Rogue Male – Geoffrey Household
This novel, published in 1939, is set just before WWII had broken out. It takes the form of the journal of “a bored and wealthy Englishman who had hunted all commoner game and found a perverse pleasure in hunting the biggest game on earth.” He had tracked Hitler (whose name never once appears in the book) to a house where he was staying in Poland. The writer of the journal (who also never reveals his name) has no political interests and no mission in mind – he claims that even when he was lying on the edge of a cliff with the “great man” in the telescopic sights of his rifle, he wasn’t sure if he intended to pull the trigger. But at that moment he’s attacked by a guard. In his journal he reports that he was tortured extensively (fingernails pulled out, etc.), then left for dead. He isn’t dead – not quite. When the authorities come to recover the body – and find it missing – they begin a world-wide manhunt for the rogue male. Most of the novel follows his escape and his period of hiding from determined agents. The amount of prolonged misery he goes through caused me to wonder if it would be worth living in so brutish and furtive and lonely a state. At the end he manages, by an ingenious devise, to kill the evil Quive-Smith (who has him trapped in what is, literally, a hole) and regains his freedom. Household closes things out with a letter, from which we must assume that our hero has set out again on the same mission as before – though this time he’ll pull the trigger. The book is written in a simple, straightforward style, and it kept me engrossed. But after a while the thoroughness with which Household describes everything became tiresome; too much detail amounts to empty verbiage. And for all his determination to make things authentic, near the end the author introduces a plot twist (involving a confession Quive-Smith wants our hero to sign) that has no logical basis. But Rouge Male is one of those books that must be judged in context. I don’t mean to be sarcastic when I use the term “our hero.” He’s a stoic Britisher who through intelligence and skill and perseverance manages to win out over tremendous odds. This tale of survival – which was repeatedly reprinted from 1939 to 1943 – was relevant and, in a dark way, inspiring to British readers in the midst of a war.

Accident – Walter Mosley
Mosley abandons traditional narrative, and I abandoned his novel at the halfway point. Impressionism can work in painting, but not in telling a story. Language is meant to order things. If you were describing an accident you were in (to the police or to a friend) you wouldn’t leave out connecting sentences or engage in a leap-frog of the mind or insert asides. The listener would think you were brain damaged. Here’s an example of Mosley’s approach: “The good brown earth in my hands. Once this would be a thing of tension; bells and music. Now we act it all so slowly. The camera stays for minutes on a close-up. Speaks for itself. Silence. Time running out.” Writing of this sort is trying to attain some intellectually inspired end. The reason I stuck with the book for so long is that when Mosley has at least one foot on the ground he’s good. Characters and plot peek out, and I was interested. But these moments of clarity were few and far between. I wonder what Accident would look like if Mosley rewrote it in a manner that was as simple and straightforward as Rogue Male. Of course he wouldn’t; he’s gone off in a direction that has garnered him praise from the intelligentsia. In a five page Afterword a professor gives a professorial explanation of what Mosley is seeking to do: “See his tactics, instead, as a disclosure of the complexities of narrative discourse.” But what gets buried, in these tactics and complexities, is the human element. I usually glance at the endings of books I don’t finish to see what became of the characters. I didn’t this time. I wasn’t interested, and I knew it would be complicated.

The Hotel – Elizabeth Bowen
This was Bowen’s first novel, written when she was twenty-eight. Despite a prose style that was a bit difficult to follow, I was initially interested in the residents of an upscale vacation hotel somewhere in Italy. But increasingly the “bit difficult” prose became more convoluted; one can only wonder when one reads a sentence like this: “Her personality had a curious way of negativing her surroundings, so that unless one made instant resort to one’s senses the background faded for one and one conjured up in one’s half-consciousness another that expressed her better, that was half an exhalation from herself.” A similar shift toward awkward complexities occurs in the plot, with Sydney taking the central role. This young woman has an emotional attachment with an older lady by the name of Mrs Kerr. I never could understand what this attachment was (or what any of Sydney’s problems were). A clergyman by the name of Mr Milton arrives at the hotel and enters into a nebulous relationship with her. They become engaged, she breaks it off (for which Mr Milton should be eternally grateful). Then comes Ronald, Mrs Kerr’s son, who seems to lack a will (or a distinct personality); he wanders about. It’s only when the other hotel residents – the Lawrence girls, Colonel Duperrier, Mr Lee-Mittison – make brief appearances that the novel has a sparkling humor; if the focus had been on them, this could have been an entertaining romp. But Bowen was aspiring for something much more ambitious – and who is more lofty an object of aspiration than Henry James? So we get laborious explorations of states of mind expressed in a labyrinthian prose. Bowen would have been better off if she had been influenced by the early Waugh or Huxley.

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.

School for Love - Olivia Manning
Wonderful and unique. A little orphan boy, a cat, a spinster he goes to live with in Jerusalem. And other assorted personages, all drawn extremely well. But the triumph is Miss Bohun, who could have been merely the standard villain, but she’s more. She’s more because Olivia Manning cared enough about all her characters to draw them in depth, and that depth has a lot of heart. When done with this book I felt that I was looking ahead at the life journey the boy is about to take. What did he learn, during the time I spent with him? Good or ill? There’s an unsettling ambiguity. *

Boston Adventure - Jean Stafford
I read to the halfway mark of this book (just to get credit for it). I often thought, during those two hundred pages, that the story would break out and become satisfying; I felt it could do so. But enough is enough – it just wasn’t happening. The problems: everything was handled in a turgid way, from scenes to feelings; repetition abounded, not helped by a convoluted Henry James-like prose; the main character’s emotions had a melodramatic edge. Much later Stafford wrote a non-fiction book about Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother called A Mother in History. It’s done with perfect simplicity.

The Heat of the Day - Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen sure knows how to write. Meticulous care is given to scene, mood, texture. But, problem is, all this care translates to laborious going for the reader. Finally I looked at a paragraph and knew I’d have to plow through another inflated demonstration of Miss Bowen’s precious sensibilities. And I wasn’t up to it. I asked myself a question: Do you care about any of her characters? These wooden, lifeless, anemic props? In The Death of the Heart Bowen was also the meticulous craftsman, but that book was infused with the animating spirit of real people.

The Prison - Georges Simenon (French)
I read an interview in which Simenon said that when he sat down to write a novel he had no idea where the plot would go or how it would turn out. This one wound up nowhere. It had an interesting premise, but he did nothing with it. The main character, who’s searching for the answer to why his wife killed her sister, walks around, drinks a lot, agonizes a lot. We wait to find out the Why, but what we learn is a total copout. On the final page Simenon has the character kill himself by crashing his car into a tree. (Sorry for the spoiler, but it really doesn’t matter.)