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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.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: The Chaperone

21 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: The Chaperone, by Laura Moriarty
Riverhead, 2012. 371 pp. $27

The summer of 1922, fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks can’t wait to leave Wichita, Kansas, for a month-long New York tryout with an avant-garde dance company. Given the political and social tenor of Wichita, Louise’s parents seem unusually liberal and open-minded, but, to their daughter’s disgust, they give out that they’re looking for a respectable woman to chaperone her. Cora Carlisle, mother of two sons about to enter college, volunteers for the job, and the Brookses accept, while making it seem as if they’re doing her a favor. As for Louise, she promises to be absolutely horrible:

But there was no mistaking the contempt in the girl’s eyes. It was the way a child looked at the broccoli that must be eaten before dessert, the room that must be cleaned before playtime. It was a gaze of dread, made all the more punishing by the girl’s youth and beauty, her pale skin and pouting lips. Cora felt herself blushing. She had not been the subject of this sort of condescension in years.

However, that’s not half of it. No sooner have the two travelers boarded their train than Cora begins to sense what she’s up against. Louise has read all the books Cora has, and then some. She’s even brought Schopenhauer along, which would seem pure affectation, except that she’s marked passages where the philosopher’s observations move her. Unlike Cora, Louise disdains Prohibition, wears no corset (but plenty of makeup), and sees nothing wrong with letting men flirt with her, some of whom are old enough to be her father. Cora assumes that naive, inexperienced Louise is merely acting out, an adolescent unaware of consequences, and that her parents have been negligent in raising her. That they have, but she’s no innocent, nor do appearances fool her, as when she wonders how someone as dull and restrained as Cora could have attracted a man as handsome and successful as her husband. Naturally, the remark cuts the older woman to the quick, especially because, as the reader soon learns, Cora’s marriage isn’t what it seems.

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Cinemaphiles may recognize Louise Brooks as a star of the silent screen; her bobbed hair helped make that style a symbol of the 1920s, and she was the film incarnation of the flapper. So in casting her opposite Cora, Moriarty has drawn the battle lines, for Cora is a fictional representation of a Midwestern Progressive who fought for woman suffrage but has the social and sexual prejudices common to her time and class. At first, therefore, The Chaperone promises to be a funny, sharply observed clash of outlook, to which the splendid sequences in New York, full of feeling and atmosphere, lend zest. Then, to Moriarty’s further credit, the narrative takes off to a higher level altogether.

Cora, it turns out, was an orphan, raised by a Catholic home for abandoned girls, and shipped by train westward, traveling station to station until someone liked the look of her and took her in. Several novelists have written about these trains, and no wonder (see, for example, My Notorious Life); what a heart-breaking story, and Cora’s had me cringing in pain. But the surprise of The Chaperone is that it’s not just Louise who’s looking forward to a taste of freedom in New York. Cora, who has been dutiful all her life, has undertaken to search for her birth mother, and though many obstacles get in her way, she won’t take no for an answer. She could never explain this to Louise, but of the two of them, she winds up having the more satisfying, successful trip.

The Chaperone is a wonderful book, beautifully written, the characters well drawn, even the minor ones. Moriarty thrusts them boldly into situations from which they don’t always emerge proud of themselves, and I like that–except when her earnestness gets the better of her. For instance, when Cora’s horrified to attend a theatrical performance where black and white sit together and the performers are African-American, the author immediately drops in a scene in which a more tolerant Cora talks to black activists in the 1970s. It’s as if Moriarty fears that we won’t like her heroine anymore and has to rescue her.

If there’s one problem with The Chaperone, it’s that discursiveness, the desire to tell all of Cora’s life. I don’t think Moriarty needs to, and the book runs at least fifty pages too long. They’re not bad pages, but they lack the substance of the rest, and the narrative has the feel of looking in vain for a strong ending. I think the story could have stopped years earlier, letting the reader imagine the rest. But still, it’s a terrific book.

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

Self-Flagellation As an Art Form: The Photographer’s Wife

15 Monday Feb 2016

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Review: The Photographer’s Wife, by Suzanne Joinson
Bloomsbury, 2016. 334 pp. $26

Eleven-year-old Prudence Ashton has been dragged by her self-absorbed father, Charles, to Jerusalem in 1920, with no thought to her happiness, formal education, safety, amusement, or social isolation. (Prue’s mother is somewhere back in England, perhaps institutionalized; Prue fondly remembers her storytelling, though also her brutalities.) But to Ashton, Prue’s a nuisance, an encumbrance. The only thing that matters is his lunatic scheme to remake the ancient city along British lines, blowing up whatever’s in the way, to create parks, green spaces–desert? What desert?–and orderly neighborhoods. His colonial nightmare might be funny, if people weren’t dying because they oppose the regime that dreamed it up.

