Marina Lewycka, “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian”

I am not a huge fan of the “triumph-of-the-human-spirit” genre.  I am a pretty soft touch and I deeply resent being manipulated, but from time to time, I’m caught unawares and charmed. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian did the trick.  Reader, I cried at the end.

Not without laughing like a hyena in other spots, mind you, which is one saving grace.  Marina Lewycka’s novel is actually fairly close in basic outline to The Clothes on Their Backs.  It is another story of the daughter of war-damaged Eastern European immigrants to England. It is cast, however, as a comedy, and reminded me strongly of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, especially as Lewycka winds the plot down, bringing onstage all the characters for a noisy, cheerful finale.

The premise is simple, even predictable: narrator Nadezhda’s ancient Ukrainian father, a widower, wants to marry the rapacious 36-year-old Valentina. She is in England on a temporary visa, and marriage will make her legal.  Her chief qualifications appear to be a pair of “superior breasts.” Nadezhda and her ten-years-older sister Vera, who have been at odds since childhood, must cope.  Somewhat predictably, their relationship thaws as Nadezhda comes to understand more about her sister’s childhood and their widely different view of life.

Lewycka does two things I admire technically.  Though Nadezhda narrates, it is clear that she is pretty tightly wound,  stubborn, and quick to fly off the handle — without acknowledging these traits. That’s really hard to pull off.  So is the way she narrates scenes she did not witness; Lewycka uses a subtle transitional sentence or to to indicate that she has the information at second hand, and then inserts us into the action. It feels legit in this instance, and it’s very useful.

Of all the funny bits in the book — there is a chapter, for instance, entitled “Green Satin Bra” — my favorite is perhaps the least subtle, a feral cat named “Lady Di” who turns out to be a male.  For reasons too complicated to recount, there is a vast immobile Rolls Royce beached in Nikolai’s  front yard.  (Valentina’s doing, of course.) “Lady Di likes the Roller.  There is a window on the rear passenger side that does not fully close, where he can squeeze in. He invites his friends round, too, and they party all night on the sumptuous leather seats, and then spray a bit of piss around to mark that they were there.”

The brilliantly catchy title refers to the book Nikolai is writing. We get excerpts. I had no idea tractors could be so interesting.

Adam Langer, “Ellington Boulevard”

Adam Langer is one of those people who notices everything.  There’s a throwaway detail early in Ellington Boulevard where he has a minor character drive away from a scene in a car missing a license plate.  Of course the alcoholic slattern Marilyn Scheinblum would drive an inadequately registered car!

But he also has a grip on the big picture. This is a novel about New York City real estate. “Each sale is its own miniature play: a wry Neil Simon comedy about a couple selling the walk-up where they first fell in love, a bleak Arthur Miller family drama about siblings feuding over inherited property, an August Wilson tragedy about a man forced to sell because he can’t keep pace with the rising cost of living.” Oh, what a clever concept: he works outward from one apartment changing hands on West 106th St. also known as “Ellington Boulevard.”  The tenant, affable and earnest, is being evicted by the greedy building owner. The cast of characters spirals out from there to the buyer, her fiancé, the realtor, his boyfriend, the owner’s former wife… you get the idea.

Langer keeps all the balls in the air, which is hard enough to do.  What sets him apart is the way he walks the fine line between comedy and caricature. In some ways this is a smaller, kinder Bonfire of the Vanities. With a cast this big, you’re not aiming for exquisite shades of character. Langer’s structuring conceit is framing this as a musical.  He gets everyone on and off stage efficiently, lets ‘em have their moments, but they aren’t going to be sitting around looking into a dying fire, laying bare their souls.  (Exceptions are made for the protagonist and his love interest, who get to bare their souls in northern Manhattan.)

So you have all these more or less venal characters buzzing around, mortgage brokers and magazine editors and emotionally stunted graduate students. Langer mocks them all, but he also endows them with some humanity, so that we empathize with… well, most of them. I really admire this. It’s much easier simply to be savage but Langer is obviously generous and his tolerance expands the novel.

Ellington Boulevard focuses on the crazy peak of the real estate market in New York. As the book ends, there are hints that the bubble may be bursting. Now that we’re sitting here amid wet soapy bubble-residue, the book feels like a monument to something finished.  I hope that doesn’t harm its fate, because it’s lots of fun.

Full Disclosure: Adam is the friend of a friend and we share a publisher.

