The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros

The edition I had was Knoph’s tenth anniversary “celebration” of the book’s initial publication. It’s actually a mini-book – small in size, almost a square, and the font is large; it’s 134 pages long. The publisher deems it a “coming-of-age classic.” It’s a very easy read about a Chicano family living in poverty in Chicago. It’s episodic, filled with colorful characters. It’s not an angry book, not an indictment; there’s no grinding of axes. It moves nicely. But I only made it about halfway through. It just wasn’t for me. Maybe it was too simplistic – I’ve appreciated quite a few coming of age books by women writers, but they were more complex, more geared to adult sensibilities. If I was a young girl (especially one who was culturally different from my peers) I would have finished the book (especially since it is now assigned reading in many junior high school classrooms). Anyway, it made Cisneros famous. In her introduction she acknowledges the novel’s autobiographical aspects. And she also keeps referring to Iowa. Why Iowa? – need you ask? It’s interesting that the road to fame for this poor Chicano girl would go through the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. There, in that simple fact, is a lesson for those with literary ambitions to take heed of.

Everything to Live For – Paul Horgan

This is the second of the three “Richard books.” (The first, Things as They Are, is on my Most Memorable Books list.) The two differ in a number of significant ways. Things is in the first person, is episodic (like linked stories), and Richard is a child. Everything is in the third person, has a definite plot that covers events in a single summer when Richard is seventeen. He’s spending that summer with very wealthy relatives. Actually, he finds that he’s been invited there to be a stabilizing influence for Max, the son of the family. Max is twenty-one, and is a complex character. Though he has everything to live for – good looks, intelligence, the love of a terrific girl, money he’ll be inheriting – he’s going off the rails emotionally. Why is he so unhappy, why does he act in such an objectionable way, why is he so reckless? So bent on self-destruction? We get an answer, which I found to be on the weak side. Max’s behavior and emotions dominate everybody, and I found a reaction gradually setting in: Really, is he so damn important? The whole premise struck me as shaky. Not helping matters is that Richard came across as unusually self-assured for his age. And the book is often over-written, over-thought. Still, despite all these negatives, I stayed involved. Many aspects of Everything are good (particularly the portrayal of the secondary characters). I believe that Horgan was too emotionally invested in the material. (Why? – was he Richard?) This is one of those novels that should have been done with more detachment.

Post script: I’m not doing re-reads anymore (at least not for now), but after I finished Everything I found that, in 2008, I had written a review of it. Seventeen years is a long gap, but I never had the slightest inkling of having read it before. And in my previous review (which was negative) I give a reason for its failure that never occurred to me this time around. Makes one wonder . . .

The Wife – Alafair Burke

The author is the daughter of the crime novelist James Lee Burke, so she had her foot securely in the publishing world. Yet she has other irons in the fire. She went to Stanford Law School and then worked as a deputy district attorney in Portland, where she prosecuted domestic violence cases. And, besides writing a lot of books, she’s a professor of law at Hofstra University. So she knows how the legal system works as regards crime cases, which lends a valuable authenticity to The Wife. But can she write a good novel? Well, yes, but with limitations. There are two lines of narrative: one is in the first person, in which Amanda (the titular wife) relates events. The other is in third person and follows a detective named Corrine. The story opens with Amanda’s husband – a professor of law at NYU – being accused by a student of making inappropriate sexual advances. Things escalate (mainly a rape accusation from another source). Then one of the accusers disappears. Things get very complicated (and involve Amanda’s past). Too complicated? Too many loose ends floating around? Yes, in my opinion. But my main problem is the first-person narrator. This type of novel depends on surprising the reader, but that’s most often based on the author using misleading tactics. Near the end of The Wife we find out that, in the version of events Amanda has given us (and why would we not have believed her?), much has been withheld or is outright false. Since I react badly to being misled, I wasn’t happy with this twist. And the novel, with all those complications (which keep growing), is too long and is filled with texts and emails and cell phones and internet searches – all of which law enforcement can use to trace your actions (potential wrongdoers beware!). I did stick it out to the end only to find that some important things were left unresolved. So I have a few questions for Ms. Burke: Was the husband convicted of murder? Does Corrine follow up on leads that implicate Angela – as she states she’ll do in the book’s final sentence? Is there going to be a sequel? Is the movie deal still on? Please reply at this site.

