Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (2009)

I recently read Half Broke Horses, the novel by Jeannette Walls that is closely based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. It's sort of a prequel to her memoir The Glass Castle, and and if you haven't read that, some of the episodes in Horses won't have nearly as much effect. Also, Walls seems to be trying to explore how her mother Rosemary got to be how she is.

This was a deeply absorbing account of a remarkable woman: indeed, a remarkable girl, because Lily had to find courage and resourcefulness at a very young age, living out west with her homesteading family. Her Victorian la-di-da mother thought herself too fine and delicate to ever do any work, and was very comfortable with letting her children cook, clean, and do chores. Lily, as the oldest, essentially ran the household and kept them going, as her dreamer father wasted money on doomed schemes.

Lily didn't waste time feeling sorry for herself. She got herself a slap-dash education, and by 15, she traveled several days and 500 miles on horseback so that she could take up her first teaching job. Eventually she and her husband turned to ranching, a life that suited them perfectly. She learns to drive; she takes flying lessons. Throughout her long life, through disappointment and mistakes, tragedy and lean times, her tough, practical, unsentimental hard work got her through.

Lily didn't waste time feeling sorry for others, either. Her usual response to someone, for example, falling off a horse: "He's fine, he just got the lace knocked off his panties." She didn't believe in "mollycoddling" sick children. With her children, especially Rosemary, she's more a teacher than a mother: "From the time she was three, I drilled Rosemary on her numbers. If she asked for a glass of milk, I told her she could have it only if she spelled out "milk." I tried to make her see that everything in life . . . was a lesson." The reason, she says, is that "I wanted to get across the idea that the world was a dangerous place and life was unpredictable and you had to be smart, focused, and determined to make it through."

As readers familiar with The Glass Castle know, the main lesson Rosemary took from all this was to please herself and scavenge her way through life, and not care what anyone else thinks. (In this she bears not a little resemblance to Lily's own mother.) But by not being able to understand her daughter, Lily drives her away.

Lily was an amazing woman, but also her toughness became hardness. By the end of the book you can sense what she lost from that. The novel concludes with Jeannette's birth to Rosemary and her new husband, Rex. Lily is sure that she won't be "cut out of the action when it came to my own grandchildren. I had a few things to teach those kids, and there wasn't a soul alive who could stop me." For once, Lily was wrong.

True Detectives by Jonathan Kellerman (2009)

The actual plot of True Detectives is convoluted but has something to do with a missing girl; a fat, gross, and crazy movie director who is completely obviously an amalgam of Michael Moore and Mel Gibson; a spiraling down young movie star; and whatever. Also there’s some Cain and Abel, or rather Moses and Aaron, stuff going on. Plots are not really what I read Kellerman for.

I’ve been reading Kellerman since his first novel, When the Bough Breaks, came out in 1985. Back then, he had a fresh idea: Alex Delaware, a child psychiatrist (retired and wealthy thanks to some good real-estate deals), is brought in to consult on cases involving traumatized children. Child abuse was a big topic back then, and Kellerman made good use of his own experience with medical pediatrics. He was probably the first mystery writer to use Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy as a plot device. And he was one of the first to feature a gay detective, Milo Sturgis, as a main character.

In the 25 years since, he’s not as fresh, and even expanding his mystery stories beyond Alex and Milo—and children—hasn’t much changed the usual way he unfolds his novels. A crime occurs in the Los Angeles area; his detectives go around asking lots of questions; too many leads, not enough connections; and slowly the pieces come together, no matter how scattered they first appear. Usually there’s a final confrontation, often at some remote hideaway of the villain’s. You might learn something about forensics, medicine, or science along the way. The usual.

What makes the novels still very enjoyable, to me anyway, is Kellerman’s snappy spot-on characterization and dialogue that sounds like the real thing. Here, Jack and Darius—two cops on a hot 1979 L.A. night—are cruising alleyways, and they’re bemoaning the cop car’s alleged air conditioning.

Jack Reed said, “Alleged, as in Jimmy Carter’s a commander in chief.”

“Now you’re getting unpleasantly political.”

“That’s a problem?”

“Night like this it is.”

He’s also able to write dialogue for all kinds of people: low-life criminals, the rich and famous, beat cops and detectives, and regular folks of all personalities and backgrounds. He also does a good job of rendering internal dialogue realistically.

As for characterization, Kellerman takes time to sketch even minor background people in a few descriptive phrases. He’s acutely aware of fashion and brands and what clothes say about the wearer. Some examples:

· [Mr. Dmitri] was a short, bald, stubby-limbed, bullnecked man in his late fifties with a pie-tin face blued by stubble . . . . [Although rich], he wasn’t spending it on wardrobe. Short-sleeved pale blue shirt, baggy gray pleated pants, gray New Balances.

· Tonight she’d gone for sultry but subdued: black V-neck sweater with a triangle of white cammie hiding some but not all of her cleaves, snug gray wool/Lycra slacks that hugged her like a lover.

· Dement had the same badass-hick getup he’d displayed in the family photo: plaid Pendleton, jeans, motorcycle boots. Sleeves rolled to the elbows exposed chunky, inked-up forearms. Greasy hair was tied back in a ponytail; a full, unruly beard framed a nose that looked as if it had assaulted someone’s fist.

One of his characters, a clotheshorse with a very elaborate closet, lets Kellerman give free rein to his love for describing beautiful clothes:

· Aaron met the poor fool wearing indigo Diesel jeans, a slate-colored, retro Egyptian cotton T-shirt from VagueLine, unstructured black linen jacket, perforated black Santoni driving shoes.

· What the well-dressed man dons when sitting on his ass for protracted periods of tedium came down to a loose brown linen shirt-jacket with four flap pockets, tailored to conceal his 9mm, beige cargo pants of the same carefully rumpled fabric that provided another quartet of compartments, cream silk socks, butter-soft pigskin Santoni driving shoes.

I guess you could say that the focus on appearance as characterization is shallow, but I really enjoy how adept Kellerman is at getting the nuances of clothing and self-presentation.

Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler (2009)

Noah’s Compass is Anne Tyler’s eighteenth novel, and its elements will be comfortably familiar to her long-time readers. Couples in her work tend to divide into controlled, emotionally remote, quiet types (almost always the man) and messy, somewhat hapless, warm-hearted ones (almost always the woman). A few examples: Michael and Pauline in The Amateur Marriage; Macon and Muriel in The Accidental Tourist; and Ira and Maggie in Breathing Lessons. Readers can also expect martyr mothers, estranged children, and of course Baltimore. But I don’t care if it’s all familiar and safe and fits me like an old sweater. Old comfortable sweaters are great.

Liam Pennywell, 61, has just retired from teaching fifth grade, and on his first night in a new apartment a burglar hits him on the head, giving him a concussion. The move and the concussion also bring his family—daughters, sister, ex-wife—more directly into his life.

At the same time, Liam is deeply troubled by his inability to remember the event. When he meets the much younger Eunice, who works as a “rememberer” for a forgetful and wealthy old man, he becomes intrigued. The two hit it off, and Liam begins to confront all sorts of things he’s forgotten.

Sometimes the pieces here fit too comfortably into place, but the romance’s outcome surprised me. I thought it was a brave choice for Tyler and the more I think about it, the righter it seems. I like Tyler’s increasing meditations on getting older and the way it narrows your choices. So often I read things that chimed perfectly with stuff I’ve been musing about. And I loved this; Liam, the former philosophy student, is talking to his daughter:

[H]e said, “Epictetus says that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one by which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don’t take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he’s his brother. That’s how it can be borne.”

I’m going to remember that.

It’s certainly not an earth-shaking novel, but it’s Anne Tyler and that tells you just about everything.

A Great Unrecorded History: a new life of E.M. Forster by Wendy Moffat (2010)

In light of the unpublished manuscripts that emerged after E.M. Forster’s death in 1970 at the age of 91, his old friend Christopher Isherwood remarked, “Of course all those books [about Forster] have got to be re-written. Unless you start with the fact that he was homosexual, nothing’s any good at all.” That, in a nutshell, is the reason for this new biography. At first I was skeptical about this sweeping statement, but Moffat absolutely succeeds in showing just how central Forster’s sexuality was to his writing and his life.

For example, why did Forster stop publishing novels in the 46 years after A Passage to India came out in 1924? He wrote essays, reviews, biography, lectures, and so on, but no fiction for publication. Over the decades, disappointed readers have wondered why. And the answer is that Morgan could no longer stand the pretense. Even by 1911, a diary entry describes his “weariness” about romantic plots: “the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa.” What he wanted to write about, what he most deeply cared about, was the love of men for men—a “great unrecorded history.”

