Brunonia Barry, “The Lace Reader”

After 40 years of not reading a book about the Salem witch trials (could the last one have been Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond?), I just read two, back to back. What’s up with that? What is it in the zeitgeist that made two gifted and competent authors think about Salem and say to themselves, “Hey! That’s a great idea?”

The problem with the situation is that invidious comparisons ensue. If you’d told me I would prefer The Lace Reader, the book with narration by the suicidal victim of incest, I wouldn’t have believed you. But you have to give it to the crazies, they get a grip on you. And weirdly, all that careful historical stuff from The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane – which was the best part for sure — has faded next to the charm of loony Towner Whitney. As she calls herself. But she lies, she tells you that right away.

So you spend the novel trotting along, panting slightly, trying to discern What Really Happened. There are uneven spots. In places the narrative shifts into a more temperate omniscience — in part to fill you in on actual facts, and to get you into the head of the appealing town cop, Rafferty — but it can’t compete with Towner’s superheated storytelling. And what happens when you tell a story with a fractured chronology like this is that sometimes the exposition happens awkwardly, or too late. Brunonia Barry has invented a wonderful Bad Man who among other sins runs a fundamentalist church in contemporary Salem, full of self-aggrandizement and narrow-mindedness and dubious exorcisms. But it isn’t quite clear who they all are until a little late in the game, well after they’ve interrupted a funeral by tangling with some of Salem’s witches. Also contemporary.

Roughly, the plot has Towner returning to Salem for her beloved aunt’s funeral (see above) and having to face down the ghosts of her teenage years. Ghosts include the death of her beloved twin sister, her mother’s chilly and authoritarian childrearing practices, her aunt’s spooky way of reading secrets in lace, a jilted boyfriend, etc. etc. Only remember that she lies. Brilliantly.

Katherine Howe, “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane”

It’s always fascinating to try to parse what makes a book popular. Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is a good read, but so many excellent books get published and sell poorly that a first-novel success like this attracts my attention. The publisher, Hyperion, is supporting her with an elaborate website and she’s traveling for the book, but it must have been sold hard to bookstores, too.

Part of the appeal must be the magic. Howe takes on the Salem witch trials and, as a PhD. candidate in American studies, her research is thorough. Better, though, she’s got a grasp on what it is people really want to know in an historical novel, i.e. what it was like to be there. She’s excellent with the sounds, smells, the cold, the scractchy fabrics and the circumscribed world of 1692 Salem.

And then the magic extends to the present day — our heroine Connie Goodwin is a Harvard PhD. student in history, specializing in Colonial America, and her research leads her to Deliverance Dane, who was hung as a witch. Howe has invented a book of receipts that once belonged to Dane, which becomes the McGuffin in the story. The near-contemporary (1991) stuff is weaker material, as believably tense academics start behaving oddly and ultimately casting spells. Shades of Harry Potter, I’m sorry to say. And though the love-interest is appealing — he makes his first entrance sliding down a rope, ta da! — he is also quite bland. There’s something of a disconnect between the more ambitious 17th-century segments, which explore the meaning of witchcraft to its practitioners as well as to the community, and the 20th century story which is pretty plot-driven.

I did toy with casting the movie. No, I don’t know that there’s going to be one, but if you had Anne Hathaway as Connie… James Franco as Sam… Austin Pendleton as Connie’s academic advisor… and surely there’s a raft of actresses appropriate for the witch parts… problem with this is it’s sort of The Crucible crossed with, oh, gosh, A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Probably better just to leave it as an entertaining summer novel.

Mollie Panter-Downes, “Good Evening, Mrs. Craven”

Another nifty revival from those folks at Persephone Books in London. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote the “Letter from London” in the New Yorker for 45 years. In addition, she wrote short stories, 21 of which are collected here. They all date from World War II. They are small in scope, more like snapshots of a situation than narratives, but the keen observation and the lack of sentiment make them quite fascinating. Panter-Downes seems immensely reliable.