Hotel Savoy – Joseph Roth (German)

This short novel – an early work by Roth – was published in 1924, yet it seems quite modern. The prose is spare but sharp, the first-person narrator is mostly a noncommittal observer, there’s an absence of a plot. Gabriel fought in WWI and had been in a Siberian prisoner of war camp. On the opening page, on the street in front of the Hotel Savoy, he thinks: “After five years I again stand at the gates of Europe.” (Where, exactly, in Europe we never know.) He plans to stay in the hotel “a couple of days or a week,” but that span of time grows into what must be months. Since he has little money (and no luggage), he’s given a room on the sixth floor of the seven-story hotel. Room 703: “I like the number – I am superstitious about them – for the zero in the middle is like a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger.” Since I’m on that page, in the elevator with Gabriel, I will add more of his thoughts, for they impart the main virtue of this novel: “I enjoy the swaying feeling and calculate how many wearisome steps I would have had to climb but for this noble lift. As I rise even higher, I throw my bitterness, my wanderings and homelessness, all my mendicant past, down the liftshaft from which it can never reach me again.” While the two lower floors of the Savoy are opulent, reserved for the very wealthy, the top two floors house the poor in dismal little cells. The hotel is a microcosm of the world, in which there exists a scale of different classes. Is this a social protest novel? Is it about the impoverished, who would work if there were jobs to be had, rising up, at the end, in violent revolution (which is crushed, but not before leaving the hotel in ruins)? Not really. The novel is mostly composed of Gabriel’s interactions with various characters, all odd in various ways and to varying degrees. It’s these characters, including both the wealthy and the poor, that stand out – that give the novel it’s richness. At the end Gabriel is on a train, headed for parts unknown. And that’s it. This is a major talent stretching its wings on a limited stage. *

Weights and Measures - Joseph Roth (German)

This novel is lightweight – it’s only 150 pages long – and the edition I have is midway between the size of a mass market and a trade paperback. Oh, you want to know about content? Well, there’s hardly anything to it. In a review of Roth’s The Radetzky March, which I liked very much, I described the characters as “muted” and wrote that they proceeded to their fates like “dumb animals.” The same can be said for W&M, yet it lacks the panoramic social aspect of March. We get Inspector Eibenschutz and little else. He’s supposed to be extremely unhappy, but he comes across as emotionally inanimate. The book is sloppily constructed; only near the end do we find out that the Inspector is thirty-six (all along I thought he was in his fifties). It’s also silly. Eibenschutz is obsessed by a gypsy woman (those gypsy women!); when she first appears “her dark blue-black hair led him to think of southern nights, which he had never seen but had possibly once read or heard about.” The prose is simple and precise, but in a self-consciously studied way; you know this when you’re constantly thinking, “How precise and simple!”

Immortality - Milan Kundera (Czech)

Kundera isn’t a novelist. He’s a thinker whose writing serves as a forum for his ideas. He has attained such eminence in the literary world that he can do whatever he wants; this shapeless grab bag of a book is what I’ll call philoso-fiction. In it the author plays a role, as does Goethe and other real-life figures from the past. The fictional modern-day characters are subordinate to Kundera’s larger aims, so they aren’t fully-developed. Free rein can liberate or lead to self-indulgence, or it can do both. Immortality may offer up a unique potpourri for the intellect, but it lost its luster for me (and it did have luster for a while). The overall perspective on human nature is a cynical one. An example: a woman is given the choice (it’s one or the other) of spending the next life with her husband of many years or of never meeting him again; her answer is “We prefer never to meet again.” (She phrases it as “we” because her husband is sitting next to her.) The point being made (with Kundera everything has a point) is that her love is an illusion, and with her answer she’s made to face that fact. Despite invigorating moments, I grew weary. The fictional side wasn’t holding up, and ideas that were intriguing and insightful were examined so rigorously that the freshness was leeched out of them. Plus I had my fill of Goethe; when he reappeared at the beginning of Part Four I called it quits. I did so with absolutely no curiosity, no regrets. I just wanted class to be over.

