Forgotten treasure

A good novel is more than a string of good sentences, but the sentences in Elisabeth Savage's The Last Night at the Ritz (1973) are so good you might miss the fact that it is also a good novel. I found myself reading many of these sentences more than once, meaning that reading the novel once was almost like reading it twice. No wonder it took me so long to make it through a 188-page book.

Another reason for that could be the many digressions by the story's unnamed narrator, a middle-aged woman whose literary aspirations, like her first husband (she calls him "the real one"), died young. Even her digressions often have digressions, meaning readers frequently need to reorientate themselves to figure out where they are. In other words, the novel takes a little work, worth it though it is.

The novel occupies just one day in Boston when our narrator meets her best friend, Gay, and Gay's husband, Len, for some drinking, dining and reminiscing. Yet through the many digressions, or flashbacks, we learn virtually everything significant about the relationship of these three people from college days till now.

Our narrator — how I wish she had a name — had a brief affair with Len years before. She is childless but regards Gay and Len's eldest son, Charley, as her own son. Len works for a publishing company. Both Gay and nameless once hoped to be published themselves.

Several factors bring things to a boil on this day in Boston. They are all drinking too much. Len worries about Charley, now in Canada dodging the draft. Gay worries about Marta, Len's lovely and self-assured assistant who goes with them on their night on the town. Wes, a man with whom the narrator has had a casual affair, is also at their table, as is Walter, an author whose first book has just been accepted for publication.

OK, not much really happens, but Savage gives us every subtle nuance, every little change in mood, so one is aware of a great deal happening just beneath the surface.

And then there are those wonderful sentences. One could almost open the novel anywhere, point a finger blindly and find a choice one.

Although an excellent novel, The Last Night at the Ritz was quickly forgotten soon after publication, forgotten by everyone but Nancy Pearl, that is. Pearl raved about it in one of her Book Lust books. Then it and few other forgotten treasures were reprinted as Book Lust Rediscoveries. Before it is forgotten again, discover it for yourself.

Runaway girls

As the first female deputy sheriff in Bergen County, New Jersey, Constance Kopp has responsibility for the female prisoners. And she thinks there are way too many of them. In Amy Stewart's Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions (2017), the third novel in this excellent series, Constance is troubled by the fact that a runaway boy is just a runaway boy, while a runaway girl is a criminal, or at least treated as one.

Her prisoners include Edna, a young woman who believes the United States will be pulled into the war in Europe (the year is 1916) and, wanting to make a contribution, runs away from home to work in a munitions plant. Minnie, 16, runs away from home with a man who promises to marry her but doesn't. Her parents don't want her back, and now she faces years in a reformatory until she reaches adulthood.

Constance must really put her convictions to the test, however, when 18-year-old Fleurette, her youngest sister (actually her own daughter from being seduced as a teenager), runs away from home to join a vaudeville troupe. Her other sister, Norma, wants to bring Fleurette back by force, if necessary. Constance is torn.

Stewart bases her novels not just on a real person but on actual newspaper accounts from the period. Much of what takes place in Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions actually happened, as Stewart shows at the end of the book. Her fiction fills in the blanks with remarkable success.

I have been impressed by each of the Constance Kopp adventures so far and look forward to reading the next one.

Sacred books

She just couldn't avoid taking it personally: sending a choice title back to the publishers was like sending a perfectly good pooch to the pound, knowing it would be euthanized.

Matthew Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

As the person in charge of our condo library, I must make the decisions about which books win spots in our limited shelf space and what to do with the others. Some of these discarded books get donated for the next Friends of the Library book sale. Others go to Goodwill. Those that are worn or torn get tossed into the recycling bin. It is that last category of books that troubles my conscience.

Matthew Sullivan

Those of us who value books hate even the thought of destroying them. Even the sight of a book with a broken spine or a dog-eared page can bother us. To us, as George Orwell might have put it, all books are sacred, even if some are more sacred than others. A Gutenberg Bible? Very sacred. A first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird? Sacred. A beat-up Nora Roberts paperback? Just a little bit sacred. Yet what else am I to do with that Nora Roberts paperback and all the other worn-out books?

