MarysLibrary

Save Me

Save Me by Lisa Scottoline
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This new stand-alone Lisa Scottolini novel is what we have come to call “an Oprah book,” meaning women’s fiction that is a couple of notches up from chick lit but not reaching the outskirts of literary fiction. It’s not difficult to read but it does tackle real problems that are not easy for the protagonist to cope with. The reader can look forward confidently to a happy ending.

The premise here is the conflict a woman faces when there is an explosion and fire in a school cafeteria between saving her daughter and saving another girl who is near at hand. Her decision leaves her conflicted and at the center of heated controversy in the town she has just moved to and where she has few friends to come to her defense.

Complicating the story is her daughter’s uncomfortable awareness of her strawberry birthmark (like that of Mikhail Gorbachev) and the insensitive reactions of other children. The child’s family tries to protect her from teasing and unkind stares with which the daughter is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

Scottolini tells a gripping story in filled with lots of action and a bang-up ending. This is just the book for when you’re home for the day with a summer head cold.

2011 No 110

The American Senator

The American Senator by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Once again I have been unable to contain myself and have rushed ahead to the end of The American Senator ahead of the schedule of my online Trollope group. And it’s not like I just HAD to know how it ended. I’ve read it at least twice before.

This is not Trollope at his best. Or rather, it’s at his best and at his weakest. The character of Arabella Trefoil is one of his most complex and sensitive. Arabella is penniless but a great beauty with hopes of a brilliant marriage. However, she has waited too long, refused too many men who weren’t quite rich enough, or didn’t have quite as high a position in society as she wanted. She is now 30 years old, which is very old indeed in late 19th century terms, and she is still struggling to catch the perfect man. This despite the fact that she is engaged to be married to a diplomat, John Morton. He has a country house, quite a bit of money, and a respected position, and he is a good man and loves her. But Arabella is looking beyond him to Lord Rufford who has a larger house, more money, and a title.

Like so many women of her day, Arabella must find a husband. She is fit for no employment and has no other choice than to sell herself to the highest bidder. Will Lord Rufford bid? Will she be able to keep Mr Morton on a string until she has played out her game with Lord Rufford?

Arabella’s story is a sub-plot. The heroine of the novel is Mary Masters, one of Trollope’s sweet and lovely girls, who has been raised by Lady Ushant, whose nephew, Reginald Morton (cousin to John) she has fallen in love with. She is being courted by one of my favorite Trollope characters, yeoman Larry Twentyman. Her step-mother makes her life miserable when Mary refuses Larry. The parallels between these two women and their difficulties deciding which man to marry are explained unusually well in the Wikipedia entry for The American Senator.

The senator? The role of the title character is muddled, with some episodes almost laugh-out-loud funny as he gets himself into difficulties criticizing English practices such as rotten boroughs, purchased church livings, and undue deference to nobility. Trollope takes the opportunity to poke fun at Americans, though the narrator’s unspoken criticisms are no more unreasonable than the senator’s.

Near the end of the book the story bogs down in unnecessary repetition and when one arrives at the two chapters devoted to the senator’s speech delivering his opinions to the English public the reader’s eyes glass over.

Nonetheless, this is a fine novel, as almost all of Trollope’s are, and in Arabella we have one of his most interesting and ultimately sympathetic characters.

2011 No 109

In a Dark House

In a Dark House by Deborah Crombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another wonderful Deborah Crombie mystery. The story takes place in London, my favorite setting for Crombie mysteries, this time in Southwark. It was in this area of London that Little Dorrit was set, with the Marshalsea prison the focus of the story. Crombie has a little girl attending the Little Dorrit School (based I’m sure on the Charles Dickens School) and Winnie Montfort, the Episcopal priest, is the temporary rector of St Peter’s church (which is based on St Andrew’s.)

The crimes in this story are murder and arson. The body of a woman is found in a burning warehouse and although nobody can prove it, astute fire department investigators suspect arson. Across the street is a refuge for battered women and it is a resident there who calls in the alarm. Is there some connection between the shelter and the murder?

