Joanna Trollope, “The Soldier’s Wife”

I always enjoy Joanna Trollope’s books, though I can’t usually tell them apart retrospectively. Is that a bad thing? It didn’t used to be. I imagine Trollope’s heyday featured legions of female readers — of a certain age, naturally — reflexively buying and enjoying “the new Joanna Trollope.”

Entrance to Horne Barracks, Larkhill, England; photo Trish Steel. A world apart.

But the book business has changed, as I never cease noticing, and moderately well-known writers like Trollope have gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle. Her books now lack that essential quality, “discoverability.” Which is a horrible word, but useful, since it stands for something we writers didn’t used to worry about: the potential for a book to appear on a reader’s radar. I would have thought that Trollope had retained legions of loyal readers even in the US, but I’m not sure that’s true since even I, a loyal fan, stumble over them by accident. (So much for Amazon’s algorithms.)

I was a little bit apprehensive about The Soldier’s Wife; afraid it might be more of a polemic than a novel. And Trollope obviously did do a lot of research about family issues in the military. But I should have trusted in her ability to transform research into a fictional world, and above all to create believable characters. So Alexa Riley’s apprehension about her husband Major Dan Riley’s return from deployment in Afghanistan is utterly convincing, as is Dan’s disorientation. So are the wives on the base, so are Dan’s commanding officers and colleagues. Trollope has always had a special gift for writing about children, and the three-year-old twins, Flora and Tassy, are practically scene-stealers.

Trollope’s perennial source of conflict is the differing needs and desires of her appealing characters. In The Soldier’s Wife, as you’d expect, the stresses of Army life are laid out in detail: the impermanence, the lack of control, the rigid hierarchy, the old-fashioned assumption that a military wife must subordinate her career aims to her husband’s. Dan, returning from the violence and unpredictability of Helmand Province, is jumpy and preoccupied. Alexa, who loves him, is overwhelmed and resentful. Dan is a good officer, likely to be promoted, and the Army is his identity. Alexa’s thirteen-year-old daughter Isabel, from a previous marriage, precipitates much of the action by running away from a despised boarding school. Maybe the resolution feels a little bit rushed. Maybe if you’re not a total Trollope fan, you’ll feel the book is formulaic. I still found it very absorbing.

And do admit: aren’t you curious to see what Trollope is going to make of Sense and Sensibility?

Barbara Trapido, “Temples of Delight”

It’s kind of a bold title for a book, don’t you think? If you call your novel Temples of Delight, you are either being harshly sardonic or you’d better deliver. Fortunately with Barbara Trapido doing the writing, delight is indeed forthcoming. Along with some confusion, I  have to admit.

An 1815 set for “The Magic Flute,” by Karl Friedrich Schinkel

As we know, the border between the literal and the fantastic isn’t a very comfy place for me. The same is true of earnest, hardworking young Alice Pilling, who when we meet her is a third form student in a mediocre girls’ school. Into the school, and Alice’s life, erupts Jem McCrail, a brilliant and iconoclastic life force, even if she is only thirteen. Trapido lays out her premise in the first sentence: “Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice.” And even though Jem disappears from school after a few months, her influence shapes Alice’s response to life for years thereafter. I can only give you the barest bones of the plot because it’s quite rambunctious, for a story about a clever girl’s coming of age. There are deaths and births, seductions and betrayals, three suitors for Alice… oh, golly. Do I see an allegory appearing? Does it mean something that Alice’s first boyfriend is named Roland? Or that Mozart’s The Magic Flute keeps shuffling in and out of the narrative? Of course it does.

And what, exactly, is Trapido driving at, with an infant named Pamina and a devilish-looking love interest named Angeletti, and nuns everywhere? I didn’t even try to sort it all out. For me, Trapido’s strong suit is charm, and Temples of Delight provided several hours of delicious reading.

Norman Rush, “Mating”

Well, this was ambitious. A friend, hearing that I was headed to Africa, suggested Norman Rush’s Mating with the caveat, “It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.” I was completely won over by the narrative voice and the premise, though. It’s set in 1980s Botswana, in the development/academic community, i.e. the white folks. A nice contrast to West with the Night, I thought. But I might not have taken it on had I hefted its 600 paper pages. (Six hundred, folks! That’s a lot of mock-anthropology!) Instead I read and read and read on my Kindle, wondering why I’d been at it for weeks and was still only about 60% through.

