Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book review: A Year in Provence

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A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. 224 pages.

A Year in Provence begins with New Year’s lunch and ends with Christmas lunch. Between the two meals is a memorable year full of characters (from eccentric neighbors and affable builders to aged chefs), forays into the countryside, unwelcome visitors, the Mistral, and, of course, gastronomic delights.

Without explanation, such as how they can afford it, Peter Mayle describes how he and his nameless wife buy an old farmhouse in the Lubéron, insulated from the greater world and from change by the public lands that surround them. With dry English detachment, Mayle settles into a life ruled not by the minutes of commerce (“time is money”) but by the seasons and the opportunities each brings, whether it’s goat races, boules, or fresh olive oil. Although puzzled at first by what the people do when the bitter winter Mistral blows, Mayle soon figures out that even this depressing and confining season has its products — babies.

To their credit, the Mayles seem willing to accept and adapt to the Provence pace of life rather than expecting to find the urban English experience to which they are accustomed. They accept that the builders will return tomorrow “normalement” and don’t fuss when “tomorrow” is weeks later. Rather than becoming demanding and ugly, which would achieve nothing, they come up with a plan that motivates the builders to complete the house by Christmas. They choose to live in Provence on its terms, not theirs.

Mayle expertly portrays the foibles of each person he meets. As a farmer, his neighbor Faustin is ever the pessimist, seeing future clouds on sunny days. “As if his life were not already filled with grief, Nature had put a further difficulty in his way” (that is, the table and wine grapes have to be picked at separate times, giving both crops the opportunity to go bad).

Another neighbor, Massot, could be the stereotype of the American mountain man, mistrustful and fiercely independent. Of his fierce Alsatians he says, “They wouldn’t be happy in a town. I’d have to shoot them.” Mayle adds, “He turned off the path to go into the forest and terrorize some birds, a brutal, greedy, and mendacious old scoundrel. I was becoming quite fond of him.” Mayle doesn’t pass up an opportunity for irony. Massot says, “Every summer they [Germans] come here and put up tents and make merde all over the forest” as he tosses an empty cigarette packet into the bushes. Later Mayle talks about, “The Belgians . . . to blame for the majority of accidents . . . forcing the famously prudent French driver into ditches.”

The author of A Year in Provencedoes not spare himself. Hearing shots and hoping that the local grocer had missed killing a sanglier, Mayle says of the French countryman, “Let him worship his stomach; I would maintain a civilized detachment from the blood lust that surrounded me . . . This noble smugness lasted until dinner [a wild rabbit] . . . The gravy, thickened with blood, was wonderful.”

When Mayle isn’t chatting with the neighbors, being advised by the local plumber-musician, despairing over how to move his heavy stone table, entertaining friends of friends and obnoxious advertising executives, or watching goat races, he is, of course, eating. He and his wife find culinary wonders in the “good, simple food” served inexpensively in the restaurants they visit. “. . . artichoke hearts, tiny sardines fried in batter, perfumed tabouleh, creamed salt cod, marinated mushrooms, baby calamari, tapenade, small onions in fresh tomato sauce, celery and chick peas, radishes and cherry tomatoes, cold mussels” — and those are just the hors d’oeuvres, served with “thick slices of pâté and gherkins, saucers of olives and cold peppers.”

When it comes to food, Mayle’s favorite adjective is “fresh,” which captures difference between life as most of us know it and the charm of Mayle’s life in the Lubéron. Pressed for the time by the pressures of suburban living, commuting, work in the city, and our consumerist culture, and detached from the land, we eat food that is packaged, preserved, and transported, and then sold to us at a time and distance from when and where it was produced. Most of us live and eat well, we believe, but at the price of stress and at the cost of the pure enjoyment Mayle finds every time he dines in Provence, where bread is launched “into a sea of fish soup” and “it was as if the sliced, wrapped, machine-made loaf had never been invented.”

I began A Year in Provence out of curiosity about its popularity and soon found myself living vicariously through Mayle, savoring not only the food and the beauty and rhythms of the countryside that produces it, but the companionship and consideration of each person they meet. As Maurice, the chef who finds a way to provide the powerless, desperate, and grateful Mayles with their Christmas meal “at a tiny table between the kitchen door and the open fire, next to a large and festive family,” says, “It’s not the day to be without an oven.” A Year in Provence shows how richly rewarding even a simple life can be when accepted on its own terms, without ego, assumptions, or demands.

23 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Portable Dorothy Parker

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The Portable Dorothy Parker with an introduction by Marion Meade. New York: The Penguin Group, 2006. 656 pages.

As I read The Portable Dorothy Parker, I thought of the short stories of John Cheever. Although many of their stories are set in about the same boozy time period, Cheever’s focus is often the suburban family man who has everything the successful American male should — and who still finds that life is elusive, even wanting and empty. Parker’s tales are primarily of the urban woman, some rich, some poor, rarely satisfied, never happy. In some ways, Cheever’s man and Parker’s woman live in the same void, although not at the same comfort level.

In Parker’s world, as in Cheever’s, the sexes seem to be at cross purposes, unable to communicate openly and hoping to hint their way to understanding. When the girl in “The Sexes” says, “There isn’t a thing on earth the matter. I don’t know what you mean,” the young man, along with the reader, must be able to guess at the nature of the conversation that is about to follow and its inevitable outcome — including the final, “I was not sore! What on earth made you think I was?” Parker’s keen ear and sense of timing make even the dated dialogue and references relevant today.

