Re-reads

The Duke of Deception – Geoffrey Wolff

This book elicited a strong reaction in me, so for that alone it’s significant. It’s subtitled “Memories of My Father,” and is classified as a memoir, with Wolff’s father playing the major role. The Duke was a deceiver of epic proportions. His life story (as he presented it), his upper-class mannerisms, his possessions – all false. Oh, the possessions were real, but they were unpaid for. It seemed that he had an aura of authority and wealth that earned him trust from merchants and other victims who were all to ready to accept worthless checks and put items on credit. As for those possessions, they were the best. The best automobiles money can buy, the best clothing, watches, jewelry. The restaurants and hotels he frequented were top tier; he put his meals on his “tab,” he walked out of hotels without paying for his stay. All bills and requests for payment were blithely ignored. He was a man with talents beyond scamming. He got jobs (using a resume that included Yale and the Sorbonne in Paris, neither of which he attended) in aerospace industries, not as an engineer but as a facilitator. Because he was good with people, he was good at those jobs; but he would eventually tire of them and begin to be a no-show. And he would be fired. I could go on (and on and on) about his shortcomings, but it’s his relationship with his son that’s at the core of the book. And here he excelled. He was a good, loving father when Geoffrey was young. A father many would wish for. He spent a lot of time with the boy, taught him things, praised him. And gave him lavish presents. When, in his early teens, Geoffrey caught the boating bug he received the finest in motor boats. When Geoffrey could drive, he received a fancy sports car. Of course, these were unpaid for. But still. It’s the reservoir of love Geoffrey has for his father that becomes a conflicting element in this book. Because, as Geoffrey grows older, he begins to see his father’s flaws, his fakery, his inadequacies. He begins to question the man, and the Duke reacts with anger. Things sour between the two. What bothered me was that, while Geoffrey becomes judgmental, he carries on like his father, as if rules of conduct didn’t apply to him. He borrows money that goes unreturned, he’s deceptive in his dealings with people and institutions; he’s a faker who assumes appearances to impress people. He’s sent to exclusive schools (one in England) and he wastes his time there. Never studies, seldom attends classes. Instead, he parties, drinks far too much. He wrecks his cars. Speed limits? – who cares, he would go 140 MPH if he felt like it. Though how a change came about in Geoffrey’s behavior/attitude is not part of the story, his bio shows that at some point he straightened up and started living an honest life. He graduated from Princeton, wrote books, taught at universities; he got married, had two sons (to whom he dedicates this book). His father’s final years were brutal. If he was to be punished for his faults, he received such punishment in full measure. He was in and out of jails and mental institutions. His body was found two weeks after his death in a shabby room, amid squalor and empty bottles of liquor and empty barbiturate pill boxes. The smell emanating from the room alerted someone passing by to the fact that the police needed to be called. Obviously no friends checked up on him; he had no friends. He had appealed to his son (in an aggressive manner) for help – that he come live with him. Geoffrey wouldn’t allow this to happen. He had his life on the right track, and there was no room for a mess like his aged father. I can’t blame Geoffrey for this decision; his father was beyond help. In closing: If Geoffrey loved and cared for his sons, as his father had loved and cared for him, and if he taught them to avoid all the bad behavior – which he had eventually learned to avoid – then he got valuable lessons from the Duke. 4

Fat City – Leonard Gardner

Billy Tully, at age thirty, has reached the dead end of life. At times he gets an inclination to revive his career as a boxer, but he was never that good to begin with. Now he can only take and deliver punishment, and see who can survive. There’s no glamorizing of boxing: it’s brutal, ugly and, as Billy thinks at one point, insane. He turns to it to make a buck; his other jobs, such a field work (topping onions, etc.) is also brutal in the demands it makes on the body and the spirit. The setting for the novel is Stockton, California, a place you never want to be. At least not the area Billy occupies – skid row. Ratty rooms, bars. Yes, Billy is a heavy drinker – what can be expected? Out of loneliness he briefly gets involved with a woman – also a drinker, but, unlike Billy, an insanely abusive one. Billy emerges as a decent man in a very bad place, and with no discernable way out. There’s another character, a twenty-year-old named Ernie Munger. He and Billy meet at a gym, spar a bit – but, besides youth, Ernie has no gift. He gets a girl pregnant and they marry, though he doesn’t love her. He seems, in his aimlessness, his lack of resources, to be headed to the same fate as Billy. And what is Billy’s fate? He simply disappears; he’s there in a late chapter, then he’s gone from the narrative. I believe a novel so relentlessly bleak has worth because there are many lives like those depicted in Fat City, and their story should be told. The author was almost one of them. Much of what happens to Billy in the book happened to Leonard Gardner: growing up poor in Stockton, boxing, field work, an early marriage that didn’t last. A talent for writing saved him. But, in a very long life (the last time I checked he was in his nineties), he wrote only this one book, when he was thirty-six. He wrote screenplays, notably for the excellent movie version of Fat City, directed by John Huston. 4

