Reading Those Classics #10

Classic War Memoir. Today is Memorial Day, a day of remembrance and mourning. This is a day to honor the men and women who died for our country while serving in the U.S. military. War memoirs by Americans are Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I (Hervey Allen): With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (Eugene B. Sledge); and The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien).

Flight to Arras – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

On May 10, 1940 at 4:30 A.M. Guderian led the 1st Panzer Division across the Luxemburg border followed by Rommel and his 7th Panzers across the Belgian frontier.  France had to fight for its life.

In this memoir, Saint-Exupéry recounts his experience as a pilot of Air Group 2/33 during the invasion. Crews are sacrificed and villages are burned in the momentum of war. The air reconnaissance crews are aware of the absurdity of war and feel miserable in the face of defeat but do their duty. Carrying out orders in the best way they can is the only thing left to do.

Faced with an imminent death, de Saint-Exupéry reflects on life, humankind and our relationships with others. He conveys through his writing important life lessons: “Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.” “Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.” “To live is to be born slowly.” “Not a single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us” “For love is greater than any wind of words.” Saint-Exupéry advocates unity, fraternity, equality and tolerance.

The author never returned from a reconnaissance flight in the south of France in 1943. He was only 44 years of age. This book forces you to think about how people see service to their country during unthinkable circumstances.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

John Putnam Thatcher #23

Brewing Up a Storm – Emma Lathen

Lots of activists are motivated by a vision of a more just, verdant, peaceful, prosperous world, but a few are driven by boredom and need for admiration. After her divorce and with nothing to do, empty nester Madelaine Underwood founded NOBBY, No Beer Buying Youngsters. NOBBY is campaigning against Quax, a nonalcoholic beer sold on the Coke and Pepsi shelves. NOBBY claims drinking Quax will lead kids to drinking Kix, the real beer made by the same brewer.

Mrs. Underwood is a narcissist who feels entitled to center stage. She has zero insight into or empathy for other players who have different views and interests. She has no focus for reading or studying facts and figures. In a congressional hearing she makes wild claims backed up only by stories. Lacking judgement of risks or opportunities in changing situations, she commits NOBBY to a lawsuit on behalf of a family they have not investigated. She foments a riot outside the Manhattan store of a hamburger chain that has decided to carry Quax and then she calmly leaves in a taxi as if she’s done nothing wrong.

I found the deep dive into who the victim was entertaining and instructive, though I grant it pushed the murder past the one-third mark and inflated the book to 300-plus pages. Lathen was the pen name of a  female writing team of an attorney and an economist. They wanted to remain anonymous because they thought their acerbic take-downs of executive behavior would offend their corporate clients.

She had a bead on how people think and act, not just titans of Wall Street but ordinary people as well. She describes the world of business, politics, and special interest groups  through the eyes of their series hero banker sleuth John Putnam Thatcher – curious, skeptical, bemused, and tolerant.

Written in the late 1990s, are the Thatcher mysteries dated? Sure, the sane tone alone makes them seem old-fashioned. But we can still enjoy her settings and plots and the indirect application of knowledge in organizational behavior and the psychology of anxiety.

The Rainbird Pattern

The Rainbird Pattern - Victor Canning

The English police can’t catch the Trader, who has kidnapped two high government officials and traded them back for a small number of uncut diamonds. Working out of an agency whose members have a  license to kill, Inspector Bush and his superior Grandison are convinced the Trader will kidnap a third official – perhaps the highest in the land –  demand a huge number of diamonds and then retire with his female accomplice to live on his extorted gains.

Meanwhile, the elderly, rich, lonely Miss Rainbird hires psychic Blanche Tyler to canvas the spirit world for her long dead sister Harriet. Miss R. desperately wants find out why Harriet is disturbing her dreams. Harriet, it seems, wants Miss Rainbird to locate Harriet’s illegitimate son, adopted out to a humble family 40 years before, and do right by him with the wealth of the family. Wanting information to back up her spirit guide Henry and locate the nephew, Blanche sends her boyfriend George Lumley out to scout around. George collects background from people who are charmed by his happy go lucky nature and willingness to buy drinks.

