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Book review: Bridge to Terabithia

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Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. New York, NY: HaperCollins Children’s Books. 2003. 176 pages.

If there was one thing I loved about school, it was the Scholastic Book Club. I’m not exaggerating when I say getting the Scholastic catalog and placing an order was a highlight of my childhood. I didn’t walk 10 miles through blizzards and hungry packs of wolves to school like the previous generation half-jokingly claimed, but unlike many of today’s children I didn’t have much stuff. We had neither money nor room for “junk,” as my dad would say.

When I was allowed to buy a Scholastic book, it was a treat to be savored. I had to choose carefully. Some of my favorite titles: The Snow Ghosts. Mystery by Moonlight. The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost. The Mystery in the Pirate Oak. The Mystery of the Great Swamp. The Girl Who Ran Away. The Magic Tunnel. The Arrow Book of Ghost Stories. I remembered a few others by their covers, although I can’t swear I read them: The Ghost Rock Mystery. Deadline at Spook Cabin. The Stolen Train.

I liked mysteries and stories with a hint of the otherworldly. Some ended prosaically — as with Scooby Doo adventures, the ghost turned out to be the equivalent of the creepy lighthouse keeper. Others — the ones I liked best — ventured into the child’s version of the Twilight Zone: The Snow Ghosts. The Magic Tunnel. A non-Scholastic book in this cdategory merits mention: The Secret Pencil by Patricia Ward, which tops my list of children’s books.

Some of these stories have a common theme — a child who feels like a misfit in his or environment or circumstances. The only girl in a family dominated by rowdy boys. The loner. The city boy who doesn’t know to wear rubber-soled shoes because he’s never learned how to play. The girl with imagination who wants to be a writer. If you were a child who liked to read, these stories seemed to have been plucked from your soul.

Since my Scholastic Books days, I haven’t read many (if any) contemporary children’s books, such as The Baby-sitters Club. I get the impression they’re more realistic and issues-oriented. The literatures changes with the times and sensibilities, and I imagine the newer stories appeal to more than just sensitive, lonely spirits.

Bridge to Terabithia, from 1977, seemed like a step in the evolution of children’s books from the 1960s to today. In his rural, working-class world of seasonal employment and social conformity, Jess tries to hide his artistic proclivities from his family even as he uses his limited means to nurture them. In his father’s view, real men don’t draw. In a telling simile, Paterson writes, “Jess drew the way some men drink whiskey.”

While his parents are mired in the day-to-day concerns of poverty, and his older sisters in their acquisitiveness, Jess dreams of greatness — of running, of being the “fastest, the best” so “even his dad would be proud” and “forget all about how tired he was from the long drive back and forth to Washington.” His parents yearn for the money, stability, and security that will always be beyond their reach. Jeb yearns for the recognition, approval, and love that they keep out of his.

As a swan among ducks, Jess doesn’t have many friends beyond his little sister, May Belle, to whom he is kind and cruel. “Why couldn’t he quit picking on her?” She’s the one person who looks up to him, and the one person he can dominate. She’s also a “durn lucky kid” — she gets hugs and kisses from their father while Jess looks on enviously.

That, along with a crush on a young music teacher, another swan among ducks, is Jess’s life when Leslie Burke and her parents move in next door from the city. Upper middle-class urban hippies, they’re not like anyone Jess has known. To his horror, Leslie is faster than he is — faster than any boy. Jess soon finds out that her self-absorbed mother, a writer, pays no more attention to her than his parents pay to him.

Overcoming their differences and difficulties by focusing on her experiences and his dreams, Jess and Leslie create their own world, Terabithia, where they rule. Here, they come up with schemes to “slay” one of the giants of their real life, Janice Avery. Jess, who has never been a free spirit like Leslie, can’t always maintain his kingly manner. While she appears to listen “respectfully to someone talking to her, Jess was shivering, whether from the cold or the place, he didn’t know.” She isn’t afraid to take risks. Like his parents, he is.

To me, the problem with Bridge to Terabithia is that I could not cross it. Paterson’s portrayal of the meanness of home and school life in a struggling town is detailed and devastating. Like Jess, I wanted to escape to Terabithia, but like Jess I never fully experience it. Words like “kingly” and “Spirits” and “knightly” can’t evoke emotion when used sparingly without context. I can’t share Leslie’s passion for this land over the creek or why she’d risk so much for it. Jess knows what she thinks and wants to understand what she does, but he doesn’t feel it, and neither could I.

Bridge to Terabithia’s power lies in its transformational ending, when Jess can tell May Belle, “Everyone gets scared,” and his teacher can talk about her late husband that he never imagined she had. Even Leslie’s parents come to life at last; “Bill didn’t sound like himself” as he expresses his awareness and gratitude. We see Jess in the anger phase; “she had made him leave his old self behind” but she had “failed him.” At the same time, though, there’s a hint of Terabithia’s potential — to “make him see beyond to the shining world — huge and terrible and very fragile.”

Bridge to Terabithia’s underlying gritty realism carries the book. Its inability to get beyond Jess’s limited, but growing perspective — his frustrations, his emotional poverty, and his narrow frame of reference — mutes its power.