Sunday – Georges Simenon (French)

Authors who write a suspense novel which is constructed so that everything points to a surprise twist at the end must be aware of a major pitfall: that twist must not only be believable, but it must offer a jolt to the reader. If it doesn’t deliver that effect, the work is a failure. For half this short book Emile plans to kill his wife Berthe, using arsenic in her food, but all along we feel that things won’t turn out as he expects. Over many months we follow as he carefully – very carefully – devises the perfect crime (which has to occur on a Sunday, when the local doctor is out sailing). Though we’re always in Emile’s mind, I had trouble understanding his motivation for murder, and Berthe remained a mystery. But, still, the writing was clear and concise, the setting – a small town on the Riviera – was well rendered, and the events moved along. So I waited for the payoff with a sense of anticipation. Waited until the last two pages. And what I got there was illogical and dumb. Berthe knew what he was up to all along, and had her own diabolical plan in place? Please – there was absolutely no basis to suspect that. Simenon’s nose dive into the pitfall I mentioned can be attributed to his approach to writing. In an interview in the Paris Review he stated that he didn’t plot his novels and had no idea how things would turn out. This shows in Sunday, in which he found he had no ending. As for why I once thought it was a success – well, there’s a real mystery (as is the fact that Simenon is considered to have been an important writer). Out of curiosity, I went back in Jack London and found four previous reviews of his novels. I thought one of them was fairly good. Of the others, none of which I finished, there’s a recurring complaint: “lacks logic . . . characters act without sufficient motivation.” One of the reviews closes with two words: “What balderdash!” Unlike Leonard Gardner’s one heartfelt effort, Simenon wrote over 400 novels. Delete

The Emigrants – W. G. Sebald (German)
Not fiction, not history, not memoir, though all these forms coexist. Sebald tells the stories of four Jews who left Germany during Hitler’s reign: an elementary schoolteacher (the author was one of his students); a doctor from whom Sebald rents a house; Sebald’s great-uncle, who was valet and traveling companion to a wealthy young man; and a painter Sebald strikes up a friendship with. There’s not always a straight narrative; sometimes Sebald writes about himself, and sometimes, in writing about one of these men, another character takes over (such as the mother of the painter, whose memories make up a section of the book). The author and the painter approach their subject matter in ways that are much alike. Sebald watches as Ferber “constantly erases, smudges, overdraws, as if his goal is to reduce his picture to dust.” Sebald covers hundreds of pages with his “scribble,” of which the greater part is crossed out, obliterated by additions or discarded. The results in both cases are also similar. Of a Ferber portrait: “. . . an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper.” What emerges from the disparate events and emotions of The Emigrants is a muted mood of melancholy. Though none of his characters were subjected to life in concentration camps, they were affected psychologically by the holocaust (three commit suicide). Sebald puts forth an overlooked fact: some German Jews believed – before their worlds came tumbling down – that Germany was their homeland; the mother’s account of her youth in the village of Steinach is almost idyllic. The translator, Michael Hulse, deserves praise for giving us prose that is well-nigh perfect in its fluency. The grainy black and white photographs add a documentary touch: these people lived.

