Tag: 20th century

Day 671: Lila

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Cover for LilaBest Book of the Week!
In Lila, wonderful writer Marilynne Robinson returns to the small Iowa town of Gilead, the setting of her previous novels Gilead and Home. In these novels Lila Ames is not much of a presence. She is referred to as the surprising choice of a wife for the elderly, gentle, and educated pastor John Ames—much younger, rough, and uneducated.

Lila has lived almost her entire life on the tramp, ever since Doll stole her away, a neglected, starving, feverish little mite who lived mostly under the table or was locked out of the house. Doll and Lila joined up with a group of travelers lead by Doane, wandering from job to job, and life was just fine until the long, dark days of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Years later, Lila has stopped outside Gilead and is living in a shack, walking to nearby farms and houses and asking for work.

Lila knows nothing about religion, but on occasion she has been curious about it and was warned away by Doane, who claims all preachers are charlatans. So, one day she ventures into the church. There she sees and is drawn to John Ames, and he to her. Eventually, they marry.

The action of this novel is mostly interior. Lila is tormented by some of the memories of her previous life and feels unworthy of Ames. She is afraid that he may ask her to leave at any minute. All the same, she occasionally wants to return to the freedom of her old life.

Ames, on the other hand, is happy to have Lila’s company, for he has lived alone ever since the death of his wife in childbirth, years ago. He is afraid she will decide to leave him one day.

As with Gilead and Home, this is a quiet novel, characterized by religious discussions as Lila tries to read and understand the Bible. She has no prior relationship to religion, but she has vowed that John Ames’s son will be brought up praying, as his father does. The discussions in Gilead between the two pastors were way over my head, but these are more fundamental.

I am not particularly interested in religion, but what I like about Robinson’s books is that they are about good people trying to be good. That is a refreshing theme these days. And the writing is superb, the subject matter approached with delicacy. I can’t recommend any book by Marilynne Robinson strongly enough.

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Day 665: The Sleep Room

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The Sleep Room In this atmospheric novel set in the 50’s, Dr. James Richardson is a young psychiatrist when he accepts what appears to be an exciting opportunity to work with the world-famous Dr. Hugh Maitland. Maitland has just opened a clinic in rural Suffolk where he will be employing some experimental therapies and hires Richardson as a doctor for the facility. Richards is surprised to find he’ll be the only doctor on staff with just weekend relief.

When Richardson begins work at the clinic, he is surprised that Maitland will not let him examine the patient records. One of Maitland’s beliefs is that mental problems are chemical and need chemical solutions, not psychotherapy. In the Sleep Room,  one of his experimental therapies is keeping six women asleep for months.

Although Richardson has some twinges of doubt about Maitland’s ideas, he defers to him as the expert. Soon he has other things to think about. He becomes very busy with his work and is also romantically involved with a nurse, Jane Taylor.

Small odd things happen beginning almost with his arrival, though. He thinks someone is behind him when no one is. He hears sounds when no one else is in the room. Things disappear and reappear in places where they shouldn’t be. Richardson begins thinking that the stately home housing the clinic has a poltergeist.

The Sleep Room is a difficult book to review because it slowly builds up quite a bit of suspense, but then I found the explanation for the events absurd. Yet, there is a reason for that and I can’t really get into it without giving away too much. Let’s just say that after an apparent climax there is a long, boring explanation followed by a short, apparently aimless follow-up, and then everything gets turned upside down.

One problem is that the final twist isn’t signaled well enough by the rest of the novel and actually doesn’t make sense in terms of the total of the novel’s narrative style. I can think of another book that employed a very similar trick but much more successfully. So, although I was captured by this book, I find that it ultimately doesn’t work.

Finally, the novel is only adequately written and poorly edited. In particular, I noticed loads of unnecessary passive voice and several instances of confused homophones: “knave” instead of “nave” and “taught” instead of “taut,” for example. These problems were with the published book. I was not reading an advance reading copy.

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Day 661: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

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Cover for The Bully PulpitNoted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin approaches her subject of the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft from several insightful angles. Although her book examines their careers separately, it is focused on the differences in their personalities and approaches that finally led to the serious rift in their friendship of many years. This rift also led to Roosevelt’s third run for president, which split the Republican ticket.

