Mavis Gallant – The Writer’s Writer

     I’ve always wanted to read Mavis Gallant since Fran Lebowitz opined on Charlie Rose that The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant was one of the books of the year.  She sounded fascinating because she was a Canadian who spent most of her adult life in France.  I read a couple of her really short stories from that collection after it went into paperback in Joseph Beth, but didn’t actually buy it.  (I only feel somewhat guilty about that since I’ve purchased a couple trees worth of books at JB).  She died last year at 91 after a lengthy career, though she wasn’t published in Canada until the ‘70s.  Her American reputation was made because over a hundred of her stories appeared in The New Yorker (only John Cheever saw more of his short fiction published there).

     I saw Paris Stories (2002) at this darling independent bookstore in Niagara-on-the-Lake so I bought it and started reading it almost immediately and it ended up taking me about two and a half months even though there’s only fifteen stories.  What happened?  They’re densely detailed and intricate works that were physically difficult to read because the font was so small.  Either Canadians have better eyes than me – quite possible – or they’re used to this font.  Maybe it’s cultural.  

Mavis Gallant in Paris

     In this collection, Gallant focuses mainly on Paris as well as other parts of France and Switzerland while presenting French natives, ex-patriots from North America, and refugees from Eastern Europe.  The stories cover over fifty years from the immediate aftermath of World War II through the 1990s.  An underlying theme is that Europe has never fully recovered from that war and the subsequent conflicts between democracy, communism, and fascism.  Having lived in Europe, it felt like a collective lived memory to me, but I don’t think most American readers would be as entranced.  

Mavis Gallant Writing in Postwar Paris

     In “Forain,” Gallant encapsulates her overarching theme in an image of an immigrant writer’s funeral:

Only a few of the mourners mounting the treacherous steps can have had a thought to spare for Tremski’s private affairs.  His wife’s flight from a brave and decent husband, dragging by the hand a child of three, belonged to the folklore, not the history of mid-century emigration.  The chronicle of two generations, displaced and dispossessed, had come to a stop.  The evaluation could begin, had already started.  Scholars who looked dismayingly youthful, speaking the same language, but with a new, jarring vocabulary, were trekking to Western capitals – taping reminiscences, copying old letters.  History turned out to be a plodding science.  What most émigrés settled for now was the haphazard accuracy of a memory like Tremski’s.  In the end it was always a poem that ran through the mind – no a string of dates.  

Like her compatriot Alice Munro, Gallant writes stories that are much bigger than the form.  Munro’s stories have the psychological detail and complex plot structures of novels whereas Gallant’s stories are the essence of entire cultures and histories.  The major difference between them is that Munro always has one character in a story with whom a reader can empathize; Gallant never identifies with any specific character, but regards them with, as Mary McCarthy termed it, “a cold eye.”   That may be the reason that Gallant didn’t have as broad a readership as Munro.

     However, this approach works brilliantly in the chilling “August.”  Here’s part of a letter that a young woman writes to her psychotherapist about what she sees as their failed professional relationship:

     “What help can you give me?” she wrote.  “I have often been disgusted by the smell of your dresses and your rotten teeth.  If in six months you have not been able to take your dresses to be cleaned, or yourself to a dentist, how can you help me?  Can you convince me that I’m not going to be hit by a car when I step off the curb?  Can you convince me that the sidewalk is a safe place to be?“  

Mavis Gallant at Le Dôme Restaurant in Paris*

     I’m glad I finally read Gallant.  She’s daunting and somewhat involved.  I took much longer with her book (about two months) and this review (about four weeks) than I initially expected.  Perhaps that’s the result of examining work that is classic rather than timely.  Or it could be a result of my lack of focus.  

*Photograph by Paul Cooper

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

     Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) was one of the most popular and well-paid writers in the world from the 1920s through the 1940s.  He experienced an unhappy childhood, became a doctor, and wrote on the side until it could pay him more than medicine.  This happened quite quickly and by thirty, he was already a novelist to watch whose plays were being produced in London and New York.  The real money at the turn of the 20th century was in playwriting and especially in adapting one’s novels to the stage.

The Novelist at Work 

     From there, he went on to success after success, though he was never taken as seriously by critics and by the guardians of the canon as ‘the mandarins,’ which was his term for Joyce, Woolf, etc.  His personal life was fascinating and it’s that aspect which is the engine for Hastings’ work.  Not only was he gay at a time when it was illegal in England and the U.S., which was part of the reason he resided in the south of France for much of his life, but he worked for the British intelligence service during both world wars.  He was probably one of the most well traveled authors of any era and it was those experiences that played into his work.

