Olaf Olafsson, “Restoration”

The soldiers fled into the sea of corn in an attempt to hide, but they were plainly visible to us and we knew they would be to the pilots too. It was a terrible sight; they crawled, trying to save their lives, inching along as slowly and carefully as they could so as not to move the corn, in the belief that they were invisible. The planes flew in a great arc up the valley, metal gleaming in the sun, and for a moment it looked as if they would be swallowed up in the blueness. Then they returned, gradually lowering their altitude before releasing a hail of machine-gun fire into the corn. They repeated the maneuver twice, then vanished in the direction of San Martino, sunlight flashing on their wings.”

In a way this is the scene we know is coming from the very beginning of Restoration, for Olaf Olafsson goes to the trouble in a foreword to sketch the movements of Allied and Axis troops in 1943-4 along the boot of Italy. Olafsson takes this background of intense drama and sets in the foreground a tale of multiple deceptions and betrayals that reaches its climax, as it must, when the front line of the battle for Italy reaches the Val d’Orcia in southern Tuscany.

Southern Tuscany's Val d'Orcia, which one character calls "paradise."

Well-read italophiles will recognize Iris Origo even before reading Olafsson’s acknowledgments. Origo was part of the English colony of Florence who married an Italian and created, at her legendary estate La Foce, a kind of model community. Olafsson cites Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia as a key source, but Restoration, as a 21st-century historical novel, must leave that war diary pretty far behind. True, one of the principal characters is Alice Orsini, clearly modeled on Origo. But hers is only one of narratives braided together here. Other characters are the Icelandic art restorer Kristin Jonsdottir, who mysteriously appears at the isolated San Martino estate in the days before the Germans reach it; the enigmatic art dealer and restorer Robert Marshall, who appears to be selling paintings to Göring and Hitler; and Alice’s husband Claudio, whose absence is as strong as a presence.

At the very center of the novel is a Caravaggio painting that passes through Kristin’s hands and becomes a McGuffin in the Hitchcockian sense. Several of the characters have a stake in its existence and its whereabouts. For Kristin, it represents both her identity as an artist and her revenge against Marshall, whose mistress she was. For Alice, it poses a threat to everyone at San Martino, and its menace hinges on her own deepest regrets. None of the characters is especially subtly drawn but they’re believable enough, and  Marshall’s blank domineering quality is paradoxically intriguing. The narrative has been whirled in a chronological Cuisinart so you have to piece together bits of the mystery until the middle of the book, after which the imminent arrival of battle takes over in the suspense department. Unfortunately the story is also parceled out to various points of view, which sometimes become confusing. Both Kristin and Alice narrate in the first person; in addition their actions are recounted by a third-person narrator, and — least effective — Alice keeps a diary which she addresses to her missing husband.

Notwithstanding the questions of creative originality raised by Kristin’s narrative, this is a tale of actions rather than ideas. About halfway through I began mentally casting it as a lush, middlebrow costume drama. It’s been at least fifteen years since The English Patient won its Oscar. Hollywood, are you listening?

Edith Wharton, “The Custom of the Country”

It took Jonathan Franzen to draw my attention to the symmetry among the titles of Edith Wharton’s three big New York society novels: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence.  Franzen also tries to persuade his readers, in a New Yorker piece celebrating  the sesquicentennial of Wharton’s birth, that The Custom of the Country is the strongest of the three books. I disagree. It may be one of Wharton’s most entertaining novels — she didn’t often exercise her sardonic sense of humor in print — but it can’t touch the penetrating melancholy of her best work.

As Franzen points out, Wharton gave Undine Spragg the beauty she did not herself possess.

That being said, it’s a heck of a lot of fun. The opening line has lingered in my head for years: “‘Undine Spragg — how can you?’” Undine — named, thank you, for a hair-waving tonic — goes on for the next three hundred pages riding rough-shod over every obstacle that stands in her way. Perfectly solipsistic, she is the perfect woman for her age. All Undine wants is a steady diet of admiration and publicity. Gosh, she’s the perfect woman for our age, too. I’m pretty sure if she lived now she would have her own reality TV show. The genius of the book, though, is that Undine can’t go out and design a line of tea gowns or endorse a particular brand of corset. She has to not only marry, but marry a man who can provide her with a never-ending stream of cash and social clout. Unfortunately, she’s both unsophisticated and slightly dim, so she makes a series of errors.

