Monthly Archives: September 2019

Resurrecting Oz: Finding Dorothy

30 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Finding Dorothy, by Elizabeth Letts
Ballantine, 2019. 351 pp. $28

In October 1938, Maud Baum has a mission to undertake in Hollywood, and since she’s seventy-eight, she presents an odd picture to security guards and receptionists. But those who underestimate Maud do so at their peril, for not only has she learned a thing or two in her long life about effecting change, her mother was a charismatic activist for feminist causes, especially suffrage. More important to the reason Maud lays siege to M-G-M, she’s L. Frank Baum’s widow — he, who penned the book whose film version is in production, The Wizard of Oz.

And as she begins her quest, this is what she sees:

It was a city within a city, a textile mill to weave the gossamer of fantasy on looping looms of celluloid. From the flashing needles of the tailors in the costume shop to the zoo where the animals were trained, from the matzo ball soup in the commissary to the blinding-white offices in the brand-new Thalberg executive building, an army of people — composers and musicians, technicians and tinsmiths, directors and actors — spun thread into gold. Once upon a time, dreams were made by hand, but now they were mass-produced. These forty-four acres were their assembly line.

Maud wants to be sure that this factory won’t destroy the work into which her late husband put his heart and soul — and, as the reader eventually learns, constituted his only professional success in a lifetime filled with disappointments. And what should Maud find when she visits the M-G-M soundstage, but a girl too old to play Dorothy singing a song about a rainbow? This not only does damage to her beloved husband’s opus, it will, Maud believes, betray the millions of children who love the original.

From this ingenious premise comes an intriguing, occasionally uneven but ultimately satisfying novel, written with wisdom and a sure hand. Letts splits her narrative in two, one half for the movie in production, and the other, for Maud’s childhood and subsequent marriage to Frank. Throughout, the author delivers a strong feminist message, which comes to the fore when she crashes the studio. Those scenes focus on Judy Garland, still only fifteen when the filming starts, and oppressed from all sides. She’s got a horrible mother who treats her like a dollar sign; an assistant producer who molests her; a commissary that, on studio orders, won’t let her eat anything but cottage cheese and lettuce, for fear she will grow and then really look too old for the part; and diet pills she must take, which give her insomnia, for which she takes another set of pills.

Publicity photo of Judy Garland for the 1939 film (as a publicity photo, with no recognized photographer and originally intended for wide distribution, such images are widely considered public domain; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

But Judy also has Maud, though she doesn’t realize it yet, because that kind old lady knows a victim when she sees one and can’t walk away. Maud’s license to be a gadfly lacks the necessary signatures, and the executives running this horror show periodically try to shut her out. Why, then, does she continue, and how does she manage to?

The key lies in Maud’s past, invariably bound up with the original models for Dorothy, Auntie Em, the Emerald City, the Wizard, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and, yes, Toto too. To Maud, these autobiographical bits mean much more than a past life, representing intense emotional experiences. Though I prefer the studio narrative, with credible portrayals of Yip Harburg, the lyricist, and Louis B. Mayer, the second m in M-G-M, Letts does well to show why Maud looks after Judy and refuses to take no for an answer. Also, though not an Oz aficionado, and as someone who likes the book better than the movie, I still appreciate the revelations about Baum’s sources for his characters, especially because Letts resists the temptation to overplay them. What could have been a wink-wink-nudge-nudge routine feels more natural and earned.

I wish Letts had shown more and told less, and that the prose rose more often to the level quoted above. Also, I don’t quite believe certain plot points, especially how easily Maud penetrates the studio, though I accept Letts’s assertion that she has stuck strictly to the historical record, which is pretty remarkable in itself, since history doesn’t always make good fiction. (One nit about the afterword: I wish she’d mentioned Yip Harburg’s most famous other songs, like “April in Paris,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” or “Paper Moon,” not just his other musical, about Amelia Bloomer.) Even so, I salute Finding Dorothy, which tells an unusual, worthwhile story.

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

Who Knew Politics Could Be so Much Fun?: Empire

23 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: Empire, by Gore Vidal
Random House/Vintage, 1987. 486 pp. $17

Caroline Sanford, recently arrived from Paris, where she’s spent most of her life, hits Washington in 1898, and that city will never be the same. It’s not just that Caroline has the requisites to advance in society or make a brilliant marriage — youth, looks, charm, and money. In fact, society bores her, unless it provides the means to a different end, and she’s convinced that wedlock would be even duller. Rather, she possesses yet another trait, worth more than the others put together, an iconoclastic way of thinking about men and women, which therefore makes her difficult to shock. Moralists ascribe this “improper” outlook, and the plans that result, to her foreignness. But Caroline’s American enough to understand that where her countrymen fear to tread — or, more particularly, countrywomen — creates an opportunity, which she’s European enough to seize with panache. As she says, life’s not easy for a woman who wants more than anything to be interested. Her scheme to achieve that takes everyone by surprise: to publish a newspaper.