The astute mystery reader will gladly anticipate how the search for the Trader and the search for the nephew will converge. The less said about the plot twists in this review, the better lest I spoil the surprises. Suffice to say, the ending is so messy and ominous that I found myself haunted for a couple of days.  Canning’s view of malum naturæ  (metaphysical evil) will bring to mind Graham Greene and Chesterton. In fact, in a review of this book the Catholic Herald approved, “The touch of the master becomes more apparent with each new Canning….””

The characters are excellently drawn. With his monocle and hard-won experience, Grandison persuasively argues that prayer and luck will lend a hand in catching the Trader.  The unmetaphysical Bush is inexorable and ruthless, fearing failure will stymie his career and hating the Trader for his cool audacity. Madame Blanche is earthy and shrewd at the same time, while harmless George is believable as the amateur detective. All the Rainbirds – even the dead ones – have plausible roles. The Trader turns out to be gloomy and cold, bent on using the proceeds from precious stones to retreat to a fortress while overpopulation and pollution cause the rest of us to drown in own crap.

Those readers into cognitive psychology will enjoy Canning’s portrayal of the relationship between the spirit medium and her clients. Knowing Miss Rainbird is self-centered, Madame Blanche depends on her client to try to make sense out of whatever vague information she channels from Henry. Canning emphasizes that even the skeptical – and Miss Rainbird is determined never to be fooled – can be manipulated into connecting ambiguous dots because we humans are pattern-seeking beings that search for meaning. Everywhere. With random data. Blanche, however much she fishes for details and sends George to gather intelligence, is sincere: she believes she has The Power.

When this published in 1972, it sold quite well and Alfred Hitchcock made a fair movie version, Family Plot (worth a look for William Devane). It was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger and nominated for the Edgar awards.  Since the Seventies, critics and serious mystery fans have come to regard this one as Canning’s best novel. Speaking of thriller and mystery writers in the Sixties and Seventies, as good as pre-war Eric Ambler, Hammond Innes, Andrew Garve and Geoffrey Household, sorry to say, Victor Canning seems to be joining them in the ranks of Forgotten Thriller Writers.

Medical Internship

Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation – Sandeep Jauhar

The writer tells what it’s like to work as an intern in hospital wards for internal medicine in New York City. The memoir was published in 2008.

Dr. Jauhar describes the exhaustion brought on by the stress and overwork expected of first-year interns. The ordeal of internship is designed to be terrible in order to weed out the uncommitted and to engender in young doctors a loyalty to the profession. It calls to mind how the torment of boot camp makes people loyal to the Marines.

Med school requires rote memorization of huge amount of material. Med students learn to associate a list of symptoms and observations into a most likely diagnosis. As the saying goes, “When you hear hoofs, think horse, not zebra.”  They can then recommend treatment, especially with the help of an iphone. But many of them are at a loss when presented with something unexpected. So the internship is supposed to throw at them unexpected constellations of symptoms, pre-existing conditions, and acute trauma.

This book is most illuminating when he giving of examples of not having time to give attention to patients because he is being summoned to deal with other urgent cases down the hall. He goes on at length about his lack of confidence in his decision-making in situations that could quickly evolve into harm, injury, disability, and death. These stories prove that patients have to fight for attention so they had better advocate for themselves and their own, if their own are incapable.

Dr. Jauhar notes that he wrote columns for The New York Times that brought attention to the problem of overworked interns delivering sub-standard care. But he didn’t seem to suffer any lasting fallout to his reputation from his colleagues. One would have expected that he would end up doing insurance exams for the rest of his professional life. He also notes in passing that many residents reject becoming primary care physicians because the PCP work life is so busy, harried, and holistic. In contrast, working a specialty like cardiology has regular hours and a more specific set of symptoms and conditions to focus on.