The Test - Pierre Boulle (French)

In France there’s a test youths must take to get their General Certificate. Or maybe the government has curtailed it due to this 1957 novel, in which it’s depicted as a scourge worthy of use by the Inquisition. Marie-Helen is uniquely unprepared to digest the work of the intellectual giants of the western world. She had lived in a Malaysian fishing village from age nine to seventeen; at that point she was kidnapped and returned to “her people” (white people). But she considered the villagers to be her people. Not only was she assimilated into their culture, but she was happily married. Boulle clearly believed that his heroine should have been allowed to carry on her life in Malaysia. Certainly she should! – all that happens after the kidnapping borders on the ridiculous. Her failure to pass the test leads to her breakdown, a number of murders and a suicide. The agony and despair the various characters feel is rendered in prose that would make a writer of Harlequin romances cringe. At first I thought the translator might be responsible, then I thought he might be partially responsible, but finally I put the blame on Boulle. How could a novelist whose work I’ve admired (The Bridge over the River Kwai, Planet of the Apes) come out with something as clumsy as this? I read those other books long ago. Was I lacking in discrimination? I find it reassuring that the edition of Kwai I have is from the Time Reading Program, and they made excellent choices. 

Life and Times of Michael K - J. M. Coetzee

Michael K is like Robinson Crusoe, yet his isolation takes place in the midst of war-torn South Africa. The opening sentence presents us with one factor that will separate him from others: “The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip.” His life passes in solitariness, which he finds easier than dealing with people. At age thirty-one Michael is thrust into the turbulent world when he tries to return his dying mother to the place where she was born. After her death we follow his wanderings. I was involved with the problems he faced and his attempts to solve them, and the unadorned prose was effective in conveying facts. But Coetzee wasn’t satisfied with facts, nor with the character he had created. He wanted to impart a higher meaning to Michael’s existence. As a result, things go badly off course. First he has Michael reject life by rejecting food. Not only didn’t this ring true, but following a person’s loss of bodily substance wasn’t interesting. In a brief Part Two, Coetzee changes the point-of-view to that of a doctor treating the emaciated Michael in a camp; through this deep-thinking character the author tries very hard to inject significance into the situation. In the even briefer last section we return to Michael, but everything – particularly a sexual encounter – seems fabricated. Ultimately we wind up someplace murky and inconclusive. The path Coetzee chose to take – one in which he aimed for profundity – led to a dead end, both for the novel and for Michael K.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
As I neared the last fourth of this book I lost faith. There was not enough basis in reality to support what was happening – particularly Miss Brodie’s having such a long-lasting influence on the girls; she seemed foolish and nutty, not a charismatic force. Also undermining believability: the artist painting Miss Brodie into all the girls’ portraits; her acting as a kind of procuress; the freedom allowed the girls to visit Miss Brodie at the music teacher’s house and to pose for the artist. Near the end Spark narrows the focus to Sandy and Miss Brodie, abandoning the others. But these two are eminently unattractive people. A dispiriting coldness permeates this book.

The Golden Ass - Apuleius (Latin)
It’s said to be the oldest prose work preserved in its entirety, and also to be written in the mode of the street storytellers of ancient Rome. At first I found its vibrancy and broad humor refreshing, thinking that people have not changed much in what they want from a piece of entertainment. But after the narrator was turned into an ass the story degenerated into one cruelty after another, one distasteful sex encounter after the other. All portrayed with brutal delight. Yes, I suppose people are still the same in what they want from entertainment.

Pere Goriot - Honore Balzac (French)
A bad so-called “great” novel. There are scenes and characters that come alive, and the cynicism seemed bracing – for a while. But it soon became clear that the book was overblown and improbable. Some parts are downright ridiculous. Just before he expires on his deathbed, Old Goriot has the strength to make a six (6!) page speech. Sections read like melodrama from a book for adolescents, such as the whole episode about the master thief Vautrin. Rastignac’s weeping got to be too much for me. I’m not in sympathy with the sensibilities of that period in French cultural life when being in Parisian society was all-important. Balzac seems to be cynically criticizing it, through the eyes of Rastignac, but at the end Rastignac chooses to enter that false and despicable and unhappy world. Why? Did he really need calfskin gloves? Lastly, the book was sloppily written, and I don’t think the translator is to blame.

The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth (German)
Are there more muted characters in fiction than the members of the Trotta family? Their feelings are comprehensible, they can arouse sympathy, but they’re caught in the inexorable cogs of history (the fall of the Hapsburg Empire) and they proceed like dumb animals to their fates. This chronicle of inevitability is told in a glittering prose which, despite its density, has the glittering preciseness of a cut diamond. Some scenes are masterfully done – the duel takes place in a trance. *