Emile Zola, “La Curee/The Kill”

Oh. My. Goodness. This novel is so much fun. For a certain reader, that is. If you require subtlety in your fiction, La Curée (translated as The Kill) will not be your cup of tea. Emile Zola was heavy-handed. But golly, if you can get past the forceful nature of his story-telling, you’re in for a great treat here. Sex! Real estate! Paris! Fabulous clothes! (Really, Alexander McQueen, eat your heart out.) It’s like “Dynasty” filmed by Merchant Ivory, with an “R” or “X” rating depending on how the sex scene on the bear-skin rug is shot. You heard me: “sex scene on the bear-skin rug.”

Winterhalter's 1855 portrait of Empress Eugenie and her ladies-in-waiting -- the fashion standard in this novel

The novel was written in 1872 but set roughly ten years earlier, when acre after acre of narrow streets and grubby slums were replaced by the linked boulevards lined with elegant apartment buildings that represent Paris-as-we-know-it. As you might imagine, some people in this period got very, very, rich: the “kill” of the title is the final moment of a hunt, when a pack of dogs tears the prey to pieces. That’s Zola’s metaphor for the businessmen leading Parisian urban renewal. One of them is Aristide Saccard, a wily Provençal speculator with a keen appetite for a deal. Think Donald Trump, with black hair and a French accent. (I’m not going to get into Zola’s theories about genetics, or his network of novels about the extended Rougon-Marcart family, or his place in French literature. You know where to go for that.) Saccard has, naturally, a trophy wife. Evidently Trump did not invent the phenomenon. This one is called Renée, and of course she is beautiful, miraculously fashionable, and a total hottie.

But. Here’s the genius part — Zola gives Saccard a son from a previous marriage, named Maxime, who is twenty and also a hottie, if a hottie of equivocal gender identification. Slender, blond, hairless, beautiful, but he likes girls. Likes them to hang out with, which is why he and his step-mama are such good friends. Also, it turns out, likes them for sex, which is why Maxime and Renée end up in bed together. Now, since Zola is so keen to drive his point home, he sends Maxime and Renée to see a production of Racine’s Phèdre, which involves incest in exactly their configuration. But unlike the characters in the classical tragedy, Renée and Maxime note the resemblance and more or less shrug their shoulders. Paris, Zola wants to be sure we understand, is morally bankrupt.

He doesn’t solicit our emotional involvement with these characters, though they are all psychologically plausible. They are a lesson to us, about the corruption of Imperial Paris and the weakened blood lines of France. (Note that the novel was written two years after the demoralizing defeat of the Franco-Prussian war.) But it’s not a polemic. It’s a fiction. It’s not kitsch, it’s not campy and flippancy aside, it actually isn’t like “Dynasty”. When Zola’s describing incestuous sex on a bear-skin rug he is depicting maximum depravity. To bolster his case, this scene takes place in a conservatory full of tropical plants, all swollen with sap and discolored — honestly, I’m not making this up, and there’s nothing remotely ironic about it. Zola’s conviction — which pervades all of his novels that I’ve read — carries the day. He believes he is writing a tragedy, arousing your pity and fear.

But of course we are a little too jaded to take it seriously. Or that old bear-skin’s gotten a little moth-eaten with use. Yet there are still scenes capable of touching the emotions. At the end of the book Saccard is examining a demolition site with some colleagues. One of them realizes he is stepping over the ruins of the house he’d lived in as a youth. He spots the fifth-floor room, peeled open by the wreckers, with its torn wallpaper trembling in the wind.

“I spent five years there,” he murmured. “Things weren’t going well, but that was all right, I was young… You see the armoire? That’s where I saved up three hundred francs, one sou at a time.”

Renée’s bill from Worth (Worms, in the novel) is 250,000 francs at her death on the last page. Easy come, easy go.

Walt Longmire on the Small Screen

Henry Standing Bear -- eventually

Apparently A&E has agreed to produce a series based on Craig Johnson’s Western-themed mysteries. Of course you want to know who will star as Walt, the wise and somewhat battered narrator — answer is Robert Taylor, and I couldn’t find a recent photo of him. Instead here’s Lou Diamond Phillips, cast as Henry Standing Bear. I think they’re both going to have to bulk up.

