→ July 14, 2010
→ By

The Unconsoled.

New blog entry on some Red Sox and Mets prospects in the NY Penn League is up. My hit from this afternoon with Colin Cowherd is also online. I’ve filed my reaction to the Blue Jays/Braves trade, so it should be along shortly.

—

One of you warned me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, but I believe I already had it on my shelf at the time and I’m pretty stubborn about at least trying books once I’ve obtained them. And it was a pretty quick read given its heft. But not only is it my least favorite of the four Ishiguro novels I’ve read, it’s just a conceptual mess that takes an interesting premise reminiscent of Philip K. Dick and forgets to flesh it out into a complete story.

The plot revolves around Mr. Ryder, a renowned concert pianist who has just arrived in an unnamed Central European town for a performance, only to find himself sidetracked by an endless series of errands and other unfinished business, because the town is populated by people he’s met before, even including a girlfriend and a sort of stepson, but he doesn’t remember any of this. Time bends in odd ways, people act and react strangely, and monologues go on for pages and pages. And the town seems to define its identity by the status of its best musicians, having cast one aside when his style fell out of vogue and a new star arrived, only to find the latter to be a broken man and a drunk.

It seemed clear to me from early on in The Unconsoled that Ishiguro was writing a realistic novel within the world of dreams – the abrupt transitions from scene to scene, the fact that two buildings on opposite sides of the town turned out to be one and the same, the way items could change within a room over the course of a conversation, and the frequent situation that should be familiar to all of you of Ryder’s inability to get to someone he’s left behind or forgotten about or just needs to reach. If that was the author’s intent, he was successful, as I was off balance almost the entire novel because various conventions of the realistic novel no longer applied.

But the execution suffered in two ways: One, Ryder’s actions became extremely frustrating. He’d fail to say or do obvious things to alleviate bad situations, such as the time a childhood friend wants to show him off to her snobby friends who doubt she knows Ryder, only to have him come along but do nothing to reveal his identity. He’s rude and even cold to the boy, Boris, to whom he is something of a father figure, and often leaves Boris on his own inappropriately. It was maddening, even more than in a novel where the main character is simply unlikeable. In this novel, he’s unreadable.

Two, the end of the novel does not answer the key question: If this is all a dream for Ryder, what on earth does it mean? Are all of these people real, or merely manifestations within his brain of stages of his life? Stephan, a young pianist, can’t seem to satisfy his parents through his music, as they insist on seeing him as a disappointment; is that Ryder’s own experience as a young man? Why does Ryder spend much of the novel fretting over the arrangements for his parents, who are coming in to see the performance, only to find out (or be reminded) that there’s no evidence they’re coming at all? Why are there at least four or five of his friends from his youth in England living in this small Central European town, all acting like little time has passed? I read the book expecting some kind of a resolution at the end, either an explicit one (e.g., Ryder wakes up) or an implicit one (e.g., Ryder starts to identify some of the parallels between the dream-world and his own past), but I got nothing, not even hints at Ryder’s pre-visit life to help me make the connections myself.

I love Ishiguro’s prose, but in The Unconsoled his dialogue was out of control, with the aforementioned long monologues (one lasted at least five pages, with not so much as a paragraph break) and very frequent repetition of phrases or meaningless points. His prose was far more in control in The Remains of the Day, and after The Unconsoled he wrote another altered-reality novel that was tighter and much more compelling, Never Let Me Go.

Next up: Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning March.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 13, 2010
→ By

Midnight’s Children.

Futures Game recap is up, as well as a video of me & Jason Grey talking Futures Game.

—

In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe.

My only knowledge of Salman Rushdie prior to beginning his much-lauded novel Midnight’s Children was that he was the subject of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses and that somehow he’d managed to bag, even temporarily, Padma Lakshmi. His public image and the controversy over the latter novel gave me the impression that he was a dour, serious writer, and I was only reading this work because it appears on the TIME, Modern Library, and Radcliffe top 100s through which I’m gradually working my way. (It also won the Man Booker Prize in 1981, and in 1993 won the Booker of Bookers, given to the best winner from the first 25 years of the award.)

