Lucette Lagnado, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit”

I have to admit that this is my second try at The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit — a friend gave me a hardcover last year and it languished on the “to read” pile. But sometimes books come at you again and again, have you noticed? So when another strong recommendation from a well-read friend accompanied its appearance on the laundry room book exchange shelf, I obeyed.

I have to admit that I found the writing rather flat-footed, which was a distraction from start to finish. But I kept reading eagerly, which I can only attribute to the power of Lucette Lagnado’s story. She begins with the improbable courtship between her parents in Cairo in 1943 and I was fascinated by the exotic milieu of Egyptian Jewry in World War II. Her father Leon, tall and courtly, came from a Syrian family, and retained for the rest of his life the strict mores of that Arab country. Lagnado’s mother Edith was the sheltered daughter of a single mother, a teacher and an intellectual. Despite being poorly matched they bore five children and spent their lives together.

Although this is a memoir of her parents, Lagnado’s real subject is exile. Her parents were both citizens of the cosmopolitan colonial Egypt: Leon spoke English with an upper-crust accent and move easily in British social circles, while French was the Lagnados’ language at home and Lucette, like her siblings, went to a lycée. Few of their friends knew any Arabic at all. But the Cairo they inhabited so comfortably became more and more inhospitable with the realignment of power in the Middle East following the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. After the deposition of King Farouk and the Suez Crisis, Jewish families like the Lagnados were no longer welcome. But theirs was not a family that could pull together in a crisis. They packed 26 enormous suitcases full of impractical objects like brocade dressing gowns and fine china and left. Lucette’s beloved cat Pouspous stayed behind in their rambling apartment.

After months marooned in uncomfortable poverty in Paris, they fetched up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. As part of her research, Lagnado was able to read the records kept by the social worker who attempted to get her family settled, and the contrast between the loving daughter’s memory of her father and the social worker’s frustration with the stubborn disoriented emigré is startling. Leon Lagnado, who had cut such a dashing figure in Cairo, had no interest in accomodating himself to the United States. He hated it all, from the bold women to the bland food. Even the roses lacked the heavy scent they had had in Egypt. His faith was his only comfort.

I knew very little about the diaspora of Arab Jews, and the fact that Lagnado is almost exactly my age gave me an extra level of sympathy. The final chapter, when she goes back to her family’s Cairo apartment, some 40 years after their departure, is almost unbearably poignant.

Ian McEwan, “Saturday”

Have I told you already how much I love the book exchange shelf in my laundry room? Sure, there’s a lot of James Patterson, but sometimes such finds! Last week I went down to do a load of darks and came back with Saturday and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit! And as it turned out, Saturday was the perfect book to read after Man with a Blue Scarf. Best of all, I was able to read Saturday in more or less one sitting, which was the ideal reading condition for a book that takes place over the course of one day.

So we’ll get Proust out of the way first, OK? When I say “takes place over the course of one day,” we do go through 24 hours with Henry Perowne, the 46-year-old English neurosurgeon who is Ian McEwan’s protagonist. But in the course of that day, Perowne’s memory travels through his past. As when we follow Proust’s narrator, we wander from the novelistic “now” (say, Perowne kissing his wife) to the remembered “then” (Perowne meting his wife). With a tug of the thread, we are brought back to the fictional present and reinserted into the course of the day. And Perowne (as with Proust’s narrator) doesn’t just remember things, he thinks about them. He ruminates, turning over his ideas about life, incidents of his day, his work, his children, his past, the nature of memory, the flow of his moods, the way they affect his perception.

And here’s where we get to Martin Gayford, for McEwan’s subject is the age-old question of where consciousness/identity/the soul resides. Perowne, as befits a neurosurgeon, is a resolute materialist. In his view, the brain produces the mind. In Man with a Blue Scarf, Lucian Freud is also seeking a kind of essence, and produces it in material form through artistic effort. McEwan makes Perowne almost completely resistant to that kind of incalculable, ungovernable impulse — almost. But he gives Perowne artistic children, a son who plays the blues and a daughter who is a just-published poet. They parse the world differently from the way he does, and despite his bafflement, he tries to follow them. And in his effort to process the novel’s denouement, Perowne resorts to story-telling.

