MarysLibrary

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

You probably need to know a bit about Seattle to really appreciate Maria Semple's new book, Where'd You Go, Bernadette? It helps to know, for example, that the new Koolhaas Seattle Public Library is so Green it's heated by the body heat of library visitors and that it's cooled by breezes from Elliot Bay piped underground to the building. The good citizens of Seattle are so eager - indeed, anxious - to serve the entire population of potential library users they have created a space for bums to spend the day, isolated a bit from the people who want to do research or find a book but don't want to smell this other constituency. The furniture is designed so that it can be hosed down and disinfected overnight.

Here's one remarkably accurate Urban Dictionary description of a Seattleite:

• Is easily agitated when tourist asks to see the original Starbucks, Microsoft or Kurt Cobain's house. True Seattleites do not care for these things.
• Is a pretentious coffee snob due to the thousands of delicious coffee houses and rostaries that surround them.
• Any person who knows not to visit Pike Place Market on a Saturday.
• Any person who was disappointed by EMP (unlike the inbred hicks from across the country who come to visit it).
• Any person that hates it when Californians drive through Washington and cry about the rain and the cold.
• This is a city that is completely devoid of soccer moms.

What we have in Semple's new novel is a portrait of Seattle as seen through the eyes of Bernadette Fox, an architect from LA who is "allergic" to Seattle even after eighteen years of living there, and her husband, a Microsoft guru. They have promised their twelve-ish daughter Bee that she may have whatever she wants if she gets all As in middle school. They think she will ask for a pony, but she wants a trip to Antarctica. Bernadette, the marginally sane mother who is mildly agoraphobic and depressed because of some sort of architectural disaster in LA, is deeply distressed at the idea of crossing the rough waters of Drake Passage between Cape Horn and Antarctica. She is also distressed at having to spend time with people.

But Bernadette is bravely making plans to go on this excursion until a neighbor who lives downhill from her insists that Bernadette get rid of the blackberry vines that are creeping under and over the fence into her neighbor's perfectly maintained garden. (Not to mention crawling under and over the house that Bernadette and her family live in. They keep a weed whacker in the living room to control the shoots coming up through the floorboards.) What nobody seems to realize is that these vines are providing erosion abatement and when Seattle experiences an unusually heavy rain (predicted by Cliff Maas on his web site which everyone in Seattle reads) shortly after the vines are removed, the resulting mudslide is ruinous to the neighbor's garden and the back of her house. Partly as a result of this altercation Bernadette decides she cannot make the Antarctic trip and disappears.

I have complained that this book has been chosen by Spokane Reads as the one book everyone in our city is encouraged to read and talk about this year, but I want to withdraw that complaint. There is little Spokaneites enjoy more than making fun of Seattleites and this novel provides a cache of ammunition. Here is Bernadette on househunting in Seattle:

My first trip up here, to Seattle, the realtor picked me up at the airport to look at houses. The morning batch were all Craftsman, which is all they have here, if you don't count the rash of view-busting apartment buildings that appear in inexplicable clumps, as if the zoning chief was asleep at his desk during the sixties and seventies and turned architectural design over to the Soviets.

Everything else is Craftsman. Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman. It's like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won't matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.

The mud-spattered neighbor suffers from the particular snobbism of old-time Seattleites, resulting from the fact that white settlement in the city goes back only to 1853 and that by far most of the people in Seattle have arrived recently from elsewhere. The neighbor brags of her family history:

Within a four-mile radius is the house I grew up in, the house my mother grew up in, and the house my grandmother grew up in. . . . My great-grandfather was a fur trapper in Alaska . . . Warren's great-grandfather bought furs from him. My point is you come in here with your Microsoft money and think you belong, but you don't belong. You never will.

This phenomenon is called the "Seattle freeze," which is attributed to all the Scandinavian blood in the city.

But Bernadette has some upper-middle-class prejudices of her own. She is eavesdropping on a nearby table in a restaurant:

They don't know the difference between a burrito and an enchilada! . . . Oh my God, they've never heard of mole.  . . . They're covered with tattoos! . . . Did you see the tattoo one of them had on the inside of his arm? It looked like a roll of tape. . . . Know what one of the guys at the drive-thru Starbuck's has on his forearm? . . . A paperclip! It used to be so daring to get a tattoo. And now people are tattooing office supplies on their bodies. . . . Oh my God. It's not just any roll of tape. It's literally Scotch Tape, with the green and black plaid. . . . If you're going to tattoo tape on your arm, at least make it a generic old-fashioned tape dispenser! . . . Did the Staples catalog get delivered to the tattoo parlor that day?

Well, I won't go on, but I do recommend the book, which is charming and witty and filled with satire at the expense of the uber-hip, the liberals who are so far left they have fallen off the continuum, the people who refuse to buy salmon unless they know the name of the boat it was caught from, a population that is divided neatly into those who work at or have made shocking amounts of money from Microsoft and those who, despite the enormous advantages to the city and the University of Washington of all that money having been channeled their way, and despite the fact that Microsoft, along with Boeing, is the very basis of the city's economy, nonetheless cherish a bitter hatred of Bill Gates and his company.

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

About  30 years ago someone removed bottles of Tylenol capsules from the shelves of a Chicago drugstore, added potassium cyanide to them, and returned them to the shelves. Seven people died. Johnson & Johnson, the parent company, cooperated with the police, FBI, FDA, and media, immediately withdrawing all Tylenol from the shelves, warning people not to take their product, and eventually offering to replace capsules with tablets. Product packaging changed overnight to the belligerent packaging we have today. It was the first really effective crisis management episode, with Johnson & Johnson, within a few months, in better shape than before the poisonings. Their success was based on apology followed by complete transparency.

Public relations and that subset of it called crisis management is big business these days. But despite the J&J example people and companies in trouble seem not to have learned the lesson that a prompt acceptance of responsibility without excuses is the most ethical and most effective way to handle a serious PR problem.

