MarysLibrary

The House at Riverton

If you liked the movie Gosford Park you are going to love The House at Riverton.

The story takes place primarily between the years 1914 and 1925. The narrator is an old woman who is remembering her life "in service" in a large country house. She tells us the story of the old family that lives there and their difficulty coping with the changes of the modern world.

This isn't a mystery novel, but the novel is full of mystery. There are questions of paternity, of who truly loves whom, of the truth about the suicide of a young poet. Framing the story is a movie being made by an American girl who interviews the aged narrator and takes her back to visit Riverton for one last time, a visit that brings many memories to the surface.

The House at Riverton by Kate Morton (2006) 473 pages. 4.5 / 5 stars

American Wife

American Wife started out exceptionally well. I was initially delighted with the subtle characterization, crisp descriptions, light humor, and skillful plot development.

To base the story very closely on the life of First Lady Laura Bush, was brilliant. The major characters, a politically conservative husband and a liberal wife, worked together and balanced their lives beautifully.

And then Sittenfeld lost it. With no explanation or justification, over the course of 10 to 15 pages, the wife became rigid, intolerant, and dissatisfied and began nagging her husband. His good humor and vulgarity, funny and charming in the early part of the book, was not so attractive in a middle aged man, but the character's behavior did not change dramatically nor was he entirely out of line. He did, however, rapidly change his outlook from intelligent and compassionate to bigoted and insensitive. No explanation was offered for such swift character change.

Sittenfeld is young and perhaps she has not yet noticed that most conservatives don't speak disparagingly of blacks and Jews nor do they routinely make jokes about homosexuals or the physically and mentally handicapped. What's more, there are liberals who have been known to behave in these ways, if seldom in front of other liberals. When her characters drop suddenly into these stereotyped behaviors Sittenfeld's book falls apart.

This is a great disappointment. Sittenfeld is a clever and adept writer and although she didn't demonstrate this very skillfully in her earlier novel, Prep, the beginning of American Wife was first rate. At about page 300, however, she became so focused on making a political point that she swept aside subtlety and discrimination and her work became predictable and her characters unrealistic. A very sad development in what started out to be one of the best novels of the year.

Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife (2008) 558 pages. 2 / 5 stars.

Night Flight

Michel Tremblay mentioned in Birth of a Bookworm this wonderful short novel by the author of the children's book, The Little Prince. But Night Flight is far from a children's book.

It's about the men who flew the mail from Santiago, Asuncion, and Patagonia to Buenos Aires and then on to France during the 1920s and 30s. It's about love and heroism and death.

Inform Buenos Aires: We are cut off on all sides; storm developing over a depth of eight hundred miles; no visibility. What shall we do?

What indeed.

Impossible communicate Buenos Aires. Can't even touch the key, the shocks are numbing my hands.

I have only once flown in a plane like those that carried the mail in this novel and it was a warm sunny day with no breeze. The ride was exhilarating. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like for these men, flying at night over the Andes, into storms, with insufficient fuel, with no hope of rescue in small, canvas planes.

But Saint-Exupery can imagine it. He experienced it. He was lost during World War II flying reconnaissance over the Mediterranean.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Night Flight (1932) 87 pages. 5 /5 stars

The Strangeness of Beauty

Lydia Minatoya's The Strangeness of Beauty is a sensitive and insightful novel about life in Japan during the years before the Second World War.

This is an I-book, a Japanese novel written by a woman and based in large part on her own life. (The Tale of Genji is an I-book.) In The Strangeness of Beauty the "I" is Etsuko, a woman who came to the US with her husband in her youth. When her sister died giving birth in 1921, Etsuko became foster mother to her niece, Hanae. The child's father thought she needed to escape the effects of the second-class citizenship accorded the Japanese in Seattle and so in 1928 Etsuko and Hanae go to Kobe to live with Etsuko's mother.

During the next 10 years as Japan becomes increasingly militaristic and authoritarian, Etsuko makes a life for herself caring for her beloved niece and attempting to come to terms with her long-estranged mother. The description of Kobe in these years as seen from the point of view of a privileged samurai family is intricate and detailed. The three generations of women in the Fuji family must make constant adjustments and struggle to understand and sympathize with one another while their world changes around them.

