→ November 23, 2014
→ By

The Painted Veil.

I appear to be totally out of step with the literary establishment on W. Somerset Maugham, whose roman-à-clef Of Human Bondage seems to be his magnum opus, appearing on the Modern Library list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century (although the construction of that list was fraught with problems). Meanwhile, his shorter novel The Painted Veil, published ten years later, receives far less praise and even less attention, even though it’s a far more interesting and readable story – that is, a book written for the reader, rather than written for the author. Unlike Of Human Bondage, which I found a chore, The Painted Veil flew by with a combination of high tension and an insightful portrayal of the protagonist’s inner turmoil.

Set in southern China during the height of British colonialism, Veil focuses on Kitty and Walter Fane, a young married couple in Hong Kong, where Walter has taken a position with the colonial authorities. Kitty, bored to tears with her bacteriologist husband, embarks on a dangerous affair with a caddish colleague of Walter’s (from the administrative side of the government), but the novel opens with her husband’s discovery of the affair. He presents her with a choice: Accompany him to a remote Chinese village where he has taken a position fighting a cholera epidemic, or face shame and ruin when he sues her for adultery. When her paramour does exactly as Walter expects him to do – that is, throws Kitty overboard in favor of the wife he never intended to leave – she heads into the hinterlands, where she’s confronted by reminders of both her faithlessness and her superficial worldview from all corners.

Kitty is the only character in the book to get a full treatment; Walter is kind of two-dimensional on the page because that’s all his character is, a stiff-upper-lip British gentleman who adores his wife – at least, before her betrayal – but shows very little emotion, one small part of her alienation from him. (Maugham eventually tells the story of their brief courtship and engagement, at which point it’s clear that the betrothal was ill-fated from the start, with plenty of blame to go around.) Coerced to journey with him to a village where death is a likely outcome for one or both of the couple, Kitty is confronted with the vapidity of her life to date, between the sacrifice of the Catholic nuns who run the hamlet’s orphanage while providing palliative care to other victims and the almost nihilistic attitude of the British envoy Waddington. You can almost predict what two things will happen next, but Kitty faces several decisions that eventually send her back to England, but as a far different woman than the one who left it three years earlier.

Maugham detailed his rather spectacular falling out with the Christianity of his father in Bondage, but his depiction of the faith of the nuns is respectful, neither mocking it nor lionizing them for their work. There’s no divine justice for Kitty, no direct retribution for her sins, and no hope given of a reward for a life given over to sacrifice either. Maugham toys with some Buddhist and Taoist themes, but Kitty’s spiritual awakening is minimal and forced upon her by outside circumstances; even as she leaves the remote village for London via Hong Kong, she still has time for one more mistake that will blow up what little sense of enlightenment she thinks she has. Yet there’s a realistic aspect to her character that sells the book; she’s flawed as real people are flawed, deludes herself as real people do, and faces the same moral and existential questions most people face throughout their adult lives. The book’s ending, for her, will only be as happy as she makes it via her own decisions.

There are several film adaptations of The Painted Veil, including a 2006 version with Naomi Watts and Ed Norton, but I’ve seen none, and that most recent one changes several key plot elements. Also, I found Maugham’s prose in Bondage to be awkward and choppy, but Veil suffers from none of that at all, with highly descriptive and more poetic phrasing.

Next up: David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.

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→ September 1, 2014
→ By

The Silkworm.

J.K. Rowling’s second detective novel starring Cormoran Strike, The Silkworm, continues to establish the detective character as the star of the series – a critical trait in any variation on the hard-boiled theme – while dropping Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott, into the world of publishing and avant-garde literature. While the crime and its resolution are just as compelling as that of the first novel in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, it’s Strike and Robin who keep the story moving, as Rowling develops each character and explores their professional and personal relationship.

Strike is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who lost one of his lower legs to an IED, born out of wedlock to a groupie of the rock star Jonny Rokeby, with whom Strike has next to no relationship at all, although I get the sense we’ll meet Rokeby in a future book. His foundering private investigation business has received a huge boost after he solved the murder in The Cuckoo’s Calling, which brings Leonora Quine, the wife of the eccentric and would-be transgressive novelist Owen Quine, to his office to track down her missing husband. Of course, Owen’s been murdered, in a grisly fashion that mirrors the concluding scene of his new, unpublished book Bombyx Mori (Latin for “silkworm”). Solving the murder requires Strike and Robin to navigate the huge egos of Quine’s corner of the publishing world while also engaging in the kind of textual analysis you might expect to find in a college literature class. (I would have loved more passages from the fake book, but I’m generally a sucker for metafiction – and it would be fun to see Rowling mock transgressive literature.)

Rowling seems to have had a lot of fun sending up her targets in the worlds of literature and publishing, not least in the character of Quine – a philandering artiste of questionable talent, still living off the reviews of his first novel, published decades earlier, and financial support from his longtime agent, Liz Tassel. Quine’s ability and commercial success both pale compared to those of his rival, Michael Fancourt, who appears to be his own biggest fan and who has some very curious thoughts on literature, art, and love. I don’t recognize any specific targets of these parodies, if that is indeed what they are, and while they’re all entertaining and more than just two-dimensional side characters, they only come to life at all because of how Strike and Robin work them over during their investigation.

In the first novel in the series, Robin came on board as a temp and served primarily as Strike’s admistrative assistant and chief organizer, but we knew then that she had aspirations of joining Cormoran in detective work. She gets more such opportunities in the Quine case, and the result might be The Silkworm‘s greatest strength: Rowling crafts her into a strong, compelling, three-dimensional female co-lead, so while Strike is still front and center, it’ll be hard to imagine him working without her, both because she can do things he can’t (particularly where a more sensitive touch is needed with a witness or suspect) and because he’s coming to depend on her professionally and even emotionally.

That development means that The Silkworm does suffer from some second-novel blues, as Rowling spends time on her two characters on plot threads that aren’t related to the crime (something you’d never find in a classic hard-boiled detective novel) and that don’t lead to any specific resolution or catharsis at the end of the novel. Strike’s relationship with the beautiful but damaged Charlotte, which ended at the start of the first book, takes a few more turns for the worse, while Robin’s relationship with her fiancé Matt hits the skids over her commitment to a job he didn’t want her to keep. Those diversions are still critical to the evolution of Robin’s relationship with Strike, and I can imagine further development in all three relationships (or, in the case of Strike/Charlotte, a relationship that won’t quite end) in future books in the series, but they came across as too tangential to The Silkworm‘s story.

Rowling’s greatest gift as a writer – and I believe she has several – is storycraft, and while The Silkworm isn’t as involved as any of the Harry Potter novels or even The Casual Vacancy, it is tight and gripping and, in hindsight, gives the reader sufficient clues to sniff out the killer, although I was never really sure and ultimately fell for Rowling’s final feint. The investigation is convoluted and nonlinear, with Strike and Robin pursuing multiple leads at once, and Rowling eventually telling us what they’re doing without telling us what they find so she can obscure the killer’s identity until the very end of the book. The emphasis on the process, such as Strike’s advice to Robin before her first attempt to interrogate a witness, added a realistic element to the novel.

The New York Times review of The Silkworm ended with an ambiguous opinion on the novel, that “the most compelling characters are not the killer or the victim, but the detectives charged with solving the crime.” To me, however, that is an unequivocal statement of praise – a great detective novel starts and ends with the detective him- or herself. The story’s the thing in a mystery, although the detective can become part of the appeal in that genre as well, but I enjoy detective novels when I like the detective, whether he’s hard-boiled or sunnyside-up. I’ve always enjoyed Rowling’s voice and ability to craft a story I can’t put down, and now that she’s attached those to a great if unusual detective character, I’m all in.

Next up: Christine Sismondo’s America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops.

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→ August 6, 2014
→ By

The Casual Vacancy.

My Tuesday column this week covered the Javier Baez promotion, and I held my weekly Klawchat yesterday too.

J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, met with huge commercial success (of course) and mixed reviews, many glowing but many disappointed, although I wonder if they were just hoping for more Horcruxes. I waited for the furor(e) to die down and for the book to come out in paperback, reading her wonderful detective novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, first, so my expectations for Vacancy may have been different than those of reviewers encountering it fresh off the last Harry Potter book. (Witness the savage takedown of the book offered by the New York Times‘ Michiko Katukani.)

I thought it was fantastic, melding the classic British literary formula of centering a wide cast of characters in a single English town with the modern, wry realism of small-town novels like those of Richard Russo. The Guardian review, also slightly negative, jokingly referred to the book as “Mugglemarch,” although I’m not clear why that would be a bad thing. George Eliot’s magnum opus has to be the model for countless novels of this order, just as Ann Patchett says half-seriously that each of her novels is her own attempt to recreate Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. What it lacks, if anything, is a truly sympathetic central character; Harry Potter, who lost his parents at age one, sustained a miserable childhood, and even at Hogwarts was hounded by death threats from without and spiteful classmates from within, was never pathetic. He was a clear hero, flawed and complete, the Boy You Could Root For. There are many characters within A Casual Vacancy for whom you will feel great pity, and there are probably a few in whom you’ll recognize friends, family members, or perhaps bits of yourself, but there are no heroes, and no one behaves heroically, not until it’s a little too late.

The small English town of Pagford is rocked by the sudden death, due to a cerebral aneurysm, of beloved town council member and father of four Barry Fairbrother, which creates the “casual vacancy” of the title and leads to much political jockeying to fill his open seat. Pagford is split down the middle on the subject of The Fields, a low-income housing community that puts a financial drain on the town and is home to some petty criminals and lower-status residents, including the Weedon family, with teenager Krystal, destitute because of her mother’s chronic drug addiction. The pro-Fields council members, which include Dr. Jawanda and included Barry, want to keep the Fields under Pagford’s budget, while the anti-Fields contingent, led by the fatuous Howard Mollison, wants to dump them on neighboring Yarvil. Mollison views himself as the town’s de facto mayor and leading citizen, thanks in part to his successful market and the opening of a new cafe that employs a trio of the adult characters’ teenaged children.