This book is also a second-generation immigrant memoir. He writes about the pressure to succeed he felt from his parents, immigrants from the Punjab to Southern California. His father went from ill-paying post-doc to ill-paying post-doc and became cynical about the American Dream. Of his father Dr. Jauhar says, “He adopted the habit of distilling life's problems into simple aphorisms dealing with faith, persistence, the value of work—Booker T. Washington stuff.”  He instilled in his two second-generation sons the drive to study hard and succeed as respectable professionals. Dr. Jauhar does not discuss much any prejudice he encountered himself, not even the mild and transient dismay he must have felt when patients assumed he was a foreigner of some kind.

Sure, Dr. Jauhar spends a lot of time self-doubting his ability to withstand the internship and he talks too much about the appearance of women he encounters. The main appeal of the author for the lay audience is that he’s not a guy from an affluent medical family who’s known all his life that he’s going to be a doctor. He takes various academic twists and turns before he ends up in med school.

The reader will give him credit that he got a PHD in physics before he went to med school so his systematic thinking skills were trained. And perhaps because of the second-generation experience, he developed emotional intelligence, common sense, and social skills, which we all know doctors often lack. He’s not the same kind of kind of guy as the cocky residents with their macho posturing or the overbearing snots disguised as respectable middle-aged doctors, the kind of doctors and nurses that “don’t believe in” covid vaccines or depression, or believe that women and minorities “don’t feel pain like we do.”

It the kind of book that reminds us to respect credentials but not to be overawed by experts. We potential patients and caregivers have the duty to ourselves to get educated about DNR’s and informed consent for our own sakes and for others. We have to clarify to ourselves just what our values are. We need that clarification of values to be able to make decisions before we are sick and frightened and not thinking as clearly as usual. We don’t want to be the goober who will say to a doctor, “You’re the doctor, you decide.” Is this informed consent process really about me the patient, or is the doctor trying to cover his ass?

The Ides of Perry Mason 48

On the 15th of every month for the past four years, we've run something related to Our Favorite Lawyer. It's unbelievable to me this is the 4th anniversary of this column. 2019 seems as faraway as the age of the mastodons.

The Case of the Buried Clock - Erle Stanley Gardner

Written in 1942, this is one of the few Perry Mason novels with topical references, something Gardner avoided because, ever a professional with an eye on sales, he thought referring to current events would date a novel and make it less likely to survive and sell.

WWII engaged the attention and energy of the whole country, however, so Gardner has his character Harley Raymond, a wounded veteran, warn his Rotarian audience that they had better be prepared to fight and sacrifice for a long time if the US is going to achieve victory. As for shortages, tires were rationed due to the war effort and this regulation gives Perry Mason a clue later in the novel.

Harley’s girlfriend Adele Blane has a sister Milicent whose husband Jack Hardisty has been embezzling money from his rich banker father-in-law Vincent Blane.  After burying the stolen cash near the Blane’s mountain cabin in a heavily wooded area outside of L.A., no-goodnik Jack is knocked off in chapter 3.  Getting the inevitable killing out of the way early follows Gardner’s custom, which is a best practice in a mystery in my book.

Poor Milicent, now widow of Jack the thief and victim, is the suspect. Hey, her prints were on the murder gun, what more does Lt. Tragg need than that? Vincent Blane hires Perry Mason to get his family out of the most serious trouble they’ve ever met.

It turns out that also buried was a wind-up alarm clock, the old kind with a striker that rings two bells on the top. The clock seems to be 25 minutes slow.  Plenty of other clues make the plot elaborate but not incomprehensible: the “truth serum” scopolamine in the vic's body; an uncertain estimated time of death; camera and negative strangeness; and finally Gardner’s dependable old “two guns” muddle.

Other attractions in this mystery: a large cast of eccentric characters; natural dialogue; excellent court room scenes, and Perry really doesn’t have a grip on the case until the end. In the fandom of the Perryverse, this mystery is a favorite because the plot stays clear though it is complex and demanding of the reader’s little grey cells.

