“Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann (1916) – 160 pages  Translated by David Luke

“Once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.”
Thomas Mann in “Death in Venice”

A long time ago, I read the novella “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann. I didn’t like it very much at that time. The main protagonist, author Gustav von Aschenbach, seemed pompous and humorless to me, and I just couldn’t get into the story at all. Because of my experience with that book, I steered clear of Thomas Mann for several years. Finally after reading much praise for Thomas Mann, I decided to read his long novel “Buddenbrooks”, That book was excellent, so I went on to read another of his long novels, “The Magic Mountain”, which I also found to be a fine novel.

So it was time to re-read “Death in Venice”. It has happened before that a book I read long ago and didn’t like much at the time would redeem itself and become one of my favorites upon re-reading. Theodore Dreiser and George Eliot are two authors whom I did not much like the first books of theirs I read, and yet now both of these authors are favorites of mine.

Upon re-reading “Death in Venice” now, unfortunately I still do not ‘get’ this novel. My criticisms are still pretty the same as they were thirty years ago, when I first encountered this novel. I still do not much care for the main character Gustav von Aschenbach. He still seems terribly pretentious and without humor, not good company for an entire novel. He seemed tired and depressed throughout the novel. He only has the one enthusiasm which is the young beautiful fourteen year-old boy Tadzio whom he constantly watches and exclaims over. I notice that now there are several blog entries about the homosexual theme in “Death in Venice”, and I have considered whether or not that might be the reason I don’t like the novel. However I’ve read, enjoyed, and admired several fine novels about homosexuals including “A Single Man” by Christopher Isherwood, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” by Manuel Puig, “Gemini” by Michel Tournier, and “Eustace Chisholm and the Works” by James Purdy.

Gustav von Aschenbach strikes me as the classic manic depressive. Perhaps fatigued from writing his books, he drags himself off to Venice for this vacation. Nothing really interests him there until he sees the boy Tadzio, and then Aschenbach is swept up in paroxysms of joy. Tadzio is there in Venice with his older sisters, and it probably is a good thing for Aschenbach that Tadzio’s parents aren’t there to get suspicious of all the attentions this old man is paying their son. In the novel itself, there is no hint of erotic attraction, just an old man admiring and sometimes following this young boy. Aschenbach never even speaks one word to Tadzio.
 

“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Perhaps the line I just quoted and the line which started this article indicate what Thomas Mann is up to in “Death in Venice”, the warping effect that solitude can have on an individual. “Death in Venice” may have been a courageous book for its time. I just wish it were more interesting to read now.

“Other People We Married” stories by Emma Straub (2011) – 214 pages

In the title story of the new collection of stories by Emma Straub, “Other People We Married”, we have the new ideal of the family vacation.   Not only do the husband, wife, and child go on their vacation, but they are accompanied by the husband’s gay friend, Charlie, who also just happens to be the wife Franny’s best friend.   While the husband Jim quietly drives the car, the wife Franny in the back seat with three year-old son Bobby carries on a sharp witty conversation with her best friend Charlie who is sitting in the passenger seat in front.  All are happy with the arrangement.  The husband is happy just to drive the car, and the wife can indulge in a scintillating exchange with Charlie while still taking good care of her child, and Bobby is delighted to be with his happy mother, while Charlie is enjoying the vacation too.

The stories in “Other People We Married” are amiable snapshots of life in the twenty first century.   Certainly it is hard to generalize about life in the twenty first century, but let’s just say that these stories are not about or for the troglodytes who would actually vote for someone financed by Americans for Prosperity or the Koch brothers.  These are thinking perceptive human beings.   One facet of these stories I particularly liked were the frequent surges of witty repartee or insight that give an Oscar Wilde feel to these stories.  Some writing instructors might urge that a writer to tone down these flashes of wit because they might detract from the overall style of the stories, but I disagree. I think that writers should use their full array of talents in order to win over their readers, especially in short stories.  I enjoy sharp repartee and clever insights.

 “In the light, the house wasn’t that bad – it was worse.”

“My parents didn’t close the door when they used the bathroom, and as far as I knew no one in John’s family had ever even had to go,”

“Jackie’s whole body was taut and boring, and Franny’s was wiggly.  Everyone they passed on the street turned to look at her, and Jackie couldn‘t blame them.  Franny moved her bottom from side to side with every step, like she was Fred Astaire dancing with an invisible Ginger Rogers, always pushing her backward in those heels.” 

“Other People We Married” is that rare book that was first published by a tiny publisher in 2009, but developed such a devoted following that it was picked up by a major publisher and re-published.  Emma Straub, daughter of horror genre writer Peter Straub, is mining much different fictional territory than her father.   These are contemporary witty stories about everyday life.

If you read a lot of collections of stories like I do, you begin to recognize a pattern.  Every collection starts by putting the best stories up front, and usually the best story in the collection is the first followed by several strong stories.  If enough good stories are available, the collection will end with a strong story to leave a good taste in the reader’s mouth.  The weaker stories are usually hidden two-thirds or three-quarters of the way into the collection.  It is a rare collection that doesn’t follow this pattern.  The last collection I read where every story was equally strong was “The Imperfectionists” by Tom Rachman.  “Other People We Married” does not entirely escape this short story collection pattern with a few less memorable stories near the end.  However the strong stories in the collection are probably strong enough to carry the reader through.

It is always fun to see a new talented writer emerge.  I suppose the next major hurdle for Emma Straub is to write a full novel.  I wish her luck.

“Twelfth Night” by William Shakespeare (1601) – 61 pages

It was the twelfth night of Christmas.  The  celebration has gone on for the full twelve days with great reverence and with religious ceremony in honor of the holy mother Mary and her son Jesus.   Now Christmas is over, and it is time for some wild fun.  In Shakespeare, wild fun takes the form of too much alcohol, excessive eating, cruel practical jokes played on one another, women dressing up like men, music, and a lot of romance.  This is Merrie Olde England after all.

“Twelfth Night” is one of William Shakespeare’s comedies.  According to the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, “Twelfth Night” was written in 1601, immediately after he had completed “Hamlet”.

“Twelfth Night” takes place in the far away land of Illyria which is in modern day Albania.  The ship carrying twin brother and sister Sebastian and Viola has just been wrecked off the coast of Illyria, and neither knows what happened to the other.  Viola has lost all her clothes in the shipwreck, and that is when she decides to start wearing men’s clothes.  Dressed as a man and now with the name Cesario she gets a position working for the Duke Orsino and becomes his intermediary in wooing Lady Olivia.

