What’s for Dinner? - James Schuyler
Like Alfred and Guinevere, about 90% of this novel is made up of conversation (including the title). We learn about people not by what they do or think but by what they say; this approach to telling a story is fresh and engaging, and for a long stretch I enjoyed the book. Schuyler’s subjects are marriage, infidelity, alcoholism, mental illness (a large portion of the action takes place at a mental institution). He treats these serious issues with a light touch – too light, as it turns out. He should have heeded the advice that one of his characters gives a new patient when he starts weaving a belt in craft therapy: “And always pull the knot really tight, or it comes out looking funny. The first belt I made hung all crooked, because I didn’t do that.” Schuyler’s knots were too loose in that he never gave the serious issues the weight they deserved. Near the end he disposes of people and their problems in a callous way; even his language becomes crude, as if he were expressing annoyance with the whole enterprise. There’s also a lot of filler. Too much space is devoted to the group therapy sessions, and the only purpose the teenage twin boys serve is to trade vulgar remarks. Alfred and Guinevere was well-nigh perfect; this book hangs all crooked.

Castle Rackrent & Ennui - Maria Edgeworth
Rackrent is more successful because it’s shorter and is narrated in the voice of Thady Quirk, faithful servant to generations of Irish Rackrents. He chronicles the foibles of the various “Sirs” who take possession of the estate. They come across as shabby ne’er-do-wells; but as long as they give “entertainments” and are free with their money, Thady holds them in high esteem. One problem with the three times longer Ennui is that its premise is unsustainable. How much can you say about a man who has everything and is bored by it all? Not much. Instead, Edgeworth turns this into the story of the moral education of a man who learns to appreciate the higher values. Unfortunately, she does it in a preachy way. I liked the bored and irresponsible Lord Glenthorne more that the noble prig he becomes. When he finds out that he’s not really a Lord (babies switched at birth), he relinquishes his estate to a happy blacksmith who’s the rightful heir. Then, as Christopher O’Donoghoe, he embarks on life as an ordinary man. Edgeworth could have given him a harsh dose of reality; instead he’s immediately befriended by a wealthy mentor who admires his virtuous character. So Christopher is still rubbing elbows with the aristocracy. At a party he meets Cecilia, of the “celestial countenance.” At the end of the novel he’s married to her and is a successful lawyer; even his estate is returned to him (the blacksmith makes a mess of his elevated station in life). I felt gypped.

What Maisie Knew - Henry James
I’ve criticized authors for having a Henry James-like prose style. Now I can criticize The Master himself. I liked the novel’s premise – a little girl being shuttled about by adults – but James’s convoluted wordiness doesn’t reveal emotions, it obfuscates them: “ . . . if he had an idea at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision.” Untangling such nuances wore me down; I began to think, in exasperation, “Just spit it out.” As an experiment, I took the book’s opening sentence and simplified it. James: “The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a great deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause.” Me: “Though the child was provided for, the new arrangement was perplexing to her, and she was anxious about how her life would be affected.” The elegance of James’s sentence has been lost; but, if I have to choose, I’ll take clarity over beauty. And I’ll always choose truth over falsity. James’s main goal was to capture the sensibilities of a little girl. But his Maisie has only one dimension: she’s an analyzer of adult feelings and motivations. She’s not a real child; Maisie is Henry James.

Buttonwood - Maritta Wolff
In none of the four novels I’ve read by Wolff is the prose polished, but this time it’s downright sloppy (her overuse of modifiers is a glaring problem). Why didn’t an editor at Random House do some work on the manuscript? And why didn’t Wolff learn the finer points of her craft? Another question is, Why do I read her? She has a gift for narrative, and I find the dilemmas she sets up to be engrossing. In this outing a woman is hooked on TV soap operas; in a way, Buttonwood is an old-fashioned soap opera. Not that it’s without depth and insight. Wolff’s examination of a marriage in the process of falling apart is convincing. However, she gives intimations of a mysterious problem (homosexuality?) separating the young couple, but never brings to light what that problem is. In the case of the main character, she does disclose his secret life in the final pages. But, after all the buildup, my response was “That’s it?” On the back inside cover of the book (I bought it secondhand) someone wrote the following: “Dull most of the way through small mid-western town to a tacked-on unreal ending that reveals Paul’s true attachment.”

The Fool Killer - Helen Eustis
A twelve year old boy relates his experiences (which take place in rural America in the late 1800s) after he flees his foster home. He speaks to the reader in a dialect not unlike Huck Finn’s: “When I come home, I knowed the Old Crab was waiting for me, and I would catch it.” Because of his youth, he’s dependent on adults; in his wanderings he stays with families or lone individuals. George is observant and thoughtful; he’s also very emotional and impressionable. An eccentric old man tells him of the mysterious fool killer, who’s “eight feet or over – tallern any man – and carries a chopper so sharp it’d cut through a fence post like it was a segar.” George develops an amorphous fear of this lurking entity. The person who has the greatest impact on him is Milo; George comes to idolize the man. They make plans to wander from place to place, always sleeping outdoors (Milo won’t sleep in a house), until they reach the Pacific. Milo abhors society, and they intend to live outside its restrictions. It gradually becomes clear that George has formed a bond with a deeply disturbed individual. The two are separated after a murder at a camp revival, and George is taken in by the Galts, a kindly (and childless) couple. George becomes part of a family; he’s loved and is finally able to lead a normal life. Then Milo reappears . . . This is a good tale, but what’s remarkable about it is the final short paragraph, when the reader suddenly sees things in a wholly different light. This can happen only if the author has planted the seeds to make that which is surprising and unsettling seem to be absolutely right.

Whistle Stop - Maritta Wolff
You don’t want to have the Veeches as neighbors. They’re trashy, noisy and continually embroiled in some commotion. Nine people are crammed into a small, rundown house, and they’re often at each other’s throats (sometimes literally). One of the occupants is the child of the eldest daughter, Mary. The father’s identity is never disclosed, but it’s strongly implied that he’s Mary’s brother, Kenny. The two definitely have an unusual relationship. So we’re talking incest, though Wolff never puts that card directly on the table. She glamorizes both these characters. Kenny refuses to be ensnared by any ties – a job, one woman; he’s like a strong (and sometimes dangerous) animal, confident in his ability to fulfill his immediate needs. Mary is beautiful, competent, and as self-contained as a sphinx. They live lives (separate ones) outside the confines of the house, and only stay there intermittently. The novel gives a full share of attention to each member of the Veech family during one summer; the young people are all dissatisfied and want to get away from the dead-end little town they’re stuck in. This was Wolff’s first novel, written when she was in her early twenties, and the prose is far from polished. I wondered why an editor didn’t tidy it up a bit, then decided that maybe its messiness reflects the messiness of the lives being portrayed. The dialogue (“Now lookit here, I been telling you you gotta cut this kind of business out and I ain’t just been talking to hear myself, neither”) is true to how the uneducated Veeches speak. What matters most is that Wolff was an author with the right instincts. The book is alive, it moves (sometimes, in the action scenes, with velocity). Each character is a distinct individual, and I was involved in their predicaments. Though they make major mistakes, I wasn’t judgmental as long as I understood them. In the case of Mary and Kenny, the deep fault lines in their personalities are unsettling. Mary casually neglects her daughter (who’s becoming a warped little girl) and Kenny’s legacy in the town takes the form of a horribly disfigured woman. The hidden tragedy at the heart of this novel may be incest. What lingers after the inconclusive ending is a feeling of sadness, like the sadness evoked by the whistle of a passing train.

Born Twice - Giuseppe Pontiggia (Italian)
Though subtitled “A Novel of Fatherhood,” this book seems autobiographical. I could do a bit of research and find out if Pontiggia had a severely disabled son, but why bother. The author had his chance to engage me, and he did so on only a few occasions. The short episodes that comprise the book are written in a prose that’s elegant, even pristine. Because the grim facts of disability are handled gingerly or avoided altogether, they make hardly a ripple on this immaculate surface. Of primary interest to Pontiggia are the thoughts and encounters of the father. On almost every page we get ruminations like this: “To challenge one’s limits as an end to itself (otherwise known as the fashionable imperative) derives from the fear of accepting one’s limits.” I soon reached the conclusion that this isn’t a novel of fatherhood; it’s a novel of self-absorption. The son – the ostensible focus of the book – isn’t given much attention; in most of his appearances he utters comments that are extraordinarily insightful (and thus suspect). The narrator has a wife, though not a marriage; in their exchanges she constantly expresses her disapproval of him. I could sympathize with her.

False Starts - Malcolm Braly
It couldn’t have been easy for Braly to write this “Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons.” He had to look back at the wreckage of a life spent mostly behind bars. He was first incarcerated at age eighteen and was released – this time for good – at age forty. During his previous brief interludes of freedom he was unable to hold a job and his relationships with women were fraught with difficulties; he turned to meth and petty theft. These thefts were so inept that he was inviting capture. As he engaged in a self-inflicted wasting away of his life, he aspired to do something noteworthy, thinking that “afterwards I would always be defined by this affirmation and I would never again feel useless and stunted and soiled.” He would finally, in his own eyes, be “worthy of love.” If he had never found a talent his life would have been bleak indeed. But in his thirties he began to write crime novels; his ability to make a living as an author was a factor in his being released from prison. He would go on to produce something that met with serious acclaim: On the Yard. His memoir closes with him basking in success: “That evening our apartment was filled with friends who came to watch me watch myself on the Tonight Show . . . I had found a life here in the Magic City, a life among peers, and I had also found some part of the love I had always yearned for.” So there’s a happy ending to this autobiography. Yet, though I found Malcolm Braly to be perceptive and honest (and a good writer), I felt remote from the boy and man. The parts I’ve quoted show intimacy, but there’s an emotional detachment – or, more likely, an evasiveness – in the way he tells much of his story. The book’s main value lies in its study of prison life (though, as Braly acknowledges, that life has been replaced by something far meaner). He gives us the day-to-day routines, the toll prison takes on one’s spirit, the people he interacted with in the cells and mess halls and on the yard. Though he may have found peers in his new life, for many years his peers were cons like him.

Sudden Rain - Maritta Wolff
This isn’t nearly as successful as The Big Nickelodeon, though it has that novel’s readability. Again Wolff uses a lot of dialogue, but this time the characters sound alike, and they use language that’s gushy. I wonder how many times the word “marvelous” appears. Or “absolutely.” Things are “absolutely marvelous” or “absolutely fierce,” and a person is an “absolute love.” “Divine” also rears its ugly head. There are too many modifiers; someone can’t just be imposing, they must be “terribly imposing.” You get the idea. The novel is about relationships in and outside of marriage, but the characters often struck me as coming straight from central casting. The ending leaves everything – every last one of the conflicts – unresolved. I felt mildly gypped – not terribly and absolutely gypped, because I didn’t care that much what happened to these people. But, despite my gripes, I did read all four hundred pages. And I need to note an extraordinary chapter, one which shows how skilled a writer Wolff could be. A character is murdered – a random killing – and the economy and force with which this event is portrayed make it stunning.

Without a Hero - T. Coraghessan Boyle
Another one of my forays into modern literary fiction, another example of how freakishness has become the new gold standard. An offbeat or bizarre idea comes first, then it’s developed into a half-baked story. Real people in real situations don’t interest authors like Boyle. His characters merely serve their freaky roles in a freaky narrative. I started about half the stories; some I didn’t finish because I was overcome by boredom. One I abandoned was “The 100 Faces of Death, Volume IV” (the title of a video that shows people being killed in grotesque ways). At that point I had my fill of Thomas John (T. Coraghessan’s given name). I was left wondering what motivates him – a mercenary cynicism? He certainly plays the freakishness angle for all it’s worth, using that unpronounceable moniker and trying to look like Dracula for his book jacket photos. When I consider how highly regarded he and others of his ilk are in today’s literary world, I think of Kevin McCarthy’s frantic words at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”: “They’re here! They’re here!”

Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane (German)
This novel, written in 1894 by a 75-year-old man, contains elements that I found original and completely successful. What Fontane chooses to omit is critical. An example is the way he presents Effi’s affair; though we’re in her mind for most of the novel, we’re denied access to what transpires between her and Major Crampas. There was intimacy, but of what sort? We’ll never know. Crampas’s last words (which he speaks to Effi’s husband after he’s been mortally wounded by him in a duel) are: “Will you . . .” Will you what? We’re faced with enigmas, but they’re the kind that make you see life as an inexplicable and poignant mystery. Nobody is a villain, nobody is without flaws. No one is consistent. You can question every conclusion or justification any character makes. At the end Effi says that her husband “ . . . was as fine a man as any one can be who doesn’t really love.” But is she mistaken? Did Innstetten, despite his harsh actions after he learned of her infidelity, love Effi? In this tragic story there’s beauty and sentimentality and moments of untrammeled joy. And wisdom too – one doesn’t live to Fontane’s age without coming to some conclusions about life. *

The Big Nickelodeon - Maritta Wolff
In this page turner the author brings together a large cast of characters caught up in a variety of tangled predicaments. Dialogue is one of Wolff’s strengths; each individual comes alive with their own distinct voice. In the first chapter a body is discovered on a California beach; on the last page the identity of the person is revealed. Reading this rich, sprawling novel is more than entertainment. Wolff shows us people striving, often not sure what they’re after, sometimes pursuing the wrong goals. Ultimately they’re hostages to their needs and their natures.

Mockingbird - Walter Tevis
Though reading this book was not at all laborious, the plot and characters are so complex that they defy any tidy summing up. Tevis presents a futuristic world headed toward extinction (not with a bang but a whimper); even biological humans have lost their humanness. Bentley has to slowly discover his; books are the means by which he gains access to feelings which had been drugged and indoctrinated into dormancy. Mary Lou, a rebel who escaped such indoctrination in her youth, is relatively intact. The robot Spofforth was created using the brain of a human as a model; he fleetingly feels – and is disturbed by – random emotions and memories belonging to his donor. In its depiction of a social-engineered world in terminal disarray, the book makes you think. Tevis is less successful in making me feel. He tries to show the evolution of Bentley as he opens up to emotions and learns to love, yet this aspect seemed forced and awkward. In The Man Who Fell to Earth and Queen’s Gambit Tevis convincingly conveyed deep alienation, but in this novel he couldn’t breathe life into scenes of human engagement.

Old Red and Other Stories - Caroline Gordon
There are quite a few successes in this collection. The best are about Aleck Maury. He’s a great character, and I wonder if he was based on Gordon’s father. How else could she have such empathy for an aging sportsman with an elemental need to hunt and fish? In the Maury stories she captures, with a masterful understatement, Aleck’s feelings as the world he loves slips inexorably from his grasp. Her finest achievement is “The Last Day in the Field,” in which she makes this conflict of love and loss palpable. Bittersweet loss is also the theme of “All Lovers Love the Spring”; Gordon follows a woman’s random thoughts, and in doing so a whole life emerges. The weakest – and longest – story is “Emmanuele! Emmanuele!” It’s populated by intellectuals and the plot is intricate; both seem contrived. Gordon was an author with limitations – she had to care deeply about her characters and she had to keep the plot simple. When she stayed in those parameters she was capable of beautiful work.