“Lady with a Lamp” requires only monologue to reveal the actions, sufferings, and feelings of the silent Mona, whose garrulous friend observes her every move and expression and yet is oblivious to the depth of Mona’s pain.

In many stories, Parker relies on monologue and dialogue to reveal the truth underneath the words, which mean nothing. In “Arrangement in Black and White,” the more the “woman with pink velvet poppies” asserts her colorblindness, the deeper her racism is revealed to be. She can say sincerely both, “You know, so many colored people, you give them an inch, and they walk all over you,” followed by, “I haven’t any feelings at all because he’s a colored man” without seeing any hypocrisy.

For “Big Blonde,” perhaps Parker’s best-known story, she uses a narrative approach. Like Hazel Morse, the reader becomes lost in an ill-defined haze of men and alcohol. “She was always pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go” sums up Hazel’s meaningless relationships and life. Parker captures the American obsession with the show of happiness and the burying of genuine emotions in the constant exhortations to “slip us a little smile” — an effort that requires alcohol to sustain. Even the maid responds to Hazel’s suicide attempt with, “You cheer up, now.”

In some ways, the title character of “Mr. Durant” evokes Cheever. An insignificant and complaisant business- and family man leads a double life for which he pays no consequences. Women are to be used until they threaten the security and comfort of his position, yet his actions toward the stray dog his children find reveal that he sees himself as the victim. His “peace with the world” is more important than anything, including people.

Parker is a literal writer who seems to avoid the type of symbolism that makes Cheever’s “The Swimmer” so powerful. This lack of literary and psychological stretching may have kept her from achieving her dream — writing a novel, which she believed was necessary for a writer to be taken seriously by both the literary establishment and the reading public. Her failure did not prevent her from being a harsh critic, and The Portable Dorothy Parker includes rather flippant dismissals of novels by Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, and others.

Parker despises whimsy and fantasy, including the works of J. M. (“Never-Grow-Up”) Barrie and A. A. Milne (“And it is that word, ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”). One wonders what she thought of the more adult efforts of her British contemporary, J. R. R. Tolkien.

If Parker cannot say anything positive about another writer’s work, however, she sarcastically praises the book itself. “. . . it is brought out by the Grove Press in a most pleasing form — a small book with excellent print and paper, and hard covers, though not of cloth.”

Parker’s poetry reflects her no-nonsense, stark view of love and life (and death); there’s little romanticism here. “Unfortunate Coincidence” (“Lady, make a note of this:/One of you is lying”) is compact blend of eroticism and cynicism; “Faute de Mieux” reveals a rare wistfulness (“I never said they feed my heart”); and “Fighting Words” (“But say my verses do not scan,/And I get me another man!”) shows what she believes her priorities to be, although Enough Rope‘s many suicidal and death-wish poems lead the reader to another conclusion. While Parker often stretches a rhyme, rhythm, or literary device to the breaking point, her verse is often painfully personal and evocative.

Already hefty, Dorothy Parker is made less portable by the addition of “A Dorothy Parker Sampler,” random ephemera that includes letters. Most of these are not highlights of the Parker canon and could have been left out. The one exception is a long letter to Robert Benchley, written from Switzerland. Parker reveals heartfelt compassion for her friends and their sick children as well as her own anguish over a dead love affair (“I honestly don’t know where John leaves off and I begin.”). It’s a rare glimpse into Parker’s heart that isn’t obscured by sarcasm and wit.

Parker’s straightforward, surface style can detract from the darkness of her subject matter. As Marion Meade notes, Parker had a “capacity for listening and watching with amazing clarity.” If only Parker had been willing to dig a little deeper, she might be remembered as a successful novelist rather than as a wit — a label she despised.

16 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

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St. Mawr and The Man Who Died. By D. H. Lawrence. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1959. 212 pages.

Not truly novels, St. Mawr and The Man Who Died seem to be experimental works in which D. H. Lawrence continues to explore the themes found throughout his longer fiction — the emasculation and dehumanization of men, the power and inscrutability of nature, the cynicism of post-war England, the difficulties in relationships and sex, and the potential of reinvention and resurrection.

Young Lou Witt, married, dispirited, weary, and bored, finds in the stallion St. Mawr the vitality the men around her lack. Although “some inscrutable bond held them together . . . a strange vibration of the nerves rather than of the blood,” Lou’s marriage to Rico enervates her. The relationship soon becomes Platonic, “a marriage, but without sex.” The vital animal element of marriage “was shattering and exhausting, they shrank from it.”

When Lou touches St. Mawr, she finds him “[s]o slippery with vivid, hot life!” His “alive, alert intensity” fires her emotions, which she realizes had died in the post-war era of facile friendships and fun. St. Mawr “seemed to look at her out of another world.”

With her purchase of the stallion, Lou’s perspective alters; “she could not believe the world she lived in.” Although unreachable and unknowable, St. Mawr is more real to her than her husband, his friends, and even his apparent new love interest. For Lou, “all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard, let’s-be-happy world.” Rico becomes almost a caricature of a man, imitating his father’s officiousness and righteous indignation without feeling them. Lawrence describes Rico’s meticulous attention to his appearance in detail: “. . . he dressed himself most carefully in white riding-breeches and a shirt of purple silk crepe, with a flowing black tie spotted red like a ladybird, and black riding-boots.” While Rico is decorative and transparent, St. Mawr is vital and mysterious.

