****& Sons

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ampersand

(photo: Leo Reynolds, creative commons license)

By David Gilbert – This 2014 novel was named a “best book of the year” by many reviewers, and it’s full of richness on every page. A literary novel in every sense, it’s about an aging Manhattan author and notorious recluse, A.N.Dyer, whose failing faculties compel him to call his sons to him and in other ways try to straighten out the tangle he’s made of his life.

His two older sons are estranged both from him and each other. Jamie is a filmmakers living on the East Coast who’s just completed a dubious project documenting, perhaps too rigorously, life’s final decay. Richard is a struggling Los Angeles-based screenwriter, who has the prospect of long-awaited success dangled in front of him if only he can deliver the impossible-to-get film rights to his father’s first and most important novel, Ampersand.

The third, much younger son, is 17-year-old Andy. (You’ll have noticed A.N.Dyer, Andy, Ampersand, and the book’s title). Andy is ostensibly the product of a liaison between Dyer and a Swedish nanny. The arrival in the household of baby Andy and the story of his conception ended Dyer’s marriage. But the real story of Andy’s origins are more significant than anyone but Dyer knows, and he’s summoned Jamie and Richard to New York to tell it. And to enlist them in ensuring to Andy’s future welfare, should he die.

Throughout, as a sort of shambling Greek chorus is Philip Topping, son of Dyer’s oldest friend, Charlie, whose funeral opens the book. Philip is the same age as the two older sons, and they’ve obviously never had much use for him and still don’t, even though he’s ensconced in Dyer’s East 70th Street apartment, the flotsam washed ashore from a foundering marriage. Topping is a “Mr. Cellophane”; they look right through him and never know he’s there. Or, as Philip himself says, “I’m guilty of easily falling in love, of confusing the abstract with the concrete, hoping those words might cast me as a caring individual and dispel my notions of a sinister center. I believe in love at first sight so that I might be seen.” But the Dyers don’t see him, even when it’s necessary they should.

Dyer’s clean-up of his affairs includes selling his papers to the Morgan Library, and they, like the Hollywood manipulators, are interested in Ampersand. They will sweeten their offer considerably if he includes a draft of it. Alas, he destroyed all the drafts years before, so is pushed into the insupportable position of having to retype the whole manuscript, inserting awkward phrases and misdirected text, which he crosses out to arrive at the version in the published book.

It’s a very New York book, with apt references not just to places and events but to the way the city and its citizens go about their business. All this seems sly and perfectly grounded. Here are a few sentences from the Morgan Library rep’s pitch to Dyer:

In my biased view, we are the intellectual heart of this city. A visitor from another planet would do well to visit here first in order to understand our human narrative. We also have a tremendous gift shop.

Dyer’s agent then suggests they’ve been approached by the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center with a much more generous offer, and receives this response, which manages to insult everyone:

If money’s the bottom line, we can’t possibly compete. Ransom and their ilk will always win. And they are a fine institution and Austin is a fine central Texas town. But if you want to maximize profits, may I suggest breaking up the archive and selling the pieces in lots. But if respect, sensitivity, geo . . .

Philip Topping is everywhere and nowhere in the book, as its part-time narrator. It also includes excerpts (freshly typed!) from Ampersand—a vicious tale indeed—correspondence between Dyer and Topping, senior, from childhood on, and texts between Andy and a young woman he’s hoping to seduce. Full of humor, human foibles, and beautiful writing—“seductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak,” as NPR reviewer Mary Pols said—it’s a book that flew under my radar, but which I’m glad I finally found.

Bonus: A History of the 27th Letter! The Ampersand!

The 21st Century Spy Novel

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spy, espionage, reading

(photo: David Lytle, creative commons license)

Some readers may long for the (fictional) days of the Cold War—a nostalgia fueled by the brilliant movie Bridge of Spies—and the dark-soul novels of John LeCarré and Graham Greene. At least then, we knew who the enemies were. After the disintegration of the iron curtain that protected Soviet secrets, the spy novel became a bit of an anachronism, but now it’s surging back in popularity and creativity, 21st century style.