As it turns out – unsurprisingly to me, and probably to you as well – I’d sold Rushdie short. Midnight’s Children is inventive, sprawling, witty, satirical, acerbic, gross, and, in many ways, important. I wouldn’t say I loved the novel, for a few reasons I’ll get into, but I don’t think I have to love reading a book to recognize it as great literature. It is, in many ways, the Indian One Hundred Years of Solitude, not quite as compact or as immersing, but with the same combination of wide and narrow scopes while using magical realism to tell its story.

The narrator of Midnight’s Children is Saleem, born at the stroke of midnight at the precise moment that India earned her independence from Great Britain, a date that has symbolic significance as well as plot significance within the novel. The symbolic significance is obvious, as Saleem’s story parallels and intertwines with the history of India, not just as a country but as a people struggling to figure out the whole independence thing, while the plot significance derives from the fact that each of the 1,001 children born in India within the hour after independence develops some particular magical skill or power, with Saleem eventually – in rather crude fashion – discovering that he has the ability to read or even enter other peoples’ minds.

The story of the novel spans three generations, going back to his grandfather and his peculiar courtship of his wife – originally his patient, as he was the town’s one doctor, sent to Germany for his education – through his own parents’ unusual union, with each marriage, courtship, or broken heart sowing the seeds of future calamities. As Saleem’s mother gives birth, a Christian nurse with anarchist leanings switches his tag with that of another baby born simultaneously, altering not just their fates but, in Saleem’s story, at least, that of India as a whole. Saleem leaves India for Pakistan and returns after two separate exiles, leads a mental conference of the thousand and one children of midnight, becomes an ascetic with a preternatural sense of smell, falls in love with an illusionist, becomes a father and a widower, and ends up with a strange wasting disease that leads him to write down the story of his life, one that cannot be untangled from the story of India from its independence through the novel’s present day. His dabblings with various forms of extremism all lead to disaster, not just for him but for anyone who comes near him – he is convinced that he is the cause of the misery – standing in for India’s own unfortunate swings toward communism or religious hatred.

Rushdie’s prose is at once maddening and magical, maddening because of stylistic quirks like strings of three adjectives without interruption of comma or conjunction, magical in passages like this one, where he introduces one aspect of the novel’s altered reality where the emotions of a cook enter her food and the bodies of those who consume it:

And, now restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people’s food seeping into her – because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes umbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination.

(The meatballs of intransigence. I worked for someone once who ate too many of those.)

I’m only superficially familiar with Indian history, although I hit Wikipedia many times to check and see if events described in the novel were taken from real life. (Unfortunately, most of them were.) But it’s clear that Rushdie intended to satirize many aspects of Indian culture, society, and especially its government; his comments on Indira Gandhi led the despot to sue him for libel when the book was published. Saleem and his family – included a number of cousins, uncles, and aunts who are various shades of wacko – seemed to me to stand in for various problems or crises of India as a whole, writ smaller and often with comic effects.

I could even see this book used in a class on comic novels – I took such a class in college, where I first encountered The Master and Margarita and If on a winter’s night a traveler – because of Rushdie’s use of farce and dry, sidelong wit, including this almost throwaway line where he pokes fun at Saleem’s innocence as the character walks through a dirty city street:

…and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs;

There were a few plot twists that didn’t sit right with me, generally characters making decisions that made little or no sense to me. There’s also a passage where a magician who specializes in making things or people disappear is presumed killed, but it’s not clear why she wouldn’t have used her power to save herself; I imagine it was necessary to have her killed or removed from the story, but the manner in which Rushdie did so felt incomplete, and I was half-expecting her to resurface.