22 July 2017
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Thirty Indian Legends of Canada

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Thirty Indian Legends of Canada by Margaret Bemister. Illustrations by Douglas Tait. Vancouver, British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre. 1997. 160 pages.

In her preface to Thirty Indian Legends of Canada, dated September 15, 1912, from Winnipeg, Margaret Bemister notes that many of these stories are printed for the first time, while others are “adapted from well-known authorities.” She mentions one tribal name on her list of sources (“the Okanagan chief, Antowyne”). Other than this single reference and some names (Chippewa, Cree, Iroquois, Osage, Ottawa) and geographical places (Assiniboine River, Manatoline Islands, Lake Huron, Missouri River, Niagara Falls) sprinkled among the stories, there is little to help the lay reader understand where they originated, how, and why. Canada covers a lot of land from east to west and north to south, and embraces many cultures, but that diversity is sometimes lost in this collection.

Not surprisingly, animals and plants—or what appear to be animals and plants—figure strongly in many of the tales. It may be a dormouse, which was “once very large;” butterflies that carry messages from whispering grass (not suburban lawn grass, but tall grass deeply rooted in prairie soil); bears, squirrels, birds, and three animals that evoke the northern wilderness—beaver, lynx, and wolverine. As you would expect, manitous and magicians appear and sometimes disappear.

More notably, a few stories feature giants and fairies. Most of us can picture a giant or fairy as portrayed in western literature, but what were these entities to Canada’s first peoples? One can only imagine from descriptions such as “He saw all around him queer, little fairies, each one with a tiny war club. They peeped from out the bark of the trees, from amidst the grass, and even from out his pouch” and “At the call of Weeng his sleep fairies had come forth, and now with their clubs were knocking their enemies on the head.” Clearly these aren’t the ephemeral winged sprites that a Victorian girl may have doodled in the garden. The problem here may be time and translation. How do you convey ancient, alien concepts in a language that was never meant to express them?

While there are villages and large families (for example, the ten brothers of “The Giant Bear” and the ten daughters and husbands of “The Fairies’ Cliff”), some stories have a lonely, isolated feel. In “The Daughters of the Star,” hunter Waupee (the White Hawk) lives in a deep forest and one day reaches a wide prairie, where “no trace of footsteps was to be seen.” In “The White Feather,” an old man and his grandson are so isolated on an island that the boy “had never heard any one but his grandfather speak.” “The Lone Lightning” evokes shades of the Grimm Brothers’ Hansel and Gretel; a “lonely little boy” is raised by his uncle, who intends to stuff him with bear meat and fat, then kill him. His sad, lonely fate “may be seen in the northern sky on autumn nights.”

Some stories tell of beginnings, like “The Five Water-spirits,” whose play gives rise to Niagara Falls, where in the “sunny spray you may see their sandals and their wings.” “The Stone Canoe” addresses grief, the afterlife, and the idea that you cannot stay in the “Land of Souls” until your work is done and your life is meant to end.

I wish I knew more about these stories, how they arose, and if they were influenced by outside cultures (ponies make an appearance, as does a cabin built and abandoned by white men). Without context, phrases like “laughing like girls on a holiday” (“The Five Water-Spirits”) sound oddly English. What would that simile mean to the people who told it and heard it told? Thirty Indian Legends of Canada left me feeling isolated and lonely and wanting more—more legends and more knowledge of the peoples who brought them to life.

6 July 2017
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Last Witchfinder: A Novel

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The Last Witchfinder: A Novel by James Morrow. New York: Harper Perennial. 2007. 560 pages.

The last dodo. The last passenger pigeon. The last wilderness. The last fill-in-the-blank usually evokes a sense of sadness, loss, and finality. The Last Witchfinder, the over-the-top epic about a sister and brother dedicated to opposing world views in a time of rapid advancements, celebrates the last — we hope — of ignorance at a truly devilish level. Unlike the harmless dodo, the pretty passenger pigeon, or the soul-searing wilderness, the last witchfinder is an repulsively compelling creation, a stubborn holdover from an irrational time, when as much evil was committed in the name of the Good Lord as Satan could hope for.

Jennet Stearne and her brother Dunstan arrive on the scene in England just as the Age of Reason is taking root. Their story isn’t told by the standard omniscient human narrator. Instead, it’s recalled by a more lasting, if questionably reliable, witness to the Enlightenment and all that’s happened since — Newton’s Principia. That this novel requires a little more imagination and suspension of belief is obvious when a book takes the place of a human author, while the humans are the mere subjects. Sometimes Morrow’s odd device breathes a little academic vitality into the narration, but more often the Principia‘s interjections and commentaries are too intrusive, forced, awkward, and lengthy to be effective. The imagination carries one only so far.

Jennet and Dunstan are molded differently by their shared experiences. Their father, a witchfinder, makes his living by producing the proofs that condemn marginal or eccentric members of society, usually women, to gruesome state executions. His sister-in-law, a half-informed but intellectually curious devotee of Newton, becomes a threat to the beliefs of the past that fuel his existence. When she is condemned as a witch, Jennet makes it her mission to use Newton’s work to disprove the concept of demons and witches. Her brother, his father’s son and blinded by his lust for Abigail Williams (the star witness at the Salem witch trials) and religious ecstasy devoid of spirituality, clings aggressively to the past, seeking witches where there are no hints of any and becoming the last witchfinder even as the practice is dying in the shadows of the Englightenment.