While the antagonists may have changed—or, with what’s going on in Russia these days, be cycling back again—clandestine operations persist among countries that are enemies. And, as Wikileaks has reminded us, spying even occurs among friends. “As a piece of news, this surely sits alongside the Pope’s status as a Catholic,” said Christopher J. Murphy for CNN last year. As a consequence, the espionage writer has a lot of conflicts to choose among.

Tthe techno-thriller subgenre, so well explored in the past by writers like Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal) and Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October), has rapidly expanded fictional possibilities. Every day, it seems, more sophisticated technologies emerge that can be used to create political instability in other countries or groups and damage their military and economic security.

A recent Library Journal article said, “One needs look no further than today’s headlines to see the global issues available to present-day storytellers that weren’t there even 20 years ago.” A good case in point was the 2015 near-future thriller, Ghost Fleet (by P.W. Singer and August Cole) about the vulnerability of a U.S. military dependent on communication technologies—like GPS and wireless—and compromised by the computer chips that make them possible.

Recent popular espionage thrillers illustrate how diverse the threats are: Terry Hayes’s I Am Pilgrim, involves deadly biological warfare; cyberespionage in David Ignatius’s The Director; Close Call by Stella Rimington (first female director general of MI5) covers counterterrorism; and the agents in Todd Moss’s Minute Zero face political instability in Africa.

Books like these turn reading and watching the daily news into a quest for the story beneath the story.

UPDATE:  Great minds . . . Dawn Ius wrote about this same trend in The Big Thrill magazine, 1/31/16.

****Wishful Thinking

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busy

(photo: Priscilla, creative commons license)

By Kamy Wicoff — On Amazon, this book is categorized as “women’s fiction,” which is probably a more politically correct designation for “chick-lit,” but whatever, it’s a genre I don’t usually read. It turned out to be a lot of fun and a refreshing change from serial killers trading in body parts.

Jennifer Sharpe is a stressed-out, divorced Manhattan career woman with two young sons who struggles to fit everything into her schedule. She’s wracked with guilt that her kids are getting too little of her time. Add an ex-husband who has documented her missed appointments and such and wants to renegotiate their custody agreement to have more time with the kids. Then add a nanny whose school commitments mean she has less time to help out, and a work project that will be Jennifer’s dream come true (plus some much-needed extra $$$), if only she can reach the boss’s ambitious productivity targets.

Of course, her life is impossible—that is, until someone puts an app on her cell phone called “Wishful Thinking” that lets her be in two places at once. There are so many ways this little technological boost (involving wormholes and—don’t ask, you just have to go with it) can go wrong and does.

Wicoff has written a believable Jennifer, plausible friends and work colleagues, a self-absorbed but not totally worthless ex, a dishy new boyfriend, and a sympathetic genius physicist who is behind the whole thing. All in all, an interesting cast of characters. The book is both good-humored and grounded in the frantic reality of many working moms’ lives (minus the wormholes).

Christina Baker Kline (author of the best-selling Orphan Train) calls Wishful Thinking “A thought-provoking, gimlet-eyed satire of contemporary motherhood in the guise of a romantic comedy.” If you’re looking for a fast-paced, mostly light-hearted novel to enjoy on your winter vacation—one that really lives up to its title—this could be just the thing!

Brooklyn

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Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn

Not in the mood for the stunning violence of The Revenant or the bitter racism of The Hateful Eight? Nor the angst of Carol or The Danish Girl? Nor the special effects weaponry of Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Here’s a nice, sweet historical movie about first love, the pains and rewards of immigration, and the choices we make.

Brooklyn (trailer), as directed by John Crowley, with a script by Academy Award nominee Nick Hornby (based on Colm Tóibín’s book of the same name), reminds us that leaving home is a lonely choice, even when it’s the best choice a person has. (And so much harder before email, skype, and budget air fares.)

When clear-eyed Eilis Lacey (played by Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan) leaves Ireland to come to America in the early 1950s, she has no confidence that she’ll ever see Ireland again. In a bit of cross-cultural serendipity, she meets Italian plumber Tony (Emory Cohen), and each is charmed with the other and the cultures they come from. Watching her try to learn to eat spaghetti under the tutelage of her bantering roommates is splashily funny. But when tragedy at home calls Eilis back to Ireland, she does go, despite the length, cost, and difficulty of the journey. Once home, the inducements to stay mount.

