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Saving Your Life (and the World): The Lake on Fire

25 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: The Lake on Fire, by Rosellen Brown
Sarabande, 2018. 349 pp. $18

Why in the world is a group of Ruthenian Jews from Zhitomir trying to homestead in Wisconsin? That’s the question Chaya-Libbe Shadarowsky asks herself, and by the time she’s seventeen, in 1891, she’s come to a few conclusions. So when her parents pull her out of the school she loves, which has expanded her outlook and given her hope, and plan to marry her off within the community, she must make an excruciating choice.

Chaya loved her parents and felt their difficulties — her mother breathed for them, she was their pulsing machine. She admired her father for the dignity of his commitments. He was a man who bled for others, who ought to have been given a chance to work for the well-being of strangers. But they were living someone else’s life, she was certain of that. Driven to improve their chances, they had chosen wrong, and were covered with the dust of failing farmers. They seemed to attract catastrophe — the rain that soaked the hay before they got it in, the calf that strangled in the womb and could not be pulled out until its poor mother expired, the wind — so harsh it could not be measured — that took down the chimney pipe and let the rain flood in and soak the quilts and bother the babies. Each, if you traced it back a few steps, was the result of their incompetence.

She dreams of escape though she has no money, a struggling grasp of English, and no idea what she could do to keep body and soul together. But Chaya is nothing if not resourceful, and when she makes it to Chicago, her ten-year-old brother, Asher, unexpectedly tags along. His presence delights her, for she loves him more than anyone, yet also terrifies her, and not just because she now must support two people on invisible means. He’s ungovernable, and his impulsive nature, which seeks unfamiliar words and experience, renders him incapable of understanding obstacles, especially other people’s feelings or private property. Though Chaya worries he’ll be arrested for petty theft, the notion that her little brother might be a sociopath or harbor deep rage never occurs to her.

Both siblings bend their talents to social protest. Asher scrambles for a living as sneak thief and wunderkind and befriends the men building the World’s Columbian Exposition, due to open in 1893. With inequality visible on every corner, he becomes a political radical, whereas Chaya, committed to working within the system, crosses paths with Jane Addams and other social reformers from the higher classes. The juxtaposition poses the chief question of The Lake on Fire: Once you see oppression and suffering, how do you respond?

The novel explores several answers, each of which finds representation in a particular character or characters, achieving a universality in the particular. That’s not so unusual; more remarkable is how Brown proceeds with such subtlety that no one, ever, sounds like a talking head. The Lake on Fire therefore offers a primer on characterization, and it’s a demanding art. Brown takes her time, because she wants you to see everything she does and enter her narrative. This is what literary fiction aspires to, painstaking vividness that feels effortless. Readers who assume that portraying physical background, feelings, and character to such an extent must inevitably be highbrow or boring don’t know what they’re missing.

However, the unhurried approach works only because Brown constantly introduces the unexpected through the characters’ reactions, particularly to unforeseen intrusions that no one else would notice, but which mean the world to them. It could be a strange-looking dog on a railroad station platform, a manner of dress, the weather, an odor that carries particular associations, but they all spark a search for meaning and keep the reader close. Once or twice, I wanted the internal narrative to stop, and the external one to resume. But this wasn’t because the story bored me, only that I’d gotten the point, and the tension made me impatient.

More seriously, Asher gets under my skin in the wrong way. After a while, he becomes hard to like, and though I don’t demand liking in fiction, the reasons I dislike him — his self-absorption and lack of empathy — evaporate when it’s thematically inconvenient. If he’s unempathic in general, how does he wind up caring so much about the downtrodden men whom the city gobbles up and spits out? Chaya, usually so clear-eyed, seems to overlook or forgive her brother’s bad behavior on reflex and wonders why others can’t. Her stubbornness paints her (and the author) into a corner, the outlet from which strikes the only contrived note in the book.

Still, The Lake on Fire bowled me over, a splendid example of what literary fiction can be.

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

Spy Family: Paris Spring

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Paris Spring, by James Naughtie
Overlook, 2016. 320 pp. $27

Will Flemyng, who works undercover for the British Embassy in Paris, is accosted on the métro by an East German agent named Kristof. At first, Will wonders whether Kristof is willing to trade information or change sides, and since it’s April 1968, and talk of democracy in Prague has the Soviet bloc on edge, Kristof’s sudden appearance offers possibilities.

Or does it? A subsequent rendezvous turns testy when Kristof threatens to expose Will’s brother, Abel, who spies for the United States, as a traitor. Will refuses to believe him or be bullied. But he also keeps his own counsel, because this is family, and the Flemyngs are close, matter of state or no. So Will doesn’t tell his boss, Freddy Craven, all he should, and there too lie emotional ties. Freddy’s like a father to Will, an older man in ill health who’s shown him the ropes of tradecraft, and for whom Will would risk anything.

Meanwhile, the student population has fomented rebellion, and the streets are boiling. The embassy is expected to watch these events carefully, and in return, with so much focus on Paris, any diplomatic mistake will quickly become public knowledge. Freddy, like any sensitive soul, realizes something’s up with Will, but he doesn’t know what. A love affair that ended a few months before? The tensions of the job? But before that question can be resolved, Grace Quincy, a world-famous journalist who could pry secrets from a clam without having to open it, blows into Paris. Will, knowing that Grace is trouble and that her flirtatious attentions mean she’s digging for information, nevertheless invites her over. But before that happens, she’s murdered at Père-Lachaise cemetery, of all places, and the police quickly learn that Will’s name is on her dance card. It’s obvious that one side or other had her killed, for reasons of espionage, but who, and why?