Lydia Minatoya wrote one previous book, Talking to High Monks in the Snow (1993), a memoir of her youth in upstate New York as a second-generation Japanese-American and her adventures in Asia as a teacher. But she has written no other fiction.

Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty (1999) 372 pages. 5 / 5 stars.

Pointed Roofs

In 1915 an English teacher and journalist, Dorothy M Richardson, published a novel that must have made Virginia Wolfe very nervous. It was Pointed Roofs and it was the first volume (she called them chapters) of a lengthy novel she was to call Pilgrimage. It is considered to be the first British stream-of-consciousness novel.

The book was about an English girl who went to Germany to be a teacher in a small girl's school. That girl was Dorothy Richardson. The books in this roman fleuve - there are 13 of them - follow very closely the life of the author. Richardson was in Germany in about 1890 and she loved it there - the people, the food, the music. Especially the music.

But 1915 wasn't a good time to publish a book in which the author expressed admiration for the riches of German culture. Pointed Roofs was deeply criticized when it was issued and has never recovered.

There were other reasons for the book to be received with less than a wholehearted welcome. It was hard for the reader of 1915 who was used to Hardy and Galsworthy to adapt to Richardson's style, which depends on a lot of ellipses and which shows the differing ways that the character of the English girl views people and places depending on her internal moods. It was undoubtedly confusing for the uninitiated early 20th century reader who had not before encountered the internal monologue used in this manner.

Also off-putting for the 1915 reader was the intensely female nature of the book's outlook. Richardson sees everything from the point of view of a 17-year-old who is frustrated in the limited world of that day and who is uncompromising in her criticism of the treatment of women. The fact that she published her book in the middle of World War I and still portrayed so well the main character's infatuation with Germany and things German is an indication of the steely will of this author.

And yet, for us, this is a brilliant book, filled with life and building characters whom we can identify with wholeheartedly. We are used to sentence fragments and rapid change of point of view, and to following the thinking of a character whose mind is wandering in time and space.

I recommend this book very highly.

Dorothy M Richardson, Pointed Roofs (volume 1 of Pilgrimage) (1915) 162 pages. 5 / 5 stars.

A Song for Summer

A Song for Summer is a richer, better written book than some of Ibbotson's other novels, all of which are very good books. It has a more satisfyingly complex plot. The important characters are better drawn, although many of the people on the fringe are somewhat typecast. And it's rather like a cross between Agnes Grey and The Sound of Music.

The heroine of Song for Summer is an English girl, Ellen, who goes in 1938 to Austria to be matron at an experimental school rather like A S Neill's Summerhill. Things are chaotic when she arrives but she soon straightens everybody out and makes friends with the people in a neighboring village.

There is always a love story in an Ibbotson novel and the one in this novel is a humdinger. Ellen, as it happens is the daughter and niece of three suffragists. Her mother is a physician and her aunts are a mycologist and the principal of a teacher training college. All have university degrees. The man she loves is the scion of an old and noble German family from the Sudetenland. He is at the school working as grounds keeper in order to be near an old friend from Germany with whom he travels about collecting folk songs and much more.

The book is filled with food and music and good friends and there is hope that the lovers will find their way to a happy ending until . . . well, you can imagine the chaos that 1939 brings to these people and their little world.

Eva Ibbotson, A Song for Summer (1997) 282 pages 4.5 / 5 stars

The Open Door

The Open Door is the best novel I've read in months, better even than The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which was splendid.

The major characters are Constance Fenimore Woolman, grand niece of James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry James. These two were close friends, traveled together, and wrote long and frequent letters to one another. Mainstream theory at the moment believes that Woolman wanted Henry James to marry her and found her life not worth living when he did not propose.

Elizabeth Maguire's book turns this theory on its head and suggests that Henry James wanted to marry Woolman, primarily to provide camouflage for his homosexual adventures. (That he had such adventures is doubted by almost all of his biographers.) The author suggests that Woolman was of great significance in James' fictional development and that he was jealous of the monetary success of her fiction. The latter is probably true as James did not earn a great deal of money despite his fame and the respect in which he was held by the critics.

The dialog between these two novelists and their comments on their friends and family (Alice James, John Hay, and others) are delightful. The author has a real gift for describing the streets and houses of Italy and for making her characters come to life.

Elizabeth Maguire, The Open Door (2008) 236 pages. 4 /5