Lawrence uses long swathes of St. Mawr to philosophize, often directly or through the Welsh groom, Lewis, who says, “But a man’s mind is always full of things.” St. Mawr has no plot, and the stallion himself disappears from the narrative before Lou decides to “escape achievement” in the desert of New Mexico.

In New Mexico, Lawrence finds the “wild tussle” of life, which is missing from the long-civilized England, where everything is fenced in and where “the labourers could no longer afford even a glass of beer in the evenings, since the Glorious War.” The displaced New England housewife who precedes Lou, seeing beauty in the desert first, then struggle, may represent Lawrence’s own perspective and evolution during his stay there.

The Man Who Died begins with a peasant’s acquisition of a cock — perhaps the one that crows three times before Peter realizes his three denials of Christ. Like the cock, the man who died (or, more accurately, didn’t die and therefore didn’t rise again) is tied “body, soul, and spirit” by “that string,” his commitment to mankind to die and to be resurrected. “The doom of death was a shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of life.”

Having survived his promised destiny, the man who died again renounces his godhood to become a man, this time permanently and with no agenda. His near death drives him to seek life, but not the “greed of giving” or the “little, greedy life of the body . . . he knew that virginity is a form of greed . . . he had risen for the woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to give, not greedy to take . . .”

In his new situation, “the presence of people made him lonely.” He believes he has fulfilled his mission and is beyond it: “My way is my own alone . . . I am alone within my own skin, which is the walls of all my domain.”

Also alone is the virgin priestess of the temple of Isis, patiently awaiting the return of Osiris. Like Lou and many other female characters in Lawrence, she senses the superficial sexual appeal of men, but even to the great Anthony, “the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in the shadow of frost, for all the flooding of his sunshine.” An old philosopher tells her, “Rare women wait for the re-born man” and that the lotus responds to “one of these rare, invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more,” dismissing Anthony as one of the “golden brief day-suns of show.”

The consummation of the relationship between the virgin god and the virgin priestess, in a temple surrounded outside by suspicious, vindictive slaves, is beautiful and moving. “It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose!” Instead of being a mere part of the “little life of the body,” sex (and procreation) becomes a deeply spiritual experience, “the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire.”

In both St. Mawr and The Man Who Died, Lawrence is rarely subtle or restrained, covering pages with repetitious expositions of his favorite themes, sometimes reveling too much in the variety of expression. In spite of their flaws, both works are inventive, imaginative, and stirring. For anyone who is familiar with Lawrence primarily though his more well-known novels and stories, these two works are worth a read.

9 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Black Arrow

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The Black Arrow. By Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1963. 256 pages.

With the War of the Roses as its backdrop, The Black Arrow blends the romance of young love and the excitement of its hero’s initiation into war and politics. The theme of loyalty runs throughout — loyalty to parents, guardians, leaders, followers, lovers, and oneself.

England’s loyalties are divided between Lancaster and York, although the distinction makes little difference to the country’s more practical citizens. “It is the ruin of this kind land,” a woman said. “If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots.” When the naive young hero, Richard Shelton, reassures her that men “cannot better die than for their natural lord,” another man points out, “No natural lord of mine . . . I followed the Walsinghams . . . And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did it; call ye that natural?”

Despite young Dick’s idealism, which makes him faithful to his guardian and to the men with whom he has served, despite many disturbing rumors, it soon becomes apparent that most men are loyal primarily to their self-interests, whether they seek power like Richard Crookback or favor and riches like Dick’s guardian, Sir Daniel Brackley. Even the mysterious “Jon Amend-All” of the black arrow, whose objective is to revenge himself and his friends on Brackley, is found collecting rents from Brackley’s cottagers, acknowledging that they will suffer the hardship of having to pay twice. The man behind “Jon Amend-All” is no beneficent Robin Hood, but as cold and crafty a political operative as Brackley himself.

Brackley’s loyalties are soon explained. “I lie in Kettley till I have sure tidings of the war, and then ride to join me with the conqueror . . . Tosspot and Shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o’ one side, waiting.” As Clipsby says, “For, indeed, he is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York.”

Fleeing from one danger into another, Dick finally understands that he cannot trust Brackley simply because he is Dick’s guardian, or even Ellis Duckworth as his savior and protector. The only person upon whom he can rely is the girl he loves, who, ironically, was intended to be his wife in one of Brackley’s financial maneuvers. The black arrow flies from Tunstall Forest to Kettley, then through wetlands back through Tunstall to the Moat House and on to Shoreby, with treachery and the threat of war hanging over all.

With every adventure, Dick’s loyalty turns more inward on himself and his heart’s desire. He is loyal to York because Ellis Duckworth is and Daniel Brackley isn’t. When he finds himself rapidly in and out of Richard Crookback’s favor, he is “neither glad nor sorry.” Danger and treachery transform Dick into a more mature man who recognizes that loyalty is neither won nor lost so easily or quickly. In one of the novel’s strangest and weakest scenes, he proves his loyalty to his bride-to-be by rejecting the advances of her best friend, peculiar as they are.

