Book 19 – Poor George

By Paula Fox

A children’s author and novelist since the 1960’s, Paula Fox experienced a bit of a resurgence several years ago when a few of her key novels were republished by WW Norton after being out of print for over a decade. Writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Andrea Barrett and Jonathan Lethem praised her as a profound influence on their work.

Her adult fiction tends to be realistically bleak portraits of personal and social malaise. Not usually the kind of literature I seek out. Although Poor George was indeed bleak, it was also quite beautifully written and even funny at times.

The setting is very similar to the Highsmith novel I just read, A Suspension of Mercy: seeking a change of pace and to save some money, a young husband and wife leave Manhattan to live in a small house in the country. The isolation and close quarters exaggerate whatever inherent personal and marital issues they have, and then well, things gradually implode. Similar premise I suppose, but different vibe -- main differences being the degree of tragedy and suspense, and lack of police involvement and body count!

Fox is an elegant writer and she makes a compelling story about a rather unremarkable English school teacher George Mecklin. As soon as I read this passage, I knew that I was going to like the novel:

His hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched over, George pressed his forehead against window. Why was everything so shabby? … Suddenly he pictured himself throwing out everything they possessed, sweeping out every corner of the little house, leaving only the washed, sweet air of the country in their four rooms. Then, frightened at the prospect of such nakedness – what would they be without their little wretched accretion of objects? – he ran upstairs.

Poor George, so miserably sympathetic, and yet Fox doesn’t let you take her principal character too seriously. The funniest parts tend to take place at the private school where George works. I’m sure some of the 50-bookin’ teachers here can relate to George as he’s caught in the middle of trivial infighting among the teachers or trying to find some motivation marking papers at home:

Tonight he must start reports; some would make him writhe with impatience. The school never gave up. Students who failed seemed to be its raison d’etre; hysterical parents had to be cozened into a patience they could only simulate. “He needs more confidence…” How many times would he have to write that before the day was out?

Good stuff. I’m definitely keen on reading her other novels now, even her recent memoir Borrowed Finery.

Interesting factoid: not too long ago, Fox discovered she was the biological grandmother of Courtenay Love after being reunited with the daughter she had given up for adoption when she was 20. Fox and her notorious granddaughter apparently “do not get on”!

Book 18 – A Suspension of Mercy

By Patricia Highsmith

Thanks to Olman’s collection, I had my first opportunity to read Highsmith. And man, her writing is good! For an excellent summary, check out Olman’s impressions of this tight, well-crafted novel.

For myself, I really appreciated how Highsmith set up a situation where you understand the characters underlying psychology and background. Whatever issues that lurk in their veneer of normalcy creates the required conflict to get the plot moving. And as the characters dig themselves into a crazier and self-destructive situation, you may think what an idiot or nutcase this person is, but at the same time, you totally see where they’re coming from. The choices they make, however irrational, makes sense according to their motive. This makes for an intelligent and satisfying suspense novel that also succeeds in being genuinely tragic.

I would so love to read some more Highsmith now. I don’t know if her other books are even darker than this, but I love dark depressing fiction… so bring it on!

Book 17 – Lush Life

By Richard Price

I remember reading how Richard Price has a marvelously uncanny ear for street talk and police procedure. As a fan of The Wire, I also noted he was part of the show’s elite team of crime fiction writers and how reviewers often drew comparisons between his earlier work and The Wire even before he came on board. When I spotted Lush Life at my local thrift shop for $3, I was siked.

From the blurb, I already knew that the novel was about a shooting that occurred in the Lower East Side, where Price grew up. Other than what I already mentioned, I didn’t know anything more than that. It took me a while to get into it as the author sets up the characters and scene. I was also a little wary about the central character, Eric Cash, a restaurant bar manager, who at 35, is close to giving up on any hope of achieving whatever youthful aspirations he once had.

While out drinking with people whom he barely likes, they get robbed at gunpoint and one is shot dead. Emanating with self-loathing, Eric quickly transforms from key witness to suspect in the eyes of the two police detectives, who are otherwise capable, but end up making a fatal mistake. Once I was left trying to figure out what was going on, I was hooked, as the narrative scope swiftly and confidently expanded from the shooting incident to encompass a whole cross-section of people that intersect as the police investigation progresses.