Besides all the romantic complications, “Twelfth Night” has a wide variety of broad comic characters.  These include Olivia’s fool Feste and her ne’er-do-well uncle Sir Toby Belch and his drunken friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek.   Sir Toby and Sir Andrew cause so much trouble that Olivia’s steward Malvolio wants to kick them out of the house.  Later though, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew get their revenge on Malvolio with an elaborate cruel practical joke.

It is mentioned in the play that Malvolio is a Puritan.  That got me to thinking that Shakespeare lived until 1616, and the Pilgrim ship the Mayflower came to Massachusetts in 1620, so there was likely some overlap between the Shakespeare era and the Puritan era in England.  Shakespeare definitely comes out in “Twelfth Night” on the side of Merrie Olde England over the Puritans, as Malvolio is severely mistreated in the play for humorous effect.

The most famous line in the play is the following.

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

This line is used as a cruel joke to make a buffoon out of Malvolio who takes excessive pride in himself.  Yet now I hear this same line spoken on television praising someone in all seriousness.  From now on, I will realize that the person so praised is being made into a buffoon by this over-praise.

I listened to “Twelfth Night” on audio disk.  I find audio disk the ideal format for listening to Shakespeare’s plays, because the dialogue in the plays was meant to be spoken anyway, and with audio disk you can listen over and over as many times as you need or want to fully understand the play.  I usually find it great fun to listen to Shakespeare, and the play “Twelfth Night” was no exception.  The only disadvantage to listening to “Twelfth Night” on audio disk is that you can hear the comic character Sir Toby Belch actually belch.

“Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes  (2010) – 600 pages

“It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn’t know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about.”

“Matterhorn” is another of the ten novels shortlisted for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes, now 67 years old, spent over thirty-five years writing his novel about the Vietnam War.  After reading this Vietnam novel “Matterhorn”, I can say his time was well spent.   I suspect he has more fully captured what it was like to be in a United States Marine platoon in the jungles of Vietnam during the war than any other writer.

Before “Matterhorn”, two Vietnam War novels have stood out for me.  “Going After Cacciato” by Tim O’Brien and “Meditations in Green” by Stephen Wright are  deep, surreal, and allegorical novels about the war.

“Matterhorn” is something different.  Its goal is to capture exactly what it was like to be in Vietnam down to the smallest detail.   The original first draft of the novel that Karl Marlantes wrote was 1800 pages, reduced down to the final version of “Matterhorn” is 600 pages.

The Vietnam War was different from other wars.  Many of the soldiers who fought in the war wore peace symbol necklaces.  The soldiers came to Vietnam from a United States where the hippie subculture, huge protests against the war, and the Black Power movement were occurring.  Drug use was rampant especially among the young.  Many of the young draftees showed up with shoulder length hair which would immediately be sheared much to the shame of the recruits and draftees.  They brought their music with them, and the soundtrack for the war was “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”.

“Matterhorn” is especially sensitive to the racial issues that were taking place.  Each platoon had several black soldiers who mostly stayed off by themselves.  This was understandable considering the entire military chain of command was infested with white racists from top to bottom.  The leader of the platoon in “Matterhorn” can see with his own eyes how well some of the black soldiers perform in battle and would like to promote at least one to a leadership position.  This meets resistance on two fronts.  Some of the white racists up the chain of command are opposed to it on racist principle.  Also the black soldier to be promoted doesn’t want the position, because the other blacks in the platoon will see him as an Uncle Tom kowtowing to the whites.

Another strength of “Matterhorn” is the dialogue.  It is apparent that Marlantes spent a lot of care to make sure the soldiers’ jargon and informal speech is correct. You see the strong friendships that develop in the platoon.

As in any good war novel, there are a lot of battle scenes in “Matterhorn”.  One day a Colonel gives orders to the platoon to take that hill, Matterhorn, where the North Vietnamese Army is situated.  Against all odds and with the extreme cost of several soldiers getting killed or severely wounded, the platoon manages to take the hill. The next day the Colonel changes his mind, decides the platoon should leave the hill and locate somewhere else.  I suppose in all wars the military leadership far away from the battlefield has little idea of what is really going on.  Like in any war novel, we get introduced to many colorful characters only to see them get killed or severely wounded later.

While reading “Matterhorn”, you get the sense that Marlantes has empathy for all the imperfect people who make up this imperfect world.

One thing that impressed me about “Matterhorn” was the energy.  Even though these young soldiers are in awful, messed-up circumstances, they are young and in their prime and as long as they are not wounded or killed, they are having the time of their lives.

As a novel, “Matterhorn” at least matches if not surpasses the other Vietnam War novels I’ve read.    It would go on my list as one of the finest war novels of any war.

“This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.”

–          Karl Marlantes, “What It Is Like to Go to War”

“The Odds” by Stewart O’Nan  (2012) – 180 pages

On the verge of bankruptcy and divorce, Art Fowler makes one last desperate dashing attempt to save his economic fortunes and his marriage by taking his wife Marion to Niagara  Falls for Valentine’s weekend.   Art and Marion, in their fifties, have both lost their jobs due to the 2008 deep recession and are about to lose their house.  Their daughter is old enough to live on her own, so now it is just Art and Marion,

Art makes these grandiose plans to save his marriage.  He books the honeymoon suite, he buys an expensive ring to give to Marion to present to her at just the right moment.  Art figures that since he’ll be declaring bankruptcy in a few months anyhow, these expensive purchases won’t cost him anything.  The hotel has a casino attached, and therein lays Art’s plan to recover his economic future.  He has a method.

All of Art’s plans are wasted on Marion.  She has never forgiven Art for his affair with Wendy over twenty years ago. Marion’s resentment shows up in her every conversation with Art.  Art constantly keeps trying to rekindle their love by taking Marion to the chintzy Niagara Falls attractions like Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, but Marion ain’t buying it.   Art even takes her to a music concert by the old 70’s rock group Heart.

“The Odds” did not work for me as a novel.  Art Fowler struck me as one of those stereotypical small-brained guys who wears his heart on his sleeve like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin., while Marion struck me as the ever sensible wife who somehow endures the buffoon.  Somehow the marriage felt to me about as chintzy as Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Stewart O’Nan is known for the detailed realism of his novels.  “Last Night at the Red Lobster” was an excellent novel which presented the details of the life of the manager of a chain restaurant.  “Emily Alone” also was a very good poignant novel about the life of an old person.  Somehow these novels made real life moving, whereas “The Odds” made real life even more mundane, at least for me anyway.  I should mention that after looking at the reviews, I found that lots of people loved “The Odds”.