Reading Those Classics #9

Classic Police Procedural. This 1967 novel was the third novel in the well-regarded Inspector Reg Wexford series of 24 novels, which went from 1964 From Doon with Death to No Man’s Nightingale in 2013. The first was 226 pages and the last was 304, so it seems that the author was able to resist the sprawl that pumped mysteries up to the 400+ neighborhood, ironically as lengthy as their Victorian forebears, the novels of sensation. Heaven knows, I like a little back story for characters in genre novels, but I don’t have to follow them through every life crisis that dogs us average middle-aged people with our tedious jobs, our unfathomable spouses, our delinquent kids, our demanding dependent parents, and our unlovely in-laws. Enough in real life, thank you very much.

Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Ruby Branch makes money on the side running a disorderly house on the cheating side of Kingsmarkam, in Sussex. No names, no identification, and for a small amount of cash, a couple can snatch hours of undisturbed lovemaking,

Or whatever antics cheating couples get up to. Because one night a man with a knife tuned the love nest into a slaughterhouse. The blood-soaked carpet is desperately cleaned by house-proud Ruby, but Inspector Reg Wexford and his second-in-command Mike Burden take it away for testing. They had received an anonymous letter alerting them that ‘a girl called Ann’ was killed on the same night that Anita Margolis went missing. Anita is the party-girl sister of artist Rupert Margolis, a character Rendell uses to satirize creative types who turn other people into lackeys because as artists they can’t be expected to do dishes.

Stolid Reg Wexford and disapproving Jack Burden are often at the center of the questioning of persons of interest but in this novel they are moved off-stage to give space to the character of the new policer officer, Mark Drayton. Mark becomes enthralled by a beautiful young woman who assists in her father’s dingy shop. Some readers may complain about the lack of strong female characters in this one but Rendell makes up for this by an insightful examination of young male psychology. On top of the usual mindless will to possess and control, Drayton is estranged from his own feelings and hasn’t the faintest notion of what his girlfriend feels or wants.

Rendell impresses the reader with her grasp of the light and dark sides of character, the craziness that bubbles under the surface of some personalities. Anita Margolis is good with money and has a steadying influence on her head-in-the-clouds brother, but she acts impulsively and parties way too much. Ruby seeks order through cleaning but throws her loyalty and love away on worthless small-time crook Monkey Matthews. Noreen Anstey has a good marriage with a fine man and she throws her teaching job and marriage away for a stupid affair.  

Rendell is very good at the mystery and suspense elements of her stories. But both are secondary to her characterization, which makes the unfolding of plot and clever surprising twists believable. More a novelist working with mystery and crime elements than a mystery writer, she calls to mind Andrea Camilleri and the Montalbano mysteries.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

"Were Americans this Dumb before Television?"

Note: 1985. Famine in Ethiopia. Live Aid. New Coke. A hideously cold winter in the Eastern US. Greenpeace ship sunk. Nintendo. The Color Purple. REM. Gorbymania. Michael Jordan. This novel. I missed all these things. I was in graduate school.

White Noise – Don DeLillo

In 1985 this example of postmodern literature won the National Book Award for Fiction. It is humorous and accessible yet terribly bizarre at the same time. DeLillo‘s central concerns are the fear of death and the fear of the fear of death, and the strategies people adopt to get out of the double-bind of feeling anxiety and then beating themselves up for feeling anxiety. These strategies include but are not limited to cultivating obsessions related to food, exercise, and the hedonistic pleasures of consuming.

The reader is drawn into the story because the characters and setting are so everyday. It’s set in a Midwestern town that’s also a college town, say Ithaca or La Crosse or Normal or Grand Forks. The main character is Jack Gladney.  As a university professor, he has made a niche for himself by founding a Center for Hitler Studies, though his directorship makes him vulnerable because he has only beginner’s proficiency in German. Credentials count for much in academe so his lack of language chops means his scholarly reputation is founded on sand.

Not that he is different from other members of the faculty, all of whom are like him, sufferers of impostor syndrome. Murray is a colleague who wants to replicate Jack’s Hitler Center with an Elvis Institute. He demonstrates a propensity to over-think everything, which causes his hold on reality to slip. Impressionable Jack has no defenses against being bamboozled by Murray. Murray calls Jack in the middle of the night to follow up on their conversation about Jack’s agoraphobic German teacher. Murray says, “He looks like a man who finds dead bodies erotic,” which disgusts Jack so much that he doesn’t see the tutor again.

Jack’s personal life has been anything but stable. He is on wife #5, Babette, and they live with their kids from their previous marriages. DeLillo captures their flow of conversations, sometimes abstract, sometimes trivial. Their exchanges are realistic in their mix of significance and insignificance. And the TV is always on, constantly stirring the air with fact and trivia and violence and silliness and pitches.

I get the impression that DeLillo wanted to convey how the flow of information is so incessant that we become hardened and desensitized to it. Even back in 1985, pre-computer-in-every-pocket, pre-web, pre-social media, we were unable to react effectively to or to exercise our sense, common or critical, on the data that captures or half-captures our attention. In this novel, town dwellers react to the uncertainty of an environmental disaster with a mute stoic incomprehension, kept in a refugee camp for nine days. And after the “toxic airborne event” they just get on with life.  

Jack imagines that his death will be graceful and elegant, like a white swan landing on a lake. But after he’s exposed to the “airborne toxic event,” extensive medical testing reveals to Jack that “death is in him” in the form of a toxin with an unpronounceable unmemorable name in his bloodstream. His original confidence about death transforms into constant anxiety that he tries to diminish with obsession.

Jack anxiously hopes for reassurance in miracle anti-anxiety drugs advertised in the tiny ads buried in weekly gossip tabloids (remember those?). He finds out his wife has been taking an experimental medication to counteract the fear of death and he fixates on the idea to take the pills too though she won’t tell him who sponsoring the trial and hints the medication has side effects that would “beach a whale.” His father-in-law Vern gifts him with a handgun which Jack notes is the “ultimate device for determining one’s competence in the world,” as neat a piece of male psychology as we’ll ever see in a novel.  And the gun looms large in the last part of the book.

I enjoyed reading White Noise. DeLillo isn’t interested in narrative development or characters that aren’t remote, but his use of language really is engrossing. Words breathe, in DeLillo’s view; for example, he renders bureaucrat attitude and expert double-talk hilariously. In this novel, he almost always avoids the gnomic dialogue that defeated me in Underworld (1997). With post-modern novels, different readers will get different take-aways, if indeed getting impressions to think about is a reader’s goal in reading.

Hard-boiled Short Stories

General Murders – Loren D. Estleman

This book collects ten short stories and novellas published in the early Eighties in monthly mystery magazines. The tales star lone wolf PI Amos Walker who has been featured in about 30 novels, from 1981 to the present.

Estleman is a true professional in that he delivers the action that mystery readers want, but touches on themes we’d expect in a modern novelist. PI Walker’s experience in Vietnam, military intelligence and Detroit have given him wisdom and irony in spades. Walker is skeptical without being cynical and is hard-boiled but sympathetic. Like more than a few people who have lived or live in SE Michigan, Walker has tangled feelings about the region, especially the border of Detroit-Hamtramck.

Some readers might find hackneyed the hard-boiled tone. Equally by the numbers are the characters of the wise-cracking detective, lawless police, and vicious law breakers. But to me the crooks and victims were an interestingly diverse bunch. Believable dialogue, descriptive passages, and the mood is never, I think, too dark or callous.

The situations varied enough in settings to hold attention. Some stories ended a little abruptly, but others were about the ideal length for a novella. Readers that like to stretch and lounge a bit in short novels will prefer the 20-plus pagers to the 10-pagers, which may lack elbow room.