Monthly Archives: April 2023

Prisoners, Expatriates: The Piano Teacher

24 Monday Apr 2023

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Review: The Piano Teacher, by Janice K. Lee
Penguin, 2009. 326 pp. $15

Claire Pendleton, newly married, accompanies her engineer husband, Martin, to Hong Kong, where he has a job designing waterworks. The year is 1952, before modern feminism, so convention dictates that Claire will live like other expatriate wives, sheltered, waited on, and expected to look the part but have no life separate from their husbands’—perhaps no inner life at all.

Victoria, Hong Kong, 1950, unattributed photo (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But Claire married Martin because he asked, and because marriage lets her escape a dreary existence in an England still enduring wartime restrictions, not to mention her fault-finding, disagreeable parents. So though she’s used to retreating into the background, Claire has the chance to emerge—and, to an extent, she takes it.

Hired by a wealthy merchant family, the Chens, to teach their young daughter the piano, Claire winds up falling through a cultural and emotional rabbit hole. For no apparent reason, almost equivalent to how she married Martin, she enters an affair with Will Truesdale, the Chens’ chauffeur.

Will’s employment is unusual, given that Chinese never hire Europeans for household tasks, but that’s only one mystery of many. It’s obvious that Will has led a remarkable past in which he’s suffered, but Claire can never get anything from him except physical passion, which, to her surprise, she craves.

Over time, she learns to reexamine her preconceived notions and prejudices about race, “foreigners,” and her new home, but at first, Hong Kong terrifies her:

Sometimes she got the feeling that Hong Kong was too alive. It seemed unable to restrain itself. There were insects crawling everywhere, wild dogs on the hills, mosquitoes breeding furiously. They had made roads to the hillsides and buildings sprouted out of the ground, but nature strained at her boundaries—there were always sweaty, shirtless worker men chopping away at the greenery that seemed to grow overnight.

What Claire doesn’t know, and what Will refuses to talk about, is that more than a decade before, he had a torrid affair with a beautiful Eurasian woman, Trudy Liang, cousin to the Chens. This narrative, including what happens after Pearl Harbor and the Japanese conquest of Hong Kong, alternates with Claire’s. The reader knows what she doesn’t, including how the invaders imprison foreign nationals like Will, and how that changes him.

But Claire senses a secret behind his stone wall and believes, correctly, that he’s a person capable of great feeling—except that he won’t love her or admit it if he does. This hardened position is the engine behind The Piano Teacher. As the wartime and postwar narratives finally mesh, the tension rises, and the novel’s themes emerge with even greater sharpness.

Lee explores the boundaries between integrity and the willingness to do anything to survive terrible circumstances. Other characters refer to Trudy and Will as “survivors,” perhaps with admiration, but that may not be a compliment. Racism figures heavily in Trudy’s story, for, as a Eurasian woman, she’s “exotic,” which, to certain bigoted Europeans, elicits fascination mixed with contempt. The Japanese too have their own view of mixed-race people.

Lee does a terrific job portraying colonial attitudes, not least spite, envy, and a hollow sense of superiority, which emerges in a dozen prejudices. Nonentities at home become lords in Hong Kong—and, after a while, act entitled to their elevation. The author’s spare prose plays well here, as she shows much with few words, whereas what’s unsaid carries great weight.

However, if Will’s past is the engine driving the narrative, his refusal to share any of it with Claire drags it down like a millstone. He’s a tough character, not especially likable. I doubt he loves Trudy, either; their relationship feels too brittle for that, and he’d rather die than make himself vulnerable.

Between that and Claire’s inability to stick up for herself, I nearly stopped reading twice. Her character, at least, follows an arc—she grows into herself, a little—whereas he seems to take pride in never changing, which becomes tiresome.

