A Well Deserved Pulitzer Prize
Back in November, I wrote a brief review of A Day in the Life Of Abed Salama. Reading that post now, I regret that it was so reserved and devoid of genuine praise. True, Nathan Thrall tells a heartbreaking story, and at this point in my life, I am wary of stories like this.
Nevertheless, it was a terrific book. I had trouble putting it down. I was very deeply moved by it. These people are filled with goodness and kindness; I hated to read about their suffering and prayed for the easing of their pain.
On May 6, it was announced that A Day in the Life Of Abed Salama has been awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. I was deeply gratified to find this out. It is such a deserving selection.
The Great American Novels: A List from The Atlantic, My Take, Part Two
[Click here for Part One.]
I was really pleased to see two of my favorite mysteries on this list: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald. The Chandler title is revered by many crime fiction fans and does not need any additional boost from this list or from me. Nevertheless, it’s great to see it included with the likes of The Great Gatsby, A Farewell To Arms, The Sound and the Fury, The Invisible Man, and other acknowledged classic works of fiction. (But not The Catcher in the Rye, a book which I find irritating and overrated.)
The case of The Zebra-Striped Hearse is another matter. For quite a while now I’ve been singing the praises of Ross MacDonald, a writer whose gifts, to my mind, have not until recently been sufficiently recognized. (And a big thank-you to Library of America for helping to rectify that situation.)
‘MacDonald’s depiction of mid-twentieth century southern California as a land of material riches and moral and spiritual bankruptcy has rarely been equaled. His mix of noir cynicism with an empathetic view of human vulnerability makes for a strangely heartbreaking reading experience.’
(The above is a quote from a letter I wrote several years ago to the Washington Post Magazine.)
I’ve read all of the Lew Archer novels, some of them twice. I began with The Zebra-Striped Hearse and just kept going. Here is a passage I cherish from that novel:
‘The striped hearse was standing empty among other cars off the highway above Zuma. I parked behind it and went down to the beach to search for its owner. Bonfires were scattered along the shore, like the bivouacs of nomad tribes or nuclear war survivors. The tide was high and the breakers loomed up marbled black and fell white out of oceanic darkness.’
There is one novel that did not make this list, that I strongly feel should be there. That is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I was utterly transported by this book. I remember when I finished, thinking to myself, All these years there’s been talk of who would write the Great American Novel. Wikipedia defines it as “… the term for a canonical novel that generally embodies and examines the essence and character of the United States.” Lonesome Dove does that, and then some.
I can never think of this book without recalling the TV miniseries that was based on it. It was brilliant. How could it not be, with a cast headed by Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Glover, Diane Lane, Anjelica Huston, Robert Urich, and others?
The Hunter by Tana French
Tana French brings the rural life of Ireland vividly to life. For me, that was the best thing about this book.
The Hunter is the third work I’ve read by this author. French is known for writing long novels that are crowded with characters and incident. Other writers in this genre have recently been doing something similar. For the most part, this trend does not work well for me. I like mysteries to have a tight, driven quality. This was decidedly lacking in The Hunter – at least, it was for me.
This book is in the nature of a sequel to The Searcher, where we are introduced to Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago police officer who has taken up residence in a village in Ireland with the tongue twisting name of Ardnakelty. He has established a friendship with Trey, an adolescent girl who lives in the village. Trey – real name Theresa – comes from a rather chaotic family situation in which the father has been largely absent. She and Cal operate a sort of ad hoc carpentry shop in which they repair and build furniture; this undertaking is useful and therapeutic for both of them. It’s clear that Trey could use a father figure in her life, and Cal is more than happy to fill that role.
(In addition to a fast moving plot, I like crime fiction that creates interesting, believable characters, even if they’re not necessarily likeable. French at times succeeded in doing this, especially as regards Trey.)
Trouble arrives early on when Johnny Reddy, Trey’s actual father, suddenly reappears on the scene. He’s been up to nobody knows what in London and has returned bursting with news of a scheme that he claims will make the families in the village a pile of money. Cal has his doubts; the reader can’t help but have them as well.
