Monthly Archives: March 2015

The Sorrows of Young Werner: All the Light We Cannot See

30 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
Scribner, 2014. 531 pp. $27.

I started reading this World War II novel with some skepticism, and I confess, the first several chapters made me wonder whether I’d like it, despite all the raves. What’s the deal with snippet-length chapters? Some feel like television–short scene, nifty tag line, go to break. Also, I’m prejudiced against stories that mix fables, especially the kind of scenes that filmmakers shoot with Vaseline on the lenses, with cruel reality. And though the first stretch of All the Light We Cannot See took bold steps, many landed mighty close to the puddles of treacle that kept gathering, the just-this-side-of-sentimentality that reminded me of Thornton Wilder on a good day.

Saint-Malo, Brittany. (Courtesy Antoine Declerck, via Wikimedia Commons).

Saint-Malo, Brittany. (Courtesy Antoine Declerck, via Wikimedia Commons)

Finally, few novelists have ever reached me with a story in which characters from very different walks of life happen to cross paths. Mark Helprin, for one, handles this skillfully, as he did with In Sunlight and in Shadow, because he takes randomness seriously as a theme. But when I picked up All the Light We Cannot See (again, light in the title), I’d just finished Adam Foulds’s In the Wolf’s Mouth (reviewed March 12), whose randomness felt merely trotted out, not explored.

But what do you know? I wound up devouring All the Light We Cannot See, and though I have reservations, I’m now probably the zillionth reviewer to recommend it. The story concerns Werner, a young, unschooled German orphan who’s taught himself electronics and a good hunk of mechanical engineering, and who’s such a prodigy that an institute for pure-bred Nazis takes him as a cadet. Meanwhile, Marie-Laure, a blind French girl whose father is a locksmith at the Paris museum of natural history–and who somehow isn’t in school–learns science from the museum staff and by reading Jules Verne in Braille.

This is the fable part, in which the world largely smiles on Marie-Laure and glares at Werner, as they run up against life’s choices. But as Marie-Laure learns from the protagonist of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, “logic, reason, pure science: these . . . are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.”

Accordingly, All the Light We Cannot See starts taking a harder line, with powerful results. Werner has only one friend at his Nazi institute, a dreamy bird-watcher, whom the others abuse as a scapegoat, and whom Werner does nothing to protect. The friend’s sufferings foreshadow the pact Werner has made with a devil who’ll demand that he use what he’s learned to kill people he’s never met. Werner tries to pretend that he’s there to celebrate pure science, but underneath, he knows better, a conflict that sharpens once the war sweeps him up. Meanwhile, the Germans invade France, and Marie-Laure’s father spirits her to his uncle’s house in St.-Malo, on the Breton coast. As the occupation tightens, and daily life becomes more threatening and dangerous, she too puts herself on the line.

I like how Doerr portrayed his two main characters; Marie-Laure’s father and great-uncle; and Werner’s institute friend. But most of the large cast feel like shadow figures, even though they command my attention by what they do. As with TV again, they fall into two categories, good and bad, and there’s never any doubt to which group they belong. However, Doerr can tell a story, eye-blink chapters or not, and the intricacies that lead to the ordained meeting between Werner and Marie-Laure compel you to turn the pages. I also like the theme of searching for light, in the mind or in reality, and what that metaphor means–warmth, delight, knowledge, freedom, humanity, love.

And then there’s the prose:

In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth . . . and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water . . . and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.

All the Light We Cannot See is a beautifully written exploration of how war and greed twist people, and with which there’s no such thing as compromise.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Widow Finds Her Voice: Nora Webster

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: Nora Webster, by Colm Toíbín
Scribner, 2014. 373 pp. $27
When I first started reading Nora Webster, I wondered whether it deserved to be called a historical novel. Now that I’ve finished it, I think that in its masterful subtlety and understatement, the book ranks among the best historical fiction I’ve read in a while.

The flap copy actually undersells Nora Webster, odd as that sounds. Scribner would have us believe it’s a story about a newly widowed Irishwoman in her forties, trying to cope with loss, loneliness, and her struggles to raise four children on her meager savings. But it’s also how Nora, paralleling the feminist movement of the late 1960s–which seeps into the narrative around the edges–literally and figuratively finds her own voice.

