Elinor Lipman, “Isabel’s Bed”

I must have read Isabel’s Bed four times. I remember that it was my introduction to Elinor Lipman and I think it remains my favorite of her books, but I hadn’t read it in a while. Having done so, I can safely report that it was as delightful as ever.

Lipman’s books walk a fine line. Now that I think of it, they remind me of another current obsession, Glee. Like the TV series, they dance in and out of various modes of humor while delivering a satisfyingly humane result. There is satire, there is farce, there is observational humor, there is even the occasional flash of pathos. Oh, yes, and romance. It is true that in Isabel’s Bed nobody lines up and belts out a cheesy 70′s rock anthem. But there is some dancing cheek to cheek. And characters break down stereotypes, take risks, grow, reap the rewards.

Our narrator is Harriet Mahoney, a 41-year-old writer who has left New York with her tail between her legs after being dumped by her boyfriend of 12 years, Kenny Grossman. Kenny makes bagels. Kenny doesn’t understand Harriet’s drive to write, or indeed much else about her. On the other hand, it’s pretty obvious that Harriet is walking around wearing a “Kick Me” sign on her back. Lipman’s description of Harriet’s favorite outfit (stirrup pants and a long Peruvian sweater: the book dates from 1995) pretty much says it all.

So Harriet answers an ad for a ghost writer in the New York Review of Books, and ends up as part of a startling menage on Cape Cod. The center of the wheel is Isabel Krug, a blonde life force in velours sweats, who needs help writing her memoir. Turns out her claim to fame is having been in bed with stuffy Greenwich money man Guy Van Vleet on the night when his wife shot him. In casting the movie, one would have to cast Dolly Parton of 20 years ago as Isabel. (I allow myself infinite chronological leeway in fantasy casting.) I won’t say anything about the male characters. Suffice it to say, there are some. Cute ones. You figure out the rest.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, “In the Bleak Midwinter”

So at choir practice the other night I was talking to a friend about sublimation. Really. The soprano section was discussing Dorothy Sayers, and the moment in Gaudy Night when Harriet Vane, fiiiinally after soooo long, looks at the sleeping Lord Peter Wimsey and falls for him. Much ooh-ing and aah-ing and then we had to sing something in Latin for a while.

However, when the Latin was finished, Soprano I leaned over and said, “You’ve read Julia Spencer-Fleming, haven’t you? Because in those books, the heroine and the male love interest… well, it’s been six books and they’re still yearning. Oh, and she’s an Episcopal priest! You’d love these books! The titles are all quotations from hymns!”

Now I know that there are hundreds of thousands of readers who have no interest at all in a series of murder mysteries featuring a female Episcopal priest and her neighbor the police chief in an upstate New York hamlet. And for those people, the hymn-based titles will not be an additional draw. Nor will the fact that the Rev. Clare Fergusson came to the priesthood from the Army and knows cool ways to hurt bad people. (In one passage she reminded me of Lee Child‘s Reacher.) Even when I report that Spencer-Fleming is a terrific writer, these readers will remain unmoved.

Which is fine. Tastes differ. What’s more In the Bleak Midwinter, despite the ecclesiastical bells and whistles, is a pretty conventional murder mystery. This is not a startling departure like the work of Susan Hill or  Tana French. But here’s the deal: it takes at most a few hours to read a murder mystery and usually about a year to write one. You’ll notice the asymmetry. Gosh, I probably consume more than forty years’ worth of mystery-writing every year and, yes, that does alarm me somewhat. It also explains why I’m so pleased to find a new author.

Oh, the plot. Newborn baby left in box at church door, body of girl found in snowy ravine, Rev. Clare has the wrong clothes and car for upstate New York in November and by the way, the vestry hates her. And the police chief is married. For now.