She deals largely with the women left behind in England, ever more  hungry, lonely, anxious, and cold. One story is narrated from the point of view of a man, kept in London on important war work, who chafes at his safe domestic routine and envies a former schoolmate who manages to get himself killed as a parachutist. A couple of them focus on the strange relationships wartime forged: lodgers, paying guests, master/servant relationships turned topsy turvey. There are a couple of lovely ones (“Battle of the Greeks” and “Literary Scandal at the Sewing Party”) that poke fun at the country working parties where the women of a village cooperated to make “comforts for the troops.” (Angela Thirkell had a good time with these, too.) Melancholy is never far away, though. The title story, “Good Evening, Mrs. Craven” uses the device of a dinner at a Strand steakhouse to sketch the pitiful situation of a long-time kept woman whose lover has been sent abroad with the military. It’s all very small-scale but affecting nonetheless.

Andrew Taylor, “Bleeding Heart Square”

It’s a really good day when you find a new writer who publishes clever, literate murder mysteries. It’s an especially good day when this writer has been at it for a while and there’s a backlog of titles for you to work through. And it’s a terrific day when the writer is Andrew Taylor, and your introduction to him is Bleeding Heart Square.

Bleeding Heart Square hardcover

His U.S. publisher, Hyperion, is issuing some of this previous books along with this one, and they all have beautiful covers with architectural photographs, vaguely sinister, dark-toned — not unlike the covers of the Alan Furst books. Say what you will, these designers know just how to signal the contents of these novels. Bleeding Heart Square is set in 1934 London, as economic conditions reduce the options of many Britons, and the Fascist party starts to stir up all kinds of ugly trouble. But Taylor, clever man, maps this situation onto a 19th-century framework. Did you remember that Bleeding Heart Yard is the setting of a big chunk of Little Dorrit? (It’s OK, I had to check, and I just read the darn thing.) Furthermore certain characters in Bleeding Heart Square — the alcoholic gentleman ne’er-do-well, the physically imposing and menacing landlord — share DNA with Dickens’ characters.

But Taylor’s not slavish, and the mystery part eventually overruns the Dickensian scaffolding. Lydia Langstone, 28 and pretty, has left her boorish rich husband (soon to join the British Union of Fascists) because he bullies her. She flees to her estranged father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, who lives in a squalid boarding house in Bleeding Heart Square. Taylor is especially good on the nitty-gritty reality here: Lydia left home with “Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones’ Own but she had forgotten her toothbrush.”

There’s a murder, there are sinister clues (literal bleeding hearts are regularly sent to the frightening landlord, Serridge). There’s a downtrodden police investigator (more Dickens) and a fresh-faced journalist who falls for Lydia. Several sections take place in the country but it’s more Stella Gibbons than Angela Thirkell. No laughs, though.

Still, all the literary allusions bring a level of playfulness to the plotting. Which, by the way, is excellent. Twists and turns all the way, right to the end. A really artful piece of work.

Colette, “Retreat from Love”

I’m having a hard time getting a fix on Colette, though I’m enjoying the process. It seems that, to a greater degree than is true for many writers, her biography strongly influences what she writes. And though I generally try to read without a lot of background, I did have recourse to the introduction when I finished Retreat from Love. Then it all made sense. It was written in 1906, just after she’d split from Willy, and while she is clearly working through the end of that relationship, she equally clearly has not given up on men or monogamous relationships. What’s surprising, in fact, is the way she still seems to idealize romantic love.

The premise is that Claudine, while her husband Renaud takes a cure in a Swiss sanatorium (shades of The Magic Mountain), stays with a friend in an old house in the Jura mountains. Claudine provokes Annie to recount a number of sexual adventures. Then Marcel, Renaud’s gay scapgrace son (Claudine refers to him as “this dubious little trinket”) shows up, on the run from some debtors. Claudine makes the mistake of trying to shove Annie and Marcel into bed together, providing nothing but humiliation for both. Renaud dies, Claudine mourns.

But you don’t read Colette for the plots. It’s the situations, the characters, and her writing that make her worth while. Nobody sees the world the way she does, and while there is an annoying whiff of narcissism to Retreat from Love, Colette/Claudine has enough sense of humor to lampoon her own performance onstage in a pantomime.

