Monthly Archives: November 2014

False Premises

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

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Harry Hopkins, FDR's can-do adviser. (Courtesy of the U.S. Social Security Administration)

Harry Hopkins, FDR’s can-do adviser. (Courtesy of the U.S. Social Security Administration)

Review: Sleep in Peace Tonight, by James MacManus

St. Martins, 2014. $27

Whenever I think of storytelling that grips me, even when I know the ending, I think of two books in particular. One is famous nonfiction, Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August; the other, an obscure, now out-of-print novel, The War at Troy, by Lindsay Clarke. Despite the obvious differences, both succeed in the same way: through vivid description, scrupulous attention to detail, and, most of all, faithful rendition of larger-than-life characters.

In Tuchman’s narrative, for instance, the Russian foreign minister receives the German ambassador’s declaration of war with, “The curses of the nations will be upon you!” The context she’s re-created feels so clear and true that the present-day reader has no urge to laugh, only to shudder in sympathy, rage, or sadness. Similarly, in Clarke’s novel of the Trojan War, Paris first sees Helen by looking into Aphrodites’s eyes, and you begin to understand how a man, sitting knee-to-knee with the goddess of love, could contemplate an act of murderous folly. This, to me, is authentic storytelling.

Unfortunately, I find little authenticity in Sleep in Peace Tonight, which feels more like a rant than a novel, fiction about history rather than historical fiction. The action takes place in early 1941, the darkest days of World War II for Britain, when the Luftwaffe unleashes terror bombing, day after day. This background is the only part that feels real, as you see fighter planes assembled in pieces in makeshift sheds, chosen because they don’t look target-worthy from the air. Or that’s the gamble.

The novel purports to be about Harry Hopkins, whom FDR sends to London as his eyes and ears, while Congress debates Lend-Lease (the act that legalized military aid to Britain and effectively ended U.S. neutrality). I’ve always admired Hopkins, a New Deal wizard who ran the WPA, so I was looking forward to seeing him in action. However, it’s an empty story. Even Churchill, the real protagonist, boozing and raging and summoning Hopkins at all hours, seems more like an unfinished sketch than a real person, while the supporting cast are cardboard cutouts or position papers. They seldom speak for themselves, the author preferring to summarize their thoughts and feelings like a conference agenda. Indeed, most of Sleep in Peace Tonight feels like a series of meetings that repeat themselves. Even the love affair between Hopkins and his beautiful English chauffeur, Leonora Finch, reveals little about either of them, though it does allow Leonora to state the theme over and over: Stop talking about how to win the war and get to the front lines.

Consequently, the novel never shows what these people are like when they’re not strutting on the world stage. Hopkins, for instance, has a fiancée in Washington, and his beloved, second wife died of cancer. He has four children. Does he ever think of them? Not really. They’re mentioned, of course, but they’re like figurines on a mantelpiece, dusted off occasionally.

Meanwhile, the history feels doctored, resectioned to suggest a tension that the narrative fails to deliver. To make characters (and the reader) wait while a legislature makes up its mind is pretty dull stuff, especially if that legislature never appears directly and is three thousand miles from the real action. Lend-Lease, in fact, got through an isolationist Congress in about two months–not bad, considering–but in these pages, it’s a miracle, because of American selfishness and FDR’s inability to lead. He comes across as a craven, feckless Nero who plays with his stamp collection while London burns, and “whose physical paralysis had become a metaphor for his lack of political will.” As for the First Lady, she’s so concerned about social programs at home to care what happens to the world–and her number-one program is to see her friend Hopkins married.

Given these portrayals–and that the other American characters are either philanderers, lushes, or both–I wonder whether the real theme of Sleep in Peace Tonight is the war’s humiliation of England, directed against the American rescuers. Treated authentically, that could make excellent fiction.

Send Up the Twenties

24 Monday Nov 2014

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Review: Bandbox, by Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 2004. $25

A vodka bottle comes through an interoffice mail chute by mistake and clunks a sozzled reporter on the head–and that’s just the beginning. A satirical farce that reads like a thriller, Bandbox is a hilarious valentine to the New York of 1927. The title refers to a flashy magazine fighting for its life against a hard-charging competitor, led by a one-time staffer nurtured at its hooch-filled bosom. Nothing’s too low for this ingrate defector, whether it’s bribing an office underling to rifle desk drawers, calling in the vice squad, or faking photographs.

