Re-reads

The Professional – W. C. Heinz

This novel follows a boxer’s preparation for a title bout. One of its unique aspects is its accurate depiction of the world of boxing. (You can throw out all those fight movies you’ve seen – they’re totally bogus and ridiculous.) The novel is primarily about three people: Eddie Brown, the boxer; Frank Hughes, a sports writer who’s doing a magazine story on Eddie; and Doc Carroll, Eddie’s trainer and manager. We’re never in Eddie’s mind – we only get to know him by his words and actions – but Frank is the first person narrator, so we’re privy to his thoughts and feelings. We also get to know Doc, because he talks a lot to Frank, and he’s quite open about what he thinks and feels. The locale, for almost the entire book, is a hotel in upstate New York – a secluded place in the off-season. It’s where Eddie, the contender, prepares his body and mind (under the scrupulous guidance of Doc).You’re not interested? That’s a shame, because this is a novel that digs deep into character. It’s conveyed mostly through dialogue – dialogue that ranks with best I’ve ever read. Heinz (a sportswriter; this was his only work of fiction) was a master of clean, clear prose. It’s interesting that the championship bout, which is the goal being pursued with such dedication and determination, takes up only a single page. 5

Heaven’s My Destination – Thornton Wilder

Twenty-three-year-old George Brush is tall, handsome, intelligent – and a man devoted to passing on his moral beliefs. They stem from his study of the Bible (plus some Gandhi and a touch of Marx). It’s not a private affair (though he lives in accordance with the beliefs he advocates); he takes every opportunity to instruct strangers on how to live the proper life, and he will politely correct any transgressors he comes across. He sees this as a duty. The reception he gets can range from disinterest to indignation to physical attacks. George emerges not as a comic character but as a lonely man unable to relate to flawed humanity (which includes, to his despair, women; he very much wants to be married and have a family). His job as a traveling salesman takes him through the Midwest and South during the Great Depression. He’s very successful at selling textbooks to schools because he has perused every volume, and he believes that Caulkin Press puts out the best product of its kind (if he didn’t believe this he wouldn’t have taken the job). You might get the impression that Destination is heavy going, but the opposite is true. It has a jaunty, buoyant quality, and is often quite funny. That said, it offers up ideas. Though George seems to change nobody, is he right in his beliefs? At any rate, I loved the guy, in all his naive sincerity. This is one of those rare books that I think everybody should read, for both the pleasure it gives, and for those ideas. 5

The Deep Sleep – Wright Morris

The way this book is constructed is unique. There are five characters, three women and two men, and the narrative constantly shifts from one to another. It works like this: we’re in one character’s mind, and then someone else enters the room, and we shift to that person’s perspective. Each character has his/her four or five pages (in the third person, with their name as the title of their section) and this shifting goes on for over 300 pages. We get to know each of these people (though the men come across more strongly then the women). Actually, there’s a sixth character, Judge Porter, who is recently deceased; it’s his passing that has brought his daughter and her husband to the house. The Judge emerges in a vague way – a man respected in the community but a stranger in his home (why this is I didn’t fully understand, but it has to do with his wife). I’ve read a lot of Morris’s work, and it seems to me that he loved the act of writing too much, which can result in words that have no real purpose in developing the plot and characters. Sometimes the book rambles without purpose, and I would become uninvolved. But, still, there’s a lot that’s good – and you won’t read anything quite like it, which counts as an achievement. 3

The Cook – Harry Kressing

This novel has been praised as a diabolical masterpiece, and it’s obvious that at some time I must have been one of its fans. My theory about its success is simple: you have to buy into the premise that Conrad (the cook) is all powerful. His manipulative skills are overwhelming, and he handles the wealthy family where he is employed as if they are as malleable as warm putty. By the end his employers have become his servants – literally, uniforms and all – and he rules at the Prominence mansion. On this reading that premise increasingly became unacceptable. Never a hitch, never a misstep as Conrad moves smoothly to his goal? People are simply weak pawns without wills? Really? It’s as easy as that? It all came to seem contrived, and the predictability of events caused a ho-hum feeling to set in. Not helping matters was my objection to the cruelty – notably a repellant scene where Conrad impales another cook’s hand to a tabletop. Its weirdness gives this book a compelling aspect, and it’s written in a nice prose style. But there’s not enough of substance to make it worth your (or my) time. 2 (delete)

