The Spoilt City - Olivia Manning

The second of the Balkan Trilogy. As with the first (The Great Fortune) the setting is Bucharest. World War II has broken out and the city is in disarray as its residents face an imminent invasion. But unfortunately Harriet and Guy Pringle get most of the attention, and they’re not particularly interesting. Guy remains vague; this is an autobiographical work, and Manning seems to be walking on egg shells when dealing with her husband (probably because he’s an ass). Yaki is still the most alive, multi-dimensional character, and Bucharest is still a fascinating place, but they get second billing.

Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning

This last novel in a trilogy has Harriet and Guy in Greece, with Guy’s difficulty getting a job the main focus. He’s still vague (sigh). There’s a suggestion of Harriet having a fling with a handsome young fellow, but we know she’s too proper to do it. The book takes on aspects of a romance novel, and Yaki is gone, so I stopped reading about the bland and tiresome Pringles.

A Man of the People - Chinua Achebe

The problem with this novel is that Achebe mixes politics with romance, and the romance part is weak. Nanga, the corrupt political boss, is a forceful, repellant character. The narrator is a good (and amusing) observer – until he falls in love. When the emphasis changes to the love affair, the book suffers.

The Collected Stories of John O’Hara

There are lessons to be learned from O’Hara: how to entertain (all the stories capture and hold one’s attention); how to use dialogue (it’s naturalistic and reveals character); and how to make an ending resonate. There’s a revelatory jolt at the close of the best of these stories, such as “Can I Stay Here?” What is revealed lingers with you. This isn’t a trick ending; it flows from under the surface of what has gone before. The problem is that O’Hara often doesn’t have that moment. All else is there – the entertainment, the good dialogue; but, without an ending of consequence the story is merely good; there aren’t enough very good ones in this collection. The longest (a full-fledged novella) is the worst piece of writing in the book. Surely the editor, Frank MacShane, could have made a better choice. On the flip side, “Over the River and Through the Woods” belongs in any anthology of the best American short stories. Young writers should read O’Hara and recognize his virtues. 

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
There are aspects of greatness in this book - depth, texture, scope - but for me it was too ponderous to enjoy. Scenes, motivations are weighed down by over-description, over-explication. It’s an adventure novel on one level, but the adventure never gets off the ground. In Conrad’s nature there was an exhausting compulsion to examine everything to the nth degree, and that’s too heavy a burden for a story to carry.

The Pearl - John Steinbeck
The book deals simply with simple matters while actually delving into life’s great questions (what do we value; what should we value?). Once Steinbeck sets his course on this morality tale he refuses to give it a happy ending, which is the honest thing to do. But he slips up on logic (the death at the end, as presented, is improbable). Steinbeck makes humane points about human nature, though sometimes those points have a maudlin quality.

The Great Fortune - Olivia Manning
The author found the key to making this book work in the character of Yaki, a wonderfully colorful and fascinating reprobate. She alternates chapters about him with chapters about Guy and Harriet Pringle. It’s Harriet who supplies the POV, and the sections featuring her are a bit drab. Manning seems reticent – probably because the author is Harriet, and Harriet is mainly concerned about her relationship with her husband. So Manning withholds; the reader has little understanding of the intimate dynamics of this marriage. She’s troubled by Guy’s attitude toward her, but Manning doesn’t show things with much force. In most of the scenes Harriet is with somebody else; Guy makes “appearances.” I don’t see Guy as a flesh and blood person (Yaki I do see!). Still, I like wary Harriet. I like the clear, flat, economical style of writing. The Bucharest setting was wonderful – Manning really captures that place: exotic, corrupt, self-indulgent, garish (as are the people who reside there); I felt the weather, the streets at night. This is part of a trilogy, and I’ll read on. *

Less Than Angels - Barbara Pym
Not great Pym. The problem is too many characters; the important ones get diluted by those who don’t deserve the amount of space given to them. Yet, with a Pym novel, there are virtues you can count on: she treats her reader as she would a friend. She will respect you, she will not offend you. She will be herself, and offer herself to you (in the form of her story and characters) with warmth and humor – and do it gently.

School for Love - Olivia Manning
Wonderful and unique. A little orphan boy, a cat, a spinster he goes to live with in Jerusalem. And other assorted personages, all drawn extremely well. But the triumph is Miss Bohun, who could have been merely the standard villain, but she’s more. She’s more because Olivia Manning cared enough about all her characters to draw them in depth, and that depth has a lot of heart. When done with this book I felt that I was looking ahead at the life journey the boy is about to take. What did he learn, during the time I spent with him? Good or ill? There’s an unsettling ambiguity. *

Boston Adventure - Jean Stafford
I read to the halfway mark of this book (just to get credit for it). I often thought, during those two hundred pages, that the story would break out and become satisfying; I felt it could do so. But enough is enough – it just wasn’t happening. The problems: everything was handled in a turgid way, from scenes to feelings; repetition abounded, not helped by a convoluted Henry James-like prose; the main character’s emotions had a melodramatic edge. Much later Stafford wrote a non-fiction book about Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother called A Mother in History. It’s done with perfect simplicity.

The Heat of the Day - Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen sure knows how to write. Meticulous care is given to scene, mood, texture. But, problem is, all this care translates to laborious going for the reader. Finally I looked at a paragraph and knew I’d have to plow through another inflated demonstration of Miss Bowen’s precious sensibilities. And I wasn’t up to it. I asked myself a question: Do you care about any of her characters? These wooden, lifeless, anemic props? In The Death of the Heart Bowen was also the meticulous craftsman, but that book was infused with the animating spirit of real people.

The Prison - Georges Simenon (French)
I read an interview in which Simenon said that when he sat down to write a novel he had no idea where the plot would go or how it would turn out. This one wound up nowhere. It had an interesting premise, but he did nothing with it. The main character, who’s searching for the answer to why his wife killed her sister, walks around, drinks a lot, agonizes a lot. We wait to find out the Why, but what we learn is a total copout. On the final page Simenon has the character kill himself by crashing his car into a tree. (Sorry for the spoiler, but it really doesn’t matter.)