The series of events that makes Dick a man is his theft of the Good Hope, its subsequent destruction, and the death of the captain’s man, Tom. “Dick’s heart smote him at what he heard. Until that moment he had not perhaps thought twice of the poor skipper who had been ruined by the loss of the Good Hope; so careless, in those days, were men who wore arms of the goods and interests of their inferiors . . .” Dick achieves his aims, but at the cost of many lives and the prosperity of the innocent Arblaster, who mourns “my man Tom” until the end of his days.

As a protagonist, Dick is refreshingly and painfully human, at least outside battle. While brave, he lacks the ability to pick up on clues that are obvious to his less-sheltered acquaintances, including those about the true nature of Jack Matcham. He suffers remorse for what he has done and begins to ask others like Ellis Duckworth to reconsider their course. He has the mercy that Richard Crookback and Brackley lack.

Whatever its historical flaws (some of which Stevenson points out in footnotes), The Black Arrow is beautifully written, with well-drawn characters, a plot that rarely stalls, realistically bloody battle scenes, and dialogue that is often poetic without being jarring. While not Stevenson’s greatest effort, The Black Arrow is exciting and fun for anyone of any age who loves a solid historical drama.

3 February 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Literary Lover: Great Contemporary Stories of Passion and Romance

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The Literary Lover: Great Contemporary Stories of Passion and Romance. Edited and with an introduction by Larry Dark. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1994. 368 pages. ISBN 0140171649.

From the young to the old, the sanctioned to the illicit, the mundane to the erotic, and the bored to the ecstatic, editor Larry Dark traverses the sometimes perilous territory of love, lust, and marriage in this collection of twentieth-century stories.

Dark deliberately progresses from the young to the middle-aged to the elderly. He begins with “Faces of Madness” by Rachel Ingalls, a tragic story of teenage love and adult lives destroyed by parents who are more concerned for their money and reputations than for their own children. Left to themselves and in their simplicity, William and Jean discover more about love than the adults around them have ever understood. When they are betrayed by those who claim to love them, they separately retreat into madness, wounded irrevocably.

While not as disturbing as “Faces of Madness,” Steven Millhauser’s “The Sledding Party” is haunting in its own way. Most of us will recognize Catherine’s adolescent perturbation and discontent as she struggles with her friend’s half-understood declaration of love. Millhauser captures the mixed, confused emotions of the girl on the cusp of womanhood — fear, longing, alienation, desire to belong, and the pull between the things of childhood and those of adulthood. During the course of one crisp winter’s night, a subtle transformation takes place that leaves Catherine’s future to the reader’s imagination.

At the other end of the spectrum is the calculating woman whose “Instruments of Seduction” (Norman Rush) include not only objects but a keen sense of how to manipulate her men earned through decades of practice. In “The Habit of Loving,” Doris Lessing shows how even an older man with a lifetime of experience can mistake basic sympathies for love in his quest for something wonderful and greater than himself. “Letter to the Lady of the House” by Richard Bausch outlines what can seem to be the natural course of a long marriage. “People start out with such high hopes,” the letter writer’s aunt tells him after revealing that “whatever she had once loved in [her husband] she had stopped loving, and for many, many years before he died, she’d felt only suffocation . . . only irritation and anxiety when he spoke.” The letter writer begins his epistle after “another one of those long, silent evenings after an argument . . . We had been bickering all day . . .” but asserts that, “. . . whatever our complications, we <i>have</i> managed to be in love over time.” He concludes, “And if I could, I would do it all again, Marie. All of it, even the sorrow. My sweet, my dear adversary. For everything that I remember.”

Some stories, such as “Morning” by Joyce Carol Oates, seem strangely uninteresting given the topic. Caught between her safe, predictable husband and her married lover, Lydia makes the obvious choice, which somehow works out — at least for the near term, with a hint of what is to come.

As a contemporary tale from 1988, “Graduation” by Andre Dubus is dated. Even with its deep South setting, the story’s focus on virginity, the effects of its loss on a 17-year-old girl, and the lie she tells her future husband seem overstated. “Safe Houses” by Nadine Gordimer is dated by its historical context, but is nonetheless a compelling story of a political enemy whose “safe house” is that of a woman too rich, insulated, and bored to realize or guess at his identity or his nature. Theirs is the relationship of people who do not want to change their lives, but who seek opportunity and the passion of the moment. “Yet of course he had feeling for her — hadn’t he just made love to her, and she to him, as she did so generously — he should not let himself dismiss the relative sufferings of people like her as entirely trivial because it was on behalf of nothing larger than themselves.”

“Innocence” by Harold Brodkey, 34 tedious pages of the student-narrator’s detailed analysis of his attempts to bring his girlfriend to climax, does not improve with a second reading (I had read it before in another anthology). By contrast, the gem of this collection is William Kotzwinkle’s beautiful, moving, sizzling “Jewel of the Moon.” The older bridegroom of the arranged marriage begins as his wife’s slave and, through months of delaying and building up to the consummation, completely masters her and her desires to their mutual ecstasy. “Jewel of the Moon” is both loving and highly erotic, a combination that is rare in this anthology.

The Literary Lover has its moments, but there are surprisingly few insights into relationships. Even John Updike’s “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer,” while more original and interesting than the Oates story with a similar theme, falls short, as does “Houses” by David Leavitt, in which a man is torn between life with his wife and the emotional home and future he has imagined for himself and his male lover. By the time I came to the end of The Literary Lover, I was afraid that perhaps all that can be said about love in its many forms has been and that there is nothing left. I hope I am wrong.

