Tag Archives: 1920s

Small Town, Big Corruption: The Gods of Green County

25 Monday Apr 2022

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Review: The Gods of Green County, by Mary Elizabeth Pope
Blair, 2021. 240 pp. $26

One hot day in 1926, the sheriff shoots Buddy Harper to death in Paradise, Arkansas, and claims self-defense. Since the sheriff practically runs Green County, and since a raft of witnesses testifies that Buddy threatened him with a crowbar, acquittal seems certain. Nevertheless, the attorney the sheriff has hired to defend him, Leroy Harrison, nearly withdraws from the case. His client, though smoother than silk, seems utterly unscrupulous, and it’s suspicious how the witnesses’ statements tally so closely in wording.

However, Leroy keeps the case in the end. His wife has just had another miscarriage, the great pain of their lives together, and he can’t handle the turmoil that would surely result if he disappointed the sheriff. But there are compensations, for subsequently, Leroy’s elected judge. And that’s part of his problem, for his conscience tells him that’s wrong, especially when he sees how the sheriff wields power, in ways both petty and devastating.

Nobody suffers more than Coralee Wilkins (née Harper), who sees visions of her late brother on the street, her porch, and the grocery. To her husband, Earl’s, dismay, she becomes more religious as a means of coping. The preacher she chooses is a corrupt, money-grubbing type who encourages his congregants to handle poisonous snakes.

The symbolism here might be heavy-handed: the snake in Paradise. But Pope has re-created a dirt-poor cotton town, with its intricate links forged through lifelong relationships and resentments. The result is a terrific story, a moral tale about power, loyalties, mental disturbance, and corruption. Although I dislike her intended conclusion, she brings her decidedly imperfect folk to life, and it’s a loving portrait she portrays of a time and place gone by.

Told through three different voices — Leroy’s, Coralee’s, and Earl’s — the narrative opens with Coralee’s psychotic delusion:

Truth is, I always could see things. Not every little thing all the time, but the full flower inside the bud of a rose, the fire inside a new green leaf that wouldn’t show until fall, the old man inside the boy selling newspapers on the street. Sometimes I even knew the future. One summer when a hard frost killed the crops and everybody was hungry, I had a vision of Johnny Wilcox bringing us a wheelbarrow full of turnips, and sure enough, he showed up the next day. Another time, I saw Laverne Bishop take up a snake even though she’d never trusted the Lord enough to test her faith before, and the very next Sunday she did. Those times, Mama called me her little prophet. Most of the time she said it was Satan working through me.

Earl, who works for a pittance at a cotton gin, doesn’t know what to do, as Coralee’s illness progresses and her behavior endangers herself and others. He’s a good soul, the salt of the earth, and illiterate, as she is. It’s a poignant portrayal, and you feel for both of them. “No — and furthermore” propels the story, as every move the three narrators make backfires. This small town, where everyone’s known each other forever, has its staunch loyalties that help people get through but also its hatreds and suspicions.

The earliest known working cotton gin, Burton, Texas, built in 1914 (courtesy Jim Evans, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons)

However, the one hatred Paradise lacks is racial. No Black characters live or work here, apparently, nor do any of the three narrators even refer to Blacks. The omission, though it simplifies the storytelling and allows the focus to remain on the principals’ concerns, makes me wonder why Pope chose that approach. I hope it’s not to protect her characters, so they don’t seem “dislikable” — a cardinal sin in book publishing, these days.

Several crucial scenes take place in a bar, and that too tests belief — not in the latter part of the novel, which occurs twenty years and more after the shooting, but in 1926, when Prohibition ruled the land. Along the same lines, somehow World War II escapes notice or mention, which gives the impression that Paradise must be hermetically sealed.

Finally, the narrative takes a couple too many twists in its latter stages, not always believably. And I think Pope wants the reader to see Leroy, who can’t leave the shooting or the sheriff’s abuses of power alone, as the villain here. He’s a whistleblower who neglects his family, yes, and not all his reasons for pursuing his cause are altruistic. But should he really leave well enough alone? And as the only character who stands up to evil, he has my admiration — especially if the alternative is just to keep his head down and tend his own garden.

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

The Revolution Gone Wrong: Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

21 Monday Mar 2022

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Review: Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, by Janet Fitch
Little, Brown, 2019. 730 pp. $30

It’s March 1919, and the Bolshevik state totters because of civil war, the leaders’ incompetence and corruption, and deprivation deep enough to make people regret the tsar. Marina Makarova Kuriakin, though born to a wealthy bourgeois family, sympathizes with the revolution’s goals but believes they’ve gotten lost and fears the common people will once more pay the price.