I don’t understand why she has an affair with him, even less why she puts up with him for as long as she does. Their liaison serves the plot, but I think it would have done better—and looked less convenient—if he’d cracked just a little, even if he tightened up again afterward. Let Claire hope for a glimmer based on what’s happened between them, not simply her own wishes. And I wonder how everyone in Hong Kong except Martin knows they’re sleeping together.

I do like the story and the way Lee depicts prewar Hong Kong and what happens to it, which I’d never read about before. I also admire the author’s subtlety, mostly, because she refrains from spelling anything out, leaving much between the lines. I feel involved in the narrative that way. But I would have wanted more and clearer clues to show how and why certain things happen and would probably have liked the novel more had Lee provided them.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, where it had sat, unread, for more than twenty-five years.

Readers and Writers: An Alternative to Goodreads

20 Thursday Apr 2023

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I’ve been trying out alternatives to Goodreads, and shepherd.com is one you might not have heard of. As a reader, I can scroll through myriad book categories (“The best books about __________”) and see recommendations that are informed and passionate.

As an author, if I create a category and write five brief, compelling descriptions of books that belong in it, I may list my bio and blurb of my own book. Nifty, no?

Romanian shepherd, 2006 (courtesy Friend of Darwinek via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

For what it’s worth, I called my category “The best books about men and women breaking unwritten rules.”

More Than a Muse: Leonora in the Morning Light

17 Monday Apr 2023

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Review: Leonora in the Morning Light, by Michaela Carter
S&S, 2021. 393 pp. $27

In 1937, twenty-year-old Leonora Carrington, would-be artist, meets the Surrealist painter Max Ernst in London. One eye blink later, they’re attracted; the average zoo possesses less animal pheromone than these two.

Defying her industrialist father, who disowns her, Leonora follows Ernst to Paris, where she tries to paint, sometimes succeeding, and to avoid her lover’s second wife, who assaults her physically in public.

Despite the pheromones, the lovers are a mismatch. Ernst is forty-six, more than twice her age, and probably couldn’t spell fidelity, never mind live up to it. Nobody around him does. His friends, the likes of Lee Miller, Man Ray, and Paul Éluard, swap sexual partners as if that game couldn’t hurt anybody who has an artistic soul, which makes Leonora fear she lacks one. Head over heels in love, she wants Max to divorce his wife and marry her. Good luck.

I’ll confess that this novel confuses me. I was expecting a story about one woman’s growth as an artist, which would no doubt entail her search for her own style and her fight for recognition in a field dominated by men who’d never accept a woman as anything but bedmate or muse. Indeed, Carter writes in her author’s note, “This is not the story of the Great Man’s Woman. This is the story of the Great Woman.”

Carrington’s 1963-64 painting, The Magical World of the Mayans, at the National Anthropology Museum, Mexico City. Carrington spent most of her life in Mexico. (Courtesy Ioppear via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons)

I wonder. Leonora in the Morning Light vacillates between the feminist/artist theme and Max Ernst’s star power, and since the novel focuses more on their love affair than Carrington’s artistic education, it might not have been a fair fight to begin with.

Perhaps that results, in part, from Ernst’s fame, as evidenced by the emphasis in the jacket flap copy and the pointless prologue, set in 1977, which tries to show how Carrington merits our attention regardless of her erstwhile lover. Moreover, half the book has little or nothing to do with art, recounting the principals’ belated flight from France in June 1940 after the German invasion.

To be fair, before the war, you do see Carrington at work and, even more often, dreaming compelling images that she tries to paint. Also, Ernst does guide her to find her artistic vision and praises her grasp of the surreal—though she feels, with some reason, that he’s stingy that way, when generosity would have cost little. Still, it’s plain that their affair influences her life as an artist.

However, it takes about a hundred pages for Leonora to start painting as if she means it. And Ernst, despite the magnetic attraction, is poison for her, which to me makes him repellent. Selfish, hungry for the limelight, unable to commit himself to her yet complaining when she’s not there when he needs her, he’s holding her back, and she can’t break away.

