Barry Maitland, “No Trace”

Maitland is new to me. This is another book I bought because of its cover — note to publishers of murder mysteries, bring on the moody black and white images, relevance to plot be damned. Apparently Maitland is launched on a series involving these Scotland Yard detectives, David Brock and Kathy Kolla. Apparently also St. Martin’s/Minotaur isn’t doing much to push them, because there’s very little sales apparatus on the Amazon website — earlier books don’t even have jacket photos, there’s no Kindle edition, no review, not even reader reviews.  Pretty sad. It’s not a great book, but it’s respectable, and genre addicts need their fixes. It takes a heck of a lot longer to write these things than it does to read them, so it’s a pity the publishers don’t know how to find us. 

Respectable but not great, I have to say. I suppose the model here is Deborah Crombie or Elizabeth George, straight-up contemporary police procedural involving male DCI and female DS. Only they have no personalities. They’re utterly flat. The book is ingeniously plotted but Maitland is so cursory with the characterization that at first the narrative had a strange choppy rhythm, as we moved from consciousness to consciousness without — this is difficult to express — ever feeling grounded. I think that’s what I mean. Here’s an example: late in the book Kathy Kolla visits the Soane Museum in London to follow up on a clue. She has a conversation with a guide  in the course of which essential information is imparted. Yet the guide is described only as “an elderly, impish man” and not named. That’s an opportunity lost.  Think of the nifty pen portraits we get from writers like Crombie and George, who manage to flesh out even the most fleeting presences in their books.  

The dialogue isn’t bad, and the description of place is pretty good. Lots of moaning about Yard bureaucracy (standard for contemporary UK and Italian mysteries) which ties neatly into the plot. Plot concerns pretentious idiocy at a Shoreditch art gallery. This stuff works very, very well. Nice sardonic view of art that includes, for instance, a “piece” called “Dead Puppies” that involves just that.  Clever.

Georgette Heyer, “The Masqueraders”

OK, it’s my one true vice. Not, in point of fact, all that vicious but I still hesitated to admit that I’d read this. But the deal I made with myself was that I’d write about every book I finished, so I can’t excuse leaving out a piece of total fluff.

In fact, this was the first Georgette Heyer novel I ever read. A friend gave it to me when I was 12 (also the year I discovered Dick Francis, another long-time love). I can’t count the number of times I’ve read The Masqueraders but the last reading was long enough ago so that I could appreciate its freshness.  It was published in 1928, and it’s not strictly one of her Regencies, being set in 1746 or so, just after the defeat of the Jacobites and Bonnie Prince Charlie. So the men, noticeably,  get all the good clothes, brocade coats with whaleboned skirts and huge cuffs to the elbow, lace ruffs and showy jewels. The men also get duels, and they get to hold up coaches using tiny pocket pistols and sword-sticks; maybe this is all more noticeable because the main characters are a brother and sister who have entered London society disguised (cross-dressing, in fact) as each other. I suppose in a day when men powdered their faces that was a more believable disguise? Or maybe in a day of black and white movies? The point is that the guys have all the fun while the girls are required to languish. And despite the improbability — you really have to check skepticism at the door — this is one of the better Heyers because the female lead has something active to do. (With a sword stick.)

No matter. I couldn’t read it critically. In fact this was sort of like seeing an old boyfriend at a party and understanding what I fell for all those years ago.

Julia Child, “My Life in France”

A minor work from the titanic Julia. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a sacred text in my house growing up, and when my children were tiny PBS kindly ran the early French Chef TV shows at an hour when they could entertain toddlers, so I was interested in the saga but its anecdotal telling does it no favors.  Yes, you get her marvelously tart yet generous voice, and there’s almost enough food material, but it doesn’t really hold up.

Best moment: describing the pack of stag-hounds run by the second husband of Louisette Bertholle, one of the three original collaborators on Mastering.  According to Julia, the stag hunt is unchanged from the days of the Louis, regulated on the calls of the cor de chasse trumpets (ancestors of the French horn). “There were about twenty different trumpet calls, each indicating a stage of the hunt: the dogs are circling; the stag is in the water; the scent is lost; the stag breaks from the forest; etc.”

Why, it’s ballet, only on horseback! The structure, the system, the profound formality. Also evident, of course, in French cuisine.

Georgette Heyer, “The Unfinished Clue”

Copyright 1934, straight-up English country-house mystery. Totally predictable, very restful. Opening sentence: “It was apparent to Miss Fawcett within one minute of her arrival at the Grange that her host was not in the best of tempers.”

I think we’re done here.