Moffat shows clearly why and how it was so difficult (and dangerous) for Forster to understand, accept, and explore his homosexuality. By the same token, she traces his increasing knowledge and experience closely, in remarkable and sympathetic detail. She allowed me to feel Forster’s joy in finding sex and intimacy at last. The yearning for connection across boundaries, especially of class and race, defined Forster his whole life, and when fulfilled brought him deep happiness. The greatest love of his life was Bob Buckingham, a policeman.

There’s much food for thought here, and plenty of essay fodder, on the subjects of race and class. It seems like all the English gays of his own class preferred working-class lovers. I assumed that was a safety mechanism because of the power imbalance, plus the fascination with the Other, as in Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism. (Forster’s first two serious lovers were Indian and Egyptian; he also had a long affair with a part-black English cab driver.) But I don’t get either attitude from this biography. Moffat carefully details Forster’s deep concern to treat his partners as social equals, making sure his friends did too, and was very sensitive to their feelings. He had many working-class friends, not just lovers.

The Forster that emerges here is admirable, human, even lovable. He put a premium on friendship as the prime human virtue, and his huge circle of friends and correspondents evidently adored him. (One American friend, broke, sold his Winslow Homer so he could visit Forster in England.) Reading this book can be saddening because of how a social prejudice can so constrict a great artist’s working life, not to mention his personal life. What a waste! But Forster wasn’t the kind of man to feel sorry for himself. I wish I had known him.

And finally, kudos to Moffat. She performed some truly energetic scholarship to prove her case, tracking down letters, photographs, and other evidence “scattered in archives” or in “remarkable hiding places—a vast oak cupboard in a London sitting room, a shoebox humbly nestled among mouse turds in a New England barn. . . . Only in 2008 were the final entries in his private diary, restricted from view since his death, opened to readers.” Forster left instructions that his papers couldn’t be mechanically reproduced, so every bit of sometimes barely legible writing had to be transcribed by hand. And the result of Moffat’s hard work is not just an interesting, well-written biography. A Great Unrecorded History is indispensable to a deeper understanding of E.M. Forster, his life, and his works.

Staggerford by Jon Hassler

I recently read Jon Hassler's Staggerford (1977), set in small-town Minnesota and describing a week in the life of Miles Pruitt, a 35-year-old high-school English teacher. The setup here reminds me of Anne Tyler or maybe Garrison Keillor: quiet, deadpan humor; appreciation of small-town foibles; mostly good people mostly trying hard.

Miles' life doesn't look like much. He teaches his classes of varying ability. He walks home where he boards with an elderly Catholic-school teacher (he used to be in her class). He and his librarian lady friend Imogene attend long evenings of bridge with the school superintendent and his wife.

However it might look from the outside, Miles likes his life. He's a good teacher, wrestling with the dullards and challenging the smart ones. He does what he can to help an intelligent student whose progress is threatened by poverty and a crazy mother. He likes walking, and enjoys his landlady, and gets a kick out of the school superintendent's long droning conversations. It all looks changeless, except maybe for the kiss he finally plants on Imogene, and we think maybe this is a turning point.

Except that event gets buried in a growing farce starting with two high-school boys fighting and eventually involving the local Indian tribe, fears of an AIM uprising, the National Guard, and Miles' student's crazy mother. It ends surprisingly in a way I really didn't like, although I could see that it made sense given the book as a whole.

This is Hassler's first novel, and it can be weak. The best example is an episode describing Miles's first love that aims to prove the adage "a woman grows up to become her mother." It's used uncritically and as if always true, which of course is bullshit, and on the whole the episode is a great big easy cop-out for some cheap-ass irony.

Hassler went on to write some 10 more novels, several also set in the town of Staggerford, and I want to read more of him.

The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin

This slim 2003 novel is part of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. Sutty, a young Earth woman who has studied with the Ekumen, is sent on her first mission to a planet called Aka. First contact reports described this planet as peaceful and static, but when she arrives 60 years later, it's changed.

Now it's controlled by a soulless, communist-like political structure that has banned the Telling, the planet's traditional Taoist-like philosophy/art/literature. It's all very much like China's Cultural Revolution, only planet-wide. Sutty must seek out remaining traces of the traditional culture and help to preserve and record it, a dangerous task not just for her but for the natives.

I enjoyed reading it; as always, Le Guin writes with simple and vivid elegance. Sutty is likeable, brave, conscientious. The actual tales told in the Telling aren't that memorable, I'm afraid, but there are some interesting themes like the importance of twins/couples/doubles, and flying. Le Guin is in trouble when she tries to make the case that stories can be a culture's entire history, science, and so on. At the end she questions this, but it feels perfunctory to me.

Le Guin isn't breaking any new ground here, however. Themes and images are deeply familiar from earlier books—the Taoist philosophy, the politics, the thinly disguised critique of our own culture. (Like how the government/corporation's ubiquitous bitter, hot drink is called Starbrew.) She has a tendency to moralize. Yes, she tries to be fair, not black and white, but the problem is you can see her trying.

I don't like Le Guin's affectation for employing British spelling and usage. Other than that, Le Guin remains one of my greatest pleasures to read, especially on the sentence level, so vivid and beautifully paced. For example, this description of a river ferry trip:

And Ferry Eight, now full of blatting and squawking and the quiet, intermittent voices of country people, and smelling of manure, fried bread, and sweet melons, moved slowly, her silent engines working hard against the drastic current, between wide rocky shores and treeless plains of thin, pale, plumy grass.

"Drastic" is the striking, perfect centerpiece of this beautifully composed scene. That's the sort of thing that keeps me coming back, decade after decade, to Ursula Le Guin.

Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons For Making it Work by Tim Gunn

As much as I was looking forward to reading this book, I was disappointed.

Now, I love Uncle Tim, and I still think that as a host and mentor on Project Runway, he's perfect. Plus, I did thoroughly enjoy all the gossipy dish, along with glimpses behind the scenes on PR. His autobiographical stuff was also quite interesting.

However, Gunn comes off surprisingly badly in this book. All his Lessons about taking the high road clash pretty badly with his obvious score-settling here. I don't mind at all someone snarking about ridiculously arrogant behavior by the rich, glamorous, and over-validated--but when it's coming from someone who keeps declaring how he's incapable of snark, my cynicism meter goes off.

You can tell it's pretty damn satisfying for Gunn, getting to tell all these revealing anecdotes about his horrible mother, his (possible closet case!) father, Anna Wintour, Emilio Sosa, and many others. He has a long list of grudges, including encounters with strangers, and he's pretty entertaining about getting back at these folks. I just wish he'd admit that that's what he's doing.

Also, when Gunn says (many many times) how he's too nice, what he really means is that he's spineless. Someone appropriates the Vogue magazine he's reading; instead of just asking for it back, he "takes the high road," says nothing, and congratulates himself for avoiding confrontation. He does say he's finally learned to say no--about some things. But I'm not ready to take life lessons from a guy who would rather buy a new Vogue than say "Hey, I was still reading that."

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 2: The Kingdom on the Waves

By M.T. Anderson (Candlewick, 2008).



When I reviewed Vol. 1, The Pox Party, I commended its "distinctly strange atmosphere, compounded of Gothic horror, Enlightenment idealism, slave memoir, and YA coming-of-age novel," and called it "brilliant, surprising, imaginative." By the novel's end, as the Revolutionary War is breaking out, Octavian is fleeing toward the King's camp, hoping for freedom. When I'd finished, I couldn't wait for the next volume. So it's with the deepest regret I must now report how disappointed I am with The Kingdom on the Waves.

As the centerpiece of his novel, Anderson has chosen a little-known episode in the American revolution, when Lord Dunsmore creates his Ethiopian Regiment by offering freedom to slaves of Rebel owners who join up. After a major defeat, Dunsmore's coalition retreats aboard a small fleet offshore, the "kingdom on the waves" of the title. Smallpox soon ravages the mostly uninoculated former slaves, and the whole thing ends in defeat.

Yes, it's an overlooked part of history, and Octavian's position offers an interestingly bitter, cynical view on "liberty" in the colonies, and there's something bracing about hearing Washington referred to as that Virginian slave-driver. But in being so fascinated by his setting, Anderson has forgotten to tell a story.

The intriguing atmosphere of suppressed horror from Vol. 1 becomes a numbing atmosphere of claustrophobic futility in Vol. 2. Bar a few entertaining scenes and Anderson's always lively dialogue, this book goes nowhere slowly. An enormous swath of its 561 pages are spent in gloom belowdecks while Octavian and his friends wait and wait and wait for something to happen while sickness rages through the fleet. Events of note tend to be sickeningly unfair or tragic or disgusting or all three.

