Reading Those Classics 2023 #2

Classic Novella: Faulkner liked this long 1939 story so much that he read from it during a guest speech in Virginia.

Old Man – William Faulkner

This short novel narrates the experience of a convict during the Great Mississippi Flood of April, 1927.  The most destructive river flood in US history covered 27,000 square miles and affected over 700,000 people that lived in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Natural disasters are often remembered in folk songs so  Arthur Field and Memphis Minnie wrote songs about it. The flood was so devastating to life and property that even Republicans were shaken enough to get on board with the federal government committing the resources to build the world’s longest system of floodways and levees.

Faulkner tells a great story, mixing in the adventures of fictional characters with an historical event like the April 29 dynamiting of a levee at Caernarvon (LA) in order to save the Big Easy. This detonation caused destruction and loss owners never got compensated for and turned out to be needless.

This is a pessimistic theme that Faulkner examines in yet another tale about the struggle of our species against the forces of nature and the decisions of foolish humans turned faceless merciless leaders. Faulkner’s convict-protagonist acts out of steadfastness and courage but it’s a struggle against the forces of nature and the authorities. Live an unassuming life with a conscious emphasis on patience and good faith and see how much natural disasters or mindless bureaucracy care if you get in the way of them.

This short novel from 1939 would be an excellent story for the introduction of readers new to Faulkner who are justifiably nervous about tackling this notoriously hard writer. Like the novel Sartoris, Old Man provides a modernist work-out with lengthy complicated sentences using punctuation that’s not especially conducive to comprehension. There are also time shifts, poetic imagery and symbolism that readers can bring their own imagination and experience to. 

But no sticks of dynamite with hissing fuses -- like the challenging experimentation of The Sound and The Fury or mystifying word play of As I Lay Dying -- are tossed into the lap of the reader.

This story appears in these collections:

·         Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses | Old Man | The Bear - Vintage ISBN 0307946754

·         Sixteen Short Novels - Wilfrid Sheed

·         Fifty Great American Short Stories - Milton Crane

·         Ten Modern Short Novels - Leo Hamalian

·         Eleven Modern Short Novels - Leo Hamalian

Click on the title to go to the review

·         The Sound and the Fury (1929)

·         As I Lay Dying (1930)

·         Light in August (1932)

·         The Unvanquished (1938)

Rex Carver #3

The Python Project - Victor Canning

Only a rich person that goes for an elephant foot umbrella stand could love the python bracelet. Antique. Gold. Diamonds for eyes. Emeralds for scales. Creepily decadent, it has been stolen from its rich widow owner. The insurance company hires private investigator Rex Carver for its recovery.

Carver soon discovers that the thief – the ne’er do well brother of the rich widow - has disappeared. Carver persuades his partner, Hilda Wilkins, and her BF Olaf the Swede Sailor, to interrupt their vacation and pursue investigations in Mediterranean spots such as Italy and Libya (an accessible place when this story was released in 1967, not so much after 1969).

After Carver locates the bad hat brother and his sleazy partner, however, the game changes completely. He enters the murky world of spies where all the heavy-hitters, no matter what side they are playing on, are cold-hearted bully boys and bad girls, jailers, torturers, and executioners. Canning held a view of espionage as dim as John le Carré’s:

She looked hard at me then, and something was touched off within which wasn’t often allowed to show in her face, but for a moment it was there, and it was something I’d seen before in Sutcliffe and Manston, something that gave one the feeling of standing naked, half-dead with fatigue, looking down into some greeny- blue ice gorge which just offered coldness while you fought off vertigo, and death when it overcame you… They all came from the same mold.

But Canning is not as solemn about it as le Carré. There are plenty of odd settings, quirky characters and one-liners that are pretty funny.

Rex Carver starred in four fast-paced adventure stories, all released between 1965 and 1968. This was Book #3. Carver occasionally works with Richard Marston, who was hero of TheLimbo Line (1963). Carver is not hard-boiled, but impudent or irreverent in that endearing and amusing way the English and Irish do so well.