Muriel Barbery, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”

I wanted to like The Elegance of the Hedgehog. For one thing, it has been brought to us by the estimable Europa Editions, publishers of the totally wonderful Jane Gardam. Clearly these are people of discernment.

Then, of course, I am a francophile, so the premise — cranky ugly autodidact concierge warms up to brilliant suicidal twelve-year-old girl in a grand Paris apartment building — was immensely appealing.  And in fact I did love the stuff about life in the building; the to-ing and fro-ing of the Parisian Great and Good.  There’s a marvelous scene where Paloma gets dragged by her mother to a sale in a lingerie store on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, and witnesses a battle to the death over a pair of lacy underpants, carried out under the guise of the utmost courtesy.

I was a good sport about the intermittent lessons on philosophy or the Japanese concept of wabi that come from Renée, the concierge.  (The structure has her observations alternating with those of Paloma, the twelve-year-old.) Read ‘em all, took them in. It even occurred to me that I was not to take this whole story literally which is a difficult concept for me. Perhaps a novel in which a pair of sisters are named “Paloma” and “Colombe” is signalling some allegorical intent. OK. Authors have different intentions. I can wrap my head around that.

But here’s what you don’t do — you don’t graft together all this highfalutin philosophy and this clever wise-cracking narration with a story too sappy for Frances Hodgson Burnett.  You just don’t.  Least of all do you pull the stunt that Muriel Barbery does at the end. Suffice it to say that the final words of the book are: “The beauty in this world.” Nope. No preaching.

The handsome Gallimard edition

This book was a huge best seller in France and has been on the New York Times best-seller list for almost three months, so lots of people are buying and enjoying it. I guess I’m just crankier than I thought.

Laurie R. King, “Touchstone”

Laurie R. King is really good at what she does. Her characters are interesting, she plots well, and she’s really good on atmosphere.  The prologue of Touchstone includes a wonderful passage in which a pair of hands intent on a task becomes a character, and she endows them with personality, even a sense of humor, while bringing to life the reader’s curiosity. In fact, none of the three characters in the prologue is identified: they are reduced to their own essences.  It’s a great way to get the reader to take the bait.

So I was really excited at first. There’s another bravura section early on which casts a car as an “invader” into rural Cornwall, and all was well — until the narrative gradually ground to a halt. The plot concerns an attempt to foil a terrorist plot in the months leading up to England’s General Strike.  The “touchstone” of the title is a World War I veteran who, after having been injured by a German shell, finds all of his perceptions so keen that he has withdrawn from society.  Great concept, and he’s a very appealing character. But the book stays largely in the consciousness of an American FBI agent who fails to snap into life. The oleaginous black-clad (really? must we?) villain is just annoying and neither of the leading female characters rose beyond the sum of their physical descriptions.  Which is odd, really, because King has created wonderful female characters.  (I wondered if, in this case, she wasn’t hampered by sticking to what she imagined a male consciousness to be like. Not very flattering to guys; simplistic.)

And then, the books of King’s that I like aren’t the historical ones.  She’s written a very successful series about a notional Sherlock Holmes protegée/wife named Mary Russell and I find those unreadable. So it occurs to me that maybe the problem is Laurie R. King writing historical fiction. She’s done the research, but the language feels stilted, for one thing. And then, I’m not sure she can really imagine herself back into the cast of mind of an earlier era. Because they did think differently. They saw things differently, felt and expected different things from life.

Maybe it’s too much to ask, to look for that historical sensibility grafted onto crackerjack plotting, because when all’s said and done this is supposed to be a mystery. But even the suspense part was disappointing. Despite scenes of unruly crowds, a number of fist-fights and not one but two bombs, the story arc was weighted down by exposition. Too much background about anarchists vs. socialists, too much detail on labor unrest in the U.S. and Britain. It takes a special reader to be entertained by a paragraph on the British Defence of the Realm Act.

Jane Mulvagh, “Madresfield: The Real Brideshead”

This one’s a little frustrating. Madresfield is a little-known English country house that served as the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited.  But part of what made it interesting to Mulvagh was its early history and the fact that the house has been lived in by the same family for hundreds of years. I suspect the book is actually a PhD. dissertation with pretty illustrations; there’s a lot of enthusiasm about the range of documents I could not quite share.

