→ July 15, 2019
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Furious Hours.

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is more like three non-fiction novellas in one package, tied together by overlaps in the stories but not by any significant theme, so the inclusion of all three in a single tome feels a bit forced. Each of them is interesting and tightly told, none more so than the first of the three, as Cep has done substantial research, although ultimately she can’t create a conclusion where none exists.

Harper Lee did not write another book after the runaway success of the novel she would refer to as “the Bird” for the rest of her life, and barely wrote any words at all for publication, leading to a popular myth around her that she had said all she wanted to say – a myth into which her famously reclusive nature also played. Lee did try to write another book, however, about the story Cep unfurls in Furious Hours, that of the Reverend William Maxwell, a black preacher and timber worker in Alabama in the 1960s and early 1970s who took out numerous life insurance policies on family members, including two wives, and then killed at least five of them to collect the payouts. He was arrested and charged with one murder but acquitted mostly due to the lack of direct evidence, and the killings only stopped when the uncle of his last victim executed him point-blank at the funeral service. Lee heard about this story and spent years researching the Maxwell case, interviewing the man’s killer and Maxwell’s longtime attorney, Tom Radney, among others, but for reasons Cep tries to address in the final third of the novel, she was never able to finish it – or even submit part of a manuscript.

Maxwell’s story is a crackerjack, right up to his dramatic death. He wasn’t just a cold-blooded, calculating murderer, but a traveling, revivalist preacher, a longtime con man, and a hard worker on timber sites, respected if a bit feared by the men with whom he worked. His decision to kill off his first wife, and then continue to kill off several other family members, for no other apparent purpose than to collect insurance money, came fairly late in his life: he was around 44 when his first wife was found dead in her car – this was a common method for Maxwell, with four of the five corpses for which he is assumed to bear responsibility discovered in or under cars – and he was killed at age 52, right after delivering the eulogy for his last victim. Cep details the murders and how Maxwell managed to get away with so many, even as a black criminal in 1970s Alabama – although the fact that all of his victims were also black may also have helped him.

Maxwell spent a lot of time over those eight years in court, sometimes defending himself against murder charges but more often fighting insurance companies that tried not to pay him for deaths they thought he’d caused. His lawyer through all of those cases was a white man, Tom Radney, formerly an idealistic state legislator who came home to open up a private practice and made good money off Maxwell, since he was so frequently at war with the law. Radney’s story makes up the middle third of the book and it’s the weakest by far; he’s not as fascinating a character as Maxwell or Lee, nor is any part of his life as interesting as what they both did, but there’s also a reliability problem with Radney’s story that isn’t present in the other two – he helped Lee in her research, which then became part of Cep’s. History is told by the survivors, and Radney outlived Maxwell by over 30 years, while Lee was alive but chose silence.

The third section tells Lee’s story, not just the story of her work on the never-submitted book she titled “The Reverend,” but her whole biography – no small task given the author’s disdain for media attention and her nearly half-century of self-enforced silence. Cep does her best work here, because there is so much in the Lee section that I never knew about her – details from her childhood and adolescence, the extent to which she worked with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood (and perhaps wrote, or rewrote, parts of it), her reactions to the book’s enormous and almost immediate success, and some of the real explanations for the writer’s block that kept the world from ever seeing “The Reverend,” or anything else, in print. (The book that was released a year before her death, Go Set a Watchman, was her first manuscript, which multiple publishers rejected before J.B. Lippincott responded favorably but asked for major revisions; the revised book is the one we know.) Perhaps there isn’t enough material for a full-length biography of Lee, who wrote numerous letters but was obviously very protective of her privacy, but this is a very good use of the limited material that is available.

