Monthly Archives: October 2022

Trouble Amid the Magnolias: The Help

31 Monday Oct 2022

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Review: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Putnam, 2009. 444 pp. $17

Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, recent 1962 graduate of the University of Mississippi and daughter of a well-to-do cotton planter, feels uncomfortable back home in Jackson. Unlike other young women in her social class, she doesn’t even pretend to like football or the young men who love it.

Skeeter (short for “mosquito,” a childhood nickname inflicted by her empty-headed older brother) has never even had a date, doesn’t know how to chat up a prospective mate, and more or less resists her mother’s attempts to make her over and see her married. Rather, she wants to be a journalist and write important stories.

Skeeter wishes she could talk to Constantine, the Black maid who raised her and would surely understand her dreams, unusual though they are. But Constantine has left the Phelan household under circumstances no one will reveal.

Federal marshals escort James Meredith to class at the University of Mississippi, October 1962 (courtesy U.S. News & World Report and the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Meanwhile, two other Black women serve Skeeter’s erstwhile high school friends—or, rather, one does, because the other’s fired for unjust cause. Minny’s a fabulous cook, but she speaks her mind, and white employers don’t like that, or even the suggestion that she has a mind to speak. Her friend Aibileen moves heaven and earth to find her another job, which occasions the telling of lies.

Further, Aibileen, who loves the white children she brings up—seventeen, altogether, over her years of service—is grief-stricken and angry. Her beloved son, a college graduate, was beaten to death because he inadvertently used a bathroom reserved for whites—and his employer looked the other way. Consequently, Minny and Aibileen, though well schooled on how to cope in the white world, are tired of taking blows.

You know that Skeeter’s path will somehow intertwine with those of Minny and Aibileen, improbable though that sounds on the surface. You also know that Skeeter must make the approach, because she’s the only one who can do so and live to tell about it. Without giving anything away, I’ll simply say that the consequences are farther-reaching than she could have imagined, and that the racial animosity that pervades every social interaction in Jackson comes into full focus.

This setup takes a while to come together, and the narrative sometimes feels top-heavy, with three narrators, their secrets, home lives, and social connections, not all of which fit seamlessly. But Stockett keeps the pot boiling throughout, and her story, if it seems implausible at odd moments, packs a punch.

I like how she re-creates the 1960s, rare authenticity for an author who didn’t live through that time. But she grasps the Sixties vibe, the notion that change is in the air, like it or not—and these characters don’t, for the most part. Stockett senses what’s worth including and what isn’t, and I never think she drags in details, which convey a coherent worldview, the ultimate test of historical fiction and arguably its most important component. Faithful to that mindset, she makes Skeeter, though relatively enlightened by comparison to her peers, no better than she should be.

All three principal characters appeal, if in different ways and voices. Minny, the saltiest, steals the show, as with this trenchant commentary about her new employer, Celia:

. . . Miss Celia stares out the back window at the colored man raking up the leaves. She’s got so many azalea bushes, her yard’s going to look like Gone With the Wind come spring. I don’t like azaleas and I sure didn’t like that movie, the way they made slavery look like a big happy tea party. If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green drapes up her little white pooper. Make her own damn man-catching dress.

Too bad the minor characters don’t measure up. Skeeter’s former high school friends, now the faceless villains running the Junior League, seem like devices to aid the convoluted plot. A potential suitor of Skeeter’s hardly registers a pulse, so I don’t understand why she looks twice at him.

Her father and brother are placeholders, though her mother, who at first comes across as a stereotypical steel magnolia, achieves a little depth as the story progresses. More would have helped. I wonder whether the busyness of the narrative gets in the way; there’s just not enough time and space for development.

But The Help is a courageous, powerful novel, the kind that might not get published today, I fear. With our present emphasis on authors telling only those stories that belong to them, as judged by unknown but omnipotent arbiters, we’ve surrendered to appearances, as though they mattered more than truth. But you can still read this novel, which surrenders to nothing, and I recommend that you do.

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

Year of the Thriller: Novelhistorian Turns Eight

24 Monday Oct 2022

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Another blog birthday and recap of my favorites from the last twelve months. I can’t remember a year in which they included so many thrillers, all literary. For a genre that’s supposed to fly on high-octane action, it’s remarkable how much thrust these authors achieve by putting character in the cockpit.

Not that these novels lack compelling plots; on the contrary, they have propulsion to burn. It’s just that the depth of characterization increases the tension, rather than getting in the way, as the common notion of thrillers would have it.

