Category: Uncategorized

The Beads by David McConnell (Itna Press, 2024)

I was amazed and delighted by David’s new book. It’s an ambitious and almost entirely successful novel about the coming of age of a young man in late 20th-century America and the simultaneous dissolution of his family and culture. David’s writing is brilliant; the book is ambitiously conceived and masterfully executed, and its satisfactions are rich and rewarding.

It’s one of the best contemporary American novels I’ve read since Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life. I was sorry The Beads did not receive the attention and acclaim it deserves.

John Caldigate by Anthony Trollope (1879)

I enjoyed reading this late Trollope novel.  Excellent, complex characters and a very engaging and suspenseful plot.

John Caldigate graduates from Cambridge and being estranged from both his father and his family’s estate, decides to cash out his inheritance and use his fortune to mine for gold in Australia.  On the two-month-long sea voyage there he meets a charming beautiful woman named Mrs. Smith.  She captivates John with her intelligence and he falls in love with her, despite the warnings of fellow passengers and even the ship’s captain, who are all sure she is an untrustworthy adventuress.  Once in Australia they live together as man and wife, although do not officially marry.  But her lust for gold (and brandy) ends their affair, and John returns to England with an even larger fortune.  He reconciles with his father and reclaims his inheritance and marries Harriet Bolton, a young woman he has loved ever since first seeing her before he left England when she was only 16.

But no sooner are they wed and the parents of a baby boy then Mrs. Smith returns to England, claiming that John married her in Australia and that she is the only legitimate Mrs. Caldigate.  The remainder of the book involves the trial for bigamy and the prolonged and difficult restitution of John’s good name.  The resolution of John’s calamity gets a bit bogged down with details pertaining to judicial bureaucracy, religion, and postage stamps, but this is an excellent Trollope.

 

 

Watson’s Apology by Beryl Bainbridge (Carroll & Graf, 2011)

A very engaging and flawlessly executed novel by the masterful Bainbridge based upon a real murder case that occurred in London in 1870. After almost thirty years of marriage the Rev. Watson, a clergyman and headmaster of a small school for boys, violently murders his wife on a Sunday afternoon.

Bainbridge begins the book with the couples awkward and desperate courtship and marriage — a marriage based upon mutual need and very little affection.  Things only get worse over the years as both Rev. and Mrs. Watson become more solitary and eccentric, slipping slowly and irrevocably into madness.

Bainbridge skips across the years, observing the couple at roughly five year intervals.  Her point of view is cold and analytical — there’s not a trace of warmth or wit in the book and no authorial voice or presence.  A dispassionate book about a crime that arose out of a sick and twisted passion.

 

Esmond in India by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala [published as R. Prawer Jhabvala] (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1958)

I enjoyed reading and admired this early novel of RPJ, set in India — New Delhi — in the 1950s, when India is still adjusting to independence from England and the partition of the country.

Esmond is a handsome, charming, intelligent young Englishman in India who has gotten himself disastrously married to a beautiful, indolent, and not-very-bright Indian woman, with whom he has a son.  The plot revolves around two families: the family of Esmond’s wife and the family of the Indian man she was engaged to, but jilted in order to marry the glamorous Esmond.  Now the girl’s family wants to marry its son, a penniless but altruistic doctor working with poor people in the jungle, to the daughter of the other family, a recent college graduate who is idealistic but is also  seduced by Esmond’s golden charm.

With so much attention paid to matrimony and family dynamics, one understands why Jhabvala is often compared to Jane Austen — they both write about the same kinds of people in the same kind of situations, observed with the same gimlet eye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eleanor by Julian Fane (Constable, 1993)

Eleanor is a curious novel that chronicles the early life of its heroine, Eleanor Carty, who is born illegitimate in 1905 and raised by two spinster sisters who run a home for children born out of wedlock in a London suburb.  She grows into a beautiful young woman and talented pianist, and at 17 makes a disastrous marriage to David Ashken, a brilliant but brutal violinist.  She manages to escape from his abuse and eventually divorce him, and moves to America, where she becomes an actress in touring companies of Broadway plays.  But after a few years the death of one of her Auntys returns her to London, where she falls in love with a handsome and talented actor who is unfortunately 35 years older than she — an age difference that forces him to leave her.  Heartbroken, she once again moves to America, this time living in Santa Barbara in a cottage on the estate of Virginia Heim, a millionaire heiress, who is kind and affectionate and sponsors Eleanor as she resumes her study of the piano, which leads to a career of being two of a four-handed piano duo.  She is courted by a beautiful Scottish nobleman who she does not love but marries for security and returns with him to England.

Eleanor is an appealing creation: beautiful, talented, intelligent, honest, independent, strong-willed.  Her story is interesting and original and Fane’s writing is succinct and elegant.  It reminded me a little bit of Penelope Gilliat’s oddly brilliant and unusual books.  I’d like to learn more about Fane, and read more of his work.  I remember loving his first book, Morning, an incandescent memoir about early childhood.

 

 

 

 

Mrs. Panopoulis by Jon Godden (Knopf, 1959)

A beautiful, devastating short novel by an author I increasingly admire.

Isa Panopoulis is a wealthy, beautiful, supremely elegant and twice-married (and twice-widowed) elderly Englishwoman traveling with her companion and heir, her niece Flora, in Africa.

