Speculation: The Coffee Trader

13 Monday May 2024

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Review: The Coffee Trader, by David Liss
Random House, 2004. 432 pp. $17

Amsterdam, 1659, the heyday of the Dutch Golden Age, is a city devoted to commerce and speculation in a remarkable array of goods, such as spices, sugar, tobacco, liquor, whale oil, metals—anything and everything. Miguel Lienzo, who trades on the Exchange, affects calm in the face of risk, works from instinct, and prides himself on his loyalty.

Handsome, charming, and quick-witted, he’s tempted by a pretty face, a feeling that’s often returned. And when an attractive widow, Geertruid Damhuis, entices him with a business proposition concerning a commodity still little known, he sees its potential right away:

It had a rich, almost enchanting, bitterness—something Miguel had never before experienced. It bore a resemblance to chocolate, which once he had tasted years ago. Perhaps he thought of chocolate only because the drinks were both hot and dark and served in thick clay bowls. This one had a less voluptuous flavor, sharper and more sparing.

Geertruid has capital, and he knows the Exchange; between them, they figure to make a fortune on coffee futures.

But commodities markets are fickle, impossible to control with certainty, and nothing remains secret for long. Geertruid is Christian and Miguel, a Portuguese Jew, so their partnership is technically illegal, though such dealings do happen discreetly. However, the Ma’amad, the council of Jewish elders that polices its community with an iron fist, will punish Miguel if they find out—and a key figure on the council, Solomon Parido, is Miguel’s sworn enemy.

Romeyn de Hooghe’s engraving, ca. 1695, of the bima in the Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam (courtesy Rijksmuseum via Wikimedia Commons; deeded to public domain)

Geertruid’s involvement aside, Parido’s a trader himself, and if he learns about the coffee scheme, he’ll certainly attempt to ruin it, and Miguel. Further, Miguel, brought low after a failed investment, lives with his younger brother, Daniel, yet another trader, who despises him and toadies to Parido.

The Coffee Trader offers a superb portrayal of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, from the stench of the canals to the clothes that mark social status and religion to the fascination with novelty and the pride in a city riding high. Liss conveys all this with seeming effortlessness, whether through street scenes or in taverns or the frenzied activity on the Exchange.

He also makes excellent use of the cultural background. The Ma’amad has the power of excommunication, which terrifies Miguel, especially because the council operates on the theory that if any Jew misbehaves, the Christian authorities will expel the whole community. And since expulsion is a fact of Jewish history, that justifies the Ma’amad to itself.

That’s only the beginning. Like other Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam, in his homeland Miguel outwardly practiced Catholicism because his life depended on it but privately worshiped as a Jew. Miguel and Daniel managed to flee, but the Inquisition killed their father and seized his property.

Consequently, if the Ma’amad strips Miguel of his right to associate with other Jews or attend synagogue, he would be denied the faith for which he has suffered, and which defines his world. The disgrace would mean leaving Amsterdam, a polyglot city he loves and whose innovations excite him.

I admire how Liss devotes such care to his protagonist’s complex motives, which raise the stakes in this fascinating, tense thriller. It’s not physical danger that matters, though occasionally a character threatens Miguel with violence; it’s the injustice he faces, his desire to hold his head up, the breathtaking risks he takes, his wish to trust and be trusted.

That last desire ratchets up the tension. As with any thriller, he doesn’t know friend from foe, often, and his judgment changes constantly. Is someone who appears friendly actually working for Parido? Is an apparent enemy a potential friend, as he or she claims? For how long, if so? Someone’s controlling the people around him, but who? The story has a seemingly infinite number of twists, and well-crafted surprises keep coming until the final pages.

For that, blame the rumors that swirl around Miguel, who can never tell what they’re based on or who launched them. He has a conscience, which makes him vulnerable, even as he’s taking the boldest, most cutthroat actions. And he’s a flawed hero who’s done a few despicable things, which adds an edge to his wish to live a life in which loyalty matters.

On the negative side, Daniel, by no means the most evil character in the novel, sometimes seems the worst of the bunch, perhaps to give his distraught wife, Hannah, and Miguel someone and something to push against. At times also, Liss explains too much, as with adding the phrase “he lied” after someone utters an obvious falsehood. I understand his wish to make sure the complex financial shenanigans are crystal-clear, and I think he does well with them. But his dialogue and characterizations are so sharp, such explanations are completely unnecessary.

But those are quibbles. The Coffee Trader is a crackerjack thriller and first-rate historical novel, and I highly recommend it.

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

Hey, Let’s Put on a Show!: Glorious Exploits

06 Monday May 2024

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Review: Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon
Holt, 2024. 304 pp. $27

It’s 412 BCE, and the tide has turned against Athens in the Peloponnesian War, while the city of Syracuse, Sicily, is rising. Gelon and Lampo, two out-of-work Syracusan potters, bring meager rations to the quarry where hundreds of Athenian prisoners-of-war are dying in shackles. Few Syracusans even know; fewer care.

But of all things, Gelon admires Euripides, and he sees in the prisoners a chance to realize an old dream. He knows he’ll never visit Athens, never attend the theater there and witness the drama that moves him. Why not mount a production of Medea, one of the master’s greatest works? Surely, some of the prisoners know the play, and a few are even rumored to be actors.

Lampo thinks Gelon is crazy, but that’s nothing new. They’ve been friends since boyhood, so he’s used to hearing hare-brained ideas. But he also knows that once his buddy settles on a scheme, there’s no stopping him. Reluctantly, he agrees to help direct the play.

What follows is at once madcap, unpredictable, poignant, hilarious, and deeply powerful. The production changes anyone who comes in contact with it, whether the actors, the two “directors,” spectators, and crew, which includes a group of children who latch onto Gelon.

After all, when doomed men perform a tragedy about pride and betrayal, greed and downfall, the stark choices the characters make when they have nothing left to lose makes you think. This is no ordinary play, no ordinary setting.

Back in the Thirties, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made several movies in which he says, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” to raise money for a worthy cause. Lennon has adopted that trope and given it an entirely different force and context, with remarkable results.

Along the way, he introduces several nice touches. Since Gelon lost his only child to untimely death, he’s happy to involve the tag-along kids, which in itself brings about a surprise or two, but also contrasts with the story on stage, in which Medea kills her children to take revenge on Jason, who betrayed her. Then too, the play is today considered an early expression of feminism in Western literature—what happens between men and women, and how women get the worst of it, a theme that runs through the novel.

Eugène Delacroix’s painting, Médée furieuse, showing Medea about to kill her children, 1838, photo by Yorck Project (courtesy Louvre, Paris, and Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

That emerges, in part, with Lampo. Illiterate, humble, yearning for love and a smidgen of prosperity, he comes to embrace his role as a theatrical director with both hands. His portrayal is at once a satire on the profession—I laughed out loud—and a reminder how thrilling it can be to play a larger part than everyday drama grants.

Also true to life, Lampo winds up believing in that role a little too much. Nevertheless, in his false greatness, he rises to a step he never would have taken otherwise: he sets out to woo a beautiful slave, Lyra, hoping to buy her freedom and marry her. Naturally, he has no clue what he’s doing.

Further, with money in his pocket for the first time—the directors find a generous producer—he discovers how differently people treat him when he wears expensive clothes and flashes a fat purse. He’s no longer the out-of-work ne’er-do-well but a man to whom merchants and tavern keepers say, “Yes, sir; right away, sir.”

I enjoy good stories about the theater, and Glorious Exploits is that, a love letter to make-believe. When the directors visit the best scene shop in town to order props, costumes, masks, and backdrops, Lampo gets a lesson in stage artifice. The building is four stories, but:

You can’t see the real walls, ’cause they’re covered with scene paintings from different plays. To my right must be Olympus—rolling clouds and gorgeous sunbeams thick and gold as honey. To the left are the battlements of some citadel, probably Troy, blood streaks on the limewashed brick like gashes in pale skin, and tiny archers in the towers. It’s so well done, I’m nervous walking past it, like if I don’t leg it, I’ll go the way of Achilles. Straight ahead is the best scene of all: Hades. The river Styx to be exact, the water green and trembling with faces and limbs rising.

Lennon tells his story in modern Irish slang, which takes getting used to, but which eventually feels natural. The language is profane, sharp, and frequently funny.

The storytelling takes the reader through twists and turns, many of which are unexpected, some of which are heart-stopping. I heartily recommend Glorious Exploits, which has much to say about our times, even though it’s set 2500 years ago. It’s a marvelously imaginative novel, one that takes a remarkable premise and expands on it in several directions.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this review appears in shorter, different form.

Tenacity: The New Detective

29 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: The New Detective, by Peter Steiner
Severn, 2023. 181 pp. $32

Munich in 1913 is a corrupt place, much in need of the policing it never seems to get, for no cop in his right mind will offend the men in power. Nineteen-year-old Willi Geismeier doesn’t see law enforcement that way, however, and when he pursues a case, he doesn’t care where or to whom the evidence leads.

You’re young, his superiors tell him. You’ll learn or you’ll pay for it. And when they warn him that he’s just a beat cop and has no business playing detective, he takes the test to qualify for that position and passes. Naturally.

But the Great War intervenes, which he barely survives with eyesight, health, and faculties intact. And when he recovers, finally, he rejoins the police force—only now, postwar Munich has to contend with rightist groups and their wacko theories about race and “Germanness.”

In that climate, and with the flu pandemic increasing tensions and causing hysteria, bizarre crimes happen. One of them apparently involves widespread theft and resale of hospital drugs and equipment. Maybe unethical medical experiments are taking place too, though nobody will believe that; the doctors have sterling reputations and the politicians in their pockets. Nevertheless, Willi grasps this complex, risky case with both hands.

The New Detective, the third Willi Geismeier mystery/thriller in the series that began with The Good Cop, functions partly as a prequel, covering his war service, recovery from his wounds, and other experiences that shaped him. But much here is similar to the first installment.

Willi’s love for Shakespeare, which he finds the key to the human soul, remains constant. So does his insistence on following his instinct rather than instructions, which continues to anger his superiors (and the suspects he’s pursuing). This narrative, like the prior one, plays out in a wide time frame that circumstances do nothing to shorten, and “no—and furthermore” receives a less important role. That’s not your typical thriller.

It’s not that Willi faces no obstacles; he does. It’s that he doesn’t let them penetrate his consciousness; the “what do I do now?” musings common to fictional investigators have no place here. But more on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, one key element remains the same across both books and provides the reason to read The New Detective: the historical atmosphere. The wartime sequences, though short, are exceptionally vivid and authentic. But Steiner also knows Munich, period, and from the start, the narrative renders the city close up, as with this description of Willi’s first beat, in 1913:

The apartment blocks had been put up in a hurry in the late 1890s. Thanks to corruption in the building trades, they were already crumbling and should have been condemned. Few trees or shrubs could grow in the dark, narrow courtyards. The gas lights should have been on around the clock, but most of them had been destroyed. Drugs were sold and used freely in the courtyards. Prostitutes entertained their customers in hallways and abandoned rooms. Residents mostly cowered in their apartments.

The political environment is absolutely frightening, as desperate circumstances meet ambition, and those willing to break rules (or heads) will triumph. As with the first book, this one has an obvious political message, which is that the ultranationalists of 1919 and 1920 Munich are the direct ancestors of today’s white supremacists. Racism, fears of decline, anti-Semitism, rants about the “inferior” classes or races, belief in social Darwinism—they’re all here.

Soldiers in Munich, November 1918, cheer the creation of the Bavarian Free State, a republic replacing the Bavarian monarchy. It lasted less than six months. Photographer unknown. (Courtesy https://www.sueddeutsche.de/image/sz.1.3798999?v=1541596292&format=webp via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

To no surprise, as with its predecessor, the novel sometimes feels heavy-handed. Certain scenes also take place without our hero witnessing them, which allows the villains to strut their stuff in complete confidence that no one will see their evil. That’s a didactic device, at best. But after a while, that nobody—or practically nobody—objects to what the villains say or do has a chilling effect.

Willi, as hardheaded as they come, has a bulldog’s monomania. I find him both appealing and off-putting; his colleagues seem to agree. As I suggested before, the way in which he shrugs at obstacles, refusing to take them seriously, says, “I’m not fazed. Tell me the bad news.” And you know he’ll get around the difficulties, no matter how long it takes.

Whether you believe what happens or not—Willi does seem to have extraordinary luck—how he goes about his craft makes a good story. And the dialog is terrific, sharp and to the point.

The New Detective isn’t for everybody. But I liked it anyway.

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

Men, Women, and Animals: The Dolphin House

22 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: The Dolphin House, by Audrey Schulman
Europa, 2022. 307 pp. $15

In summer 1965, Cora quits her job as a waitress at a men’s club in Tampa, Florida, and buys a one-way ticket to St. Thomas. At twenty-one, she doesn’t know what to do with her life. As a deaf person, she feels at a keen disadvantage in a speaking and hearing world, though her habit of watching in silence allows her to identify danger, especially from men:

Men tended to speak in a deep voice with little emotion. They made statements . . . . They talked at length, assuming all were interested. They didn’t ask questions. Their hair was flattened with grease. They sat with their legs spread as though something in their pants needed the room; perhaps it was all the keys in their pockets, to their homes, their cars, their offices.

With animals, however, she’s completely at ease, having grown up on a farm and worked at a riding stable, where she learned how to get horses to trust her. Consequently, she’s absolutely perfect for the job she walks into on St. Thomas, working with dolphins at a research center established by an ambitious, manipulative Harvard neuroscientist named Blum.

The three researchers have had an artificial lagoon built and study the four dolphins swimming in it, seized from the wild. Oddly, though, the men won’t go in the water, so how can they observe anything? Worse, they perform “surgeries” on the dolphins, and she’s not mollified when Blum tells her that they implant electrodes in their heads. All she knows is that the dolphins scream in terror, and that the procedures leave wounds.

NASA photo of bottlenose dolphin, 2004, Florida (courtesy NASA via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

In his ham-fisted way, Blum’s trying to tabulate what dolphins can or can’t do with their large brains—so long as they imitate humans. He hopes to cash in on government grants to scientists studying cognition and make a name for himself. Eventually, he realizes that Cora’s more than an animal trainer in a bathing suit and takes an interest in what she discovers about the dolphins.

But he does so only for his own purposes, and his two colleagues refuse to see her as anything but a sex object. Welcome to the Sixties and the obstacles faced by women in science.

But Cora, who can’t get her hearing aids wet or they’ll short out, must go into the water without them, and what she learns excites her beyond measure. She senses the dolphins’ sounds in her body and studies them much as she observed the horses, focusing on their relationships rather than what they can imitate. She’s the expert, though she lacks the vocabulary to describe what she’s seen.

I love this premise: the woman who can’t hear understands more than the men who can. But what makes The Dolphin House worth reading is the novel’s animal protagonists, the four creatures unwillingly captive to the greed and fantasies of humans. The sequences in which Cora tries to learn their ways and teach them what Blum will recognize as “communication” have a beauty and drama that sweep me away.

The dolphins’ empathy, playfulness, aggression, temper tantrums, and sociability never cease to amaze me. That’s communication, whether or not a human can interpret it. But Blum, chasing ever-larger grants and fame, wants her to teach the dolphins human speech and tells her that’s the only way to spare them the surgeries. And Cora, recognizing this manipulation for what it is but also hungering to be thought of as a researcher rather than just an animal trainer, agrees.

The Dolphin House has a wide scope. Besides the science, which Schulman introduces with a light hand, the novel asks what real communication is. Those who can hear define it as words, which these scientists assume is the superior way.

None of these guys possesses an ounce of poetry or sense of drama, nor does any man in the book understand the physical world, for all their study of it. That’s Cora’s realm, but to one scientist in particular, if he can’t tabulate something, it doesn’t exist. Right there, that says a lot.

Where I have trouble is how far Schulman seems to wish to take this division between the sensitive, feeling Cora and every man she meets, only one of whom has any decency or even a positive trait. The others are greedy, lecherous, exploitive, narcissistic, and denigrate women; two seem like rapists waiting their chance to strike. Cora senses that none would have the faintest idea how to pleasure a woman, assuming they even think it a worthwhile goal.

This blanket portrayal goes far beyond the sexism-in-science theme or even the sexism of the Sixties. Schulman could have made the same points without fashioning her male characters out of straw so that they’re easier to knock down. I also wonder why the physically adept Cora never tries to defend herself against passes, looking only to escape. She seldom pushes back against verbal insults or injustices, either, though she’s not the type to think “a lady wouldn’t say that.” So she’s too much one way as well.

All the same, The Dolphin House is a brilliant novel, and I highly recommend it.

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

Murder in Little Tokyo: Evergreen

15 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: Evergreen, by Naomi Hirahara
Soho, 2023. 280 pp. $28

It’s 1946, and Aki Nakasone and her family have finally been permitted to return to Los Angeles after their imprisonment at Manzanar internment camp and forced relocation to Chicago. But nothing’s the same in LA. Like other Japanese Americans, they’ve lost jobs, property, and their home and have little left except pride, endurance, and determination.

Pettit’s Studio photograph of downtown Los Angeles, 1946 (courtesy Pettit’s Studio via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Aki has one thing to look forward to, however: the return of her husband, Art, from army service in Europe. Married just before he shipped out, the couple has spent almost no time together. They’re essentially newlyweds, and Aki can’t wait to start their lives together.

But Art’s return brings her no joy. He’s moody, withdrawn, tells her nothing. And Aki, who feels overwhelmed by marriage and has been taught to submit to her husband’s wishes, hesitates to ask the questions that might ease her mind and reestablish the rapport they once had.

A flashpoint between them is Art’s best man at their wedding and former comrade-in-arms, Babe Watanabe. Aki has always thought him irresponsible, even immoral, and when Babe’s father shows up with strange bruises at the hospital where she works as a nurse’s aide, she suspects physical abuse. So when Mr. Watanabe is murdered in a seedy residential hotel in the neighborhood known as Little Tokyo, Aki worries that Babe’s the killer. A son murdering a father? Unthinkable, yet . . . .

But she can’t say a word against him in Art’s hearing, partly because she rarely sees her husband anymore. He’s been spending his evenings supposedly chasing down stories for the Little Tokyo newspaper that has hired him as a part-time reporter but has also been socializing with his colleagues, among whom Aki feels outclassed and unsophisticated. She wonders whether she knows Art anymore.

As you have probably figured out, she takes halting steps to solve the murder, unsure of herself at almost every turn, which I like. The story moves quickly, if not always smoothly, and the author keeps you guessing the solution until the end. She re-creates the gritty, sometimes hand-to-mouth circumstances forced on Japanese Americans and the bigotry they face daily. I particularly like the premise, which places insecure Aki struggling to solve the mystery that’s her marriage, that of the crimes affecting people she knows, and how the two puzzles intersect.

Hirahara offers occasional glimpses into social attitudes I’d never heard of and wouldn’t have anticipated, as when Aki recalls the suffering at Manzanar:

We had lined up for our inoculations, almost like cattle and sheep. . . . Rumors flew fast and furious. The government was poisoning us with these shots, many claimed. But often our camp-wide digestive problems could be traced to food that was left out too long before being cooked and served.

But despite these virtues, Evergreen leaves me unsatisfied. The male characters are flat, having one or two salient qualities, and that’s it. The narrative explains Art and records his behavior but doesn’t suggest his inner life, or even that he has one. (And for all his symptoms of post-traumatic stress, I don’t believe he ever saw combat. It doesn’t live inside him in any other way.) The couple never grapples with their problems, and as a consequence, the resolution feels hollow and anticlimactic. Just a finger snap, and life’s good again.

Much of the information imparted about the internment, dispossession, and bigotry reads like information dumps. Some scenes seem to have no other purpose than to teach this sadly neglected history. Maybe too Hirahara would have done better to explore one issue in depth rather than drag in, say, the Ku Klux Klan.

I thought Amy Chua did a more cohesive and powerful job integrating the history into her novel, The Golden Gate. But neither author thought to link the persecution and dispossession of Japanese Americans to German concentration camps, which I find startling. And Hirahara has a perfect segue; after all, Art fought in Europe.

Finally, her narrative style gets on my nerves. At one point, Aki hears of a badass named Ox and thinks, “Obviously not his given name.” Later, she gives someone a penicillin shot and observes that the drug would reduce the chances of infection. You don’t say!

I’m not sure what to think when—no exaggeration—an author plays Captain Obvious on every page. Is she a pedant, unaware she’s talking down to her readers, and her editor goes along? Or do most readers want everything spelled out, no inferences necessary, and I’m the outlier here?

Granted, Hirahara’s not writing literary fiction. But even so, Evergreen goes to ridiculous lengths to connect every dot. And if Aki has to explain each conclusion she draws, that makes her seem none too clever, hardly the type to solve a crime.

Too bad this novel doesn’t live up to its premise.

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

The Eye of the Storm: A True Account

08 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: A True Account, by Katherine Howe
Holt, 2023. 268 pp. $29

One blistering Boston day in June 1726, Hannah Masury attends a hanging of three pirates, whose sendoff is ministered to by no less a personage than Cotton Mather. Having played hooky from a wharfside inn where she toils for pennies, that night she decides to bed down in the barn, where she finds a boy, desperate and terrified, demanding a bite to eat.

Against her better judgment, Hannah leads him to the inn kitchen; two men pursue them. Hannah evades them, but they cut the boy’s head off with a machete and hunt her too. Knowing that he signed on as a cabin boy on a certain ship, Hannah makes a snap decision. She chops off her hair, takes his boots and clothes, and visits the ship, intending to take his place.

However, the ship’s master is Ned Low, an infamous pirate, a mercurial man who knows no restraint or mercy:

Near as I could fathom, Ned Low was actually many men imprisoned in one compact sailor’s body, with never a sign of which one might be shown to the world at any given moment. He was one minute laughing and swallowing Madeira in his open mouth, spraying it in the air like a mermaid, and the next cracking one of my shipmates across the jaw for laughing too loudly. . . .

In choosing to join Low’s search for booty, to which everyone aboard is sworn upon pain of death, she’s taken a tremendous risk. They might strike it rich—for a time, until capture and punishment bring them down. But Hannah faces a closer threat, for the moment Low finds out who she is might be her last. One day, she learns what it means to sail in the eye of a storm, amid a pocket of calm while everywhere else is chaos. What a metaphor for her predicament.

Edward Lowe, aka Ned Low, rendered by unknown artist; date unknown (courtesy National Maritime Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

A century later, Radcliffe Professor Marian Beresford wants to throw Kay Lonergan out of her office. Kay, an undergraduate who seems to have neither ability nor strong character, is pressing an antique book on Marian, allegedly a fragment of Hannah’s memoirs. Marian, having never heard of Hannah and alert to other details, suspects that Kay has swallowed a hoax.

However, as a sharp-eyed historian, Marian has noticed intriguing facts about the fragment that prompt a second look. And since her father is a big wheel at the Explorers Club, with the money to finance an expedition. . . . you can guess what happens next.

Usually, I find the trope of The Manuscript and the Researcher insipid fare, especially with the earnestness that so often sugars it. But something about A True Account compelled me to read it, and I’m glad I did.

First, you can guess only part of what happens next, and Howe twists her narrative with skill and a keen eye for human foibles. Nobody’s too good here. Little is as it seems, and Marian quickly discovers that her bland student knows a few tricks. Also, our professor has no excitement in her tweedy life, so she’s glad to do something that promises thrills, might even be daring—though she suffers guilt about them, fearing humiliation every other second. Her biography might be titled Of No Account—or so her famous father treats her, and so she believes, deep down.

Meanwhile, Hannah’s life as a pirate is as gripping as it gets. Not only does she have to remain constantly vigilant, the violence of the life she’s chosen forces her to think about who she is at heart. At the inn, she led a hard life, but at sea the perennial threat of bloodshed raises the stakes, even as the promise of wealth beyond her dreams drives her onward.

A woman of her time had no way to earn such a fortune. Howe wishes to show that a pirate crew had more liberty and potential than any landlubber—circumscribed by the threat of hanging from a yardarm, to be sure.

Both narratives benefit from Howe’s prose, which zips along like a ship under full sail, running before the wind. I admire how she introduces physical detail, which permeates the narrative. Hannah’s amazement at the nature the city girl has never seen provides a clever contrast to Marian’s frustration with just about any physical circumstance outside Cambridge. Be warned that the pirate scenes are grisly, though the violence never feels gratuitous or sensational.

My only complaint, admittedly minor, is the intended feminist parallel between Hannah and Marian. Each has her struggles, yes, but the risks one character takes to assert herself far outshine the other’s and lie in a very different realm, despite what it says on the jacket flap.

Even so, Marian too has a trick up her sleeve, and just when you think you can predict the ending, guess again.

I highly recommend A True Account.

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

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary

01 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, by Laura Stanfill
Lanternfish, 2022. 334 pp. $19

The nineteenth-century French village of Mireville has a peculiar destiny and makeup. Not only does the sun never shine, which makes growing anything edible a pointless chore; the key industry, so to speak, is fabricating elaborate music boxes called serinettes. These gadgets perfectly imitate pitches that birds sing, except the music is popular songs.

Why would anyone want that, you ask? To teach canaries to sing music recognizable to human ears—of course!—and to hold competitions. Or such is the case in America, the market for the serinettes produced in the Blanchard family workshop.

A serinette made by Bonnard, dating from 1757 from Mireville (courtesy Rama, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Though Mireville has lace makers, grocers, and even luthiers, the Blanchards rank among the best families there. This status is duly impressed on every firstborn Blanchard male, who’ll one day run the business. Accordingly, the village wives whose husbands make lace or violins pay social calls on Mme Blanchard—of whatever generation you care to name—hoping to prepare the groundwork for a match between the Blanchard scion and their daughters.

This social-climbing pipe dream has even less chance of fruition once Georges Blanchard, as an infant, somehow chases the rain away and earns the sobriquet of Sun-Bringer. His mother, Cérine, doubts he did anything of the kind, but her husband insists, so that’s that.

Her child’s difficult infancy confirms for Cérine what she already knew—women do the work, and men make the rules:

As was expected of all music-makers’ wives. Cérine raised Georges to stifle skinned-knee yelps and to lift his chair away from the table, lest the scuffs trigger his father’s temper. Silence was sacred—not for women or children to break. But sometimes she hummed under her breath, or dropped a knife on the stone hearth, or smashed a plate just so she could pick the pieces up and throw them down again, allowing herself a lingering measure of joy at each small thud and crack.

The legacy of Sun-Bringer sticks to Georges with untold consequences; his son, Henri, feels keenly the need to do something extraordinary, except he can’t. Not at first, anyway.

What he can do, though, is listen and show great empathy, sometimes to an excessive degree. Those qualities will figure in his attempt at heroics, but their everyday impact is equally remarkable. Henri’s closest, only friend is Aimée Maullian, a lacemaker’s daughter. He takes heat for choosing a friend of the opposite gender, but by the time he’s twelve, the young female population of Mireville is eating out of his hand—which he recognizes only dimly, so intent is he on having friends.

I’d sooner believe Henri’s father ordained the sunshine that now roasts Mireville. But Singing Lessons is a gently magical tale, and greater truths sometimes lie beyond literal fact. If men believe they can and should teach canaries to sing, they can’t be expected to listen to their wives and daughters. In theory, that leaves a tremendous competitive edge to any boy who’s got open ears and a good heart.

But that boy will also suffer guilt and terrible loneliness, because his father, expecting great accomplishments like changing the weather, and will ignore him if they don’t occur. Henri also knows he has a rival for his father’s favor, acknowledged but seldom spoken of. It follows, then, that Henri will try to earn Georges’s love by working a miracle. And when that attempt falls flat, the boy, now seventeen, must leave Mireville.

Singing Lessons is a pleasant, heartwarming novel, so I almost feel churlish for pointing out its weaknesses. Henri’s the crux of the story, but he doesn’t begin the book; his father does. That’s understandable, in that the father’s legacy shapes the narrative. Besides, Stanfill has to explain what a serinette is, how it works, and its social place in Mireville.

Even so, that setup takes a while to get rolling. And when Henri has to leave town, I expect him to suffer serious reversals before the end, yet he doesn’t. He faces obstacles, but mostly they grant him experience that has a salutary effect. I’m glad for him, but it also seems a bit neat, as does the final resolution. Whether that’s pleasing or less satisfying depends on your taste.

I wonder whether Stanfill might have begun with Henri’s story, interposing his father’s as needed, and used the space saved to draw out the boy’s wanderings. But she apparently spent fifteen years writing the book, so no doubt she tried that option and decided against it.

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary offers a sweet story about fathers and sons, with wry observations about male pride. Read the novel for either reason, and you’ll be rewarded.

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

Celebrity Murder: The Golden Gate

25 Monday Mar 2024

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Review: The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua
Minotaur, 2023. 362 pp. $28

It’s March 1944, and Walter Wilkinson, a frequent guest at the fancy Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California, is found murdered—shot at twice, surviving the first confrontation but not the second. However, Wilkinson is more than just a prominent out-of-towner; he ran for president against FDR in 1940 and was presumed a candidate for the ’44 election as well. (Chau has based him loosely on Wendell Wilkie.)

Consequently, the murder has enormous implications, and Detective Al Sullivan has a thousand pieces to fit together in this jigsaw puzzle of power and privilege. The Bainbridge family, one of San Francisco’s wealthiest, provides several persons of interest, if you count cousins, as Sullivan must. Isabella Bainbridge, in fact, is drinking with him in the Claremont bar when he’s called upstairs to investigate the first murder attempt—and when he comes back downstairs, she’s gone.

Curiously, Isabella’s late sister Iris died fourteen years before in the Claremont, presumably by accident—and evidence from that death may pertain to the current case. Coincidence or not? But even without that complication, Wilkinson’s infamous philandering and political views have earned him many enemies, from radical leftists to, perhaps, Mme Chiang Kai-Shek, who lives in Berkeley and, it’s alleged, had an affair with Wilkinson.

Incidentally, I thought this bizarre—what was she doing in Berkeley?—but apparently, she did live there and was rumored to have had an affair with Wendell Willkie. Wartime rumors deserve their reputation, but I like what Chua has done with Mme Chiang.

Wendell Willie, Republican presidential candidate, 1940 (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

So there’s pressure on Sullivan, and the district attorney to whom he answers cares less about guilt or innocence than building his career. If he can send a Bainbridge heiress to the gas chamber for murder, so much the better. Apparently, a socialite jilted him a week before their wedding, and he’s got an ax to grind. He’s also got a dozen prejudices, which he treats as fact.

From this maze of secrets and motives, Chua has crafted a first-rate mystery with more twists than fifty yards of rope, starting with the two separate gunshots, only one of which hit the target. I like how she conveys psychological disturbance (caveat: her portrayal of psychiatrists speaks of prejudice), and I’m not surprised to read that she’s a law professor, given how she deftly explains procedure. I also like how she re-creates the wartime Bay Area, inundated with men in uniform, shipyards clanging away, and the rules of child labor, say, going by the boards.

The place is also blatantly racist, which figures prominently, as the credibility of witnesses or theories about who done it depend on who’s got what skin color. Since Sullivan has Mexican heritage—he changed his name to aid his career—that provides the chance to test him at every turn. He’s a dedicated lawman, but he’s also trying to make his way, and he wrestles with his conscience—or tries not to, which tells you something.

In a clever parallel to the D.A., Chua plays on Sullivan’s own social prejudices against the rich, whom he brushed up against while attending UCal Berkeley:

Kids who felt guilty—no, resentful—about being born with a gold spoon in their mouth. Kids trying to escape who they were. Trying on different personas like normal folks tried on shoes. . . . Too many choices, that was the problem. They had no constraints, no debts, no need to work—they could be anything they wanted, barring only a total lack of talent, which was actually not uncommon.

Consequently, when he questions the beautiful, intellectually nimble but manipulative Isabella Bainbridge, he has to steel himself to resist her charms and doesn’t always succeed. He also loses his temper at his bright but untrustworthy niece, whose mother is a deadbeat. Uncle Al winds up looking after the girl a lot, and he resents it. So he has sharp edges and weaknesses, what every hero needs (but which some authors don’t provide).

But his biography is as fake as a three-dollar bill (and I can’t understand why Chua would make such a mistake). I’ll readily believe he’s got a Mexican father but can pass, and I’m shocked to learn that these United States deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans during the depression, including people born here. (Nothing’s new under the sun.) But I don’t believe that Sullivan is one-quarter Jewish, and I could have done without that. I could also have done without the slur he utters about the relevant relative.

More significantly, did Al really work a passel of jobs to pay his way through Cal, get stellar grades, and star on the baseball team? Did he really fight on Guadalcanal in 1942, get discharged because of a knee wound, try to reenlist and get rejected? That knee never even gives him a twinge; he even runs three miles a day. What a guy.

Fortunately, Mr. Perfect has his flaws. The Golden Gate is a terrific book.

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

Nobody’s Noble: Essex Dogs

18 Monday Mar 2024

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Review: Essex Dogs, by Dan Jones
Viking, 2022. 450 pp. $30

In July 1346, King Edward III of England invades France, claiming that the throne of that country belongs to him, igniting what would later be called the Hundred Years’ War. Among the invading host landing on the Norman coast is a band of men self-styled the Essex Dogs, led by Loveday FitzTalbot, a former thief turned soldier-of-fortune.

But hardened veteran though he is, Loveday feels the strain of this campaign. Signed on for forty days at a penny per and all the booty they can carry, the Dogs have no particular loyalty to their monarch’s pretensions.

Oh, they shout the war cry praising his name and dutifully call the French king, Philippe, a usurper. And when the blast of war trumpets in their ears, the excitement of battle carries them along. But their chief goal, aside from filling their purses, is to make it home alive, as a group.

Edward the Black Prince receiving his knighthood of the Garter, ca. 1440-1450 (courtesy British Library via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Good luck. Jones, a historian, portrays medieval warfare in its most gruesome face, sparing nothing. Crossbow bolts and arrows fly with appalling results, and in the scrum of knights and men-at-arms, armor is no guarantee of safety. The crush of men and horses struggling for footing on blood-soaked ground brings terror and confusion.

But these relatively brief, intensely violent moments are only part of a soldier’s lot. There are long marches in summer heat; inedible food and brackish water (when available); disease and voracious insects; boring days spent in stinking encampments; and hostile civilians who find ways to make the invaders even more miserable.

Most of all, the Dogs have their leaders to contend with, starting with Sir Robert Le Straunge, the knight who’s promised to pay them at campaign’s end. From his first days in France, Loveday, starting to grow sick of war, anticipates what lies ahead:

Robbing towns. Hurting civilians. Stealing food. Taking orders from idiots like Sir Robert, the latest of a long line of Essex knights of that name, whose whole purpose was paying lesser men to work their estates and risk their lives in wars, in the hope that the Le Straunges might earn the favour of greater lords and kings.

The divide between noble and commoner pervades Essex Dogs, as it should. Some of the leaders, such as the earl of Warwick and Lord Northampton, the army constable, are capable tacticians. But whether they deserve their commands on merit or not, their mistakes, fits of temper, or foibles must be tolerated, even applauded, because of their high birth. By contrast, any commoner who steps out line will hang before sunset.

Also, where Warwick and Northampton sometimes seem on familiar terms with their underlings, the latter have to take care never to presume. Their lordships seem like employers too impatient to consider anyone’s needs except their own—I’ve worked for such people—except that these guys have the power of life or death. The only trait they share with their men is the foulest language I’ve read in many years. I’ve known sailors with cleaner mouths.

Essex Dogs shows clearly and repeatedly that there’s no nobility in war or warriors. The way the English abuse the French peasantry and townsfolk is absolutely hideous. I sympathize more with the civilians, faceless though they are, than with the Dogs, one or two characters excepted.

Maybe that’s because invading another country on a flimsy pretext appalls my modern ears; I can read that in a history book more easily than a novel, where motives and characters are supposed to compel me. But this plot-driven story pays too little attention to character.

Only two members of the Dogs show anything beneath their surfaces: Loveday and Romford, a sixteen-year-old boy on his first campaign. But even they feel rudimentary, a point to note, because this book is the first of a planned trilogy. I think Jones will have to develop his crew to much greater depth if he is to sustain his saga.

Still, the novel offers plenty of action; there’s always another (mis)adventure to propel the story, and I had no trouble turning the pages. Each chapter opens with a quotation from a contemporary chronicler describing a particular incident, which Jones then portrays as it might have looked on the ground, a startling contrast to the heroic description. I like that twist.

I also find amusing how Jones renders Edward, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, who figures prominently. The heir to the throne is a whiny teenager with more bravado than common sense, no martial gifts whatsoever, and a thirst for liquor, which he can’t hold. That’s Edward, the Black Prince we’re talking about, who’ll grow up to rank among the most celebrated soldiers of his time. As Jones’s end note says, this story is fiction.

Essex Dogs has a plot that moves rapidly, driven by vivid historical detail. I was glad to read the novel for its antiheroic depiction of medieval warfare. But after this first volume of three, I think I’ve had my fill.

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

War and the Mind: Sergeant Salinger

11 Monday Mar 2024

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Review: Sergeant Salinger, by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue, 2021. 286 pp. $29

When we first meet Sonny Salinger, he’s twenty-three, it’s April 1942, and he’s not liable for military service because of a heart murmur. He has the luxury, therefore, to visit the Stork Club, the famous Manhattan night spot, to see his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, the impossibly beautiful Oona O’Neill (the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s daughter).

The club fashions her a debutante, an attraction for visitors but also, be it known, for lecherous power brokers like the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, a regular there. Speaking of regulars, Sonny meets his idol, Ernest Hemingway, and dances a rhumba with Oona that Fred Astaire would have been proud of. To look at Sonny, a gawky six-footer with big ears, you wouldn’t think he could dance a step or court a great beauty.

But Sonny Salinger, whose real name is Jerome, has more to him than anyone knows, and his life is about to change, with consequences for him and for American literature.

Heart murmur or no, he’s drafted. At first, he has a desk job with Counterintelligence, stationed in Devon, England. But come D-Day, he’s part of the second wave at Utah Beach, for the boys from counterintel have to interrogate prisoners.

However, little happens as planned in wartime, so Sergeant Salinger, though he questions suspected enemy agents, French townspeople, and captured soldiers from time to time, spends most of his war firing a rifle. He earns five citations for bravery.

Utah Beach landing, June 1944 (courtesy National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But Sergeant Salinger isn’t a war story in the strict sense. It’s about a writer who gradually loses his mind because of what he sees and does as a soldier. As we know, J. D. Salinger recovered enough of his faculties to write Catcher in the Rye, a notable collection of short stories, and a couple lesser works, none published after the 1960s.

What stilled his writer’s voice temporarily after the war and eventually for good? What drove him to seek seclusion for decades? Charyn offers answers. Though many scenes seem improbable on the surface—his stock in trade—quick research will show that the facts are correct. Charyn may exaggerate how these scenes unfolded, as a bold novelist will, but if the details appear improbable or surrealistic, the effects are entirely plausible and well grounded. And as with other novels of his I’ve read, he has a gift for bringing real-life figures to the page, which is often a treat.

In those novels, I’ve admired Charyn’s keen eye for historical detail, which again figures here. That’s as it should be, for if we’re to believe that Salinger breaks under the strain of combat (and its aftermath), we have to see what disturbs him. Here’s his first look at Utah Beach, a relatively benign moment:

He leapt out of the landing craft into a wallop of water, flailing a bit, like a bat lost in a storm. Sonny had a life preserver that was almost a strangulation cord, plus a combat pack on his shoulders that pounded as the water pounded. He couldn’t afford to get his manuscripts wet. He had the melody of words inside his skull as he could hear the terrible whine of bullets all around him. A dogface fell and disappeared into the undertow, then resurfaced with one of his fingers shorn off.

But the following days and weeks provide a nonstop horror show in which you wonder how things could be worse, only to watch them spiral downward. It’s not remarkable that Salinger cracks; rather, it’s remarkable how much he tolerates when others fall to pieces. And part of what bothers him is the hypocrisy his superiors display, as when small-time Nazis take their punishment while rocket scientists and high-ranking intelligence officers get flown to the States and given jobs.

The portrait of the writer as a young man wouldn’t be complete without portraying his family. I must confess I doubted some of his parents’ antics, but I believe they ground their son into dust, and how that might have happened. The writer lauded for his depiction of adolescence isn’t allowed to grow up or have his own thoughts or feelings. Only his older sister, Doris, helps him escape that booby-trapped existence.

I found Sergeant Salinger hard to take sometimes, mostly because I wasn’t sure whether I was reading a deliberately absurd novel like Catch-22, in which we’re meant to laugh until we cry, or a re-creation of actuality. Charyn’s blunt, unsparing prose carries the ring of truth, yet what happens seems incredible, a contradiction that can be hard to stay with.

But the psychological observations, some of which occur through fantasy sequences, seem spot-on. Whether J. D. Salinger actually suffered what Charyn describes is, in the end, immaterial; he might have, and that’s worth thinking about.

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