27 January 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Collected Stories by Paul Theroux

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The Collected Stories by Paul Theroux. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. 660 pages. ISBN 0140274944. Recommended.

From troubled marriages (“World’s End,” “You Make Me Mad”) and families (“After the War”), from Africa to Malaysia to London, The Collected Stories by Paul Theroux covers a lot of physical, political, social, and emotional territory. Whether he is writing about the past, present, or future (“Warm Dogs”) or as the first-person or omniscient narrator, Theroux describes places, people, and events colorfully yet coolly, as though as a writer he is not part of the world or life portrayed.

Parts I, II, and III are mostly discrete, unrelated stories covering a wide range of places, people, and themes. Unhappy marriages and relationships, also found in Parts IV and V, are the topic of many Theroux stories. “World’s End” begins with, “Robarge was a happy man . . .” and ends with, “. . . he knew now they were all lost,” with a subtle revelation of disloyalty and the realization of distrust in between. In “A Political Romance,” love and life come full circle; bloom, discontent and stagnation (“. . . in thirty years he would be — this hurt him — the same man, if not a paler version”), and renewal (“Lepska, I love you”). “What Have You Done to Our Leo?” uncovers a woman’s perfidy and a man’s naivete, assumptions, and developing understanding (“Her laughter was coarse, that stranger’s laugh that fitted the new image that Leo had of her.”). A rarity in fiction, the older couple of “You Make Me Mad” knows each other too well, yet clearly not well enough. “Sinning with Annie” takes a quirky look at an arranged marriage between two children from the perspective of the adult, prudishly westernized husband. “Words Are Deeds” starts with what appears to be a potentially exciting and risky erotic adventure that resolves quickly into bitter reality (“I hate that tie”).

Set in the recent past, “The Imperial Icehouse” is an agonizing story about time that evokes its slow movement along with its decisive moments. “The sounds of the horses chewing, the dripping of the wagon in the heat; it was regular, like time leaking away” ties the preceding procession of the melting ice to the denouement, when “Mr. Hand raised his whip and rushed at John Paul . . . The ice was not larger than a man, and bleeding in the same way.” In “After the War,” the teenaged stranger masters the master of the house, opening the door for the man’s unhappy family; ” . . . the child . . . without warning arched his back in instinctive struggle and tried to get free of the hard arms which held him” — perhaps an allegory for what happened to colonial nations after the war. In the future of “Warm Dogs,” a couple finds that is the children who possess them.

The stories in Parts IV and V are narrated by a fictional career Foreign Service officer who serves in Ayer Hitam, a backwater Malaysian village, and then London. A memorable exception is “Fury,” the story of an expatriate American woman in which the narrator does not appear until after the shocking if not surprising climax.

These stories reveal Theroux’s skill as a storyteller. They are recounted so vividly and objectively that they seem to be memoir, not fiction. The reader feels both the narrator’s fascination and boredom with his surroundings and acquaintances and senses his emotional detachment and occasional rebelliousness. In particular, small and remote as it is, Ayer Hitam becomes a bottomless well of characters and stories, from the somewhat senile Sultan, the proud Japanese businessman who turns hatred to his advantage, the shaman who commands the tiger, and the anthropologist who gets too close to her subject to the feverish American who sees the ghosts of a local man’s relatives. The narrator indulges in a few stories about his own lovers, but these are among the weakest tales. In these stories, Theroux is at his best when the voice he uses is most detached from the characters and their stories and at his weakest when his narrator loses his detachment by associating himself too closely with the group. For example, when he writes, “We rather disliked children; we had none of our own,” his narrator loses the outsider status that gives these stories their believability, interest, and even poignancy. At times, however, this objective perspective is too observational and cold, for example, “She saw me and sat forward to let me kiss her, and she lingered a fraction as if posing a question with that pressure.” The narrator’s point of view is that of a raconteur rather than that of the person experiencing people and events; he writes about what he observed, not about what he felt or feels. Even during his erotic encounters, the narrator is ever the Foreign Service official, ready to observe and report.

As with any short story anthology, some of The Collected Stories are haunting and memorable, while others are almost instantly forgettable. Generally, I prefer the earlier stories to Diplomatic Relations (i): The Consul’s File and Diplomatic Relations (ii): The London Embassy because they are less constrained, more inventive, and yet more real. While not a great short story writer like John Cheever, Paul Theroux is certainly a master storyteller who conceives stories worth telling.

5 January 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Cranford

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Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited by Elizabeth Porges Watson. New introduction and notes by Charlotte Mitchell. ISBN 0-19-283209-3. Recommended.

Not a novel, not an anthology of short stories, Cranford is perhaps best described as a cohesive series of vignettes. Recounted by a young woman of about 30 from the city of Drumble [Manchester], these stories depict family, friendship, and love lost and found in a village dominated by poor but genteel spinsters and widows. “. . . all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.” Small, rural, and elitist in its way, Cranford is a place out of time, where faded fashions and proprieties still matter.

Gaskell begins Cranford with a series of descriptive statements. Some are accurate, while others prove to be ironic. For example, “Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.” While discovering Cranford and the Amazons who possess it, we also learn the dry perspective and voice of the narrator, who clearly loves the village while gently highlighting the foibles of its female inhabitants. “But I will answer for it, the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in wear in England, was seen in Cranford — and seen without a smile.”

