The Hunter and Heavy Weather.

Cape Cod League top 30 prospects: 30-16 and 15-1. I’ll be on ESPN 1000 Chicago’s 9-11 pm program, but we’re taping it beforehand so I don’t know exactly when I’ll be on.

Richard Stark’s The Hunter is a different sort of hard-boiled novel from the ones I usually read. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote about good guy private eyes who were tough and comfortable with moral ambiguity but rarely strayed into darker territory. The Hunter revolves around a thief named Parker who is hellbent on revenge against the girl and guy who betrayed him during a big score, shooting him and leaving him for dead.

The story starts with Parker catching up with the woman, then jumps back to tell us about the score gone wrong, then shifts focus to Parker’s other prey, the onetime partner who masterminded the betrayal but realizes that Parker isn’t dead. Where Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe would knock a guy cold, Parker kills him – he kills for revenge, he kills for leverage, he kills to send messages. He shows remorse for one death he didn’t plan, but otherwise reasons away every kill (when he reasons them at all) as justified. Stark’s style is dry and efficient, short sentences, minimal details. It moves, and I found myself pulling for Parker despite the fact that he’s a nasty piece of work.

The Hunter was a ripping read until the last five pages, when Stark (actually a pseudonym for the prolific Donald Westlake) has Parker, normally a meticulous planner, make an uncharacteristically sloppy mistake, perhaps just for the purpose of sending him on one last major score in the final few paragraphs of the book. It seemed out of character and forced for a story that was an effortless work up until that point. It’s absolutely worth the read, but I found that ending to be a letdown after 98% of the book was so strong.

I don’t devote much time to P.G. Wodehouse books for two reasons. One, I’ve flogged his stuff relentlessly enough that if you were ever going to try him, you probably already have. Two, his books more or less share the same plot but with different gags and twists to get to the same ending. Heavy Weather, part of the Blandings Castle series and a direct sequel to Summer Lightning, gets a mention here for the wrong reason: It was dull and not that funny. It has to be the first Wodehouse novel I didn’t enjoy, and I kept waiting for the comedy to kick in; it’s just a continuation of the plot of Summer Lightning, picking up just a day or two after the previous novel ends, and it lacked both Wodehouse’s typical silly situations and wisecracks and his trick of weaving multiple seemingly unconnected plots into one pat solution.

I’m writing this on a plane and they’re showing the chick-flick “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” I looked up to see Matthew McConaghey destroy a wedding cake because he pushed the cork out of a champagne bottle instead of holding it and twisting the bottle. Really? Does anyone actually open a bottle of champagne by letting the cork go flying? I will say this, though: Whoever the casting director was, he clearly had a good time with this film. That’s a lot of good-looking women in one movie. Otherwise it looks like the kind of flick my wife would watch when I’m traveling.

Next up: William Styron’s controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

No Country for Old Men.

Tentatively scheduled to be on Mike & Mike at 8:42 am EDT on Monday. Latest draft blog entry is posted, with updates on the Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Rangers.

I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men before seeing the film and knocked it off in just three days. The book is riveting, a quick-moving hard-boiled mystery along the Texas-Mexico border that starts when Llewelyn Moss comes upon the carnage at the scene of a failed drug shipment, decides to take the money he finds, and ends up hunted by the law and by an amoral hit man named Anton Chigurh. The story is interspersed with first-person passages from Sheriff Bell, who tries to make some sense of the violence and disregard for life he saw while pursuing Chigurh. It is quick and dense with action; McCarthy makes scenes like Chigurh buying medical supplies and treating himself for bullet wounds interesting and fast.

I still haven’t seen the film version, but if the movie was true to the book for the character of Chigurh, I’m surprised to see that any actor could win an Oscar for that role. Chigurh is central, and he is undeniably scary, but he is also completely one-dimensional and boring. He’s an automaton, a remorseless, reasonless killer with no personality and little action in the book beyond (sometimes inventive) murders. The reader sees Chigurh from the omniscient narrator’s perspective, but the narrator’s view is limited to Chigurh’s actions during the events of the novel, and we are left with the same confusion and lack of information as Sheriff Bell, who refers to Chigurh as a “ghost” and whose window into Chigurh is limited to the events laid out in the novel. We know Chigurh by the trail of dead, but we know nothing else of him. (One possible interpretation of Chigurh is that he is Fate or, more likely, Death, which would explain the lack of emotion and inability to change his course of action; I imagine you could write a whole thesis on that topic.) Sheriff Bell is the most interesting and complex character, but he’s not involved in the action – he’s the thoughtful, not-dead narrator who can’t figure out the hows and whys of what he witnessed – almost as if he’s God looking down on a world gone mad.