The political intrigue increases when those children of these various “grown-ups” – and I use the term only the biological sense here – begin posting revelations anonymously on the town council’s badly-managed website. Those attacks form the bridge between the town council storyline and the various goings-on of the kids, from sex to drugs to rape to self-mutilation, which form the second layer of subplots. The idea that the Kids Are Not All Right and that their parents really have little idea, along with the kids generally knowing more of what the parents are up to than the adults think, is a common trope in modern literature and television (Dawson’s Creek would not have existed without it), but Rowling deploys it well by at least making the kids flawed in their own ways. They’re still kids, not wise beyond their years, just bearing the split of wisdom and ignorance that all teenagers carry (and many of us carried into our 20s … and 30s…), so they make huge mistakes too, ones that carry consequences for themselves and their parents. Posting the anonymous attacks to try to slow down their parents’ political ambitions have consequences an adult would foresee but an angry son or daughter might not – outing an affair, revealing a theft, divulging a secret attraction, these are words that cannot be borne and one by one they slow or derail their parents’ plans.

Rowling takes a grim view of the provincial provincials who populate her novel, and she blankets the book in coarse language to describe their selfish and self-destructive doings, some of which made me wince and wonder if she was perhaps overdoing it to shed the children’s-author label. (I hope not; Rowling’s prose has never bothered me as it has many readers, but in particular I’ve always appreciated her willingness to deploy her advanced vocabulary.) Her greatest gift in storycraft has always been her ability to weave unconnected subplots together into a unified conclusion – in the Harry Potter stories, every detail mattered, even across multiple books – and she’s able to do that here, but with far more morbid results. The council subplot comes to a head just as Krystal Weedon’s fractured family falls apart in the Fields, and the novel concludes with a funeral,
One character of the whole panoply emerges as a half-hero, the one truly courageous act of anyone in the whole novel coming from perhaps the least courageous character of them all, and one of the only ones to receive a full fleshing-out – perhaps why she’s the closest thing to a sympathetic protagonist in the book.

As for the common criticism that the book is “boring,” that’s always in the mind of the reader, and I can only say I was never bored – I tore through it as if it was a thriller, but I’ve always enjoyed Rowling’s prose more than most readers because I find her highly descriptive style creates clear imagery in my mind as I read. The novel has very little “action” in the traditional sense, but I thought that was in many ways an homage to classic Brit lit, to which I found countless allusions in the Harry Potter series too.

If you’ve read the book, regardless of whether you enjoyed it, you’ll probably get a laugh from the Guardian‘s “digested read,” which summarizes and satirizes the book in a few hundred words.

Next up: Oh, I’m a few books behind here, but since finishing this one, I’ve read Anne Enright’s dismal Man Booker Prize-winner The Gathering>The Gathering, Caroline Blackwood’s autobiographical novella Great Granny Webster, and Walter Scott’s Waverly novel The Heart of Midlothian.

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→ May 27, 2014
→ By

Bleak House.

My second “mock” draft for 2014 is up for Insiders today.

I’ve had mixed views on Charles Dickens over the years, loathing his work when forced to read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities in high school, only to enjoy The Pickwick Papers tremendously when I read it at age 34, picking up more of the wordplay and sarcasm but also benefiting from a more free-wheeling storyline. I even read abridged (Moby books) versions of at least two other Dickens novels when I was about my daughter’s age, and still remember hating Fagin – probably a reason I’ve never read the unabridged Oliver Twist to this day. My goal of completing the full list of titles on the Bloomsbury 100 forced me to decide on Dickens’ longest and most highly-regarded work, the 350,000-word Bleak House, a legal drama, soap opera, romance, and mystery all wrapped up in an overarching work of stinging social criticism.

The central plot device in Bleak House is a never-ending lawsuit in England’s Chancery Court, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, a case that originated as a dispute over a will that has since devolved into a nightmarish sequence of legal maneuvers designed only to rack up billable hours, with no evident progress toward a conclusion. The suit has already driven one claimant, the dotty Miss Flite, to madness, and its promise of lucre if it ever reaches a conclusion will lead other characters down that path over the course of the book. Dickens uses the lawsuit as a method of introducing a panoply of main and secondary characters, and splits the narration between his omniscient voice and the orphan Esther Summerson, who becomes a ward of John Jarndyce and companion to another of his wards, Ada Clare. Ada’s romance with her cousin Richard Carstone, and his subsequent search for an actual career, form the basis for one major plot thread, while the unknown history of Lady Dedlock, another claimant to part of the Jarndyce fortune, forms another. The latter story eventually leads to murder, a mystery that gives the novel some much-needed narrative greed just as Dickens seemed to be passing his pitch count and losing his fastball.

Dickens published the novel in monthly installments, something he did for many of his novels, which is the common explanation for his verbose prose, mostly comprising overly detailed descriptions of anything worth describing in the text. But the style also likely encouraged Dickens to craft chapters as individual episodes, moving the stories along and creating cliffhangers and twists to conclude them, so that even the modern reader won’t get too bogged down in lengthy descriptions of a stand of trees or the furniture in a sitting room. I also got the impression while reading Bleak House that the serial nature of the initial publication may have helped blunt the impact of the numerous deaths, mostly tragic (and one, Mr. Krook’s, rather comic), that occur over the course of the novel, ranging from deaths due to poverty and disease to those due to drug abuse, mania, or a broken heart.

