Anita Brookner, “A Misalliance”

Brookner, an art historian, also wrote on Greuze, who painted this portrait.

As I slogged my way through A Misalliance, I became increasingly aware of a déja vu sensation. Not only, I realized, had I read A Misalliance before — but it was this very book, read some 25 years ago, that persuaded me to stop reading Anita Brookner. The problem with Brookner, I realized, turning page after dull page, is that she appears to have one thing to say. She said it well in Hotel du Lac, andeverything else of hers that I have read (except for her monograph on the 18th century French painter J. B. Greuze) treads around the same well-worn track. To wit: there are two kinds of women, the ones who get the men and the ones who, through no fault of their own, don’t. Men are often dazzled by vitality and youth, overlooking the quieter virtues. And society has no comfortable place for the single woman of a certain age.

A Misalliance concerns itself with Blanche Vernon whose husband Bertie has left her for a computer expert named Mousie. Blanche “perceived the difference between herself and Mousie as a very simple one: Mousie was used to being loved. Metaphorically, Mousie had been holding out her arms, in the certainty of meeting a welcoming embrace, since she was a little girl…. By holding out her baby arms Mousie had emitted the correct signals: people knew what their response should be.” Blanche, it need hardly be said, can’t compete. The misalliance of the title is her chance and rather hectic involvement with a slatternly stranger. The strong points of the book are Brookner’s wonderful descriptions of clothes, and the best fictional migraine ever. Not, perhaps, enough to fill 190 pages.

Mary Renault, “The Friendly Young Ladies”

I grew up reading Mary Renault’s gripping historical novels about ancient Greece, especially the two Theseus novels, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. So I was surprised when, at the library, I found a Mary Renault novel titled The Friendly Young Ladies with cover art from the 1930s and a copyright date of 1944. I even wondered if it was the same Mary Renault — and the only literary evidence that it is resides in general narrative fluency and a concern with homosexuality.

According to this edition’s afterword, Renault herself was gay, and spent much of her life in a relationship with another woman. And evidently The Friendly Young Ladies reflects Renault’s coming to grips with her sexual orientation and how it played out in her life as a young woman. The “young ladies” of the title are the beautiful self-possessed blonde Helen, the boyish Leonora, and Leo’s young sister Elsie. They are characterized as “friendly” by a young man who tries his hand at romancing all of them, serially.

Leo & Helen live in an old college barge converted to a houseboat. Sweet!

I was less interested in Leo and Helen’s relationship, which has an admirable functional stability, than in the character of the willfully naive Elsie. The novel opens with her as the miserable pawn in her parents’ toxic marriage. When a young doctor, Peter Bracknell, takes it upon himself to bring some sparkle to Elsie’s life, she falls for him with the ardor of the terribly bored. In fact a case could be made that Elsie is one of those girls whose life is ruined by trashy reading — the use of fiction to distract, pacify, entertain or inspire, is an important theme in this novel. Inspired by Peter, Elsie runs away to find Leonora, who lives with Helen on a houseboat not far from London. Soooo picturesque, and Renault makes the most of her atmospheric setting. It’s Peter, of course, who has a go at Helen and Leo, eliciting temperate but courteous responses. The final character to add to this merry-go-round is the enigmatic neighbor Joe, a writer like Leo. Joe is the real deal, manly, sincere, unpretentious but a literary heavyweight. He and Leo are the closest of friends, cooperative and easy together until sex upsets the apple cart.

At this point, the rhetoric gets awfully heated and I was reminded of Dorothy Sayers’ novels, in which sleeping with a man has earth-shaking emotional significance. Morning-after chat:

‘Leo.’

‘Yes?’

‘You know, don’t you, this can’t end here.’

‘My dear,’ she said. ‘it’s tomorrow now. It has ended.’

‘We said that. But not now.’

‘Now more than ever. You know that’s true.’

‘It would tear up our lives,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve thought of all that. But it might be worth it.’

‘It might be. But it never is.’”

Well, times have changed, haven’t they? But the character of Elsie, who goes through the book evading unpleasantness and refusing to acknowledge reality, is someone we still meet. She assumes that once Peter has kissed her on the forehead, they are engaged. She casts herself as the heroine of any drama, and gooses up daily life until its turbulence satisfies her. Reading a few pages of one of Joe’s books, “Elsie would have known what to say about a book like this if it had come out of the library in the ordinary way. There was enough suffering and sordidness in real life; a good book should make one happy.”

Ironically The Friendly Young Ladies probably wouldn’t have satisfied Elsie’s craving for romance or Joe’s urge toward unadorned modernism. But sometimes an author writes a book to figure out what she thinks, and the result can offer its own unusual pleasures.