Toss in an abducted child, a rogue fire-fighter who won’t stop searching for a solution to the arson suspicions, a social worker with a guilty conscience, and assorted other puzzles . . .

2011 No 108

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I first read this mystery I was stunned at the ending. Although I hadn’t read it at the time I was assuming one of Ronald Knox’s 1929 Decalogue for Detective Stories, “The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.”

This book is included in many lists of classic mysteries and rightly so. Orthodox or not, the story is brilliant with what were at the time new clues (or clews as the book calls them), never used before in detective fiction.

I always like those reviews that say, “If you are only going to read only one (blank), this is the one to read.” Well, if you’re going to read only one Agatha Christie mystery, this is definitely THE one.

2011  No 107

The Reservoir

The Reservoir by John Milliken Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I no longer remember where I heard about this novel or what it was that made me want to read it. In any case, I requested it from the library and today I sat down to give it the Nancy Pearl treatment, reading the first 35 pages or so and expecting to then make a note in my database as to why I didn’t want to bother reading the whole book.

But it caught me. The story is based on the death of a young woman in Richmond, Virginia, in 1885. The author has researched the case in newspapers and other material at the Virginia Library and fleshed out the various characters. He has the trial transcript and made the most of the more than 75 witnesses the prosecution called, some of them very colorful characters, some of them so obviously lying through whatever of their teeth remained in those days of hit or miss dentistry.

The body of a young woman is found floating in the city reservoir and it is discovered that she suffered a blow to her head, probably before she went into the water, but possibly after. She was pregnant and unmarried. Could this have been suicide? Her cousin was arrested and tried for first degree murder and . . .

It wouldn’t be fair to tell you any more except to say that this is a fascinating take on the lives of young southerners who were children during the Civil War and who were making their way in the New South of Reconstruction when the city of Richmond was a boom town and there was money to made if you were willing to work hard.

2011 No 106

Clouds of Witness

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hebrews 12:1: ‘we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” Why Dorothy L Sayers moved the s in her title I’m not certain. Perhaps she was suggesting that there were too many witnesses, too many clues, in this difficult case where Lord Peter must prove that his brother, the Duke of Denver, did not murder his sister’s fiancé despite an explosive argument with him shortly before the crime took place.

A few things in this book deserve mention. The dead man was fond of the novel, Manon Lescault, and he had something in common with Manon’s lover. Mary, Lord Peter’s sister, first meets Parker, Peter’s Scotland Yard detective friend in this book, though it’s a while before they take up with one another. And to produce documents that will prove his brother’s innocence, Lord Peter flies back to England from America, which, considering when the book was published, makes him the first transatlantic passenger in history.

2011  No 105

Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

George Orwell’s first book, published in 1933, is gripping. It begins describing life in a filthy, falling-down hotel in “the quarter,” the fifth arrondissement in Paris, going without food for as long as three days and pawning his clothes while looking unsuccessfully for work, eventually finding a job as a plongeur in a fancy hotel on the Rue du Rivoli, spending 15 to 17 hours a day as a dishwasher and errand boy.

Tiring of this he writes to a friend in England that he needs a job and is hired to tutor a disabled child. His friend lends him some money to get back to England. But there is a month’s delay before he will take up his new position so he borrows some more money and “tramps.” The law at that time in England provided some free or inexpensive food and places for the country’s many unemployed men to sleep, but a man could avail himself of one of these places only once a month and so had to be constantly on the move from one to another. Interestingly, these men take great effort to remain out of jail although that is one place that would be clean and provide them with food, a bed, and some warmth.

Reading this book when I was young I believed that in the early 30s Orwell, having quit his job as a provincial policeman in Burma, must have been turned out by his family (described by Orwell as lower-upper-middle class – he went to Eton) which had many and lengthy ties to the British colonies in Asia. Orwell was born in India.

I now find that Down and Out in Paris and London, while not exactly fiction, was not as it appears to be, the chronicle of the hard times Orwell experienced while out of work and trying to break into journalism. It is, rather, a carefully crafted description of life at the bottom, a life he experienced for a few days or weeks at a time, voluntarily, and with his family’s comfortable home to retreat to when he tired of life as an indigent. He was slumming.

The story itself is repulsive, being the descriptions of life in bug-infested hotels in Paris and on the road in England, sleeping 40 men to a room for eight pence a night, going weeks without eating anything more nutritious than bread and margarine, and of course tea. The men he meets and with whom he tramps are full of life and Orwell describes them perceptively and without condescention. And the conditions the men endure are almost intolerable.

Orwell was, early and persistently, an anti-imperialist, and eventually an anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist. He was also a socialist with a story to tell that he hoped would awaken the capitalists of England to the conditions of the poor and indigent around them. How well he succeeded at the time I don’t know but his book remains for us now as the heartbreakingly detailed story of the failure of what we would now call government welfare.

The men who are out of work are soon unable to work because of malnutrition and fatigue from the constant movement, the difficulty of scrounging food and a place to try to sleep. They complain of the stringent rules in the various places they are forced to resort to just to stay alive. They grumble about their hardships. But most of all they resent having to accept charity. They are not ashamed of being down and out. They are deeply ashamed of having to accept money and food and lodging from the LCC, the towns in which they stay, the Salvation Army, and other charities. The men, whom we would now call “the homeless,” are in the early 1930s surprisingly sober, drug-free, and they are not suffering from major mental illnesses as the majority of such people are today.

All this is conveyed in Orwell’s crystal prose, without an unnecessary word, with no complex syntax, exceedingly well organized, and filled with the colorful details we find his other books and essays.

2011  No 104  Coming soon: Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens 

And Justice There Is None

And Justice There Is None by Deborah Crombie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was reading Nina Sankovitch’s Tolstoy and the Purple Chair the other day and came across the following reference to Deborah Crombie, whose novels I’ve been reading lately.

Anne-Marie had just introduced me to the writer Deborah Crombie and her sleuths, Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. She reread the series while I worked my way through, virgin and loving it.

Crombie’s novels are like that, the kind of books so rich you want to re-read even on your deathbed.

In this murder mystery, set in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, the murdered woman is an unlikely victim. Young, beautiful, rich, liked by everyone, she is loved by a young antique dealer who wants her to leave her wealthy and powerful husband. Gemma Jones, newly promoted and with her own patch in Notting Hill, thinks the husband killed her. But when he, too, turns up dead, and killed in the same grisly fashion as his wife, Duncan Kincaid’s theory that the person who killed an antiques dealer a few months before is again at work.

The newly introduced characters in this novel are colorful and charming and they will, some of them, remain friends of Gemma and Duncan and their boys in later books.

2011 No 103

Sentimental Journeys

Sentimental Journeys by Joan Didion
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title essay in this collection is about the Central Park Jogger case and that is why I read the book, but I found that the rest of it, though dated, provided some worthwhile reading. Didion always writes well and she does a fine job here of exploring the mood of New York City and how it contributed to the media frenzy the jogger crime induced.

The sentimental journeys she refers to are the “memories” of the city as it never was and the current feeling (in 1989) that crime was out of control and everything was in decline. There is a case to be made that all that was true at that time. She also explores the unspoken but ever-present white racism as many perceived it in the media discussion of the case and the trial.

Another essay, on the 1988 election, is of course dated in some ways but her astute observations on a presidential race apply to any political election these days. One example of the artificiality of campaigning: When Michael Dukakis (who was running against George H W Bush) addressed a crowd at one campaign stop the cameras couldn’t be set up to film him properly and so he made his speech with his back to the crowd. He made three short campaign stops: in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, a Jewish Hadassah meeting, and I forget the other. Not many people were at any of these stops and they were remarkably unenthusiastic. That wasn’t the point – the point was he had covered his constituent groups and got filmed for the evening news. His opponent conducted a similar campaign.

