Tag Archives: 1946

Love Letter to Pulp Fiction: Paperback Jack

20 Monday Feb 2023

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Review: Paperback Jack, by Loren D. Estleman
Forge, 2022. 224 pp. $27

Jacob Heppleman returns to New York from World War II in 1946, thinking the world has changed beyond recognition and wondering whether he has a place in it. A hack writer for pulp magazines, he quickly discovers that these markets have dried up.

But his agent has taken the liberty, while Jack was in the army, of selling one of his novels to Blue Devil Books, for publication in paperback. Cover approved and everything, with the promise of an advance against royalty Jacob sorely needs—though his name now appears as Jack Holly.

September 1929 issue of Black Mask, featuring the first serial episode of The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, quintessential hard-boiled fiction. Illustration of detective Sam Spade by Henry C. Murphy (courtesy Popular Publications Inc. via Wikimedia Commons; copyright lapsed, therefore in public domain)

Since Jacob never signed a publishing contract—never even heard a whisper of the deal—this is patently fraudulent (and perhaps incredible). And since he rejects the made-up moniker and the anti-Semitism that makes it commercially advisable—what did he fight for, after all?—he has no intention of permitting his book to appear with Blue Devil. Paperbacks? Ugh. Hardcover’s where it’s at, and Jacob intends to become a “real” writer, learn his profession the proper way.

However, when the only place that will pay him for his words turns out to be a second-rate tabloid that hires him as a rewrite man—no byline, low salary—he wonders how he’ll make a living. And when he takes a writing class under the GI Bill, hoping to nurture his art, the teacher’s a nasty, arrogant 4F who has it in for veterans (natch), which thwarts Jacob’s plans for study.

The class does help him in one way, though. He meets Ellen Curry, a beautiful redhead who’s hoping to improve her writing so that she can find a secretarial job.

Eventually, Jacob agrees to become Jack Holly to the public, and Robin Elk, Blue Devil’s British publisher, promises that he can’t go wrong. Jacob, though he respects Elk’s war record—he survived a German POW camp—thinks the man has a slimy side and doesn’t trust him.

Jacob also insists that if he’s to write gritty crime stories, he needs to meet a gangster or three. Elk sends him to his star illustrator and convicted felon, Phil Scarpetti, whom Jacob befriends (no easy task), and from whom he learns a great deal, thanks, in part, to a few crucial introductions.

The jacket flap calls Paperback Jack a thriller. That’s news to me; only intermittently does the narrative’s “no—and furthermore” push our hero to the brink. Yes, there’s a gangster who wants a cut from Jacob’s royalties in return for his advice, but he never feels that threatening.

More significantly, a congressional hue and cry in 1952 against the immorality peddled to American youth by paperback writers and publishers ropes in Phil and Jacob and could wreck their careers. I love those scenes, outrageous assaults on First Amendment rights and human decency that read like House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. But I still don’t think “thriller” because of them.

Nevertheless, Paperback Jack is a wonderful book, a delightfully evocative rendering of hard-boiled fiction and its practitioners in the 1950s. And as you would expect—demand—from such a story, Estleman has the language, culture, and attitudes down cold. From the opening lines, in which Jacob admires a hip, slick, and cool typewriter in a pawnshop window, you know you’re in the hands of a master:

The typewriter—for that’s all it was, despite the trimmings—compared to his old gray Royal standard like a spaceship parked next to a hay wagon. In a pawnshop window it was absurdly out of place, surrounded by egg-beaters and pocket watches, bouquets of fountain pens, a Chock full o’ Nuts coffee can filled with wire-rimmed spectacles tangled inextricably like paper clips, a full set of the World Book Encyclopedia (outdated emphatically by events in Munich and Yalta). It looked proud and disdainful, a prince in exile.
And it spoke to him.

Estleman, last seen in these pages with Billy Gashade, writes propulsive, unexpected prose that actually means something and doesn’t sell out to cuteness. Consider this thought of Jacob’s, as he struggles to find his feet: “The army spent six weeks training a man to act on reflex, without thinking, and no time at all retraining him to use his brain when the crisis was over.” A concise description of a veteran having trouble fitting into civilian life.