Another strong tie to the Gayford book is the focus on the physical qualities of man: hair, skin, bone structure. A passage in Saturday about the musculature of the face might have come from Man with a Blue Scarf. McEwan, like Gayford, seems to find great reward in hard work. At the end of his long day Perowne performs surgery and reflects on why it satisfies him more than anything else in his life. “For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even all awareness of his own existence has vanished… This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger.” Lucian Freud might have said the same thing about painting a portrait.

Martin Gayford, “Man with a Blue Scarf”

And to think that I almost missed this book, which is subtitled, “On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud.” I was sent it by a friend, who thought the account of intense engagement with an artist would interest me. As it happens, I have read and admired Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House, which is about Van Gogh’s time with Gauguin in Arles. I like Lucian Freud’s work. (He appears tangentially in Book Group of One because he was married to Caroline Blackwood.)

Still, I was not prepared for the sheer exhilaration and charm between these covers. Man with a Blue Scarf is so stimulating and provocative that I gulped it down like my first cup of coffee, and like caffeine, it made me feel more alert and perceptive. The premise is simple but unusual. Gayford is a well-known curator, writer, and art critic, and a longtime friend of Lucian Freud. He proposed himself as a sitter for one of Freud’s portraits, and was accepted. This book is his account of the several hundred hours he spent in Freud’s company, watching — and participating in — the creation of an image of his own face. That transaction in itself, Gayford sitting, Freud painting, is a fascinating matter. Gayford’s erudition and authority make him an excellent guide to Freud’s technique and place in contemporary art. (He’s a huge fan, by the way. My only criticism is a faint whiff of hagiography.) Freud works very slowly, gradually building up his image to reflect, not the way Gayford looks on one occasion as in a photograph, but the way he looks over time, with different expressions and moods.

But as Freud creates a portrait of Gayford, so does Gayford create a portrait of Freud, using his own medium of words. And Freud is evidently a fascinating talker. One of the great pleasures of the book is Gayford’s direct, elegant summaries of ideas, punctuated by Freud’s colorful judgments. (For instance, Freud despises Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “‘He’s the worst of the pre-Raphaelites, his work seems to me the nearest painting can get to bad breath.’”) Naturally one preoccupation of the two men is the creative enterprise and here is real wisdom. Gayford intensely admires Freud’s focus and his work ethic, referring on many occasions to the way Freud thinks about producing paintings. An artist, Gayford says, “has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he or she has set him or herself is worth struggling constantly to achieve.” He sees this as a job description for Lucian Freud but it’s true also for himself, as he produces a book. Like the one on the desk next to me. Like the one I’m writing now. He makes it sound difficult but worth while — for that alone, I would love this volume.

I have to add that, much as I love electronic books, I deeply appreciated this physical one. Lovely heavy paper, beautiful type, and many illustrations, placed artfully within the text. All in all, it’s a splendid reading experience.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, “To Darkness and to Death”

With so much anxiety during the holiday season — will Junior get home in the snow, does Aunt Tillie still like gingerbread, would hubby wear a bright green track suit and is he an XXL — it’s very soothing to have a well-constructed mystery to dive into. Thank you, Julia Spencer-Fleming, for taking my mind off the miserable state of the United Postal Service, etc. To Darkness and to Death, which features beatings, explosions, and logging machinery, was just the ticket. Once again, we’re in Millers Kill with the Rev. Clare Fergusson and Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne. This time we actually meet Russ’s wife Linda who turns out to be a “pocket Venus.” Who knew Linda would be a hottie? Once more, Clare’s and Russ’s emotions move one step closer to conflagration while the two of them cooperate to solve a violent puzzle.

Of course Spencer-Fleming encounters the challenge implicit in her success. If you write good mysteries, there’s an audience for them, and you get to write more of them. However, with each volume in your series, you put more stress on your readers’ suspension of disbelief. Millers Kill, New York, an Adirondack hamlet, has been home to a disproportionate amount of mayhem. I’m fine with it — for now. And of course reading a series one after the other makes the basic premise seem especially incredible. But I do wonder how long this fiction can be maintained. (One possible answer: See Sue Grafton.)

My other quibble: in this volume, Spencer-Fleming dips into a style that reminds me of Jane Haddam, another mystery writer. The omniscient narrator jumps from the consciousness of one actor in the drama to another, and another as the tale unfolds.  There’s nothing wrong with this, per se. Maybe that is simply how the story needs to be told, but it’s not fresh, and that bothers me.