It did not help that much of the story of “The Odds” revolves around gambling, another activity that doesn’t interest me at all.  I’ve been in these huge rooms in casino hotels that are filled with hundreds of slot machines, and the people there always seem to be having about as much fun as someone having three teeth extracted in a dentist office.   I’ve got to stop reading novels about subjects that don’t interest me like drug taking or gambling.  Somehow I always expect the author will make it interesting anyhow.

I’m quite sure Stewart O’Nan will write some great novels in the future, but for me “The Odds” was a miss.

“Even the Dogs” by Jon McGregor (2010) – 195 pages

 “Even the Dogs” is one of ten novels on the shortlist for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

This novel was a hard sell for me, because of its subject matter.  It is about ten or so hard drug users who live in an unspecified English city.  They don’t have jobs, they stay in unoccupied vacant apartments or other abandoned buildings, and they beg and/or shoplift to pay for their next drug fix or score or in their words “for the gear”.  Their drug of choice is heroin, but they will settle for lesser drugs or even alcohol if heroin isn’t available.  For the heroin, they must find a main vein or artery which hasn’t been used recently to shoot it up.

“One last fix to get their heads down and then it was like no more than a blink before they were awake again and cold and sick and crawling around looking for the next score.  Might have been a few hours but it never felt more than a minute.  Woke in some yard one morning and found a whole bunch of  dead mice about the place, frozen solid.”

Let’s just say I’ve never had an interest in the world of drug users, curiosity about their means of living, or even sympathy for their plight.  This is a definite roadblock to my fully appreciating “Even the Dogs”.  I remember that “Trainspotting” had a lot of drug use in it too which was treated humorously, but here the drug use is deadly serious.

The novel begins with one of their number, Robert, dying.  Several years before Robert’s wife and daughter had left him, and since then he has opened up his house to the others where they can shoot up in peace(?).  Later his daughter Laura joins him there, and soon she is mainlining heroin too.   One thing in the novel I found unconvincing was how upset all these other drug users are at Robert’s demise.  It just seemed to me that sudden death would be a fairly common occurrence among hard drug users essentially living on the streets, yet in the novel Robert’s death is treated as an overwhelming tragedy by everyone.

“Even the Dogs” is a grim intense read; much of it is gripping.  The writing itself is of high quality.  If I had had a shred of empathy for any of the characters, I might have been moved.

I did find one part of the novel sensationalistic, the autopsy which is performed on Robert.  For the autopsy, Robert’s body has to be cut apart and various parts of his insides examined closely, and the author lingers over every cut.  I kept thinking that no dead body fares well whether it is burned up and the ashes put into an urn or buried to rot in a cemetery.   Grim thoughts.

Ultimately I was unconvinced by “Even the Dogs”, but readers with a more open mind than me could very well be moved.

“Back” by Henry Green (1946) – 245 pages

It is easy to recognize a novel title by Henry Green, because they are usually titled with present participles such as “Living”, “Loving”, and “Party Going”. The novel title “Back” is also a present participle, because in this case the hero of our novel, Charley Summers, minus one leg, is ‘Back’ to England after fighting in World War II. Actually Charley has spent the last two years in a German prison camp. His girlfriend Rose died while Charley was away. Before dying, Rose had gotten married to someone else, and Charley figures he may or may not be the father of Rose’s son.

The author Terry Southern, one of Henry Green’s numerous disciples, called Green not merely a writer’s writer, but a writer’s writer’s writer. Brooke Allen wrote that Henry Green “raised the pedestrian to the sublime”. John Updike and Eudora Welty were two more disciples of Henry Green.

I first started reading Henry Green about twenty years ago due to John Updike’s introduction to the re-publication of the three novels ‘Living’, ‘Loving’, and ‘Party Going’ in one book. Updike’s introduction was published separately in one of the literary journals of the time, and I immediately went out and bought the book. Henry Green’s novels were like nothing I had encountered before. There is an immediacy, an intensity at the sentence level that makes Green’s writing fun to read even when he writes about supposedly mundane things like office life or just walking in a park. Reading Green, one gets a sense of the wondrous strangeness of ordinary life for all of us.

 Henry Green is a modernist. If you are looking for realism, forget it. Probably the writer that is closest in my mind to Henry Green is Vladimir Nabokov. In fact, in the novel “Back”, Charley Summers meets a woman who is the ‘double’ of his dead girlfriend Rose. The plot is similar to Nabokov’s plot involving doubles in his novel “Despair”, but whatever plot there is, is not important in Green’s novels. It is the inexplicable joy that bubbles up in his sentences.

 Here is my honest reaction to “Back”. I thought, the basic facts of the story are nothing special, but why am I smiling so much while I’m reading this novel? There is a deliciousness to Henry Green’s sentences that also reminds me of Nabokov and perhaps even of John Updike. Green is particularly strong in writing dialogues which are a joy to behold.

Henry Green wrote his last novel in 1952 even though he lived to the age of 68 when he died in 1973. Alcoholism is the usual explanation for why he did not write any novels during his last 20 years. 

Henry Green is a writer for those who passionately care about fiction, for those who want to read something totally unique and not something which is a lot like someone else’s work. If you have not yet read Henry Green, I would recommend you start with his acknowledged short masterpiece “Loving”. After you have read “Loving”, if you enjoyed it as much as I did, then you are probably ready to read “Back”. “Back” is an excellent novel, but not quite as accessible as “Loving”.

“Beside the Ocean of Time” by George MacKay Brown (1994) – 217 pages

Imagine you are in the cold windswept Orkney Islands which are even north of Scotland.  It is easy to imagine the Orkney Islands when you read a novel by George MacKay Brown. 

 It doesn’t happen often, but once in a great while, you can tell by the first three short sentences of a novel that you are reading a special book.  Here are the first sentences of “Beside the Ocean of Time”. 

 Of all the lazy useless boys who ever went to Norday school, the laziest and most useless was Thorfinn Ragnarson.

 I don’t know what to do with you, you’re useless,” said Mr. Simon the teacher.  “I’ll speak to your father.”

 ….

 “He’s no good at farm work either ,” said Matthew the farmer.  You’d think he’d be good at something – everybody has a gift of some kind, don’t they? – but Thorfinn drifts about as idle as a butterfly.”  

 Thorfinn is a boy who instead of paying attention in the school classroom or doing his farm chores, is always off in his own world daydreaming.  Mr. Simon the teacher is discussing the Norsemen (Vikings) in Constantinople 800 years ago, so Thorfinn daydreams that he is a boy crewman on the Swedish ship Solan Goose going down the Volga River back in those times.  Thorfinn’s adventures on the Norse sailing ship in the twelfth century are the first chapter of “Beside the Ocean of Time”. Other chapters are built around Thorfinn’s daydreams about Scotland’s battle with England at Bannockburn in the fourteenth century and other more recent events on the Orkney Islands where Thorfinn lives. 