Sara Gruen, “Flying Changes”

Flying Changes follows Sara Gruen’s Riding Lessons, picking up with the same characters just a few months later. It exhibits pretty much the same strengths and weaknesses as the earlier book: the heroine is occasionally unbearable, the animal characters come close to upstaging the humans, and there’s really too much going on. But the big thing is, Sara Gruen’s prose is incredibly readable. I knew from the get-go that eventually I was going to collapse on the couch and churn through this book until the end. Never mind that the narrative was predictable from the beginning, in outline if not in detail. I couldn’t have cared less. So, there’s a subplot that peters out into nothing. So, the romantic interest is not much more than a warm body (a horse called Joe has a much more carefully thought-out personality). As if to amp up the emotional hold on the reader, this time Gruen introduces a baby.  And a cat — oh, gosh, kittens, too! It’s OK, I’m putty in her hands.

And this is because of the quality of her prose.  It’s not so much that she’s a good writer, which she is.  Descriptive, so vivid, lively, clever, funny.  Good ear for dialogue, her characters talk like people you know, in sentence fragments and with circular logic. The pacing is good: she spends the right amount of time dwelling on the important scenes and gets in and out of them gracefully. More than that, though, she has the magic quality and try as I might through this reading, I can’t quite define it.

Curtis Sittenfeld has it.  I didn’t really enjoy American Wife but I couldn’t have put it down. Rosamund Pilcher and Maeve Binchy have it — but a lot of writers of that kind of pleasant house-and-home fiction don’t. I think it’s something about one sentence leading into the next, a kind of rhythm? Maybe it’s the way the writing involves all of the senses? Here’s Annemarie relaxing on the back of her horse Hurrah, while he’s resting in his stall.  ”I lie back, my legs slack and my head resting on his rump. His spine is padded and warm and slightly indented. I love the feel of my vertebrae stretched out along his. We fit like a zipper.”  Pretty indelible.

Charles Dickens, “Little Dorrit” 3

It did not occur to me until page 751 that one of Dickens’ subjects in Little Dorrit is the very creation of narrative.  Of course in a book this big the author’s got a lot of preoccupations and I wonder if this was even something he was conscious of.  Here was the tip-off: Our Hero Arthur Clennam (hardworking, honorable, loyal) was raised by a cruel, harsh mother who justified her life as religiously motivated. All of her hardness and coldness and rigidity was for Jesus.  Near the end she miraculously recovers from her paralysis and rushes out to find Little Dorrit.  She is disoriented by the street (she’s been shut in for years) and the people she sees out there.  Dickens comments on “the want of likeness between the controllable pictures her imagination had often drawn of the life from which she was secluded, and the overwhelming rush of the reality…”

The disparity between the “controllable pictures” and the “rush of the reality.” Ouch. Then I thought about some of the secondary characters like Miss Wade, whose flawed perception of the world has been demonstrated, or Mr. Merdle, whose public persona as The Man of the Age was a fantasy.

But don’t we all create pictures in our imaginations? Don’t we all form our experiences into narratives? Don’t we all craft our personal presentation into the most flattering possible form?

Little Dorrit doesn’t.  She is almost entirely un-self-conscious. She just does her duty. The same is true of the more amiable secondary characters like Pancks and the Plornishes.  Flora Finching, Arthur’s childhood sweetheart, might straddle the line here.  She has invented a magical romantic memory of their long-ago relationship that almost obscures her ability to forge a new one. Dickens is a little kinder to her, though, allowing her to enjoy her rosy dream and also revealing her innate generosity.

I’m not at all sure what’s going on. I don’t quite believe that Dickens is suggesting that the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives are harmful. It’s going to take more thought to work that out. In the meantime I wanted to record the book’s end, one of my all-time favorites. Arthur and Little Dorrit have just been married and stand on the steps of the church portico “looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.

“Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness…. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and in shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.”

Charles Dickens, “Little Dorrit,” 2

This book is a massive read: what my children might call “a beast” of a book.  But that’s one of its pleasures, I find. Lurking at the back of my mind, day in and day out, is this alternate universe, mine to enter whenever I choose.  Probably one of the enduring pleasures of my life, when I think about it, this confidence that current conditions can always be eluded with the help of fiction.

I’m in the Bernie Madoff section.  Both Dickens and Trollope, I knew, had these characters, these shady banker/swindlers whose actions in the market corrupt the populace as a whole.  What’s eerie is the extent to which Mr. Merdle prefigures Madoff.  Here he is, pretending to try not to accept Mr. Dorrit’s fortune to invest: “It would not,… be at the present moment easy for what I may call a mere outsider to come into any of the good things — of course I speak of my own good things –…”  He goes on like this for a few sentences, and adds that in these transactions “there must be the purest faith between man and man; there must be unimpeached and unimpeachable confidence…”  Yup.  That’s how it works.

