The Greyhound in the Leash - Joyce Horner
In the prologue Evelina is at her high school graduation and is listening (though her mind wanders) to the speaker, who gives out that old homily: their lives are still to be lived. “But when the time comes we can be only one of the things we dreamed of being; sometimes we end by not being any of them.” The speaker adds that they have “several possible selves . . . in some places, with some people, you turn into a different person . . . .” The novel is made up of four parts; in each Evelina is thirty-five. In the first three of her incarnations she has married very different men, and is shaped by those choices. In two of her marriages she was not in love, nor does she share an affinity of spirit. The men are good, in their fashion, and she’s not unhappy (though there’s a reappearing Charles Bryce to whom she’s physically attracted). Her marriage to Paul is a different matter altogether; there passion existed, and also an affinity. But that marriage was wracked by problems, mostly due to Paul’s dissatisfaction (not with her, but with how his life had turned out). No seductive Charles Bryce appears because he’s not needed. Evelina and Paul wind up separating. Whereas the loveless marriages survived, and offered security, the love of her life is someone she cannot live with. Part Four is brief: Evelina is unmarried (though in her past she had loved a man named Paul); she has a job as a librarian at an Institute. She has a close friend, Katherine (also a recurring figure throughout the novel, one for whom an independence existence was primary). Though this isn’t the ending Evelina may have wished for, she isn’t a tragic character; she’s open to the world around her and is content in a quiet way. Her life is similar to the one lived by the author (Joyce Horner was forty-six when she wrote the novel). I think she was trying to explore the way things worked out for her, and her approach is thought-provoking. It evoked my own private thought: Evelina remains stable and resilient in all her incarnations because she was brought up by loving parents. She had a solid base from which to embark on whatever life had in store for her.

The Family Moskat - Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
This teeming, panoramic novel brings to life Poland from the early 1900s to the beginning of WWII. In weight and scope it has elements of greatness. But is there too much weight and scope? There are over 600 dense pages, and it’s prefaced by three family trees. I soon developed a strategy to deal with this deluge of names: concentrate on the people who are important. There’s Asa Heshel and the three women he loves (or can that emotion be attributed to him?); Abram, a capricious and monumentally flawed life force; the nefarious Koppel. All the others, though colorful, I relegated to accessory role players. Once those ground rules were in place, I found the book to be eminently readable. The plot covers too much ground to give any summarization, but some general statements can be made. One is how unhappy most people are. Especially in the relationships between the sexes, strife reigns, and in many cases marriage leads to divorce. Also of importance is the book’s historical aspect, especially in regard to how political upheavals affected the Jewish population in Poland. With the onset of WWI and the threat of Bolshevism, the first evidences of antisemitism appear, and it becomes steadily more virulent. Lastly, there’s the role that Judaism plays. Though the many rituals and religiously-dictated customs seem foolish (as they do to many Jews, who reject the old ways), they give sustenance to a people who are outsiders; through them they connect with all Jews everywhere, including those who are no longer alive. And the rules of conduct set down in the Torah, though rigid, are noble in nature; to break them is to violate the True Way. But there’s aberrant human nature to consider, and life to be lived, so the violations occur. Singer presents characters with all manner of faults, but because they are human I could relate to how they think and feel and act. In the late 1940s the novel was serialized for two years in the Jewish Daily Forward. Singer may have felt an obligation to recreate for this audience a world that was vanishing. He succeeded. *