Like Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Cranford is focused on gender roles and the different lives of women and men. The sexes share many characteristics; Captain Brown and Peter Jenkyns display the thoughtful, neighborly solicitude associated with women (with Peter going so far as to don a woman’s dress), while Miss Jenkyns (the woman Peter impersonates) exhibits a manly will and resolution. It is the opportunities they have and the way in which they live that separates the sexes. Captain Brown, Peter, and Signor Brunoni have traveled and seen some of the world, and have even influenced it, while Miss Jenkyns, Miss Matty, Miss Price, the narrator, and their friends are constrained by their gender, gentility, and social code to hearth and home. Here, they perform their small household tasks, including ensuring that their maidservants are not disturbed or distracted by “followers,” or interested young men. The social code that prevents any of them from working in “trade” also determines the hours that can be spent outside the home. “Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls . . . ‘from twelve to three are our calling-hours.'”

In such a small, interconnected village, everything that happens is noteworthy, and every decision is important if the occasionally cruel social order is to be maintained. “The whole town knew and kindly regarded Miss Betty Barker’s Alderney,” whose fall into a lime-pit warrants Captain Brown’s advice, “Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers . . .,” so the narrator can ask the reader incredulously, “Do you ever seen cows dressed in grey flannel in London?” Miss Matty’s decision not to marry against her family’s wishes keeps the peace at great personal cost, and her wistful decision to allow Martha to have a follower recompenses her later when the outside world intrudes into her realm with its ugly realities — one of the many signs that Cranford must and will change. When Lady Glenmire renounces her title and takes the name of Mrs. Hoggins upon her remarriage, Cranford reels with shock and dismay, and it takes Peter Jenkyns, and his broader perspective from India, to reconcile the village and its de facto leader, Mrs. Jamieson, with the new ways.

The narrator, who divides her time between her father in the progressive world of Drumble and the slowly and reluctantly changing Cranford, finds herself under the village’s influence. As an observer, she describes the complex set of rules that govern Cranford society and the social slights they necessitate, not without a sense of regret. She is aware of the absurdity of Cranford society’s beliefs and behavior combined with expediency, such as the occasion of Miss Betty Barker’s party for the Cranford elite. “‘Oh, gentility!’ thought I, ‘can you endure this last shock?'” when “all sorts of good things for supper” appear. “. . . we thought it better to submit graciously, even at the cost of our gentility — which never ate suppers in general — but which, like most non-supper-eaters, was particularly hungry on all special occasions.” More seriously, she pities Miss Matty and her lost love and life, and like her other well-meaning friends determines that she shall be happy.

With the arrival of Signor Brunoni and the ensuing panic over the perceived crime wave that seems to hit Cranford, the narrator loses some of her wryness and seems to become nearly as frightened by the rumors of strangers and robberies as her elderly friends. It is the new outsider, Lady Glenmire, who “never had heard of any actual robberies; except that two little boys had stolen some apples from Farmer Benson’s orchard and that some eggs had been missed on a market-day off Widow Hayward’s stall.” Even while caught up in the panic, however, “I could not help being amused at Jenny’s position . . ..” When she speaks of Jenny’s ghost, the narrator says, “. . . for there was no knowing how near the ghostly head and ears might be . . ..”

Through the narrator, who seems to represent Gaskell’s own perspective, Cranford pokes gentle fun at a time and place that had already become a fairy tale-like setting, where goodness outdoes pettiness, justice prevails over setbacks and hardships, and even the prodigal son (or prince) can return to set things right. In Cranford, Gaskell reminds the reader of a recent past that is both amusing and moving, a time to look upon fondly but without regret for the changes that Peter and the marriage of Lady Glenmire/Mrs. Hoggins bring about. The one constant in life is change, and inCranford change is at least as much for the better as for the worse.

29 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text

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The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with notes and a preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Highly recommended.

The west was conquered and the midwest cultivated, so in The Great Gatsby set in the 1920s we turn our attention back east, where to midwestern narrator Nick Carraway and his neighbor Jay Gatsby the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ East Egg dock seems to represent the fertile promise of America, and the dreams and the money that are supposed to make them reality. Some dreams, like the dream of recapturing a romantic past that never really was, become nightmares.

Although he witnesses and participates in deception, including both sides of the Buchanans’ infidelity, Nick wants to appear to be a reliable narrator, which he emphasizes when he says up front, “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me.” Later, Nick identifies himself with “the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him, too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Nick’s authorial viewpoint sets the tone for his story and his observations of the brutish Tom Buchanan; his shallow and unsatisfied wife, Daisy; his class-climbing mistress, Myrtle Wilson; and the mysterious Jay Gatsby, the hero of the different unbelievable fictions he tells (when Nick asks him what part of the middle-west he is from, Gatsby responds enigmatically, “San Francisco.”) A confused Nick hears solemnity in Gatsby’s voice and sees sincerity in his look, despite the obvious prevarication.