So Furious Hours is a good read – three good reads, really, or at least two, and the middle one is fine – but a disjointed one. The first section is a true crime story with lots of drama and salacious details; the last one is a thorough if short biography of a pivotal figure in American literature who, herself, was a flawed, regular human whose success contributed to her undoing. The through line of Furious Hours is a tenuous one: it’s the Maxwell case, but without Maxwell there, the connection feels forced. If you approach this book as three distinct reads that share a particular connection, it’s probably going to be far more satisfying than the series of loose ends left by trying to into the three a single narrative that isn’t quite there.

Next up: Sadegh Hedayat’s novella The Blind Owl, in its first translation.

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→ June 27, 2019
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The Satanic Verses.

If you knew one thing about Salman Rushdie, it’s probably that he spent much of his life under an Islamist death sentence known as a fatwa, issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 in response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. The Ayatollah claimed that the book was blasphemous, and he refused to retract the order – which said that any Muslim would be a martyr for killing Rushdie and also issued the threat of death against his editors and publishers – even after Rushdie issued a half-hearted apology. The Iranian government has only backed away from the fatwa in the intervening three decades, never lifting it, and the massive bounty on Rushdie’s head is still in place.

The Ayatollahs would have done far more for their own cause by ignoring the book, because I find it hard to believe enough people would read this dense, highly metaphorical, bloated novel, and understand its implications for devout Muslims, to make one iota of difference in the Islamic world. They Streisanded the whole thing by drawing attention to it, and made the book a global best-seller when it would probably have faded into oblivion had they done nothing. I’m not even sure the book is that good, but I feel confident few readers would have waded far enough into it to care about the parts that so offended the Ayatollah.

The Satanic Verses starts with two men who fall from an airplane that has been blown up over the English channel by a suicide bomber but are saved by an unknown miracle, after which they are transformed into the archangel Gibreel (Gabriel) and into a devil, or perhaps the devil. (The book was published less than three months before Libyan terrorists bombed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.) The two narratives split and then twist around each other, with Gibreel’s story drifting into dream sequences of magical realism or simply the delusions of a man with schizophrenia, while Chamcha, the man who sprouts horns and a tail like a devil, encounters a more mundane series of nightmares that begin with abuse by immigration authorities.

Gibreel’s dreams include visions of a businessman named Mahound – itself a derogatory name for Mohammed – who becomes a prophet, is fooled by a scribe who deliberately errs in writing down Mahound’s words, and whose wives are mocked by the twelve prostitutes at a brothel in Jahilia, which is a pre-Islamic name for Mecca. They also include the incident to which the book’s title refers, in which Mohammed exhorted Arab followers to keep three of their pagan goddesses, only to later recant the statement and claim he was fooled by Satan into making it. The depiction of the prophet Mohammed as a rube, a con man, or a sexual libertine was sure to anger devout Muslims, although some of this is buried beneath Rushdie’s dense, florid prose, and nearly all of it is written in the unreality of Gibreel’s visions.

Chamcha’s journey is much easier to follow, even with his on-and-off transformation into a hirsute demon, and explores more humanist themes of alienation from country and family. His domineering father tried to control Chamcha through money and familial obligations, an oppressive maneuver that helped encourage the son to flee India for England, where he encountered a new type of social and cultural isolation. The metaphor involved, of the father standing in for one’s country of birth, and the natural desire to reconnect before it’s too late to matter, is easier to grasp, and the narrative of Chamcha’s life is mostly linear and grounded in reality. Except for the horns.

Parsing what’s real in Gibreel’s narrative and what’s imagined or hallucinated is difficult enough, but it’s exacerbated by Rushdie’s prose style, between his prodigious vocabulary and often poetic musings, and his lax attitude towards time. The novel’s great climactic scene includes a march of penitents to Mecca and to the sea, led by a young girl Ayesha who claims she’s communicating with the Archangel, where the faithful follow her into the Red Sea. Whether they survived and transcended or merely drowned is left to the reader – and to the surviving, less faithful neighbors and family members who watched them disappear.