Too outspoken for her own good, at a time when a carelessly uttered word can have fatal consequences, Marina constantly puts herself on the line, whether by arguing in public or insisting on learning facts that other people would rather not talk about. More immediately, however, she’s pregnant by someone other than her husband, and neither man knows she’s having a child. Her first concern, therefore, is to find a safe place to wait until the birth.

The sequel to The Revolution of Marina M., Chimes of a Lost Cathedral tells the heart-breaking story of ideals betrayed by humorless, dogmatic, power-hungry manipulators who, when human behavior fails to match their theoretical framework, kill the humans they hold responsible. Stark suffering, paranoia, and oppression abound, usually in combination.

Among other Bolshevik cruelties or acts of negligence, Fitch addresses the plunder of the peasantry for their foodstuffs; overcrowded orphanages that make the Dickensian versions look like paradise; or censorship and suspicion of poets, of whom Marina is one. Through her trials and travels, which must eventually lead her back to Petersburg, her birthplace, Chimes provides a wide lens on one of modern history’s greatest upheavals.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, in a July 1920 photo by Pavel Semyonovich Zhukov (courtesy Russian Federation via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Marina also lives as fully as she can under the circumstances, which means, in part, that she has many love affairs. Sexual freedom belongs to her own revolution, and though I sense a sharper feminist edge in Marina M. than I do here, you can see still see it. Marina searches for partners who understand how please a woman, and she points out where the Bolsheviks have reneged on promises to value women’s contributions to their society as well as men’s.

For all that, though, I think the previous volume does better. Much as I like the later narrative, it’s got too much in it, not all of which fits comfortably. Marina’s penchant for argumentation seems forced at times; would she really be that careless? But the real problem is the overall approach. Chimes feels less coherent and incisive than its predecessor, and I can think of at least one plot point that’s both predictable and convenient, though Fitch integrates it emotionally. (I don’t want to give it away; suffice to say it involves one more loss of many.) Though this book is somewhat shorter than its older sibling, it feels longer, maybe because I sense that the author is saying, “Okay, now, let me show you this.”

To be fair, I like a lot of the this. I’ll never forget the orphanage scenes or those on the awful, overcrowded trains, which stink even more of hatred and backbiting than they do of bodily secretions. Also, when Marina meets literary lights like Anna Akhmatova, Maxim Gorky, and Osip Mandelstam, plus many more whose names I didn’t know, I get that keen sense of betrayal among writers who numbered among the first Russians to support Lenin, for all the good it did them or their country.

In that regard, I suspect the author intends a jab at cancel culture, considering how much discussion there is of politics perverting art. In that line, I note that one writer who makes a cameo appearance, Yevgeny Zamiatin, has surfaced in recent debates about censorship, and his 1921 ground-breaking, dystopian novel We, said to have influenced both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, has been reissued. Is Zamiatin’s presence in the narrative a coincidence? Maybe not.

I also admire Fitch’s prose, as I did with Marina M. Passages like this one, about the need to tell stories and what purpose they serve, take flight:

Humans tell stories about themselves, where they’re from, what they do in their work, what they’re doing here instead of home with their families. Everyone has some sort of story. Each human being walks around with an epic poem of himself, just waiting to stand up after dinner and recite it, poor bards that we are. Something about humans, we want to be known. We think we’re a story: beginning, middle, and end — and this is how it ended up. But of course, our stories have no sense, no rhythm, no meaning — an unfolded fan made more sense than human life. In any case, I didn’t want to tell my story. It was as bitter as uncured olives.

More episodic than its predecessor, yet giving a vivid taste of time, place, and character, Chimes of a Lost Cathedral is worth your thought and effort. But do read the other novel first.

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

Oh, Kay!: Rhapsody

27 Monday Sep 2021

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Review: Rhapsody, by Mitchell James Kaplan
Gallery, 2021. 342 pp. $27

In 1924 Paul Whiteman, legendary impresario and consummate schmoozer, attempts to persuade Katherine Warburg to attend a musical extravaganza at which George Gershwin has “consented” to play his latest composition. Katherine resists. After all, she’s a remarkably gifted, classically trained pianist and knows little of jazz or Gershwin besides his penchant for popular songs, about which the less said, the better. It’s not her type of music, thank you.

But as James Warburg’s wife — the banking Warburgs, known for generous hospitality to literary and musical celebrities — she’s an important target in Whiteman’s publicity campaign, and he’s a difficult man to refuse. Besides, Jascha (Heifetz), Igor (Stravinsky), and Sergei (Rachmaninoff) will be there. So Katherine attends and gets an earful:

George Gershwin strolled out, a tall man with pomaded black hair and a prominent nose. Attractive, certainly, but it was not about his features. It was the way he held himself; his bemused, blasé expression barely masking an underlying restlessness; his dark, soft eyes. All in all a coolness tinged with vulnerability and warmth. He wore his tuxedo like a shroud of sobriety. The finest evening attire, however, could not transmute a Tin Pan Alley tunemeister into a classical pianist.… Whiteman raised his baton and that klezmer clarinet embarked upon its crazy discourse, complaining, wheedling, sulking.