 So who really is this lazy useless boy who is perpetually daydreaming?  Although it is never explicitly stated, I’m pretty sure Thorfinn grows up to be our novelist George MacKay Brown.  I would imagine vivid daydreaming is almost a prerequisite for a writer, and I’m guessing that in a lot of cases their parents and teachers didn’t like all the time their ‘idle and useless’ kid spends daydreaming.

 It is always a special occasion for me when I read one of the books by George MacKay Brown.  I’ve read at least three of his books now, and he is one of those authors I will come back to again and again.  He passed away in 1996.  The main thing to remember about George MacKay Brown is that he chose to live in the relative isolation of the Orkney Islands for most of his life.   When you read one of his books, you can almost feel the cold wind blowing across these far northern islands.  His stories are simple, uncluttered, usually about the seas or the farms around Orkney..  He was a poet also, and it shows in his plain unadorned sentences.

 “Beside the Ocean of Time” is actually made up of separate stories tied together only by Thorfinn Ragnarson , his three sisters, and his father.  I may have given the impression that the stories are mainly a boy’s daydreaming fantasies, but there are also romantic stories involving Thorfinn’s father, his sisters, and Thorfinn himself.  Most of these stories are about life on the Orkney Islands.

 “Beside the Ocean of Time” was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994 and was judged Scottish book of the year that year by the Saltire Society. 

“Perla” by Carolina De Robertis (2012) – 236 pages

 After reading “Perla”, I am quite sure that I’ve discovered a new major world-class novelist. Carolina De Robertis was raised in England, Switzerland, and California by Uruguayan parents.  “Perla”, De Robertis’ second novel, takes place in  Argentina and Uruguay. 

 “Perla” is a supremely intelligent, deeply moving novel about a horrifying situation.   “Perla” is about Argentina in the years when it was ruled by the military junta which was responsible for the torture, disappearance, and ultimate deaths of over 30,000 people from all over Latin America.  Only a few weeks ago I had read Tomas Eloy Martinez’ novel “Purgatory” which served as a good introduction to this time in Argentine history, but which I did not find completely convincing as a novel.  In “Perla”, De Robertis has impressively humanized and dramatized the events of that sorry time and has brought a passionate intensity to the telling.  This is the South American novel that I’ve been looking for during the last dozen years, a novel that stunned me.

At one point in the novel, some of the political prisoners of the Argentine military junta are taken up in an airplane and flown over the Atlantic.  When the plane is far enough from shore, the side door of the plane is opened, and soldiers push the political prisoners out of the plane and they fall to their deaths into the ocean.  Without any bodies, the government could easily deny any knowledge of these prisoners’ whereabouts, and the murdered prisoners are put on to ‘disappeared’ lists.  The mothers of some of the ‘disappeared’ political prisoners formed an activist protest organization called “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo”, and some of these mothers were also arrested and ‘disappeared’.

 This is a terrible story of man’s inhumanity to man.  Since many of the people who were murdered by the Argentine junta are also Argentines, one soon realizes the deep anger between the families who had members murdered and those who actually participated in and facilitated the murders, and that this deep anger will continue for many, many years.  Perla’s father was a Navy officer during the time the military junta was in power, and helped carry out these “disappearances”. Perla was just a baby at that time, yet she is held accountable for the sins and crimes of her father.   Her best friend dramatically and loudly breaks off with her when she finds out about Perla’s father.   

 In the character of Perla, De Robertis expresses this horrible human tragedy in human terms.  I’m not going to go into the plot at all so as not to spoil the story for anyone.  All I can say is that this novel moved me more than any other novel I’ve read this year.  What puts this novel above other political novels is the intelligence and passion that Carolina De Robertis brings to the story.   Here is a good example of De Robertis’ style as she writes about Perla’s experience reading Rimbaud’s “Illuminations”.

 “The words seep into your mind.  They pour into your secret hollows and take their shape, a perfect fit, like water.  And you are slightly less alone in the Universe, because you are witnessed, because you have been filled, because someone once found words for things within you that you couldn’t yourself name – something gesturing not only toward what you are, but what you could become.  In that sense, books help you in a way your parents can’t.  They emancipate you.”

The cover of  the book “Perla” may suggest the passion of this novel, but does not suggest the mental toughness here. 

 I highly recommend you read “Perla”.

“The Beginner’s Goodbye” by Anne Tyler (2012) – 198 pages

 Anne Tyler has always walked a fine line between the believable and the contrived.  Many of her novels have eccentric gentle characters to which she gives unusual traits.  Such wonderful novels as “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant”, “The Accidental Tourist”, “The Amateur Marriage”,  and “Searching for Caleb” have all centered on characters which the ordinary world would probably pass by, yet she has put these unusual strange characters in stories that are tremendously moving.  One might say that Tyler’s novels almost always center on gentle offbeat characters that come to cherish each other’s eccentricities.

 Tyler’s new novel, “The Beginner’s Goodbye” follows that same pattern of introducing eccentric characters, but this time it felt to me like she crossed the line into contrivance.  There are several colorful woman characters here each with their laundry list of ‘delightful’ oddball ways.  There is the deadpan wife Dorothy, the over-controlling sister Nandina, the workmate Peggy always ready with a basket of food. 

 It doesn’t help that our 35 year old male protagonist and narrator, Aaron, is rather an old woman himself.  Tyler’s male characters frequently seem a little too rounded without any of the annoying sharp edges most men in real life seem to have.   Aaron who is our narrator in this novel has a detailed interest in women’s clothes

 “It wasn’t clear to me how a short-sleeved sweater could provide much warmth, but she seemed very fond of this one, which was white and sort of gathered at the shoulders, so that it swung out like a cape.  The sleeves were hemmed with narrow knit ruffles (wouldn’t you know), and two more ruffles ran down the straight part where the buttons were. “  

 I doubt any guy would talk like that.

 Aaron and his sister Nandina work in a publishing company where the authors pay to get their work published.  One book line they specialize in are beginners’ guides such as “The Beginner’s Book of Kitchen Remodeling” or “The Beginner’s Income Tax” or “The Beginner’s Wine Guide”.  Throughout the novel, there are serious or humorous suggestions for more beginners’ titles such as “The Beginner’s Book of Letting Go” or “The Beginner’s Menopausal Wife.”  This, I suppose, is meant as gentle humor, perhaps a little too gentle. 