Finally, I found the meandering story of the plot, especially its jumps back and forth in time, to be very distracting, since the transitions often weren’t clear and much of the present-day content was completely ancillary to the main storyline. I thought Rushdie may have even acknowledged the nonlinear, tangential nature of the book through the voice of his main character:

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

But I may be erring by putting words in the author’s mouth when they only emanated from that of one of his creations. It was a tough read – not Tolstoy tough, but maybe Faulkner tough – but the creativity, the humor, and the borderline insanity of the book was remarkable, and as a window into a country and culture with which I wasn’t that familiar, it was an educational read as well.

It’s worth a mention that the witch with whom Saleem falls in love is named Parvati, while his second wife, who appears as audience and muse when he steps back from writing/telling his life story, is named Padma. So perhaps J.K. Rowling, in addition to reading A Dance to the Music of Time and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, read Midnight’s Children and threw in a reference via the names of two of her characters.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s frustrating, dreamlike novel The Unconsoled.

Filed Under: TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ July 2, 2010
→ By

Woman in the Dark and The Wicked Pavilion.

Dashiell Hammett only wrote five novels during his lifetime – I’ve read four and have the fifth, The Dain Curse, on my shelf now – as well as 80 short stories, most of which involved either Sam Spade or The Continental Op as the detective. One of the most unusual works in his bibliography is the novella Woman in the Dark, a suspense story originally published in three parts in Liberty magazine in 1933.

Unfortunately, I’d have to say this is my least favorite Hammett work, and not just because it’s not a detective story. The plot revolves around the titular Woman, Luise Fischer, a kept woman who has fled her abusive boyfriend (Robson) and lands at the house of a man named Brazil who has some criminal activity in his past. A fight scene puts the two on the lam and eventually in hiding with another ex-con that Brazil knows while Robson manipulates the law to try to put Brazil and jail and force Luise to return to him. The conclusion required a last-minute twist and a bit of guesswork on Luise’s part, and I didn’t feel the story went anywhere. That said, bad Hammett beats good work by a lot of authors, and it features his usual crisp prose, noir settings, and characters in various degrees of corruption. It’s just more for completists; if you’re new to Hammett I’d suggest you start with his most famous work, The Maltese Falcon.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded graciously. “Childhood is the happiest time, after all, so why shouldn’t she want to spend her last years in a return to that happy state?”
“I never found anything happy in childhood and neither did you,” Elsie stated pugnaciously. “I don’t think I ever saw a smile on your face till the day you were allowed to clip your own coupons.”

Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion is an ensemble novel, a rare style because it’s so difficult to pull off, but when done well – as here, or in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto – it creates an immersive atmosphere and increases the odds that the reader will identify with one or more characters or subplots.

The Wicked Pavilion revolves around the fictional New York restaurant Cafe Julien, a gathering place for the city’s artists, writers, men-about-town, and various hangers-on. Dalzell is a painter dancing around the poverty line, pining for his halcyon days with his friend Marius, another painter who found tremendous success by dying suddenly in an accident in Mexico. Elsie is the domineering dowager who tries to run the life of her young female friend Jerry, who realizes that Elsie is doing more harm than good – and might be a touch unhinged. Rick and Ellenora are the star-crossed lovers who met in Cafe Julien, and continue to meet there after long periods apart … but this time, Rick has returned from abroad and Ellenora is nowhere to be found. Everyone, to borrow a line from White Christmas, has an angle, even the side characters who populate the book’s fringes, and many of the characters only seem to be pretending to be artists or society women or intellectuals, and Powell never lets on whether her characters are ever happy or merely putting on the good face:

Rick Prescott had been leaning against the park fence watching them for a long time, thinking ruefully that of all the happy workers in the world wreckers were undoubtedly the most enthusiastic.