     Maugham’s highly disciplined writing method depended upon him working four hours each morning on fiction culled from stories told to him by various friends, acquaintances, and strangers during his travels.  He was incredibly prolific, writing hundreds of stories (he felt this was his métier), and dozens of novels and plays over a sixty-five year period.  He had something acerbic to say about many things, including drunks, which makes sense since his most significant partner was an alcoholic.  However, he was also very supportive of younger writers.  He started an award – still given annually – for future generations of authors to travel and thereby enrich their work.  

     Selina Hastings’ research was extensive and Maugham lived a very, very long time.  I felt I was dragging along month by month with him.  It doesn’t help that although the binding on this Canadian edition is smooth and durable, the font seemed archaic and the point size miniscule.  Yeah, I know I sound middle-aged with that comment.  My biggest compliment to Hastings is that her 2009 biography has encouraged me to check out some of Maugham’s writing.  Both The Casaurina Tree:  Six Stories (1926) and Cakes and Ale (1930) sound enticing, especially after I disliked the script of The Constant Wife (1926) in The Shaw Festival’s smart 2005 production.

Harlan Coben: MISSING YOU

    I’ve been meaning to read Harlan Coben since seeing Guillaume Cadet’s 2006 movie version of Tell No One (Ne Le Dis à Personne), which was as close to a modern updating of Hitchcock as anything in the past two decades.  Sarah and I were meeting and I noticed she had Missing You (2014) on a shelf.  She kindly lent it to me.

     Missing You moves lighting fast because Coben cuts between two plots:  NYPD detective Kat Donovan seemingly reconnecting with an old flame on an internet dating site, and a bizarre kidnapping scheme.  Although there is a complex series of events that pull both of these stories together, Coben has fashioned the various plot elements with expert precision.  The two major female characters compelled my attention and I found myself reading very late to figure out the nefarious scheme that drives the modern variation on damsels (and dudes) in distress/chase section of the plot.

Harlan Coben

     Coben conveys the parochial oppressiveness of a generations-old Catholic neighborhood with telling details, especially the number of children per household and what that might mean.  He also ramps up a sense of horror about online dating.  It will make most readers think twice about online messaging and safety in meetings.

Love in Later Life: Works by Ruth Rendell and Kingsley Amis

     Both The Girl Next Door (2014), Ruth Rendell’s penultimate novel and Kingsley Amis’s Booker winning The Old Devils (1986) present a group of married, retired friends reuniting after many years.  In both cases, one of the main plotlines examines heterosexual love between widowed and divorced partners that may have felt a passion for each other at a younger age, but never acted upon it.  These relationships either effect major changes or are the results of internal re-examination.  Characters are reinvigorated because they sense they haven’t time to waste.  

     Devils is funny and charming and has an edge that still makes me remember it almost thirty years later.  Amis may be better known now for his first novel Lucky Jim (1954) and his comic take on the postwar British socialist state and what it meant for both the working and the middle classes.  He was the father of Martin Amis, also a comic novelist with one of the most extravagant, baroque styles imaginable while still maintaining a naturalistic setting (best bets:  Success 1978, Money 1984, Time’s Arrow 1991).  In later life, he turned into a roaring boor of a drunk, but his writing was still sharp and funny.

WWII Londoners

     The Girl Next Door examines a group of late septuagenarians living in contemporary London and its outer suburbs.  They’re connected because they spent their childhoods in the same suburb during World War II.  A pair of skeletal hands, not from the same person, is found by builders working on a new development.  Rendell lets the reader know early who has killed the couple as well as the identity of the female victim.  That mystery remains enigmatically in the proverbial back seat because she’s focused instead on showing people looking back over their lives.

     They have the sense that sixty years have passed very quickly because lives can be summed up in a few sentences, especially when it’s someone else’s.  Things become poignant when some of them either want or are forced to take risks and change their lives.  Some succeed and some fail, while set against the shadow of their eventual mortality, a theme more explicitly stated in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959).  Rendell’s understated, witty style can somehow render intense grief with kindness and display a gallows humor about a sociopath.

Presto Variations by Lee Lamothe

Sometimes it’s okay to say ‘no’

     I bought Lee Lamothe’s Presto Variations (2013) in a charming independent bookstore I’ve gone into a few times over the years in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  It had a really neat cover of overlapping keyboards.  I read the back cover and realized it was a police procedural thriller that seemed to be about money laundering.  I did not focus on the reason for the laundering, which was drug money.  Okay, we all have a blind spot about something and mine is pretty much anything to do with drugs.  Yes, they’re out there and yes I’ve been very close to people who did them and that’s how I know how they can destroy people and I don’t want to see that in ‘entertainment.’