 Aaron’s wife Dorothy dies suddenly quite early in the novel, and there are loose ends between Aaron and Dorothy that hadn’t been resolved.  Perhaps the most moving scenes in the novel involve the resolution of this unfinished business between Aaron and Dorothy.  

A Baltimore Neighborhood

I am not a novice to Anne Tyler novels.  In fact I’ve read nearly everything she has written, and she has always been on my short list of the novelists I most admire. However I consider “The Beginner’s Goodbye” a lesser Anne Tyler novel to the point I questioned some of the techniques she uses here.  Approaches used to great effect in other novels seemed here to be mere contrivances.  In other Tyler novels, the story would center around perhaps two or three gentle offbeat characters, and it is a revelation how they make their way in the modern world of Baltimore.  In “The Beginner’s Goodbye” about seven of these characters come dancing out at the reader, each with their own ‘endearing’ quirks.  Beware of a quirkiness overload.

The following novels, written in the decade of the 1910s, are nearly 100 years old or just over 100.  This was the decade of World War I when fiction writing nearly stopped for several years.  Still there were many good novels written early in the decade.

 “Petersburg” by Andrei Bely (1913) – In this novel, the city of St. Petersburg, Russia is as much a character as the people.  I remember thinking while reading this novel that it should be up there with those Russian classics “War and Peace” and “Crime and Punishment” on the list of finest Russian novels.   This is a modernist novel that can not be summarized in a few sentences.  There is so much there, all told with a great deal of charm.    

“The Vagabond” by Colette (1910) – This backstage novel, Colette’s best, is about Renee, a dancer on the music hall stage in Paris.  It is based on Colette’s own experiences.  After her divorce, Renee got this job dancing, and the men do come around, but Renee isn’t ready for courtship yet. 

Here are a few Colette quotes.

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”

“Be happy.  It’s one way of being wise.”

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”

“The Song of the Lark” by Willa Cather (1915) – No woman could have been more different from Colette than Willa Cather, who often wore masculine clothing and whose most significant relationships were with women.  “The Song of the Lark” is about a young woman from Colorado who is talented and strong enough to become a successful world-class opera singer, just as Willa Cather was talented and strong enough to become an outstanding world-class novelist.   

“The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910) – This is the only novel by the poet Rilke.  It is a unique novel which if you can get into the poetic spirit and subtle depth of it, can have profound effects on your life. 

Here are some Rilke quotes.

“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other”

 “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

“Le Grand Meaulnes” by Alain-Fournier (1913) – This is the great novel of young obsessive love where ‘The Grand Meaulnes’, a boy of 17, meets a beautiful young woman at a wedding party and immediately falls madly in love, only to lose all traces of her and end up back at school.  The novel is about Meaulnes’ efforts to find her again. I remember being 16 and a junior in high school and falling in love with a sophomore girl whom I never did find the courage to actually talk to.

“Count d’Orgel’s Ball” by Raymond Radiguet (1924) – 160 pages

Raymond Radiguet wrote only two novellas during his short life, “The Devil in his Flesh” and “Count d’Orgel’s Ball”.  Some famous writers have died young, but none younger than Radiguet who died at the age of twenty in 1923 of typhoid fever.   

 “Count d’Orgel’s Ball” is a novella about the idle, idle rich.  They spend the time before noon of each day meticulously dressing for their teas, their exquisite drawing room parties, their ballroom dances which extend long into the night.  Radiguet’s world is at the pinnacle of French High Society.  These fashionable people’s idea of a summer vacation is spending two months in Venice with their entourages.

 Early on in the novel Radiguet throws in a few witticisms that give the book an Oscar Wilde vibe.    

 “The unconscious actions of a pure soul are even more strange than vice’s schemes.”

Yet “Count d’Orgel’s Ball” manages to tell a real story.  Most of Oscar Wilde’s plays and stories, except for “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, seem like weak glue to hold his famous delightful witticisms together.  On that one occasion, ‘Dorian Gray’, Wilde managed to produce real literature.

 Although “Count d’Orgel’s Ball” is the story of the love affair of young man Francois with Mahaut, the wife of Count d’Orgel, never has a story of extra-marital love been so innocent.  From the moment Francois meets Mahaut, he falls hopelessly, romantically in love with her.  Mahaut gradually realizes to her horror she is as much in love with Francois as he is with her.  All of this love making takes place in the presence of the amiable husband, Count d’Orgel.  One small point for me was that the husband Count d’Orgel’s first name was Anne.  A man named Anne kind of threw me for a loop. 

 The romance between Francois and Mahaut never comes close to being consummated, but even the touching of arms, a kiss, or a glance between the two lovers is given heightened significance.  In this three-way love affair, all parties are excruciatingly civilized. 

 I found “Count d’Orgel’s Ball’ a nice readable amusing novella, but I would not rank it as highly as the novels of Francois Mauriac such as “The Desert of Love”, “Flesh and Blood”, or “The Knot of Vipers” which were also written around the 1920s.  If only Raymond Radiguet would have been given more time to develop his talents,

“Hitlerland” by Andrew Nagorski  (2012) – 327 pages

 “He (Herbert Hoover) told Arenz that if Hitler would face an American jury, there wouldn’t be any question about him being declared insane.”

 “Hitler is sowing something in Europe that will one day destroy not only him but his nation.    William Shirer April 14, 1941 

I rarely read non-fiction and even more rarely write about non-fiction books, but this book I could not resist.  It all started last year with “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson  That book was about the American ambassador in Germany William Dodd and his daughter Martha.   That is a fascinating story about two people who were in way over their depth in a place to witness the insanity and brutality that was happening in Germany in the 1930s.  

 Although there were some Americans who were Nazi apologists and some who willfully avoided seeing what was actually happening, most Americans were stunned and angry about what was taking place.  Perhaps William Shirer said it best.

 (William) Shirer and his Austrian wife, Tess, were relieved to be leaving the German capital in the fall of 1937.  Summing up those three years there, he wrote in his diary on September 27: “Personally they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparations for war has hung over all our lives like a dark brooding cloud that never clears.”

 Except for a few years in the late Twenties when Hitler was in prison and just after he was released, most of the Americans in Germany were in one of two categories, either journalists or part of the diplomatic corps.  After Hitler took over in 1932, few Americans stayed in Germany unless they had a good reason to be there.  If Americans were walking the streets while a Nazi rally was in progress, they were likely to be beaten up if they didn’t display the proper enthusiasm.  Some people thought that once he was in power Hitler would try to restrain his followers, but if anything he egged them on to more severe acts of violence.

