I read this book for for the Slaves of Golconda bookclub. Written in 1930, it is narrated by the midlist writer William Ashenden.
As a young man in the 1890′s, Ashenden knew the British literary icon, Edward Driffield (ostensibly based on Thomas Hardy, which Maugham denied). At that time Driffield was a little known working class writer married to Rosie, an earthy sexually promiscuous woman. Later in life, Driffield rose to fame and acclaim and a second wife. Now, after Driffield’s death and being, himself, in middle-age, Ashenden has been approached by Alroy Kear to get the inside scoop on Driffield’s life before his iconship was established.

Alroy Kear is a best-selling author and sychophant, who, in cahoots with Driffield’s second wife wants to produce an autobiography suitable to the elevated and refined status of an icon.

I loved this book for its satirical take on the literary scene, which I found just as relevant in 2011 as in 1930:

I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E M Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E M Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.

The character of Rosie, Driffield’s first wife, is a weakness of the novel, being rather flat. She is unremittingly sexual and cheerful. But I find that generally Maugham is less successful portraying men’s attractions to women than to other men, and that may be because he was primarily gay with a few ambivalent (and I have to wonder if somewhat forced) relationships with women in his life. These were brief and concurrent with his longstanding relationships with men: Maugham lived with his first partner for 30 years until his partner’s death, and then with his second for the remaining 20 years of Maugham’s life.

However for his time (1930), Rosie was a remarkable and disturbing character because of her happy sexual appetite and the lack of authorial criticism for it. The stock character of “the whore with a heart of gold” was supposed to realize her unworthiness and sacrifice herself for the hero. Instead Rosie outlives everyone and is entirely contented with herself.

What I loved about this book was its satirical portrayal of class and the literary scene. The sly cutting comments that Ashenden makes about Kear and his success made me laugh out loud. The conflict of class was vivid and so was the hilarious and yet sad manipulation of Driffield first by his patroness and then by his second wife to make him appear refined to the middle-class who read his books.

Poor Driffield rebelled in the only way he could, refusing to bathe at all in the last years of his life, and hiding out in the local pub as long as anyone would let him. But they didn’t let him much–and that’s the whole point. He wrote his best books while married to Rosie, everyone acknowledges that, and yet at the same time everyone around him believes that Rosie wasn’t good enough for him. They’re all virtuou and wants to make him so. And all he really wants to make him happy are cakes and ale. Rosie was the only one that got that.

The title of the novel comes from Twelfth Night. Sir Toby Belch (who would have been a pal to Driffield) says:

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

Cakes and Ale was reputedly Maugham’s favourite of all his books, and I can understand that. This was such a fun read for me, as a writer, especially as I read it just when I was re-entering the publishing process and anticipating the public literary scene that he criticizes.

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(cross-posted with A Novelist’s Mind)

Let me start by saying that this is a book of crime fiction that made me cry. I expect suspense in crime fiction, and Jussi Adler-Olsen delivered (my children looked at me as I was reading the last 100 pages saying over and over, “I can’t stand it! Does she get rescued or not?”). I wouldn’t even be surprised at the kind of tears that come from emotional manipulation. (I cry over telephone commercials.) But it was genuine, tender, true human feeling that had me weeping.

Jussie Adler-Olsen, the Danish author of The Keeper Lost Causes, is one of the best loved and best sold Nordic authors of crime fiction. In Denmark last year, one million of his novels were sold. That’s right–last year–in a country with population 5.5 million. He’s also a bestseller in Germany and Austria, rather larger countries.

I’m sure he’s going to be here as well. I’m impressed and now also excited that his work is being translated into English, this novel the first of what I’m sure will be many, coming out August, 2011.

I’m gratified that I got an advanced reader’s copy so that I can tout his abilities not only in this genre but plainly and simply as a writer. The major characters are brilliantly conceived as an investigating duo. Carl Morck is a grumpy, slovenly detective whose flaws had previously been overlooked if not forgiven by his colleagues because of his effectiveness. However, ever since an investigation gone wrong, where one team member died and another was paralyzed, Morck has been indifferent and depressed and annoying.

