How It All Began - Penelope Lively
It all begins with a seventy-seven-year-old woman being knocked to the pavement by a purse snatcher. Charlotte’s hip is broken; this necessitates a temporary move to the home of her married daughter. We’re then introduced to eight characters whose lives are altered by what happened to Charlotte; it may affect them in seemingly trivial ways (one man’s lecture notes are left behind), but the repercussions are far-reaching. Lively follows the story of each character; she enters their minds and makes them distinct and believable. I gradually became aware that some people were positive personalities, others negative. The negative ones were self-centered; satisfying their desires was their primary concern. They weren’t bad people; they were like you and me. One person who changes from negative to positive is Charlotte’s daughter. Though Rose takes her mother into her home and is considerate, there’s something brusque in her attitude. But when she falls in love with Anton she softens. And deepens. This love – which is destined to go nowhere – is the novel’s strongest aspect because it’s the most moving. That said, the person I felt closest to was Charlotte (she is the Penelope Lively portrayed in Lively’s memoir of old age, Dancing Fish and Ammonites). This is an absorbing and thought-provoking book, and I had only a few quibbles. There are times in the last fourth when we seem to be treading water, as if looking for a place to go ashore. And the mugger who makes an appearance in the closing paragraph is a mistake. If he had been omitted the ending would have belonged to Anton – and he deserves it. Though, when Lively rounds out Anton’s life, I wished she had given him more than loneliness. Actually, my response is a tribute to Lively – for it was she who made me care about him. *

Rum Punch - Elmore Leonard
The Library of America has devoted three volumes to Elmore Leonard’s work (one exclusively to his westerns). He was highly prolific, and many of his novels have been made into movies. The adaption he liked best was “Jackie Brown,” directed by Quentin Tarantino. I’m no Tarantino fan, but I saw the film (in a form edited for television), and I liked it. So I chose to read Rum Punch, the novel it was based on. There were a number of changes, one major. In the film Jackie Brown is in a romantic involvement with a white bond bailsman by the name of Max Cherry. Jackie, played by Pam Grier, is black (or, as they say, chocolate-colored). But in the novel Jackie Burke is white. Still, the personality of Jackie is the same in film and novel. Leonard, who saw his work get butchered for the screen, must have appreciated that Tarantino got some things right. Actually, I thought the film was better than the novel. I admired Leonard’s swift, unencumbered prose and his smart, sharp, quirky dialogue. Also good was the sense of authenticity; Leonard seems to know all about guns and the legal aspects of being a bail bondsman. But gradually these virtues wore thin. We get too much snappy dialogue – it’s as if Leonard were showing off a talent. The same goes for authenticity – too much. In the Chronology section we follow Leonard’s life from birth to death, and it’s clear that he didn’t get his street smarts from firsthand experience. He did research, and I felt that he was piling up all he had learned for display. The overly-complicated plot didn’t help my mood, nor did I find lowlife characters committing casual murder to be entertaining. Only Jackie and Max had enough substance to interest me. But it was only enough for me to take a peek at the ending before calling it quits. The film was more successful because, for starters, it consumed only ninety minutes of my life. And the script simplified the plot and cut down on the cast; one lowlife (Samuel L. Jackson’s Ordell) survived. When the dialogue was spoken by talented actors, it worked; and since what people said was there to move the plot along, much idle talk was eliminated. Leonard was an unabashed writer of pop fiction, so a question arises: does he deserve the honor of being part of The Library of America? Actually, the question should be rephrased: is being in the LOA an honor? They’re in the business of publishing and selling, so they face a problem: Who next? (How about Evan Connell?)

Last Things - Madison Jones
In her letters Flannery O’Connor expressed admiration for the work of Madison Jones. At least for his early novels; the book I’m reviewing was written when he was sixty-six and she was long dead. I wonder if, like me, she would have found it ponderous. Not in size – it’s a little over two hundred pages. But we’re always in the mind of Wendell, and it wasn’t a pleasant place to be. He’s an academic young man who finds his fellow human beings to be contemptible; he has no sense of morality, nor any purpose to his life. Through a unlikely series of events he gets involved in drug trafficking and begins an affair with a married woman. He will coerce this woman – Tricia – to commit a murder, and later she will take her life. Jones frames this story of a man’s downfall in religious terms. Wendell feels that he’s in the clutches of someone named Farrow; the word “devil” is never used, but in lines like “This was Farrow’s doing, his sorcery” it’s clear who he’s meant to represent. There’s also a fundamentalist-style preacher to whom Wendell attributes powers. This religious bent was probably always an aspect of Jones’s work, and it would have appealed to O’Connor. The problem with this novel – and here’s where the word “ponderous” comes into play – is that nobody elicits sympathy. Wendell’s increasing agony and confusion merely began to weigh heavy. As for Tricia, she needed to be someone the reader could sympathize with, yet she comes across as a plot prop; I cared as little for her as Wendell did. At the end he experiences a moral awakening, but goes unpunished fo his crimes; I thought he should serve hard time in the state pen. The real moral of this story: if a writer must convey a religious message, it has to be subordinate to the demands of good fiction.

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
I’ve never been a fan of Hawthorne, but I did read all of this novel. I had made attempts before, but failed. The trick, I found, was to skip the forty page introductory “sketch of official life” (Hawthorne’s words) entitled “The Custom-House.” Why was it included? Possibly because, standing alone, the novel is well under 200 pages and thus occupies that awkward territory between a short story and a novel. I went directly to the opening scene, in which Hester Prynne is released from prison with her infant and is displayed to the crowd wearing a dress with a scarlet letter – an A, for adulteress – that she had sewn over her breast. No need to go into the plot, but some background facts seem relevant. The novel was written in 1850, and the action takes place 200 years previously in the Puritan town of Salem, notorious for its witchcraft trails of 1692 (in which Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, played a prominent role). The change of the spelling of the last name suggests an attempt at separation from that harsh (and unrepentant) family patriarch; the victims of his interrogation were mainly women, and in this novel Hawthorne shows sympathy for Hester (and for women in general). But it’s a work that doesn’t bridge the barrier of time. The moral issues which the characters agonize over belong to a religion-bound sensibility. The prose, though carefully crafted, is wordy, circuitous and effusive. As for the characters, Hester came across as wooden, Dimmesdale as a weak hysteric; Chillingworth’s role as a force of evil was contrived; Hester’s daughter, the “little Pearl,” was overdone in her elfin capriciousness. I was only rarely pulled into their emotional lives, so I viewed them mostly with detachment. But I could recognize that these people and their problems mattered deeply to Hawthorne; this novel seems driven by necessity, and for that it’s worthy of respect.

A Fine and Private Place – Morley Callaghan
When I began this project one of the ground rules was that I would review any book that I made it halfway through. I made it halfway through this one, but I have no desire to examine the faults which caused me to terminate our relationship. Anyway, who any interest in an author like Callaghan? Or any interest in my opinion about his novel? My stats show a paltry few visits (five or six is paltry), and who among those five or six reads a word? I get no comments, so the answer is probably nobody. People tell me that I need to reach my audience – that nobody knows my blog exists. Probably true; but I can’t help noting that these advisers (all literary types) do know about the existence of my blog and don’t visit it. As the word count for “Jack London” approaches the 200,000 mark, my purpose (though not my effort in producing something I deem worthwhile) has begun to sag. Playing a role in this decline is that the fodder for the reviews – the books themselves – have dwindled in quality. When I began my reading life, sixty-six years ago, the fictional vista seemed endlessly rich. Now it’s difficult to find a novel that I enjoy (as for something that inspires excitement, it’s been a while). I’ll bring home ten books from my university library, and I may complete two. The novel that I started before this one was by Thomas Berger. I’ve gotten great pleasure from him, but in The Houseguest, written when he was in his sixties, he tries to recapture the nutty exuberance of The Feud, yet all he can summon up is sex. It was tired and cynical and depressingly empty, and I lasted only to page thirty. Maybe I’ve also grown tired and cynical and empty. The grave is a fine and private place, and maybe this project should be buried.

Dancing Fish and Ammonites - Penelope Lively
More and more I turn to authors who, in previous books, have shown that they’re capable of excellence. I also, more and more, have been reading the letters, journals and memoirs of these authors. Though this book has “A Memoir” after the title, in the first sentence of the Preface Lively writes, “This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is a view from old age.” The book is divided into six sections, and “Old Age” is the title of the first. At age eighty Lively contemplates her situation and that of others in the same leaking boat. Despite some serious health issues, she’s handling old age quite well. She has her bad days, but she isn’t plagued by loneliness or depression (she constantly refers to her family and friends and is generally upbeat). She has attained respect in her chosen profession and seems to have had a fulfilling private life to look back on (though she remains reserved about personal matters– she reveals no secrets nor settles any scores). Her mind is obviously still in fine working order. In this opening section she could be talking to the reader, and she emerges as a person I liked and found to be engaging company. Unfortunately, the intimate tone gradually diminishes in what follows. In the second section, “Life and Times,” she takes a look at world events and describes how they affected her, but she does it in an a pedantic “explaining” way. The distancing from intimacy culminates in the final section, “Six Things,” in which she takes objects she owns and tells of their history. Because of the dry way it’s done the only person who would find this interesting is Lively herself. A novelist would have recognized this. But Lively wasn’t writing a novel; she was putting in words a goodbye to the world she knew in a way that pleased her. Still, a writer must always satisfy a reader. Though my friendly feelings for her never seriously faltered, I did get a bit antsy when she was discoursing on ammonites and the Jerusalem Bible. As she notes somewhere in the first section, old people can be boring, and they must watch themselves.

Pastoral - Nevil Shute
I turn to Nevil Shute’s novels like I would to comfort food. And it’s not junk that I’m consuming – all of the six books I’ve read by him are quality work (with On the Beach being his best). His approach, in both prose and the presentation of plot and characters, is workmanlike; you always understand exactly where you stand. And even when he’s writing about machinery he makes it engrossing. His two themes are hardship and romantic love. In Pastoral the hardship is war. Peter Marshall is a bomber pilot, conducting nighttime raids on Germany. He falls in love with a section officer who relays the radio messages between planes and ground. Peter’s feelings for Gervase intensify a conflict in him. Though he’s a loyal Brit, he’s flown fifty-eight missions, and he doesn’t want to complete the two he has left; he wants to live and love. But the path of love is not a smooth one – he commits to Gervase quickly, she’s reluctant. Too quickly, too reluctant? It seemed so to me. And there’s a touch of sentimentality near the end that I found discordant. Sentimentality is a flaw Shute sometimes fell prey to, but it’s one I can forgive because it stems from his feelings for his characters. When needed, he can write with steady resolve: the two long sections in which he describes bombing missions are masterfully done. What always matters with Shute, even in his lesser attempts, is that he understood the human heart. One scene embodies the reason why so many readers have turned to him. Gervase knows that Peter and his three man crew enjoy fishing, so she pays a visit to an old lady who owns an estate that has a lake stocked with trout. She asks for permission to allow the men to fish there. After a long conversation permission is granted. When Gervase returns to the base someone who doesn’t know she’s already made her visit says, “I wouldn’t go out there, if I were you.” And then he tells her why. The way Shute constructs the scene the reason he warns her off comes as a surprise, and it has a lingering impact.

The Photograph – Penelope Lively
The novel opens with a man finding a photograph in which his deceased wife is holding hands with the husband of her sister. He concludes that an affair had been taking place, and he initiates a search into the infidelity. We go into his mind and that of the sister and her husband. The voices of all three are distinct and strong; we get to know these people. But Kath, the deceased woman, is a shadowy presence; we see her only through the limited perceptions of those others. And we’re never told, until the end, how she died. When it’s revealed I didn’t feel cheated, or that I was being teased (I had a pretty firm idea as to how, one which I believe Lively intended me to have). What matters is why Kath died. But the book is constructed in such a way that it’s those other three who I was involved with and who I understood. A skilled writer like Lively could have found a way for Kath to emerge and speak for herself, but she chose not to. The only insight comes in one of the closing chapters when Mary Packard, a character who had been close to Kath for many years, finally makes an appearance. Mary tells of the Kath she knew, and passes judgment on three people who were dazzled by her beauty but who left the person inside emotionally abandoned. That’s the Why of Kath’s death, though it comes late and indirectly. In opposition to Kath, Lively describes Mary as “one of those rare and perhaps blessed souls who are able to make their way through life without the need to be shored up by companionship, or dependents, or love.” The seventy-year-old author seems to be offering up a formula not for conventional happiness but for immunity from the pain others can inflict on the needy.

Carry On, Jeeves – P. G. Wodehouse
Many upper crust Brits consider Wodehouse to be the greatest comic writer of the century. That would be the early twentieth century, when idle young men could live luxuriously off stipends from wealthy aunts or uncles. This volume has ten stories about Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. Bertie is a carefree soul who wakes late from a “rather cheery little evening” of fun and games and a quantity of alcoholic drinks and who will spend the next evening in the same manner. He avoids anything that takes much effort or will tax his brain (this includes cultural pursuits). In the ten stories in this volume he or a friend (with names like Corky and Bicky) get into some predicament, and the ever resourceful Jeeves rescues them. Often this involves a disentanglement from a serious relationship with a woman. Bertie has an inventive way with words. When he first meets Jeeves he’s suffering from a hangover, and Jeeves mixes a concoction for him to drink: “For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb in the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right.” He hires Jeeves on the spot. For Evelyn Waugh Wodehouse “has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” I was merely diverted for a while, until the air of frivolity grew stale and the spindly plots seemed repetitive and silly. To please me humor must have substance; these stories are all froth, and halfway though the eighth one I called it quits. Wodehouse was staggeringly productive – he published over ninety books. Also of note is that this quintessentially English writer lived most of his life in the United States; he became an American citizen at age seventy-four. He was knighted just before his death at the age of ninety-three.

Passing On - Penelope Lively
Another bad parent. The opening scene takes place at the mother’s funeral; the novel is about her two children, both in late middle age, who stayed with her for most of their lives. This mother, Dorothy, is an evil person – if trying to destroy your children by undermining any confidence and positive self-image is evil. She largely succeeds. The son, Edward, is incapable of coping with life (he comes across as near catatonic). Helen, for whom coping is an ingrained reflex, is a 52 year-old spinster (which is what Dorothy wanted her to be; no young romance for Helen!). She’s intelligent, sensitive, perceptive. Why did she stay? She could have done what a third child, Louise, did: fought her mother tooth and nail and flown the coop as soon as possible. Helen realizes that she became reconciled to the role of mediator. Both Helen and Edward, by not being strong-willed, by believing in their inadequacies, let their mother smother their individuality. With Dorothy absent the brother and sister are beset by longing for what they never had – mostly sexual love. Neither finds this kind of fulfillment. Edward makes a suicide attempt after impulsively groping a boy; Helen gives up on a glib widower who will never reciprocate her feelings. At the end the two sit together in the home so long dominated by the virulent presence of Dorothy. What next? “They saw that there is nothing to be done, but that something can be retrieved.” I didn’t see anything to be retrieved. Both will simply accept life as it is for them and trudge along to their deaths. This unashamedly sad novel is marred only by the fact that it has a lot of padding. The same thoughts run on too long (too much about the widower) and Lively introduces plot elements that are contrived (Louise’s problem son moving into their house, and his transformation into a good kid, is the most glaring misstep). Still, this work illustrates how a parent can be intentionally destructive to their child. How should Dorothy’s children spell Mother? “ ‘M’ is for the many ways you hurt me . . .”

The Kingdom of the World - Alejo Carpentier (Spanish)
This snake of a book slithers here and there with power and ornate beauty. It’s one of the deadly species, as befits a story about the brutal history of Haiti. Not that the author intended to give a coherent account of that history. Instead he presents the nature of tyranny: the poor are mistreated by all who dominate them, be they white, black or mulatto. The main character, Ti Noel, is a young slave (sometime in the mid 1700s). To enter the mind of a boy who is one generation removed from Africa is to go into a sensibility with unshakable mystical beliefs. The reader is placed in the position of accepting that way of seeing things – which is difficult. But we’re not only in Ti Noel’s mind; the point of view shifts unpredictably from one person to another. Events begin, then are dropped; we start a chapter to find that things are a certain way but aren’t told how that came to be like that; we’re in Cuba, we’re in Italy. At the end Ti Noel is a mad old man who has escaped into a kingdom of the imagination; he remains inexplicable. Carpentier has not tried to write a novel that’s appealing in human terms. But he does succeed in conjuring up a forbidding and unfathomable world.

The History of Henry Esmond - William Makepeace Thackeray
I was mildly enjoying this despite the use of so much French and Latin (left untranslated for ignorant me) and the fact that it’s a historical novel written in the 1850s (I had no knowledge of the personages and events that form the background action). But Thackeray has a pleasing style and I liked Henry – as a boy. However, the boy didn’t develop into an interesting man. Also, the author began serving up standard Victorian fare. Extreme emotions abound: a woman cannot simply be beautiful, she must be more perfect than a goddess; eternal vows will be upheld to the death; manly tears flow copiously. And so on. Probably villains are refreshing in books of this type because they serve as a contrast to the boring stereotypes of staunch virtue. At any rate, I quit halfway through. I was disappointed in Thackeray, who subverted Victorian values so brilliantly in Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon.

Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively
A mood of mystery and sadness infuses this novel. By means of flashbacks the author takes us with Claudia through her whole life, and we’re with her at the end of it, in a hospital room, looking at the lights and shadows through the window. The romance at the emotional heart of the story is done well. Lively writes beautiful prose; one is aware of that, and she demands your concentration, but this evocative book flows with grace. *

McKay’s Bees - Thomas McMahon
I liked the businesslike approach, assertive and clear; I liked the diverse characters, I liked the premise of the story. Then it turned stagnant. The characters and the situation were not developed. Instead the author began concentrating more and more on factual material, as if he were writing a text.

The Drinker - Hans Fallada (German)
Proletarian prose, in which Fallada has a character take a drink and quickly descend into a hell of self-destructive alcoholism. Actually, the man is crazy – that’s the only way to account for his deterioration. Drink isn’t the issue. I read that Fallada doesn’t revise; he should have. There’s some vigor to this, but it was unreasonable and melodramatic and sloppy, and I couldn’t finish it. I thought his What Now, Little Man? was very good, but I read that long ago, and now I’m suspicious.

Cast a Cold Eye - Mary McCarthy
These are social dissections, not stories. People are caricatures of a type and exist only to make the author’s points. The observations are often accurate, fresh and amusing, but not vital to me. The prose, too, was difficult; it slowed down this reader, who was already slowing down. The only story that had real life was “Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?”, but in it there was a real character: Poor little Mary McCarthy herself. This one, in which the author’s eye is not cold, was terrific.

Blindness - Henry Green
Written when Green was in his teens, this is a remarkable work for the first half. The author has control over a variety of devices – a journal, letters, interior monologues. Then the book turns to the love interest, first exploring, for a long chapter, a girl’s day, then showing the girl and John together – and the whole thing breaks down. The language becomes stilted (purposely, I think; an authorial effect that doesn’t work), the emotions dubious (how did John get to be the person we are presented with?). All authenticity vanished, and I stopped reading. Green suddenly seemed like the teenager he was.