When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka
I was immensely moved by this novel. Its slenderness belies its power.
In When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka tells the story of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War by relating the experience of a single family consisting of two parents, an eleven-year-old daughter, and an eight-year-old son. The place is Berkeley, California; the year is 1942. As the novel opens, the father has already been arrested and imprisoned in New Mexico. The authorities had hustled him out of the house while he was hatless and still in his dressing gown and slippers. It is an image indelibly stamped in the minds of his wife and children. For the son in particular, it is a mortifying memory of the father he adores.
The mother barely has time to pack before she and her children board the train. Their destination: a prison-like facility in the bleak Utah desert. Once resettled there, their existence is drab and circumscribed; one day is very much like the next. There is no variety and no beauty, with the exception of the wild horses occasionally glimpsed beyond the confines of the camp:
She pulled back the shade and looked out into the black Nevada night and saw a herd of wild mustangs galloping across the desert. The sky was lit up by the moon and the dark bodies of the horses were drifting and turning in the moonlight and wherever they went they left behind great billowing clouds of dust as proof of their passage.
Yet before long, those same horses provide a fresh source of grief.
The point of view from which this story is told shifts from chapter to chapter, as the narration shifts from one family member to another. The boy’s voice is especially poignant, as he struggles to understand what has befallen his formerly happy family, and why. He wants only a return to their former life. He begins to plan for that eventuality, and when the war is finally over and they are allowed to return home, expectations soar:
Nothing’s changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out our old classmates….We would join their clubs, after school, if they let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!
Surely one of the most hateful aspects of prejudice is the way in which its victims internalize the opprobrium of other people. The unreasoning animus of others is transformed into a denigration of one’s own self. (This process is vividly bodied forth in William Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy.”)
A few pages later:
We would accept all invitations. Go everywhere. Do everything, to make up for all the years we had missed while we were away. Yes, the world would be ours once again: warm days, blue skies, the endless green lawns,cold frosted glasses of pink lemonade, bicycles skidding across the gravel, little white dog on long leashes with their noses pressed hard to the ground, the street lamps coming on at dusk, the distant clang of the trolley cars, small voices crying out No, I won’t, the sound of screen doors slamming, the quick patter of footsteps running across driveways, mothers with wet hands–Mrs. Myer, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Thomas Hale Cavanaugh–stomping out onto front porches shouting, Just wait till your father gets home!
The very next line tells us what we already suspect: “But of course it did not happen like that.” In fact, everything has changed, and changed irrevocably.
Julie Otsuka’s writing is elegant and full of poetry; it reminded me of a pointillist painting in its restraint and precision.And just below the surface there runs a current of barely restrained rage. That rage does not break through until the novel nears its end. Some reviewers have called the concluding chapter a mistake. I did not feel that way. By that time, I was ready for an anguished outburst. To me, it seemed a fitting way in which to end this sad and terrible tale.
Julie Otsuka
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Wikipedia has a comprehensive entry on the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during the Second World War. Some of the visuals featured are shocking – at least, to me they are. It was a shameful thing that was done to innocent people.
There’s an excellent review of When the Emperor Was Divine on the blog Books on the Brain.
The Bedlam Detective, by Stephen Gallagher
The Bedlam Detective takes place in England in 1912; there are also several brief but intense excursions into the Amazon jungle. Sir Owain Lancaster ventured forth on these expeditions with plenty of preparation – only it was almost all the wrong kind of preparation, informed as it was with Sir Owain’s colossal hubris. He even took his wife and young son with him, making sure that they were provisioned as the family of an English aristocrat ought to be. The results – madness and death – are pretty much a foregone conclusion.
Now it is Sebastian Becker’s task to travel from his home in London down to the West Country in order to determine Owain Lancaster’s mental state and consequent ability to conduct his own affairs. If he is not competent to manage them, the Masters of Lunacy must take action. Sebastian, who for a time was a detective with the Pinkerton Agency in the U.S., has recently returned to England with his American wife Elisabeth and their son Robert. He’s now in the employ of the Masters of Lunacy in the capacity of special investigator. The meager salary barely pays the rent, but it’s a job, and one that holds a certain fascination for Sebastian. Moreover, this particular inquiry is destined to take Sebastian deep into ominous territory beyond the original remit.