The deputy chief comes up with a brainstorm: promote Morck up and down simultaneously. He is to be put in charge of a new department, Department Q, which will handle cold cases that, for political reasons, need to be seen to be still active. Nobody expects him to actually do anything in his new office down in the basement. And he is just as happy with that situation.

His new assistant, however, is not. The mysterious Assad, a refugee from the Middle-East, brings Morck back to life with his strong coffee, irrepressible spirit, keenness of mind and unusual connections. The pair of them are irresistible as partners.

The case they investigate concerns the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard, a rising politician, young, beautiful, intelligent, who has been missing and presumed dead for five years. The novel follows 2 interwoven strands: the present day police investigation, and the sequence of events from Merete’s point of view from prior to her disappearance onward.

It’s expertly done. At nearly 500 pages, the book didn’t feel long at all. I read it over a weekend, unwilling to put it down. And as the strands came closer and closer together in time, the suspense was almost unbearable. But more to the point, the novel isn’t just driven forward by a desire to know what happens. The journey is just as gripping. The full cast of characters and their interactions with Morck and Assad are engaging, written with humour and compassion. Here’s a small sample from the beginning of the partnership:

“Do you have a driver’s license?” he asked Assad, hoping that Marcus Jacobsen had forgotten to take that detail into account. If so, the whole question of the man’s employment could be taken up for discussion again.

“I have driven a taxi and a car and a truck and a T-55 tank and also a T-62 and armoured cars and motorcycles with and without sidecars.”

That was when Carl suggested that for the next couple of hours Assad should sit quietly in his chair and read some of the books on the shelf behind him. He turned around and grabbed the nearest volume, which he handed to his assistant. Handbook for Crime Technicians by Police Detective A. Haslund. Sure, why not? “Pay attention to the sentence structure while you’re reading, Assad. It can teach you a lot. Have your read much in Danish?”

“I have read all the newspapers and also the constitution and everything else.”

“Everything else?” said Carl. This wasn’t going to be easy. “So do you like solving Sudoku puzzles?” he asked, handing Assad the magazine.

If only you were here in person, I’d make tea and talk much more about this book, but as a second best option, I recommend you pre-order it.

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In classic mystery form, the novel opens with a dead body. But for the first third it reads more like a literary novel and even the rest of the book is driven, not so much by suspects, investigation, danger relating to the crime, but by the character of the characters. I couldn’t put it down. If Downie can sustain the quality of writing throughout the series, I will be seriously impressed.

Medicus is about a doctor in ancient Britain under the occupation of the Romans. Gaius Petreius Ruso is an army doctor, recently divorced, broke and burdened by financial obligations to his extended family, a guy whose career is held back by his honesty and integrity. He is likable and believable because he is also a man of his times, with prejudices and blind spots. His exposure to a new country, its inhabitants, and the culture of occupation is a learning experience for him.

So is Tilla, the young British slave whom he buys in order to nurse back to health, a feisty herbalist and midwife who would gladly bite the hand that feeds her if it gets her back to her people and the British rebellion. To her dismay, the hand belongs to a man who is much more sympathetic than she expects.

The dead body is that of a young prostitute, which raises issues that are universal in time as well as place, about sex, slavery, armies, and freedom. Although the novel takes place in ancient Britain, it is typical of the latest wave of historical novels, which give a contemporary feel to language and setting and make free with some of the facts.

It worked well for this book and I was completely engaged, even though normally I’m a stickler for historical accuracy, because I was rooting for Gaius and Tilla. Highly recommended. Page 17:

Ahead of him, a chorus of excited voices rose in the street. He recognized the fat man, still shouting orders in a thick Gallic accent. The female who had collapsed had now attracted a sizable crowd. They seemed to be carrying her to the fountain. Ruso tossed the last fragments of cake to a passing dog and strode on in the direction of the amphitheater. It was nothing to do with him. He was not, at this moment, a doctor. He was a private citizen in need of some bath oil…

There was a sudden gasp from around the fountain. Someone cried. “Ugh! Look at that.”

A child was pawing at her mother’s arm, demanding, “What is it? I can’t see! Tell me what it is!”

Russo hesitated, came to a halt, and promised himself it would only be a quick look.

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This is perhaps the funniest book I’ve ever read; it’s also seriously brilliant. This is a novel that deserved to win the Booker prize.

It’s about anti-semitism in particular, but more generally about other-ness and self, about hatred, jealousy and love. The first 2/3 is laugh out loud funny, so much so that I attracted attention from my kids (what’s so funny, Mom?), my h (who took the kobo from me to read a passage) and strangers who looked around to see the hilarity for themselves (in the girls’ change room, in the lobby of a nursing home).

The last third, while funny in spots, is necessarily more serious as the book draws toward its end, and each of the main characters is inescapably confronted with humanity’s worse aspects, each of them choosing a different response.

The three main characters are an elderly widower, a middle-aged widower, and a middle-aged man who has, his whole life, been a mourner in search of an object to be mourned. The first two are Jewish types. Libor is a nearly 90 year old holocaust and Communist era survivor who moved between Hollywood and London. Sam Finkler is an ASHamed Jew (the name of the organization he co-founded), a loud, successful philosopher-author of self-help books and tv personality. While they have an overabundance of identity to cope with, Julian is their foil, a Gentile with too little, a wannabe something who makes a living by imitation as a celebrity look-alike, a dreamer who wants to hold a dying woman in his arms, and if not that, to be a persecuted Jew.

The humour in the novel comes from playing with these types, taking a core of truth and exaggerating it in caricature to highlight its characteristics. And yet the characters aren’t simple or flat, but rounded out and turned around so that we can see other dimensions of who they are and how they interact with each other, their children, their wives, their lovers.

I don’t know if it sounds as funny as it is, or as sharp. I wasn’t all that attracted to the book by the descriptions I read of it, but it was available as an e-book at my library, so I downloaded it.

Readers on amazon are about evenly divided between people who loved it and people who hated it, which I find interesting and not uncommon. I’ve been on both sides of that fence. And obviously, in this case, I’m on the side of being wowed.

By the end of the first page of The Finkler Question, I knew that Howard Jacobson could write, but it wasn’t until the end of the first chapter that I realized just how well. He’s a smart guy that Jacobson, and a compassionate one, who isn’t afraid to stick his hands into some of humanity’s nasty bits. And yet I didn’t end the book feeling at all depressed by it. If anything I felt elated by the brilliance of the novel, its humour and its honesty.

This is what I drew from it. There are various responses one can have to the pain of this world and to life, but the best of them is to live fully, mourn honestly and love one another.

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This is the kind of book that made me want to know more about the author, and so I was pleased to find the interview that was included in the Reader’s Guide. This is a novel that could have been great. When I began reading, I felt that I was in the hands of a master (remarkable for a first novel). I could just relax because it takes a masterful book to overcome my habit of analyzing technique. So I snuggled into the couch, tension leaving my shoulders, and settled in for a great read.

That feeling diminished midway through the book as I began to notice the writing instead of being swept along. , and the voices weren’t always as distinctive as they had been. I wondered if another draft was needed or a more insistent (or less?) editor. Still, it was a very good book, and I’m interested in what Meyer will do next.

American Rust takes place in the rust belt a few hours from Pittsburgh. I had no idea, until I read this book, how bucolic that area is. I always imagined it as, well, rusty.

In the distance most of the hillsides were nearly black but there were a few patches of errant light where the land shone a bright green. (p 60)

The field descended gradually to a stream and then the land went uphill again, a hundred different types of green, the pale new grass and new buds on the oaks and darkness of the pine tree needles, the hemlocks…You called it all green but that was not correct, there should have been different words, hundreds of them. (p93)

The story is told from a number of points of view in a stream of consciousness that owes something to the lineage of Impressionist writers like Ford Maddox Ford. I saw, from looking at reviews in Goodreads, that some readers found that difficult to connect with, but for me, it was successful (for the most part) and deeply engaging. I was gripped and didn’t want to put the book down. The settings were vivid and convincing, the small dying town, the rural surroundings, the nearest prison, and the social and psychological questions these settings provoke.

The story is naturally a gripping one, because it is about the consequences of an unplanned murder. Most closely connected to the murder are two unlikely friends: the high school genius and the high school’s top jock, who didn’t live up to their promise after graduation. In their early 20′s both young men are stuck by character and circumstance in a dying town. The other voices in the novel are people connected to these boys: a middle-aged mother, her lover who is the local chief of police, the other boy’s sister and his father (whose voice surprisingly comes in late in the book).

Although there are two female voices in the novel, this is a story mainly about men, male violence and male self-sacrifice. Do you remember the O’Henry story (I think it was called “The Gift”) about the young wife who sells her hair to buy her husband a watch fob while the husband is selling his watch to buy his wife a comb? This novel seemed to me a grimmer, darker take on this archetype. Meyer’s male characters find themselves capable of both inflicting physical harm and of giving up their own body in sacrifice for love and friendship. But as each sacrifices himself for another, without knowing the sacrifice the other is making for him, the story seems to move inexorably toward a tragedy where everyone is destroyed.

And then it doesn’t. At the 11th hour there is a sharp turn, not toward a happy ending, but an avoidance of total tragedy. My main quibble with the novel is that this feels abrupt and not quite true to the rest. Perhaps the novel should have ended at an earlier point if Meyer wanted to go for ambiguity, or go on for another 50 pages and play out the tragedy.

Having said that, I still think this is a book I’d love you to read because he strives for greatness and it’s his first novel. Even if he didn’t quite get there, it was worth the reading and worth the pleasure of thinking about the novel, his themes, his characterization and his style.

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I loved it. The structure is perfect, the characters compassionately and truly portrayed, the suspense tight, the language never running away with itself and at times so lovely I had to re-read it.

This is a novel about a quiet hero who is misunderstood by his family and shunned by his community, though he has never hurt a soul, a man who is kind to chickens. It is a novel about another man who is haunted by a choice he made when young, understandable at the time, but which blighted the life of another. And at the end, I cried because the ending was perfect.

I was curious to read this novel right after American Rust because they have elements in common. Both revolve around a murder and the unlikely friendship between two boys, one a reader, the other an athlete in an economically faltering, single industry area. The setting is different, the rust belt vs the American south, and the literary approach is very different.

No stream of consciousness for Tom Franklin. (Before I go on, I have to tell you that a part of me just wants to jump up and down and say, oh it’s so good! Read it!) He superbly uses third person narrative to shift between the perspectives of Larry Ott and his one-time friend, Silas Jones, currently a police officer in Mississippi. That Larry is white and Silas black complicated their friendship in the 1970′s, and that complication had long-term and painful consequences. Franklin also shifts in time between the present and the past, gradually and tantalizingly unraveling two related mysteries, a girl gone missing in 1982 and another in the present day.

I read it breathlessly, unable to put it down. Though I guessed at some of the revelations before they came, that didn’t matter because what I really wanted to know was whether wrongs would be righted, whether people could outgrow their old limitations, if they would get the time to do so or if death would get them first. The book is rather shorter than American Rust. At 237 pages it wasted not a word. It’s a tight book and a fabulous one. Just have a look at the opening paragraphs:

The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.

It’d stormed the night before over much of the Southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, lived alone in rural Mississippi in his parents’ house, which was now his house, though he couldn’t bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tracks, eating his McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken to what the networks presented him and then sitting on his front porch as the day bled out of the trees across the field and night settled in, each different, each the same.

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“The Good Soldier is a novel which extorts admiration” The New York Times

“For all the author’s clever manipulation of words, he has given his story nothing to compensate for its artistic feebleness.” Boston Transcript

“His avowed method is to tell it all as if he were on one side of the fireplace…and a listener opposite him…But frankly Mr. Hueffer is so terribly long-winded…[that] the longing to go and do something else would be too strong… long before the tale was well afoot…” Times Literary Supplement

“The infinitely artistic development of events, their slow growth and inevitability, the turning inside out of characters to show amazing linings, have no hint of tediousness…” Observer

As a writer, I find it heartening to read these contradictory reviews of The Good Solder by Ford Maddox Ford (aka Hueffer).

I read the novel on my new kobo, but then I turned to a physical book (see the link) because it included these reviews and a number of critical essays as well. Let me first quickly summarize what I got out of the essays. The Good Soldier is a comedy. It’s a tragedy. It’s a social novel. It’s a Freudian novel. The narrator is an idiot. The narrator is insightul. The narrator can’t be trusted as far as you can throw him. The soldier of the title is a tragic hero. He is an idiot. Love is ridiculous. Love is epic. Passion is admirable. Ha!

I would like to write a book as deeply investigated and hotly debated as this one. Written during the outbreak of the first World War, this is a novel about two enmeshed couples, marital affairs, passion and the forbidden object of passion. One of the marriages is between a tart and an asexual man (the narrator). The other marriage is between an uptight woman and a man who is generous of spirit and body (courtly knight or lech, depending on your view). But the beauty of this book, for me, isn’t as much in what it’s about as in how the story is told.

Using quite different techniques, Ford does the same thing I did in The River Midnight, ie as the book goes along, he provides the reader with information that sheds new light on a previously revealed fact or incident that makes it seem entirely different than on the first encounter.

Ford does this through an unreliable first person narrator who shifts back and forth in his telling, commenting on his own reactions then and now, in the sort of rambling, random way that people actually tell stories. The writing is careful, subtle, and very funny. The narrator does seem like an idiot at first, but as the novel goes along, I found him to be clever and insightful. The story moves from comedy to tragedy, from the farce of incompatible marriage to the sad torment of people who could be good in other circumstances treating each other with merciless cruelty because they ought not to be together and are helplessly trapped with each other.

And yet, even there, when tragedy is at its peak, there is a note of comedy in the obvious hyperbole of the tragic outcome. I don’t want to say too much here and reveal the end, but if you do or have read this, tell me what you think of the pen knife and the madness of “shuttlecock.”

Ford Maddox Ford

Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass–through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

He does it brilliantly. According to Wikipedia:

The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the past century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer’s ’100 Greatest Novels of All Time’, and The Guardian’s ’1000 novels everyone must read’.

I would agree with that.

This is a delightful book, perfect for a holiday break. The illustrations by Douglas Gorsline are perfect, the facial expressions and posture of his pencil sketches capturing the spirit of the characters. Why don’t publishers illustrate books anymore?

First published in 1917, the book was well reviewed by the Boston Evening Transcript:

To read Parnassus on Wheels is to be glad there are books in the world. It is graceful in style, light in substance, merry in its attitude toward life, and entertaining in every aspect of its plot and insight into character.

Yes! This short novel, weighing in at only 160 pages, is written in the robust first person voice of Miss McGill, a 39 year old New England spinster who, having baked (by her calculations) 6,000 loaves of bread while looking after her author brother, decides to take off in a horse drawn book mobile. The previous owner, Roger Mifflin, a wiry, feisty, humane purveyor of literature to the countryside, intends to write a book of his own. His philosophy and their friendship is the heart of the book.

Having read it, and smiling while I post, I am heartened now about ebooks for two reasons. First of all, I had to wait for ages to get this book from the library, but if I already had an ereader (which I intend to get soon), I could have downloaded it here. And so ereaders combat the short shelf life of books that should outlast the shelves. Secondly, in thinking about Mifflin’s (and presumably Morley’s) thoughts on literature, I can see how ereaders and ebooks may bring literature to the far reaches of the globe.

I recently saw a news story about the one laptop per child program, and how much difference it has made in the children’s and their families’ lives. The representative from the program said that in his experience the best part of the program is that it breaks the isolation that these people suffer from. But it isn’t only practical information that is available. So is literature.

To quote Roger Mifflin:

What I say is, who has ever gone out into high roads and hedges to bring literature home to the plain man? To bring it home to his business and bosom, as somebody says? The farther into the country you go, the fewer and worse books you find…[Y]ou’ve got to go out and visit the people yourself–take the books to them…and then little by little you begin to get good books circulating in the veins of the nation. (p 75)

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