Monthly Archives: October 2017

Across Generations: The World of Tomorrow

30 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The World of Tomorrow, by Brendan Matthews
Little, Brown, 2017. 549 pp. $28

When we first meet Francis Dempsey, he’s passing himself off as Sir Angus MacFarquhar and doing his best to charm society girl Anisette Bingham and her mother on the Britannic, bound for New York. It’s disconcerting for Francis to pretend to be a Scottish peer when he’s Irish, he’s never been to Scotland, and he doesn’t even know which spoon to use.

But he’s having the time of his life, remarkable since he was in an Irish prison only days before. Using his father’s funeral as a cover, the IRA sprang him and his brother Michael, a seminarian, then unwittingly provided them with a strongbox of cash when a safe house blew up. However, Michael lost both eardrums and his senses in the blast, so in Francis’s scheme, Michael becomes Sir Malcolm, his invalid brother commended to his care. But Michael, in his post-traumatic state, has a companion, the recently deceased William Butler Yeats, who seems to vanish and reappear and lecture Michael about what to do next.

Are you getting all this? Throw in that the Dempseys have another brother in New York, Martin, a jazz musician hoping to make a splash, and that the king and queen of England are visiting the World’s Fair, and — oh, by the way, it’s June 1939.

Frank Buck’s Jungleland, souvenir of the World’s Fair (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Then there are bad guys, and this is where both Francis and The World of Tomorrow get into real trouble. John Gavigan, once a big-time New York hood, has been funneling guns and cash to the IRA for years. Gavigan drags in a former IRA assassin, Tom Cronin, who knew the Dempseys in Ireland, to deal with Francis’s theft of IRA funds.

At its best, The World of Tomorrow is a hilarious romp about fulfilling dreams, the dicey nature of love, and what people have to learn to accept if they wish to be happy. It’s also a love song to the importance of family, and the Dempseys’ tortured, tangled roots make a fine narrative. I also like how Matthews portrays the jazz musician Martin and his long-suffering but devoted wife, Rosemary, the rock of the crazy family she married into.

But it’s hard balancing the deadly serious with the madcap, and though Matthews is a terrific storyteller, pushing his characters to the limit at every turn, the killers don’t fit. The violence that frees Francis and Michael and sets up their escapade feels faceless and comically absurd, like the Binghams’ fascination with the allegedly titled suitor for Anisette. (Who would name their daughter after a liqueur?) But the violence that Tom Cronin’s ordered to execute is neither funny nor absurd, and Tom’s agony over it is real and painful, for he thought he was done with that life years ago, and now he has too much to lose. Then too, unlike those of the other characters, Tom’s reflections travel in circles, as though Matthews’s conception of him runs a little thin.

Matthews means to point out how past deaths condemn the current generation to take up a struggle that shouldn’t be theirs. That’s what happens to the Dempseys, and it’s what Matthews thinks of the IRA: “Some histories you washed off quickly. Others you wallowed in like a sty.” In giving Michael the ghost of Yeats to push against, the author introduces an intellectual version of that Irish ideal, and that this Yeats is selfish, blind to family ties, and no help to Michael tells you all you need to know.

I like this generational theme, but I think Mathews could have achieved it without Cronin or Gavigan, and including them overburdens the novel. I don’t just mean the jarring difference in tone, or the less-than-full villains who drive this subplot, of which there are too many, and their attendant contrivances. The World of Tomorrow is chock-full.

Otherwise, it’s got something. One pleasure is the prose, descriptive, discursive, and rich, as you’d expect in a fizzy, vivacious story. For instance, here’s what Martin feels about his adopted city:

As much as he loved the electric charge that came from moving in a sea of bodies surging from one place to another — crossing a street in the moment the traffic signal changed, a swell of suit-and-tied men and sway-hipped women, each of them racing to get somewhere that seemed so important — there were times when he wanted to call a stop to it, to slow it all down and not be carried along anyone’s tide. This was why the early-morning hours were his favorite. Walking a nearly vacant street, with only a couple slouched against each other in the distance, steam drifting lazily from a manhole, a splash of neon thrown into a puddle, an after hours bar whose last diligent drinkers hunched over their highball glasses — this was the New York he had come seeking. The city in a country hour. A time of deserted lanes and privacy amid the millions.

The World of Tomorrow, though it plays a few jarring notes, is good music for the mind and the heart.

