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Blame the Woman: No Small Shame

17 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: No Small Shame, by Christine Bell
Impact, 2020. 396 pp. AU $33

When fifteen-year-old Mary O’Donnell emigrates from Scotland to Australia in 1914, besides the promise of a more prosperous life, she’s hoping to taste a thin wedge of freedom, like a good pie — and to be reunited with her childhood crush, Liam Merrilees. But there’s precious little money waiting in this sparse landscape for Mary or her family, Further, Liam has lost the fire in his eyes, though not his self-involvement. When he’s not being outright brutal toward Mary, he shows absolutely no interest in her, but she’s the only one who can’t see it. She’s used to being kicked. Mary’s mother has bruised her all her life, and not just emotionally; daughter accepts this as her lot.

From this premise, you can predict where the narrative will go most of the time. You know that Mary won’t give up on Liam, that mother will never stop ripping into her, and that vile prophecies will bear fruit, evoking more than one trope. Yet the novel works, more or less, because Mary struggles to slip between the Catholic hellfire her mother has taught her to fear and the life she’s dreamed of leading. Her awakening from masochism won’t happen overnight, nor will the world spin any differently for it, but Mary’s interior journey is far less ordained than her exterior one.

The background fits too. First World War Australia, though distant from both Gallipoli and the Western Front, where its volunteers have gone, has its own battlegrounds, starting with that word volunteer. The country has no conscription, but the number of white feathers handed out to able-bodied men not in uniform, based on the grotesque assumption that real men never shirk a fight, takes a heavy emotional toll, on Liam as on others. The lengthy casualty lists don’t seem to make a dent, either; if some men have been slaughtered, it’s up to the rest to avenge them, even if nobody really knows concretely what the war’s about. Throw in wartime price inflation, the wages that haven’t kept pace, and strife between Catholic and Protestant, you’ve got quite a vortex of problems. Incidentally, Mary’s mother relishes the religious conflict, in her perverse way. She’s a piece of work.

I like this aspect of No Small Shame, the everyday burdens that twist life in ways that no one could have imagined when the trumpets sounded. Not least are the burdens that women bear, silently and without question, for it’s their job to make sure their men are happy and feel supported, no matter what sacrifice that entails. And you guessed it: Mary takes the brunt, though she’s not alone.

Bell’s prose is simple yet effective, as with Mary’s first glimpse of her new home:

Where were the fabulous fields and plump livestock waiting for lads and farmers promised by the immigration agent in Motherwell offering assisted passages to sunny Australia? All Mary could see extending beyond the train windows was blade after blade of grass bleached colourless as sand in a desert. The poor animals in the endless paddocks were without a leaf of shade or drip of water. She couldn’t guess how any of them survived.

Less convincing, I find, are the characterizations. Maw, her mother, is well drawn. As for Mary, it’s not easy to portray a slow transformation to selfhood, and Bell succeeds, mostly, barring shaky instances that don’t quite make sense to me. Liam, though predictable, has edges. He’s never learned to move past self-pity or reckon with who he is, and though he wants to do better, he can’t. Unfortunately, the reader knows what Mary doesn’t, that he’ll never change. I wish Bell hadn’t tried to redeem him, which I don’t believe, and which I think actually demeans his stature, renders him less tragic.

The children in these pages are idealized, not like any I’ve ever met. Ditto Tom, a Protestant friend of Mary’s who holds a candle for her, which she’s remarkably slow to recognize. He’s a nice guy and treats her kindly, but he’s cardboard, and since he’s crucial to the story, his opacity hurts the narrative. As a man with a medical condition that prevents him from enlisting, he embodies the shame men feel, just as Mary represents women that way. That’s not enough.

Nevertheless, despite these objections, I should point out how unusual No Small Shame is among First World War novels with a female protagonist, a narrow field to begin with. Mary’s neither nurse nor bandage roller nor factory worker nor her country’s soul, keeping the home fires burning. I like that. For that reason, you may find this novel worth reading.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the author through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

If Music Be the Food of Love: Simon the Fiddler

08 Monday Jun 2020

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Review: Simon the Fiddler, by Paulette Jiles
Morrow, 2020. 337 pp. $28

Simon Boudin, though a Southerner by birth, doesn’t care about the Civil War, nearing its bloody end in March 1865. An itinerant fiddler who lives by and for music, he plays at weddings, garden parties, and, when he has to, saloons, staying one step ahead of the Confederate conscription men. But a bar brawl makes him a captive, and he’s quickly hustled into a ragged butternut uniform and sent to Texas. Nominally part of a regimental band, he’s nevertheless involved in a firefight in May — a month after Appomattox — because of a vainglorious Union colonel named Webb. But afterwards, Colonel Webb gives a party, and who should the hired musicians be but Simon and his friends?

