Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way”

I really don’t know what to say about this. My Proust project has been pretty much separate from the rest of my reading. I’ve always had an idea that In Search of Lost Time was something that I’d only appreciate in late middle age, like string quartets and the operas of Wagner. (I’m not doing very well on the latter two categories, I’ll admit.) So I guess I thought it was time. I’d tried before, and gotten maybe midway through the second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. This time around I thought I’d try it in French, and that has been the magic touch. I found it unbearably slow going in English. It’s even slower in French, but I expect it to be, and there’s a great deal of pleasure in puzzling out the sentences, matching up the pronouns and antecedents, threading back half a page to pick up the subject of a verb. Add to this the fact that I’m reading at at night, before I go to sleep, and that it functions almost as well as Ambien. No wonder it’s taken me four months to get through it.

Marcel Proust

But I’m enjoying it mightily. I got hold of a 1970s three-volume Pléiade edition, with its brown leather cover and yellow ribbon markers, and thin strong paper. Very satisfying to hold. And the contents have the same quality of sensory satisfaction. There’s not much of a discernible plot. For so many pages (months, in my reading) the narrator was just trying to get to sleep — like me! There was real enchantment in settling down at night into this sea of words.

Of course I’m not very sharp at 10 p.m. Or is it that my critical faculty is suspended for this book? (Books — I do intend to read the whole thing, though it will probably take a couple of years.) Probably the most effective way to do it would be to circle back around right now and read Swann’s Way again, to see if I can get a grip on the structure. As a small-picture person, I am overwhelmed by the scope of this thing. Imagine, then, my excitement when on the penultimate page, Proust refers both backward to earlier in his tale and forward, to “instants like those when (as we will see later on) I was unable to discover the pleasures that I desired.” At least the author was in charge. That reassured me. And, yes, I did discern the parallels between the narrator’s obsession with Gilberte and Swann’s obsession with Odette. I got it that Proust is exploring the slippery quality of perception and memory. But what I look forward to every night is entering his incredibly sensual world, vivid with sights and odors and gossip and fabrics and the quality of light slanting through an old pane of glass.

Lloyd Jones, “Mister Pip”

Very early in this book comes a piece of wisdom from Mr. Watts (also known as Pop Eye, and as “Mister Pip”): “I have no wisdom, none at all.  The truest thing I can tell you is that whatever we have between us is all we’ve got. Oh, and of course Mr. Dickens.”

For most of Jones’ readers, Dickens is going to be the familiar character here, but for the children in an unnamed village on the island of Bougainville, he is a stranger. And Mr. Watts, the only white man in the village, has come to be their teacher amid chaotic circumstances. Apparently all he can think of to do, in order to keep order and impart wisdom or even information to the village children, is to read Great Expectations aloud. The narrator, Pip, becomes lodged in the imagination of Matilda, who narrates Mister Pip.

You could say this book was an inversion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, in which the hapless English aristocrat ends up in the South American jungle, perpetually reading Dickens aloud to his de factor captor. You could equally say that, like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, this is a story about the power of a story. I always like those.

A lot happens. The South Pacific island of Bougainville is torn apart by two factions known to the villagers as the “redskins” and the “rambos.” The island is being blockaded, so there is no food, and no real way for the villagers to escape. (There’s a certain Lord of the Flies feeling to it, as well.) Matilda’s mother frames Mr. Watts’ reading of Dickens as blasphemous, and goes toe to toe with him for control of the children’s souls. She cannot understand how Mr. Watts can believe in Pip but not believe in the devil.  In fact, his choice is curious, because evil is certainly abroad on this island.

Jones structures the novel ingeniously, constantly cranking up the tension and raising the stakes. He writes really well: the voice of the narrator, Matilda, is immensely appealing. And he’s not afraid of the big emotional statement. But what probably moved me most was the paragraph when Matilda explains why she is so loyal to Dickens: Great Expectations “supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own… Now, if that isn’t an act of magic, I don’t know what is.”

Sue Grafton, “U is for Undertow”

In Sue Grafton’s twenty previous books she’s figured out ways to vary her formula: Kinsey Milhone, her private investigator in Santa Teresa, CA, sometimes gets snagged into puzzles with their roots in the past. That gives Grafton the opportunity for extended flashbacks. The solutions to the mysteries occur differently as well: sometimes the reader knows before Kinsey does who the bad guy is. Grafton is confident and competent at taking the narrative out of Kinsey’s head, and all of these techniques keep her franchise fresh.

U is for Undertow involves an old mystery, the kidnapping and disappearance of a little girl in the mid-sixties. Kinsey gets dragged into investigating it by a young man who thinks he saw the child being buried.  Turns out, he’s the original unreliable narrator, as his siblings hasten to inform Kinsey. I don’t look for too much food for thought in a mystery, but Grafton’s chewing on questions of perception and memory here, quite effectively. Can her informer Michael Sutton be trusted? And how does this reflect on her own attitude toward her family of origin? A cousin turns up with some crucial letters from her childhood; is she going to be forced to see things in a different way?

My one complaint about this book regards the climax. As I’ve said before about Grafton, she’s a real pro, and she knows she has to give us a confrontation between Kinsey and the bad guy. But in this book that confrontation felt hasty and anti-climactic, cobbled together merely for the sake of the structure. She can do better than this.

It occurs to me that maybe Grafton is using the flashbacks in these novels as practice for writing non-Kinsey novels. Surely she’s looking forward to busting out of her pattern. If nothing else, writing about a PI who can’t use a computer or a cellphone (this book is set in 1988) must get really frustrating. Just think: only five more letters of the alphabet (and I’ve always wondered what she’d do with X, Y and Z). Then we’ll get to see what else she has up her sleeve.

Julia Glass, “I See You Everywhere”

I really like Julia Glass. I was blown away by Three Junes and though her second book, The Whole World Over, felt like an anti-climax, it was still prodigiously readable. I See You Everywhere falls somewhere between those two novels in its impact. I expected a lot, and Glass delivered … quite a bit.

The subject this time is a pair of sisters. I have sisters. I can relate. I’m pretty glad, though, not to have a sister like Clem. Louisa, the elder, is skeptical, verbal, reserved; Clem is a spunky femme fatale who leaves a trail of broken-hearted men. Louisa is an artist, a writer, a gallery owner: Clem’s wildlife-preservation career takes her to remote places all over the country. The story is narrated by the two sisters in turns, and this is where it’s faintly annoying. I can see that Glass might have felt this choice to be effective in describing the atmosphere of mutual incomprehension and distrust between the sisters, and it is that. But it feels slightly forced, as the differences between the sisters feel schematic. Yes, of course some families do peg their offspring in this way: the athetic one, the sedate one; the impulsive one, the rational one. And yes, Louisa and Clem’s parents are unflective enough to have made that error. It seems unsubtle, though. So does Glass’s habit of defining the women’s lives primarily through the men they’re with. In fact that’s the weakest point of the book. I realize novelists can’t fit everything in, and I realize that these women’s attitudes toward men are one of the dramatic differences between them. But I found this annoying. Unless I was supposed to grasp that the sisters’ bond was so close that they didn’t need female friends? No, I don’t think that’s it.

Bad things happen to them in the twenty-year scope of the book: accidents and cancer and a bad marriage and disillusionment. Louisa — perpetually the elder, more cautious, more sober — reflects toward the end that as you age, everyone begins to accumulate wounds, so that the outrage of youth (“How could this happen to me!”) becomes the rueful acceptance of middle age (“That’s the way it goes.”)  There’s an important plot point that brings some gravity to the novel, and it is serious enough to cast its shadow back to the beginning. In many ways Glass is like a latter-day Laurie Colwin — a huge compliment — but she’s comfortable with a streak of melancholy and angst that Colwin usually avoided. She is also very good on animals. Much of I See You Everywhere concerns human relationships with wild creatures and Glass doesn’t shy away from the complexity of our attempts to preserve them.

I’m still not sure what I was meant to take away from this book. I’m not sure I know more about relationships than I did though I certainly know more about grizzly bears.