Elizabeth George, “Believing the Lie”

Oh, Elizabeth George. Bravely facing the challenge of trying to both satisfy her readers — who, after all, want more of the same — and keep herself interested. Possibly bored by the narrow confines of the traditional procedural mystery, and, to my mind, hemmed in by the template of the handsome aristocrat moonlighting as detective…. it is honestly quite a dilemma for an author. George tried to step outside these limitations back in 2007 with What Came Before He Shot Her, the back story of Lady Helen Clyde’s murder. (Good as George is, I had never felt Helen was more than a bundle of mannerisms, and she did seem to be keeping Lynley trapped in a relationship out of a Dorothy Sayers novel.)

But we inveterate readers of murder mysteries don’t want earnest tales of social concern. We want the traditional puzzle and solution. So what’s an ambitious writer to do? George has succeeded better than most at stitching together the requisite plot, the requisite sidekick action, and stimulating forays into what we might call a novel of social criticism. Problem is, Believing the Lie, packed with all of these contents, weighs in at 624 pages. And actually, that’s just the first problem.

Morecambe Bay. Does it look ominous? 'Cos it should.

The second problem is Deborah St. James, who occupies many of those pages. Deborah’s been a secondary figure from the get-go, and not much more credible than the late Lady Helen Clyde, but as long as she was kept in the background, she couldn’t do much damage. Here, George has Deborah taking on a substantial role in the investigation and she reveals herself as immature, impulsive, and hugely irritating. Her part of the plot involves endless discussion of infertility, adoption, surrogacy and IVF that feel transplanted from the pages of an earnest specialty publication.

The overall plot concerns the death of Ian Cresswell, who drowns in Lake Windermere. (Cue tourism material, especially lengthy description of both quicksand and tidal bores in Morecambe Sands, which alert the reader early one that someone will probably stray onto said sands.) Strings are pulled at New Scotland Yard to get Lynley to investigate this death which the coroner has already deemed an accident. Because Lynley has no official standing, he has to use subterfuge to gain access to the most rudimentary information regarding Cresswell’s death.

I’m leaving out a lot. (Spoilers coming.) There’s another subplot about a hapless reporter for one of the vicious British tabloids, sent to Cumbria to dig up dirt. Still another subplot about the sad damaged children Cresswell leaves behind, and yet another one about Barbara Havers’ friend Taymullah Azhar and his elfin daughter Hadiyyah (getting a little grating, that elfin-ness). And more, still more: Lynley’s sex life! Barbara’s hair! A gay love affair and a sex change in Mexico!

Remember what your parents used to say to you when you’d done something really awful: “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed.” It’s only the people we care about who can disappoint us.

Julian Barnes, “Something to Declare”

I tend to think of Julian Barnes as an all-English writer but I realize, that’s probably just because he used to rather famously play tennis with Martin Amis. (So very English!) But it turns out that Barnes is Francophone and something of a Flaubert scholar — ack, Flaubert’s Parrot, of course he’s a Flaubertiste. So Something to Declare is a nice little collection of various Francophilia subjects: tourism in France, the Tour de France, Henry James and Edith Wharton touring France, French food…. and in the kind of cleverness this book is full of, “French letters.” (A pun: you might not recognize that as an old-fashioned term for condoms.) Most of these pieces, in fact, are reviews for the usual suspects: The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Flaubert "dissecting Madame Bovary." He looms large in this book.

Well, cleverness about the French: how delightful! In a book like this there are going to be hits and misses and only because I am conscientious did I read all of the essay on Boris Vian, Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens,which was a waste of time because I don’t know what any of them sounds like. Ditto the essays on films I hadn’t seen. But when Barnes is writing about literary figures, that’s when the fun starts, because he treats Baudelaire and Mallarmé and George Sand and, yes, Flaubert as if they were friends who had just left the room.

For instance, I was especially entertained by the essay on Louise Colet, Flaubert’s mistress, a figure Barnes handles with both amusement and sympathy. Her writing — of course she wrote — was evidently overheated and bombastic, she herself always the heroine of the tale. Here’s how Barnes describes  Colet’s thinly veiled account of her affair with a celebrated poet (the character “Albert” in Colet’s novel, Alfred de Musset in history):

Musset was clearly unsafe in a cab at any speed, and as Flaubert sardonically reminded Louise, ‘Convention has it that one doesn’t go for a moonlight drive with a man for the purpose of admiring the moon.’ But Louise went for many moonlight drives with the poet. Musset would turn up drunk and imploring on her doorstep and — such being her reverence for glory — he eventually got into her bed.