Pierre_Mendès_France, the Socialist politician who had helped extricate France from Vietnam, was willing to form a coalition government in May 1968 and listen to the student demands. But the Gaullists increased their power in the next election (courtesy Dutch National Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

Naughtie excels at portraying Paris under siege and the student protests:

. . .the canteen in the student building was filled with a rolling crowd and had the air of a cavernous bar in the early hours, a dance hall with the lights down. There was a group in one corner listening to a guitar, some of them flat out on the floor, and across the room an argument was threatening to turn into a struggle. Somebody ran shouting from the room. At least five people were handing out newspapers and campaign sheets at the door, one of them wearing a Mao cap, the others in black.…Someone was cooking oil. A few on the floor looked as if they’d slept there for days and the place looked like a school gymnasium on a wet afternoon. They’d rigged up an urn to boil water for coffee, and people were pulling stale bread rolls from a cardboard box. Someone had brought in a cat, which sat on top of the jukebox with its tail rigid in the air and its eyes wide.

But good as that is, it’s just the vivid background. The real story involves two families. First, it’s the Flemyngs, and how the brothers balance their feelings and ties against the secrecy demanded by their work, which affects a third, older brother, Mungo. Until reading Paris Spring, I didn’t know I wanted an older brother named Mungo, but it helps that this one is supportive, caring, and paternal, without being pushy or controlling, the family mediator. Mungo comes to know Freddy as well, so there’s plenty of warmth to go around in this coldest of cold-blooded professions.

The other family consists of Will’s allies, foremost among them Freddy, of course, but also others encountered during his travails over Kristof. Rivalries exist, to be sure, but even as temporary friends, they stick together. They know better than anyone else what the power of secrets can do, especially those that may or may not exist, except in rumor. As Freddy tells Mungo, who’s a historian, “You warn your students of the fog of war. Well, I know it to be real. I breathe the fumes.”

Naughtie’s grasp of spydom as a brethren echoes John le Carré, and the same could be said of his focus on characterization. Paris Spring fails to emulate the master in that it resolves with a couple turns that may be too neat; another neatness is how indulgent Freddy is with Will, which strains credulity at times. Nevertheless, Paris Spring is an excellent thriller, elegant in the way le Carré’s are — as few moving narrative parts as possible, a focus on motive instead, and characters who believe in what they’re doing. Bravo.

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

Finding True Norse: The Half-Drowned King

11 Monday Sep 2017

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Review: The Half-Drowned King, by Linnea Hartsuyker
Harper, 2017. 423 pp. $28

You’ve heard this before: A young warrior, cheated of his birthright by his cruel stepfather, dreams of restoring his lands and honor. But to do so, he’s left his ancestral home to seek glory and wealth. While he’s away, his beloved sister, who depends on him for protection, falls vulnerable to enemies who covet her for her beauty and spirit. And just as he’s about to return, a treacherous assassination attempt almost succeeds, which reveals that he has powerful foes united against him.

But where this novel differs from others that deal with similar themes and rely on similar characters is the setting, ninth-century Norway. It’s a key moment in that country’s history, when Harald Fair-Hair, a young, charismatic leader, is trying to bring myriad jealous, quarreling kings to heel and make a nation of them under his rule. It’s a strange concept, nationhood, and not everyone can get his mind around it; each chieftain worries that his claims and ambitions will be forfeit, and that he’ll owe fealty to a boy who’s done nothing special.

Harald Fair-Hair, rendered in the fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbok (courtesy Árni Magnússon Institute, Iceland, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Hartsuyker captures that feeling well, without succumbing to the temptation to permit her best and brightest characters to see into the future, which would be trite as well as improbable. Rather, she lets her two main characters hold ideas that set them apart from their contemporaries, but without overdoing it. Ragnvald, the warrior who fights to regain his birthright, sees value in a single, united kingdom, which would end the constant internal feuds and provide a stronger defense against foreign raiders. He also wonders why innocent relatives of wrongdoers must be punished, or why, after a successful battle, the victors should rape, kill, and pillage at will, wreaking violence on people who can’t hurt them anymore. But Ragnvald’s not especially enlightened beyond his time. Like every other Norseman who calls himself a man, he believes insults are a fighting matter, a dangerous quality for the irascible sort he is. And like everyone else, he’s very superstitious, as when he battles what he thinks is a dead man’s spirit:

A silhouette at first against the charcoal sky, it lurched over the uneven ground. With every step it stumbled, only to recover its balance just before falling. Its clumsiness made it seem more implacable, as though it would plow over and through anything that lay in its path. It had been a big man in life, broad and bearded. Now the face seemed dark, the beard matted. Far-off lightning crackled behind it. Ragnvald stood staring at it for a moment before recovering enough to draw his sword.