On the positive side: as ever, Spencer-Fleming manages the plotting dexterously. This time the mystery concerns the development of a tract of land near Millers Kill and the author lays out the competing interests even-handedly, showing how different outcomes threaten different constituencies and characters. Equally even-handed is the distribution of sympathy; no one is a complete bad guy, no one wears a halo. And as in the earlier books of the series, Spencer-Fleming threads the plot with the liturgy and moral concerns of the Episcopal church. Not only does this add heft to the books, but I bet Episcopalians are big mystery fans.

E.F. Benson, “Paying Guests”

E. F. Benson is familiar to most of us as the author of the immortal Lucia novels which have been brought to our TV screens every now and then, most memorably in a mid-1980s production starring Prunella Scales. Around the same time, a few of Benson’s other novels were re-issued, among them Paying Guests which has been sitting on my bookshelf ever since, surviving purge after purge. I had not re-read it until now but it lingered strangely in my memory — strangely for what is really a rather muted comedy. Unlike his contemporary Wodehouse, Benson isn’t a laugh-out-loud humorist, nor a florid stylist. This is the humor of understatement, dry as a bone. The omniscient narrator sees everything: actions, motivations, afterthoughts, few of which are especially creditable.

It’s a small world Benson portrays here. We are  at “Wentworth,” a guest house in the fictional town of Bolton Spa, which offers baths and nasty-smelling waters to a group of permanent invalids. Wentworth is terribly genteel, recognized not only for the comfort it offers but also for the social standing of its guests. Who — this being a Benson novel — are silly at best, stupendously annoying at worst. But then, look at Mapp and Lucia. What Benson seemed to recognize was that sometimes loathing a character is as satisfying as liking him. In this case the star of the show is the pompous, self-regarding Colonel Chase, a former Indian Army officer who lords it over the other guests at Wentworth, bragging incessantly about his excellent health and bullying them all at the bridge table. One plot development actually does deflate the Colonel’s conceit and this, clearly, is the imbalance in the novel that must be righted. Strangely, the Colonel is more appealing when insufferable.

Other characters: a pair of middle-aged spinsters who become a couple (about one of them Benson says, “Miss Alice Howard was a pathetic person, though she would have been very much surprised if anyone had told her so”) and a Mrs. Bliss who espouses Mental Science, a thin disguise for Christian Science. Probably funnier in 1929.

Molly Keane, “Treasure Hunt”

I'm thinking a boa like this one

Molly Keane’s Treasure Hunt begins with a funeral. First we see a grand, comfortable country house in Ireland called Ballyroden, dreaming in the sun, completely empty, notable for the number of champagne corks littering the gravel in front. (It’s a frank piece of stage-setting, unsurprising since Treasure Hunt was originally a play, produced in 1949 and running for a year on the London stage.) Characters appear and vanish: a sprightly elderly fellow in a beautifully-cut swallow-tail coat, to claim a sheaf of flowers left behind. Three servants, home early from the church to prepare the house for the mourners. Interest quickens as the servants wrangle gently among themselves.

If one were actually watching the play, this is the point at which one might begin to wonder a little bit, since part of the stage business involves the manservant William’s preparation of “a nest” for Aunt Anna Rose. And the nest is located in an eighteenth-century sedan chair, equipped with a telephone.

The funeral, it turns out, was that of Sir Roderick Ryall. The mourners include his aunt (that would be Aunt Anna Rose), his brother Hercules (he of the sheaf of flowers), his sister Consuelo, and his heir, the young Sir Phillip. But it turns out that what actually died was the old way of life in Ballyroden, for Sir Roderick has spent every penny of his own money and his siblings’ money, too. Those champagne corks so liberally popped as Sir Roderick’s body left the house came from the last bottles in the cellar. It is young Sir Phillip’s task to rein in the dizzy, wanton, childish expenditure of the elder generation. Here’s how Keane puts it when Phillip countermands the post-funeral champagne and orders tea instead: “Thoughts of tea seemed distinctly shabby and middle-class and disrespectful to the dead in contrast with the gold of sun and wine.”

