Reading Those Classics #18

Very Long Classic. If you’ve found this blog, you are the kind of reader that takes it as completely normal to sit down and read hundreds of pages of one damned thick square book just for the sheer pleasure of it. We hardcore readers feel that there comes a month in which we just have to take a daily dive and not surface for 30 or 40 pages. The Red and The Black.  The Way We Live Now. Sometimes a Great Notion. The Children’s Book. Though we’ll dutifully read The Newcomes or Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s more of a pleasure if the novelist is accessible. Lin was bilingual so his English prose has a polished style with a gentle sense of humor, sympathy for human foibles, and deep insights.

Moment in Peking: A Novel of Contemporary Chinese Life - Lin, Yutang

This 1939 novel is an 800-page saga of family life among the upper middle class of China, covering forty years from the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 to the Second Sino-Japanese War starting in 1937.

Lin wrote this book in English for an isolationist American audience whose knowledge of China would half fill the navel of a flea.  As a cultural diplomat, Lin’s didactic purpose is to explain history and topics anthropological and ethnographical with respect to traditional beliefs and customs. He did so in order to fight stereotypes, encourage sympathy, and inspire material support for the Chinese who were suffering the inhumanity of the Japanese in China at that time. From 1937 to 1945 the Japanese military regime killed from 3,000,000 to 10,000,000 Chinese men, women, and children.

In the introduction Lin emphasizes the fact that the novel is a story of “how men and women adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but gods rule.” Lin could be accused of being an idealist, overly concerned with mere personal adjustment to stern realities, instead of focusing on intersections of social, political or economic changes wrought upon race, class, and gender relations.

A humanist and individualist, Lin believes the real is the personal. Our unique personality - identity through time, sense of right and wrong and values formation - makes our character the pattern of all reality. Our rationality is the only thing that distinguishes us from animals. We therefore have the responsibility to use our rationality to live a life balanced between the eccentricity in us and other individuals that provokes change and the centrality in ourselves and society that maintains stability.

This tension between eccentricity vs. centrality, or if you prefer, resistance vs. authority, works on us individuals intra-personally and in society inter-personally. Basically, human beings are playful curious wayward dreamers who are pressured by society to furiously pursue money, glory, office, property. All those external things in moderation – but levity, laziness, apathy, escapism, wandering, loafing and daydreaming in moderation too.

Although comparisons are odious, it is impossible not to review this novel without a glance at another Chinese masterpiece about a Chinese family set against the background of social turmoil, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Writing in the middle of the 18^th century, Cao Xueqin (Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in) had to be circumspect in his examination of a strict hierarchy of feudal relationships, an austere system of morality, corruption and malfeasance, and constant surveillance of Han Chinese patriots by the Manchu authorities.

Lin didn’t have to be so prudent in his analysis of real-world Chinese disgruntlement with the decay of Manchu rule, the misrule and depredations of warlords in China in the 1920s, and the barbarism of the Japanese in China in the 1930s. To their sons and daughters the generation born in the 1850s handed off a slew of unresolved political and economic problems. The Western powers and Japan had humiliated China on all fronts, from war to trade to gunboats, opium and missionaries. After the Manchu fell, unfortunately the Republic of China was plagued with nepotism and corruption and increasing pressure and violence by the Japanese. From the 1920s on, Lin himself had a ringside view of these ructions and calamities. The last section presents a sharp analysis of Japanese brutality in China, for which the Japanese government banned the novel when it was released.

Like the author of The Dream of the Red Chamber, Lin uses fiction to illustrate how Chinese upper middle class people retained Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhist beliefs in their efforts to preserve the best of family life in times of great change such as the introduction of western ideas and technology and the modernization of society. How strong and in some ways how admirable is the institution of the middle-class family which had been operative in China for centuries. But how can the family and patriarchy change to deal with the autonomy of women and change of gender roles and continue to function in modern times?

How many girls in those days had dreams that were never fulfilled and ambitions that were never satisfied, hopes that were thwarted on the threshold of marriage, and later lay dormant in the breast and were expressed in the form of hopes for their sons! How many wanted to go on with their studies and could not! How many wanted to go to college and could not! How many wanted to marry the type of young man that they cared for and could not! … These were the lovely unsung women, the silent heroines, who married husbands either worthy or unworthy of them, and whose record was left for posterity only in a simple tombstone standing before an earthen mound among wild berries and thistles on some village hill.