Brooklyn—which was also an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture—has moments with “a resonance that extends far beyond its immediate circumstances,” says Glenn Kenny for Rogerebert.com. It’s a beautiful, big-hearted movie that will leave you smiling, Irish eyes or no.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audiences 90%.

Bonus treat: an interview with Colm Tóibín and Alice Walker (The Color Purple) about the translation of their novels into film, including a guide to pronouncing his name.

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The Piano Lesson

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piano

(photo: Ovi Gherman, creative commons license)

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is on stage at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre through February 7, one of his ten plays—The Century Cycle—set in Pittsburgh’s predominantly African American Hill District in different decades of the 20th century. The Piano Lesson and another play in the cycle, Fences, which McCarter produced two years ago, won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Piano Lesson takes place in 1936, in the midst of The Great Migration of southern blacks to northern industrial cities—Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago. One of its themes is the difference in perspective of visitors and newcomers from the rural south compared to their family members already established in the urban north.

The story centers on members of the Charles family and (with a captivating stage set showing both the urban neighborhood and the intimacy of the Charles’s home): Doaker, a cook on the railroad, his widowed niece Berniece, and her 11-year-old daughter. Their well-ordered routines are disrupted by the arrival from Sunflower County, Mississippi, of Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie, and his friend Lymon, who’ve driven north with a ramshackle truck full of watermelons to sell.

Boy Willie has been offered the chance to purchase the farmland of a white man (Sutter) who died under mysterious circumstances. He’s saved up some money for the purchase, the sale of the watermelons will help, and to seal the deal he needs the proceeds from selling the family piano. Berniece refuses to sell it. Carved on the piano is the story of their family going back to slavery days. So beyond the rural/urban, south/north divide, there is the tug-of-war between honoring the past versus enabling the future.

Further disrupting the family is the claim by each of the northern household that they’ve seen the ghost of the dead white man, and their willingness or unwillingness to believe that Boy Willie killed him. Playgoers can develop various theories as to the reality and significance of this particular ghost, but it’s clear that the characters are haunted by many ghosts, including those represented in the piano’s carvings, and, more immediately, Berniece and her uncle Wining Boy’s dead spouses.

The excellent cast—Stephen Tyrone Williams as Boy Willie (with an unbelievably long Act II monolog that possibly should be trimmed); Miriam A. Hyman as Berniece; John Earl Jelks as Doaker; and Cleavant Derricks as Doaker’s slick brother Wining Boy—is directed by Jade King Carroll. David Pegram was a perfect Lyman, a half-step behind and eager to become citified. There is much good humor in the characters’ interactions of the kind only close kin can indulge in.

The presence of a composer, sound designer, and music director in the crew credits suggests how significant music is in Wilson’s conception of the family and their story. The beautifully staged men’s work song about the Parchman Prison Farm is long, but not long enough!

The program for the play includes a helpful family tree of the Charles family, who can trace their lineage (thanks to the piano) back to Doaker’s and Wining Boy’s great-grandparents. This is an unusually full picture of family during slavery days, as demonstrated in Henry Louis Gates’s fascinating Finding Our Roots PBS television program. Reflecting on ancestors in slavery is powerful, as Regina Mason’s discovery of a great-grandfather who was a former slave, attests. These modern-day quests, three or four generations after the action of Wilson’s play, illuminate how some members of many families, like Boy Willie, wanted to put all that history behind them and how others, like Berniece, believed in keeping it close. In her case, the lessons of the piano were worth more than money.

Go Home, Girl—Well, Maybe Not

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Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight

Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight”

It’s come to the point that Twitter pundits have suggested a moratorium on books with the word “Girl” in the title. They might have extended the ban to dark covers with open type and a mysterious photograph suggesting rapid movement. The Stieg Larsson books started “The Girl” craze, and Vulture.com compiled a list of some 91 “The Girl Who/With . . .” copykitties, 2010-2014. That list doesn’t even include Gone Girl, The Girl on The Train (not to be confused with Girl on a Train), and Luckiest Girl Alive.

Those last books have become so popular a new literary subgenre has been created for them, variously titled: “chick noir” (ick) and “domestic thriller.” The “chick noir” label is justly reviled for implying “a lesser sort of noir, marginalized away from the ‘real’ noir,” and might have the unfortunate effect of turning away readers, says Kelly Anderson in BookRiot.

It’s probably not a coincidence that there’s also a resurgent use of the term “gaslighting.” (Gaslighting, of course, refers to the 1944 film Gaslight, in which husband Charles Boyer tries to rid himself of wife Ingrid Bergman by convincing her she’s insane. Once again proving there’s no accounting for taste.)

Domestic thrillers—and Gaslight was definitely a leading example—focus on everyday domestic life and relations with intimate partners. Through this ordinariness, they produce “their own brand of suspense—the disturbing feeling that it could happen to me,” says Dawn Ius in The Big Thrill magazine. Knowing whom to trust is a fundamental dilemma in people’s lives—especially women’s lives. Domestic thrillers play to that uncertainty, building an atmosphere in which “something’s-a-little-bit-off,” Anderson says.

Like other thrillers, domestic thrillers are about The End of the World as We Know It, but written in small letters, and one person in the “we” is usually the female narrator. Those narrators are deeply engaging and honest—at least readers must think so—and, Anderson says, they “do and say things that women know are against the code to say out loud.” As a result, many of these books are not just mysteries but also interesting character studies.

What’s notable is that many domestic thrillers are written by women. In New York Magazine, in a review of a great new boxed set of classic crime, writer Megan Abbott says crime fiction by women “has always been about more than solving a mystery.” By exploring the most compelling fears and pervasive anxieties of the times, domestic thrillers can show that “the darkest and most resonant tales are the ones that hit closest to home.”

***Passenger 23

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cruise ship

(photo: ed2456 on pixabay; creative commons license)

By Sebastian Fitzek, narrated by Max Beesley, with a cast of actors. Unless you read German, the only way you can enjoy psychological thriller-writer Fitzek’s latest book is through Audible.com, which is perhaps why it’s called “An Audible Original Drama,” though it is available in print and for the Kindle in its original language.

Passenger 23 is based on a horrifying premise that sent me straight to fact-checking: Yearly, about 23 people—crew and passengers—disappear from the world’s cruise ships IRL. The true number is unknown, because ship owners have a substantial interest in keeping these disappearances quiet and in portraying those that do come to light as suicides, even when evidence of suicide is nonexistent. And, when disappearances occur at sea, the only investigation may be carried out by a lone policeman from the ship’s often tiny country-of-registry. This investigator’s work will not be mistaken for that of Scotland Yard or the FBI. It’s a perfect set-up for criminal shenanigans.

In Fitzek’s novel, undercover detective Martin Schwartz is willing to take on the Berlin police department’s most dangerous cases, in part because he’s become less attached to his own life in the five years since his wife and young son died in an apparent murder-suicide aboard the cruise ship Sultan of the Seas. When he receives a mysterious invitation to meet an elderly woman aboard that same ship in order to find out what really happened to his family, he can’t resist.

Once aboard, he finds himself drawn into the woman’s theory that a serial killer may be loose on the ship. A young girl who disappeared from the ship some months earlier reappears, carrying the teddy bear of his drowned son. But she’s not not making sense. The girl’s mother disappeared at the same time, in a chilling echo of what happened to Martin’s own family.

Solving this puzzle would be sufficient for any book, but Fitzek also provides an early teaser-scene about a man, located somewhere in the ship’s bowels, who has consented to have his healthy leg amputated. Why, and whether this secondary (and far-fetched) story has anything to do with the principal plot, we don’t learn until the end of the book. It’s in an epilogue that, oddly, comes after the production credits—glad I didn’t turn my iPod off too soon!

For my taste, Fitzek tries a little too hard for the gruesome detail. In addition, the cluster of murder-suicides of single moms and their children has one glaring common denominator that even a police operative far from his tiny island redoubt ought to find suspicious.

As to how well this works as an audiobook, I was disappointed. Beesley had a formal, almost stiff style out of keeping with the material, and while the other actors were used only for the scanty dialog, which felt intrusive. Audible has added intermittent sound effects—feet running, doors clanging, ropes squeaking, and the like—that didn’t add to the experience. I’d just as soon let the author tell me the door slammed than having to think “What was that?” Audible has produced a short trailer for the audio version, available on YouTube.

A somewhat longer version of this review appears on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

***Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways

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Madame Bovary

(graphic: wikimedia)

I’m envious of the women in my book group who are native French speakers and able to read Gustave Flaubert’s classic in its original language. I read the 2010 English translation by noted American short story writer and essayist Lydia Davis, one of the 19 produced since the book’s 1856 publication. Her intent, she has said, was “to do what I think hasn’t been done, which is to create a well-written translation that’s also very close, very faithful to the French.” Here is a Julian Barnes essay comparing notable translations, including Davis’s, across the generations. If you want to read Madame Bovary, I suggest at least skimming Barnes’s essay to  find a translation suited to your reading preferences.

The novel is a period piece, set in a particular, rather dreary locale, and not all periods and settings wear as well in terms of interest over 160 years. When Madame Bovary was published, the government said the novel was a danger to morality and religion and put Flaubert and his publisher on trial, though they were acquitted. However, in general, “provincial French woman has affairs with doltish men” is no longer a riveting or scandalous storyline, and “spends more than she should” is the modern way of life. Likewise, the beliefs and foibles Flaubert pokes fun at (conventional and bourgeois views, including religion, chief among them) are of varying relevance today. In an Introduction Davis quotes Nabokov’s view that, in Madame Bovary, “the ironic and the pathetic are beautifully intertwined,” and it is those sly revelations about society and how people move in it, rather than plot, that give the modern reader the greatest satisfaction.

Reader tastes have changed not just with regard to content, but regarding style, too, and a book about that same period written today would be very different from Flaubert’s approach. One consequence of what now seems a rather disordered style is that Madame’s character never quite came into focus for me. She is motivated by the ill-considered whims of a moment, a pliant object for the men around her, and rarely self-actuated until of course the end. It turns out, as Barnes notes in his essay, that translator Davis doesn’t actually much like her, or the book. Interesting.

As an exemplar of realist fiction, Madame Bovary was a path breaking book. Unlike most novels that came before, it didn’t romanticize (in the literary sense) or try to draw moral lessons—the lessons were clear from the book’s events and their consequences. Flaubert’s intention was to make the novel not just not “romantic,” but anti-romantic, in that Madame’s susceptibility to and pursuit of romanticism and shallow gratification are what cause her downfall. Occasionally, thought, the authorial voice does make a judgment in the nature of a delicious truism, for example: (about the lovers) “She was as weary of him as he was tired of her. Emma was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.”

Translator Davis in an introduction says this novel’s “radical nature is paradoxically difficult for us to see: its approach is familiar to us for the very reason that Madame Bovary permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter.”

The Revenant

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RevenantLeonardo DiCaprio won a Golden Globe for his performance as Hugh Glass in The Revenant (trailer), and the movie is nominated for a dozen Oscars. If these awards were for fortitude alone, the accolades would be well-deserved, as cast and crew have spoken at length about the physical hardships they faced in filming this movie. “The elements sort of took over,” DiCaprio told Wired interviewer Robert Capps. One must wonder, why did they undertake such a difficult and potentially perilous project?

Perhaps they did it because younger audiences today haven’t grown up knowing about the privations and violence inherent in the settlement of the West—there was life before Disneyland—and need to have the blood and guts smacked in their face. In which case, the movie is a success. It’s based in part on Michael Punke’s novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, set in 1820s Montana and South Dakota along the Upper Missouri River.

If they want to give cinematography awards to Emmanuel Lubezki for this film, I will be standing in the front row cheering. It is a beautiful film—with breathtaking views of the western United States (and Canada, Mexico, and Argentina)—shot with a deep depth of field worthy of a Sierra Club coffee table book. Snow-melt rivers, star-spangled nights, forests that pull you into the sky.

It’s just that we’re shown unspeakable violence, then astounding beauty, then unspeakable violence, then astounding beauty, then unsp. . . .you get the rhythm. In fact the violence was always so gruesome that it became (I hate to say this, since human and animal lives were purportedly involved) borrring. The beauty that followed it began to feel like heavy-handed ironic commentary, losing any capacity to soothe. The sound design and music are emotionally apt and compelling, I thought (score by Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who wrote the script with Mark L. Smith, did not conceive of Hugh Glass as anything more than a character bent on revenge. Glass pursues this hollow quest for pretty much two hours and thirty-six minutes. What I like to see in a character is some growth, some change, some “ok, this is awful, but I can rise above it” (or not). But while DiCaprio may well be capable of a meatier performance, the film doesn’t ask it of him. We learn nothing by watching it except that having an angry mama-bear drooling over you is really disgusting, but wait a sec, now she’s going to fling you around like a rag doll again. And drool some more.

For good reason, we don’t like the Frenchies, or the single-minded Indians, or the dim Americans. Everywhere they appear, Lubezki’s beautiful landscape is soon tainted by blood, usually human. Please. A little nuance. But, as Manohla Dargis says in a New York Times review, Iñárritu “isn’t given to subtlety.” The word revenant means “ghost,” and it was clear why the ghosts of Glass’s murdered wife and son keep reappearing and where they will lead him. And I won’t even mention the many, many instances in which the viewer Sees What’s Coming a Mile Away.

All this made me long to reread The Big Sky, the 1947 novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner A.B. Guthrie, Jr. The novel was chosen as “The Best Novel of the American West” by members of the Western Literature Association. As in The Revenant, The Big Sky’s characters travel the Missouri River, live as trappers and guides, and face the vicissitudes of weather and the native population. Yet their struggles will stay with you always, while, I fear, The Revenant is at least dramatically forgettable.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 87%.

Weekend Movie Pick: The Danish Girl

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Alicia Vikander, Eddie Redmayne, Danish Girl

Alicia Vikander & Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl

You (like me) may have admired Eddie Redmayne in the TV version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008), in My Week with Marilyn (2011), as Marius in Les Miserables 2012), and as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (Academy Award, 2014). You still may be surprised at how moving his delicate performance is in The Danish Girl (trailer).

I knew vaguely what this movie was about—very “loosely based” on the lives of mid-1920s Danish painters Einar and Gerda Wegener.

Despite their happy and loving marriage, Einar comes to realize he is a woman in a man’s body. “Lili,” as his alter ego is named, is at first a diversion for the pair, then a painful inevitability, and Einar becomes one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. Both of them suffer because of Lili’s condition and the strains it places on their love, yet they desperately try to make some kind of relationship work. Yet it’s dangerous to be a pioneer.

While Redmayne is superb, he’s matched in nuanced expressiveness by Swedish actor Alicia Vikander as Gerda. The delicious Matthias Schoenaerts plays Einar’s childhood friend, Hans, with whom a frantic Gerda reconnects while the couple is in Paris. Ben Whishaw also appears, determined to court the shy Lili, or is it Einar he recognizes and pursues?

Not much was known about transgender identities in 1925, and the medical practitioners with whom the couple shares its secret propose predictably draconian measures. But the real drama is watching Redmayne transform himself into a female being. Says Nathan Heller’s Vogue article, “He is no longer recognizable as a 33-year-old man; suddenly, the flash strikes his face and the transformation is complete.”

The film, directed by Tom Hooper with a script by English playwright Lucinda Coxon, is based on the 2000 David Ebershoff novel. Due to Coxon’s diligent research, the movie actually contains numerous factual details not in the book. Tim Gray’s interview with Coxon for Variety reveals that the film is actually closer to what really happened than either the novel or Lili Elbe’s pastiche of a “memoir,” which was, Coxon told Gray, “a work of many hands.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 71%; audiences 75%.