Tag Archives: 1953

Some Enchanted Evening: The Invitation

30 Monday Jul 2018

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Review: The Invitation, by Lucy Foley
Little, Brown, 2016. 426 pp. $26

Hal Jacobs, a struggling English ex-pat journalist in Rome, crashes a soirée given by a contessa, the first time he has been social in months. It’s 1953, close enough to the world war so that the city and its inhabitants still bear wounds, Hal included. By the evening’s end, however, he’s charmed the contessa — who knows perfectly well he wasn’t invited — and a mysterious, beautiful woman who, in their moment of mutual vulnerability, hints at the scars she does her best to hide. Their brief tryst leaves such a deep impression on Hal that he believes he’s experienced the only warmth and happiness of his life — or has he simply loaded the circumstances with more emotional freight than they can bear?

Remains of the Roman Forum, 2012 (courtesy Bert Kaufmann, Roermond, Netherlands, via Wikimedia Commons)

Months later, however, he sees the woman again. The contessa has managed to fund the film she was trying to produce — that had been the soirée’s purpose, to assemble angels who might invest in it — and because Hal knows the cinema, she engages him to write a magazine story about it, an assignment he gets through her contacts. The stars, director, and others associated with the film will revisit the coastal location where it was shot, and Hal is to pen glitzy, frothy nonsense about this gathering as publicity for the release. Since much of the money to make the film comes from Frank Truss, he’s there with his young wife, Stella — the woman Hal met in Rome.

The invitation to a Mediterranean setting, themes of sexual passion and emotional honesty, and lost souls searching for what they’ve never had reminds me of The Magus, one of John Fowles’s early novels. Another similarity is a parallel narrative, but this one goes back several centuries rather than decades, which Hal reads about in an old diary. But Foley does better than Fowles, I think, in two crucial respects: Her female characters are fully drawn, not merely sex objects, and there’s less literary artifice.

What there is, I could do without — the prologue adds nothing, and I skipped the parallel narrative of the diary. The real action, between Hal and Stella, needs no mirroring or adornment. Foley not only takes love at first sight and makes it credible, she skillfully uncovers layers of past and secret hurts for both principal characters. I’m not sure why Stella’s sections are first-person, whereas Hal’s are in third; does that difference accomplish anything? But two unspoken questions lurk constantly within the narrative, and it’s amazing how much tension they create: What will happen between Hal and Stella, and what will result?

That tension emanates from the characters themselves, much less so the antagonist. Frank Truss lives up to his name as Stella’s sole support, but she pays a heavy price. It’s not so much that Frank likes to get his own way; it’s that when he’s around, there is no other way. He’s menacing enough to serve his narrative necessity, but as a character, he’s too one-sided, the only flawed portrayal in the book. Foley tries to rescue him somewhat at the end, and though I like the shifts in perspective that she creates, they don’t go far enough. You know Frank’s a bad guy from day one, and the pretense he has of altruistic commitment is so obviously pasted on, it’s no surprise when it’s proven a sham.

By contrast, though, Foley does a terrific job with the lesser characters in attendance. I particularly like the film director, Gaspari, a lonely man, humble in his artistic gifts, and the contessa, whose warm-hearted, tolerant approach to life is very appealing. Foley also sets her scenes with care, as with Hal’s crashing the contessa’s soirée:

Torches have been lit in brackets about the entrance, and Hal can see several gleaming motor cars circling like carp, disclosing guests in their evening finery.… He is not prepared for this. His suit is well-made but old and worn with use, faded at the elbows of the jacket and frayed at the pockets of the trousers. He has lost weight, too, since he last wore it, thanks to his poor diet of coffee and the occasional sandwich.… When he first wore it he had been much broader about the chest and shoulders. Now he feels almost like a boy borrowing his father’s clothes.

With prose like this, Foley delivers her keen psychological insights, connecting closely with the reader on every page. The Invitation is well worth reading.

