Thursday July 31st 2008, 1:35 am
Black and White and Dead All Over
By John Darnton
Knopf, 2008
| Fairly ominous, when a book’s very title is a cliché, a pun, or a play on words. More ominous still when it’s all three, as in John Darnton’s new novel Black and White and Dead All Over, in which the ailing print newspaper trade forms the backdrop for a series of murders. In the newsroom of the New York Globe, an editor is found dead, and Smart, Ambitious Female Detective and Crusty, Righteous Guy Reporter team up to find the killer.
In the course of their investigations, SAFD and CRGR encounter all the faces of the publishing industry, from wacky publishers to wacky reporters to a wacky billionaire tycoon-tyrant (tyrantoon?) whose name is Lester Moloch (any guesses on his real world template?). There are more murders, and readers not in it simply for the plot will soon stop reading, assaulted on all sides by prose like this: |
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Jude hurried to his cubicle. It was messy, but hardly the worst in the room. Manilla folders and books were piled on the floor, but the walls were relatively bare. Next to the computer was pinned a photo of Elaine that he had taken during a week in Scotland eight months ago. She was standing straddling a bike, her hair blowsy in the wind against a backdrop of heather and wildflowers. Sexy-looking.
Assess all that’s wrong with that paragraph, and you have the failings of Black and White and Dead All Over: the lazy sentences, the lazy descriptions (Jude’s cubicle is compared to cubicles that haven’t been described; walls are bare relative to nothing; Elaine’s hair has to settle for being blowsy – which hair cannot be – because the author stopped on that word instead of the correct “blowing”; Elaine manages to have a backdrop – not background – of ground-flowers despite the fact that she’s standing up, straddling her bike; rather than describe her, Darnton simply tells us she’s “sexy-looking” … and so on), lazy everything.
Print newspapers are dying precisely because of this kind of lazy contempt for their readers. Darnton’s editor – if such an individual exists and would dare to come forward – deserves a pink slip.
–Steve Donoghue
Monday July 28th 2008, 7:49 pm
In the 17 July issue of the London Review of Books, anomie-heart-throb Benjamin Kunkel, author of the novel Indecision and one of the founding geniuses of the literary journal n + 1, turns in a long and genuinely thoughtful review of Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Netherland, which he generally likes, with one or two rhetorical and stylistic reservations:
Hans as a narrator operates a bit like a malfunctioning camera capable of tremendous long and short-range focus, but unable to yield anything but a fuzzy middle distance.
Or this nice bit, about the novel’s celebrated cricket scenes:
The descriptions of cricket are the best thing in the book, even or perhaps especially for an American reader for whom ‘cricket’ is chiefly an insect. It’s a bit like reading about the tea ceremony in Kawabata’s The Master of Go, where ignorance of the rules only heightens the sense of their ritual beauty, or encountering Lawrence’s pre-Chatterley sex scenes, where you know what’s going on emotionally without having any clear anatomical idea. But when Hans’s accounts of the matches tempt him to philosophise, we start to understand why the novel’s cricket scenes, so enjoyable in themselves, are so unsatisfying as they connect (or fail to connect) to the rest of the story.
As Open Letters readers may be aware, our own Steve Donoghue was less than enthusiastic about Netherland when he reviewed it for our blog, and he was even less enthusiastic when he had to revisit the book because of James Wood’s glowing appraisal in The New Yorker. Kunkel’s estimation of the book is less than glowing, so Donoghue will be spared further annoyance for the nonce.
Also less than glowing, in the same LRB issue, is a delightfully provocative review of Richard Price’s novel Lush Life by Deborah Friedell, who clearly enjoys tossing rhetorical red capes in front of pawing bulls, as when she opines, “If good writing means showing, not telling, how can a novelist compete with HBO?” or merrily hands us this: “In London, in New York, when young literary things meet, book chat is gossip. The smart conversations, the ones they’ve trained for, are about TV.”