The most influential literal voice is that of Daisy Buchanan. Lacking the romantic substance for which Gatsby has idealized her as the symbol of his youth — his real youth — Daisy becomes a siren with a siren call. Nick writes, “The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.” Her friend, Jordan Baker, tells Nick, “. . . and yet there’s something in that voice of hers. . . .” Later, Nick mentions that the “exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain,” and “I think that voice held him [Gatsby] most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed — that voice was a death song.” Nick says of Daisy, “Unlike Gatsby and Tom, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs . . .” By contrast, Myrtle is earthy, with “an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continuously smoldering.” Tom, whose affairs we are told have included a hotel chambermaid, seems mostly unsusceptible to Daisy’s voice, while even Nick notes its influence and Gatsby is destroyed by it and by his desire for the real past that every story he tells effectually effaces.

A compact novel concentrated on only a few months in the lives of a few characters, The Great Gatsby is rich with symbolism. During his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby almost stops time literally by knocking Nick’s clock down, but instinctively he catches it before it falls. “We all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor,” Nick writes. Gatsby even apologizes as though he had broken the clock and as though it were a significant loss that his countless money can’t replace. As the reunion continues, Nick says of Gatsby, “. . . in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

Throughout, time is a consistent theme; it is part of what Gatsby futilely endeavors to recapture. He can reinvent a past in which he was “educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years,” but he and his means cannot recreate the real past. As Nick observes, “Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” He adds later, “Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”

The Great Gatsby reminds me of The Count of Monte Cristo. Both Gatsby and the count start life as ordinary men and, through circumstances and the determination to achieve a much-desired goal, transform themselves into extraordinary men, ciphers to all but the most observant of their fellows. One seeks to revenge a past wrong; the other ignores the present and tries to reinvent the past as though there had never been a Tom Buchanan and as though Daisy had never loved him. Both efforts take time and unlimited patience and money, but only one is successful. The count revenges his past so he can live better in the future, but Gatsby fails because he does not understand, or want to understand, that the past is written and that the future begins with the present.

Somewhat lacking in heart — the only character who displays genuine emotion is Tom Wilson, Myrtle’s despised husband — The Great Gatsby captures the jaded excesses of the post-World War I era and the American faith in time, money, and effort as the sources and creators of success. The novel also shows the greater power of circumstance and fate. I’ve read The Great Gatsby only once, but to appreciate its structure, symbolism, and richness would take several re-readings. Read once for pleasure, then read again to explore Fitzgerald’s craft.

21 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Fox

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The Fox by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

One of D. H. Lawrence’s fable-like tales addressing gender roles and relationships, The Fox is developed based on the symbol of a female-centric farm beset by a “demon,” a marauding male fox. Owned and run by two women, the “small, thin, delicate thing,” Banford, and “the man about the place,” March, the farm is remarkably unproductive. One independent-minded heifer refuses to stay put, and the women, afraid of birth and responsibility, sell the pregnant cow before she can produce a calf. Because “Banford and March disbelieved in living for work alone,” it is clear that their farming venture, the nature of which requires commitment and hard work, is fated to fail.

Into this setting, where “fowls did not flourish,” comes a fox, a symbolic male, that carries off not only the hens, but March’s consciousness. As a male intruder in this female world, “he knew her.” The imagery is deliberately sexual; “her soul failed her,” and, too mesmerized to fire her gun, “she saw his white buttocks twinkle.” Having encountered the male, she determines to hunt him down. “She was possessed by him.”

Months later, March again threatens to shoot the real fox, a young man who comes to the farm from the outside world of men and war. As with the fox, the other male, “March stared at him spellbound.” Again, the symbolism is not meant to be subtle; Lawrence writes, ” . . . the boy was to her the fox, and she could not see him otherwise” and “she need not go after him any more.”

The fox and the man change March, who in the man’s presence becomes “pale and wan,” anxious not to be seen, “a shadow in the shadow” — almost like a fox herself. Throughout the novel, the man, Henry, has the same effacing effect on her. She is no longer the “man” of the farm, but a shrinking, passive, mesmerized female, speaking in a “plangent, laconic voice” when the real man is around. In her dreams, the fox and the man are powerful sexual images that take away her ability to articulate; the fox “whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed this brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain . . . [She] lay trembling as if she were really seared.”

As the story continues and Henry and Banford vie for March’s attention and loyalty, it is easy to see Banford and March as a lesbian couple, incomplete in the way the French writer Colette viewed such relationships. Henry, the man, carries the gun, hunts, and watches; he is “most free when he was quite alone.” With Henry’s arrival, Banford becomes more stereotypically female, strong-willed but physically weak, querulous, and manipulative. March is in the middle, the man to one, the woman to the other. Banford says of Henry, “He’s a boy like you are.” March is always indistinct to the soft-spoken, courteous Henry, who wishes to dominate her and to bring her into focus. When Henry kills the fox, March dreams of burying Banford wrapped in the fox skin — a thought that leaves her with “tears streaming down her face.” She does not want to let go of either woman or man, or the feminine or masculine in herself.

Events and choices leave March with “nothingness at last”; having hunted for the fox and reached for happiness, she is left with a “realisation of emptiness” that can be resolved only by being “alone with him at her side.” To be female is to sleep, a form of death, while to be male is to keep awake, know, consider, judge, and decide. In The Fox, as in other Lawrence novels, the man-woman relationship is one of strain between masculine values of dominance and possession and feminine desire to “stay awake” and for autonomy and self-determination.

