Cheating at Canasta - William Trevor
Two stories are excellent: “The Dressmaker’s Daughter” and “Bravado.” Two others are good, but eight are no more than fair. Those aren’t stats to be proud of (even though the fair ones get published in The New Yorker). Trevor is in his eighties; it may be significant that his weakest stories – somber mood pieces that meander around an idea but never develop into anything of substance – deal with the elderly, while the two excellent stories are about people in their teens. In “Bravado” a young girl is attracted to a boy who has a reckless swagger. But does her admiration spur him on to impress her? When his actions have tragic consequences, a moral question arises for her: must she bear part of the responsibility? The fact that we never anticipate this specter of guilt gives it impact. Guilt is also at the core of “The Dressmaker’s Daughter.” Guilt can be a redeeming emotion, but often it’s a burden one must live with – somehow. When he’s at his best Trevor’s stories linger on after the final word.

The Girls of Slender Means - Muriel Spark
I almost abandoned this novel thirty pages from the end. It’s thin, both structurally and emotionally. The disjointed snippets seem carelessly patched together, and Spark’s attitude toward her characters is cold, even disdainful. Of the girls living in the May of Tech Club (just after the end of WW II), three stand out. Selina is a sexually adventurous beauty, Jane does what she calls “brain work,” Joanna gives elocution lessons in which she recites poetry and has her students recite it back (the book contains long stretches of poetry and psalms, which the other-worldly Joanna knows by heart). Only Nicholas Farrington interested me (his death is announced on page four, though he appears, quite alive, from beginning to end). For him the girls of slender means at the Club embody some ideal of young womanhood; his longing for the ineffable kept me reading, and those last thirty pages added dimension to the novel. A bomb – a remnant of the war – goes off in the garden of the Club, starting a fire that traps some girls on the top floor. Nicholas tries, with the firemen, to rescue them; he’s acquainted with the roof of the adjoining building, for he’s been sleeping there with Selina. All the girls escape – except one. We know that Nicholas will, in the indeterminate future, be killed in Haiti, where he was a religious missionary; what caused him to take that path in life is never explained, but it seems somehow connected with the death at the Club. On the last page, in an evocative passage, he gazes at a May of Tech girl as she pins up her hair – an image he will recall “years later, in the country of his death.”

Murder by the Book - Rex Stout
It’s hit or miss with Stout, and this is a solid single. Archie takes center stage, the cast of suspects is manageable, and when Nero Wolfe unveils the identity of the murderer it made sense. I missed an inconsistency that Wolfe spotted, and felt my inadequacy as a private eye. The fact that three people are murdered for an inconsequential reason is no huge deal; Stout isn’t trying to be Dostoevski. The writing – Archie’s voice – is snappy and bright: “She was the kind you look at and think she should take off just one or two pounds, and then you ask where from and end by voting for the status quo.”

The Name of the World - Denis Johnson
Beware of novels with titles like this one. The first-person narrator has a lot of Zen-like thoughts but no vitality. He sleepwalks through a series of episodes that lead nowhere. When we learn that he’s actually mute with grief (his wife and daughter had been killed in a car accident) I didn’t respond because nothing about the guy rang true, including this tragedy. Then, while at the art department of the university where he teaches, Mike blunders onto a “Cannon Performance”: students are watching a young woman “engaged in shaving her lathered mons veneris.” Her name is Flower Cannon. Mike is roused out of his dormancy; he’s even inspired to this lofty thought: he would have loved for his daughter, if she had lived, to have turned out to be like Flower. The plot is headed toward a relationship between the two (Flower pops up wherever Mike goes), but I wanted no part of the impending nonsense, so I bailed out on page 62, which was the halfway point. I hope that my description of the Cannon Performance hasn’t misled you. Even with the sex thrown in, this book is as drab an old brown suit.

Charley Smith’s Girl - Helen Bevington
There’s a bittersweet irony behind the title, for Charley was never a father to Helen, though she dearly wanted him to be. In the course of this memoir, which begins when Helen is three and ends when she’s in her early twenties, she spends less than a year in his presence. Her mother raises Helen; she loves her daughter, but a difficult life has made her severe and unyielding. As a young woman Helen comes to a conclusion: “Both my parents had lost me, by not loving me enough. My judgment was stern and complete against them. Either one, I told myself, could have kept me through love. But my mother wanted a dutiful daughter, and my father wanted no daughter at all.” Though that evaluation is the harsh truth, this book is an effort by a middle-aged woman to understand, and thus feel compassion for, her parents. She succeeds without shirking from reality (even at her own expense). But this isn’t one of those memoirs full of woe and resentment. Not at all; there’s a brightness to Helen’s story. And in that brightness lies the reason why she prevails over her upbringing. Throughout her life she’s always eager for happiness and is open to love. Bevington’s prose is smooth and inviting, and she’s never boring. This reflects an aspect of her nature: she cared about the reader and wanted to offer us a pleasurable experience.

The Tortilla Curtain - T. Coraghessan Boyle
In a recent review of a story collection by Boyle I criticized his lack of interest in real people in real situations; I also questioned whether he was motivated in his writing by a mercenary cynicism. In this novel he shows not only a concern for the downtrodden, but for the state of our world. He follows the plight of two illegal Mexican immigrants who’ve come to the USA to find work. I can’t go into the hardships they encounter – if I got started, where could I stop? The other two characters, the affluent Mossbachers, lead lives that stand in stark contrast to what Candito and America are going through. Kyra and Delaney have moved to the posh Arroyo Blanco Estates to escape the hectic and dangerous Los Angeles scene, but they’re still not safe from undesirables; a gate at the entrance proves inadequate, so residents decide to wall in the entire subdivision. There are also ecological problems: humans have invaded territory where they don’t belong. Coyotes snatch both of the Mossbacher’s dogs, and residential development high up in a canyon turns out to have disastrous repercussions. Boyle creates an apocalyptic mood, which is good, and I give him credit for tackling serious issues (the book could be entered into the debate about illegal immigration). That said, as a literary work it isn’t very good. Though Spanish words are tossed in, Candito thinks like someone raised in the USA, not in a small Mexican village. Also, the suffering he and his wife experience reaches nightmare proportions; it’s just too much. Delaney is a walking parody of liberal cliches, and his evolution into a rabid racist isn’t convincing. The ending is an out-and-out mistake; it’s chaotic, almost hysterical, and on the final page Boyle abandons his characters in the midst of a massive mudslide. Maybe the novel should be taken as a thriller with social relevance; it does succeed as a page turner.

The Last of Mr. Norris - Christopher Isherwood
This short novel was combined with the equally short Goodbye to Berlin to make up The Berlin Stories. In Goodbye, which I read decades ago, Isherwood writes, “I am a camera with its shutter open . . .” This time the camera is focused on an aging confidence man operating on the international stage. Though Arthur Norris has some talent for double dealing, his weak nerves make him unfit for a life of intrigue; also, his schemes fail as often as not, leaving him in dire financial straits. But he has a remarkable ability to shake off his fears (and to enjoy life in a blithe way), and during his flush periods he lives high on the hog (and is quite generous). He’s a scoundrel without malice, both guileful and oddly lacking in guile (he makes no effort to conceal his taste for sadomasochistic sex, in which he’s on the receiving end of the whip lashes). The narrator, William Bradshaw (a pseudonym for Isherwood), takes a liking to this old debauchee, who in return is childishly eager for his friendship – and his assistance (Mr. Norris is an incorrigible user of people). Little is revealed about Bradshaw’s life; Isherwood stays focused on Norris and a handful of secondary characters. The action takes place in the years preceding the Nazi takeover, so we get the author’s perspective of this tumultuous period in German history. I admired the novel on all levels and wondered why I had put off enjoying the pleasures it provided for so long.

Death in Summer - William Trevor
A third of the way through this novel a shift in emphasis occurs. The key figure in this evolution is Albert, an apparently insignificant young man whose job is to scrub graffiti off subway walls. He first appears as he listens to Pettie, a girl he came to know when they were in the same orphanage. Albert is worried, for he sees signs of distorted thinking on Pettie’s part. She’s been turned down for a job as live-in nanny for a baby whose mother was killed in a road accident. It’s the mother-in-law’s fault, Pettie believes; Thaddeus, the father of the child, wanted her to get the job, they had a bond, Pettie could sense it. . . . Albert tries, gently, to steer her away from this line of thinking. It’s futile; much of what Albert sets out to do is futile. What matters – in the terms Trevor establishes – is that Albert’s goodness makes him someone of major importance. It’s in his nature to worry about people who are life’s lost souls and to act on their behalf. In this novel those who are compassionate take on substance; those who lack that quality are diminished. Mrs Ferry, who at first glance is using an old affair to cadge money from Thaddeus, is not to be dismissed so easily, not when we gain insight into what motivates her. There’s a long section in which we follow Pettie’s thinking; she will kidnap the baby, but she doesn’t do it with malicious intent; her life has been blasted by so much pain that she has found refuge in a world of fantasies. At the end Albert pays a visit to the father. He wants to make Thaddeus understand Pettie, for understanding will lead to forgiveness; it’s important to Albert that the she be forgiven for what she did. There are scads of self-help books aimed at enlightening; but here, in people and situations that are real, is a moving lesson in life. *

Where There’s a Will - Rex Stout
This is the sixth Nero Wolfe mystery I’ve read, and the most disappointing. Too many characters, too complex a plot. Even Wolfe, near the end, admits that he can’t figure out who killed Mr. Hawthorne. If the genius can’t untangle things, how can I feel anything but frustration? Wolfe does wind up solving the case, but the clue that opens the door is gratuitous, flimsy and involves knowledge that only a botanist could have. Stout also throws a major red herring into the stew pot: one side of Mrs. Hawthorne’s face has been horribly disfigured by an arrow shot by her husband – presumably an accident – and he dies from a gunshot that rips off half his face. Yet this peculiar coincidence turns out to have no significance. Lastly, due to the large cast of characters, we get little of Archie, who merely runs around a lot, and even less of Nero, who merely asks questions. The first two Wolfe novels I read were good; the next three were not so good; this one was a waste of time. I’ll give Stout one more try.

