David Benioff, “City of Thieves”

David Benioff frames City of Thieves as his grandfather’s story of survival during the Siege of Leningrad, and it may be that. But he also tips us off very early that his book is also about story-telling. The narrator is the grandfather, Lev Beniov, a  seventeen-year-old Jewish virgin, burdened by self-doubt. He and two friends, on fire-watching duty, find a dead German officer floating toward them in the night sky. They speculate about the cause of his death: “‘He froze to death,’ I told them. I said it with authority because I knew it was true and I had no way to prove it.”

Later on, when Lev has acquired his improbable friend Kolya, the handsome blonde army officer, the two encounter a pair of cannibals who come close to turning them into meat patties. Escaping narrowly, they discuss their luck. “This is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk.”

The challenge, writing a book like this, must be how to present the horror in a way that readers can take in. Benioff structures City of Thieves as a kind of picaresque narrative. Lev and Kolya, thrown together by chance, are sent off on a lunatic mission — to find a dozen eggs by a certain deadline, or face certain death. Episode after episode sounds like a folk tale: the cannibals are giants with clubs, for instance. An encounter on a frozen rooftop with the corpse of a bearded old gent named Ruslan (a name from Russian folk tales, I believe) suggests the death of Old Russia.

But Benioff is not a screenwriter for nothing: the over-arching narrative keeps moving and ultimately develops, as it had to, into a battle between good and evil. Fought, naturally, on a chess board. I suppose all these Russian themes might seem annoying or artificial: there is snow, there are forests, there are even wolves heard in the distance. But if you don’t want Russia, I guess you don’t read this book.

I think what carried me along with such deep pleasure was Benioff’s relish for his craft. He is above all a wonderful story teller. And while death and mayhem, starvation and humiliation are the constant background of his narrative, we never lose sight of the fact that the teller does in fact, survive, and is telling this saga a lifetime later. He never masks his anxiety, his inglorious behavior, his folly — but his mordant view of his own behavior is immensely appealing. Here he is leaving a German love-nest at gunpoint, thinking about how all the heroes he’d heard of thought nothing of their courage:

“Heroes and fast sleepers, then [the insomnia is a leitmotiv], can switch off their thoughts when necessary. Cowards and insomniacs, my people, are plagued by babble on the brain.”

The framing device places us with David, the writer, and his elderly grandfather. David has filled tape after tape with the story, and wants more information, but his   grandfather has run dry. “It was a long time ago,” he says. “I don’t remember…” David presses him for more detail: “A couple of things still don’t make sense to me–” Lev, the survivor, has the last word:

“‘David,’ he said. ‘You’re a writer. Make it up.’”

Irish Murdoch, “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, and not in a good way. We used to talk, in art-history graduate school, about the idea of a canvas being “transparent to” the subject; this meant that the painting itself did not get in the way of the illusion. It’s an old-fashioned notion, and it applies to fiction as well. Some novelists coddle you with  this illusion of participating in an alternative universe. Others, however, want you to be aware that they are not. Normally I prefer the old convention, and that may be why I was so uncomfortable with A Fairly Honourable Defeat.

What brought me to Iris Murdoch was finally renting the movie in which she suffers from Alzheimer’s. It piqued my curiosity and a friend prompted me to follow up even though I’d long shied away from Murdoch, expecting her to be too intellectual or something. As it turned out, my apprehension was only slightly misplaced. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the ideas she was handling; it was just that the whole exercise felt damn chilly.

Here’s the paradox: you are very aware at all times that Murdoch has brought her characters into being in order to put them through a sequence of episodes having to do with modern morals. There are the long-married Rupert and Hilda, rich, handsome, a tad smug. Hilda has an odious younger sister, Morgan, who crashes through the novel with the self-absorption of a two-year-old but a much better vocabulary. Rupert’s young gay brother is struggling with monogamy (this must have been shocking in 1970) and the biochemist Julius manipulates them all. Oh, I’ve forgotten Morgan’s ex-husband Tallis, hapless, old-fashioned. At a guess (geez, could it be his name?) he represents The Church and its outmoded ineffectiveness.