In a strange afterword, Anderson defends his choice not to be more interesting by saying that "If this were the fantasy novel it so much resembles, there would be a third volume with gargantuan, cleansing battles" and "all people would be free, shackles would fall from every wrist, and bounty would return to the land." But, since this isn't what actually happened and slavery persisted in America for generations longer, you're out of luck, reader! I would have settled for a lot less than a big fireworks party with Ewoks, but Anderson really, really wants to rub our noses in the futility of it all. Unfortunately, futility isn't very interesting.


Nevertheless, in fairness I also have to say that I kept turning all 561 pages because M.T. Anderson is too good a writer to dismiss. His dialogue is especially good, pitch-perfect for each character's class and circumstances. I want to list a few examples to show the range:

A Royalist of Lord Dunsmore's set: "Sirs, while I would liefer commend the nobility of restraint, here must I endorse rather the vigor of lively opposition… "(p. 201)

Pro Bono, a house slave: "I can't even say how deep that skunk smell is. You can keep falling through parts of that smell and there are other parts, whole other rooms and wings you ain't known about. That is one devilish power of a smell." (p. 228-229)

Octavian, sui generis: "Did you need speak of Dunmore's doubts? Did you need tell us he was foolish and uncertain? . . . You spake thus, sir, to vent wit, so that you might regale us with the acuity of your observations." (p. 208)

Also, buried beneath all the novel's oppression and despair are some awfully good character portraits, the affecting story of Octavian learning more about his mother, and lovely tid-bits like fables and stories, the odd newspaper story or official proclamation, and the like. I still admire M.T. Anderson, just not this book.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party

By M.T. Anderson (Candlewick, 2006).


I've never read a book with such a distinctly strange atmosphere, compounded of Gothic horror, Enlightenment idealism, slave memoir, and YA coming-of-age novel. Octavian and his mother are slaves in 18th-century America, and subjects of an ongoing experiment by a group of natural philosophers calling themselves the Novanglian College of Lucidity. The College is studying the effects of European education and culture on Africans. Octavian narrates most of the novel, sounding very convincingly like a well-educated man of his time.

The effects of the Novanglians' pseudoscientific experiment are bizarre and cruel. (Be warned: I almost stopped reading this book after a few chapters because I found the early descriptions of nasty experiments on cats and dogs so upsetting.) Octavian learns Latin, Greek, the violin; he also must weigh his faeces daily on a golden plate. That grotesque yoking of the crude and the refined is an image in little of the kind of mind that gets to be in charge of Octavian and his mother.

When the revolutionary war starts to break out--at the same time Octavian undergoes terrible loss and betrayal following the pox party--he escapes. Octavian then faces another set of cruel ironies: fighting on behalf of Liberty when he has none; fighting for Property when he is some. The almost unrelenting tone of suppressed, enraged horror gets some relief as the narrative turns to letters home from a rebel private who befriends Octavian, and who is as open and talkative as Octavian is closed in and silent. Other forms of narrative include advertisements, scientific reports, and passages crossed out in ink.

Brilliant, surprising, imaginative, brave enough to challenge YA readers with big words and big ideas, this is the most interesting novel for young readers—for any readers—I've come across in a long time.

Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett

After reading the final pages of Scales of Gold, if it hadn't been from the library I'd have thrown it across the room, beaten it with a fireplace poker, and buried it in the cat box.

Not about animals this time. No, Dunnett has moved on from that, and achieved cruelty to readers. Her specialty is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, over and over, in more and more finely honed ways, taking care to lull the reader into a false sense of security, the better to deliver the biggest most hobnailed-boot kick in the gut she can possibly manage. She achieves a tour de force, cleverly arranging the two biggest gut kicks in the very last pages.

And she does this by making people behave in ways they never do: holding petty grudges for years and years despite, through those years, working together with the grudged person in harmony to achieve common goals, performed with great courage, fortitude, and strength of character--all abandoned in a moment just for scorekeeping.

That would be enough to cross her off my list, but this book also suffers from longeurs of "I'm coming with you." "No, you're not." "Yes, I am." "No, you're--OK, I guess you can." "I will NEVER come with you!" and many, many, many variations of same.

I'm done with Dunnett. Never again. No amount of colorful adventure is worth that.

Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu (1864)

I'd never read Le Fanu but had often heard him mentioned as a contributor to the mystery/suspense/sensation novel, and Harriet Vane publishes a monograph on him, which made me curious.

The narrator is Maud Ruthyn, only 17 when the novel begins, and she's grown up isolated in a spooky dark house with her distant, uncommunicative father. He's obsessed with the blight on family honor, many years ago, when his brother Silas was accused of a terrible crime--never proved, but scandalous. Although Maud is heiress to a great fortune, and Silas has an early reputation as a spendthrift rake, the father believes in his Christian reformation and wants Maud to live with him after the father's death--even though Silas is heir after Maud. This, you see, will convince the world of how truly trustworthy Silas is.

As you might imagine, this doesn't go well. Innocent Maud, taught to be silent and compliant, wants to believe the best of her uncle, ignoring all kinds of warning signs--for example, he's charged with educating her, and given a substantial sum to do it, but blandly says that wandering around outside in the fresh air will be better for her. Little by little, he removes her freedoms, and tries to engineer a marriage between his no-good son Dudley and Maud.

The novel has plenty of spooky touches like a frightening bully of a governess, an enormous decaying old house which has had a suicide (or is murder?), religious weirdness, laudanum, rough and scary servants, and so on. Little by little Uncle Silas separates Maud from any friend, including his own daughter Milly.

For me though the feeling of suspense was watered down because the book is, I think, too long. It needs more compression to sustain the right pitch of tension; too often, events extend rather than develop the plot.

Also, I was bothered by a lapse in the storytelling. Early on, one of his Maud's few reliable older friends, whom she trusts--a Dr. Bryerly, a friend of her father's--is alarmed by her circumstances, and tells her very seriously to secretly scratch his London address with a pin on the inside of her clothes chest, leaving out his name, and to burn the paper on which the address is written. He tells her to fly to him if she's ever in serious danger. She follows his instructions to scratch in the address.

Throughout the novel, I kept expecting the tock to follow this tick, wondering when on earth she was going to remember this escape route--especially when Uncle Silas's machinations take her to London. But no, it's as if this never happened. Chekhov's gun on the mantelpiece never goes off. I found this loose end very unsatisfying.

Still, I enjoyed reading this; Le Fanu is a lively writer and some of his scenes are quite funny, especially a fight between Dudley and one of Maud's would-be suitors, with an onlooker encouraging Dudley to knock him in the "dinner-service" again.

A further word on Dunnett

I have to make one complaint about Dunnett so far. I really hate how she resorts to the death of a pet to make a point about the cruelty of people or situations. In Book 1, an innocent hound gets it; Book 2, an innocent lapdog. Book 3 (I just started it) is the worst so far, with a lovely scene where the bad guys slaughter a large group of beautiful, affectionate cats right in front of the people who love them. Luckily I saw it coming and managed to skim most of the relevant paragraphs.

This is really pissing me off. I don't think it's just that this pushes certain buttons of mine. I'm also pissed off because I think it's cheap. It's lazy. There are all kinds of ways to establish that villains are cruel and ruthless and Dunnett is a good enough writer to do that without going for the easy way to make me cry. I suppose next it'll be kittens, or maybe baby otters.

I'll keep reading, but I'm pretty angry right now.

Spring of the Ram by Dorothy Dunnett

The first book was so good, I couldn't wait to read the second in Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolò series, Spring of the Ram. This one is exciting and fascinating, as Nicholas races to Trebizond on a dual mission: beat out a rival for the best trade deals, and rescue his 13-year-old stepdaughter from a dubious marriage with that same rival. At the same time, Trebizond is threatened by the Sultan Mehmet, and Nicholas is bringing soldiers to help defend this last outpost of the Byzantine Empire from takeover by the infidel.

There's much to enjoy here: hair's-breadth escapes, the Trebizond court's decadent glories (arcane ritual followed by bath-house shenanigans), plenty of fighting, ruses, scams, and guile. It's interesting to see how young Nicholas has to fight to establish his leadership among men older and more experienced. Descriptions of exotic Trebizond were absolutely good enough to eat, full of lush detail, immensely satisfying.

Dunnett is not one of your happy-ending writers, though, and I was a bit disappointed at how mixed the payoff was. I guess I have to expect this; her plots tend to follow a failure-success-failure structure, and no victory so far has been unambiguous. Also, I would like to know what Dunnett has against dogs. In Book 1, an innocent hound gets it; here, an innocent lapdog. At least the deaths were mercifully swift. I will not expect any dog encountered in future books to have a long lifespan.