Hearing “Rhapsody in Blue” turns Katherine’s world upside down. A deep friendship forms with Gershwin, later an affair, and a musical collaboration as well. For “Kay,” as Gershwin nicknames her, knows lessons about orchestration and harmony he’s never learned, while his restless, roving musical imagination jolts her from preconceived notions, and he encourages her efforts to compose. Not only does she feel that Gershwin understands her in ways that Jimmy Warburg doesn’t, the lovers enjoy the physical passion missing in her marriage. With a brashness typical of the man, he publicizes their liaison. He writes a musical using her name in 1926: Oh, Kay!, whose hit song, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” remains a standard.

Unfortunately for Kay, Gershwin’s roving imagination takes him into other women’s arms. Warburg, who’s never been faithful to Kay and often disappears for months on end to Europe, has little to complain about. Their daughters sympathize with him, however, a reflection of the sexual double standard and the relative discretion he maintains by conducting his affairs in other countries. They’re both indifferent parents, at best, but Kay bears the brunt. Meanwhile, her composing career takes off — she becomes the first woman to write a complete Broadway score — but she pays a terrible price. And Gershwin will never marry her, she realizes.

I wish I could say that Rhapsody does this story full justice, especially because I’ve loved Gershwin’s music all my life. (To insert a personal note, my wife and I walked down the aisle to strains of “An American in Paris,” because that city is where we got engaged.) I also love the theater, that of the 1920s and 1930s above all; and Kay Warburg (née Swift) makes an excellent protagonist with whom to explore the musical and theatrical happenings of the time. At its best, Rhapsody shows why and how music evokes feeling, and Kaplan astutely analyzes Gershwin’s in particular.

Yet I find the novel a cluttered hodgepodge, stuffed with anything and everything. Instead of beginning at the musical premier of “Rhapsody in Blue,” or even Kay’s life before she met Warburg, the story starts with a needless prologue and hops about like a grasshopper, seldom remaining long in one place. Further, if I listed every famous name that floats through the narrative, from Fred Astaire to Duke Ellington to Dorothy Parker, I’d have no room to review the book. In a way, the name-dropping has a point, because Kay knows nobody before she marries Warburg and barely has two pennies to rub together. Money buys glamor, and she soaks it up. But the People magazine approach wears thin, and the army of famous, or soon-to-be famous walk-ons distracts attention from the key players and the issues they face.

First performed in 1924, this piece, which Gershwin said he’d begun composing on a train to the rhythm of the wheels, captured Katherine Warburg’s imagination. She’s not alone. (courtesy http://riverwalkjazz.
stanford.edu/#bonus-content/george-gershwin-20s via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Rhapsody poses several cogent questions, not least about the influence of money on art and the artist, whether genius excuses bad behavior (especially negligent parenting), and what shapes or creates popular taste. But other themes and ideas bury these under a blizzard of famous names, scenes that seem to exist only to reach a certain biographical plot point, and sound bites about current events. There’s a cartoon psychiatrist I could have done without, even though he was a historical figure, and the pastiche of scenes from New York life never amounts to a lived-in atmosphere. By contrast, Gershwin seems much more likable than his legend would suggest, and though that interpretation may be justifiable, in the composer’s latter years, we see nothing of the nightmare he visited on his intimates, misbehavior resulting from an undiagnosed brain tumor.

Passionate Gershwin fans will find pieces here and there in Rhapsody to enlighten and perhaps delight them, and Kay Swift’s story deserves a hearing. But this novel is one of those in which a lot less would have yielded a lot more.

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

Star-Crossed Love: The Glittering Hour

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Review: The Glittering Hour, by Iona Grey
St. Martins, 2019. 468 pp. $29

It’s January 1936, and nine-year-old Alice Carew misses her mother terribly. Mama’s away in Burma with Papa, who has mining interests there, and the family’s Wiltshire estate, Blackwood, feels like a prison to Alice. An artistically precocious child with no head for or interest in reading or mathematics, Alice has no allies in the house save her beloved nanny, Polly, who can’t protect her from Grandmama, as starchy and cold an aristocrat as ever graced England’s shores.

The old lady has never liked her grandchild, censors the girl’s letters to her parents, and even denies Alice the colored pencils Mama bought for her. Good grief. Yet despite her grandmother’s and father’s opinion that Alice has a second-rate mind, the girl sees plenty, including their lack of love for her — but not the reason for it. Therein hangs a tale.

However, all this is prologue to Mama’s back story. Selina Carew, née Lennox, was a Bright Young Thing in the Twenties who burned the candle at both ends. With a passion for expensive amusements and a horror of boredom, Selina and her blue-blood friends cut a swath through London at breakneck speed, awash in champagne and jewels, tossing out arch bon mots and trying to decide whether this or that costume party or dance will be too unbearable; really, isn’t there anything better to do? To her family’s horror, the scandal sheets eat this up, from which Selina derives some satisfaction.

Selina’s no airhead (though I reserve judgment on her friends), because if she were, The Glittering Hour would have a flat, spoiled-brat heroine and require a seismic change from her that would strain credulity. Rather, she has deep conflicts, from which she’s trying to hide. She represents the upper-class cohort that survived the Great War and who dash from party to party so as to conceal the pain of loss. But Selina feels it, can’t help it; like so many women of all social classes, she lost a beloved brother at Passchendaele. What’s more, much as it hurts, she refuses to believe that all joy must end, though admittedly, she overdoes it. Worse, none of that may be spoken of:

Seven years on from the armistice and the scars of the war were still visible everywhere. One got adept at looking past them, or through them, or pretending they weren’t there at all. One got on with things in the best way one could; there was always someone worse off, like the man selling matches, or Lady Renshaw, who had lost all three of her boys… One could never complain about one’s own loss. Selina understood why her mother had buried hers in the deepest recesses of her heart and hardened her face against the world. It was her way of coping, of Getting On. But it was a sad legacy for a boy whose smile could light up a room.

Selina meets Lawrence Weston, an artist who makes his living painting portraits based on photographs for war-bereaved families, but whose real passion is photography — which few people consider an art form. Little do they know. For extra money, Lawrence takes pictures of the rich and famous making public nuisances of themselves — he knows about Selina Lennox before they meet — but he prefers photographing miners, the men selling matches, whatever social commentary his lens seeks out.

William Monk’s 1920 engraving of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, a memorial to the war dead. The wooden structure was later replaced in stone (courtesy http://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/ via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I understand what Grey’s trying to achieve by starting with Alice, but that approach has its flaws. Though Alice’s predicament squeezes my heart, as it’s meant to, that’s not where the richest material lies. I prefer Selina’s inner struggle as a Bright Young Thing and her relationship to Lawrence, which has so many social markers, the pair might even inhale and exhale differently, for all I know. The class barrier to romance is hardly new, but Grey’s rendering takes on particularity, because she grounds it so thoroughly in active physical detail. It’s not just Lawrence’s shabby clothes or Selina’s accent that set them apart, though those matter and are what onlookers see and hear; it’s how the physical details reveal these two characters’ different worldviews.

On the minus side, the story hinges on two secrets, neither of which is particularly hard to discern, and the narrative has its melodramatic moments, especially toward the end. I wish Grey didn’t resort to telling, rather than showing, emotions in certain key moments— what a shame, for such an astute observer — and the resulting shorthand phrases sometimes go thump. Further, though Grandmama’s portrayal will curdle your blood, she’s that real, Alice’s father seems like a shirt stuffed with papier-mâché.

Even so, The Glittering Hour finds something new to say about the decade after the Great War, and Selina and Lawrence are appealing characters. It’s worth reading for that, if not for more.

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

Missing, Presumed: The Poppy Wife

04 Monday May 2020

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Review: The Poppy Wife, by Caroline Scott
Morrow, 2019. 423 pp. $17

It’s spring 1921, two and a half years since the Great War ended, yet for many, painful uncertainty continues. Edie Blythe of Manchester is one who lives with that burden. Coping with her husband Francis’s presumed death in October 1917 has hurt her enough; the absence of definitive proof is excruciating. But as the story opens, Edie receives a photograph of Francis, undated, unaccompanied by any letter or identification, and the French postmark is only half-legible.

Nevertheless, she’s convinced that in the photo, Francis appears significantly older than she remembers him from his final home leave in September 1917, which means he may still be alive. Naturally, she can’t account for the photograph, though she invents wild theories. In any case, she sets out for France to try to track him down.

The Menin Gate at Ieper (Ypres), Belgium, holds thousands of names of British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in action, but with no known grave. It’s one of the most moving memorials I’ve ever seen. (My photo, September 2019)

Meanwhile, Francis’s younger brother, Harry, is trying to trace him too. Since the war, he’s become a photographer-as his missing elder brother was, curiously enough. Normally employed to take studio portraits, Harry has been sent to the war cemeteries of France and Belgium — still very much under reorganization and construction — to photograph gravesites or places mentioned in soldiers’ letters home. The bereaved parents or spouses paying for these photographs want tangible images to hold onto, perhaps proof of their loss, and they can’t afford to visit the ground themselves.

A worthy task, preserving memories, yet Harry aches. He’s the only Blythe brother of three to return from the war, which already causes him survivors’ guilt; witnessing so many graves lashes him to a pulp. Equally painful, he’s always loved Edie. But he’s never acted on his feelings, and he believes he did nothing wrong by harboring a yearning. However, he’s pretty sure Francis figured it out and held it against him — and maybe Edie does too.