The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton – Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
Wooldridge avoids a pitfall many biographers succumb to when writing about famous authors. It has to do with length. Do we need multiple volumes (three for Graham Greene, five for Henry James)? Do the single volume works need to be so lengthy (Updike 576 pages, Capote 632)? This is research gone wild; the biographers feel compelled to use every last thing they find, and as a result the subject gets buried under a deluge of facts. Wooldridge’s account of Wharton’s life is a mere 152 pages (and at least half of those pages have photographs, an invaluable asset in telling a story). Possibly the book has been relegated to the Young Adult category because it’s not a weighty tome and its approach is straightforward. But I didn’t at any time feel I was reading a book meant for a teenager. (Anyway, what fifteen-year-old would be interested in an author of the early 1900s who wrote novels for adults?) In the confines of this review I won’t go into the life of Edith Wharton. Suffice to say it was a remarkably active one; she had a unquenchable thirst for experience – for new sights and for the company of stimulating people – and she used her considerable wealth to satisfy her needs (her “brave escape” from convention was contingent on her inherited fortune). But she could also sacrifice comfort – in WWI she worked tirelessly to aid the suffering in France. Lastly, she was a writer, and in that profession she found immediate success (with the help of family connections). There was a marriage to the wrong man and a dearth of physical love. But all in all she led a good life, one which she appreciated. In her last year Wharton addressed a packet of papers “For my biographer.” Her request of the person who told her story was that they “find the gist of me.” I believe that Wooldridge has fulfilled that wish.

Plains Song – Wright Morris
Wright Morris and I have had a long relationship. This is the fourth of his novels I’ve reviewed in this blog, and previously I had read three or four others, two of which I liked very much – The Deep Sleep and Love Among the Cannibals. At least I liked them when I was in my twenties; since then I’ve been consistently disappointed in his work. I keep returning to Morris because I believe he possessed the ability to produce something wonderful, and in reading the opening chapters of Plains Song I thought he might fulfill that potential. The two characters (Cora and Harrison) and their situation are presented without adornment. A woman marries a man she hardly knows; she goes to live on his farm on the Great Plains. She finds their first (and possibly last) sexual act to be a horrific experience; they live together without emotional intimacy but also without strife. Her life consists of the many chores of a farmer’s wife, which she does diligently and which give her a sense of purpose. From that first sexual act she bears their only child, a daughter. Though these seem to be sparse ingredients for a novel, I found them fully sufficient to hold my interest. But Morris wasn’t content with a limited scope, and he abruptly shifts gears. As the decades start to speed by a host of new people crowd into the confines of this short novel; more daughters get born; daughters marry husbands and bear more daughters. A dispersal of focus sets in, and I reached the point where I felt no contact with anyone (including Cora and Harrison, who recede quietly into the background). In the last third of the book one of the random daughters named Sharon is given the most space, but she’s undeveloped as a person (what’s her job, what’s her sexual persuasion?). She’s merely a vehicle the author uses to go into an overtly profound mode – it was a Morris tendency to muse about Life, always a mistake. He started out with a grounded simplicity, which I found satisfying and meaningful, but by the end things had become ill-defined and inconsequential. So there it is: once again Wright Morris disappoints me. Maybe I’ll read his autobiography next.