Pieces of eight, otherwise known as the Spanish dollar; date unknown, but after 1497 (courtesy Numismática Pliego via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

How? I think it’s because the protagonists carry around an internal “no—and furthermore.” They don’t need an antagonist threatening them—though that happens, often—because they have so much to hide, and their sense of shame drives them to take risks.

Exhibit A has to be Hour of the Witch, Chris Bohjalian’s tale of a battered woman in 1667 Boston who brings suit to divorce her husband. That makes her suspect in this Puritan town, if not criminal—and she can never admit her great shame, which is that she has sexual desire.

A different secret to hide drives An Unlikely Spy, Rebecca Starford’s novel about a young woman hired by MI5 in 1939 to track British Nazis. From the wrong side of the tracks, the new operative is brilliant at dissembling—she’s pretended all her life she comes from a higher social class than she does—but the self-deception comes at a price.

Social class also pushes the envelope in A Net for Small Fishes, Lucy Jago’s story about cut-and-thrust intrigue at the court of James I. An herbalist and fashion consultant, hired to rouse a young, beautiful countess from her depressed stupor, quickly gets in over her head, betrayed partly by ambition but mostly by the ruthless aristocrats she serves.

In M, King’s Bodyguard by Niall Leonard, Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901 attracts Europe’s crowned heads and anarchists who’d like to kill them. Since Kaiser Wilhelm is a likely victim, the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch must work with his German opposite number, who’s probably lying about his identity. Our hero bows to convention outwardly yet holds subversive ideas, among them a sense of decency he knows others don’t share. That makes him fascinating and gives his enemies an edge: they’ll stop at nothing to achieve their goals, whereas he draws back.

The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman, ventures into mystical territory via a female golem created in 1941 to protect Jewish children from the Holocaust. Much more than a page-turning survival story, this novel, set in France, portrays human characters trying to transform themselves—and a nonhuman character wondering what life means. A beautiful, passionate narrative about life and death, love as miracle and sacrifice, and the nature of grief.

Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky offers a contest between good and evil through a single character and often reads like a thriller. A young Chinese girl kidnapped in the 1880s and sold into sex slavery in San Francisco fights to free herself. But her face and gender are inescapable, and her shame at how people treat her sharpens her pain to the breaking point. This novel is bleak but essential reading.

Matrix, by Lauren Groff, isn’t a thriller, whatever its title suggests—it’s about Marie de France, an author of fairytales appointed in 1158 by Queen Eleanor of England to run a failing abbey. Marie deploys her considerable social and political skills attempting to put the place back on its feet and to create a haven where the women in her charge can escape men’s influence altogether. That may sound like a fairytale too, but Groff makes you believe, and her prose is spectacular without calling undue attention to itself.

Peter Manseau takes up similar issues in The Maiden of All Our Desires, except that the convent he portrays, though run under similar principles and rendered in similarly tactile prose, is about faith—where it comes from, what it means, and what gets in the way. The residents have secrets, desires, and questions, as well as a different take on dogma—and the bishop’s coming to decide whether rumors of heresy are true. A thought-provoking, engaging, and entertaining novel.

So long as we’re talking about women challenging church doctrine, consider The Myth of Surrender, Kelly O’Connor McNees’s story set in 1960 about two pregnant teenagers resigned to giving their children up for adoption at a Catholic home for unwed mothers. But these young women, who think they’ll outrun their shame and bypass a youthful mistake, have unpleasant surprises in store. An old story, to which the author gives fresh punch and stunning twists.

I’ve never read a mystery quite like I Will Have Vengeance, by Maurizio de Giovanni, in which the detective’s character and outlook drive the story, also a page-turner. Set in 1930s Naples, concerning the murder of an opera star, the narrative shows why hunger and love are the motives for all crime. That truth affects the brilliant, moody, yearning protagonist, who has the reputation of being cold, yet feels more deeply than anyone around him.

Fine novels all, with more than a few thrills to spare.

The Northwest woods

20 Thursday Oct 2022

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When Theodore Roosevelt signed the American Antiquities Act of 1906, the law granted him and successive presidents the power to create national parks and set aside forest lands. During his presidency, he preserved 150 national forests, totaling 150 million acres, and created the U.S. Forest Service to administer them.