Canning was a Silver Dagger winner and named a Grand Master by the British Crime Writers Association. He's becoming a neglected writer so we should read him.

Packham & Mitchell #1

Up and Down – Mat Coward

This 2000 mystery was the first story in the Don Packham and Frank Mitchell series. The books are usually set in the nicer suburbs of London. This story grabs the attention of the reader who knows gardening because the murder scene is a garden allotment, an area of land that local people lease from a municipal council for growing fruits and vegetables or ornamental plants or keeping fowl, rabbits and bees.

Allotments are communal places where people share water with the other plot renters. So when resources are discussed in the allotment association, it is easy to imagine that under pressure unlovely peasant traits may come to the fore: tribalism, avarice, self-interest, ignorance, and conceit. Called in to investigate the murder of a long-time allotmenteer, Detective Inspector Packham and Constable Mitchell interview a variety of persons of interests, of all ages, dispositions, and social classes. I sometimes had the vague feeling that English class subtleties implied by a suburban north London setting were escaping my dim American understanding.

DI Packham and PC Mitchell make a comic pair because they are as different as chalk and cheese. Packham suffers some degree of manic depression. One day he is upbeat to the point of wired, but the next day he is withdrawn, hopeless, cynical, and angry. Newly promoted Mitchell is optimistic about life since he has a sensible wife and baby on the way. He’s at loss dealing with Packham’s mood swings, but he also thinks he can learn a lot about detecting from Packham’s shrewdness and experience.

So, the plausible plot moves along briskly with numerous laughs and wisecracks. There is a certain amount of satirical lashing out at random targets, the author is especially cranky about what 20 years of Iron Lady ideology “I’ve got mine, screw you” have done to core cultural values.  The political irrationality of the threatened closure of the allotment site to build a yet another retail park (in American: strip mall) is cleverly woven into the story. Packham comments on the greed and spinelessness of leaders while Mitchell wonders if he some kind of lefty tree-hugger. It’s a hoot.

The plotting is gently paced with well-structured chapters that are neither too long or too short. Multiple red herrings draw the reader in to connect information from interviews and re-interviews. The conclusion has a one-two punch that is satisfying.

Mysteries that followed this story include In and Out (2001), Over and Under (2004), Deep and Crisp (2004), and Open and Closed (2005). Don't let this naming convention, an artifact of marketing, put you off giving this series a try.

Inpector Montalbano #16

Treasure Hunt – Andrea Camilleri

A bizarre story opens in a calm that has descended on the Vigata (Sicily) police station for days and days. Series hero police inspector Salvo Montalbano is perplexed and bored, wondering where all the petty crooks have gone, perhaps ashamed that all the bankers, corporations, and politicians are better at stealing than they are.

Brother Gregorio and sister Caterina Palmisano have been fervent Catholics from their early age in the Forties. While this is not unusual in Vigata in 2010, what is strange is that they have not left their apartment for several years. They have had no contact with the rest of the world until they post on their balcony railing a series of banners urging sinners to repent or face retribution. After a few days, since brother and sister detect no evidence of regular people changing their evil ways, they start shooting at random passers-by on the street.

Montalbano and his fellow cops show up and subdue the elderly shooters. Inside, the flat gives the distinct impression that madness lives here. It’s in a state of Dickensian squalor, a large room is full of crucifixes of all sizes, and on old Greg's bed lies an inflatable doll, torn, leaks fixed with various patches but without an eye.  

After a few days, another almost identical inflatable sex doll is found in a dumpster in Vigàta. Montalbano decides to take the two dolls home to think about them, triggering the inevitable comic scenes of misunderstandings that their presence generates in his housekeeper and cook Adelina and his friend Ingrid the Swede.

In the meantime Salvo begins to receive strange anonymous letters. These contain the instructions for a treasure hunt: riddles, tests to pass, places to discover. The commissioner is restless and creeped out but he feels something is wrong and he decides to play along.