Emma - Jane Austen
This is the fourth book by Austen that I’ve read – and the last. In the opening a weak-willed young girl accepts Emma as her mentor. Harriet is romantically interested in a farmer. A farmer! For Emma this will certainly not do, so she steers Harriet away from the estimable Robert Martin and toward a more socially acceptable mate (though one lacking in character). To me this was a shameful act of manipulation, and I wondered if Austen was making a statement about values. Could she be critiquing a world in which status, money, manners and dress are all important? No – for Austen status, money, manners and dress were of the utmost importance. Like the rest of her work, her main subject is affairs of the heart among wealthy villagers who have estates with names such as Hartfield and Donwell. The rest of the world, with all its messiness, is totally excluded. This may be one of the reasons for Austen’s appeal; she offers escapist reading, complete with happy endings. I don’t have much interest in her subject matter, nor do I find her parodies of characters like Mrs. Elton amusing. And, if one isn’t interested or amused, the intricacies of her prose, though it has a crystalline stateliness, is a bit difficult to follow. She’s also too wordy; this 539 page book could benefit by a cut of two hundred pages. Still, I kept reading because I rather liked Emma. She has flaws, one of which is an inflated view of her own merit; after a series of blunders, she comes to see herself in a diminished light. So she grows as a person. By the end of the book four marriages have taken place, including that of Emma and Mr. Knightley (in the last line, their union is described as one of “perfect happiness”). Harriet, who had all but disappeared from the novel, is one of those who marry – to Robert Martin. Emma (who had seen the error of her meddling ways) is glad for her, and wishes her the best; but, of course, they can no longer remain on terms of intimacy.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Mr. Darcy was a problem for me, one that never went away. For most of the book Austen presents him as a man whose sense of superiority is such that he has open disdain for those who don’t meet his lofty standards. He’s also a meddler; he uses every resource to separate his friend from a woman who he, Darcy, considers an inappropriate match. Since he displays little feeling for Elizabeth, when his proposal of marriage comes it’s a surprise (her “astonishment was beyond expression”); she rejects him and catalogues her reasons for actively disliking him. Yet they will marry, and this is due to nothing short of a metamorphosis in Darcy. Suddenly he engages in all sorts of kind, generous acts. We’re to take this as an indication of his feelings for Elizabeth, but to me it wasn’t Darcy doing these things; it was Austen stacking the deck in his favor. Does she succeed at making the two credible as lovers? I saw no warmth on either side. Darcy remains wooden, and though the same cannot be said of Elizabeth, her most passionate moment takes place when she first sees his estate; the splendor of the house and grounds is such that she feels “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” When her sister asks her how long she has loved Darcy, she answers, “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Her mother is enraptured by the marriage: “Oh! my sweetest Lizzie! how rich and how great you will be!” Her sentiments are not just those of a small-minded and greedy woman. In the society of the idle rich depicted in this book (no main character does a lick of work) people maneuver to be in the good graces of those who rank higher in wealth and status. The two worst toadies – Elizabeth’s mother and the fatuous Mr. Collins – are one-dimensional objects of Austen’s ridicule and disdain. Yet Elizabeth’s friend marries Mr. Collins for the financial security he can provide. And Elizabeth? After her marriage she plans to protect Darcy from the “mortification” of having to interact with “vulgar” people. She “looked forward with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley.”

Growing Up - Russell Baker
For half the book Baker focuses not on himself but on his family. His father dies at the onset of the Great Depression, and he and his mother are forced to live with various uncles and aunts. The child/young boy’s growing up is depicted in terms of a growth in his understanding of the people around him. Though his indomitable but thwarted mother is the most vivid character, others – such as the hugely generous Uncle Allen and Aunt Pat – are strong presences. Then there’s Oluf, who carried on a courtship with Russell’s mother. In letters he wrote to her we see this lively, enterprising, optimistic man being broken in his struggle to find work. He ends his correspondence with Elizabeth (and disappears from her life) with the words “I am lost and going and not interested in anything anymore.” Baker’s use of these excerpts show him at his unobtrusive best. Unfortunately, the book weakens as he reaches his mid-teens and takes center stage. Teenagers and young men are not very likable creatures, nor are their crises of much interest. Baker assumes an attitude of humorous indulgence (in the case of his difficulty in losing his virginity, he portrays himself as a fumbling rube). But it’s a lumbering type of humor, and the prose – which once could deftly evoke emotions – is no more than what would be expected of a competent journalist.