But I do love a reading project, and though I occasionally thought of bailing out, I stuck with Mating to the end, adding one more to the pitiful list of National Book Award winners I’ve finished. And, more to the point, adding a bracingly skeptical angle to considerations of modern Africa.

Here’s the premise. The narrator is a 32-year-old Stanford PhD. student whose thesis on nutritional anthropology has dried up owing to lack of data: “I had to hunt for gatherers. Gathering was a dead issue in my part of the bush,” she explains. So she’s somewhat marooned in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, casting about for something to do rather than returning to Palo Alto, tail between her legs. She finds herself drawn into the orbit of the handsome, charismatic Nelson Denoon, a rock-star social scientist. (If that’s an oxymoron, our nameless protagonist doesn’t get it, but there’s a lot she doesn’t get.) Denoon, having written several totemic books, is involved in a top-secret project in the Kalahari desert.

Tshabong, the urban center of Botswana’s part of the Kalahari desert

Once our heroine finds this out, she becomes obsessed with witnessing Denoon’s village, called Tsau. It’s an entirely new creation, a community run by and for women. It’s been kept secret in order to develop fully before it can be examined by anyone. Nelson is the only white person who lives there. Nelson has made the rules, hoping to create a testosterone-free utopia. Only toward the end of the book does a protest from one of the Tsau residents reach Nelson: “He has made us live like elephants!” i.e. in a matriarchal group that successfully marginalizes males. It takes the various characters a very long time to wonder why Nelson gets to impose his ideas. Interestingly, it’s also a while before the reader focuses on the black/white equation because Rush keeps the narration in the protagonist’s head. It’s all her observing The Other and forgetting that she, too, is observed. But the book’s title reminds us that her romantic involvement with Nelson can also be seen anthropologically.

I loved the denseness of the narrator. She has an Asperger-esque way of recounting every detail, analyzing herself with the same kind of clinical interest she turns on everything else: “I see myself as quite perfectible. It always surprised me how few pygmalious, polymathic men had ever been interested in sprucing me up, given that I’m so interested and available, and that, as everyone notices first about me, I remember everything.” OK, maybe you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with this woman, but she’s very funny. As in, “If there is an evolutionary justification for the pygmy bladder assigned to the female race I would like to know what it is.” Just one more thought-provoking point to consider.

Maria Semple, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”

Here’s what this book had against it from the start: it’s about a crazy mom. She spends a lot of time railing about bourgeois Seattle, not one of my more urgent interests.  And — potentially fatal — the narrative is cobbled together out of different “documents.” But Maria Semple is very clever, and she walks that fine line between skewering society and leaving room for her story to have heart. Will I remember Where’d You Go, Bernadette? in ten years? No. Did it distract me on a plane trip? Yes. Job done.

Local color: Seattle space needle

The premise is that said mom, Bernadette Fox, has vanished. Semple’s cleverness is in not making this at all clear from the get-go. Bit by bit, document by document, you understand who she is (mom, wife of a Microsoft executive, former architect, very irritable lady). The entertainment of the first portion of the book is Semple’s wonderful mimicry of voices in emails, school memos, news clippings, and the narrative from the point of view of her daughter Bee. The best characters, i.e. the most entertaining, are the self-serving Soo-Linn Lee-Segal, a Microsoft administrator, and Audrey Griffin, Bernadette’s lunatic self-righteous neighbor.

Once we get to the heart-warming bit, the fascination wanes somewhat, but by then Semple has us engaged, and this is emphatically a comedy. Some of which takes place in Antarctica, which was a first for me. Extra credit for that.

Steven Sherrill, “The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break”

And now for something completely different…  from whatever you last read. Because how many novels are there that feature, as the protagonist, a minotaur? And set him down in small-town North Carolina, as a line cook in a steak restaurant? Where the other characters pretty much take him for granted, call him “M,” and understand that after about 5,000 years of existence he still doesn’t quite know how to manage his horns?

George Frederic Watts, “The Minotaur.” Wistful, no?

I owe The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break to reader Barbara. I do tend to get into an anglo-Euro rut, I know, and if there’s one over-arching theme to my reading it’s escapism, so this was a refreshing break. Also, I will admit, discomfiting. Steven Sherrill is a very good writer and he uses a wide range of tones here, beginning each chapter in blank verse, stepping away from the action to muse on the dilemmas of humanity  – which I know sounds tedious but it isn’t. It’s thoughtful and wise. Provocative. Quirky. Probably funny, but I was so consumed with compassion for M that the humor if any passed me by. Remember Kermit’s lament, “It’s not easy being green?” Trying carrying a bull’s head on a human body.