After they’ve moved to southern France, a home and studio she’s largely created and paid for, nothing will make him leave, even the war. The Germans won’t bother us, he insists, though he knows Hitler has personally branded him a “degenerate” and had his works burned. Besides, the light is so good for painting. She can leave if she wants, but he’s staying, and he won’t discuss it.

What Leonora in the Morning Light does accomplish, though, is to create a remarkably clear picture of artists and how they live, work, and think. Max’s Ernst’s first demonstration for her:

He rubbed the side of the pencil over the paper. . . .It was like dreams, she thought, how they live all day in your body, in the bones of your wrists and elbows, in the spongy tissues of your liver and your lungs. Your logical mind is oblivious to them, and only when you let go and give in to sleep do these dreams dare to show their faces, the way animals at the zoo come out at dawn and dusk, when the light itself is a kind of refuge.

Carter’s a poet, and the language throughout is unerring, whether to set a scene in a Parisian café, artists frolicking at an English cottage, or the desperate escapes after the invasion. I believe everything the characters say and do, which feels utterly natural, without any wink-wink, nudge-nudge because of their fame. Their flaws as well as their genius come through.

If you read Leonora in the Morning Light, be warned that there’s a rape scene. Leonora also has a psychotic break, in which she becomes delusional, involving long, excruciating (and tedious) sequences of images and bizarre events. This didn’t surprise me, because her gift for the surreal is so deep as to suggest fragile internal boundaries between self and exterior, reality and fantasy. Sooner or later, she’ll crack.

What did surprise me was the degree to which she recovers. After her attack, she does draw back from certain subjects and images she fears might push her back over the edge, but you sense she’ll be all right in the long run. I wonder how we can know that.

An intense, unusual novel, this, perhaps best approached as a peek into an artist’s soul.

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

Climbing the Mountain

11 Tuesday Apr 2023

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When I broke into print twenty-five years ago, I did so as a historian, tracing the potato’s social and political influence on the Western world. But my first love was fiction, and today, I’ve done what I dreamed of as a teenager more than a half-century ago: I’ve published a novel, Lonely Are the Brave (Cynren Press).

I feel as if I’ve climbed a mountain that grew taller as I tried to reach the top. That’s because Lonely Are the Brave is the fifteenth or so novel I’ve written; with each, I hoped I’d gotten to the summit, only to discover I hadn’t. But now I’m there, and the view looks magnificent.

I’m delighted. Excited. Glad I didn’t give up.

If you’d like to know more about Lonely Are the Brave, here’s the premise. A war hero returns to his Washington State logging town in 1919 grieving his late wife, and when he decides to remain home with his infant daughter, he hears a rumor the child isn’t his.

Most bookstores in Seattle carry Lonely Are the Brave, and so does bookshop.org.

Thanks for reading.

Larry

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Ancient Curses: The Children of Jocasta

10 Monday Apr 2023

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Review: The Children of Jocasta, by Natalie Haynes
Europa, 2018. 295 pp. $18

In the ancient Greek city-state of Thebes, a young girl is affianced without warning, warmth, or joy to Laius, the king. Jocasta, though wishing to be dutiful, can’t help think that her parents don’t care about her—they favor her much-younger brother, Creon—and have betrayed her for the expected advantages of the marriage.

More bewildering yet, right after the wedding, Laius disappears for weeks in the mountains with his drinking and hunting buddies, leaving his young bride alone with a few attendants. Why did he marry her, then? Wasn’t it to produce heirs that would secure the throne and prevent future conflict in Thebes?

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,1808, Oedipus and the Sphinx (courtesy Louvre Museum, Paris, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Good luck with that. Thebes is home to the tortured souls already mentioned, later joined by Oedipus and the children he’ll have with Jocasta: Eteocles and Polynices, the quarrelsome princes; and Antigone and Ismene, their devoted sisters. These names live today largely because of Sophocles, who dramatized their tragic ends and the curse that hung over their family.