Christobel Kent, “A Fine and Private Place”

Apparently the late Magdalen Nabb was not the only Englishwoman who wrote murder mysteries set in Florence. Her Death of an Englishman, I find, was first published in 1981, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Christobel Kent should now feel free to claim this territory. What’s more Kent has branched out in a slightly different direction. Her detective, the intensely likable Sandro Cellini, is a private investigator in this novel (the second in the series), and her cast of characters is an international crew of artists marooned on a retreat of sorts in a gloomy castle in the Maremma. Thus A Fine and Private Place doesn’t have the intensely Florentine atmosphere of the Nabb books, nor the melancholy and somewhat insular atmosphere imparted by Nabb’s investigator, Marshall Guarnaccia.

However. Let’s be honest: this is Mystery Tourism, crafted for readers like me who just want to spend a few hours outside of their own worlds, traveling the somewhat predictable and certainly reassuring trail of the procedural mystery. And while the atmosphere is especially well-handled in this book, the plotting does feel somewhat mechanical. When Loni Meadows, the retreat director, goes off the road in a car on an icy night, it looks like an accident. But it turns out that nobody actually liked the woman, and furthermore that several — oh, wait, I mean all – of the artists had plausible reasons to do her in. As did Count Orfeo, the arrogant, wealthy owner of the castle itself.

You figure it out, or you let Sandro Cellini figure it out for you.

Henry James, “The Coxon Fund”

Since Henry James’ “The Coxon Fund” is a novella rather than a full-blown novel, this post may be a cheat. On the other hand,the long tale is bound and sold independently as part of the “Art of the Novella” series published by Melville House. New to me, and enticing.  Anyway, I read it.

It’s funny. Sometimes I forget this about James: he could be a real bitch. About someone the narrator doesn’t like, he says, “She had arts of her own of exciting one’s impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her assumption that we were kind to her because we liked her.” Notice how the sentence requires a moment’s untangling before you appreciate the sting at the end, and remember that a good deal of comedy is in the timing.

Some, though, resides in the premise. Here the butt of the joke is the “magnificent” Felix Saltram, a brilliant talker and thinker, so brilliant that he attracts various unlucky patrons who support him in hopes that he will be able actually to “do something.” Lecture series are organized, but Saltram shows up drunk, if at all. He moves into the home of the nice Mulville family and casually ruins them. The inimitable Jamesian twist is that a rich American invents a fund (as in the title) to support a great thinker. It’s too complicated to explain how, but Saltram’s eligibility for the fund becomes entwined in the marriage prospects of a charming American heiress.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t slapstick and it isn’t first-rate James either. But sometimes — as with chocolate — a little bit of James‘ writing, even if not the best, can be quite satisfying.

Laurence Cosse, “A Novel Bookstore”

I wonder if Europa Editions chose to publish Laurence Cossé’s A Novel Bookstore based on the success of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It almost has to have been so. (Same translator, anyway.)  And by the same token, what bothered me about The Elegance… is striking in A Novel Bookstore. Once again, we have a polemic thinly disguised as fiction. This time, however, the author’s underlying rant targets the mediocrity of contemporary book publishing.

handsome French cover

The novel opens with three violent, mysterious attacks carried out on widely different characters in geographically separated areas of France. It appears, in the first pages, that this is a quirky thriller. What do these three have in common? The thriller framework, though, is quickly abandoned as the narrator turns to the story of a bookstore in Paris called “A Good Novel.” (In France the book shares the title of the shop: Au Bon Roman.) The concept is that the store will only carry the Very Best in Literature.

Well, that makes me pretty uneasy. There’s a key passage where two of the characters come to recognize each other’s magnificent literary taste: “She only bought novels that were out of the ordinary, rarely recent publications and if, exceptionally, she did buy something that had just come out, it was the only one of that year’s batch that Van had found worth reading.” Van, the bookseller, goes on a little bit later to “congratulate” another customer on her taste and this is all getting a little bit self-satisfied. Then we have other characters who are permitted to make statements like, “I have never dreamt of either success or money. I don’t think about it. It is elegance that interests me.”