I think Lin succeeds in his goal of humanizing his characters such that the reader sees them as people. Especially young people who do the things young people do: have hopes and dreams, obsess about clothes, like to travel and go out, talk without thinking, and discuss their favorite characters in The Dream of the Red Chamber.

Serious-minded readers will be put off that in the 1930s, while the Chinese were suffering and dying by the millions, Lin had the nerve to write about upper middle-class people having parties to gaze at the moon from their rock gardens and romantically tossing themselves into ponds to ensure the happiness of their sweethearts. He tells about Chinese literary games and inserts proverbs into his character’s conversations. He provides travelogues of Olde Peking that made the reader want to rush to view images of the traditional capital. To the delight of foodies in the reading audience, Lin details the dishes served at the various parties and banquets. Nary a worker or peasant to be seen.

In his own time, Lin caught heat from all sides of politics and both sides of the Pacific for his emphasis on the real as the personal and his persistence in taking moderately what so many people think everybody must take dead seriously - adult responsibilities, profit margins, ideology, the future of the country -  or be regarded as less than human. And though he is sympathetic to women not conforming to traditional roles, his views on feminism are achingly outdated in 2023.

I know, I’ve said little of this novel’s plot or characters. Trust me, it’s a moving and fascinating story. Readers with a strong interest in traditional and Kuomintang China will be attracted by his pedagogical approach to novel-writing. This novel was a best-seller in 1939, earned Lin three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was made into a TV series in Hongkong in 2005.

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

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

Classic Abandoned: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon

Classic English Mystery: Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie

Classic Set in Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande: Road to Rhuine - Simon Troy

Classic Set in Working Class England: Living - Henry Green

Inspector Maigret #17

Maigret on the Riviera by Georges Simenon

This 1932 mystery is also known as Liberty Bar. M.’s superiors assign him to investigate a murder on the French Riviera, so the novel is set in Antibes, Cap d’Antibes, Juan-les-Pins and Cannes.

Stabbed to death in his car is Australian William Brown, once a spy during WWI, so M. is told to tread with discretion. M. finds that Brown has come down in the world, owing to poor choices as to hard drinking and unsavory companions. M. finds out that Brown’s lifestyle frightens and disgusts his family, which deprives him of resources and pays him only a monthly minimal allowance.

M. also discovers that Brown shared his life among his “four women:” first Gina, his “official” mistress and the mother of the second one, with whom he lived in his villa in Antibes, then Jaja, the owner of a bar in Cannes, where the young Sylvie, the fourth and a prostitute, also lives.

Despite this sordid backdrop, M. feels a connection with the victim because they resemble each other in looks, an uncompromising attitude, and a love for a quiet drink. Also, among the lush tropical flora, garish colors, and tanned beach bunnies, for a brief moment while wearing his usual heavy coat, M. himself better understands why a man on the Riviera for the first time might turn to extreme slacking.

He takes himself in hand, however, and explores two different settings, high and low, to find the culprit. The sadness and the squalor are balanced in the last when M. and his wife have a wonderful conversation in the last couple of pages.

In this 17th Maigret novel, written in 1932, Simenon starts to use the existential themes that we meet in his “hard novels.”

 

American Music Genre

Deep Blues - Robert Palmer

Though a bit shy of 300 pages, this history satisfactorily covers in an accessible style the American music genre from the Delta country, i.e. the northwest section of Mississippi and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana. It is filled with biographies of musician and critical overviews of how their music influenced each other’s work and white artists such as Elvis Presley. The copiousness of the information is, in fact, overwhelming, like a lot of serious books about genres like jazz and rock. The book contains many suggestions for further reading and a list of essential recordings by the figures such as Robert Lockwood Jr., Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters.

Best First Mystery 1947

The Horizontal Man - Helen Eustis

This 1946 mystery would be enjoyed by readers that appreciate the dark psychological suspense novels of Ruth Rendell as Barbara Vine or Helen Eustis’ contemporary Margaret Millar. Eustis portrays characters in The Horizontal Man as under a great deal of mental pressure whose symptoms are jumpiness, touchiness, tears, insomnia, irritability and avoidance of people.