In the Matthew Sullivan novel Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore he has a character who was once a librarian but later became a prison guard. Even a prison library can't accept all book donations, so this man takes all the rejects home and shelves them in his own house until there is hardly room for him to move around. That is more extreme than I want to be, but still I can see where he's coming from.

This man's daughter, the woman mentioned in the quotation above, works in a bookstore and has a similar problem. Books that don't sell, or don't sell quickly enough, are sent back to their publishers to make room for newer books. The publishers may remainder these books, which means putting an ink blot on the top or bottom and sending them back to bookstores to be discounted. Or they may simply be destroyed. She views returning a good book to the publisher as being like taking a good dog to the pound.

It occurs to me that the ideal employee in either a library or a bookstore should love books, but not excessively so. Those who love books will take good care of them, shelve them and display them properly and perhaps even make an extra effort to place the right book in the right patron's hands. Employees who love books to excess may become too protective, as in the above examples. Or they may simply ignore their work and try to read as many of the books that surround them as possible during working hours. Or perhaps even steal them.

In The Library Book, Susan Orleans writes about the fire that all but destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986. The thought of burning books repulsed her, yet for some reason she decided that her research should include burning a book, just to see how it burned and how quickly. But which book should she burn? She describes her selection process in some detail, but finally she settles on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. This strikes me as one of the last books a book lover would choose to burn, since burning books is what Bradbury argues against in his novel. I might have selected a ragged James Patterson paperback because there being so many of these in the world and nobody would miss it. And it is much less sacred than Fahrenheit 451.

Love, war and a fiddle

Soldiers and others watched them pass with interested looks because they carried musical instruments and there is not a human being on earth who does not have a favorite song, lacking only somebody to play it.

Paulette Jiles, Simon the Fiddler

Love and war have certain things in common. Each takes us out of our comfort zone. Both can be dangerous. Both can cause us do things we would not otherwise do.

And so we have the situation in Simon the Fiddler, the new novel from Paulette Jiles. Simon Boudin, a young introvert who wants only to play his fiddle and learn the secret he believes every song contains, manages to avoid conscription until the very end of the War Between the States, when he is forced into a Confederate uniform. His fiddle at least spares him from most front-line duty, and he is placed in an army band with a few other musicians.

The end of the war doesn't mean the end of danger for Simon, for by then he is in Texas, now mostly under military control while he and his mates lack proper discharge papers. Their instruments give them opportunities to make a little money, but also make it more difficult for them to stay under the radar.

So why not leave Texas and head for someplace safer? Because that's where Doris Dillon is. She is a pretty Irish immigrant pledged to serve the family of an army officer for a few years. That officer is a cruel man who has eyes for Doris himself, at least when his wife isn't around.

Simon has never met Doris, but he sees her at one of his performances, where he plays an Irish song for her. The pair carry on a secret correspondence, while he pursues her and tries to find a way to rescue her and then get her to marry him. Toward the latter end, he buys some property along the Red River, sight unseen. Why would a fiddler want to become a rancher? Because he believes land might be more of an enticement to this Irish girl than a fiddle. But he doesn't really know this Irish girl.

You may think you know how this is going to end, but Jiles will surprise you. This is a beautifully written, beautifully structured novel that explores new territory in that old story about love and war.

A mystery with bright ideas

The cover of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan (2017) raises questions even before one opens the book. In the color coding used by publishers of paperbacks, a black cover suggests dark subject matter — horror stories, for example, or novels about mass murderers. Yet over the black background on Sullivan's novel are brightly-colored books that carry the title, which itself hints at something much lighter. So which will it be?