Despite all that, the characterizations can be hit-and-miss. Jacob’s memorable, if opaque in spots; for instance, I don’t quite believe his Jewishness, and I wonder if this tough-guy writer has been rendered as too emotionally remote. Ellen seems at times a male fantasy. I wish the narrative showed more of her life separate from Jacob’s, though she does have strong opinions, a mind of her own. But the supporting cast is first-rate, starting with Phil, who steals most scenes in which he appears, and Elk, the smarmy publisher, whom Jacob never entirely warms to.

Paperback Jack is a love letter to a style of fiction and the authors who produced it. I was looking forward to reading it and am glad to say it’s as advertised. Enjoy.

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

Matchmaking and Mayhem: A Rogue’s Company

11 Monday Oct 2021

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Review: A Rogue’s Company, by Allison Montclair
Minotaur, 2021. 337 pp. $27

London in 1946 is a city struggling to get on its feet again, amid perennial food shortages, all-too-slow postwar reconstruction, and grief over losses. What a perfect time and place for the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, a fledgling business devoted to repopulating a bloodied world.

Iris Sparks, one of its two principals, accustomed to tight spaces and violent men, persuades her partner, (Mrs.) Gwendolyn Bainbridge, war widow, to receive martial arts training. London has mean streets, after all; men are men; and Sparks and Bainbridge have paired up on more than one amateur criminal investigation, so you never know when a well-placed karate chop may come in handy.

Royal Artillery searchlights form part of the Victory Parade, London, June 1946 (courtesy Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

No one could provide a more deserving target than Lord Bainbridge, Gwen’s bully of a father-in law, who has just returned from Africa, where he has mining interests. Technically, Gwen’s a member of the board of directors, or should be, having inherited her late husband’s shares. But Lord Bainbridge has taken custody of that inheritance, because his son’s death sent Gwen into a psychological tailspin, and, by court order, a psychiatrist must declare her competent before she may assert control over her assets. That ruling also applies to her seven-year-old son, whom her father-in-law intends to pack off to the same brutal boarding school inflicted on the boy’s father — and Gwen can do nothing to stop this.

A Rogue’s Company takes a minute to percolate the mystery, but no worries, there. Iris and Gwen are characters you’ll enjoy, with wit and verve to spare, and present a contrast in their origins and social views. Both must negotiate their class differences, not only with each other, but their respective friends, and though I would have liked to see more uncertainty in them, questioning whether their connection will last, they’re an interesting mix. Their bond feels genuine. Ironically, neither of them is married, though they have admirers. Gwen still mourns her husband, but you get the idea that she’s in no hurry to become intimate with anybody again.

They do diverge in their toleration for danger. (Hint: Iris, who seems to have been an intelligence operative, craves it.) However, neither fears to upset convention, as when an importunate board member of Bainbridge, Limited, tries to pry into Gwen’s “absence,” the time during which she received psychological treatment. To ward him off, she replies that she went to prison. Why? he asks, astonished. She killed a man, she says. Why? “For asking too many personal questions.” To his credit, the board member laughs; so did I.

Still, you know that the menace circling the Right Sort Marriage Bureau will erupt into action. And when a man’s found dead near the Livingstone Club, where colonials go to drink and disport themselves, the game’s afoot. Before they’re done, financial shenanigans, a kidnapping, and much listening-in on conversations will take place.

The narrative doesn’t take itself too seriously — one of its charms — yet there’s content alongside the entertainment. The story delves a little into race prejudice, gender roles and expectations, and the intersection of pride and violence, treading lightly, to be sure. Sparks and Bainbridge have something to them, in other words, and aren’t merely the framework for a mystery. Montclair’s not in too much of a hurry, and I like that.