The protagonist of A Thousand Pardons, Helen Armstead, knows this instinctively and when her husband, Ben, has a spectacular mid-life crisis and she goes back to work, this is the way she handles some small-time crises for the clients of the four-person PR company that hires her. She soon is hired by a very large PR firm. But just as she is handed the biggest and most important case of her new career she finds herself trying to help a famous movie star whom she knew in elementary school (but who doesn't remember her) when he blacks out and thinks he has harmed a young woman. As her husband attempts to get back on his feet and her 14-year-old daughter gives her the grief that 14-year-olds so often do, she struggles to balance her work life, her personal life, and this project to aid the panicked but not very grateful star.

The characters in this book are engaging, even the out-of-control husband and the bratty daughter. The actor not so much. But Helen's career successes are entertaining as is Ben's attempt to straighten out his life. It is believable (if only just) that a world-famous man might turn to Helen for help when he found himself in serious trouble, and her short-term solution is a logical move. But somehow the second half of the book was unsatisfying for me.

The author of the novel, Jonathan Dee, studied under John Hersey, was an editor at The Paris Review, and had a novel (The Privileges) short-listed for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. His prose is smooth and this is not a difficult book to read. The character development of the Armstead family is well done. The plot is believable (if only just.) The book will probably do very well. And some readers will like it very much indeed. I read it as part of early filtering of novels for the 2014 Buff Orpington Tournament and I will recommend that it be included but with reservations. 

Related articles

ElCicco #CBR5 Review #20: A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

Book Review: Jonathan Dee's A Thousand Pardons

Review: A Thousand Pardons (Audio)

In the land of PR crises, there ain't no mountain high enough

Reading with the Fair Elaine

I'm Elaine's Reading Mentor. Her mom asked me to take on this task about three years ago as a way to introduce Elaine to books and for her to have someone to talk to about what she reads.

That sounds like a great idea, and of course, it is, but what we plan and what actually happens are seldom the same thing. And so Elaine has taken on the role of my Reading Mentor. She goes to the library every week and she picks out picture books for us to read together. She has really good taste in picture books and she knows me well enough by now to pick books that I will enjoy.

Someday I'm sure I'll get around to introducing Elaine to my favorite books, but meanwhile she is quite astute at choosing books that have those qualities that I particularly favor.

1. Excellent illustrations (Elaine had chosen this year's Caldecott winner months before the winner was announced.

2. Colors, lots of primary colors, colorful end papers

3. Repetition (for example, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Horton Hatches an Egg)

4. Books about friends who help one another out

5. Books about trains (this is fortunate as Elaine herself loves books about trains)

Today's favorite book falls into none of these categories. And I'm not sure why Elaine picked it because she had no idea until I explained it to her the significance of the title and the story. It is Who's on First? by Abbot and Costello.

I've sent her a clip from You Tube with the original comedy skit, but it didn't take her very long as we read to figure out what was coming next and so we both knew when, as I turned the page, to shout: Third Base!

The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood

Narrative structure isn't very sexy and it's not the first thing most people notice about a novel. Although I, too, like a lively plot and character development, I always find myself drawing the architecture nof the narrative. Where are the characters, how did they get there, what changes when they move about, do we get to see them moving (on the train, in the carriage, etc.), and do we move around in time as well as in space during the course of the story?

The narrative structure of Ann Hood's The Obituary Writer (2013) is divided into two times and places: San Francisco at the time of the earthquake, moving to Napa during the early 20th century. And 1961 in Arlington, Virginia, and Providence, Rhode Island.  The obituary writer is a woman, Vivien Lowe, who was in the middle of a passionate affair with a married man in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake occurred and her lover was killed. Vivien's best friend has married a vintner and moved to Napa Valley and in the wake of the destruction of her life, Vivien moves to the town of Napa to be near her friend. It is there that she begins writing obituaries. These are not the usual obits we are used to, telling us the degrees the dead person earned and his jobs and the awards he was given. She writes instead about what the person loved, what her friends loved about her, little vignettes of her life.

We meet her in 1917 when she has just read in a newspaper story that a man with amnesia who fits the description of her lover is said to be in a Denver hospital. This raises hopes that her lover is not really dead and she prepares to take the train to Denver when an unexpected death keeps her in Napa.

The second woman, Claire, has been having a passionate affair in Northern Virginia in 1960 until her husband, Peter, comes home and finds her with her lover. She soon finds she is pregnant and thinks the child is that of this other man. She doesn't know what to do - stay with her difficult husband or leave to be with the father of her child.

The family goes to Providence, Rhode Island, to celebrate the birthday of Peter's mother, whom everyone calls Birdy. When Birdy has a heart attack and Claire a serious accident, Claire becomes closer to her mother-in-law.

And eventually some characters find the love they seek and others come to understand who they are and what they can do with their lives. A very satisfying book.

Related articles

Book Review: The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood

The Towers of Trebizond

Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond (1956) is one of the strangest novels I've read. It certainly has one of the strangest opening lines I can think of:

"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from the animal on her return from High Mass."

A charming opening with a sharp hook. Who can resist wanting to know what this camel is doing in Oxford and what other eccentricities we will find in Aunt Dot's daily life. The narrator's low-key humor draws the reader into the story as well as our curiosity about aunt Dot.

The narrator's name is Laurie, and she goes off with her aunt, Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett, and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, a Church of England priest, to convert the Muslim women of Turkey to high-church Anglicanism. Aunt Dot, who is thought to have been inspired by Dorothy L Sayers, has traveled the world for many years but now finds much of it "spoiled."

"Abroad isn't at all what it was." She looked back at the great open spaces of her youth, when one rode one's camel about deserts frequented only by Arabs, camels, flocks of sheep, and Gertrude Bell.