Nine Women – Shirley Ann Grau
This collection came out when Grau was in her late fifties. Because of the extreme range of quality, it occurred to me that the four outright failures may have been discards found in a drawer. If this was the case, she surely worked on them, but they’re based on an idea that doesn’t hold water (a woman wants to rejoin her husband and daughter by dying in a plane crash) or they lack substance (post-wedding bickering among relatives and friends who drink too much). Their conceptual flaws make them unsalvageable. That said, four stories – most of which deal with old age – are good and may be of recent origin. In all the writing flows nicely, with pleasing clarity. But let’s cut to the one outstanding piece, which is the first and the shortest. In “The Beginning” a girl tells about her resourceful mother, who knew not only how to survive in a hostile world but how to flourish as a businesswoman. She always referred to her daughter in the highest terms: as a hidden princess, a lotus flower, a pearl without price. Their bond is made palpable. The closing lines in the story: “When the kingdom at last fell and the castle was conquered, and I lost my crown and my birthright, when I stood naked and revealed as a young black female of illegitimate birth, it hardly mattered. By then the castle and the kingdom were within me and I carried them away.”

The Dalkey Archive – Flann O’Brien
In the opening chapters the highly fantastical almost bridges into science fiction. We get a stoppage of time; an interview with Saint Augustine; a concoction, which, when released, will exterminate all life on the planet. This weirdness is presented with a rollicking verbal inventiveness. But gradually a change settles in – the prose becomes straightforward and the plot has Mick logically working out a plan to save humanity. We aren’t done with eccentrics – Sergeant Fottrell is addicted to adjectives: “I know the dates and times protuberantly because it was my good self who carried out the punctures with my penknife.” Fottrell has disabled a bicycle tire because, according to his “moly-cule theory,” a man can turn into a bicycle or anything else that he has a long and intimate acquaintance with. (Since the molecules switch places, a bicycle will begin acting like a man.) Mick also has an encounter with James Joyce, who’s living in anonymity in a nearby town (but is he the JJ?). The picture of Mick that emerges is a sad one: he’s a bachelor in his thirties who lives with his mother; his job is so insignificant (and underpaid) that it’s never identified; he has a girlfriend, but their relationship is celibate. And he drinks too much. He decides that, after he’s solved pressing problems (such as saving humanity), he’ll enter one of the more rigorous religious sects. But he solves nothing; instead, in the closing ten spoken words Mick gets a jolt that unravels all his plans. Though the book never becomes dark or heavy, the fading of the initial exuberance is obvious. Near the end O’Brien has Mick think “As an intending Trappist, he would have to turn his back on pleasure but that would not be so easy because he knew of practically nothing which could be called pleasure.” Is the author describing his own frame of mind? Archive was written by a sick man; it was published two years before O’Brien’s death at age fifty-five. His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, is his most famous work; I find it to be a boring bit of juvenile indulgence. But in The Third Policeman and The Poor Mouth, and in Archive too, O’Brien gave me pleasure.

The Works of Love – Wright Morris
I never could get a handle on what made Will Brady tick. His only act of initiative – this is something he does as a young man – is to propose to a prostitute he visits regularly. She laughs him out of the room. When he leaves the house he finds a group of women sitting on the steps; he asks, “Is there one of you girls who would like to get married?” They too find his proposal to be funny. But after this Will shows no conviction; his jobs and his subsequent marriages are initiated by others. He even has an infant he didn’t father foisted on him. He accepts all that comes his way without resentment or involvement. His life roles are summarized in this way: “A father, one who didn’t know what being a father was like, and a lover, one who didn’t know much about love. More or less hopeless.” Perhaps it was Will’s uniqueness – was there ever such a rudderless person in fiction? – that made reading about him rather fascinating. But what counts in a novel that challenges your credibility is your final opinion about where the author is taking you. As Morris skips years (in unsubstantiated giant strides) Will winds up an old man who, in a faux childish fashion, deals with the Great Questions of Life. A Voice from out of the sky says to him, “There’s no need for great lovers in heaven. Pity is the great lover, and the great lovers are all on earth.” With this turn to profundity I began to plod along inattentively (which may be why I couldn’t understand the ending). Morris violated his own credo about what fiction should deal with; regarding a book about men who visit the moon, he writes, “What the world needed, it seemed, was a traveler who would stay right there in the bedroom, or open a door and walk slowly about his own house.” I agree – there’s value in addressing the ordinary human condition. But in The Works of Love Morris is closer to that condition when he’s describing a man who hasn’t a clue about how to be human.