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

This Blog Is Three Years Old: Or, Why I Read

23 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“I couldn’t connect with the characters.” As readers, we’ve all said that, at one time or other, and if you’ve written for publication, I guarantee you’ve heard it from agents or editors who turned down your work. But what does it imply? Is that connection entirely subjective, a matter of taste, and therefore meaningless except for that audience of one? After all, what kind of connection can you expect when there are so many books written about so many different characters?

I thought about these questions as I compiled my annual list of favorite books I’ve reviewed in the past year. They include three mysteries, a thriller, two picaresques, a Holocaust novel, a snapshot of youth, another of old age, and a tale of an infamous miscarriage of justice. I call just about all of them literary. But the one common thread? The characters compelled me. I wanted to know more about how they felt, because I could feel along with them. I expected to learn something about human nature from them, and I did.

Contrast that with two much-heralded novels I put aside recently, one about a woman who explores the Arctic, and the other, about a lynching. Compelling premises? Sure. Beautiful sentences? You got ’em. But these novels didn’t grab me. I didn’t know how the characters felt, even though the authors tried to tell me–and the problem wasn’t just that the narratives told rather than showed. The authors must have thought they created an emotional connection, but I felt none. I thought I was reading about events or actions or attitudes, and however unusual or significant they were, attention-grabbing by their content, they remained abstract.

Not that it’s easy to write that emotional connection. Last month, I attended a workshop given by the literary agent Donald Maas about his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction, which I’ve mentioned before. I’d gone to the workshop with a half-completed novel–half a house completed, if you will–and hoped to find out what could help me pull it together and finish it. By the third day, I realized that all I had was a big hole in the ground and a lot of building materials scattered around it.

So I’m very impressed with the following books and authors, who, no matter what their story or premise, have created that elusive emotional connection. In no particular order:

The Ballroom, by Anna Hope, tells of a man and woman trapped in a paupers’ institution in Yorkshire in 1911, and how he courts her through smuggled letters, unaware that she can’t read. Another desperate institutional romance, The Golden Age, by Joan London, takes place in an Australian sanitarium for juvenile polio victims in 1946. The kids, though stricken with a life-changing and potentially fatal disease, are much healthier than their parents and have bigger hearts.

By contrast, Sabina Murray’s Valiant Gentlemen takes place on a very large stage, starting with the Congo in the 1880s. Murray dazzles you without being self-conscious and sifts through the most serious subjects without taking herself too seriously–only two of the many pleasures of this novel re-creating actual historical figures. Steven Price’s By Gaslight, equally evocative, takes you into London’s underworld of 1885. It’s a long book, 731 pages, and Price builds his enthralling tale atom by atom.

Darktown, Thomas Mullen’s terrific mystery about two African-American cops in late 1940s Atlanta, is so tense, you think the novel might combust at any moment. Its deeply explored theme, racial politics within law enforcement, couldn’t be more timely. Gods of Gold, Chris Nickson’s mystery set in late Victorian Leeds, depicts the bare-knuckles life of a dreary industrial English city as well as the uphill struggle to uphold the law. Nickson conveys a depth of feeling and atmosphere in remarkably few words.

When the judges are the criminals, as they are in Crane Pond, Richard Francis’s retelling of the Salem witch trials, there’s no end to deviltry. But if you think you know the story, think again, for this judge was the only one to repent his actions, and the man’s internal struggles are compelling indeed. Crane Pond may be the most memorable book I read this year. And speaking of struggle, Mary Doria Russell’s, Doc, as in John Henry Holliday, wants to live life to the fullest in frontier Dodge City. A brilliant dentist, virtuoso pianist, and card shark, he inspires almost universal respect–but he’s dying of tuberculosis at age twenty-two.

Paulette Giles offers a very different view of the West in News of the World, about an itinerant town crier who reads newspapers to audiences starved for stories of other places. His outlook, demeanor, and personal code make him an irresistible character; I wish I knew someone like him. Better yet, I wish he were running the country. Amor Towles tells an inverse story to that in A Gentleman in Moscow, about an enemy of the Soviet state who’s sentenced to lifetime imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. From this circumscribed life springs a tense, richly emotional and intellectual journey on a Tolstoyan scale.