     Lamothe lives in Toronto, which was another selling point for me, but I couldn’t tell exactly where the story was taking place (Toronto, Detroit, Buffalo) as the set-up was on the border, but seemed to start on the U.S, rather than the Canadian, side.  Lamothe demonstrates a jazzy style that owes something to Elmore Leonard with less juice.  It’s certainly not the frenetically baroque voice of James Ellroy either.  Here’s a bit from a conversation between the main launderer and his psychotic second in command, who plans to muscle him out somehow:

      Markowitz hung his head, hangdog.  “I took the shot, that’s all a guy can do, right?  Take his shot.”  He made a guilty smile and started laughing.  “Okay, okay, I’m an asshole.”

      Jerry Kelly didn’t mind kicking a sick cat.  He piled it on.  “Plus, we just lost another eighty.  That guy Petey that said he had a pipeline to get the dough out?  Do a test run with eighty grand?  He just fucked right off.”   Jerry Kelly’s blank blue eyes studied Markowitz gnawing at his lip.  “ I’ll fix that.”

     I read on for another sixty pages where the two lead cops Ray Tate and Djuana Brown were trying to get back to their dream of retiring to Paris and various dangerous lowlifes were setting up their schemes.  One complete innocent trying to do something decent for the world got beaten up and it turned me off.  The prospect of another three hundred pages really didn’t do it for me.  So I skipped to the end and found out that a lot of the lowlifes were killed off and the major asshole was offed in a nasty manner and I thought, “Enh.”  

    It’s like ordering something in a restaurant and then just not liking it, but also not being able to send it back because it was what it was.  I just couldn’t take it this time.

Drood by Dan Simmons

Triumphant tour de force

    I’ve wanted to read Dan Simmons’ Drood (2009) since it was first published, but I was intimidated by its length (771 pages in hardback) because I’m a slow reader.  When I finally got around to reading it, Martha asked me, “How long will it take you to read that?”  I replied, “Probably a month if I make time to do it.”  Actually, it took four weeks, but part of that was due to a plane flight.

Dickens with Daughter Katy (right)

     Simmons focuses on the friendship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.  It’s Collins who narrates the book, addressed to a Dear Readers sometime in the future (around 2008 or so).  The relationship between Dickens- the Inimitable and acknowledged as Britain’s greatest living writer at that time – and Collins – originator of the suspense and detective novels works complexly on a number of levels:  friends, collaborators, relations by marriage (Dickens’ daughter Katy was married to Collins’ brother Charley, who was Dickens’ illustrator), mentor and protégé (Dickens was always willing to give avuncular advice, though not so willing to take it), and most tellingly, bitter rivals.

Wilkie Collins

     The rivalry, however, was on Wilkie Collins’ side.  Dickens may or may not have been aware of it.  There are allusions to Iago, and they’re accurate, though Wilkie feels both justified and disgusted by his feelings and actions.  The daily domestic details of their two lives as they relate to Victorian England (and, to a lesser extent, the U.S.) in the 1860s are both fascinating and pretty awe-inspiring.  Simmons lists his research in the end acknowledgements and it’s on the level of a graduate thesis (or dissertation).

Staplehurst Railway Accident

     However, what pulled me through hundreds of pages was the horrific mystery Simmons sets up with the Staplehurst railway crash disaster in 1865.  Dickens was traveling with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother and the three miraculously survived the crash.  In the aftermath, while assisting others, Dickens encountered Drood, a spectral figure that might be a master criminal or the leader of a cult or a demon.  Dickens tells Wilkie about this and it becomes his obsession.

     During this period, Collins wrote his masterpiece The Moonstone, while Dickens finished Our Mutual Friend, conducted a number of exhausting reading tours, and began yet failed to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  It’s fascinating to realize that magazine serialization and dramatic adaptation were the primary sources of fiction writers’ income, rather than book publications and sales.

     Like one of those serialized Victorian novels, Simmons takes the reader on a tour of England – primarily London – that examines all social classes, the city and the country, the rules for men and women in legal and clandestine relationships, and the official versus the literal underground economy.  Simmons tackles big subjects while enticing the reader through suspense in the manner of the great 19th century British novelists.  He does so without ever losing sight of the action’s main through line. 

The Dickens Family

     The intriguing aspect that ramps up the horror comes out of Dickens’ interest in mesmerism (we’d call it mind reading or mind control nowadays) and it’s eventual connection with Wilkie’s laudanum (the primary ingredient being opium) addiction.  A drug addict as first person narrator calls into question reliability, which Simmons uses as a way for the reader to analyze the plot, especially everything involving Drood.  Even as Wilkie does horrible and eventually monstrous acts, I kept wondering if he was worse than Drood.  Simons pulls a surprising twist at the end, which leads back to the primary relationship between Dickens and Wilkie Collins.  It made me go back to check out earlier conversations between the two to see how he’d set things up.

Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life

99% of readers and reviewers 

love her, but here’s the 1%

     I loved Kate Atkinson’s first novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) because it was a funny, intelligent, biting family saga covering the 1950s through the 1990s in York, England.  The main character was the same age as Atkinson over those years, but I never felt she was a stand-in for the author or that the story was autobiographical.  Instead, the details of middle-class England at that time both resonated and reverberated.  There’s a hilarious sequence when the family goes on a car vacation and things go wrong, both logistically and emotionally.  I also enjoyed her second novel Human Croquet (1997), though it was almost too inventive with its time travel armature.  Everything about Shakespeare, however, was excellent.

Kate Atkinson

     What I noticed about Atkinson was that her novels always had a tricky resolution plot-wise.  In mysteries and thrillers, writers employ what I’ll call ‘shadow plotting.’  What I mean is that the reader is being led down one path by the author, who is creating a completely different pathway that will result in the climax and be explained in a denouement.  For instance, Agatha Christie created a different path for each of her suspects and either Poirot or Miss Marple or Tommy and Tuppence explained who had done what from before the beginning.  Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler practiced this technique, usually through the set up of what seemed to be a simple case, but which was really the lead into something far more treacherous, dangerous, and complex.  Edmund Wilson’s problem with Chandler’s writing was the weakness of the resolution in comparison to the degree of depravity or decadence suggested by the mystery.  In Wilson’s opinion, the resolution would never live up to the intrigue.

     Atkinson would throw in an element that didn’t really add anything to what she had brilliantly created:  penetrating, witty portraits of petit bourgeois Britain.  She’d reveal something at the end that instead of seeming like a Joycean epiphany, just felt peculiar and unnecessary.  I ignored her next couple of books until Stephen King went wild about Case Histories (2004) in Entertainment Weekly.  This was back when his column “The Pop of King” was probably the best all-around accessible popular criticism since Pauline Kael’s 1970s movie criticism.  The difference is that King acknowledged his preferences upfront before critiquing works.  I wish a collection of “The Pop of King” would be published as a book, especially since EW is pretty much dead in the water and has been ever since Jess Cagle left as the editor.

From the BBC Series Case History
with Jason Isaacs and Millie Innes

     Case Histories was extremely well written, but Atkinson juggled four different cases (twice what most of the classic mystery authors generally presented in books) and, though Ian Rankin does the same in his Rebus series, Atkinson creates more complex characters than Rankin so the connections between the cases were more tenuous or indirect than in contemporary mysteries that are more seriously focused on the genre.  I skipped the next three, though I wondered why she was so intent upon writing private eye books, rather than the tragicomic family sagas with which she started.  By the way, the PBS series starring Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie, the private eye, was highly entertaining, though I still didn’t think there was a strong connection between many of the characters (primarily the suspects in the multiple simultaneous cases).

         Life After Life (2013) received adulation on both sides of the Atlantic.  It showcases Atkinson’s elegant, funny style while trumpeting her ‘shadow plotting’ to the nth degree.  In this case, the main character keeps getting killed off and we return to the basic premise – upper-middle class English family from 1910 – 1968 trying to survive and thrive during the tumultuous 20th century, though primarily during World War II.  The English stiff upper lip and genteelly fighting spirit provides the undertow throughout the novel.  The one constant (besides Ursula – named for the little bear star, the protagonist that’s killed off more times than Bill Murray in 1993’s Groundhog Day, but finds herself in a different situation somewhere in Europe during the period every time she’s resurrected) is the family house.  This is no accident.  ‘An Englishman’s house is his castle’ is the old saying and it’s as culturally endemic as ‘American as Mom, the flag,  and apple pie.’  

     For a sense of Atkinson’s style, here are two sequences involving the parents Hugh and Sylvie and their first attachment to the house:

     ‘Lottie (Sylvie’s mother) died with less fuss than was expected and Hugh and Sylvie married quietly on Sylvie’s eighteenth birthday.  (“There,” Hugh said, “now you will never forget the anniversary of our marriage.”)  They spent their honeymoon in France, a delightful quinzaine in Deauville, before settling in semirural bliss near Beaconsfield in a house that was vaguely Lutyens in style.  It had everything one could ask for – a large kitchen, a drawing room with French windows onto the lawn, a pretty morning room and several bedrooms waiting to be filled with children.  There was even a little room at the back of the house for Hugh to use as a study.  “Ah, my growlery,” he laughed.’

And a little later (and, yes, the English love to name their homes):

Fox Cubs

     ‘”Look,” Sylvie whispered.  Two small cubs sprang out onto the grass and tumbled over each other in play.  “Oh, they’re such handsome little creatures!”

     “Some might say vermin.”

     “Perhaps they see us as verminous,” Sylvie said.  “Fox Corner – that’s what we should call the house.  No one else has a house with that name and shouldn’t that be the point?”

     “Really?”  Hugh said doubtfully.  “It’s a little whimsical, isn’t it?  It sounds like a children’s story.  The House at Fox Corner.”     

     “A little whimsy never hurt anyone.”

     “Strictly speaking though,” Hugh said, “can a house be a corner?  Isn’t it at one?”

     So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.

     Though I think that Atkinson is an excellent writer and Life After Life is the best book I’ve read by her, I don’t think she’s great.  The London Blitz sequence, while incredibly detailed and graphic, is not as memorable for me as the one in Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch.  Part of this may be that Atkinson ambitiously takes on most of the 20th century in this book, while Waters presents only a few characters in London during and immediately after the Blitz.  In her latest, Atkinson revives Teddy, Ursula’s younger brother and an RAF pilot during the War, as her protagonist.  I hope she focuses her plot centrally.  I look forward to it.

Jane Smiley: Good Faith

Back to some forgotten 

elements of the 1980s

     I’ve read four of Jane Smiley’s novels:  A Thousand Acres (1991), Duplicate Keys (1984), Moo (1995), and, most recently, Good Faith (2003).  Over a thirty-five year career, she’s written fiction, non-fiction, critical studies (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel from 2005 is an excellent primer for anyone interested in how writers create fiction), and young adult novels.  She has set books in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s, Greenland in the Middle Ages, a Midwestern flagship research university, an Iowa farm, Beverly Hills, and other far-flung places.  She’s moved among many genres:  the psychological thriller, the campus novel, the family saga, the comedy of manners, and short story collections.  She’s wrestled with both Shakespeare and Boccaccio in specific works patterned on theirs.

Lower Manhattan's Financial Center

     What I’m trying to say is that she’s one of the most versatile of writers.  Good Faith takes on the simmering economic mania of the 1980s when real estate began booming, Treasury bills – good ol’ T-Bills that were previously ignored in the popular consciousness – became a commodity, portfolios turned into bargaining chips for borrowing ever greater amounts of money that eventually would not be paid back, and savings & loans morphed from milk and cookies institutions into something resembling economic cocaine.  At the dawn of the ‘80s, cocaine was just a party drug; its full destructiveness wasn’t understood until the late ‘80s, which was when the ‘trickle down’ economy first crashed because borrowers had kicked the can until it boomeranged as a crushing boulder.  I remember the gold and silver markets being tended daily by the media in the late ‘70s, rather than the early ‘80s, but I’m sure Smiley’s research backs up her story.

     Good Faith begins in 1982 and ends in 1984 just as Americans looked towards ‘a new day’ after the final hangover of the Carter administration.  Smiley’s novel could be a cautionary tale for middle-class, small city/exurbia America of the mid-1980s, but it’s actually a look back from the vantage point of the 2001 post-9/11 economic ‘correction.’  Smiley 

The Reagon Era

captures the sensibility of the early Reagan era without ever dressing up the narrative with period pop culture details, which is a mightily disciplined feat.  Good Faith percolates along as the reader wonders whether Marcus Burns, the second main character, is a rainmaker or a charlatan or an out-and-out con artist.  Shaw would have loved this guy, especially as he explains how the federal government’s policy changes in taxes, savings & loans, and various other industries would free up money to grow and grow (though only for those with yachts in the harbor, not the rowboat owners that found themselves metaphorically stuck in the mud when the economic tide rolled out).

     What’s most compelling about Smiley’s novels is how she raises big questions as her subtext, rather than as the actual plot.  A Thousand Acres re-examines the story of King Lear, but touches upon progressive farming practices, while the main characters act from, but rarely articulate, the effects of child sexual abuse.  Moo presents a large university that could be located in a town like Ames, IA, or Bloomington, IN, or Falcon Heights, MN, but the underlying dichotomy concerns the attitudes of the Silent Generation administration, the ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty’ Baby Boomer faculty and staff in middle age contrasted with the pragmatism and lowered expectations of the Generation X students.   When Good Faith 

Baby Boomer Faculty

concentrates on an extended entrepreneurial family in a smaller city somewhere within a couple hours drive from New York City, though we’re never quite sure where, it really bubbles. 

     I haven’t read The Greenlanders (1988), which Jonathan Franzen thinks is one of the most under-appreciated contemporary American novels, but those I’ve read usually feel like they’re in the Midwest or the Plains states.  Even Duplicate Keys, which hinges on a harrowing sequence where the main character believes a suspected killer is quietly burglarizing her in the middle of the night, doesn’t exactly capture NYC in the late ‘70s.  It could be any big American city and since the plot revolves around the music industry, it might as well be L.A. or Nashville except for the fact that the main characters walk everywhere and that’s very significant in the book.  

Jane Smiley

      Locale is not a strong element of Smiley’s writing, though research is omnipresent.  Actually, there’s so much information about how money works in Good Faith that I felt I was trapped in an Arthur Hailey novel like The Moneychangers (1975) or Airport (1968), where it was always publicized how many interviews he’d conducted, though he still ended up with cliché-driven plots and stick figure characters.  Only Maureen Stapleton and Lee Remick were able to breathe any kind of life into the screen adaptations of his books.  Smiley is in a different class of writer from Hailey in quality, but perhaps not in terms of intention.  However, she doesn’t sell anywhere near like he did..  Even though A Thousand Acres was celebrated in its day, Lorrie Moore chose it as a current unjustly overlooked book in the May 2015 O magazine.  

     When Carole and I were chatting about writers a couple of weeks ago and I mentioned Smiley, she said, “Oh I got through ten acres of her big one and gave up.”  I posited that it was because of Smiley’s writing style.  It’s understated to the point of bland.  She strips some of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style to their basic points and dissipates – actually, she pretty much erases – a strong individual voice.  Here’s the opening:

This would be ’82.  I was out at the Viceroy with Bobby Baldwin.  Bobby Baldwin was my one employee, which made us not quite friends, but we went out to the Viceroy almost every night.  My marriage was finished and his hadn’t started, so we spent a lot of time together that most everyone else we knew was spending with their families.  I didn’t mind.  My business card had the Viceroy’s number in the corner under “may also be reached at.”

    This could be the start of an updated private eye thriller or a literary equivalent to Cheers, which also premiered in 1982.  Instead, the Baldwin family members give it a sense of the wild, idiosyncratic hilarities of a Preston Sturges movie.  That’s the greatest attraction, rather than the gentle Mephistophelian comedy Smiley is more intent upon engineering through a narrator who isn’t very dramatic.

James M. Cain: The Cocktail Waitress; Robert Benton: The Late Show

A perplexing, somewhat dated 

late career novel and a small, understated gem

     While browsing at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, TN, I found James M. Cain’s The Cocktail Waitress, otherwise known as ‘the lost final novel’ on the cover.  Landmark Booksellers is worth a look when visiting Nashville; it sells new, used, and rare books and sometimes even has a group sitting around talking politics and philosophy.  It’s in a Colonial Revival mansion with various rooms, akin to The Book Loft in Columbus’s German Village and one of the coolest landmarks in that city, each space housing different books by type and genre.

     Actually, the first time I read Cain was in high school with a four novel collection I found at The Book Loft.  Yes, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943, though first serialized in 1936) are suspense classics that present desperate and down on their luck characters in the 1930s resorting to schemes that start simply and go disastrously wrong.  Neither book is as lurid or sexy as the simultaneously prurient and puritanical movies adapted from them.  Bob Rafelson’s 1981 version of Postman, however, sort of goes over the edge and Jack Nicholson was a little too old and ugly in the lead; he didn’t seem that different from the aging husband that he and Jessica Lange planned to kill.  

Barbara Stanwyck

Billy Wilder’s 1944 version of Indemnity updates the action by a decade, thereby leaving behind the Depression-era overtones, and masterfully casts Barbara Stanwyck in the lead.  Rather than playing the neurasthenic wraith of the book, she is sexy, smart, and kinky.  She is so thwarted in her ambitions by a patriarchal society that she thinks up a complex plan, which just happens to be evil, because she’s so bored.  It’s one of those movies where you think, “if only she’d had a chance at a great career, what could she have done?”

     Serenade (1937) was turned into a Mario Lanza vehicle, which I’ve never seen.  It must have been bowdlerized to make it to the screen in the ‘50s because the main character is a bisexual male opera singer, who’s saved by a selfless South American woman.  Cain had wanted to be a singer, but didn’t possess the talent.  At the time, I couldn’t get enough of the book, but I’m not certain I’d feel that way now.  The one that 

blew me away was Mildred Pierce (1941).  It’s a domestic drama about a working mother who makes it big because of determination, grit, and some luck.  Things fall apart because of her Achilles heel:  her wretchedly selfish – even wicked – older daughter that she protects extravagantly.  The daughter finally pulls something so mean that Mildred’s had enough.  The book makes perfect sense, while the Joan Crawford vehicle has to turn into a memory suspense thriller with a murder in order to adhere to the hypocritical Hays Code and for the movie studio execs to be interested.  It’s one of those movies where I thought, “if only Barbara Stanwyck had played the part, this could have been so much more convincing.”  Todd Haynes hewed much closer to the book in his TV version with Kate Winslet.  We haven’t seen it, but the book is a couple of hundred pages, while Haynes’ version is five hours!

James M. Cain

     The Cocktail Waitress (published in 2012, but mysteriously written sometime much earlier) is told from the first person point of view of the eponymous character.  It’s a difficult work to place historically because it wasn’t found until after Cain’s death in 1978, but it feels like it’s decades old.  Here’s a sequence from the first chapter between Joan (the waitress) and her sister-in-law Ethel at a funeral:

     I said:  “Ethel, I apologize for my tone.  I’ve been through quite a lot, and being accused of murder, or something that sounds a lot like it, is more than I can take.  So – “

“It’s O.K.  I make allowance.”

“Now, may we get on?”

“If you’re talking about Tad, everything’s taken care of, and there’s nothing to get on to.”

“Then, I thank you.”

But I sounded stiff, and she snapped:  “Joan, there’s nothing to thank me for, Tad’s my own flesh and blood.  He’s welcome and more than welcome, for as long as may be desired.  And the longer that is, the better I’m going to like it.”

40s Hot Pants?

     They sound like hardboiled dames from the ‘30s or ‘40s, but Cain makes reference to the waitresses wearing hot pants, which I didn’t think came into style until the early ‘70s.  So, there’s the simultaneous double-time of Bette Davis’s Dead Ringer (1964), which felt like 1944 and with the twin characters supposed to be at least ten years younger merged with an episode of Charlie’s Angels (around 1977), where Jaclyn Smith’s Kelly would be skimpily clad, stuck in an impossible male controlled situation, but getting out in the nick of time because of Kate Jackson’s Sabrina and Cheryl Ladd’s Kris.  A college friend of mine thought Angels had its cake and ate it too by presenting strong women solving crimes, but also looking pinup sexy.  The older, established writers and producers of Angels made the more mature supporting characters sound like something out of the ‘40s, while the leads sounded like the ‘70s.  

     The cover of The Cocktail Waitress compounds the issue by making the waitress resemble Keri Russell dressed like Jaclyn Smith in ’77 with a side view of her breasts reminiscent of Jane Russell.  She is regarded by an older man, who’s smoking, and the viewer is put in his place.  Again, this feels double-sided, but so is Joan, the waitress, who ends up with two dead husbands and a dead boyfriend.  Is she a black widow or a victim or what?  Two-thirds of the way in, the book reveals a couple of details that place it in around 1960 or ’61, one of those being the original opening of the musical The Fantasticks.  The other has to do with a notorious medication, which plays brilliantly into the end of the novel.  It reminds the reader that Cain always displayed a ‘justice is blind’ attitude towards his characters.

Art Carney in The Late Show

     Another work that deals with the ‘40s noir movie through the prism of a later – in this case, 1970s – lens is Robert Benton’s The Late Show (1977).  It’s a great title because it simultaneously references the old movies that would play after the news in many TV markets in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the main character Ira, played by Art Carney, is a semi-retired private eye who limps, gets worn out easily, and is slightly deaf, so this may be his swan song, and it underlines that the values of the ‘40s have gone out of style, but so have the beatnik values of the early ‘60s and late ‘60s Woodstock that are personified in Margo, played by Lily Tomlin.  She hires Ira to find her cat, kidnapped by an acquaintance because she owes him money.  The acquaintance is up to his neck in trouble with a fence and the movie is off and running.

     It’s also about cheating, greed, corruption, and psychopaths; just like the best of the noirs, but it’s not elegant like them.  These are working, or not so working, stiffs who live in grubby homes and motel rooms and drive vehicles that might not make it to the next gas station.  They’re aware their dreams haven’t worked out, but they keep plugging away. 

Cassidy, Tomlin and Carney

The lighting feels natural – it’s under lit – and the color hasn’t held up well, though that feels appropriate, but the performances by Carney, Tomlin, Bill Macy, Eugene Roche, and Joanna Cassidy cannot be dimmed.  They seem like they’ve lived in this world and paced those streets.  The texture is casual, almost as if it’s a throwaway, but it comes into deadly focus with an original car chase over lawns in a lower-middle class neighborhood and the final image of a bus stop bench underlines the irony of the entire proceedings.

Eat The Document by Dana Spiotta

Notes from underground as radicals 

reinvent and the truth lies dormant

     Dana Spiotta’s Eat The Document (2005) imagines the two leaders of a group like The Weather Underground actually going underground in 1972 after a subversive incident goes wrong and proves fatal.  A reader may already have an inkling of how this will turn out, but Spiotta’s smartest move plot-wise is to also focus on teenagers in the late ‘90s and their ‘counter-cultural’ behavior. The radicals of the ’67 – ’74 era wanted to change American society by trying to stop the Vietnam War from outside the system of power.  The teenagers and young adults of the late ‘90s are more interested in commenting, mostly with ironic self-awareness, upon the system in which they find themselves.

     

The Weather Underground

     The course that the female leader’s life followed from 1972 – 1998 proves fascinating history of various political and philosophical views by those living in the American counterculture.  By the ‘90s, they seem like a marketing niche demographic.  The younger generation’s members may seem more articulate and sentient, but they do not lead a physical course of action to challenge – certainly not overthrow – the powers that be.  One computer genius does initiate 

a bold course, but this is to become part of the establishment.  He hints that he might undermine from within, but there’s little evidence he will since he ends up treating his girlfriend in a patronizing fashion.

      Jason, the teenage son of the female radical leader years later, is the only character to be granted first person limited omniscience in his journal.  His observations and longing are sharp and pointed.  They’re also too lucid, almost as if this fifteen year old were writing a position paper instead of a journal.  That’s the only fault I have with Eat the Document.  

    With this and Stone Arabia (2011), Spiotta demonstrates her intense focus on the outsider in American society, whether that may be the outlaw, the obscure, or the eloquent.  She shows that although people may say they want to start over or change their lives, they rarely do unless they have few – if any – other choices.  Her style observes power (corporate, 

Dana Spiotta

governmental, celebrity) in a way that does not distance.  She’s different from Don DeLillo, to whom she’s been compared, in that regard.  Instead, she pulls in the reader to look at the patterns of this era.

Ruth Rendell 1930 - 2015

Farewell to a Great

Ruth Rendell

     Ruth Rendell, whom we’ve featured in the past, died Saturday after suffering a stroke in January.  She was extraordinarily prolific, publishing over 60 books in fifty years under both her name and her pseudonym Barbara Vine, and

Rachel Kushner: Telex from Cuba

Worth savoring for this historical novelist 
of grace, intelligence, and style

     I wanted to read Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba (2008) after I’d liked her The Flamethrowers (2013) so much.  I thought it was one of the best novels I’d read in the past decade.  She writes big, taking on a subject, its era and locale, and then goes one step further to place it in an international

Andrea Levy’s "Small Island", Jayne Anne Phillips’ novels

Excellent writers who 

unconsciously disappoint in some works

Andrea Levy

     Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) won the Orange Prize, which is given to female writers (yes, lots of controversy about that from a wide swath of political stripes, but I’m not going there) and then the Orange of Oranges (the British really get into that best of best mentality because they had the biggest empire of all until relatively recently).  It’s set before, during, and immediately after World War II in England and Jamaica – a proud dominion of the British

Redeployment/The Handmaid’s Tale

Across continents and in our backyard 

lie the terrors of dystopia

     Phil Klay somewhat unexpectedly won the National Book Award in November for Redeployment, a collection of short stories detailing the experiences of various soldiers during and after tours of duty in the Iraq War.  I hoped Klay would win because it was about the war, which both American pop and lit culture have