Ever since, Washington has benefited greatly. I’m comforted to know that my home state’s magnificent forests are protected under law and count as a delightful respite from city life the hours I’ve spent hiking in them, watching birds, and listening to flowing creeks and waterfalls. When I see a tree trunk measuring yards in diameter, as in the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park, I stand in awe; I’m looking at a living monument older than many events that have shaped the modern world. And when I crest a steep hill in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest and view a sun-dappled valley where wispy fog burns off at the treetops, I’m glad to be alive.

I’ve tried to portray wonder at and love for natural beauty in Lonely Are the Brave, my novel set in a fictional Washington logging town in 1919. Both main characters love the woods as their Northwest heritage; the irony, which they recognize, is that one’s a former home builder turned woodworker, and the other’s an heiress to a timber fortune.

I’m pleased to share the cover, above, which I hope conveys the novel’s spirit.

The Last Southern Knight: Cold Mountain

17 Monday Oct 2022

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Review: Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
Grove, 2017 (reissue). 449 pp. $17

In September 1864, wounded Confederate soldier W. P. Inman leaves the rural Virginia hospital where he’s been convalescing and lights out for home, without furlough papers. It’s a risky move. Irregulars comb the countryside for deserters, and if they catch him, the only question is whether they’ll kill him immediately or bring him to the nearest town for execution. But he hates the war, which he feels never had purpose, aside from protecting wealthy slaveholders’ property, and combat has scarred his psyche so badly, he’s ready to take his chances.

He hopes to meet up with Ada Monroe, a woman back in Cold Mountain, western North Carolina, whom he hasn’t seen since the war began. They’ve exchanged letters, but Inman doesn’t know whether they ever had an “understanding,” or, if they did, whether Ada will care for him now, in his emotionally damaged state.

But Ada has her own troubles—and a journey to make. Her father, a preacher, has just died, leaving her with a farm gone to seed because of wartime labor shortages and no skills or resources to maintain the place. The late Monroe encouraged—nay, required—his daughter to cultivate her mind and sense of gentility, so that she must never lift a finger in anything remotely resembling physical labor.

Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina (courtesy James St. John, https://www.flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/51363496155/, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

As a consequence, Ada’s extremely literate, plays the piano (stolidly), and can draw, but she hasn’t a clue about raising crops or animals, or about the natural environment on which her existence would depend if she operated the farm. However, she has only one alternative: returning to Charleston, where she was born, throwing herself on the mercy of relatives she never liked, and settling for a husband who’d probably not appreciate her independent mind.

Cold Mountain bears a slight resemblance to the Odyssey, in that Inman, as Odysseus, must endure myriad misadventures and combats to return to Penelope, whom he dares not presume is waiting for him. His narrative is therefore episodic, full of “no—and furthermore” and derring-do. Like Odysseus, he’s clever and needs to be; unlike him, though, he’s not malign. Not ever. Rather, he assists people in distress as he meets them and never surrenders to temptation. He’s more of a knight-errant than an adventurer, and maybe too good to be true.

Meanwhile, Ada has received a tremendous stroke of luck in the form of Ruby Thewes, who shows up because a friend has said Ada needs help. Ruby has no refinement, book learning, or soft feelings but knows all there is to know about the soil, the barnyard, and how to read the seasons. I like that Ada’s tutelage comes hard and that her journey is both internal and external, unlike Inman’s, who seems fully formed. Rather, Ada must shed her old life, and this minute wouldn’t be too soon. I also like how she reads to Ruby, her turn to pass on what she knows, and how they disagree as to what happiness is, or whether it’s even worth bothering about.

Her story moves me more than Inman’s, by far. Ada grows as a character, whereas he doesn’t, and whatever changes he’s gone through, you see them hazily in aftermath rather than in transition. During his odyssey, one physical conflict is much like another, and none stand out for me, either in themselves or what he learns from them. Conversely, her narrative feels more cohesive, and she transforms before your eyes—not without a struggle, which adds to her portrayal. Her obstacles, though daunting, seldom feel ridiculously insurmountable, so she seems more human, less larger than life.

Maybe the greatest pleasure of Cold Mountain is the prose, which has been justly celebrated, and which conveys the characters’ physical and emotional realms with vividness and precision:

In his mind, Inman likened the swirling patterns of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat.

I admire Frazier’s refusal to sugarcoat human nature, and his depiction of lawless, bloodthirsty, and greedy behavior is both real and appalling. If ever a novel did justice to the brutality Americans visited upon each other during those years, this one does. This is a vision of the Civil War that has rarely, if ever, appeared in fictional form.

Nevertheless, the narrative compromises that vision with a romantic underlay, and Cold Mountain is less satisfying for it. As with Varina, Frazier appears to argue that nobody really wanted secession or believed in the war except for a slim majority who held wealth and power. Somehow, I don’t think that’s how the Civil War lasted that long. But in any case, Frazier’s perspective whitewashes his characters while trivializing the history.

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

No Possession, Only Determination: Hour of the Witch

10 Monday Oct 2022

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Review: Hour of the Witch, by Chris Bohjalian
Doubleday, 2021. 400 pp. $29

Mary Deerfield leads what many people in Boston in 1663 would call an enviable life—though they’d never admit it, because envy is a sin. Her father, a leading merchant, imports many useful items like furniture, cloth, and cutlery. Mary’s husband, much older than herself, is a prosperous miller, a man others look up to. However, she’s still childless at twenty-four, which arouses suspicions of possession by Satan.

But Mary’s only possessed by qualities a woman must not have—a strong will informed by intelligence and desire. She dares want a better life than the one her brute of a husband allows: he beats her mercilessly, and his idea of sexual relations is equally violent and shaming. For every insult he endures, or thinks he endures, Mary pays; and when he’s drunk, which is often, he imagines slights everywhere.

One of the many reasons I’m glad I didn’t live in seventeenth-century Boston.

Worse, he knows how to dissemble. Though familiar at the tavern, he’s never earned the constable’s reprimand for drunken behavior or punishment in the stocks. He beats Mary in private and makes up outlandish excuses when friends or family ask about the occasional bruise that shows. She wonders whether their young servant, Catherine, sees through the lies—not that she’d sympathize, because Mary suspects the girl lusts after her husband.

Mary understands lust. She feels it when she’s around her son-in-law, Jonathan, married to Thomas’s daughter by a previous marriage, and for Henry Simmons, a man who works in a merchant’s warehouse. At night, after Thomas has rolled off her and begun snoring, she touches herself and struggles to rationalize the pleasure, half-believing that the devil has, in fact, taken hold.

Nevertheless, when Thomas stabs her hand with a fork hard enough to break a bone and draw blood, Mary has had enough. Despite the odds, she decides to file for divorce, ignoring all counsel to desist. It’s not just that a woman has no chance against her husband, particularly one as clever as Thomas. It’s also the fork, which her father imported—a fork that has three tines, the extra tine suggesting, to some, an instrument of the devil.

I admire so many aspects of this brilliant novel that it’s hard to know what to name first. So I’ll start with the voice opening, which establishes the Puritan mindset and beliefs about sin. Few authors, particularly thriller authors, display the confidence to pull this off—where’s the action? Won’t I bore the reader?—but Bohjalian delivers.

These few pages wax terrified at the temptation lurking everywhere, implying that terror will recur in the following narrative. Most important to historical fiction, the author shows how people think in seventeenth-century Boston, and how that contrasts with today’s mores—or does it? Aren’t people still scared of their desires, and doesn’t the tremendous shame they carry prompt them to behave their worst?

Whoops; I’ve just praised a prologue. In my defense, I’ll point out that this one reveals no forward action.

But it does prepare us to see Mary as decent, mostly kind person struggling with being a vessel of desire and, though she wouldn’t recognize the word, a feminist. An early description of her down by the wharf shows how she tries to cast herself:

The men were tanned and young, and though it was autumn and there was wind in the air, the sun was still high and the crates and casks were heavy, and so she could see the sweat on their faces and bare arms. She knew she had come here to watch them; this was the reason she had walked this far. But she didn’t believe this was a sin or the men had been placed there as a temptation. Visiting the wharf was rather, she decided, like watching a hummingbird or a hawk or savoring the roses that grew through the stone wall at the edge of her vegetable garden. These men—the fellow with the blond, wild eyebrows or the one with the shoulders as broad as a barrel and a back that she just knew under his shirt was sleek and muscled and hairless—were made by God, too, and in her mind they were mere objects of beauty on which she might gaze for a moment before resuming her chores.

But Boston’s a place where every move is watched and judged, and this is how Hour of the Witch turns the screws. It’s not just that the threat may emerge anytime, anywhere, and often does. Nor is it only that “no—and furthermore” blooms here like dandelions (Mary’s image for envy), or that Bohjalian pushes his heroine to the absolute limit. With Thomas, he creates an antagonist who’s truly despicable yet apparently normal, which makes him that much more dangerous. While reading this book, I often thought of my favorite Hitchcock films, for the natural relentlessness of his villains and the manner in which ordinary objects, like the three-tined fork, become charged.

Hour of the Witch is a sterling example of a literary thriller, unafraid to dwell in emotional moments and use them to connect to the reader. I leave it to you to read this gripping narrative and ponder to what extent the Puritan scourge has marked our country to this day.

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

Hunger and Love: I Will Have Vengeance

03 Monday Oct 2022

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Review: I Will Have Vengeance, by Maurizio de Giovanni
Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
Europa, 2012. 212 pp. $16

Commissario of Police Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi doesn’t need his job, strictly speaking. Financially secure, a rarity in Naples in 1931, and of aristocratic lineage, he could be a gentleman of leisure if he wished, marry a woman with blue blood like his, and live pleasantly, attending parties and the opera. But Ricciardi’s job lends him his sole purpose in life, and the reasons why make him one of the most compelling fictional detectives I know of.

He has no friends or family, save a seventy-year-old woman who was his nanny during his childhood, and who feels free to lecture him on his workaholic habits as she serves him dinner, typically an hour before midnight. Neither sociable nor personable, Ricciardi puzzles most of his subordinates—indeed, most people he meets—and if it weren’t for his brilliant track record, nobody would want to work for him. His brigadier, Maione, is the only policeman on the force to realize how everyone misjudges Ricciardi, whose deep green eyes seem perpetually full of sadness. If anything, the commissario feels too much.

But even Maione doesn’t know why, or what ghosts lurk in his boss’s mind—literally. Ever since Ricciardi stumbled across a murder victim in his parents’ garden as a child, a scene he privately euphemizes as the Incident, he’s been deluged by empathy for the dead. As he walks around Naples, he hallucinates corpses he’s seen in the past, imagines what they felt just before they died, and, remarkably enough, uses that perception as an investigating technique. That’s how Ricciardi lives his work, for he’s known all his life “that crime is the dark side of emotion.”

The Incident had taught him that hunger and love are the source of all atrocities, whatever forms they may take: pride, power, envy, jealousy. In all cases, hunger and love. They were present in every crime, once it was pared down to its essentials, once the tinsel trappings of its outward appearance were stripped away. Hunger or love, or both, and the pain they generate. All that suffering, which he alone was a constant witness to.

And oh, by the way, Ricciardi hates opera and its excess of feeling.

Teatro San Carlo, Naples, the world’s oldest continuously active opera venue (courtesyflickr.com/photos/stojaphotography/18734141725/in/photolist-, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

His singular opinion on that subject for his time and place figures in I Will Have Vengeance, for not only does the title come from an opera, the murder victim is a famous tenor. In life, Maestro Arnaldo Vezzi’s singing and stage presence commanded devotion from adoring audiences, but nobody liked him up close, especially not the managers, cast, and crews who had to work with him, and whom he terrorized. Even so, his star power was such that money flowed in his direction, and wherever he performed, he drew packed houses.

Consequently, who’d kill the goose that laid so many golden eggs? What provocation would push a member of the opera company to commit that murder and sweep all practicality aside? Those are the questions Ricciardi wishes he could answer, for the killing happened in Vezzi’s dressing room during an intermezzo, which points toward a perpetrator who’d have free backstage access.

Besides the hard-working Maione, assisting Ricciardi is a priest who loves opera. Thanks to a network of favors granted and received, Don Pierino Fava manages to witness performances from a spot just behind the curtain, as he does the fateful night in question. At Ricciardi’s request, he explains the opera’s story line and the ins and outs of operatic performance—details that matter to the investigation, dear reader, so pay attention. But it’s not just business between priest and commissario; the good Don Pierino, though flabbergasted that Ricciardi hates opera, also senses the shadow over the man’s soul.

I Will Have Vengeance moves like lightning, without waste motion or words, proving once more that a character-driven mystery can be just as riveting and suspenseful as its plot-centered cousin. As with the opera, every detail matters, and all’s in plain sight, something I appreciate. There are no tricks here, no rabbits pulled out of hats. I also like the departmental politics, and how Ricciardi handles his boss, an incompetent with friends in high places, which is to say that the commissario shows him no respect. Occasionally, that allows de Giovanni to work in subtle political commentary about Mussolini or his Fascist regime.

Another subplot I like concerns the sole outlet for Ricciardi’s softer feelings, a young woman who lives in a building across from his, and whom he likes to watch embroider at night. Trust me, it’s not creepy, and there’s more going on than even the hawk-eyed Ricciardi can guess.

I Will Have Vengeance is a masterful mystery, and I heartily recommend it.

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