I also like the writing, willing to linger on emotional moments and offer physical description with psychological resonance. Here’s one example, as when Iris is driven past Kensington High Street, Kensington Gore, and onto Kensington Road:

Streets are like spies, she thought. They passed through where you live, changing identities according to local customs, and disappear without notice. She tried to remember what a gore was. Something topographical, vaguely triangular, but she couldn’t help imagining the neighborhood steeped in blood every time she traveled through it. She wondered if anyone else made that connection, or if it had just become another name without meaning over time.

The novel (and I) could have done without the prologue — what else is new? — and a couple loose ends affix themselves with perhaps too much ease. One or two of the nastier characters soften a tad, maybe in ways they shouldn’t. I’m also skeptical that Sparks, despite her background, can be so blasé about crime scenes; I think even the hardest-boiled detective (which she isn’t) would at least wince. But A Rogue’s Company, the third installment in the Sparks and Bainbridge series, is an engrossing, delightful book, well worth your time.

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

Island Idyll: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

08 Monday Feb 2021

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Review: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows
Random House/Dial, 2008. 290 pp. $17

Early 1946, Juliet Ashton, a British journalist and author of lighthearted essays, tires of her book tour and finds little inspiration in London, where (male) gossip columnists and pundits resent her success. She’s also looking for Mr. Right and, at age thirty-two, despairs of finding him — or even knowing who he’d be, if she tripped over him in broad daylight.

Intrigue comes via letter: A man on the island of Guernsey has acquired a book, second-hand, that once belonged to Juliet, who left her name and address inside the front cover. Since the Germans occupied the island during the recent war, no bookshops exist there any longer; and since he likes the book, selected essays by Charles Lamb, could Miss Ashton please give him the name of a London bookshop that could sell him more? And, by the way, she might like to know that, partly because of her old book, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came into existence.

Girls evacuated from the Channel Islands in 1940 to Marple, Cheshire, try on clothes and shoes donated by America (courtesy Ministry of Information and Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, this piques Juliet’s interest, so she writes back, sparking an avid correspondence between the several members of the literary society and herself. Meanwhile, Juliet writes and receives other letters — from the publisher (also a friend), his sister (another friend), an obnoxious American who’s courting her, and other Guernsey residents who don’t belong to the literary society but have opinions about it, and the participants, they must share. Many of these acquaintanceships cross. To no surprise, Juliet comes to believe — hope — that her next book will revolve around the German occupation of the island.

I usually avoid epistolary novels, but this one manages to work, chiefly because the milk of human kindness runs like a river through its pages, and I enjoy the portraits of the island eccentrics. They have names like Isola and Dawsey, and there’s a fellow with a more commonplace moniker but singular taste — he’s read only one book in his life, by Marcus Aurelius, and his friends show great patience every time the society meets, when he lectures them about it.

Humor peppers the letters, as with Juliet’s publisher’s remark about her American suitor: “He’s all charm and oil, and he gets what he wants. It’s one of his few principles.” Or Juliet’s observation that, because Charles Lamb taught Leigh Hunt’s youngest daughter how to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, “You naturally want to learn everything you can about a man like that.”

You may have concluded by now that the authors have striven for an Austenesque touch, and you’d be right. (Austen’s books also make a cameo appearance.) As a series of vignettes about good-hearted characters, Guernsey succeeds, and though at times treacle threatens, the narrative mostly avoids that pitfall. If you’re looking for an edge, you won’t find it here, but there’s longing and pain to leaven the story.

Some epistolary novels suffer from contrivance, particularly the looseness with which the entries logically connect, but that doesn’t bother me here. If you read Guernsey, don’t expect high stakes or a gripping storyline; the significant questions are too mundane, as in, will Juliet find a writing subject for her book and, in the bargain, true love?

Nothing wrong with that, but we’re talking light entertainment, purely. Guernsey doesn’t take itself too seriously, and therein lies its charm. Perhaps because letters say only so much — or these letters do—I don’t find Juliet a full, memorable character, so her concerns don’t compel me. But they don’t have to; characters like Isola, who makes herbal potions that everyone politely avoids, dabbles in phrenology, and fashions herself a would-be Miss Marple, carry the load, such as it is. Unfortunately, the American suitor is a caricature of the rich, narcissistic male; his opposite, a central figure of island life deported by the Germans for wartime acts of resistance, reads more like an ideal than a real person. The minor characters, consequently, steal the show.