It’s a dangerous assignment, because these men have no discharge papers, and the martial law that obtains in these parts treats such wanderers unkindly. Not only that, Colonel Webb treats everyone unkindly and seems to enjoy it. Nevertheless, he has also engaged an Irish governess for his daughter named Doris Dillon, for whom Simon falls, hard. Based on the limited communication that passes between them, he believes — hopes — that she feels similarly. That does it: From that moment, he resolves to woo her. However, he’s conscious of who he is and what he has to offer. Without land or a promising future, he believes he has no chance with her, so he sets out to make himself respectable.

The obstacles are enormous, and setbacks, even tragedy, befall the group of musicians. But Simon is nothing if not resourceful in his single-mindedness, and he expects the path to true love to be bumpy. “No — and furthermore” lives here, and the story sails along; but no matter how rough the water, Simon keep swimming. His hard-working character and determination are part of his charm, but without music, he’d be lost:

Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to, and so this search for employment among the drinking places of Galveston did not bother him. To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.

Music and such prose are two pleasures of Simon the Fiddler. Jiles knows folk music the way she knows Texas of that era, which is to say, inside out. Many songs that Simon plays have faded from popularity or current memory, but the author builds scenes around a couple I love, like “Shenandoah” and “Red River Valley,” so that the music itself becomes a character.

I wish I could say that Simon the Fiddler equals Jiles’s previous novel, News of the World. I’m reminded of the old baseball joke about the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who insisted he didn’t want to win twenty games in a single season, the mark of excellence, because then everybody would expect him to do it again. So I don’t mean to carp when I say that to me, Simon never achieves the breadth or depth that Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, the protagonist of News of the World, does. (Interestingly, Kidd appears here too, in a cameo.) Where Kidd has flaws and edges, born of experience, observation, and crotchets, Simon just has a bad temper, the only blemish to his otherwise sterling character — and, as it happens, a plot device.

As for Doris, she’s perfect — beautiful, sweet-natured, strong, witty, passionate, a young man’s dream. She may be a bit vain, hating to wear the eyeglasses she can’t see without, but that’s hardly a serious complaint against such a paragon.

Meanwhile, Colonel Webb has no redeeming features, and to craft her villain, Jiles has ticked every box. He’s a lech who makes known his intent to have Doris; a ranting alcoholic; a vicious, controlling husband and father; a liar; and, it’s suggested, involved in graft. Webb’s villainy increases the pressure on Doris, and therefore on her white knight. But it also feels melodramatic, weakening the novel, even as it motivates Simon to move faster. What price page turning?

News of the World is a more fulfilling, memorable book. But Simon the Fiddler makes a good yarn; and, after all, the world loves a lover. Take it for that, and you’ll enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher; this post previously appeared in Historical Novels Review in different, shorter form.

Intriguing Developments: The Last Passenger

20 Monday Apr 2020

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Review: The Last Passenger, by Charles Finch
Minotaur, 2020. 292 pp. $28

London, 1855. When a plodding, dissolute Scotland Yard inspector asks Charles Lenox for help solving a murder at Paddington Station, that request puts Lenox in a difficult position with most of the force. First of all, Charles is an amateur; secondly, unlike any police inspector, he’s of gentle birth (the second son of a baronet); and thirdly, he has a way of turning up evidence and making deductions that arouses envy. But this particular case offers no clues to be envious about. The dead man carries no means of identification — no wallet, papers, or belongings — and the murderer removed all the labels in the victim’s clothes.

What’s more, the investigation reaches frequent impasses, because “no — and furthermore” has taken up residence here. You never have the feeling that justice is inexorable, which adds to the tension, and what strikes you most isn’t Lenox’s skill but his eagerness to learn. That quality separates him from some (though not all) duly sanctioned officers of the law.

Since The Last Passenger is the thirteenth entry in the Charles Lenox series, the third of a prequel trilogy portraying how he began his career, I didn’t know I’d wind up reviewing it until I realized, within the first few chapters, how it stood out for me from its siblings. The mystery is extremely clever, and the prose graceful, but with Finch, those are givens. Rather, what appeals to me most about The Last Passenger is how the narrative probes more deeply into Charles’s character and moral and political beliefs than any other installment I’ve read.

To many men of his social station, he’s betrayed his class, and they cut him accordingly, which hurts. That has happened before, but here, he aches more from it. Further, he fears his mother disapproves as well, which carries extra weight, and she’s his sole surviving parent. Nor does his loneliness end there. Still a bachelor at age twenty-seven, and having extinguished his torch for his childhood friend and next-door neighbor, Lady Jane Grey (now, there’s a name from Tudor history!), he finds that Lady Jane and his mother keep putting eligible young women in his way. At first, he wishes they didn’t, but when one young woman in particular smiles upon him, he wonders about that thing called love.

I don’t remember another Lenox novel in which our hero pays so much attention to the disparity of wealth that the metropolis displays, and of which he’s an example. Nor has he before now recognized racial prejudice, in himself or anyone else, or considered deeply the institution of American slavery that has aroused protest in England as the story opens. (Echoes of current issues, perhaps?) Finally, as regular readers of Finch’s series know, the author delights in peppering his narratives with arcane facts, of which this one offers a more than usual portion. Among other bits, you learn what the British railway had in common with ancient Roman chariot tracks; why, in prior centuries to the nineteenth, no respectable lady wore green; the derivation of the word nickname; and how the phrases mind your P’s and Q’s and cold turkey entered the language.

As always, Finch gives you the Victorian Age, in large and small, as with this brief description of the era’s inimitable decorating style, which Charles can’t stand:

. . . a sort of prodigious clutter, walls and tables crowded past elegance, every piece of cloth in the room double-or triple-embroidered, remnants of statuary, wretchedly heavy silver platters and ewers, big dark clocks, etchings of colossal ruins. The spare black-and-ivory elegance of Lenox’s childhood was gone now — submerged beneath a rockslide of things, objects.

Also noteworthy is how Finch takes care to show his detective’s mistakes, and not only because Lenox is learning his craft. Unlike Holmes, say, Lenox never carries the whiff of infallibility, so he’s that much more human. And in The Last Passenger, you see his maturation in more than one way, which is very satisfying. This is not just another mystery, or even just another Lenox mystery, and I recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, though I did not review it there.

Insight: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

06 Monday Apr 2020

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Review: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, by Andrew Miller
Europa, 2019. 410 pp. $19

One rainy night in 1809, a coach pulls up to a vacant country house in Somerset, discharging a badly injured man. Nell, the housekeeper, can’t tell whether it’s John Lacroix, master of the house, for he possesses few recognizable clothes or belongings, and facial hair and wounds obscure his features. However, Nell tends him; and yes, it’s John, an officer of hussars returned from a disastrous campaign in Corunna, Spain, against Napoleon. John slowly recovers from his physical wounds, pleasing Nell and his beloved sister, Lucy, but he’s emotionally out of sorts and refuses to speak of his war. And when a comrade visits to urge him to heal quickly and return to his regiment, John decides to travel instead and settles on Scotland as a destination. He’ll look for an island where he may find solitude and solace, though how he envisions those qualities remains vague, even to himself.

Meanwhile, two men have been sent, unofficially yet on high authority, to hunt him. Why they’ve targeted John is unclear, at first. All you know is that one of his seekers, Calley, is as vicious a brute as any who’s ever drawn breath. On sighting a man he’s never met, for example, he measures up the newcomer to guess whether he’d be his equal in a brawl. It’s Calley against the world, and he’ll come out swinging.

This brilliant, delicately written thriller has to do with a manhunt, obviously, but offers a significant twist. John’s hunting himself too, though he doesn’t know that yet, trying to figure out who he is. His entire life, he’s accepted a given version of himself and can’t see its constraints. Instinctively, he turns away from questions, especially the existential kind. But on his travels, he meets Emily, a freethinking woman who’s going blind, yet sees what he can’t (a lovely touch). As he learns to trust her, he opens himself up to insight and reflection — which is all very well, but two men are trailing him.

Death of Sir John Moore, British commander at Corunna, Spain, from an 1815 aquatint by William Heath, engraved by Thomas Sutherland (courtesy The Martial Achievements of Great Britain and her Allies from 1799-1815, by James Jenkins, via Wikimedia Commons)

To call a thriller “delicate” may sound strange, especially considering that this one, like many, portrays its share of violence. Yet the adjective fits. Miller’s is a subtle hand; he shows just about everything, letting you infer from his beautiful, lucid prose all you need to know while keeping John and Emily less open to themselves than to the reader. That’s extraordinary storytelling. Like a house assembled by artisans who take pride in details that few visitors or even residents would ever notice, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free reflects the author’s dedication to moments small and large, characters major or minor. Nell, the housekeeper, has an inner life, as does John’s sister, Lucy, though neither plays a lengthy role. Such loving attention extends even to characters with whom our protagonist never even interacts:

He would stroll while he was still free to do so, and he set off, walking away from the water and turning into a narrow street of gabled buildings, part of the city’s medieval guts. Through cellar windows he saw backs bent over benches, cutting, sewing. He saw through two windows — the whole body of a house — a garden where men were twisting rope. At the gates of a yard he saw three giants stripped to the waist, their skin blushed blue from some process they were resting from. They watched him as he passed. They looked like men made almost mad by what they did.

Note that this prose, which carries you through what might otherwise seem like a digression, puts you — and John — in the scene actively, conveys a notion of his character and an image of early nineteenth-century English life.

Also impressive, and what few authors succeed at, the villain has his due. Calley’s thoroughly repugnant, yet you glimpse the kind of life he’s had, and why he might have surrendered to his crueler instincts — all of it suggested, never announced.

Andrew Miller has written a splendid story that’s at once a page-turning novel of suspense and an inquiry into what defines freedom. I highly recommend Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, one of the finest novels I’ve read in several years.

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

Love Quadrilateral: Watershed

30 Monday Dec 2019

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Review: Watershed, by Mark Barr
Hub City Press, 2019. 303 pp. $26

Early one morning, Claire Dixon wakes because of painful symptoms of gonorrhea, which she could only have contracted from her husband, Travis. In a fury, she bundles their two children into the old car and sets off for her mother’s house nearby. The older woman, none too pleased to be roused, nor to have house guests, acts as though these burdens can only be redeemed through the arduous chores she has planned for her eleven-year-old grandson.

What a thrilling opening; you see Claire’s predicament instantly and can’t help put yourself in her place. And since this is sometime around 1936 or 1937 in small-town, western Tennessee near Memphis, hard times elicit hardness in people, while gossip about the Dixons will surely become cheap entertainment. It’s a hardscrabble place, Dawsonville, and the only hope for the future is the dam under construction that will provide the area with electricity for the first time. Not everyone greets the project with enthusiasm, either, for the federal government is the builder, which evokes fears of taxes, intrusion, or invasion by city slickers.

Initial architect’s rendering of the Watts Bar Dam on the Tennessee River, ca. 1939 (courtesy Tennessee Valley Authority via Wikimedia Commons)

One such newcomer is Nathan McReaken, a young electrical engineer from Memphis, but the way people treat him, he might as well hail from the dark side of the moon. He’s trying to catch on with the dam’s engineering office, no easy task, despite his impressive resume. Nathan’s granted a ninety-day tryout, reaching the end of which will require cleverness, talent, and political skills.

Like a bunch of other out-of-towners, he rents a room in a boardinghouse run by Claire’s Aunt Irma. But unlike them, he has a keener, more nuanced sense of his surroundings, and he’s far more sophisticated intellectually and emotionally, though that’s not hard. Unfortunately, he’s taken professional risks in the past, and he’s running from a mistake for which he’s been unfairly blamed. So, like Claire, he fears for his reputation too.

The 1930s and the New Deal fascinate me, so I was primed for this book. I also love the engineering office politics, easily the strongest scenes in the novel, and the cutthroat competition just to have a paying job, which brilliantly captures the desperation of the Thirties. The descriptions of the construction process and the difficulties of supply and labor offer a glimpse of how remarkable the effort was — and when you realize that this dam was only one of thousands of government projects, you have to be awed. On a more human scale, Nathan’s voice represents the passion and professionalism behind the project. He comes through loud and clear, expressing his acuity but also his loneliness:

Downstairs someone coughed. He pictured the boardinghouse as if it were a child’s miniature, each of them a doll in its own compartment. There was only the cough, the scuff of a shoe, the sudden voice raised in laughter, that told you someone was really there. A half-dozen lives playing out in parallel.

However, Watershed’s parts don’t cohere. I don’t know how Claire decides, as she does, to make something better of herself; at times, she hardly seems the unsophisticated “country girl,” as described, so what’s she changing from? She’s certainly not her mother’s daughter, and I feel I know the older woman better, what her standards are, what she cares about most, and why. Three men want Claire, or act as though they do, but, other than her prettiness, I can’t say what motivates them. Nathan, who believes he’s meant for her, just “feels right” in her presence. Okay, but the three men spend so much time maneuvering around each other, I begin to think Claire’s more an object of desire than a full person. I will say that after Travis, a complete boor, practically a thug — why did she marry him, again? — Claire’s next romantic choice makes sense.

But mostly, Watershed loses its way after its powerful start. Many chapters, though too brief to digress far and well written, have nothing to do with the story and exist only to show attitudes toward the dam and the electricity that will come. Though I like these themes, I wish Barr had confined them to scenes in which his protagonists appear, which would have felt natural, not shoehorned in. Without revealing too much, I note that these favorite themes loom so large at the end, they confuse the resolution, which zips by. Twice, I looked back after finishing the book to be sure I hadn’t missed a brief chapter or section. I’m still puzzled.

Watershed reached print through the generosity of Charles Frazier, whose Cold Mountain Fund dedicates itself to bringing southern writers into print. I applaud this mission with fervor and look forward to future offerings. However, I urge the powers behind Watershed, whether the fund or the publisher, to devote more resources to proofreading. Watershed suffers from many errors, not just dropped letters or words, some of which make the dialogue hard to follow.

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

From Auschwitz to Australia: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

08 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman
Putnam, 2018. 293 pp. $26

Dutiful, reliable, bewildered by life, unsure what happiness is or whether he’s ever experienced it, that’s Tom Hope — until he meets Hannah Babel. Hometown, Australia, has never seen anything like her, and even in 1968, the changes sweeping the West seem to have skipped this rural, agrarian corner of Down Under. Hannah, an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (a phrase probably seldom used, but it fits) plans to open a bookshop, of all things, and she hires Tom, a sheep rancher and orchardist, to do welding and carpentry to prepare for the opening. She’s utterly mercurial, older than he by fifteen years, speaks inflected English he can’t always fathom, and when she lets her canary, David, fly freely, the bird settles on Tom’s shoulder, further discomfiting him.

Hannah settles on him too, in a passionate rush that made me think, for a moment, that The Bookshop of the Brokenhearted derives from a male fantasy. But no; though their instant mutual attraction burns intensely, plenty of obstacles stand between them, least of which is that Tom has never read a book. A few years before, Tom married Trudy, a psychologically unstable woman who has left him, twice, and scarred him so badly that happiness is “a fugitive,” to “be roused to confidence, encouraged,” but, if grasped too strongly, might “slip back into the shadows, forever.” (Trudy’s legacy continues in other ways, but I don’t want to reveal too much.) Hannah has had two husbands, both dead, but she suffered her worst loss at Auschwitz, which stays with her, always. Metaphorically, that loss connects her to Trudy, something that neither Tom nor Hannah expected.

Poddy lambs, or orphans, drinking milk at a sheep station (ranch) in Australia (courtesy Figaro at English Wikipedia)

In lesser hands, a premise like this could easily turn sticky with treacle, melodrama, clichéd predictability, or a combination of these. Books, bookshops, and libraries are a hot thing in fiction these days, soon to be a trope, perhaps. Nevertheless, nothing happens here without second thoughts, reversals, mixed feelings, and a sense of dread, collectively the best tonic for treacle. Hillman never loses sight of his characters’ age, maturity, or makeup, and his narrative takes no adolescent flights of fancy, relying on simple prose, grounded in the everyday, again staying in character. Consider this passage early on, just after Trudy leaves, and Tom, in his workshop, wonders whether she’ll write:

With the soldering, it was the work of a good two hours. An old, demented ram he treated as a friend butted him repeatedly as he sanded and primed — not hard, just affectionately. And Beau [his dog] in turn chewed on the old ram’s leg. Tom asked himself aloud: ‘What do you expect her [Trudy] to say to you, you nong? “Hello, it’s a nice day?” For God’s sake.’ He was a practical person who never thought of fate and things that were meant to be. He could take apart an engine, stand surrounded by its thousand parts, find what was causing the problem, put the engine back together. He might daydream, but he knew that the dreams were foolish.

How can you resist a scene like that, which shows another side to a man not given to reflection?

Besides the treacle, it would be easy for a writer to adopt Hannah as a Jew of convenience, visible to a knowledgeable reader as unfamiliar with her own faith, which she’s also conveniently let slide. That’s a favorite device, as I’ve noted before in other posts. But Hillman knows his ground, rendering Hannah’s flashbacks with authority and depicting her Jewishness as well as the casual anti-Semitism of Tom’s neighbors. But their reaction is an aside; Tom has never heard of Auschwitz and has the barest notions of the Holocaust, about which Hannah refuses to tell him. So it’s the hidden past that lies between them, not what the neighbors say, about which Tom wouldn’t care anyway.

Names matter in this novel, at times too obviously. Tom Hope? Check. Does Babel refer to the tower of, given Hannah’s multilingual, sometimes chaotic persona; or Isaac, the great Russian writer murdered by Stalin? No question where Pastor Bligh comes from, a vicious, self-righteous disciplinarian who lives up to his namesake, except that he’s incompetent at his job. I have no sympathy for fundamentalist Christian cultist lunatic sadists, and I suppose that’s fair. Yet I want this man to have a three-dimensional rendering, and he doesn’t get one.

Even so, that’s the major glitch in The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, a warm, satisfying, decidedly unsticky novel, which I highly recommend.

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

Ménage à Trois: Love Is Blind

14 Monday Jan 2019

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Review: Love Is Blind, by William Boyd
Knopf, 2018. 369 pp. $27

Brodie Moncur is one of those fictional characters you wish you knew in real life. A Scotsman entering his twenties in the nineteenth century’s final decade, Brodie has spent six years tuning pianos for an Edinburgh concern, Channon and Co. He knows all there is to know about his craft but much less of the world than he would like, so when his boss chooses him to manage a showroom in Paris, Brodie jumps at the chance. With his bag of tools and the knowledge in his head, he can go anywhere. But to make his break, he must stand up to his narcissistic, tyrannical father, who keeps the army of Brodie’s siblings in thrall—Brodie’s the first to leave and by no means the youngest. Nobody, least of all Brodie himself, expects him ever to return; as Boyd often does, he shows that anticipated emotional transition through the natural world:

Brodie had been fishing this small river since he could remember — Callum [his brother] also. They knew every bend and pool, every potential crossing point, every placid, midge-hovered eddy. It had a calming effect on him… memories skittered through his mind, came and went like butterflies or sun dapples beneath breeze-shifted branches; he saw himself as a little boy with his first rod, remembered the charge and thrill of his first catch. Maybe this small river and its wilderness should be ‘home’ to him, he thought, not the manse or the village. He should carefully store the memories of this day and recall it whenever he felt lonely or homesick.

But, as the title suggests, this novel isn’t just a coming-of-age story. A creative thinker, in Paris Brodie devises a scheme whereby a celebrated pianist will use a Channon exclusively and thus publicize the brand. The idea works, but with consequences that will change Brodie’s life; John Kilbarron, “the Irish Liszt,” signs on, sweeping Brodie into his mercurial, if fading, orbit. One moon encircling planet Kilbarron is Russian soprano Lika Blum, his mistress, for whom Brodie falls, hard. Another moon is the pianist’s boorish, mistrustful brother, Malachi, who worships John and acts as his business manager. To no surprise, life gets very complicated. It also travels to different places, and one of the pleasures of this novel is how Boyd describes them all.

Some tools of the trade: rubber mutes and a tuning hammer (courtesy Onascout via Wikimedia Commons)

Brodie’s character appeals, in part, because he takes his many losses without an ounce of self-pity, while enjoying happiness to the fullest. He draws people to him wherever he goes, and his love for and understanding of pianos makes his work a fascinating art. The scenes in which he repairs or tunes these magnificent instruments make wonderful reading, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a virtuoso’s necessary assistant that no one ever meets.

Brodie trusts people easily, perhaps too much so — strange, given his corrupt, vicious father — and suffers for it. His ingenuity bears fruit, but others seem destined to appropriate it. Accordingly, bad things do happen to him; one theme of Love Is Blind is how quickly happiness and contentment can dissolve. Still, those reversals have to do with others’ weakness, not his, so at times, I wonder whether he’s a little too good to be true. His sole major flaw seems to be vengefulness, but you have to push him very hard before he unleashes it, testament to his patience.

The more obvious weak link is Malachi, whose antagonism has no apparent root except a self -sacrificial brother worship, which Boyd explains but never explores. As an antagonist, Malachi is satisfyingly tireless, but after a while, he becomes more of a device than a person. I wish Lika came into closer focus as well, for she seems a passionate, seductive, willing beauty, perhaps too convenient for Brodie by half. He’s the star of the show, and what you think about that fact or the man himself will decide whether Love Is Blind is for you.

Despite these drawbacks, though, I like this novel, and I think Brodie’s story makes for beautiful, poignant reading.

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

Just Three Blocks Apart: Not Our Kind

17 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: Not Our Kind, by Kitty Zeldis
Harper, 2018. 337 pp. $27

One morning in 1947, Eleanor Moskowitz is on her way to a job interview when two taxicabs collide on a Manhattan street. Eleanor, riding in one, suffers a mild injury, though she’s more upset at missing her interview. But the passenger in the other taxi, Patricia Bellamy, insists on bringing Eleanor to her Park Avenue home and tending to her.

As it happens, Patricia’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Margaux, needs a tutor, and Eleanor has teaching experience and a Vassar degree. More importantly, Margaux takes to her instantly, as she has to no other person besides her parents and her mother’s brother, her Uncle Tom. As an angry, whiny child suffering a disability — she had polio and walks with a cane — she normally dislikes everyone on sight, so the connection to Eleanor means something to Patricia.

Trouble is, Eleanor’s Jewish, and Patricia’s an anti-Semite — the genteel sort, to be sure, but her husband, Wynn, is louder and more pointed about it. In fact, he’s louder and more pointed about everything, a drunken boor with roving eyes and hands. But the Bellamys hire Eleanor anyway, because Margaux likes her, and they’re desperate for someone to get through to their daughter.

Screen shot from the trailer for Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947, which featured John Garfield, one of the era’s great actors, in a supporting part. For this and other “suspect” roles, the House Un-American Activities Committee destroyed him. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

But Eleanor has her doubts too. As her mother says, these prospective employers are “not our kind,” and the newly hired tutor feels intimidated by their wealth, apparent ease, and, well, perfection, observable even in the building where they live, only three blocks from her own:

Mrs. Bellamy lived in a twelve-story apartment building on the southwest corner of Eighty-Third and Park. Eleanor was more attentive today to the six limestone medallions, each depicting a wreath of fruit and flowers, the four massive Greek columns, two on either side of the door, as well as the black lanterns that were attached to the façade. With its limestone and brick exterior, the building projected a permanence, and even moral rectitude, that made the buildings in her own neighborhood seem almost provisional in contrast.

Zeldis has New York down — the clothing styles, social mores, scenery, and, most germane, workplace anti-Semitism. The author has a gift for the unexpected, the essence of tension, so that even when the plot seems predictable, events don’t turn out quite the way you think. I also like Zeldis’s knack for getting tremendous mileage out of a simple situation that’s actually very complicated, especially once Patricia’s charming, individualist brother happens on the scene and hits it off with Eleanor right away. The Bellamys’ prejudice lurks behind every interaction, as if the elephant in the room were trumpeting loudly, except they try not to hear it. It’s the problem that simply won’t go away, and Zeldis resists any temptation at easy fixes. For the most part, until the last quarter of the novel, the plot unfolds naturally, with no apparent guiding hand.

Where Not Our Kind falls short, I think, lies in the characters, especially the men. Wynn is a cartoon; Zeldis belatedly announces his merits, trying to mitigate his villainy, but you don’t see them. Likewise, though Tom’s charming, he’s elusive, and though I can see Eleanor admire his ease and wish she had it, and that she soaks up his kindness and sensitivity, that’s different from love. I like Patricia and her daughter, who seem real, and Eleanor’s mother, Irina, who can observe that she’s unhappy about decisions Eleanor has made, but that unhappiness isn’t fatal.

The heroine’s another story. I sympathize with Eleanor, but once I finished the book, I tried to remember her flaws and couldn’t. She’s unsure of herself and a little envious, but those hardly count, and she seems remarkably self-possessed, seldom at a loss for the words she needs to stick up for herself. She grows toward feminism without using the term, a worthy theme and apt for the time, but I find Patricia more rounded.

Further, Eleanor’s Jewishness is entirely cultural, and though many novelists draw such characters, I often suspect that they do so merely for the inconvenience that observance causes in the workaday world, or because they’re not confident they can do otherwise. Zeldis plainly can; late in the book, Eleanor recoils inwardly at pork on a plate. She could have, should have done that throughout the narrative–not necessarily as strongly, just to acknowledge her difference, her otherness, which she notes in many other ways.

Finally, Not Our Kind, despite its marvelous descriptions of clothing or architecture, doesn’t feel like 1947. There’s no sense of relief after a war, or even that there was a war, though we’re told that Wynn didn’t fight, and that Patricia lost a brother. There’s nothing about popular culture, politics (as in anti-Communist hysteria, whose roots lay in anti-Semitism), or other goings-on — surprising, given that Gentleman’s Agreement, a movie about covert anti-Semitism, came out that year.

I enjoyed reading Not Our Kind, but I don’t think it will stay with me.

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

Internal Medicine: The Winter Soldier

05 Monday Nov 2018

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Review: The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown, 2018. 319 pp. $28

In 1915, war sends Lucius Krzelewski, a third-year Polish medical student, to a regimental hospital somewhere on the Polish front. But what that sounds like bears no relation to what he finds there — he’s the only doctor, aided by a single nurse and three orderlies, and they toil inside a dark, dank, freezing church whose roof has a large hole in it. They have no x-ray machine, laboratory, or hospital beds, and though they have fairly steady supplies of dressings, carbolic, morphine, and chloral, the emergency medicine is far from anything Lucius has ever heard of. In fact, he’s hardly ever touched a patient, his training having consisted of rote memory and recitations. He does possess an extraordinary internalized representation of what the human body looks like beneath the skin, and his diagnostic instincts are very sharp. Unfortunately, what matters now is how quickly and effectively he can perform amputations.

However, Sister Margarete, the nurse, is there to teach him, and he proves a quick study. Not always quick enough for her taste, to be sure — she has a sardonic way of observing formalities that tells him she knows more about his inexperience than she’s letting on. She also senses his social unease, though not its cause, a stuffy, aristocratic upbringing:

He wondered if he had grown up in another time or place — among a different, silent people, his unease would never have been noticed. But in Vienna, among the eloquent, where frivolity had been cultivated into a faith, he knew that others saw him falter. Lucius: the name, chosen by his father after the legendary kings of Rome, itself was mockery; he was anything but light. By his thirteenth birthday, so terrified by his mother’s disapproval, so increasingly uncertain of anything to say at all, his unease began to appear in a quiver of his lip, a nervous twisting of his fingers, and at last, a stutter.

Ever since then, Lucius has seldom been able to talk to anyone easily, unless it’s about medicine, for which he has that preternatural, internal feel. It is his life raft, his hope, his balm for what ails him, a malady he cannot diagnose. Yet he can talk to sister Margarete. That in itself is astonishing, for she belongs to the Order of Saint Catherine of Siena, speaks about lice in biblical phrases, and has been known to withhold painkillers from patients who try to trespass certain boundaries, a mistake they don’t make twice.

Yet this formidable, utterly correct angel of mercy isn’t all she seems, any more than Lucius is, which may explain the growing, unspoken attraction between them. The jacket cover typically tells too much, so I advise against reading it, but this much I’ll say: The arrival of a soldier suffering acute shell shock provides a defining moment in the narrative.

And those hospital scenes are terrific. Mason is not only an exceptionally accomplished novelist, he teaches psychiatry. You sense that his portrayal of psychological battle trauma, terse and stripped-down as it is, is all the more authentic, without a trace of the theatrical. Likewise, his depictions of incompetence, class-consciousness, bitter ethnic rivalry, and utter disarray within the Austro-Hungarian Army ring absolutely true. There’s a brief battle scene (which, though vivid, seems a bit contrived), but Mason’s more concerned with suffering behind the lines and what people can and will do when they are pushed far enough. Only in those circumstances can Lucius see his shortcomings and capacities, which is why, despite the intense cruelty, pain, and heartache, his experience transforms him. Internal medicine, indeed.

Where The Winter Soldier troubles me is toward the beginning and the end. Once Lucius sets eyes on his so-called regimental hospital, the forward narrative pauses for forty or so pages to recount his upbringing and education. It’s interesting, mostly, beautifully written, and often darkly funny, yet I found myself saying, Oh, come on, already. Does the novel need all of this material, and must it come right there? I invite you to decide, as with the ending, not all of which seems entirely credible to me.

But The Winter Soldier is an excellent novel, an unusual tale of romance and coming of age, set against an equally unusual portrayal of war.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this post first appeared in shorter, different form.

Less Talk, More Mystery: The Widows of Malabar Hill

26 Monday Feb 2018

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Review: The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey
Soho, 2018. 375 pp. $27

Some books I want to like because their themes speak to my principles, and their premises and storylines promise to teach me something. That’s why I was eager to read The Widows of Malabar Hill, but I wish I could say the novel is anything other than a disappointment.

The year is 1921, and Oxford-educated Perveen Mistry is the first female lawyer in Bombay, and one of the few in India. Since she hasn’t been admitted to the bar, a result of sexism rather than ability, she may not argue cases in court as a barrister but only take depositions and process legal papers as a solicitor. In this capacity, she serves her father’s law firm, and though Perveen wishes she could do more exciting work than read contracts and wills, she’s resigned to it — more or less.

A Zoroastrian fire temple in Udwada, India (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, a well-to-do client of her father’s, a Muslim textile-mill owner, has just died, and there are issues concerning the inheritance due his three wives. It looks to Perveen as if a swindle is going on, so someone must talk to the widows. But not only are they in severe mourning, they live in purdah, or seclusion, never leaving the house and certainly not speaking to men. At best, Perveen’s father might obtain a group audience through a grille, but he could never see their faces to gauge whether they were telling the truth or speak to them alone. So Perveen goes in his stead. And what she finds is not only a swindle but conflicting interests within and without the house that will lead to murder.

What’s wrong with this? Nothing. It’s where Massey takes her premise — and how she gets it there — that’s the problem. First of all, the mystery doesn’t really start until page 70 or so, which slows the pace considerably. The rest is back story about Perveen’s romantic history. Though her past explains her intense commitment to justice for women, her parents are actually more interested in seeing her graduate law school than in finding her a husband. Consequently, there’s no push that Perveen must contest, no contrast here to justify the back story, no barrier to overcome. The two plots intersect, but barely, and had Massey dropped the romance, the mystery would have remained intact. Though Perveen’s life experience provides a different cultural context from her legal sleuthing, the theme of women struggling against sexism is already evident, so the romance adds nothing new there.

Nevertheless, Perveen’s past includes some of the most compelling scenes in the book. She’s a Parsi, a descendent of Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India centuries before. Massey has much to say about Parsi customs, culture, and how a (relatively) liberated young woman like Perveen chafes under a tradition that puts men firmly in charge. For instance, under Parsi law at that time, a wife could obtain a divorce on the grounds of infidelity only if her husband had consorted with another married woman, whereas visiting a prostitute was his right. To her sorrow, Perveen learns that no redress exists for virtually any form of marital abuse, unless it threatens her life.

I could have gladly read more of this painful, poignant story of a young woman’s fight to preserve her individuality and freedom against insuperable odds. But even there, I would have liked a subtler narrative technique, the lack of which undoes The Widows of Malabar Hill. Massey has a great deal of information to impart, and I’m happy to learn it, but I prefer not to have it dumped. Too often, characters explain in dialogue what should be shown or implied through action, and though the subject matter and situations are new to me, I find that the stilted, undramatic presentation stifles the story. The rhythm of the plot involves bursts of action followed by lots of talk, and the latter feels heavy after a while.

The mystery therefore suffers, as characters race to and fro, only to stop and exchange information, important parts of which are privileged, conveniently discovered, or withheld from the reader altogether until a key moment. The seemingly obligatory scene in which Perveen confronts the criminal follows two formulas so ancient they’ve grown mold. The culprit not only confesses but does so more volubly than seems plausible. It’s too much talk yet again, the weight that sinks a novel that begins with so much promise.

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