 Even in the early years immediately after World War I, if anyone talked to Hitler for more than five minutes, he would go into an obsessive almost incoherent anti-Semitic tirade, and his listeners could not get a word in edgewise. To anyone who had met Hitler personally during those years, Kristallnacht and what went on in the concentration camps came as no surprise.             

 At least three major literary figures are featured in “Hitlerland”.  In 1928, Sinclair Lewis married Dorothy Thompson who was one of the leading journalists in Germany in the late Twenties and early Thirties.  After they left Germany in the early Thirties, Lewis wrote his novel “It Can’t Happen Here” which alerted Americans to the dangers of fascism. Thomas Wolfe spent some time in Germany attending the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.  Wolfe was at first impressed with Nazi Germany but before he left became aware of its ominous threat to the world.  By 1938, Wolfe was dead at the age of 37 of “tuberculosis of the brain”.

Mildred Harnack

The third major literary figure in “Hitlerland’ is Hans Fallada of Germany.  Of Hans Fallada, Mildred Harnack said, “He is not happy, he is not a Nazi, he is not hopeless.”  Hans Fallada later wrote the best account of the sad life for regular Germans during the Hitler years in his novel “Every Man Dies Alone”.    Mildred Harnack, the woman from Wisconsin who married a German, also became famous as the only American woman executed by the Nazis.

 I was totally absorbed in “Hitlerland” while I was reading it.  That usually doesn’t happen to me while reading non-fiction.  Usually I skip around, but I read every word of this book.  I suppose it was a combination of my intense interest in the subject matter as well as the quality of the writing of Andrew Nagorski.

“Purgatory” by Tomas Eloy Martinez (2009) – 270 pages – Translated by Frank Wynne

 “The threat of exile and death were the features of daily life under the military regime in Argentina, a more-or-less democratic country that considered itself safe from 20th-century totalitarian horrors and became the proof that no society is immune to them…No country is immune from the totalitarian horrors that beset Argentina from 1976 to 1982.”

 Alberto Manguel, The Guardian,  January 13, 2012

 “Purgatory”, the last novel written by Tomas Eloy Martinez before he died in 2010, is the novel he was meant to write.    Martinez was exiled from his homeland of Argentina in 1975 when the military junta was still plotting its takeover of the Argentine government.  He did not return to Argentina until 2008 to write this final novel, “Purgatory”. 

 Up to 30,000 people in Argentina were killed or disappeared in the atrocities committed by the military junta during the six years that it ruled.  Their stated goal was to remove the leftist threat in Argentina by getting rid of  Communists, socialists, and other leftists in Argentina, while actually getting rid of anyone who disagreed with the junta’s dictatorial rule.  The military junta had the tacit support of the United States government whose Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of the military takeover, “”Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement… because I do want to encourage them. I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”  In support of the death squads,  defacto leader of the military junta Jorge Videla said, “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure”,  

 It was during the rule of this junta that ‘disappeared’ was first used as an active verb as in “The death squad ‘disappeared’ those persons.”

 Back then, people let themselves be numbed by sentimentality to forget the death that was all around them.  The flying saucers, the soap operas, football, patriotism…”

 “Purgatory” is the story of Emilia and Simon, a happily married young couple in Buenos Aires.  Emilia’s father is the propaganda chief of the ruling military junta who have just taken power in Argentina in 1976.  The family invites the leader of the junta, The Eel, to their house for dinner, and Simon, the son-in-law, says a couple of intemperate things which embarrass Emilia’s father and anger The Eel.  A few days later Emilia and Simon travel by car to the south of Argentina to do their work as map makers.  At one of the checkpoints, Simon is removed from the car.  Although Emilia later soon hears from someone that Simon has been tortured and murdered, she can not accept that fact.  She spends the next thirty years travelling to various places in the western hemisphere on rumors that Simon has been seen.  This is the novel’s back story.

 The novel actually begins with Emilia living in New Jersey thirty years later, when she thinks she sees someone who looks exactly like Simon did thirty years ago. 

 My reaction to this novel, “Purgatory”, was two-fold.  I was much interested in the ‘hard’ part of the story, the part that was based on historical fact involving the military junta and the leftists..  I was mostly unfamiliar with the story of Argentina during those years, and that part of the story deeply engaged me.  The ‘soft’ part of the story, the romantic magical dream-like part of the story interested me much less.  I rarely have much use for dreams or magical sequences in fiction; I’m much more drawn to the hard here and now, although I did much appreciate the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” 

 Previously I have read one other Tomas Eloy Martinez novel, “Santa Evita”.  I still consider that novel his justifiable masterpiece.  By all means read that novel.  Although at times I was deeply absorbed in “Purgatory”, I would not rank it quite as highly as “Santa Evita”.

 As so often is the case with dictators, the military junta in Argentina later started an unnecessary war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands (the Malvinas) in 1982 which Argentina lost, soon leading to the end of the dictatorial military junta in Argentina. 

 “Purgatory” was selected for the 2012 Best Translated Book Award longlist.

“Coral Glynn” by Peter Cameron  (2012) – 210 pages

 Can a novel, or for that matter a novelist, be just too perfect?  That is a question I asked myself while listening to “Coral Glynn” on audio book. Peter Cameron is a careful exact writer, and I definitely plan to read more of his novels.  He painstakingly chooses each precise word.  I paid rapt attention to nearly every word while listening to “Coral Glynn”, because it is so well constructed and beautifully written.  It is a wonder that I didn’t like ‘Coral Glynn’ even more than I did. 

 Sometimes I wished Cameron would give himself permission to lose control, let himself go.  I don’t mean that he should have gone hog wild like James Joyce with his streams of consciousness or like Malcolm Lowry with his alcoholic revelries (reveries?) or like Jack Kerouac with his rhapsodies about just any old thing.  I just wished there was more evidence there was a living, breathing, fallible human being who was writing “Coral Glynn”.

 Originally I assumed the novel was taking place immediately after World War I until there were hints that the events were actually occurring after World War II.  This is an old fashioned Gothic story, and the characters in “Coral Glynn” seem also old-fashioned, not of this modern world. Most of the characters in “Coral Glynn” could have fit in nicely into a novel written a hundred years ago.   These characters in “Coral Glynn” are almost stereotypically Gothic.  You have the vulnerable young woman, the war-injured Major still living with his mother, the nosy busybody housekeeper, the gloomy house and forest.  It was almost like a breath of fresh air when Lazlo, a guy with an original sense of humor, shows up in the novel.       

 I’d like to compare Peter Cameron to one of my favorite most careful United States writers, Richard Yates, author of “Revolutionary Road”, “The Easter Parade”, etc.  While reading both Yates and Cameron, you get a strong sense that they are aiming for perfection in the words and stories they choose and that they frequently attain it.  I would call both Yates and Cameron “writers’ writers”, the type of writer other writers admire for their polished technique.  Sometimes you wish they would just relax, let up for a change.  The difference between Yates and Cameron is that Yates brings much needed order to messy messed-up modern life, while Cameron’s story here is so old-fashioned as to be almost fusty.        

 I did like “Coral Glynn” a lot, but at the same time it seemed almost too tidy, elaborately contrived to fit in to the Gothic mold.  Next time I read Cameron, I’m going to look for a novel of his set in the modern world, that doesn’t fit so snugly into the Gothic framework.

“Crow” by Ted Hughes (1970) – 89 pages

Crow Blacker Than Ever              

By Ted Hughes

When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven,
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.

But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing heaven and earth together-

So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.

Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank-
A horror beyond redemption.

The agony did not diminish.

Man could not be man nor God God.

The agony

Grew.

Crow

Grinned

Crying: “This is my Creation,” Flying the black flag of himself.

 The poems in “Crow” contain some of the harshest, blackest, bleakest images ever put into poems.  Ted Hughes wrote most of the poems between the time his first wife poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide by putting her head in the oven in 1963 and the time his lover Assia Wevill  committed suicide the same way in 1969 taking her and Ted’s four year old daughter Shura with her.  Life isn’t always beautiful.  “Crow” is dedicated to Assia and Shura.

The poem “Crow Blacker than Ever” is by far the most accessible poem in “Crow” and is justly famous.  However there are other great lines in these poems which the reader must look carefully for and study to appreciate.  I liked the following lines.

Crow realized God loved him-
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

Even before I read “Crow”, Ted Hughes was one of my favorite poets due to his book of poems “Birthday Letters” (1998) which was his most accessible and explicit response to the suicide of Syliva Plath as well as his translations of “The Tales of Ovid”, “The Orestiea” by Aeschylus, “Phedra” by Jean Racine, and “Alcestis” by Euripedes.   I put Hughes’ translations in the same league as those by Anne Carson and Seamus Heaney which is high praise indeed.

“The Dud Avocado” by Elaine Dundy (1958)  –  260 pages

“The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”

“The Dud Avocado” is the story of recent United States college graduate Sally Jay Gorce who gets to spend two years in France starting in 1955 and wants to experience as much of  Paris and the rest of France as she possibly can.  She is 21 years old and ready for everything and anything, has mostly a lively time, makes a few dumb mistakes, but keeps her high spirits throughout.  When she first arrives in Paris, she has an affair with Teddy, an Italian businessman who is married and already has another mistress.  Teddy turns out to be – can you believe it? – a jerk. 

“Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it. ”

 Then Sally Jay does some acting at an English-speaking theatre in Paris.   She also starts to hang out with a group of friends called ‘The Hard Core’ who are into all-night Parisian clubbing.  They go to dance clubs, Paris townie bars,  gay men’s clubs (then known as queer bars), gay women’s clubs (then known as lesbian bars), coffee houses that serve alcohol, gangster bars, and so on. 

“A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.”

 Did I mention that  Sally Jay Gorce has a wicked, wicked sense of humor, and it would make sense to read “The Dud Avocado” just for all the great lines?  Here are a couple more lines. 

“It’s amazing how right you can be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.”

“What’s the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it’s over.”

Never have we had a novel like this, about a young woman throwing caution to the wind and grabbing Paris and France for all she can get.  No wonder “The Dud Avocado” was a best seller when it came out in 1958 and has been republished several times since then. 

 “The Dud Avocado” is a New York Review Book Classic.  Many of us have grown to value the NYRB Classics, and I do believe I have found one of the reasons for their success.  Where many republishing efforts are aimed at getting certain fiction writers back in print, NYRB classics concentrates on getting specific novels or books of stories republished.  As in pop tunes, there are a lot of one-hit wonders in fiction out there.  These authors will never be all that famous, but they did manage to create one wonderful novel or book of stories.  Concentrating on the book rather than the writer, NYRB Classics have brought a lot of these one-hit wonders back to life. Just as in music, some of these one-hit wonders are more fun than some highly acclaimed artists’ works.

 “The Dud Avocado” is a one-hit wonder.  Elaine Dundy will never be up there on literary Mount Olympus.  I don’t think “The Dud Avocado” is all that well written, but it makes up for that in humor and exuberance and originality.   The last half of the novel drags a bit, but Sally Jay’s high spirits keep us caught up in her story  This one time Elaine Dundy managed to capture the wildness and excitement of  a young woman living in Paris on her own in 1955.

 “I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.”

“History of a Pleasure Seeker” by Richard Mason  (2011) – 277 pages

 It is always a pleasure to discover a wonderful novelist you haven’t read before.  That is what happened to me with Richard Mason and his captivating new novel “History of a Pleasure Seeker”. 

 Frequently novels have as their main character an underdog, someone for whom you can feel empathy and for whom you can cheer.  Our hero Piet Barol in “History of a Pleasure Seeker” is no underdog.    He is a gifted ambitious young man who is “extremely attractive to most women and to many men”.   Piet is a young man on the rise. He reminded me of my first roommate in college.  Salutatorian of his high school class, my roommate had steel blue eyes, high cheekbones, hair the color of golden brass, and women just passing on the street would flirt with him.  Once in a while one of these college women would want to stay overnight, and beforehand I would get kicked out of the room and have to sleep on the floor in somebody else’s room.   Some of the other guys in the dorm told me to complain and stand up for myself to him, but I never did.  As winter approached, he stored his motorcycle in our dorm room taking up most of the floor space, but I still didn’t complain.  All of this came to a quick end when he flunked out of college at the end of the first semester.  After that the guys in the dorm were envious of me, because I had the entire dorm room to myself.   

 Unlike my old roommate, Piet Barol, although much favored in looks and talents, has much more respect and concern for the people around him.  Getting back to the novel, Piet’s story takes place in 1907 in Amsterdam.  Piet gets a job as a live-in tutor for a wealthy man’s troubled young son.  The rich man has a beautiful wife and two lovely daughters, and Piet keeps his eyes and ears open for his main chance.  His efforts to ingratiate himself into the rich man’s family are aided by his musical and artistic talents.  The novel has a very continental view of romance and relations between the sexes.  For me, it was a tremendously fun read. 