Meanwhile, Ragnvald’s sister, Svanhild, has yearnings and a quick mind considered unwomanly by some. She longs to escape their stepfather and the lecherous suitor he’s arranged for her, and she dreams of taking to sea, visiting other places, even–dare she think it–marrying a raider. She has little fear of talking back to men or challenging their political beliefs, which makes her the ninth-century equivalent of a firecracker. But, just as her brother is no Abraham Lincoln, she’s no feminist, for she never assumes that her role in life could be anything other than wife and mother, or that her sons would grow up to be anything other than sturdy warriors. Hartsuyker doesn’t push too far.

She plots her story well. Nothing goes as planned, so no-and-furthermore thrives in this icy north, and simmering tempers provide all the heat anybody needs. But The Half-Drowned King, though it has its share of fighting, is more about the politics of ever-shifting alliances, how a wise leader looks beyond immediate advantage, and how Ragnvald and Svanhild hew their separate paths. Hartsuyker does the politics especially well and uses her command of Norse ways–their system of justice, for example–to great effect.

The Half-Drowned King makes for interesting historical fiction because of its setting, but it’s less satisfying in its characters, who, despite their quirks, resemble talking heads. Hartsuyker tells the story almost entirely through dialogue, and she often recaps what her characters have just said, as if it weren’t already clear. The lack of contractions can sound stilted, and you sometimes get the feeling that the speakers are expecting a bard to turn their declarations into song–which, in fact, happens occasionally.

Reflection usually comes in brief, half-illuminating bursts. Consider this example: “Her mixture of innocence and ruthlessness was charming, and he could never decide whether he wanted her to keep her pretty pictures of the world, or learn his own cruel lessons.” It’s an explanation in trite language, not an exploration, and the implied emotional transition–which whizzes by like an arrow–deserves more.

The same could be said of The Half-Drowned King, a readable but not memorable novel.

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

Class Conflict: The Summer Before the War

28 Monday Aug 2017

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Review: The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson
Random House, 2017. 479 pp. $28

That last, idyllic English summer of 1914, Hugh Grange, a young medical student, has come to rural Sussex to visit his beloved Aunt Agatha and Uncle John. As the protegé of a famous surgeon who has all but invited him to marry his pretty daughter, Hugh may be forgiven for thinking he has the world on a string. However, two obstacles emerge to his plans.

Obviously, one is the coming conflict, of which just about everyone remains blithely ignorant in this lovely town of Rye. The other is Beatrice Nash, a young woman hired to teach Latin at the Rye grammar school, a subject traditionally a male preserve. She owes her job to Aunt Agatha, a closet feminist but no “suffragette,” who has politicked, plotted, and flattered to get the old-boy network to accept her protegée. Beatrice is intellectual, serious, and a freethinker–much like Hugh–whereas the surgeon’s daughter is a flirt, a twit, and a social climber. So there’s even less doubt whom he’ll prefer than what’s about to happen to Europe.

That predictability plagues much of The Summer Before the War. Simonson sets her battle lines right away, so that you can tell the good guys from the bad guys, or, when there’s less question of good versus bad, who’ll survive and who won’t. Her upper-class characters are completely detestable, but they’re stick figures, mere attitudes on two legs, and therefore easy targets. To cast doubt on what seems ordained, Simonson employs the “no–and futhermore,” often with skill, but toward the end especially, the story feels contrived and resolutions too neat. It doesn’t help that the novel has one or two superfluous subplots.

But to give The Summer Before the War the credit it deserves, Simonson has a knack for social conflict, and she portrays the pecking order of Rye with wit and verve. The never-ending battle against small-mindedness, gossips, sexism, and class snobbery consumes much energy in these pages, and the repartée between Hugh and his rakish cousin, Daniel, makes fun reading. (It’s a bit surprising how neither young man seems to have a home other than that of their aunt and uncle, but I’m glad they don’t.)

Rye Grammar School, which last held classes in 1907, as it appeared in 2010 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Beatrice’s struggles are more compelling. She has to play the upright spinster so that the school worthies will hire her, because only a young woman of irreproachable character may come in contact with impressionable youth. Meanwhile, of course, said worthies have nothing but contempt for these lower-class children and would never lift a finger to help them, whereas Beatrice actually believes she can bring light into their lives. Further, having catered to a domineering, scholarly father who has recently died, Beatrice should, in theory, have her meager inheritance, but (male) trustees prevent her from touching it. They, and others, assume that a “girl” of twenty-three can’t be independent without losing her virtue, a criticism that extends to her desire to write books. These are the parts of The Summer Before the War that I like best.

But I like the humor too. Consider this description of an oak-paneled anteroom:

. . . between two large windows, an imposing, green malachite bust of Cromwell on a matching plinth so floridly carved with vines and flowers that Cromwell himself would surely have had it destroyed. Hugh was not familiar with any connection of the Earl North family to Cromwell. Perhaps, he thought, there was none and that was why the ugly heirloom had been consigned to oaken purgatory to intimidate unwanted guests.

The Summer Before the War unfolds at a leisurely pace, for the most part. I don’t mind that, and I regret that so few authors these days tell stories that way; they probably figure their readers won’t have the patience. They may be right, but I don’t think length is the problem. It’s depth. We That Are Left and A Gentleman in Moscow, for instance, succeed by showing their characters’ inner lives so thoroughly that I don’t care how many pages go by. Conversely, when Simonson narrates an intricate story with half-full characters whose inner lives she tells in shorthand (“he felt such-and-such”), that’s when I become conscious of page numbers.