From this elegant, emotionally rich premise comes a novel of great power and psychological complexity. Both Edie and Harry are lost, even as survivors, as they try to find a way to continue living. You can’t help feeling drawn to them, Harry especially, as they struggle to do the right thing, whatever that is, not knowing whether they dare to hope for a happy future.

As an aficionado of First World War fiction and historian of that era, I applaud Scott’s portrayal of the time and place, which feels utterly lived in, testament to her scholarship and authorial skill. Besides her lost souls, she has the battlefield, the soldiers’ banter, the trenches, the mud, the postwar French towns trying to rebuild; all of it, rendered in breathtaking simplicity. Tens of thousands of soldiers died without a known grave, a mind-boggling tragedy which Scott has conveyed from many angles. Every note rings true, with the exception of the Blythe brothers’ company officers, who seem too lenient concerning certain lapses of discipline, on which the plot more or less depends. I think that’s forgivable, but I dislike the author’s occasional misdirection to give the reader false assumptions, while the characters, you find out later, knew the truth. That creates tension, but it’s an ungenerous trick.

Those are quibbles, however, when the narrative and the writing style take wings. I could cite many passages, but active description carries the day. Here’s one from Edie’s hotel in Arras, one place she’s gone on her search:

There are prints of Madonnas and saints all around the walls of this rented room and a black wooden crucifix is suspended above the headboard. It is wound around with a string of rosary beads and crumbling sprigs of heather. When she wakes in the night she can see the beads slowly rotating above. It looks like a bed in which an elderly relative has slowly died. She has spent enough nights lying awake in this awful bed trying to match the photograph silhouette of a broken-down town to the streets through which she has spent the day walking.

With words strung together like these, a thorough sense of place, and a story so deep and moving that it won’t let you go, The Poppy Wife is a superb novel. Warning: If the title and cover strike you as awkward, clichéd, or dumbed down (as they do me), don’t be put off. For the record, the British edition is titled The Photographer of the Lost, which makes more sense, as does the UK cover. I can think of several reasons Morrow repackaged the book, not least that they’re trying to position The Poppy Wife as women’s fiction. Is it Edie’s story or Harry’s? I don’t think it matters.

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

Two Shot: The Girls in the Picture

20 Monday Jan 2020

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Review: The Girls in the Picture, by Melanie Benjamin
Delacorte, 2018. 415 pp. $28

When would-be artist Frances Marion flees San Francisco for Los Angeles in 1914, the last thing she anticipates is falling in with the crowd of hopefuls knocking on the doors of those who produce “flickers,” as movies are popularly called. But Frances catches the bug too, and in a great stroke of luck, gains an introduction to Mary Pickford, the most beloved actress in America, who also has artistic control over her films. Luckier still, Mary and Frances take to one another on sight, and a famous partnership begins. With Marion as her screenwriter, Pickford will go on to even more dazzling heights, playing young girls in her famous blond curls and rosebud lips.

Director Marshall Neilan (far left), star Mary Pickford, screenwriter Frances Marion, September 1917, photographer unknown (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Frances’s first look at Hollywood may be idealized, but it sets the stage for what follows:

Far from being a barren cow town, the place seemed drenched in color, crimson and gold and purple and white flowers spilling out of every window box, embracing every streetlamp. I couldn’t stop gazing at the tall pepper trees, with their languid, lacy green leaves dripping with clusters of red berries, providing much-needed shade from a sun that rarely found a cloud behind which to hide — something this native San Franciscan thought she would never find tiresome. Orange groves dominated the mountainous landscape that sloped to the beckoning sea, the air so perfumed that I immediately craved the sweet, tangy fruit that I’d never really cared for before.

Naturally, La-La Land can’t remain milk and honey forever, with such large egos, salaries, and audiences in which to bask. And that is by no means the whole picture. As women at the peaks of their respective professions, Pickford and Marion become easy targets for jealousy and slander, with others waiting — hoping — for their fall, men in particular. The two friends often talk about such conniving men and vow they’ll never let a man come between them. Famous last words.

However, it’s not just the man-child Douglas Fairbanks who splits the friendship when he marries Mary, and whose powers of jealous manipulation know no limit. Within a few years, the advent of talkies overturns the silent screen, casting out those performers who can’t cope in the new medium (or are perceived incapable of it). Further, as producers consolidate their power—and the industry—they retain artistic control and subjugate their hired talent, women especially.

This history both enlivens The Girls in the Picture and undoes it. I like the behind-the-scenes action that describes how movies are made, for both the silent and sound eras. I’m also glad to learn how the studio system today got its start, and the how its rampant sexism has very old roots. But these events and themes, significant though they are, fail here to make a novel.

