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.