The Picnic at Sakkara by P. H. Newby (Knopf, 1955)
Everyone’s hapless and floundering in this gently satiric novel set in Egypt in the 1950s. Some wry comedy and a sweet buoyancy keep this haphazardly plotted novel engaging. It sustains one’s interest but doesn’t leave one with much. A sort of combination of Waugh and Forster, and inferior to both.
A State of Change by Penelope Gilliatt (Capuchin Classics, 2009)
A very odd, brilliant, engaging, and perplexing book. The story of a Polish emigre to the UK after WWII and her life there for the next two decades. Kakia is a delightful and admirable character: intelligent, creative (she is an artist/cartoonist), sensitive, humorous and ends up with Harry, an equally sympathetic and admirable man. Their mutual friend and Kakia’s former lover, the soulless Don, is a charismatic malcontent and serial womanizer. The story moves forward in specific scenes of dialogue and omniscient narration skipping through the years. The Capuchin edition I read was riddled with typos and mistakes, which made it very difficult and frustrating to read, but nevertheless Gilliatt’s wiley brilliance shone through. This is the kind of book that made the reader feel he was in the presence of an accessible superior mind.
Love’s Shadow by Ada Leverson (Norton, 1962)
Book One of the Little Ottleys trilogy. Charming: an upper-class romance played out in Edwardian London. Nicely quirky characters and delightfully foolish dialogue. Light but not lacking: souffle-light.
Night Letters by Robert Dessaix (St. Martin’s Press/Wyatt, 1997)
Beguiling, intelligent, elegantly idiosyncratic: a writer recently diagnosed with AIDs, which he perceives as a death sentence, flees his native Australia to wander randomly around the globe and ends up in Venice, after shorter stays in Locarno and Vincenza and Padua. The book is comprised of letters he is writing every night and sending back to a friend (unidentified) in Sydney. These letters are not realistic but rather long fantasias on life, death, love, art, and history and are interposed with two long stories the author is told by a woman in Locarno (about a Baroness) and a professor in Venice (about a courtesan). These tales are vivid and well-told, but not as interesting as the author’s own ruminations, and seem a bit like unnecessary padding. But a lovely — and despite its tragic premise — delightful book. By the author of Corfu, which I read last year.
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (Reprint Society, 1955)
Murdoch in a light, farcially comic tone. Jack Donoghue, a drunken literary ne’er-do-well wanders around London and (briefly) Paris, encountering a motley collection of philosophers, shopkeepers, film producers and film stars, some human and some canine. The pace is lax and rambling and one often wants to admire Jack a bit more than one does, but ultimately Jack and the book arrive at a touching and satisfying ending. Second-rate Murdoch, I’d say, but appealing in its modesty and charm. Includes a beautifully written interlude in Paris on Bastille Day (the best chapter in the book). And the dog is very well depicted.
Miss Mackenzie by Anthony Trollope (Penguin, 1993)
Delightful. Our heroine, Margaret Mackenzie, is plain, middle-aged (at 35) and poor, but manages by employing her considerable charm, integrity, and intelligence to marry the decent Baronet Sir John Ball, and become Lady Ball. With two delectable villains — the present Lady Ball and the squint-eyed Reverend Maguire — and a plot that involves bad business loans and contested wills, this is Trollope at his most entertaining.
Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn (Open City Books, 2005)
The third in this trilogy (now five books) about a decadent and dangerous English family finds our hero sober and drug-free, but still involved with society’s high life — very high, in fact, as Princess Margaret makes an enjoyable nasty appearance at the house party that serves as the book’s centerpiece. Once again St. Aubyn relates the cruel and petty behavior of unsympathetic characters with elegant, but sometimes labored, prose. A bit more appetizing than the second (NYC) installment, but still leaves a bad taste in one’s (my) mouth.
Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple (Macmillan, 1949)
Delightfully readable novel of life in a provincial English city and two families, one rich and evil and the other poor and good. Schematic and obvious, but cleverly plotted. Thea Hunter, a young woman of ambition and pride, is an engaging and sympathetic heroine, and the snobby Lockwoods — especially Mrs. and the awful twins — are deliciously hateful.
A Sensible Life by Mary Wesley (Viking, 1990)
Odd, because of its uncanny similarity to The Camomile Lawn in terms of tone, character, and plot. Although the world of the book spans decades and continents, it seems comprised of only a dozen people who consistently re-encounter one another by coincidence. But, like CL, charmingly readable and engaging, and the characters are vivid and sympathetic. There’s something crude about Wesley’s novels, an authorial directness and lack of subtlety that gives them a slightly cartoonish vibrancy a la Tin Tin. And the pleasures thereof.
Memorable Days by James Salter and Robert Phelps (Counterpoint, 2010)
Letters from the correspondence of these two writers from 1970 – 1980. Loving and lovely letters, and a nice glimpse into the working lives of Salter and Phelps. But something sad at the heart of it all: the disappointed literary expectations, the inevitable distance — geographical, emotional, physical — between the two men. Salter’s life apparently as wondrous and luxurious as it seems.