One of the most engaging essays covers the correspondence between George Sand and Flaubert, who were literary friends in middle age. Barnes calls this a correspondence in which Flaubert manages “to attain both equality and difference.” They argued, they gossiped, they tried to hammer out the basic question of What Fiction Was For, and ended up on opposite sides of the question. Sand became “increasingly prone to giving Flaubert increasingly basic advice… She has told him to get married… she has told him not to be grumpy;… told him to eat properly, take walks, and do some gym…” Barnes straddles respect and irreverence in these essays. If this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like it a lot.

Julian Fellowes Likes Me: My “Downton Abbey” Saga Continues

Lord Fellowes: what a gent!

I posted recently about an article in the New York Times that discussed a current publishing craze for “Downton Abbey”-themed books. My brilliant and loyal friend Fred Bernstein got incensed that To Marry an English Lord wasn’t on the list, since Julian Fellowes had publicly said that it was one of his influences for “Downton.” Fred actually wrote a letter, a piece of paper onto which he slapped a bunch of stamps, and tossed it into a mailbox in Brooklyn. His letter suggested that Fellowes might care to mention To Marry in connection with “Downton.” And faster than you could imagine possible, Lord Fellowes (yes, he’s a lord) wrote a lovely, lovely letter back. Which the New York Times obligingly published this morning. Wheee!

Edith Wharton, “Old New York”

When I was talking to Pat Ryan of the New York Times about this wonderful piece in that newspaper (commemorating Mrs. Wharton’s 150th birthday on January 24), I remembered Wharton’s marvelous series of novellas called Old New York, and realized I needed to read them again.

Morris-Jumel Mansion at 160th St. in Upper Manhattan: a country house to Old New Yorkers

My clearest memory was of the first, which involves the sensitive eldest son of a domineering businessman. Lewis Raycie is sent to Europe for a Grand Tour in the 1840s, entrusted with $5,000 to buy pictures for what his father wants to call the “Raycie Gallery.” Charged with purchasing work from the Italian Renaissance, Lewis (under the influence of John Ruskin) buys instead works by Giotto, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca. His homecoming is disastrous. This story is called “False Dawn,” and like the others, it involves some shifting of time-frames; by the end of the story, the paintings are worth five million dollars and have been sold to buy pearls and a Rolls-Royce. From the 1840s we go to the 1850s, to the longest tale which is called “The Old Maid.” (Yes, it’s the source of the 1939 movie with Bette Davis.) Let’s just say it involves several perennial Wharton themes, including the conflict between the security of a bourgeois life and the urge for adventure. This one’s very moving. Wharton never had children but she wrote over and over again about thwarted mothers and complex familial arrangements, always taking into account the tricky weave of emotions surrounding maternity. By contrast, “The Spark” is a simpler thing,  set in the 1890s but with the key action — which we as readers never see directly; interesting choice — occurring during the Civil War. It’s basically a portrait of a stolid society man, Hayley Delane, who fascinates the narrator because of some inexplicable core of generosity that seems to surprise Delane himself. Finally, set in the 1870s comes “New Year’s Day,” which starts with the marvelous line, “‘She was bad… always. They used to  meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,’ said my mother.”  The “she” under discussion is Lizzie Hazeldean and as is usual with Wharton, she’s neither as bad as the mother thinks nor as good as the narrator believes at one point.

Of course New  York is a character in all of these stories. Wharton grew up an awkward, clever society girl in a tight-knit world that she returned to repeatedly in her writing. She managed to break away, but her most famous novels, like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, keep circling around the question of how the individual fits into her community and what is gained or lost by that embrace. She often uses physical settings to underline action. Take the business with the Fifth Avenue Hotel in “New Year’s Day” — a hotel is full of transients, people who don’t belong. (The word “promiscuous” was sometimes used in those days to describe the social mix.) So when Lizzie Hazeldean of Old New York is seen exiting the hotel on New Year’s Day (a day traditionally spent with family), in the company of a man she isn’t married to, and the hotel is on fire — well, that hammers home Wharton’s point about potential social conflagrations when people don’t stay fixed in their circles.

Old New York was published by Appleton & Co. in 1924 and it must have been successful, for it was followed by three more “Old…” city books, all in the same attractive illustrated format. Unfortunately, none was as good as this. In 1931 Appleton published Old New Orleans by Frances Tinker, and in 1933, Old San Francisco by Ruth Comfort Mitchell. E.F. Benson contributed Old London in 1937 but it’s not as good as the “Lucia” novels. I’ve always wondered whether Wharton was commissioned to write Old New York by some clever editor with the extended series in mind, or whether the other collections followed Wharton’s success. This book is by far the best of them.

Even More on “Downton Abbey,” This Time Adding Edith Wharton

This week I spent some time chatting with Pat Ryan of the New York Times who was assigned to write a nifty story for the New York Times about some sites in New York that were reminiscent of Edith Wharton. (The 150th anniversary of Wharton’s birth is January 24th.) Pat’s story is really charming and includes fabulous photos of American heiresses who married Englishmen — just like Lady Grantham! It also mentions To Marry an English Lord, the book I wrote with Gail MacColl about these heiresses. And the pictures are fabulous. Of course if you got here from the link in the story, you already know that!

Jane Haddam, “Wanting Sheila Dead”

I was a little bit disappointed by the last one of Jane Haddam’s books I read, the 2009  Living Witness. I’m delighted to report that Wanting Sheila Dead brought back what I so enjoy about Haddam’s novels: penetrating social analysis delivered in a faintly sardonic fashion, along with a satisfying procedural mystery plot. (Minus the soap-box quality that marred Living Witness.)

This time around, affable former FBI profiler Gregor Demarkian gets involved in a reality TV show that’s filming in his hometown of Philadelphia. The host, Sheila Dunham, is the kind of monster we love to hate; relentlessly unpleasant, unpredictable, given to titanic bursts of fury. Naturally she’s the Sheila of the title and she’s apparently the target of an attempt at murder during the tryouts for “America’s Next Superstar.” (Classic Haddam: a “superstar” needs no talent.) To increase the pressure on Gregor, the show is filmed at Engine House where his wife Bennis Hannaford grew up in the kind of familial dysfunction that makes the action in Eugene O’Neill’s plays look like circle time in a cozy pre-school. A subplot involves one of Gregor and Bennis’ neighbors on Cavanaugh Street, a Very Old Lady who appears to have been murdered. Two unrelated murders for the price of one!

My only complaint, and I expect it had to do with editing, is that I was disappointed to be separated from some of the girls who were contestants on the show. Haddam excels at entering into her characters’ points of view and building sympathy with them, so I wanted to know more about  why Ivy Demari (tattoos, green-streaked hair, skeptical) or Andra Gayle (daughter of a Bronx drug addict) had auditioned for the TV show. It felt as if Haddam had been working up a sub-plot about them, and it never got fleshed out.

Bel-Ami Alert: Rob Pattinson Seduces in a Top Hat

Hungary stands in for Paris -- effectively, no?

As I’ve already made clear, I’m pretty eager to see the film version of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. It’s a book I love (serial seduction in 1885 Paris!) and the casting is delicious, with Robert Pattinson as Georges Du Roy and Cristina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas as three of his, um, targets. The trailer even includes a shot of the scene where Du Roy hits on Scott Thomas’ character in church! Dastardly!  Release set for March 2.

Ann Cleeves, “The Crow Trap”

Say what you will about the decline of civilization, but I know some of you will agree that the ease of buying English murder mysteries in the U.S. is one material benefit of living in the 21st century. Ann Cleeves doesn’t appear to have been picked up by a U.S. publisher, yet The Crow Trap is pretty readily available on Amazon. In fact, there’s a UK TV series called “Vera,” featuring Brenda Blethyn as the canny, chunky, churlish but appealing Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope. Vera’s one of those misanthropes-with-a-kindly streak, an outsider who listens all the more carefully, a woman who refuses conventional femininity, and has a very high solve rate. If she reminds you of Elly Griffiths’ Dr. Ruth Galloway, (also heavy, also mouthy), I’d say it’s a zeitgeist matter rather than copycat or homage in either direction. The world just seems ready for fat female crime-solvers, at least in the UK.

The "otter count" in the valley is a plot point. So of course I'm going to give you otters.

Another theme shared by Griffiths‘ and Cleeves‘ novels is the passionate involvement in a vanishing rural landscape. Griffiths‘ novels are set in Norfolk, while Cleeves has written 4 novels set in the Shetland islands as well as the Vera Stanhope books. They’re located in northern England and in The Crow Trap, a wild hillside is being considered for a quarry. Naturally there’s a great deal of money at stake, as well as an array of characters who are emotionally involved in the project for various reasons. Cleeves takes an interesting approach to the structure of what is, fundamentally a procedural. She narrates events from the point of view of each of the three women who are living in a tiny, isolated cottage near the quarry site, carrying an environmental study on the potential impact of the quarry. Each woman has a different angle, different information, different motivations. It’s a clever way to ensure that the readers have all the information they need for the puzzle’s solution to be satisfying. As with Telling Tales, I found The Crow Trap a little slow, a little dry — Cleeves’ style of writing dialogue, for instance, seems choppy and clumsy.

But, you know, sometimes what you want is a solid English murder mystery. That’s why it’s called “escape reading.” And The Crow Trap did the trick for me.