The Bedlam Detective is one of the historical mysteries I included in a recent post about new historical mysteries. At that time I had just begun reading this novel, and I mentioned that Stephen Gallagher’s prose, characterized by “a sort of measured understatement,” very much appealed to me. I’m happy to report that there was no falling off as the novel progressed. In fact, there was unexpected added value in the form of some marvelous set pieces, like this description of a country fair:
First came the noise. Not one Marenghi organ, but a dozen, each one cranked up to drown out its neighbor….their tunes varied as the wind changed.
There was a gateway of painted scenery and electric bulbs that turned the entrance of a common field into a portal of wonders. Beyond it, a bazaar of light and noise. The fair was a portable city of tents and boards, of wooden towers and brilliantly decorated show fronts. Among the temporary buildings stood mighty engines like Babylonian elephants, all crashing pistons and blowing steam, powering the rides with their belts and dynamos.
Talk about putting you right there, in the midst! This is but one of several wonderfully evocative passages. Stephen Gallagher’s deep knowledge of the period about which he writes informs this novel throughout. It is not intrusive or distracting, as can happen with historical fiction. Rather, it acts as an enhancement to this absorbing story of crime, madness, sanity, courage, and love.
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Although a fairly prolific novelist and screenwriter, Stephen Gallagher does not appear to have a series currently on the go. Yet The Bedlam Detective has a tantalizingly open-ended conclusion that left me wanting more. And so I hope that in future Gallagher will favor us with additional novels featuring Sebastian Becker.
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This Marenghi organ was built in Paris in 1910:
Four (hurried but sincere) recommendations
My reading has far outstripped my reviewing capacity at this point, and now I’m heading for the airport. But I simply can’t leave without recommending four books: two are historical fiction, one is a classic of psychological suspense, and one is a biography. All were outstanding, and I hope to write about each of them in detail when time permits. Meanwhile, here they are:
I mentioned The Bedlam Detective in a recent post on new historical mysteries. At that time, I had just begun the novel. Now I’ve finished it and can recommend it without reservation. It’s a vivid evocation of Britain just prior to World War One. Also it’s exceptionally well written.
When the Emperor Was Divine is more than exceptionally well written – it is just beautiful. Beautiful, and almost unbearably sad, this is the story of what happens to one Japanese-American family during World War Two. Events unfold through the eyes of a young boy, who witnesses his family being uprooted and torn asunder. When I finished it, my heart felt so heavy, I could think of nothing else all day.
Of Georges Simenon‘s Act of Passion, John Banville asks, “Has there ever been a more penetrating account of love’s destructive power?” Penetrating, riveting – and profoundly shocking.
When I finished Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, I felt compelled to learn more about just what happened to Ann Boleyn, and why. So I turned to Alison Weir’s biography of that hapless figure in history. The Lady in the Tower was all absorbing and deeply tragic. And some questions are still not answered, and may never be.
Cats in the news
First, there’s the amazing tale of Holly and her 200-mile trek down Florida’s east coast. The story of Holly’s arduous undertaking put me in mind of the children’s classic by Sheila Burnford. 
In that novel, Tao, the Siamese cat, had the companionship of two dogs. Holly, on the other hand, seems to have made her way all on her own.
Holly, reunited with her grateful owners
The January 21 issue of the New Yorker had an especially fine cover:
“Herding Cats,” by Barry Blitt
(Three guesses who the herdsman is; the first two, naturally, don’t count.) This was an exceptionally fine issue, too. I recommend especially David Owen’s “The Psychology of Space.” Here we are introduced to the fabulous Oslo Opera House and its designers, the firm of Snøhetta Architects. 
“Becoming Them” is James Wood’s eloquent, supremely poignant account of his ever changing relationship with his aging parents. And I enjoyed “Experience,” a short story by Tessa Hadley, author of The London Train.
