MarysLibrary

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