The Month in Books - January 2010

At the start of 2010, I set a goal to read 15,000 pages by year's end, including twelve books of greater than 650 pages. I am measuring progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in January:

1. Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann (review)
2. Young Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore (review)
3. Number9Dream - David Mitchell (review pending)
4. The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery (review pending)

Pages Read: 1,450
Year-to-Date: 1,450
Books > 650 pages: 0

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

I had only lukewarm things to say about Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography, Stalin, which I felt took a far too gossipy approach to the regime of one of the world's most malevolent mass murderers. Rather than explore and analyze the mechanics of the Great Terror or Stalin's plans for collectivization, Montefiore gave detailed accounts of dinner parties and vacations. So it may come as a surprise that I even picked up his second book on the dictator, Young Stalin, but I was handed a copy by my father, who enjoyed it, and figured I would give it a try. It is a superior book to its predecessor, even though it self-consciously takes the same approach, for which Montefiore has clearly heard criticism:

I make no apology that my two books are tightly focused on the intimate and secret, political and personal lives of Stalin and the small circle that ultimately came to create and rule the Soviet Union until the 1960s. Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a miniscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin...

I suspect that what Montefiore really decided was to exalt any previously unrelated details, trivial as they may be, at the expense of a thorough analysis of his subject. Fair enough, that's his choice, but in a 700 page book like Stalin, he should have been able to capture both. The problem is exacerbated by the gap between the two books; Stalin essentially opens with the suicide of Stalin's second wife in 1932, and yet Young Stalin ends with the October Revolution of 1917. Thus one can read both of Montefiore's volumes on Stalin, well over a thousand pages, and have not the slightest knowledge of his role in the Russian Civil War, the creation of the Soviet Union, or the power struggle after Lenin's demise. This boggles my mind.

That said, I will say that his approach works better when focused solely on Stalin's early years, in a book that runs half the length of the previous one. This is a timeframe in which the personal is the natural focus, and even the political side of Stalin's life at this point is largely a function of the people with whom he associates. His youthful acquaintances read like a list of mid-century Soviet heavies: Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, Molotov, Voroshilov.

Perhaps most remarkable is the revelation that in many ways, the young Stalin was no more than a mafioso with ideological motivations. Sure, the money was going to Lenin, and Stalin seemed to be a true believer in the Bolshevik cause, but much of he did to further that cause amounted to no more than a series of violent felonies:

"On the initiative and orders of Stalin," said one of his top gangsters, Bachua Kupriashvili, a permanent gang of brigands was now assembled. "Our tasks were procuring arms, organizing prison escapes, holding up banks and arsenals, and kill traitors." Stalin commissioned Tsintsadze to set up "the Technical Group or the Bolshevik Expropriators Club, it was soon known by another nickname--Duzhina, the Group, or just Outfit."

Soso [Stalin's childhood nickname] strained his ingenuity to raise cash for Lenin, travelling widely to Novorossiisk on the Black Sea, and Vladikavkaz, in Ossetia. In Tiflis, he ordered schools and the seminary to deliver cash from their teachers while he discreetly prepated the Outfit for his gangster rackets.

The story of young Stalin is the story of the rise of the Bolsheviks, but also the teetering last years of the Romanov empire. It is a sign of the preposterous short-sighted weakness of the Tsarist regime that despite numerous arrests and exiles, Stalin was inevitably able to raise enough funds to bribe his way back. Only his final Siberian banishment, to the edges of the North Pole, is sufficiently secluded to ensure he completed his term:

If Stalin called Kostino "an ill-fated place," Kureika was a freezing hellhole, the sort of place where a man could believe himself utterly forgotten and even lose his sanity: its desolate solitude and obligatory self-containment were to remain with Stalin throughout his life.

I still think that those interested in Stalin are best served starting with what Montefiore terms "an exhaustive narrative history;" the two he recommends are by Robert Conquest and Robert Service. It seems unlikely that many readers would be more interested in Stalin's love life or taste in movies than in his role as Soviet dictator. But for those who have such tastes, or have already read a more traditional biography and are looking for some added spice, Montefiore's account of Stalin's early years should be just the ticket.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

There's a certain amount of temptation to apply to Hunter College's Creative Writing MFA, not because I have any pretensions of writing fiction myself, but just to have classes led by authors like Peter Carey, Nathan Englander, and Colum McCann. McCann is big news these days, having recently won both the National Book Award, and perhaps more lucratively, the spot at the top of Amazon's Best of 2009, for his fifth novel, Let the Great World Spin. In this extraordinary book, McCann tells a series of tales about disparate inhabitants of New York City, a city of loners that was connected for one day in August 1974 by Philippe Petit's famous Twin Towers tightrope walk:

