When a novel promises to tell the story of a famous actress from Hollywood's golden age, potential readers might fear they are in Jackie Collins/Judith Krantz territory. Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures isn't a gossipy, trashy romp. It's a smart journey alongside a strong woman. One who on occasion is weak but who is never, ever less than real.

If you're a fan of big studio era Hollywood films, it's easy to start playing the who's who game. Is Irving Green a combination of David R. Selznick and Irving Thalberg? Is Laura Lamont really Jennifer Jones? Ginger must be Lucille Ball. Susie and Johnny? Hello Judy and Mickey. If none of the previous names mean anything to you, don't worry. You don't need to know anything about Hollywood to enjoy this book.

That's because the core of this book isn't about stardom, it's about happiness. Do we know what makes us happy? Or unhappy? It's also about what it means to be yourself. Early in the book the main character is rechristened in true Hollywood-style. Laura, formerly Elsa, remains the same person but understands that she now has two distinct histories and futures. There are simply things that Elsa could do that Laura can't or won't do. It's not a psychological split, it's acknowledgement of the bargain she's tacitly made.

This book deserves a wide audience. It is enjoyable and thoughtful without being maudlin or manipulative. Laura's life isn't perfect but her choices are believable and her strength a welcome change from the old "high price of fame" routine. Highly recommended for fans of Old Hollywood, movies and intelligent fiction.

(The perfect companion book to Laura Lamont is Jeanine Basinger's insightful The Star Machine which explains in entertaining detail how the great studios manufactured stars.)

Books I've Finally Managed to Finish

Some books just don't start well for me and it requires an effort to stick with them. Sometimes that effort is rewarded with a great story. Mansfield Park took 100 pages for me to really get into it. Even something as light and fluffy as Spying in High Heels didn't get going for 40 pages or so. I'll take slow start/great ending over great start/bad ending any day.

It doesn't always end well. Sometimes slow start ends in worse ending. Over the past months I've experienced the highs and lows of slow starts.

1. Caribou Island by David Vann   It took 3 false starts to finally finish this one. It never actually sailed along and it is as depressing as a 20 hour Alaskan mid-winter night but I respect it. Great writer. Maybe in need of Prozac or Lexapro; or just a few hours of Chappelle's Show.

2. Deadly Little Secret by Kathryn Casey   Spending over 50 pages with someone who is scared they are going to be murdered and who you know will be murdered is a little ghoulish. That made the first part of this book tougher going than is usual for Kathryn Casey. It definitely improves. This isn't her best but it's still worthy of any true crime fan's time.

3. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen  I've been on a classics kick lately and this is one of the books that's been sitting on my shelf, mocking me, for years. I finally tackled it last month and although it didn't grab me until the end of Volume 1, after that I couldn't put it down. According to the introduction in the edition I read this is Austen's "most complex and least likable novel." I can see why but it is definitely worth reading.

4. Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile by Gyles Brandreth  How do you make Oscar Wilde boring? If you're looking for lessons on that, and I can't imagine why anyone would, then seek out the first 50 or so pages of this book. Recounting famous incidents from Oscar's life isn't the best idea if you're going to make them dull. The mystery, once it gets going, isn't bad though perhaps needlessly complex and the evocations are 1890s decadence are a hoot.

I'm currently reading (listening to) Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers and it suffers from another complaint: draggy middle section syndrome. The dialogue is snappy, although I don't see how Lord Peter Wimsey makes it through all those books without someone telling him to shut up and the narrator is making the most of it. But page after page about fingerprints - the lifting of them, leaving of them, photographing of them, measuring them, etc - is over the top, and not in a campy way.  Well, it's on the list so I'm going to finish it.

Cardboard Cliches

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw has been on my to-read list since it came out last spring. The central idea was intriguing: tracking the emotional of a hit-and-run death, focusing on the people in the car. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed reading a book so thoroughly flawed as this one. In short, the dialogue is unbelievable, the characters are cliches, the narrative is so chopped up that it feels more like a short story collection than a novel but the descriptions and simple human observations are very good, often beautiful.

For every "Olivia's family was an epicenter of credit card frivolity" and cats whose "purring made them seem motorized" you have to wade through dialogue such as: "I hate when you talk that voodoo science crap." You could plan an evening's entertainment around having your friends over to read some of the dialogue aloud, competing to see who can actually make it sound like something a human being would say.

