Ruth Rendell, “Tigerlily’s Orchids”

OK, here’s a question. You pick up a new Ruth Rendell mystery, let’s say Tigerlily’s Orchids. The first character you meet, Olwen, is lucidly determined to drink herself to death. And furthermore, “On the whole Olwen was indifferent to other people or else she disliked them…” Do you find that attitude refreshing, or are you aghast? I’m not giving much away by telling you that Olwen eventually has her way and that the process, described with Rendell’s customary calm, is not attractive. So now you’re warned.

Cross-section of a Parisian apartment house by Edmond Texier, 1852

One of qualities I enjoy about Rendell’s work is exactly that calm. She doesn’t editorialize about Olwen. Nor about the incredibly handsome but vapid Stuart Font. Nor about Wally Scurlock, the venal caretaker for the North London apartment block called Lichfield House where the novel takes place. Watch out for the names, though. They tend to supply auras for characters, like the wealthy young girl named Noor, rumored to be dating an Indian prince. (Reminds you of Queen Noor of Jordan, perhaps?) The funny thing is that most rumors in Tigerlily’s Orchids are wrong. Most of the judgments made by the characters about their fellows are also wrong. This is a novel of miscommunication and misapprehension. Oh, yes, it’s also a murder mystery, but that’s easy to forget. There are various feints at physical mayhem and various skullduggery and bad behavior and certainly a puzzle that needs to be solved. But the victim had almost slipped my mind when the solution to his death presented itself.

I got a big kick out of the structure of the novel. The link among the characters is the apartment block itself, placing Tigerlily’s Orchids in a tradition that goes back into the nineteenth century. For instance, Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (usually translated as Pot Luck) follows the entwined lives of a group of apartment dwellers. In Rendell’s hands the device feels like one of those clever cartoons exposing a cross-section of a multi-dwelling building and catching the inhabitants in private moments. For instance:

Claudia Livorno came through the swing doors, carrying a bottle of Verdicchio and walking gingerly because the step outside was icy and her heels were high. She rang the bell of Flat 1.

Olwen had nothing in Flat 6 to eat except bread and jam, so she ate that and, when she woke up from her long afternoon sleep, started on a newly opened bottle of gin… In the flat below hers, Marius Potter was sitting in an armchair that had belonged to his grandmother reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the second time.

See? Fun! Oh, and by the way, no character is named Tigerlily, and there are no orchids.

Honore de Balzac, “Pere Goriot”

Wouldn’t it be fun to know how many library books circulate without ever getting read? I haven’t had a library card in 25 years so I’m just getting used to the new freedom of choice that lets me bring books home and dip into them for free. Last week’s haul was eclectic: a Tracy Chevalier novel, a volume of Chekhov novellas, and Pere Goriot. I only finished one of the Chekhov tales but the Balzac was lots of fun, in a literature-geek way. Which is to say that I enjoyed reading it, but a great deal of my pleasure involved books connected to Pere Goriot rather than the book actually in my hand. What I did cherish was the detail of the settings and atmosphere. Balzac is generous with descriptions of the world his characters live in, from the squalor of certain neighborhoods in 1819 Paris to the enameled monogram on a gold Bréguet watch.

Ingres portrait of Francois-Marius Granet, at Nat'l Gallery London. Corresponds to my mental image of Eugene.

It turns out that Pere Goriot was published in the mid-1830s and was one of the first full-length novels that falls into Balzac’s immense series called la Comédie humaine. It has a number of important features that narrative culture still takes advantage of. One is the prototypical French character of the young-man-from-the-provinces who arrives in Paris eager to make the city its own. In this case, he’s Eugene de Rastignac, from minor nobility, poor, handsome and charming but above all, ambitious. Balzac retooled him as Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions and Dumas gave him a rapier and called him d’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers. Zola uses the trope over and over again, as does Maupassant.

Of course you know what they say: that there are only two stories, “A man goes on a voyage” or “A stranger comes to town,” and this is the former.  Eugene is all potential — he has no present when the book begins. Just his restrained provincial past and the future which he must choose. Balzac sets out two paths for him, embodied in the two older men living at the shabby Maison Vauquer, a Left Bank boarding house. In one corner is our titular Pere Goriot, a retired manufacturer of vermicelli, who has sacrificed everything for his two beautiful daughters. (The specificity of “vermicelli” is typical of Balzac.) In the other is Monsieur Vautrin, a mysterious figure of titanic energy who tries to lure Eugene into a profitable arranged marriage. Yes, actually, he probably is the devil: Balzac gives him great lines like, “… there are no principles, just things that happen; there are no laws, either,  just circumstances.”  When another character calls him a prophet, he answers, ”I am anything and everything.”  Oh, that Balzac, what a cynic!

The narrative tension hovers around Eugene’s choice, and Balzac leaves the outcome open. Only in later books do we meet Eugene de Rastignac as a powerful and worldly Parisian figure. Vautrin comes back, too, to reprise his role of tempter and fixer. This trick of working with recurring characters over an extended narrative was another Balzacian innovation. Actually, I think that means “Downton Abbey” is directly descended from  Pere Goriot.