William Randolph Hearst as a New York congressman, 1906, photo by James E. Purdy (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Naturally, she does not intend to print stories about doilies or the right way to entertain, or even politics, of which she has an innate sense. No; she desires to publish a scandal sheet that outdoes William Randolph Hearst, the king of so-called yellow journalism, whose latest coup, if it may be called that, is fomenting the Spanish-American War for no good reason other than to augment his own power.

Family rivalry plays a key role, here. Caroline’s half-brother Blaise, works for Hearst. Said half-sibling is also trying to deny her the rightful share of the fortune their father left them. So for Caroline, buying and running a successful newspaper means not only fulfilling her dream of being someone other than wife or socialite, but socking Blaise where it hurts — and believe me, he deserves it.

Lucky for Caroline, she’s immediately taken up by one of the first families in Washington. John Hay, former private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and soon to be William McKinley’s secretary of state, has a son, Del, who’s sweet on her. Hay the elder also has significant friends and political bedfellows, the likes of Henry Cabot Lodge, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Adams and his brother, Brooks (descended from two presidents and noted for their historical and political writings), Henry James, and various others.

So Empire offers the reader a close-up view of politics during the McKinley years and after, which is to say much like today: “… it’s the way that things are made to look that matters now,” not the substance of what anybody says. Vidal takes this huge cast of historical figures, just about everyone except Caroline and Blaise, and renders these movers and shakers in their heads and skins. The result is electric, and often very funny. The humor is biting and caustic, and when these famous wits trade ripostes, the dialogue runs away with you. (Theodore Roosevelt provides the butt of many such sprees, even from his daughter, friends, and supposed allies.) Like a latter-day Dickens, minus the treacle or the moralizing, Vidal re-creates these people in their passions, urges, and appetites, as with this portrait of William McKinley at table:

Lunch was as simple and as enormous as the President’s dove-gray waist coated paunch, which began very high indeed on his frame and curved outward, keeping him from ever sitting close to the table, which accounted, no doubt, for the single shamrock-shaped gravy stain on the black frock-coat that hung in perpendicular folds to left and right of the huge autonomous belly, like theater curtains drawn to reveal the spectacle. Quail was followed by porterhouse steak which preceded broiled chicken, each course accompanied by a variety of hot bread — wheat muffins, corn sticks, toast, and butter.

It helps if you’re familiar with the history, but even if you’re not, Empire is a delight either way, and an education. Vidal takes a very dim view of American politics and the influence of wealth upon it, and if perhaps he overstates his case at times, he’s always entertaining. The way most of the characters manage to overcome their scruples—even Caroline, at moments—lends a cynical tone to the proceedings, which may not please everyone. Is nothing sacred? Are there really no heroes and no principles, where power and money are concerned? But readers will immediately see our present day in all this too, and besides, you’ll laugh out loud. Who knew that politics could be so much fun?

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

Finnish Saga: Deep River

16 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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

Review: Deep River, by Karl Marlantes
Grove Atlantic, 2019. 717 pp. $30

During the early 1900s, Russia’s hard-fisted rule over Finland prompts violent uprising, met with even harder fists. Aino Koski, a young woman committed to the radical nationalist movement, endures imprisonment before she flees to America, to live with her two brothers in the Pacific Northwest. Aino never forgets her losses, familial or personal — deaths, eviction, destitution, torture — and ascribes them all to capitalism. She’s got an argument, but of course it’s a little neat, as is her solution. Her blind faith in revolution, no matter where or when, and rigid reduction of all situations to the same self-righteous formula, wears on those who love her. To give her credit, as an activist with the infant International Workers of the World, or Wobblies, Aino accomplishes minor miracles organizing the loggers in various camps around the Northwest. But her victories and single-mindedness come at great cost, to herself and others.

Wobbly organizer Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, also called Joseph Hillström, became famous as Joe Hill, thanks in part to the song written after his execution in 1915 (courtesy Utah Division of Archives and Records Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Deep River lovingly portrays Finnish immigrant society, and you don’t need to read the author’s comment at the end to guess that Marlantes has written about his forebears. You see the men quick to violence if they believe their honor in question, and their stoic, maddening, sometimes hilarious refusal to express anything verbally. The women pick up the pieces, guiding their menfolk through difficult moments like loggers breaking up a jam at a narrow point in the river, offering coffee and cake, subtle redirection, or unexpected steel. They hold their own, but boys will be boys.

Whether these characters’ struggles will catch you completely and take hold depends, I think, on your taste for Marlantes’s narrative style. He does an excellent job weaving labor history into his story, and he shows how management’s hired thugs, captive law enforcement, and recruitment of citizen vigilantes crushes the Wobblies and paints them as the instigators. (Management did such a thorough job at public relations that I had admired the Wobblies for their efforts but deplored their methods, only to read here that they preached nonviolence.) Figures; the victors write the history.