 After completing “History of a Pleasure Seeker”, I wanted to find out Mason’s secret in writing this novel.  After researching a bit I think I’ve found his secret.   In an interview in Books I Think You Should Read, he said the following.

“The book that most inspired  History of a Pleasure Seeker  is a book on quite a different subject: Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. That is a superb novel that charts the experiences of twelve characters fleeing Paris just before the Germans arrived in 1942. I had an experience while reading it that I hoped to give the readers of History. I was swept up in the story. I loved the author’s confidence, her style, her rich humanity – and her sympathy for her characters, whatever their flaws. I also admired her briskness and quickness. When I finished it, I knew I wanted to write a book that gave this same kind of pleasure to others – and that’s how History of a Pleasure Seeker began. It’s also why I wrote it by hand. Nemirovsky wrote by hand, her writing small and dense as she filled every inch of the paper. It was she who liberated me from Microsoft Word!”

What a brilliant sensible thing for Richard Mason to do, to have as his authorial model Irene Nemirovsky.  I don’t believe it is all that common for a male writer to have a female writer as a role model, but it certainly works in this case..  I’ve read many of the great Nemirovsky’s novels, and I do see many of the same qualities in “The History of a Pleasure Seeker”.  Just as Mason says he was “swept up in the story” of “Suite Francaise”, I was swept up in the story of “History of a Pleasure Seeker”.

 The novel ends with the words “To be continued”.  I will continue.

“Watergate” by Thomas Mallon (2012) – 429 pages

This novel is all about the Watergate scandal.  Many of us remember vividly this scandal back in 1972 which started as a minor hotel room break-in, but ultimately led to the only resignation of a United States President.  The novel is the story of some of the insiders of the Richard Nixon administration as they deal with the scandal.

Nixon liked to hire guys like himself, rough guys who try to out-A-Hole each other.  These in the administration include Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman, Chuck Colson, John Mitchell, and Gordon Liddy.  So I suppose in that sense Watergate was inevitable.

Let’s face the facts.  Richard Nixon and all the lower level A-Holes and SOBs he put into his administration aren’t all that interesting.  With this tough crew, the dialogue in ‘Wategate’ is without sparkling wit or wisdom and is not the least bit memorable.   I won’t be quoting any lines from “Watergate”.  It could have been comic and humorous to see some of the above crew getting in each other’s way and confronting each other.  I wouldn’t call the novel “Watergate” exactly an apologia, but the people that Mallon makes fun of in the novel are not those in the list of rude guys above, but the milder ones such as Eliot Richardson and Jeb Magruder.

Also depicted in the novel are some of the women who are close to the Nixon administration including Nixon’s secretary Rose Woods, long-time Republican-wellwishing daughter of Teddy Roosevelt Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Nixon’s wife Pat.  I suppose they were added as characters in the novel to provide some much needed color around all the drab dour men in the administration, but somehow they seem to be outside and unknowing about the main narrative of the scandal.

The novel “Watergate” was a disappointment for me, more of a disappointment because I’ve really liked several Thomas Mallon novels previously including “Arts and Sciences”, “Bandbox”, and especially “Henry and Clara” which is an excellent historical novel about the two people who shared the theatre box with the Lincolns the night Lincoln was shot.  Mallon usually does write historical fiction, but his novels have the literary qualities I appreciate.  Mallon’s conservative politics formerly did not get in my way of appreciating his fiction.

Probably one of the problems with “Watergate” for me is that it occurs in the too recent past which I’m very familiar with and about which I do have strong underlying opinions.  I believe if Mallon had chosen as main characters some of the obnoxious outrageous men listed above besides Nixon, he could have had a more dramatic novel.  Instead the characters who are depicted seem to be bland and curiously watered down including his main character Fred LaRue.

In all of the hullabaloo surrounding Richard Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford’s becoming President, and Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the mainstream media downplayed that there actually was a ‘smoking gun’, a tape that proved that Nixon had managed the Watergate cover-up from the beginning if not perhaps the actual burglary itself.  Nixon himself should actually have gone to jail along with his underlings.  Ford’s pardon of Nixon set a bad dangerous precedent allowing future Presidents who committed crimes to not be charged.

Mallon invents a totally imaginary tame love affair for Pat Nixon with a guy from New York.  His novel would have been much more colorful if Mallon instead had depicted Richard Nixon’s twenty-year gay love affair with Bebe Rebozo.

I don’t know if it was my politics or Mallon’s politics that made this such a lame novel for me, probably both.

“How it All Began” by Penelope Lively (2012) – 229 pages

“How it All Began” is a very English novel, so a lot of the conversation in the novel is about furniture.

In these articles, I try not to play God; I do not pass judgments on novels. Instead I will write ‘This novel worked for me’ or ‘That novel did not work for me.’ I’m quite content that I don’t have the same literary tastes as the average reader, and I’m sure these average readers have little use for my favorite books either.

“How It All Began” did not work for me. The premise of the novel is that all that happens in the novel occurs as a result of one initiating act. At the beginning of “How It All Began”, Charlotte is literally robbed and mugged by a poor teenager. Even though the novel takes place in the present time, this mugging by a teenager is so Seventies. Today Charlotte would more likely be literally robbed and figuratively mugged by a billionaire. This is the first occasion in the novel that Lively gets our modern times wrong.

So we have an initiating act that determines everything else in the novel. This is Blaise Pascal’s idea that if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed. If we had walked this direction instead of that direction, our lives would have turned out completely differently. This plot device is so trite that it smacks of a writer frantically looking for a topic.

It wasn’t always thus between Penelope Lively and me. At one point, after reading “Moon Tiger’, “Passing On”, and “The Photograph”, I considered her one of my very favorite writers. I don’t believe that these former novels were intended to be humorous, and it is in the attempt to be humorous in “How It All Began” that is Lively’s downfall here. She just does not have that light touch required for comedy.

“How It All Began” just tries too hard to be jaunty. All of the characters have a jaunty, I suppose English, attitude. After reading this novel, I can’t help but think that this relentless jauntiness is a distinctly English character defect. Even the one non-English character, the Balkan immigrant Anton, adopts this trait to the delight of everyone except me.

And the characters are always busy. They have to be oh so busy doing their multitude of tasks and visiting their many, many friends. All this busy-ness naturally gets tiresome at some point. One of the great humorous novels of all time, “Oblomov” by Ivan Goncharov, is about a guy who goes many days without getting out of bed at all. That would never happen in “How It All Began”. These characters grate by constantly doing things that are useful and productive. That’s not comedy, that’s sort of real life.

I found the novel to be a quite heavy-handed attempt at comedy.

Then again you may love “How It All Began”.