The atmosphere is dark in this, the 16^th of 28 Montalbano full-length novels but it's readable and entertaining. Amazing that the author can write so many and still maintain the reader's interest.

The Ides of Perry Mason 44

On the 15^th of every month, we deal with a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer. 

The Case of the Beautiful Beggar – Erle Stanley Gardner

Twenty-two year old knockout Daphne Shelby claims to be the niece of seventy-five year old Horace Shelby. She has been instructed by her uncle to cash a check for $125,000 (in today’s money, about $920K). Then she was to have Mason prepare a will leaving all uncle’s property to her and bring it to the house for his signature. But she has found the bank account cleaned out. And to her alarm, shrewd and designing relatives have had Horace declared incompetent, committed to a rest home by a dodgy medico, and gotten themselves appointed conservators of his goods and chattels.

Mason knows crooked relatives when he sees them. Feeling sorry for the young woman and her vulnerable uncle, Mason handles the civil proceedings as to the competency hearing. He also engineers a banking sleight of hand to get some of his client’s money back.

The first half of the book moves along briskly and interestingly, but we veteran Gardner fans do wonder when the killing is going to occur. It finally does, but the murder, the trial, and the reveal seem rather mechanical, as if Gardner were just connecting the dots for the average reader that’s sitting in a waiting room and needing some diversion.

In fact, that trial and reveal side is treated so routinely and hastily hints that Gardner was more interested in writing about a theme important to himself. He was, like the victimized codger in this book, 75 years old when he wrote this mystery. He puts extra energy and insight into examining what it must feel to be like to be old, vulnerable, and the target of heartless users who want to undermine his sanity, strip him of his property, and warehouse him in a crappy nursing home until he dies.

Recall in 1965, Medicare was a new unfamiliar program, 65 was considered old, and getting old meant a prison-like “rest home.” In 1965, only about 9% of white males born in 1890 where still alive so Gardner was writing about a relatively rare situation, though obviously of extreme import to the victim involved. Heaven knows, because people are living longer, exploitation of the elderly is more common nowadays, making this mystery approach the definition of literature, in Ezra Pound’s words, “news that stays news.”

Sometimes the Mason novels of the 1960s mildly disappoint but because Gardner is writing about a topic urgent to him, this is well worth reading for hardcore Mason readers of a certain age.

Reading Those Classics 2023 #1

Prize Winning Classic. This novel won the National Book Award when it was released in 1962. It was a surprise winner, beating full-throated endorsements of the American dream Franny and Zooey, Revolutionary Road, and Catch-22. This writer makes the case that the fix was on but I think The Moviegoer won because of the happy ending.  A sad ending would have been too unamerican to win a prize.

The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

The web tells me that Al Gore said his favorite book is The Red and the Black by Stendhal. But my memory – talk about an untrustworthy guide - tells me that in Gore’s last unfortunate bid for office the press had a high old time when Gore said his favorite book was The Moviegoer. Just goes to show how not like us plain folks Gore is, The Media gleefully implied, that he would like a novel narrated by a frivolous and disengaged loser.

Cute, very nice, and charming that The Media missed or disregarded the fact that the novel is by a writer committed to life, heartfelt and authentic. And I mean authentic in an existential sense. To live an authentic life means our feelings, thoughts, words, and actions are moderate, rational and in accord.

This novel is moody but light, as readable as existentialist novels like The Stranger, Those Barren Leaves, Norwegian Wood, Kokoro, and As I Lay Dying are usually not. I enjoyed reading The Moviegoer, though in some parts I chided the unreliable narrator “Okay, you’re in despair – I get it  - it's not a helpful response to adversity.” 

Thirty-year-old stockbroker and war veteran Jack “Binx” Bollings lives “tidily and ingeniously” in Gentilly, a suburb of New Orleans. After being wounded in combat in Korea, he has returned from the police action traumatized and stuck in despondency and disillusion that life seems so every day, so mediocre. He goes to movies during the day with other lonely escapists and leads a loose love life, walking an ethical tightrope by giving himself up to lasciviousness with his secretaries. Binx is so lost in sin – not for nothing is spiritual sloth one of the seven capital sins - that his voluntary don’t-care sadness makes him torporous even upon hearing his Aunt Emily’s sound advice:

I don’t know quite what we’re doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

Aunt Emily brings to mind doughty grannies and aunts in The Unvanquished and Satoris.