That’s the premise, assuming it matters. Throw in a raft of eccentrics adept at stirring up whirlwinds, mobsters, a star-struck young man escaping college in Indiana, an unfortunate encounter with President Coolidge, and you’ve got as tart and heady a Manhattan as served in any speakeasy during Prohibition. Mallon spices the drink with lovingly researched details that made this transplanted New Yorker sigh with nostalgia: the interior of a subway car, the views from the newest skyscrapers (since become landmarks), the then-famous but now-obscure personalities who appear just within the story’s peripheral vision.

Mallon gratifyingly obliges the dictum that a satirist should push characters’ eccentricities to their limit. These include a shy magazine staffer who prefers animals over humans to the point that he believes John Scopes guilty “of at least presumption, since neither God nor nature would ever have allowed the evolution of charming monkeys into terrible men.” Then there’s a researcher, once married to an Italian count, who wouldn’t know an ordinary, everyday fact if it bit her, but can confirm–from experience–the shoe size of Arnold Rothstein, the gangster.

What really makes this cocktail fizz, however, is the prose. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so often over a novel. Consider this offering, about a “big-game-hunting literary sensation,”

a writer so virile and hairy-chested, he looked, when his shirt was open, like something he might have just shot. . . on the page, he boiled his sporting and amorous adventures so spare it sometimes seemed he was being paid by the word for what he left out.

It’s pretty clear who this is, but Mallon drops Hemingway’s name into the book later, as if to pretend otherwise. Wink, wink; nudge, nudge.

Bandbox is good fun and sharp satire, and I suspect that Mallon intended no more than that, which is to his credit. His publisher, however (as publishers do), tries to go further, using the adjective poignant on the jacket flap. I didn’t see any poignancy, and I’d be hard-pressed to call any of the characters three-dimensional. But they’re not supposed to be. They’re vehicles for a rollicking, crazy ride, and that’s just fine. Hop aboard.

Three Hundred Words of Genius

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

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In the past three weeks, I’ve put aside five novels. Each had a good premise, and all were intriguing. But once I got past that, I found nothing to keep me, and after the third misfire, I wanted to know why I couldn’t connect with these stories. After all, I’m a novelist too, and maybe other readers would feel the same about my stuff.

So I went back over the books in my mind, and though each was different, I noticed one common thread: The authors narrated backstory to explain a character’s hopes, dreams, desires, restraints, and impulses. I think I get what the writers were trying to tell me, but that didn’t grab me enough. I was reading a description, not witnessing a character grow before my eyes. So I decided that fact can’t substitute for insight; recounting circumstances doesn’t reveal a character’s inner life. And to me, without that, a novel ain’t got that swing.

This is one reason I admire Wolf Hall, which, if you haven’t run across it, is Hilary Mantel’s novel about Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power at Henry VIII’s court. To say that Mantel writes better than just about anybody these days is neither the reason I put five other novels aside nor very helpful. But taking a good look at the first 300 words of Wolf Hall (297, to be exact) shows me what I was missing and what I wish I could achieve with my own fiction.

The story begins with a beating. Within fifty words, you read that the unnamed victim is flat on the ground, “eyes turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out.” Not rescue him; just help him out, a measure of how he’s learned, perhaps, to curtail his desires. “One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.” His physical disadvantage is obvious, but I also sense his emotional vulnerability.

The next two paragraphs name the father, Walter, and give him speech and actions, all vicious–but the boy has no name. Many have criticized Mantel for being deliberately vague about who’s speaking or thinking throughout the novel, a style that maddens me too, sometimes. But here, I think it’s genius. Just as Walter’s violence feels matter-of-fact, ritual, so does his son’s self-effacement. He’s trying to be small and inert, so that he can escape his father’s blows. All the same, when he hears his dog barking, he thinks, “I’ll miss my dog.” Again, even the dog has a name, and, interestingly, a poetic one, Bella–a lovely touch. But the point is that the boy craves his father’s love, even if he doesn’t say so, even if he doesn’t directly know it.

Then, to end the three hundred words:

Look now, look now,” Walter bellows. He hops on one foot, as if he’s dancing. “Look what I’ve done. Burst my boot, kicking your head.