The social criticism within Bleak House remains the book’s main selling point in modern reviews and rankings, with Daniel Burt naming it the 12th-best novel of all time in The Novel 100, tops among the Dickens novels on his list. The theme of a chasm between the haves and have-nots still resonates today, especially in the United States where the safety net is tattered and worn, but it’s somewhat obscured by the soap opera that dominates the novel’s plot. To make the story appeal to a large audience, Dickens included no end of romantic entanglements, loony side characters (some enjoyable, some just too ridiculous), and deaths and illnesses, all of which serve both to stretch the book out and to provide entertainment value. The absurd Mr. Smallweed (whose physical state seems a dead ringer for J.K. Rowling’s depictions of Lord Voldemort at the beginning of Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire), the rakish Mr. Skimpole, and the doomed Mr. Krook all have their moments of humor, often dark, but Dickens overplayed many of his other jokes, such as Mrs. Jellyby, a woman obsessed with Africa to the point of ignoring her own children – a metaphor for England and for missionaries more worried about converting African natives than feeding the local poor. (I’ve already slipped one reference to Mr. Krook into an ESPN column, and there will be more when Oregon pitcher Matt Krook is draft-eligible again in 2016.) That’s the main reason why the third quarter or so of the book began to drag, along with Dickens’ too-prolix prose, before he inserts a murder and the ensuing mystery to ratchet the tension back up in a race to the finish. Without that, finishing Bleak House would have been quite a chore.

I haven’t seen the award-winning 2005 mini-series (free for Amazon Prime members) which adapted the book into an 8½-hour serial and included in its large cast a young Carrie Mulligan (as Ada Clare), Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock), and Patrick Kennedy (as Richard Carstone), but would welcome any feedback on whether it’s worth tackling.

Next up: I’m behind on reviews, having already finished Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka’s memoir Aké: The Years of Childhood, and just started Attila Bartis’ Tranquility.

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→ May 2, 2014
→ By

The Cuckoo’s Calling.

J.K. Rowling published her first detective novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, apparently to see what kind of response she would get to a novel that didn’t have her name attached to it. The book received strong reviews, but barely sold anything until word leaked – or “leaked” – that Rowling was the true author, at which point it became a global best-seller, along the lines of the more modestly-reviewed The Casual Vacancy. It turns out that Rowling has quite a knack for the detective genre, crafting a legitimate hard-boiled detective story, complete with a compelling main character, along the lines of the field’s masters, just updated to a modern setting, and populated with characters and red-herring subplots you might find in a classic mystery novel too.

The detective at the heart of The Cuckoo’s Calling, Cormoran Strike, is indeed hard-boiled, a very down-on-his-luck detective, discharged from the British armed services after losing part of one leg to an IED in Afghanistan, and momentarily living in his office after breaking up with his longtime, faithless girlfriend Charlotte. Strike receives two unexpected visitors to start the novel: A new client, the brother of one of his old school chums (who died when riding his bike into a local quarry as a teenager), asking Strike to investigate the alleged suicide of his adoptive sister; and a temporary secretary, Robin, whom Strike wasn’t expecting and probably can’t afford to keep, but who takes to the work far more than either she or Strike anticipated.

The suicide in question is that of Lula Landry, a supermodel and star of newspaper gossip columns who appears to have jumped to her death from her new luxury apartment, a building also occupied by a famous film producer and his coke-addict wife, as well as an American rapper who has written several songs about Lula. Her brother, John, doesn’t believe the official verdict of suicide, and wants Strike to find the truth, suspecting two hooded black men spotted fleeing from the area of her building on CCTV footage.

The Cuckoo’s Calling brought me back to the first Hercule Poirot novel, Death on the Nile, one of Agatha Christie’s finest works because of the broad set of characters she introduced and heavy use of red-herrings, where nearly every character who didn’t commit the murder at the heart of the novel has some other secret Poirot eventually sniffs out. Rowling has also populated her book with peculiar secondary characters and suspicious suspects, most of whom have something going on they’d rather you not know about, even if it had nothing to do with Lula’s murder. (Spoiler: She didn’t kill herself. Sorry.) While I understand Rowling’s prose has always provoked oppobrium from critics, I appreciate her highly evocative style of writing, long on descriptions to allow the reader to see the action in his/her mind – which suits how I read fiction.

I’m currently re-reading the Harry Potter series for the third time by reading a chapter a night aloud to my daughter – we’re on The Goblet of Fire and I’m running short of accents already – and, because I know the plots so well, I’m picking up all of the clues Rowling left along the way to point the perceptive reader to the ultimate reveal at the end of each book. She uses the same tactic in The Cuckoo’s Calling: Everything you need to know to figure out who did it is there in the book, but she blends these details into the dialogue so well that they didn’t stand out (to me, at least) as obvious clues.

The pleasure in detective novels isn’t so much about the whodunit as it is about the central detective character, whether it’s a hard-boiled shamus like the Continental Cop or an erudite eccentric like Nero Wolfe. Rowling appears to have studied the genre well, as Strike has plenty of aspects of the hard-boiled detective, but with modern flourishes, including what I might call his unusual parentage, and enough of an intellectual streak to call to mind Wolfe or Lord Peter Wimsey – which also means Rowling doesn’t have to have Strike fight his way out of most of his confrontations with suspects. His interactions with Robin, his less-interesting assistant who remains endearing for her innocent eagerness to participate in the detecting side of the job (perhaps an alter ego for the reader), also break type, as Rowling seems to have made it clear that the two aren’t going to shack up, a direction I hope she maintains in future books. It’s a promising beginning to a new series, especially if you liked Rowling’s detail-oriented writing style and the humor she always worked into the Harry Potter novels, and would like to see that brought to the hard-boiled detective arena, a genre where sparse prose is the usual rule. The next Cormoran Strike novel, The Silkworm, comes out on June 19th.

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→ April 7, 2014
→ By

The Comedians.

What use to anyone was the body of an ex-Minister? A corpse couldn’t even suffer. But unreason can be more terrifying than reason.

I’ve made my adoration for the novels of Graham Greene, particularly his political novels, clear on this site many times; I’ve read more novels by Greene than those of any other author but Wodehouse and Christie. The Comedians (Penguin Classics) isn’t often listed among his greatest works, perhaps because it’s seen as less serious than his Catholic novels, but it remains a serious work in theme and tone. As an indictment of Third-World despotism in general and of Jean-Claude Duvalier in particular, it is searing and angry, yet Greene also manages to populate his novel with rich, flawed characters in whose struggles against the irreversible tide we find mirrors to ourselves.

The novel begins, with the wry humor that Greene always manages to slip into his works, with three men in a boat: Brown, Smith, and Jones, all “comedians” on the stage of life, each playing a part. Jones is the English confidence man, Brown the American hotelier in Haiti who has played his share of marks, and Smith the do-gooder American hoping to open a “vegetarian center” in Haiti with government funding. Brown returns from a lengthy stay overseas to find a government minister dead in his hotel pool; Jones is arrested as he tries to enter the country, triggering another long con for him; Smith and his wife find themselves unable to reconcile their good intentions with the corruption of the Duvalier regime. When Jones’ game turns around his fortunes, Brown becomes involved, putting himself at risk and that of his relationship with his unhappily-married mistress, Martha.

The tensions that result from Jones’ alternating hero/villain status with the State push the other central characters, including Martha, into situations that expose their rawest nerve endings. Every action they take bears multiple levels of meaning, for the regime is always presumed to be watching or listening, and punishment for its enemies is brutal, but not always swift. While the Smiths are innocents unable to adjust their worldview to fit a country ruled by a dictator with a secret police force, Brown and Jones are forced into the uncomfortable situation of having to confront their own histories of failure that they fled to Haiti to try to escape.

Brown narrates, but as with most Greene narrators, he’s adept at historical evaluations of his own emotions as well as those of others – but he’s also inept at anticipating the reactions of others. Brown knows he’s creating additional barriers between himself and Martha, beyond those of her husband, her needy son, and her social status, yet seems unable to stop himself from issuing the cutting remark or asking the wrong question. In the process, Brown manages to con himself, while also showing Martha a side of his personality she’d probably have preferred not to see. No one was better able to explore the nature of an affair of the heart in a novel that ostensibly dealt only with affairs of state than Greene, whether here, in The Quiet American, or even in a weaker novel like The Human Factor.

Failure looms as the other overarching theme of The Comedians, from the failure of Haiti itself to establish a functioning, democratic government to the failure of U.S. policy in Haiti, supporting a borderline fascist autocracy because it stands as a bulwark against communism; from the failures of Brown, a moderately successful confidence man now running a de facto bankrupt hotel in the world’s least desirable location, to those of Jones, whose invented history may contain some or no kernels of truth whatsoever. Brown can’t run a business, manage an affair with a woman who is more than willing to maintain the status quo, or even help a political refugee escape. He is the greatest comedian of them all, an actor on a stage speaking someone else’s lines.

—

Nothing new from me on ESPN since the last update, but Chris Crawford has weekend draft update and his first weekly top ten prospects ranking for fantasy players.

Also, for Top Chef fans among you, Hugh Acheson tweeted a link earlier today where you can vote for the West Athens, GA, community garden to get a large grant from Seeds of Change. You can vote once a day while the contest is open.

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→ February 16, 2014
→ By

The Yard & Adam Bede.

The Yard, Alex Grecian’s first prose novel – he’s previously co-authored the graphic novel series Proof – is a hopelessly formulaic, lurid crime story that feels far more like an attempt to create a franchise than a desire to tell an actual story. Set in London just after Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror has ended, The Yard wants so badly to tell us how awful Victorian society was for those outside the privileged classes that it pelts the reader with a series of hoary details that beat that horse until it’s glue and steak frites.

The Yard opens with a cheap attention-grabber – a dead cop is found stuffed in a steamer trunk at a London railway station with his eyes and mouth sewn shut. This introduces us to Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, a group of a dozen (now eleven) detectives assigned to look solely at homicides, of which there are far too many in London for this unit to handle. We also encounter Dr. Kingsley, the amateur forensic pathologist and assigned Voice of Reason whose mere presence makes this feel like the pilot for CSI: London. The detectives, led by the just-promoted Inspector Walter Day, work to solve the murder of their colleague, eventually splitting into factions to investigate potentially related crimes, including the murders of several bearded men, which eventually put several of the detectives in jeopardy (of course) and lead to two resolutions.

Grecian’s characters are his saving grace, and if I had any desire to continue with the sequel The Black Country, it would be to follow them. He’s crafted four strong police characters in Day, Inspector Blacker, their boss Sir Edward Bradford, and the constable Hammersmith, each of whom has a well-defined personality and admixture of positive and negative traits. (There are no worthwhile female characters, so the book flunks the Bechdel test entirely.) We get too much of Day’s home life without any real payoff, but Hammersmith’s back story turns out to be critical in defining the character and explaining some of his subversive actions.

Unfortunately, Grecian panders to the audience from the start by keeping his crimes graphic and offering repeated “shocks” to end maybe half of the book’s hundred-odd four-page chapters. We have the initial police murder, and then the murders of the bearded men who were shaved and then had their throats slit. We have a dead child, left to die in gruesome fashion, and the kidnapping of another by a man who may be a pedophile (Grecian implies this but, in a welcome bit of self-restraint, spares us any such details) but is certainly a psychopath. We have prostitutes, one a surviving victim of Saucy Jack himself. We get lots of time in Kingsley’s lab, with murder victims and others like the child laborer whose jaw was eaten away by phosphorus due to her work in a match factory. None of this was essential to the central plot, just extraneous details to titillate the reader and satisfy the same cravings that make lowbrow shows like Criminal Minds so successful.

The two central crimes also failed to grab my interest, and their resolutions revolved too much on coincidence and too little on actual policework for a novel ostensibly about police work. We learn the identity of the cop-killer before the quarter mark, and we get interludes from his perspective that add nothing beyond making it clear he’s a dangerous loony. He keeps showing his hand to the detectives, and he’s eventually found out through dumb luck. The so-called “Bearded Killer” is revealed a little later in the book, but it’s a crime without intrigue and only comes into play because Hammersmith ends up the target here before another idiot gets in the way and takes the razor intended for the constable. The Yard doesn’t need a Sherlock Holmes, solving cases in a few hours through the powers of deduction, but I can’t say London would be any safer through these bobbies blundering through their cases and waiting for the killer to all but turn himself in.

* I’m dispensing with a full writeup for George Eliot’s Adam Bede, which appears on the Bloomsbury 100, as it was dull and a tough slog, a real disappointment after I enjoyed Middlemarch. Adam Bede is preachy, with its too-perfect characters and over-the-top depiction of a girl in trouble treated unfairly due to Victorian attitudes. (I’m sure it’s all quite accurate, but I don’t imagine this story would have changed many Victorian minds through its telling.) Adam is a simple, kind laborer who wants to work for a better life, falls for the wrong girl, then eventually falls for the right one, the end. It reads like a first novel, which it was, and takes so long to even get into the main plot that I would have given up after 100 pages had I not been so hellbent on finishing the entire Bloomsbury list.

* Next up: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, which was a finalist for both the the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (the year when the board declined to give the award to any title) and the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Medal (losing to Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz).

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→ January 21, 2014
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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

The titles listed in Bloomsbury’s 100 Must-read Classic Novels (actually 99 novels plus Chekhov’s short stories, which is totally cheating) were largely familiar to me before I’d even started working my way through the list, skewing strongly toward classics of British literature (42 of the 100 titles were by British authors, plus five by Irish authors). The list’s creator, Nick Rennison, did show one clear and regrettable bias in his selections, however, with several titles that advocate political change toward socialism, generally to the detriment of their value as works of literature. News from Nowhere was one such title, a dreadful utopian novel that, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, is the prose equivalent of an actuarial table. Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, published three years after the author’s death, resembles an actual novel more than News did, with real characters and proper plots, but there is so much sermonizing and so little character development that the book amounts to little more than 600 pages of didactic sludge.

Tressell, the nom de plume of the Irish-born writer Robert Croker (later Robert Noonan), based The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in large part on his own experience as a house-painter, working for subsistence wages while the merchant class and politicians grew rich off his and his colleagues’ labors. The title refers to these workers, who give so freely of their efforts to enrich others and seem, in Tressell’s view, to acquiesce to a system that is designed to exploit them and perpetuate that exploitation for generations. In that, Tressell was partially right – England’s labor laws were heavily stacked against the working class until the Labour Party took power in the 1906 election, before which a trade union could be held liable for losses resulting from collective actions such as strikes. Even as Tressell was writing his manuscript, completing it in 1910, the situation was only beginning to improve for the “philanthropists” of Great Britain.

Labor protection proved the solution to many (but not all) of the ills Tressell attacks in his novel, but his extreme naivete about human nature led him to advocate strong socialism, with little or no ownership of private property and penalties on savings or investment, rather than fair labor practices. Tressell has the two socialist characters, Owen and Barrington, deliver tiresome lectures to their fellow painters about the evils of capitalism and the benefits of socialism, all founded on now-discredited beliefs that people would still continue to expend maximum efforts when all incentives for good work or for ingenuity have been removed. By removing the possibility of large gains for the large sacrifices involved in inventing or developing new goods or processes, innovation will slow, and funding for high-risk projects (like most startups) will flow to countries where the potential for high returns still exists. Socialism as Tressell describes it has been tried and failed in countless economies, so reading his prescription for a command economy like those that collapsed across Eastern Europe and that have only enriched those in power in Africa is sadly comical.

Tressell’s awkward satire is actually more effective when he attacks the hypocrisy of those who profess to be Christians, mouthing the words of their Messiah while doing quite the opposite. Tressell limits his attacks on the religion itself – although I’d infer from his text that he was a nonbeliever – and instead focuses on those who preach the Gospel while doing nothing to help the less fortunate, and often would use their working hours to keep the lower classes in need of basic assistance like food, lodging, or medical care. Tressel’s primary antagonist, the painting-firm owner (and thief) Rushton, is found in the streets spreading the Good News – and making sure he uses these words to keep the poor and unemployed from banding together to try to improve their situation. It’s easy to see a parallel in the sliver of the U.S. electorate that professes ardent belief in the same religion and yet votes against programs that might help the very people Christ implores His followers to help.

Tressell also falls into one of the worst traps for the would-be satirist, violating what is now Roger Ebert’s First Law of Funny Names: Funny names aren’t funny. Tressell populates his novel with obvious and unclever puns, like rival painting outfits Pushem and Sloggem, two-faced philanthropists Crass and Slyme, the ineffectual city councilor Dr. Weakling, and the venal landowner and MP Sir Graball D’Encloseland. Satire need not be hilarious to be effective, but the failed attempts at humor here only serve to further insult the intelligence of the reader who might not have already given up in disgust at the author’s ignorance of basic microeconomics.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 of the way through Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of the Indian-born mathematician Ramanujan, whose brief life was marked by enormous insights into number theory despite his lack of any formal education in the field.

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→ October 30, 2013
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Middlemarch.

This week’s Behind the Dish podcast reunited me with my old Baseball Today co-host Eric Karabell. And you all thought I died when I went over that waterfall with Bias Cat, didn’t you?

George Eliot’s Middlemarch appears on the Bloomsbury 100 and ranks 9th on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100, but after my intense dislike of her novel Mill on the Floss*, I expected a similarly arduous read, with slow prose and distant, even odious characters. Middlemarch feels like the work of a different author, however, less bleak and moralistic, with stronger, better-rounded characters (and a few jerks), and every bit as pointed a perspective on the restrictive nature of Victorian society, especially regarding the rights of women.

* Not to be confused with Millon de Floss, one of the great biographer-stalkers of his time.

Middlemarch weaves several related stories together, all centered in the fictional English town of the title, revolving around idealistic young characters whose desires go beyond the traditional spouse-seeking of English literature prior to the 1860s. It begins with Dorothea Brooke, destined to be the semi-tragic heroine of the novel’s first major plot, as she rejects a suitor nearer her age and emotional temperament to marry the dour, chauvinistic theologian Edward Casaubon, a blowhard who is the first of the novel’s many comic side characters. Dorothea’s other suitor, Sir James Chettam, marries Dorothea’s sister in what becomes a far happier marriage. Edward refuses to induct Dorothea into his intellectual life, perhaps because it is nearly bankrupt, leaving her bored and unhappy until his early death, at which point an absurd codicil to his will forbids her to take up with Edward’s distant cousin, Will Ladislaw, who is a far better emotional match for Dorothea.

Middlemarch is also home to the Vincy siblings, Rosamund and Fred, a financially irresponsible pair who have very different aims in romance: Fred wants to marry Mary Garth, with whom he’s been in love for years, while Rosamund sinks her claws into the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, because she sees him as a path to upward mobility. Fred’s ability to marry is hampered by his dissolution, which leads him to bankrupt himself and nearly do the same to Mary’s father, while Rosamund manipulates the idealistic Lydgate, who doesn’t plan on marrying because it would interfere with his professional endeavors, into a betrothal he didn’t desire.

Eliot takes the usual themes of marriage and inheritance as the starting point for deeper explorations of character and societal mores than contemporary novels typically explored, helping usher in an era of fiction where independent women were increasingly found as central characters and where their lower standing in a male-dominated culture was fodder for entire novels. Dorothea begins as a high-minded, emotionally immature woman who reaches for some ill-defined goal in marrying the old pedant Casaubon, only to realize she’s grasped at a cloud and lost her independence without any intellectual gain. Fred has to be shamed into a life of industry and diligence, in a career that seemed beneath him, to have any chance to marry the woman he loves. Lydgate’s match with Rosamund turns out to be disastrous, as her extravagance nearly bankrupts him, his researches grind to a halt, and he’s caught up in a scandal involving the local squire Bulstrode, who makes ill use of the doctor to try to hide his own mistakes. While some characters face consequences for their own sins, others find their lives constrained by the need to keep up appearances, or by the effects of gossip about untoward appearances. Even in the epilogue, Eliot grants most of her characters middling outcomes, where financial success and happiness are mutually exclusive; Dorothea may at least fare the best, as she can find happiness even in an imperfect situation, telling Ladislaw that “if we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for,” marking why she stands above the rest as the novel’s real protagonist and most empathetic character.

As much as Dorothea stands at Middlemarch‘s moral center, Lydgate struck me as the most fascinating character because of the small window he provides into Eliot’s own views on the rise of science and research in English society and culture. Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch intending to work as a doctor to fund his researches, bringing ideas for reform and for greater service to those unable to afford proper medical care to a small town with decidedly staid ideas on what a doctor should do and say. The obstacles he encounters from the town’s aged, established medics slow his practice significantly, even when he has some success in treating difficult cases, but it is the marriage to the dim-witted, materialistic Rosamund that destroys his intellectual curiosity, because he can no longer devote time to research or volunteer work because he has to pay the debts she has accumulated. Coming from a male author, this might read as misogynistic, but Eliot imbues all of her characters, male and female, with strengths and defects, so even the venal Rosamund is multi-dimensional, while the reader cannot exonerate Lydgate of blame in his own downfall. (It’s also hard to accuse Eliot of anti-feminism when she has Mary say, “Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.”

Middlemarch might be the most-praised novel ever written in the English language. Virginia Woolf referred to it as “the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” A.S. Byatt used that quote in her 2007 review, saying it was possible to argue – seriously, can you get more wishy-washy? – that Middlemarch is “the greatest English novel.” Daniel Burt’s top 100 only lists two English-language novels ahead of it – the abysmal Moby Dick and the abstruse Ulysses, the latter by an author who’d abandon English entirely in his next novel, Finnegan’s Wake. Eliot’s prose is far more pleasant to read than Melville’s and easier to digest than Joyce’s, with incisive wit (as in the “husbands” comment above) or profound renditions of human emotions:

When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die – and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

Writers who craft realistic characters typically exhibit this understanding of emotion and thought, whether the feelings depicted are negative (fear of mortality) or positive. Eliot can drift from compassion to disdain – Mary, the novel’s most insightful speaker, points out that “selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything in the world,” which is undeniable – over the course of a few pages, but there is always the sense that she reveres character, even if she doesn’t always revere her specific characters. I don’t share Woolf’s and Byatt’s veneration of Middlemarch, as the Lydgate/Rosamund thread tended to meander and Rosamund was the least compelling character in the book, but it is a marvelous novel, a broad study of many brilliantly rendered characters, and a lesson in integrating multiple storylines into a single narrative.

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→ October 23, 2013
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The Return of the Native.

I was assigned two books in my Lit class in my senior year of high school on which I bailed after 20 or 25 pages, reading the Cliffs’ Notes for one and watching the movie for the other. I eventually read both books in full as an adult, as both are on the Novel 100 and, to be honest, it bugged me that I’d never made a more serious attempt to finish them. One of them was Theodore Dry … er, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which amounted to 200 pages of shit in an 800-page novel. The other was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is one of my favorite novels ever written, a tragedy as well but a work of consummate beauty in prose and characterization, as well as the best example I have encountered of the use of irony in a serious novel.

The Bloomsbury 100 includes a second Hardy title, The Return of the Native, which doesn’t quite hit the heights of Tess but also doesn’t inspire the same frustrated outrage that that other novel does. Native instead focuses on the interconnections between a number of flawed characters in a tiny English hamlet, and how tiny choices create avalanches of consequences for all of them, with an ending that, in veritable Hardy-esque style, leaves no one truly happy.

The native of the book’s title is Clym Yeobright, a former resident who has found success in the Parisian diamond trade, but finds the work unfulfilling and has returned to Egdon Heath to embark on a scheme to educate the children of the poor. By the time Clym enters the scene, we have already met the other characters and seen their entanglements: Thomasin Yeobright, Clym’s cousin, is betrothed to the unstable Damon Wildeve, who himself is still in love with the local maiden Eustacia Vye, who had had an affair with Wildeve but generally disdains all of the local residents as beneath her. Thomasin returns home to Egdon Heath from a marriage ceremony with Damon that didn’t come off, as Wildeve lacked the proper license, by way of the reddleman (a traveling seller of the pigment red ochre) Diggory Venn, who also carries a torch for Thomasin. When Wildeve and Thomasin do marry, Eustacia throws herself at Clym, hoping he’ll enable her escape from Egdon Heath when he returns to Paris, unaware that he has no plans to do so. When Wildeve and Eustacia both find themselves in unhappy marriages, their liaison is rekindled, leading the four down a path into tragedy.

For a man somewhat estranged from his church, Hardy reflects a strongly moralistic worldview in his writing, more so here than in Tess, where he directs more of his ire at the chauvinistic Victorian environment that condemns his title character to a life of misery. Native takes more of a balanced approach to its subject, combining a frank look at sexual politics and the essence of human emotions with a plot where nature dooms the least morally sound characters over the more innocent ones. Hardy’s language makes it clear that Eustacia is the wicked seductress and Wildeve the feckless lover and husband, with Thomasin in particular receiving treatment as the victim of their maneuvers.

Basde on a small sample of two novels, Hardy might be my favorite writer of prose after the incomparable F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Hardy’s poet self pops up repeatedly in the text of his novels. He refers to the “black fraternization” of the “obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land” to describe the desolate scene off the moors near Egdon Heath, and describes Eustacia examining her own dismal situation by thinking “what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.” Clym, after the last of his tragedies in the novel, declines to appear at an event for fear he “might be too much like the skull at the banquet,” which is a hell of a lot better than referring to something in a punchbowl. Eustacia says “I’d give the wrinkled half of my life!” to live in a cosmopolitan place where she could live like a lady, a throwaway phrase that becomes more meaningful when her life is in danger later in the book.

Hardy, always full of sunshine, has time to refer to Clym’s loss of innocence as

the stage in a youngman’s life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile.

And he mirrors my own thoughts on the rising tide of darkness as autumn closes:

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness aganist that fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery, and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Of course, I doubt Hardy meant I should light my Weber kettle grill in response to the shortened days, but that’s the best I’ve got.

Two final side notes on The Return of the Native:

* A 1994 TV movie adaptation starred two then-unknown actors as Damon and Eustacia: Clive Owen and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I think it’d be worth seeing on that basis alone.

* I can’t hear the name of this novel without thinking of this sketch.

Next up: I’ve been lax at writing up books lately, but I’ve gotten through Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, as well as David Goodis’ noir novel The Wounded and the Slain, and am now on the non-fiction The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History by David Sinclair. If anyone has a particular interest in either of those classic novels, drop a line in the comments.

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