The entire novel takes place on a single day when the ship they are cruising on stops at an island off the coast of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).  Isa and Flora go ashore along with Martin, a kind but penniless English young man who is returning to his struggling farm in the interior, and Humphrey Arbuthnot, a middle-aged English gentleman who knew and admired Mrs. Panopoulis when they were both younger.

Mrs. Panopoulis’ heart is failing; the heat onshore is debilitatingly and she grows progressively weaker during the long tiring day.  But she succeeds in her secret mission to arrange an engagement between Martin and Flora, thus guaranteeing Flora’s happiness and future.  It’s a generous act that concludes her mostly selfish and trivial life, and Godden’s honest depiction of the flawed yet charming Mrs. Panopoulis is engaging and admirable.  It’s unusual to encounter an elderly character who, though failing physically, is nevertheless bracingly autonomous.

A gentle, yet surprisingly prickly and affecting book, beautifully written.  And in a gorgeously-produced Knopf edition with a stunning jacket and design by George Salter.

The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow (Doubleday Doran, 1932)

I had vaguely heard of this author but didn’t know much about her life and work.  I read about The Sheltered Life somewhere — I think on a blog about books written by women — and have had it on my shelf for a couple of years.  I’m glad I read it, for it’s a beautifully written book about a well-off and socially prominent family living in Virginia (Richmond, I think, although it is called Queensbury in the book) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The first part is set in 1906, and after a short impressionistic interlude, the third part is set in 1916. In this formal way, as well as other stylistic and texturous ways, the book resembles Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.  Both books are sharply bifurcated by time and follow the internal lives of many characters within a family and small community of friends.  And Glasgow’s assured, intelligent, and lyrical writing often reminded me of Woolf’s.

At the heart of The Sheltered Life is a tragic romance between a young girl and an older man.  Jenny Blair Archbald is 9 years old in the first section and about to turn 18 in the third; as both a young girl and as a young woman she has been powerfully charmed by George Songbird, a handsome neighbor who is married to Eva Birdsong.  Eva is a beautiful and charismatic women whom everyone adores, including George, although that does not stop him from being chronically unfaithful and thereby destroying the woman he so dearly loves.  Eva Birdsong is a  wonderful character — a supreme creation.  Jenny Blair, along with her grandfather, her widowed mother, and her two aunts, who all live together down the street from the Birdsongs in a once-genteel but quickly fading neighborhood, observe the disintegration of the Birdsongs’ marriage, and Jennie Blair’s flirtatious infatuation with George, which he is unable to resist, hastens its tragic demise.

The rapidly changing world of the South, becoming less  genteel and stratified in the wake of the Civil War and the advent of the Industrial Revolution, is deftly suggested throughout the book.  Glasgow creates a world that is richly detailed and sensually evoked.  The book is longer than it needs to be and would have benefitted by a tighter editorial vision, but it’s a rich and complex novel of wisdom and compassion.  I’m not surprised that Glasgow, a very fine writer, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her novel In This Our Life.

Ellen Glasgow’s house in Richmond, Virginia

The New Life by Tom Crewe (Scribner, 2023)

 

This is a novel based upon the lives of Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, two Victorian men who collaborated on the book Sexual Inversion, which attempted to destigmatize and decriminalize male homosexuality by placing it in a historical context and detailing case histories of homosexual men.  Addington is a homosexual who has married and produced three daughters and hides behind this shield of heteronormative domesticity, destroying both himself and his long-suffering wife in the process.  Ellis, who seems to be only sexually excited by women urinating, is married to a lesbian writer and feminist, who is living with her female lover.  Theirs is not a happy marriage.

The novel, which follows the two men in alternating chapters, is set in the few years the men spend collaborating on the book and the few years after it is published in the wake of the Oscar Wilde scandal.  A bookseller is arrested for selling the “obscene” book, and the resulting court case destroys both men and their marriages.

The book is cleverly conceived and vividly imagined.  I read it with much pleasure and engagement, although I found much of the writing oddly inexact and estranging, as if Crewe was trying to be inventive and poetic and more often than not failing.  A less ambitious, more straight- (no pun intended) forward style would have made the book even more affecting and effective.

 

 

Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley (Harpers, 1900)

I must have read something about this book somewhere, otherwise why would it have ended up on my bookshelf?  But of course I just forgot what and where…

Red Pottage (the terrible title refers to a lentil stew mentioned in the Bible) is a wonderful book — smart, funny, engagingly plotted and charactered.  It’s about two young women, Hester Gresley and Rachel West, who are close friends and both unmarried at 28.  Hester lives with her brother, who is a self-deluded and narrow-minded vicar, and his equally petty and vindictive wife and their mewling children; Rachel, who has recently inherited a fortune and ascended into aristocratic society, travels from one country house to another.  Hester has published one novel to considerable success and is trying to finish a second, but family life at the vicarage makes it difficult for her to write.  Rachel is pursued by two men and falls in love with one, despite his having had an affair with her new friend Lady Westhaven.  Both Hester’s novel and Rachel’s romance come to a tragic end.

Chomondeley not only creates two strong, independent, smart, and sympathetic heroines but also uses her finely-honed satirical wit to delightfully and delicately skewer many of the clerical and aristocratic characters.  The book has an insouciance and freshness that makes for delightful reading.  I look forward to reading more Chomondeley, which is apparently (and disappointedly) pronounced “Chumley.”