For the most part, Guernsey capably straddles that perilous territory between humor and hideousness, offering a glimpse of the Occupation, in seemingly different version from its Continental counterparts. Maybe the authors airbrush a few things, but in the main, I believe their account. I do wish they hadn’t introduced a French refugee incarcerated at Ravensbrück, who seems to need only a few months on the island, among new friends, to become whole enough to cope. Sure.

But these are quibbles. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society makes fun reading, a short, not-too-sweet tale of warmth and humor.

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

She Beats the Boys at Their Own Game: Spitfire

03 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: Spitfire, by M. L. Huie
Crooked Lane, 2020. 320 pp. $27

June 1946 marks about a year since Olivia Nash’s war ended, but peace hasn’t reached her yet, and may never. Living in a vodka bottle, behind on her rent for her London flat, Livy’s stuck in a proofreading job at a third-rate newspaper, which she’s unlikely to keep much longer. Wartime memories plague her like the Furies, but she can’t even tell anyone or share her stories, for what she did was very hush-hush: She parachuted into France as a secret agent and fought with the Resistance. The Germans nicknamed her Spitfire.

Most people would find proofreading dull after those exploits, but for Livy, it’s killing her. She’s furious and bereft, and nothing can assuage the pain. However, just when she’s at her lowest, a man with an aristocratic bearing and an air of the skirt-chaser tracks her down, offering a job in “journalism.” Livy suspects it’s an elaborate ploy of seduction, but she has nothing left to lose, so she goes to the address on the man’s business card. And when her would-be employer, Ian Fleming, pushes the Official Secrets Act form across his desk, Livy signs. She won’t be writing or reporting; she’ll be spying.

Old Admiralty Building, London, where Ian Fleming worked for Naval Intelligence during World War II, as it appeared in 2010 (courtesy Tim Gage, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons)

Regrets follow. Fleming tells her that the Frenchman who betrayed her and their group leader, whom she loved, belongs to a network very much alive and kicking. The British want the names of agents in the network, as do the Soviets and Americans, and her assignment is to go to Paris and obtain the list. Livy wants nothing to do with the traitor, let alone aid his prospects for employment by His Majesty’s Secret Service. But she accepts the job all the same (otherwise, there wouldn’t be a novel), whereupon Fleming sends her to charm school for two weeks, to file down her sass and her Lancashire manners and accent.

Those scenes are a lot of fun. Rest assured that our heroine will learn how to drink tea properly and mingle with diplomats, but plenty of sass remains. In Paris, she meets an American agent to whom she’s attracted, but that’s a trap, so she turns down his repeated offers to work together. When he complains that they both want the same thing, so why not? Livy retorts, “Really now, me mum raised me right.”

Another pleasure of Spitfire is the story. “No — and furthermore” blooms on almost every page, it seems, and bears lasting fruit. Double-crosses (or, shall we say, shifting alliances) continually force Livy to scramble, and, as a result, she gets in and causes plenty of trouble. She makes mistakes, sometimes bad ones, but her gifts for tradecraft and her extraordinary courage carry her through. The boys may think she’s just a pretty nonentity, but a few of them wind up on their fat behinds, sometimes literally.

Huie spends little ink on scenery, just enough to give a flavor of postwar London and Paris. Sometimes I wanted specific rather than generic descriptions, but dialogue and action do the work, and Livy’s voice is irresistible:

Livy assumed [the door lock] would be of a certain quality — perhaps tougher to spring than one in an average flat. Still, burglary had been on the curriculum at the SOE camp, and she’d picked more than a few locks in her day, though never while wearing a tight satin dress in a hallway in one of the best hotels in the world — but there had to be a first time for everything.