Unpolished, repetitive, obvious in its imagery, and blunt about its messages, The Fox is flawed and pales beside Sons and Lovers and Women in Love. As a short study of the ideas surrounding gender, roles, and relationships that predominate in Lawrence’s fiction, The Fox is worth the attention of both Lawrence student and aficionado.

8 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness}

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The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness} edited by Susan Koppelman. Foreword by Alix Kates Shulman. Recommended.

In this anthology about “women and fatness,” fat women eat, exercise, laugh, cry, love, give birth, and are abused and exploited. In fact, they experience the joys and tribulations of women everywhere, but what defines them, or sets them apart, is their body size.

The American interest in fitness seems to have begun in the late 1800s, when urban sophisticate May Welland of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was compared to the hunt goddess Diana and noted for her slimness and athleticism. By the 1920s, thinness was firmly established as the fashion, with characters such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker (The Great Gatsby) representing the slender, athletic, almost boyish ideal. In Koppelman’s collection, Octavia Thanet’s “The Stout Miss Hopkins’s Bicycle” (1897) is an early example of how women suffered socially for their weight and how they began trying to manage it through exercise — an unthinkable notion for ladies of previous generations. One hundred years later, 1997’s “The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe” (Hollis Seamon) also pairs two woman who to the world appear to have eating disorders — Suzanne Brown, who prefers the fullness of flesh, and Theresa, a teenager with apparent anorexia.

Some stories, like “Fat” (Grace Sartwell Mason) play purposely to the popular stereotype. Mrs. Payton Tierney substitutes a constant supply of rich foods for the love that no longer exists between her and her husband. Food is the problem and the solution as “The prison of her flesh received her” and the story ends in a surprisingly predictable way.

Stories like “Good-Bye, Old Laura” (Lucile Vaughan Payne) and “Skanks” (Rennie Sparks) capture the respective times and experiences of their teenage protagonists. Laura and Janine are complex characters whose peers influence their feelings about themselves and their bodies, with disturbing results for both. “The Hershey Bar Queen” (Elena Diaz Bjorkquist) is a teenage revenge fantasy, although the protagonist’s food obsession and child-like simplicity and gullibility make the supernatural ending disappointingly ineffective.

If Mrs. Tierney, with her bonbons and distaste for exertion, is the stereotypical fat woman, the husbands in “The Feeder” (Maria Bruno) are alpha males whose wives fight back by taking control of their food, their bodies, and their weights — the thin wife consciously, the fat one less so. This story stands out for the disturbing image of a trapped, dying bird, wings broken, that is not worth saving to the insensitive husband.

“Perfectly Normal” (Lesléa Newman) is about the fat hatred and other prejudices of an anorexic wife. After making her promise not to get fat like her active, happy, lesbian sister, her husband sends her to a sanitarium before she wastes away even more. The combination of the wife’s first-person perspective and the extremities of her opinions (“The least she [sister] could do was rip out the labels [of her clothing] so she would not have to be embarrassed” [about her size]) puts this story at the border of two-dimensional for the sake of making a point.

That is part of the problem with any focused collection like this; the focus on food, fat, and fat attitudes casts a blinding glare on the issues rather than truly illuminating them. It’s interesting to see attitudes over the past 100 or so years, but questions arise, such as: How do those attitudes compare to those toward fat men, or to those who are different physically in other ways? If, as is claimed, only 10 percent prefer a fat partner to a normal-sized one, can the bias against fat be so definitively said to be social and cultural? Are those influences that widespread and strong? If the claim is true, are fat women really powerful erotic symbols to any but a few? It’s mentioned that Lillian Russell, at more than 200 pounds, was a sex symbol of her time — but is that because she was fat or despite the fact she became fat with age?

In her defensiveness about fat, Koppelman writes, “There is nothing in women’s fiction to affirm the calamitous claims of health risks made by the bariatricians, the exercise gurus, and the weight reduction mavens.” Koppelman cannot be so single-minded as to confuse what appears in fiction with what happens in reality. Obesity, like other extremes, not only comes with serious health risks (for example, diabetes and all its complications), but also can limit the fat person’s activities in ways that have nothing to do with societal bias (for example, I am too heavy for horseback riding, which I would love to be able to do). Koppelman’s logic seems to be that, until a woman writes fiction about obesity-induced illnesses, they are not an issue for women.

The big question here is, “What does fat mean?” To the 5’7″ patient in “Perfectly Normal,” it means weighing more than 100–115 pounds. “The Hershey Bar Queen” weighs more than 400 pounds, as must the sideshow attractions in “Noblesse” (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) and “Even as You and I” (Fannie Hurst). Suzanne LaFleshe weighs a little over 200. It’s an important question because an active, confident, 200-pound woman, while fat by medical and social standards, may fall within the realm of normal deviation, while a girl like “The Hershey Bar Queen,” enormous and obsessed with food, is a clear case of pathology. People fear pathology, whether it’s morbid obesity, autism, or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe {and Other Stories of Women and Fatness} is hampered by the restrictions and biases of its focus. A few stories stand out, but many are slices of life that lack depth, context, and subtlety. Another issue is that the book copy was not proofread; there are numerous typographical errors throughout, sometimes several on a page, so that the trustworthiness of the texts is in doubt — an unfortunate problem in a work produced by an academic professional like Koppelman. Still, it’s worth reading for the handful of gems.

11 November 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf