The publisher and date listed always refer to the edition of the book that I read; illustrations are chosen for the graphic appeal and may not correspond to the edition that is cited. Photographs are always of the author (unless otherwise indicated).
This is a novel about a young English woman named Tessa. Tessa is a devout Catholic and most of the novel centers around her years in Oxford (evoked in great detail) in the early 1960s, where she studies literature and is a member of a Catholic students group led by Father Theodore, a brilliant, beautiful, and charismatic mathematician/priest, who Tessa falls (platonically, she thinks) in love with. She misguidedly marries Ben, a fellow Catholic student, so that they can provide a home for Father Theodore, but of course this doomed menage self-destructs and in what seems to be a hastily appended flash-forward, we learn that Tessa has found a new life as a fabric artist in the United States.
Tessa is a naive and sometimes unbelievably clueless character, but Patton Walsh is a good and smart writer who elevates this story above the dubious plot and makes it into an interesting exploration of faith and love.
The Grass Beneath the Wire by John Pollock (Anthony Blond, 1966)
I’m not exactly sure why, but I loved reading this book — I didn’t want to put it down and didn’t want it to end. The characters are not sympathetic and the books is thoroughly dark and depressing, but its forthright and unapologetic tone is fascinatingly seductive.
The Grass Beneath the Wire is the story of Michael Richmond, a young English gentleman. It is set in 1943, in the midst of WWII, and Michael is intent upon not serving in the army. He fails to report for duty, leaves Oxford for London so he can be with John Batchelor, the young man he is hopelessly in love with. He keeps John by cashing bad checks in the nightclubs and restaurants they frequent all day and night, moving along a circuit dictated by closing and opening times, along with a crowd of similarly alcoholic and amoral young people.
This gin-sodden good time is ended when Michael is court-martialed for being AWOL and for his criminal check-cashing, and he is sent to military prison, where the middle third of the book takes place. He spends his time in prison performing tedious and useless tasks like plucking the grass from behind the electric wires that encircle the camp, and polishing pots that are then left outside to rust so that they can be polished again. He sleeps with a beautiful boy named Alf, and in a violent brawl in his hut he loses an eye, which invalids him out of the army. He returns to Oxford where he quickly amasses gambling debts, so he returns to London and borrows 500 pounds from Mary Arbuthnot, who had been keeping John Batchelor in his absence. Once again (seemingly) solvent, he regains John’s affection and companionship, but when the borrowed money runs out he resigns himself to either kiting checks or prostituting himself, learning absolutely nothing from his dark journey.
Almost everyone behaves selfishly, stupidly, and badly in this book, but the characters are so vividly depicted that they become almost irresistible and the descriptions of days in bars and evenings in nightclubs are trenchant and funny. The lack of moral judgement and the unhesitatingly frank portrayals of homosexuality are surprisingly candid and bracing and the picture, though dark, is clear and thrilling.
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler; translated by Charlotte Collins (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2016)
I bought this book for $1 at the Dollar Tree because it looked interesting — a short novel, originally published in Germany, about a solitary rural man’s life throughout much of the 20th century. It was an “international bestseller” and published by FSG.
Although it spans nearly eight decades, at only 150 pages, it’s a glancing portrait, but it seems a deep one, by virtue of its empathy and vivid recreation of important moments from Egger’s life. Orphaned as as small boy, he is raised by his tyrannical uncle, a farmer, without love. He is brutally beaten and become independent as soon as he grows strong enough to defend himself. He lives alone and works at physically taxing odd jobs until he meets Maria, a waitress at the local village inn. When he marries her he begins working for a company that builds cable-cars and ski-lifts in the mountain valleys. Maria is killed and their humble home is destroyed in an avalanche, and he spends eight years in a Russian prison camp during and after the war. When he finally returns to his village in 1951, the world has changed. He lives alone in rooms or mountain shacks and supports himself by guiding tourists through the surrounding mountains.
A Whole Life is a quiet, sad, but lovely book about the solitary life of a thwarted yet decent man. Curious and memorable.
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha (Tin House, 2020)
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a big, ambitious New York City novel — rather similar in scope and tone to Bonfire of the Vanities (I imagine). Its wealthy and privileged characters are well-developed and interesting, and the book has no post-modern gloss or attitude — the rich Trollopian narrative is conventionally presented and offers all the many satisfactions of 19th-century novels.
It takes place over about six months in 2009 — after the crash of 2008 — and seamlessly combines the worlds of high-finance, baseball, and journalism. Beha writes with a confident authority about all these things and whatever research he did is unobtrusively incorporated into this very accomplished and enjoyable book.
Sanctity or There’s No Such Thing as a Naked Sailor by Dennis Selby (Simon and Schuster, 1969)
The oddest thing about this very odd book is that it was published by a mainstream publisher in 1969. I’d love to know who acquired it at S&S, and what they were thinking.
Sanctity… is the story of a young man, improbably named Shelley Skull, a homosexual scientologist from Wales who is living in New York City in the late 1960s searching for another gay man named Rocco Sabine, who has mysteriously disappeared — or perhaps been murdered — after living a somewhat legendary life in the underworld. Shelley’s episodic search takes him to orgies, gay bars, brownstones owned by millionaire transvestites, Tucson Arizona, and finally Morocco, where he is kidnapped and forced to donate his eyes to the above-mentioned millionaire (whose sight is failing).
None of this is particularly well-written or funny, or sexy, or cleverly-plotted, or amusing. It’s just bad — a gay lark that falls quickly and desperately flat.
This autobi ographical novel is an account of George Hayim’s doomed and dangerous affair with a (mostly) straight French boy of Moroccan descent. George meets the young and sexually magnetic Edouard in Paris, and brings him to England, so that Edouard can learn English and make some money. Edouard relies on George, is sometimes charmed by him, but mostly seems to hate his interference and treats him rudely and badly. George, who feels that Edouard is not sufficiently and consistently appreciative of all that he has done for the boy, alternates caring slavishly for him and threatening him with deportation and humiliation.
All this bad behavior gets a little repetitive, but both George and Edouard are original and compelling characters, and are surrounded by George’s various friends, who are mostly wealthy European bohemians, and Edouard’s friends, who are mostly prostitutes and other assorted low-lifes.
The book is too long and the dynamic between the two men is too predictably recurrent, until the final page when a shift occurs and their relationship seems to change into something resembling an old friendship. (There is a charming five-minute documentary video featuring George Hayim in his eccentric home in Sydney on YouTube.)
Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (Richard Bentley and Son, 1893)
I came across a reference to Rhoda Broughton in a novel I recently read — or perhaps it was the biography of Beverly Nichols? It was mentioned as being seen on a character’s book shelf and was, I believe, an indication of their being middle-brow. So I ordered two of her books — Nancy and Not Wisely but Too Well.
Although this book has problems with pacing and sustainability, I enjoyed reading it and thought it was interesting and engaging, and often quite witty and biting.
Nancy is a 19-year-old girl who lives with her wealthy curmudgeonly father, her kind but ineffectual mother, Barbara and Ton-ton, her older and younger sisters, and Algy, Pratt, and Bobby, her three charming and high-spirited brothers. Her father’s childhood friend Sir Roger Tempest visits the family and he and Nancy fall surprisingly in love. They marry, honeymoon in Dresden, where they meet Frank Musgrave, a young neighbor of Roger’s who Nancy finds exasperating but strangely attractive. She flirts with him by constantly sparring, not comprehending the mixed message she is sending.
Once back in England, Nancy and Roger return to his house and are visited by the beautiful and angelic Barbara. For mercenary reasons Nancy attempts to instigate a romance between Barbara and Frank, but her intentions misfire and only succeed in making Frank fall more deeply in love with her. Meanwhile, Sir Roger goes to Antigua for eight months to restore proper business procedures at his sugarcane plantation, which had been (mis)managed by a scoundrel.
Nancy is 400 pages and the plot, which concerns the estrangement between Nancy and Sir Roger, does not make much sense and becomes tiresome. But Nancy is an unusual character, and her present-tense, first-person narrative voice is charming. The pithy and witty dialogue often put me in mind of Ivy Compton Burnett, while at other times the distinct shadow of Jane Austen falls across these pages.
Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood (New York Review of Books, 2002; originally published by William Heinemann in 1984)
An odd, compelling book, ambitiously and originally conceived but rather repetitively executed.
Mrs Devina Blunt is a genteel and well-off British widow who lives in a charming house in Wiltshire, where she and her late husband, the Colonel, landed after living in India for most of their lives. She is devastated by the loss of her beloved husband, and inexplicably estranged from her daughter, Nadine, who lives in London with her insufferable husband (Justin) and their unruly and spoiled twins.
One day a man in a wheelchair — Corrigan — arrives at Mrs Blunt’s door collecting for charity, and an odd symbiotic relationship evolves between them. Corrigan pushes Mrs Blunt to happily re-invent herself, all the while swindling her out of thousands of pounds. The book’s exploration of how people affect one another regardless of their intentions is complex and ingeniously observed, but the book itself is diminished by its static narrative: the dynamic between the characters never changes despite how long and how often they communicate, and the reader wishes a good editor would cut a third of the book, leaving intact a swift and thrilling book about the complexities of good and evil.
Relative Successes by A. L. Barker (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1984)
Another smart and astringent book by a writer who continues to intrigue me.
Relative Successes is a book in three parts. The first part relates a summer in southern Frances, as experienced by two teenage British schoolboys, Jessell and Waldo, and Waldo’s beautiful and beguiling mother, who enchants Jessell, who remains enthralled by her well into his adulthood. The middle section deals with Jessell’s later encounters with Waldo’s wife Daisy, who claims her husband has mysteriously disappeared. So Jessell travels to southern France with Connie, his wife, because he has a hunch that Waldo may have returned there. The concluding section takes place in France where Jessell and Connie befriend a strange couple staying at their resort — a middle-aged woman who is a kleptomaniac and her handsome and virile much younger husband. The book ends with Jessell thinking he has caught of glimpse of Waldo at a circus.
It’s hard to know what all this means — the novel doesn’t seem to amount to anything, although page by page it is engaging and curious. The writing isn’t quite as idiosyncratically brilliant as in some other of Barker’s books, but it’s vivid and witty. So not a first-rate Barker, but an interesting and worthwhile read nonetheless.
No End to the Way by Neville Jackson (Barrie and Rockliff, 1965)
This is an interesting novel about homosexuality in Australia in the mid-1960s. It is set in a small western city — Perth? — and chronicles the relationship of Ray and Cor, two men in their 30s who meet, fall in love, live together, consider themselves married, and then part with violence and hate.
Ray runs his own advertising business and lives with his parents; Cor, who emigrated to Australia from Holland with his wife, is a bartender at a gentleman’s club. Mia, his wife, is pregnant and Cor is also kept by a Mr. Hamilton, so he is hardly an ideal candidate for a committed relationship.
The book is engaging and easy to read (I read it in two days) but has several formidable problems. The first is that its written entirely in second-person, which is awkward and alienates the reader from Ray, who should be the first-person narrator. The book is also, unsurprisingly but disturbingly, of its time: it’s full of homophobic self-loathing (Ray and Cor, who are both closeted and “straight” acting and appearing, have no sympathy or use for anyone who is effeminate or apparently homosexual, and Ray’s attitude towards women is unremittingly misogynistic). The deeply closeted and paranoid nature of the two men is a direct product of their relentlessly and dangerously homophobic society, which makes it impossible for gay men to live without constant fear and shame.