I also found McCarthy’s prose, a little unclear in the best of circumstances, to be at its most confusing in No Country, not just due to his standard aversion to punctuation but also due to the constant scene-shifting. There are two unnamed characters in offices whose roles were never clear to me, and, when one of them is killed, I wasn’t even sure which one it was.

The problems with thin characters only bothered me upon reflection – the book was a fantastic read because of the pacing and McCarthy’s tremendous and sometimes beautiful prose, and there’s plenty of material to consider after the fact that makes up for the weak characterizations. It’s not as good as Blood Meridian or The Road but still a solid read.

Next up: Back to Blandings Castle for some Heavy Weather.

The Death of the Heart.

TV today – ESPNEWS at 2:40 and Outside the Lines in the 3 pm half-hour, both EDT.

Articles: Preview of the signing deadline. First report from the Under Armour Game. Second report should be up this afternoon.

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart appears on both the TIME and Bloomsbury lists and ranked 84th on the Modern Library 100; TIME‘s Richard Lacayo praised the way Bowen used the main character, 16-year-old ingenue/orphan Portia, to reveal the cruelty of the characters around her: “In the mirror of her innocent eyes, experience will catch a glimpse of its own reflection. It’s not a pretty picture.”

This theme was unmistakeable, as Portia is particularly useful to Bowen in laying bare the selfish, jealous, spiteful nature of Anna, wife of Portia’s half-brother Thomas; after Portia’s parents die, she goes to stay with Anna and Thomas in London, only to find herself tied up in the quiet, seething resentment and anger between them, Anna’s paramours (whether consummated or not isn’t quite clear, although I don’t think it needs to be), and that most essential element in any English novel, the servants. Bowen does infuse some comic elements, but the novel’s greatest strength is in her descriptive prose:

Portia had learnt one dare never look for long. She had those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere, that learn shyness from the alarm they precipitate. Such eyes are always turning away or being humbly lowered – they dare come to rest nowhere but on a point in space; their homeless intentness makes them appear fanatical. They may move, they may affront, but they cannot communicate. You most often meet or, rather, avoid meeting such eyes in a child’s face – what becomes of the child later you do not know.

Bowen also has a little fun with caricatures, not of whole characters but of little traits, some humorous, some shocking:

She walked about with the rather fate expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her…

But ultimately, The Death of the Heart is dull. Very little happens; Portia falls for one of Anna’s beaux, the shiftless, irresponsible Eddie, earning the scorn of just about everyone around her and heading for an inevitable heartbreak at Eddie’s hands. Bowen focuses so heavily on emotions and settings that the plot, while not truly thin, is short, and the novel’s end brought release from the oppressive air of the time period.

Next up: Non-fiction with Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, the story of his year in exile in a tiny mountain village in southern Italy.

Charlotte’s Web.

TV on Monday: 2:40 pm EDT on ESPNEWS and 3 pm on Outside the Lines.

Between Then We Came to the End and The Magicians, I read the #13 book on the Radcliffe 100, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, which also appears at #63 on the Guardian 100. I’ve seen both the 1973 animated adaptation and the the 2006 live-action version – we own the latter on DVD and I’ve probably seen it in whole or in parts 50 times, as my daughter went through a phase where she wanted to “watch the pig” over and over again – but I don’t think I had ever read the book; if I did, it was when I was much, much younger.

The story is probably familiar to most of you – a spider and a pig form an unlikely friendship where the spider, Charlotte, comes up with an amazing plan to save the pig, Wilbur, from ending up the entree at Christmas dinner. Charlotte’s actions attract plenty of human interest, but it isn’t until her final web that she knows she’s saved Wilbur’s live, after which he has an opportunity to return the favor in some way by saving her egg sac.