The book takes on many aspects of a travel guide as the party, joined in Constantinople (as Father Chantry-Pigg insists on calling it) by a feminist Turkish doctor who converted to Anglicanism during a visit to England, travel along the coast of the Black Sea to Trebizond, once the capital of the Empire of Trebizond (early 13th to mid-15th century. It was the birthplace of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1494.)

Having no success with their missionary attempts, Aunt Dot gives her camel to Laurie and she and Father C-P slip across the border into Russia. Laurie in the course of her travels to Biblical sites re-examines her faith. She has chosen love over the church and is engaged in a long-term adulterous relationship. (The author was the mistress for 24 years of a former priest.) The camel, who has mental health issues and is suspected of substance abuse (azalea flowers) provides Laurie's transportation to these evocative places and the animal probably has a deeply significant meaning, though I can't discern what that might be.

The ending of the book surprised me. The whole novel surprised me, with its combination of humor, satire, philosophical musings, feminist rhetoric, a weak and wandering plot, and mystical religion. It is highly thought of by those whose thoughts on such matters carry weight and it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Testimony by Anita Shreve

Last month the 22nd Avenue Book Club read Anita Shreve's The Pilot's Wife (1998) and everybody liked it and zipped right through it. Kate liked it enough that she picked up another Shreve novel, Testimony (2008) and recommended it to me. And here I am recommending it to Shreve readers - or Jodi Picoult and Ann Patchett readers. I zipped through this one too.

The story is set in exclusive Avery Academy in Vermont. The book is narrated by many people (a technique I particularly like) beginning with Mike, the headmaster, who has just been handed a tape that was shot in an Avery dorm a couple of days earlier. It shows four Avery students having sex. This kind of thing makes its way to You Tube regularly they tell me. But in this tape the boys, all stars on the school basketball team with brilliant careers ahead of them at Brown University and Gonzaga University, are 18 and 19 and the girl is only 14.

The headmaster attempts (foolishly - idiotically really if you consider the thing is already all over You Tube) to keep the story contained within the school. He calls in the three boys involved and demands - with no offer of a lawyer or parents to advise them - written confessions from the two who show up. The third, a local from the town of Avery, cannot be found.

But already the girl has phoned her parents and told them she was plied with alcohol, drugged, and forcibly raped, which we know from the narratives, including her own, is patently untrue. She pursued the boys and her participation was entirely voluntary, which doesn't make it any less illegal, but does help the reader to understand how heartbreaking the repercussions of the incident are and how complex the following attempt at cover up and the frantic press coverage.

The frame of the story is the research of a student at the University of Vermont who is writing about young men and alcohol. Some of the narratives are the responses various people - parents, the boys themselves, the girl, a woman who works in the cafeteria, one boy's girlfriend, the man who was in contention to become the headmaster and lost out to Mike. Others employ an omniscient narrator who tells us about Mike or the mother and father of the local boy. A particularly moving narrative is comprised of the notes the missing boy writes to his girlfriend.

So who is to blame? What went wrong? How could this have been prevented? The answers are many but in some ways there is no answer. It is our culture that has facilitated this crime and destroyed the lives of so many people.

And now I'm off to the library to pick up another Shreve novel.

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

Every once in a while a book comes along that speaks to a reader as if it were written just for her. This doesn't mean it's not appealing to many other readers - and in the case of William Kent Krueger's Ordinary Grace I expect that so many readers will find the book appealing it might make it to the best seller lists.** But for me its message of mercy and forgiveness, its offer of ordinary miracles, ordinary grace, is so vivid, so riveting, that it has gone immediately to my personal "best" list.

Here's how it begins:

All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota. His name was Bobby Cole. He was a sweet-looking kid and by that I mean he had eyes that seemed full of dreaming and he wore a half smile as if he was just about to understand something you'd spent an hour trying to explain. . . . He was a small kid, a simple child, no match at all for the diesel-fed drive of a Union Pacific locomotive.

It was a summer in which death, in visitation, assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder. You might think I remember that summer as tragic and I do but not completely so. My father used to quote the Greek playwright Aeschylus. "He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

In the end maybe that's what the summer was about. I was no older than Bobby and didn't understand such things then. I've come four decades since but I'm not sure that even now I fully understand. I still spend a lot of time thinking about the events of that summer. About the terrible price of wisdom. The awful grace of God.

It's 1961 and the narrator, a thirteen year old boy, Frank Drum, is living in the fictional small town of New Bremen, on the Minnesota River. (The book's cover photo is of the Mendota Bridge over that river.) His father's experience in World War II so changed him that he gave up studying law and was ordained a Methodist minister. Frank's mother is a frustrated housewife who longs for the city but instead is leading a rural church choir. Frank has a younger brother, Jake, who stutters, and an older sister, Ariel, who is musically talented.

Everyone in the family loves and admires Ariel, who is planning to attend the Julliard in the fall. But one night Ariel doesn't come home and the repercussions on the family and the community are enormous. His family appears to be disintegrating and his mother in particular is unable to cope with the grief. As Frank and Jake learn more about her disappearance and discover the secrets of some of their neighbors, they begin to understand the pain and despair of the grown-up world, but also its grace and redemption.

**As this book is being released in the spring of 2013, the publisher, Simon & Schuster, is feuding with the big-box book chain, Barnes & Noble. Until the issue is resolved Barnes & Noble is not stocking new Simon & Schuster books. Unavailable in this second-largest bookseller in the US, Ordinary Grace will sell fewer copies than might normally be expected.

Related articles

Review: Ordinary Grace

Felicity & Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow

This is Barbara Pym Reading Week over on My Porch so I'm re-posting these comments about a book that I think provides some insight into Pym's novels.

