Books to the Ceiling

Roiled. Distressed. Even distraught. Even in tears. That was me, wandering through the house in the early hours of this morning, contemplating the emotional wreckage so vividly depicted in Donna Leon’s seventeenth Guido Brunetti novel.

The book begins and ends with a funeral. In between these two solemn events, Brunetti and his team investigate the death of an eleven-year-old girl found floating in one of Venice’s many canals. Identifying her is the first priority. She turns out to be a child of the Gypsies - or, more properly, the Rom. Her parents are eventually located in an encampment outside the city. The scene in which the mother is informed of her daughter’s death is shattering, like something from one of the great Greek tragedies.

Interestingly, Brunetti has been reading in just this area, encouraged by Paola, his ferociously intellectual wife. (A university professor whose personality is a nice synthesis of the brainy and the sensual, Paola is one of my favorite continuing characters in this series.) This conscientious, caring policeman is haunted by the scene in The Trojan Women by Euripides in which Hecuba bewails the death of her grandson Astyanax: “‘I, homeless, childless, and the one to lay you in your grave, you so young and miserably dead.’”

[ Engraving of the death of Astyanax]

Once again, Leon gives us a Venice with all its contradictions: choked with the tourists that are its life blood, filled with hidden beauty, its people by turns generous and ruthless. And once again, she limns a society where favors are traded, and veiled - and not so veiled - threats are made against those who would pursue justice into unwelcome territory.

Of course, much of the beauty of Venice is in plain sight. At one point, Brunetti wanders into a church to look at a favorite painting, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion:

“Brunetti had always been struck by how bored this Christ looked, stuck artfully up there on his cross, posed in front of the hedge of perpendicular spears that divided the painting in half. Christ seemed finally to have come to accept the truth of those warnings that all this business about becoming human would come to no good; He seemed eager to get back to the job of being God.

Passages like this illustrate well the reason why so many of us cherish Donna Leon. This is simply not the kind of scene, not to mention the caliber of the writing, that you commonly find in contemporary crime fiction.

Guido Brunetti is not in the mold of the middle-aged detective with secret sorrows and a messed up personal life. On the contrary, his family - he and Paola have two children - is what sustains him, the one immutable good in his troubled universe. He knows he can go back to them and find renewed strength with which to fight the good fight. And go back he does, especially when a meal is on offer. The entire family frequently has lunch together as well as dinner. We readers are invariably told just what’s on offer chez Brunetti, and it’s inevitably something utterly mouth watering: fusilli with black olives and mozzarella and calamari ripieni, for example. Even the pizza sounds special, when kicked up several notches with mozzarella di bufala and pomodorini!

Believe me, you’ll be as grateful for these interludes of warmth and sanity as Brunetti himself is.

As I was reading The Girl of His Dreams, I kept waiting for the meaning of the title to come clear. It eventually does, with the utmost poignancy.

Donna Leon

In Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri turns a laser-like eye on the experience of Indian expatriates. Back and forth they go, these characters, from India to America and back again (with occasional stopovers in London, the author’s birthplace). If they are not traveling in actuality, then their restless spirits are traveling instead, searching constantly for a way to accommodate the sundered parts of their existence.

In the title story, Ruma is twice exiled, having moved from New York to Seattle. Adam, her American husband, works for a hedge fund and travels frequently. Mother of little Akash and once again pregnant, Ruma is lonely and isolated in her new home. She has mixed feelings about an upcoming visit from her widowed father. “Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer used to.” But her father’s week long sojourn becomes a quiet revelation.

I can’t resist observing, with regard to “Unaccustomed Earth,” that the portrayal of Akash is one of the least sentimental depictions of a fictional child that I have ever come across. All right: to put it bluntly, he’s a nearly insufferable brat! At least, that’s how he struck me, at first.

In “A Choice of Accommodations,” Amit and his wife Megan, a physician, have traveled to the Berkshires to attend the wedding of Amit’s old school friend, Pam Borden. They have left their daughters with Megan’s parents so they can have a romantic getaway, but instead, the trip exposes fissures in their relationship.

Five stories comprise the first part of this collection. Each is like a small novel, filled with discreet pleasures that are inevitably overshadowed by anguish, guilt, and sorrow. Problems that commonly face all families are magnified and complicated by cultural ambivalence.

The second part of Unaccustomed Earth consists of three interlinked stories. Each concerns Hema and Kaushik, a woman and a man who are brought together by destiny more than once. The pain of an irreconcilable loss hovers over these tales. At one point, Kaushik flees his family, working his solitary way up the coast of Maine in the middle of winter:

“I had never traveled alone before and I discovered that I liked it. No one in the world knew where I was, no one had the ability to reach me. It was like being dead, my escape allowing me to taste that tremendous power my mother possessed forever.