Sullivan answers the question on page four when Lydia Smith, who works at the Bright Ideas Bookshop in Denver, discovers the body of Joey Molina, a young man who had spent most of each day hanging out in the shop. Now he is literally hanging in the bookstore, dead by suicide. Not much less shocking than discovering the body is a photograph of herself, taken at a childhood birthday party, that she finds in his pocket. How did Joey get that photo, which she doesn't remember ever seeing before, and why would he have it in his pocket?

This outstanding mystery novel reminds me a bit of Carolyn Pankhurst's The Nobodies Album, in which a woman trying to understand how her son, a rock star, could possibly be a murderer discovers the real murderer. Sullivan, too, comes at the murder mystery sideways. Lydia just wants to understand Joey and that photo in his pocket. Along the way she identifies a killer.

No, Joey really kills himself. The murders in question happened years before when Lydia was a little girl at a sleepover at a friend's house. During the night someone entered the house and killed every member of the family with a hammer, while Lydia hid under the kitchen sink. Her own father has always been the prime suspect in the case, but there has never been sufficient evidence to arrest him. Now he lives alone in rural Colorado, and Lydia has avoided him for years. But perhaps he can explain that mysterious photograph, since he is probably the one who took it.

And so Lydia Smith solves a big mystery while trying to solve a smaller one. The two mysteries, it turns out, are connected in surprising ways, and both keep us guessing most of the way. (You will probably discover the murderer a few pages before she does.)

Sullivan's novel is as original as any mystery you are likely to find. I recommend it highly.

Archives of our desires

To own a certain book — one you had chosen yourself — was to define yourself.

Julian Barnes

Henry Hitchings expands on this idea in his introduction to Browse: The World in Bookshops, which I reviewed here two days ago. He calls choosing a book, not just to read but to own, "a small enlargement of one's self."

He continues, "Many of us cherish libraries, which are on the whole wonderfully democratic institutions and often the wellspring of ideas, but it is on our own bookshelves, packed with our purchases, that we find the archives of our desires, enthusiasms and madnesses."

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean flirts with this thought in The Library Book. Speaking of her childhood in the Cleveland area, she writes, "We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family." In college, she says, "I turned into a ravenous buyer of books." Her expanding library gradually defined herself.

It could be argued that we are also defined by our library selections, except that this archive of desires, enthusiasms and madnesses is hidden away in library records. Our book purchases, on the other hand, rest on shelves visible to ourselves each day, and to any visitors who may happen by. What about non-readers? Their own "archives" may take the form of stacks of magazines, shelves of DVDs, a cellar full of wine bottles or whatever. To some extent, we are all defined by our possessions, including those who possess very little.

But our subject here is books and how those we choose for our own shelves serve as a kind of autobiography. The fact that I have both The Library Book and Browse, as well as such books as Time Was Soft There, The Library of Lost and Found and The Care and Feeding of an Independent Bookstore, on my own bookshelves certainly says something about me.

Another book I am currently reading, The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage, also touches on this subject. A woman is embarrassed by what the books her husband chooses to read say about him, and therefore about her: "The grandmother didn't like the way he bought Western novels when, if he had to read Western novels, he could have gotten them from the lending library." There, at least, the archive would be hidden.

A passion for bookstores

The way most people browse, it's as if they've stepped into a temple or church. This is not riffling through the hangers on the clearance rack or tossing canned corn into the cart. No, this is browsing. It even sounds drowsy: to browse. Heart rates slow. Time disappears. Serious people turn into dreamers again.

Matthew Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

A passion for bookstores may not be universal in the sense of everyone, but perhaps it is in the sense of everywhere. That is the idea one gets from reading Browse: The World in Bookshops, edited by Henry Hitchings (2016).

Hitchings asked writers from around the world to reflect on their experiences in bookstores, and the results, most of them anyway, are fascinating, often inspiring.

British novelist Ian Sansom recalls working at Foyle's Bookshop in London as a young man and spending most of his working hours hiding from customers, and presumably his bosses, and reading.

"Literature was my homeland," writes Juan Gabriel Vasquez, whose other homeland is Colombia.

Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor recalls visiting a Nairobi bookshop as a child. "We were in paradise," she writes, "because there was no (offending) school textbook in sight to destroy our illusions!"

"I would argue that under most circumstances the conversation of used book dealers or obsessive collectors is the best conversation in the world," says Michael Dirda, who writes about books for the Washington Post. In his essay he tells about using the hours before a predicted blizzard, while his wife is out of town, to search for treasures in a used bookstore.

Danish author Dorthe Nors tells of the thrill of seeing one's own book in a bookshop, although in her case the store manager, unimpressed, gets angry because Nors has moved her book to a more prominent position.

And so it goes, from Turkey to China to Ukraine to Italy and beyond. Some people may go to amusement parks for thrills. Others of us head for a bookshop.

Money buys watches, not happiness

Barry knew he was good at making and losing money and getting paid for both handsomely.

Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success

In Gary Shteyngart's deceptively good 2018 novel Lake Success, hedge fund manager Barry Cohen gets paid handsomely indeed even though he loses much more money for his clients than he makes. I say "deceptively good" because the novel turns out to be much better than you might think in the early going.

Gary, we find, is also good at both making and losing friends. He's an outgoing guy, which is why he attracts investors, but he proves to be too shallow and too needy to maintain relationships. His collection of expensive watches, "the implements of his true desire," is the only thing that really matters to him. And this includes his Indian-American wife Seema and their 3-year-old autistic son Shiva.

With his marriage in shambles and the feds closing in because of his Wall Streets dealing, Barry takes a few of his favorite watches and begins a cross-country bus trip to try to start his life over again. Mostly he hopes to reclaim his college girlfriend, now divorced and with a son of her own. He trashes his wedding ring, his cell phone and his credit cards, and because he is always trying to make a good impression on people he meets along the way, he is soon out of cash and turns to begging.

Gary thinks of his bus trip as significant, the beginning of Act 2 of his life, yet he returns pretty much the same man, just one with interesting stories to tell. He's still a lousy husband and father, good only at making money while losing other people's money. Soon he is left with only his beloved watches. Yet somehow Barry does change by the end, and the inspiration for that change comes from an unexpected quarter.

Shteyngart's novel, with the 2016 presidential campaign as a backdrop, delivers both tears and laughter to its readers, at least those who can get past the opening pages.

Tips for introverts

Susan Cain's Quiet helped introverts feel better about themselves, assuring them that they are perfectly normal (despite what many extroverts might think) and that they have much to offer the world (in many ways more than extroverts can offer). Jenn Granneman's The Secret Lives of Introverts aims to help introverts live their lives. It's more of a how-to book than an inspirational book.

Granneman does cover some of the same ground Cain covered, but mostly she is interested in how introverts, especially young introverts, can better cope with a world that often seems stacked against them. How does an introvert find a job? Make friends? Get a date? Break up with an unsuitable boyfriend or girlfriend? Get more alone time without appearing rude? All these things pose greater challenges for introverts than they do for extroverts.

Yet her book isn't just for introverts. She addresses extroverts as well, offering advice to help them better understand introverted friends, spouses, lovers, employees or whatever. Extroverts often fail to understand why anyone would rather stay home alone "doing nothing" than go to a party with friends or colleagues. "But for introverts," Granneman says, "'nothing' is really something." Those hours spent alone thinking, reading or listening to music help introverts make sense of the often noisy and confusing world in which they spent their day and prepare themselves to face a similar kind of world the next day.

Granneman manages a blog called Introvert, Dear (introvert dear.com) that she mentions frequently in her book. Recent posts on the blog from a variety of introverted writers have titles like "I Kept to Myself at a Birthday Party, and Enjoyed It," "How to Stay Married to an Extrovert When You're an Introvert" and "5 Reasons You Should Hire an Introvert." If you are not interested in reading the book, try the blog. It's got similar advice but in smaller doses.