Barbara Pym is one of those authors whose readers fall into either the category "I love her!" or "What's the fuss?" Harrison Solow loves her, which is obvious from her delightful fictitious non-fiction book, Felicity & Barbara Pym, published in 2010. It's a clever idea: a young college student has to write an essay about Barbara Pym's novels and an experienced teacher guides her as she approaches this entirely new subject. The foreward to the book is by Hazel Holt, who calls it original, controversial, academic, readable, serious, light-hearted, sensible, and charming.

Felicity is a fictional student at a fictional New England Ivy ("with its strangely appropriate connotations of creeping tendrils, tenacity, and poison") who is writing to the fictional Mallory Cooper, who is working in Hollywood but for a semester is tutor to Felicity whose literature professor is on sick leave. Mallory bears a striking resemblance to Harrison Solow. The tutor begins by recommending that Felicity learn what she can about the English, who are a more complex people than other anglophones realize.

The tutor begins with a recommended reading list to give Felicity a feeling for the English and their world:

• Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson
• English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell
• The English by J B Priestly
• Victoria's Heyday by J B Priestly
• Anything by Somerset Maugham, Iris Murdock, Margaret Drabble, A S Byatt
• Some of the Miss Read books
• The Damerosehay Trilogy by Elizabeth Goudge
• Novels by D E Stevenson
• Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
• Poets of whom Miss Pym's characters are fond: Coventry Patmore, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Pope, Milton, Goldsmith, Keats, Gray, Marvell, Donne, Rossetti
• The Story of English by Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil

This is not the typical college reading list but the tutor believes Felicity will learn more from these books than from sociological or historical studies.They are, she says,

... solid reflections of the same culture and era as ... Barbara Pym. I think you will find great (and many) similarities of tone, attitude, cultural and moral values, habits, customs, foods, assumptions, rituals, language, class, education, and society between these illuminating tales and those works that are considered literature by people who think they know about such things -- as well as by the people who do.

More books to provide background are those written for children by Noel Streatfield, A A Milne, E Nesbit, C S Lewis, and P L Travers. Also worthwhile to set the scene is Robert Louis Stevenson's xenophobic children's verse,"which represents an attitude of semi-sweet smugness that you will find over and over in English literature."

I want you to feel the vocabulary and the syntax and the concerns and the themes -- the flavour and the manners and the foods and the tools of Barbara Pym's world.

Although she does not want Felicity to begin there, she does send her to the critics that many of us read when we were studing English literature (and that I still own in browning and slightly foxed paperbacks.)

• E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel
• Ian Watt
• Virginia Woolf
• I A Richards
• William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
• F R Leavis
• Northrop Fry
• The Pelican Guide to English Literature (in 7 volumes)

The girl is assigned Barbara Pym's novels as the subject for a major essay and as she begins reading the first, Some Tame Gazelle, she finds herself immediately floundering. "Nothing happens," she complains. The men are silly and the women are mousy. The characters are all alike. What's with the dowdy clothes? And how can anybody consume as much tea as the people in these novels?

All valid complaints coming from a very young, not-widely-read, student whose first questions to her tutor are: Why should I read Barbara Pym? and Why read literature at all? Solow does a fine job of answering.

She points out that Barbara Pym's novels are written by a woman who is steeped in the habits of her age and class. She was born in 1913 and was upper middle class and very well educated (Oxford.) Her books are far from obvious and they emphasize the importance of class in that era. Says Solow: "... there are a number of seemingly irrelevant and random factors on which the delicate structure of class is built, the least of which is income, and the greatest of which may be, ... a cup of tea."

She recommends that Felicity "... investigate every reference to every author, book, poem, or source quoted in Barbara Pym's work. You will not understand her characters, nor will you succeed in your English Literature studies unless you do." This is something my online otherlit group has discovered as we make our way through Pym's oeuvre.

She also recommends that Felicity learn all there is to know about tea and be prepared to take a test on afternoon tea, high tea, meat tea, lunch, dinner, supper, China tea, Ceylon tea, and whether the milk is put into the cup before or after the tea itself.

Her explanation of the world Pym's women come from, their experiences and their expectations is excellent. These are women who spent the most important years of their youth during the war; they are used to sacrifice and keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of nightly bombardment. They understand the class significance of a rayon sweater, a brightly colored dress, or baggy tweeds. They have grown up reading Enid Blyton and adopted her values: self-deprecation, doing one's bit, never drawing attention to oneself.

The tutor in the book has taught a class comparing Barbara Pym and Anita Brookner and she gives us the syllabus. ("You must, you must, must read Anita Brookner, quite probably the best and certainly one of the three best English (fiction and nonfiction) writers in England today.") Pym was the mistress of the "in group" and Brookner of the "out group." I would dearly love to take that class if it existed.

Originally posted January 18, 2013

Related articles

Barbara Pym's centenary glass of blessings

Marvelous Spinster Barbara Pym At 100

Philip Hensher toasts the novelist Barbara Pym

The Happy Ending

The popular preference for a story with a happy ending is not a mere sweet stuff optimism: it is the remains of the old idea of the triumph of the dragon-slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the man beloved of heaven.

               GK Chesterton, quoted at The Book Trunk

Barbara Pym

From 1950 through 1961, Barbara Pym novels were published about every two years. Her low-key stories were about "excellent women," pillars of the Church of England, unmarried and satisfied to stay that way. Her audience was not large but it was devoted.

But in the 1960s she found publishers no longer willing to publish her novels. They weren't exciting enough, not enough suspense (no suspense at all, really), not enough sex and violence (no violence and very subtle sexual situations.) For more than a decade she continued to write, or try to write, her subtle and charming books, but in the face of publisher denials she was depressed and unable to work.

Then in 1977 the Times Literary Supplement asked prominent literary figures to name the most underrated writers of the 20th century. And both Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin named Pym. Almost immediately she was inundated with letters from publishers wanting to publish her books, interviewers wanting to put her on the radio and TV, stories about her in the press, visits from well-known figures, all the adulation she could ask for.

