Colm Toibin, “Brooklyn”

I’m not entirely sure I know why Colm Toibín’s Brooklyn is not simply a shorter, quieter Maeve Binchy novel. Which would have been fine — I love Maeve Binchy. And at a glance, you can see my confusion: Eilis Lacey, a young woman in Enniscorthy, Ireland, is maneuvered by her family into emigrating to Brooklyn where there will be more opportunities for her than there are at home. Pushing her out of the nest is her beautiful, accomplished elder sister Rose, whose earnings have largely supported the widowed Mrs. Lacey and Eilis herself.

Brooklyn Bridge -- what else?

What’s different from Binchy, though, is what Toibín achieves through sheer authorial control. It’s a kind of sleight of hand: I would have to read the book again to see if I could catch him at it. Because what he manages to capture is nothing less than the expansions of Eilis’s consciousness and ultimately, the rewards and the costs involved.

The structure is pretty simple. The first section of the book takes place in Enniscorthy, the reader’s sense of the town radiating outward from the Lacey house on Friary Street. This is the part that’s familiar from Binchy: the sense of the dense web of small-town relations. But rather than stepping back a bit to direct the reader’s attention to this, Toibín writes strictly from Eilis’ point of view, and she barely notices. This is the water she swims in: how could she have words for it?

Not until Toibín narrates her ocean crossing do we grasp how limited her experience is: she is seasick without being able to identify what is happening to her, for instance. She arrives in Brooklyn to find a place ready made for her, with a job and a room in an Irish boarding house, but merely being there exhausts her: “For each day, she thought, she needed a whole other day to contemplate what had happened and store it away, get it out of her system so that it did not keep her awake at night or fill her dreams with flashes of what had actually happened and other flashes…  full of rushes of colour or crowds of people, everything frenzied and fast.”

One of the interesting choices is that Toibín doesn’t specify the time period  right away. You sort of home in on it: there are cars, women wear stockings, they talk about “the war.” It’s very different from the usual scene-setting of an historical novel. Nothing is mentioned unless it stands out to Eilis. She builds a life in Brooklyn, a more spacious, self-determined existence. She is barely aware that she’s doing so. Only when she returns to Ireland does the change become apparent.

So where, I kept asking  myself, is the conflict? Where is the lure that keeps the reader turning the page? The tone is scrupulously measured, almost flat, almost clumsy. Toibín passes no judgment on anyone’s character or behavior and has no interest in charming the reader. Yet I found myself describing the book as “lovely,” perhaps because of the author’s generosity and earnestness and sympathy as Eilis tries to work out the definition of the word “home.”

Sophie Hannah, “The Dead Lie Down”

Well, Amazon may be promoting Sophie Hannah by interviewing her along with the goddess Tana French, and she may indeed be a very smart girl, but The Dead Lie Down was not my favorite mystery of the month. I know I’ve blogged about how appealing crazy narrators can be — I’d forgotten that they can also be deeply unappealing. Henceforth, I will have to clarify that they must be charming to keep me on the hook. Ruth Bussey, Nutcase Narrator #1, is one of those needy humorless ones, the kind who might try to buttonhole you by the detergent at the supermarket and if you weren’t careful you’d end up taking care of her cat. Or listening to all the terrible things that have happened to her. (And they are pretty bad.) Then there’s Nutcase Narrator #2, Charlie Zailer, a policewoman. Ruth turns to Charlie when she begins to have suspicions about the man in her life. Bad things have also happened to Charlie, and Ruth admires her for her resilience.

The mighty shadow of Ruth Rendell lies heavily on this novel, but Hannah doesn’t have quite the readability that enlivens Rendell’s output. If I’m going to spend several hundred pages in the presence of very disturbed people, I am going to want something besides horrified curiosity to keep me interested. Hannah leans heavily on plot for this, but it was awfully convoluted.