It’s a heartbreaking tale, one well worth learning about, but be warned: There’s plenty of violence, even when the Wobblies don’t appear. Marlantes, ex-Marine captain and author of Matterhorn, a superb Vietnam War novel, excels here, as you’d expect. His action scenes carry an electric charge, and the knowledge that these people can and will do anything just about anytime keeps you riveted. He loves his characters, but he doesn’t protect them.

He also keeps you connected through intense physical detail, especially the mud, danger, and squalor of logging camps; and the landscape, whether before the axes fall or, in the following case afterward:

It looked as if a giant had had a temper tantrum, smashing the gigantic trees into slowly bleaching jackstraw piles of splinters, stumps, and snags, and the occasional lengths of abandoned steel cable, some as thick as a man’s wrist, and broken blocks, heavy, grooved wheels called sheaves encased between two steel cheeks through which the cable was threaded. The stumps took [Aino’s] breath away. Her whole family could stand on top of one of them with room for twenty more people, maybe thirty if some of them sat on the edge and dangled their legs over it.

As a Northwest resident (and a tree hugger and hiker), I find these descriptions moving, portraits of what the region looked like before greed and demand for wood got the upper hand.

But Deep River disappoints in a couple significant respects. Aino comes across fully, though I expected more psychological scarring from the torture she received in prison, particularly regarding physical affection from men. Her two brothers and their friends Aksel and Jouka also earn complete portrayals, but the others seem more like figures known for a trait or two. All the women besides Aino are strong, which I appreciate, and they have their moments. Yet I’m not always sure what makes them tick.

More importantly, Marlantes’s way of telling emotions gets in my way. Often, he creates a marvelously tense confrontation, building the drama, only to let the air out with a sentence like: “They stood, looking at each other, love pouring from their eyes.” Deep River’s length and breadth may beg for economy in places — the narration essentially goes until the early 1930s — but these moments deserve their weight, and Marlantes’s descriptive prowess clearly measures up to the task. I just wish he had exercised it.

So take Deep River for what you will, a wonderful story shortened at crucial points, or an involving saga of blood and heroism in rough country.

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

Past Lives: Old Baggage

09 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans
Harper, 2018. 310 pp. $16

Matilda Simpkin lives in a glorious, thrilling past as an activist for women’s suffrage, who, before the First World War, rubbed elbows with the Pankhursts and threw elbows at policemen trying to subdue her. But it’s now 1928, and London life has dulled for Mattie. She lectures from time to time on the old days, for she has priceless lantern slides of the movement and can talk about what it was like to be imprisoned at Holloway, the infamous jail where suffragists were tortured, out of the public eye. An elegant, passionate, witty speaker, she’s quick on her feet and quicker to remind her audiences that women under thirty still can’t vote in Britain, nor those of age who lack the property qualifications. So Mattie still has her cause, her sisters in need, and the energy to lend a hand.

Annie Kenney, left, and Christabel Pankhurst, founders of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Manchester, ca. 1908 (photo courtesy Hastings Press via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But nobody’s paying attention, really, and that’s Mattie’s problem. Not only has her generation lost its fire; she needs to feel listened to, be the center of attention, to mentor others. However, she can be too quick to offer solutions to their problems and too slow to hear their silent plea simply for an understanding ear; and her urge to fix people, whom she sees as acolytes, can make her impossible. She assumes that those who turn away must be complacent or scared of risk, never dreaming that she herself scares them, or that the way she comes across subverts her efforts. In other words, Mattie Simpkin is a good-hearted, committed narcissist, and though such people often make waves, they don’t always pay attention to those who fear drowning in them.

Picture, then, her attempt to teach the younger generation. She forms a girls’ club called the Amazons, which meets weekly near her home on Hampstead Heath, for intellectual and physical exercise, learning and cooperative games. Who’d bother to join a club run by a windbag feminist of yesteryear? Dozens, as it turns out, a victory that Mattie accepts as a matter of course, and she thrives in her role. Despite her pedantry and occasional lack of sensitivity, both of which can be hilarious, she has much to teach, as relevant now as it was then: As a girl, you’re a real person, and you can make a difference. Her students aren’t always sure what this means, but most like the sound of it, and things go fine until a particular girl shows up, one who evokes the past. On such small incidents, worlds turn.

As you find out only at the end, Evans’s previous novel, Crooked Hearts, has a tangential connection to Old Baggage. I liked Crooked Hearts, but I like the current book better. It’s more serious yet funnier at once, which sounds odd until you notice that the tone here lacks all consciousness of satire, and the characters feel deeper. They have no sense that anyone should laugh at them, because they believe what they’re doing is utterly important. But our heroine needs a sidekick, one who’s more tuned in, and Florrie Lee (called The Flea), fills the role perfectly. The women are sparring partners in both heart and in politics, and though there’s social commentary aplenty, I never think it’s over the top or pasted on. It’s part of the action.