The narrative, though talky enough, rests on simplistic characterizations that bounce between two poles instead of bumping up against edges. In almost any scene, the reader may ask, will Mary be the girl who never had a proper childhood, and who grasps at her popularity to prop her up? Or will the generous, sensitive adult shine through for her friend Frances, with whom she shares an artistic outlook and ardent feminist sensibilities? As facts and viewpoints repeat themselves, the conflict plays out from A to B and back.

The story also seems too simple. Love happens at first sight, and so does hatred. Conflict lasts a few paragraphs, and just when you think, Now, we’re getting somewhere, the rift resolves somehow. Benjamin offers the “no,” but not the “furthermore,” maybe because the story must move on to the next script, the next year. Round about page 260, the threat that Fairbanks poses to the women’s friendship emerges, and for a while, the trouble percolates and deepens. But for some reason, Frances, who’s capable of holding her own with just about anybody, can never manage with Mary. Benjamin, who says that she has made up all the dialogue, seems unable to let her stars go.

Some of these problems may have to do with biographical fiction and its constraints, but there are other, more successful approaches to Hollywood, as with The Chaperone, about Louise Brooks, a lesser silent film star. The Girls in the Picture aspires to a more panoramic view, which is fine; in a different framework, that might work. But despite a large cast, this novel stays a two shot, Pickford and Marion, which poses limits, and their long internal monologues feel predictable and repetitive, especially Pickford’s. As for color, the cameos the jacket promises are similarly flat, except for that of the entirely self-absorbed lech, Louis B. Mayer.

The Girls in the Picture has whetted my interest in reading about early Hollywood history, so I’ll say that. If that’s what you’re looking for, maybe this book is for you; but I can’t recommend it as a novel.

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

Past Lives: Old Baggage

09 Monday Sep 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murder in Troubled Times: Beyond Absolution

27 Monday Nov 2017

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Review: Beyond Absolution, by Cora Harrison
Severn, 2017. 249 pp. $29

Cork, 1923. Father Dominic, a much-loved Capuchin friar, is found dead in the confessional at Holy Trinity Church. Someone has killed him with a weapon thin enough to pass through the grille separating penitent from confessor, and sharp and long enough to penetrate his brain through his listening ear. Reverend Mother Aquinas, who runs a convent school and knows everyone in Cork, grew up friends with Father Dominic and his brother, Lawrence, also in holy orders. Though respectful of Inspector Patrick Cashman, the detective assigned to the case, and aware that solving the murder is his job, the Reverend Mother brings her keen faculties and web of contacts to bear, hoping to aid the overworked inspector.

The first question is whether the late priest had heard too much–and, given how he died, the metaphor is inescapable. But the secrets of the confessional are never divulged, so there was no chance that Father Dominic betrayed a confidence and paid for it. Nevertheless, shortly before his death, he visited an up-and-coming antique shop and saw something there that agitated him. Since he was no collector–couldn’t be, considering his vow of poverty–why he went there raises more questions than it answers. What’s more, the owner of the antique shop, Peter Doyle, has a little explaining to do. Witnesses say they saw him at Holy Trinity at the time of the murder; but he says he wasn’t, and since he’s Protestant, he had no reason to go there.

However, there’s something about him that doesn’t quite square. A theatrical group that he runs, which is preparing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, contains a raft of people who seem to have plenty of money to spend, no matter what their occupation. What connection that has to the murder is anyone’s guess, but suffice to say that every cast member of the Mikado becomes a suspect. But what motive would they have to kill a much-loved priest?

Then again, no one is entirely beloved, and Father Dominic ventured into prisons to give the sacraments to incarcerated IRA soldiers. The agreement made the previous year to grant Ireland independence, minus the six northern counties, has pleased practically nobody, and the violence continues. Accordingly, the priest’s death becomes a political issue, as do the religious affiliations and family lineages of almost every character in the novel.

Auxiliaries and “Black and Tans” fought the IRA and earned the undying enmity of Irish nationalists (courtesy National Library of Ireland via Wikimedia Commons)

I like this aspect of Beyond Absolution. Harrison re-creates the mutual suspicion and prejudice that crops up in or lies beneath the surface of every human transaction. She betrays the loyalties to client, faith, class, or brand of nationalism and how they seep through life and color how people make decisions. You see divisions within the police, the educational system, and the church. Since the dominant ethic seems to be based on tradition, fear, and suspicion, you get the feeling that the sensitive, forward-thinking characters–the Reverend Mother, Inspector Cashman, and a few others–are trying to hold back the ocean. In another nice touch, the Reverend Mother once taught Cashman, so she has a personal stake in wanting him to succeed; likewise, she can recall how several other characters behaved as students of hers.