Sybille Bedford, “A Legacy”

“Show, don’t tell” — that’s what we’re instructed, as writers, to do. But after finishing Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy, I no longer remember just why that is. To…. keep the reader interested? To keep the plot ticking over? If Bedford had spent less time telling, we wouldn’t have lovely paragraphs like the one in the middle of A Legacy that ruminates on the nature of life — “never as bad nor as good as one thinks… Never as good, never as bad, but a drab, bearable half-sleep banked by a little store of this and that, subsiding after visitations and alarms… an even-paced irreversible passage.”

She can stop and ruminate by this point, because she has the reader so completely hooked on a story that might not be superficially appealing. It concerns, as she says in the introduction, three German families in the late nineteenth century. The families, linked through marriage, represent different facets of the German upper class — a wealthy Jewish mercantile family in Berlin, and two families of Catholic aristocrats from southern Germany. One, the Feldens, live in a strange rural bubble that is almost eighteenth-century in nature. The old Baron, for instance, is the best veterinary surgeon in three counties, yet his children are barely literate and certainly enumerate. The other family, the Bernins, are more worldly and ambitious, influential in the politics of Baden — but Baden is soon absorbed by the German Empire. When a young Baron von Felden marries the Jewish Melanie Merz, the two families are so different that nobody makes clear just how the poor bride is supposed to convert to Christianity:  she gets it wrong the first time, and becomes a Lutheran.

Some of this is very funny. One of the Merz sons has a French mistress who “though presentable was not respectable. One of the counts against her was that in an age of rubber tubs she travelled with a silver bidet.” Yet on the whole, it is tragic.  The level of incomprehension and lack of communication among people and kinds of people has wretched consequences for both both individual and national levels. The saddest part is… well, twofold. Bedford ruefully portrays a pre-modern world in which a damaged younger son could be packed off to an Army stud farm and kindly cared for. It is the new Prussian order that has so damaged him; yet by the same token it is his dreamy, self-indulgent pre-modern family that permitted him to be so damaged. Lovely as that world was, Bedford sees it clearly. But sadder still is the inability of the characters to connect emotionally — often, even to converse. I’ve often wondered how those marriages worked, in the days when nothing at all could be discussed. Bedford’s imaginary version seems quite plausible.

This would not be a compelling read, were it not for Bedford’s writing. It’s witty, it’s generous, and sometimes she take immense pleasure in the material delights of the world she can’t actually have known. For instance, a card game called Grabuge: “a game played by two people with one hundred and twenty-eight packs every single card of which is a spade.” Could this really exist, or did Bedford make it up?  It hardly matters.

Ake Edwardson, “Never End”

OK, I swear I’m not going to read any more Swedish murder mysteries. Not right away, at least. I don’t remember exactly why I bought this one — certainly I have plenty of experience with the genre. In fact I am deeply puzzled at the success of Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which I read a year ago and disliked. It is true that Edwardson is not quite as dark as Larsson. His murderer is nuts as well as bad — surely an extenuating circumstance? And there’s a ray of hope in the ending. It’s also true that the writing is more animated than Larsson’s. Edwardson dodges in and out of the viewpoints of many of the cops investigating a nasty series of rape/murders. He does it effectively, communicating some hint of what the emotional toll of such an investigation might be. Yet the technical business — for this is a solid procedural before it’s a psychological study — is quite dull. Or maybe that’s just me.

Part of the appeal of these books is their descriptions of Scandinavian weather. I find it fascinating: probably the extremes. Never End is set in Gothenburg, apparently a resort area, in the middle of a summer heat wave. There is almost no true night: morning comes around 2 a.m. Edwardson leans heavily on this bit of local color, and even though everyone is wandering around with a sunburn and eating ice cream all the time, he still manages to make summer ominous. That’s quite a trick.

Georgette Heyer, “Cotillion”

OK, so I just laid waste to another couple of hours, looking for reassurance. Cotillion is not one of Heyer’s best. It splits pretty evenly between social comedy and romance but the hero is what they call a “sapskull” in these books — a somewhat dim-witted clothes horse with a heart of gold. The plot has the orphaned Kitty entering into a false engagement with him so as to attract the attention of his cousin Jack, the rake. Except as we all know, the rake is the far more compelling character and it’s a good thing Heyer doesn’t put the two of them in the same room very often. Part of that, of course, is that only in the rake character can Heyer bring sex into her romantic entanglements. There’s really no other way to work it in, considering that the very appeal of these Regency novels rests in the strict, even intricately controlled manners and behavior. So it’s really only when you’ve got the guy with the mobile eyebrows and the lazy smile and the ironic air that you really sit up and take notice. Johnny Depp, in fact. Maybe I won’t read any more of them unless he could plausibly star in the film version.