So what was my problem with this novel? Partly it had to do with the structure. There is loads of dialog among the various characters; it consists mainly of discussions of Johnny’s plans but also covers other subjects as well. The plot advances very slowly. I wondered if there was going to be an actual crime at some point. There was, but it was a long time coming. It was, inevitably, a murder; the victim was someone it was very hard to care about.
Meanwhile, we are reminded at every turn of Cal’s fierce devotion to Trey. I’m all for caring for those among us, especially children, who are in extra need of protection. But somehow in this context, I became impatient with these reminders. I might have found this aspect of Cal’s personality to be somewhat inexplicable.
I think that my chief issue with this novel was that it was simply too long. It would have packed much more of a punch, I think, if it had been cut by a third, or maybe even a half. Toward the end, I was having to push myself to get finished. I even briefly entertained the thought of bailing out early, but I hate to do that when I’m so close to the finish line.
Tana French’s novels typically receive rave reviews. This one is no different. Maybe it’s just me. I’m not entirely negative where her novels are concerned. Of the three that I’ve read, I liked Broken Harbor, a novel of the Dublin Murder Squad, the best. This might have to do with my vast preference for police procedurals. At any rate, a review on Goodreads by Emily May pretty well sums up my reaction to The Hunter. (Scroll down and click on ‘2 stars’ to read Emily May’s review of The Hunter.)
After finishing that book, and breathing a deep sigh of relief, all I could think to myself was, I want a mystery I know I will love: one with a fascinating, fast moving plot, intriguing and unpredictable characters, and wonderful writing. Luckily, I knew just where to turn…
A Return to Old New York: The Wharton Plot, by Mariah Fredericks
In this novel, the redoubtable Edith Wharton involves herself in the investigation of the murder of David Graham Phillips a fellow author. Wharton had only met Phillips once; on that occasion, she’d found him rather insufferably full of himself. Nevertheless, she gets drawn in to the inquiry.
Fredericks does a wonderful job of recreating New York City circa 1910. Edith and her husband, the hapless Teddy, have taken rooms in the fashionable Belmont Hotel. Henry James, her friend and colleague, is staying there also. She seeks his advice from time to time, but he’s rather elderly and distracted at that point in time, and also grieving the loss of his brother, the distinguished professor and powerful intellect William James.
There’s a delightful scene early in the narrative in which Edith, walking past a bookstore, is irritated by the sight of the mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart prominently displayed in the window, while her own work is nowhere to be seen! (Later on, she phones Rinehart to ask for some advice regarding the solving of murders.)
If you’re getting the impression that I found the actual mystery to be the least compelling aspect of The Wharton Plot – well, you’d be right! Also, I must admit that the casting of historical personages in crime fiction is a trend that I’m rather wary of. But I think Fredericks really makes it work here.
I’m not all that widely read in Edith Wharton’s oeuvre, but I have read – and loved – The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Reading The Wharton Plot made me want to return to her works. I have therefore embarked on a collection of her ghost stories published by New York Review Books. It is simply entitled Ghosts. I’m about half way through it at this point. Th stories range from good to great; ‘great’ would definitely apply to “All Souls,” the first tale in the collection.
While I’m at it, I’d like to recommend The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart, available on Kindle Unlimited for $0.00. For a mystery written in 1908, it’s surprisingly readable and quite engaging.
Speaking of Mysteries…
Here are two that I’ve enjoyed recently:
Three Inch Teeth – That’s a scary title, for sure. Dallas Cates, newly released from prison, vows revenge on those who caused him to lose precious years of his life behind bars. One of those on his hit list is Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden and the continuing character in this excellent series. Cates has developed an especially fiendish murder weapon, and it’s a race to the finish to see if Joe and his fellow law officers can stop Cates as he and his confederates rampage through the sparsely populated and stunningly beautiful landscape of the Cowboy State. Another winner from C.J. Box.