In this brief opening, I believe that Mantel has distilled the essence of Cromwell’s character, which she’ll weave throughout the novel. He survives as a courtier because he can sense danger almost before his adversary has planned the blow. Walter is a worse tyrant by far than Henry VIII, though just as changeable, so it’s useful training. Cromwell keeps his feelings tightly wrapped, and while he’s generous to waifs and wanderers, like Walter, he can twist people’s arms, but with words. And to the titled men who jockey for power at court, Cromwell, the son of a brewer and blacksmith, has no name. He’s a nobody.

Naturally, the first three hundred words can’t say all this. But they say enough.

Rottenness in the New Jerusalem

17 Monday Nov 2014

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William Hogarth, “The Rake’s Progress,” plate 3, “The Tavern Scene.” Black-and-white image courtesy of The Gutenberg Project.

Review: The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew W. Taylor

Hyperion, 2011. 412 pp. $25.

By all accounts, late eighteenth-century English towns were foul-smelling sinkholes, where physical and moral corruption bred like flies in drawing rooms and hovels alike. Andrew Taylor has imagined a college at Cambridge, named Jerusalem, a most unholy nest that stinks to high heaven, crowded with power-seekers, hypocrites, and carousing young gentlemen of high birth and low morals.

The latest malodorous scandal concerns a young undergraduate, Frank Oldershaw, who has had a nervous breakdown because, he says, he saw the ghost of a woman who drowned herself. Ghosts and their sightings may be as common as mud among the lower orders, but Frank Oldershaw is an aristocrat, and “self-murder,” as it is called, is so reprehensible a crime that nobody of breeding speaks of it.

Consequently, Frank’s widowed mother, Lady Anne Oldershaw desires to restore her son’s health and reputation; like any doting parent, she doesn’t know (or prefers not to know) that her boy witnessed his vision following an appalling debauch, gross even by Jerusalem College standards. To investigate, Lady Anne hires John Holdsworth, a bookseller who has achieved small notoriety for a book he wrote debunking ghosts as fictions of the superstitious and those who would prey on them.

What Holdsworth finds, and, more importantly, how he goes about it, make compelling reading. Without giving too much away, it’s enough to say that he has strong personal motives to lay this or any ghost, and that specters of all sorts trouble the characters of this tale. Of course, Holdsworth’s ability to gather and sift evidence make him a first-class detective. But his perceptions of human behavior, and how self-interest shapes how we see ourselves and others, are what truly set him apart from everyone he meets. His loneliness in insight and the implicit divisions in a rigid class system complicate his efforts to understand the Oldershaw case and himself.

Holdershaw’s growth as a character adds an extra, unusual dimension to an excellent mystery, told with gusto, deftness, and natural command of a historical scene. I read few historical mysteries, or even mysteries in general, but I recommend this one.

A Speck of History: This Date in 1916

14 Friday Nov 2014

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On 14 November 1916, Robert Jackson, an American relief volunteer in Belgium, checked out disturbing rumors. The German occupiers of Belgium, he had heard, were deporting workers to serve the German war effort, breaking official promises and violating international law. The latest “selection” would take place at Court-St.-Étienne, sixteen miles southeast of Brussels, at an empty textile mill.

Cardinal Mercier protecting the Belgians, by Charles Fouqueray, 1916. Library of Congress, Print and Photograph Division.

Cardinal Mercier protecting the Belgians, by Charles Fouqueray, 1916.
Library of Congress, Print and Photograph Division.

“In the distance,” Jackson later told his journal, “the can[n]on were booming very loud, the 3rd day in succession,” as a “long serpentine of men” filed into the mill. Outside, “entirely apart & away were the masses of women & children waiting & weeping, wondering whether their men would be taken & coming as near as was permitted.”

If a man was told “to the left,” that meant liberty–“so far as liberty exists for the inhabitants of Belgium”–and “to the right” meant Germany. The “selection” screened thousands of men in four hours, of whom almost nine hundred were loaded onto sealed boxcars, bound for Germany. There, they would be offered contracts to work in war plants and tortured if they refused.

That same day, American newspapers reported a protest by Cardinal Désiré Mercier, the chief Catholic prelate in Belgium. Many neutral nations also criticized the German policy, even Switzerland, but not the United States. President Woodrow Wilson, having just narrowly won reelection under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” refused to speak publicly on the matter; he interpreted neutrality to mean diplomatic silence, except when he felt American interests were involved. (He also hoped to mediate peace, a delusion the Germans encouraged, but that’s another story.)

In 2003, I read Robert Jackson’s journal at the Hoover Archives at Stanford; Herbert Hoover directed the relief effort that employed Jackson, and many of its papers wound up there. When I opened the journal, a small, hard-backed notebook like those used for school compositions, my hands trembled. The ink had browned with age but was generally legible, and the words leaped off the pages, evoking passions and images of people long dead. This was the eyewitness account I was looking for, a description that would retrieve a speck of history from obscurity: the deportation of 120,000 Belgians in 1916-17, a little-known event in a great war. I used it in my book, The Rape of Belgium, and it has stayed with me ever since.

Sisters in Mercy, and Much Else

10 Monday Nov 2014

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Review: The Daughters of Mars, by Thomas Keneally
Atria, 2012. 513 pp. $26.

“Fortune favors the brave,” wrote Virgil, a saying that describes both Thomas Keneally’s approach to this extraordinary tale and its two protagonists. Naomi and Sally Durance hail from Australian cattle country and a home where domestic duties wore their mother down before her excruciating death from cancer. Determined to pursue a different, more independent path, few of which exist for women in 1915, as trained nurses, they volunteer to serve the Australian forces in the Great War.

But despite what they have in common, Naomi and Sally have never been close, so they sail overseas with much left unsaid. And the elephant neither of them speaks about–a rather hefty creature, in this case–is that both sisters hoarded enough morphine to grant their mother her final wish, to die with no further suffering. What happened, exactly? Sally isn’t sure, and Naomi, who was there at the last, may or may not have told the truth.

Recruiting poster for Australian nurses, Sydney. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; from the Library of Congress )

Recruiting poster for Australian nurses, Sydney. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; from the Library of Congress )

From this premise comes a riveting story that spares nothing and no one and grabs you until the last sentences. It’s not just the hospital or dressing-station scenes at Gallipoli and northern France, conveyed with unflinching realism, or the grotesque blasphemies that steel, gas, and flame inflict on human flesh. It’s the fear that grips the nurses, which they can’t help breathing in, like the fetid odors of the wards: Be careful what attachments you form, because nobody’s safe.

How the Durance sisters cope with this terror frames the novel, especially given their sibling rivalry and mother’s death, an irony that they face daily in their work as healers. Their relationship matters more than any other, even when they allow men into their lives. There are flirtations and romances between many nurses and soldiers–how could there not be?–but the author takes care to give the women conversations and desires that have nothing to do with men.

I’d have liked even more of that, but I think Keneally does well. He goes even further, portraying the nurses’ struggles in which love or justice don’t necessarily triumph. A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but Keneally is too good a novelist and historian to offer the reader cheap candy. That’s why I was disappointed at how often he tells the reader what the characters feel, rather than show it. The clumsiest instances involve his reminders, early on, that Sally hasn’t forgotten her guilt about her mother’s death–as though she would, or anyone would assume so.

The heavy hand also blunts the way British officers treat Australians, which was no doubt shabby in reality, but tiresome here nevertheless. Every British commander in this novel seems criminally negligent, while the Aussies just do things better. Strangely, too, despite the realism Keneally insists on, the Durance sisters somehow have no trouble finding good food and drink on days off spent in hungry, ruined French towns.

Naomi’s character puzzled me, sometimes. She seems downright cold, for no apparent reason I can figure from her upbringing. Is this a simplistic authorial device with which she can keep the world (read: men) at a distance? If so, a woman of her intelligence and aplomb could have achieved the same result with subtle sexual diplomacy. To me, that would have made her more complete and believable, refining what’s already a compelling book.

If you’ve never read a novel about the First World War–or even if you have–The Daughters of Mars is  superb, faithful to the events and passions of the time, a human, moving story. I recommend it.

Why I Put Off Writing This Review

06 Thursday Nov 2014

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Review: All Souls’ Rising, by Madison Smartt Bell
Vintage, 2004. 530 pp. $17

Some books grab you by the throat; this one grabbed me and squeezed. I’m glad I read All Souls’ Rising and likely won’t forget it until I lose my marbles. But boy, is it hard to talk about.

Yet this book should be talked about, and read, for its boldness as much as anything else. Originally published in 1995, it’s the first volume of a trilogy recounting the only successful slave revolution in history, which began in Haiti in 1791. The premise: The French Revolution caused echoes in this slave colony, then known as Saint Domingue, leading to a grisly race war. And when I say grisly, I mean tortures I shudder even to name, next to which rape and murder seem ordinary.

