Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
The author writes about her childhood – the experiences and feelings of her six-year-old self – with a simplicity that gives this book its appeal. The story she has to tell is one of a pioneer family’s life. What comes across forcefully is the resourcefulness needed to survive. Pa can build a house from scratch, dig a well, shoot game, plant a crop. When a prairie fire comes sweeping toward them, he knows exactly what he and Ma must do to save themselves. On those occasions when he goes to Independence for supplies, or is late to come home, apprehension sets in; Pa is the linchpin of the family. Ma is the glue; she does her full share of work, but she also imposes orderliness; despite the fact that they have a dirt floor, the house must be clean and tidy, and Laura and her older sister must be well-mannered young ladies. These people are strong in spirit, resilient, upbeat; pioneers must be or they would crumble in the face of the many hardships and dangers they encounter. In one chapter a huge pack of wolves surrounds the house. The entire Wilder family is felled by what they call “fever ’n’ ague” (it’s actually malaria). A neighbor tends to them; though separated by miles, people come to the aid of each other when needed. As for Indians, they’re not seen in today’s politically correct terms; Pa believes that, since he developed the land into a farm, it should be his. The Indians are hostile, sometimes threatening, though never violent. In the end the government orders the settlers off the land, so the Wilder family pack their wagon and leave all they worked so hard to make. They move on to their next home, and many young readers followed. Why the huge success of this series? The overriding feeling this book imparts is one of warmth, and this warmth comes from love. The Wilders loved one another, and therefore Laura’s childhood was idyllic.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Initially I was impressed by this novel, especially when I learned that the author was in his mid-twenties when he wrote it. Kesey’s two antagonists are archetypes: McMurphy is the unconditioned, untamed male, Nurse Ratched the emasculating female; in the confines of a mental hospital they become engaged in a deadly battle of wills. The narrator is a broom-wielding Indian inmate who relates what he witnesses and also conveys his vision of a world controlled by an inhuman Combine. But when I passed the halfway point an array of nagging problems set in, mostly involving the Chief (McMurphy’s name for the narrator). The accumulation of things he sees and hears becomes unlikely (he’s everywhere). Then he begins to enter the minds of other characters; the switch to third-person omniscient is jarring. The Chief becomes a participator in events, but he was more interesting when he was a shadowy observer. Also, I felt that Kesey inspiration and drive had petered out, and he was groping around for ways to move his story forward; what he comes up with too often are juvenile hijinks. Would the fishing trip, which is to be chaperoned by “two sweet old aunts,” be allowed by the hospital staff, especially when one of the aunts shows up and is young, pretty and scantily clothed? A problem for the novel is that the movie version was better. Being more compact, it eliminated most of the meandering, and the Chief doesn’t carry the burden of narrator. As I read the final pages I realized that I was seeing the closing scenes from the film, and it was those remembered scenes that moved me. Though one thing the book did at the end that the movie didn’t. When the lobotomized McMurphy is returned to the ward – now a vegetable which Nurse Ratched puts on display – the men dismiss him as a fake. “Aaah, what’s the old bitch tryin’ to pull over on us anyhow, for crap sakes. That ain’t him.” In this statement Kesey returns to his original theme: men need the untamed McMurphys to roam the world.

The Wine of Solitude – Irene Nemirovsky (French)
In Helene’s highly dysfunctional family her mother is a selfish, amoral beauty who treats her daughter with aggressive disdain and her father is an amiable absentee, compelled to go out gambling nightly. At age twelve cynical, world-weary Helene wants her father’s love and harbors a hatred for her mother; at age twenty-one cynical, world-weary Helene wants her father’s love and harbors a hatred for her mother (and gloatingly watches the woman’s beauty erode as her own grows). She decides to get revenge by stealing the affections of her mother’s layabout lover. She succeeds, though she never allows him more than kisses; he departs in disgust (can’t blame him). Nemirovsky severely exaggerates emotions while failing to develop the personalities who are feeling those emotions; as a result her characters turn into caricatures striking dramatic poses (the father’s deathbed scene was so overwrought that it became silly). And I started to have practical questions about our heroine. Why, as a grown woman, doesn’t she have a life outside her family? Why hasn’t she developed intellectually or morally? Can’t she do something more constructive with her days than plot? The author obviously recognized this flaw, so in the ending she lets Helene soar, free as the wind: “ ‘I’m not afraid of life,’ she thought. ‘The past has given me the first experiences of the world. They have been exceptionally difficult, but they have forged my courage and my pride. And that immutable treasure is mine, and belongs to me. I may be alone, but my solitude is powerful and intoxicating.’ ” Right, sure. A novel like this has a perverse appeal: its faults are entertaining (“forged my courage” – that kind of thing). And Nemirovsky can write well; the atmospheres of the various places the Karol family flee to in the wake of the Russian Revolution (Kiev, St Petersburg, Finland, Paris) are evoked nicely (though, through Helene’s eyes, all except Finland are grim and joyless). In the beginning I found her negativity to be bracing; as a thirteen-year-old she looks at a picture of a happy family in her textbook and thinks, “Good Lord! What imbeciles . . .” The picture may depict a lie, but the author of this book doesn’t come up with any truths either.

Miss Gomez and the Brethren - William Trevor
Another gathering of lost souls from Trevor. The problem with this novel involves the central character. Miss Gomez remains inaccessible throughout; she makes radical changes in her thinking and behavior, but the groundwork to support these shifts isn’t there – things just happen. The corporeality she lacks is fully present in Mrs. Tuke; much of the book is concerned with her, which is its saving grace. In many ways she’s a horrid person, but always comprehensible; she tries to escape from what she is and what she does by self-deception, romance novels and gin. Mr. Tuke is another fully-realized character, sad and muted, beaten down by life (and his wife). Mr. Batt, the aged and deaf boarder at the Thistle Downs, moves through a world that he can no longer relate to. These three people mattered to me. The same can’t be said for the ethereal young lovers, Alban and Penelope; they suffer from the same insubstantiality I found in Miss Gomez. The setting – a street in London that’s being demolished – imparts an apocalyptic air to the dramas being played out.

Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky (French)
Nemirovsky experienced firsthand the 1941 German invasion and occupation of France. In this novel she assembles a large cast of characters, from wealthy Parisians to village farmers, and shows them living under conditions of great stress and upheaval. The first section, “Storm in June,” is fast-moving and kaleidoscopic, effectively capturing the chaos and terror as people flee Paris. In the slower-paced second section, “Dolce,” she explores the varied responses of villagers to an established occupation. Both sections are successful, though there’s an unavoidable – and tragic – flaw to this novel: it wasn’t finished, nor was it fully revised. The author, being Jewish, was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died at age forty. She had resided in France since she was sixteen; when the Nazis invaded she wrote with the shadow of the Final Solution hanging over her head and those of her husband and two small children. At the end of the book are appendices with her letters and a notebook, and they make clear that she was aware of the likelihood of her death. Writing this ambitious novel (she projected it, when finished, to be a thousand pages long) may have provided her with an intellectual and emotional respite from her plight and a purpose – beyond survival – to her days. She recognized the faults of her work-in-progress; she even lists them at one point, and closes with the words “In general, not enough simplicity!” She was right; but circumstances prevented her from solving the problems. What she did accomplish is remarkable and, considering its provenance, important. The novel almost went unpublished. Her daughters, ages four and twelve when their mother died, made it through the war (their father was also put to death). They had in their possession the manuscript, written in pencil, the words tiny to conserve paper. When they were adults their attempts to read it failed; too many painful memories were rekindled. But, as old age approached, they knew they must take on the project. So, sixty-four years after Irene Nemirovsky wrote the words that make up Suite Francaise, the world and the people she created come to life. *

The Catfish Man - Jerome Charyn
Jerome Charyn (which is the name of both the author and the novel’s first person narrator) wore me out. I made it two-thirds of the way into this quirky and rambunctious trek through Jerome’s life, but I rebelled when I started a chapter that began: “I didn’t have to dream of that blond boy. The image of Marcos holding him by his ears, that’s what stuck to me. I thought of killing the Phantom, beating him on the head with a shovel while we were out on the bayou, getting the mayor his frogs.” No more, I decided, and the feeling I had was relief. An author gifted with a fertile imagination can’t let it run wild; an author gifted with a mastery of the language can’t let glibness take over. In the long run – if there’s nothing else – the results of such prodigality become trivial and tiresome. What’s most telling is that I never cared about Jerome. When I quit reading I hadn’t an iota of curiosity about what happened to him; he wasn’t a person, just a crazily-colored pinata for Charyn to bang away at.

Selected Stories - V. S. Pritchett
I read only half of the stories; I became convinced that mild enjoyment was all Pritchett had to offer. He’s a prose stylist of note, but most of his effort went into creating sentences that are dense and rich. The stories themselves have limited scope and don’t tackle subjects that matter much. I finished too many with a “So what?” feeling. Only “The Key to My Heart” truly engaged me, mainly because of the appalling and appealing Mrs. Brackett. To experience Pritchett’s talent at its peak, go straight to his memoirs, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil.

David Golder - Irene Nemirovsky (French)

Nemirovsky recounts the last days of a man who dedicated his life to the pursuit of money. She doesn’t condemn cold, stony David Golder – he’s the most sympathetic person in a cast of characters composed mostly of leeches, and his physical suffering and fear of death give him a humanity one can relate to. In the grasping world presented here a few people still value simple sensuous pleasures; the chapter that takes us with Joyce and her lover is a needed diversion from the rest of the book, which is dominated by gloom. This gloom eventually becomes monochromatic and overpowering. When the cruelties pile up (such as when Golder’s wife tells him that his daughter, the one bright thing in his life, is not his) the novel loses balance. Negativity (the first word of the book is “No”) is too extreme. And the ending is melodramatic; the author tries to give Golder a hero’s stoicism and to make his last moments evocative. But, whatever its flaws, this is a serious, ambitious novel. That Nemirovsky wrote it when she was twenty-three is beyond impressive.

Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel - William Trevor

Most of the people in this book are life’s losers, and many are deluded, but Trevor treats them all with compassion. This is an intricate, strange novel, but it works (e.g., the revelation about the Terrible Thing that happened at the hotel is handled in a way that’s surprising but believable). The characters form a dense tableau of thoughts and spoken words as each pursues his or her way of getting by in the world. They may not be ideal ways, but even the repulsive Morrissey is made comprehensible. And though Ivy Eckdorf is dangerously crazy, her transformation in the last chapter is moving. She finds the only possible way to bring peace and happiness to the suffering residents of O’Neill’s Hotel – and to herself. *

Botchan - Natsume Soseki (Japanese)

This second novel by Soseki was hugely popular in Japan. Though an easy read, it’s superficial, the humor is juvenile, and the main character is a one-dimensional blowhard. It gives no indication of the darkness and depth that would mark Soseki’s later work.

The Call of the Toad - Gunter Grass (German)

A well-written bore. The widow and widower’s cemetery plan is leeched of any interest it might have had by the oblique way in which it’s framed. An author (Grass, I guess) potters around with reams of material the widower has sent him. He reconstructs their story, but his many interjections and digressions slow everything to a toad’s pace. I stopped short of the halfway mark.