Emile Zola, “La Debacle/The Downfall”

Another long silence, but I’ve been helping Emile Zola fight the Franco-Prussian war, and it’s taken a long time. Didn’t turn out too well, either: after all, Zola called his book La Débâcle for a reason. Just to get you up to speed: in July of 1870, Prussia more or less manoeuvered France into declaring war. The French, banking on a tradition of military triumph, marched eastward in confidence, carrying only maps of Germany because it was assumed they would invade the neighboring country. But the Prussian army was better organized, better provisioned, and better commanded. Defeat followed defeat, and on September 4,  a large segment of the French army surrendered after a crushing battle in a village called Sedan. Nearly 90,000 men — including the Emperor of France — were taken prisoner. The Prussians swept west to surround Paris, besieging it for more than four months. In the political instability that followed its surrender (you still with me?) the city itself seceded from France and was governed briefly by the Commune. Civil war ensued, with street-to-street fighting and the torching of many familiar monuments. You’ve heard the phrase, “Paris is burning?” In May of 1871, it really was.

Meissonier's "Allegory of the Siege of Paris"

You think that’s a lot of explanation? I’ve just saved you 582 pages. But when Zola wrote La Débâcle in 1892, this was recent history, fresh in everyone’s mind. His goal in reiterating the horrors was to demonstrate how France had been humbled, and why.

There’s way too much here to sort through so I’m taking the lazy way out with bullet points. Truth to tell, I’m still somewhat stunned. As I’ve said elsewhere, Zola’s not a subtle writer and when you get him on, say inadequate wound care, he’s relentless. This is hardly an enjoyable book but it packs a punch.

–Unlike La Curée, this is a polemic rather than a novel. Sure, there are characters and it’s through them that that we perceive what Zola’s so het up about (corruption, laziness, disorganization, mistrust, neurosis, selfishness, cowardice, etc.) But the characters are pretty schematic. Types rather than individuals.

–The research is prodigious. Zola began as a newspaperman, and he reported the heck out of this book. My copy had some scholarly apparatus that tracked our intrepid author’s sources and they were very impressive.

–Back in 1870, when you wanted to make a case — or beat an audience over the head, perhaps? — the way to do it was with a big, heavy piece of fiction. No longer true. I don’t know much about Zola’s role in the Dreyfus affair but I wonder if his famous “J’accuse” letter  of 1898 isn’t a precursor of modern journalistic rhetoric. Which would have Zola using both old and new tools within his career.

–Seems to me there are two fictional things to do with a battle. One is Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme technique in which your protagonist gets mighty confused about all the noise and people running around, and loses track of Waterloo. The other is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels method, where you provide maps and let the reader follow the action hour by hour. Zola switches back and forth between them.

–One forgets how much the basics matter in wartime, both before and after the battle. The French fought hungry and tired — we’re talking days of fasting because of disorganized supply lines, and sleepless nights because of wet tents and dawn marches. What’s more, once the gunfire stops, the problems really begin, not only for the soldiers but also for the civilian population.

–This book is too long. There’s a lot of repetition and the pacing is slow. But the length forces the reader to feel a tiny bit of the tedium and, imaginatively, a measure of the discomfort, dislocation, terror, pain, humiliation and grief endured by the soldiers and victims of the Franco-Prussian war. And by that measure, it’s a success.

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.

Eric Hazan, “The Invention of Paris”

The Invention of Paris is nowhere near as much fun as Graham Robb’s Parisians, but in fairness, Eric Hazan probably had something else in mind from the start. Robb is frankly, joyously anecdotal, while Hazan’s aim is perhaps more holistic; he wants to look at the city as an entirety, possibly even as a single character. I’ve done more reading about this city than about any other, so maybe this is true of London or New York or Berlin as well, but it seems strikingly the case with Paris: the history varies dramatically depending on your outlook. And to an extent that I hadn’t encountered before (except in Albert Boime’s Art and the French Commune), Hazan comes from the left. So his history is largely the tale of an oppressed working class. I have no difficulty with this per se — nobody is doubting that conditions in the Faubourg St. Antoine were dreadful in 1789. It’s the nostalgia I find a little harder to swallow.

Not like it used to be

And, frankly, the book isn’t all it could be. Hazan’s premise, clever enough, looks at the circular geography of Paris and tells its history as a perpetual expansion beyond the city walls. He refers to the “psychogeography of the boundary” which, though academic-speak, makes sense. Then the chapters follow the quarters of old Paris, the villages and faubourgs of new Paris. But in places they are little more than a rather dull guide-book, and feel quite second-hand.

Then the structure falls apart completely, with a section on Red Paris and another one that cobbles together a chapter on flâneurs and a chapter on photography of Paris. The last is particularly interesting, but they both feel like papers written for some other purpose and stripped of their footnotes for a lay audience.