But it’s Mattie who drives the book, eccentric, principled, and flawed. As one of her less enthusiastic charges in the Amazons observes:

Miss Simpkin… had a face as readable as a penny newspaper, enthusiasm and exasperation, encouragement and the odd gust of rage chasing across her features. ‘Thar she blows!’ some of the bolder girls would whisper, as Mattie sounded off about Mussolini, or dogs with docked tails, or vegetarians.… Miss Simpkin was peculiar. Normal people stayed indoors when it rained, and thought that nice stockings were important; they didn’t sing in public, they didn’t pick up frogs and tell you about Greek plays.

Besides the sense of humor visible on almost every page, Evans has a knack for capturing historical ages and scraping the sepia off them. She understands politics and social movements from the inside and how they look from the outside. Likewise, the difficulties Mattie faces in her quest to educate the young reveal obstacles inside her and in others, so that her inner narrative connects to the outer, seamlessly accomplished.

Old Baggage is a delightful, moving book, and I recommend it.

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

The Prophet of Desire: The Dream Peddler

02 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Dream Peddler, by Martine Fournier Watson
Penguin, 2019. 370 pp. $16

Sometime in the early 1900s, a stranger comes to an unnamed American rural town. His name is Robert Owens, and the winter day he arrives, a young boy goes missing. Robert, though a newcomer, volunteers to help search, which creates a favorable first impression. He also dresses well, has courtly manners that people aren’t used to, and an engaging, unpretentious acceptance of human foibles, a trait that, as events prove, they’re used to even less.

Naturally, they wonder why he’s come, and whether he has designs on the widow in whose boardinghouse he lives. He doesn’t. He’s a traveling salesman, of sorts, and his product is dreams. Once word gets out, which happens slowly, he’s taken at first for a huckster and a charlatan, but he’s neither. Not once does he push his product (which comes in the form of colored liquids in glass vials), nor does he promise the sun, moon, and stars. When prospective customers approach him, he asks what they’d like to dream, decides whether he can help, and, if the answer is yes, mixes his elixirs for them, offering a money-back guarantee.

Freud’s first version of The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, in a print run of 600 copies that took eight years to sell out (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Robert’s an itinerant psychologist, in other words, and the town needs his services. Animosities and untapped desires abound, none of which must be thought of, or, heaven forbid, spoken about. Indirectly, Robert encourages his customers, who include the lovelorn, frustrated, bereft, ambitious, and heartbroken, to feel what has long lurked inside them. Not everybody believes him when he explains that dreams come from within and can’t predict the future, only provide a test version of it. They think he’s selling what they don’t have but can somehow acquire.

I love this premise and what Watson does with it. She’s made Robert a prophet of desire, and beneath his tolerant, wise exterior lies a deep shame and, perhaps, moral cowardice. He represents the notion that desire alone never hurts; it’s what you do with it that counts. I agree wholeheartedly, but many people don’t, and Watson’s fictional town is no exception, starting with the preacher, who believes Robert does Satan’s work.

Consequently, despite the liberation that many customers experience from their dreams, you sense that Robert will wear out his welcome, and you may even guess how that unfolds. Nevertheless, the how matters more than the what, for The Dream Peddler fairly glows with feeling, a narrative as irresistible as I’ve read in a long while. With great subtlety, Watson renders the complexities of small-town rural life, while modernity licks around the edges, scaring some and enticing others. I said the novel takes place in the early 1900s, but the only substantial clue is the lone automobile in town, a Ford belonging to the doctor, presumably a Model T. The way in which a few characters itch to see the world while others prefer to keep it at bay depicts a state of mind about to change: the twentieth century and its marvels and tragedies.

It’s hard to believe that The Dream Peddler is a first novel. Even without the sure-handed characterizations and storytelling, the prose would suggest an experienced pen. Consider this passage, about a man out cutting ice alongside his horse, Martha, to store in his ice house for the summer (itself a wonderful detail):

Charles came into that familiar thinning of the trees, and then the vastness of the ice spread out before him. Far away it was uncertain, rippled in places from the water’s unseen movement, but here where he stood closer to shore it was still thick and faithful. Martha walked onto it without fear, nostrils quivering in the cold… Ice cutting was hard work, but Charles enjoyed it. He was always enthralled by the white precision of the blocks as he lifted them from their hold, like marble destined for the walls of some exotic palace in a land he would never see.

Reading the name Robert Owens, I couldn’t help think of Robert Owen, the nineteenth-century Welsh industrialist and social reformer who founded a short-lived utopian socialist community in Indiana. Does Watson’s Robert have a utopian vision of desire? Unfortunately, yes.

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