→ November 11, 2009
→ By

The Case of the Missing Books.

I’m back and online again. I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 3 pm EST (and maybe again later that half hour) to discuss the NL Gold Glove Award winners. There’s at least one awful oversight on par with Franklin Gutierrez from the AL awards. Klawchat is on for tomorrow at 1 pm EST.

Ian Sansom’s The Case of the Missing Books is the first in the “Mobile Library” series of pseudo-detective novels, but wasn’t good enough to get me to attack the second book (which one of you mentioned in the comments on the last post was unreadable anyway). The story revolves around sad-sack librarian Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from London who takes a librarian job in a rural Irish town, sight unseen, only to find that the job has changed to one overseeing a mobile library, and that all fifteen thousand books have gone missing. This leads Israel to play detective – badly – to try to find them.

For the most part Sansom just borrows gags from other writers or, in the case of all the bathroom humor, from time immemorial. The vegetarian-served-a-meal-of-meat gag? (Saw that in Everything is Illuminated, and it wasn’t funny then, either.) The blue-collar guy with an unexpected interest in classic literature? The driver who can’t seem to keep his car on the road? Jokes about Israel’s name? There was very little original humor in the book, and with a pretty thin plot – halfway through the book, Israel is barely settled in the town of Tundrum, and I wouldn’t say he makes any progress in the case until the final 50-60 pages – there’s nothing left to sustain the book. It’s a quick read because of all the dialogue, and some of the dialogue is quick and snappy, but it raises the question of whether Sansom can write decent prose, and some of the dialogue brings an unnecessary level of detail around ordinary events in Israel’s day.

Next review will be much more positive, though – Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 21, 2009
→ By

Hangover Square.

Sorry for the disappearing act, but it was a long and hectic week in Arizona. I’ll be on the Herd at 11:10 am EDT on Wednesday, and on Mile High Sports 1510 in Denver at 8:25 am MDT.

He walked through Castle Square to the sea. When he reached the sea he saw that dawn was breaking over it, dimly, bluely, feebly, amidst the torn clouds of rain. He smelt the air and felt better. He was glad he had done this. He felt like a walk. He was doing the best thing.
And then he felt a curious snap in his head.

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, part of the Bloomsbury 100, is an overlooked work from the playwright behind the movies Rope (famous for director Alfred Hitchcock’s use of long takes with disguised cuts) and Gaslight, a psychological novel of a different sort: The protagonist is suffering from what we’d now call dissociative identity disorder*, and one of his personalities wants to murder the woman his other personality loves.

*Dissociative identity disorder is, according to one theory, a reaction to childhood trauma, such as abuse, but Hamilton depicts Bone’s split personality as something he’s had from birth.

George Harvey Bone’s primary personality is the saddest of sacks, a social outcast who spends his time following a group of libertines who abuse him verbally but are all too happy to take advantage of his occasional flush periods. The group includes Netta, an aspiring actress who is neither that talented nor that driven and is primarily hoping for luck or fate to hand her a big break. Bone is in love with her – or perhaps with the idea of her – and she plays with his emotions in a cruel, sadistic manner. Bone’s secondary personality is monomaniacal in its drive to kill Netta, realizing that she is the obstacle to Bone (or his primary personality) getting on with his life.

Hamilton was criticizing the seemingly impermeable barrier between social classes in interwar England, with Netta and her friends exploiting Bone when it suits them but refusing him full entry into their social circle. (Of course, part of their disdain for Bone is what they call his “dumb moods,” when he has actually clicked over to the secondary personality.) That subtext was obvious, but I’ve read several references to Hamilton also depicting fascism through the story, and I just don’t see it. It’s a good thriller, one where Bone’s murderous desires are made a little morally ambiguous by the rotten treatment he receives at the hands of the heartless Netta, and creeping fascism does receives its mentions (through Netta’s sort-of beau, Peter), but I’m hesitant to put more metaphor into the story than Hamilton intended.

The version of Hangover Square currently in print is full of unfortunate typos, and I’m not sure whether they’re from the original text or just sloppy editing by the new publisher. Some errors were unintentionally funny, like roadside “sinposts” (I assume you find those on the Highway to Hell) or, after a phone has been ringing for a while, “at last there was an answering dick,” without actually explaining who the dick was. (Sam Spade, perhaps? Philip Marlowe?)

Next up: I finished The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread while in Arizona; is anyone still reading it, or should I post a writeup with some discussion questions for those who already did? I’ve since moved on to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Under the Net.

I was originally going to call Iris Murdoch’s* Under the Net the poor man’s Lucky Jim, but by the time I finished, I changed my view. It’s more of the homeless man’s Lucky Jim – a similar modern picaresque around a hapless central character who can’t get out of his own way, but maybe 25% as funny as Amis’ novel with an ending that made no sense to me at all. It appears on both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (at #95).

*If Murdoch’s name rings a bell for you but the book doesn’t, the 2001 film Iris was about her, with Jim Broadbent winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Murdoch’s husband.

I admit, however, that the novel’s foundation in philosophy was probably lost on me, since I’ve never taken a philosophy course or had any interest in the subject. Murdoch herself was a philosopher, writing five nonfiction books on the subject, and philosophy is a running theme through Under the Net, with references to specific philosophers and discussions of the subject both through dialogue and through the plot. I didn’t appreciate any of the references and the dialogue tended toward the boring, while the narration … well, you tell me:

The roadway was glowing with light. One one side the Arc du Carrousel stood like an imagined archway, removed from space by its faultless proportions; and behind it the enormous sweep of the Louvre enclosed the scene, fiercely illuminated and ablaze with detail. On the other side began the unnatural garden, with its metallic green grass under the yellow lamps, and its flowers self-conscious with colour and quiet as dream flowers which can unfold and be still at the same moment. A little distance beyond the railings the garden ran into trees, and beyond the trees an explosion of light announced the Place de la Concorde, above and beyond which was raised upon its hill the floodlit Arc de Triomphe standing against a backdrop of darkness, with an enormous tricolore which reached the whole height of the archway fluttering inside the central arch.

That paragraph includes 143 words of descriptive text … in the middle of a pursuit scene. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere with the plot, Murdoch decides to stop and smell the roses.

Next up: Something a little more fun – Walter Moers’ City of Dreaming Books.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 3, 2009
→ By

Brighton Rock.

Today’s chat transcript is up and, I think, rather snarky. I wrote a bit about Happ and Penny last night on the Four-Letter. I’m tentatively scheduled to be on ESPN Radio tonight at 10:25 pm EDT.

Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is his lone entry on the Bloomsbury 100, yet more evidence that as much as critics agree that Greene was a great novelist, they can’t seem to agree on what his best work was. Modern Library had The Heart of the Matter on their top 100; Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo put both that work and The Power and the Glory on theirs; the Guardian put The Quiet American; and I believe I’ve seen similar praise (that I can’t locate) for The End of the Affair. And for all of that, I loved the half-serious/half-satirical Our Man in Havana*.

*Apropos of nothing, this is now the 11th Greene novel I’ve read, including all of his “serious” novels. That puts him sixth on the list of authors when ranked by the number of titles I’ve read – your challenge is to guess who the top five are in the comments. One hint: I’ve never written up a book by #2 or #4 on this site.

Brighton Rock is lumped in with Greene’s “Catholic novels,” but while there’s certainly a lot of discussion among the characters of religion and its relation to right/wrong, I think that’s at most a secondary theme in the book. The novel focuses on a teenage delinquent nicknamed “Pinkie” who has taken over one local gang of street toughs who run, among other things, small-time bookmaking outfit. Pinkie’s gang commit a murder before the book has started, which leads to a string of murders and attempts all aimed at covering up the initial crime. Pinkie himself starts out as just an amoral, power-hungry killer, but as the book progresses and Greene peels back the layers of Pinkie’s character, we see more that he is driven by a raging feeling of inadequacy, set off when others show a lack of respect for his abilities, and driven by a desire to be seen as a capable adult.

Pinkie is pursued by an amateur detective named Ida Arnold, whose passing acquaintance with one of Pinkie’s victims turns into a quest to identify the killer(s) and see them brought to justice, a quest that itself changes shape as the story progresses. While Pinkie has clear, dogmatic views on life informed by inexperience and a superficial form of Catholicism, Arnold is a spiritualist with an independent moral compass of less certain origin. Pinkie hooks up with a girl who could provide testimony against his gang for one of the killings, and saving her becomes part of Ida’s quest, but the girl herself (Rose) is a cipher of a character who is childlike in her thoughts and actions.

Greene’s novels are short and tend to move along quickly, but despite the detective-novel portion of the plot, Brighton Rock was slow and plodding, especially when the camera focused on Pinkie, who is more interesting as a character to study and dissect than as one whose actions we might want to follow.

Next up: I’m a bit behind on reviews, as I finished John Cheever’s Falconer last night.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 29, 2009
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 16, 2009
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ July 8, 2009
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 13, 2009
→ By

The Thirty-Nine Steps.

I’m in the midst of the wakes/funeral after a death in my wife’s family, so my moderation of comments and responses to them may be sporadic and arbitrary for the next few days.

The blog post on Borchering and Washington is up on the draft blog. I think video of Washington will be up tomorrow.

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is on the Guardian 100 and served as the inspiration for the excellent early Hitchcock film of the same name, although Hitchcock, as was his wont, rewrote a good chunk of the plot, including the meaning of the title phrase, so if you’ve seen the film much of the book will still be new to you. It’s a straight-up spy story with an emphasis on action: The protagonist finds himself privy to an international plot and by the start of the second chapter is on the lam from both the authorities and the nefarious plotters seeking to destabilize Europe and spark a world war.

The book runs a brief 106 pages and the narrator is in almost constant motion; when he’s not on the move, he’s hiding or planning his next move or both. The double pursuit ups the stakes and almost guarantees that he’ll be in danger, but also increases the need for him to engage in some serious social engineering to find food and shelter as he dances around Scotland trying to evade his pursuers.

I’m not sure how it landed on a list of the greatest novels of all time – it’s good, but it’s just a spy/adventure novel and doesn’t even have the distinction of being the first work in that genre (Erskine Childers’ lone novel, The Riddle of the Sands, holds that honor). It’s a good airplane read or just the solution for a dreary day, as an unnamed man quoted in the book’s introduction put it: “It was one of those days when the only thing to do was read John Buchan.”

Next up: Nonfiction – William Easterley’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 8, 2009
→ By

A Simple Story.

This has nothing to do with the book, but this Guardian review of six new flavors of Walker’s potato chips is pretty funny.

Anyway, the title of Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1790 novel A Simple Story is, one assumes intentionally, ironic, as the story is not simple, and isn’t even a story; it is, in fact, two stories in four volumes, the first two of which constituted a first draft of the novel that was never published. The first part is a somewhat classic if oddly set romance of the period, mixing serious material with witty banter, but the second part is a dramatic statement on social mores of the day, especially those that pertained to women’s roles and treatment.

The two halves of the novel do read like separate books, joined only by the common male lead, Mr. Dorriforth. The first half tells of the frustrated romance between Dorriforth and his ward, the orphaned Miss Milner, an intelligent, witty girl whose lack of any real education leaves her somewhat ill-prepared for the world of manners and rules into which she is thrust. The dialogue in this first half (Miss Milner: “As my guardian, I certainly did obey him; and I could obey him as a husband; but as a lover I will not.”) is clever and unusually quick for a novel of that time, but I didn’t find the story that compelling; if Inchbald had published those two volumes alone as a novel, the title might have fit better but the book would have been unlikely to meet with commercial success.

The second half is set sixteen years after their ill-fated marriage; the now Lady Elmwood and her daughter, Matilda, have been cast out of the manor, and Lord Elmwood (Dorriforth) refuses to so much as see his daughter because of his ire at his wife. The barely-contained – and sometimes uncontained – rage of Dorriforth burns the pages, while Inchbald tells a second story of male/female relations in late 18th-century England, casting the male as the villain without making him evil or one-dimensional. The subservient positions in which women are placed and the roles their upbringings played in placing them there are openly questioned, themes that have lost most of their relevance but were probably topical at the time the book was published.

Inchbald is perhaps better known today for writing the play, Lovers’ Vows, performed by Fanny Price and her wacko relations in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which makes A Simple Story interesting for its likely influence on Austen and perhaps the Brontë sisters. The witty dialogue between Miss Milner and Dorriforth in the first part is reminiscent of Austen’s wittier works like Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, while Lord Elmwood seems a clear prototype for the dark, brooding male protagonists in Jane Eyre and (more strongly) in Wuthering Heights. On the other hand, if you’ve read Austen and either Brontë and didn’t care for them, I can’t see you enjoying A Simple Story either.

Next up: Henry Miller’s, um, profane Tropic of Cancer.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 18, 2009
→ By

Eyeless in Gaza.

I’ve been sitting on a writeup of Eyeless in Gaza for a week-plus because I’m not sure how to sum it up. It’s a strange book with one clever literary device but an odious protagonist and a philosophical vein that, frankly, bored me.

I’ve read two other Huxley books – the dystopian classic Brave New World and the social satire Antic Hay – but Eyeless bears no resemblance to either work. The protagonist, Anthony Beavis – no, no sign of Butthead, sorry – is a morally rudderless libertine who lost his mother at an early age and was raised by an emotionally distant father who rebounded into a second marriage. He goes to college where he befriends a shy, religious boy named Brian, only to betray him a few years later by seducing his intended. Some years later, Anthony has an existential crisis while trying to write a “sociological” book that is more of a philosophy of life.

The clever device was the weaving of multiple timelines together without destroying the feel of the narrative. You know from early in the book, for example, that Brian is dead, because it’s revealed in the latest timeline, but because Huxley has chopped up his story into four or five timelines and cycles among them as they converge towards the book’s end, the how and why comes out in stages. It’s not the only book to use this method of telling a story, but the separation among storylines is more severe than in any other book I can remember, I don’t believe I’ve read an earlier book that used this device.

Beavis, however, is indeed a butthead. His betrayal of Brian is really just the icing on the cake, although it certainly colors one’s opinion of him to know that he betrayed his best friend and in possibly the only genuinely good person in the book. Everyone else is rotten and/or broken, and when one character threw another overboard or under the bus, I just greeted it with a shrug.

Eyeless in Gaza is part of the Bloomsbury 100, but that seems like a questionable call given the more enduring influence and popularity of Brave New World; in fact, Eyeless seems to be out of print in the U.S.

—

I’m scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto on Wednesday at 6:05 pm, and we appear to be on for a 1 pm Klawchat on Thursday.

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