However, somebody does move Binx. Arousing his deepest feeling is his Aunt Emily's step-daughter, Kate Cutrer. Though Kate has bipolar disorder – she’s never more gorgeous and compelling than when in a manic episode - Binx sometimes imagines a life of stability for them, somehow.

The novel presents five episodes, all smooth movements as Binx ages from twenty-nine to thirty during Mardi Gras  – of course since the story set in The Big Easy. The novel passes with few revelations though the heart-to-heart conversation with Lonnie Smith is very fine. Lonnie is Binx’s 14-year-old half-brother, terminally ill, debilitated in a wheelchair, and a devout Catholic that offers his suffering to God in reparation for other sinners. Lonnie is well-aware of his own approaching death due to any opportunistic pathogen spoiling to bully his weakened immune system. Lonnie prays for Binx’s soul when he takes communion. Who is to say intercessory prayer does not contribute to the ending of the novel in which Binx and Kate and the reader embrace the whole world, complete with a future, ready to be resilient?

Ending on a traditionally American can-do note, the novel is a good one to start a new year.

John Putnam Thatcher #2

A Place for Murder - Emma Lathen

There’s no way to make any money in cattle in Connecticut but a wealthy gentleman farmer keeps a herd of Anguses anyway. He also depends on the help to run an up-and-coming dog breeding kennel, another hobby of folks with a lot of dough. Unfortunately, in middle age he has kicked over the traces, impregnated a canine handler half his age and thus feels the honorable thing to do is divorce his wife of 20 years to the comic consternation of their son the college student.

Splits between wealthy business partners who are also husband and wife involve complex negotiations concerning property settlements. So our series hero, John Putnam Thatcher of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, is brought in to facilitate the divorce settlement. Shockingly, the other woman ends up killed and so does another victim and Thatcher must solve the mystery.

Lathen trains her satirical eye on corporate America and a rural enclave of the very rich. She skewers corporate jockeying when the PR man of the Sloan is striving to get a seat on the Board of Directors, an outcome the conservative Thatcher is valiantly opposing. All the leading characters are middle-aged men with the usual problems of that sad demographic but the women – wives, secretaries, technocrats – make the system work and further their ends in the indirect ways the oppressed and canny have developed over time immemorial.

Every Lathen novel seems to have a slapstick scene of public mayhem that’s hilarious. So, the dog show is an extremely well-done set piece, with funny interplay between fierce rivals competing hard for best in breed and show.

Published in 1963, the second Thatcher murder mystery gives a part to the recurring character, young Ken Nicholls. He met his wife in Accounting for Murder so in this one Jane is expecting their first and Ken is comically concerned about her delicate condition and spending too much time away in The Constitution State. The other members of the gang also play funny parts – perfectionist Everett Gabler and man about town Charlie Trinkam and Miss Corsa, Thatcher’s implacable PA. The inept and dense bank president Brad Withers plays a much bigger role in this one since he is brother to the wife in the troubled couple.

Well-worth reading, one of the best of the 24 book series, though it was only the second written.

Click the title to go to the review:

Banking on Death (1961)

A Place for Murder (1963)

Accounting for Murder (1964); Silver Dagger Award

Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round (1966)

Death Shall Overcome (1966)

Murder Against the Grain (1967); Gold Dagger Award

A Stitch in Time (1968)

Come to Dust (1968)

When in Greece (1969); shortlisted for Edgar Award

Murder to Go (1969)

Pick Up Sticks (1970)

Ashes to Ashes (1971)

The Longer the Thread (1971)

Murder Without Icing (1972)

Sweet and Low (1974)

By Hook or by Crook (1975)

Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978)

Going for the Gold (1981)

Green Grow the Dollars (1982)

Something in the Air (1988)

East is East (1991)

Come In From The Craziness

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

William Wallace “Willie” Lincoln was the third son of Abraham and Mary Lincoln. After his father's election as president, Willie moved into the White House with his parents and younger brother Tad. Because Congress stinted funds for the upkeep of the residence, furniture was broken, curtains torn, and rats proliferated in the basement. Perhaps from drinking contaminated water, both Willie and Tad contracted typhoid fever in February of 1862.