Lots of description of the countryside, lots of narrative about Elgar’s relationship with the family but the really juicy stuff doesn’t happen until page 277 when it transpires that the 7th Earl, father of seven, a devout churchman, was also bisexual and indiscreet.  Big scandal, exile to Europe, etc. Lots of collateral damage done to the children; Evelyn Waugh was a friend of one of the daughters. Hence the source of his inspiration.

Mulvagh clearly feels strongly about the house and grateful to the current chatelaine; one senses her discretion about the scandal and the emotional fallout.  She does make the point that the Lygon children, like Waught’s Flytes, were cast out of Eden as a result of their father’s misbehavior.  The girls couldn’t marry “well,” and the boys were troubled. Perhaps most interesting is the point made by David Cannadine in the Foreword, that the true inspiration for Brideshead was not “a Vanbrugh stage set, a palazzo fortissimo” but a moated manor house, hidden away in a foggy vale. I doubt, though, that this book is going to erase Castle Howard from my mind.

Linda Grant, “The Clothes on Their Backs”

I bought this book because the cover was so pretty…. and then read it on a Kindle. That is to say, I picked it up at Barnes and Noble, added it to the pile of eight books I was going to buy, thought, “I’m not carrying those home, it’s time for a Kindle.” And went home and ordered the gadget.  Then, finally downloaded five of the eight books onto it.

This was possibly unfair, especially since it was a material quality of The Clothes on Their Backs that had drawn my hand to it in the first place. And in the event, I had to go back and reread the prologue because the Kindle was a little bit disconcerting. It felt at first as if this was one of those books where the narrator of the frame is eclipsed by the far-more-vivid characters in the main section of the novel.

This is true, but intentional, because the story involves the summer of 1977 when Vivien Kovacs’ life is blown open. The only child of a pair of Hungarian Jewish refugees to London, she has grown up in at atmosphere of control and silence about the past.  Bookish and naive, a bundle of emotions seeking an outlet, she scrapes acquaintance with her father’s ex-con brother Sandor, and from there the story takes off.

The characters are wonderful: Sandor is one of those greedy, larger-than-life figures who dominate any space they enter, including your head. His dignified Jamaican fiancee Eunice and Vivien’s rough-trade boyfriend round out the cast, along with London itself.  There’s a wonderful black-and-white scene, all moonlight and shadows, set on a Thames dredger in the middle of the night, and another set-piece involving sex in a deserted Tube train at the Golders Green depot.

And then, of course, there are the clothes. Vivien uses her wardrobe to define herself, to define others, but above all, to work out who she is. “The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in….We are forever turning into someone else, and should never forget that someone else is always looking.”

Grant is wonderful on uncle Sandor’s gangster suits, Eunice’s disciplined, impeccable outfits, and the plumage of the dance hall where Sandor and Eunice take Vivien — two-tone shoes and gaudy suits, tight satin dresses and cruel high-heeled snakeskin sandals that make Vivien’s feet bleed.  That, children, is the cost of emotional life.  Oh, and here’s some wonderful advice from a tango teacher: “All ways of thinking pale into insignificance if you just take big steps and leave the thinking to me.”

It’s one way to grow up; uncomfortable, but it makes for good reading.

Julian Barnes, “Nothing to be Frightened Of”

Well, it was Dead Writers Weekend around here and it ended last night as I read John Updike on John Cheever’s biography in The New Yorker (March 9). Disconcerting: Updike’s voice sounded so very alive!  And writing about Cheever, who was such a big part of my growing-up years that I still can’t believe he’s dead…  And then in the same issue, a profile of David Foster Wallace who taught some of Will’s friends at Pomona.

This might have been strange enough, but it would have made less of an impression if I hadn’t also been reading Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened Of.  He’s talking about death, of course.

Holbein's "Dance of Death"

I think about death a lot. There is apparently a French term for this, le réveil mortel, which Barnes translates as “the wake-up call of death.”  Those of us who have received the call are aware that our days are numbered. If Barnes had a Facebook page, he would be a fan of le réveil. But he’s not close-minded: he considers the option, which is simply dropping dead without ever acknowledging that death is on the way. That would not be his choice: “For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about…”  And mind you, he’s not just talking about the death of our individual bodies, for Barnes is a somewhat regretful atheist.  (“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”)  He’s also facing up to the death of whatever it was that made us individuals, and — as if that weren’t enough — the death of the human race.

A lot of this is so abstract that my mind just slithers away from it. But Barnes is so clever, so humane, such a good writer that I relished the book. It is also, necessarily, about his life, including a funny and problematic family (whose isn’t?) and an enviable career.  He even spends a page facing up to the notion of his last reader.