I can’t say enough about Lahiri’s gorgeous, gorgeous writing. This book helped me to understand why I pick up, and then just as quickly put down, so much contemporary fiction. IMHO, it can’t hold a candle to this. With this book, Lahiri has raised the bar very, very high.

(I just have to throw this in at this point: one of the ways in which I judge writers of fiction is how well they handle writing about sex. There’s a scene in one of these stories that totally erased my doubts on that score - it was a “Wow!” And now, I’m going to monitor the library’s reserve list on this title…)

In 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Interpeter of Maladies. She followed this story collection with the novel, The Namesake. I recommend both highly, though for me, the former has a slight edge. Lahiri is a master of the short form narrative. My only question about her at this point is whether, in her future work, she will be moving outside the sphere of the Indian-American experience, which clearly constitutes her comfort zone. On the other hand, it won’t bother me if she doesn’t. She has made that world so real, so vivid - and so universal.

And now, I give you Jhumpa Lahiri:

My husband just walked by the computer and exclaimed, “What a jaw-dropper!” I figure if she gets worn out from all that writing, she can make movies instead! (In fact, she appears in the film version of The Namesake, which i have not yet seen.)

Last night , the Usual Suspects enjoyed a particularly bracing discussion of The Indian Bride by Karin Fossum. Mike provided us with some fascinating background on this author, who is currently being hailed as Norway’s “queen of crime.” Now in her fifties and enjoying great success in her chosen field of endeavor, Fossum still regards the publication of a book of her poetry in 1974 as the high point of her writing career.

The initial plot premise of The Indian Bride is notable for its poignancy. Gunder Jomann, a lonely man in his fifties, becomes fascinated with India and decides to travel there in search of a bride. Immediately the reader thinks, Oh, he’ll never pull this off. At the same time, you are rooting for for this kindly, inoffensive soul. Surely he deserves an infusion of happiness into his life!

By some miracle, he goes to India and meets Poona Bai. He falls in love with her, and she with him. They marry; he returns to Norway to make ready a place for her; she is due to follow shortly.

Naturally, this being crime fiction, catastrophe follows. Not only catastrophe, but heartbreak, because we readers have so wanted Gunder’s dream to be realized…

A terrible crime is committed. Group members felt that the novel’s ending left them uncertain as to the true identity of the perpetrator. ( I could not enter into this part of the discussion, having read the book several years ago and not gotten around to re-reading it for this meeting. It is amazing what you forget, especially when you careen from one book to the next, the way I do…) Someone posed the question: Do we as readers feel dissatisfied when the conclusion of a mystery is ambiguous? (Some did; some didn’t.) How often does this happen anyway? (Not very, in the reading experience of most of us). Finally, is such ambiguity more likely to be found in Scandinavian crime fiction?

This last question led quite naturally to a discussion of whether we could identify any distinctive characteristics of these works. Mysteries set in Norway and Sweden have been riding a wave of popularity for several years now. How to account for this? It may be that after decades of gorging themselves on crime fiction from Britain and America, readers have welcomed the novelty of new and exotic settings brought vividly to life by the best of the new international authors. None of us felt sufficiently well read in Scandinavian crime literature to offer much in the way of sweeping generalizations (although it is always such wicked fun to propound sweeping generalizations, baseless though they may be!). A number of us have read several books by the Scandinavians; this was especially true of Mike. We did feel that the prose in these novels tends to be eloquent and spare, while the mood tends toward the bleak (all those long, cold, dark winters, we guessed).

Of course, the quality of the writing depends a great deal on the quality of the translation. Of the books by Karin Fossum currently availabe in Engish, we identified two translators: Charlotte Barslund (The Indian Bride and the upcoming Black Seconds) and Felicity David (Don’t Look Back, He Who Fears the Wolf - both superb, by the way - and When the Devil Holds the Candle, the weakest of the four, IMHO.) We found no stylistic fault with either translator.

Henning Mankell was the first of this generation of Scandinavian crime writers to attain popularity with English-speaking readers, first in the UK and then here. His Kurt Wallanders series is still the gold standard. When those novels was first appearing in the U.S. several years ago, they were arriving out of series order and making avid readers somewhat crazy. This problem has since abated, but not disappeared altogether. In the case of Fossum’s Inspector Sejer novels, we have been getting them more or less in the correct order. But the library pulled a fast one on us by first ordering The Indian Bride direct from a British publisher in 2005 . The British title is Calling Out for You! So the library now owns this novel under two different titles. Unwary readers can be forgiven for thinking they were getting two different novels. (This actually happened to one of the Suspects!) On top of that, the first book in this series, Eve’s Eye, has yet to be translated into English.