What disturbed me most about the book was the discovery that the screenwriters behind the live-action movie had changed so much of the dialogue and story. In the book, the animals play a much smaller role, and there’s no horse or crows. Fern’s younger brother has more dialogue and is less of a brat, while Fern herself actually turns away from Wilbur when she develops a crush on a boy in her class – a fickle friendship that serves as a counterpoint to the friendship between Wilbur and Charlotte. When it’s clear that Charlotte’s plan has succeeded, Fern is more interested in getting more money to go on another ride with her new boy-toy. Templeton, the rat, isn’t quite so Steve Buscemi-like, with a little more personality and a little more interest in helping Charlotte. (A little, but not much.) And Wilbur is a lot less childlike in the book, with even a touch of sarcasm was wiped out in the film version.

But most of all, I was shocked by the book’s ending – Charlotte lives! How the hell could they change that?

The Magicians.

First blog post from the Area Code games is up on the Draft Blog. Second one is filed and should appear on Friday morning. I’ll also be on the telecast of the Under Armour Game on ESPNU on Saturday, making a few short appearances from the stands or the dugout if we can work out the logistics.

Friend of the dish Lev Grossman came to my attention because of his work (with Richard Lacayo) on the TIME 100, and when I asked them to do a Q&A for the dish about that ranking, Lev asked if I’d be interested in reading his upcoming book, The Magicians, which comes out in hardcover on Tuesday. I knocked off the book on my flight to California on Tuesday – all but 20 pages, to be exact, although I finished the book before I got to my rental car – and absolutely recommend it. (And no, I wouldn’t recommend it solely because Lev’s a Friend of the dish. It’s legitimately awesome.)

The Magicians will inevitably be called a grown-up rejoinder to Harry Potter, and Grossman does borrow from Rowling’s works while alluding to other giants of the fantasy genre, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Faerûn. The central character, Quentin, is a young, very bright, heartsick loner in present-day Brooklyn who dreams of a world like that in his favorite series of books, about a magical world called Fillory which is accessed through a grandfather clock in the house of a British family. Quentin is a skilled magician in the real-world sense of card tricks and disappearing nickels, but eventually discovers that the magic of spells and incantations is real and enrolls at a college for magicians that bears a few resemblances to Hogwarts. Unlike the innocent teenagers of Harry Potter’s world, however, Quentin and his classmates drink, smoke, swear, and screw, although I think they do more drinking than the other three things combined, and eventually embark on a sort of kill-the-big-foozle quest that defies their (and the reader’s) expectations.

Grossman manages to straddle the line between straight storycraft and outright parody brilliantly. One can read The Magicians as a retelling of the Potter myth with older kids, greater tragedies, and more complex interactions between characters, as well as several cliche-mocking twists in the final hundred-odd pages that skewer not just Rowling’s work but the standard plot devices of fantasy and science fiction. (There’s also a great shot across Rowling’s bow in defense of American magic.) Yet never does the book descend to the superficial, sneering tone that pure parody often has, as The Magicians‘ story stands strongly on its own, built around a complex, brooding central character, and an accelerating plot that grows from school-aged dramas involving crushes and difficult exams to life-and-death struggles in another world. He adds depth to two of the main characters with glimpses into their dysfunctional family lives, and ties up just about every loose plot strand or seemingly incongruous event as the novel speeds to a too-early finish – and the final two pages seemed word-perfect to me both as I read them and as I replayed them for hours after reading.

I do have minor quibbles with the book – there’s a “why do bad things happen to good people” discussion that seemed cursory and labored, and the way Quentin discovers a friend of his is gay was a little out of place and didn’t end up tying into anything else in the book. There is also one major event near the novel’s end that was like a slug to the chest to read, although I could see it as a counterpoint to Rowling, who largely skipped that sort of tragedy in Deathly Hallows (justifiably, given her audience). Grossman is also a big fan of the sentence fragment – “But still.” appeared at least twice – although I think that will only annoy the sliver of you who are as hardcore about grammar as I am.

Where The Magicians succeeds most is in Grossman’s creation of an immersive world within his book, and then a world within that world for his characters. Fforde, Rowling, and Murakami all have that ability to draw me into the pages of a book so that finishing the work is akin to waking from a pleasant dream. Grossman has achieved that same feat here.

Next up: Why not follow this with another book from the TIME 100? Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

Then We Came to the End.

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End starts out as a modern-day Catch-22, the hell of the cubicle-farm replacing the hell of war, but two abrupt changes in direction turn it into a more serious work, resulting in an often hilarious but uneven, disjointed novel that, despite the odd construction and mood shifts, I still enjoyed and would recommend.

The story, told almost entirely in the first-person plural, revolves around a bunch of employees in the creative area of a Chicago advertising firm that is slowly dying during the end of the dot-com bubble, with the group’s ranks diminishing by one or two with each round of layoffs. Lightening workloads mean more time for gossip, pranks, and the silly office games that seem to take place in every company that looks even a little bit like this. (The best gag in the book, about an office chair, reminded me of my favorite mousepad, one I bought through a site I’ll call F’dCompany, that reads: “you can have my aeron when you pry it off my cold dead ass.”) The first half of the book is frequently hilarious and offers a great blend of realism and absurdity – nothing in the book is impossible or even improbable, but everything is dialed up to be a little funnier or a little more ridiculous. The second half of the novel becomes more serious as one of the colleagues gets a serious medical diagnosis and a couple of the laid-off workers start to get a little weirder; although Ferris starts to give the reader a clichéd ending, it turns out to be a parody of the cliché rather than what would have been a colossal letdown in the plot.

The main problem I had with the novel is that right about at the halfway point, Ferris inserted a short story about the character who gets sick written in a different voice with a completely different tone. If I had to guess, I’d wager that Ferris had originally written this short story but found no outlet for it or was unable to expand it into a novel, so he inserted it into this novel and built the character into the novel’s story and made her subplot the primary plot of the novel’s second half. It has a disconnected feel similar to that of the end of Ender’s Game, where Orson Scott Card stuck a separate short story he’d written on to the end of what was otherwise a fun if somewhat simple sci-fi adventure/coming-of-age novel. That story and its integration felt forced, and the jarring shift in narration in Ferris’ novel was similar.

The other issue with the book is that there’s no central character with whom the reader is likely to connect – even the character in the short story isn’t terribly sympathetic, and we don’t get much insight into any other characters besides her. Ferris is working with an ensemble of interesting, quirky characters who are well defined but who by and large don’t develop and spend the entire novel at arm’s length from the reader.

Despite those two issues, Then We Came to the End is a funny and quick book that still manages to hit some serious themes, especially about work-life balance and how work has become life in different ways for many people in the workforce today.

Next up: The Magicians, the upcoming novel from Friend of the dish Lev Grossman.

The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.

Hits from Tuesday: Chicago’s Baseball Tonight (scroll to around 21:00), The Herd, Baseball Tonight (radio).

Upcoming: I’ll be on ESPN 97.3 FM in Philly/south New Jersey today at 4:10 pm EDT, and on ESPN 710 in LA tomorrow at 11:42 am PDT. I’ll be on ESPNEWS on and off on Friday afternoon between noon and 5 pm EDT for trade deadline coverage.

I found out about Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard
through a Michael Chabon entry in the NPR series You Must Read This, where contemporary authors write about semi-forgotten classics they consider must-reads. As a fan of ACD’s Sherlock Holmes stories, I had high expectations for Brigadier Gerard that weren’t quite met by the seventeen stories in this complete collection.

Brigadier Gerard is a cavalier in the Hussars of Napoleon’s army, a loyal, brave, pompous, and slightly gullible (but not stupid) man who is often entrusted with dangerous tasks that he mucks up before coming up with a clever solution – or having one fall in his lap. He’s unusual among characters of this sort in that he’s a little simple-minded yet is charming and resourceful and clearly sympathetic, even if ACD was having a little fun with stereotypes of the French.

The stories were written by an Englishman for an English audience, so a lot of the humor relies on cultural knowledge that’s foreign to this American reader. (For example, Gerard causes trouble in an English fox hunt, but I had to infer why the punch line was funny, having zero experience with this sort of activity. Perhaps I should have given Dog Killer a call?) Some of the humor is universal, such as Gerard entirely missing the point when another character is lightly mocking him or misinterpreting a gesture or action, but I could only assume these stories are much funnier to a Brit. I also found the pacing to be slower than the Holmes stories, despite a healthy quantity of action in the majority of Gerard’s escapades.

I’d still recommend the book because Gerard is an endearing character; his conceit is largely backed up by his exploits, and there is something undeniably charming in his Old-World attitudes and longing for the bygone days of Imperial France. Chabon, unfortunately, set unrealistic expectations for me with his lavish praise of stories that are fun but not, for me, must-reads.