In this unique historical novel from 2017, Saunders quotes fascinating testimony of Willie’s suffering. The witnesses were staff serving the first family and guests of a lavish gala that the Lincolns felt obligated to host, to demonstrate the government could function normally despite the war. The author draws from first-hand documentation such as Mrs. Keckley’s book and secondary sources such as Margaret Leech’s Pulitzer-winning popular history Reveille in Washington. But to show the vagaries of memory and the resulting unreliability of witnesses, Saunders quotes people who remember that the night of the reception was moonless and people who recall the full moon was beautiful that night.

Willie died a painful death, his small intestines perforated by infection, allowing bacteria to invade his abdominal cavity. His family members were plunged into grief and near madness. Willie was interred in a borrowed vault in a cemetery in Georgetown. His father felt such acute misery that he visited the crypt many times to mourn and console himself. In a poignant scene, Saunders has Lincoln take his son’s remains from his coffin and hug him as if he were still among the quick.

Astounded with “delighted incredulity” that anybody would actually touch a “sick-form” are the ghosts with which Saunders populates the cemetery in Georgetown. They are dead people who don’t realize that they are as dead as doornails. They are so attached to concerns of the world – money, sex, guilt, family life, love, beauty, regret, productivity, applause, etc. etc.  - that they don’t realize they should leave the bardo, a transitional space between life and death or between the life just lived and the next incarnation.  

As befits magical realism and a good ghost story, points are left obscure, because the more opaque, the more shadowy and inspiring of the sense of wonder. So though ghosts believe that their fellow haints are sometimes enticed out of the bardo by lying demons disguised as loved ones, there’s no reason to assume they are correct. Without explaining why (how should they know?), the ghosts do seem to be correct that the bardo puts children in jeopardy, because of the grotesque fate of a teenage girl that needn’t be described here. Three well-intentioned ghosts try to implement a plan to move Willie on.

Saunder’s overview of the bardo is amazing, ingenious, fascinating. Curiosity, morbid and not, impels the reader further and further into the novel, and therefore into its supernatural universe, so dismal and musty, unknown and full of mystery impossible to fathom. The use of simple words and grammar is impressive. The ghosts kid themselves with euphemisms. Coinages of bardo jargon ("the matterlightblooming phenomenon") and obsolete words (“drear”) mingle. Different ghosts talk in different registers to correspond to their time period and character, or lack of it.

The writing has drive and force and laughs, the dialogues lively between the well-drawn characters, especially the three protagonist-ghosts. Saunders can develop powerful images, too, such as that of a gangling Lincoln who, dressed in black and wiry awkward bent with anguish, rides at night on a small horse with his feet almost scraping the ground. Also cartoonish but impressive are the descriptions of the manifestations of the ghosts. Punctuation disappears completely though mercifully not for very long and never beyond the ken of a veteran reader of Faulkner.

I’m not widely read in contemporary paranormal fiction or magical realism, so I can’t judge how original or extravagant or daring Saunders is with the supernatural elements. There are some lapses of taste and some mawkishness here and there. But overall I think that this novel is an incredible read, provoking thought about death, inevitability, memory, nonattachment, and equanimity in the shadow of loss of people, places, situations and concerns, loss that is out of our control.

Incidentally, after his father's assassination, Willie’s body was exhumed. His coffin accompanied his father’s on the train back to Illinois. He was interred in a cemetery in Springfield alongside the remains of his father and brother, Edward B. (Eddy) Lincoln, who had died at the age of three in 1850.