Rick’s observation seems to set him outside the world of happy workers, while Dalzell’s observations on other artists lay before him how much he’s sold out his art – which may not have been anything special in the first place – while Jerry ends up in the wrong bar at the wrong time and finds herself in a special prison ward for prostitutes, forcing her to contemplate her symbiotic (and destructive) relationship with Elsie.

Powell’s transitions across the three main subplots, often intertwining them by having Rick connect with Jerry at Cafe Julien or Dalzell end up with a patroness of the arts who ends up invited to a party thrown by Elsie, are smooth, and if you’re okay with insightful inner monologues, all three move along well. It’s rich, complex, satirical, witty, and rewarding. I would still suggest anyone new to Powell start with the more linear A Time to Be Born, but The Wicked Pavilion would be a great follow-up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ June 27, 2010
→ By

Taken at the Flood.

I don’t normally write up Agatha Christie books because while each story is different, the general structure is the same, and it’s not like there’s anything new to say about Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, or even Colonel Hastings or Inspector Japp, for that matter. Taken at the Flood had two characteristics that set it apart from the other Christie novels I’ve read so far, so it’s worth a brief post on a Sunday morning.

One is that despite the fact that the book – also published as There is a Tide, both titles coming from a speech by Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – is a Hercule Poirot novel, the man we all know and love doesn’t appear until past the halfway point, outside of a very brief cameo in the prologue. Christie spends the first 60% of the book setting the scene for the first murder, walking us through all the key characters, showing us their motives (in whole or in part), and then following the initial investigation before Poirot finally makes his entrance. I can understand Dame Christie wanting to change it up a little bit, but I happen to like the pompous little Belgian, and I thought his absence took something away from the book, which had a clever plot and a twist in the resolution that I haven’t seen in another Christie novel.

The other unusual facet of Taken at the Flood was what seemed to me to be some sort of political commentary, something I don’t normally associate with Christie’s novels. The plot revolves around the family of a wealthy man who, as a lifelong bachelor, had supported most of them and made grand promises of future support for their own professional endeavors, like expanding the family farm or conducting clinical research instead of working as a family physician. The uncle, Gordon, married while abroad on a trip, only to be killed shortly thereafter in an air raid on London, leaving his young wife a widow in control of his entire fortune, and his expectant heirs out of luck and often in dire straits. I could be reading too much into it, but I thought Gordon was a metaphor for the government and his heirs stood in for people who lived on the dole or otherwise expected to the government to bail them out of their difficulties or, in one character’s case, make working for a living unnecessary. Christie also included several shots at the British government’s taxation schemes during World War II that first gave me the idea that she might be offering a broader comment. Your mileage may vary.

I was pleased to have, for a change, caught two of the most significant clues and pieced together about half of the solution, but once again was far from getting the whole thing. The fun’s in the reading for me, although I do try to form something more than a wild guess as to the killer’s identity and motive. The twist in this one made that quite a bit more difficult than normal.

This marked the 500th novel I’ve read so far, sixteen of which were by Dame Christie.

Next review: Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion. I’m still about three behind my actual reading, but I’m catching up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ June 25, 2010
→ By

Ubik.

Those of you on the fence about buying a Kindle from amazon.com may be interested to learn that they’ve cut the price to $189. Competition is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

—

Philip Dick’s novel Ubik made the TIME list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, one of the few genre novels on the list (and, I’m guessing, a book for which Lev Grossman stumped). I’d read nine other Dick novels, putting The Man in the High Castle – the least sci-fi of any of the books I’ve read from him – on the Klaw 100, but hadn’t read any of his work in close to a decade before picking up this title.

Ubik is typical Dick in that it involves reality turned on its head, where he changes the fundamental conditions of our physical existence, then inserts relatively ordinary people and sees how they act and respond. This time around, there’s a new scientific process that allows people who have died to be placed in a state called “half-life,” where they remain physically dead but their brains can continue to function when they are, in effect, plugged in, a period amounting to a few hours in total between physical death and brain death. So Glen Runciter, who runs an anti-psychic operation, can communicate with his dead wife for a few minutes when he has to make a critical business decision (how terribly romantic), although he runs into trouble early when one such session is interrupted by a neighboring half-lifer who manages to invade the signal.