A good illustration of the confusion over the publication dates and variant titles of these novels can be seen in this entry for Fossum on Stop, You’re Killing Me!

Meanwhile, Henning Mankell has switched to writing standalones. That’s his privilege, of course. I haven’t read any of his non-series novels - sigh… (That was a from-the-heart sigh of one who is pining for an abandoned series character…)

So, thank goodness we have Fossum’s Inspector Sejer and his excellent second-in-command, Jacob Skarre. (We were struggling with the pronuciation of these names!) And let’s not forget Sejer’s splendid dog, a Leonberger named Kolberg.

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Mike also recommended The Return by Hakan Nesser, and I can recommend What Is Mine by Anne Holt and The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson. (For a more complete list of Scandinavian authors of crime fiction, plus lots of other news about international mysteries in general, see Eurocrime.)

In conclusion, I wish that the naysayers who believe that where this genre is concerned, there’s nothing to discuss, could have present last evening while this highly educated, knowledgeable, and insightful group of people analyzed Karin Fossum’s The Indian Bride.

[Spoilers lurk in ths post - beware!]

Last night, Literary Ladies (aka “Book Babes”) met to discuss The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller. I’ve already posted a review of this novel, and I was interested in what the group members would have to say about it.

The marriage of Delia and Tom Naughton was the subject that intrigued everyone the most. Why would a woman stay with a man who was such an unrepentant philanderer? There followed some discussion on the mysteries of the human libido - especially, as it is manifested in the male of the species. Did we reach any profound conclusions? No - but we had fun speculating!

Ultimately, we decided that Delia must have been genuinely hooked on the adrenalin rush of campaigning. Also, she had never really stopped loving Tom. As a result, Tom more or less got to have his cake and eat it, too. That is, right up until he was felled by a stroke. Even then, it seemed as though he would continue to enjoy the comforts of home, nursed along by Delia as he slowly recuperated. But then “the oddly sullen Meri,” as one reviewer called her, had to work her mischief…

I have to say that this was one of those book discussion nights in which the book itself almost seemed beside the point. All nine of us were either present or former employees of the library and we had alot of gossip to catch up on. This we did during the delicious dinner served to us by Kathy, that most gracious of hostesses. (Mmm, that salmon nicoise was to die for! I’m always grateful when something I’m allowed to eat plenty of also happens to taste good.)

After that most excellent repast, we talked about the book for a time, and then the conversation took a somber turn. We remembered two of our departed library colleagues; then some of us talked about loved we had lost, and how difficult the experience had been. I felt cocooned in compassion and empathy while these sad recollections were being recounted. And we did, finally, get happy again as the evening drew to a close.

I just have to say this: I am profoundly grateful - honored, too - to have these women as my friends.

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This morning, at the library, I led a discussion of The Professor’s House by Willa Cather. (Run, Roberta, run!) I’ve already posted twice on the subject of this singular writer and her memorable masterpiece, and to be honest, I almost did it again earlier this week. I’ve had several days’ worth of Willa Cather immersion leading up to this morning’s discussion.

What a remarkable woman Willa Cather was! Growing up on the plains of Nebraska, she soaked up the cultural riches that Eurpoean immigrants had brought with them to the new land. She read the classics, studied foreign languages, and developed a passion for classical music and opera that lasted throughout her life. She attended the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1895.

While still in her teens, Cather experimented with her appearance and her dress, cutting her hair short and wearing men’s clothing. One gets the sense that her parents were reasonably enlightened people who, realizing that they had a prodigy on their hands, albeit a somewhat eccentric one, allowed her the freedom to follow her muse.

I asked the group this morning if anyone felt frustrated by the way in which the story of Tom Outland’s sojourn in the Southwest (and briefly, and disastrously, in Washington D.C.) interrupts the story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter and his family. One reader was in fact made so impatient that she skimmed a good deal of that part of the novel. We all agreed that it was an unusual structural dislocation, and that as readers, we were made to shift gears rather unexpectedly. And yet, there is some magnificent descriptive writing in Tom Outland’s Story. Those of us who have traveled in the Southwest appreciated the love of the landscape that Cather expresses so eloquently.

On reading The Professor’s House again, I felt, to a greater degree than on my first reading, the pervasive sadness that suffuses this narrative. Godfrey St. Peter has known passion, both intellectual and romantic, but as he enters middle age, he must come to terms with the fact that his great adventures in both spheres of activity are behind him. What lies ahead represents a diminution of all things, culminating finally in that greatest adventure - “that last hard bed” - that last house.

One final word here: I’d like to recommend Willa Cather: The Road Is All, a film that appeared originally as part of the American Masters series on public television in 2005. It is beautifully done.

