Day 159: The Art of Fielding

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Art of FieldingI’m not a sports fan, and I don’t really understand why some people view baseball skills as art. This next statement may be heresy to some people, but I also did not enjoy reading Moby Dick. What do these two things have in common? The Art of Fielding, a contemporary literary novel by Chad Harbach. The book would seem to not be a good fit for me. Nevertheless, I was curious about where the plot was leading. I found the book very readable, littered with Melville references though it may be.

The Art of Fielding follows the course of a few important characters. Henry Skrimshander just wants to play baseball but has no particular ambitions until he is spotted in a game by Mike Schwartz, the team captain for the Harpooners baseball team from Westish College in Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Mike recruits him and devotes himself to training Henry to be a great shortstop, to the neglect of his own academic career. Soon, Henry is on the way to breaking a record for no errors held by his hero, Aparicio Rodriguez, the author of The Art of Fielding, a zenlike opus on baseball that Henry has carefully studied.

Henry’s college roommate is Owen Dunne, a brilliant student and baseball player who is also gay. He becomes involved in an affair that will have far-reaching consequences.

The college president Guert Affenlight is happy because his daughter Pella has left her husband and returned home. Affenlight is a Melville scholar, and Westish College adopted a Herman Melville motif at his suggestion because Melville made a lecture stop at the college long ago.

Pella, a difficult and rebellious woman, abandoned a promising college career to drop out of the last few months of high school and run off with an architect she met at a lecture. Guert and Pella have been estranged ever since. Both of them want to make amends but are not quite sure how.

Everything seems to be working out for everyone until Henry makes his first error in years, a disastrous throw. The characters are forced to reassess their own views of their lives.

Harbach is a careful writer who occasionally uses brilliant imagery. At heart, though, the novel is rather slight and shallow. It was 2011’s Big Book and critics raved about it, but those giving it a second look seem to be a little more critical. I enjoyed The Art of Fielding, but my enjoyment was mild.

Day 158: Death of a Maid

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Death of a MaidI have been curious about M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth series ever since seeing an episode or two of the TV series, so I finally picked up Death of a Maid. Luckily, I only invested a dollar in this purchase.

Mrs. Gillespie is the best maid in town, but she is also a malicious gossip. Hamish Macbeth has won her services in a raffle but he spends most of the day trying to avoid her. Then she is found bashed in the head with a bucket in the house of a retired professor who was out all day. Hamish, who spends his time trying not to look good at his job for fear of promotion, finds there are loads of suspects.

Meanwhile, an old girlfriend has arrived in town with a new suitor, and Hamish is feeling jealous.

I don’t think I have ever read a book where the author has made less of an effort. The novel devolves into a series of short scenes that all seem to be prematurely cut off, usually by someone flouncing away even in the midst of being questioned by the police. The mystery is only difficult to solve because the book is littered with suspects. Macbeth catches the murderer 20 or 30 pages from the end of the book, but it continues to maunder on as if the author doesn’t know how to finish. Although I know this is a popular series, in my opinion it has run its course.

Day 157: Empire Falls

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Empire FallsBest Book of the Week!

I’ve been picking up Richard Russo novels at the bookstore for years and putting them back down because I wasn’t sure I’d like the subject matter, but now that I’ve read Empire Falls, I wish I’d been reading them all along.

Miles Roby’s life hasn’t been going too well. He quit college to run a diner in his dying home town in Maine when his mother was ill, and 20 years later he’s still flipping burgers. His wife Janine has left him for her dim-witted personal trainer. He has been in love with one of his waitresses, Charlene, since high school but sees no sign that she returns his feelings. He has an uneasy relationship with the owner of the diner, Mrs. Whiting. The only thing that seems right in his life is his teenage daughter Tick, and she is having problems at school.

Miles’s father is an alcoholic ne’er-do-well who was hardly ever around when he was a child. He comes around when he wants to earn a few dollars or hit up Miles for money. The mill has been shut down for years, and most of the townspeople don’t feel like they have much of a future.

Miles’s brother David is recovering from a drug habit, but his cooking and new ideas have recently been responsible for an increase in the diner’s business, and he wants Miles to move the business to a larger restaurant. Miles has been avoiding a decision. He has only been hanging on because he doesn’t know what else to do and because Mrs. Whiting long ago promised to leave him the diner in her will. She owns most of the town and behaves as if she owns him, too.

Miles doesn’t realize it, but his fortunes have been stymied for years because of events in the past. His only clue to these events is his recollection of a summer spent with his mother on Martha’s Vineyard when he was a small boy.

A pleasure of this book is its myriad of small-town characters and the warm, witty way that Russo depicts them. Russo is skilled at involving you in the fortunes of Miles, his friends, his family, and even his town. This novel is delightful.

Day 156: Winter Garden

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Winter GardenI want to start out this review by saying that I usually avoid reading tearjerker fiction (by the way, that’s different from being brought to tears by emotion that is evoked honestly in fiction) and I don’t like things that are too heartfelt, if that makes any sense. Having misgivings, I read Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah upon the recommendation of a friend because I have always been interested in Russia. This decision was a mistake for me because I found this novel too corny, contrived, and predictable.