Joe Chip is one of Runciter’s employees and he, Glen, and ten other employees embark for a highly lucrative mission that goes very wrong when a bomb explodes and somebody dies. What is not clear to the reader is who has died: to the employees, it appears that they all survived but Runciter died, but their world begins acting oddly and they receive messages from their old boss that indicate that they are in half-life and he was the only survivor. The primary mystery of the book is whether or not Joe and his dwindling team are actually alive or in half-life, and they try to chase Runciter’s clues and figure out what they need to do to (half-)survive, with a secondary thread surrounding who is actually controlling their new, unpredictable environment. And the title, a play on the Latin word, ubique, meaning “everywhere” (present in our word ubiquitous or in the Spanish verb ubicar, “to be located”), turns out to be a substance that combats in the rapid physical decay that starts to overtake the members of Joe’s team.

The chapter intros, advertising all manner of products under the Ubik name, usually with comical product warnings, reminded me of the epigrams and fake quotes before chapters in Jasper Fforde’s novels, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear Fforde was a Dick devotee. (Stop laughing.) I also thought the idea of a world being created to order for the person(s) experiencing it has been reused a few times, including The Matrix and one episode of 1980s revival of “The Twilight Zone,” at the least.

Dick uses a few early misdirects to keep you guessing about the real explanation behind the bomb and the weird possibly-half-life world, although the result does leave a few plot strands hanging. I also thought the final chapter, barely over a page in length, felt like a cheap add-on, one that undermined a fairly strong if slightly conventional conclusion in the prior chapter. And it takes a good 20-25 pages for Dick to set up his universe, explaining in often dry terms the various forms of psychic abilities in use as well as the whole half-life phenomenon, a section that took up about 10% of the book. Overall, though, it’s a clever, mind-bending novel, and following Joe (the main protagonist) through his confusion about the changing world and then his attempts to save himself, if not others on his team, was compelling.

The question I have is whether this merited inclusion as one of three true sci-fi novels on the list (along with Neuromancer, a decent novel worthy for its prescience; and Snow Crash, a good read but a poor selection for the 100), along with a pair of fantasy novels and a comic book. I’m not an aficionado of the genre, but I could make a case for the Foundation trilogy (they did give The Lord of the Rings a spot, as well as A Dance to the Music of Time), and would argue for Dick’s alternate-history work The Man in the High Castle as more literary and seemingly more serious. And there’s a separate debate over whether six entries out of 100 is too much for the combined sci-fi/fantasy genre, not including works like Never Let Me Go, A Clockwork Orange, or Animal Farm that used elements of altered reality to tell much more serious stories. I liked Ubik and would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind a little sci in his fi, but as a top 100 candidate it fell short for me.

Next review: I don’t usually review Agatha Christie novels, but Taken at the Flood interested me enough that it’s worth a few grafs.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 24, 2010
→ By

Farewell, My Lovely.

My first notes piece from the Tournament of Stars is up, along with a video of right-hander Christian Montgomery.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

How can you not like Raymond Chandler? He was a serious, literary writer who chose the detective story as his milieu and even wrote one of the greatest essays ever on the art of writing (“The Simple Art of Murder”). His prose was sparse and forceful like Hammett’s, but with a constant undercurrent of wry, self-deprecating humor. And his influence has been enormous.

I think the critical consensus has The Big Sleep as his best novel, but for my money Farewell, My Lovely surpasses it, with a more involved plot, much more insight into the character of the detective, Philip Marlowe, and more dry humor. Marlowe stumbles on a giant man, Moose Malloy, who storms a black nightclub that was previously whites-only, and is more or less dragged upstairs where he sees Malloy slug the bartender and hears him shoot the owner. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a cold call from a potential client who wants him to provide protection for a brief job that night, and despite his own suspicion, goes along … and that’s where the fun really starts.

Chandler weaves the two cases in and out of each other as Marlowe chases one while the other might be chasing him, and while there’s a natural suspicion that the two tracks are related, the answer to that isn’t clear until the very end of the story. I thought we got more insight into Marlowe’s character in this book, from the way he uses the weakness of Jesse Florian to get more information from her to the way he manipulates her nosy neighbor to his handling of the liberated young Anne Riordan. There’s a con-man psychic, marijuana cigarettes, a kidnapping, lots of booze, and the usual spot-on prose from the master of the genre.

Next review: Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 23, 2010
→ By

Death in the Truffle Wood.

Pierre Magnan’s Commissaire Laviolette novels have long enjoyed success in France but have just recently become available in English, starting with the series opener, Death in the Truffle Wood.

A number of hippies have gone missing recently in a small, nondescript town in Provence, and as the novel opens the reader witnesses another murder, unrelated except for the fact that it occurs as the serial killer is dumping one of his bodies, tying the two crimes together, albeit clumsily. Long, lazy passages introduce us to the various residents of the town (that is, the pool of potential suspects), most of whom are involved in some way with the truffle business. (The mushrooms, that is, not the chocolates.) Magnan gives us a few passages devoted to the fungus and local customs and dishes built around it, but not quite enough for my tastes. Eventually, the book’s nominal star, Laviolette, arrives in the town on an ambiguous, almost unofficial assignment to solve the string of murders, and he begins by trying to break down the barriers thrown up by the local citizens, most of whom date their heritage in that town for generations, toward any outsider.

Two aspects of Death in the Truffle Wood bothered me. One was the language, which could be a translation issue as much as a prose issue, but throughout the book Magnan showed a sparse style that seemed less an homage to the classic hard-boiled novels I enjoy than just laziness, like Magnan couldn’t be bothered with details, as in this absymal section on a kitchen scene that’s tangential to the main action:

The owner, in a state of panic at his overloaded stoves, inundated his underlings with contradictory orders. Little by little, however, everything fell into place and order reigned once more.

Oh, everything fell into place? That’s nice to hear. If you’re not going to fill in the picture, don’t sketch out the outline. As it was, Magnan had several asides along those lines that desultory nods toward the standard expectations of scene-setting, which stood in stark contrast to his over-long descriptions of the potential suspects, presented in awkward internal monologues before the plot can really get rolling.

The second problem was the fact that the alleged star of the book, Commissaire Laviolette, fades so easily into the background and has little to do with solving the case. In fact, he missed one of the most obvious clues I have ever seen in any detective novel, the pig’s reaction to a specific patron in the town’s bar. But he also lacked character or personality, and the novel reads like a mystery that solves itself.

I’m willing to concede that some of the trouble could be the result of a poor translation and would give the series another chance, but I’m going to try to get the next book, The Messengers of Death, in the original French and see if that makes a difference (even though it will take me substantially longer to get through it). But right now, I have a feeling this is another case of reviewers fawning over a novel that was a hit in another language and country first even though, had it been written by an American and published first in English, they would have seen it for the thin, somewhat drab novel that it is.

Next review: Back to a master of the genre, Raymond Chandler, with Farewell, My Lovely.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ June 21, 2010
→ By

Fer-de-Lance.

I’m back from a week of vacation in St. Kitts with my phone completely off and no access to email. Add to that a copious supply of rum and it might have been the greatest week of my life. I will get to a post running through the places where we ate as well as general thoughts on the island later in the week.

I also went through seven books in seven days, mostly detective stories, starting with my first exposure to Nero Wolfe in print form with Rex Stout’s first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance. I’ve heard several of the classic radio programs starring Sidney Greenstreet as the corpulent, eccentric genius who solves crimes without leaving his office/apartment and raises and breeds orchids when he’s not playing detective. The real leg work falls to his employee and occasional verbal sparring partner Archie Goodwin, who also handles some of the orchid-management duties and often finds himself frustrated in the face of Wolfe’s ability to draw correct conclusions from limited data.

Fer-de-Lance is the first of the 33 novels Stout wrote, although he didn’t write it as an introductory novel, making references to (nonexistent) prior cases and character histories so that the novel’s beginning isn’t bogged down in lengthy details or dull tangents. The case involves an Italian immigrant who goes missing and turns up dead and a college President who drops dead suddenly on a golf course, with Wolfe and Goodwin making the connection and Wolfe figuring out how the core murder was committed but not knowing for certain who committed it until later in the book. The climax, where Wolfe reveals the killer’s identity to the police, is a bit over the top but certainly enjoyable.

Two major facets of Fer-de-Lance propelled the book forward for me. One is the two fascinating characters of Wolfe and Goodwin. Wolfe is a maddening (but not mad) genius, exacting, arrogant, but brilliant and logical, relying on the psychology of suspects much as Hercule Poirot typically does. Goodwin chafes under his boss’s condescension but ultimately must bow to Wolfe’s superior powers of deduction; he’s too much of a dandy to be hard-boiled but does fill the role of the hard-boiled detective who pounds the pavement, threatening and being threatened, while Wolfe sits in the comfort of his office. Stout sets up a number of avenues of friction between the two for subsequent books.

The other was Stout’s approach to revealing the crime to the reader, which deviated from the standard formula where the author saves the final details for the last chapter or two of the book. In many detective or mystery novels, that’s almost a requirement, as the reader’s curiosity provides velocity to the text that is lacking in pedestrian writing, but Stout’s characterization and simple and witty prose are strong enough to drive the reader forward even after Wolfe and Goodwin have settled on the killer’s identity and instead work backwards to prove that Wolfe’s answer is correct, rather than following clues to a conclusion that ends the book.

I enjoyed Fer-de-Lance but wouldn’t class it with Christie’s intricate, subtle plotting, or Chandler’s terse, literary prose; it’s faster and easier but without the same depth, definitely worth the time if you’re familiar with any of the Wolfe adaptations and want to see the character in his original form, or if you’re looking for a quick, fun, yet still intelligent detective novel.

Next up: There’s not too much new to say on the 20th Wodehouse novel I’ve read, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, other than that it’s vintage Wooster, so I’ll skip ahead to Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood for the next writeup. I’m currently reading Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi (also published as The Zen of Fish).

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ June 11, 2010
→ By

Olive Kitteridge.

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy; but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted o be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed.

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge , winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is a novel of short stories, all connected by their setting and the presence of the title character, the crotchety, depressed, and often cruel retired schoolteacher whose role varies from episode to episode. In several stories, she sits at the center, sometimes with her long-suffering husband Henry, sometimes with her semi-estranged son Christopher (whose life appears to be the long process of recovery from having Olive as a mother), and at the end, in “River,” as the star.

Along the way we meet many other residents of the small town Crosby, Maine, the suicides and would-be suicides, the drunks, the faithless spouses, the grieving widow, the older couple looking for safety in each other, almost nobody happy and nearly everyone dealing in some way with depression. That makes for compelling reading, as Strout’s understanding not so much of the human psyche but of the why and how we become depressed is so deep that she can paint these characters with a delicate hand, but it also makes for a complete freaking downer of a book. It is great literature, with prose reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s, and Olive is a riveting and fully realized character, but she’s also unlikeable for her coldness and her refusal – or inability – to take responsibility for her actions and their effects on those around her.

The short story novel concept is a new one to me – whether this even qualifies as a novel is a matter of opinion, but the presence of Olive in every episode and the overarching story arc of this later period of life does tie everything together with a clear direction from start to finish – and reading it gave me the feeling of watching a season of a TV series, each episode self-contained, introducing a new cast around the central character. The downside is that we merely get glimpses into each side character, such as Angie, the alcoholic piano player whose role as the other woman is contributing to her malaise, or Julie, the overdramatic woman jilted on her wedding day by a fiance who wants to be with her but not to marry her, and whose conclusion is open-ended and unsatisfying. But I don’t think Strout’s goal was to satisfy but to, as the blurb on the back cover says (in a rare instance of one of such text proving accurate), “offer profound insights into the human condition.” And I’d say on that front, she succeeded. I just wouldn’t call her if I had a case of the blues.

Next up: Vacation, with at least nine books in tow, starting with Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance and Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood. And since this is a real vacation, involving planes and such, I’ll be offline all of next week, including, most blissfully of all, email.

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→ June 10, 2010
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The Magician’s Assistant, etc.

I loved Ann Patchett’s breakout novel, Bel Canto, in every way imaginable – for its plot, for its prose, and for its rich, wide array of compelling, well-drawn characters*, but found her follow-up, Run, to be a thin, hackneyed love letter to then-candidate Barack Obama disguised as a novel.

*The Q&A with Patchett at the back of her last novel had an enlightening line from her about how, to her, all her novels are alike, because each is her attempt to rewrite Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I got about 40 pages into that book and bailed, because the prose was maddening, but knowing the general plot I can see the correlation between it and Bel Canto. So, nice work, Ann – I think you rewrote it in a way that people are more likely to finish it.

The Magician’s Assistant precedes Bel Canto in Patchett’s bibliography and shares its theme of people from different worlds thrown together by fate, although its cast is smaller and there are some elements of magical realism that weren’t in either of her two later novels. The novel opens as Sabine, the assistant of the title, finds herself suddenly widowed after the magician she assisted for twenty years suffered an aneurysm. But it turns out that the magician, Parsifal, was gay, and their marriage was one of convenience, with Sabine’s love for her boss-turned-husband unrequited, and Parsifal’s partner, Phan, died not long before Parsifal did. And after Parsifal’s death, Sabine finds out the family he claimed died in a car accident is, in fact, alive in Nebraska, and when they learn of her existence, they fly to Los Angeles to meet her, which results in a trip for Sabine to Nebraska to explore her late husband’s past.

The novel is filled with people, nearly all women, in various stages of broken, with Sabine perhaps at the top of the list. She’s confused by Parsifal’s refusal to confide the details of his past in her, and grieves in part through dreams or visions of Phan and eventually Parsifal in some sort of afterlife. While she’s looking for direction, the women in Nebraska – Parsifal’s mother and two sisters – are each looking for something different, closure for the mother, an escape (or simply an answer) for the older sister, a connection to a lost brother for the younger one. It’s not devoid of action, although some of the most active scenes are told through flashbacks, but the book is driven by the emotions of the central characters, and other than a sentimental (but, I confess, moving) ending, these emotions felt very real throughout the novel.

Patchett was still rounding into form in this novel, and the book suffers from its lack of a decent male character – decent in the sense of well-formed but also as a comment on their behavior. Sabine’s father is wonderful, but a cipher in the context of the book. The two best male characters to get any screen time are both dead. Parsifal’s father, brother-in-law, and younger sister’s fiance are all two-dimensional and either jerks or wallflowers. Bel Canto had far better developed male characters as part of its amazing menagerie of hostages and terrorists, each drawn clearly and fully in ways that the men of Magician’s Assistant are not. It’s worth reading, but only after you’ve read Bel Canto.

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I mentioned starting Walter Moers’ Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures, but quit after 150 pages because the book wasn’t going anywhere and I had 500+ pages to go. I loved Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear and liked The City of Dreaming Books, but he repeated himself in Rumo and the latter book didn’t have the whimsy or character development of the other two novels.

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Next up: I’ve got about 50 pages to go in Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, which for some unknown reason is only $6 on amazon.com.

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