Colette’s always very strong on the countryside, and while that’s not so much my thing, she’s lyrical, evocative, and doesn’t go on too terribly long. And the animal stuff is wonderful. She has a grey cat and a black bulldog named Toby. Here she describes going off for a walk with “Toby in walking dress. Toby’s walking dress consists mainly of an apple which he carries in his mouth, and as the apple’s too big it distends his jaws and makes him look like a dolphin. It obviously bores him to death, but he must have made a vow.”

The book ends with Claudine alone in the country, visited by Annie and some friends in a loud red and yellow car. (Prefiguring Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows?Maybe not.)  Then they drive away, leaving Claudine with her animals, you have a distinct feeling of a wrong being righted.

James Hamilton-Paterson, “Cooking with Fernet Branca”

I’m not a great fan of the comic novel. Never have warmed up to Wodehouse, didn’t really get the point of Zuleika Dobson. My craving for the naturalistic rules out the patent artificiality of the genre. Still, for the first 157 pages of Cooking with Fernet Branca I was delighted.

It’s high time that someone lampooned the spate of Tuscano-travel-twaddle that was launched by Frances Mayes‘ Under the Tuscan Sun (though if you see the ultimate source as Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, I won’t argue). And who better to do it than a highly literate Englishman? (That would be Hamilton-Paterson, whose name is so perfect that I suspect him of having made it up.) What better protagonist than a fey, self-conscious Englishman of ambiguous  sexual orientation? There he is, planted on a hilltop above the Tuscan coast, feeling superior — until he meets his next-door neighbor, the slatternly Marta, an emigrée from an obscure  former Soviet republic.

You don’t really need to know what happens. Just accept that it’s preposterous and good-natured. The title refers to our hero Gerry’s predilection (that’s the kind of word that gets tossed around a lot) for adventurous cuisine. Hamilton-Paterson generously includes recipes for treats like Mussels in Chocolate. Gerry is also very fond of the poisonous liqueur Fernet Branca, a kind of high-brow version of Jägermeister. In other words, tastes vile, packs a punch.

Here’s just one example of the clever-boots writing: “My ignorance of geography, I ought to point out, knows no bounds and hence no frontiers.”  Very neat, no?

Eventually, though, I tired of the strenuous high-jinks which include many helicopter landings on the Italian hilltop, a boy band’s orgy in a Viennese roof-top hotel, and a refresher course on the “white telephone” school of Fascist Italian filmmaking. Sequels to Cooking with Fernet Branca are entitled Amazing Disgrace and Rancid Pansies. I’m going to pass.

Kate Walbert, “A Short History of Women”

I wish I had liked A Short History of Women more than I did. It’s very ambitious and maybe I’m in too frivolous a mood to do it justice right now — after all, I’ve been on a junk-reading kick, and Kate Walbert is tracing feminism through four generations of women, the eldest of whom starved herself to death in 1914. It’s a wonderful premise. Walbert ranges across England and the U.S., setting scenes in the nineteenth century through to 2007. A wrenching chapter at the end has a grown woman — exactly my age, as it happens — reading her mother’s blog and leaving coded comments, hoping to extract some maternal comfort at a safe remove. That push/pull between mothers and daughters is very well portrayed.

But the characters are so difficult, so prickly! They are so mean to their menfolk! (Who, BTW, all end up dead or invisible.) Pretty mean to each other, come to that — there was some contemporary sister byplay that came uncomfortably close to the bone. Not to mention a “rap session” circa 1973 that made my toes curl with discomfort and revisited teenage misery. And here’s the basic problem: I didn’t really like any of them well enough to thoroughly empathize and pay attention. I’m not sure why the first Dorothy did starve herself: she just said it was the only thing she could do. Huh? Leaving two children complete orphans?  Isn’t that a little bit… high strung?

Finally, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to make of the contemporary women, both of whom are struggling to conscientiously raise daughters. They suffer from anxiety and loneliness and general ennui.  Is Walbert suggesting this is the general feminine fate?

Thomas Perry, “Dance for the Dead”

It’s books like this that I really need to blog about, just so that I can remember I read them. I love Thomas Perry, I think he’s brilliant at what he does and Dance for the Dead is one of his better books so it’s really good.

Still.