The Grass Is Singing - Doris Lessing
In this novel a marriage is the seedbed for the unfolding of a horror story. It’s not just that Mary and Dick are mismatched, and that poverty and isolation (they’re poor white farmers in South Africa during the time of apartheid) grind them down. Mary, whose mind we spend the most time in, is mentally ill. “Of course I am ill,” she says in the last chapter. “I’ve been ill ever since I can remember. I am ill here” – and she points to her heart. But this is a brief moment of clarity; on the last day of her life she’s overwhelmed by despair. We know the outcome of the story in the opening pages: Mary is dead, murdered by Moses, the houseboy, and Dick is stark raving mad. What follows is a flashback in which Lessing relates in detail the factors that led to the disintegration of these two people. It’s a serious literary work, well-written and engrossing; but the ending, instead of bringing a sense of completion, raises questions – and doubts. Mary had always felt loathing for blacks and had treated them tyrannically; but in the last chapter, as she waits for Moses to kill her, Lessing suggests that the two have been involved sexually. Since the reader hasn’t been made privy to the development of this relationship, the forces compelling these two people to feel and act as they do are inexplicable. Lessing also suggests that Mary was sexually abused as a child; but why raise that issue at the end? And why all this suggesting? The intensity level of the entire book is pitched very high; but intensity can’t serve as a substitute for perception, and immoderation is always suspect. South Africa, with its debilitating climate and morally bankrupt racial attitudes, comes across as a sort of hell. The only singing on these pages is a wail of lamentation.

The Simpleton - Aleksei Pisemskii (Russian)
In this depiction of human nature we get a heavy dose of vices, among them greed, selfishness, malice, callousness, hypocrisy and envy. Pisemskii’s characters are either unable to see their faults or they righteously justify their errant behavior. In the opening scene a woman proclaims that she’s no gossip; after getting the scoop on a family’s misfortunes she hurries to another house to pass on all that she had heard. In an attempt to ease his financial difficulties a father bullies his daughter into agreeing to marry a man she loathes. When the father talks to the suitor he says, “A bride used to be brought to the altar by force. We could never allow ourselves to do such a thing.” The suitor is the simpleton of the title; this marriage will bring Pavel nothing but suffering. He isn’t lacking in intellect. What he does lack is worldliness; he’s a babe in a woods full of vipers, and in this sense he is a simpleton. The reader can’t sympathize with the miseries Pavel experiences because to be innocent is to be contemptible. This is a subversive book; Pisemskii’s artful cynicism turns what could have been a tragedy into an excoriating comedy of manners.

Three Continents - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
I shouldn’t be reviewing this novel because I never got halfway through it; but 145 pages constitutes a substantial investment of my time. Initially I was carried along by the prose, which flows without a ripple. The first stirring of my critical faculties came when characters have experiences that should elicit strong emotions; but their feelings, as expressed in that unruffled flow of words, lacked impact. Next to come under scrutiny was the plot. Rawul, the leader of a movement aimed at establishing a Seventh World, takes up residence at the estate of the narrator and her twin brother; accompanying him are his two assistants, Rani and Crishi, and a crew of anonymous followers. Soon they’re in complete control of the place. How they’re able to exert such power isn’t made credible (the twins come across as dopes and dupes); nor does Jhabvala make any attempt to explain the Seventh World philosophy (because there’s nothing to explain); nor are the relationships that develop out of this premise believable (the repellent Crishi gains sexual dominance over both twins). A host of secondary characters are added to the mix, all carrying a lot of baggage, but I saw no purpose for their being in the book (twenty-five pages are devoted to the grandfather, who does little more than die). After I quit reading I began to wonder whether I had been a dope and dupe in admiring Jhabvala’s earlier work. Or had she gone astray as a writer? Supporting the latter theory is her dedication of Three Continents to James Ivory and Ismail Merchant; this glossy novel may be the natural outgrowth of doing too many screenplays for glossy movies.

One Thousand Souls - Aleksei Pisemskii (Russian)
Seldom does an author create such an impressive work; seldom does it crumble so completely. For almost four hundred pages Pisemskii was writing what had the makings of a great novel. The portrayal of Kalinovich is remarkable for its thoroughness. This severe young man covets wealth and status; yet, when he moves to a town to take up the lowly post of School Inspector, he gradually comes to appreciate the generosity extended to him by his predecessor in that job, Godnev; more important, he responds to the pure love that Godnev’s daughter, Nastenka, feels for him. Despite these factors, he’s persuaded by an odious Count to marry the wealthy Paulina. In forsaking love for an advancement of his station in life, Kalinovich is aware of the cost to himself and its effect on the woman he betrays, but his good instincts are not strong enough to govern his actions. Up to the point of Kalinovich’s decision to marry, the characters and their interactions were authentic and vital. But the novel’s final Part Four, which takes up events a decade later, constitutes a repudiation of what went before. People we had come to know are replaced by imposters; changes in relationships defy logic; the prose gets strident; far too much attention is devoted to the impenetrable intricacies of Russian politics. It seems that Pisemskii, like his main character, couldn’t see the value in what he had in his grasp and thus, unwittingly, let it all slip away.

H. M. Pulham, Esquire - John P. Marquand
If taken on a superficial level, this fictional autobiography is a pleasant read, in a lulling sort of way. Yet I finished it with misgivings. For beginners, is that “Esquire” meant to be mocking? Though Henry Pulham has the outward trappings of success, his personal life is devoid of pleasure or purpose. He’s alone in his family, unable to relate to his wife and two children. He can cope with things, but not with emotions. When his wife has an affair Marquand provides information so that the reader is fully aware of it, but Henry remains clueless. His youthful romance with Marvin Myles stands out as the brightest episode in a humdrum existence, but in this depiction of first love Marquand (like his protagonist) isn’t able to connect; not helping matters was my persistent doubt that a vibrant woman like Marvin could feel strongly about someone as bland as Henry. His relationship with his wife is more convincing. Kate is a discontented woman; she doesn’t love Henry and it shows in her constant carping. Though he has bouts of irritation (which he immediately chides himself for), he never becomes bitter or despairing; such feelings are not options for a person brought up to put the best face on whatever life hands you. So there it is, the story of Henry Pulham, told in his own guileless words, and what am I to make of it? Marquand’s light-handed approach gives it a humorous aspect, but I think the author had a darker agenda in mind. On the final pages Henry writes the “Class life” that he’s been putting off for the entire novel (his class at Harvard is having its twenty-fifth reunion). The closing sentences: “We spend our winters in town and our summers in North Harbor, Maine. In either place the latchstring is always open for any member of our Class.” What struck me was that only one member of his Class has remained a friend, and he’s the man with whom Henry’s wife had an affair. I think that J. P. Marquand was not unaware of this sad irony.

On Overgrown Paths - Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
This book was written during the three years when the author – nearly ninety years old – was held in custody by the Norwegian government, facing charges of collaboration with the Nazis. Hamsun gives a defense of his wartime actions; you can accept it or not, though I can vouch for the truth of his claim that one can look through his writings and find no hostility to Jews. In my readings of ten of his novels I recall a Jewish watch-seller who would cheat anyone gullible enough to let him, but he’s a benign rascal, not a Fagin. Hamsun faces most of his incarceration with resignation; the exception is a four month confinement in a Psychiatric Clinic. He doesn’t provide details of this stay, but it seems that the constant probing into his mental faculties was, for him, unbearable. He writes that when he went into the Clinic he was in good health; when they released him he was “turned into jelly.” Age, physical infirmity (he was deaf and partially blind), and his situation make this book a sad farewell. In the first part a buoyant spirit sometimes shines through, but as time passes his capacity to find pleasure in the simple things of life wanes. Paths is mainly made up of “trifles” that include routines, observations, encounters, memories. Near the end he recounts events that took place when he was a young man in America; he is, for the last time, a storyteller. Shortly thereafter the court verdict comes down; the final words in the book are: “I end my writing.” I’ll end this review with a quote in which Hamsun encapsulates his special gift: “ . . . I was no stranger to the field of psychology . . . during a very long career of writing I had created several hundred figures – created them inwardly and externally like living people, in every condition and aspect, in dreams and in action.”