Back in June, I wrote about The Professor’s House by Willa Cather. This was my first foray back into classic literature after many years of devotion to new books. Of late, I’ve gotten hooked on new books all over again and neglected the back-to-the-classics resolution that I made upon retiring.

But now, here I am, set to lead a discussion of The Professor’s House next month. I only agree to lead a book discussion if I feel that I would profit by revisiting the book in question. Sure enough, as I re-read Cather’s small gem of a novel, I am feeling enriched by it all over again. In the June post, I quoted her lyrical description of Lake Michigan. Here are some other memorable quotes:

“As [the Professor] left the house he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation.”

(And yes, I can’t help thinking right now that you have to hope and pray that the “difference” is something bearable, that it in no way resembles the kind of catastrophe currently confronting Silda Wall Spitzer…)

“I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance–you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations.”

And finally, and most provocatively -

“The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”

If you are local, please consider joining me for a discussion of The Professor’s House at the Howard County Central Library at 11:00 AM on Saturday, April 5. Copies of the book are currently available at the Fiction/Audiovisual Desk.

In 1986, when I found myself reading Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, I had been single for four year and had a young son. Miller’s protagonist in her first novel has also recently left her marriage with a child in tow. The Good Mother is the story of what happens to Anna Dunlap when she begins to have relationships with men - more specifically, it is about what happens to her, at this crucial juncture in her life, as a mother.

When it came out, the book caused something of a sensation. Up until then, very little had been written about what life was like for newly single mothers who, after a long absence, were attempting to re-enter the dating pool. At the time, I had many friends with children who were also struggling to navigate past the flotsam of broken marriages. We all read The Good Mother, and we took it as a cautionary tale. What happens to Anna could happen to you. You may not, after all, have an untrammeled right to another shot at finding a soul mate - at least, not without paying a very heavy price. (I am happy to report that virtually all of my friends from that turbulent time eventually landed happily on their feet, myself among them - with plenty of help from those same friends, and others!)

I have since read three other novels by Miller: While I Was Gone, Lost in the Forest, and most recently, The Senator’s Wife. I enjoyed them all, though in the case of The Senator’s Wife, I have a few reservations. For one thing, I encountered some surprisingly graceless writing. For example, here’s one of the main the characters, Meri, describing a book that her husband Nathan is writing: “It was about the Great Society programs. It interspersed an account of the politics that had dictated the shape of those programs with the life stories of five people who were supposed to have benefited from them, bringing their histories up to the present.”

Another problem I had with The Senator’s Wife was its length. It’s a good example of a book that would have profited by some judicious editing. The main thrust of the story kept getting buried under details, some of them of an extremely prosaic nature. At one point, I thought if I was told once more that someone was either loading or unloading the dishwasher, I would scream! This tendency on the author’s part to regale us with the minutiae of domestic life was all the more frustrating because the story in and of itself really was very intriguing, with an outcome that I for one could never have predicted.

Judging by the title, I thought this book would have more to do with politics than it did. But I should have known better. Miller’s interest and expertise tend to be concentrated, often very intensely, in the sphere of domesticity. Tom Naughton, the senator in question, is characterized as an old style liberal where his political convictions are concerned. With regard to his marriage, however, the word libertine would be more apropos. The way in which Delia Naughton accommodates her husband’s wayward tendencies is the central mystery that drives this provocative novel. (If by this description, you are sensing a likeness to a certain real life high profile political couple, well, it’s probably not pure coincidence. Yes, there’s more than a soupcon of Clinton here, but there are also important differences.)

The Senator’s Wife is going to make a terrific discussion book. I was subbing at one of our library system’s branches on Saturday, and a patron mentioned that she had just finished this book. We immediately embarked on a wide-ranging analysis of the characters and their motivations. We had trouble stopping ourselves - it was great! I’m slated to attend a book club discussion of The Senator’s Wife next month and am very much looking forward to it.

Sue Miller

Last night, the Usual Suspects Mystery Discussion Group enjoyed an in-depth and at times raucous discussion of Fire Sale. Our discussion leader Pauline, always a thorough researcher, provided plenty of interesting background on Sara Paretsky and her series protagonist, V.I. Warshawski. For the sake of comparison, Pauline also read P.I. novels by Sue Grafton (Kinsey Millhone), Marcia Muller (Sharon McCone), and Linda Barnes (Carlotta Carlyle), among others. One characteristic shared by all of these novels: they are written in the first person. This lead to interesting discussion as to what effect this choice of narrative style has on a novel. Is it easier to write fiction in the first person - could it almost be construed as an easy “out” for the author? Does it create more intimacy between the reader and the protagonist? Is the necessary limitation of point of view a hindrance or an advantage? (It does mean, after all, that the reader knows only as much as the narrator knows, and no more.)