Basically, Van and his patroness Francesca put together the perfect bookstore for literary types. Francesca is rich, so they can rent nice quarters and don’t have to worry much about the bottom line. There is a great deal in the book that reads like a nuts-and-bolts treatise on the French publishing trade and it’s only moderately interesting. Worse yet is a certain mean-spirited pedantry: “his poor use of language cheered me up,” says one character. “I always find it entertaining when people are redundant.” Well, I don’t find it entertaining when people are smug.

Naturally the bookstore A Good Novel has enemies among the hacks of the publishing trade, and they conspire to bring it down. That’s basically the plot. There are many references to what I assume are real (good) novels. I can’t help wondering if the author would have included this volume in the store’s stock.

Lee Child, “Worth Dying For”

“He had never taken aspirin and wasn’t about to start. He had been banged up in the hospital a couple of times, with IV morphine drips in his arms and he remembered that experience quite fondly. But outside of the ICU he was going to rely on time and willpower. No other option.” Got that? We’re back in the world of Jack Reacher, the Big Guy with the Moral Compass, and aspirin is for pantywaists.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Reacher, Lee Child’s prototypical American loner. Furthermore Worth Dying For compensates for the weakness of Child’s last book, 61 Hours. I was disappointed by that sketchy and underwritten tale, then confused to find another Lee Child for sale only 6 months later. Maybe 61 Hours is a barely-fleshed-out screenplay. Maybe it was a kind of stopgap, written to tide readers over while Child’s annual production got onto the Fall Best-Seller schedule (like a hop to get you marching in step with your neighbors). But from the very beginning, Worth Dying For demonstrated the artful pacing that may be the real secret to Child’s success. About a quarter of the way through the book he stops the action for the following paragraph:

“Our ship has come in. An old, old phrase, from old seafaring days, full of hope and wonder. An investor could spend all he had, building a ship, fitting it out, hiring a crew, or more than all he had, if he was borrowing. Then the ship would sail into a years-long void, unimaginable distances, unfathomable depths, incalculable dangers. There was no communication with it… No news at all.” Child goes on in this vein for a couple of hundred words before returning to winter in rural Nebraska where the story is set. It’s another one of those situations Reacher stumbles into, the small town where things seem faintly askew and no one will answer his questions, and then someone turns up bleeding. And Reacher, despite being more than usually dinged-up (from the grand finale of 61 Hours), swings into action.

Nebraska winter: nowhere to hide

However. Child overstepped two boundaries for me with this book. One was the violence. For the first time in 15 books, I actually had to skip pages. True, I’m very squeamish. Also true that when your hero is notable for his size, marksmanship, and fighting experience, these qualities need to be unleashed. It’s part of the deal with the reader. But this time it went too far for me. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get there.

Also too far: when Child has one of the innocent bystanders in the novel take justice into his/her own hands. In truth, Reacher is a vigilante. But in Worth Dying For the crimes are so evil and the punishments so grotesque that I was disturbed. I would much prefer to think of Reacher as a near-caricature, the big guy with the muscles who sets things straight and doesn’t take pills.

Deborah Devonshire, “Home to Roost”

This little volume is the book that put Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire ahead of her late sister Jessica Mitford in the tally of books published. (Debo: 12. Decca: 11. And Debo’s got another one coming out in November 2010.) Not bad, for someone who only started publishing in 1980 and whose sister Nancy always called her “9,” claiming that was her mental age. (Nancy, who died in 1973, will probably end up ahead in this particular race with 17 titles, but she did start nearly fifty years before Debo.) And, yes, Home to Roost is just a collection of what used to be called “occasional pieces” but now we can just call “magazine articles.” Still, it’s endearing. One gift Debo possesses is that of comic timing. Here is a sentence from a piece about “Romney Marsh and Other Churches,” in which she proclaims her preference for English ecclesiastical architecture — “I so agree with the English nanny who was taken with her charges to Chartres Cathedral and, when they came out into the fresh air so beloved by nannies, was asked what she thought of it: ‘Well, it’s a bad light for sewing in there.’”