But it was late in the day. Pym had already been diagnosed with cancer and she died in 1980 after a very short time in which to enjoy her fame and the vocal appreciation of her readers.

She was one of those excellent women herself, supportive of the Church of England, very high church, and with her sister, with whom she lived for many years, an active figure in her village social life. One assumes she has gone to Anglican heaven where she is continuing to write her novels, which will be waiting for those of us who arrive their in our turn. (Those of us who go elsewhere can always get her books on interlibrary loan.)

For the last year the Yahoo otherlit group, a spin-off from the Yahoo Trollope group of which I've been a member for the last decade, has been reading Pym's novels, in order. We are now reading Crampton Hodnet, published in 1985, and will soon undertake An Academic Question.

The rewards of reading Pym's novels, especially reading them slowly and in the order of their publication, are many. She is wry and sly, amusing and sometimes almost heartbreaking. She has a number of subjects to which she returns in every novel, including food (I wish I had her recipe for cauliflower cheese), clothes, and obscure English poets, many of which she first encountered as a student at Oxford in the 1930s.

Pym's characters frequently quote little-known poets and almost always the quotations are just a bit off. They don't mean what the character thinks they mean. In our world of Google and other search engines we can identify the poets and find the entire poems and watch as she skewers the character, the poet, and the poem. But when her books were first published the reader would have needed Pym's knowledge of these obscure works in order to understand what she was doing. As I said, she is subtle and sly.

Beginning tomorrow, Thomas at the book blog, My Porch, will begin Pym Week during which he and other bloggers will post about Pym. It looks like fun and I encourage you to stop by and see what's going on there.

   

Killer Market by Margaret Maron

This marvelous mystery should be subtitled "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Furniture Manufacturing and Merchandising." Margaret Maron's mysteries are all (so far) set in North Carolina and this one takes place in High Point during the semi-annual furniture marketing week.

Killer Market has one of the most unusual murder "weapons" I've encountered: a brownie. A special brownie laced with ground up penicillin, fed to a greedy eater who is allergic to penicillin. (Should anyone want to do me in badly enough they could do worse than use this technique on me as I'm extremely allergic to penicillin and I love brownies.)

Judge Deborah Knott is sent to High Point to substitute for a local judge. She arrives in the small city in the Carolina Piedmont remembering another visit there when it was very quiet, no traffic to speak of, and they rolled up the sidewalks at 5 PM.

But the place is jumpin'. Traffic jams everywhere, no parking places anywhere, and no rooms available in a hotel within 60 miles. It's the week of the International Home Furnishings Market. Some 70,000 people are in town for the week. Deborah meets an eccentric old lady who gives her an exhibitor's badge so that she can get into the show and into the many parties sponsored by furniture companies.

Fortunately, she runs into a friend from law school who agrees to put her up for the week and she meets a handful of people from high end manufacturers to low end retailers. She and the old lady (who uses a new pseudonym with each person she encounters) get tote bags and she watches as the woman pulls out plastic baggies and proceeds to fill them with food from the party buffet tables. Unfortunately, when she later reaches into her tote for her checkbook (or her car keys) she pulls out a baggie of fried chicken. Her tote bag has gotten mixed up with the old lady's.

The next morning when she recesses her court she finds a detective waiting to talk to her. "Did you find my purse? Did you bring it with you?" The detective says yes, they did find her purse, but it is part of "the crime scene evidence." One of the people she had been talking with the previous evening has died of anaphylactic shock and her tote bag with her purse in it was found next to the body. The bottle that contained the penicillin tablets she had been taking for a sore throat is empty. She is a murder suspect.

Maron interweaves information about furniture through the story and the reader learns the difference between RTA and RTO (ready to assemble vs rent to own), the specialized meaning of "heavy dating" (allowing a retailer to take as long as 36 months to pay off his bill), MSRP and "no,no,no" (manufacturer's suggested retail price and no down payment, no interest, no payment for a year.) She visits a company that builds the sets in which the manufacturers display their furniture.

And being Deborah, she gets herself involved in solving the murder, figuring out who had opportunity, who had the means, and who had a motive. There are plenty of suspects who might meet these criteria, including herself. As she learns more about the people who knew the victim she slowly begins to figure out who the murderer is and why the victim died.

Elegance by Kathleen Tessaro

Louise Canova, the American protagonist of Kathleen Tessaro's novel, Elegance, is unhappy. Everything in her life seems to be off kilter, including her deeply dissatisfying marriage. When she and her English husband split up she decides to strive for elegance, using a book she found in a second-hand bookstore.

Most chapters are headed with a quote from the book, which is real, by the way, and was written by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux in the 1960s. As Louise follows the advice in the book she finds her life slowly changing for the better.

She falls for the director of the current production at the London theater where she works in the box office (she was once an aspiring actress) and she applies for a job at the Royal Opera. Will she get her man? Will she get her dream job?

The book is charming and quick to read with no risk that the ending will be other than satisfying, one way or another. Tessaro's more recent novel, The Perfume Collector, verges on literary fiction, but Elegance is much more easy going, the very thing for a rainy day.

Mopping Up Again

I read a lot of books about which I have good intentions. I plan to write something about them for Goodreads and post to this blog about them. But that doesn't happen. I'm on to another book or two or three or six. So here are some books I finished reading about the beginning of the year but didn't report on.

The House on Mango Street (1991), by Sandra Cisneros. This novel was a gift from my friend, Maria. A Christmas gift, actually, and I liked it. I read it right away and I think I finished it in one day. It's short and it's in the form of vignettes. Maria said it was one of her favorite books and I understand why. The protagonist, Esperanza, is enormously appealing and the story is one of hope and optimism in the face of difficulties growing up.

