. Wilson
An English novel (very English) about a boy’s coming of age. It’s the first in a projected series, and it suffers from that – there’s a lot of stage setting for events that will follow. Although I enjoyed this I don’t feel any desire to read the rest of the novels.

Lovers of Their Time - William Trevor
Good collection, marked by Trevor’s compassion. Also notable is how he concentrates on old people, although he must have been only in his fifties when he wrote this. Trevor is entertaining and his work has substance. Still, no story was truly outstanding.