I’ve left out Phillip’s cousin Veronica Howard, a little brown wren of a young woman, as practical and unglamorous as Phillip. She is deeply exasperating to her mother, the stagy, glamorous Consuelo, and when Veronica and Phillip invite English paying guests to the house, Consuelo is shocked at their vulgarity. A great deal of the comedy of the book comes from the cultural clash between the rich but “not quite.. not quite quite” Mrs. Cleghorne-Thomas and the haughty Consuelo. And though spiced with malice, the humor is  not fundamentally cruel. Keane herself was Anglo-Irish, born and bred to the daffy, enchanting world of immense damp houses and iffy financial arrangements. She clearly feels sympathy for the young people who don’t know that world and the froth of Treasure Hunt is streaked with faintly warped elegy. One of the English paying guests, walking through an outlying barn, spots, “perched afar on crags of broken china, a birdcage, an affair as elaborate as the Crystal Palace, and inside it, he thought, a dead bird, until he looked closer and saw it was a black cock’s feather boa — caged for no earthly imaginable reason.” If you are drawn to  the image of a feather boa imprisoned in an elaborate bird cage, this book’s for you.

 

 

 

Sarah Dunant, “In the Company of the Courtesan”

I don’t think I’d be brave enough to write a novel in which the last 50 pages subverted the previous 325. Just think how careful you’d have to be, laying it all out beforehand, from major plot points to dialogue to the characters’ thoughts and reactions. Everything has to work from two very different angles. And I think it probably helps to have a strong narrator, which Sarah Dunant does. In the Company of the Courtesan is told from the point of view of  Bucino Teodoldi, a dwarf, who serves as major-domo to Fiammetta Bianchini, the courtesan of the title. He is smart, well-read, and cynical. Well, you would be, as a dwarf in 16th century Italy, where you are at best a joke and at worst a punching bag.

Titian's "Venus of Urbino"

Dunant, as I’ve said here before, is a terrific writer so Bucino’s narrative voice is completely absorbing. We readers buy his point of view. But I have to admit that I was wondering a little bit where Dunant was going with the story. It was pleasant to read, but seemed to be drifting somewhat, until suddenly Dunant turned the whole thing upside down. And once she does, you absolutely must go back over the tale in your head, and you start to consider characters and incidents and even themes — glass and water, in this case — which take on a completely new meaning. I don’t want to ruin the plot by saying one more thing about it.

As in The Birth of Venus and Sacred Hearts, In the Company of the Courtesan is set in sixteenth-century Italy. In fact the 1527 Sack of Rome provides the launching pad for the plot, as Bucino and Fiammetta, ruined and wounded in the invasion, retreat to Fiammetta’s home town of Venice, where they must claw their way back into business in a different kind of city. Dunant makes much of what is remarkable about Venice, both its topography and the immensely sophisticated polyglot population. ( I can’t say I’m entirely sure what Titian is doing in there, except to paint Fiammetta and add historical window-dressing.) I read this trilogy out of order — Sacred Hearts is the last in the series — but even so it’s impressive and enjoyable, dramatic and stimulating. I wonder what Dunant’s working on now…

Julia Spencer-Fleming, “Out of the Deep I Cry”

Well, that was very satisfying. I was a little disappointed by Julia Spencer-Fleming’s A Fountain Filled with Blood, especially after the very strong start of her first book, In the Bleak Midwinter. But here she is on Book Three of her series, in fine fettle. Episcopal minister Clare Fergusson and small-town police chief Russ Van Alstyne are involved in another tricky situation with moral, legal, and spiritual ramifications. Guns are brandished, suspects interrogated, red herrings placed and discarded, physical damage is done, and more.

Let’s look at what Spencer-Fleming has to build into each book: a murder and its solution. Increasing romantic tension between Clare and Russ. Counter-tension presented by Russ’s marriage. Church background. Small-town background. And, about 85% of the way through the book, a direct confrontation with the bad guy. Mind you, not all mystery writers bother with that last step but I think the expectation is pretty much built in: I usually feel let down if it doesn’t happen.

All of these elements are present in Out of the Deep I Cry, locked into a mirroring structure that deepens their significance, for Spencer-Fleming starts with a flashback involving the teenaged Russ witnessing a very weird suicide attempt. Then chapters alternate, from “Then” to “Now,” elaborating the puzzle. Look for water: a leak in the church, a dam, river-rafting, a rainstorm, a flooded basement. Very clever. But at the same time, the plotting and writing are tight enough so that you’re carried along by the power of the story-telling. That’s why they call it “escape fiction.”