Eustis plays fair in that from the first chapter the reader is challenged to continue, wondering if and if so for how long, the intense descriptions of overwrought states of anxiety will continue. She also dares us readers with a cast of unsympathetic characters. Loners, sneaks, cranks, bullies, users, nervous Norvuses – readers who have worked in university administration will be convinced that Eustis experienced at first hand the academic setting, to have captured the motley collection of personalities found in disgruntled departments, which are like Tolstoy's unhappy families, "unhappy in their own fashion." It’s an interesting twist on the stereotype of lecherous tenured male prof to make the flirty manipulative professor Freda Cramm – sounds like a woman’s name in an Edith Wharton novel – a sexual predator.

As for the story, in the hyper-excited first chapter, an Irish faculty member is murdered while visiting an American women’s college that sounds like Smith, it being an exclusive private liberal arts school in New England. A pair of unlikely detectives take up the investigation.

Recent college grad Jack is a novice reporter for a local mediocre newspaper. College gal Kate, tough and teased about her stoutness, dominates Jack as they bungle about with their theories about the crime. They blunder into a romance that is oddly affecting, as the reader ends up really pulling for their unlikely future together. Jack and Kate provide much needed comic relief. To my mind, because the anti-Nick and Nora fade into the background in the last chapters, the fun of reading falls off.

Like many challenging books, The Horizontal Man goes into the category of “love it or hate it.” To my mind, as in the not-really-a-mystery mysteries of Mary Fitt, the utterly convincing characters make this worth it. This novel won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1947. Her only other mystery novel was The Fool Killer (1954).

The Ides of Perry Mason 52

On the 15^th of every month, we run an article about a novel or original TV episode about Our Favorite Lawyer. I note on a ranking website that Perry Mason is ranked like #20 on a list of best TV courtroom dramas. Despite selling 300 million copies of the novels worldwide and being shown on TV umpteen millions of times, it fades out of popular memory. Transience is the way of the world.

The Case of the Queenly Contestant – Erle Stanley Gardner

Lawyer Perry Mason depends on his office manager Della Street to pass on her impressions of would-be clients. Trusting in her shrewd judgement, he believes her when she tells him tall, regal Ellen Adair is assured and poised, every inch the consummate professional as the head buyer of a major department store (remember those?).

Queenly suave Ellen has a sad story. Twenty years before in her California burg, Ellen won a beauty pageant at 18 and a chance for a screen test in the City of Angels.  But she disappeared to have the baby of rich kid about town Harmon Haslett. She totally broke off relations with her own family due to the shame of having an illegitimate son in the late Forties.

Ellen asks Mason about the law of privacy invasion because a newspaper in her hometown is thinking of running a “Whatever happened to…” kind of column on her doings and whereabouts after she seemed to have vanished in Tinseltown. For the sake of her son, Ellen does not want probes into a past better left in the past. Perry feels she is not forthcoming with all her concerns and she leaves his office with both lawyer and client dissatisfied.

Working on his own dime because he is attracted by a fight, Mason kicks over some rocks and finds himself surrounded by especially duplicitous people, such as Ellen’s indiscreet female friend, a bent cop turned PI, a sleazy lawyer, and a tough fixer man, not to mention, unfortunately, Ellen, his own client. Added to the fog of mystery is the sudden disappearance and presumed death of rich Harmon Haslett, heel of a father but still a tycoon back in the burg. Gardner doesn’t tell us why Harmon’s yacht was sunk so readers are thus free and happy to assume it was attacked by a pod of killer whales off the Portuguese coast.

Hey, it happens.

Mason digs in and finds still more intrigue. He discovers that Ellen had her and Harmon’s son but left the child to be raised by that staple of fairy tales, a kindly childless older couple. They didn’t live a lonely hut in the woods. If they had, they would not have been recently killed in – you guessed it in one – a car crash and thus not available to back up Ellen’s story. Plus, in the wake of Harmon’s providing lunch for some orcas, a nurse, the “diabolically clever” Agnes Burlington, who attended at the time of the merry-begot’s birth, wants to seize the chance to make money out of this potentially embarrassing information.

And we all know what happens to blackmailers in Perry Mason novels. Busted, charged, and jailed with no bail, prime suspect Ellen tells Mason not to argue the circumstantial evidence. Luckily for her, Mason disregards her instructions, and does challenge the reasonable inferences the evidence implies. With what result I need not reveal at this time and in this place.

Though I readily admit the Mason novels of the Sixties are a mixed bag, I recommend this one for its tight story, variety of players, and timely for 1969 theme of changing attitudes about single women having babies. Sure, Gardner has assumptions about the roles and attitudes of men and women that we would expect of somebody born in 1889. But at least he had sympathy for the long row women have to hoe in a world of double standards.

Reading Those Classics #17

Classic Set in the Industrial North of England. In this 1929 novel, Green does that modernist thing Faulkner did: dialogue-driven writing in dialect. So the dialogue is best read aloud. This video on Brummie is a useful primer though the presenter doesn’t seem to know all dialects of English link sounds together (it’s called liaison). To show how odd people are – everywhere! - Brummie is despised in the UK and thought charming everywhere else.

Living - Henry Green

Green spent a year or two working on the floor of his family’s Birmingham foundry. The guys assumed he was being punished by this father. But Green always knew he was going to write a novel.  In the late 1920s, though only in his early twenties, Green was the last modernist in the manner of those stiff-necked hardnoses Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. The 22-year-old probably told himself, “I’m gonna blast the old-fashioned novel.”

How?

Start in medias res. Strip narrative down. Write taut and spare. Dump adjectives and conjunctions. Dump articles even. Give readers characters but give Mr Craigan no first name and pin on other characters unmemorable and easily-confusable names like Jones, Gates, Bridges, Dale, Tupe, Tarver. Give no help understanding who’s who. Provide no authorial interpretation. Let’s go ultra-meta, with prose giving disconnected movie scenes of a date to the movies.

Lily Gates and Jim Dale, who was Mr Craigan’s young man in iron foundry, stood in queue outside cinema on Friday night. They said nothing to each other. Later they got in and found seats. Light rain had been falling, so when these two acting on screen walked by summer night down leafy lane, hair over ears left wet on his cheek as she leant head, when they on screen stopped and looked at each other. [ . . . ] Later her head was leaning on his shoulder again, like hanging clouds against hills every head in this theatre tumbled without hats against another, leaning everywhere.

It is impossible to put down. And I have no idea how Green stokes the compulsion to keep reading, since he doesn’t help us readers. He doesn’t “make you see” like Conrad intended or have an overarching orientation to the world like D.H. Lawrence.

Moral concerns? Please. People want simple things, most of the time.  Lily wants escape and a babby. Her female neighbors want respectability and don’t want ill things said of them or theirs. The rough tough manly guardians of the patriarchy want to be obeyed by women and be fed by women and be taken care of by women because they know as night follows day without women they would live like pigs. And even their stunted sense of propriety rebels at the notion of living like pigs.

But ties of some sort that bind people together?  Nah. Women are tough on each other; married looking down on the unmarried, mothers looking down on not a mother yet; double-standard, ready to believe the worst about young and single women. Real men don’t really connect. Being a manly man means being divorced from one’s own feelings and oblivious to those of others. Tongue-tied about any shit that’s really important. At least, if the reader grew up in a working-class neighborhood, the strutting bantering masculinity will be familiar and relatable, nostalgic or toxic or both.

Living is mainly habit for Green’s people. Proximity. Monotony means you don’t have to think so hard about what comes next. Custom of the country. Recall the peacocks in Loving, Green has a thing about birds, in this one oft mentioning dingy sparrows and dusty pigeons and the instinct to return to home. Miss Gates [Lily] ends up not going to Canada with her heel of a BF Mr. Jones and so:

As . . . the housewives on a Sunday will go out, in their aprons, carrying a pigeon and throw this one up and it will climb in spirals up in the air, then, when it has reached a sufficient height it will drop down plumb into the apron she holds out for it, so Miss Gates, in her thoughts . . . was always coming bump back again to Mr Craigan.

After a while, the book feels like living the working life. People go to work and come home, eat, fight and make up, fight and feud on, attempt to escape but come home. But we’re looking at it from above, detached, but not wanting to look away. 

Mission accomplished: nineteenth-century novel blasted.

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

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

Classic Abandoned: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon

Classic English Mystery: Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie

Classic Set in Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande: Road to Rhuine - Simon Troy

No, You Die Today!

You Die Today - Baynard Kendrick

In this mystery from 1952, Captain (US Army) Duncan Maclain, blinded in WWI, comes to the aid of Ted Yates, blinded in combat in Korea. The police think Yates ran amuck with a pistol. Maclain has become a PI. He is aided by his seeing eye dog Schnuke and his bodyguard dog Driest. His assistant is Spud Savage (now there’s a name for the pulps) and his driver Cappo.

The plot and action are too varied to get into in a short review. A lawyer and business executive before he was a full-time writer, Kendrick was sighted but he worked with blind vets in real life. So, he has insight into the challenges of the blind having to adjust.

The blindness is decidedly not only a feature to set Maclain off from other whodunit sleuths. Maclain has sharpened not only his four remaining senses, he also does jigsaw puzzles to help him focus his concentration on the problem at hand. I will say that readers who dislike contraptions a la Rube Goldberg may want to steer clear, though Intricate Engines of Death are a Golden Age Mystery standby.

I liked the story because of the unique characters and clear prose. Not being a mechanical kind of guy, I was less captivated with the reveal.

 

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”

Note: I didn’t start using computers until summer 1992, because from 1986 I’d been working at a Japanese university that somehow missed signs the digital age was nigh. I didn’t get on the web until Fall 1993 when the online Chronicle of Higher Education helped me find the job that sent me to Latvia. That was the last time I was an early adopter. I broke down and got a mobile only in October, 2022. I’m not bragging, believe me.

Neuromancer – William Gibson

Written in the early 1980s, when MS-DOS gibberish and floppy disks were in their infancy, this science fiction novel posits our digital future.

This novel was released in 1984, but I didn’t read it until 1986, when I was just out of grad school and free to read stuff not assigned, working in Japan about 50 hours a week. At the time, I was very impressed with Gibson’s ability to construct the atmosphere of the street – the boring logic of territory, coercion, hustling, and saving face. The dense sentences of polysyllabic words didn’t bother me nor did his assumption that readers would just have to keep up when he introduced weird concepts like a pandemic that kills all the horses and:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

What, asked Gibson, will people do with this magical technology? Learn? Forge bonds in humane communities? Let in the sunbeams of enlightenment?

Nah. They’ll steal. Cars extend our legs, radio extends voices and ears, screens our eyes, and tech extends our sticky fingers into the tills and data banks of other people. People will also use tech to modify their body for non-medical purposes. People will improve their looks and customize their senses. How installing doodads on and in the body will usher in the new utopia is not even an issue since enhanced people seem to be living kind of how we live now – driven by “our almost irresistible desire to see ourselves as somehow above nature, above the body (Oliver Sacks)”.

So, as I re-read this in 2023, I conclude that Gibson got it right about the world wide matrix, drones, viruses, hacking, flash robs, and the ruthless super-rich and their lawless minions. The plot is about Case, a hacker, who is hired by a mysterious shell of a guy Armitage, to pull off a big heist. Or something. 

Case is assisted by bodyguard and personal assistant Molly, who is creepily enhanced, and Riviera, a sadist at least half psychotic. Case has a help desk in the form of a dead guy whose hacking ability is captured on disk. Case also meets an AI. The jury is still out as to whether Gibson will be prescient about AI, i.e., that a special police force, with unlimited powers and the pleasant attitude that goes with them, will be assigned to prevent AI from becoming smarter on its own and realizing it.

There are no human beings in this novel, starting with our hero. Digital technology enables Case to surf the net, that is, to extend his mind into vast banks of data and information and money but excessive time doing this has turned him into a workaholic whose relationship with his own body is uneasy and alienated. He feels guilty, justifiably, for the bad stuff that’s he done.

Recommendation: still well worth reading. While the Blade Runner-like atmosphere is way cool enough to turn heads that think anime is really something, we adults can get into the story of Case and how he gradually learns that he can live a life that doesn’t involve hating himself even after he's done hateful things.