But Haynes, who writes in her afterword that Sophocles is only one classical source of the Theban myths, has taken them in a different, fascinating direction. Narrating alternately between Jocasta’s point of view and Ismene’s—with an occasional snippet from Oedipus and Creon—Haynes recounts a version of events that has more to do with passion and politics than oracles, messengers, and hubris, though those crucial elements do appear.

The author retells the story from a feminine (and feminist) viewpoint, relying on voices that are traditionally walk-ons (especially Ismene’s), but that’s just the surface. The reader will instantly recognize what lies beneath. First off, Haynes has reimagined Jocasta as a neglected child who would look upon the sudden, unexpected advent of the young Oedipus as the promise of the love she never received.

For his part, he’s the clever, willful operator who’s crushed the Sphinx (here in less mythical guise) and stolen a march on his rivals, which accounts for his instant popularity but has implications for how he’ll behave down the road.

I admire this approach, and if the result seems modern, not Sophoclean, for the most part, it works. As with Joan, Katherine J. Chen’s novel, The Children of Jocasta will strike some readers as revisionist. So what? The treatment here still contains human truth and gives much to think about.

Haynes’s Thebans are less concerned with divine will or their place in the cosmos than their desires, ambitions, political power, morality, and what the people outside the palace will think of them. Some of these mythic figures are more pious than others, but none believe that the gods have sealed their fates and they’re mere puppets. Quite the contrary; The Children of Jocasta involves contests of will for high stakes.

What’s also interesting is how the men in this family, or most of them, love their wives, daughters, and sisters. Fathers want daughters, and nobody talks of exposing girl infants on hillsides. Women have secondary roles to men, but there’s no doubt that queens matter or that they hold power. Ismene’s love for her family helps drive the action, and both her father and uncle care for her, despite what else they do.

As a dramatic critic, Aristotle famously wrote that plot matters above all. Since the ancient playwrights could not change the myths, that makes sense. But here, we have a character-driven novel based on those myths. I find that intriguing.

Haynes’s prose brings Thebes to life, as with this passage, when the newly crowned Jocasta visits the marketplace, amazed at the finery she’s never seen. Nobody recognizes her, and it hasn’t sunk in yet that she can have anything she wants:

On another stall, her eye was caught by piles of clothes in every colour: bright dresses which she longed to touch, every shade of red between orange and pink, every shade of yellow between saffron and unripe lemons. She walked into the thronging aisle and reached out to feel the deep blue fabric of a simple shift dress. It was crisp and unworn and would be the right length without alteration.

However, I wish Haynes tried less hard to make her story and characters “relatable.” She’s created a physician-turned-tutor, Sophon, whom Ismene reveres, and who plays a key role in events. That’s fine. But Sophon’s philosophy, which stresses the influence of others’ choices on one’s own and questions the gods’ power, even their existence, seems a stretch. I like this man and his steadying, kindly influence, yet I wonder if he’s meant to reassure us these people aren’t so different from ourselves. But Haynes’s entire approach has already made that clear, so why does the narrative need that from him?

A couple minor tics add to my sense that the author has worried—needlessly—that we won’t see ourselves in these troubled Thebans. She uses nicknames, which sometimes threw me—Ani, Isy, Eteo—and laughed or smiled or other improbable verbs instead of said. I can’t help think of A Thousand Ships, Haynes’s more recent book, and my sense of it, that she lacks confidence in what she’s created. If so, she’s a much better author than she knows.

The Children of Jocasta is a vivid, thought-provoking novel, well worth your time.

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

Making Her Way: The Streel

03 Monday Apr 2023

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Review: The Streel, by Mary Logue
U. of Minnesota, 2020. 216 pp. $23

In May 1877, Brigid Reardon, fifteen, and her sixteen-year-old brother, Seamus, leave Galway for New York. The potato blight has returned to Ireland, and the English landlord, wishing to be rid of as many tenants as possible, pays their passage.

It’s a cruel blow to Brigid, to whom family is all, but she means to make her way. And with her spirit, intelligence, and willingness to work hard, she has the resources to see it through. She also appreciates the adventure for what it is—when she has the luxury to do so.

But it won’t be easy. While Seamus and two friends seek work on the railroad in the Midwest, Brigid toils in a Brooklyn boardinghouse. By a stroke of luck, she gets a recommendation to be a maid in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the home of the wealthy Mr. Hunt, who owns mining interests.

Brigid likes her job and her employers, who seem kind, tolerant people. Their opulent lifestyle, which benefits her in dribs and drabs, amazes her:

After I had lit all thirty candles, I stood back and looked at the room. The light from the candles made the gold leaf in the plaster ceiling shine all the brighter. Like a fairy castle it was. My mother would never believe such splendor existed. I would write and try to describe it in my next letter and explain how on the feast of Thanksgiving the Americans ate more food in a day than my family had eaten in a week.

But the Hunts’ rakish, handsome son, Charlie, makes advances to Brigid that she has a hard time repelling. And when she receives a letter from home announcing her mother’s death, Brigid decides to leave St. Paul for Deadwood, South Dakota, where Seamus and his friends have put down a claim on a gold mine.

S. J. Morrow’s 1876 photograph of Deadwood for the War Department (courtesy National Archives at College Park via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Shortly after her arrival, however, Seamus’s girlfriend, Lily, is found stabbed to death, and he was the last person to see her alive. Fearful for her brother’s safety and convinced of his innocence, Brigid urges him to flee. That looks bad, but the local sheriff is reputedly anything but just or impartial, so if Seamus sticks around, he’s likely to hang. Brigid vows to clear his name and find the real killer, despite advice from all quarters that this is no job for a woman and dangerous besides.

Since Lily’s corpse doesn’t show up until page 51, Logue takes pains to establish her protagonist’s character, the setting, and circumstances. I admire her confidence to wait, and I like how she handles the immigrant story, which seems smoother than the scenes right after the crime, in fact. But the investigation narrative soon settles in.

I do wonder at a couple facets, not least the miners’ luck at finding gold, and the modern echoes I hear behind certain stretches of dialogue. One of Seamus’s friends seems idealized too. But Logue’s storytelling carries the day.

The subplot, which deals with Charlie Hunt’s visits to Deadwood, lends force to the narrative. He’s the only other important character who has angles and edges, and Brigid can’t tell whether they make him interesting or dangerous. He’s there to dicker for the miners’ claim on behalf of his father and to resume his pursuit of her. But is he merely trying to seduce her, or does he mean what he says, a permanent connection? Her confusion and wavering opinion adds to the tension.

Her sleuthing, however, is neither particularly effective nor methodical. Rather, things happen in front of her, and she takes note, so The Streel isn’t your classic detective story. Brigid does try to interview men who might have wanted Lily for themselves, resented Seamus’s claim on her, and killed her out of jealousy. That widens the pool of suspects.

But Brigid also hears universal laughter at her claim that her brother intended to marry Lily, who, they say, was hardly the marrying kind. Brigid, though schooled in certain aspects of life, has never met a prostitute before; Deadwood’s sexual mores bewilder her in several contexts, blatant or covert.

Consequently, The Streel (the word means “harlot” in Gaelic) has much to say about propriety, a moving target in such a place, and the double standard. As an attractive young woman in a town overwhelmingly male, Brigid draws attention, not always flattering, especially when the less polite citizens jump to conclusions about her character, which they can’t manage to keep to themselves.

Logue pretties up nothing about Deadwood. You see the place for what it is, a charmless, muddy hole in the ground where people are chasing their fortunes—or stranded in the failed attempt—and not always careful as to methods. Unfortunately, the author tries to pretty up a couple aspects of her story toward the end, rushing through transitions that should have required more struggle. Nevertheless, The Streel is an engaging mystery and immigrant story.

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