In Resurrection Walk, criminal lawyer Mickey Haller commits to the fight to free Lucinda Sanz, imprisoned five years ago for a murder she did not commit. It’s an uphill battle for many reasons; the legal wrangling is excruciating. Haller has his half brother Harry Bosch on hand to act as his investigator. Harry is retired from the LAPD and facing some health challenges, but his cop instincts and his resourcefulness are still intact. Mickey needs them, as well as help from other professionals and witnesses, to win Lucinda Sanz her freedom.
I marvel at Michael Connelly’s ability to grab the read by the throat right at the novel’s outset and not let go until the end. It was just what I needed, and I’m no end grateful!
Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux
After finishing – and hugely enjoying – Leaving by Roxana Robinson, I wanted to jump into another engrossing work of fiction. I felt that it would have to be something radically different from the Robinson novel. As luck would have it, I had recently encountered William Boyd’s glowing review of Burma Sahib. This, I thought, might be just the thing I’m looking for. I was right – it was.
In Burma Sahib, Paul Theroux recounts a fictionalized version of the years spent by Eric Blair in Burma just after the close of the First World War. Blair worked for the colonial police, a job for which he was uniquely unsuited. The novel is a deeply engaging character study. Blair alternates between hating his surroundings and hating himself. In particular, he is repulsed by the ‘sahibs’ who lord it over the Indians and the Burmese in an unthinking and often cruel manner. Socializing in their exclusive clubs, their behavior is boorish. In fact, the British Empire in general does not come off too well here.
Blair himself shares some of the prejudices exhibited by those he professes to detest.. He is not always a likable character, but I was nevertheless fascinated by the way in which Theroux depicts his disastrous missteps coupled with the gradual changes in his personality.
One of those changes has to do with Blair’s growing desire to be a writer. When we first meet him, he is already a compulsive reader and has begun to write poetry. Gradually, surrounded as he is by a mother lode of material, this impulse morphs into an urge to compose stories. All the while, he feels as though he is enacting a part, on the one hand that of a Burma sahib, on the other, that of a shrewd observer at a remove form the action. (No wonder he is so taken by Conrad’s story The Secret Sharer.)
This novel features some truly beautiful descriptions of the exotic landscapes of Burma:
‘They had left the hot glare of the city and its risen dust, the shop signs and hoardings and the clatter of carts, the sullen faces of natives stalled at level crossings, the noses of their bullocks and horses pressed against the horizontal pipe of the barrier. They had entered the jungle and its green shadows and its leaf-scented air, its sheltering trees, the glimpses of green fields and fences, a geometry of gigantic earthen trays of standing water, with rice shoots poking through, his first sight of paddy fields that he’d known only from an illustration in a schoolbook—and those pictures had not revealed the beauty of them he saw now. And bamboo—fountains of it in tight clumps, and some of it dense in thickets, birds nesting in the green striped canes. He smiled when he saw the tree whose name he knew now, the peepul tree, as well as one he wished to know—thick trunk, wide leaves.’
I’ve been reading intermittently the works of Paul Theroux for many years now. He is a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction. The fiction I’ve read is The Mosquito Coast (1981) and The Elephanta Suite (2007). Theroux’s nonfiction mainly consists of travel narratives; among those, I’ve read The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Dark Star Safari (2002), and Deep South: Four Seasons on the Back Roads (2019). I read The Mosquito Coast back when it first came out, and I remember being mesmerized by it. In 1986 it was made into an excellent film, which I’ve long felt that no one knows about but me. I find this perplexing since it had a stellar cast: Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, and River Phoenix, in a role he played before his untimely death in 1993.
(A more recent version of this novel has been made for TV. I have not seen it.)
So, just who is Eric Blair? As the novel is drawing to a close, he as chosen another first name for his second self. That name is George. Some years later, when he became a published and widely known author, he selected a last name to complete his pseudonymous identity. That name was Orwell.