A Kid for Two Farthings – Wolf Mankowitz
To write an endearing novel you need a young, appealing main character and a cast of benevolent adults. You must make everything true to real life, but any problems should be offset by a lightness of spirit. Lastly, you can’t be caught trying to be endearing. Mankowitz covers all the bases. Joe is six, and lives in the Jewish section of East London (a colorful, teeming world). The kid of the title is a goat with one underdeveloped horn; Joe buys him thinking he’s a unicorn. He gets his extravagant ideas from an old tailor named Mr. Kandinsky, who owns the house where Joe and his mother live (the father is in Africa, possibly trying to start up a business). Mr. K tells Joe that a unicorn’s horn can grant any wish. Joe has four: that the women at the milliners shop where his mother works will be able to gossip (that one was wasted!); that Mr. K gets the patent presser he needs for his business; that Schmule, Kandinsky’s assistant and a wrestler, will win his match with the dreaded Python; and that Joe and his mother would be reunited with his father. At the end the first three wishes have come true; of the fourth, his mother says that they would never go to Africa, but that his father would come back soon. Then she adds that she needs to see about Joe starting school because he “was growing up knowing nothing about life.” She’s wrong there. Though Joe lives in the imaginative world of a child, he’s perceptive enough to learn much about human nature. Example: When the mother tells Mr. Kandinsky that she’s no longer pretty he clears his throat (which means, to Joe, that he was going to say something important): “You are pretty as long as someone loves you, Rebecca, and so many love you that believe me you are very pretty. Look at me. I am ugly, and old, but even I am pretty when somebody loves me.”

The Cat – Georges Simenon (French)
Simenon was in his mid-sixties when he wrote about two elderly people who marry after their spouses die and soon become engaged in a cat and parrot game of mutual hate. The “master of the psychological novel” (Newsweek) is on shaky ground concerning the motivations of his characters. But when he wanders away from his plot machinations something valuable is to be found. The story is told from the perspective of Emile, a man in his seventies whose existence is aimless and empty. The strife with his wife gives purpose to his days; thus he needs Marguerite and she – for the same reason – needs him. For a short while he leaves her to live as a roomer of an amiable barmaid; this interlude is the most interesting part of the novel, for we’re free of the nonsense about Emile’s cat and Marguerite’s parrot. Yet he returns to his wife, on the same contentious basis as before; hate is as strong a bond as love, though it doesn’t alleviate loneliness. Emile isn’t a thinker, but he’s a feeling man. His memories of his first marriage, which was a happy one, have impact; they quietly evoke a lost world, a lost woman, a lost man. The conflict with Marguerite is ugly and depressing; Emile’s unsolvable predicament is depressing too, but in a moving way. When Simenon gives us this lonely man walking the streets, doing small tasks, drinking too much, trying to fill his days, he had his real subject, which was a grim depiction of aging. I wonder if he knew it.

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 when reviewing it. In an interview Simenon stated that he didn’t plot his books – he just let things happen – and he wrote them in one sitting and didn’t revise. In this novel the central character, Frank, does things that he doesn’t understand, and neither did 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. William T. Vollman wrote the Afterword; to him Frank is an enigma, and he finds great significance in this. What balderdash!

Portuguese Irregular Verbs - Alexander McCall Smith

Diverting and mildly funny. Recommended for a quick, light read.

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, 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 that things in the present are much worse than they were in his boyhood, and he foresees the future (Orwell wrote this on the verge of WWII) as even more bleak. He goes back in memory to his early years. Though life for young George was often ugly and emotionally arid, this segment is a beautifully-wrought evocation of the past. Being inside George’s mind does get 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 the common man; 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 pretty codas – 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. Even the simple values people lived by have been undermined by the forces of progress. He returns home; he had lied to his wife to make the trip, and she’s onto the lie; on the last page he’s enduring a tirade of accusations (mainly of unfaithfulness, 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. *

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.)

Portrait of a Man with Red Hair - Hugh Walpole
I stopped about three fourths through. The premise was interesting, and I endured the florid writing because I thought Walpole had a purpose in using it. There was a feeling, when the man with red hair appeared, of a nice turn to the macabre. But all was preparatory to juvenile nonsense. Extreme emotional states over-described.

Tropic Moon - Georges Simenon (French)
The prose is lean, and Simenon creates a heavy, dark atmosphere, but the book lacks logic. Characters can be mysterious, but they can't act without sufficient motivation. In order to be involved, the reader has to buy into people and events; an uninvolved reader is an unsympathetic one. The misery of the main character is so deep – he’s so unrelentingly anguished and often drunk – that it becomes an ordeal to read about him.

Blott on the Landscape - Tom Sharpe
I stopped reading when things got foolish (the lions arrived). Up to a point this was a good comic novel, but the author didn’t have control of his material; he just piled on more and more absurdities until the structure collapsed. If he had been truer to real people the book would have been tamer and infinitely better.

The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
Mitford got one thing right: she made me believe in the closeness and loyalty of the Hons (an aristocratic British title, short for “Honorable”). That loyalty was an anchor throughout, because they were a disagreeable lot. Still, the narrator resolutely stood up for them, no matter what they did – they were Hons, after all. A mildly diverting read.