Louis Couperus, “Eline Vere”

Ever heard of Louis Couperus? Me neither. But it turns out he’s THE naturalist writer of 19th-century Holland — their answer to Flaubert, perhaps, or Tolstoy. Which makes Eline Vere the Dutch version of Madame Bovary or possibly Anna Karenina. The problem with those nutty heroines is that they can be pretty annoying to the reader, and in this novel we spend a great deal of time in Eline’s head. Since she’s inclined to be high-strung and narcisisstic, it gets wearing. On the other hand, since Couperus was twenty-six (and a guy) when he wrote this, it’s a pretty impressive imaginative feat.

The setting is The Hague, the time 1889, and part of the interest for me was my eternal fascination with the details of prosperous late-19th-century life: the plush, the gaslights, the hangings, the tulle ball gowns. Couperus doesn’t stint on these descriptions but he also makes clear the extent to which the comfortable upholstery of this life is protective but also rigid. I think it was Walter Benjamin who pointed out the 19th-century fascination with padded cases for the objects they held precious, and that image came frequently to mind.

Adolph Menzel's painting of binoculars

So, Eline. She is the beautiful talented orphan daughter of an eccentric unsuccessful painter. She lives with her bossy sister Betsy in physical comfort and great respectability. But her position as a pretty, cultured, marriageable young lady is not quite satisfying to her. Our first hint of trouble is her excessive focus on what other people are thinking about her. Hint number two is her overheated crush on an opera singer — she not only entertains romantic fantasies about him but even collects an album full of photographs, which she is then put to the trouble of burning when her illusions about him are dashed.

Big trouble comes, though, when she gets engaged to the honest, good-hearted Otto. She is delighted at first to surrender to his even temper and sunny outlook, but she begins to entertain doubts about him when her rakish, neurasthenic, cynical cousin Vincent more or less calls her back to the Dark Side. The slippery slope for an upper-crust girl apparently looked the same in The Hague as it did in Edith Wharton’s Old New York: sketchy friends, a suspicious cough, the habit of wearing only black dresses, little drops measured from a dark glass bottle… What makes Eline Vere different is that, just as Couperus spent considerable time on Eline’s affectations, he also invests energy in her absolute madness. And he’s darn convincing. The scene when she considers and discards various suicide methods is hair-raising. And even though Couperus goes to the trouble of tying a few pretty marital knots in the relationships of some of the (many) secondary characters, that won’t be what you remember when you close the book.

Nancy Mitford, “Wigs on the Green”

I was recently thrilled to discover a long-lost Stella Gibbons novel, Nightingale Wood, which has just been republished by Penguin. Perhaps encouraged by that delight, I leapt on the handsome new Vintage paperback of Nancy Mitford’s long-out-of-print Wigs on the Green. But I was reminded that many neglected books deserve to remain that way. Of course, given the energy of the Mitford industry it seems unlikely that any scribblings by any of those sisters will remain overlooked for long.

There are two reasons for the long disappearance of Wigs on the Green, the first of which is that it’s a satire of the British Fascists, so ardently espoused by Nancy’s sister Diana. The book may have been intended as a light-hearted romp but it was apparently completely transparent — the introduction by Diana’s daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley notes that the character of young political enthusiast Eugenia Malmains is a clear portrait of Unity Mitford. The sisters did not speak for years afterward.

Unfortunately, the other reason the book has been forgotten is that it just isn’t any good. Nancy produced two charming novels, Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, but before she achieved those she penned a couple of damp squibs called Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding. (Afterward she went on to write truly wonderful biographies of mostly eighteenth-century figures: Madame de Pompadour, Frederick the Great, Voltaire.) Wigs on the Green is one of those starter novels. It reads less like an actual piece of fiction than like a set of stage directions, strangely declarative, almost hortatory, and the characters are mostly cardboard figures. Roughly, the plot involves two young-men-about-town who travel to a Cotswold village to pay court to a local heiress. This is the beautiful but peculiar Eugenia Malmains/Diana Mitford, granddaughter of Lord and Lady Chalford. She has been brought up in virtual seclusion and cares only about the Union Jack Movement. Madcap doings ensue, culminating in an historical pageant at the magnificent estate of Chalford House. Village life is sketched in: there are arty young men at nearby Rackenbridge, a couple of hearty yokels, an insane asylum populated entirely by peers, and my favorite character, the deliciously pretentious Ann-Marie Lace who sees life as one dramatic opportunity after another. She is inclined to adopt a foreign accent owing to six months’ worth of singing lessons in Paris, and dresses more for the stage than for village life.