You don’t read books like this in order to remember them. You read them for escape and entertainment. Over the years I’ve put a lot of time and effort into facilitating this kind of escapism in my life. The bookshelves of one entire wall in our apartment are lined with paperback mysteries and thrillers and cozy British family dramas (Rosamund Pilcher, Joanna Trollope) just so that I can take periodic breaks from my own not-terribly-taxing reality. But I need to be able to match the escape to the mood. And believe it or not, Perry often requires a modicum more energy or resilience than some other thriller-writers. His Jane Whitefield novels, of which Dance for the Dead is the second, concern a Seneca woman who spirits people out of the world and escorts them into an invisible hidden existence somewhere else in America.  This particular novel includes an arch-villain who hides within a huge security company, running a separate kind of bounty-hunting operation. All of Perry’s books feature chases, nifty gadgets, creepy villains and weird walk-on characters. But Perry makes Jane almost human, so she gets depressed sometimes about what she does. Sometimes she fails, and that’s depressing, too. Perry had the sense to retire Jane after a handful of books, perhaps because he took pity on her. (Or maybe because the plot of each book must by definition be an extended chase, and that could get boring). Anyway he’s a terrific resource for a fast reader who sometimes needs pure distraction. My only reservation is that they are somewhat interchangeable.

Yup: here’s the paradox. If they were more distinctive, they would be more memorable. Then I wouldn’t be able to read them over and over again. Then they would actually be less useful to me, providing only 2 hours of harmless reverie rather than 4 or 6 (or, in the case of certain Dick Francis novels, 10 or 12).

Donna Leon, “About Face”

I’m beginning to feel a little bit sorry for Donna Leon. For years it seemed as if she had a great gig, living in Italy, writing popular murder mysteries set in Venice — what a fantasy! The problem is that the reality of living in Italy has begun to get darker and darker. About Face goes so far as to compare Italy’s state of lawlessness to that of Somalia, and Leon makes a pretty good case for this assertion.

In this book the bad deeds have to do with refuse. We all know about the Neapolitan situation with the trash in the streets, and the deep involvement of organized crime with the industries that do or don’t remove trash and take it where it’s supposed to go. If you think about it, the situation couldn’t be confined to Naples alone. So this is what Commissario Brunetti investigates this time around.

The spin is the presence of a character, Franca Marinello, whom Brunetti meets at a dinner party and likes very much despite her face which has apparently been ruined by overly drastic plastic surgery. Leon’s working with metaphor here: Brunetti’s inability to see beyond Marinello’s face, and his haste to judge her, impairs his ability to grasp what is really happening in the baffling garbage case, which soon includes a murder.

Leon writes a terrific scene that takes place in some abandoned fuel tanks, in which a young eager cop is viciously burned by merely touching some toxic goop that’s leaked out of its barrels. (Given the emphatic way Leon signaled this, I was afraid he was going to be shot, so merely losing a bunch of skin to poisonous slime came as quite a relief.) The bad guys who are trafficking in the stuff aren’t even identified, let alone brought to justice. I’m pretty sure Leon thinks there’s none of that to be had in Italy right now.

Ken Follett, “The Key to Rebecca”

Every now and then you just can’t find the right thing to read and this has been my problem in the last couple of weeks. I picked up Nicola Krauss’s The Invention of Love on a strong recommendation from a friend, and found the tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale irritating. Then it was Binnie Kirshenbaum’s The Scenic Route, which started feeling like a less intellectual version of the Krauss book; nominally about a a love affair but it kept cutting away from the affair to the narrator’s family history. I liked the tone and if my own writing hadn’t hitten a rough patch I might have had the stamina to keep going with the Kirshenbaum.

Instead I read Ken Follett. He does what he does very well and I don’t think I had read this before (wouldn’t I have remembered Rommel in the desert, muttering about Tobruk?). The writing is literate enough to be inoffensive and the plotting is conventional but solid. Cairo during WW2, a German spy and an English intelligence officer locked in a struggle, etc. etc. Pyramids, a belly dancer with corrupt sexual practices, a beautiful young girl, naturally, caught between the two men.

The good guy won. My mind wandered during the denouement so I can’t remember exactly how. I’m still on the prowl for total distraction. Maybe Dick Francis is up next.