Meredith is a caregiver. She takes care of her father’s business and tries to take care of everything else for everyone. She has also tried to love her cold, withdrawn mother all her life, but her mother remains unknowable. Meredith’s sister Nina, on the other hand, is a photojournalist who seems unreliable to Meredith and hardly ever comes home. This, Meredith resents.

Their father has a heart attack, which brings Nina home. During his illness, he insists that the girls force their mother to tell them a fairy tale she used to tell them as children, only this time, she is to finish it. Then he dies, and Nina returns for the funeral.

It is obvious from the beginning, even before we hear a word of the tale, that it isn’t a fairy tale but a true story about their mother’s difficult life in Stalinist Russia. Of course, you immediately know that by listening to the story, the women will grow to love and understand their mother. By the way, they will also figure out how to reconcile their relationships with each other and solve their other life problems. A review I read says “Although this book starts off fairly maudlin, it evolves into a gripping read.” I have to disagree. I think it starts out maudlin and stays that way.

Day 155: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for In the Garden of BeastsBest Book of the Week!

In the Garden of Beasts is the latest of Erik Larson’s extremely interesting histories. In a couple of his books, he takes the approach of  juxtaposing two seemingly different subjects and showing how they are related, for example, in Thunderstruck, where he tells the story of Marconi and the invention of radio and how that affected the capture of the famous British murderer, Crippen. In other books, though, he has managed to make historical events more personal by relating them from the point of view or one or two people. Such is the case with In the Garden of Beasts, which follows William E. Dodd’s years as the American ambassador to Germany during the build-up of Nazi power before World War II (1933-1937).

The book is about the experiences of Dodd and his family as they witnessed the events of those times. It focuses mostly on Dodd and his daughter Martha, based upon their letters and memoirs.

Dodd was in many ways an uncomfortable fit for the position of ambassador. He was an academic–a historian whose previous position was chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago. He had worked his way up from extreme poverty and believed that he had not risen as far as he would have if he had come from a more privileged background.

Dodd was a personal acquaintance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he requested a position as an ambassador of a small country from FDR, hoping both to add to his prestige and to be able to devote more time to writing his history of the South. In an ironic twist, though, he was offered Berlin, a much more demanding situation than he wanted and no sinecure, after several other candidates turned it down.

He saw his role as that of a reformer. He intended to live modestly on his salary and provide the other employees in the diplomatic service with an example of good stewardship of public funds, never understanding that his frugality was more likely to be misunderstood by his colleagues from more privileged backgrounds, who were the more usual occupants of such a position and who viewed him with disdain. In fact, some of them circulated a malicious and untrue rumor that FDR had made a mistake with the phone book and offered the job to the wrong Dodd.

The family was at first inclined to believe that the stories of attacks on foreigners and Jews by the SA (German Stormtroopers) were exaggerated. Frankly, they were also somewhat anti-Semitic. Martha admired the vigorous blond young men who were excited by the rise of Hitler, and she socialized with men in the Nazi leadership. In fact, she was quite the party girl, in every sense of the term. Dodd naively thought that he would have more impact on German policies if he maintained friendly relations with the country’s leaders, no matter what he thought of them personally.

It took Dodd an inordinately long time to recognize the truth about the kind of people he was dealing with, especially considering all his sources of information. However, when he did, he was at times heroically unflinching about standing up to the Nazi high command.

The genius of this book is that it relates history from the point of view of naive onlookers whose understanding of the situation and sense of danger grow slowly, rather than from complete hindsight. The book brilliantly conveys the feel of the time and place as the Dodds slowly realize the extent of the Nazi atrocities and begin to understand the growing terror of the German citizens. Dodd is an interesting character, a man who is sneered at by his staff and the Germans for his fuddy-duddy qualities, such as leaving state balls at 11 to go to bed, but who startles them several times by having the courage to stand up to Nazi leaders.

Day 154: The Summer Tree

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Summer TreeLong ago I read books one and two of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry but was unable to find the third book. Awhile back, I found copies of all the books and decided to re-read the trilogy. It is going to be very hard for me to divorce my review of The Summer Tree, the first book, from that of the entire trilogy, because my impressions are of the complete trilogy, but I remember thinking that it was the best of the three books.

Five friends attend a lecture by Professor Lorenzo Marcus on the University of Toronto campus. After the lecture, he reveals that he is actually the mage Loren Silvercloak who has come to them from Brennin on another world to ask them to travel there and celebrate the reign of High King Ailell. (Of course, they decide to go.) One of them lets go of the others during the transfer and finds he is separated from the others for much of the action of the novel. On Brennin, it turns out to be the eve of a great battle, during which each of the five find they have their special parts to play.