So once you’ve created a minotaur/line cook, what do you do with him? Not, as it turns out, a whole lot. There is certainly enough plot to keep us going, as M stumbles into a couple of problematic situations and also opportunities. You care enough to want to know what happens to him. But none of it (sorry, cannot resist the pun) has mythic scope. Sherrill goes into a lot of detail about M’s life; his car, what he eats, his grooming routines which are very elaborate. For instance, the area of his body where he turns from bull into man is itchy and sensitive, and often painful, and requires a great deal of care. Hey! Think that’s a metaphor? And M has trouble expressing himself because his bull’s tongue just isn’t meant for speech. Time and again his motives and actions are misinterpreted and he has a terrible time connecting with people. M is very lonely.

Just getting through life, you know? Despite M’s presentation as an ordinary creature, I couldn’t help thinking of him as Man. More or less well-intentioned, learning sometimes from his mistakes, often at a loss as to how best to behave. The rest of the characters — his co-workers, his neighbors in the Lucky-U trailer camp — exhibit the same average-Joe mixture of qualities.

Still not getting a clear picture of this book? Here’s a little sample:

The architecture of the Minotaur’s heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps… is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster’s veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.

At home in bed the Minotaur doesn’t remember what he said to Kelly, if anything. She put her hand on top of his. He tosses and turns throughout the night, maybe sleeps, maybe not.

Andrew Miller, “Pure”

If I describe Andrew Miller’s Pure as a novel about excavating a cemetery in 18th century Paris, you’re not going to want to read it. And maybe if you’re really, really squeamish the subject matter is going to be problematic.

On the other hand, if I present Pure as a coming-of-age novel set just before the French Revolution, in which an engaging  young engineer faces a great challenge, that may sound more attractive, and it’s equally true. The novel opens with Jean-Baptiste Baratte kicking his heels in an anteroom at Versailles, waiting to see a minister who has a job for him. Baratte is a farmer’s son from Normandy who has been educated at the elite Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and thus that useful fictional figure, the socially mobile protagonist. We see him, in Pure, as a supplicant, a boss, a lover, a son, a rube, and above all a man growing into his natural authority.

19th century print of the Cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris.

The task assigned to Jean-Baptiste at Versailles is the demolition of an overcrowded cemetery in the center of Paris. Les Innocents had been in use since the Middle Ages and by the 1780s presented serious health hazards to the neighborhood. Miller is pretty eloquent about the aesthetic issues as well — olfactory for the most part. The cemetery did indeed get demolished, the bones removed to a new location in what is now Montparnasse. The neighboring church was also destroyed, and Miller lingers over the irruption of light into the filthy dark medieval interior:

Once inside the church, they go in single file. The sun has risen above the roof line and where the roof is gone, the light breaks in a shallow angle on the facing wall, picks out, with a kind of unnecessary perfection, the fluting of a pillar, the bevelled edge of an arch, a stone face staring goggle-eyed at some wonder in the middle air…. Something falls, flickers through light into shadow and hits the piled pews with a noise of thunder.”

Light, purification, education, social mobility — you see where Miller is going. A secondary character in Pure is an affable forward-looking doctor named Guillotin whose future invention would remove so many heads. The opening scene at Versailles is matched by a closing scene that foreshadows the coming irrelevance of the Ancien Régime. We even see a cameo of the firebrand Camille Desmoulins delivering a rabble-rousing speech at the Palais-Royal (homage to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety?). But these themes are woven artfully into the trajectories of the characters. This is not one of those historical novels that feels studded with facts, like an overloaded fruitcake. Instead it feels like a seamless, illuminating experience. And here’s the clincher: I finished it two days ago and it lingers in my mind — enormously satisfying.

Ian McEwan, “Sweet Tooth”

I’ve never really known what to make of Ian McEwan. I often feel that I’m not quite clever enough to really grasp what he’s driving at. Actually Sweet Tooth shines a pretty bright light on this weakness, because like me, its narrator, Serena Frome, is a lazy reader.

