Category: Uncategorized

The Descent by Gina Berriault (Atheneum, 1960)

A brief, brilliant, and mordant novel, Berriault’s first.  Published in 1960, but set a few years ahead in 1964, The Descent is a dystopian novel about the arms race and the deluded craze for underground bomb shelters.  Berriault’s novel find the United States diverting attention away from the horrors of nuclear war by deluding its citizens with the pleasures and benefits of living underground.  As a sop to pacifists, the President appoints Arnold Elkins, a mild-mannered  professor at a midwestern University, to the newly created cabinet post of Secretary of Humanity.  After a disastrous trip to Hiroshima and an exasperating stop at the United Nations, Elkins, his wife, and his two daughters embark upon an under-financed tour of the country on buses and trains, lodging in cheap hotels, mostly being ignored or abused wherever they appear.

Berriault takes on not only the U.S. government and big business, but also the United Nations, and her vision is dark and angry, but the book itself is often quite amusing as it details the misadventures of the hapless and ill-used Elkins family.  Her writing at this early stage of her career is assured and tense; she’s very much in control of her material, and the book often calls to mind Kafka’s nighmarish normalcy.  An interesting and curious book.

A Card from Morocco by Robert Shaw (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969)

I don’t know how this book found its way onto my shelf.  It seems an unlikely book for me to buy: the jacket of the American edition gives it a mid-century espionage/thriller look that would not have attracted me.  Perhaps it was mentioned in one of my catalogues of books with gay content or of gay interest.  If so, it was mis-categorized, for although it is the story of a friendship between two (straight) men, there is little to no homosexual content.

In any case, I’m glad I read it, as I enjoyed it very much and also very much admired the terse, fire-bright prose, which reminded me of James Salter, combining as it did terrific dialogue with crackling descriptions of the physical world.  Set in Madrid and other parts of Spain in the 1960s, A Card from Morocco examines the unlikely friendship of the British Lewis and the American Slattery, both men in their 50s who have wound up in Spain after failed lives elsewhere.  Lewis, a former Major who has been passed over for a government job, has retreated to Madrid and married a much younger woman.  He is devoted to her but worries that he cannot sexually satisfy her and wants her to take a lover.  Slattery has been exiled by his wealthy Boston family and is paid by them to stay away.  He’s a good painter but a depressed and dangerous drunk.  He sabotages his own engagement to a nice French girl by sleeping with her mother (while his fiancee watches).  Both men are very good at self-destruction, and their friendship is based on their trying to save one another from his worst self.  They both fail in this attempt, but a tenderness and respect grows between them that comes to seem a lot like love.  The book is shocking in its sexual frankness (and darkness) and surprising in its tender unabashed depiction of affection between men.

A Card from Morocco is very similar to Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (1967) with its European setting and its triangulated tensions between men and women.  Shaw even employs many of Salter’s stylistic tics; scenes could almost be lifted out of one book and placed in the other, although Shaw’s men are cruder and less-well behaved than Salter’s.

An interesting book, and surprising to find such a brilliantly written book by an author I knew nothing about who doesn’t seem to have received due appreciation, perhaps because his acting career overshadowed his literary accomplishments.

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972)

I felt I had been reading too much British and European literature recently, and so looked for something essentially American on my shelves and The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford was the perfect choice.  This is another book that had stood neglected on my shelf for many years.  I had started Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel once many years ago and had not liked it, and so I must I have formed an aversion to her that kept me from reading this book.  I’m glad that I finally have.

The Mountain Lion is a novel about childhood that flows beautifully and clearly from a potent and essential well.  It tells the story of a sister and brother, Molly and Ralph Fawcett, who grow up on a walnut farm in  California.  Their father is dead, and their two sisters, Leah and Rachel, are old enough to exist in their own separate sphere of family; their mother is loving but distant and ineffectual, and has little sympathy for either of her two strange younger children.  So Molly and Ralph cleave tightly together, and the novel examines the strong bond they share and how that bond is inevitably and tragically severed.

Much of the novel is set on their Uncle Claude’s ranch in Colorado, where Molly and Ralph spend several summers in a more stimulating and liberating atmosphere than their home. But is also here, on the ranch, where Ralph pursues a friendship with Uncle Claude, a friendship that tragically affects his relationship with his sister.  Molly, who wants to be a writer, is a precocious and unpleasant child, both judgemental and unforgiving.  But she is also very funny and smart, and Stafford makes her seem achingly real and alive.  So her sudden death at the very end of the novel is shocking and devastating, and casts a disturbing blackness back over the bright open landscape of the book.

A fresh, alive, beautifully written novel — a masterpiece of its kind.

 

People in Glass Houses by Shirley Hazzard (King Penguin, 1988)

A slight and underwhelming collection of short stories based upon Hazzard’s experience working at the United Nations.  Each of the eight stories focuses on a different person or group of people working at the “Organization,” which is clearly modeled on the U.N.  Hazzard’s approach is mostly satirical, revealing the ineffectual bureaucracy and endemic pettiness of everyone working at the Organization.  Some of the stories are more developed narratively than others, but most are slight and repeat the same themes and notes.  Disappointing and a failure as far as engaging fiction is concerned, but Hazzard writes with her customary wit and elegance, and her depiction of character is, as always, first-rate.

Some of the characters do reoccur, and one supposes that Hazzard might have developed the material more ambitiously and fashioned a clever, biting, comic novel out of this.  But that would probably have only been marginally more successful.

Amateurs by Dylan Hicks (Coffee House Press, 2016)

Amateurs is an ambitious and accomplished novel that appears to be relaxed and easy-going.  It is generously plotted and peopled, but I never sensed the author’s effort or ambition. 

The plot centers around the events leading up to Archer’s wedding to Gemma, and involves many characters in their circle of friends and relatives.   Among them are Lucas, Gemma’s ex-boyfriend, and his friend Sara, and her ex-boyfriend, Jon, who was Archer’s roommate at Harvard.  Archer is rich and smart but lazy and entitled; he pays Sara to write novels he passes off as his own.  The ties between these characters are morally and romantically and erotically complex, and Hicks does an excellent job exploring and illuminating them, moving back and forth in time and place and from character to character.  He’s also very smart and witty, as are his characters, and there is a lot of sophisticated and very amusing word/language play throughout the book.  A nice, smart, entertaining read.  I enjoyed it and admired it.

Venusberg by Anthony Powell (Little, Brown & Co., no date* [1952, 1965])

A darkly comic and elegantly chilly novel about a young British journalist who travels to a small unnamed Baltic country as a foreign correspondent shortly after WWII.  The community he finds himself in consists almost entirely of diplomats (and exiled Russian nobility).  He falls in  with a rather aimless and indolent lot and begins an affair with a charismatic and wealthy native who is married to a much older stoic professor.  Not much happens, but Powell writes with an almost brutal asperity and lack of sentimentality, and the result is refreshing and bracing.  There’s a flavor of Evelyn Waugh — the black comedy masking something deeper and darker, and a cool, clear-sightedness and understated flippancy. 

Our hero’s name is Lushington; his mistress is Ortrud; his friend at the British Embassy is DaCosta.  I enjoyed reading this book very much.

*Interestingly, the book was first published in the United States in 1952 by the Periscope Bookshop and the Holliday Bookshop.  The unsold stock was taken over by Little Brown in 1963 after they became Powell’s American publishers. Little Brown reissued the book with a new spine label and price label to the flap in 1965.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (Simon & Schuster, 1971)

An ambitious and original novel and a very impressive achievement.  I had read this when I was in High School (1978), when of course the world and time of the book were both much closer to me.  Now it seems very long ago and far away, and perhaps more startling and interesting because of that.  Lessing takes on many interesting subjects: communism, sexual politics, love, sex, creativity, depression, psychiatry and analysis, and creates a book that allows her to explore all these topics intelligently and sensitively in a novel and complex form.