Coincidentally, the last three on the list are the last three I reviewed–or maybe it’s no coincidence, since I finish few books these days unless they truly draw me in. Golden Hill, Francis Spufford’s version of an eighteenth-century picaresque about a man arriving New-York in 1746 bearing a draft worth a thousand pounds, is a marvelous, page-turning moral tale. Is Richard Smith a bounder, a swindler, or an honest man worthy of immediate inclusion in high society? Everyone who’s anyone in New-York takes sides. A Single Spy, William Christie’s heart-stopping World War II thriller about an NKVD agent who doubles for the Abwehr, portrays a man who’s feral and disturbed, yet sympathetic. Impossible, you say? Read it and decide.

Finally, A Boy in Winter, by Rachel Seiffert, is simply one of the best Holocaust novels I’ve ever read. Set in Ukraine in 1941, her narrative has no heroes, speeches, nor forced redemptive moments, offering her characters only the chance of mercy.

As always, thanks for reading.

No Heroes Need Apply: A Boy in Winter

16 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: A Boy in Winter, by Rachel Seiffert
Pantheon, 2017. 242 pp. $26

Ukraine, autumn 1941, and the German invasion of Russia is now several months old. At first light, two young boys flee across their small town, trying to reach the schoolmaster’s house, in hopes he can tell them where to hide, whom to trust, assuming the rumors are true. But before they can get there, the Germans’ trucks roll in, and the boys must escape the unexpected trap.

The trucks’ arrival wakes Otto Pohl, a Wehrmacht engineer building a road through this forested, often marshy countryside, so that the invading forces may be efficiently supplied and reinforced. Otto’s a good sort, a conscientious man who believes the war to be criminal, which is why he volunteered to build a road in the Eastern wilderness, thinking that as army service went, he’d never be forced to see or do anything he’d hate himself for. He’s about to be proven wrong.

The Germans round up every Jew in town and drive them into a brick works, where they’re forced to stand, awaiting what they believe is transport further East. No one in town much cares; the victims are only Jews. What they do care about is the strict curfew the Germans have imposed and the constant threat of search and seizure. Nevertheless, Yasia, the teenage daughter of a prosperous farmer, decides to risk trying to reach her boyfriend, a deserter from the Red Army, now working for the invaders. She too sees more than she wanted.

Murder of Jews by SS paramilitaries, Invanhorod, Ukraine, 1942. This photo was taken by a German soldier serving in the East; a member of the Polish Resistance working in the Warsaw post office intercepted it for future documentation. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Historical Archives, Warsaw; public domain)

Three things distinguish A Boy in Winter from the average Holocaust novel. The first is a refreshing lack of earnestness. Nobody makes any speeches about right or wrong to condemn or embrace anti-Semitism or the German regime. In fact, the characters say very little, though their thoughts, gestures, and actions speak loudly.

The characterizations, the second key asset, are so strong and nuanced — even the SS commandant — that you understand why things happen the way they do. There are no heroes here, only powerless people trying to balance fear and suspicion against their will to get by and see another day. A great many evils can happen through that calculus, but Seiffert is much more interested in showing them than in criticizing. And by focusing on the very small picture rather than the large one, she has much to say about both. For instance, why are the two boys the only ones who try to run away? Why is Yasia the only onlooker not to keep her head down? The answers lie in character, not plot manipulation, but more than that, you can’t read this novel without plugging yourself in place of these characters and wondering what you would do.

The third way A Boy in Winter succeeds is in its moral compass, which points not to redemption but the possibility of some small mercy. An overdetermined authorial urge for redemption has marred many an otherwise fine book, and, since it’s a Christian concept, I like it even less in a Holocaust novel. By reaching for less heavenly attributes — for what’s only a glimmer in this world of mortals — Seiffert achieves more.

To do so, she writes in spare, elegant prose, precisely fitting her spare, elegant narrative. Consider this flashback passage about Yankel, the elder boy who runs away (and the title character), through the eyes of his father, Ephraim. Yankel loves to look at photographs of his uncle Jaakov, Ephraim’s brother, who emigrated to Palestine:

He asked more about Jaakov as he got older, wanting more often to hear the stories of his travels and his olive trees, or even just to see his photo… And though Yankel sat with it quietly, content with his own thoughts, never saying very much, Ephraim saw — not without pain — the admiration in his son’s gaze. He began to feel, too, how his eldest’s eyes measured him, silently: the narrow walls of his workshop, the fastidious labour in the lenses he ground there, the tiny screws he tightened to hold them in their wire frames. The scope of his life was meagre, seen against his brother-in-law’s.