Chatsworth, no longer Debo's home

There are book reviews and little essays here, some about Chatsworth and some about elements of the author’s life (the delicious piece on “Tiaras” falls into this category). She was present at Jack Kennedy’s Inauguration and funeral, and has written about both of those events with great feeling. The final piece is a meditation about the beautiful house Ditchley Park in its heyday, when it was occupied by Ronald and Nancy Tree in the 1930s. “After many years, does memory play you false? Do you look back on events, people and places in a slanted sort of way, slanted to summers being fine, friends always there, jokes, laughter, pleasure and entertainments galore, untouched by responsibility and living for the moment in a cheerful, hopeful sequence of exciting exploration?” Coming from a woman of ninety, this is almost unbearably poignant.

Home to Roost also seems to be the work of that rare creature, the natural writer with charm to burn. I will say, though, that the Duchess is given a run for her money by Alan Bennett, who wrote the introduction. He begins by comparing the Duchess to Miss Shepherd, his famous Lady in the Van, “both strong-willed single-minded women who wanted something out of me.”  He also called her, he says, “Ms. Debo.” I would have liked to see that.

Katherine Pancol, “La Valse lente des tortues” or “The Slow Waltz of the Tortoises”

The thing about chick-lit is, sometimes it’s trashy. And sometimes you don’t respect yourself in the morning for having devoted umpteen hours to find out if Joséphine will really get together with Philippe, and if so, how they will get past the problem of the nasty Iris, Joséphine’s sister and Philippe’s husband. And then, you realize not only that Philippe isn’t really that interesting, but also that you have just read 744 pages in a foreign language and maybe it was a waste of time.

Waltzing? I think not.

 

So that’s where I am with Katherine Pancol’s La Valse lente des tortues. I greatly enjoyed the first book of this trilogy, Les Yeux jaunes des crocodiles. Maybe it was just the novelty of reading popular fiction in French, but I am a perennial sucker for the Cinderella story which we got complete with wicked sister in that volume. But in La valse lente… Pancol seems to feel obliged to up the ante. Thus she includes not only a witchcraft subplot but, most jarring, adds a serial murderer to her cast. Now, I know I tend toward rigidity but I do prefer to keep my genre fiction separate. With chick-lit you want some level of naturalism so that you can imagine yourself in the shoes of the heroine. (Which shoes, in this case, are pounding Parisian pavements, hence the fun.) With serial murders, you want someone highly intelligent in charge and maybe you want some sinister atmosphere and you certainly do not want tortoises mixed into the dénouement. But here they are.

Pancol’s next novel in the series is called Les Écureils de Central Park sont tristes le lundi or, believe it or not, The Squirrels in Central Park Are Sad on Mondays. A quick perusal of the French Amazon reviews included the line, “Il y a trop de blabla …” or “There is too much blah blah.” Enough said.

NYRB Reading Challenge (Nov. 7-13)

One of the endearing characteristics of the book-blog world is its chumminess. Maybe readers feel embattled, or maybe they are just good communicators and enjoy building networks. Possibly this is a blogger thing rather than a bookish thing, but the fashion and cooking blogs I follow don’t seem quite so… enmeshed. (The cooks come close, though, I have to say.)

So every now and then, somebody invents a clever community activity, like the above: the New York Review Books Reading Challenge. It was cooked up by Mrs. B. of The Literary Stew and Honey of Coffeespoons. All you have to do is read one book from the incredibly enticing NYRB list, and post a review between November 7 and November 13. If you’re already blogging, put your blog link into a comment on either of the above blogs. Otherwise you can use LibraryThing or Goodreads. Honey and Mrs. B are judging a little competition — the prize, naturally is A BOOK! Honey and Mrs. B will blog about the reviews which I guess makes this a meta-blog event.