The characters saddled with this dialogue aren't exactly fleshed out in believable ways beyond their giggle-worthy dialogue. It's a weird combination of characters with mostly believable emotional responses utterly unbelievable actions and words. The main characters, the Kinney siblings are fleshed-out cliches: Nick is the drugged out astrophysicist, Alice is the wildly success artist with women falling out of the sky to sleep with her, and Carmen is the earth-mother left-winger. Half the time their dialogue consists of "stuff lefties say" instead of anything that sounds remotely like what real people say. This is livened up by the occasional snatches of "stuff conservatives say" and that's even worse.

When Anshaw is on, usually in her descriptions, she's great. When she's not on, it's painful and stunningly off-key. Her unsympathetic characters are so unrealistic it stops the show - like when Carmen's in-laws bring a statue of the Virgin Mary to her wedding. That's how Anshaw conveys that these are spiritually certain folks, with shtick. The nadir is the chapter devoted to 9/11. For a writer who understands the subtler nuances of guilt this is one ham-handed scene. Carmen is spouting conspiracy theories as the towers fall, Alice yammers on about being numbed by special effects and Nick awakens from a drug-induced stupor to announce, "We just took delivery on a big message." It doesn't sound anything like people experiencing the horror of 9/11, it sounds like exactly what it is, someone thinking back to that day.

I don't know whether to recommend this book or not. Even it's exploration of the effect of the accident on the Kinney siblings isn't entirely successful - only one character truly deals with it and the end is just beyond words goofy. But there are phrases and lines that stick. If you're truly interested in this book, the Audible version may be your best bet. Renee Raudman's reading gives dialogue a humanity that is missing on the page.

Sympathy for the Devil

In the genre of women’s fiction, Jodi Picoult, Sue Miller and Anita Shreve exemplify the unwritten ground rules: an event of some trauma or import intrudes on the seemingly ordered life of a woman living in a seeming idyllic suburban or rural town. Lisa Unger certainly plays by the rules but she also manages to add her own stamp to the genre.

The plot description of Fragile may remind some of Rosellen Brown’s excellent Before and After but that’s merely superficial. Brown was focused on the toll taken on one family. Unger chronicles the impact on an entire town. Her cross-section of characters verges on over population at the beginning of the book but once the action kicks in the pattern Unger is weaving becomes clear. Unger is particularly good at showing the reader unpleasant characters without making them cartoonish. Even her most repellant characters retain a humanity.

There were a few things in Fragile that are, well, curious. One is Unger’s choice to saddle a major male character with the name “Jones”. At least it’s not “Storm”, I guess. Then Unger has one character named “Chuck”, another “Charlie” and a third “Charlene”. If she was trying to make the three a triptych of each other it doesn’t come off. Maybe she just likes the name Charles.

An enjoyable book. Recommended for fans of Jodi Picoult, Sue Miller and Rosellen Brown.

This is Your Life – Southern-style

First off, this is not a thriller. The subtitle to The Last Talk with Lola Faye is “a novel” and that is the correct description in my opinion. Thomas H. Cook delivers a few twists and turns in the book but while motivations may be shrouded there is no big psychological mystery nor are there chase scenes and other assorted perils. Instead Cook tells the story of a mediocre professor who one night unexpectedly meets the woman he holds responsible for his father’s murder. The conversation that follows, the talk of the title, takes the narrator back to his life in an Alabama town of reduced expectations.

Cook chooses to tell the bulk of the story in a series of flashbacks – a risky choice but it is mostly successful here. It helps that the writing is engaging and never fussy, and that the book is short (around 250 pages) so that it can be read in one gulp on a deckchair near the body of water of your choice. In fact this book is probably best read in one or two sessions. Broken up over days the story of Luke and Lola Faye might start to creak a bit. Can Luke really be so totally lacking in self-awareness? Taken at the right speed the story is revealing and entertaining, reminiscent of Barbara Vine.  My only quarrel with the book, aside from the publisher’s choice of calling it a “thriller,” is the last chapter. It feels like a cop out, a tacked on happy ending that was already implied without hitting the reader over the head. Maybe that’s the publisher’s fault, too.

Recommended for fans of literary mysteries of the Barbara Vine variety.

Recent Acquisitions from the Vine

Complaining about the poor selection of free items strikes me as a tad ungrateful yet I have to admit that Amazon’s Vine offerings haven’t been tempting the last few months. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean I have to choose a book that does not interest me – especially when I have to write a review in exchange. But enough whining, in this month’s second batch were too review-worthy books.

 

The Last Talk with Lola Faye by Thomas H. Cook

This is billed as “a novel” despite a plot that involves a man finally meeting the woman he holds responsible for his father’s murder. Less than 300 pages, Lola looks like something best read in one gulp. Perfect for my long awaited vacation this week.

If I like this I’m in luck, it appears that Mr. Cook has written twenty other books.

 

 

Finding Chandra by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz

The summer of 2001 was the summer of the Chandra Levy case. Then 9/11 happened and pundits were falling all over themselves to say that THIS was real news and didn’t we all feel silly about obsessing over the Levy case. The case was sensationalized by cable news mongrels and it was a typical Missing White Female media frenzy. Fortunately Washington Post reports Higham and Horwitz treated the case as more than the scandal de jour and didn’t settle for sensationalism. Their series of articles, which form the basis of this book, helped to identify the killer.

All Yesterday’s Parties

The story of a party girl who finds herself hanging out with the Rat Pack, the Kennedy Clan and La Costa Nostra simultaneously only to spend the rest of her life paying the consequences sounds like a great idea for a great novel. As The Go-Between proves, there is more to great novel than a great idea.

Frederick Turner starts out by creating a distinct barrier between the subject, Judith Campbell Exner, and the reader. Instead of telling her own story, JCE’s story is told by a old reporter who had access to her diaries but rarely quotes from them. Instead the reporter treats readers to his interpretation of her story. This might have worked had Turner not chosen to make the reporter the classic unreliable narrator, had the reporter fall in love with his own idea of JCE and then, for some truly unfathomable reason, make this the one reporter who can never seem to find the right words or the right analogy. Paragraphs of the narrator telling us that he can’t find the right word but it’s sort of like this, etc, might work once in the novel but more than once stops the novel dead in its track every single time. And that’s not counting the time he’s struggles for an analogy that he sort of remembers but doesn’t quite. Look it up on the internet already, buddy.

There is a tie for nadir of this failed experiment. Candidate One is the entire chapter entitled “Killing MistahCastro” (JFK, you’ll be shocked to learn, had an accent). Candidate Two is the narrator’s ruminations on the subject of “virginality”. What’s that, you say. You do not want to know and you certainly don’t want to know several pages of it.

That’s just the writing. The plot is not much better. Whether you’re a JFK fan, a JFK hater, a left-winger, a right-winger, a centrist, or a political agnostic there’s something in here to make you roll your eyes in disgust. Pick a cliché about these characters and chances are it’s here. So let me summarize for you: JFK and his father used the mafia to buy the nomination and then the election. (I was fascinated that the price of the Illinois and West Virginia primaries were both a briefcase full of money. One would think that on a per capita basis Illinois would be worth a suitcase full, but I digress.) But wait, there’s more! Sinatra and JFK liked threesomes! RFK was a saint! Peter Lawford was a tool! And … does anybody really still care about this foolishness? And if they do, why not read a trashy bio on any of the above and skip the faux handwringing about the corruption of it all.

I don’t claim to know what the truth is about any of the above allegations. This is fiction and Turner can do what he pleases as long as he makes it all matter. He fails to do that. From the minute he introduces her to when his narrator claims to be trying to rescue JCE from being “Jack Kennedy’s lay” he does her a disservice. Turner never makes Judith Campbell Exner a believable character and he very rarely shows her outside of her interactions with the cast of famous men. Jacqueline Susann could have written a better life story of JCE – at least she would have given her some humanity.

Derivatives Watching

Thirty pages into Frederick Turner’s The Go-Between I feel like I’m playing spot the influence. There’s the unreliable narrator – nod to Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. There’s the investigator who is entranced by the subject of his investigation – nod to Preminger’s Laura. The self-consciously hard-boiled narrator has too many examples to pin down just one but this one feels vaguely Norman Mailer-like. It’s all a little distracting which doesn’t help when the style is to show you the main character (Judith Campbell Exner) by never actually showing her directly.

I hope its just a creaky start.

Upstairs, Downstairs and the Summer House

More Barbara Vine than Elizabeth George with Whatwasdone and Whydoneit being as important as whodunit. This book has a surprising number of passive characters - people who let tradition, circumstance and the will of others determine their fates.

As is often the case, there are several instances of 21st century opinions being voiced by characters from previous centuries. Morton does an admirable job of recreating the "downstairs" world of the servants in a great house although at times it feels slightly cribbed from Upstairs/Downstairs. The narrative is nonlinear, with flashbacks, dictated memories and letters recreating the story of what happened at the house at Riverton one night in 1924.

Grace is a refreshing lead character, starting out in life believing she is fortunate to enter "service" (being a servant in a grand house) only to later grasp the chance to become truly her own woman. Her doppelganger of sorts, Hannah, is more frustrated and frustrating. I couldn't quite make out whether Morton was presenting Hannah as a woman trying to break free of convention or as a woman who never fully matures finding make believe games and secret codes more compelling than real life. Perhaps Morton was trying for both.

Whatever the case this is an entertaining tale, decently written and in Grace, a character whose choices I found myself pondering after I'd finished the book.

Mysteries of Barcelona

This is one of those books that makes me glad I have access to ARC's through Vine. Very likely I wouldn't have gotten around to reading it this year even if someone gave me a copy and insisted I read it. And that would have been a pity because this is a very entertaining book.

It's the story of David Martin, a writer of pulp fiction in 1920s Barcelona. He loves books and loves creating stories, in fact that's all he really wants to do. He's so entranced by stories that he doesn't actively live his own life. A series of events sets everything he values beyond his reach: his best friend, the woman he adores, the work he loves, even his own future. Into this situation comes the mysterious Andreas Corelli with a proposition: write a book for me.

There is a strong whiff of both the Gothic and the supernatural here. Think the Mysteries of Udolfo. This is great story telling, but it's even better scene-writing. The dialogue is witty, sometimes laugh out loud witty. The central ideas - art as the repository of the artists soul, the nature of faith and the essence of friendship - are far from trivial. The most compelling part of the story for me was the friendship between David and the girl he unwillingly takes on as his apprentice, Isabella. The bond between them is so effortlessly drawn and yet so palpable. It's rare to see a male-female friendship portrayed so honestly, so reverently in popular fiction today. The translator deserves special recognition as well, this never feels like a "translated" work yet it retains a distinctive sensibility.

As much as I like this book, I recognize it isn't for everyone. If you don't like old school Gothic this won't be for you. If you want an ending with everything answered, this may leave you dissatisfied. But if want a well-written wild ride with nuggets of genuine insight about fiction and story-telling, this is a book you should read.

Random Thoughts

I'm reading Iain Pear's Stone's Fall and D.J. Taylor's Bright Young People. At nearly the halfway mark I've noticed a few thing, all of them random.

• Roughly 20 Kindle lines equal one printed page.
• A different "voice" isn't necessary to convey a change in narrator. Pears does it effectively but subtly almost entirely through the opinions and perceptions of the narrator.
• Although if asked I would swear that I hate slow paced books once I get into a well-written slower paced book, I like it. Stone's Fall can move glacially at times but is still entertaining.
• Those Brits do love creating "clubs".
• The press's fascination with reporting the doings of basically moronic people is not a new phenomenon.
• I'm becoming obsessed with LibraryThing.
• This obsession may not be a bad thing. So to speak.

The Death of My Literary Credibility

Not that I ever had much but the fact that I'm reading and enjoying Twilight might just be the thing that empties the account.

Well, what do I expect? I did give in to peer pressure. Two smart women I respect fell in love with the whole Twilight series and kept urging me to give it a try. One wanted me to read it so she'd have someone to help her figure out why she's so addicted to a story about teenage vampires.

I'm a third of the way into the first book and, yes, it is addictive. I'm not dreaming about Bella and Edward but my commute is flying by even when that annoying couple who insist on reading books to their daughter loudly and in funny voices is sitting near me. (I'm all for sharing the reading love but am always happier not knowing how a stranger would voice the aspirations of a very tired bunny.) Stephenie Meyer is a competent writer. The plot is interesting but in these post Interview With a Vampire times not exactly revolutionary. If I had to make a guess at what makes these books readable it's that Meyer does a good job of creating a very ordinary life for Bella that stays ordinary even after she meets a clan of vampires.

Bella has a flighty but loving mother, a loving father who's not exactly sure what to do with a teenage girl, she has girl friends who are interested in boys and clothes, she's a good student but not a star and she's a klutz at any sport. She's all around average except in the degree of parenting she does for her parents - cooking and sorting out the dry cleaning. All that normal makes it easy to relate.

At least I've been reading

So I haven't posted much. Vacation, more work stress, etc but, thankfully also reading. Finished two books, make that three, and started a few more. One that I started that I've been putting off a little is Elizabeth George's latest Insp Lynley mystery. I haven't read her last two. The last wasn't a mystery and from the write-ups didn't appeal to me, and the one before, which was a mystery featured a serial killer. I don't get the whole serial killer appeal in mysteries or true crime. I like motives, real motives, not psychosis. To each reader their own, I guess.

From what I understand With No One as Witness killed off one main character and left another in a tailspin. That was unpopular but honestly I don't know what else George could have done. Her characters were getting a little stale. I say that with fondness but really, how much more could anyone have taken of Deborah obsessing over the fact that she can't have children or Thomas feeling oh so guilty about something. I think that's why I liked A Place of Hiding - most of that was limited and one of the characters pointed out to Deborah that her life wasn't so bad. Also, the mystery was satisfyingly twisty. And Barbara Havers wasn't on scene. I could do with a lot less Havers in any of these books.

Anyway, then George write a slice of life novel (or whatever) about the little urchin who shot poor Helen. And that, from what I understand, was even less popular. Well, bully for Elizabeth George if she wants to stretch her wings a bit. Not that I'm likely to ever read What Came Before He Shot Her but rock on anyway.

So now we roll into Careless in Red and Lynley is understandably a bit, well, insane (in a very upper class sort of way) but still has his wits enough about him to follow proper procedures when stumbling upon a dead body. Like most Insp Lynleys, this one starts slow but once all the characters have been introduced the plot hums along. Yes, everyone does think about everything verging on too much (turning on a light switch can send these people into long reveries about the past) and the MacGuffin that fascinates everyone this time around is .... surfing.

No joke, surfing. A change of pace from everyone being obsessed with World War 2 in A Place of Hiding and maybe because I went to high school in Florida, just a little giggle worthy. Half the town is either a surfer or vehemently opposed to everything surfing stands for. And who knew surfing stood for anything?

Then there is one of the main female characters - a large animal vet named Daidre. She has secrets. Or should I say SECRETS because her lack of apparent candor is noted by nearly everyone who comes in contact with her. Then there was an incredibly weird scene in which Daidre presumes to tell Insp Thomas Lynley that it's all ok that his wife is dead because she's in a better place, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. After knowing him for 2 or 3 days and after just admitting that she'd basically Googled him to get the goods on his background. If she's supposed to be his future love interest I swear this is my last Elizabeth George because who does this shit? You find out a stranger is recently bereaved and you ram your not too clear yet not exactly original spiritual beliefs on him!?! Calling the mess of tripe she offered up "spiritual beliefs" is too kind by half since Daidre avoids mentioning God or Allah or Buddah or Jesus or any other major spiritual figure and keeps referring to feelings. If a Wiccan wandered by during this speech I'm sure he or she would have advised Daidre to get a little structure in her beliefs already. A Unitarian would have giggled and told her to make a choice already. (Ok, I'll stop now.)

Enough complaining: I like the mystery, I'm glad to see Insp Lynley back with all his endless navel gazing and it's good to be spared Havers for a change.

Great Book Meets Crappy Work Week

Most days I know I'm lucky. I have a job that I enjoy and I'm fairly compensated. That's a rare combo in these times and I know it. But every once in a while I have a work week, like this one, that makes me yearn to do manual labor. (Aside from the fact that I'm an utter klutz and would likely cause harm to anyone in the vicinity while attempting said manual labor.) This was one of those weeks; with a vengeance.

Fortunately this was also my first week of Amazon Vine and the first book off the Vine was The Lace Reader. I can admit now that I was half-expecting to hate this book or be disappointed by it. For one thing, it was a "Book Club Favorite", a phrase I associate with dreck like Eat, Pray, Love or worse. (Note to self: stop being such a book snob.) Even after 100 pages I was prepared for disappointment.

Instead I found a book so well-written and well-crafted that the big "twist" wasn't an "where did THAT come from" but "oh, yeaaahh, that makes sense." And that's how I prefer my big plot twists, I like them to make sense. I like little clues along the way that are subtle yet add up, especially in retrospect. This is a great book, the closest thing to The Secret History since, well, The Secret History.

Strange Bedfellows

Certain books have been known to make me sleepy. It isn't that they're boring, just the opposite. They require a degree of concentration that at the end of a long day blissfully banishes work from my mind and makes my eyes sag. Paul Johnson's History of the American People and History of Christianity did this brilliantly. So did The Reformation and The Closing of the Western Mind. I love these books, enjoyed every page but I knew that twenty pages or so and the Cappodocian Fathers or Zwinglianism would send me to dreamland.

Now it's Eric Hobsbawm's turn to play Ambien in a bookcover. He's up to the task. Give him a dense topic like, say, the fiscal health of the French government under Louis XVI and I'm gone after two pages. At this rate I'll finish the book sometime in 2009. The Age of Revolution is more economic history than history. It's also more socialist view of economic history. Not that Hobsbawm forgets his duties. He's not a polemicist, thankfully.

If I want to be bored rather than drained I couldn't do any better than Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl. After ten pages I knew I'd be skipping my way through this book. It's not that Gregory plays fast and loose with history - this is historical fiction, after all - nor is it that her dialogue screams anachronism! with every line. (Early on, Mary Boleyn says of Anne "I thought she'd marry a French count or somebody." Somebody?) I don't expect Elizabethan English here but "You can't be more a virgin than me."?

So far George Boleyn has introduced his sisters to the concept of tampons (no joke), Mary has experienced post-partum depression and all three young Boleyns have moaned about the fact that their family is using them to advance their interests. This is about as authentic to the Tudor period as my computer. It's enough to turn me against novelized treatments of real people. Oh wait, I'm already against that. But that copy of Fatal Majesty that's been sitting unread on my shelves for eight years is headed for the donation pile for certain after this.

Insightful Cliches

I can't decide whether this book is amazingly insightful or one extended cliche.

I do have a weakness for Sue Miller. She's the best of the "women's writers" genre that includes Judi Picoult, Anita Shreve, Alice Hoffman and, lately, Barbara Delinsky. It's a genre that's on the cusp of "serious fiction" (whatever that is) and at its best tackles topical issues from a woman's perspective. All fine and good.

Sue Miller specializes in exploring the world of "what was she thinking?" or more often, "what in the name of God was this woman thinking? Is she brain damaged or something?" She's very good at creating believable female characters who make apocalyptically bad choices. Miller does this without coddling her characters and with a prose style that propels the story along while seeming to linger over the daily details.

The Senator's Wife is clearly inspired by several political wives. Joan Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lee Hart and Hillary Clinton. Delia Naughton, the title character, is probably closer to Joan Kennedy in specifics. Married to an Irish politician in the 1950s and 60s, she learns of his affairs but resolves to forgive him until another affair, too public and devastating to her whole family. She continues to stand by him politically but they lead largely separate lives.

Enter next door neighbors Meri and Nathan I'm convinced Miller decided to spell "Mary" as "Meri" so it would be one letter closer to "mess" because that's what she is. A complete mess. A newly married journalist who is terrified of being defined by her husband with a marriage that seems more defined by sex than friendship. Meri is needy. She knows that her life has really been a series of aimless moves that have the appearance of a clear path. She quickly becomes as fascinated by Delia Naughton as her professor husband is by the mere idea of Senator Naughton. Without giving too much away, Meri passes the line from intense interest into creepy stalker pretty quickly. Meri falls apart when she gets pregnant, falls more apart once the baby is born and keeps falling.

Contrast this with Delia. Her life is defined by her relationship with her husband, despite her seemingly successful attempts to create her own life. She is cool, dignified, has an apartment in Paris, has wine and pate for dinner and makes a great gift basket. Delia is also the master of the answer that is accurate without revealing anything. You get the feeling Delia is tired of defending or explaining her relationship with the Senator. She loves him but she can't put up with his betrayals anymore. Her actions baffle her children. Why does Delia campaign for her husband after his particularly appalling betrayal? Because she believes in him politically. Because she holds out some hope for reconciliation? Because she wants him in her debt? Because she wants to hold onto her public dignity? She can't give him up entirely and she's convinced herself they've worked out a life that suits them. Until the Senator has a massive stroke.

The story peaks, or hits rock bottom depending on your taste, with a scene between the Senator, Meri and her sleeping newborn and a late entrance by Delia. There's no getting around that what Meri does is selfish at best, twisted and delusional at worst. Miller tries but I never felt like Meri's actions "made sense" even in her nutty brain. Do you really want to spent time with a character whose actions make you nauseous?

This is the dilemma. Part of me thinks Miller is too good a writer not to know when she's creating a character readers will yearn to visit physical violence upon. Part of me also thinks that Miller thinks she's saying something deep about sexuality and married love. She's not. She's doing a bang up job of showing what goes on in side the mind of the woman in your neighborhood who just can't get her shit together, though.

Not that we're much wiser as to why Delia does what she does. Maybe that's s as it should be since Delia herself doesn't fully understand her actions. Not in a chick lit "Gosh I don't know WHY I did that way" but in the way of a mature woman acting on torrent of emotional and rational spurs. She's confused in the way any one would be confused at finding that the rules one subscribes to and the bargains one has made are suddenly all void. Delia convinces herself she's given up hope that her husband with come home to her and be faithful. But when the chance presents itself, she gives in again.


I could get all philosophical and wonder if Meri doesn't subconsciously betray Delia because Delia is a surrogate for Meri's own emotionally absent mother. Well, maybe, but still, keep your blouse buttoned already.

The End of the Wars

Travelling for work as much as I do means I get to spend time reading on airplanes but makes keeping up this blog a challenge. In the last week I've finished 3 books - one an audio book - and started on two more. Two of those books have left me in the middle of major wars a mere six centuries apart.

The Winds of War is an amazingly easy read. Wouk has an ear for dialogue and an ability to impart facts and philosophy usually without appearing to do so. Once in a while he falters, like when he had pilot Warren Henry explain Russian history to the crew of an aircraft carrier, but it's almost endearing how hard he tries to have it make sense. It's also not easy to have one character just happen to be on the spot for the Battle of Britain, the first Roosevelt-Churchill meeting, the Battle of Moscow and in the vicinity for Pearl Harbor. It's even harder to have said characters sons be on the scene for the other major events of the pre-war, Poland and Pearl Harbor, but Wouk goes for the proverbial gusto. He's promised the reader a panoramic view of the beginnings of World War II and he's not going to let a little thing like odds put him off.

Bully for him. I'm willing to forgive the occasional stretch of likeliness for a good and honest story which Wouk more than delivers. It helps that Wouk creates very believable characters, I was especially surprised by his strong female characters. No one is perfect in this book although Captain Victor Henry sometimes seems a close to it. He's more married to the navy than his wife, FDR takes a shine to him and invites him over for cocktails and dinner, he meets Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, a beautiful young woman falls in love with him, etc. I can't quite believe that I didn't hate this guy. Wouk shows Victor's insecurities, his failings, his weakness, his ambition, and his inability to communicate with his children despite loving him dearly. He also has the other characters in the book appraise Victor with results that are far from perfect. Finally, Victor admits that he's just a pawn to FDR, that the world leaders he's encountered considered him an errand boy at best, that he's put his career ahead of his family, and best of all, he drinks himself into a stupor when his wife writes him a Dear John letter. Oh yes, and the battleship command he's all but lusted for his entire career sort of ... sinks out of his reach. And none of this is presented as "poor saintly Victor and his trials." It's just life.

A few words about Natalie, Wouk's stand in for American Jews during the war. She did get on my nerves on occasion. So much that I skipped a few of her scenes. It's hard to accept that it would take a grown woman 2 years to get out of Europe even with all her uncle's visa challenges. I went along with it, increasingly grudgingly though. I understand what Wouk is trying to do here but it's one of his balder efforts.

All in all, The Winds of War is a great book. Is it the American equivalent of War and Peace? Will I be hunted down and burned at the stake for even writing that sentence? In my humble opinion, it's in that territory. For the modern reader it's certainly more accessible not simply because the history is more recent but because where Tolstoy can't resist would spend 100 pages telling the reader what it all meant, Wouk is more restrained. Don't get me wrong, I loved War and Peace, it is truly a timeless book. But it's hard to read it without thinking what a pompous old Count Leo must have been. Wouk, on the other hand, seems like a decent dinner companion. If you want to learn about World War II without tackling a major history, The Winds of War is for you.

Trial by Fire, on the other hand, is not for the casual reader. If you think Tolstoy and Wouk love their battle scenes I promise you they have nothing on Jonathan Sumption. No one has anything on Jonathan Sumption when it comes to detailed descriptions of battles. I'm not a fan of battle scenes but you have to admire what Sumption does. With precious few original sources he comes as close to "You Are There" as possible. He also has an eye for character and intrigue that kept me interested. Unlike Barbara Tuchman, Sumption couldn't care less about chivalry or courtly love. He's a cold-eyed realist with an unbeatable ability to assess character. This is a fine book and I'm glad I've read it, I just doubt I'll ever reread it.

I'll cover the third book, My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart in another post. Yes, there's a war angle in that one too but let's not push it.

Week 2 of the Wars

I try not to read the reviews on Amazon before I've read the book itself. Once I've committed to reading a book, and it is a commitment, I want to form my own impressions. I do read the reviews when I'm trying to decide whether to buy a book. After decades of "collecting" books (that's my story and I'm sticking to it), I'm running a little short on space so even buying a book involves a commitment of ever decreasing shelf space.

One reviewers comment on The Winds of War has stuck in my mind. It said, roughly, how annoying it is that main character Captain Victor Henry is always right. No doubt about it, that is exactly the sort of thing that would piss me off. So I've been on the lookout for signs that Capt VH is just too perfect to be suffered. It's a fine and somewhat unfair line. I can be as unforgiving of a perpetual screw up as I am of the too perfect. A character can be right without being insufferable. It's just not easy to do.

A good example, especially since it's top of mind for me, is Stuart Redman from Stephen King's The Stand. Stu is one of the few survivors of the super flu. He becomes the spokesman for the "good" survivors. He could easily become unwelcome but King keeps Stu human. He doesn't preach, he's often right but never perfect. He stays rootable.

So far, Wouk is keeping Victor Henry rootable. I'm amazed at that when I tally up his credentials: he's a faithful husband, a committed Christian, he's argues with the Nazis about the alleged Jewish conspiracy, he's right about the importance of radar, he tells Goering to shove it, he's right about the ability of the British to hold out against the Nazis, he hangs with Churchill, he resists the advances of a young woman, he's FDR's pen pal, etc. And he has a nickname. Pug. He's called Pug by most of the characters in the book. And he doesn't mind.

I should hate ol' Pug by now, page 526 to be exact. Even with all his virtues and his luck at being at the very crux of history nearly every day, Victor Henry is still good company. Same with headstrong, aka always doing something monumentally stupid, Natalie Jastrow. It helps greatly that neither character is present as being "always right" or universally adored. Pug may be sipping martinis with FDR but deep down he thinks his naval career is going nowhere. Natalie may be soliciting her ex-lover's help, mere days after her wedding, but she's constantly manipulated by her Uncle Aaron.

Wouk does an amazing job of not presenting any of his characters as entirely good or wholly bad. Not even the Nazis. His narrative powers continue to impress as well. Some have accused Wouk of writing soap opera and in a way he has, if soap opera means the daily life of common people. Is Rhoda going to leave Pug for Palmer? Will Natalie cheat with Leslie Slote? These questions are sandwiched between events we know will happen: Germany will invade the USSR and Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor. In this Wouk is covering the same ground as Tolstoy in War and Peace. Everyday lives in extraordinary times. The main difference is that Wouk assumes no prior knowledge by his readers, which makes his work all the more accessible.

Meanwhile, back in 14th Century Europe, Jonathan Sumption is still leading the most detailed tour of the Hundred Years War ever. I had it wrong when I said I couldn't get passed the Truce of Calais with Tuchman, apparently I've made it passed the Battle of Poiters. I know this because Poiters is still in the future in Trial By Fire and still I'm riveted. Sumption's ruminations on what made John II of France such a lousy king belong in a MBA management course. "Like many weak men, John II found it difficult to work closely with those who were not his friends." Ain't it the truth, girls. Even better: "They pressed their opinions on him with the determination of men who had learned to despise him." This sums up every senior management team meeting at my office last year. Minus any hint of chivalry.

The First Post

Is always the hardest. After all, in one post one has to justify the very existence of the blog. Too much pressure? No. I'll just pretend this is a draft.

The book of the moment is The Winds of War by Herman Wouk; 896 paperback pages of an American family during the Second World War. This is one of those books that's gone from being a hot book, to a classic, to a miniseries/"Television Event", to a strange obscurity. I can't remember what possessed me to tackle this, especially knowing that it's followed by a Part Two of Sorts, War and Remembrance, that's 1,056 pages long. (War and Peace, which took me an entire summer to read, is only about 1,400 pages long.)

I think it started when I read The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor and realized how woefully uniformed I am about World War II. I know the basics: Nazis, Pearl Harbor, Bunkers, Atomic Bombs, etc. But the fact is I've started more non-fiction books on World War II than I've finished. Maybe I thought that fiction would be an easy entry into the subject.

Still, 896 pages isn't usually associated with easy.

That's why I'm amazed that I'm 350 pages in after only a week. Using simple, straightforward prose Wouk has built a narrative drive that rivals the best, slickest genre fiction. He doesn't skimp on ideas or characters or atmosphere. Yet what in the hands of, say, James Michener would equal the most painful of boredoms becomes in Wouks hands a book that's hard to put down. I'm actually looking forward to propping myself up in bed at night for my ritual hour long reading session.

I'll get into the text in another post. Now I simply want to revel in the sheer readability of a modern classic.