Not having read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island since I was a child I wasn't sure I would be quite so enchanted with it now as I was then. But we had tickets to the Spokane Civic Theater production of the play of that name and I wanted to refresh my memory of the plot. Finding that the library had the 1981 edition that contains the original N C Wyeth illustrations, the day I borrowed it I came home and sat down with a cup of tea to look at the pictures. And the whole package was irresistible. So once again I had the total immersion experience. And believe me, it has not only not lost anything over the years. It has become richer and more entertaining. (And the play was very good.)

The Killing Floor is the first of Lee Child's Jack Reacher mysteries, published in 1997. I've read such good reviews about Lee Child and so many positive comments about his hero, Jack Reacher, that although I understood that there was a lot of violence and gore in the book I bought a copy and got to reading it. And I found the plot was ingenious, the story moved swiftly, the character of Reacher was appealing. In fact, I bought the second book in the series. But the warnings about the violence were right on the money. Seldom have I read a mystery with such explicit sadism. And now that it has come time to read the next book I can't bring myself to do it. I've rated the book four stars because it is excellent in every way except that, for me, it has too much truly grim murder with altogether too much blood.

This first of the mystery series featuring Ian Rutledge, A Test of Wills, was published in 1996 but it wasn't until 2002 that my Virginia friend, Sarah, told me about these unusual mysteries, written by a mother and son team under the son's name. How good could a book be written by such an unusual combination? The answer is very, very good indeed. The books take place in the years immediately after the First World War and Ian Rutledge finds himself back in his old job at Scotland Yard where he is a detective. But he is suffering from what was then called shell shock, in the Second World War combat fatigue, and now Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His disorder manifests as the voice of a soldier he was required to shoot for cowardice shortly before the end of the war. Hamish MacLeod is not visible to Rutledge; he seems always to be just behind him. But his voice accompanies the detective wherever he goes reminding him of the trauma he has undergone during and just after the war and occasionally bringing to his attention subtleties and correlations that help to solve the murders. I got started on the series when I lived back in Virginia. Now I'm starting over from the first book and hope to read them all before the next one is due out in 2014.

Seven Books

Yesterday I picked up some books I had reserved at the library. Allowing patrons to search the catalog online and reserve books no matter where in the Spokane Public Library's system they reside is a priceless tool that most libraries can provide now that they are no longer dependent on card catalogues. 

We are allowed to reserve 20 books at a time and my reserve list is often full. This is because I read reviews of books before they are published and request them right away. They sit on my reserve list for weeks and sometimes months while they are still on order. So my active list is only about 10 books or less.

But a little bird has told me that there is talk of increasing the number of books we are allowed to reserve. (They will undoubtedly call it the Mary Drew Reserve List Increase Policy.) That would be a boon to many of us.

Here are the books I borrowed yesterday:

Elders, Ryan McIlvain

Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger

The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo

All That I Am, Anna Funder

The Good Earth, Pearl Buck

The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting, Alice Miller

I put Elders and Ordinary Grace on reserve because they have been suggested for next year's Buff Orpington Tournament. Yesterday afternoon I read the first 30 pages of each and I can recommend both of them, judging from how they begin, the characters we meet, the setting, the plot (gleaned from inside the book jacket), and the quality of the writing. They both concern religion.

Elders is about Mormon men of 20 who are in Brazil on the two-year missionary work required of every Mormon lad. An enthusiastic Brazilian missionary is matched with an American man 18 months into his two-year stint. He is losing his enthusiasm and perhaps his faith. They rub one another raw at first but eventually they reach a comfortable friendship. Both are searching but with very different results.

Machiavelli and Marco Polo made their way onto my list because I realized I had read neither and they are pretty basic. I just discovered that there is some question about whether Marco Polo actually went where he said he went and did what he said he did. I don't think that matters. The book is a classic even if it's quasi-fiction.

All That I Am went on reserve because a handful of the people whose reading I follow on Goodreads have it on their virtual TBR pile and Fay at Read, Ramble recently recommended it. Published in 2011, the book takes place in Berlin just as Hitler becomes chancellor and then in England to which a quartet of young people flee. They attempt to bring the dangers of the Nazis to the attention of the world and the story of that attempt is given us in a document written by one of them as it is interpreted by another 60 years later.

Fay at Read, Ramble is also the inspiration for my decision to re-read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. There has been much controversy over the years about Pearl Buck's novels and whether she deserved the Pulitzer Prize and whether her books are worthwhile. I think it's safe to say they are middlebrow but that does not make them unworthy. I was encouraged to read this by my father when I was about 10 and I still remember parts of it vividly. But I suspect I missed much of the point of the story.

And finally, I got the Alice Miller book, The Body Never Lies, because I read in an interview with Hilary Mantel that she was re-reading all of Miller's books. Miller's theory, propounded through all of her books, is that many people must admit that their parents demeaned them when they were children, criticized them too sternly, or physically punished them, and that these cruel parenting styles have left a lasting scar on them now that they are adults. I have read Miller in the past and I am ambiguous about her theory. So much is true but much strikes me as way off the mark.

Buff Orpington Tournament Semifinals

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

vs

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Judge: Wendy Weise Cohon

In many ways, these novels are similar: both critique totalitarianism and feature American foreign relations; both address issues of identity, authenticity, and dissimulating; both speak candidly about the craft of writing and relish telling stories within stories, and both tell tales of love. Yet, the two books could not be more different.

OSM is bleak and disgusting, from the sewers to the torture chambers to the work camps, abused animals and discarded orphans. An overwhelming sense of death and defeat mark this text, despite the government’s daily cheerful rereadings of its citizens’ misfortunes.

It is self-consciously literary, although not gracefully so, particularly in the first part of the novel. Johnson, too, is trying to do hard work here: critique totalitarianism in narrative form and undermine that form by revealing that nothing is as it seems. Everything is a sham.

