Monthly Archives: January 2016

Everybody’s Guilty: The Sympathizer

25 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove/Atlantic, 2015. 371 pp. $26

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the narrator known only as the Captain declares in this novel’s first line, also the start of his “confession.” And what a harrowing, painful outpouring he commits to paper in what appears to be solitary confinement, inflicted by captors at first unidentified. He tells of being born illegitimate in North Vietnam, of half-European parentage, and the vicious prejudice that pursues him as a result. His only consolations are the unwavering love of a mother who died young, and two longtime friends whose loyalty sustains him and for whom he would lay down his life. He talks about his education in the United States, and his attraction for aspects of American culture, not least its freer sexual mores. But mostly, he recounts what he did–or failed to do–as a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, a riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale of crimes he committed to protect his secret identity, trying desperately to play both sides. Accordingly, he knows more than he cares to about murder, rape, treachery, napalm, torture, racism, and hypocrisy, and he delivers much of his story with brilliant observations that are often howlingly funny in a raw, dark way.

Operation Frequent Wind, 29 April 1975. As Saigon fell, some Vietnamese civilians were evacuated to U.S. Navy vessels, as here, and granted asylum (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via U.S. Marines; public domain)

Operation Frequent Wind, 29 April 1975. As Saigon fell, some Vietnamese civilians were evacuated to U.S. Navy vessels, as here, and granted asylum (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via U.S. Marines; public domain).

“What was it like,” he asks rhetorically, “to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?” Much as he admires American culture, he deflates our “Disneyland ideology of happiness,” our pretense of eternal innocence no matter how many times we’ve lost it in dirty wars or tricks, “citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.” And when you pretend innocence, you can believe that anything you do is just, whereas, “at least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.”

Not that the South Vietnamese government is any better. The General, under whom the Captain serves, is a gifted, patriotic leader who pays lip service to moral assumptions only so long as they prop up his power and self-image. He’s seen everything, learned nothing. Ditto the Communists, who think life is a science determined by historical axioms, and who have no use for love, except for the teachings of Marx and Mao, which the Captain has hardly studied–they’ve no feeling to them. “How could I forget,” he remarks toward the end, “that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were the empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?” Most particularly, he deplores the cold sexlessness to which communism aspires, “the belief that every comrade is supposed to behave like a noble peasant whose hard hoe is devoted only to farming.”

Consequently, the Captain belongs nowhere, and it’s his ability to see everything from the outside–his sole talent, he thinks–that only worsens his sense of isolation. But it does make for terrific satire. He meets a right-wing congressman, a filmmaker, a professor of Asian studies, and skewers them all, without ever claiming to be superior. The Captain’s flaws are front and center, in fact, to the point that the sympathizer can be hard to sympathize with.

This novel is very disturbing, and some readers may shy away because of it. In particular, the graphic violence can be hard to take. But if you can, give it a try. Such grisliness often puts me off, but the subject here matters to me. I came of age during the Vietnam War, which left a deep impression, and about which I’ve read many fine books. To me, this one surpasses them all–for its unsparing honesty, insight, breadth, and vivid prose. What’s more, it’s even a first novel, further proof to a fellow author that life just isn’t fair.

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

Johnny on the Spot: Jack 1939

21 Thursday Jan 2016

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Review: Jack 1939, by Francine Mathews
Riverhead, 2012. 361 pp. $27

Read solely as a thriller, this improbable page-turner obeys all the conventions. It has a sexy, daring hero, who gets into hair-raising scrapes not even a genie could possibly escape, yet of course, he manages. He beds the most beautiful, passionate woman in Europe, though she’s older, married, and infinitely more worldly than he. And–most importantly–he saves the world to the extent anybody can in the spring and summer of 1939, besting none other than the sociopath Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo (and future architect of the Final Solution).

Aaron Shikler's posthumous official portrait of JFK, 1970 (Wikimedia Commons via White House Historical Association, public domain)

Aaron Shikler’s posthumous official portrait of JFK, 1970 (Wikimedia Commons via White House Historical Association, public domain).

In other words, you could read Jack 1939 and say, “Tell me another.” Or you could lay it down and wonder why you wasted your time on yet another spy novel embodying the clichés that both bedevil and drive the genre.

But you could also read this novel as a fictional biography of John F. Kennedy as a callow, idealistic youth, and as a meticulously researched historical tale of a world destroying itself, with delicious portraits of FDR, J. Edgar Hoover, Churchill, and other leaders thrown in. To the degree that Jack 1939 surpasses the clichés, it does so because the author has thought deeply about her protagonist and drawn a coherent, fascinating portrait of a charming, tortured, sickly, underachieving young man, humiliated by his parents, especially his loathsome father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who never tires of telling him he’ll amount to nothing.

It’s Joe P. who creates the key problem of this novel for FDR, the president who appointed him ambassador to Britain. Kennedy’s an appeaser, an isolationist determined to keep the United States out of any European war. So when Roosevelt wants a fresh pair of eyes to report from Europe, unbeholden to the State Department (or anyone else) he taps young Jack, whose cover is that he plans to interview European politicians for his senior thesis at Harvard. What Jack doesn’t know, at first, is how far his father has gone to deal with the Germans, or how far he’s willing to go, a secret that will shake him to the roots. So Jack faces dangers not only from political enemies but from the worst place of all, his own tortured psyche. It’s a great setup, and in case you needed further trouble, there’s Jack’s undiagnosed Addison’s disease, which has most people figuring he won’t live to see thirty.

But FDR senses that young Kennedy has much more to him than anyone suspects.

Jack might be sick and his record might be checkered, but he was one of those rare souls completely at home in the world. It didn’t matter that he was Irish or Catholic or that his father was regarded as an unprincipled cad; Jack slouched into the most breathless of WASP bastions in his careless clothes and threw his legs over armchairs like he’d owned them from birth. His ease was admired and slavishly imitated; his quips and sarcasm circulated like a kissing disease.

However, once in Europe, Jack quickly learns that his charm and social gifts will get him only so far. They’re particularly useless when it comes to repelling Heydrich’s assassins or rescuing a valuable list of names for which many people have already died or a piece of military hardware that everyone wants. So he must live by his wits and luck, both of which are considerable. But he makes many mistakes, not least for his terrible temper, hooked up like a lightning rod to his sense of injury. I love that stroke, which seems psychologically astute, portraying Jack as oversensitive to slight, just what you’d expect from the child of emotionally abusive parents.

His skirt-chasing doesn’t really satisfy him, because he hates being touched, physically or emotionally. Mathews supposes that he was no great shakes as a Harvard Lothario, “deflowering Radcliffe virgins,” until he meets the gorgeous, brave woman I mentioned above. Nevertheless, Jack’s affectionate and loving with his favorite sibling, his sister, Kathleen (known as Kick for her natural vivacity), and those scenes leave the impression of a very lonely young man dying for the real connection he could never seem to find.

What I find least believable, though, is that FDR would keep a secret radio transmitter by which he and Jack communicate. I’m also none too sure whether Jack’s apple fell that far from his father’s tree. I remember JFK as president, and I’ll never forget the day he was murdered. But I’ve come to reexamine the myths in which I used to believe, including his supposed brilliance at foreign affairs, of which Cuba and Vietnam furnish prime counterexamples.

Nevertheless, Jack 1939 takes place before all that, and it’s intriguing, sometimes poignant, to see the future president struggle with the world as he saw it.

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

What a Family: Médicis Daughter

18 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: Médicis Daughter, by Sophie Perinot
St. Martin’s, 2015. 374 pp. $27

James Thurber once wrote about a vicious, ill-tempered Airedale, of which he observed that there was a slight advantage living in the same house, because Muggs didn’t bite the family as often as he bit strangers.

Unfortunately for Marguerite de Valois, the heroine of this novel, there’s little advantage in being Cathérine de Médicis’ youngest daughter, and no humor, however dark, to comfort her. The Queen Mother, the real power in late sixteenth-century France behind her weak-willed, ineffectual son, Charles (portrayed here with symptoms of manic depression), spares no one. Though an able, decisive leader, not for nothing is Cathérine known as La Serpente, and nobody feels the venom more than Marguerite, a beautiful, curious, intelligent child.

Marguerite, who can’t believe that maman cares about her only to the extent that she can marry the girl off for political advantage, redoubles her efforts to please. Naturally, too, this gets her nowhere, because she can never be pleasing enough, and any sign of hesitation to obey, let alone have her own mind, dooms her to punishment, which of course Marguerite turns against herself. She must be wrong. Maybe she even harbors sinful desires that prevent her from being properly dutiful. Otherwise, why would her family, who love her, treat her like that?