If there’s a twinge of pain in the book, it’s the spectacle of the collateral damage. There’s over-bred Ralph Marvell, the scion of Old New York, a refined intellectual who is incapable of earning a living. Beautiful brassy Undine dazzles him and he makes the mistake of seeing in her a sensibility that meets his own. The match ends, of course, in tears, and Undine uses their son Paul as leverage to get a divorce so that she can marry up — into the French aristocracy.

It was interesting to note on this reading that while Wharton gives us liberal doses of Ralph’s disillusionment and desperation, the Marquis Raymond de Chelles remains a cipher. No, a type: a French aristocrat, deeply enmeshed in family and church, absolutely beyond Undine’s comprehension. He’s as elusive to us as he is to Undine.

The third man in the trio — Undine’s beaten-down stock speculator papa doesn’t count except as a cash machine — is Elmer Moffatt, the bumptious nouveau riche, with his red face and shiny pate and slightly-too-tight clothes. Energetic, competitive, aggressive, loud, Elmer is the guy who appears over and over again in anglophone literature of the turn of the century. He is Undine’s true counterpart.

Wharton has the last laugh. She finds something Undine wants, but cannot have. Better yet, her own actions have put the prize out of reach. It’s the perfect revenge of writer on character, not savage but stinging.

Peter Robinson, “Before the Poison”

Am I the only reader who finds Peter Robinson’s books a little dull? Heaven knows I’m a faithful fan of the standard English procedural murder mystery. Add flashback material that takes us into wartime Yorkshire and you’d think I’d be in pig heaven here. I had previously read Robinson’s In a Dry Season and found it slow, but Before the Poison didn’t feature Robinson’s Inspector Banks. The new protagonist is a Hollywood composer named Chris Lowndes who returns to his native northern England after the death of his wife. Chris buys, sight unseen, the rambling Kilnsgate House in a remote Yorkshire dale. Once there, he finds himself haunted by the house’s history and particularly by the tale of Grace Fox, gorgeous former resident, who was hanged for murdering her husband in 1953.

Singapore 1941-2 by David Ralph Goodwin, via Museum Victoria (Australia)

Basically, Chris sets out to clear Grace’s name. Did she poison her husband?  If so, why? He was a chilly sadist, she had a handsome young lover. On the other hand, the death could have been a heart attack. The narrative alternates between invented chapters of a book of famous trials (which makes it clear that Grace was condemned by small-town 1950s morality) and Chris’s painstaking reconstruction of her life. Excerpts from Grace’s wartime diary are added about halfway through.

Painstaking: phone call by phone call, even the ones that aren’t returned. Every glass of Shiraz or single-malt Scotch Chris drinks. Every piece of music he listens to. Too much detail that did not, for me, contribute either characterization or tension. The strongest part of the book is Grace account of her years as a nurse in World War II, ranging from Europe to the South Seas and back. Unfortunately her terrifying adventures in the flight from Singapore were tangential to the Yorkshire narrative.

And in the end? I suppose the conclusion is subversive but I was too beaten down by the tedium to care.

Ruth Reichl, “Tender at the Bone”

You know those books that you always know you’ll read eventually? Tender at the Bone was one of those for me.  I’ve enjoyed Ruth Reichl’s writing ever since she became the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 1993, and her memoirs (this is one of three) have been big sellers. Besides that, why would you not want to read about a woman who found her way in life through food? Especially when she is as good at portraying character as she is at describing a meal?

Van Gogh's red cabbage and onions. Start chopping!

And there are some memorable characters in this book. In fact the very opening chapter, “The Queen of Mold,” sketches Reichl’s mother in colorful, funny, disturbing and affectionate colors — for one of the aspects of life Reichl must deal with is her mother’s mental illness. She sets this up really well, and it’s one of the key qualities that makes Tender at the Bone more than just a food memoir. At first we wonder why Mrs. Reichl has such odd ideas. Comments made by family friends puzzle little Ruth. When her mother’s mental illness is finally named, we aren’t surprised, but by that point she has us completely hooked.

Hooked on what? Generosity. Humor. Vivid description of sensory material. And enough narrative tension to keep us turning the pages. How will Ruth manage in a francophone Montreal boarding school at age 13? Or as a camp counselor on the French island of Oléron? Will she ever have a boyfriend? Will she and her friend Serafina survive their girls-only  trip to Tunis? Above all, what does Reichl owe her mother? Toward the end of the book she describes coming back to her parents’ house as an married career woman, well on the way to earning a reputation as a professional cook. Her mother is in a manic state. “I pushed the door open and hesitated, dreading the moment when I would lose myself. Crossing the threshold, I had a falling sensation, as if I were careening backward in time. I tried desperately to grab onto the Gypsy chef, but she was gone, along with the restaurant owner and wife. All that was left was a little girl.” If you’ve ever known people who made you lose your footing as a reasonable, functional adult, this will be a familiar nightmare.

We all find our ways to cope with life, and Reichl’s, to our benefit, turned out to be food. She tips her hand early on, describing her honorary grandmother’s cook: “Alice would have snickered derisively at the notion, but she was the first person I ever met who understood the power of cooking.  She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.” Order; precision; repetition; the exercise of familiar skills. Comfort, creation, and yumminess at the end. Thanks, Ruth.

Jill Ker Conway, “The Road from Coorain”

Why do we read memoir anyway? Whose life is interesting enough to, well, deserve that I should spend several hours on it, instead of alphabetizing my spice cupboard or for that matter, writing my own memoir?  Who is going to provide me with a vicarious experience that will be informative or stimulating or packed with emotional insight?

For an academic, Conway knows a lot about sheep.

Actually, most of the memoirs I’ve read recently fall into that category, which suggests that either I’ve been very lucky in my selection or that I’m selling the entire genre too short. Because Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain is another worth-while read. First, and most notably, because Conway grew up in the Australian bush, and her description of that childhood is a loving and vivid portrait of a kind of life that probably doesn’t exist any more. (It bears comparison to the brilliant Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir of an African childhood.) I suspect that Conway’s descriptions of life on Coorain, a sheep station, will stick with me longer than the rest of the book simply for their exotic quality, and possibly because Conway describes them with the special clarity of childhood memories.

The rest of her story colors an intellectual coming-of-age tale (not dissimilar to Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase) with a specifically Australian palette. Conway gradually discovers that she is a true intellectual, but in the 1950s this makes her a very unusual woman. Further complication is supplied by Australia’s own identity crisis during the period. Conway is troubled by the colonial spirit of her country, and by its persistence in measuring itself against Great Britain. Having spent her early childhood in an environment that was specifically, uniquely Australian, she deplores an intellectual culture that takes its values and principles from that island nation on the other side of the globe. She compares the Australian origin myth to the American:

Why was my mind full of images of exhausted, marginal people, or outlaws like Ned Kelly, rather than triumphant frontier figures like Daniel Boone or Buffalo Bill? I knew that somehow it had to do with our relationship to nature, and with the way in which the first settlers’ encounter with this environment had formed the inner landscape of the mind, the unspoken, unanalyzed relationship to the order of creation which governs our psyches at the deepest level. Australians saw that relationship as cruel and harsh…”

This is just not material — not a past, not provocative writing about a past — that I could find anywhere besides the memoir of a thoughtful observer and writer who had an unusual experience to relate. Possibly a good definition of what makes the genre worth reading?

Charlotte Rogan, “The Lifeboat”

Well, I just finished Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat and I am really glad I have no plans to leave dry land any time soon. Even the river outside my window is looking somewhat menacing. But come to think of it, so is my fellow man.

Rogan’s premise is not a new one: what happens when a group of people are trapped in a small boat on the Atlantic for way too long? But you know, it’s the way the tale is told that makes the difference. And while I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed this novel, I don’t think enjoyment is the point. It’s provocative. It’s haunting. And it’s incredibly convincing about a primal nightmare.

Three weeks with this as your only view? You'd be an unreliable narrator, too.

Our narrator is Grace Winter, a twenty-two-year-old widow. (Watch the names, which are always plausible, but always full of meaning.) She’s on trial after her three weeks at sea in a lifeboat following the wreck of the ocean liner Empress Alexandra, in 1914. Her attorneys have asked her to write a retrospective diary of her days on the water. The diary entries alternate irregularly with chapters that fill in Grace’s background, marriage, and the trial itself. The voice throughout is Grace’s own.

She makes no particular effort to charm. It becomes clear that she is one cool customer, approaching life from a very practical point of view. It seems  that her handsome young husband Henry was engaged to another woman when he met Grace. And that the meeting was anything but accidental. And that Grace had no qualms about using sex to capture him. Here’s a telling detail: after a hiccup in their relationship Henry comes to see Grace to explain himself. “I had worn a pale dress and outlined my eyes so they looked big in my ashen face. It wasn’t a costume or disguise, exactly, but a form of communication.” Ah. Communication. Of course.

If this is how she behaves on dry land, how might she act when her life is at stake on the open sea? And, equally important, when her freedom is at stake back in civilization? I’ll say only that Grace seems to believe what she’s telling us — most of the time. So the narrative has a shifty, constantly flickering quality.

But that’s water for you, and water dominates The Lifeboat. Golly, this book is wet! There’s water sloshing around in the bottom of the boat, sometimes a terrifying amount. The boat’s overloaded, riding so low that the sea is constantly splashing in over the gunwales. The characters’ clothes are constantly sodden which may sound petty but it’s 1914. Think about those layers of petticoats and skirts or long woolen trousers, hanging on your legs on a cold North Atlantic night, soaking up salt water, rubbing your skin raw. Rogan’s really good on the symptoms of fatigue, cold, and above all dehydration. People go mad, die, vanish. Grace fades in and out of awareness, or at least tells us she does. When rescue comes, it’s anticlimactic. After everything that’s happened in the lifeboat, a bunch of Icelandic fishermen with fresh water and blankets are not going to fix things. It’s not clear to me, at the end, that any rescue could ever help Grace. Or — and here’s the cold trickle down the spine — help any of us.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont”

The cover of the Virago edition of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont shows Rupert Friend wearing a modish blue muffler, with his head tossed back as he roars with laughter, and Joan Plowright (also mufflered, though hers is pink) in profile, looking robust and contemporary. It’s a still from the 2006 film of the book, and you can’t blame the publishers for using it, but as I read, the image got further and further from the book’s action. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is Elizabeth Taylor’s foray into Barbara Pym land and there’s very little in the way of full-throated laughter. In fact it’s hard to know how it could have been made into a film without being made either cutesy or sentimental.

There is certainly humor in the novel: Taylor’s sharp observations can be very funny. But by the end, this is an unflinching look at the loneliness and humiliation of old age  that tallies in many particulars with Penelope Lively’s How It All Began. The difference is that Laura Palfrey, the heroine — yes, I think we can call her a heroine — of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a woman of a different era from Charlotte Rainsford of How It All Began. Like Charlotte, she’s a widow with a middle-aged daughter. We glean that she spent a great deal of time abroad as a Foreign Service wife. Stoicism and patience are her strengths. She certainly needs them at the Claremont, a dreary London hotel where she takes up residence. We get to know a core of other long-term boarders  and at first we might be in E.F. Benson territory, with the bibulous Mrs. Burton, the mousy Mrs. Post, the wicked Mrs. Arbuthnot on her crutches and ludicrous Mr. Osmond with his perpetual letters to the newspapers. Taylor isn’t above poking fun at them — even Mrs. Palfrey is described amusingly: “She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.”

Funny is too easy, though. One day Mrs. Palfrey trips and falls outside the basement flat of the charming young Ludovic Myers, who takes her in and cleans her up and gives her a cup of tea. This, obviously, is the Rupert Friend part. The two form a desultory friendship and at the Claremont Ludovic is taken for Mrs. Palfrey’s grandson. Possession of an attractive young person does wonders for her status, and Taylor could have played this for laughs: the real and impostor grandsons, the jealous old ladies, the hand-knit sweater with the too-long sleeves, intended for Desmond (real) but given to Ludo (fake). Instead, with the lightest of touches, Taylor indicates Ludovic’s own loneliness and his own sense of honor and independence. It’s honest and touching, but far from heart-warming. Much more interesting than that.