Not only is this a beautiful, evocative passage, revealing in a physical sense the rift between father and son, you understand why Ephraim is anxious to follow the Germans’ orders, whereas Yankel has no hesitation disobeying them. How Yankel got to be that way is of course very important, but Seiffert brings you there, just as she brings you everywhere else you need to go.

A Boy in Winter is a sublime, powerful, brilliant novel, among the finest about its subject that I’ve ever read.

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

Between Two Fires: A Single Spy

09 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: A Single Spy, by William Christie
Minotaur/St. Martin’s, 2017. 388 pp. $26

Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov, the orphan-thief protagonist of this superb, hair-raising thriller, is both feral and sympathetic. I wouldn’t have thought that possible, but, then again, if you read A Single Spy — and if you like this genre at all, I suggest you do — you’ll discover that many things are possible.

The first is that Alexsi, as a mere teenager, is more than a match for the smugglers he’s taken up with in Azerbaijan. This would be a dangerous occupation anytime, but in 1936, there are Russian soldiers on one side and rival gangs on the other, and no one can afford scruples. Still, Alexsi trusts his instincts. As a practiced thief, he has a sixth sense for when others intend to rob or sell him, and whoever tries winds up with his throat cut. However, the NKVD catches him where he shouldn’t be, and just when he thinks he’s about to get a bullet in the skull, they startle him by offering him a job. If he passes their tests — and the penalty for failure is that bullet — he’ll work for them, doing the killing, robbing and prowling he’s always done, except for the state. The rewards can be enormous, as he learns immediately:

The first thing Alexsi noticed was that, unlike every other Soviet apartment, there wasn’t anyone else living there. Which was unprecedented in his experience. There were freshly painted walls and thick blue curtains. A sofa, chairs, a table. Spare and severe furniture, in the Soviet style, but to his eyes unbelievably luxurious. A gas stove and a refrigerator instead of an ice box. He opened it up and was greeted by a gust of cool air and shelves filled with food. Milk, sour cream, butter, cheese. If they were trying to impress him, it was working.

But everything’s a test. No question his handlers ask is ever innocent, no matter how it sounds, so he must think one step ahead, always. His greatest asset is his poker face, which conceals more than they know, in particular a detestation for bullies and a soft spot for a friend’s family, his only childhood respite from a violent, abusive father.

In the abstract, it seems improbable that an NKVD agent, hired and trained to be a ruthless operative for Comrade Stalin, would possess both a human core and a healthy skepticism of the Soviet regime. Yet Alexsi, despite his savage instincts for survival, has a code that tells him not to hurt anyone who hasn’t tried to harm him. Naturally, his instructions and that code will conflict. And the complications multiply, because he can only escape the fearful, terrifying Soviet Union by accepting an assignment to Berlin. There, he eventually joins the Abwehr and becomes a double agent, reporting everything back to Moscow at the risk of his life. Caught between two fires, Alexsi must be slippery indeed to avoid the flames. “No — and furthermore” governs every moment. Not only must he please his two masters while avoiding detection, once more, no conversation is innocent, no matter with whom. He takes to heart his NKVD mentor’s advice never to reveal his true identity to anyone, for any reason — and if they guess, he must find a way to dismiss it convincingly. The tension fairly ripples off the page.

Alexsi’s vantage point allows him to make private observations, comparing the two totalitarian regimes he knows. For instance, the night of Kristallnacht, he’s studying in a university library, when he overhears someone ask nervously whether the rioting in the streets has been authorized. If it is, that means they can go see what’s happening; if not, they must stay put. Alexsi thinks, This could only happen here.

Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons)

While reading A Single Spy, I thought often of Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers, another excellent thriller about the training and adventures of an NKVD agent. Christie takes a different approach, making Alexsi’s education a tutorial affair rather than at a school among inquisitive classmates, probably essential to the scheme, because it allows the spy-in-training to keep his inner self private. But the novels are similar in at least two respects. Both rely on atmosphere, and both introduce plenty of sex. Christie even has Alexsi’s training include it, in a chilling scene that I find hard to believe and suspect was included for its titillation. The only other false note is how Aleksi, as a junior agent in Berlin, manages to be told certain monumental secrets from none other than Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr.