I don’t mean to blame Simonson or single her out; I happened to read her at a moment when I’m redefining my standards. Many, if not most, novelists follow some version of what she does, which for me these days means that I can borrow a stack of promising books from the library and find only one or two that intrigue me past the opening pages. The Summer Before the War would have pleased me more had the author plumbed her main subject and characters to the greater depth.

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

Brilliant, But a Little Mean: Leaving Lucy Pear

10 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: Leaving Lucy Pear, by Anna Solomon
Viking, 2016. 319 pp. $26

It’s summer 1917, and eighteen-year-old Beatrice Haven sneaks out of her uncle’s home at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, one night to leave her newborn infant in a pear orchard. Her act is desperate, of course, but not entirely random, for Bea anticipates that poachers from town will be coming to raid the orchard and will therefore find the child. What follows is beyond predictable, but Bea’s only thought–indeed, her only choice, as she sees it–is to save her baby from the orphanage. Further, that suits her purposes, for she plans to attend Radcliffe come the fall, though whether that notion is hers or belongs to her mother, Lillian, is an open question.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Meanwhile, the woman who picks up the infant girl is Emma Murphy, mother of eight, wife of a hard-drinking fisherman, Roland. The narrative shifts ahead to 1927, when Lucy Pear, as the foundling is called, is ten years old, and Emma has tired of her husband’s frequent absences and violent temper. She’s easy prey for Josiah Story, mayoral candidate and quarry manager, whose charm, money, and connections prove irresistible. Josiah arranges for Emma to tend Bea’s invalid Uncle Ira, who still lives in the house with the orchard. The job brings Emma needed money, a measure of independence from Roland, and puts her in Bea’s path, for that’s where she lives too. Radcliffe lasted barely a few months, and depression has immobilized her ever since.

So everybody’s got secrets, and cowardice has brought them about. Had Bea been able to stand up to her mother, she might not have made disastrous, self-destructive decisions. If Emma could face down her husband, she’d be better off, as would their children. And so on.

All those tightly contained secrets create an emotional pressure cooker, and Solomon exerts every ounce of tension imaginable, posing moral tests right and left that her characters often fail. I admire her refusal to protect them or ease their way; they’re no better than anyone else, and sometimes less. Yet the author never disengages to throw them in your lap, as if they were suddenly your problem. I think it takes courage to write like that, particularly when, more often than not, the publishing marketplace values the milk of human kindness, even–especially–if it’s artificially sweetened. Reading Leaving Lucy Pear, I’m reminded of the boldness of Philip Roth or Vladimir Nabokov–though she’s more merciful than they–and in most ways, it works for her.

I also admire Solomon’s way of illuminating psychological moments through superb prose:

Her mother looked at her tenderly and Bea felt swollen and strangled. She nearly began to speak. I am already so disappointed. She was stopped by fear: fear that if she started talking about herself, she would never stop; fear that her pain would fall out of her, grotesque, hairless, gasping, and she would not be able to stuff it back in.

All this makes Leaving Lucy Pear a gripping, painful, exceptionally well-observed narrative. And it’s also damned difficult to read, because the only truly sympathetic characters among a multitude are Lucy, Bea’s Uncle Ira, and her estranged husband, Albert. Tenderness is strictly rationed here, whereas hardness litters the ground, blocking every move, or so it seems. There’s a fine line between courageous, unflinching honesty and what can feel, at times, like authorial sadism. Solomon crosses it, I think, which makes her people difficult to sit with.

Similarly, I wonder why the Havens, wealthy Jews, must have no sense of their Jewishness except that they’re ashamed of it, Lillian especially, who’d do anything to pass. I get that Leaving Lucy Pear is partly about people afraid to be who they are, and that the historical background includes the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and the unabashed bigotry it aroused, an atmosphere from which nobody escapes. Even so, the portrayal has a mean edge, and the Havens’ self-hatred digs them a deeper hole than they already have as crass, disconnected, and (in Lillian’s case) manipulative people. Solomon rescues them, somewhat, by conveying how weak and fearful they are, and therefore still human. (Lucy, at age ten, is actually the strongest, most luminous character in the story, outshining both her mothers by far.) Yet Leaving Lucy Pear is a frightening, disturbing ride, and though I like the ending, I felt a bit bruised by the time I got there.

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

The Agony of Passing: The Gilded Years

09 Thursday Jun 2016

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Review: The Gilded Years, by Karin Tanabe
Atria, 2016. 379 pp. $16

In autumn 1896, Anita Hemmings returns to the place she loves most, the Vassar campus, for her senior year. Not only is she the class beauty (by popular vote), she excels at Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and music, the subjects deemed most suitable for young ladies–along with hygiene, of course. Social convention funnels Vassar graduates toward a single profession, teaching school, if not marriage to a wealthy Harvard or Yale man. But Anita dreams of further study, a professorship, perhaps even fieldwork involving ancient Greek artifacts. For someone of her ability, it’s possible.

the-gilded-years-9781501110450_lg

Yet it’s also not. Anita is African-American, so for three years she’s been passing as white. To look at her, no one would guess her secret. But if the school were to find out, she’d be expelled, for Vassar doesn’t admit Negroes. In fact, as the story opens, the Supreme Court has just supported segregation, through the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Consequently, Anita has survived three years by remaining on the fringes, not exactly keeping to herself, but avoiding the spotlight.

Her senior year, however, she rooms with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, heiress to a New York fortune and a social dynamo. Lottie loves to shock, talking freely, and (perhaps) knowingly, about sex, alcohol, and other forbidden subjects. As she says, “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.” So Lottie’s the perfect foil for Anita, pushing her into adventures that threaten to blow her cover, but which Anita can’t resist. It’s not just that Lottie’s a force of nature; it’s that Anita has desires like anyone else. And those yearnings lead her toward Porter Hamilton, a Harvard man smitten with her, a handsome, forward-thinking son of a Chicago lumber baron.

It’s a wonderful setup (based on a real person, incidentally), and Tanabe goes interesting places with it. Every move Anita makes, she risks pain, indignity, or exposure, all of which she must keep to herself, which provides a constant source of tension. The first meeting of the debating club takes up Plessy v. Ferguson, and Anita has been chosen to argue for segregation. By chance, Lottie meets her roommate’s brother, Frederick, and falls for him. Anita suffers her classmates’ casual references to blacks as inferior, which she must of course swallow in silence.

With that much going for it, I wish The Gilded Years had done more to live up to its promise. The slings and arrows that Anita must endure deserve sympathy, but she never explores them to any depth. Tanabe misses many chances here, starting with the Plessy v. Ferguson debate, which could have revealed much, but which the author prefers to summarize after the fact. That explanatory style, telling versus showing, hurts the novel in several respects, especially in character portrayal. To name one example, Anita declares her passion for intellectual subjects, yet her drive to obtain top grades seems to grip her more, because you see and feel it. But her intellectual ambitions pale beside her hopes of marrying Porter Hamilton, a notion that takes her captive maybe six minutes after they meet. I sense that Tanabe’s rushing things because she wants to compress the subplot to fit a grander design, but that comes at a cost. Anita’s undue haste makes her come across more like her flighty, less substantial roommate than herself.

But even the lightning love affair might work if Anita were reflective enough to penetrate her conflicts, rather than simply ricochet off them. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously observed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, precisely the idea here. But Anita merely dips her toe into what life would be like with Porter but having to deny her family, or how her experience differs from, say, Frederick’s, who could pass physically but hasn’t tried. Despite that good head on her shoulders, she never asks herself what the many accolades she receives from her racist classmates imply about perceptions of beauty, character, intelligence, or social standing. Nor does she ever wonder what makes the Vassar community so sure of its racial and social superiority, what feelings might lie behind this, or how that shapes the world around her. She’s not quite a full person, in other words.

What’s more, it’s Lottie who commands attention, generous and grasping at once in her self-absorption, a grand manipulator and benefactress. It’s she who propels the narrative, has a clearer physical presence (it’s curious that Anita, the campus beauty, doesn’t even rate a physical description), and brings about a climactic confrontation. If Anita can’t drive the action, she could at least spend that energy internally, ripping things apart and trying to reassemble them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do either.

The publisher calls The Gilded Years “Passing meets The House of Mirth,” evoking Nella Larsen’s 1929 tale of race relations, set mostly in Harlem, and Edith Wharton’s story about social climbing among Fifth Avenue bluebloods, published in 1905. Like other attempts to “package” a novel, the glib comparison misrepresents all three books. Tanabe’s publicists would have done her better service by letting The Gilded Years stand on its own.

The official pub date of The Gilded Years was June 7.

Disclaimer: I received bound galleys from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Morality in War: Until the Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead

30 Monday May 2016

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Review: Until the Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead, by S. Thomas Russell
Putnam, 2014. 435 pp. $28

Captain Charles Hayden commands H.M.S. Themis, a frigate patrolling Caribbean waters in 1794, during the French Revolutionary Wars. He serves immediately under Sir William Jones, a captain senior to him, known for bravery and impeccable seamanship but a greed for glory that plunges him into foolish risks, for which others pay with their lives. Hayden must follow Sir William’s lead or be disciplined, and it should be noted that Sir William boasts of friends in high places. But the junior captain is a very different sort of commander, and therein hangs a tale.

Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's 1795 rendering of Lord Howe's victory the previous year at the Glorious First of June, during the French Revolutionary Wars (Courtesy Wikiwand)

Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s 1795 rendering of Lord Howe’s victory the previous year at the Glorious First of June, during the French Revolutionary Wars (Courtesy Wikiwand)

First of all, when Hayden takes a risk, as he does all the time, he carefully weighs the cost against the likely gain, as any prudent captain would. But Hayden goes further, considering what he’d do in his opponent’s place, taking motives, resources, and sensibilities into account. Even more remarkably, he grants his adversary abilities and conviction equal to his own, typical of his outlook. For similar reasons, he consults his junior officers, to teach them tactics and leadership as well as benefit from what they have to say. Hayden’s therefore a rare commander in any military organization, especially the Royal Navy, which never met a new idea it liked.

But open-mindedness runs up against probabilities and experience, and the Themis quickly tests its captain’s character. Against all odds, the ship picks up two survivors from the open ocean, a pair of Spanish aristocrats, hence nationals of a British ally. However, their story seems so far-fetched that Hayden has to wonder whether these men are whom they claim to be, perhaps spies or criminals. One officer suspects that the younger survivor is effeminate, a dangerous secret, given that the Articles of War punish homosexuality with hanging, though presumably a foreign civilian wouldn’t be subject to the rule. What’s more, this young man gives Hayden advice to heal his injured heart; the captain recently lost the love of his life to another.

So Hayden can hardly be a neutral observer when the gunroom mess discusses the ways men and women differ in their thinking, the first of several moral or ethical questions to enter the narrative. Others include slavery; what’s permissible in war (especially for personal advantage); at what point does an enemy in extremis become a victim to be rescued; and what a commander owes his men, over whom he has the power of life and death.

Grappling with these questions is one pleasure that separates Until the Sea from lesser novels of the genre. True to form, there’s plenty of action, but you never feel it’s just there to keep the narrative rolling. Russell derives tension from several sources, whether Hayden’s misgivings about his orders, the identity of the Spanish gentlemen, or the presence of a crippled slave ship. I also enjoy the dialog, especially the witticisms of a Mr. Hawthorne, lieutenant of marines.

On the downside, I wish Russell plied a more vivid pen. He knows seamanship, and he takes you inside the chess game of naval maneuvers, a pleasure. But he doesn’t reveal the ship itself, whether the cramped quarters, the complex parts, or the visual space in which the characters move and speak. Similarly, it’s a rare passage where the author troubles to portray the sky, the sea, or a port of call:

The city itself was a-hum, trademen’s carts and barrows passing by, planters in their carriages and gigs, dusky-skinned slaves and freemen going about their business, and then the Creoles with their nutmeg skin and striking features–to Hayden’s eye, more handsome than either of the races that spawned them.

I don’t want to sound harsh, because I like this book, and Russell’s a good storyteller. But his prose is serviceable at best, and so are the characterizations. Hayden’s a sympathetic chap, but too much so, as if his liberality and troubled conscience shine like stars in the Caribbean firmament. And too often, Russell tells the reader what Hayden’s like, rather than show him. This is where I have trouble with the ecstatic blurbs on the jacket, which liken Russell to Patrick O’Brian.

I know; I know. The poor man didn’t ask for that, and I can’t blame him for not being somebody else. Nevertheless, I can ask why Russell chose to make Hayden a paragon, when O’Brian isn’t afraid to have his hero, Jack Aubrey, behave at times like a lout or a bigot or a lush. I understand the author’s instinct to protect a protagonist–you want to like him, and you want your readers to do the same. But it’s a better novel when you don’t get in the way.

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

Narrow Fiction: The Cherry Harvest

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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Review: The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna
Morrow, 2015. 321 pp. $26

You know what must happen next. It’s spring 1944, and Thomas Christiansen, a Wisconsin cherry farmer who’ll lose his orchards if he doesn’t get help for the harvest, asks the U.S. Army to supply German prisoner-of-war labor. His wife, Charlotte, though she’d do anything to save the farm or ease her daily struggle to put food on the table, has severe misgivings. Her favorite child, Ben, is with the army facing German bullets, and Charlotte wants no Nazis near her house, especially nowhere near her beautiful, innocent, teenage daughter, Kate.

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Charlotte never expresses her feelings, except about Ben, but for some reason, she’s dissatisfied with her marriage. Her husband, though hardworking, is a mild-mannered intellectual type who’d much rather be running a bookstore, and the physical spark she once felt for him has lessened considerably since Ben went to war. Thomas is always quoting poetry and talking about books with Kate, a subject that Charlotte disdains when she’s not feeling jealous. Naturally, however, she won’t discuss any of this, because her answer to every problem is to shut up and soldier on.

So am I spoiling anything by saying that it’s Charlotte, not Kate, who has an affair with a German prisoner? Further, the jacket flap gives away that Ben returns wounded, though you’d have guessed that too. And when you read, early on, that he romanced the girl next door at a dance, you need no crystal ball to figure what kind of wound he has. As for yet another dose of predictable, when Kate nearly drowns in a lake and washes up at a fancy vacation home, who should rescue her but a handsome senator’s son, who’s smitten with her from the get-go and promises to fulfill all her dreams? That said, however, I do like the scenes in which she tries to mingle among his posh friends, which capture what a poor, simple farm girl trying to pass in La-La Land would feel like, including her reaction at a bathroom large enough to live in.

My point isn’t to beat The Cherry Harvest into the ground, but to figure out what went wrong. Sanna has tried valiantly to re-create a moment in time, and though I don’t really believe we’re back in 1944, particularly, I do believe we’re in Door County, Wisconsin, during hard times, and farm life comes through loud and clear. She’s got an excellent premise to work from, and Charlotte’s a mess, which means she has potential.

So what could Sanna have done differently? Let’s start with Ben, who, though a crucial character, doesn’t show up until fifty pages from the end. Aside from rare smiles or jests, he’s a hundred percent the angry, bitter, young warrior, spiraling out of control, repelling everybody faster than you can shout, “Incoming!” because, well, the novel has to end. Thomas has possibilities, but, aside from an explanation that he has the farm only because he inherited it, we see only that he’s forgiving, reasonable, thoughtful, and everything else a patient, long-suffering husband should be. At one point, Charlotte wonders, briefly, whether he had another life before they met, an instance of authorial telegraphy that repeatedly mars this novel. But we never witness his soul-stirring. Nor do we get past the surface of Karl, the English-speaking German who tutors Kate in math (natch; what Germans are expert at, ja?) and makes love to her mother. He’s got a feral side that draws Charlotte, but the rest of him is blank, aside from his many declarations that Germans are good people, just like Americans. It was all Hitler’s fault, you see.

When he says that, I’m waiting for Charlotte, proud of her Norwegian heritage, to blurt out, or at least think, Then what the hell are you SOBs doing in Norway? Or the rest of Europe, for that matter, where surely she knows that goodness has folded its tent long ago. But nobody says anything like that, only repeats that Ben has been fighting them, so they have no place on the farm.

What kills The Cherry Harvest for me, then, is its narrowness. If you’re going to whistle an old, hackneyed tune, add a harmony or three, an improvisation, a surprise, an unexpected duet or trio. Charlotte clearly has an Oedipal entanglement with her son, but we don’t know why he’s her special child. Likewise, Kate never resents playing second fiddle, nor does Thomas question his wife’s obsession. As for Karl, he could be a fascinating character, someone who entices Charlotte but also repels her for who he is, not just the uniform he wore. Instead, he rescues her from rape, and the prisoner who assaults her is the badass nobody likes, who so happens to have a scarred face. Compounding these literary felonies, Sanna has Charlotte fantasize all too easily about a life with Karl, though never really developing the idea, just dropping it in, only to dispense with it even more quickly two pages later.

Pure, uncomplicated qualities–and their inevitably flimsy transitions–make for weak fiction; they’re Hollywood. Round them out, give them depth through complexity. That’s what The Cherry Harvest fails to do.

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

I Sing the Body Dissected: Speakers of the Dead

31 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: Speakers of the Dead, by J. Aaron Sanders
Plume/Penguin, 2016. 301 pp. $16

Not quite halfway through this mystery novel set in 1843, a man who makes most mortals tremble says, “Your ego surpasses your reputation. Not every New Yorker believes you’re the next Charles Dickens.”
To which comes the reply, “Your nose seems to have healed,” a reference to a tussle that defined their previous meeting.
The man who landed the punch is a youthful Walt Whitman, and the target belongs to a Tammany Hall ward heeler from Manhattan’s toughest neighborhood, so Speakers of the Dead offers the chance of a fresh, zesty tale. Throw in that Sanders has plumbed an arresting piece of social history–a controversy over medical dissection–and the novel promises even more.

Elizabeth Blackwell, medical pioneer (Undated photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons via National Library of Medicine; public domain)

Elizabeth Blackwell, medical pioneer (Undated photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons via National Library of Medicine; public domain)

Unfortunately, however, Speakers of the Dead seldom delivers more than the novelty of a poet serving justice with pen and rough-and-tumble. The storytelling depends solely on revelations and surprises rather than what lies within the characters, which means that Sanders has to keep pulling novelties out of the hat. Well before the end, the mystery peters out, and you can often hear the literary machinery creaking between the lines.
The narrative begins as twenty-two-year-old Mr. Whitman, who’s written tons of newspaper stories and an admittedly bad temperance novel but little poetry, tries to save a woman friend from hanging for murder. But the police prevent Walt from presenting evidence, and as she dies, he vows to prove her innocence. As editor of the Aurora, a struggling newspaper, Whitman has a ready mouthpiece to raise public opinion. But powerful men quickly make their opposition known, and his life and job are threatened. The furor only grows when Whitman discovers a link between so-called resurrection men, body snatchers who sell the newly deceased to medical schools, and the murder for which his friend died. Not just that murder, either; since the resurrection men have a lucrative (and illegal) business, they’re more than capable of protecting it by creating more medical specimens.
The most interesting part is the deep-seated objection to dissection. Many people, encouraged by clerics, believed that dissection prevented the soul from reaching heaven. In the novel, their protests at medical institutions quickly turn violent, and Sanders portrays the mob scenes with frightening vividness. As I read, I couldn’t help thinking of their present-day counterparts, attacks on abortion clinics and the blood libel against Planned Parenthood, a comparison that Sanders underlines. Lurid rumors swirl about medical practitioners known to have performed the random abortion, testimony to public fear and ignorance.
Sanders takes this idea one step further, probing the notion that beauty exists in what we fear, in death as well as life. In one vivid scene, he has Whitman observe human organs preserved in jars:

The sheer enormity of the collection overwhelms Walt. He looks away, but there is no away in this room, and he has to confront these objects, and so he regards them as they are . . . and he feels pulled at by their odd beauty, their untranslatable state, and he is overcome with the sense of his own decomposition, his flung likeness, coaxed to vapor and dust, and he gives himself to the image of his impending death. . . .

Several well-known figures populate Speakers of the Dead. For instance, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, represents feminist themes about male power and female suffering. Edgar Allan Poe makes a memorable cameo appearance, shouting like a madman to help his fellow poet escape capture. But except for Poe, these famous characters are flat, without edges.
Sadly, the narrative suffers the same flaw. Walt learns the apparent connection between the resurrection men and the murders rather easily, and no contrary evidence complicates his reasoning. He fingers the culprit fairly early on, and the only question is how much trouble he’ll get into before he can plead his case.

Aside from an occasional striking detail, New York drifts in and out of focus, a half-sketched landscape with or without figures. I wanted to see facial expressions, body language, scenery just beyond the immediate picture frame, all of which would have helped.
Though Whitman makes a vital, attractive protagonist, full of lust, rage, egotism, and passion for justice, like the other characters, he seems boxed in, restricted to what the narrative demands. I wish he’d been given more rein, especially to develop the theme of beauty in death. But I also wish he’d been restrained, as when he quotes a poem from Leaves of Grass; and decides, in a single paragraph, that he needs to focus on poetry rather than prose. Such self-conscious passages feel like nonfiction, unless they’ve been earned and worked toward, not simply dropped in.

Since the subtitle of Speakers of the Dead is A Walt Whitman Mystery, I gather that Sanders has others in mind. I hope he takes a different approach with them.

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

Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown: Master and Commander

14 Monday Mar 2016

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Review: Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brien

Norton, 1990. 459 pp. $14

I don’t know why or how I avoided reading this novel, the first in a famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, but as a recent convert, I advise you to hie yourself thither. Master and Commander is no ordinary sea story, even if you think one cannonade is much like another, or that you’ve heard all you care to about wooden ships and iron men.

HMS Victory, the most famous British ship of the Napoleonic Wars, if not any era (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

HMS Victory, the most famous British ship of the Napoleonic Wars, if not in all of history (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Rather, O’Brian takes the genre giant steps beyond its normal limits. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about sailing ships, how they functioned, or life (and death) at sea, yet the narrative wears this information lightly. Moreover, he has an extremely perceptive eye for character and mood, revealing the inner lives of the main cast, certainly, and even glimpses of what the minor players dream about, portrayed in vivid, easily flowing prose. I wish he’d given more depth to the two women who appear most frequently; they’re little more than ambitious sex objects. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that O’Brian is master and commander of both the English language and psychological observation.

The premise is deceptively simple. Jack Aubrey, a Navy rat in his late twenties, has finally obtained a captaincy over the Sophie, a brig assigned to patrol western Mediterranean waters. His career has suffered severe ups and downs, mostly because he can’t control his feelings about idiotic, narrow-minded superiors who give him idiotic, narrow-minded orders. Since we’ve all felt that way, we can sympathize, though I suspect that most people would display better judgment than Aubrey, who conducts a more or less open affair with his immediate commander’s wife. On the other hand, Aubrey has a friend or two in high places and his excellent seamanship to recommend him. So he’s given the Sophie, which he sees as his chance at redemption and getting out of debt, for the navy rewards its captains for every enemy ship they bring home as a prize of war.

Just before he’s due to sail, he meets Stephen Maturin, a penurious doctor who shares his love of music, among other interests. The captain persuades his new friend to become the Sophie’s surgeon, a real coup, given that most vessels must put up with half-educated sawbones just as likely to kill their patients as cure them. Further, having lived in the western Mediterranean for years, Maturin’s knowledge of the Spanish coast and its languages make him a valuable asset. But Stephen’s greatest task may be to slip gently inside the captain’s blustery, mercurial exterior and understand his rough edges in ways that nobody else does.

This is where Master and Commander excels. Maturin’s presence as a landlubber curious about everything nautical–and his subtly raised eyebrows at customs and traditions that he thinks make no sense–gives life under sail an extra dimension, a view with which the reader identifies. But it’s not just that O’Brian’s characters move fluidly among every rope, spar, and pulley, employing their names and functions so naturally that they have trouble explaining them to Stephen in terms he can understand. It’s that Aubrey, a very social creature who loves good drink and good conversation, and who has dreamed all his life of being master and commander, realizes that his new rank forever separates him from the shipboard society he craves. Dining with the Sophie’s officers brings this sad truth home:

Everyone was unnaturally well behaved: Jack was to give the tone, as he knew very well–it was expected of him, and it was his privilege. But this kind of deference, this attentive listening to every remark of his, required the words he uttered to be worth the attention they excited–a wearing state of affairs for a man accustomed to ordinary human conversation, with its perpetual interruption, contradiction and plain disregard. Here everything he said was right; and presently his spirits began to sink under the burden.

What perplexes Aubrey most is why he can’t seem to break the ice with James Dillon, his extremely capable lieutenant who holds him in guarded contempt. Stephen understands Dillon better, for they’re both Irish-born and became acquainted during the disastrous Rebellion of 1798. Aubrey’s prejudices against “Papists” touch Maturin less, because he’s Protestant, but he deplores the captain’s careless, disparaging remarks about Catholics and Irish rebels, which, naturally, set Dillon’s teeth on edge.

These touchy relationships add tension, but they also underline a central theme, about social rank, power, and their far-reaching effects. Rank and power can swell to a geyser propelling a man upward or a vortex dragging him down, and managing these equal possibilities requires a keen hand on the wheel, day in and day out. Even men of lower rank and prospects face the same problem. The sailing master, a gifted navigator, curries Aubrey’s favor, partly because he’s sexually attracted to the man the crew nickname Goldilocks–but homosexuality is a hanging offense, so he’s careful to make his fawning look like anyone else’s. Another example is an ordinary seaman who clearly has the gift to advance but fears to progress beyond what he thinks is his natural station. The Sophie is an entire world in a short stretch of timber and canvas.

Disclaimer: My son loaned me his copy of this book, which he read long before I did, a mark of his good taste.