Finally, my daughter-in-law gave me these delightful towels for Christmas: 
Miss Marple, our resident feline, greatly approves of the subject matter of this post: 
“You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead—to which I say: Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.” – Ann Patchett
I now have both a Kindle and an iPad. The latter was a gift from my younger brother, formerly of Harvard Business School and currently employed by Apple at their corporate headquarters in California. Now I just googled Apple to be sure that the address is Cupertino rather than Mountain View. (When you do not live there, the now famous names of the towns of Silicon Valley tend to run together.) To be exact, the current address of the corporate offices is ‘1 Infinity Loop, Cupertino.’ Nearby is the Junipero Serra Freeway, named for the Franciscan Friar and famed missionary.
Frsy Junipero Serra (1713-1784)
Artist’s rendering of Apple’s new campus, now slated to open in 2016
Thus we have the kind if random juxtaposition of past and present – happy, carefree, and jumbled – that to me seems typically American and inspiring of a sort of head shaking but nonetheless deep affection.
Well, I’ve wandered way off topic….
Anyway, I’ve not been using the Kindle much lately, as I’ve been overawed by the iPad’s mighty capabilities. (You were right, Richard!) But lately, where reading is concerned, I’ve found myself desiring less and less to read e-books, preferring instead to have the old fashioned print volumes nestled securely in my hands. More than one person has recently commented to me that they’ve gone over to e-books exclusively. I find such confidences dismaying, especially as they’ve been emanating from persons of my own generation.
I’ve been feeling very differently of late, possibly because I haven’t been traveling in recent weeks (a respite that’s about to end). I’ve been desirous of reading in the old way- and only in the old way, with books, magazines, and newspapers in my hands, positioned to receive the light. So you can imagine how delighted I was by “Don’t Burn Your Books–Print Is Here To Stay,” an article that appeared in the January 5 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Among other encouraging words, Nicholas Carr says this:
Half a decade into the e-book revolution,… the prognosis for traditional books is suddenly looking brighter. Hardcover books are displaying surprising resiliency.
Now, there are times when I think that resiliency is entirely down to me! But no – it seems that others are making a similar discovery. After charting the recent decline in e-book sales, Carr observes: “The fact that an e-book can’t be sold or given away after it’s read also reduces the perceived value of the product.” You may disagree with a few of Carr’s other assertions – I myself would quibble with the allegedly disposable nature of genre fiction – but still be heartened by his analysis of the current state of the world of books.
And then there’s “The Bookstore Strikes Back,” Ann Patchett’s rousing piece in the December 2012 Atlantic. Patchett and her business partner have singlehandedly demonstrated the durability of this beloved retailing tradition. They couldn’t stand the idea that their city, Nashville, was facing a future without a bookstore, and so they did something about it. Despite the odds in the current climate, Parnassus Books has succeeded brilliantly, and not just in financial terms.
In February of last year, during an appearance on The Colbert Report, Ann promised viewers signed copies of State of Wonder if they purchased it through her bookstore’s website. The result; a gratifying spike in sales of this terrific novel.
You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead—to which I say: Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.
Ann Patchett, writer and co-owner of Parnassus Books
Ann Patchett, right, and partner Karen Hayes at Parnassus Books
John Updike on America art: John Singleton Copley and Winslow Homer
What a pleasure it is to be once again reading John Updike!
Upon graduating from Harvard in 1954, John Updike set out to be a graphic artist. Toward that end, he went to London and attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His actual aspiration was to be a cartoonist. In the introduction to Always Looking, he exclaims: “‘How I did love Big Little Books!'” 
Upon returning to the U.S., Updike moved with his family to New York. He began contributing regularly to the New Yorker; thus, his career as a writer, rather than an artist, was launched.
Updike begins the collection Always Looking with a brief, lively, and cogent essay on some of the high points of American art with “…the first great painter cast up by our art-sparse, undercivilized, eastern-coastal New World, a young man as precocious as he was assiduous, John Singleton Copley.”
Born in 1738 of Irish immigrants on Boston’s Long Wharf, his childhood marred by his early death and then, when he was thirteen, by that of his stepfather, the English artist and engraver Peter Pelham, Copley was all his life a striver and, with what I would like to think of as a typically American trait, a learner.
This portrait of Paul Revere is probably Copley’s most famous work – though not, in Updike’s view, his best: “The shirt is splendid, but the hand on the chin appears too big for the face, and the reflection of the fingers of the other in the silver of the teapot seems surreally artful.”
On the other hand, Copley’s portrait of Epes Sargent “…shows a textural brilliance of another sort, in the thoughtful aged face and the puffy, wrinkled hand set off against a coat of plain gray broadcloth.” Updike adds: “The painter’s voracious eye even notes the little snowfall on Sargent’s shoulder from his powdered wig.”
I love this portrait of Mercy Otis Warren, a woman I’ve not previously heard of, although I should have:
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Of Winslow Homer, Updike tells us: “Instead of going to Europe, as he and his family had intended, he went to war. Specifically the Civil War, at the behest of Harper’s Weekly. One of the illustrations that he produced for that periodical is entitled The Army of the Potomac–A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty:”
This was Winslow Homer’s first painting, done when he was in his late twenties.
Boys in a Pasture (1874)
Updike notes that Boys in a Pasture “…gives us a low horizon, a hat of sunstruck straw, a Pythagorean triangle, and beautiful bare feet–we can feel the grass tickle them.”
Was ever a work of art so succinctly and gracefully summed up!
Twenty years later, Homer produced this masterwork:
High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894)
From the vantage point of his cottage on Prouts Neck, in Maine, “Homer wrested images of untamed wildness and power, scenes of water and rock generally unpopulated.” Updike goes on to say of Homer’s famed seascapes in general:
…we cannot but be conscious of the paint itself, of thick white dabbled and stabbed, swerved and smeared into place in imitation of the water’s tumultuous action; we simultaneously witness both the ocean in action and the painter at work. These arduous passages of tumbling foam and exploding spray are at once representative of natural phenomena and examples of painterly artifice; thing and idea are merged in the synthesis of artistic representation.
Sunstruck straw…dabbled and stabbed…Updike effortlessly transforms prose into poetry.
In the New York Times, in November of 2011, Andrew Delbanco noted that Higher Gossip, a posthumous collection of essays and reviews, serves as a “… reminder of what a prodigy we have lost.” How sad and how true. Always Looking does likewise. (John Updike died in 2009.)
The full text of the above essay, entitled “‘The Clarity of Things,’ can be found on the NEH website.
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John Updike, age 9 in1941, in a photo taken by the author’s mother.
Looking ahead: the coming year in reading: historical mysteries
For this reader, 2013 might well be the year of historical mysteries. These are a few that are looking good to me right now:
Kate Williams wrote ENGLAND’S MISTRESS, a biography of Emma Hamilton, which I greatly enjoyed.
I’m already about a quarter of the way through The Bedlam Detective. I was a bit uncertain at the beginning, but I am now well and truly hooked. This mystery is set in England’s West Country, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. Stephen Gallagher writes with a sort of measured understatement that I find extremely appealing.
Reviews for each of the above titles can be found at Kirkus.
The Child’s Child, by Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine
Over the years, my devotion to the works of Ruth Rendell has steadily increased. She is one of the few writers who never disappoint – or, almost never….
Perhaps “disappointed” is not the right term to describe my feelings about The Child’s Child. Certain aspects of the novel were very impressive. Rendell plunges fearlessly into challenging territory; namely, homosexual love and motherhood outside of marriage. Her characters are blunt and unflinching when discussing these sensitive subjects; their clashes come across as real and convincingly abrasive.
Grace Easton is a university lecturer in literature and a candidate for a PhD . As the novel begins, she and her brother Andrew have just inherited Dinmont House, a spacious London dwelling, from their grandmother. Rather than sell it, they decided not only to keep it but to move in and live there. At the time, both are unattached, but soon Andrew becomes seriously involved with James Derain – so seriously that there’s a very real prospect of Andrew’s bringing his lover to live with him – with them – at Dinmont House. What makes this a dicey proposition is that Grace and James have taken an instant dislike to each other. Their animosity grew out of a conversation about the pain inflicted on two groups of individuals who have suffered opprobrium throughout history: unmarried mothers and homosexuals. Who has had to endure the most agony? The conversation became heated. Grace retreated slightly, in an effort to cool things down, but James wasn’t having any of it. (It’s a fascinating argument; you can feel the heat emanating from both parties as James, unyielding and indignant, continues to up the ante.)
The atmosphere at Dinmont House, initially so pleasant, has been poisoned, at least for Grace, through whose point of view we’re following these developments. In light of this disturbing change, what happens next is all the more unexpected and complicates matters enormously.
Have I whet your appetite? Well, The Child’s Child is nothing if not a page turner. This, despite the fact that Vine/Rendell inserts a book within a book smack in the middle of the story of the Eastons at Dinmont House. This second narrative is purported to be by an early twentieth century writer named Martin Greenwell. Though never published, Greenwell’s novel had been privately printed. Grace is avid to get hold of it, as its themes are relevant to the subject matter of her doctoral thesis. Toby Greenwell, the author’s son and heir, has agreed to lend the book to her.
As she settles down to read it, we settle down beside her. The title of Greenwell’s novel is The Child’s Child, and its content proves strangely relevant not just to Grace’s academic work but also to her life, and to the lives of Andrew and James as well. And one thing soon becomes apparent: The Child’s Child could never have been published in Britain, in the early part of the twentieth century.
Two aspects of The Child’s Child have appeared in previous works by Rendell. Writing as Barbara Vine, she used the device of the novel within a novel equally effectively in Anna’s Book (1993). Again as Barbara Vine, she explored various facets of homosexual love in No Night Is Too Long (1994). What I haven’t encountered before, in my three decades of reading and loving this author, is writing that at least at certain times, seems curiously flat – almost, in some instances, downright awkward. For example: “One thing Maud’s mother had never told her was where babies came from, but Maud was already anxious to keep her daughter aloof from the dangers of men’s company so gave her some limited sex education.” It’s a clumsy locution rather than an egregious one, and it could easily have been smoothed out, perhaps as follows: “….Maud, already anxious to keep her daughter aloof from the danger of men’s company, had given her some limited sex education.”
There were several similar instances. A minor character is introduced as Enid, only to become Edith later in the same paragraph. Now, it’s easy to see how this could happen. But it seems to me that someone – the author, a proofreader, or an editor – should have caught the error.
I could not help but wonder if the desire to move the plot along at all due speed took precedence over the desire to write eloquently, with beautifully crafted sentences flowing one into the other.
It’s not that I found a great deal of this kind of thing. It’s just that I am not accustomed to finding it at all in the prose of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Did it spoil the book for me? Not really – not at all, in fact. Both stories were sufficiently compelling that in my eagerness to learn the fates of the respective characters, I was able to overlook a few infelicities.
And there’s more than enough exceptional writing here to act as antidote. Grace’s thesis concerns the portrayal of single mothers in the classics of literature. As she gets deeper into her subject, her empathy for these women deepens accordingly:
So I went to bed, thinking as I often did about how these women felt when they knew they were pregnant, the disbelief, the realisation, the horror, shame, fear, and wish for death.
Later, Grace observes that “One single act of sex can have a profound effect on one’s life….” This time she’s not thinking only of other men and women, but of herself as well.
To sum up, I do recommend A Child’s Child, despite some problems with the writing. I guess that for me the bottom line is that even when she’s not at her absolute best, Ruth Rendell outdistances the competition by a substantial margin. And one thing I particularly appreciate about this novel is that it’s actually about something other than the arranging of characters in entertaining scenarios. Rendell deals with difficult issues in an unflinching manner that I find entirely admirable as well as completely convincing.
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It is my feeling that the masterpiece among the Vine novels is A Fatal Inversion; for the greatest of the non series novels written as Ruth Rendell, I’d choose A Judgement in Stone. As for the Wexfords, I have trouble deciding. She’s such a master of the procedural; they’re all, in varying degrees, excellent.
Geroge Baker as Chief Inspector Reg Wexford in “Road Rage”
Books to the Ceiling 