However, there are major problems with the novel. Part I, actually reads as if it is tacked on to Part II—and was done so in a rush. Its bizarre, melodramatic events depict the protagonist as part ingénue part superhero.

Part II, the real heart of the novel, refers to these incidents only tangentially and builds its conclusion upon a relationship established in Part I that is utterly absurd and improbable. One could argue that this may be part of Johnson’s goal, concerned as he is with what people are willing to believe and for how long. But it is a lot to ask of a reader.

I was excited to read this recent Pulitzer, but The conclusion features a major plot hole, and the political critique (haven’t we already read our Marx, our Orwell for that matter?) feels as if its at least half a decade late. I don’t feel edified by the novel or charmed by the its craft, and I can’t think of a single compelling reason to recommend it--to anybody.

After reading OMS, Sweet Tooth was a breath of fresh air.

The tone is light and entertaining and like OMS, there is a sense, which the narrative here freely admits, that someone has “dream[ed] up a scheme to please his masters. But no one knows what it’s for, what the point is. No one even asks. It’s right out of Kafka.”

Indeed we follow the plights of Serena Frume, a new recruit in MI5 enlisted to participate in a secret operation called Sweet Tooth: she must convince an unsuspecting academic that he has won a grant and will be free of teaching commitments so that he can write. There’s no real sense what “Sweet Tooth” hopes to achieve, except that it will compete with the CIA’s sponsored literary journal. Largely, ST focuses on Ms. Frume’s affair with her rather unappealingly-described academic, rather than political espionage or intrigue. As their affair grows, tension builds: will she compromise her identity or no?

At times, ST reads as if it could be retitled, “Bridget Jones, Spy Girl.” Frume comes across as naive and silly, because she so willingly complies with whatever MI5 asks, regardless of reason and without question. I have taught undergrads in Cambridge: the cultural slang brought me right back and McEwan’s got the young, newly graduated coed down. She is sweet and well-meaning, educated, if a little clueless.

I find it rare now that novelists write satisfying endings, but McEwan does so in an epistolary form that changes one’s reading of the entire novel. Like OMS what one initially assumes is not as it seems. It’s delightfully playful.

Is it as literary as OMS? No. Is it as flawed as OMS? No. Is it as politically motivated as OMS? No. Would I recommend it to a friend? You bet.

Ok, fellow Buff-Opingtons and Pulitzer prize judges, you now know that I too am not as I seem and cannot read modern literature for the life of me: I pick _Sweet Tooth as the winner for this semi-final round.

Buff Orpington Tournament Semifinals

Quarterfinals Judge: Ann Stetson

My books for the semifinal were:

Telegraph Avenue" by Michael Chabon

and Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan.

I think my matchup may come across as a little different than most.

I had already read, Telegraph Avenue, and had not especially liked it. I view some books as books for people who don't read many books, but want people to know that they read Important Books. These books (IMHO of course), have character development that doesn't interest me, or engage me, and dialog that does not sound like anything people would say in real life.

But be that as it may, I had to forge ahead, and approach this assignment with an attitude of, "each book should be judged as if I had never read it before".

So off I went, to re-read Telegraph Avenue. To be honest, I thought some of the themes of the book, were better dealt with in Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel, A Man in Full. And I think he's the more readable of the two authors, at least as far as these two books go. (don't read, Back to Blood. Seriously, don't read it.)

Both Wolfe and Chabon like to go off on tangents. The difference between the two is that Wolfe's tangents are pretty consuming, while Chabon's remind me at times of a 6 year old, riding down the block on a bike, screaming, "LOOK AT ME!!" while he takes his hands off the handlebars. Before crashing to the curb.

Chabon and Wolfe do inhabit the same territory of large American novel that examines in great (some might say excruciating), detail, some small part of social nuance. But here's where I think Wolfe can, even when he stumbles, write rings around Chabon: he is about 50 years older than him, and even when his writing doesn't hit the target, there is still more to it. Chabon doesn't have the life experience yet, to hold his own with Wolfe. If Wolfe had written Telegraph Avenue, it would have covered the entire Bay Area, not just a small part of Oakland. The geography would have been much more of a character in the book.

So having gone off on my own tangent, let me proceed to my next book, Esi Edugyan's, Half-Blood Blues. This is Ms Edugyan's second novel. That's intriguing: it's not like she's decided to write 20 books featuring an adorable yet feisty detective. There's no way to go on with the characters from this novel: World War II happened, and then it was over. There's no possible sequel or prequel to be generated from the books. It must stand alone on its own merits. And that's pretty daring for a new writer. I think it bodes well, in that she has more to write about.

I tend to divide authors into two major groups: those who have one novel in them, a thinly veiled autobiography or something equally close to home, and those who have an imagination that can reach as far as any human's possibly can. Now, her first book was exactly that: an account of a man coming from Ghana to live in Canada. But she transcended that, which is why I put Edugyan into that rare category of transcending origins to explore boundaries.

What she writes next will no doubt also be out there, in a realm that no one ever thought about before. I mean, come on: a fresh take on Germany during WWII via jazz? How novel! (no pun intended).

Now I have to say I am not a fan at all of jazz. It's not my thing, as far as music goes. So she had to work harder to sell me on finding this a compelling topic. But she's good, and it worked.

So here we go: who is my winner? The underdog, Half-Blood Blues. I will be watching to see where the two authors go with their next books, and Edugyan may surprise me and not be able to produce again (I know Chabon will, as he has a larger collection of already published novels), but I think she is something to keep an eye on.

Some Good Advice

Summer Rental

Whenever I state categorically that I don't read some genre (Sci Fi, romance, self-help, memoirs of abuse in childhood, violent suspense) somebody strongly recommends a book in one of those categories and I find myself enjoying it despite it's genre. I don't read chick lit, or romance, or beach books. But when Wilhelm's sister was visiting recently she gave me Summer Rental saying Mary Kay Andrews is one of her favorite authors, and as I know Betty Boop doesn't read trash I gave it a try. And to my surprise I rather liked it.