The Government Inspector - Nikolai Gogol (Russian)
The director of a play must be faithful to the author’s intent. This rendition, directed by Peter Raby, didn’t ring true. Most jarring was the use of vulgar language, which I haven’t come across in any of Gogol’s other works. Later, reading Raby’s “Adaptor’s Note,” my suspicions were confirmed. He talks of “cuts, amalgamations, modifications” (one of these cuts is the omission of an entire scene). So this is an adulterated version of the real thing and should be avoided. I’d like to see (for a play should be seen) a faithful production. Despite Raby’s tinkering, Gogol launches into his story of mistaken identity with a madcap exuberance. Every character is a villain of one stripe or another, but they’re too grotesque and foolish to condemn. One can simply gape at them in wonder and amusement.

The Easter Party - V. Sackville-West
I assume that Miss Sackville-West was acquainted with real people. Possibly, in her fiction, she allowed herself the indulgence of dreaming up unreal characters. Even the dog in the story – the noble Svend – is unlike any dog that ever existed. The plot involves a group of people who gather at a country estate. One of the guests, Lady Juliet Quarles, a woman notorious for her love affairs, sweeps onto center stage: “Dar-lings! Oh, my sweets, I do apologize, I grovel.” (She’s outrageously late, you see.) I have to admit, somewhat guiltily, that for a while I was curious as to why cold, controlled Walter never consummated his decades long marriage. But I soon recovered my senses and abandoned this contrived bit of nonsense. I’ll let the inside dust jacket summary take over; it captures the novel’s tone of feverish extravagance so well that Miss Sackville-West could have written it. Regarding the characters: “Delicately, and with the supreme perception which has distinguished the author’s previous works, she sets their dormant, ruling passions in motion, probes their secrets, catalyzes their problems.” About the author: “Few writers can match the quiet dignity of Miss Sackville-West’s prose or the maturity of her understanding. In The Easter Party the rare technical adroitness with which she fashions her characters into contrapuntal patterns, renders their conversations into brilliant fugues, and . . .” Well, Dar-lings, enough of that.

Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann (German)
This massive novel is framed as a biography of a deceased composer, written by a lifelong friend. Unlike Goethe’s Faust, it’s not about a man who sells his soul to the devil. In a key document (which comes into the hands of the biographer/friend), Adrian Leverkuhn writes of his encounter with Satan and of the pact they enter into (he’s granted twenty-four years of genius). As presented, one can only conclude that this encounter happened entirely in the mind of Adrian. This strange man has character traits – primarily a coldheartedness – that alienate him from humanity. His friend claims that, unlike Adrian, he’s a humanist. Why, then, does he (or, rather, Mann) punish the reader by delving into matters that only a scholar would be able to comprehend? As I struggled through the dense sections on theology and music I had to console myself with the belief that I was getting the gist of what the author was trying to convey. Other parts are intelligible, even engaging (without them I couldn’t have made it to the end). And some scenes are beyond impressive. Yet in the last hundred pages there’s a weakening of the grip that Mann had always kept on his material. Most crucial is that the voice of the narrator becomes overwrought; with the appearance of Echo he falls into a sea of sentiment. Watching the child read he thinks, “thus must the little angels up above turn the pages of their heavenly choir-books.” In a world ruled by the daemonic such purity must die a ghastly death (related with drum rolls of doom). Syrupy sentiment, resounding doom – Mann loses his sense of moderation, and, like a wounded bull, he becomes vulnerable. My reaction to his last lengthy excursion into the intricacies of musicology was “You do go on!” Copious tears are shed, but too much heavy-handed obscurity had alienated me from the emotional life of the characters. In trying to account for the failure of Doctor Faustus a few factors may be relevant. As Mann worked on the novel destruction was raining down on his beloved Germany (a nation that had, in a sense, made a pact with the devil). And, like his narrator, he was in his seventies; possibly he was looking back at a life in which he had devoted himself to his art to the exclusion of all else; he might have seen himself in Adrian Leverkuhn. If so, the tears could well have been real, but Mann was fated to cry alone.

The Suicide’s Wife - David Madden
“She woke, felt his finger in her.” You can decide for yourself whether this opening sentence is inviting or distasteful; for me it was the latter, particularly since no lovemaking follows. The man simply withdraws his finger and gets out of the sleeping bag he’s sharing with his wife. In silence he leaves the house; he later turns up dead, an apparent suicide. Why did he kill himself? – Ann hasn’t a clue. Her husband seems to have been an enigma to her. They have three children, one twelve years old, but it’s as if they had no intimate relationship. She’s upset and baffled, but beyond that she doesn’t have the deep feelings one would expect, such as remorse or anger. Apparently he never cared much about her and his kids (he leaves them with hardly any money and a car in total disrepair). This passive, insecure woman tries to learn about “the man around whom her life had been expended” by turning to his colleagues at the college where he taught English. There she meets a creepy professor who raises the possibility that a mentally unstable student had murdered her husband. Rather than finding this an intriguing plot twist, I suspected that Madden was merely trying to extend the book to a minimal length; he had already included some dead end detours and a lot of filler – much space is taken up with Ann’s efforts to learn how to drive (repeated shifting and stalling; a page and a half that comes directly from a manual for a driver’s license test). Would insight – which is the only thing that could save this novel – emerge at the end? I had no faith that it would because the premise isn’t realistic: a twelve year relationship can’t be presented as a void. At any rate, the repugnance I felt from the first sentence became overpowering (Ann has a vaginal infection; you don’t want to know the details, but Madden supplies them). I abandoned this morbid book halfway through.

Female Friends - Fay Weldon
It’s unusual to quit on a 237 page book when you’re fifty pages from the end. For one thing, there has to be a reason why you got so far. I was initially impressed by the unique structure and perspective of Female Friends; the writing was topnotch and the three women varied and interesting. What eventually wore me down was that Weldon kept going over the same ground. All the women are victims of their bodies (which bleed, get pregnant, undergo unwelcome changes, etc.); more important, they’re victimized by men. Men dominate them, if only by being absent from their lives. And the men in this novel are a bad lot; a few are grotesquely bad, yet the women willingly engage in sex with them, have their babies, marry them, serve them, obsess about them. Weldon presents life as grubby and mean; this is true even when she adopts a flippant tone (“Grace has abortions. Like having a tooth out, she says. She looks forward to it. All that drama, she says, and distracted men, and the anaesthetics are lovely, and you wake up with no sense of time passed. What luxury!”). An unwieldily cast of secondary characters (at least a dozen to keep track of) didn’t help matters; most are dismal and distorted people trapped in aggressively bizarre situations. Love? – not to be found, even among the three “friends.” What was lively and unique on page ninety had become unpalatable by page190. I couldn’t swallow another bite.

Trio - Dorothy Baker

This could easily be converted into a stage play. It has two interior settings and three main characters. We’re not “in” the mind of anyone; thoughts and feelings are conveyed through the spoken word and by descriptions of facial expressions and gestures. The plot, which involves an odd love triangle and the resulting struggle of wills, has drama, and the various plot twists would keep an audience guessing. But I’m not cataloging the virtues of Trio. It’s not a play but a novel flawed by staginess. Though the characters are supposed to be roiled up emotionally, bad acting isn’t to blame for how affected it all seems. The fault lies with an author who keeps matters on a surface as immaculate as a glass tabletop in Pauline Maury’s modish apartment. Even the plot twists are tidy; I was aware of Baker behind the scenes, neatly arranging things. As I neared the conclusion something Chekhov wrote came to mind: “A shotgun introduced on page one must go off before the end of the story.” On page seven a little pearl-handled revolver had made an incidental appearance. I was sure it would go off, and three pages before the end it did (though, significantly, there was no mention of blood).

The Four Seasons of Success - Budd Schulberg

Schulberg was the son of a Hollywood producer and grew up in a home where literary figures were dinner guests. He gives an account of his close association with six of them: Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, Thomas Heggen and John Steinbeck. Are you interested? I was, primarily because of the presence of West, who I believe was the best of the lot. After reading the chapter on Lewis I was motivated to give him another try – with Babbitt – and my opinion was confirmed: he’s a bad writer. Heggen wrote one short novel, Mister Roberts, which became a huge success (bestseller, Broadway play, movie); he felt the pressure to follow it up with another book, but he never did; he died in his twenties, a possible suicide. Though he undoubtedly had various demons, his story has relevance to Schulberg’s theme: that writers in America are placed on pedestals; but it’s shaky up there, especially when critics are all too ready to knock you down. Fitzgerald is the prime example of a precipitous rise and fall, and he’s given by far the most space. Schulberg knew him in the years before his death, and he comes across as a pitiable character: struggling with alcoholism, reduced to writing screenplays for money, yet still retaining a forlorn optimism. But hasn’t enough been written about poor Scott? Schulberg advocates a more lenient attitude toward authors – to let them be a mountain range, with highs and lows. Two of the four seasons of success involve its loss: besides the critical boos that a once-lauded author meets with his second (or fifth) novel, there’s the slide into obscurity of authors who produced masterful works (his perfect example is Dos Passos with his USA trilogy). Most bittersweet is posthumous success, which is the only kind that was granted to West. Yet this acclaim was fleeting. How many have read The Day of the Locust? West has fallen back into obscurity. Maybe that’s just the way things are.