There’s some shifting of alliances, some flirtation, hours of talk. Conversation is often  stilted: “People can use moral concepts, as you used the concept of truth just now to persuade me. Anyone can do this.”  Since much of the dialogue is somewhat natural, there must be a reason for making characters talk like this, but I can’t think what it could be.

Most annoying is the fact that, despite their stiff conversations you come to care for most of these characters, and I resented deeply the things Murdoch had them undergo. She is so cold, so ungenerous to them! I feel as if she has called them into being only to make them miserable and prove a point. What pleasures she gives them are tainted with smugness; their disasters are irremediable.

Perhaps oddest still, the hateful ones, Morgan and Julius, aren’t even the kind of characters you love to hate. There is very little pleasure to be had in this book, and I was finally so resentful that I couldn’t even be bothered to grapple with the moral concepts. Give me Trollope on morality any day.

Margot Asquith, “Octavia”

I am so happy that I live in a place where the communal book shelf in the laundry room (recent source of that Simenon novel) also yielded Margot Asquith’s Octavia. I read her autobiography years ago, while researching the heiresses book, and remember quite liking it though not thinking too highly of the author. That impression has not changed.

Lady Asquith's glamour shot

Octavia, our heroine, is clearly a cleaned-up version of Asquith herself, who was no beauty. The photo to the right, taken when she was 35, is the most flattering one I could find. (I seem to remember a story about Nancy Astor bringing false teeth to a dinner table and cracking Winston Churchill up by putting them in and imitating Lady A….) Octavia, naturally, is gorgeous and men fall for her madly.  That’s pretty much the plot. The settings change, from the rambling Scottish estate, probably based on Glen, where Margot grew up, to various grand houses in hunting country, to the Riviera. Octavia/Margot is a brilliant horsewoman, too, and the hunting passages are nice, shades of Siegfried Sassoon.

There chief narrative device is that Octavia, while not on horseback or conquering all in black velvet on a dance floor, talks about herself to a wide variety of fascinated men. The only tension concerns which of the men will finally win her hand: the lounge lizard Robin Compton, the handsome buffoon Lord Tilbury, or the reform-mad Greville Pelham. I’ll put you out of your misery, she marries Pelham, but they don’t get along. Owing to her “high spirits” (I always think this is code for being really spoiled) they spend their honeymoon miscommunicating and I think, though I can’t be sure, that the rest of the novel is about when they finally manage to have sex. That they do, finally, is certain, because in the last chapter Octavia has a baby which dies. I couldn’t discern why the author deemed this necessary.

The most substantial pleasure provided by the book is voyeurism: what the characters  say to servants, which “ball-dresses” Octavia chooses to wear for which parties. But strangely enough, even though Margot Asquith must have been nearly unbearable in real life, a kind of good nature shines through her writing. She obviously thought very highly of herself but she’s so ingenuous in her enthusiasm that you almost forgive her.

Minette Walters, “The Chameleon’s Shadow”

Minette Walters’ books are a reliable pleasure. True, they are slightly creepy, but often, as in The Chameleon’s Shadow, superficially disturbing characters reveal appealing characteristics and Walters sticks to the bargain we expect from a mystery: that order be restored.

This one is topical: Lt. Charles Acland, a young career soldier, is grievously wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq. He loses an eye, most of the flesh on one side of his face, and his faith in fellow man. Thus, when he is caught up in the search for a South London serial killer, he is his own worst enemy, demonstrating a wicked temper and outlandish physical strength.

Walters uses a vaguely annoying technique, juxtaposing various “documents” such as newspaper columns and police reports to handle necessary exposition. I suppose this frees her to wander more freely in her characters’ psyches, but it does tend to feel cumbersome. On the other hand she does create terrific characters: the weight-lifting lesbian doctor Jackson in this book is great fun. The protagonist Acland reminded me of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher in his stoicism, isolation, and determination to work things out on his own terms. I’d back Reacher in a fight, though.

Joseph O’Neill, “Netherland”

Wow!