Here goes. Aidan Seed told Ruth Bussey that he had killed a woman named Mary Trelease. But Mary Trelease is still alive. Ruth goes to the police (that’s Charlie Zailer) saying that she fears something bad will happen. Oh, golly, I can’t really take it any further. There are paintings: Aidan’s or Mary’s. There is a murder, beyond gruesome. There are flashbacks and multiple narrators, and a sinister girls’ boarding school. Or maybe not sinister? Charlie hasn’t slept with her fiancé Simon and I’m still not sure why I know that. My enthusiasm for this kind of creepiness is pretty limited, and I think I’ll stick to Rendell as my provider.

Joanna Trollope, “The Other Family”

You could say that Joanna Trollope writes the same book over and over again. (I exclude here the historical romances she writes as Caroline Harvey, which are very good of their kind.) You could complain about how they are always about middle-class women running into small-scale problems, but that would be selling Trollope very short. Her books aren’t very ambitious, I guess, but focusing on largely female characters in situations that require emotional growth and adjustment isn’t a small thing. It’s true that I haven’t been thrilled by the last few Trollopes (starting with the 2002 Girl from the South) but The Other Family is excellent.

photo by Nigel Cox of Highgate, the Rossiters' neighborhood

It opens with Chrissie Rossiter and her daughters Tamsin, Dilly and Amy coming back from the hospital where Richie, the paterfamilias, has just died suddenly of a heart attack. Trollope wastes no time presenting the book’s conflict: Richie never married Chrissie, which the girls don’t all know. And Richie left a wife and son in Newcastle, when he and Chrissie became a couple. He never divorced his wife, Margaret. She and her son Scott are the other family of the title.

Again, it’s a hallmark Trollope situation. Richie, a popular singer in the Tony Bennett model, has dominated the lives of Chrissie and the girls. Not until his death does it become obvious that their comfortable life (comfortable economically and emotionally) was also limiting. Or to put it another way, Richie’s death bereaves all of them, but also provides opportunities. I suppose you could call this trite — there’s certainly nothing unexpected about it — but the way Trollope works through her plot is very satisfying. She’s pyschologically acute and  a terrific observer of family life. The scenes that put the four women together, communicating in an intensely female language of gesture and oblique remark, are wonderfully observed. So is a set piece that occurs near the end of the book when Amy, the musical youngest, goes to a folk music performance in Newcastle. It’s an epiphany for her, and feels like a description of an actual performance Trollope attended.

And, yes, The Other Family deals out a nice helping of reassurance. Characters behave unattractively, but only temporarily and under pressure.  Trollope has sympathy for all of them. Endless cups of tea are drunk, everyone ends up better off at the end of the book, and just because we know where we’re going, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the same-but-slightly-different voyage. Plus there’s a wonderful portrait of a big, heavy, fluffy cat named Dawson who is bracingly self-absorbed. In Trollope’s world, only cats get away with this kind of behavior. Maybe that’s why I enjoy her books so much.

David Mitchell, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet”

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet has gotten a lot of praise, but it was the fact that I could read a sample chapter on my Kindle that made me buy it. Whatever else David Mitchell’s qualities as a writer may be, he creates lively, readable prose that sucked me right into his story. And while I wondered at first whether I wasn’t just reading a premium version of Shogun, I realized the difference pretty quickly: I never finished Shogun. But The Thousand Autumns…, though a hefty 500 pages, zipped past.

The place is the island of Dejima, a man-made island next to Nagasaki. It is 1799 and the Dutch operate a limited trading post on Dejima, the only European trading facility with cloistered Japan. We are introduced first to Aibagawa Orito, a midwife, then to the young Dutchman Jacob De Zoet, as he arrives in Dejima on shipboard. One of the undeniable attractions of historical fiction is exposure to worlds we would not attain on our own, and this is where the resemblance to James Clavell resides. But ethnography and plotting are incidental in this case to Mitchell’s larger points which cluster around issues of perception and understanding between cultures. Much is made of the translation process and one of the most appealing characters in the book is an interpreter. As De Zoet matures he begins to grasp both the difficulties and the opportunities that occur so richly in the floating border town of Dejima.