The Patriot - Evan S. Connell
In The Patriot Connell proves himself adept at writing a long, straightforward novel. One of his major accomplishments is to make clear what a life-altering experience military service is, and why so many veterans hold dear the memory of their war years and the relationships they formed during that time. The most important person for Melvin Isaacs is swaggering Sam Horne, who takes Melvin under his wing. Melvin’s name is one indication that this is an autobiographical work: with the change of a vowel and the omission of two consonants we get Evan. Melvin is presented as a fragmented person in whom the parts do not function together. He’s alive and real, but, like the perplexed Horne, we’re constantly asking, “Why the hell did you do that?” Embedded in the mostly realistic narrative are scenes that skew into the surreal. Melvin has a nightmarish interview with a Lieutenant Caravaggio, who is either insane or has some unfathomable agenda. In a doomed flight in a dilapidated plane, during which Melvin announces to the tower that he’s The Green Hornet, he seems insane. Throughout the novel there’s an underlying disjointedness, but when it moves into civilian life it becomes a shambles as Connell unsympathetically assigns Melvin to various roles (college student, abstract artist, husband). But even in this last section I never lost interest, and the final scene, with the father urgently talking about how to survive a nuclear attack, again shows how forceful and original a writer Connell can be. The Patriot should ultimately be judged by the ways it succeeds, because those successes are so distinctive. In the descriptions of flight we get it all: the smell of oil, the coughing, barking engine as the plane labors upward; then a bleak and gaseous silence, the miniature world as seen from the solarium of the cockpit. And there’s a seemingly innocuous visit to a Confederate museum in which an old lady who smells of vinegar and beer and has a bath towel around her head (“Washin’ my hair, men”) gives a tour of a house where a horrific battle had been fought. She closes her four page monologue by asking her guests to look down a stairwell where the bloodstains are still “as dark as midnight, men, and fearsome as ever.” *

Persuasion - Jane Austen
I never finished it; the interest wasn’t there. The main character, Ann, was too Miss Perfect. Maybe Austen identified with her and thus kept piling up the excellencies of character. Also, the prose is difficult in that you can lose your line of thought in its prolonged intricacies. The author has a good touch with humor, and she can satirize people’s foibles nicely, but there wasn’t enough of that and too much of the cloying Ann.

Let It Come Down - Paul Bowles
I had quite enough of Bowles when I finished this novel. He can do so many things well – create interesting characters, scenes, dialogue, mood. The exotic setting (Morocco) was especially good. Yet he can’t make sense of it all. He stays, at length, in his main character’s thoughts, but that mind is muddled from hashish. Bowles moves the plot along in fits and starts; he has people act in unlikely ways, abandons characters and lines of action which he’s spent much time developing. Bowles may be lazy or hashish-addled himself; at any rate, he seems incapable of sustaining logic. What he can do – and does often (I’ve read three of his novels and some stories) – is come up with some really repugnant cruelty at the end.

The Sixth Day - Primo Levi (Italian)
Levi is a chemist, and in this book he takes intriguing scientific ideas and develops them, making a quick, solid point and stopping. Almost all these pieces succeed in what they set out to do: they make one see the world in a fresh light. It’s not Levi’s aim to develop characters or plot, so the main lack of this book – for a reader like me – is its absence of people involved in situations I could relate to. Levi was not a novelist; the closest he came to writing one was The Monkey’s Wrench – and that’s wonderful.

The Sins of the Fathers - Lawrence Block
A private eye novel of the dark, brooding variety, about sordid matters. The writing is pared down, efficiently simple, but the first person voice is too unemotional. It comes across as artificial: the world-weary PI. Not that this book isn’t well done – it all works, even the revelation at the end is plausible – but I read reluctantly, not really enjoying it, not caught up in the events, and wondering if a guilty pleasure should be more pleasurable.

The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
This unique novel sets its own standards and is driven by a passion that sweeps aside all reservations; I accepted its extremeness, its histrionic edge. The prose is initially difficult, but its intricate rhythms are accessible. In Stead’s portrayal of a weirdly dysfunctional family no one is wholly attractive, no one can be labeled as a villain; everyone is too complex to classify or dismiss. This novel sprang unbridled from the best place – somewhere deep inside the author. It’s a great achievement. *