 

 

Jacqueline Winspear, “An Incomplete Revenge”

Oh, well. Sometimes we finish books against our own better judgment, and I’m going to chalk this one up to Hurricane Irene. I read the first of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books some time ago and didn’t like it. First, I am cranky about plucky class-disadvantaged heroines in historical novels. Second, Winspear’s writing strikes me as frequently awkward. Maybe she’s reaching for formality to give a flavor of the English inter-war period. But dialogue like this (from An Incomplete Revenge) is pretty wooden. This is Maisie talking to Billy Beale, her assistant:

Hops-picking nostalgia.

Normally I would refrain from the widespread search of a property — it can be time-consuming at a point when manpower might be better utilized elsewhere. However, in this case I think it’s better than nothing. Billy, the boys found the silver close to the chestnut tree where they were collecting conkers. If we make an assumption that whoever made off with the goods leaped over the wall and then dropped the locket and paperweight as he landed and ran, more items might have been lost or a trail might still exist.”

I’ve stayed away from Winspear’s books since, but time hung heavy on my hands yesterday what with the streaming rain and howling wind and no subway service. I had picked up An Incomplete Revenge in the laundry room  (again!), wondering if I should give Maisie another try. And really, I shouldn’t have. I was lured in by two themes: hops picking and gypsies. (You always hear about hops picking, right?) On both topics, I should have stuck with Wikipedia.

Ellen Feldman, “Next to Love”

Well, what was it like? The generation that fought in World War II is dying out. As we confront the horrors brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan, we have to look back. Especially those of us whose fathers fought between 1942 and 1945, who never talked about it. We hear now about the shock, the everlasting horror of the current wars, but those men kept it all buttoned up. Didn’t want to scare the ladies. Didn’t want to re-live it.

On the home front: boredom, anxiety, loneliness, knitting...

So here is Ellen Feldman, in Next to Love, filling in a few blanks. In fictional South Downs, Massachusetts, the men go off to war and some of them do not come back. But there are their wives, Babe, Millie, and Grace. What happened? How did it feel? What was it like in 1942 as they had dinner together before the men left? What was it like the day the telegrams came? (An amazing scene, by the way. The way Feldman sets this up is cinematic and incredibly affecting.) How did the women cope? How did the men cope, if they returned?

This is an ambitious book, as Feldman proclaims from the outset with a series of epigraphs about war. We are meant to take note that what is particular is also general; what happened in 1945 is also happening now. By setting the novel in a small town and selecting characters in different social and cultural situations, Feldman casts her net wide. Much of the book is set afterward, as postwar prosperity brings cars and televisions and air conditioning to the middle class. One widow marries a Jew. One spends time in a sanitarium. If they feel a shade representative, the characters are still deeply individual. Babe, the restless intellectual, is sometimes discerning and sometimes annoys her friends with her enthusiasms. Grace, the conventional one, seeks security, while Millie navigates a series of losses. If the three women the book centers on are emblematic, they are also real.

I did have slight reservations about how the passage of time is played out. The novel covers the period from 1941 to 1964. Is it possible to travel that long a time a span in a 300-page novel without feeling like a highlights reel? (GI bill, civil rights, wives taking tranquilizers, check, check, check…) On the other hand, I valued the chance to imagine living with some of the values and limitations that were still motivating my parents as I grew up. The anxiety about sex was especially keenly depicted, but I also remembered my parents’ class anxiety. More substantially, I was bothered by the way the narrative, centered in one of the principal trio or another, backs up and moves forward so that the reader really has to watch the dates on each section. I think I can see why an author would do that — after all, a funeral will feel different to a widow than it does to her friend — but it’s not entirely successful.

Still, this novel is written with such elegance and such heart that the chronology is a small issue. Again and again, the emotional situations and responses are unexpected but just right, as is the end. When it unfolds, you’ll see what I mean. And the last line of the book is brilliant:

“If there were no war?” he repeats. “Imagine.”

Susan Hill, “The Vows of Silence”

I hate when I do this, but I bet you’ve done it, too. You’re on vacation, in an unfamiliar book store. You see a book by a favorite writer but gosh! can’t remember if you’ve read it or not. You buy it, hoping, and spend the first 20 pages wondering if it really is familiar…. or if you just think it is. Then you get to a key scene and it all becomes clear — yes. Now you own two copies of the same book.

Fortunately if the writer is Susan Hill and the book is The Vows of Silence  and, like me, you first read it several years ago, it’s still sufficiently complex to be interesting. Hill’s mysteries are fairly straightforward police procedurals set in a cathedral town, with the startling difference that Hill sometimes subverts the genre. Cops get killed: mysteries don’t get solved. Simon Serrailler is her very compelling detective, a moody, handsome bachelor who is also a highly respected artist. Serrailler may embody overt homage to some of the classic British detectives like P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh (sensitive widowed poet) and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey (blond, charming, complicated attitude toward women). But Serrailler also has a rich family life which, in The Vows of Silence, brings him as much pain as comfort.

The mystery involves a lone gunman who is killing young women in the cathedral town of Lafferton. Hill adroitly slips in and out of the consciousness of the killer, the victims, Serrailler, his sister, peripheral characters. To some extent this installment in the series suffers from the weaknesses of the genre: characters familiar from earlier books appear almost gratuitously. But there’s a rigorous intelligence behind the writing. Hill is never sentimental, she doesn’t let Simon off the hook (he can be a real jerk about his father, for instance) and she doesn’t solve her narrative difficulties by taking the lazy way out. I’m a little bit baffled as to why she isn’t better known in the U.S. and why I can’t buy her books for my Kindle. I’ve already given away my extra copy of The Vows of Silence, though.

Creepy! — “The Woman in Black” with Daniel Radcliffe

I suspected there was some movie action by the occasional burst of clicks on my post about Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. I just clicked on the trailer  for the film with Mr. Radcliffe (tentative February release) and was too rattled to watch even half of it. Hope that’s just tricky editing.

Guy de Maupassant, “Bel-Ami”

Bel-Ami has been a favorite of mine for some time, and I picked it up again recently because I’d heard about the film version starring Robert Pattinson. Be still, my heart! I’m not sure Pattinson is a fabulous actor but all he has to do in Bel-Ami is seduce. And we know he’s capable of that. I’m happy to report, though, that while I mentally put Pattinson in the place of Georges Du Roy every now and then, Maupassant’s fiction took over my imagination, and I was sucked into this delicious tale of social climbing in Third Republic Paris.

Pattinson looking jaded as Georges Du Roy

Cynical? Oh, my goodness. The wonder to me, throughout, is that even though Maupassant never conceals Du Roy’s unpleasant character, we still root for him. Why is that? He actually has few attractive qualities, aside from his looks and the uncanny ability to be what every woman wants. Old, young, respectable, virgin, whore, they all fall for Georges. Tellingly, it’s a young girl, the daughter of his first mistress, who christens him “Bel-Ami.” Is that really what women want? A handsome little buddy? The nickname is so reductive but so appropriate that it follows him into the social stratosphere. Georges Duroy, the son of rural peasants, marries up, tinkers with his name (from “Duroy” to “Du Roy” to “Du Roy de Cantel”), grants himself a title and is awarded the Legion of Honor. All on the strength of his sex appeal. Which, by the way, Maupassant signals with our hero’s moustache. It’s blonde, frizzy, and apparently irresistible. Du Roy applies it to women’s hands, necks, etc. with devastating effect. It is a brilliant R-rated literary substitute for X-rated passages. (The novel also includes one of my favorite tropes, the tropical greenhouse as locus for slightly perverse sexual activity.)

And all the time, this is an old story, the saga of the young man from the provinces come to Paris to make his fortune. Bel-Ami is like a slice of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, trimmed down and sped up. Du Roy has the ambition of Eugene de Rastignac, the heartlessness of Vautrin, the literary career of Lucien de Rubempré. As a journalist Du Roy is socially mobile, which gives Maupassant the chance to comment on money, politics, the church, society, fashion… and he thinks pretty poorly of it all. The delicious scene that lingers in my mind is Du Roy’s energetic seduction of a virtuous matron, as she kneels in prayer at the society church of la Sainte-Trinité.

Oh wait, I get it now: Bel-Ami is satiric! This is why we actually want Du Roy to succeed, not in spite of but because of his nasty character. Maupassant thus gets to prove how corrupt 1880s Paris was. And we’re fine with that, because it all happened long ago, and in another country. No such thing as a Bel-Ami in contemporary America, nope, wouldn’t happen here.

Remains to be seen whether Robert Pattinson can pull this off. Last time I checked, there was no scheduled release date for the film but the trailers look, well… seductive.

Elly Griffiths, “The House at Sea’s End”

I’ve been wondering how Elly Griffiths would manage expanding the Ruth Galloway series. I really liked her two earlier books, The Crossing Places and The Janus Stone but as I’ve written over and over again here, maintaining the momentum in a mystery series requires keeping a lot of balls in the air. And I was a little concerned, too, about Griffiths‘ principal protagonist. After all — how many plots are there for a single, overweight forensic archaeologist living in rural Norfolk?

Sandstone cliffs vs. North Sea = losing battle

Well, there are at least three really satisfying ones, which is surprising since someone has to discover old bones in order to drag Dr. Ruth Galloway into the story. In this case the location — always important in Griffiths‘ books — is an eroded cliff on the Norfolk coast. Atop the cliff sits Sea’s End House, a mansion dating from the 1930s, inhabited by the upper-crust family of Jack Hastings. But what makes this more interesting than the usual English Country House scenario is precisely that erosion. The land on which the house is built has been reclaimed by the sea so that only a few yards of grass remain between house and cliff. Hmmm… metaphor for the ground being cut away beneath the upper class?

Actually, I don’t think so. Griffiths is too interested in her characters’ emotional lives to have a class-struggle axe to grind. The relationship between prickly, brilliant Ruth and prickly, abrupt police detective Harry Nelson continues to evolve in the only way you’d want it to — more and more complicated. The opening scene of the novel involves Ruth, Nelson, and Nelson’s beautiful wife Michelle. I liked it so much I had to read it twice. Incredibly clever, the way Griffiths pulls away from the characters here and sees them in pantomime, as it were. One of the most difficult choices for a novelist is deciding where to focus your narrative: if you think of the author’s voice as a camera lens, it can zoom really close, into someone’s head, or zoom out to panoramic scope. Changing the focus, as Griffiths does in that scene, can be a sharply effective way to grab your reader’s attention.

And the plot, you ask? In this case the old bones turn out to be those of six German soldiers who appear to have been executed about 70 years ago. (Do the math.) The new deaths necessary to involve Harry Nelson are those of survivors who might be able to tell how the bones were buried. Did you know that the Norfolk coast was prepared for a German invasion in World War II? Want to know more? The House at Sea’s End has the rest of the story.

Publishing note: I read this on my Kindle, and I see that it’s not being released in the US in a physical version until January 2012.

April Smith, “Judas Horse”

It’s very clear from April Smith’s White Shotgun that she’s a talented writer with a gift for plot, setting, and character. It was thus interesting – and a little disappointing – to learn from her preceding novel Judas Horse that these gifts alone aren’t quite enough to build a satisfying suspense novel. The two missing elements were organization and narrative voice. (Happily, White Shotgun puts these essentials in place.)

Not a Judas horse but a wild mustang

Judas Horse introduces us to Ana Grey, an FBI agent whose half-Salvadoran, half-Anglo heritage makes her a misfit in any setting and thus, in a twisted way, an ideal candidate for undercover work. Judas Horse is deeply concerned with questions of loyalty – guess you can tell from the title, huh? A Judas horse is actually a tame mare who is used as a decoy to lure herds of wild mustangs into corrals to be culled. In Smith’s novel, Ana Grey goes undercover to join a group of eco-terrorists who turn out to be … well, read it and see.

The problem is that Smith has enough material here for a novel and a half. I had a hard time keeping track of all  the characters, let alone keeping track of which side they were on. (Sometimes I had that woozy, baffled feeling you get in John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor series – but Smith isn’t quite in that league.) What’s more, Ana Grey dives into her cover character before we really grasp who she is as Ana, and the flashbacks to her unhappy youthful relationships feel cursory. If you can’t follow the characters you can’t follow the plot, though it was always clear something was going to blow up.

And then there’s the aforesaid voice. Judas Horse is narrated by Ana, in the present tense. But from time to time, Smith shifts away from Ana, and even into the past. This may be a conscious attempt to break away from the conventions of the thriller. But Smith, according to her website, is a screen writer and I wonder if she isn’t more accustomed to a narrative form that relies heavily on images to convey information. Her visual imagination means that the settings in rural Oregon are vividly described, but I’m literal-minded enough to feel unmoored when a first-person narrative leaves the reliable and familiar “I” to visit another character’s experience and thoughts. Of course it’s sometimes difficult to provide your readers with essential information when you’re writing in the first person – but isn’t that why they pay us the big bucks? (Joke, OK?)

And while I’m griping, I agree with Chelsea who pointed out on the White Shotgun post that “Sterling McCord” is a terrible name for Ana’s  fellow spy/love interest (is that the name of a car? perfume? preppy clothing brand?). But this is just nitpicking. I’m certainly going to keep my eye on Ana Grey.

Book into Movie: “The Help”

Just got back from a 12 noon showing of “The Help” in Southern California and it’s taking me some time to blink my way back to reality. Yes, it’s sentimental, but so was the book. In fact the movie, a very faithful adaptation, might be better than its source. And you may have heard by now how good Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are. “Magnificent” would be another word you could use.