Culture clash, Nagasaki 1800

All of which sounds quite dry, but Mitchell’s gift is to bring his characters to life. And while the book begins in a fairly straightforward style, the narrative mechanics expand in the second half. Time and again, the novel’s action is held up as a character tells a story which might be a myth, a lie, a memory, a fable. Normally this drives me crazy but I was putty in Mitchell’s hands. The midwife Orito, about halfway through the book, ruminates about the human need for stories: “It is stories, she believes, that make life in the House of Sisters tolerable… Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.”

Finally, the writing is vivid enough to provide arresting imagery throughout. “Shuzai knees at the water’s edge and drinks water from his cupped hands. A feathery fish hovers in the current; a bright berry floats by.” It’s a spare composition like a Japanese print – on the page. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet isn’t spare. It’s rich in poetry and character, but reading it is like a remarkably satisfying dream.

Books for Boys and Girls

It’s a publishing truism that women read more fiction than men, and it’s also pretty clear than certain books or categories of novels appeal more to one gender than another. I tend not to buy books about submarines, for instance, while male fans of Jane Austen are in the minority. But sometimes novels achieve universal gender appeal. I’ve passed most of these along to the men in my family with great success. They tend to have more action and fewer descriptions of meals or clothes than what I think of as “girl books,” but they’re all character-driven and emotionally absorbing.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell      

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

The Brief  Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

City of Thieves by David Benioff

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam

Advice for the Airborne

My worst nightmare is being stuck on a long flight without a good book. I would honestly prefer to undergo oral surgery (at least you get good meds). The problem is that I don’t concentrate that well at 35,000 feet. Also, I read fast. Also, I’m cranky about writing style. So I am always on the lookout for longish books with plenty of action that are somewhat elegantly written. Of course you’d be in good hands with Lee Child or Thomas Perry or your favorite mystery writer, but here are a few more suggestions, in order of length:

your home for HOURS

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick — arranged marriage in rural Wisconsin in 1907; what you see is not what you get. Only 320 pages but dense.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice – a girl book, the very essence of charm. 368 pages and completely magical.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry —  can you really read the future from a piece of lace? Towner Whitney says you can, but she also admits she lies. Salem, Massachusetts, a crazy narrator, and a mysterious death in 416 pages.

Stardust by Joseph Kanon — a solid 528 pages of thriller set in Hollywood in 1947. Communists, movie stars, refugee German Jews playing tennis. Lots of fun.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel — Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII and Thomas More. Mantel brings the dawn of the English Reformation to life. Long enough, at 560 pages, to get you across the country and back.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt — Is it a thriller or a coming-of-age novel or a philosophical rumination? Doesn’t matter, it’s gripping and 576 pages long.

The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas — There’s a reason it’s been made into so many movies. 736 pages in the new Penguin Classics version. Improbably absorbing.

Tana French, “Faithful Place”

I always knew I was going to drop everything to gulp Faithful Place down in one or two sittings. That’s just the way Tana French operates on me. And on a few other people as well. I try not to read reviews of books I’m going to be blogging about but I couldn’t resist reading Janet Maslin in the New York Times, and I imagine that’ll move a few thousand units.

So we’re all going to be very bummed, not because the book is bad but because it’s good, and it’s disturbing. Here’s the thing: I’ve been worrying  recently (see the entry for Craig Johnson’s Junkyard Dogs) about the toll these murder mysteries take on the detectives. They get seriously dinged up, physically and psychically. Tana French goes everybody one better, though: at the end of her books, the detective is so wrecked she can’t even use him/her again. This time around it’s Frank Mackey, who in The Likeness was head of the Undercover squad. Clearly, this is a man with a special line in duplicity. Actually, French has gone and imagined for him a past right out of an Irish play like The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Family dysfunction that would do your head in, as they say over there. “Da said, ‘Little whoremasters, the lot of yous.’ I think he meant it in a nice way.” That’s the way those Mackeys talked to each other. And that, children, is the teeny tiny little tip of the iceberg.

But Frank thinks he’s escaped the drink and the violence and the poverty and the unemployment. He left home, went to police college, married up, had a child. But he’s no good to Tana French just peacefully doing his job, so she curls a lash around his neck and yanks him back to Faithful Place where his family lives in the same house and the girl who jilted him 22 years earlier turns up dead. I haven’t given away much, by the way. That’s bad enough, but there are more and bigger emotional land mines waiting for Frank. Honestly, what French puts him through — I don’t know how you write this stuff.

