The Baron in the Trees

by Italo Calvino

translated by Archibald Colquhoun

At the age of twelve, Cosimo Rondò, son of the Baron Armino, tires of his family’s rules and his odd sister’s elaborate, nasty tricks and takes to the trees, never to set foot on the earth again. He wears furs and feathers and sleeps in the trees, hunting and trading for his meals. But he remains part of society, helping deal with wolves, fires, and fruit thieves, even getting an education and writing the occasional treatise on democracy and the rights of animals. As Cosimo says, "A gentleman is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops… if he behaves with decency." He also engages in several love stormy love affairs and befriends a tribe of Spanish exiles who, drolly, also live in the trees.

I first read this, I’d guess, around 1989. It made something of an impression on me then mostly for its fantastical, absurdist elements played almost completely straight. This time around, I enjoyed the broad and witty comedy and the rich language used to describe the natural world; I also liked the classical and historical allusions (for example, Cosimo is reading Gil Blas, itself a picaresque novel about a man forced to help robbers, when he is approached by a brigand looking for refuge). Does it all mean anything? Well, Calvino is exploring the ideas of alienation and refuting societal norms, but I’m not sure there’s anything like a philosophy here, and no more answers than there is a plot. It’s a wild ride, funny and rich, a fine example of Oulipo writing. I loved the ending. 

five stars

The Matchlock Gun

by Walter D. Edmonds
1941

Set during the French and Indian War, this 1942 Newbery winner tells of an episode in a Dutch-American frontier family. When the father is gone to track Indians, a scouting group of braves comes to the house, with only the young mother, Gertrude, and her eldest child Edward, to fight them off. Really no more than a short story, this slim book’s charm is in its tossed-off details – the young couple getting married despite his mother’s objections, the way another man rides his horse, the chores that need to be done on the frontier, the loft which the children sleep in heated by the day's fire – which give it some depth and make its characters more relatable. The “plot,” which just boils down to one brief and somewhat dubious action, is not particularly interesting. It’s a nice story, but was it really the best children’s book of its year? I can’t imagine it.

three stars

Matilda

by Roald Dahl
1988

Matilda, an intellectually precocious and sweet-natured girl, is dismissed and insulted by her oblivious, greedy, dishonest parents. Bored and aggravated by their bullying and ignorance, Matilda pulls pranks on her family, such as tricking her father into peroxiding his hair or making them think there is a ghost in the house. In school, Matilda befriends a loving teacher named Miss Honey who appreciates her, but the entire school suffers under the cartoonishly violent corporal punishment of the perpetually outraged headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. Her rage at the injustice of Trunchbull’s methods causes Matilda to demonstrate sudden telekinetic powers, which she develops in order to right a great wrong that had been done to Miss Honey long ago.

This book shines with Roald Dahl’s typical humor and quirky disregard for reality, but also deals with matters important to children such as being respected and fairness. Dahl’s own unpleasant experiences at boarding school inspired him to rage against injustice and bullying; this sort of personal outrage gives his protagonists real fire, and sparks the reader to cheer at the bullies’ comeuppance. A scene in which an older child tells Matilda that school is like a war surely rings true as well for any precocious and gentle soul who faced the mockery of groups of older children, and makes these elaborate children’s revenge fantasies more grounded in reality than their magic qualities would suggest. As Matilda says of Trunchbull’s outlandish acts, "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable.” This could easily be said of Dahl’s philosophy and writing style. It’s a joy to watch Matilda put things right in such an outrageous and completely crazy way.

five stars

The Color Purple

by Alice Walker
1982

Celie, just 14 years old when the book opens, tells God (or her diary, or herself), of how she has been raped, abused, and twice impregnated by her father. When she gives birth, he takes the children away, then marries her off to a man who is so cold and uncaring that he is referred to only as “Mr.” Her husband attempts to seduce, then drives off, Celie’s only friend, her sister Nettie. Celie becomes both unwilling wife and reluctant mother figure to Mr’s feckless son Harpo, but her life is as drab and lacking in love as a farm mule’s. Her life changes when Mr’s mistress, the singer Shug Avery, comes into her life. At first cold, Shug is later charmed by Celie’s kindness and shows Celie that she is also a woman deserving of love and respect. Celie is eventually able to say, famously, “I may be black, I may be poor, I maybe a woman, and I may even be ugly! But thank God I'm here." Her renaissance and new-found self-esteem throws the household into turmoil, but it also makes the men take a second look at how they run their lives. There are ups and downs after that, of course – this isn’t a book with easy resolutions – Nettie is found and lost again, Shug leaves to go on tour and finds new love, Harpo’s headstrong wife leaves him, then is imprisoned – but Celie now has dreams and hopes now, and can find the strength to face challenges and loss.

I found this to be a moving story, brilliantly told. Walker is telling a powerful story full of tragedy and redemption and heartbreaking loss, but she doesn't play cheap with the reader's emotions (I take some elements of the ending to be somewhat allegorical). Bad things happen to good people, and all the good people can do is find the strength to carry on. This strength comes, Walker seems to say, from deep love for one another, and (to a lesser extent) a network of friends and family who will fight for you. Celie is an astounding character, telling her story plainly, without complaint of the injustice, even with wry humor at times (especially when discussing the men in her life). She stands, I think, for the notion that one’s past doesn’t have to shape one’s present, or one’s attitude.

four stars

The Burglar In the Closet

by Lawrence Block
1978

Bernie Rhodenbarr, the debonair and non-violent burglar, is back, again implicated in a murder that takes place in the very domicile he is stealing from.  Bernie’s dentist knows he’s a burglar, and convinces him to rob the dentist’s ex-wife’s apartment, where she keeps a lot of jewelry.  She returns unexpectedly, and hiding in a closet, Bernie hears her death, but does not see her killer.  The dentist is not a likely suspect, since Bernie hit the place on a different day than the one agreed upon, but that leaves a list of possible lovers and acquaintances Bernie needs to look at to take the heat off himself.  It’s another charming, witty mystery; with his self-effacing yet urbane burglar, Block is as masterful at the comic caper as he is at the rough noir of Matthew Scudder’s world.  Bernie’s narration is highly entertaining, with zany plot turns and some offbeat characters to add to the lighthearted tone.  The main “reveal” of the killer’s name is less than ingenious, but on the whole it’s a clever book; it gets by on wit and charm.

four stars

[follows Burglars Can't Be Choosers] 

Burglars Can't Be Choosers

by Lawrence Block
1977

Bernie Rhodenbarr, a dapper and skilled burglar with a taste for fine things and no propensity for violence, is found by the police in a Manhattan apartment which is not his own, with the legal occupant in the next room bludgeoned to death. He flees the scene and hides out in a friend’s building, where he meets a suspiciously helpful girl who urges him to find the real killer. Tracking down the man who apparently framed him, Bernie gets caught up in a scheme involving blackmail, kinky sex, and lots of money.

This is Lawrence’s more light-hearted series, the flip side of Matt Scudder’s gritty rough justice, and it’s an enjoyable “noir lite” leavened with wit and humor, courtesy of Bernie’s wry, self-effacing narration. The mystery is clever, and although one of the twists requires a rather far-fetched coincidence (of all the apartment buildings in all of New York, she had to walk into mine…), but the solution to the main whodunit was a pleasant surprise. Bernie is a sympathetic character because he’s intelligent and benevolently self-serving, so I’m not surprised Block went on to write a number of sequels.

four stars

[followed by The Burglar In the Closet] 

Something To Answer For

by P.H. Newby
1969

The winner of the first Booker Prize, this novel takes place during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and centers on Jack Townrow, a British man who makes his living as a corrupt Fund Distributor.  With nothing holding him to home, when he is asked to come to Egypt (called the UAR in the novel though that seems to be chronologically off) by Mrs. Khoury, the widow of a man he met ten years earlier in Cairo, he goes.  On the way, during a stopover in Rome, Townrow gets into an argument with two men over Britain’s knowledge or lack thereof of the Final Solution in 1942.  Townrow is incensed that anyone would believe the British government to be capable of colluding in genocide, while the Israeli and Greek are more cynical.   In Port Said, on the Canal, he goes to a bar he used to frequent, whose Greek proprietor spins him a yarn about Mrs K’s taking Elie’s body, along with a fortune in coins, to Lebanon though the Canal, which directly led to Nasser’s decision to nationalize it, precipitating the looming French and British invasion.  Townrow drinks until he blacks out – it seems likely to the reader that the bar owner drugged him – and awakens naked and bleeding in the desert, and is attacked by a startled camel driver, causing his head and eye to be bandaged for most of the rest of the novel.  After this incident, the novel becomes much more dream-like in its narrative, with Townrow a very unreliable narrator who gives false names, who cannot remember his nationality (though he asserts that he is Irish as part of a scam he tries to run on Mrs K), nor his age, nor whether his mother is alive. He imagines that Elie is still alive, or that he is watching the burial at sea.  He meets an Egyptian Jew, Leah Strauss, who is married to an American locked in an asylum back home.  She repels his attentions, though apparently she later becomes his lover, and she an obsession for him. Townrow walks though scenes of mob unrest (and kills a man, though apparently nothing comes of it), is arrested as a spy, and watches bloody gunfights between Egyptian and British troops with detachment.  At the end of the novel, Townrow comes to believe that a citizen is not responsible for the morality of his government and has only himself and his own actions to answer for.

I don’t usually write such a detailed plot summary in a review, but this book, with its scenes that seemed to go nowhere but had huge influence on what came after, seemed to call for it.  This is a somewhat bewildering novel, as it is difficult to tell how much of what was related actually took place or how much was a fever or drunken dream.  Did Townrow really dig up the body, or watch a burial?  Did he really kill a rioter accidentally?  The book is very much Graham Greene – efficient British man gets in way over his head in a post-colonial foreign country because he doesn’t understand the history and culture the way he thinks he does – but a Greene novel as co-directed by Christopher Nolan and David Lynch.  I understand that this is a story of self-discovery, and it’s written with skill and erudition, and its message that a person is responsible for his or her own morality is welcome enough, but there’s always a part of me that resents books which make no distinction between internal and external processes.  How can the reader judge whether Townrow’s choices are apt and his journey worth taking when we can’t even know what’s happened to him?

three stars

The Fixer

by Bernard Malamud
1966

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this novel set during the end of Tsarist Russia concerns the titular handyman, Yakov Bok, an agnostic Jew who leaves his village where he’s had nothing but personal and financial failure and tries his luck in Kiev.  There in the big anti-Semitic city, Yakov poses as a goy Russian and becomes a brickyard foreman, not through deliberate machinations but a series of events and lies of omission which make this the easiest and safest course for him.  But after a young boy is brutally murdered in the region, the authorities seize on Yakov, a Jew living illegally under false pretenses, as their scapegoat and charge him with killing the boy for magical Jewish blood rituals.  He sits imprisoned with little hope, though one or two fair-minded officials sympathize with the injustice of his arrest. 

This is a powerful novel, and it is compelling reading because the eventual plight of Yakov is of such interest.  In Malamud’s setting, the system and its drivers are not clever or all-seeing, merely thuggish, ignorant, and hypocritical.  Though there are bits of circumstantial evidence that hurt Yakov’s credibility (he had previously chased the boy out of the brickyard for vandalism, he took in an old Jew who had been beaten and stanched his bloody head with his own shirt), basically the case against him is made up of whole cloth, invented baseless lies about him personally and the Jewish religion in general.  This is particularly ironic and brutal for Yakov because, as noted, he doesn’t consider himself a religious Jew: “From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare.  What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse?  He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt.”  One of the book’s most powerful and moving scenes is when Yakov is visited by his humble, God-fearing father-in-law, whom Yakov sends away, saying God is an invention and that he hates him in any case for killing Job’s children, “not to mention ten thousand pogroms.”  The book’s purpose, I believe is to expose injustice and to exhort all fair-minded people, especially Jews, to work against it: “there’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew,” Yakov thinks to himself near the end of the book.  “You can’t sit still and see yourself destroyed.”  And yet, because Malamud has shown that the system is not just weighted against the oppressed but completely unrestrained by any duty to truth or even credibility, that it can manufacture and disseminate inventions, I wonder whether this moral works.  What is there to fight, if facts don’t matter and lone voices are silenced?  The novel ends on an ambiguous note, but where this scintilla of hope may come from seems unfounded given the rest of Yakov’s experiences.

four stars

Charlie And the Great Glass Elevator

by Roald Dahl
1972

The sequel to the famous book about the chocolate factory, this book begins in media res with Charlie Bucket, the eccentric and magical Wonka, and Charlie’s extended family all in the titular glass elevator, hurtling up into space. With a total disregard for how gravity or any other boring reality works, Dahl has the group fly to the newly built Space Hotel, meet up with some belligerent shape-changing aliens (the Vermicious Knids), rescue some astronauts, and return to Earth where, their cosmic adventures already forgotten, Wonka gives the elderly Buckets some pills that turn them twenty years younger per pill. Of course this doesn’t go right, either.

It’s utterly madcap, written as if with a young child’s attention span, logic, and sense of perspective about events. The scenes in which the president discusses the alien attack on the Space Hotel are almost Dr. Strangelove-ish, with President Lancelot Gilligrass convening his cabinet, “a sword-swallower from Afghanistan, who was the President’s best friend,” and the Vice-President, who is Gilligrass’ nanny and actually commands the room. The Chief of the Army keeps wanting to blow everything up and making explosion noises with his mouth, and the President gets distracted from the problem when he thinks of a terrifically ridiculous idea for a fly trap. And that’s just a couple of chapters; the Buckets race from one crazed event to the next. Dahl puts in groan-inducing puns, Carroll-lite doggerel, silly metaphors, neologisms, nonce words, and antiquated but actual words (“he’ll lixiviate the lot of us!”). It’s all thoroughly silly, and it’s hardly as brilliant as Carroll’s calmer surrealism, but it’s light-hearted and memorable.

four stars

American Pastoral

by Philip Roth
1997

Blue-eyed, blond student athlete Swede Levov, son of a Jewish glove maker in Newark, has built his life around the virtues of hard work and assimilation.  Without expressly repudiating his father’s culture (he inherits and excels at the elder Levov’s trade), he marries a Catholic former Miss New Jersey who raises cows, moves to a grand home in the countryside, and lives in a manner that upsets the natural order of things as little as possible; he placates Catholic and Jewish fears alike; he gives off-putting people the benefit of the doubt; he relies on the quiet strength acquired by not using one’s physical strength.  He and his wife Dawn have a stuttering daughter, Merry, who is doted upon and who at adolescence becomes enraged at America’s involvement in Vietnam and falls into the grossest ignorant, maniacal anti-Capitalist vitriol at every turn.  She throws the Swede’s life into bitter, recriminating chaos when she bombs a post office in town and becomes a fugitive; he spends most of the book wondering how such a thing could have happened, poring over minor incidents in Merry’s childhood and how much he is to blame.  His wife takes refuge in a sanitarium; he is tortured, psychically, by a vicious young woman who may or may not be an ally of Merry’s; he wonders about the health of his marriage and what his father thinks.

Over 423 pages, this overly verbose novel alternates between flashes of genius – musings on how we can ever really know another human, or what the consequences may be of the actions we take, to which we ascribe no particular importance but which may redound heavily on others’ lives and psyches – and numbing, indulgent repetition – the Swede scours the shards of his life, over and over, asking the same unanswerable questions, to no effect.  The book begins with a first-person narrator who knew the Swede as a child, and who attends his forty-fifth high school reunion, meets up with some old crushes, and fades utterly from the narrative shortly afterwards; his existence, I suppose, was merely so Roth could tackle the subject of going home again, and to exorcise some thoughts on his Boomer cohorts.  Who knows.  There is some very high drama in a dinner party at the end of the book, in which emotions run high – the guilt, the resentments of spouses and neighbors, the accusations and confessions of adultery, jealously, class and culture resentment, panic, and secrets all roil in the Swede as he considers some new information about his daughter – and it would have made a very powerful novella, but this tome is just too much.  It’s exhausting, not galvanizing.

three stars

Double Whammy

by Carl Hiaasen
1987

Hot-headed private detective R. J. Decker is hired to prove that TV host Dickie Lockhart cheats to win fortunes in Florida bass-fishing tournaments. Decker soon finds out that the stakes are so high people are willing to kill to keep secrets, but he finds an ally in an apparently deranged, roadkill-eating hermit who calls himself Skink, as well as a couple of honest cops.  Adding to the cast are a trio of moron hillbillies, an amoral hottie who seduces Decker and helps frame him for murder, and the good Reverend Weeb, Lockhart's sponsor on the Outdoor Christian Network, whose hobbies include prostitutes, fake faith healing, and land-grabbing.

It’s just as madcap as the summary sounds, with colorful heroes and villains (such as the killer who spends the final scenes of the novel with a decapitated, rotting bulldog’s head clamped on his gangrenous arm). This is the second Hiaasen novel I’ve read, and it’s seems much of a piece with Tourist Season: the same crazed pace and surreal satire, as well as the same dubious plot points (I’m not sure how the gruesome death of Decker’s client, after the death of Lockhart, helps Decker fight the charge of blackmail and murder).  It’s not worth dissecting, of course; it’s just manic zany fun.

three stars

Time's Witness

by Michael Malone
1989

The sequel to Uncivil Seasons.  This time, it is Cuddy Mangum, now police chief in Hillston, who is the narrator, and the eccentric scion of North Carolina aristocracy Justin Savile, now married and an expectant father, is relegated to a minor role.  In this novel, George Hall, a black man on Death Row for the murder seven years previously of an off-duty white cop in a bar in the black side of town, is given an unexpected reprieve by the governor.  The governor is running for reelection against war hero Andrew Brookside, whose heiress wife, Lee, just happens to be an old flame of Cuddy’s and whom he still loves desperately.  When Hall’s brother, a vocal activist, is shot and killed, Cuddy starts to uncover a vast web of conspiracy and crime, from gun smuggling out of a rich paper magnate’s factory, to political intrigues by white power militia yahoos, to attempted blackmail of the philandering Brookside, to underhanded brinksmanship by the governor.  After Cuddy’s friend, larger-than-life attorney Isaac Rosethorn, gets George Hall a new trial, some of these secrets threaten to come into the light, and Cuddy is targeted by the now-fugitive rogue cops.

Over 535 pages with a cast of dozens, this opus evokes not just the south, or the American justice system, but all of life’s rich pageant: the tattered glory of very old, very rich families who believe their money grants them superiority; the casual racism of the populace; the institutionalized racism of the death penalty, especially in the south; the dizzying highs and crushing lows of love won and lost.  There are no “good guys,” and characters who come into conflict with Cuddy are not straw men but fully realized characters who have their own ideals and morals.  Characters get married, have children, die; Cuddy tries to maintain his equilibrium as he walks a fine line between his affair with Lee, providing protection to Brookside, who has been getting death threats, and uncovering possible malfeasance in his lover’s husband’s campaign.  Malone is a fine writer, capable of pathos, Wodehousian wit (“Fattie’s whole body, of which there was an unbridled glut, relaxed with a shiver…”), action, suspense, romance, and deep perspicacity.  Malone doesn’t shy away from any issues; the novel culminates in a searing courtroom speech at Hall’s retrial, then quietly notes that about a month after this sensationalist event, another black man was executed without fanfare.  This may not be the Great American Novel, but it’s a contender for the Great American Novel About Justice.

five stars

The Whipping Boy

by Sid Fleischman
1986

The 1987 Newbery Winner, this fanciful tale is set in a quasi-medieval kingdom, and tells of the arrogant Prince Brat (as everyone calls him; his real name is Horace) and the titular Whipping Boy who has been impressed into service as the stand-in for all the punishments the Prince would get for his behavior, were he not of royal blood.  When the clever whipping boy, Jemmy, decides to run away, the sullen, lonely prince insists on accompanying him.  They are immediately captured and held for ransom by two doltish outlaws, then manage to escape, but remain only a few steps ahead of the pair.

This is a fun, lightweight adventure, full of memorable period characters such as the illiterate outlaw Hold-Your-Nose Billy (so named for his garlicky breath), Captain Nips the hot-potato seller, and Betsy who displays a trained bear for cash.  It’s a good mixture of silliness and suspense in tone.  Fleischman skillfully shows not only a gradual change in the prince, as he is shamed by being mistaken for the whipping boy, since he is lazy and illiterate himself, then saddened to learn what people think of him; but he also manipulates the readers’ expectations by showing that the prince’s life, in its own way, has been oppressive and unfair to him.  When Jemmy learns that he is wanted for “abducting” the prince, he hopes that he and Horace have actually become friends during their adventure.  A very enjoyably, witty tale.

four stars

Maniac Magee

by Jerry Spinelli
1990

This 1991 Newbery winner tells of Jeffrey Magee, an orphan boy who runs from his unloving aunt and uncle’s house and keeps on running.  Possessed of a preternatural athletic talent, he passes, throws and catches his way across the playgrounds and fields of working-class and racially divided town Two Mills, dubbed “Maniac” for his skill.  Eschewing school but loving books, he sleeps in a band shell, someone’s shed, even a zoo, when he isn’t being adopted by any family that will take him in.  Magee is unusual in not just his athleticism, fearlessness and nomadic life, but also in his ignorance of race relations and his near-inability to see why anyone should care about skin color.  So he trots from the east end of the town to the west, making friends equally, but also making enemies because of his blithe acceptance of everyone, and their acceptance of him.

Despite such heady themes, this is a fun, rollicking story, equal parts modern legend (told as if looking back long after the facts have become lost, in the language of legend, starting with “They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump…”) and morality tale.  Over a series of vignettes, Spinelli shows how Maniac becomes known, then respected, until finally… Well, the climax is a bit of an anti-climax, in that Magee inspires change rather than trailblazing it himself, but perhaps that’s a point in its favor.  Maniac is a hero, certainly, but he’s a product of his fears and the losses in his life as well as his persistence and friendliness; his speed and physical skill may be fictional, but his character is real.

four stars

The Dharma Bums

by Jack Kerouac
1958

Ray Smith (a stand-in for Kerouac himself), an itinerant poet, and his friend Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) search for an affirmative way of life in the mindless bustle of the modern era.  Preferring cabins and hiking to cities and desk jobs, the two live a Bohemian existence, getting drunk, bedding willing girls, and reciting haikus when inspiration strikes.  Parties that last days and involve casual nudity and sex (though Ray seems to be eschewing sex, or simply can’t get lucky), hitch-hiking, poetry readings, and hikes to Desolation Peak are funded by the occasional job as a fire watcher up in the mountains.  Along with other poets who live similar lives (every character is a pastiche of one of the figures in the Beat movement), they try to live a western version of Buddhism; they have differing ideas on how to live the dharma way, but call themselves equally bhikkhus (monks) and have good intentions. What they have in common is an inability to abide, or intense distaste for, the middle-class way of life in 1950s America.  Ray stays on his mother’s property and spends his nights meditating, derided as a bum by his brother-in-law; Japhy sets out for a lengthy retreat in Japan.

Primary to this soulful novel is an honest, exuberant search for a life full of meaning – not necessarily a stoic life or even one beyond material concerns, but a meaningful one.  Reading this novel at past forty, with my own insignificant flirtations with Buddhism, Zen, hitch-hiking and so on behind me, I’m not sure it has the power to move me.  It probably retains the power to inspire even this modern generation of starry-eyed college students, however, if they could get past the sometimes primitive attitudes toward women Kerouac seems to have had.  The novel is a little goofy and a bit slipshod in places (he accidentally calls Zaphy “Gary” once), but Ray is a charming, guileless character, and maintains a quiet assurance in the ability for a clear-eyed person to make his own truth.

three stars

One Of Ours

by Willa Cather
1922

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is the story of Claude Wheeler, an American farm boy who grows to manhood convinced that there is something more “splendid about life” than the quotidian existence he sees around him, that will be his future.  Frustrated at his inability to attend anything but a small religious college, and entranced by glimpses of a more daring family who engage in intellectual debate and love the arts, he gets married but finds that his wife, too, lives only for Christian missionary work; sex and making a family mean nothing to her.  He volunteers when World War I breaks out, and finds what he is looking for overseas.  He becomes convinced he has found his true place in the world when he reaches the French countryside, despite the fierce fighting and disease that he faces.

It’s a slow-moving, lyrical novel, a portrait of a rural, agricultural, unsophisticated, isolationist, labor-intensive America, an America on the cusp of modernity, with no more wilderness to tame but without the worldliness and comforts of the post-WWII boom.  I believe the book has been criticized for its third-hand scenes of war, but I found nothing particularly jarring or awkward about them as a reader; indeed, I was impressed with Cather’s ability to write so easily about this very male world.  In all it’s a good book, perhaps a bit dated now and so not apt to change the reader’s life; but this very American tale of redemption and risk, of a man making his own way in a stifling world, is enhanced by Cather’s strong, romantic prose.

three stars

Daniel Boone

by Jame Daugherty
1939

The 1940 Newbery winner, this biography of the Kentucky frontiersman is a mixture of fact and probable legend.  It tells of Boone’s life in bits and pieces, from his birth in Pennsylvania to his trapping and trading and Indian-fighting in the wilderness of Kentucky.  The picture Daugherty paints is of a bluff, honest, uncompromising but friendly figure.  The Boone this book gives us is a family man, patriot, and resourceful hunter, and little else.  He fights against the British and the Indians, is captured by Chief Blackfish and is adopted into the Shawnee tribe, but escapes and returns to his countrymen, of course.  He founds a frontier town in Kentucky, Boonesborough, and works as a pathfinder in the wilderness.  A simple man who can read and write, but not nearly as well as he can shoot and hunt and track, Boone tries his hand at farming, public office, soldiering, even land speculation (though he is far too kindhearted and naïve to make money at it, and loses all the land he fought so hard to claim).  Poor for much of his life, hunting skins to make a living, stoic about the death of his son Israel, he is portrayed here as the consummate early American: tough, proud, self-sufficient, uncomplaining.

Daugherty has a way with words and there are some quite lyrical passages.  It also can be bombastic, reveling in what Daughtery considers natural glory but what the modern reader might consider land-grabbing colonialism. At times the book tries so hard to be home-spun and aw-shucks and evocative of frontier spirit (“they waddled west as soon as they could stagger… they wrassled the wild cats and they romped with wolves”) that it comes of as totally charmless.  But it also has some charm, as when, for example, Daughtery quotes Boone as saying he was never lost, “but I was right bewildered once for three days.”  

three stars

The Hunter

by Richard Stark
1962

Parker, a brutish, gorilla of a man and a small-time crook, reluctantly takes on a job with an ex-syndicate man named Mal, who betrays Parker by convincing his wife to shoot him and leave him for dead.  A year later, out of prison and penniless, Parker tracks his wife and Mal down, then goes after the syndicate itself to get his share of the money back.

I found this book thoroughly unpleasant, with no sympathetic characters and only laughably stupid straw men for Parker to prove his toughness against.  The book’s been praised to the skies by everyone from Elmore Leonard to the New York Times, but I just don’t understand the appeal, unless the reader just enjoys the adolescent fantasy that he’s the moronic Parker.  The prose is sparse and at times ridiculous: “women in passing cars looked at him and felt vibrations in their nylons.”  The juvenile slyness of this phrase aside, it assumes all intelligent, professional women are entranced by a wife-beating idiot in grubby clothes and shoes with holes in them.  And Parker is indeed an idiot.  I found the description of his making of a fake driver’s license (he just kind of draws one and crumples it up) to be unintentionally hilarious; he starts hitting a woman who gave him perfectly good information without stopping to think about why the information isn’t useful at that specific moment; his enemies are, to a man, brainless straw men who allow him (hulking, brutal, unsmiling Parker, remember) to approach them and ask them for change before taking a gun out of his lunchbox to get the drop on them!  Yes, this really happens.  Several times.  To tough syndicate gun men who are in fact prepared and waiting for him.  The entire second half of the book, Parker vs. syndicate, is utterly absurd, from the way Parker deals with the men to his ridiculous threats against them (“pay me or I’ll start telling my friends to start robbing your shipments!” – a non-problem, surely, that they’d have encountered many times before and dealt with).  Really, the whole thing is just ludicrous, and Parker is utterly unappealing.   Did I mention that he was planning to cross Mal before he himself got crossed?  Yeah.  Uh, go, Parker?

one star

[movie note: It's worth noting that the movie, Payback, starring Mel Gibson, is orders of magnitude better than the book. The film dispenses with the unintentionally hilarious, out of touch scenes; turns Porter/Parker into less of a stupid woman-beating thug and into a guy just as tough, but who can at least feel desire, sadness, and regret; makes Mal's betrayal of Parker a true outrage rather than what Parker was going to do to him first if he didn't; gives his wife a real motive for betraying him rather than, uh, just because she's dumb I guess?; and keeps Stark's good noir dialogue. Really, watching the movie just made me realize how stupid and unappealing the book is.]

Service With a Smile

by P.G. Wodehouse
1961

Not all is well at Blandings Castle, where Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth, is plagued by an officious secretary, Lavender Biggs, who plots for bigger things; his quarrelsome sister, Constance; and the windbag Duke of Dunstable, a self-invited guest who wants to steal Emsworth’s prize pig to sell to a rival (or back to Emsworth himself, if he must).  Add to this that a curate is staying at the castle under false pretenses to be with his beloved, a millionaire’s daughter whom Constance has no intention of letting marry a curate; and the Duke’s nephew, a nice fellow who just needs a thousand pounds to settle down with his girl, and not Myra, whom he has inadvertently gotten engaged to as well.  It takes a bit of dissimulation and plotting from the always affable, unflappable Frederick, Earl of Ickenham, to get everyone, or nearly everyone, a happy ending (“there is always apt to be trouble when you start spreading sweetness and light,” he muses.  “You find there isn’t enough to go around and someone has to be left out of the distribution”).

This is a fine Emerson and Uncle Fred story, a little light entertainment with the typical madcap scenarios and whirlwind semi-solutions.  I never think that these stories approach the polished genius of Bertie and Jeeves (and this one doesn’t even have the Efficient Baxter, whose presence as a foil to Emsworth helps greatly).  Still, it’s a fun romp in typical Wodehouse style.

four stars

How Right You Are, Jeeves

by P.G. Wodehouse
a.k.a. Jeeves In the Offing
1960

With Jeeves on vacation, Bertie finds himself at his Aunt Dahlia’s place in Brinkley Court, along with an American family, the Creams, who must be handled with kid gloves to prevent their canceling a big business deal with Bertie’s uncle; Audrey Upjohn, Bertie’s former headmaster, who still chills Bertie’s soul; Upjohn’s insipid daughter, Phyllis, who is infatuated with the playboy kleptomaniac wastrel American, Willie Cream, and must be put off; and old pal Roberta Wickham, engaged to be married to Bertie’s old pal Reginald Herring, who has written a caustic, libelous review of Upjohn’s memoirs and thus whose future depends on assuaging Upjohn’s wrathful soul.  Oh, and familiar face Roderick Glossop, eminent psychologist to the wealthy, is there in the disguise of a butler to surreptitiously assess Willie Cream’s psyche.

In short, the usual cast of doomed lovers, imperious guardians, and secret schemes abound, and Jeeves must be sent for.  Though there is little in this book of the sublime Bertie-Jeeves dialogue that defines their perfect relationship (Jeeves being mostly absent and even after he arrives doing his magic more or less off-camera), there is more than enough of the brilliant Wooster narration (“one got the distinct illusion he was swelling like one of those rubber ducks which you fill with air before inserting them in the bathtub”; “in his opinion three was a crowd and that what the leafy glade needed to make it all a leafy glade should be was a complete absence of Woosters”).  One may roll one’s eyes at the recurring tropes (the fretful porpentine quote, the young lovers who cannot marry unless the young man’s future is assured), but frankly you have to be a bit of an Upjohn not to delight in this world of wit, erudition, manners, and happy endings.