Still, there are wonderful nuggets. My favorite concerned one of the reasons for the uniform look of the city. I knew (from footnotes to a Zola novel) that Haussmann decreed that new buildings in the elegant quarters should be constructed of cut stone. What Hazan told me is that long before that, the 13th-century King Philip IV ordered “every new house built in Paris to be covered with plaster,” in large part because of its fire-retardant qualities. In the succeeding paragraphs Hazan goes into some detail about lot sizes, disposition of courtyards, and construction techniques in the various quartiers of Paris, all fascinating material that would have been difficult to dig up. It was just the hand-wringing about all the vanished neighborhoods, the laments for the social mix of the old cafes, that I found annoying.

Emile Zola, “Pot Luck”

Sometimes Zola’s outrage nourishes a kind of savage farce, as in the scene in The Kill in which a woman has sex with her stepson on a bearskin rug, in a greenhouse, surrounded by loathsome artificially-grown plants. And sometimes the author’s anger overwhelms the comedy, as in the scene toward the end of Pot Luck when a young kitchen maid, impregnated by an older man, gives birth alone in her attic bedroom and puts the living baby in the garbage. (Astoundingly frank description of the process, too). Fortunately, Zola manages to tame his rage for much of the book, making it disturbing, but not unreadable.

This is Zola’s attack on the morals of the bourgeoisie. By the time he wrote Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille) he had already investigated corruption in high society (The Kill, or La Curée) and among the working class (L’Assommoir). Cleverly, he structures the novel around a bourgeois apartment building in Paris. The tenants, the owner, and even the concierge all pride themselves on the honesty and respectability of the building, and Zola returns often to the calm and quiet of the principal staircase, with its tall mahogany doors and its panels of false marble. (Yes, that’s a symbol: nobody would call Zola subtle.) Meanwhile at the back of the building is the air shaft that serves the kitchens, which the author most often compares to a sewer.

bourgeois Paris as seen by Caillebotte

We see much of this through the eyes of Octave Mouret, the classic (in French novels) provincial come to the city to make his fortune. Octave is a womanizer, and he manages to sleep his way through the building, one wife at a time, without ever having much fun. Well, nobody’s having much fun, really. It’s all about keeping up appearances, trying to marry off daughters without enough money for dowries, ignoring the fact that your husband’s mistress is bleeding him dry, refusing to sleep with your husband or trying to sleep with your wife’s chambermaid.

The most memorable characters are the monsters. Narcisse Bachelard, the ancient, drunken roué is tolerated, even courted, because he is thought to be rich. His sister, Madame Josserand, is one of the great viragos of literature, the kind of unanswerable bully whose sheer aggression carries the day. The scheming and penny-pinching that go into marrying off her daughters would be amusing if it weren’t so depressing. And to drive home his point about the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie Zola supplies a priest and a doctor who know all the secrets of the house. The former, a worldly man of the church, spends much of the novel attempting to maintain the good reputation of these characters, for the sake of the good example they present to the lower classes. By the end of the book, even he is having his doubts.

Emile Zola, “The Masterpiece”

I think it’s fair to say that Zola is kind of a blowhard. It’s always too much with him: mud or sex or fruits and vegetables. (Respectively: La Terre, La Curée, Le Ventre de Paris.) So in The Masterpiece, his novel about a failed modernist painter, at the end as the painter is buried in a dreary suburban cemetery, the procession winds past the spectacle of a damp bonfire made of five-year-old coffins. (In the 19th century you could lease a cemetery plot for a limited period.) Hyperbolic? Oh, yeah. And yet the notes to the edition I read show that when Zola trekked out to St. Ouen to do his research, he did see the same damp bonfire.

Nadar's portrait of Zola: note fake books

The Masterpiece is one element in Zola’s massive Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels. They were supposed to be a scientific analysis of France, following the fates of an intertwined clan. They tend toward the thematic: Zola wrote about retail (Au Bonheur des Dames) and trains (La Bête Humaine) and, in this case, artists. Claude Lantier is the protagonist, a genius who cannot quite pull off the great work he envisions. He is, naturally, misunderstood. Zola was very friendly with both Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, the latter of whom discontinued the friendship once this novel was published. (One of the paintings described in the book closely resembles Manet’s famous Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.) There’s a lot of wonderful detail about how the Parisian art world functioned between the 1860s and the 1880s. But the emotional heart of the novel is really located in the relationship between Claude and his band of brothers — the novelist Sandoz (a stand-in for Zola himself), and other men, a sculptor, an architect. etc. They get together weekly as young men, hotly debating the role of art in society late into the night. This narrative trajectory is very poignant, for some find success while some find only poverty, but even the success comes at a price.

The other narrative thread concerns Claude’s relationship with the beautiful and innocent Christine, a lady’s maid whom he meets in a Parisian rainstorm and who enchants him. Ultimately they marry and Zola sets up a love triangle between Christine, Claude, and Claude’s massive painting of a nude woman in the center of Paris. Christine represents sex, the painting represents art, and Claude is effectively torn apart. What feels saddest is the sense of disillusion at the end of the book. Sandoz, the novelist, berates himself for accepting the “nearly-right” rather than pursuing the perfection of his vision. Yet it was that vision that drove Claude to suicide.

Happily for Zola, he continued to crank out these novels at the rate of one a year, and finished his ambitious cycle on schedule.