Morrow uses some of the same devices found in early English novels like Tom Jones (Henry Fielding) and Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne), with chapter summaries and narrator intrusions and commentaries. At points, The Last Witchfinder is engaging, amusing, interesting, imaginative, and thought provoking. In his effort to emulate the likes of Fielding and Sterne, however, Morrow overdoes the diversions, ancillary incidents and characters, and irrelevant details. Never quite clearly defined, Jennet’s mission is too easily sidetracked by too many improbable adventures and events, and the center section bogs down in its lack of focus. It’s only when Dunstan, in his crazed unspiritual righteousness and deformity, returns to the scene that the plot picks up and the story comes back to life. The final meeting between Jennet and Dunstan is electrifying.

In a society that seems to be becoming more anti-intellectual, The Last Witchfinder is refreshing to the mind. Its premise and execution are flawed, but much of Jennet’s journey is at least disturbing, interesting, and fun.

18 August 2012
Copyright © 2012 Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Rapture of Canaan

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The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds. Highly recommended.

In The Rapture of Canaan, Sheri Reynolds creates two memorable characters, each of whom in turn creates God in his/her own image.

The first is Grandpa Herman Langston. After surviving a war that his companions didn’t and then losing his infant son, Herman founds his own “brand” of Christianity, The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. Herman’s church is based on sin, suffering, and punishment — punishing everyone around for his sin of survival. When his granddaughter falls asleep and forgets to say prayers, she is put to bed with cockle burrs and sandspurs. When a member of the congregation imbibes, he must spend a night in his own grave. When the same man fornicates with a girl outside the church (a “backslidden Holiness” named Corinthian), he is starved and imprisoned in a cellar for 40 days — mostly to hide the severity of the punishment Herman has inflicted upon him.

Herman reserves the worst punishment of all for his own wife, who as a child lied to try to hide her mother’s murder of her father. Periodically, Herman trots out Leila’s decades-old transgression as much to punish her as to educate the flock. Recognising that the past is the past, and wise enough to know that God has forgiven her, Leila loves the man, or what he once was, and his strength too much to protest. His needs outweigh hers.

For Herman, religion is control. He decides what is acceptable and what is not; for example, the women must never cut their hair. He decides who and what is punished, and how. He decides what happens to any fines collected. In Herman’s world, the sinner gives up all control to God — the God in Herman’s image.

Lest the reader think that Herman is free from temptation and sin, the other memorable character, granddaughter Ninah Huff, carefully notes all the monetary punishments that are imposed on the members of the community but that never seem to be returned for its common good.

If Herman’s God is a vengeful, controlling one, Ninah’s God is loving and understanding. Ninah and her cousin by marriage, James, are at a dangerous times in their lives, when adolescents discover how powerless punishment can be against the power of passion and love. Unfortunately, James is torn by Herman’s God and by the Jesus he claims speaks through Ninah when they make love.

Ninah, however, continues the questioning they had begun about what it means to love God and one another, and what it means to be a Christian in a world where good people like her Hindu friend from school are non-believers. Is it about seeing a miracle messiah in Ninah and James’ baby Canaan, born with the skin of his hands bonding them in seemingly endless prayer? Or is it about seeing God as love, the love that drives Ninah to brutally cut Canaan’s hands apart so that he can be free to be a sinful and real human being?

Through her affection for James, Ninah discovers the love of God in her own heart. Her God is, by definition, beyond control. James and Ninah can’t and don’t control their natural feelings and urges. Ninah begins to understand the perpetual school truant, Corinthian, whose lack of control is expressed in an exuberant, “Whee, Jesus!”

Eventually, Herman starts to lose control over the community. Some of the congregation, his own family, stop attending services. Ninah starts twisting Pammy’s hair into forbidden French braids. Ninah cuts off her own hair and is followed by several of the women, young and old. When a stroke incapacitates him physically and mentally, Herman’s grip on the community is finally lost, enabling Ninah to take the final step of setting Canaan’s hands free.

Blood is the recurring theme of The Rapture of Canaan — the blood Leila’s mother shed when she killed her husband and the symbolic blood red Leila colours her paper dolls; the blood of menstruation that Ninah hides from everyone, even Leila (Nanna); the blood of James’ first deer kill that baptizes both him and Ninah; the blood of the mare that hemorrhages to death while giving birth; the blood that Canaan must sacrifice as Ninah transforms him from messiah to ordinary baby, conceived and born in the sin of love.

As Nanna recounts stories and Ninah weaves stories into rugs made from “rags and lies, rope and hair, fabric and love,” Reynolds captures the poetry of prose. “I weave in lies, and I weave in love, and in the end, it’s hard to know if one keeps me warmer than the other,” Ninah begins. She sees The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind’s community “like an island. Like an island sinking from the weight of fearful hearts.” Ninah says of James, “He brushed my back off each time, and his hands felt like a remedy to all the badness I’d ever known.” She spends her pregnancy making baby clothes. When she sees Canaan’s joined hands in church, she thinks for a moment, “I might have sewn him together by accident when I was making all those baby clothes.”