Tower in Wexford, Ireland, 2008. (Courtesy Ian Murphy; public domain in the U.S.)

Tower in Wexford, Ireland, 2008. (Courtesy Ian Murphy; public domain in the U.S.)

At the start, Nora’s preoccupied with fending off well-wishers who continue to press her with platitudes about Maurice, her late husband, who died a few months before. In this small town in County Wexford, not only does everyone know everyone else’s business, they consider it their right to judge it, from clothes to hairstyles to whatever they assume is right and proper. Nora suffers intensely from scrutiny, real or imagined, and–in the beginning–curbs herself to try to avoid it, partly by putting up with the intrusion.

As with everything about her, you see many sides, not all of them sympathetic–her desperate need to grieve by herself; her passivity at allowing anyone to interrupt; her anger at herself for it; her self-absorption, which costs her children, especially her two young sons; and the patronizing way her relatives try to fix her life. They even have good ideas, and the money to implement them, which forces Nora to choose between accepting needed help or insisting on her independent authority.

However, there’s much more. She notices, for the first time, how her sisters pay close attention to whatever a man says, never fussing or trying to do two tasks at once while he speaks, as they would if it were only Nora. To these women, she’s not really there, she realizes. Further, when the conversation turns to politics, one sister asks the men what they think, but nobody ever asks her, though she has strong opinions. Maurice never asked her either, apparently, which makes Nora wonder whether she’ll be speaking up more, now that he’s gone.

Oh, yes, she will. Nora can be oppositional and intimidating, so much so that she’s scared her children, who talk more openly with their aunts and uncles. Gradually, however, she turns her strength toward what she wants and believes in, despite what others may say or think. Much is happening in Ireland–killings between Catholic and Protestant, protesters beaten or killed, demands for better working and living conditions, voices raised for feminism. And Nora’s television is always on, bringing news of change into her household. So when she returns to the job she once held before her marriage, she’s no longer the pushover she once was, and even joins a union. Toíbín is too good a novelist to make this transition simple–Nora scuffles with herself, endlessly–but she sheds her reticence and expands her life.

Most significantly, Nora has always had a fine singing voice but never trained or used it. Now she does, taking lessons from a woman whom everyone else finds too eccentric; in fact, all Nora’s new friends have that reputation. It’s the perfect metaphor to describe Nora’s life as a widow: For once, she has found her own voice, and damn the gossips.

Colm Toíbín has written a lovely, moving novel about a woman suffering through heartbreak, but also a novel about the 1960s that feels lived in (and much more satisfying than Cementville, which I reviewed earlier this week). What a story.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Dead Returned from Vietnam: Cementville

23 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: Cementville, by Paulette Livers

Counterpoint, 2014. 275 pp. $25

In May 1969, an American artillery platoon near Phu Bai suffered heavy losses during a night attack by North Vietnamese infantry. Since the platoon originated from a Kentucky National Guard unit, many of the dead hailed from the same county, which threw a community into deep mourning.

The firebase near Phu Bai, overrun in May 1969 (Courtesy Kentucky National Guard).

The firebase near Phu Bai, overrun in May 1969 (Courtesy Kentucky National Guard).

Paulette Livers, a native Kentuckian, has turned this collective grief into a novel, Cementville, named for the fictional county seat that lays to rest seven of its sons. Livers casts her net widely, trying to re-create an entire town, many of whose members are related by blood or marriage, and how they grieve the losses (or don’t). Each has an intersecting story, which gives the novel a mosaic feel. There’s thirteen-year-old Maureen, determined to live an important life, while her mother, Katherine, does her best to keep the apron strings tied, the relationship that interested me the most. But Cementville also has a Vietnamese war bride; a murderous clan, the Fergusons, who live in trailers; Nimrod Grebe, an elderly black man who fought in World War I; a woman who invents reasons not to leave her house, except to visit the library; and many others.

What an ambitious scheme. I applaud the attempt to depict a world split in pieces by love, hate, heroism, patriotism, bitterness, and grief. That’s like reaching for the stars, and not enough novelists do that today. Also, as someone who remembers 1969 very well, I’m always looking for a full-fledged, honest rendition of that time. The jacket flap promises a “microcosm of a society shedding the old order and learning how to live with grief,” so I grabbed Cementville off the library shelf. Further, Livers writes well, beautifully, at times.

But Cementville, though a valiant attempt, remains mostly earthbound for me. For one thing, it’s more a collection of stories than a novel, unlinked by any common thread, except a murder that seems gratuitous, even trivial, next to everything else. Significant characters behave strangely, for no apparent reason, and some of the better-drawn figures, like Katherine and Maureen, need deeper inner lives.

Then too, the town isn’t a microcosm of anything; it’s a pastiche. The narrative mentions that Katherine’s reading The Feminine Mystique, and also refers to possible resentment in the town that a young girl from the Ferguson trailer clan keeps house for Nimrod Grebe, the elderly African-American. But that’s the extent of feminism and race relations here.

I can’t blame Livers for not living up to the hype–authors don’t necessarily write their own flap copy–but I wish she’d provided a true sense of time and place. It takes more than passing references to Led Zeppelin or fish-net stockings to portray an era that feels lived in. Nobody in this novel debates or feels strongly about signs of change, whether campus protests, the moon landing, hallucinogenic drugs, hemlines, haircuts, or any other aspect of that noisy era. Even more astonishingly, nobody discusses the war that has caused such pain, nor do the young men who lost their lives appear as anything but faceless ghosts.

This is a crucial weakness, I think, reflected in how there seems to be only one resident supporter of the war among many critics of it. That rings false, both to the fictional world and what actually happened. In fact, Livers could have used differing opinions about the war, and whether the local boys died in vain, as a driving (and dividing) force. Consequently, it’s not just outside events that fail to echo in Cementville; it’s the disaster in Cementville that fails to shake the place deeply enough.

Dislcaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Marriage of Convenience: The Undertaking

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: The Undertaking, by Audrey Magee
Atlantic, 2014. 287 pp. $25

It’s autumn 1941, and a young German soldier is so eager to escape the Russian killing grounds of World War II that he weds a woman he’s never met. This gives Peter the privilege to leave the ranks for ten days, whereas Katharina will receive a pension, if he dies, and the right to call herself a married woman. Surprisingly, the pair take to one another, and when Peter returns to Russia, memories of their brief time together will have to warm them over many cold months.

From this bold, startling premise spins a novel in the same vein, spare and unflinching, often as brutal as the war it describes. The way I read The Undertaking, Magee argues that Germans made a marriage of convenience, embracing Nazism out of greed and a temporary advantage that they trusted would be long-lasting. I like novels based on a simple metaphor, and juxtaposing marriage with a hideous, criminal regime is a brilliant concept.

Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad, ca. 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad, ca. 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

Told largely through dialogue, usually in short sentences, Magee’s narrative packs remarkable punch in few words. I liked the group scenes best, especially the tension between Katharina and her parents, which results not from politics–they’re convinced Nazis, all–but from a young woman’s desire to live her own life. As for Peter and his comrades, it takes awhile for them to emerge as an entity, but some of the later scenes held me, most notably their attempts to help each other survive the battle of Stalingrad.

Even so, dialogue-as-narrative can only go so deep. Not even Katharina, whose portrayal is more complete than Peter’s, reveals an inner life. Magee allows them hardly any memories or associations to whatever they experience, nor reflections about what they’ve done.

This dissociation appears deliberate on the author’s part. Katharina wears jewelry and dresses stolen from deported Jews, and her family’s new apartment was once occupied by Jews. But she has no feelings about this, not even when she meets a starving Jewish woman in a park. Similarly, Peter helps Dr. Weinart, a friend of his father-in-law’s, to raid Jewish homes and deport the inhabitants, beating them if they don’t move fast enough. Yet he doesn’t think twice about it. He rationalizes nothing; he simply resents the evenings spent away from Katharina.

I doubt whether civilian SS officers, as Weinart seems to be, ever led such raids or recruited active soldiers to participate (and they certainly didn’t wear brown uniforms). Nor do I believe how the remarkably ubiquitous, all-powerful Weinart runs Katharina’s family and personifies the entire bureaucracy and social fabric of the Third Reich. For example, no secret police, neighborhood informants, or orchestrated patriotic displays appear, only the evil doctor. But historical fudging or shallow convenience aren’t the greatest flaws; it’s that Weinart’s wealth and promises of advancement have seduced Peter, and we don’t know how or why. Before the war, Peter was a schoolteacher in Darmstadt, like his father, and, up until meeting Weinart, wanted more than anything to resume that career. Why has he changed his mind? I think Magee wants us to believe that he always had his greedy, violent urges, and that marriage gave him an excuse to exercise them.

That conclusion fits her central metaphor, but we have only her word for it, not the characters’ thoughts or actions. Are Peter and Katharina meant to be psychopaths? If so, can a person really become psychopathic from mere temptation, as with the flick of a switch? More importantly, no matter how you label Peter and Katharina, how can a reader feel empathy for characters who have none themselves, who act with so little conscience? Doesn’t that violate the purpose of a novel?

I have to assume that Peter and Katharina are supposed to represent Germany, yet I sense that Magee’s too perceptive to ascribe genocide and a world war to a simple absence of human feeling. Even so, she offers no other credible explanation; by reducing her main characters to moral and psychological automata, she robs them and their actions of the complexity they deserve.

The Undertaking is another nominee for the Walter Scott Prize. It’s a well-written, thought-provoking book, but I wouldn’t put it on the short list.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Trying to Live a Moral Life: The Ten Thousand Things

16 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: The Ten Thousand Things, by John Spurling
Overlook Duckworth, 2014. 354 pp. $28

An ancient Chinese saying proposes that the universe contains ten thousand things. The narrator of this eponymous, thought-provoking novel observes that “of all the complexities of the ten thousand things, the self-consciousness of man is ten thousand times the most complex.”

Ge Zichuan Relocating, by Wang Meng (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Ge Zichuan Relocating, by Wang Meng (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The narrator is Wang Meng, later recognized as a master painter of the final decades of the Yuan Dynasty, what Westerners would call the midfourtheenth century. Wang’s artistic gifts, however, are matched by his uncanny talent for playing a minor role in significant events, a journey that occupies this supposed memoir, written in prison during his last years. His career as artist and sometime civil servant correspond with (and take flight from) the political upheaval that brings the first Ming emperor to the throne. (The manner in which this dynastic founder seizes and employs power resembles the rise of Mao, by the way.)

The novel begins, though, with a small moment, a fruitless search for a jade ring, a coveted family heirloom. Typical of The Ten Thousand Things and its protagonist, the effort evokes deep feelings in Wang, which he examines for their justness and morality, but also in light of his love for life and beauty. Many such small moments, rendered in prose that flows like the streams and waterfalls that Wang enjoys painting, yield fascinating, knotty musings on politics, war, justice, government, friendship, sex, art–many of the ten thousand things, in other words. Often, I had to look up from the book to ponder what I’d just read, and I came away admiring how Spurling has thought deeply about life. As with this:

 

Yes, educated people are probably always on the edge of madness. Aren’t they the self-conscious element in nature turned on itself? And doesn’t that mirror reflecting the mirror begin to exclude nature and transform a man into a monster? By his intelligence and adaptability man rises above all other creatures. But take those qualities beyond a certain point and the man is no longer fit to live in any world except an artificial one of his own invention.

Most of the narrative unfolds in first person, but sometimes in third, as if the editors of his memoirs were speaking, but it could as well be Wang himself, in his self-conscious complexity. Several times, other characters accuse him of being emotionally cautious, and outwardly, he is. But inside, he’s a boiling cauldron, and his struggle to manage that and do the right thing makes him human. At the same time, he’s always trying to improve as an artist and is terrified of allowing pride, laziness, or foolishness to hamper his vision, an internal conflict that speaks to me:

 

The difficult part is to see the ten thousand things clearly without always getting caught in my own tricks for drawing them.

 

If that’s not relevant to writing, I don’t know what is.

Despite its philosophical nature, I find the narrative compelling and tense, and the pages turned quickly for me. I do think Spurling does himself or the reader no favors by occasional foreshadowings, like “he would never have believed that such-and-such could happen,” which to me only get in the way. But in any case, you have to be in the mood for a meander, not a gallop, and though the story grows, it’s not what you’d call a coherent, classic plot.

Like In the Wolf’s Mouth and The Lie, The Ten Thousand Things has been nominated for the Walter Scott Prize in historical fiction–deservedly, I think.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Predator and Prey: In the Wolf’s Mouth

12 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: In the Wolf’s Mouth, by Adam Foulds
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 323 pp. $26

I picked up In the Wolf’s Mouth because I saw it on a list of nominees for the Walter Scott Prize in historical fiction (alongside The Lie, by Helen Dunmore, which I loved), and because the setting and premise intrigued me. In the Wolf’s Mouth takes place in rural Sicily shortly after the Allies liberated the island during World War II, which I’ve never read about, so I was curious. The title, the jacket flap says, evokes a Sicilian proverb about good luck, intriguing in itself. What’s more, author Adam Foulds supposes that as the dust settles after Mussolini’s fall, the new Allied occupation overlords, dressed in crisp uniforms and holding army-issued manuals, will inevitably trust the wrong people, to great cost. That’s a strong, plausible premise, a good starting point. Finally, Foulds is a poet as well as a novelist, and it shows:

Randall had the look of poverty, grey and small. His body was tightly knit, with jerking reflexes. In his bleak wrists and the clever joints of his fingers, Ray saw Randall’s grip on things. Firing at the range, Randall produced the quick rhythmical chuck-chuck sound of a well-handled weapon.

I only wish that the novel lived up to its assets or even followed through on its premise. Instead, the narrative focuses on the back stories of the characters who will meet at a Sicilian village, so that their brief interactions become almost an anticlimax. It’s as if Foulds wants you to forget notions of plot and concentrate on the people, how they got to be where and who they are–predator, prey, or both, depending on the circumstances. That’s an intriguing concept, if a bit heavy-handed and authorial, though I might have gone along for the ride had the characters been better company.

Among the Sicilians, the most important are Cirò Albanese, a mafioso who’s returned with the army after having fled the island twenty years before, and Angilù Cassini, a shepherd. I wanted to know them more deeply, especially Cirò, since he’s a mover and shaker and rather repellent–to sense what made him that way, maybe–but he’s more a collection of traditional ideas about blood, power, and money than a real person.

Two British soldiers and an American paratrooper, Avola, Sicily, July 1943 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Two British soldiers and an American paratrooper, Avola, Sicily, July 1943 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The best-drawn character is Will Walker, a British soldier with the occupation army. The jacket describes him as “callow,” but that’s soft soap; Will’s a bigot, a social snob, self-absorbed, supercilious, and always looking to do great things, which can be dangerous for bystanders. At one point, he decries (to himself) the soldiers who line up with a can of rations, the only payment needed to hire a prostitute on this hungry island. Another day, though, he joins the line, because the young woman is so beautiful, he thinks. But Will’s a complete character, so he has a redeeming trait: an urge to fight back against corruption and treachery.

The other character who drew me is Ray, an American soldier unhinged by combat. Foulds captures his sensitive, private nature very well, poignantly demonstrating how soldiers with those qualities suffer intensely in any army. Also, both Ray and Will are short of stature, and since I am too, I was quick to notice how the author figures that into their psychological makeup. Ray feels innately like prey, whereas Will pushes others aside, two faces of the same coin.

Will complains that the Americans he meets aren’t real; they’re like film versions of themselves, almost parodies. I wouldn’t go that far, but they don’t seem quite fleshed out, either. Ray, supposedly from New York, could be from any American city where Italian immigrants settled. There’s no particular rhythm or outlook or New York-ness to him, and his speech patterns (as with the other Americans) struck me as generic.

So I hope the prize committee passes on In the Wolf’s Mouth. If you’d like to see my review of The Lie, you’ll find it here. The whole list of nominees is here.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Fiction That’s True: An Officer and a Spy

09 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2014. 425 pp. $28

As one character observes in this electrifying novel, “There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.” The fight he’s referring to concerns what may be the most infamous intelligence coverup in history, one that divided a nation and still stirs passions more than a century later.

This is the subject of An Officer and a Spy, not just a political thriller, but a primer on how to write one. History unfolds as it happened (mostly), and all the characters existed, which ups the stakes for the author. I’ve studied both the era and the case in detail, so while I read, I knew what was coming. Yet the novel drew me in so completely that I could hardly bear the tension.

In 1895, a captain attached to the French General Staff is convicted of having sold military secrets to Germany, for which he’s stripped of his rank in public and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The army, which has conducted its prosecution behind closed doors, is satisfied, though many officers wish that the law still allowed the guillotine for treason.

One or two connected with the case wonder whether the defendant received his legal due, strictly speaking. But nobody doubts that he’s guilty, and, well, he’s Jewish and has money, so to them, he’s doubly suspect. France has long been a hotbed of antisemitism–the word dates from the 1880s, of French coinage–and the army takes it on faith that Alfred Dreyfus was born to be a traitor.

Colonel Georges Picquart, 1906 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Colonel Georges Picquart, 1906 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Major Georges Picquart, who narrates the novel, is no exception, a career officer of impeccable credentials who believes fervently in the army he has served for almost twenty-five years. What’s more, he remembers Drefyus, whom he taught at the war college and never warmed to–the condemned man is priggish and arrogant, plainly ambitious, not above currying favor. For his minor role in the arrest, the prosecution, and the degradation ceremony, Picquart is promoted to colonel and given charge of the so-called Statistical Section, whose real work is counterintelligence. Even if you’ve never heard of Dreyfus, you just know Picquart will eventually run across something that changes his perspective. But you’ll have to wait, because Harris draws this process out like the thinnest, tautest wire.

Picquart, though ambitious himself–at forty, he’s the youngest colonel in the army–doesn’t want his new job. He thinks spying is dirty and loathsome, and he shudders at having to read Dreyfus’s private correspondence. But as a man of literary and artistic taste, he appreciates the style of these letters, and slowly begins, against his better judgment, to wonder whether the man’s protestations of innocence may, in fact, be genuine. Meanwhile, there’s dissension in Picquart’s office, which he at first ascribes to jealousy, but, over time, gathers there’s more to it. Just what it is, he can’t tell, until a new document comes through his hands.

I could probably tell you the whole story, and it wouldn’t matter; that’s how good this book is. It’s not just that Harris has a pitch-perfect sense of the time and place, or that he sets up reversals, the no-and-furthermore, at every turn. It’s how he sets them up, getting beneath the skins of major characters and minor, no matter which side, so that you see their motives, why they hold the principles they do, and how far they’re willing to go to uphold them–which is pretty far. So deeply does the Dreyfus case grip the country that there’s no such thing as a secret, a casual encounter, or an easy conversation among friends.

The corruption that seeps through everywhere, like the sewage that smells so rank in warm weather, all starts with a false assumption by military intelligence, responsible to no one but itself. Sounds familiar, no?

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lonely Are the Brilliant: Flavia de Luce

05 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, by Alan Bradley
Delacorte, 2015. 392 pp. $25

If you haven’t met Flavia de Luce yet, you should. This scientifically precocious English twelve-year-old has narrated seven novels so far, and nothing makes her day like the discovery of a dead body or three. Like a 1950s Sherlock Holmes, to whom Flavia refers from time to time, she uses her self-taught mastery of organic chemistry to solve the crimes–facing, of course, much more official skepticism, because she’s a child, and female. But good children’s literature is nothing if not subversive, and Flavia is that, in spades.

Bench in a chemistry lab (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Bench in a chemistry lab (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Like Holmes again, her social abilities seldom extend beyond posing behind whatever mask suits her purpose to extract information. It’s more age-appropriate to be socially inept at twelve, so she’s got an advantage over fiction’s great misanthrope. Yet her tastes and impulses are an eccentric mix of beyond her years and not quite up to them, which makes for poignant, painful reading. The only friends she has are her two older sisters, who bully her but occasionally drop a crumb of warmth–almost. She craves being the center of attention, yet loathes it too. Adult readers will cringe at how she’s an unwitting accomplice in her own loneliness–at least, this adult reader does–but she’s terrific company nonetheless, an astute observer and a great wit.

In As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, Flavia has been packed off (or banished, as she has it) from her ancestral home to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Canada. But she’s not there long before a corpse falls out of the chimney–in her room, no less, wearing a curious sort of medallion. Solving this mystery will take more skills than usual, because she’s without the chemistry lab she had back home and must obey school rules, which severely restrict such things as comings and goings, and what times of day or night are fit for them.

Complicating the problem are myriad disappearances and possible reappearances, and the even greater difficulty of telling friend from foe. You see, Miss Bodycote’s seems to be a training ground for girls of special abilities, but what they’re being trained for, or by whom, is an even greater mystery.

But really, all you need to know is that Flavia can disprove the legend that the dying Horatio Nelson’s last words were, “Kiss me, Hardy,” because a de Luce ancestor tended the fallen admiral at Trafalgar. Or that if Flavia could raise the arterial blood pH of a particularly odious adult to 7.65, by a particularly sneaky means, “he wouldn’t stand the chance of a snowman in Hades.” Or that the command, “Just look at you!” is “often given to girls my age with little thought given to how difficult it is to carry out.” All that’s in just the first chapter.

As you may have gathered, you need not expect an entirely plausible tale here. You will get a tense, well-plotted mystery, however, and startling social commentary from the mouth of a twelve-year-old. Sharp as both my children were at that age, I’m both glad and sorry that Flavia wasn’t one of them.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.

His Private Thoughts: I Am Abraham

02 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: I Am Abraham, by Jerome Charyn
Liveright/Norton, 2014. 456 pp. $27.

What an extraordinary, ambitious idea, to narrate a novel in Abraham Lincoln’s first-person voice. But, as with its protagonist, I Am Abraham is not ordinary. And if you think you know this man–the Rail Splitter, Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, and so on–here’s a different portrait, the man who never appeared before Matthew Brady’s camera. Or, rather, it’s the man while he’s away from the chair in which Brady posed him.

A younger, unbearded Lincoln (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via the Ohio Valley Civil War Association).

A younger, unbearded Lincoln (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via the Ohio Valley Civil War Association).

I Am Abraham is the private Lincoln: full of self-doubt, compassion, deep melancholy, a sense of social inferiority, a parallel dislike of social pretension, an iron will that grew with political maturity but which he couldn’t exert at home, and, maybe surprisingly, lust. Schoolchildren may learn about poor Ann Rutledge, the young woman whose premature death left him heartbroken; I remember that. But we sure didn’t hear what Jerome Charyn has Mr. Lincoln remark, that she was “the most voluptuous gal in Sangamon County,” courted by every man who didn’t already have one foot in the grave, and even some who did. Nor did we hear about the effect that young Mary Todd, the aristocratic Kentucky belle, had on the somewhat older country lawyer:

 

 

She was like a quake of raw energy and some kind of sun goddess, and I was quickened whenever I was in her orbit. Sometimes I’d hold her hand, and I could feel an electric spurt. Mary herself said that the two of us had ‘lovers’ eyes.’ I still felt ungainly around her, like some gigantic frog with warts on his face.

It was Mary, Charyn asserts, who saw Lincoln’s potential, and urged him to enter national politics. Without her support and encouragement, he’d have never become anything more than the itinerant horseback lawyer, while she stayed at home with the children. But she had political skills too, which she longed to use, and told him early in their courtship that she intended to be the First Lady, or, as they called it in those days, Mrs. President. However, once her husband became politically powerful, he excluded her from politics, which brought about a split between them. Both lived close to the edge of mental disturbance–depression, in his case, and acute paranoia, in hers. The White House itself was a house divided.

Readers expecting watersheds of history will be disappointed. The Emancipation Proclamation takes up maybe a page, and the visit to Gettysburg, to which Charyn devotes a chapter, moved me, but not in the you-are-there way. Rather, the history here is more personal, as with stump speeches, everyday political confrontations, and the debates against Stephen Douglas–in other words, anything that shows how Lincoln came to form his principles:

 That vile skunk and piss-pot, Chief Justice Taney, had dynamited us all with the Dred Scott Decision–negroes weren’t included in the Constitution, he declared. . . It didn’t matter if [Scott] talked like a duke and read the Bible better than white folks. He wasn’t a human being. I couldn’t pirouette around Dred Scott and palaver about the virtues of the Republican Party. I couldn’t pussyfoot. Or we’d all be pissing in the wind.

Of the other characters, my favorites were Robert Lincoln, the eldest son (and Mary’s darling), and two Union generals, McClellan and Grant. But there’s also the language, which combines Lincoln’s actual words, the patterns of Shakespearean and Biblical phrasing he loved, and a voice of curiosity, self-doubt, and moral questioning that reminded me of Huck Finn, my favorite literary character. Sure enough, in an afterword, Charyn says that he had Huck Finn in mind.

I highly recommend I Am Abraham. Even though you know what happens, it’s a great story, national and personal.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.