Niccolò Rising by Dorothy Dunnett (1986)

The first in an eight-volume series, Niccolò Rising is a historical novel set in the 15th century that follows the fortunes of Claes, a dyer’s apprentice with the Charetty family in Bruges. A family by-blow, Claes has also become a sort of servant-companion to the Charetty heir, young Felix. When the youths get into trouble—frequently—from their pranks and misadventures, Claes is the one who takes the beatings, always cheerfully. It seems altogether unlikely that such a fun-loving, stolid innocent will become a scheming and hugely successful merchant-adventurer-political intriguer. We get to see how.

In his size and strength, his patient good nature, his broad low-browed face, Claes at first seems as simple as an ox. But he’s actually a gifted mimic who loves puzzles, speaks many languages, and is good at numbers. He’s good with the ladies, too. He turns the natural tendency to underestimate him into an advantage. Bit by bit, he makes himself useful to the Charettys, growing the business and eventually making international deals in political/military affairs as well as business. Romance, adventure, the subtlest personal and political intriguing among great merchant princes: Claes navigates it all, always surprising us.

This is a very dense novel, not at first easily approachable, and Dunnett doesn’t always clarify things as she might. A simple matter like names, for example: Dunnett doesn’t explain until rather late in the book that Claes is a Flemish diminutive for Nicholas (think St. Nicholas/Santa Claus), and I didn’t figure it out on my own. And in this first book, he doesn’t yet go by Niccolò, so when I began reading I kept wondering when we were going to get to the title character. More than once I had to look up untranslated foreign terms or obscure vocabulary not in Webster’s (to gant, FYI, is to yawn or gape).

Our view into Claes’s mind, his intentions, is left opaque for much of the novel—deliberately, as later becomes clear, but this distancing from the main character can be  offputting. With that, and with so many details to master—all the confusing if rich historical context combined with a huge cast of characters (a list at the beginning takes four pages)—it was some time before I felt really immersed in the world of the novel. But I was very glad I stuck with it. Perseverance has its rewards. I’ve already ordered the next volume and can’t wait to read it.

Tender Morsels by Margo Flanagan (2008)

The title of this YA novel comes from the Grimms’ fairy tale “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” one of my childhood favorites. As I read, I recognized many elements from that story (the two sisters, the ungrateful dwarf who receives their help, the friendly bear, the treasure, and so on), and I enjoyed seeing how Lanagan uses them here. Tender Morsels is a much darker re-telling or transformation, one that immediately drew me right in—but the tale suffered as it went on.


It’s really too bad. Lanagan has an interesting way with language, just strange enough for a fairy-tale feel but not too fake-archaic, especially when characters like the hedge-witch ("mudwife" in the novel) speak: “‘I weren’t desprit. I were bored. Bored, bored. Bored of coal-scuttles and thin porridge and cat-soup and chilblings and blankets made of paper. A bit of pokelee-thumpelee were something to sparkle up my day.’” Lanagan adds a necessary distance and strangeness with locutions like “littlee-man” for a dwarf. She also writes lively descriptions: “And the marsh—who knew what lay under that sheet of silver lumped with reedy islets, arrowed with the wakes of ducks?” Very nice.

I also liked the set-up, where a 15-year-old girl in terrible circumstances, driven to a desperate choice, is removed by a celestial power to a world like her own, but made over as her heart’s desire: safe, calm, predictable. You want it for her, but it’s also easy to understand how that world isn’t enough, eventually, for one of her daughters, and why it sets up conflict.

How many YA novels by now have concerned themselves with themes of incest, abuse and rape? Even when I was in high school—and next year will be our 30th reunion—it seemed like I couldn’t bring home a new YA book that wasn’t about those topics. When I realized Tender Morsels would be another such, I mentally sighed. As I read, though, I found myself impressed at first by how skillfully Lanagan makes these themes fit with how a fairy-tale heroine traditionally suffers (which can, after all, include threats of incest—see, for example, “Cap o’Rushes,” “All-Kinds-of-Fur,” and the like).

Most regrettably, the novel increasingly loses its grip (starting around p. 142, of 433 pages) as it departs more and more from the underlying fairy tale, and as the focus shifts from the mother Liga to her two daughters. By p. 296, the story seemed at a natural end and I wondered why it would go on—but Tender Morsels continues for another 130 or so. The book’s initial fascinating alchemy loses its magic, dwindling into one long thinly disguised therapy session for abuse survivors. It’s a bit cringeworthy to see how naked the revenge fantasy becomes, and how obviously one character becomes stand-in for a therapist.

As I say, too bad, because it all started so promisingly! We moved out of the magic circle of a storyteller at the hearth, flames flickering and the room deep with shadows, and into a fluorescent-lit church basement support group. Such a shame.

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2008; translation by Lucia Graves, copyright 2009)

When a mysterious gentleman who doesn’t blink offers you what you most desire, even immortality, warning bells should go off. But young writer David Martín is desperate. And all he has to do is create a new religion, or at least its story: how hard could that be for the man who churns out penny dreadfuls at 6.66 (uh huh) pages a day? And anyway, as Martín maintains in the opening sentence of The Angel’s Game, “A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. . . . from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.” The unblinking gentleman, publisher Andreas Corelli, is just offering a better price.

Much like the sensation novels Martín writes, with “plots as thick and murky as the water in the port,” The Angel’s Game is melodramatic, darkly atmospheric, sometimes silly, but greatly entertaining if you like that sort of thing—and I do. I also like the setting, a Barcelona that’s as moody, seductive, mysterious, and doom-laden as any femme fatale (so compelling, in fact, that Martín titles his newspaper serial Mysteries of Barcelona and his penny dreadfuls City of the Damned).


Equally spooky is the house Martín rents, especially its tower room containing a seductive Underwood typewriter “for which, alone, I would have paid the price of the rent,” he says, stroking the typewriter keys lovingly. Though there’s a doomed love affair (of course), books and writing are much more convincing love objects in this novel, like Martín’s childhood copy of Great Expectations, restored to him by Corelli: “I stared at the bundle of paper that to me, in a not so distant past, had seemed to contain all the magic and light of the world.”


But magic in this book isn’t so light. Things get dark and complicated, haunted by connections between and among Martín, his shadowy tower house, and past tragedies. Bodies start to pile up in Grand Guignol fashion as Martín gets more and more embroiled in his real-life sensation thriller, and he slowly realizes the true nature of his bargain.


The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, with only a few infelicities. I did sometimes wished that street names and so on were translated, because names can be so evocative. The name of a brothel, for instance, is given as El Ensueño; it helps to know this means The Dream.


More importantly—I had great fun reading this book, thoroughly enjoying the melodrama, mystery, and atmosphere. The first half was stronger, I thought, with some humor to lighten things up a bit here and there. The unrelenting and somewhat repetitively arrived at body count in the last half wasn’t always satisfying. Some complications seem to exist for the sake of complication. But I liked the recurring images of blood/water/tears/drowning and fire/arson/flames—in both cases, associated with both destruction and purification. As are books and writing, come to think of it.


I didn’t quite know how to read the ending and I sort of didn’t believe it. But that’s only a few pages out of the whole, and didn’t affect my great enjoyment of this twisted, book-adoring book.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly (2006).

Here is a tip from me to you: Avoid any novel that directly mentions Stories, Importance Of, as Connolly’s novel does in the very first line. Wherever it started (Joan Didion in The White Album--“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”?) I first noticed in  fiction somewhere around Ursula Hegi’s disgusting 1994 novel Stones from the River. Later examples include Lisa See in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005) or Keith Donohue with The Stolen Child (2006): a sensitive misunderstood child negotiates an unfair, oppressive world with the help of Stories and all they are said to tap into, which always seems to include a rich vein of self-pity. Some writers—Michael Chabon and Philip Pullman come to mind—do manage to handle themes of childhood and storytelling gracefully. John Connolly is not one of them.

The novel promises to be excitingly spooky, something along the lines of the film Pan’s Labyrinth. To quote the back cover: “High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness.” But the promise fizzles out as this becomes a clumsy quest story with obvious debts to The Wizard of Oz, the Narnia books (especially the setting, London in the early years of WWII), and the Stephen King-Peter Straub collaboration The Talisman: David is lured to an enchanted fairy-tale world through a crack in the garden wall, and there he must escape great dangers and find the king in order to get home, helped along the way by figures like the Woodsman and the knight Roland.

In the cover blurbs, the Los Angeles Times singles out Connolly’s “evocative style” for praise. Evocative of a tin ear, maybe: unsubtle, badly judged, ludicrously inconsistent. Infelicities stud the book like raisins in rice pudding, especially when we get to the adventure. “Roland had shared with Fletcher what he knew of the wolves.” “Shared with” to mean “told”? That would be bad usage for 1940s, let alone for a timeless fairytale world. A terrifying harpy appears: “David had an opportunity to examine its face as it hovered.” David might as well be examining a watch face for all the emotion that displays. A band of suspicious villagers calls out “‘Come no closer until you have identified yourselves.’” “Identified yourselves?” Peasants don’t talk like that. Roland decides not to mention something controversial: “‘I will not trouble them with my views.’” “My views”? Knights don’t talk like that.

Sometimes Connolly puts on his Story-Teller Hat, imitating fairytales through heavy iambs and anapests, no contractions, and lots of prepositional phrases:

Once upon a time—for that is how all stories should begin—there was a boy who lost his mother.

[Stories] were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.

This is how things came to pass.

“Sometimes, children stray from the path and become lost in the forest, and they are never seen again. They die there, consumed by beasts or slain by evil men, and their blood soaks into the ground.

As individual sentences those aren’t so very bad, but Connolly can’t seem to handle moving from one register to another with any grace. First we have, in fairy-tale diction, "Already he feared to hear the silence of the woods shattered by the howling of wolves and Loups." This is immediately followed by "As they walked, David had a chance to examine his surroundings." The first sentence is full of portent and iambs and archaic flavor, and the second becomes strangely flat.

Compare this sentence from the Grimms’ version of “Snow White” (usefully included in the book’s reading guide): “But now the poor child was all alone in the great forest, and so terrified that she looked at every leaf of every tree, and did not know what to do.” She did not coolly “examine” her “surroundings,” just as David probably did not coolly “examine” the harpy’s face. Connolly often seems to think that stuffy vocabulary has the same effect as an authentic fairytale narrative voice.

Sometimes Connolly’s Story-Teller Hat is borrowed from Stephen King on a bad day:

[David] could only conjure up a half-formed being that crouched in the cobwebbed corners of his imagination where all the things that he feared curled and slithered upon one another in the darkness.

Connolly seems to expect his English teacher to write “Lively!” in the margins, but portentous alliteration (conjure, crouched, cobwebbed, corners, curled) is a pretty cheap and easy trick. And again, alongside all this portentousness, we get passages like this:

David’s relations with [his stepmother] Rose were not good. . . . It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother, although that was bad enough. Her attempts to cook meals that he liked for dinner, despite the pressures of rationing, irritated him.

No 12-year-old boy, today or in 1941, experiences his life with phrases like “relations with Rose”; “her attempts to cook meals”; “despite the pressures of rationing.” The entire novel lurches clumsily like this from one diction register to another, from fairy tales to cheap horror to dull reporting to, in one horribly misconceived episode, broad working-class-accented comedy.

Worse, the style badly serves the story. All that creepy ookiness in the alliterative passage has nothing to do with David’s particular fears. His mother has died, already just about the worst thing that can happen to a child, and now his father has remarried and had another son. He hasn’t wished gruesome death on his half-brother or stepmother; he’s not obsessed with images of his mother rotting in her grave; he’s committed no sin in thought or deed that should fill him with self-disgust. It's not rot and contamination that David fears; it's abandonment.

In fact, the passage about David and his stepmother would seem to be a good time to tap into David’s real fears, but the simple-minded psychologizing (“It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother”) removes any sense of black, frightening undercurrents. Perhaps David just needs more self-esteem, or more validation from his father? Nothing about this passage suggests that what he does need is a terrifying and dangerous quest.

But that's just one example. The novel finds many other ways to go wrong. David manages to encounter, in the enchanted adventure world, issues of child molestation, homosexuality (Roland has a Special Friend), and class struggle, all filtered through a very modern understanding. The Snow-White chapters left me gape-mouthed with amazement at how exuberantly bad they are. Here David has just met the seven dwarfs:

“Names?” said the first dwarf. “Names? Course we have names. I”—he gave a little, self-important cough—“am Comrade Brother Number One. These are Comrade Brothers Numbers Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Eight.”

“What happened to Seven?” asked David.

There was an embarrassed silence.

“We don’t talk about Former Comrade Brother Number Seven,” said Comrade Brother Number One, eventually. “He has been officially excised from the Party’s records.”

You see, David’s books in his room have been talking out loud to him, to themselves, and to each other, and Snow White somehow was shelved next to a book on communism…well, that’s a tiny bit funny, or would be in a completely different book.

But when a dwarf asks David if he’s “sizeist,” how does that make any sense? How would someone 60 years ago even know how to parse that? This adventure world is supposed to be linked to David’s imaginative world, and I simply don’t believe such scenes could be part of it. And the real question is what this episode is doing in a book that otherwise takes itself and David’s quest extremely seriously, a book that proclaims stories are “yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.” I suppose the instrument could be a kazoo.

The book should end when David returns from his quest, but takes yet another misguided direction at the end. We learn too much about David’s grown-up life, and events no longer seem to make sense in a narrative way, they seem as disconnected as real life. All this fuss about his father marrying Rose, and they wind up divorced anyway? I was suspecting autobiography already (also confirmed in the appended reader’s guide), when we discover that David “became a writer and he wrote a book. He called it The Book of Lost Things, and the book that you are holding is the book that he wrote. And when children would ask him if it was true, he would tell them that, yes, it was true, or as true as anything in this world can be, for that was how he remembered i.t” This is tiresome in too many ways to list, but in that, it’s consistent with the whole.

Writers who go on and on about the magic of stories ought to dazzle more and annoy less.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (2008)

Richard Holmes defines Romantic science as "the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and produced a new vision." Although most think of Romanticism as opposed to the aims and processes of science, Holmes sees both forces as being united by the notion of wonder.

Keats, for instance, uses the thrill of discovery as experienced by astronomers and explorers to explain his own thrill at reading Chapman's translation of Homer: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken / Or like stout Cortez, when with wond'ring eyes [the MS original, later changed to "eagle eyes] / He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise..." It's an exuberant book, filled with the wonder and delight he describes, and thoroughly entertaining.

The "new planet" was Uranus, discovered by William Herschel, and Holmes devotes much time in this account to Herschel. Holmes's method is mainly biographical, looking at important Romantic scientists and explorers like Herschel and his astronomer sister Caroline, Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, and Mungo Park. Throughout, he brings in writers like Coleridge, Keats, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, showing how exciting new ideas and tropes circulated back and forth among poets, writers, and opinion makers.

The new science could also seem dark and disturbing, and Holmes discusses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his Creature in this light. Shelley's achievement seems all the more brilliant here in how perfectly she captures ambivalence toward the growing power of scientists (a word first invented in this time period) to penetrate nature's secrets.

I loved this insightful, informative, energetic book, which doesn't just describe but transmits the excitement and wonder of the age.

The Scarecrow and his Servant by Philip Pullman (2004)

Philip Pullman is best known for the His Dark Materials series, but he also writes wonderful children's books. This is one of Pullman's "fairy tales," children's stories with some familiar traditional elements, but wholly original.

In this tale, a fine scarecrow comes to life and employs Jack, a war orphan, ostensibly as a servant--though it's clear who the real brains of the outfit is. Meanwhile, the dastardly Buffalonis are trying to ruin Spring Valley with factories that make chemical poisons. The scarecrow's creator put inside him a document important to restoring the valley to its proper owners, and as he and Jack have adventures, they must also contend with evil agents of the Buffalonis.

I like the words with which Scarecrow's maker sends him out into the world:

'There you are,' he said. 'Now you remember what your job is, and remember where you belong. Be courteous, and be brave, and be honourable, and be kind. And the best of blooming luck.'

Indeed, the scarecrow is gentlemanly, with a rich, sonorous voice; he's very proud of himself, with an endearing tendency to blame everything on birds (though he is courteous to their young). And it is these qualities of being brave, honorable, kind, etc., that will save him and Spring Valley. Luck will be on his side too, not least in meeting Jack, who in the tradition of Jack stories is resourceful and quick-thinking.


I love Pullman's sense of humor here, and also how the fact of Scarecrow's being a scarecrow is never just incidental to the story. Scarecrow, with limbs made of sticks, is somewhat akin to similar items, and at one point falls in love with a beautiful young broom. Sadly, though, she is already in love with...(wait for it)...a rake.

Pullman explains on his Web site that each of his fairy tales has a particular atmosphere—18th century Germany, a version of Indonesia: "The Scarecrow and his Servant, though, belongs to Italy. If it were set to music, it would be played on mandolins, and be in the rhythm of a tarantella." It's a great deal of fun, vivid, amusing, and often touching. The illustrations are a charming addition. This would be a great book to read aloud as well.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon's (2009)

Of course, books written since the new millennium are good, too...Chaon is well known for You Remind Me of Me, but I'm not familiar with that one.

East Lynne by Ellen Wood (Mrs. Henry Wood)

Time for another Victorian potboiler! Note: this review gives away some plot details.



One of the best-known sensation novels from the 1860s, East Lynne is a book to be devoured. It's impossible to resist the lively prose, slangy dialogue, vivid characters, and melodramatic events. From a velvet gout stool in the first paragraph to the pious summing-up in the last, the Victorian hits just keep on coming: aristocracy, debt, adultery, spinsters, suppressed love, disguise, consumption, false accusations, suffering mothers, dying children, politics, and revenge. Reading East Lynne in 1862 (on the insistence of the Prince of Wales), a staid middle-aged Professor of Ecclesiastical History raced through its 600-plus pages in three sittings. The story's enduring interest is also testified to by its many dramatic productions, most recently in 1982.


The convoluted plot concerns the classic Victorian pairing of a dark and sinful woman, Lady Isabel, with a blonde and good woman, Barbara Hare. Being beautiful, aristocratic, and touchingly alone and penniless, Lady Isabel captures the heart of upcoming attorney Archibald Carlyle, who asks her to marry him even though he knows she is not in love with him. Perhaps he finds her especially pitiful because he bought her father's estate, East Lynne, before he died bankrupt, and this is a chance to return her to her home. Poor Barbara, meanwhile, truly does love Archibald, and is devastated to learn of their marriage. She's also suffering because her brother Richard is on the run, accused of murdering a local man, and this has turned their mother into an invalid wreck.


Add to this mixture the very badly behaving Sir Francis Levison. He'd flirted with Isabel before her marriage; then, some years afterward, when she's tired and weak from child-bearing and Archibald is not as attentive as he once was, Levison appears again on the scene—to work her ruin. He convinces Isabel that the secretive meetings between Barbara and Archibald (they are discussing how to help Richard) are love liaisons and that he, Levison, is the one who always loved her. Though she has everything to lose, including her children, Isabel feels so jealous and neglected that in a moment of madness, she runs away with Levison to the Continent.


This is only the beginning. Carlyle promptly divorces Isabel, and Levison almost as promptly abandons her, soon after the birth of their child. Isabel then suffers a train crash that conveniently kills her baby and its nurse. She is reported dead, affects a new identity (she is disfigured from the accident), and gains work as a governess. Meanwhile, Carlyle makes Barbara the happiest woman in England. They marry and have children. Guess what family in England happens to need a governess? That's right. In a Lifetime Movie Moment, disguised Isabel returns to her own former house, not as an honored wife and mother, but as an awkward, overlooked governess—not just to Barbara's children but to her own!


This leads to the most fascinating section of the novel, because Isabel's situation is so strange. She's in what used to be her own house where she lived first with her father and then with her husband. Her children are right there, but not her children; she has to call her own daughter "Miss Lucy." She has to accept the Carlyles' instructions as to the children, agree or disagree. This time she sees Carlyle's merits and loves him as she never did when she was his wife; and now she has to see him treating Barbara as lovingly as he once treated her. Isabel's previous life is strangely doubled in front of her, enacted by another, and she has only herself to blame for no longer being the star player.


Up to now, point of view has alternated among the various characters, with a good deal of Barbara Hare worrying about her brother and mooning over Carlyle. In the first part of the book, Barbara is a reasonably attractive figure; she sasses her pompous father and bravely works on behalf of her brother. But once the disguised Isabel comes to East Lynne, we see Barbara from a distance. Barbara secure and beloved is far less interesting than tormented Barbara, and only now does she reveal a certain coldness, saying to Isabel, "No. I never was fond of being troubled with children. When my own grow up into childhood I shall deem the nursery and the schoolroom the fitter place for them."


As Barbara recedes in interest, Isabel, in her physical and mental suffering, becomes more so—though never exactly sympathetic, as she indulges herself in emotions other than repentance:

She tore upstairs to her chamber, and sank down in an agony of tears and despair. Oh, to love him as she did now! To yearn after his affection with this passionate, jealous longing, and to know that they were separated for ever and ever; that she was worse to him than nothing!

Softly, my lady. This is not bearing your cross.

One can't sympathize all that much with her predicament. Mrs. Wood seems to acknowledge here that Isabel has not truly repented, that all her shame and sorrow is more about having ruined her own life than about the real hurt she caused other people. Ostensibly Isabel has taken this risk of returning to East Lynne because she can't bear to be separated any longer from her children. But her attachment never seems more than sentimental; if she cared that much about her children, she wouldn't have abandoned them. It's not as if Carlyle had been abusing her or making her life a misery, after all. She was just bored and felt she deserved more attention.


Nevertheless, the contrast developed in the last part of the book, between Isabel with her passion and grief and Barbara's complacency, undercuts to a large degree the pious moralizing over Isabel's fall. In the end crazy Isabel is just more fun than good Barbara. Without Isabel, after all, there'd be no Frances Davison, and his downfall is the most fun ever. He's manipulated into running for MP against Carlyle, hometown favorite and the man he wronged, to general disgust—and revenge in two flavors, comic and serious. Of course at the end all things are set right, but not before we get to thoroughly enjoy their wrongness.

Life Class by Pat Barker (2008)

As the novel opens, in spring 1914, Paul Tarrant is an art student at the Slade, and not a very successful one. “Is that really the best you can do?” says his professor, devastatingly. (The professor, like many characters in the novel, is a real-life figure, Henry Tonks.) But soon, Paul and his circle are swept up in preparations for war, then war itself. Along the way, Paul briefly becomes romantically involved with a beautiful artist’s model as he considers whether he has a future as an artist.

His friends include Kit Neville, a rich young man who makes his name painting subways and factories, and Elinor Brooke, a rising artist and the woman he falls in love with. Paul and Elinor must each find a deep and genuine way to respond to the war personally and artistically, in ways that are quite different from each other.

I’m deeply fascinated by World War I, and I’ve read Booker Prize-winning Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy set in that period. She’s a highly praised writer and Life Class is no exception: D.J. Taylor of The Guardian, for example, calls her writing here “breathtaking.” But I seem unable to fully appreciate Barker. In her trilogy, I felt she kept breaking off chapters just as they were getting interesting without developing them. With Life Class, although I was interested in the book and kept reading, I also could not join in the praise.

To begin with, I found the characters to be rather thin soup. Paul and Elinor are attractive, charming, talented (at first, Elinor more than Paul), but don’t really seem to have any faults. I was pleased when we got to hear the unattractive, bullying, self-seeking Neville’s point of view for once, because at least he has some personality. Here he is on a visit to Elinor’s parents’ house in the country, wanting desperately to be back in London, with “grit in his eyes, advertising everywhere, steam, people, pistons turning. Anything to escape from the clamorous boredom of trees” (108). I loved the passage where Neville, Elinor, and Paul go on a two-mile bicycle ride, out-of-shape Neville hating it the whole way, wondering why they couldn’t have just taken the car, for Christ’s sake. I sympathized.

Without the overwhelmingness of the Great War, the trenches, the gangrene, the mud, the horror, as a backdrop of automatic significance and to give Paul and Elinor something to respond to, would we ever care about them? I don’t think so.

Many novelists talk about art with a bias towards subject, towards the picture’s story or narrative, rather than discussing things like brushwork, technique, form, balance of light and dark and so on. Barker often displays this bias. What distinguishes her characters’ works is almost always what they depict—pastoral landscapes, trains, portraits, or hospitals—not how they are depicted. Occasionally Barker recognizes a more painterly point of view, as when Paul admires one of Elinor’s paintings: “If he stayed at the Slade another ten years he’d never be able to paint sunlight on wet flesh like that” (p. 69). But when Paul paints his breakthrough picture, what makes it a breakthrough is its subject. Presumably it takes some skill to paint a man with gangrene too, but he manages to do it without benefit of the Slade. How?

I was also surprised to see quite a few clunkers in a book by such a lauded writer, like this terribly stale simile: “boarded-up buildings at intervals along the terrace like black teeth in a smile.” Or a character suggesting an “open marriage,” a term whose earliest cited entry in Merriam Webster is 1971. Or using the term “painting” vastly more often than “picture,” which (I believe, anyway; I could be wrong) was the preferred locution of the time. I also found it strange that we get careful physical descriptions of all the characters except Paul, whose appearance is withheld until page 211, for some reason. Teresa’s and Elinor’s interest in him and Neville’s jealousy would have made a whole lot more sense if we’d known about those “heavy-lidded, slanting, dark eyes…straight shoulders and narrow waist.”

In a similar vein, I thought a more nuanced writer wouldn’t have to come straight out and tell us things like “Paul thought he detected a lot of tension beneath the surface in this family. Neville was in awe of his father, a war correspondent who’d faced anger in every corner of the world. Throughout his life the father had gravitated towards violent conflict, and the son was desperate to measure up. No easy matter if the worst danger you face is a collapsing easel. But it made sense of the younger man’s preoccupation with virility in art” (p. 52). Thank you, Captain Exposition.

I’m being harsh on a book I did, after all, enjoy reading. There’s a very interesting scene when Neville views a painting of the Last Judgment, in the summer before the war starts. Though he hates the subject, saying it’s not relevant to the modern world, he sees its power; he “saw that he was in the presence of greatness,” which is an interesting comment on Neville, and it’s fascinating how the painting foreshadows events to come in Ypres: “wormlike people hid in holes in the ground or stared up at flashes of light in the sky.” Maybe Neville will come to see its relevance.

Although I criticized Barker’s clunkiness, she can also achieve a beautiful turn of phrase. Here, Paul, lonely in Belgium and thinking he won’t see Elinor again, has just had an unsatisfactory encounter with a prostitute: “He fumbled into his clothes as fast as he could and clattered downstairs, out onto the slushy street, feeling as if he’d committed a small, unimportant murder” (287).

I wouldn’t call this novel breathtaking, but worth reading if you’re interesting in the Great War, art of the time, or even the Bloomsbury set, which Elinor gets involved with.

Basil (1852) by Wilkie Collins

Another Victorian novel? Always a good idea. Wilkie Collins was a great friend of Dickens, and an important contributor to the suspense genre. He was a fascinating figure: addicted to laudanum because of a chronic illness, he never married but lived with one woman and her child, and supported a second illegitimate family as well. Despite his pain and illness, he won many friends and worked tirelessly throughout his life.

The Mistress's Daughter by A.M. Homes (2007)

In my last few blog entries, I've discussed books I liked, from mostly to a whole lot. But this one...

The Flashman series by George Macdonald Fraser

The original Harry Paget Flashman was a nasty bully in Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, who's finally kicked out of the school after getting so drunk he has to be returned to Rugby on a hurdle. The Flashman series by George Macdonald Fraser, some dozen volumes, purports to be a set of memoirs discovered and printed well after Flashy's death (by which time he's achieved mighty respectability and has a long, glowing entry in Who's Who). In these memoirs, Flashman is glad to confirm Hughes's bad opinion; by his own accounting, he's "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady."

Good thing he's such an entertaining one. One of the few virtues Flashy possesses, along with horsemanship and a gift for languages, is the ability to tell a cracking good story. The entire narrative structure of these books may be summed up as: Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire, endlessly repeated. And these can be some pretty hot frying pans:

• The doomed retreat from Kabul
• The Crimean War and the charge of the Light Brigade
• The Cawnpore Massacre
• Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar and her insane court
• The Battle of Little Bighorn
• The Taiping Rebellion
• The Harper's Ferry raid

 Somehow Fraser manages to make such events, often tragic as well as dangerous, seem not out of place in novels that are also rollicking, bawdy fun.

Flashman, partly through chance and partly as comeuppance, has a positive genius for getting involved in hopeless military blunders, or crazy, dangerous political machinations, even though all he wants is an easy life. Plots borrow from such sources as The Prisoner of Zenda and Uncle Tom's Cabin (but don't worry if you haven't read the originals). Because he sees almost everything through the crystal-clear lens of self-preservation, Flashman pierces through all kinds of windy, sentimental follies, offering hilarious observations throughout.

Along the way he gambles, drinks, and wenches with abandon, and when he manages to survive, it's through sheer luck and because he's cheated, lied, and stolen. As much as he thoroughly enjoys and approves of his own vices, he whines like a baby when he becomes a victim himself. Part of the fun here is seeing how often that bigot, that bully, that total dick Flashy gets hung by his own petard. It must be said, though, that however apparent his dickishness is to the reader, most often he manages to fool the well-meaning folks around him, who are completely taken in by his bluff, hearty Englishman shtick.

Amid all the fun, Flashy's character can in fact be unsettling. He is near-sociopathic in his selfishness, remorselessness, and lack of empathy. Some officers of his regiment dislike seeing the men punished, but not he:

Myself, I liked a good flogging, and used to have bets with Bryant, my particular crony, on whether the men would cry out before the tenth stroke, or when he would faint. It was better sport than most, anyway.

These books would be a very guilty pleasure indeed if not for George Macdonald Fraser's skill in point of view. Flashman may be the narrator, but Fraser is the writer, and when most necessary he achieves a very delicately balanced point of view, where Flashy's narrative tilts on him occasionally like a hinged mirror that reveals the back of things. A fine example is in Flashman, the first of these novels, during an exchange with the genuinely brave and patriotic Sergeant Hudson; it's a sign of Hudson's worth that even Flashy recognizes his competence. It's the First Afghan War, things are bleak, Flashman's contribution is desperately needed, and as usual Flashy is malingering to avoid danger, overstating a few welts on his back.

"Sorry, Hudson," says I, rather weak. "I would if I could, you know. But whatever my back looks like, I can't do much just yet. I think there's something broken inside."

He stood looking down at me. "Yes, sir," says he at length, "I think there is." And then he just turned and walked out.

Flashy goes "hot all over" as he realizes what Hudson means, but the emotion doesn't last long, nor change him a whit. He survives—with enormous undeserved credit, even—and that's all that really matters to Flashman.

Flashy can be pretty shocking in his naked selfishness, but in the world of fiction, all is forgiven of those who can tell such scandalous hilarious riveting adventures. I enjoyed every page of this series, and I look forward to reading every page again someday.

The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1906)

I love Victorian/Edwardian novels and children's literature, and in Frances Hodgson Burnett I have the intersection of both loves. I remember reading A Little Princess for the first time at age 8 or 9 with breathless wonder and delight, and re-read it, plus The Secret Garden and The Lost Prince, many times over and over. I didn't even know that FHB wrote novels for adults, too, until fairly recently. I'd like to call attention to one of those novels.

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The Shuttle's plot was sparked by the late 19th-century phenomenon of rich American women marrying titled but poorer Englishmen. The title refers to the threads of relationship between England and America, woven by the hand of Fate, no less. Here, American Rosalie Vanderpoel, young, sheltered and naive, too hastily marries Englishman Sir Nigel Anstruthers, who wastes no time in bringing her to his ancestral home of Stornham Court in Kent. There, he breaks her down and isolates her from her family. Twelve years later, her younger sister Bettina--called Betty--comes of age and goes to England to rescue her. Betty is the heroine of this novel, blessed with all the virtues of beauty, intelligence, and character. Most of all she possesses a particularly American good, practical business sense.

The most satisfying parts of this novel are those when Betty, taking advantage of Nigel's temporary absence (he's cavorting with his mistress on the Rivieria, on Rosalie's money), tranforms Stornham Court. She goes about this cleverly, with dispatch and good sense, using the bottomless Vanderpoel pockets--which has the additional advantage of providing employment to the dispirited villagers. It's a wonderful fantasy, kind of an Extreme Makeover, Estate Edition: it's an especially American fantasy of setting things right and making them work. (Burnett, though born in England, moved to America at age 16 and spent most of her life there.)

Meanwhile, Betty meets the impoverished aristocrat next door. Mount Dunstan is obviously a perfect match for her but he's proud (of course) and disdains American money...at least until the last chapter. Also meanwhile, Nigel returns and tries to make everyone as miserable as he possibly can. The rest of the novel, bar the odd vacationing American typewriter salesman subplot, features some entertaining sparring between Nigel and Betty, and a lovely moustache-twirling showdown between them in an abandoned cottage.

Here's Betty, on being left in the cottage with her sprained ankle while Nigel goes off to see to the horses before, we presume, coming back to rape her:

As she heard him walk down the path to the gate, Betty stood amazed at his lack of comprehension of her. "He thinks I will stay here. He absolutely thinks I will wait until he comes back," she whispered to the emptiness of the bare room.

I love that! No way is Betty going to just sit around, sprained ankle or not, and wait for her Ruin. Though too good to be true most of the time, Betty is fine company in this novel.

What's not so entertaining, though, are the many and repetitive passages about "the shuttle," the imaginary weaving back and forth of threads between England and America, with musings on American vs. English character, and further musings on (and on) about Life and Strength and Health. There's too much clumsy repetition of similar phrases too close together. The book could have benefited from a good editor.

Speaking of Life and Strength and Health, for FHB, healthy and holy (and underneath it, I think, sex, what with the spears and the moistening and bursting) are closely linked. Here's Betty in ecstatic mode; Kedgers is the head gardener:

"One is so close to Life in [a garden]—the stirring in the brown earth, the piercing through of green spears, that breaking of buds and pouring forth of scent! Why shouldn't one tremble, if one thinks? I have stood in a potting shed and watched Kedgers fill a shallow box with damp rich mould and scatter over it a thin layer of infinitesimal seeds; then he moistens them and carries them reverently to his altars in a greenhouse. The ledges in Kedgers' green-houses are altars. I think he offers prayers before them. Why not? I should. And when one comes to see them, the moist seeds are swelled to fulness, and when one comes again they are bursting. . . . And one is standing close to the Secret of the World! And why should not one prostrate one's self, breathing softly—and touching one's awed forehead to the earth?"

Betty's rehabilitation of the garden anticipates The Secret Garden in some ways; Rosalie's gradual recovery, like Colin's and Mary's, parallels the garden's. Also, Rosalie's son Ughtred (!!) is a hunchback like Colin's father and as Colin was feared to become. Both books have a lot of this semi-mystical talk about Life with a capital L. I like gardens too, but FHB handles all of this so much more effectively in The Secret Garden--and even that novel falls victim to the breathless over-rhapsodic.

It's interesting that the few FHB adult novels I've read have been significantly less well written than her novels for children. I wonder if in simplifying her language for children, FHB managed to control her tendency toward repetition and over-elaboration.

Persephone Books has reissued this in an attractive volume; I got my copy on eBay, a 1907 edition, but you can also read it for free thanks to Project Gutenberg.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Viking, 2009)

Quick review: The elements here—a college for magic, secret doors leading to a magical land with talking animals—are familiar to fantasy readers, but this is not a children’s book, and offers a lot of intrigue. Especially well done are the scenes at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. Though not always successful, The Magicians will keep you reading.

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In the movie Shadowlands, a boy visiting C.S. Lewis wanders into the attic and finds an old wardrobe. Hoping against hope, he opens it. Of course, it's just a wardrobe. As The Magicians opens, 17-year-old Quentin Coldwater sees a mysterious vast cabinet in an old man's house. He can't help opening it—but it turns out to be just a liquor cabinet.

Quentin desperately wants magic to be real. His favorite childhood books, read obsessively over and over, are set in the Narnia-like magical land of Fillory, which can similarly be reached through a cabinet-like grandfather clock. To him, opening a door into such a world would be like "opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do but never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better" (p. 7). (That's a brave sentence in a book that might be said to be making that same promise.) Even when Quentin discovers magic is real, goes to college for it, and visits magical lands, he still must discover that even real magic can't actually live up to this promise either. Nothing can make you other than yourself.

I'm finding the reading experience of this book to be paradoxical. I loved it as I was reading it, could barely put it down, quickly forgave bothersome aspects. Yet as I've organized my thoughts for this review, the book's flaws seem more and more glaring. First, though, some praise.

I love good stories of apprenticeship, and for me the best parts of The Magicians look at how magically gifted young people learn their difficult, exacting craft at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. The classroom scenes, plus a grueling training episode in the Antarctic where students are transformed into geese for the flight down, are very satisfying to read.

Also, Grossman gets a lot of things right about magic. During Quentin's entrance exam, he's asked to perform some magic. He begins by doing the only kind he thinks he knows, card tricks, but something takes over:

With two hands together, as if he were releasing a dove, he tossed the deck of cards lightly up to the ceiling. The deck broke apart and scattered in flight, like a meteorite losing cohesion in the atmosphere, and as the cards fluttered back down to earth they stacked themselves on the tabletop. . . . He turned the deck over and fanned it out on the table like a blackjack dealer. Every card was a Queen—all the standard suits, plus other suits that didn't exist, in different colors, green and yellow and blue. The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books. (p. 33)

That intriguing list pleases me in the way poetry does. Quentin's magic here mimics the creative process where if you let go in a certain disciplined way, your unconscious presents you with images that work, that signify and imply, even if your conscious mind isn't sure why yet. Horns, clocks, bees, and books sound random, but as it turns out, all have deep symbolic associations with both Brakebills and Fillory.

Fillory is a fun creation, also, bringing in elements from many children's magical adventure stories besides Narnia, such as E. Nesbit's Five Children books, Edward Eager, A Wrinkle in Time, and so on. I could understand why Quentin longs for this world. I also enjoyed the knowing, affectionate references to Harry Potter.

In the interests of keeping this review from getting longer than it already is, I haven't even touched on the book's other characters and the relationships among them. There are some interesting figures among the magician students, especially a Sebastian Flyte-like character named Eliot. I did, however, get tired of the adolescent posturing among Quentin and his friends, who often resemble spoiled rich kids. Don't they know how lucky they are?

A big strength of the Potter books is that you know what Potter and his friends are fighting for and why. But in The Magicians, and this is the crux of the book's faults, all their powerful magic doesn't seem to be good for much except as the private amusement of Quentin and his friends, an extremely talented, intelligent, privileged group living in a tiny enclave. They have enormous power to influence the world. Yet when they consider life after graduation, "No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters" (p. 210).

Forgive me while I lapse into sputtering, outraged indignation. Excuse me? How can you say such a thing and possibly be paying any attention to the world? Maybe illness, global warming, war, poverty, natural disasters, rape, murder, injustice, and despair just aren't compelling enough for these precious little darlings. In which case, fuck you, magicians.

It's not that they aren't allowed to interfere: "It was considered chic to go undercover, to infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs, even the military, in order to get oneself into a position to influence real-world affairs magically from behind the scenes " (p. 210). Chic is so perfectly the operative motivating word there. Yes. The reason to influence world affairs would be the coolness factor.

I'll bend over backwards to be fair here and say that, yes, young people tend to be self-centered, and there's a reason the word glamor originally meant "magic, enchantment." But young people also tend to be idealistic, and you see none of that. Quentin is too busy searching for elusive personal happiness to care much about anyone or anything else. While his parents are a bit distant, he's hardly been abused or suffered anything worse than a little social awkwardness. Yet he's always feeling sorry for himself because life isn't exciting enough. HE CAN DO MAGIC but you know, yawn.

Or, as Grossman puts it, Quentin knows that after Brakebills "any one of a thousand options promised—basically guaranteed—a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him?" (p. 211). Gee, I dunno. Maybe because…he's a total prat? In the end, I just don't like Quentin very much.

Quentin's sweet girlfriend Alice finally tells him, "for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life" (p. 333). At great cost to himself and others, Quentin does at last learn this lesson, and resigns himself to as ordinary a life as a magician can have.

Now, I'm not saying this is some fantastic, stunning insight, since it boils down to "Wherever you go, there you are." I kind of expect better from Grossman than a piece of wisdom I first encountered from Buckaroo Banzai. Nevertheless, it's Quentin's and he worked hard for it. But Grossman is so invested in the Narnian secret-door hope that in the end, he betrays Alice's advice so that Quentin can really, truly start his real life of Fillorian grand adventure, hurray! This makes nonsense of Quentin's entire struggle throughout the book. And that is a very big problem.

The Fillorian section of the book, where Quentin and friends find a way into this magical land and go on a quest, contains a huge contradiction in the book's logic that I found extremely disappointing. This logic dictates that magic is difficult to learn, much more complicated than waving a wand and chanting a spell. As Grossman explains it, "The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors," such as "exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory" (p. 55).

Makes sense to me. In fact, I loved that, and thought it a big strength of the book, reminiscent of Le Guin's Earthsea wizard school, where young wizards must learn the true names of everything. Until we get to Fillory, the book is always underlining how important it is to thoroughly understand local considerations—called Circumstances—in spell casting.

Yet once in Fillory, all these stringent conditions go out the window: "He must have used a spell to speed up his reflexes, Fillorian Circumstances be damned" (p. 298). Just "be damned"? It's that easy? The characters are suddenly able to cast all kinds of spells—light spells, kinetic spells, weapon charms—and in the heat of battle too. It's beyond ridiculous that when it's easier for the plot, you can just say be damned to the laws of how magic works.

Similarly, when we first see the Beast, a dangerous character who slips into a Brakebills classroom due to a miscast spell, he's supremely powerful and frightening, in a wonderfully subtle way. The faculty—powerful magicians all—take hours to cast spells sufficient to banish him, and that's on their own territory which is heavily shielded. But when we next meet him, in Fillory, on his own ground, where he has easily defeated the old gods, Alice gives him a good beating, casting such spells as Fergus's Spectral Armory: "'Like it? Do you? Very basic principles. Second Year stuff! But then you never bothered with school, did you . . . You wouldn't have lasted an hour at Brakebills!'" (p. 360) This just doesn't make sense. Again, Grossman is ignoring his own rules that he set up because it's easier that way. I call foul.

I also wonder why these magicians can alter the physical world, but still get colds, blistered feet, and need to use condoms. It makes sense to me that they can't alter physical appearance permanently, but a healing spell should be basic magic.

Like so many books these days, The Magicians could have used better editing. I found extra words on a few pages. A "silver crown" on p. 311 is "a simple golden circlet" on p. 345. The most egregious example is the Fillory map on the endpapers. Good luck trying to follow anyone's journey, because the placements and directions don't correspond in any way to what's on the map.

Maybe no book can "get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better." But in my life as a reader, it sure has felt that way a lot of the time, even if the feeling is temporary. For all my problems with The Magicians, I'm glad I spent time there.

Grade: B+