It‘s already been entertaining to see what other bloggers are choosing, even before they start reviewing. I’ve picked out William Dean Howells’ Indian Summer, which NYRB calls “one of the most charming and memorable romantic comedies in American literature.” That seems like a stretch, considering The Rise of Silas Lapham, but I’m always ready to be charmed. (I also realize now that I was influenced by the gorgeous John Singer Sargent watercolor on its cover. Covers are always a strong suit with these NYRB selections.) I also fell for Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, set in Paris in 1848, and Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster. That’s apparently an auto-biographical novel about growing up as an orphan among English aristocrats. Blackwood is part-Guinness, so who could resist?

Want to join me? Get that order in to Amazon now and your books will be ready on your “to read” stack by Monday. (Or, in my house, gathering dust by November 7, but that’s another story.)

Nun-Fiction

Sorry. I never get puns so when one comes to me I get all excited. Reading Sarah Dunant’s crackerjack Sacred Hearts got me thinking about the nun novel as its own special genre. I mentioned in that post the appeal of the closed religious community for writers. Then I began to tot up the number of nun books I had read — and there were a round dozen on my shelves. I’m sure there’s more to the genre, like Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires which just came out this summer. And I’m not even thinking about nunfiction–OK, I’ll stop. Nonfiction about nuns. So here’s my list:

Diderot’s The Nun wasn’t published until 1796, after the French Revolution and the disestablishment of the Church in France. It’s a savage epistolary proto-novel written as from an illegitimate girl unwillingly enclosed.

Rumer Godden gets special mention for having written three nun novels. Black Narcissus came first in 1939, filmed in 1947 with Deborah Kerr. Anglican sisters in the Himalayas try not to go too native. Then in 1969, after her own conversion to Catholicism, Godden wrote In This House of Brede, about a strong-minded career woman’s entrance into an (enclosed) Benedictine convent. Followed in 1979 by the somewhat watered-down Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy.

Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s The Corner That Held Them (1948) is the atypical nun novel in that it takes the long view and examines the life of the community over a long spell of the Middle Ages rather than delving into the individual monastic consciousness.

Kathryn Hulme, The Nun’s Story 1956  If you’ve read one nun novel it’s probably this one, made famous by the 1959 film starring Audrey Hepburn. Sister Luke nursing in the Belgian Congo.

Miss Hepburn as Sister Luke

Catherine Aird’s The Religious Body (1966) demonstrates the usefulness of the convent setting for a murder mystery. Sister Anne has been tossed down the stairs. All of the suspects dress exactly alike and are identical to the untrained eye, confusing the police inspector.

Historian Antonia Fraser kicked off her fiction-writing career in 1977 with the tidy Quiet As A Nun, featuring clever detective/TV presenter Jemima Shore investigating the mysterious death of Sister Miriam. It was made into a popular 6-part British TV serial that aired in 1978.

Jane Haddam has written several mysteries involving the Sisters of Divine Grace. Precious Blood (1991) reunites a group of parochial school alumni, one of whom is a nun and one of whom gets murdered. A Great Day for the Deadly (1992) features a murdered novice at the Mother House. Murder Superior (1993) sees Sister Joan Esther knocked off at a religious convention.

Ron Hansen doesn’t write what the trade calls “category fiction” so his nun novel is serious. Mariette in Ecstasy (1992) tells the story of young Mariette who, as a postulant at Our Lady of the Afflictions,walks that mysterious line between devotion and hysteria.

Similarly, Mark Salzman uses his austere Lying Awake (2001) to probe the nature of religious fervor. Sister John of the Cross discovers that her recent close bond with God may actually be prompted by a side effect of epilepsy.

And Sarah Dunant’s 2009 Sacred Hearts mulls over some of the same questions against a colorful historical background.

But what have I missed?