Didion also discusses Hawaiian real estate, an endlessly fascinating subject. Something like 15% of the land is owned by the US government, another 15% by the state, and of the remaining land 70% is owned by large estates, especially the Bishop estate. So “buying” a house in Honolulu actually means leasing land with a house on it. If the lease is long you’re fine, though “selling” it if you stay too long can be difficult. If the time remaining on the lease is short, the cost could quadruple on you. The author also describes a Vietnamese/ethnic Chinese camp in Hong Kong, the Patricia Hearst story, the nuclear facility at Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore Labs, earthquakes in California, and much more.

This book is particularly lovely to hold. It’s 5 ½ x 9 ½ inches and the paper is thick and a cream color. The cover is nondescript, alas.

2011  No 102

Reader's Toolbox - Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch today, I came across a reference to Deborah Crombie, an author of whom I’m fond and whose books I’ve been gobbling up recently. Sankovitch is in a hospital room with her 46-year-old sister, who dying of cancer.

Piles of books were stacked along the windowsill of Anne-Marie’s hospital room, gifts from friends and from family. I was borrowing as many as I brought in. Anne-Marie had just introduced me to the writer Deborah Crombie and her sleuths, Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. She reread the series while I worked my way through, virgin and loving it. I was in the middle of All Shall Be Well. The title held out hope, and when I had seen the book there on the hospital sill, I’d asked to borrow it. Anne-Marie had said yes, but said she wanted it back. We were all still planning for more time.

But there is no more time. Her sister dies that day. The author does not adjust well to the loss of her beloved older sister. For three years she tries to forget by staying very busy, throwing herself into community activities and her childrens’ lives, but she still grieves.

Her father contracted tuberculosis when he was young and spent two years in a sanatorium. There he found peace after the horrors he had experienced during World War II. Sandovitch decides to seek similar solace in books. She makes a plan to read a book a day and write about it on her blog, ReadAllDay* – a book a day for a whole year. The resulting book is a testimony of the wisdom and solace one acquires from books.

For me, much of the joy from this book came from her increasing understanding of the importance of books in her life and how much they offer besides just entertainment or escape.

The first book she reads is Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. A quote from that book: When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment, than in literature?

Another from Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart: Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn’t ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. Love, truth, beauty, wisdom and consolation against death. Who had said that? Someone else who loved books.

And from Elizabeth Maguire’s The Open Door: Have you ever been heartbroken to finish a book? Has a writer kept whispering in your ear long after the last page is turned?

As Sandovitch reads she records her responses to many of the books and how they lead her to reflect on her family history, her experiences with her sons and her husband, her adjustment to life with her step-daughter, love affairs from her youth. And of course time she had spent with her sister.

At a rate of a book a day, she has to choose books that are no more than 300 pages long. What is she to do, then, when her son brings her his favorite book, Watership Down, which is 476 pages long? She puts the book aside until she remembers an incident from years before when a friend gave her a copy of The Bridges of Madison County saying she loved the book and was sure Sankovitch would too. Sankovitch returned it saying she thought it was a silly book, wounding her friendship irreparably. She decides to make time to read her son’s book and to accept books from friends who know about her project. She writes as carefully as she can about these books, remembering the importance of the friendship that impelled people to lend her their favorite books.

After her year-long project, she writes: My whole life, I have read books. And when I needed to read the most, books gave me everything I asked for and more. My year of reading gave me the space I needed to figure out how to live again after losing my sister. My year in the sanatorium of books allowed me to redefine what is important for me and what can be left behind. Not all respites from life can be so all-consuming – I will never again read a book a day for one year – but any break taken from the frenetic pace of busy days can restore the balance of a life turned topsy-turvy. . . . We all need a space to just let things be, a place to remember who we are and what is important to us, an interval of time that allows the happiness and joy of living back into our consciousness.

The purple chair? As the author begins her project she sets up a room where she can read and write, can do her "work" as she calls her reading project. She puts in her room an old chair, upholstered in purple. This was the place where she sat and did her reading. 

As is appropriate, I read the book in a single day.

*Please note: When I try to reach Sandovitch’s web site my browser crashes. This is probably a temporary problem.

2011  No 101