I’ve said I was fast. The Way We Live Now in four afternoons lying on my bed! I could take in a block of text or a whole paragraph in one visual gulp. It was a matter of letting my eyes and thoughts go soft, like wax, to take the impression fresh off the page. To the irritation of those around me, I’d turn a page every few seconds with an impatient snap of the wrist. My needs were simple…. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them…. Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert. Conrad was beyond my consideration, as were most stories by Kipling and Hemingway. Nor was I impressed by reputations. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between — I gave them all the same rough treatment.”

So is it any surprise that McEwan gives us a novel that Serena might have liked to read? Our girl is a Cambridge graduate in 1972 and the best way to describe her life is to say that she’s one of those anonymous girls pushing around carts full of files in a John Le Carré novel. Against the background of coal strikes, three-day weeks, cold and gloom and terrible malaise, Serena fumbles her way through a complicated Cold-War scheme of secretly supporting a novelist with government funds, in the hope that he will write anti-Communist literature. (“Sweet Tooth” is the name of the project, with its connotations of debased appetite.) Naturally she also becomes his lover. McEwan includes lots of samples of Tom Haley’s work, long enough to produce that weird reader’s whiplash when you get jerked from one narrative into another.

Contemporary Brighton: the 1972 version is one setting for the novel. Probably more cheerful now.

I began to get resentful. Serena (and I) prefer the absorptive tale. McEwan is more interested in playing with the uses of story-telling. After all… a spy novel? What is spying besides spinning falsehoods? “I wasn’t impressed,” Serena says, “by those writers… who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and that there was a difference between fiction and life…. So, no tricksy haggling over the limits of their art, no showing disloyalty by appearing to cross and recross in disguise the borders of the imaginary. No room in the books I liked for the double agent.”

And then, subtly, McEwan starts to sow some doubt about Serena’s perceptions. She reads situations wrong, misinterpreting remarks and glances and, of course, Tom’s writing. So by halfway through, Sweet Tooth is a novel about spying and narrative and fiction, recounted by an untrustworthy witness, and I’m getting a little dizzy.

But it got under my skin. I keep thinking about it, exploring the fun-house mirror effect, admiring (yes, admiring) McEwan‘s mastery and dexterity. The novel provides enough of what Serena and I like (“characters I could believe in…”) to keep me turning the pages, but providing a steady, wholesome dose of, heaven help me, ideas.

Barbara Trapido, “Brother of the More Famous Jack”

What if I Capture the Castle were adapted and updated, set in the 1970s and ’80s? What if the narrator, Katherine Browne, were another bookish and naive heroine whose horizons were broadened by a confusing tribe that included several fascinating men… but in this new book, lots of sex occurred, too? What if the author, Barbara Trapido, had a brilliant eye for the telling detail? For instance, I laughed out loud on the subway at this sentence on page 2: “He had hair to match his eyebrows sprouting, intimidatingly, like sofa stuffing from the neck of his open shirt.”

“The God of Thunder with a migraine,” 100 years earlier? Courtesy Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Well, obviously, you’d be reading Brother of the More Famous Jack. The title comes from a joke about William Butler Yeats, the kind of joke that sends the Goldman clan into fits of giggles. What’s not to like about a family that has in-jokes about Yeats? Certainly Katherine is smitten from the very start. Jacob, the paterfamilias, is a hairy, brilliant, warm-hearted German-Jewish refugee who ended up married to the beautiful aristocratic Jane. Jake is Katherine’s university tutor but she is brought to stay with the Goldmans by the divine, older, and bisexual John Millet. There are two Goldman sons, Roger and Jonathan, and since they are closer to Katherine in age, we shouldn’t be surprised that she ends up falling in love.

OK, this isn’t earth-shaking stuff and it’s not especially new, either, but I sure did enjoy my time spent with these clever, literate folk. Katherine, our narrator, is capable of cleverness like this: “Jonathan in a black pullover, I considered, would look like the God of Thunder with a migraine.”

Appealing? Then get hold of the book. It won’t be easy — mine came from the UK. Barbara Trapido‘s books seem to be out of print in the US and not available as ebooks. Oh, the injustice of the contemporary publishing world!

But to cheer us up, here’s a further bulletin on Jacob Goldman’s hair. Katherine goes to the beach with the family –

On the pebbles where we stripped to our bathers, I discovered that Jacob’s chest hair continued black and copious over his shoulders and all the way down his back. It grew in tight curls along the breast bone and straightened out over the shoulders where it lay in smooth two-inch lengths. I stared at him surreptitiously, like a kid sizing up a hunchback.

‘Say,’ Jane said, who had noticed my gaping, ‘you really are most immoderately and unnaturally hirsute, aren’t you, my husband?’”

Do people talk like that in real life? I don’t care, as long as I can read about them doing so in novels like this one.

Jane Gardam, “Crusoe’s Daughter”

There are a lot of books on the market that are more or less interchangeable,  and I read ‘em and like ‘em. But then there’s Jane Gardam, whose work sounds so conventional. Crusoe’s Daughter, for instance, is about a woman named Polly Flint who grows up in an isolated house on the North Sea and ends up as a school teacher. But the novel — like Polly herself — is just slightly weird.

We are used to this odd quality in Gardam: her lovely diptych Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat presents shards of a pair of lives that intersect but also contain vast secret stretches. You never know, in her books, who or what will turn out to be important because the narrator doesn’t weight the information for you. This could be baffling, but instead it’s rather delightful because Gardam is just such a good writer.

Lady Ottoline Morrell by Adolf de Meyer ca. 1912, courtesy Metropolitan Museum

Her foreword to this book proclaims it as her favorite, despite the much greater success of later books. It’s based on the life of her mother, who grew up in North Yorkshire like Polly Flint. The world of women in the early twentieth century was limited even before you factor in the geographic separateness of her home. And what’s most striking about Crusoe’s Daughter is the way Gardam places the reader very deeply in Polly’s awareness of the world. Much of the time Polly is puzzled. As a six-year-old she is deposited with a pair of aunts in a vast yellow house and her father departs back to the sea, where he is a merchant marine captain. The aunts and their peculiar household absorb her seamlessly and she soon takes for granted her life there though it is true that her best friend is Robinson Crusoe.

This sounds twee, but it’s not. Polly Flint (as unsentimental as her name) is a bookish girl and Robinson Crusoe is her particular lifeline. Or perhaps her alternate life. The good news is that, although Polly is as evidently marooned as Crusoe, she shows little awareness of this fact and the similarities are left to the reader to tally up. Or not. (I didn’t, having left Defoe alone since college.) Maybe there are point by point likenesses between the book but Gardam is a subtle, tricky writer, so I would doubt it. Over and over she subverts your expectations so that the most comfortable way to read her is to have none. Here is Polly, defending the unfashionable Robinson Crusoe to an aristocratic literary patroness (possibly based on Lady Ottoline Morrell?):

I said, ‘It is wonderfully written. It is true to his chosen form. Because of this verisimilitude it reads like reality. I have read it twenty-three times. In a novel form is not always apparent at a first or second reading. Form is determined by hard secret work — in a notebook and in the sub-conscious and in the head.’

‘You speak of journalism.’

‘Yes. Why not? With glory added.’”

If Jane Gardam, speaking through her protagonist, wanted to think of her fiction as “journalism… with glory added,” I’m fine with that. But I would stress the glory.

Gillian Flynn, “Gone Girl”

Wow. That was intense.

I’m still shaking my head over Gone Girl. Yes, it is incredibly gripping. It has that…. that thing, where you just cannot let it go. Maybe it won’t let you go, because Gillian Flynn has written this inside-out murder mystery from the dual points of view of the protagonists. Who are also antagonists. And both of whom are egotists.

The Mississippi River plays a sinister part in the novel. Here it is in Hannibal, MO.

Yes, I think that’s it. There’s an urgency to this story-telling  – the chapters alternate in the voices of Nick Dunne and his wife Amy and they’re both desperate, desperate to convince you that they’re right. That what they did was justifiable. That they are, really, fundamentally lovable, despite it all.

But wow, talk about unreliable narrators! There’s Nick, the drop-dead handsome working-class Irish boy from Missouri who married the high-flyer, Amy Elliott. Amy who is brilliant, beautiful, sexy, wealthy, and…. gone. Gone from their depressing house in a failed housing development in a dying town on the Mississippi river. Vanished completely, leaving signs of a struggle, the door to the house wide open, a dress on the ironing board and the iron still on. Uh-oh. They always look at the husband first, right? Nick’s in trouble.

And you know, that’s about all I can tell you, except that this sidewinder of a plot kept totally jerking me around. And that as the book went on, both Nick and Amy crept away from being naturalistic Girl and Guy next door to more startling, less subtle, almost mythic characters, leaving behind a trail of secondary folk (Amy’s parents, Nick’s twin sister Margo, the cops) as the end of the book becomes almost a two-hander. Gillian Flynn controls the material the whole time and the result is totally compelling entertainment.