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

Blood and Moonshine: Gods of Howl Mountain

30 Monday Apr 2018

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In the autumn of 1952, with “I Like Ike” signs sprouting in the North Carolina lowlands, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Maybelline Docherty is her own authority, thank you. Known as Granny May, like most mountain folk thereabouts, she’s had a hard life. Her husband died young in the First World War; their daughter lives in an institution and hasn’t spoken in twenty-odd years; and Granny May’s grandson, Rory, lost part of a leg fighting with the Marines in Korea and has been drifting and moody ever since. But Granny May doesn’t know the meaning of the word surrender, and she intends to continue enjoying life to the fullest. As a former prostitute, she makes polite folk turn away. But they still drive up the mountain for her herbal remedies, which they fear as possibly un-Christian yet wish to believe in, and she’s famous for her cakes.

The Blue Ridge Mountains, as seen from Blowing Rock, North Carolina (courtesy I, Zainubrazvi, via Wikimedia Commons)

Rory troubles her, however. He earns a good living running moonshine to buyers off the mountain, which puts him in the crosshairs of the police, who can sometimes be bribed. But there’s a new Federal revenue agent in town who plays by different rules, and as Rory soon learns, he’s a sadist of the first order. Meanwhile, Rory feuds with Cooley Muldoon, a young buck with more swagger than brains who’s willing to match Rory blow for blow, and whose father owns the largest piece of the moonshine business. Between these two threats and an attraction for a preacher’s daughter who handles venomous snakes as part of the church service, Rory has chosen to live dangerously. But Granny May says, “Christ’s father let him die on that cross.… But Christ never had no Granny like me.”

In my review of Fallen Land, Brown’s previous book, I loved the prose and the pacing but faulted the too-easily resolved conflicts between the main characters and the intellectually sophisticated observations that came from the mouths of unschooled teenagers. Not here. Gods of Howl Mountain is a much better, more complex, more believable novel, and its power propels you through the narrative, much like the engine in Rory’s beloved souped-up muscle car, named (of course) Maybelline. Rory and Granny May are compelling characters, their dialogue credible, and often a hoot besides.

Once or twice, you may come across a reference to something you might not expect, or said in a way that seems out of character, but those instances don’t intrude. If there’s a weak link, it’s Cooley Muldoon, the villain, who’s got nothing to recommend him and is simply villainous. He’s relentless, though, and very inventive, so nothing will be easily resolved, you can bank on that. Granny May’s traumatized daughter, Bonni, seems idealized, as though Rory’s view of her is actually accurate. I also wonder whether Bonni’s silence is too convenient, being essential to the plot. Rory has undertaken to find out exactly what renders her speechless, and who’s responsible. I like that part of the narrative, but I think it might have worked better had the story not turned on that device.

The prose, however, needs no qualifiers, and it’s the first thing that strikes you about Gods of Howl Mountain:

[Granny May] squinted down her nose, eyeing the tree in the yard. This tree, lone survivor of the blight, stood a centerpiece of all she surveyed from her porch. The others of its kind, chestnuts, had once covered these mountains, the bark of their trunks deeply furrowed, age-twisted like the strands of giant steel cables. Their leaves sawtoothed, golden this time of year, when the falling nuts fattened the beasts of the land, sweetening their meat. That army of hardwoods had fallen, victims of death-black cankers that starved and toppled them. Some exotic fungus had slipped in through wounds in their bark, the work of antlers or claws or penknives. This tree stood alone in the meadow, crowned high against the impending light.
A spirit tree.

This is Granny May’s first appearance, and it’s as though she were that tree, unblighted, standing tall, determined to live her way, from the land and part of it.

With Gods of Howl Mountain, Brown has gone a big step further from the promise revealed in Fallen Land, and I recommend it.

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

The Many Forms of Betrayal: The Widow Tree

06 Monday Nov 2017

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Review: The Widow Tree, by Nicole Lundrigan
Douglas and McIntyre, 2013. 310 pp. $18

In this marvelous, heartfelt novel set in the Yugoslavia of 1953, oppression comes in many forms. It’s not just that Tito’s long arm reaches from the capital all the way down to the village of Bregalnica. The villagers have seen the great leader only once, when his limousine drove through; on that occasion, he pulled on white gloves before shaking a few hands, hiding his face behind sunglasses.