Poetic, thought provoking, and compelling, The Rapture of Canaan should make you question your own beliefs and where they originated — in the fear of man or in the love of God.

16 April 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Portnoy’s Complaint

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Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. Recommended.

Combination lengthy kvetch and documentation of a fictional psychiatric disorder, Portnoy’s Complaint addresses the narrator’s life as a first-generation American Jew and an oversexed male. As both, Alexander Portnoy is unable to reconcile his desire for the American dream with his desire for compliant shikses.

Portnoy is at war with his parents, his Jewish heritage, goy society, women, and, of course, himself. He claims to despise his parents’ flair for the dramatic, yet his entire monologue is an exercise in self-centered comic hyperbole. As an atheist, he has no use for the Jewish faith, but he aspires to the camaraderie and sense of community experienced by the neighborhood Jewish men who play baseball on Sundays. The goyish middle class around him fascinates him with what he perceives to be the perfection of life that goes on behind their curtains and repels him with their religion and its imagery.

Portnoy refers to his girlfriends by nicknames such as The Monkey and The Pilgrim, which focus on what they represent to him rather than on who they are. When they are problematic, as The Monkey often is, they become individuals with greater mental issues than his own. When they are nearly perfect — upper middle-class shikses with centuries-long pedigrees, like The Pilgrim — they fail to satisfy Portnoy’s cravings for all that is not the sexual equivalent of white bread. He finally encounters a Jewish woman — in Israel — but he is not up to the challenge on any level. Mostly, Portnoy claims to want one thing while actively seeking its opposite. He is not so different from anyone else.

Part of Portnoy’s bemusement lies in how the world actually works. While he, a model student and citizen, lives a secret life that would indeed cause the headlines he fears if it were made public, he learns that two of his former schoolmates, unfettered by the type of parental attention that he finds so suffocating and free to pursue the degenerate lifestyle he desires, end up, not behind bars, but behind the curtained windows of American middle-class success, enjoying all that comes with it — including marriage. Portnoy is disturbed to discover that there is no guaranteed cause and effect. Anyone can achieve the American dream if they wish. His failure is another opportunity to blame his parents.

According to Roth, Portnoy has “strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses,” but there is not much in Portnoy’s character that is either ethical or altruistic. While his father sells life insurance to New Jersey’s poor blacks and his mother furtively disinfects the dishes and silverware used by the black housekeeper, Portnoy is on his way to becoming the assistant commissioner of human opportunity for New York City. In this position, he shows little genuine compassion or empathy for the poor minorities who seek his support. He has no more interest in the people he represents, other than as symbols of his liberal socialism, than he has in Rosh Hashanah or the other defining aspects of Jewish heritage and experience. His only interest in his lover’s threats of suicide are in the potential headlines — the possibility that his real persona will be exposed.

In a symbolic way, Portnoy resembles a man from his childhood whom he despised for his pretentious piety — Rabbi Warshaw, he of the “Pall Mall breath.” With his position as protector of the minority underclass and his apparent social liberalism, Portnoy is pious, or at least self-righteous, on the outside, but perhaps inside he, like the rabbi and his foul breath, is not so sweet or idealistic as he appears.

Despite the 289 pages of uninterrupted monologue, the reader never really knows Portnoy. The pages and pages of hyperbole make him an unreliable narrator. Because it is a monologue, he chooses what he tells — and doesn’t tell — the mysteriously silent and patient psychiatrist. The reader cannot know how much of this fiction is “true” within its context and how much is Portnoy putting into practice the flair for drama that so exasperates him in his parents — his father, whose bowels never move, and his mother, who believes that she nearly died from once tasting a prohibited delicacy and who can never let anyone forget it. Portnoy’s Complaint reads like a long, drawn-out wet dream; a long, drawn-out comic monologue; or an odd combination of both. I can envision an abbreviated version of this novel as a one-man stage show.

While not for the prudish or the conventional (Portnoy seems to say out loud the types of things most people prefer to repress, even to themselves), Portnoy’s Complaint is a funny, evocative, tactless look at the American experience. You do not have to be Jewish to appreciate Portnoy or his trials, trivial as they are. I suspect most male readers will recognize Alexander Portnoy in themselves, together with his confused and confusing desires for middle-class respectability and his need to push the bounds of sexual expression — although I cannot imagine that very many would admit it.

30 March 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex

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Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Recommended.

“Witness the people of the book, in bed.” Thus editor Melvin Jules Bukiet invites the reader into the intimacies of Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex. In this collection, everyone from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Woody Allen and Erica Jong gets into the act of exploring sex in its many varieties — heterosexual, homosexual, incestuous, paid, humorous, poignant, intellectual, sadistic, masochistic, costumed — always from a distinctive, wry Jewish perspective. Note, though, that you don’t have to be interested in erotica to appreciateNeurotica — just in good stories.