One of the major differences that Goodwin identifies is their relationships to and use of the press. The journalists particularly close to Roosevelt and involved in the fortunes of both presidents all worked for McClure’s magazine and make up an impressive list of names in journalism: Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, William Allen White, and Lincoln Steffens.

I wanted to read more by Goodwin after I read Team of Rivals, the great history of Lincoln’s career that inspired the movie Lincoln. Although I also have her book about FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt in my queue, I was interested in this one because I know only a little bit about Teddy Roosevelt and almost nothing about Taft, just the broad outlines of their careers.

Without going into detail about the careers and personalities of either man, although I developed respect for both, after reading this book, I confess to having a lot of sympathy for Taft over their split. The fact is that Roosevelt regretted his decision not to run for a third term and so looked for excuses to find fault with Taft’s presidency. After Roosevelt’s return from Africa, he criticized Taft’s record of progressive legislation even though it was actually better than Roosevelt’s own. Taft later acknowledged that he wasn’t as good as Roosevelt in publicizing his accomplishments or explaining his policies to the press.

This book is thoroughly interesting and revealing of the characters of both men. It is carefully researched, and it is also very well written. Although quite hefty at 750 pages, it moves along at a good pace and does not get bogged down with extraneous details.

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Day 658: Euphoria

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Cover for EuphoriaI switched around my book for today so that I could review a book that is about love rather than about hate (my original selection). I wasn’t thinking about Valentine’s Day coming up tomorrow when I originally selected the review. Happy Valentine’s Day!

***

Best Book of the Week!
Lily King based many of the events in her novel Euphoria on the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead. The result is a fascinating examination of another culture and Mead’s work methods as well as a love story.

When Nell Stone and her husband Schyler Fenwick (Fen) crawl out of the New Guinea jungle after grueling months spent studying the Mumbanyo, they don’t even know it is Christmas Eve. Nell has found the Mumbanyo people too militant and unsympathetic to work with, so she has insisted they leave against Fen’s wishes. We see almost immediately that Fen is jealous of Nell’s fame from the publication of her book on the Solomon Islands and that he can be brutal. Since the anthropologists consider the territory around the Sepik River to be already claimed by Andrew Bankson, their plan is to study the Aborigines in Australia.

At a Christmas party in their hotel, they meet Bankson. He has been working alone for two years and is dreadfully lonely, has even recently attempted suicide. He also feels stymied in his approach to research, wanting someone to bounce ideas off of. He has been begging for a partner to no avail.

Feeling an instant connection to Nell and Fen, Bankson urges them to pick a tribe to study near him on the river, and he takes them along it to choose. He hopes they choose the people in a village that is close to him, but they choose the Tam, seven hours away.

Here, Nell settles down to work hard, learning about the women and children. She is not allowed in the men’s street, so Fen’s job is to collect information about them. But Fen seems to be more interested in doing things with the men than in actually working on his research.

In the meantime, Bankson has been resisting his terrible loneliness and his attraction to Nell. But finally he comes to visit.

This brief novel is really wonderful in its characterizations, its descriptions of life in a New Guinea village, in its sheer richness. It reminded me a lot of another wonderful book, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.

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Day 657: The Fish Can Sing

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Cover for The Fish Can SingÁlfgrímur is an orphan boy who has always known life in a simple turf cottage with his foster parents, Björn of Brekkukot, whom he calls Grandfather, and Grandmother. His grandfather lives a life of integrity, with no interest in ambition. Words are so important in their household, Álfgrímur explains, that they are only spoken to hide things.

Álfgrímur grows up with his only ambition to live in his grandparents’ cottage and fish for lumpfish with his grandfather. But his grandmother has other ideas, so when he is old enough, he goes reluctantly off to school.

Most of this novel is an account of everyday life at Brekkukot, peopled by the peculiar residents of the grandparents’ loft, some permanently there and others passing through. These people are all good but eccentric. For example, there is the Superintendent, whom Álfgrímur as a boy thinks is the superintendent of the entire city of Reykjavic but turns out to be in charge of the public toilets at the harbor.