Trouble is, though Marguerite readily accepts her position as a diplomatic pawn and yearns to have a royal husband and a crown, her carefully tutored notions of morality and sin clash with what she sees at court. When she happens on her elder brother, Henri, having sex with a lady-in-waiting, Marguerite asks her mother whether she intends to stop it. Of course not, Madame says.

It is to your advantage to permit and ignore those women who are least dangerous–those less clever than you, lacking connections, or with personal attributes which presage a short tenure. A woman who a man will soon tire of is no serious threat.

Cathérine speaks from experience; when she first came to France from Italy, she had to put up with Diane de Poitiers, her late husband’s mistress. Nevertheless, “Had I arrived and found His Majesty without a mistress, I would have made it my business to steer him toward a woman loyal to myself. One must be clever where there is a husband to be managed.” Her daughter is appalled, though she doesn’t say so.

But there’s more pressing business. Catholic and Protestant are at each others’ throats, and the conflict, occasionally breaking out into open warfare, divides the kingdom. The Valois monarchy, caught between the need for internal order and the wish to wipe out the Protestants–a project that many French subjects are itching to carry out–leads to twisting, double-edged alliances and a deep insecurity. Marguerite vaults herself into the hurricane by conducting a torrid, clandestine affair with the duc de Guise, a Catholic champion from Lorraine viewed as an upstart by the Valois.

St. Bartholomew Massacre of Protestants, 1572, as reconstructed by Francois Dubois, a Protestant painter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

St. Bartholomew Massacre, 1572, a key event in the Wars of Religion, as reconstructed by Francois Dubois, a Protestant painter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

I like how Perinot handles the Valois family dynamics. The way Cathérine coddles her eldest son while essentially emasculating him seems real, as does her blind preference for Marguerite’s older brother, Henri, a narcissistic jackass of the highest order. The affair with de Guise gradually reveals sides of Marguerite’s lover that she’d rather not have seen, yet he can rightfully protest that she also values him for those qualities, or once did. Best of all, I like how Perinot portrays Marguerite’s early married days with a husband she detests; those familiar with the history will recognize how mistaken Marguerite is, and how he’s worth ten of anyone else.

That said, there are serious flaws in Médicis Daughter, chief of which is that the first eighty pages are largely irrelevant and slow the pace. The later narrative repeats what you need to know about the characters anyway, whereas the ending feels somewhat abrupt and could have used more space. The writing, though often fluid, occasionally stumbles because of a heavy hand, as when Marguerite’s first-person narration underlines a point already made. At times, Perinot explains when she should show, and the racing pulse and sharp inhalations are formulaic expressions of emotion, curiously so when the author has drawn her characters so astutely. One oddity is the random French word or phrase dropped into dialogue, which seems to have no purpose; another is the use of current colloquialisms, like call out, impact, or according to her script. No doubt sixteenth-century royalty used idioms like the rest of us, just not the same ones.

Still, there’s much to like about Médicis Daughter, and I think readers who stay with it will be rewarded.

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

Rot and Corruption: Company of Liars

11 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland
Delacorte, 2008. 465 pp. $24

“All England was rotting,” observes the narrator of this daring, dark, intricate novel, and there’s no arguing with him. The year is 1348, and not only has a terrifying plague cut down humans and beasts alike, torrential rains have ruined harvests. It’s a tossup which will kill first, pestilence or famine, but either way, the air stinks of decaying corpses.

Pieter Breughel the Elder's painting of the Black Death (Courtesy Museo del Prado, Madrid, via technology.org. Public domain).

Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562 (Courtesy Museo del Prado, Madrid, via technology.org. Public domain).

A street peddler, or camelot, who makes his living selling fake religious relics, sets off toward a town where, he believes, he has a chance to outrun the plague. Hoping to move fast, he wishes to travel alone, but happenstance dictates otherwise. The traveling party keeps growing until it numbers nine. They include a young girl with pure white hair; an Italian musician and his pupil; a sadistic con man; a young couple expecting their first child; a healer; and a young man born with one arm as a stump who believes he’s descended from swans. As the journey lengthens and becomes dangerous in ways the travelers could not have foreseen, they tell symbolic, allegorical stories about themselves.

Anyone familiar with The Canterbury Tales will recognize the intentional parallel to Chaucer’s masterpiece, so already, Company of Liars is an ambitious novel. However, those looking for the ribald comedy of the Wife of Bath or the Miller will find something else entirely, for, unlike the original, the plague and famine remain central here. Moreover, those threats, though constant, endanger the travelers less than the people do each other. As the title suggests, each has a secret to protect, and what they’ll do under those circumstances leads to terrible crimes.

Maitland, a psycholinguist with a splendid grasp of history, has portrayed this plague year in frighteningly vivid words, re-creating landscape and mindset. The mud, filth, carrion, gloom, prejudice, and fatalism leap off the pages. The absence of clerics to perform church services, the hatred leveled against Jews and foreigners, the business of selling amulets, the nightmarish rituals people perform to ward off the disease–they’re all here, and more.

The author also renders her characters in fine, believable detail, with a psychological acuity that allows her to incorporate grand themes without dragging them in by the heels. She’s got good versus evil, religion, xenophobia, superstition, injustice, and, perhaps most of all, hope.

Early on the camelot remarks:

Hope may be an illusion, but it’s what keeps you from jumping in the river or swallowing hemlock. Hope is a beautiful lie and it requires talent to create it for others. And back then on that day when they say it [the plague] first began, I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies.

His antagonist, the sadistic con man, disagrees:

To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; [in] that way lies betrayal and disappointment. . . . What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no self-doubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right–that’s what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.

I wonder whether Maitland was thinking of politicians when she wrote this, for it explains the bizarre lies told during our current election cycle better than anything else I’ve heard or read.

However, gripping as Company of Liars is, the novel tries for too much, adding a murder mystery to everything else. The narrative struggles to make all the pieces fit, playing a nonstop shell game between witchcraft and reality. Medieval folk believed implicitly in magic, so the confusion makes sense, sort of, but the camelot’s narrative voice derives from an accurately observed, realistic world. (I’m no fan of magical realism, and I like it even less when the two styles mix.) Further, the mystery fails to hold up, because the criminal’s identity is no surprise, despite skillful red herrings. Moreover, the guilty party is a sociopath, a solution that I’ve always found too neat.

That said, I finished Company of Liars and was glad I did. Maybe you would be too.

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

A Night at the Opera: The Brewer of Preston

07 Thursday Jan 2016

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Review: The Brewer of Preston, by Andrea Camilleri
Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli
Penguin, 2014 [1995]. 245 pp. $15

It’s a measure of how things are in this Sicilian town of Vigàta that when a destructive crime appears to have been carefully planned, the guilty party must be a “foreigner,” someone from Milan or Florence or Rome. The year is 1870, and Italy has just been legally unified for the first time since the Roman Empire, but so what? What matters in this Sicilian town is who’s bribing, cuckolding, murdering, trading back-scratches with, or blackmailing whom. Outsiders, whose sole purpose is to interfere with and impose on what they can’t understand, smell like dirty laundry aired in public and can be scented from miles away.

 

Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri's model for Vigàta (G. Melfi, 2006; via Wikimedia. Public domain)

Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri’s model for Vigàta, in 2006  (G. Melfi, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain)

 

 

Which is why the Vigàtese know implicitly that one of their own couldn’t possibly have committed the destruction that everyone’s talking about. A local would have struck out of passion, possessed by rage, incapable of cold-blooded planning. Though it may be metaphorically correct to talk of back-stabbing as the way of life here, that’s not quite accurate. It’s much more likely to happen face-to-face.

Consequently, when the new prefect, a “foreigner,” decides to produce a dreadful opera called The Brewer of Preston, he runs into trouble immediately. Nobody in town likes this opera, but the prefect doesn’t care: They’ll attend the performance anyway, because, well, they should know who’s boss. Naturally, the boss is the last one to realize where his heavy-handedness will lead–to the place he’s trying to avoid–or how hilarious, profane, and bloody the result will be.

What enrages the good citizens of Vigàta isn’t only that the jackass prefect is trying to force them to do what they don’t want. It’s the opera itself, which depends on the most ludicrous instances of mistaken identity ever to appear on a stage. After all, so few things in Sicily happen by mistake.

In Vigàta alone, and keeping only to the past three months, Artemidoro Lisca was murdered on a moonless night when he was mistaken for Nirino Contrera; Turiddruzzu Morello married Filippa Mancuso by mistake after deflowering her one night without realizing that she was not her sister Lucia, who had been the one foreordained; Pino Sciacchitano died because his wife mistook rat poison for the tonic her husband took after every meal. And suspicions in the end arose that all these mistakes were actually phony mistakes, not mistakes at all, but only alibis, even deliberate acts.

If this novel has a unifying theme–pun intended–that’s it right there: the complete and utter difficulty of figuring out what happens by accident or on purpose. The chief difference is who, if anyone, suffers legal consequences, but you can be fairly sure that nothing monumental will change.

Coincidence, if that’s what it is, plays a key role. The action hinges partly on how Mommo Friscia chooses to emit one of his famous raspberries, “which had the power, density, and brutality of a devastating earthquake or other natural disaster,” and a soprano who hits the wrong note. But these are mere details, which change in the telling.

That’s both the confusion and charm of this novel. The action unfolds out of order, from perspectives that constantly shift. Just when you think that the more-or-less honest cop, Lieutenant Puglisi, has figured out what happened, events turn that upside-down.

So if you read The Brewer of Preston, don’t approach it as a mystery or a plot with a clear, linear resolution. But do be prepared to laugh hysterically.

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

Westward, Ho!: The Way West

04 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: The Way West, by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
Mariner/Houghton, 2002 [1949]. 340 pp. $14

A wagon train sets forth from Missouri in 1845, bound for Oregon. That may not sound like much of a premise. Nor does Guthrie stud his plot with grand, sweeping action. Nevertheless, this classic Western (from the author who wrote the screenplay for Shane, also a classic) provides as gripping a tale as I’ve read in a while, simply by recounting the trials involved in traversing more than a thousand miles of unmarked wilderness, day after day, month after month.

Alfred Jacob Miller's painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Alfred Jacob Miller’s painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

His secret? The desires, dreams, and perceptions of his characters–their inner lives–spill from every page. I feel that I know these people intimately, so I care what happens to them, even if I don’t like them (and some are decidedly unlikable). At times, they act like a loose-knit family, with all its kindnesses, quirks, and dysfunctions. But their disputes, alliances, interests, and consideration for one another (or lack of it, sometimes), however minor or mundane they are, take on outsize proportions.

For instance, when one of the needier, less accomplished travelers pleads openly for help, his request sounds “womanish” to one man, prompting that listener to grapple with what he’d never reflected on before, notions of how men and women differ. It’s a recurrent theme in the novel, especially evident in how the supposedly weaker sex displays tremendous strength and fortitude. But the character’s reflections imply another, larger purpose. The people making this journey aren’t just finding a new home; they’re finding out who they are.

Guthrie handles this brilliantly. He portrays his characters from several angles–how they feel about themselves, how they want others to see them, how they behave in groups, and when by themselves. The politics, in the broadest sense, start from the first pages, when the self-appointed leader of the expedition tries to recruit men he thinks will be useful to him. It’s a vivid, involving scene, because you can already sense which way the power lines run; what each man hopes to accomplish; what seduces them; and who’s trying to seduce. Even the man serving them drinks has a viewpoint, subtly suggested–he’s worried that good customers will be leaving town. And the only thing that “happens” is that these men begin to think of pulling up stakes and heading west. I admire this kind of writing, which can make high drama out of a glass or three of whiskey.

Among my favorite characters is Dick Summers, a laconic mountain man hired to guide the wagon train. He always knows more than he says, which is why the more perceptive people seek him out, and he never rushes to condemn anybody. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a dead shot, a gifted tracker, understands and partly admires Native American ways, and knows the trail. However, as in many other novels about the American West, Dick also represents the man who’ll have no place in the society that the people he’s guiding will create. What sets him apart most is an outlook:

These [men] couldn’t enjoy life as it rolled by; they wanted to make something out of it, as if they could take it and shape it to their way if only they worked and figured hard enough. They didn’t talk beaver and whisky and squaws or let themselves soak in the weather; they talked crops and water power and business and maybe didn’t even notice the sun or the pale green of new leaves except as something along the way to whatever it is they wanted to be and to have. Later they might look back, some of them might, and wonder how it happened that things had slid by them.

At times, Dick Summers seems a little too good to be true–always on the right side, ever patient, never selfish, understands himself clearly. Yet the above passage strikes me as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. Reading The Way West, I have to wonder whether dreams are useless, if you miss what happens on your way to realizing them.

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