The anthology begins with a memorable story by Woody Allen, “The Whores of Mensa,” an over-the-top private eye tale that cleverly and humorously reveals what many of us know but some have yet to discover — that sex is less a function of the nether regions and more one of the mind. This theme is continued and expanded in “The Courtship” from The Mind-Body Problem” by Rebecca Goldstein, in which the narrator says, “And I remember too the intensity of my pleasure, which wasn’t at all physical . . . my head sang the triumphant thought: I am making love to this man . . . to Noam Himmel, the genius.” Unfortunately, “The Courtship” is marred somewhat by this ending and the tone throughout, which makes it resemble less of a literary work and more of the author’s personal fantasy, or what is known in fan fiction as a “Mary Sue” story.

Philip Roth adds imagination to the mix in an excerpt from The Counterlife in which a dentist suggest to his new assistant that they play dentist and assistant. She says, “Why is it so exciting when all we’re pretending to be is what we are?” When his physical deficiencies win over his imagination, he plummets to the world that is, not what could be, which he cannot long survive.

No matter the theme, any anthology focused on Jewish writers is bound to include references to Germans, World War II, and the Holocaust. In “Jews Have No Business Being Enamored of Germans,” Binnie Kirshenbaum’s narrator confronts the Jewish self-hatred that could make a Jewish man with a “short and convenient view of history” prefer and seek out Germans and “Aryan intellectualism.” Even the narrator’s parents have succumbed to postmodern sense of tolerance or denial. “‘Oh, none of that concerned us,’ my mother waved off the Holocaust and a world war.”

Michael Lowenthal takes a psychologically richer approach in “Infinity of Angles,” in which a Jewish homosexual connects with a German, only to find his would-be lover identifies too closely with the persecuted and demands an unusual punishment.

While there’s some humour in Neurotica, there is also mental illness. The two are combined in “Elvis, Axl, and Me” by Janice Eidus, who proves that Elvis isn’t dead; he lives in The Bronx disguised as a Hasidic Jew. Mental illness appears again in “The Quality of Being a Ruby” by Cheryl Pearl Sucher, a thoroughly modern tale of a bipolar girl experiencing anxiety neurosis who picks up lovers, drops lithium, experiments with cocaine, and resists the advice of her protective father. “For Ruby, the distillation of the illness was ‘Rubessence,’ the perfect calm of inspired originality, the longed-for union of the desired and the real.”

One of the best stories is “Taibele and Her Demon” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who brings a fairy-tale simplicity to this complex tale of deception and love. As with any collection, there are several stories I didn’t like, such as “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light” by Thane Rosenbaum, who tries too self-consciously to combine the sacred, the profane, and the silly. My favourite story was by Nathan Englander, titled “Peep Show.” The troubled protagonist asks, “What is a boy raised in a world of absolutes to do when he is faced with contradictions?” The answer is, “You question. That’s what you do,” according to the nude rabbi his imagination has conjured. Despite the humorous and ludicrous situations in which the protagonist finds himself at the peep show, the tone of the story is strangely eerie in its reference to peep show nostalgia — a little like the tone of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Although a few stories are set in places such as France, Germany, Italy, and Israel, most take place in the United States and are by Jewish-American authors. All are from the 20th century, which is disappointing since surely erotica by Jewish writers has been around at least as long as erotica by writers from other traditions. I would like to have seen more representation from other countries and time periods.

The location and time period, however, give Neurotica a couple of themes meant to appeal to a broad audience, including assimilation and secularization. In many of these stories, the faith, traditions, and rituals of Judaism are a mystery to the characters, primarily the younger ones. Noam Himmel, the genius, is an atheist ignorant of his cultural past. At one point, his seducer says, “You have heard of the Talmud?” He says later, “Sometimes, especially on insomniac nights, I start worrying that there may be a God, and worse, that he may be Jewish.” In “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light,” Adam doesn’t “really care to go” to that part of the world, and he allows his Swedish lover to extinguish his mother’s yohrzeit light. Like Adam, many of the characters actively seek goyim as lovers. Some of the older people speak Yiddish, but the young people do not. Yet, while religious, cultural, and even social bonds may seem to be disintegrating with assimilation after World War II,Neurotica shows that there is still a literary voice that has not been silenced and that remains uniquely Jewish.

5 September 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Memoir from Antproof Case: A Novel

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Memoir from Antproof Case: A Novel by Mark Helprin. Recommended.

Like Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case is difficult to classify (although Helprin helpfully gives it the subtitle A Novel). It has elements of magical surrealism, but falls short on magic.

In this sprawling fictional memoir, Oscar Progresso (not his real name, as though he were a real person) slowly and circumspectly reveals the cause of his pathological aversion to coffee, but first distracts the reader with red herrings like coffee’s allegedly toxic chemistry, the over-the-top portrayal of addiction to it, and its amphetamine-like effect on its purported victims.

The real cause is tragic but, given the tone of the novel, it’s hard to feel deeply for Oscar, the son of poor parents, graduate of Harvard University (and a Swiss mental institution), globe-trotting partner in an investment banking firm, WWII flying ace, and husband of a billionaire. The details of few of his stories are probable — how he killed two men, his life in the mental institution or even as a pilot during the war, the redundancy of the opulence of his life with Constance (how many kitchens is even a mansion likely to have?) or how she came to leave him. Then there is the drawn-out fall from power as an investment banker, from deciding the future of entire nations to being relegated to a carved wooden school desk in an unlit janitor’s closet and then to pointlessly shifting gold in the vaults with a class of unquestioning troglodyte humans; the culmination of this work is the most improbably event of all.

If there is any doubt about Oscar’s sanity, his reaction to being unable to find a larger antproof case should resolve it.

There are only two areas in which Oscar seems somewhat trustworthy. The first is the underlying story of his aversion to coffee, the story that is slowly and painstakingly revealed, and the other is his love for his wife’s son by another man, the boy he once was for only a short time.

I found myself wanting less of the whimsy and surrealism, imaginative and fascinating as it is, and more of the heart and soul that must inspire some of Oscar’s interjected and concluding thoughts, for example:

“Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one loves one’s parents and one’s children despite their failings and weaknesses — sometimes even more on account of them. In this school, you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness . . . With it [love, devotion, life as an device for the exercise of faith], your heart, though broken, will be full, and you will stay in the fight unto the very last.”

As with Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, the voice is poetic and unique and the characters etched, while the events purposely stretch the credulity of the reader (if not the narrator).Memoir from Antproof Case tries to appeal to both the imagination and the heart, but, like its predecessors, sacrifices the latter for the former. This is unfortunate, because it has the potential to be the most human of the three. Instead of feeling for Oscar Progresso and his losses and lessons, I am left thinking he is a madman and an unreliable narrator who cannot escape the obsession and fantasy he has created and now clings to; my empathy remains uncertain and unclaimed. I cannot even be sure that the one story Oscar tells that rings true really is — the one of his childhood tragedy.

Helprin is close to being a great novelist but there is something cold and intellectual in his approach and style that prevents him from breaking through as, for example, Toni Morrison has. Although he has experienced life, it is rarely clear that he has felt it. Like Oscar and some of his previous characters, Helprin seems more observer than participant, which ultimately detracts from the magic and surrealism. Part of what make something magical is a belief that it could be possible in some way or some world; much of Oscar’s narrative is possible only in a madman’s mind.

Memoir from Antproof Case is worth the read, especially for Helprin fans, but it is more fancy appetizer than satisfying main course.

Aside: My copy of Memoir from Antproof Case is stained with coffee.

7 August 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Master and Commander

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Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. Not recommended.

Master and Commander is the first in a series of Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin novels, this one set in the early 1800s. After meeting Dr. Maturin at a concert by annoying him, Aubrey learns he has been promoted to master and commander (with honorary title of captain) of His Majesty’s sloop Sophie. How Aubrey earned this promotion is unclear, as his womanising ways seems to have irritated his commandant and everyone else, although women seem to have played a role in obtaining it.

There are several problems with Master and Commander. The first is O’Brian’s fixation on his knowledge of sailing and sailing terminology. At one point, he spends pages having a crew member explaining the rigging in painstaking — and painful — detail to Dr. Maturin. There is little purpose to this, as most laymen will find it difficult and tedious to follow, and a knowledgeable person will want to skip it altogether. It adds nothing but volume to the book and proof that O’Brian did his research.

O’Brian provides no historical context for the story. England is at war with France and Spain, but even Bonaparte is rarely mentioned. The characters reference naval actions like the battle of the Nile, but these incidents have meaning only to the characters since the reader is never privy to the context or greater strategy.

While Aubrey, Dr. Maturin, James Dillon, and the master are interesting characters, most of the rest of the crew is intentionally faceless. The men in key positions, like the bosun, are rarely referred to by name. Even Marshall is known primarily as “the master,” making the attempt to give him a personality by alluding to him as an apprehensive pederast futile.

There is neither much story nor much action here. It takes the first quarter of the novel for Sophie to leave port for the first time under Aubrey’s command. The novel’s big battle, during which Sophiemiraculously defeats a bigger, better-manned ship, is so hurried and poorly recounted that there is no tension or suspense about how the encounter will play out or end. The victory evokes no sense of exhilaration in the reader, so the ensuing letdown (no promotions, no cruise) loses its emotional impact.

Even the most intriguing aspect of the novel, the relationships between Aubrey and Dillon, Dillon and Dr. Maturin, and Aubrey and Dr. Maturin, are poorly drawn, partially because the point of view is inconsistent. As a clinician and researcher, Dr. Maturin is the relatively objective observer and link between Aubrey and Dillon. He knows Dillon’s secrets (as well as his own) and the thoughtless bias behind Aubrey’s anti-Papist rants, but is reduced to expressing his thoughts and feelings of affection, frustration and disgust mainly to his journal, as though he were documenting an illness.

Master and Commander has tremendous potential, but O’Brian doesn’t have the literary skills or ability to craft a great read. His prose is ordinary at best, and history, drama, suspense, plot, and even characterisation are given short shrift. For more compelling naval adventures set during the same period, read the Horatio Hornblower series, which is much better conceived and written and which is far more evocative.

Note: The colours of the movie tie-in edition cover are pastel blue and yellow — a very odd choice, given the subject matter and target audience.

20 March 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Return of the Native

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The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy. Recommended.

In Egdon Heath, Thomas Hardy creates an otherworld consisting of the elements earth, wind, fire, and water, populated by a witch condemned by a pious woman’s spell, a Christian ruled by pagan beliefs, an assortment of other odd characters, and the native of the title whose return precipitates a series of tragic events.

The Return of the Native is centered around Eustacia Vye, a beautiful outsider wrenched from the society she craves by orphanhood and exiled to live on Egdon Heath with her maternal grandfather. Spoiled, vain, fickle, and selfish, Eustacia is not a sympathetic heroine. Although she claims to belong to Damon Wildeve (“body and soul” in one uncensored version), she really belongs to whomever can grant her what she desires and, in her mind, deserves. While Wildeve is a step above the local rabble, Eustacia can never fully commit herself to him. Each time she considers it, she is held back by the thought that even he lacks something and that surely she can do better. “He’s not great enough for me to give myself to — he does not suffice for my desire! . . . If he had been a Saul or a Bonaparte — ah! But to break my marriage vow for him — it is too poor a luxury!”

In another place, like the Paris Eustacia longs for, she would have become a mistress or a courtesan — the consort of a powerful man or men. On Egdon Heath, however, there are neither powerful men nor courtesans. There is only Damon, an equally fickle young man who hotly desires that which he cannot have — sometimes Eustacia, sometimes the naïve Thomasin Yeobright. To complicate matters, Thomasin’s cousin Clym returns from Paris, where he has a financially rewarding and spiritually stifling career. In Eustacia’s eyes (blinded to what she doesn’t want to see, just as Clym’s sight becomes literally blurred to that which he does want to see), Clym appears to be the ideal replacement for Wildeve.

In his introduction to the “standard edition,” John Paterson, talks about the censorship of The Return of the Native and its anti-Christianity elements. The novel, at least in this form, appears to be more anti-Christian than anti-Christianity. Eustacia, with her beauty; aloof and lonely snobbishness; hold over men such as Wildeve and Clym and boys such as “the little slave” Johnny Nunsuch and the adolescent Charley; and habit of haunting Rainbarrow at all hours of the night, can easily appear to fit the role of the Egdon Heath witch. Yet it is the churchgoing Susan Nunsuch who falls prey to superstition, believing that Eustacia has afflicted her son with illness. She stabs Eustacia with a needle during one of the young lady’s rare church appearances. Ironically, in the end Susan is the witch, fashioning a likeness of Eustacia and practicing a homegrown form of obeah upon it.

Susan’s male counterpart, the ironically named Christian, is no better. Simple-minded, naïve, and condemned to perpetual bachelorhood, Christian is pious not for love of God but for fear of life. He is ruled by superstition, and it requires little effort for Wildeve to convince him he is lucky and that he should gamble (as it turns out, with money that isn’t his, adding theft to his sins).

Like Egdon Heath itself (“oozing lumps of fleshy fungi . . . like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal”), the remainder of its inhabitants — the ones from whom Eustacia wishes to escape — are unflinchingly, unchangingly pagan, with Christian’s own reprobate father, Granfer Cantle, setting the example. They avoid inconveniences like church; they gleefully celebrate Guy Fawkes Day with fire and dance; they gossip without undue concern for good or bad. These are the folks from whom Mrs. Yeobright and the stoic pagan Diggory Venn (the reddleman) wish to save Thomasin’s reputation — as though it matters to them.

These are also the people among whom Eustacia is a queen. When she says, “How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman and how destiny has been against me!” the reader is hard pressed to find Eustacia’s efforts to better herself, other than trying to determine which man will best launch her into society. With his Paris connections, Clym is the obvious choice, yet it is Wildeve who turns out to have better prospects — and the will to take advantage of them.

Queen among the heathens of the heath, Eustacia is blissfully unaware of the probability that, in the Parisian society she aspires to, she would be one among many and might find herself unable to compete with the elite courtesans, mistresses, and wives of Paris. “I was capable of much,” she claims. Hardy, however, never makes clear what this “much” might be exactly, as Eustacia’s intelligence, learning, and wit are incompletely and imperfectly portrayed, and one does not make a splash in society based on looks and pride alone. Eustacia hasn’t “tried and tried”; and her youthful, ambitious impatience has led her to miss the clues that Clym is not going to “try and try,” either. Perhaps she, like Sue in Jude the Obscure, represents the dilemma of the intelligent woman in the 1800s, who can shape her own destiny only through attachment to the right man in a socially acceptable way. When that fails (Eustacia), or if an alternative means is attempted (Sue), tragedy is inevitable.

While not Hardy’s best, The Return of the Native is a must read for his readers, incorporating a grim yet objective setting, memorable characters, and a tragic plot driven by human failings more so than the destiny at which Eustacia rails. Ignore the awkward, unconvincing happy ending, as Hardy’s censors forced him to tack it on.

31 October 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Count of Monte Cristo

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The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père. Translated and with an introduction by Robin Buss. Highly recommended.

As translator Robin Buss points out in his introduction, many of those who haven’t read The Count of Monte Cristo assume it is a children’s adventure story, complete with daring prison escape culminating in a simple tale of revenge. There is very little for children in this very adult tale, however. Instead, the rich plot combines intrigue, betrayal, theft, drugs, adultery, presumed infanticide, torture, suicide, poisoning, murder, lesbianism, and unconventional revenge.

Although the plot is roughly linear beginning with Edmond Dantès’ return to Marseille, prenuptial celebration, and false imprisonment and ending with his somewhat qualified triumphant departure from Marseille and France, Dumas uses the technique of interspersing lengthy anecdotes throughout. The story of Cardinal Spada’s treasure, the origins of the Roman bandit Luigi Vampa (the least germane to the novel), Bertuccio’s tale of his vendetta, and the account of the betrayal and death of Ali Pasha are few of the more significant stories-within-the-novel. While Dumas devotes an entire chapter to bandit Luigi Vampa’s background, he cleverly makes only a few references to what will remain the plot’s chief mystery — how the youthful, intelligent, and naive sailor Edmond Dantès transforms himself into the worldly, jaded, mysterious Renaissance man and Eastern philosopher, the count of Monte Cristo, presumably sustained by his own advice of “wait” and “hope.”

This novel is not a simple tale of simple revenge. The count does not kill his enemies; he brilliantly uses their vices and weaknesses against them. Caderousse’s basic greed is turned against him, while Danglars loses the only thing that has any meaning for him. Fernand is deprived of the one thing that he had that he had never earned — his honour. In the process, he loses the source of his initial transgression, making his fate that much more poignant. The plot against Villefort is so complicated that even Monte Cristo loses control of it, resulting in doubt foreign to his nature and remorse that he will not outlive.

This long but generally fast-paced tale is set primarily in Marseille, Rome, and Paris. It begins with Dantès’ arrival in Marseille aboard the commercial vessel Pharaon and ends with his departure from Marseille aboard his private yacht, accompanied by the young, beautiful Greek princess Haydée. What gives The Count of Monte Cristo its life, however, are the times in which it is set — the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the First and Second Restoration, and the Revolution of 1830. Life-and-death politics motivates many of the characters and keeps the plot moving. Dumas also uses real people in minor roles, such as Countess G — (Byron’s mistress) and the Roman hotelier Signor Pastrini, which adds to the novel’s sense of historical veracity.

The most troubling aspect of The Count of Monte Cristo is Edmond Dantès himself. His claim to represent a higher justice seems to justify actions and inactions that are as morally reprehensible as those that sent him to prison, for example, his account of how he acquired Ali and his loyalty. Had he not discovered young Morrel’s love for Valentine Villefort, she too might have become an innocent victim. As it is, there are at least two other innocents who die, although one clearly would not have been an innocent for long based on his behaviour in the novel. One wonders if Dantès’ two father figures, his own flower-loving father and fellow prisoner Abbé Faria, would have approved of the count.

The translation appears to be good, with a few slips into contemporary English idioms that sound out of place. In his introduction, Buss states that the later Danglars and Fernand have become unrecognizable and that Fernand in particular has been transformed “from the brave and honest Spaniard with a sharp sense of honour . . . to the Parisian aristocrat whose life seems to have been dedicated to a series of betrayals.” There is never anything honest or honourable about Fernand; his very betrayal of Edmond is merely the first we know of in his lifelong pattern.

What seems extreme and somewhat unrealistic about Fernand is his transformation from an uneducated Catalan fisherman into a “Parisian aristocrat,” hobnobbing with statesmen, the wealthy, and the noteworthy of society. This, however, is the result of the milieu that the novel inhabits. During these post-Revolution, post-Napoleonic years, Fernand could rise socially through his military and political accomplishments just as Danglars does through his financial acumen. Danglars is careful to note that the difference between them is that Fernand insists upon his title, while Danglars is openly indifferent to and dismissive of his; his viewpoint is the more aristocratic.

Countess G — is quick to point out that there is no old family name of Monte Cristo and that the count, like many other contemporaries, has purchased his title. It serves mainly to obscure his identity, nationality, and background and to add to the aura of mystery his persona and Eastern knowledge create. What is most telling is that his entrée into Parisian society is based primarily on his great wealth, not his name. Dumas reinforces this point with Andrea Cavalcanti, another mystery man of unknown name and reputed fortune.

I have read The Man in the Iron Mask and The Three Musketeers series, both of which surprised me with their dark aspects (the character and fate of Lady de Winter, for example) and which little resembled the adventure stories distilled from them for children and for film. When I overheard a college student who was reading The Count of Monte Cristo on the bus tell a friend that she couldn’t put it down, I was inspired to read it. I couldn’t put it down, either, with its nearly seamless plot, dark protagonist, human villains, turbulent historical setting, and larger-than-life sense of mystery. At 1,078 pages, it’s imposing, but don’t cheat yourself by settling for an abridged version. You’ll want to pick up every nuance.

12 September 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf