Orley Farm – Anthony Trollope
This novel was published in two volumes, so I’m going to read (and review) the two separately. And I surely will read the next volume, as I’m interested in how things turn out. A trial is to take place determining whether Mrs. Mason forged the signatures of her husband and two witnesses on a codicil to a will, one which left her infant son the heir to Orley Farm. At the time, twenty years ago, her husband’s well-to-do adult son had taken the matter to court, contesting the validity of the codicil; the decision went against him, yet he remained convinced that he had been cheated out of property that was rightfully his. When new papers are discovered, giving credence to his belief, he revives the case; if a wrong has been done to him, however long ago, he’ll exact his full pound of flesh. For me, Mrs. Mason’s guilt or innocence is not in question: she forged the codicil. Still, how will she survive the retrial? Trollope is adept at putting characters in moral/emotional vises, and then tightening the screws. The crosscurrents that play over relationships are deviously constructed but entirely sound, given the characters’ psychology and temperament. Another Trollope strength is his portrayal of people who are unpleasant, deviant or evil. I’ll note two of many compelling creations: the lawyer Mr. Dockwrath, a coarse, wily brute force, and the elder son’s wife, a miser of psychotic proportions. But a Trollope weakness is also on display: some characters come across as simplistic and cloying (this is most evident in his depictions of womanly virtue). It all has to do with his attitude: when Trollope was hard he was as good as it gets, but when he was soft he turns mushy. Orley Farm also suffers in that it’s cluttered with too many characters and lines of plot (such as the love triangles involving a handful of young people). But readers in 1862 were desirous of a blockbuster, so Trollope, the human word machine, added the necessary padding. His readiness to produce on demand was an aspect of his work that critics would attack. Where’s the divine inspiration, they asked.

The Final Deduction – Rex Stout
Again I turn to Stout for a diversion. Archie gets a lot of play, which is good (when he glances into a wealthy client’s bedroom he decides it “would suit my wife fine if I ever had a wife, which I probably wouldn’t because she would probably want that type of room”). But this is a sloppily written and plotted novel; Stout wasn’t half trying. In fact, I think he was deliberately seeing how much nonsense he could foist off on his readers. The overly intricate maneuvering of the kidnapping is topped for preposterousness by the method of committing a murder. The Teddler library has a dozen life-sized bronze statues of figures from American history. A drugged man is dragged under the statue of Ben Franklin, which is then pushed over so that it falls on him. But how could someone be sure that a statue of that size and weight would land on the unconscious victim in a way that would cause death (and not just, say, crush his legs)? A little off to the side and the whole plan would be a fiasco. Of course, if the Ben Franklin had missed completely, the murderer could drag the body to the George Washington statue for another try. I often complain about how writers of detective fiction deliberately try to mislead the reader. So this time out, when the five suspects were identified, I chose the most unlikely person to be the murderer. It turns out that I was right. So now I can solve mysteries just like Nero Wolfe.

The Hat of My Mother – Max Steele
I admired Steele’s only novel so much that I got this collection of his short stories. But only “When She Brushed Her Hair” approached the excellence of Debby. And even that story is marred by an awkward introduction and a postscript in which Steele muses about the project. There’s one other piece that’s very good — “The Cat and the Coffee Drinkers” — but the rest range from interesting to mistakes. Since their publication dates begin when the author was thirty-one and end when he was sixty-six, which was his age when the collection came out, it’s a summing up of his work as a writer of short fiction. There’s simply not much of value in this slim volume (under two hundred pages), and I was left wondering how Steele could have written something as good – and ambitious – as Debby. Maybe the novel was so heartfelt that it elicited the best in him, and his best was better than what he was normally capable of. And he wrote it when he was in his twenties; he would attend five universities, ending up as the longtime director of the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; possibly academic affairs took up his time and energy. In most of the stories he uses personal experiences for subject matter; this works as long as he stays in the background. In the two successes I noted, one is about his mother and the other is about his kindergarten teacher; in the first he isn’t born yet, and in the second he’s just one of the anonymous boys in Miss Effie’s class. But too often I felt I was in a psychiatric session in which Steele reveals his inability to sustain romantic relationships (in “Color the Daydream,” which is about a love affair that turns out badly, there’s a paragraph that consists of two words: “Torture time”). This collection left me with a feeling of sadness. The stories weren’t as good as I wanted them to be, and Max Steele seemed to have had a struggle with life.

Asleep in the Sun - Adolfo Bioy Casares (Spanish) 
I finished this novel because I was perplexed, and perplexity can tease one on. Everything happening – every damn thing – seemed slightly distorted. I wanted to find out what all the craziness was about. Yet in the last thirty pages the absurdities were pushed to the point of silliness (how about a mad scientist putting the souls of dogs into human bodies?). The book turned out to be a pointless joke, and I was snookered into wasting my time on it. It’s not surprising that Bioy Casares’s mentor was Borges, that trickster who was proclaimed a genius by constructing elaborate word puzzles that defy a solution. Yet there’s always a coterie of admirers for the Emperor’s new clothes. This novel was reissued by the New York Review of Books. James Sallis, a writer of second-rate mysteries, does the introduction, and he finds meaning in the flagrantly meaningless (he claims the novel explores “the theme of identity,” et cetera). I feel I must soften this negative review by mentioning Bioy Casares’s The Dream of Heroes, in which he combined the realistic and the fantastic to conjure up an enigma. 

Debby - Max Steele 
Debby (originally published as The Goblins Must Go Barefoot) was Max Steele’s only novel. Why no others? It seems a major loss. Because Debby is one of those works that make you wonder “How could somebody do this?” Steele was in his twenties when he wrote it, but his insight into human nature would have been remarkable for a man in his fifties. He enters the mind of a woman who has the mental development of a child (Debby can’t read or tell time). As is true with children, she’s extremely self-centered and responds to people and events with an intense emotionality. Steele shows how complex those labeled as “simple” really are. When her story begins she’s staying at the Stonebrook Home for Delinquent Women. She had been there six years, ever since the state, in the form of the hated Nurse Janet, tracked her down. Debby had two children, one an infant. She loved them, but they were living wild, like animals. The children were taken from her and she was sent to Stonebrook. In the first chapter a new life opens for her. She moves to the home of the Merrills, to work as a live-in maid; soon she’s considered one of the family. As filtered through her perceptions, we follow the Merrills during the difficult decades of the thirties and forties. Debby’s thoughts and feelings focus most strongly on Mrs. Merrill and the youngest child, a boy who reminds her of the one she had lost. Though there are good times, lives are not easy, nor do things turn out happily for anyone. Mrs. Merrill, through her actions, loses what she most desired, and the amorphous fear which lurked at the core of Debby comes to dominate her. I found this ending disturbing. It’s as if Max Steele, in the first pages, had inserted an intravenous drip in my vein, and through it I absorbed raw emotion. * 

The Mesh - Lucie Marchal (French)
This is a psychological study of a mother, daughter, son, and son’s wife engaged in a struggle to dominate, to possess; all of them are repugnant (even the family dog is disgusting). Marchal ventures into Simenon territory with this look at mental aberration and moral corruption. She’s fairly successful, though her characters and their actions are too extreme. Often I found myself overboard in fetid waters.