Kafka Was the Rage - Anatole Broyard

After WWII, just out of the army, Broyard moved to Greenwich Village. He opened a bookstore, attended classes at the New School, underwent eleven months of psychotherapy. Most important, he had an affair with Sheri (Part One is entitled “Sheri” and Part Two “After Sheri”). The problem with this book can be summed up by Broyard’s conclusion as to why his psychotherapy was unsuccessful: “What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics.” Broyard doesn’t emerge as a flesh and blood presence but as a mind filtering experiences; concrete conditions and situations get the short shrift, as do the people he’s involved with. Regarding the bookstore, we’re provided with no idea of what it was like to run one on a day-to-day basis. As for Sheri, Broyard depicts her as little more than a weirdo. Sex is a big issue between them, and far too many words are expended on the subject: “Young men tend to make love monotonously, but Sheri took my monotony and developed variations on it, as if she were composing a fugue. If I was a piston, she was Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine.” And this: “When I connected myself to her, we were the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” There are a lot of twittering machines on these pages, but I’d rather know what these two people talked about over dinner. This isn’t really a memoir – it’s an author’s exploration of his state of mind, couched in literary terms. It was too self-centered for me; I never made it to the end.

The Ten Thousand Things - Maria Dermout (Dutch)

This is a strange novel in many ways: prose, construction, setting (an island of the Indonesia archipelago). Also, in its purpose. Dermout depicts the world as a dreamland of sensations, yet those who populate the world are made of flesh and blood, and at times real blood is shed. There’s an islander’s lament in which the newly-dead are reminded of the hundred things they’re leaving: people, possessions, “and also: hear, how the wind blows! – how white-crested the waves come running from the high sea! . . .” A hundred times a hundred things, Felicia thinks in her old age. She has experienced losses – most significantly a son who was murdered (or was it “killed in action?”). Felicia sees murder as a violation of life in that it’s an unnatural form of death. In a yearly ritual she pays homage to those who had been murdered, both people she had known or only known of. But throughout the novel homage is also paid to the wondrous things of which the dead are deprived. For the first eighteen pages I thought I was reading a nebulous mood piece, and I considered abandoning it; but the beginning of Part Two engaged me: “The girl was born at the Small Island and her mother wanted her to be called Felicia. The father agreed, he always agreed to everything. The grandmother did not agree at all. ‘Happy! You dare to call your little child happy! How do you know in advance?’” How indeed, I thought, and kept going. The novel includes three self-contained stories. In “The Professor” a young Javanese nobleman becomes the assistant to a Dutch professor. The two differ in every way, but most important is that one is life-denying, one is life-affirming. What’s remarkable is that I felt I was communing with the inner selves of both men. Dermout treads a shadowy boundary line, intertwining life and death, the beautiful and the grim, the tangible and the intangible.

Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson (Norwegian)

I made it halfway through this exercise in prose styling. The opening sentences: “Early November. It’s nine o’clock. The titmice are banging against the window.” Other sentences are long; one came to 169 words. Does it flow nicely? Yes, but why should I be aware of that (and why should I be counting words)? Far too many sentences are descriptive. No twig in the forest is neglected by Petterson, and if a character puts on a jacket he must first tell you that it was taken off a peg. Mowing hay, sharpening a chainsaw – all are described at length; this sort of thing is supposed to establish authenticity, but it gets tedious when done dutifully. Regarding the human element, we switch from the perspective of a 67-year-old man living in isolation to his memories of events in his youth. The tone of the book is lugubrious; hints of a variety of life-altering problems are strewn about, but when I quit reading they were still shapeless. As for that sought after authenticity, let’s take a look at the horse stealing episode. That two corralled horses could be spooked into stampeding is believable; but it’s flat-out ridiculous that one would head right where our fifteen-year-old narrator is perched on the limb of a tree and that this boy could drop onto its back as it passes under him. A stuntman on a Lone Ranger movie wouldn’t be asked to try it (a stationary horse, yes; a running one, no way). Later it turns out that, after fifty-some years of separation, the two involved in the horse stealing exploit find themselves living near each other. Petterson writes of this coincidence: “ . . . if this were something in a novel it would just have been irritating.” But it is in a novel, Per, and it is irritating.

Twenty Years A-Growing - Maurice O’Sullivan (Gaelic)

In his introduction E. M. Forster claims that this book is “an account of a neolithic civilization from the inside.” The translators use the word “medieval,” which is more accurate. The small community on the Blasket Islands (located in the extreme southwest corner of Ireland) subsist off the bounty of the sea and land; they live in an insular, pre-industrial world. O’Sullivan intended for his book to be read only by the Islanders, so his audience knew things that I didn’t. What were their homes like? How did they survive the winters? What did a typical dinner consist of? Rather than drawing a full-dimensioned picture of life, the book consists of a series of incidents (“Ventry Races,” “The Wake,” etc.). O’Sullivan was a Dublin policeman with little schooling, and there’s a naive charm in these memories of his early years. But the charm waned for me. By the end of the book I could fully understand why so many young people left the Blaskets. They got as tired of life there as I did.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Franklin wrote the first section when he was in his mid-sixties. It begins “Dear Son” and is a fairly lively account of his early years. But this isn’t an intimate look into his life (he devotes only a few sentences to his wife). Nor does he have a novelist’s flare; not one scene comes alive. His objective is to trace his rise in the world, and in doing so to instruct. In the colonies of the 1700s an intelligent and industrious young man could succeed; though Franklin didn’t start out with advantages, he impressed important people who gave him a helping hand. He was clear-eyed about himself, learning from his mistakes and working to rid himself of flaws in his character (such as a tendency to enter into disputes). A remarkably practical and focused individual emerges. He abandoned the autobiography and took it up again after a hiatus of over ten years; the second section was intended for public consumption and lacks that smidgen of liveliness present in the first part. He continues to instruct, detailing how he improved himself (“I conceived the bold and arduous project of moral perfection”); he kept a notebook in which he had a list of thirteen virtues, and at day’s end he scored himself as to whether he had achieved them. This is a study of a thinking man gifted with enormous energy, and it’s interesting on that level. Though not interesting enough to keep me reading when he turned to his political endeavors.

Dubliners - James Joyce

Dublin emerges from the fog, grey and dreary. Overall, the lives of its residents are as grey and dreary as the city. Only in “The Dead” does a man’s spirit momentarily soar, but at the end he’s meditating on all the dead, including the living who will soon join them. This concluding story differs in significant ways from the others; it’s a harbinger of the shift that would take Joyce on a radically different path as a writer. It’s by far the longest and most ambitious piece in the collection, and whereas the others are executed with a workman’s detachment, in “The Dead” Joyce assumes an intimacy with his main character. The prose, which had previously been simple and precise, attains a gorgeous cadence in the final paragraph. Artful, yes, though I thought the connectivity in Gabriel’s musings was imposed for art’s sake. “A Painful Case,” on the other hand, is a clinical study of emotional aridity, done in the mode Joyce would abandon. When Mr Duffy learns of the death of Emily Sinico he first condemns his involvement with such a contemptible creature. Then we follow his thoughts as they move in another direction, into the world of guilt and regret and loss; he ends up here: “He could not feel her in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.” Joyce considered this story to be one of the weakest; I think he was wrong, and this difference of opinion mirrors our differences as to what fiction should do. Dubliners is the only work by Joyce that I could read, and one I have great respect for. He gives us a varied cross-section of lives; though some stories are slight, they take on significance as part of a whole. His prose is easily accessible, and to me this is a virtue. Yet, due to the Irishness of his subject matter, the annotated edition I consulted explained some things I didn’t understand. The ending to “Two Gallants” was made clear (I should have figured it out on my own; I guess I couldn’t believe that the two men were such absolute bounders). In “Clay” there was no way I could have known the significance of the “soft, wet substance” that the blindfolded Maria touches. Ultimately, Dubliners left me with a feeling of regret. What would Joyce have produced if he hadn’t turned away from people like Mr Duffy? For he did abandon all the common Dubliners, of whom I am one. *

Strange Fruit - Lillian Smith

This novel is set just after WWII, and though the rift between the races has moderated from what it was in the forties, it’s still with us. The blacks of Maxwell, Georgia are fettered economically (all the women, even those who are college-educated, are servants). But, as Sam Parks, a doctor, tells a white man who’s sympathetic to blacks, “there’re other things . . . that hurt us more than poverty. It’d be a little thing to call us mister . . . It wouldn’t take a penny . . . to do that . . . It oughtn’t to shame you much . . . to do that.” Yet it’s beyond the capacity of this white man to address a Negro as “Mister.” Some blacks adapt, learn how to get along in a white-dominated world, but they have a festering resentment. In the course of this novel a black man’s rage leads to the murder of a white man. I knew, from the title, that a lynching would take place, but what was unsettling was my realization that any black body swinging from a rope would do; it needn’t be the guilty party. Sex plays a large role; the same doctor talks of how white men take black women as “manure, that’s all they are to you . . . dung . . . to make something grow green in your life.” Proper white women are off limits to lust. Yet the love affair – for it has to be called that – between Nonnie and Tracy goes deep. The fact that this white man can’t live with the feelings he has for a black woman leads to tragedy. Nonnie is an oddly passive character; besides her love for Tracy, there’s not much to her. Of Tracy we know a lot, for we’re often in his mind. In stream-of-consciousness sequences blacks and whites are given equal time, and some of their thoughts will offend people of both races. This is a raw, angry, ugly book, and it offers no solutions to the complex and deep-seated problems polluting Maxwell. Lillian Smith’s major accomplishment is presenting those problems honestly and artfully.

Fruit of the Poppy - Robert Wilder

Wilder is efficient, like a good hit man (this thriller about heroin trafficking has quite a few hit men), and he pulls off some plot twists that are both unexpected and believable. Foremost is the peculiar form of revenge that the mob boss, Dano Villanova, takes on Stacy Woodward, the girl friend who makes the mistake of skipping out on him; Wilder sets up this chilling episode with commendable restraint. Yet a lack of restraint mars much of the book, as do characters that come right out of central casting. The hero fully lives up to his ultra-cool name of Sol Madrid (the girl-on-the-run finds in him a fascinating combination of danger and – yes, you guessed it – gentleness). On the opposite end of the cool scale is the accountant who sets the plot in motion by stealing a quarter of a million dollars from El Capo; he’s introduced with this sentence: “Fear gnawed the little man in the gray suit, eating out his guts and leaving him as empty as a termite-ridden log.” Yet this quivering worm is capable of murder (which he finds empowering); and, as for the once beautiful, elegant and composed Stacy, she’s reduced to a shell “pathetically eager” to sell her body – which no man wants. Surprises like this kept me reading. I found the concluding section to be oddly flat, as if Wilder ran out of steam and could no longer deliver a punch. Still, this was an engrossing diversion.

The Flame Trees of Thika - Elspeth Huxley
These “Memories of an African Childhood” are narrated by a young girl, but it’s the adult the child will become who gives an unflinching account of a place and its people (on page two the mother, Tilly, dismounts from her horse and proceeds to “pop” the ticks that had settled on her clothing). Ticks are inconsequential compared to other hardships that confront the family in the African wilds in the early 1900s. The natives – mainly Kikuyu and Masai – are treated with understanding, but the book doesn’t shirk from describing practices and attitudes alien to our sensibilities (such as female circumcision and a complete lack of compassion for any animal). Not that the British and Dutch come across as pillars of virtue, though their vices are all too familiar. We’re presented with radically different outlooks on life. The Africans adapt to their surroundings while the Europeans try to alter it, mostly with the objective of making a profit. The persistence and resourcefulness of the settlers is amazing. Robin and Tilly (the child’s parents) are totally unprepared to farm the tract of land that Robin purchases, sight unseen. We’re too soft to comprehend how they’re able to get by in such harsh conditions; in a way, we’re viewing them through the baffled eyes of the Africans. The book’s diverse plot lines are made up of interactions the girl has with both whites and blacks (though her closest attachments are with animals); mostly she’s an observer, and some of what she sees is incomprehensible to her (but not to us; most significant is an ill-fated love affair). In this very odd childhood the oddest aspect is her relationship with her parents. They’re always referred to as Tilly and Robin; they’re not, in emotional terms, a Mother and Father to her. She isn’t mistreated, but merely taken care of in a matter-of-fact way. Though she displays no resentment, I felt the absence of warmth and affection. Despite all that she’s exposed to, some of it ugly and brutal, this unflaggingly resilient young girl develops a love for Thika. In a sense, this is a love story, with the object of love being childhood itself. *

Night Rider - Robert Penn Warren

In Warren’s first novel, written when he was in his early thirties, the talent and ambition that would culminate in All the King’s Men is evident. But ambition is a demanding virtue. The character of Mr. Munn (which is how he’s referred to in the third person narration) is key to the book; through him Warren explores the issues of power and violence. Mr. Munn is indeed a “Mr.” He has solidity, but it’s that of a figure carved from wood; for a while I thought he was real, until the inexplicability of his moods and actions accumulated; even the prose, which is generally straightforward, gets dense and obscure when dealing with his conflicted emotional states. A shame, because Warren succeeds so fully in other ways: the secondary characters are strong and the rural setting has a deep-grained authenticity. The plot is based on a little-known episode in our history. In Kentucky and Tennessee in the early 1900s an Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco was formed to force the conglomerates to pay a fair price for tobacco. But when the first step toward violence is taken, matters begin to spiral out of control; eventually night riders are terrorizing – and sometimes murdering – those who oppose them. Interesting material, but Warren passes the point where the story is completed and goes on for another hundred pages. Perhaps, being ambitious, he thought that a major first novel should be weighty in every sense of the word. What we get is Mr. Munn’s moral dilemma, which I had lost interest in, and a series of events that border on melodrama. As if to exacerbate my growing annoyance, Warren launches into a monologue (concerning the destruction of the west by the white man) by a saintly backwoods character named Willie Proudfit; we get twenty-two pages of this: “We got our’n and didn’t reckon on no end, hit looks lak. But a man’s that a-way. He sees sumthen, and don’t reckon on no end, no way, and don’t see it a-come-en. They’s a hoggishness in man, and a hog blindness.” Amen, brother.

Helena - Machado de Assis (Portuguese)

In his foreword to this early novel the author includes a disclaimer: “Do not blame me for anything romantic in it.” He also states that he holds a fondness for Helena, for in it he finds “an echo of youth and ingenuous faith.” (Youth? – he was thirty-six when he wrote it.) The book is radically different from anything else I’ve read by him; besides the romanticism, it has a conventional narrative and there’s a lavish amount of description. In the first chapter a wealthy man dies; in his will he reveals that he has a daughter, to whom he bequeaths a portion of his estate; he also asks his son and his sister to admit her to the family home and to treat her with “gentle care and affection.” Enter seventeen-year-old Helena – beautiful, vibrant, intelligent, and so agreeable that she even wins the heart of the doubting aunt. I was won over too – Helena is an enchanting feminine presence. And Estacio – what is to be expected of this young man? Though he refuses to acknowledge his true feelings, he comes to love her in a sexual way, and it’s clear that she reciprocates. Added to this dilemma – for they are brother and sister – something is oppressing Helena; since we’re in the mind of Estacio we’re barred from knowing what it is (though not for long; this mystery can be solved by using simple logic). In the last third of the book, when the various conflicts reach a crisis point, the tone of the writing changes. The intensity level is ratcheted up way too high as overwrought characters anguish over moral choices. What is the right thing to do according to the dictates of religion and the demands of a rigid code of honor? The only path open to Helena and Estacio is a narrow one. Too narrow – it constricts both them and the novel. I believe that the older Machado de Assis would have moved onto another path, into the brambles, and in doing so would have been truer to human nature, which is compelled not by considerations of propriety but by the cravings of the heart.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The main problem with this post-apocalyptic novel is that it’s monotonous. Regarding the action and the feelings of the two characters, what happens on page one is happening (with little variation) on page seventeen, and on page 84, and on page 116 – which is when I suddenly found myself flipping through the remainder of the book. In his depiction of love between a father and son, McCarthy spreads it on too thick; he’s in his true element with menace and cruelty. But since I’m not a fan of horror flicks, I couldn’t appreciate the atrocities committed by the cannibalistic monsters he has roaming the land. Nor was his style of writing to my liking; I’ll close with three examples. The opening sentences: “When he awoke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some glaucoma dimming the world.”  From page 31: “He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road. Everything was alight. As if the lost sun was returning at last. The snow orange and quivering.” And here’s a conversation between father and son (each person’s words occupy their own little paragraph): “Is it cold?” “Yes. It’s freezing.” “Do you want to go in?” “I dont know.” “Sure you do.” “Is it okay?” “Come on.” As was the case with Hemingway, McCarthy calls attention to his prose under the guise of simplicity, and I find this downright annoying. 

Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence

Reading Lawrence’s short stories – notably, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” – made me aware of how good he could be. So I returned to a book that I had abandoned many years ago; I thought that this time around I’d be more sympathetic and patient – and I was. I also found that my preconceptions (garnered from commentary I had read) were baseless. In the first third of this autobiographical novel Lawrence examines the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. To place all the blame on Walter Morel doesn’t do justice to Lawrence’s insight; the Morels were a tragically mismatched couple. But the major misinterpretation is the characterization of Mrs. Morel as a suffocating mother. Though she does look to her children as her reason for being, believing that in their lives hers would find purpose, she isn’t selfish; she wants her sons and daughter to be happy and fulfilled. As for Paul (who is Lawrence), she has no desire to possess him; her hope is that he’ll find a woman who will be good for him. That the two women he selects are not right for him isn’t something she dreams up; it’s a fact that he’s aware of. His devotion to his mother is not coerced; he gives it of his own free will. But in talking of this aspect of Paul’s life we’ve moved into the last third of the novel, and here things weaken considerably. The intense scrutiny Lawrence devotes to Paul turns into emotional nitpicking. A law should be passed declaring that nobody under the age of thirty-five can write anything autobiographical. They don’t have enough separation from their youth to see that what they went through wasn’t that momentous. Lawrence compounds the problem by presuming to enter the minds of the women Paul is involved with, so we not only get too much of conflicted Paul, but the conflicts of others too. It’s convoluted, ponderous, muddled; the prose (which in the first part is hard and crisp) gets overripe with abstract ideas that must be conveyed. To put it simply, Lawrence thought too much. When he detached himself from himself and didn’t attempt to express inexpressible states of being he could write with an immediacy and power that few authors have been gifted with.

First Snow on Fuji - Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese)

These stories (or at least the five I read) left me asking “What was that about?” and “Why did the author bother to write this?” Their inconclusiveness left a void. Only “Nature” was fairly interesting, but it too wanders about in search of a narrative. It’s as if Kawabata lays out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; though each piece has a discernible image, they don’t fit together to create an entire picture; not even a clearly defined character or emotion emerges. The author’s preoccupation with sex (wife swapping, gender change, etc.) puts him in step with modern Western sensibilities. As does his dialogue (“Yeah, your nerves are really worn down. Divorce is a tough thing for anyone to have to go through.”). Though I wondered if that dialogue, which stands in awkward contrast with the rest of the prose, was an accurate rendering into English of what Kawabata wrote. But it doesn’t matter – these glum, constricted stories have little to offer. I was amused only once, and this came in the Introduction, when the translator thanked Joyce Carol Oates for her help. That woman is everywhere.

And Even Now - Max Beerbohm

In these essays Max offers a unique perspective on life, and he does it with intelligence and wit. He also establishes a familiarity with the reader; I got the sense that he was speaking to me as a friend. I hope, in the following samples, that I do him justice. In “How Should I Word It” Max skims a book that provides models for people to use in writing letters for a variety of occasions (including romantic breakups). They’re perfect in their tactfulness, generosity, etc. Max begins to “crave some little outburst of wrath, of hatred, of malice.” So he comes up with his own array of letters (one, in response to a “small, cheap, hideous” wedding present: “Perhaps you were guided in your choice by a definite wish to insult me. I am sure, on reflection, that this was so. I shall not forget.”). In “Hosts and Guests” he gives convincing arguments that all of humanity can be classified as one or the other. He puts himself firmly in the “Guest” category; on those occasions when he must be a host, he fulfills this role only passably well (he tries hard to avoid a “frozen look” detectable to his guests when he first glances at the restaurant bill set before him). “William and Mary” is a love story. After his friend William’s marriage, Max visited him and his wife; he found her to be delightful. He came often to their home and observed their relationship with a sense of wonder; they were blessed. But Mary died in childbirth (as did the baby); afterwards William volunteered to go to a war zone as a reporter; he was killed. Many years later Max finds himself in the vicinity of the cottage where they had lived; with some trepidation he takes a detour and goes there, half hoping that the house will no longer be standing; but it is, in decay. What follows, as Max stands at the door, is an evocation of loss that is surprising and moving.

Stories - Elizabeth Jolley

A strange mishmash. The first six stories are interconnected, though they skip huge gaps in time. They depict a family – a mother, son, daughter – existing precariously on the fringes of society. The daughter serves as narrator and is the most sensible of the three. She’s likeable, and there’s pathos in her efforts to fend off chaos (though she often succumbs to the antics of the others). Despite the setbacks they face, the Morgans have an unquenchable ability to enjoy whatever comes their way. Their love for one another is interlaced with verbal abuse (when the mother calls her son a “son of a bitch” he answers, “Well if I’m the son of a bitch dear lady you must be the bitch”; after this routine comeback there’s wild laughter all around). But in the last of the Morgan stories Jolley goes seriously off course; it was so fragmented and impressionistic that I had no idea what was happening. And there wasn’t a hint of vitality or liveliness. This turned out to be a harbinger; the shapeless mood pieces that follow are about life’s outcasts, but unhappiness can’t be served up in such a drab, plodding, muddled way. I skipped to the self portrait at the end called “A Child Went Forth.” It starts out well, then it too loses coherency and focus. I found myself wondering whether Jolley’s undisciplined wandering was an artistic choice or a symptom.

Can You Forgive Her? - Anthony Trollope

I do forgive Alice. I’m also grateful to Trollope for entertaining me for 800 pages. That said, the first volume of this double-decker is better than the second. More care was taken in both the characterizations and the prose. And in the second half the predicaments developed in the beginning simply go through a process of resolution. The knotty twists and turns and changes in thinking are unraveled and things begin moving in a straight line. Alice’s initial dilemma has to do with her resistance to marrying the man she loves. What holds her back is that he’s perfect – steady in his love for her, always composed and sensible and kind. Alice, who is flawed and knows it, has the uncomfortable feeling that life with such a paragon of virtue will place her at a disadvantage; this feeling leads her to make some foolhardy decisions. On the other end of the virtue scale is George Vavasor; his evolution into a monster borders on the unbelievable – but not quite. Trollope’s understanding of human psychology turns what could have been a soap opera into literature. He was even adept at high comedy. A side story involves Alice’s widowed aunt and the two suitors clumsily pursuing her. Neither man is a match for the cunning, manipulative and eminently practical Aunt Greenow. This is the first in a series of Palliser novels, but I won’t be reading the others; politics looms ahead, and the conflicts that first engaged me have been put to rest.

The View in Winter - Ronald Blythe

You won’t read this book. Its topic – old age – is one people generally try to avoid. But the elderly pose problems that most families and all societies have to cope with; there’s also the fact that, in today’s world, an ever-increasing number of us will be blessed or cursed with a long life. So the subject must be addressed. Blythe does this, thoroughly. Although some handle old age well, he finds loneliness, isolation, and a feeling of not belonging and not mattering endemic. Many of the elderly are fear-plagued – not of death, which most face with acceptance, but of losing control of their lives (a crippling fall, a fading of the mind); they fear losing their independence and becoming a burden to others. These various negative aspects are raised by the author in his introduction and commentaries; but what we get from the old people who are interviewed is a cheerful, plucky attitude; or resignation; or muted memories. And I wondered, Where’s the passion? Why doesn’t anybody express regret, anger, frustration, bitterness? Since Blythe restricted himself to the residents of one English village, it’s possible that those he spoke with were under a pressure the old commonly feel: that they must “behave.” The liveliest section is one in which young people talk about their attitudes toward the elderly; blunt, honest, diverse, this dialogue has a vitality absent from the rest of the book. Even Blythe’s tone is intellectually detached. He’s insightful, unflinching and, at times, harsh. But the very complexity of his subject makes the book diffuse and scattered. Blythe wrote Winter when he was fifty-eight. I can’t help but compare it to Akenfield, which came ten years earlier. In that book people in a village spoke primarily about their jobs, and there was passion aplenty. In this look at the end of life bleakness prevails.

The Garrick Year - Margaret Drabble

The following sentence, which comes halfway through this book, marks the point at which I abandoned it: “I lay there and wondered what frightful depths of need the chance words of a man whom I did not know and had no reason to like had revealed in me; and I saw then clearly what later became confused; that I was about to be chained, in a fashion so arbitrary that it frightened me, to a passion so accidental that it confirmed nothing but my own inadequacy and inability to grow.” A lot of probing, right? The critical problem is that I didn’t know the woman who was thinking these thoughts. This extends even to her appearance; Nell is supposed to be beautiful, but in my mind’s eye she remained featureless and shapeless. She thinks a lot, but the things she does and the words she speaks reveal little about her. She also makes a lot of claims; one of them is a deep love for her daughter, but Drabble doesn’t include one single sustained scene between the two. A book is an inanimate object, but its main character can’t be.

Brittania Mews - Margery Sharp

For 120 pages this was a good novel. We first get to know Adelaide as a ten-year-old; then the narrative skips a dozen years. What follows is her romance with her art instructor; she pursues marriage to this feckless fellow in a headstrong way. She gets what she wants, with disastrous results. The dissolution of her love – and her dreams – is handled well, as is the hardening of her nature. But in the next hundred pages my sympathy and involvement slowly eroded. The slum in which Adelaide is forced to live was never convincing; when I was involved in the dynamics of her marriage that didn’t bother me, but after Henry’s exit the comic book garishness of the Mews and its denizens led me to conclude that Sharp had no firsthand knowledge of that world (though she writes with authority about the moneyed class). Gilbert – the second man in her life – is abruptly introduced (he’s thrown out of a bar, drunk); they immediately form a platonic soul mate relationship. He’s easily reformed by Adelaide – far too easily. Sharp stopped trying to lay a solid groundwork. Henry, with all his faults, was a real person; Gilbert merely serves a role. Events – such as the success of the Puppet Theatre – are predictable and improbable. As Part Four begins thirty years have passed. Young people with names like Dodo and Sonia Trent take center stage, while Adelaide has stiffened into a cardboard prop. At this point I had enough. Sharp attempted something major – a sprawling generational novel – but it was beyond her range. She was a sprinter attempting to run a marathon. As she labored through the years she lost her energy and the book turned slack and silly.

Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life - Karl Capek (Czech)

These very different novels (even the style of writing varies) are supposedly interconnected in that they make a philosophical point. The first of the three succeeds because I understood and felt sympathy for Juraj Hordubal. Poor man! – he returns to his home village after eight years in America (where he worked in the coal mines) hoping that his beloved wife will welcome him with open arms; instead he’s met with coldness and silence. He also finds a man living on the property who’s purported to be just a farmhand, but seems more than that. Juraj is unable to confront his wife about these matters because he fears the truth. He’s like a small animal in a cage, scurrying here and there; the only way for him to be free of the doubts and fears that plague him would be not to care – which he can’t do – or not to exist. Capek’s major accomplishment is to give us an intimate study of a simple man in torment. From that high point things drop off drastically. In Meteor the lone survivor of a plane crash is dying in a hospital bed. Because he has no identity and can’t speak (even his face is swathed in bandages) three people – a nun, a clairvoyant and a writer – conjure up stories about him and his life. I found the nun’s story interesting, but the other two, besides being silly and rambling, were pointless – which is what happens when an author tries to make an abstract philosophical point (one I never got). I became increasingly bored and restless. Shortly after I began An Ordinary Life a feeling of oppression set in. Unlike Juraj, I found a simple way to escape: I stopped reading.

On the Yard – Malcolm Braly

Braly took his personal knowledge of prison life and combined it with insight into the minds of his characters to produce a work that’s both authentic and emotionally involving. He does it with admirable economy and precision; in this dense, heavily-populated novel each word counts. He avoids stereotypes; there are good and bad men on both sides of the bars. San Quentin (not named as such in the book) is actually a humane place (at least during the time Braly spent there, in the sixties). But even a humane prison is prison. Besides the pervasive threat of danger from other inmates, there’s a sense of waste. Each day is like a scrap of litter tossed idly on the yard. Some try to avoid this demoralizing fact, others are all too aware of it. The absence of women leads to homosexual encounters (or at least constant talk about that subject). The novel is ugly, grim and vulgar, but what else can it be? A lifer named Chilly Willy plays a prominent role; he’s the prison’s King Rat, a man who uses his brains to get his way. But the mechanics of his downfall are too obvious (from the get-go I spotted the trap that was being set for Willy, so why couldn’t he?). Braly’s portrayal of Juleson, on the other hand, is done masterfully. Juleson is a decent man, determined to hold onto his dignity; we know that about him, but we don’t know until the end of the book what his crime was. In seven devastating pages we find out. But that’s not all – what immediately follows is another hammer blow, a scene that demonstrates the power of understatement.  *

Portrait of Max - S. N. Behrman

This is an elegant book, as befits its subject. For the most part it’s made up of conversations between Max Beerbohm and the author; it also includes a generous helping of Max’s caricatures. This certainly isn’t a tell-all – it’s a loving portrayal – though a side to Max emerges in which his impishness has a bite; his drawings can be hurtful (a fact that he was ruefully aware of) and he also has a taste for gossip in which people’s faults and foibles are exposed. But it’s a sharp-eyed interest in human nature that seems to be motivating him, not mean-spiritedness. Max was one of those rare souls who have a talent for living. He valued friends, and he was rich in that respect. He chose to lead what some would consider a diminished life. Though he was a prominent figure in London’s smart set, after his marriage he moved to a tiny villa on the outskirts of an Italian town. And his artistic and literary output was meager. In speaking about his retreat from glitter, glamour and fame, he has absolutely no regrets. Behrman made visits to Rapallo over a period of four years (the book ends with Max’s death at age 84). During his stays the two men spent a few hours each day talking (or, rather, with Max talking – it’s his portrait, after all). I was often pleasantly involved, but sometimes I felt excluded because I didn’t know anything about the people being discussed. Also, their encounters don’t provide enough material to fill a 300 page book, so Behrman resorts to describing in detail what Max wrote; since I could read the real thing (and, in many cases, had), I found these sections to be a waste of words. But being with Max was not a waste; it was time well spent.

Cotters’ England - Christina Stead

I’m using the book’s original title, when it was first published in England; it appeared in the United States as Dark Places of the Heart, which is too straightforward for such an eccentric, shapeless, rambling work. Stead was a writer of extravagant dimensions who let her passion and intuition have free rein; she didn’t abide by rules or limits. Her strength is her weakness; she has so much energy that she can tire the reader out. As her characters talk – and do they talk! – it’s as if floodgates have been opened. The voices of Nellie and Tom, a brother and sister, are the most insistent. But what lies behind their words? We get insight into the tangled alleyways of Nellie’s mind, but Tom is nebulous; I don’t think Stead dug her claws into him to the degree that she did with his sister. The England of the Cotter family is a dumping ground, sordid in both physical and moral terms. Despite this setting, the book has indefatigable verve and spirit; it soars in a crazy, crazed way. And behind Stead’s seemingly haphazard approach is a sense of unity. Though she veers off in a unexpected new direction in the last paragraph, I was left feeling that a circle had been closed. A fitting way to end this review is to give you a taste of the voice of Nellie, as she talks to Tom: “Ah, ye devil! Come, chick, let’s have your news, don’t tease! Tell it in your own deprecating style, at the rate of one hint a half-hour, to be tiresome. Come, what did you do last night, chick?”

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner - Alan Sillitoe

The long-distance title story (over fifty pages) is good, but it’s potential is meaty enough to be better than good, so in a sense it falls short. Early on we know too much. The boy’s intention to lose the race (which is stated on page six and never wavers) is part of his overall attitude toward life – he’s far beyond any hope for rehabilitation. Sillitoe arms his protagonist with a thoroughly worked-out defiance toward society (“. . . by Christ, I’d rather be like I am – always on the run and breaking into shops for a packet of fags and a jar of jam – than have the whip-hand over somebody else and be dead from the toe nails up”). The boy’s voice is good, but that one note – defiance – is sounded too often. As for the next two pieces – “Uncle Ernest” and “Mr. Raynor the School-Teacher” – the first was weak, the other totally inconsequential. “The Fishing-Boat Picture” (about a failed marriage) was initially interesting, but it needed an emotional kick at the end. To achieve this the reader must be made to feel emotions, and this won’t happen if they’re directly stated – which is exactly what Sillitoe winds up doing.

These Thousand Hills - A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

When I was in my teens Guthrie’s The Big Sky and The Way West played an important role in furthering my love of books, so reading These Thousand Hills was disheartening. It follows about fifteen years in the life of Lat Evans as he moves up in the world of the Montana Territory in the late1800s. I became increasingly uninvolved with this taciturn, stoical, colorless character. I also felt no empathy for him; Guthrie doesn’t develop a basis for some judgmental decisions Lat makes, so he seems heartless. The ending is a melodramatic grab bag (including a gratuitous murder mystery). Lat owns up to his shortcomings, but the impact is diminished because it has no repercussions; on the last page his wife lyrically forgives all. As for that wife, and the prostitute with a heart of gold who precedes her, they’re merely role players. There’s a mechanical, paint-by-numbers feel to this book. The prose is inventive, but in a diligent way, and the re-creation of the past has the type of authenticity that seems researched. Maybe a determination to finish his “Big Sky” series was spurring Guthrie on. Missing is the inspiration that marked those two earlier novels of my boyhood. Or, at least, that’s what I want to believe.

Cluny Brown - Margery Sharp

Twenty-year-old Cluny is described by her uncle, with whom she has lived all her life, as being “plain as a boot.” But when we get to know her she displays a buoyancy that’s engaging (she even bounds when she walks). She’s an original, a free spirit without a hint of artifice. In an early chapter a woman the uncle talks to in the park gives him a piece of advice: “I think your niece sounds exceptionally charming. You mustn’t suppress her, you must help her to develop. She may be a really special personality.” This appraisal is right on target; but rather than be developed, Cluny’s adventurous nature is stifled while she’s living with her stodgy uncle. When she’s sent to work as a servant at a country estate new worlds open for her. Sharp recognized that Cluny alone couldn’t carry the novel, so she introduces a half dozen well-drawn characters (and not a villain among them). Love is in the air, romances bloom. I had my doubts about the man Cluny falls for; it seemed that marriage to him would be as constricting as life with her uncle. But why couldn’t she recognize that? – she has good sense. The last minute about-face in her affections is too abrupt and extravagant; it needed more foreshadowing. I think the author cared so much about Cluny that, like a fairy godmother, she simply waved a magic wand and blessed her with an exciting life. I can’t really blame her.

The Feast of Lupercal - Brian Moore

Moore traces the evisceration of Mr. Devine (Dev), a master at a Catholic boy’s school in Belfast. Thirty-seven years old, he’s still a virgin, though fairly content with his drab, solitary life. That life is soon to be in turmoil. He’s in a stall in the school’s men’s room when he overhears a teacher refer to him as an “old woman” with no knowledge of how a fellow could feel about a girl. Dev is stung by these words; when he meets twenty-year-old Una she seems responsive to his tentative advances, and he’s emboldened to pursue her. This awkward “romance” results in disasters raining upon Dev like a plague of locusts. At the end of the book he’s in the same situation he was in the beginning, but inside he’s shattered beyond repair. No longer will he accept his lot in life, but never again will he attempt to make intimate contact with a woman. This is a desolate, relentless, grimy book. Though Dev is someone I understood, I wasn’t moved by his emotional destruction because Moore doesn’t make him an appealing person. At Saint Michan’s the cane rules (the scenes of beatings are appalling), and Dev wields his with gusto; he sees the boys as ugly, vicious lumps. In other ways he’s a mild man, not a bad sort. He rises up to display defiance at the end, but it’s short-lived and too late. Hanging over the characters (like a cane about to descend) is the harsh and repressive Catholicism prevailing in Belfast in the1950s. Moore condemns a society that twists people’s natures into grotesque shapes. I felt that the only response to such a place would be to violently rebel against it or to leave it (which is what the author chose to do).

Night and Silence Who Is Here? - Pamela Hansford Johnson

This novel’s lugubrious and obscure title is inappropriate and its subtitle, “An American Comedy,” is a misrepresentation. The author brings together a group of over-the-top eccentrics at a New England college. But colorful eccentrics behaving oddly aren’t funny per se, not if they have no substance nor a coherent plot to base their actions on. Things move along with a dogged joie de vivre as Johnson tries, in prose that sparkles too brightly, to make her characters cavort about, to be funny, funny, funny. Forced zaniness never works. As for Who Is Here?, I wasn’t, not for long; I made a quiet exit from a party that was turning out to be a flop.

Thurber Country - James Thurber

Early on Thurber did some excellent work, but at a point in his career everything he wrote – even if it was bad or indifferent – got published by The New Yorker, where he was employed. He got lazy – or at least I attribute the “tossed off” quality of these twenty-five pieces to laziness. Only nine had any merit. His idiosyncratic drawings, in which he can capture an expression with a minimum of lines, are the high points in this collection of prose.

The Tragic Comedians - George Meredith
Meredith’s prose tests one’s intelligence. Can you follow the intricacies of his sentences to the end, or will you lose the strand of thought and find yourself sinking in the bog of your own ignorance? The book’s first sentence – though not as formidable as many – can serve as an example: “An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her web is for the devouring lion.” Notwithstanding the difficulties, his words are elegantly arranged, and they do lead somewhere. The problem with this novel, taken as a whole, hinges on where we ultimately wind up. Meredith presents us with Alvan, an all-powerful male figure, a brilliant Adonis. He’s also noble: his aim is to raise up the consciousness of the lower classes. This forty-year-old man meets Clotilde, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl/woman; they fall in love at first sight. Of course it’s no ordinary love but one that scales the Alpine heights. Alvan wants to marry her legally; she begs him to take her away. The problem, which she perceives and he doesn’t (he believes he can overcome any obstacle), is her brutish parents; they abhor this Jew, this demagogue, and they will do anything to prevent the marriage. The battle lines are drawn halfway through the novel, and, though there’s almost no action – just speech, thoughts and feelings – I was interested in who would prevail. But as I neared the conclusion, what I got were flailing histrionics and preposterous plot twists. My reaction: All that intelligence and then this? In his introduction Meredith asserts that the “fantastical” elements of his story are based on fact; such a man as Alvan existed and “was of a mighty nature.” Nothing, the author claims, is invented, including the “lurid catastrophe” at the end. Really? I don’t buy it. It’s Meredith who injected the gargantuan aspects; the characters, as depicted by him, never walked this earth. They belong in a melodrama.

Collected Short Stories - Robert Graves
How could the author of the magisterial I, Claudius have written such inconsequential stories? Apparently Graves didn’t take the short form seriously (though he did care about honing his prose, which is inventive and lively). In his introduction he writes that “Pure fiction is beyond my imaginative range.” He’s a participant or an observer in the stories that he categorizes as English and Majorcan (he lived for a time in Majorca). Yet a third group are set in ancient Rome, so these have to be imaginative works; I only read one of them, and found it silly. Of the stories I did read, the best of the lot – “A Toast to Ava Gardner” and “Treacle Tart” – rise to the level of pleasant diversions.

John Barleycorn - Jack London
These “Alcoholic Memoirs” have merit beyond their considerable entertainment value. London begins with his early years, though he states that he had no boyhood. At age thirteen he worked in a cannery – ten hour days, six days a week, for a dollar a day; he rebelled against this life because it was no life at all (he also formed his socialistic views, seeing our capitalistic system as a gristmill that ground men down). More than half the book is devoted to the period from ages fifteen to seventeen, when he became an oyster pirate. He was on the water, free, engaged in high adventure, associating with larger-than-life desperados – men he admired and emulated. Though I didn’t believe London was the swashbuckling figure he depicts himself to be, this part is significant in that it marks the start of his serious drinking. He stresses that he had no physiological inclination for alcohol. He drank only to be accepted by the men he associated with; outside that social context he didn’t drink because he had no desire to do so. What comes next is his gold-seeking venture in the Yukon, which he covers in one page (all he got out of it was a case of scurvy). He also covers his rise to success as a writer sketchily, and the life he led subsequently is not examined at all. It needed to be, because it was then, when he was seemingly blessed with every advantage – money, a wife and children – that a psychological need for alcohol grew in him. He personifies his problem in an entity he calls John Barleycorn. London’s outlook on life, once robust and positive, becomes subject to John Barleycorn’s withering “White Logic,” which sees all beliefs and values as empty attempts to make a meaningless existence bearable. He became plagued by disillusionment and despair. I couldn’t understand why this occurred because he doesn’t treat John Barleycorn for what he is: a self-destructive force inside himself that, for whatever reasons, gained dominance. To make the reasons comprehensible would require him to reveal much more about his personal life, and throughout the book he avoids mentioning any intimate matters. In the pedantic last chapters London turns social reformer and Philosopher. He ends things on a hopeful note, but it’s half-hearted. Crouching in the shadows is John Barleycorn, who will prevail. The author died three years after the publication of this memoir, at age forty-two. The cause of death was uremic poisoning, a condition aggravated by alcohol.

The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish)
Over 600 pages of them, and not one of those pages is boring. Singer is a storyteller in the tradition of the brothers Grimm; to read him is to enter a forest where malignant supernatural beings lurk. Did Singer believe in the strange powers he writes about? All that can be said with certainty is that he was fascinated by them. The locale of some stories is pre-Hitler Europe, but they could take place in the Dark Ages. That which is irrational, which defies logic, is treated as fact. Demons exist, Satan exists (sometimes they narrate a story). These forces intervene in human lives; men and women struggle in their grasp or give in willingly to their bidding. Working from this premise, Singer’s characters grapple with good and evil, question the existence of god, try to fathom the meaning of life. No beliefs are respected and no answers are provided (least of all by a religion that’s a morass of superstition). The stories that take place in the present (in which Singer plays a role, either an active one or as a listener to a tale told him by someone else) are less exotic, though they too have an element of other-worldliness. Satan may not appear in New York, but peculiar people and odd occurrences abound. Not all stories fit the mold I’ve presented; some stay grounded in reality. Nor was every story to my liking. But always evident is Singer’s intense absorption in human nature and behavior. Because so many of his characters are ruled by aberrant emotions, this book gives off a sense of wildness. As an author Singer possessed a unique power, perhaps given to him by one of his demons: the power to compel the reader to enter the dark and tangled forest. *

The Women at the Pump - Knut Hamsun (Norwegian)
“People from the big city have no conception of the scale of things in a small town. They think they can come and take their stand in the marketplace and smile their superior smile; they think they can laugh at the houses and the paving – how often they feel that way!” Thus this book begins. Though the omniscient narrator’s familiar, jaunty tone is sustained throughout, the residents of a fishing village get a thorough examination, and few come out unscathed. This is a comic novel only in the sense that human failings are treated in a bantering way. Of the doctor, made resentful by his lack of success: “Nor did he ever attain anything respectable in the line of malice, he had started too late; as an elderly castaway he attained only to a sour dissatisfaction, to bitterness, rancor, petty vindictiveness, slander.” Hamsun uses the village as a microcosm; his universal subject is life. He perceives it to be hard; only the rare individual isn’t twisted or damaged in some way. He respects a man who’s brave, resilient and simple, who confronts life as it is and doesn’t examine it nor whine about it. I use the word “man” because this is a masculine novel; women matter, but the minds Hamsun enters are those of males. As for a plot, many years roll by, things happen in the village, small and momentous, to people of both high and low station; these events are topics of gossip for the women who meet at the pump. In the closing chapters Hamsun seems at a loss as to how to wind things up, and the book loses its momentum. Still, this is another considerable accomplishment from the Norwegian master.

Love - Elizabeth von Arnin
The title, in its simplicity, is misleading; this is a complicated and conflicted novel. A young man (Christopher, twenty-five) becomes infatuated with an older woman (Catherine). Though flattered and enlivened by his intensity, she makes determined efforts to discourage him. Nothing dampens his ardor, so she finally reveals that she’s forty-seven and has a nineteen-year-old daughter. Christopher is undeterred; he insists on marriage; Catherine weakens. Complicating matters is the fact that her daughter’s husband is a reverend in his fifties; if their age difference isn’t an obstacle, why should hers and Christopher’s be? The reverend and his priggish mother don’t see it that way; to them her relationship with a mere boy is repugnant, and since he has the power to separate Catherine from her daughter, his uncompromising attitude carries weight. In the midst of these pressures, Catherine marries Christopher. But love doesn’t conquer all; instead it leads her into a desperate struggle, for she’s in the last stage before old age sets in. She has elaborate (and expensive) “treatments” to make her appear young; they help, but they also make her look cheap. Catherine loses something precious to her: her dignity. Her formerly quiet life is in emotional turmoil, and though her daughter sticks by her, their harmonious relationship is altered. Love turns out to be a mixed bag. Are the ecstasies (which, on Christopher’s side, become less and less ecstatic) worth the grief? For me the answer is no; reading this book was a painful experience. The author creates a rose-colored aura, not unlike what would be found in a romance novel, yet the roses have thorns that tear.