Gossip is the grease that makes this world go round, and even the telephone calls may not be private, as the Reverend Mother well knows:

There were, she supposed, other countries where the exchange operators took a number in silence and put you through, preserving an air of total anonymity about the process, but here in the city of Cork, that would have been considered discourteous. In Cork, it was assumed that everyone knew everyone else’s business. And the telephone exchange women did their best to add to that common pool of knowledge. Sensible people, keeping this in mind, spent the first minutes exchanging remarks about the weather and the state of the streets before moving on to matters that were more private.

As for the mystery, Harrison tells her story well and keeps you guessing–at least about most things. It’s a little too easy to tell the good guys and bad guys apart–as with Peter Doyle, the characterizations can be one-sided–and the antique-store crowd are a bad lot, which narrows the field quite a bit. You may not guess the killer’s identity, but the motive quickly becomes obvious. Sometimes, Harrison clumsily introduces facts she wants you to know or character background. At those moments, I felt I was being Told Something Important rather than being allowed to discover it naturally.

Still, I appreciate Harrison’s skill at re-creating an era, and I applaud her decision not to try to clean it up. The Troubles were a very violent time, and she gives a glimpse of why.

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

A Clever Puzzle: Dancing with Death

25 Monday Sep 2017

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Review: Dancing with Death, by Amy Myers
Severn, 2017. 215 pp. $29

It’s hard to dislike a novel that begins, “‘Galloping codfish, Kitty! What the dickens do you call that?’” This exclamation comes from Nell Drury, the chef–do not call her cook–at Wychbourne Court, ancestral home of the eighth Marquess Ansley and his somewhat quarrelsome family. It’s 1925, enough time after the Great War for the love of merriment to have retaken hold, though no one has forgotten the suffering and sacrifice. Nell, a former student of the great Escoffier at the Ritz-Carlton, if you please, has much on her plate. Most immediately she’s responsible for the hors d’oeuvres and two full meals at the soirée her employers are giving.

However, the festivities also include a chummy get-together with the ghosts said to inhabit Wychbourne, and since the place goes back centuries, there are quite a few. Actually, only one person believes that there are ghosts, but she happens to be Lord Ansley’s sister,the sort of dotty eccentric that no English manse can be without, especially in fiction. Lady Clarice has many more instructions for Chef Nell, because, you know, ghosts must eat too, or, at the very least, they derive pleasure from smelling and seeing their favorite foods. As a dutiful, loyal servant, Nell keeps her opinions of this to herself; all she knows is that the evening will be complicated.

How right she is. If you’ve ever read or seen a movie in the country-house mystery genre, you need no ouija board to know that someone will die during the ghost-klatsch; that this murder will have multiple suspects; and that Nell will take it upon herself to investigate, sometimes running afoul of the police, who somehow think that solving crime is their job. But if Myers’s bow to conventions is altogether predictable, how she handles them makes all the difference.

Dancing with Death is strongest in its plot, at which Myers excels. Without introducing hidden facts that the reader couldn’t possibly have guessed–a ploy we’ve all come across, despite its lack of generosity–Myers leaves more or less everything open to view. You know the enmities, alliances, and romances running through the household; you just don’t know who’s lying to protect whom until people revise their stories. Consequently, Nell never sees more than the reader does, and since she has to balance what to tell the Scotland Yard inspector against her loyalty to Wychbourne, she’s protecting people as well, which adds another layer of tension.

The occasional wit helps. As Nell observes while visiting an aristocratic neighbor who wishes to hire her for a party:

It was a stone-built residence looking bleakly ornate compared with Wychbourne Court. I’m here for you to witness how grand I am, it seemed to be saying to her. The large reception room where she was asked to wait did nothing to contradict this assessment. Gentlemen in military uniform glared down from every wall and their long-suffering wives smiled weakly at the painters. Nell wondered whether they ever got together with the Wychbourne Court ghosts.

I wish, though, that Dancing with Death had more wit beyond Nell’s mild oaths; “blithering beets,” and the like, clever once, get tiresome after a while. And though Myers keeps the narrative percolating, she pays little attention to character. Nell’s a capable diplomat, independent, and conscious of herself as a pioneer, a woman in a field dominated by men. That’s interesting, but Myers does little with it other than to mention it, repeatedly. Very little of her past (or anyone’s) appears, and her reflections are the trite type common to the genre: “Could X be lying? That could be dangerous. Then again, Nell owed it to the Ansleys.” You get the picture.

There’s also little to define the era as the 1920s other than a few songs, dances, styles of dress, and social attitudes. The war has left its mark, we’re told, but people don’t seem to walk around with it. One Ansley daughter dabbles in socialism, and her enlightened views about class do her credit, but I’m not buying her theory that her parents don’t really care about that stuff anymore. Even to think so, without any discussion, conflict, or evidence, seems like a retrospective view of that time rather than those years from the inside.