I don’t understand why Livy likes the American agent; then again, she’s shown poor judgment in her life about men. I’m also not convinced by a particular, crucial double-cross, despite the amount of space that the narrative gives to explain it. On a pickier note, I can’t stand the word impact as a verb — it’s business-speak — and I doubt very much whether Englishmen and -women of 1946 would have used it. But pickiness aside, I enjoyed Spitfire, and I think many readers would too.

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

Victors and Vanquished: The Translation of Love

06 Monday Feb 2017

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Review: The Translation of Love, by Lynne Kutsukake
Doubleday, 2016. 318 pp. $26

Before the Second World War, thirteen-year-old Aya Shimamura and her parents lived in British Columbia, and though they weren’t rich, they had each other and enough to get buy–a house, a little land to farm, a community. But when war came, the government shipped them to an internment camp in the interior, confiscated their property, and drafted Aya’s father to help build the Trans-Canada Highway:

They gave him a pick to dig out the boulders and a shovel to scrape at the earth–only the white foremen could set the dynamite–and they paid him twenty-five cents an hour because, after all, this was Canada where they did not believe in slave labor. . . . But then they deducted the amount he owed for his food and bunk in the road camp, and because he had a wife and child, they further docked his pay to help cover the cost of their internment in a ghost-town camp in the interior mountains that no one had ever heard of.

Matters only get worse. Aya’s mother dies, and in 1946, her father must choose between moving east of the Rockies or “returning” to Japan, the country Aya has never seen. Grieving and distraught, her father signs the paper acquiescing to their deportation, and so they travel to Tokyo, seat of the postwar American occupation, led by General Douglas MacArthur.

From this riveting, heart-breaking premise comes an uneven, scattered novel that nevertheless gives off sparks. You just know that Aya, a quiet, troubled child whose only defense against her father’s (or anyone’s) attacks is to shut down even further, is headed for pain and isolation. And so it happens. Her schoolmates, brutal at the best of times, turn viciously on the shy newcomer, who struggles to learn their ways and routines and to understand their rapid, idiomatic Japanese. Most important, however, as native to the victor’s country–they mistake her for American-born–she’s both the object of envy and a traitor.

A licensed brothel that the Japanese opened for U.S. servicemen, hoping to protect the rest of the female population. MacArthur later closed all licensed brothels (Courtesy Yokosuka City Council, via Wikimedia Commons)

A licensed brothel that the Japanese opened for U.S. servicemen, hoping to protect the rest of the female population. MacArthur later closed all licensed brothels (Courtesy Yokosuka City Council, via Wikimedia Commons).

Kutsukake excels at portraying these cultural divides and ambivalent feelings, which she casts from various perspectives. There’s Matt, an American soldier of Japanese descent who translates the carloads of letters addressed to MacArthur from Japanese of every walk of life, containing gifts, advice, praise, or, most usually, appeals to help trace such-and-such a person or aid in small business matters. Matt takes his job seriously, much to his colleagues’ amusement, because they all know that MacArthur is unlikely to read them and surely won’t act on them. But Matt understands their desperation, pride, and sense of shame, and he feels guilty wearing an American uniform, especially when many soldiers behave badly toward the Japanese, at worst, trading food to a starving population in return for sexual favors.

Then there’s Fumi, a classmate of Aya’s assigned to mentor her but torments her instead. Fumi herself is twisted by loss; her older sister, the only person who has ever given her tenderness or kindness, has disappeared. Fumi wants to write a letter to MacArthur, hoping to trace her sister, and she cultivates Aya to write it, because, after all, the newcomer speaks fluent English.

Where Kutsukake lets the story unfold, the narrative works. But after a while, The Translation of Love begins to feel too much like a collection of vignettes, intended to show different perspectives on cultural and social issues. Part of the problem is the sheer number of narrative voices, which include every character I’ve mentioned plus a raft of others, even–bizarrely–MacArthur’s son. I like Aya’s, Fumi’s, and Matt’s voices, and that of the girls’ schoolteacher, Kendo. But the others sometimes seem like talking heads, contrived to explain the way life was and either to put the characters in hot water or rescue them from it.

All the same, I was glad to read The Translation of Love. I didn’t know that Canada had perpetrated the same bigoted, shameful crime on its Japanese residents as the United States. Kutsukake also renders everyday Japanese society of that time in vivid ways, penetrating the complex social politics of shame, pride, and public persona. Consequently, though The Translation of Love falls short as storytelling, the subject matter compelled me to finish it.

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

Nobody Escapes: I Lived in Modern Times

19 Saturday Dec 2015

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Review: I Lived in Modern Times, by Linda Grant
Penguin, 2000. 260 pp. $24

In this disturbing, insightful novel, Linda Grant portrays the Jews who worked to create the state of Israel in 1946-47 as anything but heroes. They’re gangsters and lowlifes who somehow managed to survive the Holocaust; longtime German and Austrian residents who look down on their Eastern European brethren; arrogant revolutionaries; terrorists; and displaced people who think the world owes them a favor.

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mind you, the British trying to enforce their mandate over Palestine are vicious anti-Semites, and worse. They believe that they had it tough during the world war, can’t decide whom they despise more, Arab or Jew, and express choleric amazement that their inferiors could dare rebel against them, the world’s most practiced colonialists. The only participants in this novel who get a free pass–or almost do–are the Arabs, aside from a rare bombing or sniping, referred to but never shown.

No doubt, the mainstream, heroic narrative about the founding of Israel (or anywhere else) needs correction. Nevertheless, this novel goes too far the other way, so much so that it offends me, though I share some of the author’s political views. Like her, I’m ashamed that my Israeli coreligionists oppress Palestinians today (of which I’ve seen glimpses, first-hand). Yet I reject her blanket portrayal of Israel’s founders as either misguided hoodlums or blind idealists, or of Jews as fractious and arrogant, or that any nation born in war is doomed to fight perpetually. War has always made nations, whether we’re talking about the United States, Serbia, or the Netherlands. How and when those nations make war afterward is another story, but in I Lived in Modern Times, Israel’s path seems predetermined and entirely of Jewish making, which is more than a little neat.

That said, Grant has written a provocative, illuminating story about identity. Her heroine, Evelyn Sert, is a young woman born in England of Eastern European Jewish parents. Through her British passport, she takes ship for Palestine in 1946, pretending to be Christian so as to evade the rules against Jewish immigration. She’s heard of the wonderful experiment that will build a new nation according to modern principles, in which a Jew may find a life without fear and ideals to live by.

But reality doesn’t measure up. First, she tries a kibbutz, whose socialist roots and practices (including free love) appeal to her, only to find that the heat and the hard labor wear her down, and the men treat her like a slab of meat. She settles in Tel Aviv, resuming her former occupation as a hairdresser, but her best customers are British women whose husbands are the police, one of whom believes she recognizes Evelyn from the boat.

So Evelyn splits herself. She dyes her hair blond, calls herself Priscilla Jones, and goes to the beach with these women and their husbands, listening to their diatribes. Her Jewish boyfriend, a mysterious chap who speaks fluent Hebrew, gives her the passion she’s always wanted but insists that she know her place as a woman. This poses a struggle for Evelyn, who has other ambitions and is more literate, smarter, and deeper than he is. Yet Johnny, the name she knows him by, also protects her, giving her a false passport that keeps her safe from the police as Priscilla Jones–for a while. It’s his other underground activities she’s nervous about.

As her openly Jewish self, however, the German and Austrian emigrés, though they open up a cultural world she’s missed since leaving England, also condescend to her as an ignorant bumpkin from Eastern Europe. That wears on her, but even worse, Evelyn tires of what she calls “the so-what people.”

So-what you are cold and hungry? You want to know about cold and hunger? Let me tell you where I have been. I know cold and hunger. So-what you miss your mother? My mother was gassed. And my father and my grandparents and my sisters and brothers. So-what you want your boyfriend? My boyfriend was murdered by British soldiers.