I had more to say in my notes about my impressions of this book than the plot, which is complicated. I feel that the book, while interesting and beautifully written, is much more immature than the other Kay books I have read. (It is his first.) The strangers coming to save another world idea has been done to death, and the second and third books become even more trite with the introduction of a King Arthur and Queen Guinevere plot, which I find tiresome. The five main characters are relatively uninteresting, and some of the male characters, particularly, are a little juvenile. Finally, the entire trilogy seems dated, particularly in the behavior and attitudes of the characters. My impressions of other Kay books, such as Tigana or The Song for Arbonne, are that they are more rich and subtle.

Day 153: The Shadow Woman

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Shadow WomanIn The Shadow Woman, a woman is found dead in a park during the Gothenburg Party, a citywide festival that is taking place during a blazing summer. Chief Inspector Erik Winter and his team are having a hard time finding leads or even identifying the body. All they have is footage from a surveillance camera of a Ford Escort and a strange symbol painted on a nearby tree.

Sandwiched into the criminal investigation is the narration of a little girl who doesn’t know where her mommy is and is being kept by strangers. When Winter’s team finally identifies the body, they find that the woman had a little girl. No one seems to know where the child is.

During an investigation that lasts months, Winter and his team begin to find links between the crime and a robbery that occurred 25 years ago. In the meantime, Winter’s long-time girlfriend Angela is thinking of giving him an ultimatum about their relationship.

I haven’t been reading Åke Edwardson’s Erik Winter mysteries in order, making the private lives of the recurring characters a little difficult to follow. The books keep my interest and provide complex puzzles, but I still don’t feel like I get much insight into the personalities of the main characters. The slower pace of Edwardson’s police procedurals is probably more realistic than the speed with which crimes are usually solved in fiction, but the author’s ability to effectively build suspense is also affected by this pace.

Day 152: The Master

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

Cover for The MasterThe Master, Colm Tóibín’s engrossing novel about Henry James, is virtually plotless. Over the course of five years, James works, visit friends, and remembers significant events in his life and people who are important to him. At the same time he muses on how the people, tales they tell, or incidents he has observed have informed or will inform his writing.

I have often found James’s work perplexing, feeling as if there is a lot going on under the surface that I don’t understand. A novel about him, therefore, is not an intuitive choice for me. Nevertheless, I found myself extremely involved in this story about a man who appears to have always stood back and watched. In Tóibín’s view, James lived a life of “pure coldness.”

The book delicately depicts a complex man, social on the surface but always at an emotional remove from others, homosexual but so concerned about propriety and public opinion that he never acts on it (perhaps–that is not entirely clear) and avoids situations where he may be tempted. He is sometimes very cold in his inaction, such as when he deserts his best friend, Constance Fenimore Woolson, because she has been too open for his taste about their completely innocent relationship, causing some friends to blame him for her subsequent suicide.

The most fascinating part of the novel, in my opinion, is how it illuminates the way that a writer may take a situation, a sentence, thoughts about how a pair of people interact, and turn them into a complete work of fiction. For example, a tale told to him about two children alone on an estate reminds him of his relationship with his sister Alice. As children, both of them had been abandoned as their family toured Europe and have never been fully included in the events and emotions of the family. These memories finally emerge in the ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” Similarly, his memories of his intelligent, vivacious cousin Minny Temple are brought back to life in first The Portrait of a Lady and then The Wings of a Dove.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Master is an evocative novel about the inner life of an emotionally crippled writer.

Day 151: Moonfleet

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for MoonfleetMoonfleet is a boy’s adventure story similar to Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Written by J. Meade Falkner in 1898, it was very popular for many years. I had actually never heard of it but picked it up out of curiosity a couple of years ago.

John Trenchard is an orphan boy who lives with his aunt in the small village of Moonfleet in the south of England in 1757. The village has been dominated by the Mohune family for centuries. There is a legend that Colonel John “Blackbeard” Mohune stole a diamond from King Charles I and that his ghost roams the crypts looking for it.

One day John hears noises from Mohune’s crypt, and when he goes to investigate, finds the landlord of the local inn, Elzevir Block, and Mr. Ratsey, the sexton, who say they are looking for damage from a storm. John assumes they are looking for Blackbeard’s ghost. He finds his way into the crypt through a large sinkhole and gets inadvertantly trapped there overnight. While he is trapped there, he overhears enough to realize that Block and Ratsey are actually smugglers.

John’s aunt assumes he has been up to no good when he doesn’t come back for the night, so she throws him out of the house. Fortunately, Block takes him in. But when Block’s lease expires, the lease goes up for auction and is purchased by Maskew, the unpopular local magistrate. Before Block leaves the area, John accompanies him on one last smuggling venture, during which Maskew, who has lain in wait for the smugglers with the excisemen, is accidentally shot by the excisemen. John is wounded and is falsely accused in absentia of murdering Maskew, so he must flee to the continent.

The rest of John’s adventures include diamond hunting, being imprisoned for theft when he is cheated by an avaricious diamond merchant, working as a galley slave, and shipwreck. Moonfleet is an exciting book with a gripping story line that is still popular with children.