I heartily agree with the sentiment with which William Boyd concluded his review in The New York Times:
‘The late Martin Amis once declared that “novelists tend to go off at 70. … The talent dies before the body.” Theroux is now in his early 80s and this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre. The talent is in remarkable shape.’
So Long, See You Tomorrow
This was actually a re-read, having been recommended to me by a colleague at the library shortly after I went to work there in 1982. It was published in 1980 and was William Maxwell’s final work of fiction, . A retrospective of this author’s work recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, prompting me to revisit this book.
If recollection serves, I like it the first time. I liked it this time too, but with a few reservations. These had mainly to do with the novel’s unremittingly dreary tone. The plot concerns two families, the Smiths and the Wilsons, who are eking out a living as tenant farmers in Illinois in the early 1920s. The story is told by the son of the Wilsons who, at the time of the novel’s opening, is a close friend of Cletus Smith, son of the other family. As the Wilson boy watches – I’m not sure but I thinking his name is William – the relationship between the two families becomes increasingly toxic. Consequences of a shocking and inevitable nature ensue.
Maxwell’s sentences are terse and relatively free of ornament. I guess I could have used a bit more in the way of elaboration – more adjectives! Modifiers of any sort!. Still, the story held me. I stayed with the novel, something I can’t say of a great many others I’ve tried to read lately.
‘Sometimes Cletus jabbers in his sleep. Mostly they lie curled together in what is not a very large bed sleeping the sleep of stones. The north wind howling around the corner of the house only serves to deepen this unknowing.’
This is the only novel I’ve read by William Maxwell. He is highly esteemed, especially by his fellow writers.
(Yesterday I visited the local Barnes & Noble. This is a really big one, not far from our residence here in Barrington. As I wandered the stacks and aisles, I kept seeing title after title that I’d tried to read and given up on part way through. A rather discouraging experience!)
A Psychological Suspense/Legal Thriller, a Police Procedural Set in Navajo Country, and a Thriller in the Classic Mode
In Saving Emma, lawyer Boady Sanden receives the case of Elijah Matthews as part of his work for the Innocence Project. Elijah, who is delusional in a rather benign way, has been ordered by the court to undergo electroshock therapy. Boady and others believe that this treatment is the worst possible thing that could happen to Elijah.
In the meantime, Boady and his wife Dee are fighting an insidious attempt to wrest custody from them of their beloved ward and goddaughter Emma. They had been planning to adopt the girl, but the way things are going, they may never see her again.
The Way of the Bear finds Bernie Manuelito and her husband Jim Chee once again fighting crime in the midst of the great beauty of the Navajo Nation. One can only admire their dedication and resourcefulness, and especially their devotion – to each other as well as to the law enforcement organization that they serve.
What a great job Anne Hillerman is doing in keeping alive her father’s legacy! Her deep love and knowledge of the culture and the landscape of the American Southwest shine through her stories. This is the same quality that we fans so admired in the novels of Tony Hillerman. In addition, she has skillfully brought Bernie – Bernadette – Manuelito – to the fore as a main character in the series. And yes, the “Legendary Lieutenant”Joe Leaphorn is still on the scene. It is a wonderful ensemble cast.
Of these three novels, Hero is the most straightforward thriller. I don’t read many of those, as I prefer stories with more emphasis on character development. But ever since being mesmerized by The Bomb Maker, I’ve been a fan of Thomas Perry’s writing. Hero does not disappoint. It’s a cat and mouse story with a twist: the cat and the mouse keep turning the tables on each other!
Justine Poole works for a private security firm. In the course of protecting a wealthy husband and wife, she is forced to shoot two would-be assassins. This is just the beginning of a situation that puts her in grave danger. She will need to employ every ounce of resourcefulness and courage that she can summon to win this battle for survival.
All three of these books were enjoyable reads. I confess I’m especially partial to Anne Hillerman’s series. I’ve traveled to the Southwest three times, and I love the place, especially New Mexico. The state truly lives up to its sobriquet, Land of Enchantment.
Thrillers
First, a word about this category. This term has been used to describe detective fiction, espionage, and everything in between. I’m using it here to designate novels that are primarily plot-driven, with character, setting, and other elements of storytelling important only to the extent that they contribute to the building and maintaining of the suspense factor.
It must be said, though, that in the titles cited below you will find that the characters are exceptionally well developed. This is especially true of The Goldenacre. More on that below.
–The Northern Spy by Flynn Berry
Tessa will need all the strength she possesses to insure the safety not only of her small son Finn but herself as well. For they are living amidst the perilous uncertainty of Northern Ireland. Tessa works for the BBC and is trying desperately to remain above the noisy fray of partisan politics. But this leaves her with a narrow, treacherous path to navigate. Crucial decisions confront her at every turn.
Tessa has a sister Marian, to whom she’s very close. And Marian has secrets – dangerous secrets. So: Tessa, Finn, Marian…what’s to become of them?
In Northern Spy, we get equal measures of suspense, passion, and deep human feeling. This is an extremely wonderful novel.
(excerpted from a previous post)
—You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott
—The Bomb Maker by Thomas Perry:
Called by me, in a previous post, ‘quite possibly the most gripping thriller I’ve ever read.’ (I actually listened to the recorded book.)
–November Road by Lou Berney
It’s late November, 1963. We meet the following in quick succession:
A small town housewife and mother – think June Cleaver undermined by a restless streak (and a well-intentioned alcoholic husband). Throw in a small time hood and glad hander steeped in the ethos of the Big Easy. Then there’s a vicious mob boss and his highly unconventional enforcer.
It’s a combustible combination. And into its midst bursts an assassination that shakes the world. What has that got to do with this oddball cast of characters? More that you’d think….
This was an amazing read. Toward the end I got so tense and agitated, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to race through the rest of the book or hide it under a stack of magazines – anything to avoid the conclusion I was dreading….
An outstanding thriller, on a par with The Bomb Maker. (excerpted from a previous post.)
—The Goldenacre by Philip Miller
The Goldenacre is many things at once: a thriller complete with a cunning plot and a twist at the end that I, for one, did not see coming; a terrific sense of place, that place being Edinburgh, a compelling cast of characters whose motives are not always obvious, and finally, writing that absolutely soars.
The title refers to a painting attributed to Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Here is how it is described:
“Mackintosh had painted a blaze of white sky, and, within that blaze,
something living and diaphanous. In the distance sat the black of the
Pentlands. They had been rendered as if they were not bare hills
stripped of their native trees but two giant legs and a mammoth body: a
distant giant cut from the landscape. The perspective of The Goldenacre
was unnerving: the field was both flat and three-dimensional, and the
height down to the foreground was precipitous. Throughout, the colours
were bold and watery, as rich as a passing reality, as sorrowful as a
dream departing upon waking.”
—The Last Trial by Scott Turow. Starting with Presumed Innocent in 1987, Scott Turow has produced one legal thriller after another. Each one has been distinguished by a consistently high standard regarding plotting and characters.
—Slow Horses by Mick Herron. In creating the Slow Horses (Slough House) series, Mick Herron has introduced something new and, I might add, vastly entertaining into the field of espionage fiction. These novels are the basis of a very successful television series starring Gary Oldman.
The following three authors are currently writing espionage novels in the tradition of the great John LeCarre:
—Small Boat of Great Sorrows and The Warlord’s Son by Dan Fesperman
—A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming
—The Matchmaker and The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich
The case of Paul Vidich is an especially interesting one. The events related in The Coldest Warrior are based on a true story, one to which this author has a personal connection. That story – a chilling one to be sure – is told in a six part docudrama by Errol Morris entitled Wormwood..
My post on this subject appears in a slightly edited form in the journal Mystery Readers International (Volume 37, Number 4. Winter 2021, Cold Case Mysteries.).
I’d be happy to go back and reread any one of these fine novels. That goes especially for The Goldenacre and Northern Spy.
Oh and Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope that where reading is concerned, you have a Thrilling New Year!
Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life, by George Eliot
I was so enraptured by Thunderclap, I couldn’t imagine what to read next. Fiction or nonfiction – it had to be something altogether wonderful, brilliant, unforgettable…
It had to be Middlemarch.
I first read this book decades ago, during my inexorable march though all the classics that I never had time to read while I was majoring in English in college. Even amid that welter of memorable prose and riveting storytelling, Eliot’s masterpiece stood out in my memory. I had long desired to reread it when Rebecca Mead came out with My Life in Middlemarch in 2014, reminding me yet again of that intention. Then, rather oddly, I began seeing Eliot’s novel on an increasing number of lists of favorite books of all time posted by various individuals – all passionate readers like me. Obviously, the time had come.
Middlemarch was written in the early 1870s, but Eliot sets her work in earlier in the nineteenth century, 1829 to 1832, when the effect of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to make themselves felt in England’s rural hinterland. Middlemarch is just such a place. The novel tells three love stories; the fates of the six characters thus involved unfold against the back drop of a provincial society on the cusp of major and irrevocable change.
So: what happens when Dorothea Brooke, a stern yet fascinating young woman, marries Edward Casaubon, a man who…well, put it this way: to make his acquaintance is, for a variety of reasons, to find oneself utterly dumbstruck.
Mr Casaubon is an ordained cleric who aspires to scholarly greatness. He is laboring – and I do mean laboring, a word which in this case rightly evokes an image of unrelieved drudgery – on his magnum opus, entitled (with no hint of modesty) A Key To All Mythologies.
By the time the reader meets him, he is already woefully beset by the difficulties inherent in this project:
‘Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.’
Completely preoccupied by his (futile) scholarly endeavors, Casaubon has no idea how to be a loving husband – how to a cherish a worthy wife like Dorothea. She meanwhile, in her efforts to act as his helpmeet, only succeeds in alienating him by convincing him of his true inadequacy:
”There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that inappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.’
It may be readily imagined how much pain this situation brings to both parties. This is especially true of Dorothea, whose nature is at once passionate and generous, and informed with high, if unrealistic, idealism.
Now, there is a phrase that is at once abstruse and beautiful: …’a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts….’ It may serve as a reminder that we are visitors in a literary world radically different than our own. I have found that it takes a major intellectual readjustment to read the Victorians in a way that flows smoothly. The sentences are longer and sometimes seem convoluted. And the vocabulary can be challenging. And yet, once I became accustomed to this different means of expression, I began to enjoy it – even to crave it.
Now I love it.
Middlemarch is a big, sprawling epic; I’m in no way trying to do it justice in this space. I am only trying to commend it to you, with all my heart.
I was looking for the 1994 BBC version of this novel when I came across this video on YouTube. I disliked it at first because of the song “Hallelujah,” which I feel as been somewhat overused and at any rate seemed inappropriate in this context. Oddly, however, I watched it a few more times and found myself liking it very much.
Juliet Aubrey is not an actress that I know, but she seems very fine in the role of Dorothea. In the final scene, the expression on her face – of courage, serenity, and love – is intensely moving. Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw is likewise perfectly cast.
(I was somewhat surprised to encounter Patrick Malahyde as Casaubon, since I have so enjoyed his performance in the title role of the Inspector Alleyn Mysteries.In this series, Roderick Alleyn’s love interest, the artist Agatha Troy, is played by Belinda Lang. She is married to Hugh Fraser, best known as the stalwart if not overly bright Captain Hastings in the Poirot mysteries starring David Suchet. This has nothing to do with Middlemarch, but I love uncovering facts like this.)
Obviously, the next book to read was My Life in Middlemarch. Rebecca Mead’s book is a mixture of memoir and literary analysis, and I enjoyed it very much. Her research on the life and work of George Eliot was deeply impressive.
There is a new book on Eliot entitled The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, by Clare Carlisle. This topic was covered pretty thoroughly by Mead, but nonetheless I think I’ll read Carlisle’s book anyway.
Books to the Ceiling 