I love New York. Love the variety, the strangeness, the spectacular nature of the city, the weird pockets of mini-neighborhoods, the way we’re all thrown together here, the way the city tosses mysteries at you that you will never solve. And I really love it when a novelist shows me the city I love and then some. Thank you, Joseph O’Neill. As it happens, I read most of Netherland on the subway, on my iPhone, grinning like a maniac and electronically dog-earing pages to revisit. For instance, here is the narrator Hans ruminating on his state of mind after his wife has left him: he is ashamed of his own fatalism, his sense “that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general…”  ”That dullness was general.” Love the economy of that sentence.

Or how about this: “Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.”

I could go on, but the book is a lot more than its studding of beautiful insights. Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker, is marooned in the city after 9/11 and his wife’s subsequent departure to England with their son. Reserved, rational Hans is an excellent protagonist, the kind of passive man to whom astounding things happen. His miracle is being befriended by Chuck Ramkissoon, an eloquent Trinidadian con man who… well, takes Hans for a ride. Literally. Figuratively.

What draws the men together is cricket. O’Neill obviously loves the game, and I will admit to a tiny bit of boredom with the technicalities. And sometimes he does hit you over the head with metaphors. I figure if I get it on the first reading it must be very obvious–as when Hans cannot change his batting style to accomodate American field conditions…  and then once he does, and it feels great… OK. Got it. And then, the Dutchman, exploring through this most European of sports the exotic fringes of New York City… Check. The device might be annoying, but he does it so well.

This is basically a wanderjahr tale.  Hans, severed from the relationships that tether him to the known world, wanders through an exotic landscape with few familiar signposts.  Chuck Ramkissoon is his Aeneas, guiding, explaining, and above all staging Hans’s experience of New York. As the structure almost demands, there are set pieces — among them a blackout party at the Chelsea Hotel that takes full advantage of O’Neill’s taste for Gotham’s whimsical conjunctions of humankind.

If Hans is passive, he is not obtuse, and of course — this being a voyage of discovery — he gains wisdom. One of my favorite perceptions comes toward the end, when he is back in London. Recounting a colleague’s hapless attempt to pick up a woman, he writes, “We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?”

Yet in the end it isn’t Hans’ wistfulness but Chuck’s gusto that rules Netherland. A life lesson?

Brenda Wineapple, “Sister Brother: Gertrude & Leo Stein”

I knew very little about Gertrude Stein before reading this — the famous Picasso portrait, Biography of Alice B. Toklas, “Rose is a rose is a rose,” and 27, rue de Fleurus in Paris about summed it up.

I did not know that she had a brother name Leo who was her most intimate connection for years. I didn’t know that he and she collected art together, or that eventually they simply stopped talking. Leo moved out of their shared apartment, and his later attempts to resume contact were rebuffed. He was dead to her. So here we have a wonderful work, combining Paris, art, literature, and family dysfunction. I could hardly have been more delighted.

Wineapple is an academic so the book is researched with phenomenal thoroughness (the footnotes made my head ache, just thinking about all the manuscript letters and journals she had to read). But she’s also a singularly effective and graceful writer so the deadly academic taint is nowhere present. Here’s a sentence from page 2, for instance, that I flagged: “Gertrude and Leo Stein lived among these canvases until 1914, arguing philosophy and psychology and art, reading, writing, painting, reflecting — in short, savoring the privilege of a sufficiently financed life.” Zingg! Beautifully phrased and remarkably discerning.

In fact, Wineapple’s psychological acuity is probably the crucial component of this book.  She is generous to both of her crotchety, difficult protagonists. She even has thoughtful comments on Gertrude’s baffling prose and her totalitarian, elbows-out approach to relationships. It’s a wonderful creative attitude, an example of “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”

But Sister Brother is also formed by a fine sense of drama. After all, it could be argued that these well-to-do, highly educated people did little besides go to school, buy paintings, and argue. What Wineapple manages to do is to make the arguments into what they clearly were for Gertrude and Leo — primal conflicts.

Valedictory sentence: “Leo died one year after his sister, the American failure par excellence who had never been able to bind curiosity to ambition and hurl them toward a single-minded objective.” Wonderful summation of what it takes.