We have three 30-something women who grew up as best friends in Savannah. They are now spending a month in a ratty old beach house on North Carolina's Outer Banks, renewing their close friendships, and sharing the career and romantic difficulties they face, some of which are pretty daunting.

Ellis is a banker - or rather she was a banker before she lost her job after 11 years of hard work and neglect of her private life in favor of her career. What's next for her? Julia is a model, working these days for catalogs like J C Penny. She hates her job but she can't seem to make a commitment to her boyfriend, who wants to marry her. Dorie is a schoolteacher with more problems than she can count. Her husband has announced he is gay and is divorcing her, she is in a nasty bickering triangle with her mother and sister, and she realizes after she has split up with her husband that she is pregnant. Where will she live? Will she be able to keep her job ( the school has a policy about ex-husbands and wives both teaching there)? How can she tell her mother about this? Will her sister help or hinder?

Add a fourth woman, Madison, a run-away wife who keeps to herself but pays the rent, which the others need badly. The reader knows that her husband has been stealing millions from the companies he works with and has threatened to kill her, but the three friends just think Madison needs to get away for a while. Until they discover $100,000 and a gun in her room.

The house they are renting is old and beautiful and has been in the landlord's family for generations. But Ty Bazemore, the owner, is about to lose his beloved house to foreclosure. So he rents the house during the summer and lives above the garage. Not wanting to be bothered by renters' complaints, he does the rental by text messages and calls himself Mr Culpepper. The super-organized Ellis repeatedly sends Mr Culpepper texts complaining of too few dishes in the kitchen, a drippy faucet, fleas, and much else, not realizing that the man she is complaining to is the hunk living next door.

I dare say for some this is a boringly familiar sort of plot, but as "I don't read chick lit" it's not an old story for me. The author writes smoothly and the characters are slowly revealed as the month goes on and they confess their problems to one another and work together on solutions. The mysterious fourth renter becomes less mysterious and Ellis and Ty get to know one another much better. Nothing is jarringly unrealistic.

Food and clothes in a novel always interest me and there are plenty of both in this story. The author never takes herself too seriously, often using a bit of sly humor. The women and Ty are likeable. There is a scene of threatened violence but even that is played with an undercurrent of semi-slapstick. And the Outer Banks and the Atlantic are lovingly portrayed.

The Art Forger

On the night of St Patrick's Day in 1990 when the attention of Boston was focused elsewhere, thieves entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with art valued at $500 million, including three Rembrandts, one of only 34 known paintings by Vermeer, and works by Manet and Degas. Because the eccentric Isabella insisted in her will that nothing be changed in the museum (nothing!), the empty frames remain on the walls as a sad reminder of what has been lost.

This story, which fascinates the art world still, is at the heart of the 2012 novel by B A Shaprio, The Art Forger. Our heroin, Claire Roth, is a painter who has been blackballed by the art world because of an incident three years earlier that earned her the sobriquet The Great Pretender. The reason she became burdened with this reputation emerges slowly in the course of the novel.

While painting her own works (but not selling them), Claire makes her living copying famous paintings for Reproductions.com, a fictional website, and has become an expert in creating what would be called forgeries if an attempt were made to sell them as originals. She is also an expert on Edgar Degas.

So when Aidan Markel, owner of Boston's preeminent (fictional) art gallery, arrives at her studio offering to give her a one man show at his gallery and a great deal of money if she will do him a favor she is tempted even when she discovers that the favor is to forge one of the (fictional) paintings stolen from the Gardner. She faces an ethical choice. But she agrees.

Watching Claire employ the techniques used by a painter of high-quality reproductions (or forgeries) is engrossing, and the examination in the course of the story of what constitutes truth in art, the development of a relationship between Claire and Aiden, Claire's dilemma as she begins to suspect that the Degas she is copying is itself a forgery keep the pages of this book turning at a brisk clip.

The Art Forger should send readers off to visit the Gardner museum, which is near the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and which I visited as a child when my family would make a visit to Boston every July to see the Red Sox play and to visit the MFA, the Gardner, or the Agassiz Museum at Harvard (to see the glass flowers.) From the street the Gardner looks like a not very prepossessing factory; inside is a fairy-land courtyard with palms that reach almost to the four-story glass ceiling, and gallery after gallery of more than a thousand works of art acquired by Mrs Gardner with the help of Bernard Berenson.

The museum, by the way, admits for free anyone with the name Isabella and anyone at all on his or her birthday. Mrs Gardner's eccentricity lives on.

I first heard about this book in a review by Carol on Goodreads.

Related articles

In Praise of the Fake

What We Can Learn From Art Forger, John Myatt

Buff Orpington Tournament Quarterfinals

Judge: Laurel Hicks

 Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

 

vs

Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Oh, dear. I didn't really care for either of these books, perhaps because I am just not modern enough for them. My main problem is that they are both filled with what embarrassed Bobby just once in The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.

Filthy Rich chronicles the rise (and fall?) of a nameless boy in an unspecified Asian land. Hamid deftly does Hilary Mantal (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies) one better -- he writes the whole thing in present tense, second person, and he does give a good picture of the struggles of the lower classes of the country, whatever country it is. The book moves swiftly, flawlessly, and soullessly.

McEwan's Sweet Tooth is the tale of a bright and beautiful young woman who gets into MI5 and, because she is -- I'm sorry -- a slut already, is assigned to persuade a writer to toe the party's line in his books. There is quite a good twist to the story, which I cannot tell you, or you might have to kill me. McEwan brings it off deftly enough that I think I'll declare him the winner. I'd rather vote for The Orphan Master's Son again, but I know I can't do that.

Winner: Sweet Tooth