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

British soldiers search Arabs during anti-Jewish pogroms, April 1920 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Meanwhile, Prue roams the city almost at will, lonely but fascinated. Jerusalem’s sights, sounds, colors, smells, and myriad faces draw her in, and she understands the city better than any of the English trying to bulldoze it. Prue’s only companions are Ihsan, a kindly man who tutors her in Arabic (for which she has a knack), and Eleonora, a beautiful, severely depressed Englishwoman. Like Ihsan, Eleonora’s husband is an Arab nationalist, which pulls Prue into witnessing and unwittingly participating in underground political activity, for which people are being butchered like cattle.

A pilot shows up to work for Ashton, but his real motive is to pry Eleonora away from her “mixed-race” marriage, which to him is “wrong.” Like the other Englishmen in this novel, he’s completely out of touch, expecting Eleonora to agree and takes it hard when she doesn’t. On the other hand, her husband stays away from her for weeks at a time, photographing British brutalities. He wants a child, but she’s too scared to have one; her mother died giving birth to her.

If you’re thinking these people are a dreary, listless bunch, you’re right, and then some. What kept me going were Joinson’s terrific prose and her enviable gift for creating character. For instance, here’s the pilot, recalling his school days:

Willie had experienced a series of vivid fantasies in which a man, for some reason Italian, would magically arrive at helpful moments and offer to be his intermediario. This middle-man, a fixer or wizard, would plant himself between Willie and the rest of the world and sort everything out. He charmed the loathsome housemaster, tricked bullies, coaxed his father back from his ships, and then, when his father’s presence was altogether too much, cast him away again for four years and a day.

But, like Willie, I find nothing to hold onto in the world of this novel, much of which takes place in England in 1937, when Prue has her own child to ignore.

I sometimes believe that we are designed to betray the people we love, just as sometimes we hand everything over, like a bright unclipped purse, or a secret part of our body, to a stranger

I disagree with Prue. I don’t think her life illustrates betrayal. Rather, I see criminal neglect, sadism, manipulation, and craven silence, perpetrated by monsters with whom I can’t identify. As the chief victim, Prue’s a born masochist, which gets very tiresome–Say something, damn it–but of course, she doesn’t. Masochists don’t. But after a while, when all she gets is more and more punishment, to which her silences grow longer and longer, I want to scream. Philandering, abusive husband, jealous of her artistic success as a sculptor? Sure; why not? Government agents pursuing her for reasons they refuse to divulge, in ways that seem flagrantly illegal? Oh, all right.

The Photographer’s Wife claims to be about politics, but I’m not sure what the message is. Part of my confusion comes from the narrative style, which chops the story into irritatingly unfinished bits set in different decades, so that it’s hard to get a coherent picture. Maybe Joinson adopted the mixed-up order to keep a secret, but if so, it’s a gimmick that doesn’t work. The secret seems decidedly weak and anticlimactic, yet the narrative uses it to take an unearned about-face. Even odder is that this turnabout has to do with German persecution of Jews in the late 1930s, when the novel fails to mention its Arab counterpart in 1920. But maybe the real problem politically is with Prue, who’s a total airhead about anything except art. Just as in 1920, she understood nothing of the dangerous currents wracking Palestine, in 1937, she neither knows nor cares what’s happening to the world–except she’s no longer a child, and so has no excuse.

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

Portrait of an Era: Villa America

13 Sunday Sep 2015

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Review: Villa America, by Liza Klaussmann
Little, Brown, 2015. 426 pp. $26

Sara and Gerald Murphy, according to one contemporary, “had invented summer on the Riviera,” a remark that would have made them cringe. But for the American expatriate literary set in the 1920s, the Murphys weren’t just the life of the party; they were the party. Their ongoing celebration at Villa America, their splendid house at Cap d’Antibes, was a coveted invitation and, later, itself a literary subject. F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to Sara and Gerald (and thought, mistakenly, he’d written their characters); Ernest Hemingway wrote them into The Garden of Eden, a novel published posthumously; and Archibald MacLeish modeled the main characters of J.B., his verse-drama retelling of the Book of Job, after the Murphys.

Cap d'Antibes, 2006 (Courtesy Gilbert Bochenek via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Cap d’Antibes, 2006 (Courtesy Gilbert Bochenek via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

That last reference tells you that Sara and Gerald suffered great tragedy, a metaphor for the golden years that came to a thudding end. But, as Villa America points out, their story mirrored the time in other ways. The beauty they revealed in the everyday, the ideas and discussions they encouraged, and their generosity toward their guests stimulated both passion and excess, the triumph and ugliness of the Twenties.

Klaussmann bends her considerable talent toward this ambitious subject. She re-creates the setting, the ambience, the devil-may-care, the rivalries, and the outsize personalities, drawing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway with particular zest and color. My favorite part of the book, though, was the story of Sara’s and Gerald’s furtive courtship, and how these two lonely people who knew they were different from their horrible families managed to find one another and overcome parental objections to marry. That section reads like the music of isolation, yearning for connection, and the joy and relief at finding it.

In fact, music plays a role. There’s a splendid scene where Sara and her family attend the London premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which had caused such a scandal in Paris. The ballet makes her realize what it is she’s been missing, what she wants:

She wanted to be down on the stage with the dancers, feel her rib cage meet the planks, feel the sickly ache of having her breath knocked out. She was reminded of the first time she’d tasted blood in her mouth (a skating accident), the surprise that it tasted good, rich, tangy on her tongue, the even more startling revelation that she wanted to taste it again.

Naturally, no one else in Sara’s family understands the ballet or what it was trying to say. But she senses that Gerald would have, and from that moment, she feels less alone.

For me, however, the rest of Villa America went downhill, and I found myself plodding through. From the moment the Murphys settle in on the Riviera, each chapter, which covers a particular year, feels like an episode. Many have tension, some are entertaining, but they seem to go around in circles. There are parties at which the Fitzgeralds behave like spoiled children, enraging everyone. Hemingway, a charismatic lout, repays the Murphys’ generous hospitality by treating Gerald with contempt and trying to seduce Sara. And the cycle repeats.

I like stargazing, to a point. But there has to be a unifying thread, or the narrative never gets beyond that, and the one Klaussmann chose doesn’t work for me. Gerald has doubts about his sexual orientation, and though how he deals with this stunts him, his struggle remains largely isolated. I wish I could say more without giving away too much, but I wanted a confrontation, a reckoning, and there wasn’t one, something of an anticlimax.

As a result, Villa America remains for me a series of social situations that contain both beauty and ugliness, sometimes side by side. That’s life, it’s accurate, but it’s not a novel. The joy in the beginning and the tragedy at the end (unfortunately revealed in a prologue; why?) seem like two towers with no connecting wall. There’s a lot of dancing and drinking and back-stabbing taking place between them, but for me, that wasn’t enough.

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

Homage to Tom Jones: The Foundling Boy

29 Monday Jun 2015

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With this post, I’m starting a summer schedule, in which I’ll review one book a week.

Review: The Foundling Boy, by Michel Déon
Translated from the French by Julian Evans
Gallic, 2013 [Gallimard, 1975] 415 pp. $16

Halfway through this poignant, often hilarious tale, the protagonist, Jean Arnaud, comes across a truth I wish I’d taken to heart at age seventeen, as he does:

There was, then, no shame in being young, not the way adults wanted to make you believe, saying every time you advanced the slightest opinion, ‘Wait till you’ve grown up a little. . . . When you’ve done what we did, then you can speak.’ . . . [I]t was no crime to make mistakes, to give in to your enthusiasms, to be happy or unhappy because a girl made you suffer.

Jean imbibes this lesson after reading Stendhal, who’d have enjoyed the young man’s amorous adventures and the gentle irony with which Déon tells of his growing up. But this picaresque novel also harks back to Henry Fielding’s rollicking eighteenth-century masterpiece, Tom Jones. Both begin with a foundling child of mysterious origins who fits no societal niche and will have to make his fortune through his gifts of character, which turn out to be considerable.

However, The Foundling Boy takes place in France between the world wars, not eighteenth-century England, and the particular atmosphere in which people try to recover from old wounds offers a perfect forum in which to observe how people enjoy life (or don’t). In this, the novel has a distinctly French sensibility, by which I mean that the characters who succeed are those who know better than to take themselves too seriously. I think this notion is what the French, at their best, have given Western civilization.

Once the basket bearing a newborn infant is left on a doorstep belonging to a childless couple, caretakers of a Norman estate, there’s little plot to speak of. But don’t worry. Episode quickly follows episode, and Jean gets into scrape after scrape, portrayed with wit, charm, and keen observation. Most of the story takes place in Normandy and Provence, so if you like France, or can imagine or have experienced the pleasures of either place–cider and ancient greenery in one; warm colors and aromatic herbs in the other–you’ll like this book.

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Postcard of Marseilles, 1920s (Courtesy Travel and Tourism Provence).

Sometimes, the omniscient narrator takes time out to tell you who’s important to remember, and who isn’t, as if Déon were your mentor. The role fits, for practically everybody wants to mold Jean to his or her own purposes–for his own good, of course. His adoptive father wants him to be a gardener, like himself, and to stay close to home; a con man tries to teach him to be a con man, and roam the world; and Ernst, a German youth he meets on a bicycle trip to Italy, insists that fascism offers the only useful, honest path in life.

All this is ripe for satire, and Déon doesn’t miss a trick. Especially as a young boy, Jean has no experience with which to filter out the useful advice from noise or what, to the reader, appears the counselor’s self-interest. Jean’s not weak–far from it–just green, but that constantly gets him into trouble. And as he navigates through his difficulties, what’s personal to Jean is also political and social commentary about 1930s Europe, though he doesn’t always know that. For instance, he can’t figure out why Ernst, who seems to laugh a lot and be good-natured, should take himself and his country so seriously, especially to spout hateful, vaguely frightening ideas from a book called Mein Kampf. Jean’s puzzlement reflects a common attitude of the time, one explanation for why so many Europeans underestimated Hitler.

Originally published in 1975, The Foundling Boy is a classic in France, though only recently translated into English, as with its sequel, The Foundling’s War. Déon belongs to the Academie Française, but he’s now also part of my personal pantheon: a great writer I’d never heard of.

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

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

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Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:

Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.

Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

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