Georgette Heyer, “The Foundling”/Mary Karr, “The Liars’ Club”

I’d like to say that I finished The Liars’ Club and threw The Foundling across the room because it was insipid. However, that would be a lie. I finished The Foundling because Georgette Heyer is my security blanket and I removed the bookmark from The Liars’ Club because I found it unbearable. Mary Karr is a wonderful writer and the book is much, much better than anything Heyer ever dreamed of. But sometimes you don’t want to be challenged. Sometimes you don’t even want to be amused in the dark way that Karr has — though I have to admit, I took the book too seriously to find much of it funny. Where I left off, little Mary and her sister Lecia and her dying grandmother with the amputated leg and her crazy mother are driving hell-for-leather through Hurricane Carla, having been forced to evacuate at the very last minute. (The National Guardsman had to break down the bathroom door to fetch Grandma, who was tatting in her wheelchair. Tatting, folks, is like crochet only harder. I don’t know, is that funny?)

So why wouldn’t I prefer the escapades of the gentle, ingenuous, and very rich Duke of Sale, in Regency England? The worst thing that happens to him is that he gets tied up in a cellar and has to burn down the house to get out. Furthermore, you don’t really have to believe any of it. Just let it remove you, temporarily, from whatever storm clouds you’d prefer not to acknowledge.

Joseph Kanon, “Stardust”

I’ve always really enjoyed Joseph Kanon’s books, beginning with Los Alamos. He was a big wheel in publishing before becoming a novelist and he learned a thing or two about structure and pacing along the way. But Stardust, as you’d expect from the title, is almost more of a movie than it is a book. This is a little hard to describe, because it’s a very satisfying read. It doesn’t have that thinness you sometimes get with writers who do a lot of screen work, where the dialogue scrolls down the page and you don’t know what anybody looks like. Kanon does deliver a lot of dialogue and he’s great at it: “You know anything about jumpers?… They like it a little higher. Why not just go to the Roosevelt and jump off the roof? Four, five stories? You can — I mean, he did, he’s dead. But you could also just wake up in a cast somewhere.” “He did, he’s dead.” It is the way people talk. Or maybe, more precisely, the way people talked in movies in 1947. Because that’s the other way this book is like a movie: it’s about them.

We meet Ben Collier (born Kohler) as he’s boarding the train to Los Angeles. He’s recently demobilized from the Signal Corps where he served in Germany and his head is full of horrible memories. His brother Daniel, a film director, has just had a terrible fall and may not live. On the train are a group of actors and movie executives including a studio head for whom, coincidentally, Daniel worked. When Sol has a little heart episode, Ben helps him hide it from the nasty gossip columnist and from then on, all doors in Hollywood are open to him.

So here we are: postwar Hollywood, with a protagonist who can go anywhere. His German roots (his father was a German film director, half-Jewish, who died during the war) pave his way into the emigré colony. This stuff is great — Alma Mahler swanning in and out of parties, long chatty afternoons over coffee and sweets that reconstruct a Berlin konditorei beneath the palm trees. Kanon is fabulous on the manners and mannerisms, the formality, the strict wool suits: there’s a great funeral scene. And since Ben gets swept up into studio life, we also get wonderful on-the-lot color including a massive diorama of Japan constructed to stand in for the actual country when fighter pilots “flew” over it. More detailed and clearer, we’re told, than actual aerial footage.

And finally, we have this mysterious death of the brother. Who, by the way, had a very attractive wife. Ben gets suspicious, starts to turn over some rocks, finds some nasty stuff. Ultimately there are Communists and a creepy state Congressman who holds pre-HUAC hearings. I didn’t really follow the entire denouement  – Kanon is a little too clipped and speedy at the end. But I cared less about who did what or why, than I did about the fabulous climactic scene on a sound stage with a gorgeous broad in a sequinned gown, carrying a gun that she knows how to shoot. It’s self-consciously cinematic, of course, but remains satisfying on the page. Quite a feat.