Like the contortions of self that Evelyn submits to as an immigrant to a bewildering, divided land, these passages about the social pecking order based on birth or suffering hit the mark. However, after a while, you begin to wonder why Evelyn is so passive, why she doesn’t stand up to her lecturers or simply walk away. It’s particularly jarring toward the end, when she allows someone to bully her into an action I don’t believe she’d ever take. Unlike the case in some historical novels, which rewrite history to achieve the desired result, I Lived in Modern Times takes the opposite route, putting the heroine in a false position to evade an inconvenient historical event. It doesn’t work.

As with its protagonist, this novel’s contortions come to a peculiar end.

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

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Imposter Bride

19 Monday Oct 2015

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Review: The Imposter Bride, by Nancy Richler
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $25

Montreal, 1946. A young Jewish woman named Lily Azerov, escaping from Europe via Palestine, steps off a train, expecting to meet her fiancé, a man she’s never seen. But at the train station, after one look at Lily, he decides he doesn’t want her, so his brother marries her instead.

Boulevard Dorchester, Montreal, 1946 (Courtesy Archives de la ville de Montréal, via Studio Pluche).

Boulevard Dorchester, Montreal, 1946 (Courtesy Archives de la Ville de Montréal, via Studio Pluche).

From this arresting premise comes a richly layered, marvelously observed novel about deceit, betrayal, and (of course) abandonment. Though at first seemingly the victim, Lily never really joins her new family, and she winds up enacting her own betrayal, disappearing from Montreal without a trace. Lily leaves behind a three-month-old daughter, Ruth; a large, uncut diamond; and a diary in Yiddish that, like her name, may or may not be hers. Ruth’s father, aunt, uncle, and grandmother do their best for the abandoned child and answer her innocent questions about her origins; she could never say she went unloved. Quite the contrary.

But as Ruth gets older, she receives the occasional birthday package, always a beautiful rock specimen from various places in Canada, with time, date, and temperature, but no signature attached. Naturally, the girl becomes more curious, less accepting of her relatives’ explanations, more determined to learn the truth about her mother. Do they know more than they’re saying, or is it really a mystery to everyone? That’s the problem, but it goes much deeper. Told from several vantage points (though mostly Ruth’s), The Imposter Bride recounts how each person has his or her own reasons to feel abandoned and betrayed, and how these experiences have blinded them to their own deceptions, of themselves and others.

I got lost in this web occasionally, because Richler jumps back and forth in time. But her narrative always sorts itself out, and her moment-to-moment exploration of what goes said and unsaid reveals a keen grasp of psychology and portrays well-rounded characters. Several times, I had to laugh while shaking my head at familiar Jewish inflections and perspectives, which Richler captures perfectly. I’ve never met these people, yet I know them.

Richler’s prose is simple, depending as much on the states of mind she evokes as on the imagery she sparingly but tellingly deploys. Here’s an example, from when Lily first arrives in Montreal and shuts herself in her room, fearing to go out.

It was as if the world outside her bedroom was a stilted play she’d walked into and couldn’t walk out of again, a dream she couldn’t wake from, where everything was menacing in an intangible, slightly surreal way. She hadn’t felt this way during the war, when the dangers that she faced were real. Had she felt it then, she would not have survived, she thought; she would have given herself away with the sort of anxious glance or gesture that had been fatal to so many.

Why she hunkers down goes beyond the shock and trauma to which her new family at first ascribes her aloof unfriendliness. The answer is no great surprise, especially after the clues that pop up in the story, so the ending feels predictable and fails to carry the force it might have. The novel makes Lily out to be a stable person, yet it’s hard to imagine anyone sane (a) abandoning a three-month-old infant and then (b) trying to keep in touch by sending her rocks. I also wonder how the characters who’ve been abandoned by spouses can even think about remarriage without obtaining a divorce. But despite these criticisms, The Imposter Bride has so much to say about wanting to belong, recovery from tragedy and humiliation, and the purpose of truth–all told in a gripping, astutely described process–that I still like the book very much.