Josip Broz, known as Tito, in 1961 (courtesy Digital Library of Slovenia, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in Slovenia and the United States).

That moment says much about the world of The Widow Tree, but the local is more immediate and pervasive. The Second World War may be over, but residual anger, hatred, and the urge for vengeance simmer close to the surface, and whoever challenges tribal loyalties does so at their peril. No one has forgotten anything, least of all old scores.

So it is when János, Dorján, and Nevena, teenagers whose school has been assigned a government field to harvest, dig up a shard of pottery containing ancient Roman coins, their find tests their allegiances. Nevena, whose father is the Komandant in Bregalnica, thinks they should hand over the treasure. János violently disagrees, insisting that they should keep it and tell no one. Dorján sees both sides. And in the end, because János is the most passionate and daring of the three, they decide to keep the coins; the boys bury them in the woods. Naturally, nothing good comes of this.

Lundrigan’s saying that it’s the kids who suffer most, growing up carrying inherited burdens, and the way she’s drawn her youthful triumvirate underlines the point. János and Dorján, friends practically from birth, both live with their grandmothers (their parents having been casualties of war or illness) and have long dreamed of becoming engineers and rebuilding their country. But János, who has a cruel streak, has always been a daredevil and a prankster; by the time he’s sixteen, he’s sensed that, contrary to what everyone says, betrayals destroyed his family.

Accordingly, he’s primed to rebel, and his anger is such that he won’t be silent. Dorján, of kinder nature but less confident socially, tries to tell his friend that expressing discontent will bring punishment, though he’s also worried that János is pulling away from him and has renounced their shared dream. The growing attraction between János and Nevena threatens to divide the friends even further, but, ever self-effacing, Dorján never opens his mouth to object. He sympathizes with his free-thinking friend, even shares his ideas, but is too scared to do anything about it. János is disgusted with him, but Dorján knows his limits; he’s the type whom authority figures pick on, sensing weakness.

As for Nevena, she’s in a difficult position. She admires and respects both boys, but she’s also the Komandant’s daughter, and she wants to be a good girl. Being female, she has fewer options than her friends–as in only one, marrying well–but Lundrigan complicates the picture. She makes the Komandant a doting father who intervenes to protect Nevena from her mother’s authoritarian small-mindedness. Consequently, Nevena may be forgiven for imagining that he’d be equally kind and sympathetic to everyone else.

But in Bregalnica, tender qualities are very carefully guarded. János’s grandmother, Gitta, understands how this appears every day:

To cut the silence, she flicked on the radio, heard the stream of good news. Always good news. Stories that would make a person feel better, if only they allowed them to penetrate their hearts. Gitta could not abide it, twisting the dial with a harsh snap of her wrist. That is not real. That is not real. But to whom could she complain? No one was left untouched, and no one even talked about the war anymore. They ignored the homes that were filled with new families. Forgot about the faces that were missing, or failed to notice the pale outline where shop signs had been removed and hastily replaced.

My sole criticism of The Widow Tree has to do with Dragan Dobrica, Nevena’s father. His desire to appear firm yet merciful, capable of kindness, conceals a vengeful spirit. I like that portrayal, but I’m not entirely persuaded by Lundrigan’s representation of Dragan to himself; I think he should have more difficulty, or spend more time at, negotiating between his benign and malignant selves.

Otherwise, The Widow Tree is a terrific novel, testament to the truth that for war’s survivors, the greatest casualty is trust.

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

No Holds Barred: The Yid

25 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Yid, by Paul Goldberg
Picador, 2016. 307 pp. $27

If I told you that a novel about Stalin’s plans for a second Holocaust will make you laugh out loud, you’d probably wonder whether all this reading I do had tipped me over the edge. But The Yid, whose title merely hints at provocations to come, conducts an irresistible guerrilla war against Russia, the Soviet secret police, and anti-Semitism–inevitably intertwined–as a darkly comic theater of the absurd.

It’s 1953, and though Stalin’s rumored to be dying, the killings and “disappearances” continue unabated, at his orders. The Great Leader has been assembling lists of Jews and collecting rolling stock from the farthest reaches of the empire, preparing for a mass pogrom to rival Hitler’s. Meanwhile, the secret police have been rounding up Jews for torture, “confession,” and murder, and the blood libel has as strong a currency among Russians as ever (the notion that Jews require Christian blood for ritual purposes, specifically to make Passover matzos).

Consequently, one early morning in February, three secret-service thugs enter the Moscow apartment of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the now-defunct Jewish State Theater. I won’t tell you what happens next, only that he surprises his captors:

The reason for denying the humanity of your arrestees and your executees is simple in the extreme: you block them out, because as humans we have little control over our ability to listen. And when we listen–sometimes–we hear what is said. And sometimes this leads to a dangerous bond between the arrester-executioner and arrestee-executee. Nothing good comes of such bonds.

Levinson conceives a bizarre, hopeless plan: to assassinate Stalin and prevent the pogrom from going any further. Levinson’s profession and needling, cynical sense of humor lead people who get swept up in his scheme to wonder whether he’s serious. But he is. And the cast he assembles for his drama (which appears in sections labeled “acts,” occasionally rendered in playscript) includes several memorable performers.

There’s Friederich Lewis, an African-American who fled Chicago (and other places) for the USSR because he believed that racism wouldn’t exist in the Soviet paradise. He speaks fluent Russian and Yiddish, the latter of which allows him to understand and respond to Levinson’s quips and insults. Russians call Lewis “Paul Robeson,” whom they supposedly admire, yet they expect Lewis to be only a half-step above an ape, even though he’s studied Communist theory more coherently than they and is a gifted engineer. In a final absurdity, he must often go about in whiteface to carry out Levinson’s plan; as a black man, he’d stick out, otherwise.

Aleksandr Kogan, a surgeon, regularly faces anti-Semitism, because, in the Russian mind, Jewish doctors are murderers, intent on infecting the population. Yet Kogan feels that dignity under pressure is important, so when ignoring the bigots doesn’t help, he tries to reason with them. Kima Petrova, a young woman who goes out of her way to challenge death, says nothing about herself. But we learn that the police say her mother blew her brains out and left behind a typed suicide note, though she owned no weapon and no typewriter. The typed note was a carbon copy.

Decree awarding Lydia Timashuk the Order of Lenin for "unmasking" the so-called Doctors' Plot, January 1953 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Decree awarding Lydia Timashuk the Order of Lenin for “unmasking” the so-called Doctors’ Plot, January 1953. The medal was revoked the following year, after Stalin’s death. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Kogan observes, “Let’s be fair: in our country, you don’t have to be a decent person in order to get arrested.” But it helps. When the secret police warn him that he’s about to be arrested, and that he should make a full confession, Kogan rebuts the accusations one by one. The most absurd is that he’s killed a fellow doctor, another Jew, because, his interrogator says, “Sometimes you have to kill one of your own, so people won’t think you are killing only Russians.” The interrogation follows the same lunatic pattern as random expressions of anti-Semitism, so Goldberg seems to be saying that the paranoia of the bigot and the secret service are one and the same. And with Lewis, the author makes a similar point: People don’t listen to this man, who should be a hero, because that would challenge their prejudice that he’s not really human.

Goldberg made up less of The Yid than it might appear. Stalin’s final purge, which took place shortly before the novel opens, involved accusations against eminent doctors who had treated top party officials. When those patients died, Stalin accused the doctors of murdering them as part of an international Jewish conspiracy to undermine the regime. To assume that he’d plan a national pogrom in response may sound far-fetched. But in his afterword, Goldberg insists that the lists of Jews and the movements of rolling stock have been documented. He dedicates the novel to his parents, whose names were on the lists.

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