And of course, we don’t just die: we die under circumstances that we don’t control.  Barnes’ mother had a stroke and was incapacitated to her profound and barely expressible frustration. We may lose whatever it is that makes us us (memory? character?) long before we draw that last breath.

So this Updike review of Cheever was cheering, in a somewhat morbid way.  Apparently Updike stayed cogent to the end, and very much wanted to review this new biography of his old acquaintance and colleague.  (He wasn’t thrilled by it.) We should all be so lucky.

Molly Gloss, “The Jump-Off Creek”

I was glad to see that there’s a new edition of The Jump-Off Creek, because I read a 1989 hardcover that looked as if it had come off a dude ranch’s shelf of books left by guests.  I wouldn’t have found it if Meg hadn’t loaned me Gloss’s later The Hearts of Horses, which I adored. This is similar: smaller, with a tighter radius but similar characters.  Lydia Sanderson arrives on the Jump-Off Creek to take up a claim.  She possesses two mules, two goats, and a trunk, but the woman is one long drink of true grit. Nothing surprising here. It’s Lydia against the weather and the loneliness, with subplots about the other hard-scrabble characters who share her little valley.  But it’s vivid and generous. Gloss intersperses her narrative with excerpts from a journal in Lydia’s name, and she acknowledges the pioneer women whose journals she used as sources.  That may account for the similarity of her tale to the Western segment of Amy Bloom’s Away. Everyone’s drinking from the same well here.  And if you find a great detail like Pioneer Woman heading out in an ice storm to save her mule, and having to lead the mule home while picking ice out of her eyelashes every few minutes… heck, you go with it, right?  It just convinces me further that the true winners in history are the ones who put pencil to paper early and often because they get to frame the narrative. Maybe the finest ambition in life is really to become a Primary Source, right?  Just like Edmond de Goncourt.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Pages from the Goncourt Journals”

If you spend as much time as I do mentally visiting 19th century Paris, you can’t escape the Goncourts.  I had read two of their novels, Germinie Lacerteux and Manette Salomon, but only in connection with my own novel about van Gogh.  (He portrayed Dr. Gachet with copies of those books.) As novelists, these guys are really heavy sledding. Making a tale of secret nymphomania dull is quite an achievement. So I was a little apprehensive about even the excerpted Journals but felt I could no longer avoid them, what with my interest in the Siege of Paris and the Commune.

Well! Who knew! The stilted prose is gone, the reaching for effect nowhere to be found, and in their place a lively, aphoristic, panorama of life among the likes of Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, etc. etc.   Of course part of the fascination with the Goncourts is the unanswerable question of who wrote what, but since Jules died in 1870, it’s Edmond’s character that emerges.  He was not a nice man — but his envy, his schadenfreude, his dreadful political opinions make the journals all the more interesting to read. I especially enjoyed the jockeying between him and Zola: Goncourt believed to his dying day that he invented Naturalist literature and that Zola merely did better at publicizing it.  Fascinating how the conditions of modern publishing have changed very little. Zola created a media hook by linking his books in the immense Rougon-Macquart cycle, and he worked as hard as his journalism as he did at his fiction, providing what we would call a “platform.” Goncourt, who didn’t need to earn his keep, was always classed as a dilettante despite the fact that he produced 40 volumes on different topics over his lifetime.

Edmond de Goncourt by Felix Bracquemond

He seems surprised, in the 1890s, at how furious his friends are when he publishes the Journals.  He says he was “led by my love of the truth and desire for sincerity to be perhaps unconsciously indiscreet…”  “Love of truth” is always the justification of the habitually malicious.

But he had a wonderful eye and a sometimes delicious sense of whimsy, as when he talks about giving a marmoset to a prostitute:  “It seemed to me that she was bound to like monkeys.”  Wonderful moment when he and friends dine on the upper platform of the spanking-new Eiffel Tower in 1889, gazing at the panorama of the city he adores. Marvelous everyday stuff, of the sort that Walter Benjamin adored, as when he mentions society women listening to racy songs “without the protection of a fan.”

Best entry: “How strange and peculiar nervous diseases are! Vaucorbeil the composer, has a horror of velvet, and suffers absolute agony whenever he is invited somewhere for the first time, wondering whether the dining-room chairs are covered in velvet.”

Let’s just hope there will be a mechanism whereby scholars and students can, 150 years from now, rummage through our blogs for gems like that!