Georges Simenon, “Maigret in Vichy”

Random find from the laundry room bookshelf. I have a dim memory of reading a few Simenon novels for French class a million years ago, and not caring much for them. But what was Maigret doing in Vichy?  I vaguely anticipated the great detective nosing about in Petain’s capital but no — this book was written in 1967 and Vichy is now merely a spa where Maigret has gone to take the waters. Apparently (this from Wikipedia, so who knows) Simenon’s war record is clouded: he managed to annoy both sides. Guess he wouldn’t be diving head-first into that territory, especially a mere 22 years after the Armistice.

So the book is slim and somewhat mechanical, but I was quite happy to spend a few hours in a pretty French spa town. The key moment for me was when Maigret, ruminating about the victim, thinks to himself, “It was as though he could not help himself, he must forever be adding fresh touches to the picture of her that he was building up.” Explicitly mirroring the author’s process.

Still, I’m left wondering — there are other spas in France. Why choose this one without even mentioning the past? I kept waiting for the long-guarded secret about who did what to whom in 1943…. Nope. Not even a shadow. In another writer’s hands this very absence would have been significant, but I’m pretty sure that with Simenon, what you see is what you get.

Sarah Waters, “The Little Stranger”

Why is this title sinister? Maybe it’s the combination of ideas: “stranger” always connotes something potentially menacing, and when you add the diminutive you tip over into the creepy. Then you fabricate a decaying English country house, a self-deceiving narrator, the social chaos of the years just after World War II, and you have The Little Stranger.

I don’t read a lot of this kind of thing, but  I don’t suppose anyone writing it gets far from the shadow of The Turn of the Screw. In this instance Waters seems to be enjoying both discipleship and freedom from influence. Her overriding concern here is the dislocation and anxiety provoked by the downward mobility of the “county” family that owns Hundreds Hall and the upward mobility of characters like the local builder Babb, who buys land (“the grass-snake meadow,” in family parlance) from the Ayres family and builds council houses within view of the house. In a way it’s like reading post-war Angela Thirkell from the other side of the green baize door.

Our narrator has complete social mobility. He is Doctor Faraday (no first name that I can remember: hmmmmm), son of a maid at Hundreds, a “clever boy” who was sent to good schools, worked hard, and has established a foothold in the professional class.  He’s like one of Thomas Hardy’s characters, though, in that no one, least of all he himself, can forget his plebeian origins. Faraday first comes to Hundreds Hall to see the teenage maid Betty, who is disturbed by what we’d now call paranormal phenomena in the house. He naturally becomes emotionally involved in the lives of all four of the residents, and falls under the spell of the house.

So… is Hundreds Hall really haunted? This has to be the engine of a ghost story, the need to know what’s actually going on.  Waters spins out the tension, as the weird incidents pile up, family members succumb, and the house itself takes on an uncanny power. Quite early on, Faraday has the sense to grasp that the local people of Warwickshire, the former servants and farm laborers, had “begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards.”  So, of course, is the gentry. Waters brilliantly sketches the threat posed by a nouveau-riche family that takes over a nearby house and desecrates it by tearing out paneling and threatening to install a swimming pool. Also brilliant is a visit Faraday makes with Caroline Ayres (daughter of the house and eventually the object of his romantic intentions) to one of the unfinished council houses. “What is a fitted kitchen?” asks Caroline. “There are no nasty gaps,” Faraday answers, “and no odd corners.”

Hundreds, of course, is nothing but  nasty gaps and odd corners. Waters is even-handed enough to show us its extraordinary beauty as well as its nastiness. The book ends — as, really, it had to — on an unsettling note. The house continues to crumble. Faraday, who still has keys, visits it and attempts to stave off the worst of the decay. He claims no understanding of the strange occurrences, saying only that the house has “thrown the family off, like springing turf throwing off a footprint.”  In a way it makes the fate of the House of Usher look refreshingly clear-cut.

Christopher Buckley, “Losing Mum and Pup”

It’s time for a warning to writers of my generation — “Think veeeery carefully before you start that ‘my-famous-but difficult-parents-are-dead’ book. The field is getting crowded.” 

The field is not actually crowded, yet, but as I read Losing Mum and Pup I had that feeling of strained tolerance/enjoyment, as if to say, “I’m OK with this for now, but it had better stop soon.” And I’ve only read two of these, Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them (possibly the best book title ever) preceding Chris Buckley’s. 