Scenes from Village Life – Amos Oz (Hebrew)
What these eight stories share is a mysterious, sometimes creepy sense of dislocation, as if something terrible is lurking in the shadows. Everybody in the Israeli village is unhappy in one way or another – lonely, angry, lost – and relationships (when they exist) are troubled. In the final story, “In a Faraway Place at Another Time,” the place Oz takes us to is one where degeneration and degradation reign. Though this is a solid collection, too many stories seem truncated; if a point is being made, it never comes to light. In “Digging” is everyone imagining the digging under a house or is it or is meant to be symbolic? Oz is good at creating atmospherics, but that’s not enough. Only in one story – “Waiting” – do all the elements work. The mayor of the village receives a note from his wife; it reads “Don’t worry about me.” Benny waits for her to come home, then he begins searching for her. What emerges is how empty Benny’s relationship with his wife is, and how flawed he is. He’s all surface, glad-handing his way through life. His search, deep into the night, may be his only act of commitment. He winds up sitting on the bench where his wife had been when she gave someone the note that was delivered to him. “So he settled in the middle of the bench, his bleeding hand wrapped in the scarf, buttoned up his coat because of the light rain that had started to fall, and sat waiting for his wife.”

Scum – Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
This novel was published the same year Singer died (at age eighty-seven), so one can’t help but wonder about that blunt title. Who or what does “scum” refer to? To Max Barabander or the world in general? In the opening page Max is at a café in Poland, looking at a Yiddish newspaper. Alongside stories of a world careening toward WWI he reads of three hundred brides being shipped off to prospective grooms in Australia; they have been selected solely on the basis of photographs. Max thinks, “Three hundred girls! Damn their wicked little navels. That’s what I’d like, a ship with live merchandise. Between a yes and a no, I’d make a million rubles.” So he sees this as a business opportunity – sex trafficking. Later in the novel he’s drawn into that exact endeavor. But he doesn’t instigate the plan; he initially goes along with it at another’s urging, then later decides to back out. On the surface this forty-seven-year-old man is forceful and smooth and persuasive, but he’s unable to discriminate in his actions. He’s constantly getting caught up in a tangle of lies, all of them involving women. That’s the book, basically. Singer holds one’s attention, but the abrupt ending suggests that he got tired of dealing with his conflicted character and brought a halt to the proceedings by sticking him in prison. Though Max is despicable in many ways, it’s hard to condemn him. We’re in his mind, so we’re privy to his regrets and confusion and desire to lead a life in which he hurts no one: “to make amends for every sin – with money, with words, with presents. An aversion arose in him against all those who take nothing in account except their own desires.” Despite his good intentions, Max follows his inchoate desires and goes stumbling on the downward path.

Behind the Lines – Jaroslav Hasek (Czech)
These episodes take place in a country that has long been exposed to the conflicts of its more powerful neighbors. Perhaps the Czechs are so well-acquainted with war that they can appreciate an author who makes a cynical joke of it. This book’s “hero,” Gasek (close to Hasek, isn’t it?), is a survivor, resourceful and wily and able to land on his feet in the face of any threat that comes his way. When he’s in charge he never resorts to brutality; he’s deflects it if he can. And when he can’t – when people die – it’s only mentioned as happening. Hasek populates these stories with grotesques and madmen, which lends an element of slapstick to the proceedings. His take on calamity and chaos was probably bracing to a people caught up in the Great War and the communist revolution in Russia. Bitter laughter is better than no laughter at all.

Two for the Road - Wright Morris
Wright Morris was a prose stylist. In his books that’s what matters. It’s an interesting prose, but twisty and demanding. If your mind wanders you miss the connections that move the plot along. It’s like working a difficult but accessible crossword puzzle, and there’s pleasure in seeing the blanks fill in, the crossing words combine. But it can also get tiresome. In the final analysis, are the plot and characters worth the labor of grappling with the prose? Often not. Morris seems to write from compulsion, addicted to his puzzle. I think creating the pages of words gave him much pleasure, and he wrote when there was no purpose to do so. Characters come across as fleshed-out props, plots are spindly. The first of the novellas (Man and Boy) adds up to less than the second (In Orbit).