But these are quibbles. Overall, A Single Spy satisfies in many ways.

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

For a Thousand Pounds: Golden Hill

02 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
Scribner, 2016. 302 pp. $26

“There is something maddeningly predictable about the way you procure disaster, Richard,” a friend tells the protagonist of this bold, extraordinary novel. “It is like someone winding a clock, as methodical as that. . . .”

That, at least, is the sympathetic view of Richard from within the insular community (population: seven thousand) of New-York in 1746, which is to say, lower Manhattan. The less sympathetic, more common, view of Richard Smith is that he’s a bounder, a fraud, a swindler. But the fault lies largely with New-York and less with Smith, despite the man’s willingness to admit mistakes; society’s indictments reflect more on the accusers than the accused. That’s the brilliance of Golden Hill, in which the central character is more reliable than the rest, and the disasters that accrue have more to do with society’s wrong-headed suppositions and cruel, inequitable laws.

Thomas Davies’s drawing of New York City, ca. 1770, perhaps from the perspective of Long Island. The steeple of Trinity Church is visible in the background (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The premise is elegantly simple, the sort I admire. Richard Smith, twenty-three, lands in New-York fresh from England and immediately proceeds to Lovell & Company, on Golden Hill Street, where he presents a draft for a thousand pounds. Lovell doesn’t have such an enormous sum in hard money, though Mr. Lovell could procure it in goods, over time. But Smith wants cash. He won’t say why, what business he has, or why he came to the colonies to pursue it. Both self-interest and a merchant’s natural skepticism for the abstract prompt Lovell to imagine that Smith is playing an elaborate and potentially expensive hoax. Yet the newcomer presents a document that appears genuine, from a London concern with which Lovell has done business for years. Moreover, Smith argues a credible case, and his charm, good looks, and quick wit make a strong impression. Even so, Smith will have to wait until London confirms the draft. This is only fair.

All New-York waits with him and watches his every move. To possess such a large fortune, even theoretically, makes Smith an object of intense curiosity, no less the means by which he claims it and his polite, repeated refusals to explain his intentions. Opinions and motives are freely imputed to him, and every misstep becomes a reason for laughter, condemnation, or, conversely, temporary alliance with a political faction hoping to use him for its own advantage. But, on the chance that he’s who he says he is, no one can afford to reject him categorically. Rather, Smith is swept up into the highest circles right away, starting with Lovell’s household, which includes two marriageable daughters.

The elder, Tabitha, intrigues Smith. To onlookers, that in itself causes laughter and amazement, for Tabitha Lovell has a misanthropically sharp tongue and seems to enjoy making herself unpleasant. But Golden Hill is about freedom, real and imaginary. Smith has astutely deduced that Tabitha is a prisoner of her fears as much as she indulges the freedom to taunt everyone else, and he attempts to draw her out and show her he empathizes.

However, empathy is a commodity in short supply, even scarcer than self-knowledge. The friend who tells Smith that he “procures disaster” lays out the situation this way:

This is a place where things can get out of hand very quick: and often do. You would think, talking to the habitants, that all the vices and crimes of humanity had been left behind on the other shore. Take ’em as they take themselves, and they are the innocentest shopkeepers, placid and earnest, plucked by a lucky fortune out from corruption. But the truth is that they are wild, suspicious, combustible–and the devil to govern. . . . In all their relations they are prompt to peer and gaze for the hidden motive, the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden they insist their New World to be.

Spufford is tweaking the American pretense of virtue–someone should, especially these days–but there’s much more to this passage than that. Smith’s friend is warning him that nothing will happen in a straight line, and indeed, it doesn’t. Twists and turns abound; if ever there was proof that “no–and furthermore” belongs in literary novels, not just suspense, Golden Hill is Exhibit A. But Spufford is also framing his themes: the hypocrisy concerning sexual standards, social class, wealth, race, and rule of law that emerge between the lines of this mesmerizing narrative and force the reader to ask what freedom means.

Finally, the passage suggests the tone of Golden Hill, whose vocabulary, cadences, and attitudes lovingly reflect and re-create an eighteenth-century picaresque. Spufford has wisely refrained from slavishly imitating Tobias Smollett (whom he quotes in an epigraph) or Henry Fielding, but he’s written in a form recognizably similar, and he adopts their style and form in pitch-perfect fashion.

Golden Hill is a masterpiece. That’s all there is to it.

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