Fred Vargas, “Pars vite et reviens tard” or “Have Mercy on Us All”

Twice when I was reading this book, complete strangers accosted me in French to tell me how much they loved Fred Vargas, and to tell me which of her other books I should read. And I loved Pars vite et reviens tard so much that I eagerly wrote down the titles of other people’s favorites. Maybe some of  the enthusiasm for foreign mysteries spawned by the Stieg Larsson fervor will spill over to Vargas, who deserves a big audience in the US as well as in her native France.

Like Benjamin Black/John Banville, Vargas is overqualified for the job of writing mysteries. She is actually a medievalist, and this novel is packed with … well, with information. In fact the chief protagonist, police commissioner Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, lights on the identity of a killer as he meditates on this person’s use of ellipsis in written communication. Yes, careful scholarship gets someone off the hook. You gotta love it.

But that happens toward the end of the novel. We begin in Montparnasse with an old Breton sailor who has taken up the career of town crier in the early 21st century. Someone is paying the crier to read messages that menace the town with the plague. Simultaneously, a symbol to ward off the Black Death appears on apartment doors in various Paris neighborhoods. Soon there are corpses, discovered with bites from rat fleas, the kind that carry the bacterium. Panic comes next.

rat fleas carry bubonic plague

The investigation falls to Commissioner Adamsberg, a deeply eccentric cop who does his best thinking while roaming the streets and has grave misgivings about becoming too much “like a cop.” In the time-honored tradition of odd-couple policemen, he is paired with the anxious, detail-oriented, buttoned-up Danglard, who feels affection and resentment for his unconventional boss.

The mystery is very well constructed, with switchbacks and surprises at every turn. It is not a thriller — Vargas is far too interested in the complexities of character to move the action along quickly. There is time to light on Adamsberg’s unfortunate love life; to visit a bizarre household of academics known as “The Three Evangelists”; to dwell on the remarkable properties of a calvados served in a café in Montparnasse. Some of this detail (especially the appearance of a kitten) would be awfully twee were it not for Vargas‘ equable acceptance of life’s mournful qualities.

The next Vargas book on my list, L’Homme à l’envers, (Seeking Whom He May Devour in English) is about werewolves. I can hardly wait.

Blog business

Apologies, subscribers. I have to do this to register “Book Group of One” with Technorati, which will theoretically drive more viewers to the site. This is my Technorati “claim token” which they will now read, I suppose, to ensure that I am really the author of this blog:

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But since you’re here I’ll share the jacket of my novel “Leaving Van Gogh,” due out in April. I think it’s really pretty.

Katharine Davis, “Capturing Paris”

Pleasant, earnest characters grappling with life and relationships. Nice clothes, good food and drink, interesting jobs. Discreet sexual tension. And the chance to spend a few hours wandering around Paris with these pleasant people — who wouldn’t leap at the chance? Katharine Davis’s Capturing Paris is an intensely appealing read along the lines of, say Rosamunde Pilcher or Joanna Trollope. But for someone whose computer wallpaper is a photo snapped in the Palais-Royal, it’s more than that, it’s catnip.

Paris, naturally

Annie Reed and her lawyer husband Wesley have lived in Paris for most of their married life but things get tough when Wesley’s job vanishes. Just as he is struggling with this, Annie’s avocation of writing poetry blossoms into an actual career. Handled well, as it is here, this portrayal of a bumpy transition in a marriage can make for pleasant fiction. What makes Capturing Paris special is Davis’s huge appreciation of Paris. No detail is too small, from the strange dusty smell of the Metro to the damp gray winter weather to the French obsession with scarves for both men and women. The dramatic tension is not terribly tense and the novel’s resolution by way of a kind of deus ex machina feels maybe too easy. But Davis’s ambitions are not enormous. This is a domestic drama in an attractive setting, and highly enjoyable.

Wendy Burden, “Dead End Gene Pool”

Whew! If you are going to write a memoir, you have to be prepared for the skeptical reader. This reader is going to be asking herself from the first page why she should bother to spend her time with you. After all, we were all kids. Some of us had crazy parents and feel bad about it. Others were monstrous children.  Really, here’s the question, memoir writer: what makes you so special?

Wendy Burden's grandparents at a costume party

Wendy Burden has that all figured out. She is a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt, in a branch of the family that held onto what my mother used to call “real money” well into the twentieth century. So there’s the voyeuristic angle, and I have to admit it’s good. We’re talking granny in Balmain and grandpa being driven in a car the size of a railroad car, living in an apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue that has features like a staff dining room.  Travel, clothes, education, art, expensive psychotropic medications — whatever your particular poison might be, the Burdens had lots of it. Then there’s the crazy-family angle. Burden’s got that under control, too. After all, her father shot himself when she was six. But what makes Dead End Gene Pool something more than a hyper version of Cheerful Money is Burden’s wisecracking tone. This is a woman who used the works of Charles Addams to help her figure out her world. Two very different friends told me how funny this book is, and I can almost see it. (I’m just a little sensitive on the WASP dysfunction business.) Burden is prone to wisecracks like “I guess that’s one of the only problems with old money — you get bored with it.”

Well, you won’t get bored with this, I guarantee. It has the compulsively readable quality that I also find in Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing: you may not be precisely enjoying it, but you sure can’t shut the book. One quality that I do admire is Burden’s lack of self-pity. By some standards she was dealt a poor hand of cards. There was a strong strain of mental illness in her family and her father was only one of the casualties. Two of her uncles (and probably a third) as well as both of her brothers did a spectacular amount of self-medicating, with disastrous results. Her mother, a bright and beautiful creature, was strikingly short on maternal feeling. Thus Wendy spent much of her childhood parked with her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. William A.M.Burden, Jr., who led a fundamentally Edwardian existence in a series of uncomfortably modern houses. Mom phoned in, usually from some resort. When she and Wendy were forced to live together, their communication relied on mutual sniping.

But Wendy Burden is not a whiner. She understands privilege, what it does for you and to you. Nor is she even faintly sentimental. No cozy forgiveness, just a steely, detached compassion. No cobbled-together warmth, no damn redemption in this memoir! That may be my favorite thing about it. Burden’s not mad, but she got even.

Thomas Perry, “Strip”

Yes, he’s done it again, in time for summer vacation. With Strip, Thomas Perry has brought us another hypercompetent and actually thrilling thriller. It may be a slight flaw that the most exciting scene takes place first, as Joe Carver (not his real name) lurks in a construction crane 250 feet above earth, watching five men in two black Hummers search the building site for him. Curiously the height factor amplifies the suspense of the scene — maybe by adding an extra level of menace to Carver’s situation?

Afraid of heights?

Here’s what Perry’s best at, besides plotting. (Which I don’t deny he does really well.) He puts the reader in the consciousness of sundry slightly scuzzy characters and makes them sympathetic. For instance, Manco Kapak, proprietor of several LA strip clubs, has his problems and his sadnesses like any other 64-year-old businessman. “Joe Carver” is a decent guy caught up in a case of mistaken identity and he just has to defend himself, using a fairly unusual set of skills involving firearms and hand-to-hand combat. And the police chief has his own problems which Perry can’t really expect us to take seriously. There’s maybe a faint ironic sheen on some of this, but it’s all pretty good-natured. Perry knows he’s entertaining us so he doesn’t waste much time on character development or scene-setting, preferring to concentrate on the double-cross. No honor among thieves, you know.

I wonder why Perry isn’t as successful as Lee Child. This was a more satisfying read than 61 Hours. I suspect it’s that Perry hasn’t stuck to one iconic character. It makes his books slightly less predictable. You would think that was a virtue, but with escape literature, maybe the preferred range of difference from one iteration to another is pretty narrow.

Tom Rachman, “The Imperfectionists”

The Imperfectionists begins with a seventy-year-old man in Paris listening to his wife come home after spending the night with the man across the hall. And that’s just paragraph two of the first page. This is the first of many, many tragicomic humiliations Tom Rachman deals out in 269 pages. And I’m afraid they are going to be itching away under my skin for a while now.

Would I be so perturbed if I weren’t a writer myself? Would it bother me so much to see the newspaper business being skewered? Would it bother me if Rachman weren’t so young? If he didn’t show some affection for the dinosaur of the daily paper? If he weren’t such a darn good writer? If my father hadn’t been a newspaper reporter? Don’t read this one, Dad. You’ll only find it upsetting.