Next up: Joshua Ferris’ 2007 debut novel, Then We Came to the End.

The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath is an angry, incendiary novel that blends poetic prose and sharp characterization with a severe downward-spiral plot and one-dimensional antagonists to incite a specific reaction in the reader, one of revulsion toward an economic system that, in Steinbeck’s view, was impoverishing an enormous class of Americans while enriching a lucky few. It’s a six-lister, ranking #10 on the Modern Library 100, #3 on the Radcliffe 100, and #54 on The Novel 100, and only missing from the Guardian 100. (I don’t believe any book shows up on all seven of the booklists I use, partly a function of their varying eras – such a novel would have to have been published between 1900 and 1950, in English – and partly a function of the Guardian‘s clear contrarian bent.) According to Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, it was banned and burned when first published due to its political perspective and controversial closing scene, while literary critics frowned on its preachy dialogue, thin characters, and bombastic plotting, but its reputation appears to have been rehabilitated over time, with the work now widely recognized as an American classic.

The family at the story’s center is the Joads, one of many Oklahoman families who lose their farms and head west toward the promised land of California, where jobs allegedly await these families if they can handle the trek across the southwest. The chapters alternate between those focusing on the Joads’ plight and general scene-setting chapters that provide background for the core plot and give Steinbeck a chance to wax poetically, as on the subject of Route 66:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

The Joads reach California but not entirely intact, and end up in a “government camp,” a squatter’s paradise with real buildings, clean sanitary facilities, and a fair but strong system of self-government that enforces cooperative behavior through social pressure and the rarely-used threat of ouster. The system works perfectly, and even an attempted coup by outsiders is quickly thwarted through teamwork. It is the idyllic view of communism common to much literature of the interwar era, although to be fair to Steinbeck, the camp was not a unit or system of economic production but a social safety net for the unfortunates swept aside by capitalist greed during the Depression. The Joads aren’t in the camp for very long, but the idea of a self-enforcing system like this one operating without a whiff of corruption among those in power is incredibly naive. Steinbeck’s commentary isn’t just limited to the scene-setting chapters, and one major criticism of the novel is that he puts his opinions into the dialogue, making characters sometimes seem like mouthpieces for his political views, like Uncle John’s comments on rampant consumerism:

Funny thing, I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don’t need … Stuff settin’ out there, you jus’ feel like buyin’ it whether you need it or not.

Steinbeck’s prose didn’t seem bombastic to me, nor was I troubled by slightly preachy dialogue; perhaps the 70 years since the book’s publication have seen such widespread degradation in prose writing that what was overbearing in 1939 seems fresh and clever today. Most impressive to me, however, was the book’s pacing. The Joads lose their farm, travel west over sparse land, and end up in a Hardy-esque series of big and small calamities in California that leave the reader afraid to hope for anything, yet Steinbeck focuses on little details like repair work on the family’s car to keep the text moving even when the family isn’t. There’s also a clear faith in the goodness of man – at least, of poor man – encapsulated not just in the jarring final scene but in many small sacrifices made by and for the Joads earlier in the book.

I wondered on Twitter last week if Cormac McCarthy had any of this book in mind when writing The Road, a similarly what-the-hell-can-go-wrong-next story that also focuses on a parent trying to keep a family together against impossible odds. The Joads know the name of their destination on the desolate road, but don’t know what it holds; the Man doesn’t know the name of his destination, but has a similarly vague sense of what might be there to go with the strong sense that he must take the Boy there. Both books show the best and worst of humanity in horrible situations. Both authors put substantial focus on food – not just the search for the next source, but on the consumption of it. And perhaps the father and son in the barn at the end of Grapes inspired McCarthy to build a novel around a boy and his father.

I may have more to say on Grapes of Wrath, since it, like The Road, inspires so much thought after the first reading, but in the meantime, I’ve moved on to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.

Living & Party Going.

Henry Green’s Loving appears to only be in print in the U.S. in a volume containing two of his other novels, Living and Party Going, and since I enjoyed the first novel I decided to try the other two. (Incidentally, these latter two novels don’t appear to be copyrighted in the U.S., at least not according to the cover page that indicates that Loving is copyrighted in this country.)

Living was Green’s first novel, and was the worst of the three in this volume by a fair margin. The story is, as is typical for Green, thin, revolving around workers in a Birmingham foundry that is poorly managed by its declining owner and that faces upheaval when he dies. The prose, however, is excruciating, because Green chose to omit most definite and indefinite articles, so even strong phrasings become painful to read:

Were tins of pineapple in that shop window and she wondered and languor fell on her like in a mist as when the warm air comes down in cold earth; in images she saw in her heart sun countries, sun, and the infinite ease of warmth.

The closest thing to a central storyline is the secret romance between Lily and Bert, a factory worker who sees no future for himself in Birmingham and decides to elope with Lily and move to Canada. The unraveling of that romance is one of the most absurd ends to a plot that I have ever seen, rivaling Tony Last’s fate in A Handful of Dust.

Party Going, on the other hand, is more conventionally written and, while not classically plotted, at least follows a more defined pattern by showing us a specific block of time for a specific set of characters. Those characters, a group of friends plotting a getaway to the south of France, end up stuck in a railway station and then in its associated hotel when the trains are all delayed indefinitely by fog. Their reactions to various inconveniences (mostly minor) and to the sudden, unexplained illness of the aunt of one member of the party make up the bulk of the action of the novel, although there’s a bit more drama when the crazy girlfriend of one of the characters shows up unannounced as if she was supposed to be on the trip all along.

As bad as Green’s prose was in Living from a readability standpoint, the prose in Party Going is the novel’s greatest strength:

Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone. Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness.

Even when he lapses into the modernist style of Woolf or James, he can still craft an image compelling enough to pull the reader through the awkward syntax:

Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.
Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances.

Party Going also offers more small humor along the lines of Loving, including some witty dialogue between the characters and other lines demonstrating their lack of self-awareness when trying to treat station workers like servants, while Living was nearly devoid of humor save that of the old-guard managers at the foundry who attempt to stymie the young boss trying to coax changes in the plant’s operations. Green also shifts back and forth deftly between the primary focus on the fatuous upper-class twits at the novel’s center and their beleaguered servants who, by the way, have to wait out the fog in the station while their masters relax in comfort in the hotel.

EDIT: Almost forgot – one thing I did wonder about Party Going, which Green wrote in the late 1930s, was whether the fog represented Nazi Germany, creeping up on an England too wrapped up in itself to notice the impending danger. The fog lifts at the novel’s end, which probably disproves the theory, although I could craft an argument that Green was commenting on the English aristocracy’s reliance on luck, fate, God, or simply on other parties to get it out of trouble.

Next up: The Grapes of Wrath. No, I’ve never read it before.

Loving.

Henry Green was an unusual man who wrote unusual books, nearly all with one-word titles ending in “-ing.” One of his best-regarded novels, Loving, made the Modern Library 100 (#89) and the TIME 100. It has little plot and can be hard to follow, but the depiction of class differences in World War II Ireland (featuring an English family trying to escape the war and their English and Irish servants) is clever, incisive, and sometimes quite funny. The scattered, snobbish matriarch refers to all butlers as “Raunce,” regardless of their actual names; constantly loses items; and is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter-in-law is shagging another man under the same roof. The butler who ascends to the title when the previous one dies is a money-grubbing, status-conscious, fatuous man, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. One of the female servants is in love with Raunce; the other seems to have no idea with whom she’s in love, but wants to be in love with someone.

The plot is paper thin; it would be more accurate to say it comprises several subplots, including a lost or stolen sapphire ring, the romance between Raunce and Edith, and stories like the daughter-in-law’s affair that are almost background noise behind the nonstop dialogue among the servants. Green’s writing style is peculiar, with abrupt transitions from subject to subject and speaker to speaker and a cavalier attitude towards punctuation:

‘Now me lad she wants that glove and don’t forget.’
‘What glove?’
‘The old gardening glove Edith went birds’-nesting with,’ Raunce replied. ‘Holy Moses look at the clock,’ he went on, ‘ten to three and me not on me bed. Come on look slippy.’ He whipped out the decanter while Bert provided those tumblers that had not yet been dried. ‘God rest his soul,’ Raunce added in a different tone of voice then carried on,
‘Wet glasses? Where was you brought up?’

And the setting and subtle humor are reminiscent of Waugh and Wodehouse, two of my favorite authors, although I found Green’s prose a bit offputting until I got used to it.

Next in my queue is Green’s first novel, Living. For more on Green, this review of a biography of Green offers quite a bit of detail on his life and writing career.