Hanging on the wall of their neighbor Kristín’s cottage is the picture of a young man. When Álfgrímur asks about him, his grandparents answer “He was a nice little boy, that Georg,” Kristín’s son. But Georg is now Garðar Holm, a famous Icelandic opera singer. Garðar Holm seldom comes home. When he does and his patron schedules a concert, he never appears, but he does take an interest in Álfgrímur. Álfgrímur can sing and he wants to learn to sing “one true note.”

In this novel, Laxness is interested in exploring the tension between fame and obscurity, but he is also interested in the importance of morality and honest dealing. Serious as its intent is and primitive as are the characters’ surroundings, this is not at all a grim novel. It is told with a wry and ironic sense of humor and is full of colorful characters. With Laxness, you can be sure that there is plenty going on beneath the surface of things.

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Day 644: The Wives of Los Alamos

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Cover for The Wives of Los AlamosA little note from me: I noticed that for awhile WordPress applied a feature to my blog that showed related posts at the bottom of the page. Then yesterday I noticed that the feature disappeared at some time. I couldn’t figure out a way to implement it on my blog automatically, but I was amused at its choices sometimes. So, a new feature of my blog is that every time I review a book, I’ll try to find three other reviews that share something in common with it, whether it’s the subject matter, the setting, the author. The reviews are links at the bottom of the page. Let me know how you like it!

* * *

The Wives of Los Alamos takes an unusual approach to historical fiction. It is narrated collectively, in first person plural, by all the wives of the scientists at Los Alamos during World War II. Of course, this approach has its disadvantages, as there are no characters who stand out from one another. Still, it is a fascinating way to point out what these people shared—and did not share.

The novel begins as the wives depart their former lives. They know nothing about where they are going or what their husbands are going to do when they get there. What little they know, they are not allowed to say. The novel tells their story throughout the war and their reactions when they finally learn what their husbands have created.

At times we see these women as selfish and privileged, especially when they become bored with the restrictions and begin gossiping and complaining about the “help.” But other times we realize how difficult their situation is, shipped off to a primitive environment where their housing is not even ready when they arrive, unable to learn what is going on, subject to restricted movements and stringent security even though they know very little.

http://www.netgalley.comThis is an interesting book that touches on topics that emerged during the war and after—like equal pay for equal work, the ethics of creating this powerful weapon, and family relationships and roles.

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Day 636: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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their-eyes-were-watching-godTheir Eyes Were Watching God was my selection for Classics Spin #8 for the Classics Club! Here is my review.

I had a complex reaction to this novel. On the one hand, I liked its protagonist, Janie Crawford, and was interested in her struggle to define her own identity. On the other hand, I didn’t much like any other characters in the novel. On the one hand, Janie’s struggles to define herself make the novel a landmark feminist book; on the other hand, Janie defines herself through her choice of husbands and her relationships to them. On the one hand, I don’t usually like tales in the vernacular; on the other hand, both the educated omniscient narrator and Janie’s vernacular third/first-person narration have moments of entrancing imagery. And speaking of that imagery, for a book written in 1937, the novel is occasionally startling in its sexuality.

A woman in her 40’s, Janie has recently returned home without Tea Cake, the man she left with. Having departed in some scandal, a well-off widow with a much younger, penniless man, she is figuring in a lot of talk. So, when her friend Pheoby comes to see her, Janie decides to tell her the story of her life.

Janie was raised by her grandmother in West Florida after her mother had her as a result of rape and then disappeared. Janie is a light-skinned black woman with long beautiful hair, and her appearance features in much of her story. When she is still an extremely innocent 16-year-old, her grandmother marries her off to a much older man, trying to give her stability. Janie thinks that marrying will make them love each other, but she is soon disillusioned and finds he is inclined to treat her like a work horse.

Then she meets Joe Stark, a flashy well-dressed man who seems to be going somewhere, and is. She leaves with him and they settle in an all-black town in “the new part of Florida,” where Joe soon becomes the mayor and store owner. But he defines his marriage by what he gives her and expects her to maintain a certain decorum as his wife, not allowing her to participate in many of the small town amusements. Also, he treats her with disrespect, publicly ridiculing her.