So I’m going to think about something else. One of the qualities of The Likeness that I adored was its glamour. It has a real Rebecca vibe.So I was interested to read in the New York Times yesterday (OK, it’s my hometown paper, I read it very thoroughly sometimes) about a professor named Alice Friedman. She  just wrote a book called American Glamour about modern American architecture. Here’s what she has to say: “So much about glamour is about aspiration and appearance, staging what you want to be, like Gatsby. …. and what is the true you, and will that be discovered?”

I would have said that Faithful Place was un-glamourous but using Friedman’s definition, I’m wrong. It’s actually the story of Frank Mackey ripping off his mask. Ouch.

Another Smart One

Apparently  I need to add Sophie Hannah to my list of mystery writers who are Smarter Than They Need to Be. And here she is on Amazon, chatting with the goddess  Tana French. This pretty much signals the end of my work day.

Smarter Than They Need to Be

Tomorrow, July 13, Tana French’s Faithful Place will hit my Kindle. In honor of that event, I thought I’d list a few of one of my favorite categories of authors: mystery writers who are smarter than they need to be. I find myself saying this frequently: it’s the writer with extra power under the hood who produces the really diverting diversions. Alpha order here, because I don’t actually know the IQ level of each of these people:

Benjamin Black, Booker Prize winner as  John Banville

Sarah Caudwell, eminent English barrister

Tana French, multinational (Irish, Italian, American) actress

Dorothy Sayers, author of a highly respected translation of Dante

Rebecca Stott, PhD. from the University of York, wrote a bio of Darwin before Ghostwalk

Fred Vargas, a medievalist and archaeologist, formerly of the French Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique

part of an IQ test, I believe

Fred Vargas, “Seeking Whom He May Devour”

I just spent an inordinate amount of time on Amazon trying to order more Fred Vargas books, but it isn’t easy. For one thing, there are apparently two series: the Chief Inspector Adamsberg series (which I’ve embarked on) and the “Three Evangelist” series which seems to precede Adamsberg. Then there’s the question of language, because though I enjoyed Seeking Whom He May Devour it probably would have been more enchanting as L’Homme à l’envers. I mean — “The Inside-Out Man?” Who wouldn’t want to read that?

We’re dealing with werewolves here, children. And apparently in some areas of the French Alps the legend goes that you can tell a werewolf by the fact that he’s hairless. All of his hair…. pause for shivers…. is under his skin! So when you finally catch him, you have to slit him from his throat to his crotch and you will find the fur! On the inside!

Not the werewolf but his prey

Basically what’s happening here is a string of horrible deaths, first of female sheep, then of humans. Though a knife is occasionally used, all of the victims bear the bite marks of a truly massive wolf. As it happens, wolves have just begun to settle in this remote part of France, and the sheep-herding population has mixed feelings about this development, so death by wolf-bite is doubly menacing. Somehow — too complicated to explain — the Parisian police Commissaire Adamsberg is sent to the Alps to deal with the werewolf murders.

On the whole, there are two ways to structure a murder mystery. One is to leave the murderer’s identity a mystery, while the other is to peg the crimes on a character and then set off on a chase. Seeking Whom He May Devour takes the latter tack, putting an old shepherd (crook and all), a young African man, and Camille Forestier in a livestock truck together, having a road trip. References to “road movies” point us in the right direction. Camille is the link to Adamsberg, having been his love interest in Pars vite et reviens tard.

One of the unusual and attractive features of this detective is his imperturbability and his unconventional problem-solving. It’s as if Vargas were striking a blow for the right-brain thinker. Adamsberg, we read, spends hours daydreaming in an Irish pub in Paris precisely because he speaks no English. The crowds make him feel comfortable but he is not distracted as he “spent many an hour dreaming away, peacefully waiting for ideas to rise to the surface of his mind… For that is how Adamsberg found his ideas — simply by waiting for them to turn up.” Vargas makes it clear that her detective often follows his intuition with no clear idea why he should. A lesson for us all.