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

Confusion: The Aftermath

11 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Aftermath, by Rhidian Brook
Knopf, 2013. 267 pp. $26

Brook starts with a terrific premise and mines its thematic possibilities with skill. It’s 1946, and Col. Lewis Morgan, a decorated career officer, has been posted to Hamburg to govern its British zone. His wife, Rachael, and their thirteen-year-old son join him there, occupying a splendid house, one of the few left standing in that shattered city. But hanging over their long-awaited reunion is the memory of the Morgans’ elder son, killed in a German bombing raid. Rachael has never recovered and seems not to want to; Lew pushes his grief aside, throwing himself into his all-consuming job, earning German trust while helping the defeated enemy rebuild.

 

Royal Air Force canteen, occupied Germany, 1946 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Royal Air Force canteen, occupied Germany, 1946 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Scorning the rules against fraternizing with civilians, Morgan invites the Lubert family living in the house, father and daughter, to remain. The place is large enough, and Lew’s convinced the Luberts weren’t Nazis, so why create another homeless family? But Rachael is furious. Share living space with the people who killed her boy?

Meanwhile, Lew tries to govern with a light hand, dispensing kindness and common sense. But much of the job involves identifying those civilians who belonged to the secret police or were otherwise tainted, an exceptionally difficult task, for which his subordinates think he’s much too trusting. Like Rachael, they assume everyone’s guilty, so that Lew faces unrest at headquarters as well as at home. Every scene asks who’s to blame: If it’s not the woman who kept company with a Nazi bigwig, the starving children who thieve to stay alive, or the factory workers spreading dissension, then who? And is every death equivalent, or does that of Rachael’s boy really matter less or more than anyone else’s?

I wish The Aftermath had stayed with these absorbing questions, to which reason and feeling sometimes offer conflicting answers. However, the novel betrays its characters, and the only reason I can see is to pursue an even larger theme, redemption, capital R. To explain, I’ll have to reveal (sorry) what most readers will probably guess from the jacket flap, if not the situation: Rachael winds up in Lubert’s arms. The encounters are so passionate and satisfying, the two former enemies enact their own forgiveness and dream of a new life together.

Hold on. Lew’s a maddeningly distant husband–no argument there–more so because he’s off acting like a saint at work. This feels true to life; somebody’s got to pay for all that goodness. But we never see why he’s emotionally absent, and Rachael never asks. Since he wasn’t always withdrawn, maybe his wartime service changed him. And since they’ve spent almost the entire war apart, except for their boy’s funeral, maybe she might try to draw him out, especially given his reticence. But Rachael doesn’t talk at all, while expecting him to help her, somehow. But of course he doesn’t, so after a few months of painful, uneasy silence, she betrays him, which feels rather quick, as if she’d already given up on him before she arrived in Hamburg. I find it hard to sympathize with her. Or either of them, actually.

Then again, few of these relationships make psychological sense to me. Rachael’s grief is such that she neglects her surviving son–okay–but the boy somehow never catches on that his mother prefers his dead brother. Seems to me he’d try harder to get her attention. Brook also undercuts his hero by setting a cardboard villain against him–Major Burnham, the intelligence officer who hates all Germans, is even nastier drunk than sober, and corrupt, besides. The author would have done much better to switch his character with Lew’s, while keeping their politics intact. That would have added depth to both while giving Rachael more grounds to take up with Lubert.

And what a guy Lubert is, repaying Lew’s kindness by cuckolding him and, with lip service to guilt, acting as if Lew deserves it. Like Rachael, he’s a clueless parent, thinking his fifteen-year-old daughter merely rebellious and angry when she’s plainly disturbed. It’s hard to pull for him, either, so the redemptive love is hardly that, and by this time, the reader’s looking for help.

Much happens in The Aftermath that’s worth thinking about. But the characters seem to exist only in the moment, and the end wraps up loose ends all too quickly.

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