Hee. Nice to see somebody enjoying her job. When it comes to the job of reviewing Price’s novel, her flair for the quotable continues, as when she turns to the figurative side of Price’s prose:
Book by book, his figurative language has grown increasingly ornate, his similes frequent and exuberant, if not always successful. (A friend said she nearly stopped reading Price’s new novel, Lush Life, when she came to the sentence: ‘He always imagined the slick obsidian office building that as of last year dominated the view as embarrassed, like someone exposed by an abruptly yanked shower curtain.’)
Although Friedell is generally appreciative of Price’s work, she’s not fully persuaded by his world view. Interested readers (and really, at Open Letters, we’re all interested readers) will find it instructive to re-read what our own Fiction Editor, Sam Sacks, had to say about Price’s latest - it’s a classic Sacks triple-decker, so settle in for a long, juicy read!
Saturday July 26th 2008, 12:10 am
Valfierno
By Martin Caparros, translated by Jasper Reid
Atria Books, 2008
| On August 22, 1911, the crime of that or any other century took place: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world, was stolen from the Louvre. Two years later, an Italian nobody named Vincenso Perugia was arrested for trying to unload the painting in Florence. The full details of the case have remained murky for a century and seem likely to remain so – why did Peruggia steal the painting? What did he do with in those two intervening years? What prompted him after that time to try selling it on the open market? These questions hover over the whole incident, as does the intense likelihood that the painting currently being viewed by millions of tourists to the Louvre every year is not, in fact, the genuine article. |
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Renowned Argentine man of letters Martin Caparros has written a fascinating novel (a bestseller in his native land) in which he offers a fictional resolution of the crime, in the person of the Marquis de Valfierno, an Argentine con man and the mastermind behind the theft. Caparros constructs his narrative to ratchet up the readers’ tension, interspersing an ongoing account of the theft with long glimpses into Valfierno’s past. Even in Jasper Reid’s somewhat pallid translation, Caparros’ gift for character is visible, as in this glimpse into Perugia’s mind right at the critical moment:
Vincenzo Perugia is sure you can see it on him. It’s just not possible that you can’t see it, he thinks, that I look the same now as I did yesterday, that it was all nothing. He sidesteps a puddle. The Lancelotti brothers walk beside him. He’s told them to flank him, just in case; the Rue Saint-Merri is dangerous, a refuge for petty criminals, and he has to be careful, though he doesn’t believe anyone’s going to think to steal the piece of wood he carries under his arm, wrapped in a white cloth. I can’t believe no one can tell I’ve got millions of francs here under my arm! he laughs to himself. I’m lucky they’re all so stupid.
The subject of the Mona Lisa theft has been dealt with in novels before. But none of them was quite so well-built and involving as Valfierno. I hesitate to call it a masterpiece, but it’s certainly no fake.
–Steve Donoghue
Wednesday July 23rd 2008, 9:19 pm
Lyall Watson, a polymath thinker whose enthusiasms bridged to virtually every scientific and quasi-scientific discipline known to man, has died at age 69, after suffering for years precisely the kind of prolonged, excruciating, and debilitating illness he often confessed to fearing. In this sense his death must be viewed as a benison, and of course the far greater one is that he was ever here at all.
Watson received degrees in zoology, marine biology, anthropology, botany, chemistry and ethology over the course of his career, but he was foremost an explorer, both of far-flung ideas and far-flung places. He trekked to Antarctica and the Kalahari Desert, to Tonga and Kuala Lumpur, always in search of extremes, always probing the limits of what’s known and accepted. He was a scientist in the grandest tradition of the art, roughing it in country, armed with an open mind and an indefatigable curiosity, and like so many of those grand trampers before him (Charles Darwin and more pointedly his grandfather Erasmus Darwin come to mind), he had the knack for turning out his observations in sharply readable prose:
The fullest development of individual recognition by voice occurs in seabirds which nest in large noisy colonies. Nobody who has ever seen a tern return to a dense colony and descend through a forest of sharp upraised bills to land next to the only bird in thousands who won’t try to peck its eyes out, can doubt that individual recognition has high survival value. What is surprising perhaps (until one remembers sea fogs and mist) is that, in the indescribable cacophony of a colony, this recognition should depend on sound rather than sight. The sandwich tern Sterna sandviciensis has a special ‘fish call’ that a parent with food produces when returning to the nest, and spectrograms of individual callers have shown that each and every one has its own unique signature. Part of the call says ‘Sandwich tern’, another part says ‘returning to nest with food’, but both are prefaced by a distinctive curlicue which identifies the particular tern doing it.
Watson is perhaps best known for his ‘hundredth monkey’ idea, first put forward in his 1979 book Lifetide. Observing the way Japanese macaques began washing potatoes before eating them, he suggested that at some point of critical mass (triggered by the so-called ‘hundredth monkey’) the idea of potato-washing somehow transmits not just to one group of macaques but to all macaques, including those separated by seemingly impermeable distances.
The scientific community reacted to this proposition with collective scorn, then waited thirty years and entertained it again as the concept of memes, but no matter; it was only one of the man’s countless ideas, tossed off in a lifetime of unconventional extrapolation. “He thinks things apart,” an old friend of his once remarked, “and then he thinks them back together.” This thought extended to the basics of thought itself:
The number of atoms in the universe has been estimated as ten-to-the-power-of-eighty. And the age of the universe in seconds is something rather less, like ten-to-the-power-of-eighteen. Therefore the number of distinct events which can occur in our finite area, is limited by time. And the number of configurations in which a system of atoms can exist is much greater than the number in which it does exist. It follows from this that it is highly unlikely, even impossible, that any two samples of matter should ever be the same. Which means that no two individual organisms, no two cells, and none of the entities in those cells, can ever be in the same internal state. Individuality is inevitable.
Such might be the case, but there’s individuality and there’s individuality. The human race - the collective human endeavor of inquiry - lost a true original this week. They’re rare enough, as he himself knew.
Monday July 21st 2008, 11:28 pm
The Last Unicorn
By Peter Beagle
Roc Trade, 2008 (originally published in 1968)
In a tradition to which even Homer is heir, humans have always passed down stories from generation to generation. While on the surface these myths – fables, folk tales, call them what you will – are about gods and monsters, their audience have always been meant to include adults as well as children. Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (newly repackaged by Roc Trade in honor of its 40th anniversary) has the requisite props of a standard fairy tale – a wizard, an evil king, a beautiful princess and a crumbling castle – but like every good tale it is about more. The story touches upon the essence of beauty, the magic that is all around us, and the search for who we are. |
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Beagle is often likened to Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien, and while I can see the resemblance, I feel this comparison does not do him justice; Beagle creates something unique, and in my opinion, better. His writing has the wit and charm of Carroll, but is more touching and tender. His prose can recall the elegance and beauty of Tolkien, but without the burdensome “epicness” to which he sometimes succumbs. Beagle transports the reader to a different world, one populated by mythical creatures. But what makes this so exceptional are the similarities to our own surroundings.
The Last Unicorn begins with the unicorn (no name is ever given to her) wondering if she is the last of her kind. She runs from her forest in search of others, who she feels must still exist, though it has been centuries since she has seen them. During her quest, she acquires two unlikely allies – an extremely mediocre magician and a scullery maid who’s a little rough around the edges. In a lesser novel, these two could easily be straight from central casting. But Beagle has created entirely believable and extremely human characters.
While never heavy-handed or didactic, The Last Unicorn makes us pause and contemplate how we see the world:
“How can it be?” she wondered. “I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorn or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see nothing else – what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or horses, or their own children?”
Part of the delight of Beagle’s novel is its ability to swing effortlessly between philosophy and pure entertainment. Only pages after the poignant quote above, I found myself smiling at a song being sung by a butterfly. The story flows easily, and as usual, I finished far sooner than I wanted. While the novel does not end with “And They All Lived Happily Ever After” I still recaptured something of that childhood feeling. I wanted to believe in good triumphing over evil, in true love, and in magic – and I did again.
–Alice Murphy
Sunday July 20th 2008, 9:30 pm
Thumbing the 11 July 2008 issue of the TLS you might have seen Marjorie Perloff’s review of August Kleinzahler’s new poetry collection, Sleeping It Off In Rapid City.
Perloff’s objections to Kleinzahler’s work outweigh her accolades. For instance, after quoting from a piece in which the poet caustically writes about the inhabitants of a San Francisco used bookshop, Perloff goes for the grand dismissal:
What this catalogue lacks is the particularity that makes poems like Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (whose middle section, like Kleinzahler’s, is a tour of bookshops, each image and action subtly anticipating the final revelation of Billie Holiday’s death) so arresting. To call the bookshop’s clientele “dowdy” and “ferrety”, or its proprietess a “swollen arachnid”, to remark on a girl’s bad skin and a man’s tic - such dismissive gestures are themselves tics.
Even when she praises, she picks nits:
Kleinzahler’s facility - for example, his carefully wrought staircase stanza and use of chemical vocabulary in “4-phenylcylcohexane” - is impressive, but in such realistic poetry the devil must be in the details, and the details here are largely cliches.
The precise meaning of such turns of phrase is perhaps a trifle opaque for non-affectionados to penetrate. Such individuals are encouraged to click on over to the May2008 issue of Open Letters, where our Poetry Editor John Cotter gives the same book a thorough - and thoroughly enjoyable review of his own, full of his signature sylistic beauties.
The joke is that in Kleinzahler’s own poetry, although a random snowflake may well represent a glimmer of the universal mystery, it would never be expected to power a whole poem, or even more than a line. Within a moment or two of its appearance, a “good pee,” a “night train to Milan,” and “kinetic snapshots of trees and light” appear and disappear. The poem may return to that snowflake or it may not. The world spends all day hurling discordant details at its residents, and Kleinzahler’s poetical mission is the re-stitching of those fragments into something musical, intriguing, and occasionally moving. His poems often return (in the way haiku return) to their themes only after some divergence in the world of particulars. We stop thinking about what a Kleinzahler poem is about soon after we begin to read it, in the same way we quit thinking about whatever errand we’re be running on a crowded street. We just get caught up.
You won’t be disappointed.
Friday July 18th 2008, 12:04 am
Inside Beethoven’s Quartets: History, Performance, Interpretation
By Lewis Lockwood and the Juilliard String Quartet
Harvard University Press, 2008
Every field of study has its coursework that everyone hates. For the musician, it’s Music Theory. The reading material is painfully detailed, highly specialized, and seems to bear little relationship to what we love – playing music. This book addresses the question asked by so many frustrated freshmen: “what is this for?” Without getting bogged down in specialized details, the conversations with the Juilliard String Quartet illuminate the uses of analysis to inform performance. From their perspective as performers and teachers: |
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[The goal] reminds me a little of what you would expect a great actor to do with a Shakespearean speech, who sees ways of suddenly shifting the emphasis and the intensity unexpectedly, in a kind of counterpoint to the normal discourse.
How do you slow [the students] down and say: “Hey! Listen to the words you’re saying – you’re not hearing anything you’re saying.”
The solution? Be informed. In discussing their own practice of interpretation, rather than lecturing on the principles of that art, the quartet demonstrates the value of formal, harmonic, and motivic analysis.
The introductory lectures by Harvard musicologist Lewis Lockwood make the same point, again by demonstration. He puts the works in context, discussing Beethoven’s indebtedness to Haydn & Mozart, the information gleaned from studying sketches of the works in progress, and parallels to social and psychological states of Beethoven’s era. This is historically informed performance, as it should apply to all performers of historical classical music, not only those involved in period instrument practice.
This book originated in a series of lecture-discussions given by the authors, and does exhibit a certain longing for its origins. An overhead projector and audio examples would ease the explanations of the three movements followed in detail. That being said, a copy of this book should be sent to every conservatory of music in the country. The subject may be very specific, but the insights are valuable to every classical musician. They are presented in a way to be accessible to anyone with enough interest to pick up a book devoted specifically to Beethoven String Quartets.
–Elizabeth Hardy
Wednesday July 16th 2008, 12:07 am
Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart: On the Perils of Marriage
By Anka Muhlstein, translated by John Brownjohn
Haus Books, 2007
Renowned Tudor-era historian Anka Muhlstein has written a book whose premise is as simple as it is thought-provoking. She looks at the queenly careers of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots – both of whom faced innumerable obstacles on their paths to power, both of whom fought foreign wars and faced the threat of invasion and assassination at home, and both acquitted themselves admirably in these trials. Muhlstein contends that the crucial difference between the two women was how each approached the subject of marriage. |
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Mary did so, often foolishly, three times: first to the Dauphin of France, then to Robert Darnley, and finally to Robert Bothwell – a lunatic, a weakling, and what a quainter age called an adventurer, respectively. Elizabeth flirted her whole life with the idea of marriage but famously never indulged. Mary gained a male heir out of her disastrous marriage to Robert Darnley, but she ended up imprisoned and executed. Elizabeth lived in triumphant glory, but she was obliged by dynastic imperative to put Mary’s heir on the English throne.
Muhlstein is wonderful and insightful on all this, and her greatest strength is her sure grasp of the characters who populate her story, as in this little sketch of Elizabeth’s so-called spy master, Francis Walsingham:
Walsingham’s relations with Elizabeth were never cordial. He was too pessimistic and inflexible; in other words too puritanical to endear himself to her. He did not stoop to flattering her or lauding her beauty and intelligence in the high-flown language customary at court. On the contrary, he was blunt and outspoken with her, never hesitating to draw her attention to the limits of her power. [for her part, Elizabeth] knew that her survival was more dependent on the protection of this stern, modest, discreet man in black than on all the handsome officials who adorned her court.
The book is glowingly worthy of any Tudor-scholar’s attention. And it need hardly be added that John Brownjohn’s translation is flawless.
–Steve Donoghue
Sunday July 13th 2008, 11:59 pm
Oxygen
by Carol Cassella
Simon & Schuster, 2008
Seattle anesthesiologist Carol Cassella has written a debut novel that is very nearly derailed by her own Author Bio in the back of the book. Not the part about studying at Duke and freelancing for years on subjects connected with public health advocacy, but the astonishing fact that she’s had two sets of twins, fifteen months apart in age. What fictional tale could rival the memoir this woman could write? Who could read that detail and not at once become more interested in it than in the events of Oxygen, her novel? |
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Fortunately, Oxygen is a fantastic book and manages in very few pages (very nearly from page 1) to reclaim your attention. Since it’s a debut novel, you won’t be surprised to learn that its main character is a female Seattle anesthesiologist, but Dr. Marie Heaton is a remarkable fictional creation in her own right, and by the time an operating room mishap results in a patient’s death and brings all kinds of darkness into her life, the reader is thoroughly hooked. Every aspect of the American medical bureaucracy is here flawlessly rendered, but it’s Cassella’s grasp of character and great ear for dialogue (spoken and otherwise) that propels the book, as in this tense encounter Dr. Heaton has with a hospital administrator who talks to her about possible negligence:
Negligence. It’s the first time anyone’s spoken that word to me out loud. I’ve said it to myself. I even looked it up: “failure to exercise the care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in like circumstances.”
The book opens with an evocative description of the godlike power an anesthesiologist exercises over the patients on her table, and since the novel is narrated in the first person, the reader feels a bit of the relish Dr. Heaton experiences in her job – which makes the subsequent nightmare that ensnares her life all the more poignant and irresistible. This book is no medical thriller, although writing of the caliber is thrilling; rather, it’s a medical tragedy, one with many victims. Only the readers – and I hope Cassella has many – have a purely pleasant experience of it all.
–Steve Donoghue
Friday July 11th 2008, 5:25 pm
Palace Council
By Stephen L. Carter
Knopf, 2008
It’s best to first get out of the way the likeliest criticisms of Stephen L. Carter’s brilliant and attention-consuming third novel Palace Council. It’s a political thriller, so there are a few scenes that are more cinematic than literary, and there are a few longshot coincidences contrived to keep the plot motoring in a high gear. It’s not a psychologically searching novel—as extraordinary as it may seem, the main character is a writer who never once suffers from writer’s block.
All this is for the better, of course, because Carter, a Yale law professor and chess aficionado, has a mind perfectly adapted to constructing intricately unfolding scavenger-hunt thrillers. But the singular feat of Palace Council is the way that Carter maintains a high level of guessing-game suspense over 500 pages while revealing a vivid and entirely plausible look at the inner workings of Washington politics in the 1960s and 1970s.
| The novel’s winning lead character is Eddie Wesley, whom we meet in 1954 as a young writer aspiringly rubbing shoulders with the businessmen, artists, and debutantes of the affluent Harlem elite. Going home after a wedding at Harlem’s Jumel Mansion, Eddie stumbles over the body of a murdered man who is wearing a strange upside-down cross. Eddie begins to notice others in his circle wearing the cross, which is clearly a badge of membership in some secret organization, and he gradually becomes embroiled in the mystery of the murder. And then, when Eddie’s activist sister suddenly vanishes for obscurely related reasons, Eddie commits himself to learning the truth of the enlarging conspiracy. |
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But Eddie, who becomes nationally famous as a novelist and James Baldwin-like cultural essayist, is also a high-access parvenu in the wings of the most tumultuous events of the Sixties. Carter’s fascinating (and, in the world of fiction, quite unique) central cast draws from the Brahmin class of black Americans who are now diffused to gated suburbs but were once consolidated in the area of northern Harlem known as Sugar Hill, and who exerted considerable influence in both local and national politics. Due to his friends’ clout and his own talent, Eddie comes into close contact with J. Edgar Hoover, JFK (for whom he is a speechwriter), and Richard Nixon. All of these figures are brought to life with great skill, especially Nixon who, predictably and very believably, plays a sordid part in the conspiracy, but who also comes across as a pathetically real person. Here Eddie and Nixon are having breakfast on the morning that the President made his famous surprise visit with war protestors at the Lincoln Memorial:
“Johnson’s war, not mine. Kennedy started it. Doesn’t matter. If it happens on your watch—and we can’t abandon them. Cut and run. America doesn’t do that.”
“Even when America’s wrong”
“Not a matter of right or wrong. Matter of reputation. They have to believe you’ll do what you—” He scooped his thick head for a bite. The shy smile was almost apologetic. “Can’t do it. Can’t cut and run.”
“It’s like playing poker, Mr. President,” said Eddie, hitting upon an analogy he hoped Nixon would find persuasive. “You know what they say. If you throw good money after bad, you wind up out of the game before you—”
“America doesn’t cut and run.”
The President’s eyes shifted one way, the other way, back again. He seemed restless and uneasy. He was said to be a brooder, a breed Eddie knew at first hand. Eddie looked around the restaurant. Aides stared back, and, beyond them, a few gawking early risers. All these smart people at his beck and call, but Nixon had pulled Eddie out of the crowd to eat breakfast. And then Eddie got it. The President of the United States had no one else to eat with. He wanted company, and, on this particular morning, a left-leaning novelist who hated the war but had written a vaguely complimentary essay about him eight years ago was the best he could do. Nixon wanted to be Eddie’s friend.
These little touches appear everywhere in Palace Council, enriching but never distracting from the exciting plot. This is one of those special books that can be confidently recommended to every kind of reader there is—it’s fast-paced enough to thrill someone who hasn’t ventured much beyond Dan Brown, and it’s relevant and intellectual enough to satiate the more literary sorts who might otherwise be put off by the absence of Proustian atmosphere. Palace Council is a must-read for everybody.
–Sam Sacks
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