The foreign ministers of Germany, Britain, and France try to prevent war in Europe, October 1925, Locarno. From left, Gustav Stresemann, Austen Chamberlain, and Aristide Briand (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, via Bundesarchiv)

Should historical mysteries offer a deeper perspective? I think they should; certainly, the best do. One that comes to mind, of about the same length, is Chris Nickson’s Gods of Gold. Obviously, not every writer has to be like every other, and Dancing with Death has its charms. But I know which approach I prefer.

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

A Programme Too Full: Radio Girls

29 Monday May 2017

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Review: Radio Girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford
NAL, 2016. 367 pp. $16

Maisie Musgrave, a young woman down to her last tuppence, gets a secretarial job at the BBC, a newfangled and perhaps not entirely respectable organization in 1926. After all, what is radio, how does it work, and isn’t it improper to hear a disembodied voice? But, like the protagonist in this engaging, amusing novel, the BBC is about to spread its wings and soar. The real questions involve how bumpy the ride will be, and who will learn what along the way.

Maisie, who looks, feels, and acts like a doormat, could use a lift. Growing up in Toronto, she was bullied for much of her young life, labeled “Mousie Maisie” with no kindness, yet some accuracy. Maisie has no idea who her father was, except that his name is Edwin Musgrave, and he didn’t stay long. Her stagestruck mother, Georgina, has no use for her, and her grandparents want nothing to do with her. So she has come to London, for reasons not entirely clear, feeling somehow that England offers the roots she has never known.

Consequently, getting a job at the BBC, to Maisie a posh outfit where breeding and education matter above all, is more than a godsend–it’s a lifeline. And she clings to it with all her might, which, with experience, proves stronger than she’d ever have guessed.

The first BBC aerial, atop Selfridges, the Oxford Street department store, London, 1926 (courtesy “The Dawn of the Wireless in the U.K.”)

To me, this is the best part of Radio Girls: the coming-of-age story; a young woman learning to ask questions rather than keep the silence she’s been taught; the office politics, invariably charged with sexism; and the working of a radio institution as it invents itself. Stratford excels at all this, and the narrative clips along, as Maisie learns the city, and about life:

The [tram] ride was long and she had to stand, but she didn’t mind. The car had a rhythmic sway, the bell tinkled happily, and one never knew when a sudden screech or thrust would disrupt the song, jolting them all out of their morning meditation. It was a kind of jazz, the only kind she could afford, and so she embraced the fizz of cigarette smoke, the lingering smell of coffee, and the crinkle of newspapers that added to the hum and percussion. It wasn’t stealing to read the paper over a man’s shoulder, gleaning nuggets of the world and enjoying the smell of Palmolive shaving cream. And she watched London unfold before her.

The chief conflict lies between the BBC’s director-general, Reith, and Hilda Matheson, who runs the section called Talks, and whose protegée Maisie eventually becomes. Reith is a Puritan who hates controversy or anything his nineteenth-century mind can’t wrap itself around, which is just about everything Hilda lives for. He’d fire her, if he could, but she has powerful friends, and the Talks programs–short discussions, presentations, or debates on every conceivable topic–generate tons of fan mail and expand the BBC’s audience.

I like this story, and despite my criticisms, I think Radio Girls is worth reading. Nevertheless, Stratford adds more, and that’s where she gets into trouble. The prologue, which dangles like the useless appendage it is, suggests a thriller, and yes, that subplot emerges about two-thirds of the way through, late in the game and superfluous. To be fair, the thriller part has life to it, with a couple famous figures contributing zestful dialogue and presence. But it’s too earnest by half–a screed against Fascism–and utterly improbable, whereas the rest I believe implicitly.

Besides, I’m more interested in Maisie and her struggles than in Hilda Matheson, her boss. Stratford explains in her Author’s Note that Matheson, a real historical figure, fascinates her. I agree that Matheson’s a worthy subject, perhaps for a future novel, but dragging her connection to MI5 and the clumsy thriller resolution into Radio Girls seems a stretch, at best.

I’d have also liked to see a firmer grounding in the era. Though characters talk about the Great War and the politics of the Twenties and early Thirties, you don’t see them. Stratford conveys Maisie’s poverty with great vividness, but London has no wounded veterans holding tin cups on street corners, no smog or grit to blight the air or the soul. Reith recites the mantra of a man from his time and social class, but Radio Girls doesn’t show what he’s talking about; it’s all abstract.

Reith’s a problem in himself, like the other men in this book. They have no inner lives and no contradictions, only flat surfaces, and though Stratford offers clever observations about them, the men are simply that, observed. Though I detest their sexism and what they stand for, and I cheer for Maisie and Hilda to go onward and upward, as they both like to say, I wish Radio Girls delivered more than the obvious.

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