The book bogged down for me in its fourth fifth (the affair with Saul Green) but most of it engrossed me, especially the African sections, which were very rich and powerful.  I’m glad to have read it again.  I feel enriched and broadened.

 

Heat & Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Harper & Row, 1975)

 

This engaging and enjoyable book presents two different narratives of English women in India, set fifty years apart.  In 1923, Olivia, the wife of a British bureaucrat , falls in love with the Nawab of Khatm and (probably) conceives a child with him; she ends up scandalously leaving her husband and “going over the other side” (after aborting the baby).  Fifty years later Olivia’s husband’s granddaughter (he remarried after divorcing Olivia) journeys to India to explore Olivia’s story, which she has read about in letters Olivia wrote to her sister back in England.

The book does a good job of interlacing both these narratives.  The worlds are vividly evoked as are the characters in both sections.  Jhabvala is an intelligent, economical writer; the reader admires her deftness and confidence.  The book, which  is less than 200 pages, at times seems overly compact: the woman in the 1970s section is a bit of cypher, and some of the compression and elision feels undernourishing.  A bit more food on the plate would be welcome, delicious as it is.

The Widow’s Children by Paula Fox (Dutton, 1976)

Fox seems to specialize in troubled, flawed, and unlikable characters, adjectives that perfectly fit all three  children of Alma Maldonado, the titular widow in this book.  She emigrates from Spain to Cuba when she is 16 to marry a much older plantation owner.  She flees to New York city in the 50s with her three children, Laura, Carlos, and Eugenio, losing both her wealth and social status in the move.  All this is back story to the main events in the novel, which transpire during 24 hours  in the 1970s.  Laura and her second husband Desmond are about to embark on a voyage to Africa and have gathered their closest friend, Peter Rice, and relatives, Laura’s brother Carlos and Clara, her daughter from her first marriage, for drinks at their New York city hotel and dinner at a fancy restaurant on the eve of their departure.  Clara, Laura’s only child (the other were all successfully aborted), was abandoned by her mother and raised entirely by her grandmother (Alma) who has died in the nursing home where she has been living, unvisited, for several years just as the action begins. 

The characters’ interactions over drinks and dinner are tinged with resentment and bitterness, and all of this ugly (and drunken) behavior is meticulously and exhaustively observed by Fox.  Her willingness to plunge so deeply and totally into this extremely unpleasant terrain is audacious and somewhat fascinating, and she steers the reader through this witches’ brew with a merciless and unfaltering hand.  The new day, which finds all the characters reunited at Alma’s (hastily arranged) funeral, is a bit softer and less fraught with despair, but this is a bitter and cold book, which would probably be unreadable were it not for Fox’s ability to present her characters with such incredible clarity and precision.

 

A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge (George Braziller, 1977)

 

One of the most upsetting and depressing depictions of modern British domestic life I’ve ever read.  The (unnamed) family in question live in “genteel poverty” in a small seaside village on the west coast of England; the book takes place shortly after WWII.  The mother, who once attended a  finishing school in Belgium and has social airs, has been keenly disappointed by her husband’s lack of success in “commerce.”  He’s a damaged and ill man, comic and pathetic.  Madge, the 15-year-old daughter, is practical but runs wild, pursuing a damp and dark affair with a German POW every night down on the beach.  Most of this is observed by Alan, the 17-year-old son, whose attempts to save all these desperately damaged people is both noble and tragic.

The house they inhabit is like a fifth character in the book.  Impossibly cramped and cold, it offers no comfort or shelter, and all the family members find ways of escaping it.  When they are crowded together in its tiny rooms, they are cruel and bitter, and violence runs just beneath all of their interactions.  Bainbridge writes about all of them with a clear-sighted sensitivity that allows the reader to bear the misery and sadness that permeate the book.  She keeps a lot hidden from the reader, which makes the book seems somewhat slight and underdeveloped, but the final effect is quietly devastating.