The structure is very clever. The characters all work at or for an unnamed English-language newspaper published from Rome. It was founded in the 1950s by an American industrialist and kept alive as part of the family corporation for more than fifty years. Each chapter, titled like a newspaper article, is virtually a short story, focusing on one character. We start with the Paris stringer, a hopeless old hack, and move on to the obituary writer, a business reporter, etc. etc. Their stories become intertwined and you begin to understand the personalities and relationships of the newsroom much as you would by working there. Rachman is very acute, homing in on his characters’ vulnerabilities, self-deceptions, strengths and weaknesses. He is not, thank goodness, mean.

So did I like it? I’m the wrong person to ask. In a way The Imperfectionists is like one of those English satires — Lucky Jim, perhaps, or A Fairly Honourable Defeat — that treats its inhabitants awfully harshly for my taste. Granted, Rachman is more humane than either Kingsley Amis or Irish Murdoch, but we are laughing at rather than with people here. (It’s much kinder, though, than Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which would be the obvious comparison.) And while I can see the humor, I have a lot of trouble laughing at people I feel sorry for. Case in point: the Roman matron who is reading the newspaper, cover to cover, day by day. Her English is so bad that she is close to twenty years behind. Funny, right? She goes batty when the carefully hoarded issue of April 23, 1994 does not appear with the rest of the filed copies. When you find out why, you’re kind of stunned. (Little tour de force, BTW, as Rachman has her flick through decades’ worth of headlines.)

Oh, it’s good, no question about that. Perhaps I’m just overly sensitive. “The paper — that daily report on the idiocy and the brilliance of the species — had never before missed an appointment. Now it was gone.” Sorry, it’s hard for me to call that comedy.

Robert Goolrick, “A Reliable Wife”

Three words that I would not have said added up to a great read: “train wreck” and “incantatory.” But I guess that’s why we keep reading: sometimes a new thing occurs.

It took me two tries to get into A Reliable Wife, because of the “incantatory” business. Robert Goolrick has crafted a quirky narrative voice with many short declarative sentences, lists of objects, feelings, behaviors, and a slippery way of getting in and out of scenes. The novel opens in a snowstorm on a train platform and it seemed, at first, both ominous and gratuitously arty. What kept me going was the premise: in the fall of 1907 Ralph Truitt, lonely industrialist, has sent away for a woman to come to Truitt, Wisconsin and take her place at his side as his wife. It’s a tough first scene: Goolrick has the courage to make the setting unpleasant and the character unsympathetic, so if you aren’t hooked by curiosity, you may stop reading. But once we get into prospective bride Catherine Land’s head, as she prepares for her meeting with Truitt, it’s hard to turn away from this spectacle, for Catherine is not what she has led Truitt to believe. And within a few more pages, as his horses run away with his carriage in the dark blizzard, the drama starts to blossom. The rest is so tightly constructed that I can’t add many more plot details without ruining the whole thing.

You could say this was a novel about trust. You could say it was a novel about patience. Or redemption. One point that struck me is the way Goolrick insists on the consequences of heedless selfishness. I’m not kidding about the train wreck business; bad things happen to pretty much every character here, and a good  many of them are undeserved. Some, on the other hand, are not just merited, but courted. Most of these characters are familiar with the impulse toward self-destruction. Here’s a passage that pretty much sums up both Goolrick’s style and the dilemmas the characters face: “She had no knowledge of good. She had no heart and so no sense of the good thing, the right thing, and she had no field on which to wage the battle that was, in fact, raging in her.” It’s borderline annoying, when you read individual sentences, but they sweep you along when they’re strung together into the narrative. And Goolrick does the essential things really well: he makes you care about the characters, he puts them into conflict with each other, he increases the pressure. Ultimately, you can’t turn away. That’s why we call it a train wreck.

Peter Cameron, “The City of Your Final Destination”

The City of Your Final Destination arrived in the mail, sent by a friend with impeccable taste, and it proved to be very enjoyable. The title sounds ominous, doesn’t it? I suppose it relates in a free-floating way to the narrative, which does feature characters traveling long distances for reasons that barely seem under their control. The omniscient narrator at one point asks “Why does traveling, coming far, excite us? Has it to do with what we leave behind or with what we encounter?”

This is Uruguay

In The City… the excitement comes from both sources. Omar Razaghi, a graduate student at the University of Kansas, is prodded by his girlfriend to visit Uruguay to obtain authorization to write a biography of a dead writer named Jules Gund. Jules’s brother, widow, daughter and mistress live uneasily in an enormous house in the country, miles from anywhere. Oh, gosh… “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto…” Well, whether or not Omar mirrors Dorothy, he is certainly out of his depth. The scenes in Kansas (snowy, flat, provincial, academic) and in Uruguay (lush, remote, decaying) demonstrate this clearly. Cameron’s narrator never goes so far as to describe Omar directly, but other characters’ reactions to him inform us that he is both handsome and charming, if possibly ineffectual and naive. Adam Gund — deliciously sardonic — says of Omar, “I found him charming in a slightly stupid, dewy-eyed, bushy-tailed way… it would be nice to put him in a cage and feed him nuts. And pet him.”

Only gradually do we learn the background of this weird South American menage. The widow is bitter, the mistress puzzled, the brother endlessly mordant, his younger Thai boyfriend restive. There is a gondola, marooned on a dry lake. Jules Gund the novelist wrote one novel, called The Gondola. (We read none of it, thank Heaven.) Omar’s arrival and quest to obtain permission from these heirs to dig through their past shakes everything up. Hard on his heels comes his meddling girlfriend Deirdre, aggressive, dense, self-centered if well-meaning, trampling over all of his small achievements.

The action returns to Kansas, then again to Uruguay, then to New York. (The New York section reminded me of Julia Glass in the delightful Three Junes, but the rest of the book is less sunny.) The end of the novel feels a little bit desultory, as if Cameron had not quite figured out how to stow all of his characters safely in new lives. I preferred the earlier parts of the book, as when Omar “decided that it was too easy to get places. I really should not be in Montevideo so soon. It was better before planes.”

Emile Zola, “Pot Luck”

Sometimes Zola’s outrage nourishes a kind of savage farce, as in the scene in The Kill in which a woman has sex with her stepson on a bearskin rug, in a greenhouse, surrounded by loathsome artificially-grown plants. And sometimes the author’s anger overwhelms the comedy, as in the scene toward the end of Pot Luck when a young kitchen maid, impregnated by an older man, gives birth alone in her attic bedroom and puts the living baby in the garbage. (Astoundingly frank description of the process, too). Fortunately, Zola manages to tame his rage for much of the book, making it disturbing, but not unreadable.

This is Zola’s attack on the morals of the bourgeoisie. By the time he wrote Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille) he had already investigated corruption in high society (The Kill, or La Curée) and among the working class (L’Assommoir). Cleverly, he structures the novel around a bourgeois apartment building in Paris. The tenants, the owner, and even the concierge all pride themselves on the honesty and respectability of the building, and Zola returns often to the calm and quiet of the principal staircase, with its tall mahogany doors and its panels of false marble. (Yes, that’s a symbol: nobody would call Zola subtle.) Meanwhile at the back of the building is the air shaft that serves the kitchens, which the author most often compares to a sewer.

bourgeois Paris as seen by Caillebotte

We see much of this through the eyes of Octave Mouret, the classic (in French novels) provincial come to the city to make his fortune. Octave is a womanizer, and he manages to sleep his way through the building, one wife at a time, without ever having much fun. Well, nobody’s having much fun, really. It’s all about keeping up appearances, trying to marry off daughters without enough money for dowries, ignoring the fact that your husband’s mistress is bleeding him dry, refusing to sleep with your husband or trying to sleep with your wife’s chambermaid.

The most memorable characters are the monsters. Narcisse Bachelard, the ancient, drunken roué is tolerated, even courted, because he is thought to be rich. His sister, Madame Josserand, is one of the great viragos of literature, the kind of unanswerable bully whose sheer aggression carries the day. The scheming and penny-pinching that go into marrying off her daughters would be amusing if it weren’t so depressing. And to drive home his point about the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie Zola supplies a priest and a doctor who know all the secrets of the house. The former, a worldly man of the church, spends much of the novel attempting to maintain the good reputation of these characters, for the sake of the good example they present to the lower classes. By the end of the book, even he is having his doubts.