You have to tread very, very carefully on this territory. You absolutely must not whine (Buckley avoids this) but at the same time, we readers are looking for a little acknowledgment of just how monstrous the parents were. I mean, otherwise, why are we reading?  I guess it’s to Buckley’s credit that to this day he believes his father was a great man, but by many standards, William F. Buckley comes up pretty short in the parenting department. The anecdote about walking out on Chris’s Yale graduation (he got bored) being a case in point. 

On the other hand. Buckley son’s point is that both of his parents were larger than life, and there are plenty of stories to support this claim. The one I really love involves a treasure hunt staged on Long Island Sound in which some heirloom silver and jewelry were buried, and lost to the intervention of a hurricane. There’s immense generosity and flair to this side of the WFB fatherhood. The book is extremely funny in places though I did regret that most of the good anecdotes had already appeared in the Vanity Fair excerpt. I don’t seem to be able to learn that particular lesson: just because I liked the excerpt doesn’t mean the book will hold up.

 It felt a little — thin. Buckley writes fluently and cleverly. It goes down a treat. Nice family photos. WFB’s achievements covered with appropriate filial respect. Charming humor about the weirdness and indignity of the death trade. The Buckley parents died in the same year so Chris ended up as a repeat customer at the local funeral home, a fact he found more amusing than they did. But I did wonder, as I read, why he had written the book. Because he’s a writer, I assumed. Because that’s what writers do. Because your parents’ death is earth-shaking to you. Because writing helps you process the world.  

Not until the end did Buckley himself provide the key and I must say, I forgave him everything. He realized that writing this memoir about his parents’ lives and deaths permitted him to spend more time with them. Which I found honestly touching.

I’m done, though. As baby boomers we’ve seen every aspect of our lives examined in the media and colluded in the examination. Enough, enough! We are all going to be orphans, and soon! That doesn’t mean it’s universally interesting.  

Colette, “The Vagabond”

There’s something so bracing about Colette. Sometimes the cynicism is hard to take but The Vagabond is maybe a little more disciplined than the Claudine books or Chéri. Here Colette isn’t trying to shock or titillate; it feels as if she’s bearing down hard on the issue of feminine self-determination, leaving frivolity strictly aside. The narrator is Renée Neré, a once-respectable artist’s wife who, after divorcing (the guy was a perpetual philanderer), earns her living as a music-hall performer. She is lonely but content. Now that I think of it, her hard-won equlibrium reminds me of certain passages in M.F.K. Fisher’s writing where she talks of loneliness as a friend. It’s not the life one dreams of as a young girl, but it has its consolations. Chief among them is dignity, especially precious after the humiliations of a wandering spouse.

Masculine admiration is naturally part of performing, and Renée is not at first drawn to Maxime Dufferein-Chautel when he appears at her dressing-room door. But he gets beneath her armor. He is sweet, honest, appealing, and mad for her.

We can see where this is going, right?

Matters are brought to a crisis (this is why Colette is so good) when Renée has to go out on tour with her dance partner Brague. Maxime wants to come with her, or to prevent her from going. Renée goes anyway, before committing to Maxime one way or another. She falls back into the practised intimacy of touring with Brague: “An old familiarity had already suppressed between us any politeness, flirtation, modesty, any of the lies…” As contrasted with the relationship with Maxime, which is full of intoxication, physical pleasure, the swoony sense of abandon that Renée has foresworn. Finally Maxime mentions marriage…

But by then it’s too late. Renée has regained her senses. Against a secure, comfortable future, she weighs her sense of her own identity, and there’s no choice. The decision has its price: “I am in pain. I cannot connect to anything I see.” Is there a more succinct description of depression?  But you wouldn’t have her make another choice. It’s fascinating to follow how Colette first makes Maxime ridiculous, then attractive, then finally… pitiable. This is a very short book but rich in description and this kind of subtle shading of character.

The music-hall stuff is fascinating: rehearsals, costumes, the tricks of the makeup, the fatigue, the audiences, the entrances and exits and the professional pride in it all. No glamor. In fact that’s pretty much what Renée foregoes, in breaking up with Max: the illusion of happily-ever-after.