As the author put it in a NY Times article: “An investigation will take you through a landscape.” The landscape being the Lower East Side, which Price depicts as a neighborhood of colliding populations. “This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.”

Although the intersecting kaleidoscopic narrative device has been done to death recently in overblown Hollywood dreck like Crash and Babel, it’s rarely ever put to accomplished and meaningful use. Reading Lush Life felt very much like experiencing the world of The Wire all over again, albeit with different characters and location, of course. You’ve got the police investigation hampered by politics, the law and the media; the sharp observation of class conflict and individual interactions; the wry humour. And Price’s portrayal of the middle-class white hipsters at the victim’s memorial was dead-on and merciless.

This is probably due to the fact that the new wave of "La Bohemer" gentrifiers are taking over a bygone neighbourhood. As one Salon reviewer notes: "Price seems so fond of streetwise impudence and cynicism that middle-class hypocrisy and cant become in some ways a less forgivable crime than murder". There is definitely a wary and cynical undercurrent there as you can feel how Price laments the loss of the old New York – just enough to make you feel a little sad, instead of merely rolling your eyes. I think knowing a little bit about the overall and recent history of New York helps in appreciating the novel a little more. For instance, I had to ask Olman what this Quality of Life business was about, as the author rarely explains away context to outsiders or tourists so readily. It'd be interesting to know Olman's thought about this book, since he had to jump in and read it while I was still trying to finish Post Captain!

Lush Life was a very straightforward read, but at over 400 pages, it was no quickie either! Still comes strongly recommended if you’re a fan of The Wire, interested in New York and/or you're simply looking for a well-written recent bestseller. I'd definitely seek out his other fiction work, like Clockers for one.

(16) The Shining

By Stephen King

Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.

Mainly due to my mildly snobby attitude towards mainstream fiction in general, I’ve never given King’s oeuvre much of a chance. I’ve only read Carrie and parts of Cujo as a youngster, and just recently his stab at apocalyptic-horror, Cell. Since I found a used copy of The Shining for only a buck, I thought I’d give it a try, since I very much admired the film adaptation.

First off, reading the book made me realize what an extraordinary job Stanley Kubrick had done with the film version. The creative licenses he took made the movie much more intense, and much more frightening, than King’s original novel.

Some surprises for me:

- the endlessly typewritten “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, the ghostly twin girls and blood pouring out of the elevator were all from the movie, not the novel

- the novel was definitely in the genre of supernatural horror whereas the movie was more psychological horror

- the novel actually had a happy, or much happier ending, than the movie

These surprises stemmed from my assumption that the movie borrowed the major plot points and minor details from the book, while the well-known deviations, e.g. the labyrinth instead of the topiary and the ax instead of the roque mallet, would be few and far between. Since these deviations have become iconic cinematic images, it was weird to visualize the original source of the novel.

In any case, King’s novel was still really good and although I didn’t find it very scary, there were definitely some creepy and disturbing moments in there. But the experience is nevertheless marred by the powerful influence of Kubrick’s adaptation where at times I felt the novel to be a pale echo of the movie! This is where I felt that the movie version is superior to the book. The book was very good, but the movie was definitely a masterpiece in its own right.

(15) Party Of One: The Loners’ Manifesto

By Anneli Rufus

Alone, we are alive.

Everyone’s got an idea about what the archetypal ‘loner’ is. Usually the associations are negative. Like loners are anti-social or asocial dweebs. Loners have no life. Loners are, well, losers. At first glance, a manifesto for loners seems, well, paradoxical. But the author makes the argument that a loner is an oft-misused identity label, and her book pretty much tries to dispel the common misconceptions, and in the end, reclaim the word for the loner community – if there is such a thing!

Though I’m more of an introvert than a loner (more like an introvert\extravert, or ambivert, really!), I’ve always valued solitude and a part of me has always identified with the loner mentality. So when I heard about this book, I was quite interested in reading it.

Early on, the author makes clear that this is not a new agey or self-help book. Yet a title search for Party of One on online bookstores yields a bevy of recommended reads such as “Solitude: A Return to the Self”, or “The Highly Sensitive Person”, or “Intimacy and Solitude”, or “The Happy Introvert: A Wild and Crazy Guide for Celebrating Your True Self”. Of course, Rufus regards these types of books disdainfully, as she writes:

There are books, out there, about solitude. They give instructions on being alone. These books talk of “stealing away,” of “retreats” and of “seeking sanctuary.” They pose solitude as novelty and a desperate act: the work of thieves and refugees. But for loners, the idea of solitude is not some stark departure from our normal state. We do not need writers to tell us how lovely apartness is, how sacred it was to the sages, what it did for Thoreau, that we must demand it. Those books are not for loners, not really. This is not one of those books.

So Rufus embarks on the task of defining what it means to be a loner. It has absolutely nothing to do with being lonely and has everything to do with embracing true independence. Yes, loners prefer to be left alone, but they use their solitude constructively. They tend to be opinionated, curious, intelligent, creative, and nonconformist. Largely because they feel no need to compete, they ae notably calm and stress-free and robustly happy.

There are basically two camps: the loners and nonloners (guess which group the status quo belong). The reason she is so critical of nonloners is because they are the ones that have given loners a bad name, mainly because they simply cannot conceive of true loneness. Take for example, the almost “ironclad” conventional attitude that holidays should never be celebrated alone, since for nonloners, the prospect of holidays alone is “truly horrifying”. Ah, those silly nonloners!

Rufus explores how pop culture and the media have perpetuated positive and negative images of the socalled loner, much of which comes from loners themselves. She looks at loners of yore, ie. hermits, monks and anchoresses, and phony loners, ie. bedcases. She looks at how loners deal with love and work. And she also brings up famous loners, like Piet Mondrian, and makes the case of how loners can be misunderstood:

By all accounts, Mondrian was a contented man. He was not a crazy man or a lonely man or a suicidal man or a failure or a man who lived in squalor. He had social graces, knew his manners, but chose not to be in situations where these would be called upon. Fully functional, he published an art magazine and achieved great renown in his own time. For his troubles this quiet figure was lambasted by one art critic as a “cold, ruthless Dutchman.: Like any loner whose openness to others goes only this far and no farther, Mondrian would of course be called ruthless.

When Rufus gets to the subject of loner-bashing in law enforcement it gets the most interesting. It’s amazing to learn how the vast majority of criminology experts and FBI profilers still rely on archaic definitions of personality types and fail to grasp some basic distinctions. The l-word is far too often “too loosely applied, or even misapplied”. The author writes:

What we have here is a crisis of semantics. The word “loner,” based on the shallowest impressions of surface appearances, is being used wholesale to tar an amazing diversity of people – most of them not loners – with the same mucky brush.

Rufus wants to make clear that being a loner is not the same as being a social outcast or sociopath. But too often “loner” is used in place of these words. She uses Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber as the classic example of the mislabeled criminal loner. As a teenager who was so far ahead of his peers intellectually, he became regarded as “a freak by a large segment of the student body.” Kacynski was actually a nonloner who came to resemble a loner because he was an outcast. As he admitted once in a letter to his mother: “…the many rejections, humiliations and other painful influences that I underwent during adolescence at home, in high school and at Harvard have conditioned me to be afraid of people.”

What Rufus tries to point out that these so-called loner criminals who seek revenge, retaliation or retribution… well, these are not the motives that move loners. We do not want those things from others – acceptance and admiration and control and power – that make social people kill. We neither hang nor thrive on what others think, say or do. The fact that we mind our own business saves us from the types of torment that typically lead to violence. We want nothing from others but to be left alone.

Yes. It did take me a little while to get past the overall snooty tone of the writing. As a writer, Rufus is more insightful than entertaining. There are no humorous anecdotes, as she does not aim to amuse, but to enlighten. In the end though, I was indeed very much enlightened and I ended up enjoying this book after all!

Book 14 – Post Captain

By Patrick O’Brian

Even though Redwing beat me to it, his review was rather paltry ;-), so here’s my attempt!

I was quite looking forward to reading this, as I enjoyed Master and Commander tremendously. The 2nd installment picks up where the first book left off, and begins rather like a Jane Austen novel with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin ensconced in the English countryside. They soon become acquainted with their neighbours -- the “feminine household” of Mapes Court. O’Brian does a wonderful job of introducing each female character. I was immediately drawn to the cynical and brilliant widow, Diana Villiers, who becomes entangled in a romantic triangle with Jack and Stephen. She says things like “Thou looks’t like Antichrist in that lewd hat” to her younger cousin.

Even though Diana believes that “there is no friendship in men”, she and Stephen strike up an unusual yet platonic relationship. “You do know I am a woman, Maturin?” Yet the harmony does not last long, as things get complicated when Jack enters the scene!

As expected, there are many humourous and lighthearted moments, like when Stephen and Jack flee to Spain in a ridiculous disguise that I won’t give away, and how Preserved Killick becomes Jack’s steward. And there is O’Brian’s brilliant writing. Whether it’s describing Jack’s internal thoughts:

Yet the surface of his mind was taken up less with his coming interview than with getting the utmost possible service from a single handkerchief and with vague darting reflections upon poverty – an old acquaintance, almost a friend – a more natural state for sea-officers than wealth – wealth very charming – should love to be rich again; but there was the loss of all those little satisfactions of contriving – the triumph of a guinea found in an old waistcoat pocket – the breathless tension over the turn of a card.

Or about Jack and Stephen’s friendship:

They were looking after themselves, living with rigid economy; and there was no greater proof of their friendship than the way their harmony withstood their very grave differences in domestic behaviour. In Jack’s opinion Stephen was little better than a slut: his papers, odd bits of dry, garlic’d bread, his razors and small-clothes lay on and about his private table in a miserable squalor; and from the appearance of the grizzled wig that was now acting as a tea-coxy for his milk-saucepan, it was clear that he had breakfasted on marmalade.

I can understand why fans would read all 20 books in the series. If every book contained scatterings of little gems such as these, I too would be happy to read all 20 indeed!

However, nothing is ever perfect, not even a Patrick O’Brian book.

With Post Captain at almost 500 pages, it was frankly, quite a slog at times. Master & Commander was tighter in structure and plot, and thus more consistently engaging, while Post Captain suffered from too many storylines and lack of cohesion. At times the threads were too vague or subtle for the stop-start reading or perhaps it was that certain key points got buried amidst all the male-driven action and politics, cuz I didn’t realize until much later that Jack & Diana were actually having an illicit affair!

In the end, it took me much longer to read the second installment than the first. In order to recall all the events, I found a blog which provides an amusing condensed version of what goes down in Post Captain. Another review also sums up the more critical feelings I had for the 2nd installment quite nicely.

So yes, as many flaws as there are gems, but I'd read the next installment without hesitation, though I may take a long break before I do so, as there are many other books to read!

Book 13 – The Intrepid Art Collector

By Lisa Hunter

I don’t tend to read much non-fiction, but when I do it’s usually for a practical benefit and to better myself as a person (not self-help either!). Although I have some background in art history and have fairly developed taste and appreciation, I know surprisingly very little about buying art. I must say I don’t think I’ve ever bought any art in my life. I’ve bought some nicely crafted things, like jewelry and pottery, but nothing that would involve a dealer.

I’d really like to buy cool and interesting art one day. Not anything flashy or trendy, just something that just speaks to me, or something that’s just simply beautiful to hang on the wall of my home. But for many people, like yours truly, buying art can be a little overwhelming, if not downright intimidating.

Which was why this was my only non-fiction purchase of last year. I found this book extremely informative and helpful. Even if I never end up buying that special piece of art, reading the book left me feeling confident and armed enough to walk into a gallery and just look around, and maybe even ask the right questions.

The book is also organized very efficiently with each chapter focusing on contemporary art, 19th and 20th century art, photography, prints, vintage posters, native American, African art, oriental rugs and antiquities.

There are also practical sections about dealing with dealers, buying at auction, off the beaten path, buying art online and art in your home.

Now the next step is to find the resources and time to go about finding some cool art!