Futility - William Gerhardie (Russian)
Like in a Chekhov play, nothing much happens in this novel, but amusingly. Also, as with Chekhov, behind the charm is melancholy. Life is there, sparkling and vital, but the main character can only sense it, just outside his grasp, with an ache of loss. The problem with an excellent book like this is that it’s faithful to its title. Gerhardie tries to put activity, color, movement into the plot, but sometimes the effort flags, and we’re in a deep limbo where sadness is pervasive.

Liars in Love - Richard Yates
I couldn’t read these stories in the morning because the characters’ unhappiness was too much to start the day with. This is, in a way, a tribute to Yates. He presses on the spot where hollowness and insecurity and illusions and loneliness are. He does this repeatedly, in various guises; in a Yates’ story we know what the outcome of a relationship will be. Still . . . These stories literally ache. We poor humans! The collection has two masterpieces, “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” and “Regards at Home.” They’re clearly autobiographical, as are, I suspect, all the stories (which are good to very good). A lacerating honesty like his is rare and therefore valuable. *

Sleep It Off, Lady - Jean Rhys
This collection follows Rhys’ life, and the early, childhood stories, when the girl hungers for sensual experience, are strong. The closing stories, with Rhys old and alone, are very powerful – frighteningly so. However, the middle stories are flat, evasive, lacking personality (as was the case with Quartet). Rhys cannot put down on paper who she was as a young woman. Throughout all the stages of her life there’s a fear of age, of losing the power to attract. When she faces it, it is terrible. This aspect gives the collection a cumulative power. The last three stories are unflinching – “Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic,” “Sleep It Off, Lady” and a two page story called “I Used to Live Here Once,” in which Rhys transforms herself, in the last sentence, into a ghost.

Nights at the Alexandra - William Trevor
This is a long short story. It’s nicely done, but unconvincing in one vital respect. A fifty-eight-year-old man is looking back at an incident that happened when he was fifteen. This incident is given much weight – supposedly affecting him for the rest of his life. But although I believed in his boyhood state of mind, and that he was silently dealing with disturbing feelings, too much remained hidden for the long- range effects to stand up.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish)
Garcia Marquez circles around a murder obsessively, around and around, from different angles and perspectives, and at the end we’re there for the knife thrusts. It’s as if a vast cosmic command – unavoidable and terrible – is being obeyed by us poor mortals. The author includes discrepancies in the various accounts of the killing. Most significantly, he leaves a key question unanswered: Did Angela accuse Santiago falsely? Garcia Marquez presents us with an unsolvable mystery, one that takes on dimensions larger than a single murder in an isolated town. *

Ceremony at Lone Tree - Wright Morris
I stopped reading this book with regret but with the conviction that I wasn’t missing anything. For a good span I thought the writing – the unique and quirky Wright Morris style – was wonderful. He’s terrific at character portraits and histories. Then he moved into present action and his style became confusing. Maybe he’s accurately presenting life as it is when he throws things at the reader in a disjointed way. Granted, life is not neat and orderly, but, still, we shouldn’t have to figure out who’s talking and about what. When Morris enters into the thoughts of the characters the confusion increases to the point of frustration. Not only that, he imparts a significance to things that don’t deserve it. What’s the big deal? This thought of mine, on top of all the other difficulties, became fatal.

Laugh Til You Cry - Wolf Mankowitz
An odd little book. In the beginning I was put off by the lack of the amenities of good fiction – such as setting and character. But that’s not what the author is concerned with; this is a philosophical novel, and it’s interesting on that level. Mankowitz found a fresh way to expose human shortcomings. I admired what he was doing until the end, when he softens toward his characters and lets them off the hook.