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some though at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke--stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were starting upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

Throughout the book there are interludes describing Petit's advance onto the wire, and even an extended flashback to his training for the event. But Let the Great World Spin is not just about this event, it is about this moment in time, about the city and the people thirteen-hundred feet below, who turned, transfixed, en masse, toward the Twin Towers for not the last time. Of these many millions, McCann has crafted a group portrait of a dozen or so whose lives are intertwined by more than just Petit's walk: an Irish street priest and his brother; a pair of prostitutes, mother and daughter, whom the priest was ministering to (in his fashion); an artist couple that survive a fateful car accident; a group of mothers who meet in each other's homes to discuss the sons they've lost in Vietnam; and the judge husband of one these women.

The novel opens with narration by an Irishman who has come to New York to see Corrigan, his wandering priest brother. He reminisces about their childhood, in which Corrigan always stood out as a bit unusual:

Nothing else was mentioned, until two years later he gave that blanket away too, to another homeless drunk, on another freezing night, up by the canal on one of his late-night walks, when he tiptoed down the stairs and went out into the dark. It was a simple equation to him--others needed the blankets more than he, and he was prepared to take the punishment if it came his way. It was my earliest suggestion of what my brother would become, and what I'd later see among the cast-offs of New York--the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless--all of those who were hanging on to him like he was some bright hallelujah in the shitbox of what the world really was.

In New York, Corrigan has chosen to live amongst a group of prostitutes working an expressway underpass in the Bronx, much to his brother's astonishment and regret. His nearby apartment is left unlocked so that the women can come and use the bathroom at their leisure, Corrigan's "little gesture" that already cost him a beating from one of the local pimps. Amongst the girls are a mother and daughter, Tillie and Jazzlyn, and when they get arrested on an outstanding robbery warrant, it is Corrigan who tracks them down. And it is Corrigan who dies in a car crash with Jazzlyn on the way back from her arraignment:

We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

Yet the plain fact of the matter is that is happened and there was nothing we could do to stop it...

From here the story pivots, seemingly without any connection (for now), to a fancy Park Avenue apartment where Claire Soderberg awaits a visit from a group of women with whom she shares the misfortune of having lost a son to the war in Vietnam. That is just about all it would seem Claire has in common with these women, none of whom live anywhere close to Park Avenue:

She has been to four houses over the past eight months. All of them simple, clean, ordinary, lovely. Staten Island, the Bronx, two on the Lower East Side. Never any fuss. Just a gathering of mothers. That's all. But they were drop-jawed at her address when she finally told them. She had managed to avoid it for a while, but then they went to Gloria's apartment in the Bronx. A row of projects. She had never seen anything like it before. Scorch marks on the doorways. The smell of boric acid in the hall. Needles in the elevator. She was terrified.

And yet it is Gloria whom she feels the closest bond with, despite the distance that their lives have put between them. It is in these unexpected intersections that McCann's novel thrives, illuminating the ways in which disparate lives can converge, if even for a moment, with tremendous consequences for better or worse. This is not a wholly original premise, the repeated criss-crossing of a small cast of characters, but it usually relies on such banal flukes as to drown the suspension of disbelief; see, e.g. Crash. Either because of the strength of his characters, his prose, or both, McCann's narrative rises above this peril.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

On Tuesday, I reviewed Geraldine Brooks' debut novel, Year of Wonders, a deft portrayal of life in a plague-infested English village in the seventeenth-century. I was inspired to read it based on my enjoyment of Brooks second novel, March, which offered a revisionist account of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women from the absent father's perspective, and for which Brooks was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. Despite their vastly disparate subject matter, both novels displayed Brooks' knack for writing beautiful prose and crafting a story that fully employs her talent for historical research.

Brooks continued her successful streak in 2008 with her third and most recent novel, People of the Book. Just as the first two novels were inspired by historical models (the village of Eyam and Bronson Alcott, respectively), so this latest story finds its origin in one of the world's most valuable books, the Sarajevo Haggadah:

The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript that contains the illustrated traditional text of the Passover Haggadah which accompanies the Passover Seder. It is one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world, originating in Barcelona around 1350. The Haggadah is presently owned by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, where it is on permanent display.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is handwritten on bleached calfskin and illuminated in copper and gold. It opens with 34 pages of illustrations of key scenes in the Bible from creation through the death of Moses. Its pages are stained with wine, evidence that it was used at many Passover Seders. It is considered to be the most beautiful illuminated Jewish manuscript in existence and one of the most valuable books in the world. In 1991 it was appraised at US$700 million

The protagonist of People of the Book, Hannah Heath, is a renowned Australian book conservator who, as the book opens in 1996, has been hired by the United Nations to work her magic on the famous Haggadah, which has miraculously survived the abundant violence and bombing that had recently shattered so much in Sarajevo. The first chapter finds Hanna making her first acquaintance with the precious volume, and her reverent exploration reveals both her passion for her work and the mysteries of the manuscript she is handling:

Slowly, deliberately, I examined and made notes on the condition of each page. Each time I turned a parchment, I checked and adjusted the position of the supporting forms. Never stress the book--the conservator's chief commandment. But ht people who had owned this book had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war.

Each of the unusual characteristics that Hanna notes will play a key role in the book's development, from the insect wings to the wine stain to the trace of saltwater, as each element sparks a flashback into the manuscript's history. The plot thus proceeds on two tracks: the first follows Hanna as her investigation of the Haggadah leads her to various contacts and subject matter experts around the globe; the second proceeds regressively, each flashback leaping further into the book's past. A similar plot device was used in one of my favorite movies, The Red Violin, in which a violin appraiser's analysis of the title instrument is the frame for a series of flashbacks to pivotal events in 300 years since the violin was crafted.

The novel's title is a clever double entendre; the novel's characters are all, of course, people in whose lives the Haggadah has played a pivotal role, thus they are people of that book. But the more common meaning of the phrase comes from the Muslim Qu'ran, in which "People of the Book" is used to designate non-Muslims adherents of the older Abrahamic religions, e.g. Jews and Christians. And this sense of multiculturalism plays an important role in Brooks' novel. This is most explicit in the fact that it was Muslims who saved this Jewish manuscript at two key moments when it was threatened, during World War II and the Bosnian War. Brooks expands on this theme throughout the book, with flashbacks taking the narrative into the seventeenth-century Venetian Ghetto and the Spanish Inquisition on the eve of the Jewish expulsion. The story of the book is intertwined with the persecution of Jews down through the ages, this persecution being a prime motivator for the Mediterranean journeys the Sarajevo Haggadah took from its origins in Spain. Like the Jews, the book found a way to survive:

All over Aragon that night, Jews were being forced to the baptismal font, driven to to conversion by fear of exile. Ruti, exultant, defiant, had made a Gentile into a Jew. Because his mother was not Jewish, a ritual immersion had been necessary. And now it was done. Even as the emotion of the moment brimmed within her, Ruti was counting the days. She did not have very long. By the eighth day, she would need to find someone to perform his brit. If all went well, this would be in their new land. And on that day, she would give the child his name.

She turned back toward the beach, hugging the baby tightly to her breast. She remembered she had the book, wrapped in hide, slung in a shoulder sack. She pulled on the straps to raise it out of the reach of the waves. But a few drops of saltwater found their way inside her careful wrappings. When the water dried on the page, there would be a stain, and a residue of crystals, that would last five hundred years.

Once again, Brooks' flair for historical fiction shines through in this book. Each retrospective interlude is utterly believable, the characters thinking, speaking, and behaving in form true to the circumstances of their existence, be they a Muslim museum curator working under the thumb of Nazi overlords or a Venetian priest performing the church's censorship at the height of the Counter-Reformation:

In 1589, when Pope Sixtus V proclaimed a ban on any books by Jews or Saracens that contained anything against the Catholic faith, the young priest Vistorini had been a natural choice to work as censor of the Inquisitor. For seventeen years, almost his entire life in Holy Orders, Domenico had read and passed judgment on the works of alien faiths.

As a scholar, he had an innate reverence for books. this he had been required to subdue when his mission was to destroy them. Sometimes, the beauty of the Saracens' fluid calligraphy moved him. Other times, it was the elegant argument of a learned Jew that gave him pause. He would take his time considering such manuscripts. If, in the end, he determined that hey had to go to the flames, he would avert his gaze as the parchments blackened. His job was easier when the heresy was patent. At those time, he could watch the flames, rejoicing in them as a cleansing thing, ridding human thought of error.

In fact, Brooks is so good in these historical vignettes that, just as in The Red Violin, the weakest part of the narrative is the modern thread that ties the episodes together. Hanna's relationships, in particular her romance with the Bosnian curator and her lifelong clashes with her famous surgeon mother (sadly evocative of Grey's Anatomy), which are deemed so motivating in the choices she makes, ring particularly hollow in comparison to the kinship and liaisons portrayed in the stories about that precious manuscript.

Interestingly, though People of the Book was the third novel Brooks finished, this excellent feature on the author reveals that she stopped work on the book to write March, only returning to the story of the Haggadah after finishing the Pulitzer Prize winner. All in all, it is a marvelous work, continuing the streak of excellence Brooks has shown in all three of her novels, and leaving one imbued with anticipation for her next work.

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Despite my passion for reading, there are some genres that have largely escaped my interest or attention; romance, Christian fiction, and self-help are aisles of the book store that I have failed to peruse. And normally, the mystery/thriller genre falls in there as well; aside from some John Grisham and Michael Crichton read as a teenager, that's just not where my enthusiasm has taken me. Probably the only reason I even heard of Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 was that it was longlisted for the Booker Prize back in 2008, a noteworthy event because genre fiction so rarely gets any attention from the literary prize panels. Still, even that was not enough to get me to buy the book. But when I saw a paperback copy sitting in the laundry room of my barracks in Kuwait, I grabbed it, with plans to read it on the plane back. Well, I mostly slept on the plane ride back, so it was until near the end of December that I finally got around to reading it.

Smith's is a detective story with a twist: the protagonist detective, Leo Demidov, is an officer of the Soviet secret police, a true believer doing the dirty work that kept Stalin's totalitarian regime running in the years following World War II:

His only ambition was a general one: to serve his country, a country that had defeated fascism, a country that provided free education and health care, that trumpeted the rights of the workers around the world, that paid his father--a munitions workers on an assembly line--a salary comparable to that of a fully qualified doctor. Although his own employment in the State Security force was frequently unpleasant he understood its necessity, the necessity of guarding their revolution from enemies both foreign and domestic, from those who sought to undermine it and those determined to see it fail. To this end Leo would lay down his life. To this end he'd lay down the lives of others.

As the novel opens, Demidov has been asked by his boss to handle a rather delicate situation. A junior member of the state security agency has recently lost a child, and he and his family are making noise with accusations of murder, despite the official determination that the boy was accidentally hit by a train. Murder being a supposed impossibility in the perfection of the Stalinist society, such accusations are wholly unwelcome to the government. Demidov's job is to make the family understand this:

Leo's mission was to quash any unfounded speculation, to guide them back from the brink. Talk of murder had a natural drama which no doubt appealed to certain types of fanciful people. If it came to it he'd be harsh: the boy had made a mistake for which he'd paid with his life. No one else need suffer for his carelessness. Maybe that was too much. He needn't go so far. This could be resolved tactfully. They were upset--that was all. Be patient with them. They weren't thinking straight. Present the facts. He wasn't here to threaten them, at least not immediately: he was here to help them. He was here to restore faith.

Yet in the endless depths of paranoiac conspiracy that infested the Soviet system, even as powerful a man as Demidov feels perpetually in danger. That danger becomes a reality as Demidov realizes that a workplace rival may be plotting against him:

Leo glanced across at his deputy, a man both handsome and repulsive in equal measure--as if his good looks were plastered over a rotten center, a hero's face with a henchman's heart. There were just the tiniest visible fractures in his attractive facade, appearing at the corners of his mouth, a slight sneer that, if you knew how to interpret it, hinted at the dark thoughts lying beneath his good looks. Perhaps sensing that he was the subject of attention, Vasili turned and smiled a thin, ambiguous smile. Something pleased him. Leo knew immediately that something must be wrong.

In a further example of the twisted web of deceit and betrayal that was fundamental to Stalin's regime, even Demidov's apparent victory over his rival is short-lived, and before long his own family is dragged into the matter, either to test Demidov's loyalty or to punish him, or perhaps both. At a certain point this all begins to raise questions in Demidov's mind about the slavish obedience he has paid to the state and its maxims, including in particular the notion that crimes like murder have been purged from the worker's paradise.

It is not hard to see why Smith's thriller got as much attention as it did. His prose avoids cliche, his characters are not cut from cardboard, and his plot has its share of twists and turns without resorting to illogical coincidence (though there are some convenient intersections). And considering that the main thrust of his narrative has to be the progress of the crime investigation, he does an excellent job infusing the story with the societal distortions inevitable to life in a police state, offering a literary element apparently uncommon to most such books. For those looking for a worthy point of entry for exploring the mystery/thriller genre, there are assuredly much worse places to start than with Child 44.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

One of my favorite reads of 2008 was Geraldine Brooks' Pultizer Prize-winning novel, March, which portrayed the Civil War experiences of the absent patriarch of the March family from Louisa May Alcott's beloved Little Women. It was masterful work on two fronts. March was an example of the best kind of historical fiction, using thorough research and stellar writing to place a compelling story in an equally fascinating setting. It was also a brilliant revisionist work; many are the mediocre derivative works that seek to leech off a treasured masterpiece (Gregory Maguire has somehow made an entire literary career out of it). Not so with March, which adds a dark dimension to Alcott's classic while remaining true to the original narrative.

March was not Brooks' first novel (nor by the time I read it was it her most recent), so when I discovered that her debut novel was also a work of historical fiction, it seemed worth a browse. In Year of Wonders, Brooks tackled a rather more distant subject: an isolated English village which quarantines itself during the Great Plague of 1665-6. Based on the true story of the village of Eyam, Brooks frames her narrative through the memories of protagonist Anna Frith, a young widow who has survived the plague and continues her work as housekeeper of the local rectory despite the self-imposed seclusion of the rector:

At day's end, when I leave the rectory for home, I prefer to walk through the orchard on the hill rather than go by the road and risk meeting people. After all we've been through together, it's just not possible to pass with a polite, "Good night t'ye." And yet I haven't the strength for more. Sometimes, not often, the orchard can bring back better times to me. These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now.

The first flashback returns to the early months of Anna's widowhood, which preceded the plague. Indeed, her husband was killed not by disease, but by a collapse in the mine which he owned and worked, an occupation even more treacherous in the seventeenth-century than today. Left to fend for herself and her two young sons with greatly decreased economic means, Anna decides to take a boarder, George Viccars. A skilled tailor, Viccars has come to the village to make use of his trade, which he had most recently plied in several of England's larger towns. Before long, Viccars is a trusted member of the home, gaining the affection of Anna's sons and increasingly, Anna herself. But just as she begins to seriously entertain the possibility of a romantic relationship, tragedy strikes: Viccars falls deathly ill with the symptoms of bubonic plague:

I almost dropped the pitcher in my shock. The fair young face of the evening before was gone from the pallet in front of me. George Viccars lay with his head pushed to the side by a lump the size of a newborn piglet, a great, shiny, yellow-purple knob of pulsing flesh. His face, half turned away from me because of the excrescence, was flushed scarlet, or rather, blotched, with shapes like rings of rose petals blooming under his skin. His blond hair was a dark, wet mess upon his head, and his pillow was drenched with sweat. There was a sweet, pungent smell in the garret. A smell like rotting apples.

Despite Viccars' urgent request, with the rector's affirmation, that Anna burn his belongings after his death, many of his clients demand the return of the garments he was assembling for them. Thus goes out into the village the seeds of its own destruction. Unfortunately, some of the first blows strike too close to home:

I crooned to him as I climbed the stairs and laid him down upon our pallet. He lay just as I placed him, his arms splayed limply. I lay down beside him and drew him close. I pretended to myself that he would wake in the wee hours with his usual lusty cry for milk. For a time his little pulse beat fast, his tiny heart pounding. But toward midnight the rhythms became broken and weak and finally fluttered and faded away. I told him I loved him and would never forget him, and then I folded my body around my dead baby and wept until finally, for the last time, I fell asleep with him in my arms.

Understandably, these events put Anna into a shocked depression from which she could hardly have been blamed if she never recovered. Certainly these were deadly times, particularly for young children, as reflected in the advice of Anna's stepmother not to name or love a child before they could walk. Nevertheless, the trauma for a woman just eighteen years of age to lose her husband and then watch her two young sons deteriorate and die before her very eyes, in her own arms, must approach the limits of human capacity. Indeed, Anna seeks comfort in the local herbalist's hidden stash of opiate poppies. And yet slowly, Anna regains her humanity, with the help of the rector's wife, Elinor Mompellion, who reveals her own sorrows to Anna and joins her in an effort to understand the disease that is plaguing their village and seek any remedy or defense against it:

And so for the rest of that day, we pored through the books that Elinor had carried from the rectory, looking first for the names of plants said to be strengthening for any of the many body parts the Plague seemed to attack. It was tedious going, for the rectory's books were in Latin or Greek, which Elinor had to translate for me... When we had the names of the plants, we went through the herb bunches, trying, sometimes with great difficulty, to match the descriptions in the books with the drying leaves and roots before us.

If there is a flaw to Brooks' book, it is the underdevelopment of the characters other than Anna, and perhaps Elinor. Partly this is explicable by the novel's high mortality rate; most of the villagers die, either of plague, accident, or murder, before all that much can be said about them. But it does mildly blunt the impact of their fates, as well as the plausibility of some of the twists of the novel's plot. Characterization is one of the novelist's greatest challenges, however, so it is no great insult to suggest Brooks was still perfecting it in this first novel, particularly as I already know how well she does it in her sophomore effort.

Where Year of Wonders most splendidly forecasts the success of March is the shared beauty of Brooks' ability to evoke all aspects of her historical setting. If her characters are sometimes a bit flat, they never lack credibility as creatures of 17th-century England. Brooks faithfully renders the people and events of the novel in the times in which they lived, never stooping to portraying them as inferior or barbaric, from the villagers' fateful suspicion of the herbalist widow Mem Gowdie and her niece, to Anna and Elinor's quest to understand the basics of disease vectors:

There it was, our Plague-scoured village, the names of all its three hundred and three score sorry souls pinned to the map like insect specimens on a board. Under the names of near fifty, Elinor had drawn a black line. I had not conceived that the sickness already had undone so many. The map showed it clearly: the way the contagion had spread out from my cottage, a starburst of death.

Even the most barbaric acts in the novel are inspired by feelings of fear or desires for vengeance, which hardly separate those times from our own. Despite their superstitions and their scientific ignorance, these were fully-formed homo sapiens with the range of human emotions, and Brooks admirably presents them as such. It seems Brooks has a real knack for this historical fiction stuff, which she proved yet again in her third and most recent novel, People of the Book, which I will review on Friday.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

In a sense, 2009 was the year of the Pulitzer Prize for me. I read seven novels that won the award: William Kennedy's Ironweed (review here), Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (review here), Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons (review here), Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (review here), Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (review here), Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries (review here) and, finally, Philip Roth's American Pastoral. There were no truly bad novels in the bunch, with Smiley's book just on the border, but only Eugenides and McMurtry really impressed me.

Roth is capable of doing so; The Plot Against America was one of my favorite reads of 2006, and I was mostly impressed by The Human Stain when I read it earlier this year. Like the latter, the narration in American Pastoralis provided by Roth's oft-used fictional alter-ego, famous novelist Nathan Zuckerman. The occasion of the 45th reunion of his high school Class of 1950 finds Zuckerman reminiscing, in particular about a student/athlete who had been the king of the town during Zuckerman's New Jersey youth:

The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again.

But for Zuckerman, the Swede was not just a mythical legend; he was the older brother of one of his friends and thus the first god to deign to acknowledge young Zuckerman's existence:

And then one day I shared in that glory. I was ten, never before touched by greatness, and would have been as beneath the Swede's attention as anyone else along the sidelines had it not been for Jerry Levov. Jerry had recently taken me on board as a friend; though I was hard put to believe it, the Swede must have noticed me around their house. And so late on a fall afternoon in 1943, when he got slammed to the ground by the whole of the JV team after catching a short Leventhal bullet and the coach abruptly blew the whistle signaling that was it for the day, the Swede, tentatively flexing an elbow while half running and half limping off the field, spotted me among the other kids and called over, "Basketball was never like this, Skip."

The reminiscence about Zuckerman's youth and the Swede's place in it is really a long introduction to two later encounters that Zuckerman had with the Swede. In a brief 1985 encounter, they run into each other at a Mets game, and Zuckerman is introduced to the Swede's son. More enigmatically, Zuckerman receives a letter from the Swede ten years later, asking to meet with Zuckerman to discuss the possibility of writing a memoir of the Swede's father. Though this is ordinarily the sort of request Zuckerman turns down cold, he can't possible refuse the Swede, and so they meet for dinner. In a very strange meal, the Swede talks about his health, his brother, his wife and sons, but never really gets around to the subject that had seemed to inspire the letter. Zuckerman leaves the meal concluding that the Swede, pleasant and sociable as he was, was nothing more, a man wholly lacking in drama or complexity. Later that year, at his reunion, he runs into Jerry Levov and finds out that the Swede has just died, and that it turns out Zuckerman had known very little about the Swede's life:

"The incessant questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my brother. He got the meaning for his life some other way. I don't mean he was simple. Some people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kind. But Seymour was never that simple. Simple is never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late. His life was blown up by that bomb, The real victim of that bombing was him."

"What bomb?"

It turns out that the Swede's daughter, Merry, his daughter from his first marriage, had blown up the local post office in a 1968 protest against... well, against the world, against Vietnam, against her father. A man was killed in the blast, but the repercussions certainly did not stop there. This revelation, shocking to Zuckerman who cannot quite figure out how he had remained ignorant about such an event, inspires him to reconstruct the Swede's life in the years leading up to and following the explosion that had torn his world apart. Thus the majority of American Pastoral is a novel within a novel, an imagining by Nathan Zuckerman of what life was like for Swede Levov as he married Miss New Jersey, took over his father's successful glove-manufacturing company, and raised a daughter who would eventually rebel against everything he stood for in the most violent way possible.

The early part of the book, in which Zuckerman discusses his childhood and own experiences with the Swede, is the novel's strongest section. Too much of what Zuckerman imagines about the Swede's struggles with his daughter, and his struggles with his daughter's crime, struck me as trite and cliched, from Merry's juvenile rantings about Vietnam to the machinations of Rita Cohen, the woman who shows up at the Swede's office demanding Merry's prized possessions on behalf of the fugitive girl before trying to seduce the Swede in a hotel room. Even worse, the book's frame story structure obfuscates responsibility for the banality: is this Roth who can't resist the urge to present the culture wars through platitudes, or it Zuckerman who is stuck believing in this hackneyed dichotomy.

The novel has its strengths: Roth's prose is always compelling. if nothing else, and American Pastoral does evoke many of the hotly debated issues of the late 1960s and early 1970s with verve and vigor. The novel is probably best enjoyed, and its social commentary most coherent, if read in conjunction with Roth's subsequent (and superior) two novels, I Married a Communist (set during the McCarthy era) and The Human Stain (set amidst the impeachment of President Clinton), which loosely form Roth's so-called "American Trilogy," each using its narrative to tackle the cultural divides that plagued a particular decade of post-WWII American public life.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

It is the unusual and extraordinary men and women who make it into the history books, mostly those who took some part in public life, be it politics, war, art, or science. As most of these fields were fully or largely closed to women for most of human history, the ordinary female life has been particularly under-examined. In her 1993 novel, The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields surveys just such a life, that of Daisy Goodwill. It is the only book ever to win the highest literary awards in both Canada (the Governor General) and the United States (the Pulitzer), with Shields being uniquely eligible for both as a naturalized Canadian citizen of American birth. It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

As its title suggests, the story is presented in the form of autobiographical diary entries by Daisy, whose mother's maiden name was Stone. The novel opens with an account of Daisy's birth, which necessarily entails an account of her parents, Cuyler Goodwill and Mercy Stone, and their life in a small town in Manitoba. Cuyler is a quarry worker (get it, stone?) who worships stone, routine, and coming home to his wife. Mercy is a woman so obsessed with food that her obesity hid from her the fact of her pregnancy until the day in 1905 when she went into labor:

All spring she's been troubled with indigestion. Often in the morning, and then again after her young husband has gone to sleep, she's risen form her bed and dosed herself with Bishop's Citrate of Magnesia. When she drinks ordinary milk or sweetened tea or sugary lemonade she swallows it down greedily, but Bishop's cool chalky potion she pours into a china cup and sips with deep, slow concentration, with dignity. She doesn't know what to think.

Unfortunately for Cuyler, Daisy's entrance into the world is also Mercy's exit, with her death in childbirth leaving Cuyler with the mystery of why his wife never told him of her pregnancy:

He admits to himself that his love for his dead wife has been altered by the fact of her silence. More and more her lapse seems not just a withholding, but a punishment, a means of humbling him before others who see him now, he imagines, as an ignorant or else careless man. What manner of husband does not know his wife is to bear a child?

He decides to build a stone tower in her memory, which will soon begin attracting tourists from all corners, while care of Daisy is taken over by the erstwhile neighbor, Clementine Flett, who seizes the chance to leave her unhappy marriage and start anew. She takes young Daisy to Winnipeg, where she moves in with her bachelor son who teaches biology at a local college. This domestic situation, portrayed through the inclusion of a series of letters written by Clementine and her son, Barker, lasts until 1916, when Clementine's death forces another life change upon Cuyler Goodwill, who has finished his tower:

A letter has come from Professor Barker Flett in Winnipegg concerning the breakdown of guardianship arrangements and the problem of what is to be done for Daisy's future care.

Another letter has come, only yesterday, from the president of the Indiana Limestone Company of Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. Expert stone carvers are urgently needed. An extravagant wage has been named. A comfortable apartment on Cross Street in Vinegar Hill (whatever that may be) is available for his occupancy. Transportation will be arranged for himself, his family, and his household effects. Does Mr. Goodwill have a family?

And so begins what from the outside would appear a rather pedestrian domestic life (aside from the death of her first husband from falling out a window on their honeymoon). The chapters of the book reflect the traditional landmarks, from marriage to motherhood, work to retirement, illness to death, with but a single venture into the outside world, marking Daisy's first real personal satisfaction: the publishing of a gardening column in the local newspaper, a decade of her life presented in epistolary format as she receives encouraging letters from her editor, then her readers, before the whole endeavor is abruptly snatched away:

Ottawa, January 25, 1964
Dear Dee,
I'm so sorry about this misunderstanding. I realize now, of course, that telling you on the phone was a mistake. I knew you'd be disappointed, but I had no idea you would take it this hard. You've been talking about wanting more time to yourself, more time to travel, maybe a trip to England to see your daughter. Hope we can get together as usual on Tuesday and talk this over like two sensible people.
Yours,
J.

There is much to wonder, in this book, about how the first-person writer of this 'diary' is able to discern so much about the private lives and thoughts of those around her. This is particularly so of those who died during her childhood, such as mother and Clementine Flett. Is there is an element of omniscience that defies the ordinary? Or is Daisy simply using artistic license in portraying the inner voices of her friends and family? The closest she comes to acknowledging this enigma is in the opening chapter:

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; evne our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence.

That is the struggle that Shields aptly portrays, the struggle to define ourselves, to find happiness or solace in the everyday. In the concluding chapter, Daisy's death is conveyed in scraps and pieces of her life: a recitation of organizations she had joined in her lifetime, a recipe she concocted, her illnesses, her grocery list, and the addresses of every home she lived in. All the ways of summing up a life without saying anything about it at all.

Blueberry Crumb Bars

Since the birth of my daughter and the end of my military service, I've been home so much that one would think I would have done a great deal of baking. And I did make (and quickly consume) a few dishes in the first couple weeks I was home. But the truth is that despite, or because of, my robust sweet tooth, baking has always been more of a social endeavor for me. I bake, and then take the baked goods to my office or send them with my wife to hers. Not only does this curry favor with our co-workers, it prevents us from gorging ourselves on sugary goodness.

Still, sometimes I can't resist the urge. This is never more true than when the grocery store runs a special on blueberries, which are dear to my heart but not my wallet. So when Whole Foods had cartons at 2 for $5, I bought them first and figured out what to make after. There's a coffee cake recipe that I've made a dozen times, and muffins are the obvious choice. But I wanted to try something different, and these Blueberry Crumb Bars were just the ticket. A few adjustments based on the All Recipes reviews and we were in business:

1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
3 cups flour
1 cup shortening
1 egg
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. salt
1 pinch cinnamon
1/4 cup water
1 tsp. lemon juice
4 cups fresh blueberries
1/2 cup white sugar
3 tsp. cornstarch

Preheat your oven to 375F. Grease and flour 9x13 inch pan. Stir together the white and brown sugar, flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Blend in the shortening, egg, and vanilla extract. Divide the dough in half and set aside one half for later. Add the water and lemon juice to the remaining dough and stir until just moist. Spread the wet dough evenly in the pan, and bake for 5 minutes.

In another bowl, stir together the sugar and cornstarch, then add the blueberries. Sprinkle the blueberry mixture evenly over the crust, and crumble the dough previously set aside over the berries. Bake for 45 minutes, then cool completely before cutting.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

It is hard to know what to say about a book like The Lord of the Rings. It is a bit like reviewing the Bible, really. Anyone with an interest is virtually certain to have read it, and those lacking such interest are unlikely to care much. Though I cannot disclaim a decently geeky childhood, my genre reading tended more toward science fiction than fantasy, and though I read The Hobbit as a child, I never picked up Tolkien's vaunted epic until much later in life. Indeed, it was not until the first of the recent motion picture adaptations was released that I picked it up. Actually, it was even later than that, as I did not see The Fellowship of the Ring in the theaters at the end of 2001, but sort of haphazardly added it to my Netflix queue and watched it during my first year of law school in the fall of 2002.

I was transfixed by the film, and simply had to know what happened next. The second film was not due to premiere until December of that year, so I made it my goal to traverse the 1000-plus pages by then. The book completely blew me away. I loved it, just loved it. Within months I was in full-on nerd mode, with copies of The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth and The Atlas of Middle-Earth gracing my bookshelf. I even made it through The Silmarillion, Tolkien's esoteric origin story of the Elves in Middle-Earth, and what do you know, I liked it even better. Suffice it to say, during law school I was a big Tolkien buff. When the "Extended Edition" DVDs of the film trilogy were released, I was all over them. I watched the movies, listened to the commentaries, watched all the documentaries. It was a great way to spend law school.

In the years since, the fascination has worn off a bit. I certainly no longer have the free time to sit and watch hours of DVD special features. But the book still retains its magic. This most recent reading was my third (I had read it again after the release of the last movie in December 2003), and it only gets better with increased familiarity. Reading The Lord of the Rings now is like visiting with an old friend. It is sad when it ends, but there is always next time.