Rushdie also engages in substantial wordplay and masked allusion that went well over my head because I have no background in Islamic history or writings and minimal knowledge of even geography in that part of the world. I didn’t realize until after I’d finished that the Mount Cone of the novel is Jabal an-Nour, which houses the Cave of Hira where Mohammed meditated and, according to Islamic history, received his first revelation. Rushdie renames the mountain and then delivers puns on the name, including Gibreel’s very human objet d’amour, Alleluia (Allie) Cone, who has no interest in the spiritual mountain and instead spends her life trying to climb the most materialistic of peaks, Mount Everest.

One recurring motif I did catch in The Satanic Verses is that of characters falling; in Rushdie’s world, a whole hell of a lot of people either jump or fall, mostly to their deaths, except for the two main characters who inexplicably survive. Gibreel, in fits of either madness or jealousy, kills several people by throwing them from buildings. At least two minor characters die by jumping from heights. Allie’s treks on Everest are marked by reminders of the possibility of falling, and eventually hypoxia causes her to hallucinate as well, although her eventual death comes off the mountain. The falls are always in the physical world, but given the context of the novel and Rushdie’s staunch atheism, it seems likely the falls represent man’s ‘descent’ from naïve superstition into the harsher world of a materialist, unthinking cosmos.

I had mixed feelings on Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children, but it was a far more successful and accessible novel than The Satanic Verses. This latter book felt a bit like Joyce’s Ulysses, which Joyce made clear was a book to be dissected and analyzed, not to be read. You could write papers just on side characters or word choices or recurring images across the book, to say nothing of the overarching themes of identity, alienation, or religion. But as a straight read, The Satanic Verses is maddening, and not in the way the Ayatollah meant.

Next up: I finished Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes this morning.

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→ August 4, 2010
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Scout, Atticus, & Boo.

New post on the draft blog for Insiders: Cape Cod League top 30 prospects for 2010. Also, no Klawchat this week due to the start of the Area Code Games.

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I’m a big fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, placing it at #4 on the Klaw 100, but unlike most readers I came to the book relatively late in life, reading the book for the first (and only, for now) time at the age of 29. It was never assigned in school – when I think back on the garbage we had to read for some English classes in lieu of important classics of American and British literature, I wonder what the hell my parents paid property taxes for – and I actually wasn’t an avid reader of fiction between graduation from college and the turn of the century*. When I shifted from non-fiction – and just not reading that many books to begin with – back over to novels, I decided to fill in the gaps in my cultural literacy by reading as many of those “name” books as possible. They didn’t all measure up to their reputations, but Mockingbird exceeded them, and was one of a handful of books that accelerated the renewal of my interest in reading non-comic fiction.

*The book that turned me back on to fiction, putting me on a decade-long tear that saw me read roughly 400 novels across ten years? Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, of course.

Documentary writer and producer Mary Murphy seems to feel much the same about the only literary output of one Nelle Harper Lee and assembled a book called Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird that comprises interviews with 26 writers, celebrities, a politican, and a few people connected with Lee herself on the book, its legacy and the enduring mystery of Lee’s silence, both in her lack of output and her four-decade-plus refusal to give interviews. (Needless to say, she’s not one of the 26.)

Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, had for me the most interesting essay because of how he talks about the art of writing, not just in how Mockingbird influenced him, but in how a technical analysis of the book misses its greatness – “Great books are not flawless books” – and what aspect of the book hit him the hardest. James McBride, an African-American novelist and musician, offers a passionate defense of the book as great literature, one of the questions Murphy must have posted to every interview subject, while also drawing parallels to John Coltrane when answering the question of why Lee might have chosen to stop writing after one book.

The most fun interview of all of them is Alice Lee, Nelle Harper’s older sister who, at the time of the book’s writing, was still working in her law office every day at the age of 98. With the author herself unwilling to give interviews – she reportedly was upset that one or more interviewers misquoted her in the 1960s and put words or even thoughts into her mouth, but has also indicated that she believes the author should be more or less invisible behind her works – Alice gives some insight as to Harper Lee’s childhood and what aspects of the book are grounded in real people or places.

I was surprised to find that one of the most enjoyable interviews in the book was Oprah Winfrey, whose responses may be the most personal, from her identification with Scout to an encounter with Gregory Peck (“he will always be Atticus to me”) to her plan to persuade Harper Lee to come on the show (fail). Her quote from her lunch with Lee is too priceless for me to repeat here, but it’s quite telling about the author’s attitude towards the celebrity she has so consistently declined. If you want to bounce around Scout, Atticus, & Boo, Andrew Young, James Patterson (really), and Anna Quindlen also offered interesting or insightful comments on the novel.

The introduction, written by Murphy, includes heavy quoting of the 26 essays that follow, and I found that reading it first scooped a number of the most interesting quotes from the interviews; if you pick this book up, skip straight to the first interview, with the actress who played Scout in the film version. If you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, you should do so, and then watch the film, and then read this book if you enjoyed those two works as much as I did.

Next up: John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, about the still-unproven (or disproven) hypothesis that bears Riemann’s name.

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→ July 26, 2010
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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

My Dan Haren analysis is up for Insiders, and I’ve got another post up on Omar Vizquel’s Hall of Fame case with some other notes and links.

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Who actually wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Is it possible that an uneducated moneylender and son of a Stratford glover could write over thirty plays that display the knowledge of a world traveler and the vocabulary of an alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge? This question has interested critics and scholars for two centuries, a story recounted in Columbia professor James Shapiro’s book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a thorough and surprisingly balanced look at the controversy and the cases for the two major alternative candidates, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere.

Shapiro explains in the introduction that he believes that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the glover’s son, but he presents the cases for Bacon and de Vere thoroughly and fairly – I might even say a little drily – before providing his rebuttals to each. He also lays out the arguments for Shakespeare and explanations why the doubts about his authorship are likely unfounded, based on erroneous assumptions about Shakespeare’s life and the times in which he lived. Even though I’m only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s works – I’ve only read three of his plays and have seen stage or film adaptations of three others (including the impeccable Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing) – I didn’t find that a handicap in reading or enjoying the story, which lays out a little like a mystery and a little like a psychological study of the people who so readily embrace conspiracy theories about why Shakespeare’s name appears on 33 plays and dozens of sonnets that he didn’t actually write. Along the way, Shapiro tells the story of the American Delia Bacon, of no apparent relation to Francis, whose support of her namesake became the monomaniacal focus of her life; of Sigmund Freud’s own obsession with the authorship question and belief that the Stratford man didn’t write his plays; and of the fact that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights on at least five of his plays, a point that poses many problems for proponents of alternative candidates.

One of the funniest parts of the case for Edward de Vere is the inconvenient truth that he died in 1604, yet as many of nine of Shakespeare’s plays didn’t appear until after that date, one of many problems with so-called “Oxfordian theory” (de Vere was the Earl of Oxford) that Shapiro says de Vere’s supporters handwave away or spin in a way that supports their man. There’s even a corollary to Oxfordian theory that has de Vere as both the son of Queen Elizabeth and her lover, and the two as the parents of the Earl of Southampton, which brings to my mind the funny image of a bunch of Elizabethan-era Britons running around with tin foil hats over their powdered wigs.

Despite Shapiro’s embrace of the glover’s son as the man behind the quill, he does acknowledge some of the aspects of the case that have led to the rise of alternative theories. There’s a lack of documentation of Shakespeare’s life; his books and manuscripts are gone, and much of what we do have about his life pertains to his work as a moneylender and investor. His plays have a worldly quality that he himself seems to have lacked, although that objection may arise from our own tendency to assume his world was far more like ours than it actually was. Difficulty reconciling what we do know of Shakespeare the man with what we see in his works has led to the search for other candidates, but Shapiro slyly demonstrates that such sentiments arise from conscious or subconscious class prejudices – how could an uneducated man, the son of a working-class father, have written such beautiful, erudite plays and poems?

Shapiro does mention some of the other proposed candidates for authorship of the play, but there are over fifty and the number seems to keep growing, so he focuses on the two with the strongest cases and most devoted followings. The argument for Bacon has lost steam over the last fifty years or so, and I found the lengthy explanation to get a little dry in spots, but the case for de Vere is more complex and unintentionally fun while also allowing Shapiro to delve more into the psychology of his supporters and the way that changes in how information is disseminated have allowed fringe theories to prosper, such as the “fairness” rules in media and the rise of sites like Wikipedia, where expert opinions and amateur opinions sit side by side without extra weight on the former. (For a funny, uneven, but thought-provoking polemic on this very subject, check out Andrew Keen’s 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur.) I entered this book with no knowledge of the authorship question beyond the question’s existence, but Shapiro sets up the cases for Bacon and de Vere and knocks them down in a way that I imagine would make it hard for those candidates’ proponents to recover without adding another layer of foil to their headgear. He does veer a little too deeply into explanations of “textual analysis,” which seems like extremely dangerous ground that leaves the door open for almost any interpretation the interpreter likes, but as someone who enjoys analyzing meaning and metaphor in literature I found the explanation of how attempts to identify Shakespeare’s works as inherently autobiographical led scholars down the slippery slope into thinking that space aliens from Phobos wrote them sobering. It won’t change anyone’s enjoyment of the plays, but Contested Will is an intelligent look at one of literature’s most enduring controversies.

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→ January 13, 2010
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Who Killed Iago?

James Walton’s Who Killed Iago?: A Book of Fiendishly Challenging Literary Quizzes is, as the title implies, a book of trivia tests about literature, trending heavily towards classics and Brit lit. It’s based on a radio program in England called The Write Stuff which, in the tradition of British quiz shows, makes the typical American quiz show look like Chutes and Ladders*. I’ve read plenty of the classics and know a little bit about nearly all the classics I haven’t read, and I struggled to score around 50% for the book as a whole – which, of course, makes it fun.

*I’ve been to England once, when I was 17, and we caught a game show on British TV called Cross-Wits, on which contestants were given clues to a cryptic crossword puzzle and roughly 8 seconds to solve them, which they did with shocking frequency. This was my introduction to cryptic crosswords, now one of my favorite types of puzzles (albeit one for which I rarely have time). Even at the time, none of us could imagine a US television network airing such a program, given how much more difficult it was than any game show we’d ever seen in the U.S., and given the enduring popularity of the ultimate game show for morons, Wheel of Fortune, I feel confident that even the reach of the long tail won’t bring a cryptic crossword show to American airwaves any time soon.

The book comprises ten quizzes, each in five parts. One part revolves around a featured author, with subjects in this volume ranging from Jane Austen (I only scored 5/10, missing two easy questions on my two least favorite Austen novels) to Stephen King to Shakespeare to J.K. Rowling. One part comprises questions in the form of lists of four things – authors, titles, characters, what have you – leaving you to determine the connection between them. The other three parts of each quiz vary in theme, although literary errors pop up a few times, and he runs through some obvious ones like literary firsts and lasts and, my favorite, a set of questions on last lines of famous but long books that most people never finish (2/6, and I’ve never finished either book).

If you’re into literature across the ages, Who Killed Iago? should be up your alley, but it is understandably lighter on contemporary literature with only occasional forays into pop fiction (even Twilight appears once). It even included, in reverse, a Shakespeare question I’d seen before in an online trivia challenge a few months ago – “Which stage direction explains the disappearance of Antigonus from The Winter’s Tale?”

Oh, and if you’re wondering the answer to the question in the book’s title, highlight the line below:
Trick question: Iago is alive at the end of Othello, although he’s being dragged off stage to be tortured.

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