After Joe dies, under circumstances that have already started talk, Janie meets Tea Cake and eventually leaves with him to work in the Everglades. Although Tea Cake is in some ways an improvement over her other two husbands, there are some events that disturbed me. First, he steals her $200 and comes back with $12, but she is only upset when she thinks he has left her. Next, he earns it back but makes her put it in the bank and promise to live off what he can provide, a classic play for dominance that ignores the fact that she soon has to go to work next to him, manually in the fields. Finally, he beats her up once, not because of anything she does but because he wants to show everyone that she belongs to him.

Hurston was a trained ethnographer, and her fiction details a way of life in small-town Florida of her time. I found many of the details interesting. A fascination with skin color and Caucasian features is one theme that comes up several times. In fact, when Tea Cake beats Janie, instead of provoking a discussion of the fairness of the beating, the people are more fascinated by Janie’s skin being fair enough that they can see the bruises, which makes the other men envious.

Janie is often viewed harshly and unfairly by others. But it is part of her growing self-awareness that she doesn’t care. Although to me she sometimes seems too passive in her relationship to men—her gentle response to Tea Cake’s beating is seen as a good thing—she is otherwise a strong and resourceful heroine.

Day 620: Literary Wives! The Shoemaker’s Wife

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Cover for The Shoemaker's WifeToday is another meeting of Literary Wives, where a group of bloggers get together and review a book about being a wife. If you have read this month’s book and would like to participate, leave comments on any of our blogs. Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

One thing I can say about The Shoemaker’s Wife. It provoked discussion in our household. After reading the novel’s first two paragraphs to my husband, I asked, “Does this qualify as purple prose?” and he answered, “It’s at least very mauve.” In any case, the novel is packed with labored metaphors, some of which leave us readers with very odd mental images—for example, a comparison of the Alps to silver daggers.

The novel is based on the story of Trigiani’s grandparents, a couple who met as teenagers in the Italian Alps and then were separated by circumstances for years. I haven’t read any of Trigiani’s other books, but along with many other writers these days, she doesn’t seem to understand in this novel that making things happen to her characters doesn’t automatically make readers care what happens to them. Her characters have traits, but they don’t have any emotional depth, so we don’t care about them.

A specific example of this comes early in the book, when the girl Enza’s little sister dies. Abstractly, the death of a child is sad, but since we barely know Enza and we just met Stella a few paragraphs before she died, we don’t feel much about it. If we had a sense of the child or the older sister, we would care more.

I was unable to finish this book, so I can’t answer the usual Literary Wives questions about it. Realizing I was not enjoying it at all, I decided to read a quarter of it and if I still felt like I was wasting my time, to stop. It is a very long book, so I read about 120 pages, and Ciro and Enza had just met by then, with Ciro banished to America immediately after. When I quit reading, Ciro was on the ship to New York. So, no answers to questions about how wives are depicted in this book, not even about the main character’s mothers. Ciro’s mother abandons her sons at a convent at the beginning of the book because she can’t support them and is never seen again, and Enza’s mother is a vaguely drawn figure who simply works hard.

All novels aren’t character driven, but for me there has to be something that makes a novel interesting besides the plot. Sometimes it’s the voice of a compelling character, sometimes a puzzle, sometimes a fascination with the subject or world view being described, but it has to be something.

Literary Wives logoWhile I’m writing this, I’m thinking of examples, about how Agatha Christie could create a distinct character in a few sentences, not a nuanced one, but a distinct one nevertheless. I’m thinking how in The Secret Garden we immediately recognize Mary as an unlikable child, but we can see how the fear of waking to find everyone gone from her home in India has made her more demanding, and we sympathize. I’m thinking of how hard I cried when Beth died in Little Women. And I’m thinking how fascinated I was by 18th century Japan in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.

Read along with us in February, when we will be reading and commenting on The Last Wife of Henry VIII by Caroly Erickson.

Day 609: Good Behaviour

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Cover for Good BehaviourMolly Keane was a successful author and playwright in the first half of the 20th century. Although she was known mostly for romantic frolics, Good Behaviour is certainly not in that category. In fact, at the time that she wrote it, it was rejected as being too dark. It was not published until years later, when Keane’s friend Peggy Ashcroft encouraged her to try again.

Good Behaviour is a comedy of manners and a satirical look at the life of a certain type of the Irish upper class. It startlingly begins with a murder, but I’ll leave it to readers to find out who the victim and murderer are.

After the murder, the book returns in time to recount the childhood and upbringing of Aroon St. Charles. But first it oddly shoots off to explain how Mrs. Brock, Aroon’s governess, came to them. It is telling to learn that the proper and kindly Mrs. Brock was “let go” by a friend of St. Charles, notwithstanding a good reference, because she committed the crimes of encouraging one of the boys to read poetry and comforting him after he was whipped by his father. The boy, Richard Massingham, becomes important to Aroon in later years.

Aroon is a large, unattractive girl who is desperate for affection and some acknowledgment of her own importance. She is not stupid, but she sees only what she wants to see and is incredibly naive. Although she loves Mrs. Brock, it is indicative of her character that she nevertheless makes fun of her later in life as a way to fit in with Richard and her brother Hubert. She loves her father, who treats her with casual affection, but expressiveness is considered bad form in their set.

Her relationship with her mother is more complex. Although Aroon steadfastly maintains the fiction that her parents are devoted to each other, it is clear that they are not. Mrs. St. Charles is cold and removed from her family. She has no interests in common with her husband, who spends most of his time pursuing outdoor sports and philandering. Aroon knows that, but does not seem to notice what is going on in her own house.

The events in this novel are largely trivial except for some deaths. The novel is not plot-driven but centers around the behavior of Aroon and her horsey upper-class friends, who maintain their snobbishness despite a consistent lack of funds. We see the irony when Aroon throws away her opportunity to escape her unhappy household through a combination of willful blindness and snobbery. Aroon finds her place eventually and it is a deserved one.

Although we can find some sympathy for Aroon, she is definitely an anti-heroine. If you appreciate a sly, dark, understated humor and a masterly characterization, you should look for a copy of this novel.

Day 601: The Talented Miss Highsmith

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Cover for The Talented Miss HighsmithI became interested in reading this biography after hearing about interviews with Schenkar, who called Patricia Highsmith a sociopath. Patricia Highsmith is, of course, the author of many mid-20th century thrillers, the most famous being Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. After reading the biography, I don’t really think Highsmith was a sociopath. I think she was fascinated with certain dark themes, but she strikes me as more of a social inept, perhaps partially on the autistic spectrum.

Highsmith was certainly a complex person of many contradictions. She was a lesbian misogynist, as contradictory as that sounds, who was a great womanizer in her younger years and was seldom faithful to any of her lovers. She was an outspoken anti-Semite who had Jewish lovers and a lot of Jewish friends. Known in later years as a recluse, she visited her neighbors every evening and corresponded with many people, as well as making an appearance whenever invited.

She certainly was a damaged person. She had a love-hate relationship with her mother for her entire life, blaming her for abandoning her briefly when she was young and for not divorcing her stepfather. She was a woman who always thought she should actually have been a man. A heavy drinker and smoker, she barely ate any food for years and was probably anorexic.

Her life was an interesting one. She did not seem to be a likable person and frequently behaved very badly. Yet, she had many sincerely devoted friends.

I was interested in this book but had some issues with its structure. Schenkar explains at the beginning that a chronological approach wouldn’t do Highsmith justice, so she approaches Highsmith’s life sort of organically. The problem I found with this approach was that after awhile I could not figure out what organizing principle is holding some of the chapters together. Sometimes they just seem to follow a stream of consciousness approach. It makes the information conveyed very repetitive and chronologically impossible to follow. Schenkar helpfully provides a chronology at the back of the book, along with about 100 pages of supplementary material, but by then I was exhausted and had no interest in exploring any of it.

Finally—this is a small quibble—I got irritated by Schenkar’s chapter naming. The table of contents shows only nine chapters in this very long book, but there are really forty-nine. That is because she actually names them Les Girls Part 1, Les Girls Part 2, and so on. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I could just imagine Schenkar’s editor telling her she couldn’t have a 150-page chapter, which is the length of Les Girls, Parts 1–14. Such an approach does not strike me as being very imaginative.