Mrs. Lace is funny. Certain throwaway lines are funny. My favorite section comes when Eugenia has to explain to her new friends what an Aryan is:

“‘Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes.’

“‘How about Siamese cats?’ said Jasper.

“‘That’s true. But Siamese cats possess, to a notable degree, the Nordic virtue of faithfulness.’

“‘Indeed they don’t,’ said Poppy. ‘We had one last summer and he brought back a different wife every night…’

“Eugenia was in no way put out. ‘I know, they may not be faithful to non-Aryan cats… But they love their Nordic owners and even go for long walks with them.’

“‘So your definition of an Aryan is somebody who will go for long walks with other Aryans?’”

This is loopy enough to sound like a transcription of an actual conversation among those daffy Mitford gals, and confirms my opinion that Nancy’s writing is at its best when it most closely resembles the truth. Or a slightly more sparkling version thereof.

Stella Gibbons, “Nightingale Wood”

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm was a fixture of my youth, a book everyone in the family read over and over again, though it was years before I understood it to be a satire. (Yes, sadly, I was a child who actually believed it was reasonable to name cows Aimless, Graceless, Feckless, and Pointless.) I finally grasped its true nature and have never been without a copy of the book since adulthood, so I was thrilled to receive Nightingale Wood from a friend. Even more thrilled to read the first sentence: “It is difficult to make a dull garden, but old Mr Wither had succeeded.”

Here’s what this short sentence told me. First, we are in the safe company of prosperous Englishmen, probably in the inter-War years, since no one else bothers to “make gardens.” Second, our narrator is going to take a firm line through the story, telling us what to think about the characters. Third, said narrator is perfectly happy to take a swipe at her own creations; in fact, she doesn’t much care for Mr. Wither at all. A very promising beginning, and Stella Gibbons kept it up. The story concerns well-bred well-fed people, the ones who populate E.F. Benson and Angela Thirkell. Gibbons, though, is less mean-spirited than Benson and more psychologically acute than Thirkell. Nightingale Wood is a re-working of the Cinderella story but it’s more like origami than a straight re-telling. Yes, ultimately, a modern orphan marries a modern prince, but there are multiple candidates for both of those roles and the plot has a way of doubling back on itself that just extends the pleasure.

Handsome car, but the chauffeur's even better-looking

Briefly, the story involves the intertwining of two well-off families in two comfortable houses that face each other across a wooded dell in Essex. The Withers are, as their name announces, joyless, while the Springs are noisy and cheerful. The Young People get involved with each other. And while Gibbons is sympathetic to most of her characters, she is not beyond skewering their pretensions. Thus Hetty Franklin, the mournful intellectual niece who lives with the Springs, mulls over her misfortune one afternoon before a party: “The world was so beautiful! so crammed with romance, excitement, horror, irony! In every part of it, except at Grassmere near Sible Pelden in Essex, there were to be found truths that were stranger than fiction, and more satisfying…. There were people to be taught, wrongs to be righted, there were politics and history and economics…  I know just how Florence Nightingale felt.”

It’s this little trace of affectionate mockery that makes Gibbons special. As one character tries to seduce another, the narrator announces, “Champagne can never be ordered without the temperature shooting up.” At a wedding, relating the eager attention of the guests, she says, “Their wistful, envious, interested eyes take in the tiniest detail, the finest shade of expression, the last shred of meaning, in everything that happens. It is very tiring to be a woman.” But very rewarding, with a book like this in your hands.

Barbara Pym, “Jane and Prudence”

Barbara Pym’s novels were republished in a handsome uniform edition in the early 1980s and I bought them all. They’ve survived thirty years of bookshelf purges but I hadn’t read one again until now, and I found it really delightful. I remember that some of them were quite depressing, pitilessly recounting the tiny incidents in the lives of middle-class spinsters in postwar England, all dripping rhododendrons, terrible food and worse clothes. But Jane and Prudence is one of the more light-hearted of her comedies, perhaps because there is so little at stake for any of the characters.

Set in an unnamed country parish

We meet Jane and Prudence at an Oxford reunion: Prudence is an elegant 29-year-old spinster and Jane, once her Oxford tutor, a scatterbrained clerical wife. When they go back to their daily lives, Pym lays out for us the deliciously petty behavior of Prudence’s office colleagues and her dreamy crush on her boss, who once called her by her first name. Jane, who once thought her life as a rector’s wife would be like something out of Trollope, is ditsy to the point of derangement. Prudence visits Jane and flirts with a handsome widower whose vanity is possibly Pym’s favorite toy in the book: “‘Well… one has had to hurt people, I suppose,’ said Fabian, tilting his head to one side. He had just realised that the distinguished-looking man sitting at that distant table was himself reflected in a mirror at the far end of the room. No wonder one had had to hurt people, he thought, resting his forehead on his hand.”

The men do not come off well, to be sure: Pym is especially precise about the many privileges and advantages that the women — with greater or lesser eagerness — yield to the men, from better and more food to better jobs. This, despite the proclamation from a bossy spinster that “men are only after one thing.” What that thing might be is adumbrated in a hilarious little exchange as the parish ladies decorate the church for the Harvest Festival. Fabian Driver, the handsome widower, arrives with an immense marrow (i.e. very large squash) cradled in his arms.

“‘What a fine marrow, Mr. Driver,’ said Mis Doggett in a bright tone. ‘It is the biggest one we have had so far, isn’t it, Miss Morrow?’

“Miss Morrow, who was scrabbling on the floor among the vegetables, mumbled something inaudible.

“‘It is magnificent,’ said Mrs. Mayhew reverently.

“Mr. Driver moved forward and presented the marrow to Miss Doggett with something of a flourish.

“Jane felt as if she were assisting at some primitive kind of ritual at whose significance she hardly dared to guess.”

Much better not to.

Kay Redfield Jamison, “An Unquiet Mind”

Toward the end of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison attempts to look back on her story of a life with manic-depressive disease, and to sum up. She has already been eloquent about the damage done to herself and others during her mania, and the unrelenting dreary gloom of her depressive phases. “Still,” she says, “the seductiveness of these unbridled and intense moods is powerful; and the ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.” In a way, she puts her finger on one source of the appeal of this memoir: whatever else it might be, manic depressive disease is dramatic. And drama makes a good story.

I don’t mean to imply that there is anything sensationalistic or superficial about An Unquiet Mind. Jamison is a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychiatry, as well as being “coauthor of the standard text on manic-depressive illness.” She makes it clear how ambivalent she felt about publicly discussing her own illness, for both personal and professional reasons. (Interestingly, she was concerned that “by speaking publicly or writing about such intensely private aspects of my life, I will return to them one day and find them bleached of meaning and feeling.” As if exposure, or use, would drain the meaning from such memories: I think it might.)

But surely by now many of us know someone who is manic-depressive, or “bipolar” as the new term has it. (Jamison objects to the either/or implication of that title, pointing to the more common “caldronous” confusion between the manic and depressive states.) Though there are obviously many, many forms and degrees of the illness, Jamison’s memoir must make readers more empathetic to those who suffer from it. She spends considerable space, for instance, on the question of complying with the medication, and helps to explain why patients sometimes go off their meds. She is also frank about the benefits that she feels she’s reaped from being a manic-depressive: “I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely, loved more, and been more loved…. appreciated [death] — and life — more…” But she is also frank, especially in the beginning of the book, about the damage done to herself and to her relationships. Her suicide attempt was serious. And as she points out, “the road from suicide to life is cold and colder and colder still…”

We read memoir in part to gain vicarious experience. Yet there’s a paradox here: the experiences you’d think we’d want would be the positive ones like love and comfort and beauty. So what is effective in a memoir? The dark stuff, on the whole. Many authors of memoirs seem to understand this and as I’ve pointed out, that’s what’s catchy. Jamison’s elegant balancing act initiates us into a little bit of the darkness with sympathy rather than voyeurism.

Allegra Goodman, “The Cookbook Collector”

I am baffled by Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector, and I think the issue is one of expectations. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pleasant read, the story of two dissimilar sisters in Northern California at the turn of the twenty-first century. Emily, who works in what we used to call “high tech,” is the rational, driven one: Jessamine, a philosophy PhD. at Berkeley, is all feelings and intuition and impracticality. Their mother died when they were small, their father had high ambitions for the girls, and poor communication skills. When the story begins, Emily’s company Veritech is about to go public.

I don’t know very much about Northern California and what I know about that era of the tech business comes from Michael Crichton, so I enjoyed the setting. (There was a fair amount of overlap between Crichton and Goodman, but then I believe Crichton was a demon for research.) But as I read further about the two sisters, their love lives, their friends, their preoccupations, I kept waiting for something to happen, and reader, it didn’t. I was not moved. Nor was I provoked. Every now and then Goodman dwelt on something interesting: the section of the book that deals with the effect of anticipating and receiving sudden enormous wealth was intriguing. But I was waiting for something more.

Jess is afraid of heights

Now, it is entirely possible that I missed the point. I get that Emily and Jessamine, with their opposing temperaments, nod toward Jane Austen and I made a token effort to try to squash Jess’s two love interests into the Sense and Sensibility mold. They almost fit — but that didn’t tell me much. And I didn’t know at all what to make of the cookbook collector of the title, who enters the book quite late. Is he a spectre, the fellow we may turn into if we don’t grasp life’s opportunities? Or is that George Friedman, Jess’s boss, in the early portions of the novel? (Goodman has the courage to make this guy quite dislikable, I’ll give her that.) Another problem for me was that many of the secondary characters seemed schematic, conjured into being because they served a function. Leon the tree sitter, for instance, seemed especially two-dimensional, representing the flaky side of Berkeley and the flaky side of Jess.

Nor, strangely, did I find much of the novel moving, despite the sisters’ relationships, the death of the mother, even the letters the mother left for her daughters to read on their birthdays. Even a death late in the book. Weirdly, even the gastronomic writing left me cold: Goodman goes into a lot of description in the cookbook section. She’s meticulous on food and home decor and I really love this stuff normally. Yet there was a particularly awkward dinner party scene in which characters’ personae were compared to various wines. I expected high ambitions from this novel. Goodman is marketed as literary and given the attention the book has received, I looked for more than I found here.

Louis Sachar, “The Cardturner”

I dimly remembered liking Louis Sachar’s Holes, probably read when one of my sons was a pre-teen. Might even have seen the movie with Shia LaBeouf. And I like bridge. My mother-in-law has tried again and again to teach me how to play. Hence my purchase of The Cardturner, which is a Louis Sachar novel about bridge. How bad could it be?

Weeeell….. Turns out Sachar is an avid bridge player. And it seems pretty clear that part of his motive in writing this novel is to interest more young people in playing the game. Substantial segments of the book read like a YA version of Bridge for Dummies. Entertaining, clear, admirable instructive prose. Just — not exactly fiction. The premise is winning: teenager Alton Richards is strong-armed into serving as a “cardturner” for his rich uncle Lester Trapp. Trapp is a brilliant bridge player, but blind. Alton’s task is to take his uncle to bridge games, tell him what cards he holds, and play them as instructed. There’s some emotional stuff about the uncle and about Alton’s love life, and lots about bridge, which was actually pretty interesting.

I can’t be too criticical. I am not the audience for this book. But it did seem more like preaching than like storytelling.

Fred Vargas, “Dans les bois eternels” or “This Night’s Foul Work”

Authors of murder mysteries have to keep a lot of balls in the air, and I’ve complained frequently here about disappointments in the genre. Dans les bois éternels (translated as This Night’s Foul Work) is not one of them. Once again, Fred Vargas demonstrates that there is nothing intellectually contemptible about writing entertaining fiction.

I will admit that I didn’t feel quite the same exhilaration this time as I did reading Pars vite et reviens tard. There’s something exceptionally thrilling about discovering a new writer and becoming acquainted with the detective and the team. But one thing Vargas did very well with the first Commissaire Adamsberg novel was create a large enough footprint for herself so that she had ample room to maneuver in successive novels. (Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire novels would be the contrasting case — Walt is less entertaining off his own turf.) And part of Vargas‘ cleverness was the way she made Adamsberg an intuitive, unconventional thinker, difficult to pin down, constitutionally off the grid. So in this book, when Adamsberg ends up in a bar in Normandy, toting a pair of stag horns home in his small European car, you can’t see how the dead stag is going to line up with the mysterious killing of two ne’er-do-wells in northern Paris. This could merely be one of those vague Adamsberg moments, but it’s not.

Actually, one of the plot techniques I really admired here was Vargas‘ ability to shift the terms of the conflict. In the early portions of the book — and one of the pleasures here is the leisurely way it all plays out — Adamsberg and his amiable crew are up against another branch of the police. Sure, they’ve got these two bodies and they want to find the killer but the real tension concerns whether or not they will be able to keep the case. Adamsberg suspects this is not merely a random drug killing and wants more time to investigate. Not until a hundred or so pages in do we identify an actual potential murderer.

Vargas also does well with secondary conflict. Adamsberg is a complicated guy with a difficult past. This book puts a new man on his staff, one who turns out to challenge Adamsberg on every level. And, because the logic of the murder mystery demands it, this conflict becomes part of the central puzzle as well.

Finally, the secondary characters continue to entertain. Adamsberg the goofy relies on Danglard the anxious polymath. The big-boned Violette Retancourt’s erotic spell over her colleagues endures. And the enormous timid cat La Boule plays a significant role. That part was a little bit cutesy for me, but I loved Vargas‘ character summary of the beast: “… the cat was incapable of managing alone, totally devoid of that slightly scornful autonomy that makes up the grandeur of the feline.” That kind of writing, that kind of perception, allied with clever plotting and a French setting makes a nearly ideal read for me.

Lily King, “Father of the Rain”

So why am I lying in bed with at midnight with the lights out and tears streaming down my face, when I’m normally sound asleep at 10 p.m.? Because I couldn’t disentangle myself from Lily King’s Father of the Rain. Because I didn’t really try. Because it had me by the throat and wouldn’t let go. Made me think about things I hadn’t thought about for a while and — sigh — feel stuff, too. Oy.

Here’s the gist of it: the father of the title is Gardiner Amory, a charismatic, handsome, wounded drunken WASP. (Of course I know no one like this.) His daughter Daley is the narrator. The title refers to the epigraph from the Book of Job: “Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?” And the real genius of the book is the tone of the entire first section, in which Daley is a child, and her charismatic, handsome, impossible father acts out in ways that baffle, wound, astound and alarm her. What’s so smart is the way King manages to make him loom so very large. Children, of course, are relatively powerless and King also does a great job of conveying the coping skills that Daley learns: a kind of blank evasiveness coupled with hyper-awareness of the surrounding emotional weather: “I sense all the new rules, though I could never explain how.”

The book has a threefold structure and I have to admit it was a little bit predictable, a dialectical arrangement that follows the childhood section (thesis) with a section (antithesis) in which Daley as a young adult is battened-down, controlling, risk-averse, and estranged from her father. Fortunately there is a section of synthesis, ruefully redemptive. I don’t even know if this part is convincing: I just really wanted it to be true.

The other feature of the book that brought it home so forcefully was the setting. The Amorys live in Ashing, Massachusetts, one of those WASP enclaves that I figure is on the North Shore. King handles this very adroitly: the child Daley takes for granted the enormous house, the country club, the pool, the private school, the social round floating on copious quantities of liquor. Equally admirable is the ejection from Eden, when Daley’s mother leaves her father and moves to an apartment in town. Oh, lord, the dislocation, the awkwardness, the horror as Daley’s father takes up with another woman and a kind of licentious sexual behavior overtakes concern for the kids! Naturally once Daley is on her own she rejects this way of life, and there’s a nice moment when her father drags her back to the country club over her self-righteous objections to its exclusive policies. Togged out in a new tennis skirt that her father just bought her, she finds that, yes, tennis can actually be fun.

I’d like to assert that Father of the Rain is more than just a powerful ACOA novel, but I can’t be sure that’s true. All I know is that it dug a hole in my heart.