The verdict on the Fire Sale was decidedly mixed. On the plus side, we appreciated V.I. Warshawski’s zeal in the pursuit of various malefactors. We also liked her defense of society’s most defenseless - or, at least, poorly defended - individuals. But at the same time, we found her tendency to swing into crusading mode somewhat irritating. As you read the book, it does seem at times as though V.I. is the only right-thinking person in a sea of hypocrites and money-grubbing low lives!

We estimated V.I.’s age as being somewhere in the mid forties; consequently, some of us were skeptical as to whether she could take as much physical abuse as she does in this book and get back in the ring, so to speak, so swiftly. Pauline raised the question as to whether Fire Sale was primarily plot- or character-driven. She felt it was both. We agreed with her in the main but nonetheless has reservations concerning both components of the novel. For one thing, the plot became so convoluted that several of us experienced considerable difficulty following it. (Part of the problem was that the book was just too long.) The cast of characters was large and hard to keep track of; moreover, several of them veered perilously near to being stereotypes of one sort of another. This is especially true of members of the rich and powerful Bysen family; they’re veritable archetypes of capitalist oppressors if ever I saw ‘em! Ditto their retainers. And it didn’t help in the sorting out process that three generations of male Bysens were named William, or some variation thereupon! (Yes, I know, “Buffalo Bill,” etc. But still, it was confusing.)

Interestingly, following a robust and somewhat negative exchange of views, when we were asked if we’d read another title by Paretsky, the response was largely affirmative. We acknowledged that she is a highly respected writer with a considerably body of work. If her output is uneven, she’s got plenty of company in that regard Several in the group had read other titles by her, such as Burn Marks, Total Recall, and Tunnel Vision, and enjoyed them. And her latest, a standalone, entitled Bleeding Kansas, is getting rave reviews.

I want to take a minute before I conclude to sing the praises of the Usual Suspects: What a great group they are! Their humanity and compassion, their love of books, their great sense of humor - all are deeply appreciated by me. It is a pleasure to spend time with them.

Friday night I led our book group in a discussion of The Great Gatsby. I started in the time honored fashion, with a brief background on the author. F. Scott Fitzgerald was born St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. The Fitzgeralds already had two daughters; in the time that Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald was pregnant with Scott, they lost both girls. When Scott was still very young, his mother had yet another daughter, who died within an hour of her birth. It wasn’t until Scott’s sister Annabel was born that he ceased to be an only child. (Annabel survived to adulthood, but she and Scott were never close.)

What an appalling recitation! A hundred years later, we can scarcely imagine such loss. It’s not surprising that Scott Fitzgerald’s mother was protective in the extreme, and equally unsurprising that he came to resist and resent her hovering attentions.

Scott Fitzgerald attended a private Catholic school and then went on to Princeton. In neither place did he distinguish himself as a student. When the U.S. entered the First World War in 1917, he left college in order to enlist. He never did receive his Princeton degree.

Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in the same way that Gatsby met Daisy: he was stationed at an army base near Montgomery, Alabama, where the beautiful, madcap Zelda was holding court as queen of the local debs. Unlike Daisy, Zelda waited for her man until the war’s end. Scott completed his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. It was a smash hit, and he and Zelda married the same year. Later that year, their only child “Scottie” was born. They were living at the time in New York City.

How golden everything must have seemed to them then; the future full of fame, money, and fun. And so it was for a short time (although The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, did not garner anywhere near the acclaim, or sell nearly as well, as had This Side of Paradise). The rest of their story is well known: Zelda’s descent into mental illness, Scott’s struggle with alcoholism, the wild living beyond their means. We were struck in particular by the Fitzgeralds’ rootless, peripatetic existence: New York, Paris, Hollywood, briefly back to St. Paul, Baltimore, all throughout which Scott continued to chronicle his impressions of the Jazz Age (his coinage). Some of the moving around was made necessary by Zelda’s placement in various clinics. She was ultimately diagnosed as schizophrenic. The adolescent high spirits that had made her a local celebrity in Montgomery presaged something much darker that lay in wait for her and Scott.

Zelda finished life in a sanatorium in North Carolina; as for Scott, he was a played-out alcoholic in Hollywood, what was left of his life sustained by the presence of his last great love, Sheila Graham. He died in 1940 at the age of 44. Scott maintained a correspondence with both Zelda and Scottie up until the time of his death.

In 1958, Sheila Graham published Beloved Infidel, a memoir of her time with Scott Fitzgerald. I remember my mother and her friends discussing this book excitedly but in whispers. In the big-happy-family world of the 1950’s, adultery was the love - one of them, at any rate - that dared not speak its name.

(Although Hemingway and Fitzgerald were close friends while both were living in Paris , there was never love lost between “Papa” and Zelda. At one point, Hemingway wrote to John Dos Passos to say that Fitzgerald “…should have swapped Zelda when she was at her craziest but still saleable back 5 or 6 years ago before she was diagnosed as nutty…” This from a man who ran through wives like dirty tissues.)

There is something overwhelmingly sad about the fate of the Fitzgeralds. The tragic, frenetic drama of their lives can easily overshadow Scott’s literary achievements. Clearly, it was time to turn to the novel itself.

I asked what the experience of reading - or in most cases, re-reading - The Great Gatsby had been like. The very first comment addressed Fitzgerald’s prose. We agreed that as high school or college students, we had read the novel for its plot and its depiction of the so-called Roaring Twenties in America. We had not been particularly sensitive to the beauty of the writing. I cited one of my favorite passages, near the beginning of the book:

“For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened–then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.”

Again and again we encounter this extraordinary grace of expression, which seemed to flow unforced from Fitzgerald’s pen.

From there, the discussion went forward with spontaneous enthusiasm, needing very little prompting from me. (And trust me, this is how you want a book discussion to proceed. Let’s hear it for books that make it this easy! I haven’t “led” a discussion this effortlessly since I did Penelope Lively’s The Photograph for the Central Library book club.) We discussed several of the points mentioned in my recent blog entry on Gatsby: the casually voiced (but nonetheless hurtful) racist and anti-Semitic sentiments, the way in which children were marginalized in the lives of the rich and socially prominent, and the concomitant absence of the affect of parenthood on the psyches of the parents. We agreed that this presented a stark contrast with the child centered attitude that characterizes our own times.

What, someone asked, did Tom Buchanan see in a coarse piece of work like Myrtle Wilson? We agreed that she was his walk on the wild side, an angry, bored housewife seemingly condemned to life in the ash heaps, under the all-knowing eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.

Were any of the characters in the novel based on actual people? Two seem fairly certain: Arnold Rothstein as the basis for Meyer Wolfsheim, and championship golfer Edith Cummins as the basis for Jordan Baker. (Aside from being implicated in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Rothstein is reputed to have been the model for Nathan Detroit in Damon Runyan’s story “The Idyll of Sarah Brown.” This story then became, via the alchemy of Broadway, the memorable musical Guys and Dolls.)

Several in the group had knowledge, or had even visited, sites associated with the Fitzgeralds. One who has family in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area was familiar with the Fitzgerald house on Summit Avenue in St. Paul where Scott Fitzgerald grew up. Another person, a native of Baltimore, knew the house rented by Scott Fitzgerald while Zelda was a patient at Sheppard Pratt; she had also seen Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda perished in a fire in 1948.

Jay Gatsby’s father Henry Gatz, who travels to Long Island from his home in the midwest for his son’s funeral, seemed to us an almost unbearably poignant figure. He has a compulsive need to harangue Nick on the subject of Jay’s achievements: “‘He knew he had a big future in front of him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.’” One can almost hear Linda Loman thirty years on wailing about Willy: “‘Attention must be paid! Attention must be paid to such a man!’” But precious little attention was paid to Jay Gatsby after he was murdered. His funeral was notable for the people who stayed away, in particular Tom and Daisy Buchanan, whom Nick Carroway famously denounces: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”

The night before the discussion, I watched the documentary F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams. This film is part of the American Masters series which appears from time to time on public television. It was great to see and hear Ward Just and E.L. Doctorow talk about Fitzgerald, but what really amazed me were the reminiscences of people who, as children, had known Scott and/or Zelda, either in Baltimore or in Montgomery, Alabama (where the former Sayre residence is now the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum).

Also, I recommend a site established at the centenary of Scott Fitzgerald’s birth and maintained by the University of South Carolina.

This is E.L Doctorow, from his essay “Fitzgerald’s Crack-up” :

“Of that triumvirate of hero-novelists who came of age in the 1920s, we may salute the big two-hearted pugilist and stand in awe of the mesmerist from Mississippi, but it’s the third one we mourn, the Jazz Age kid, our own Fitzgerald. He was the most natural and unforced of the three authorial voices; his plots required minimal invention; his settings were for the most part the surroundings of his readers. All of that was working the high wire without a net. He lived rashly, susceptible to the worst influences of his time, and lacking any defense against stronger personalities than his own; and when he died, at forty-four, he was generally recognized to have abused his genius as badly as he had his constitution. Yet at his best, in The Great Gatsby, much of Tender Is the Night, and the incomplete Last Tycoon, he wrote nearer to the societal heart than either of his august contemporaries.” [This piece is included in Creationists: Selected Essays by E.L. Doctorow.]

We ended our discussion with a reading of the concluding paragraphs of the novel. Here’s Jonathan Yardley, in an appreciation of The Great Gatsby that appeared a year ago in the Washington Post: “That famous passage — every passage in “Gatsby” is famous — is on the novel’s final page, near the end of six pages of prose so incandescent as, in my case quite literally, to send shivers down the spine.” That’s the effect it has on me, no matter how many times I read it. [Scott and Zelda in 1926]

P.S. Thanks, “Book Babes,” for being such terrific “discussers” - and even more, for being such great friends!

My goal here is to record my impressions upon re -reading this classic novel for the first time in decades. I wanted to do this before gathering background information or perusing any critical material in preparation for a book club discussion.

[Spoiler Alert: I am writing this with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the plot of The Great Gatsby. If you are not, or if you don't recall some key plot points, you might want to postpone reading this until you've had a chance to read - or like myself, re-read - this novel.]

My very first impression was that this was surely the most vapid, frivolous, just plain irritating group of people I had encountered in or out of a novel for a very long time! They fairly set my teeth on edge: Tom Buchanan, that mulish hypocrite, and his fluttery wife Daisy who, because of a certain superficial charm and lack of guile, is able to mesmerize men, and Gatsby himself, with his wild parties and sinister hinted-at underworld connections. One could be forgiven for given for shaking one’s head in wonderment: Just who the heck are these people, and give me one good reason to care about them!

That they were modeled on Scott Fitzgerald’s boon companions during the so-called Roaring Twenties, I know. Still, a small amount of time spent in their company seemed like an eternity. They come across as a money-grubbing, ignorant bunch - and worst of all, they seem utterly lacking in any kind of moral compass.

Okay, I’m done fulminating (although it really is such fun, I hate to stop). Other initial impressions:

Some of the descriptive writing is wonderful. Here is Nick’s first glimpse inside Daisy and Tom’s house: “A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.” This passage is a great example of less being more. At other times, though, Fitzgerald strains too hard for a literary affect: “Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees–he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.” Well, really…

The occasional literary allusions are skillfully deployed and show what a Princeton education means - or at least, what it meant in the early part of the twentieth century. I cheated a little here and googled two of those allusions. In one instance, Nick stares at Gatsby’s mansion “…like Kant at his church steeple.” As he wrote his philosophical treatises, Immanuel Kant was apparently steadied in his efforts by gazing out his window at the steeple of a nearby church.

I was also intrigued by Nick’s referring to Gatsby as Trimalchio. It seemed to me that I had heard that name recently, and in fact, I had. Trimalchio is a character in the Satyricon by Petronius, an author who lived in Rome during the age of Nero. (This work was briefly discussed by Professor Elizabeth Vandiver on the Teaching Company course on Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.) The Satyricon contains an extended passage in which a riotous feast, given by one Trimialchio, a freedman of great wealth, is described in lurid and colorful detail. A great many people attend the festivities, which go on for many hours. The similarity to Gatsby’s bacchanales is at once apparent. In fact, it turns out that Fitzgerald’s original title for this novel was Trimalchio in West Egg. (One can only be grateful that he decided against it. Just imagine twenty-first century high school and college students gazing upon the title on their syllabi and exclaiming, “Who?? From where??”)

I had completely forgotten about the casually expressed racism and anti-Semitism that occasionally appear in Gatsby. They are repugnant now; they should have been repugnant then. Okay, that sort of thing was part of the zeitgeist - but that doesn’t mean I have to forgive it. On the contrary, it served to increase my antipathy toward these people and their superficially elegant milieu.

I had also forgotten the ubiquitous servant class. Chauffeurs, maids, child minders, even butlers are ever ready to service the needs of these nouveau aristocrats. And speaking of child minders, there is one thing I do remember from my previous reading of Gatsby: children, the fact of them, impinges not at all on the lives of these characters. This is true whether the children are your own or someone else’s. (This seems to me like an affectation from borrowed from the old English aristocracy, one of many.)

There’s the scene in which the “freshly laundered nurse” brings Daisy’s daughter into the company to be admired, albeit briefly. Daisy caresses her and coos over her; in a rather absurdly formal gesture, Nick and Gatsby shake her hand. Tom, her father, does nothing. Re Gatsby’s perception of the child, called Pammy by her nurse, Nick observes, “I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.” Small wonder! (And notice the use of the pronoun “its.”) Motherhood appears to have had virtually no impact on Daisy’s psyche. Once Pammy has been whisked out of the room by the nurse, she immediately ceases to be an object of interest to the adults.

Looking over what I’ve written thus far, I’m struck by the negativity of my comments. The fact is, I did experience a growing empathy for the main characters as the narrative gained momentum. I began to feel more forgiving of Daisy, Gatsby - even Tom. Their basic humanity began to assert itself. For me, the turning point came during the confrontation at the Plaza Hotel. Even someone reading this novel for the first time would have gathered by that point that disaster was lurking in the wings, waiting to ambush this increasingly unhappy group of people.

Unfortunately, just as I was beginning to soften, I got annoyed all over again, especially at Gatsby for continuing to obsess over Daisy. It was as though the terrible accident that had claimed the life of Myrtle Wilson were of no consequence (not to mention the terrible part Daisy played in that accident and its aftermath). Nick’s last words to Gatsby are, “They’re a rotten crowd…You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” This, to man who has just colluded in the cover-up of a hit-and-run!

Still, as I just said, my sympathy had by then been aroused. I felt most intensely for Nick, whose birthday, a momentous one, is ignored, and who is forced into the role of the bystander who watches these events play out with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. How bitter he sounds as he famously pronounces judgment on the Buchanans: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” As he, Nick, was in fact forced to do.

Finally, at the very end, Fitzgerald throws open his story so that it encompasses the history of Long Island, of New York, of America itself, where the urge to re-invent oneself seems all but irresistible. Those who succumb to that urge sometimes achieve greatness and wealth, or, just as likely, they are overwhelmed and destroyed. You cannot know how it will finish when you first start out, the author reminds us. He almost seems to invoke Camus’s benignly indifferent universe. The writing in the last two pages soars; you would have to be made of stone not to be moved by it.

[I couldn't stop staring at this picture of Fitzgerald, in what must have been a rare moment of repose. Such an emblem of a Lost Generation...]

Away is the story of Lillian Leyb, a Jewish woman who has recently fled Russia after the massacre of her entire family. Or nearly her entire family…

Lillian’s first port of call is Manhattan, where, by dint of her artless but irresistible charm, she gains entree into a circle of people involved in the Yiddish theater. Amy Bloom’s vibrant re-creation of this lost world was for me, hands down, the best part of the book. And I have to say here that there is a good deal of subjectivity in this response. Suddenly I was seeing Yiddish words and phrases - keine hora, zay gezunt, mamzer - that I had rarely encountered in my adult life but remember as the background noise of my childhood. (So, hello, Grandma Mary! Yes, my mother’s mother was named Mary; go figure.) Bloom reproduces not only the language but also the speech patterns of these passionate, boisterous, sometimes despairing immigrants with uncanny accuracy.

This portrait of Jewish New York in the 1920’s is filled with affection and humor. One of my favorite characters is Yaakov Shimmelman. Here’s what it says on his business card:

“Yaakov Shimmelman

Tailor, actor, playwright,

Author of The Eyes of Love.

Pants pressed and altered.”

Poor Shimmelman, a hopeless romantic who gets just a little - precious little - in return for his devotion to Lillian!

About half way through the book, Lillian is told by a new arrival from the old country that an especially cherished member of her family might still be alive and currently living in Siberia. The source of this intelligence, her cousin Raisele, is an opportunist of dubious veracity; nevertheless, Lillian knows at once that must get to Siberia somehow and find out the truth for herself. Thus begins a cross country odyssey filled with adversity and incident. Some of the incidents were, for this reader, simply too outrageous (not to mention sordid) to be believed. That was part of my problem with the book’s second half. The other problem was that I wanted to be back in New York, among the immigrants, who might, in my imagination, cross paths with my own grandparents.

[Left to right: my maternal grandmother Mary in 1935; my mother, probably around 1934; my grandmother, my mother and myself, some time in the mid-1950's. My mother's name was Lillian.]

Well, as I said, that was my problem. I stayed with this novel because of the compelling nature of Lillian’s quest, and because of Lillian herself. Although her adventures at time strain credulity, I found myself nonetheless rooting for her and admiring her. This, I thought, is the gritty stuff that immigrants must be made of if they hope to survive in their brave new world. I was deeply moved by the novel’s concluding scenes; in them, the author won me back.

[ Soundtrack: the third and fourth movements of Symphony No.1 by Gustav Mahler. The dirge-like sonorities of "Frere Jacques" transposed to a minor key, the jaunty, swooping clarinet - why, it's klezmer music, smack in the middle of this gigantic orchestral opus! If you can, get the classic recording with the Columbia Symphony led by the legendary Bruno Walter. Walter, in his youth, knew Mahler. Listen to the entire work, and be grateful that this complex, charismatic man lived among us and gave us this masterpiece.]

( Follow this link and click on the picture of Amy Bloom and “Barnes & Noble Media” to hear an interview with the author about Away. But be warned: IMHO, the interviewer relates rather too much of the novel’s plot in her introductory remarks.)