But then, in all sincerity, Dickens also gives us poor little Amy Dorrit talking about really loving a man: “If you loved any one, you would no more be yourself, but you would quite lose and forget yourself in your devotion to him.”  Thank heaven that mode of thought has changed.

Charles Dickens, “Little Dorrit”

Man, I hate crying on the subway. I was just sniffling gently and seeping tears, but you feel so exposed. And slightly embarrassed. Oscar Wilde famously wrote that “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter.” [Warning: Wikipedia quotation, so possibly incorrect]

I am so torn about this. On the whole I despise emotional manipulation in books; I’d rather hold myself aloof like Wilde. Yet somehow in the hands of Dickens or Trollope I gladly give way. The passage that got to me here was one in which Little Dorrit thanks Arthur Clennam for having paid her horrible brother’s debts.  She trembles, kisses his hand, etc. etc. She weeps, I weep.

What puzzles me is the alacrity with which I suspend my normal rules for this guy. Amy Dorrit is one of the legion of self-effacing Dickensian girl-children whose submission is their greatest glory. Yuck. But I find myself excusing his attitude because… because that’s the way he is. Because he’s Charles Dickens, and the weird woman-thing is part of the package. It goes along with the riproaring sweep of the plots and characters, the sneaky humor, the smoke and grime and the sensory overload (another thing I usually can’t bear).

For instance, here he is describing some of the hangers-on at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison.  “Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a peculiar way of doggedly slinking around the corner, as if they were eternally going to the pawnbrokers. When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on door-steps and in draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which gave the recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance, and no satisfaction.”

Good heavens! Look at the way he piles it on in that last sentence, drawing out detail upon detail, through the drafty hallways, touching on the faded ink, to the beautiful dactylic rhythm at the end: “great mental disturbance and no satisfaction.” It’s a whole tiny little novel, tacked onto a cough! I don’t know, maybe this is just love. You accept the flaws as the mirror of the strengths.

It’s a huge book and I’ll probably post a few more times on it. Yes, I was inspired to pick it up by the PBS series which is nifty (no problems with Matthew MacFadyen, dear me no).  It’s odd to be reading so close to seeing it on TV but not detrimental to either, I find. The forms are so different that the series is like a mere fishbone as compared to the living fish. It has its own elegance, but not the same multifarious fascination.

Sara Gruen, “Riding Lessons”

Two points to think about here: aspirations and authority.

1/ Not everybody is writing Moby Dick. Some books have smaller ambitions, and what matters is whether or not the author meets the goals she’s set. Sara Gruen’s Riding Lessons might be termed a “domestic drama.”  If it were English, Joanna Trollope might have written it. As such, it’s pretty good. Annemarie Zimmer has made a mess of her marriage, alienated her daughter, and lost her job…. etc. Gruen’s misjudgment, I think, is that she makes Annemarie a little tough to take. Lots of self-pity, emotional thrashing around, poor judgment, self-absorption. There’s one scene where Gruen puts her protagonist in the kitchen to cook a show-off meal that I actually had to skip, it was just too painful to read. This is a tough thing to pull off:  we need conflict to keep the story going, and Annemarie causes most of the conflict herself.

The saving grace is the horse stuff: this is where the authority comes in. Or maybe I mean authenticity. Once Annemarie gets out of the house and into the barn, the book is golden. From the way Annemarie feels after unloading a truckload of hay (it gets in your bra) to the mysterious atmosphere of a barn at night, it’s all deeply observed and nicely written. The animal characters are very appealing.

Ruth Rendell, “The Water’s Lovely”

Finishing this book I felt the words of a pop song eluding me: something along the lines of  “Is it you, is it me, I don’t feel it the way I used to…” (Am I wrong to be thinking Gordon Lightfoot here?)

I’ve always found Rendell’s books to be reliable escapes, though sometimes into a world far more disturbing than the one I thought I was evading. This time, though, I found myself faintly bored. And mind you, the novel starts with a murder. It should be difficult to squander the kind of curiosity provoked by an opening scene in which a fifteen-year-old girl has apparently just drowned a man in the bath.  Yet somehow Rendell lost me.

I think it was largely a matter of pacing: she’s a good at plotting and I was always able to admire the way she wove the complex connections among her cast of characters. (She relies on coincidence yet manages to make it plausible: after all, life in a metropolis like London does often turn on strage chances.)

She is also excellent at portraying the characters you love to hate, with a special gift for sick mother/son domination.  In The Water’s Lovely she focuses on Marion Melville, a cunning schemer whose talent at self-deception gives the reader the upper hand. There’s blackmail, child rape, date rape, an attempted poisoning, a strangling — and still it plodded. Too much time spent in the head of the not-very-interesting protagonist, I think.

Is this an anomaly? I hope so, because if Ruth Rendell’s books are going to stop entertaining me, I’m going to need a new strategy for diversion.