The narrative follows characters from every conceivable perspective. There are racists on both sides, soldiers who switch sides, white colonists, Creoles of every social caste, bullies, braggarts, hotheads who want to settle scores–and, lest the reader despair altogether, a very few who try to contain the violence. These include the remarkable slave leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and a white doctor he protects, Antoine Hébert.

In lesser hands, the racists would be merely ugly, and Toussaint live up to his name, while the Good Doctor, a cliché in colonial literature, would resemble a cardboard cutout. But Bell takes the high road, giving them vulnerabilities, making them human. What’s more, they change, not to acquire haloes, but to display under severe duress characteristics they might not have known they possessed, which you find yourself admiring, however grudgingly, in some cases.

Another temptation Bell resists is the chance to make speeches or explain; instead, he conveys attitudes through action. For instance, Hébert teaches his Creole lover to play chess; a visitor to the household notices the board and sniggers. You don’t need a gloss to read the visitor’s thoughts: What a ninny Hébert is to lavish such pretensions on a woman with black blood in her.

Unfortunately, Bell has his own pretensions. To be sure, he knows his ground, and, to name one example, portrays the slaves’ religious beliefs and practices in scenes that feel lived in from the inside, a brilliant achievement. But he risks the whole tone of the novel (and the reader’s involvement) with frequent passages in French and Creole, which, though explicable from the context, call attention to themselves.

I also wonder why, in the first volume of a trilogy, the author leaps back and forth in time, maybe getting ahead of the story, and himself. The switches can be hard to follow, another reason All Souls’ Rising is no easy book.

But it’s an important one, a rare find, I think, when so many books are about so little. It’s not just about Haiti, of course; it’s about anyplace where one race has ever oppressed another. All Souls’ Rising made me look in the mirror.

What Makes This Novel Exceptional

03 Monday Nov 2014

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Review: Blood & Beauty, by Sarah Dunant

Random House, 2013. 507 pp. $27

It’s hard to go wrong when you’ve got the cut-and-thrust of late fifteenth-century papal politics, with mind-boggling corruption, cruelty, and hypocrisy on broad display. Then too, you have the infamous Borgia family, the larger-than-life characters who enact this story. Finally, there’s the setting, so keenly described you can smell it, feel it on your skin, in horrifying glory.

But to me, what separates this novel from the pack, whether we’re talking about historical fiction in general or that of the Italian Renaissance, are depth and subtlety.

I particularly admire Dunant’s ability to show, rather than explain, her characters’ feelings. For instance, when a dispatch rider, eager to impress, delivers a message to Cesare Borgia and his scar-faced henchman, Dunant has him talk a blue streak, hesitate, and backtrack, as he gauges his listeners’ reactions. And when the henchman finds fault, she writes, “There is a second’s silence, until Cesare laughs and relief breaks out like sweat on the boy’s face.” It’s a joke, after all.

When I read this, I was in the scene with the rider, sharing his reaction. Moreover, I understood implicitly how the henchman resents the favor that Cesare bestows on the younger man, and how Borgia keeps them both on a leash by letting the henchman enjoy his superiority–for one second.

Another strength is how the central character, Lucrezia Borgia, changes through the course of the book. A pampered child married off as a girl, Lucrezia comes to wisdom through painful loss:

Every woman who walks through the world knows there are two roads: a wide triumphal route for the men, and a second mean little alley for women. Freedom is so much men’s due that even to draw attention to it is to make them angry.

Lucrezia’s life earns this sentiment. But I wish Dunant had given her flaws other than a naiveté she can’t possibly avoid, given her upbringing, and her desire to please, which, as she observes, is her lot as a woman. Unlike anyone else in her family, she’s kind, gentle, loyal, and thoughtful of others. Yes, she carries the burden of a terrible legend, which Dunant clearly wants to revise, but isn’t her heroine too good to be true? Vanozza dei Cataneis, mother to Cesare and Lucrezia, is more fully drawn that way, even as a minor character.

Cesare, on the other hand, has enough flaws to send the whole populace to confession. He’s utterly repellent, yet I can’t help being fascinated at his political gifts, willingness (and ability) to excel in many roles, and force of character. It’s ironic that in this feminist novel, he, who causes so much of his younger sister’s sorrows (and, therefore, her enlightenment), should upstage her.

Dunant mentions a possible sequel. Here’s hoping she writes it and gives Lucrezia more angles and edges.