Laura Hillenbrand, “Unbroken”

There is no story without conflict. We can all agree on that. Another theory, widely accepted, is that extreme pressure reveals character, but I’m no longer sure I buy it. After having seen Louie Zamperini through 47 days afloat on a raft and more than two years in various Japanese prison camps, I have nothing but admiration for the guy. (And for Laura Hillenbrand in bringing us his story.) But as you read Unbroken, you meet so many human beings behaving in such a spectrum of ways from evil to heroic that you may wonder. There’s an old, old notion that suffering purifies — the “refiner’s fire” idea. What we see in Unbroken strikes me as a modern, dismaying possibility: maybe hardship is simply hardship and an invididual’s reaction to it is determined more by the pressures of any given moment than by nobility or courage, or their absence.

I suspect this is not what Hillenbrand has in mind: the book, after all, is subtitled A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. Her affection and admiration for her subject Louie Zamperini circles around this fact: he lived through a hair-raising series of traumas and found a way to leave them behind. But some men didn’t. Some men died, or stole food, or lost their minds. Are these behaviors indices of their fundamental qualities? What about the Japanese prison guards, molded by cultural forces, fighting a losing war? How are we to judge them?

And come to think of it, what do we learn of Hillenbrand herself from the way she tells this tale? I think the fact that I can even entertain this subversion of her primary theme is evidence of a scrupulous, well-intentioned writer. She has set out to write a story that could have been on the cover of Life magazine in the mid-fifties, a classic arc ending on a bright note — Billy Graham even plays a part. But years and years of research (wait ’til you see the footnotes) and the backdrop of our more skeptical era shade the black/white, us/them interpretation. Yes, there are bad guys and they are spectacular. But even the sharks are, well, just sharks. Hillenbrand won’t judge. Her stance is that she’s just relating the facts. Of course no writer can do that, since selection alone reveals your attitude. But she has compassion for everyone.

All this being said, Unbroken is a good read. It’s outside my normal range but a sample Kindle chapter completely sucked me in (unlike the drab Vanity Fair excerpt: poor editing?). It’s selling like hotcakes and I can see why. What’s not to like about the uplifting tale of a California track star, an Olympian, who fought in the Pacific theater of World War II and despite years of the worst kinds of torment, found his way back to his former effervescent humanity?

Two Years, 234 Posts

Actually, I’m not counting. That’s what WordPress does for me. Their computers are also keeping track of comments, visitors, and the puzzling outbreak of spam attached to Katharine Davis’ A Slender Thread. (Very energetic. In Cyrillic, no less. I can’t fathom what my russophone cyber visitor hopes to accomplish.)

This is the season of lists among book bloggers: yesterday I even read one that proposed what we should all be reading in 2011, which I found alarming. I keep a “ten best” list running, and I’ve done a Christmas shopping list, so here is a new way to sort a few of the 200-plus books I’ve read over the last two years.

Author most like Starbucks: Lee Child, on two counts. One is consistency. As with your venti skim chai, you know what you’re going to get when you order up one of Lee Child’s books. The other point is stimulation. When all’s said and done, Starbucks is about keeping you alert. Ditto Mr. Child.

Author least like Starbucks: That would be M. Marcel Proust, who has been putting me to sleep for about 18 months. Despite my strenous search each night for the sentence where I left off — this could take a page or more, which means easily 10 minutes of reading — I am making steady progress through In Search of Lost Time and expect to finish sometime before I die. In the meantime the dreamy, endlessly-looping prose, dense with description, punctuated with flashes of insight, is as close to dreaming as I get with my eyes open.

If it were a movie, Johnny Depp could star in it: Not surprisingly, a robust list. In the Woods, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (OK, a stretch…), Christine Falls, Captain Alatriste, and A Place of Greater Safety as Camille Desmoulins, the endlessly compelling and sexy demagogue. Not a stretch.

The book I can’t wait to read again: The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets.

The book I can’t believe I finished: Colony of Unrequited Dreams. A 592-page historical novel about the foundation of Newfoundland. Yup.

Book I didn’t even start: Freedom.

Character I would like to be: Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire.

Character I would like to meet: Jean-Pierre Adamsberg of the Fred Vargas novels.

Book I wish I’d written: Wolf Hall.

Book I could never have written: Cleopatra.

Not what I expected: La Chartreuse de Parme.

Best clothes: The Clothes on their Backs, Wolf Hall, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets.

Worst food: Unbroken.

Uplifting but not sentimental: The City of Tranquil Light.

Books that haunt me: The Hare with Amber Eyes, Let the Great World Spin.

Thanks for reading!