Unexpected greatness

There was something almost biblical about Chester A. Arthur. He reminds me of men like Moses, David or the apostles of Jesus, ordinary men whose early lives gave no clue they would ever stand out in their own generation, let alone be remembered by generations to follow.

Arthur was hardly a nothing, but he settled early for wealth over worthwhile achievement, Scott S. Greenberger tells us in his fine 2017 biography The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur. A pastor's son, he became a New York City lawyer and served briefly as a brigadier general in the Civil War, in which capacity he excelled at acquisition and organization of supplies.  These skills caught the attention of Roscoe Conkling, the U.S. senator who ran New York's political machine. Soon Arthur was Conkling's righthand man in running the spoils system that handed out jobs to the party faithful, regardless of ability. To describe Arthur as a political hack might have been generous.

Conkling expected to be the Republican candidate for president in 1880, and Arthur went to the convention in support of his boss. He was still wearing his Conkling button when James Garfield, the surprise nominee, agreed to accept Arthur as his running mate in hopes of winning New York's electoral votes. The strategy worked, but nobody, least of all Arthur, expected he would ever occupy the White House. The new vice president spent more time in New York assisting Conkling than in Washington assisting Garfield. Then an assassin's bullet (and inept doctors) changed history.

Power corrupts, but not always. Sometimes power actually builds character. Consider Moses. Or consider Chester Arthur. In his brief presidency, he stood up to Conkling, championed civil service reforms to end the spoils system, took steps to build the U.S. Navy into a world power, became an advocate for civil rights and pushed for more protection for Yellowstone.

Greenberger gives much of the credit for this transformation to an invalid woman named Julia Sand, who wrote Arthur a series of at least 23 letters encouraging him and sometimes chastising him. Often he did precisely what she urged him to do. Arthur once paid a surprise visit to her home and had a long chat with Julia and her family. She wished for more, and sometimes her correspondence reads almost like love letters. The president read her letters, and kept them even when he had most of his papers destroyed at the end of his presidency, but his heart belonged to his late wife. And besides, before he left the White House he knew he was dying.

Chester Arthur is not remembered as one of the greatest U.S. presidents, and in fact he is hardly remembered at all. But Greenberger's book reminds us that even minor presidents may have a little bit of greatness within them.

The feminization of names

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Beverly, Dana, Evelyn, Gail, Leslie, Meredith, Robin and Shirley were all primarily names for men.

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Dana Andrews

To continue the discussion of "naming the baby" begun a week ago, let us briefly consider the feminization of boy names. As Steven Pinker points out in his book, the trend of parents giving masculine names to girls has been going on for a long time, since way before the beginning of the feminist movement.

Some parents want a boy and so give their daughters the boy names they had already picked out. Other parents choose masculine names in the belief such a name will give their daughter more confidence or independence or whatever. Many girl names are feminized versions of boy names. Charles becomes Charlene, then either can become Charley. Gerald becomes Geraldine, then either can become Gerry. Samuel becomes Samantha, then either can become Sammy. Robert becomes Roberta, then either can become Bobby.

Terry Moore

My parents named me Terry, not Terrance but just Terry. It was a common name for boys born in the 1940s. The popular comic strip Terry and the Pirates began in 1934. I knew other boys in school with that name. Two members of Monty Python, my contemporaries, were named Terry. One of the characters in American Graffiti, a movie about the class of 1962 (my class), is named Terry. Yet, perhaps because of actress Terry Moore, that name quickly evolved into a name for girls, much to the disgust of my father. Today few baby boys are called Terry.

Rarely do names move in the other direction, from girls to boys. Despite the Johnny Cash song, there are no boys named Sue. (Today there aren't even many girls named Sue.)

History in fiction

What Edward Rutherfurd did in one fat novel — tell the history of New York City through fiction (New York, 2009) — Beverly Swerling did in four fat novels. Her death in 2018 prevented her from continuing that history into the 20th century, assuming that was ever her intent.

Following City of Dreams, City of Glory and City of God, her 2011 novel City of Promise covers the period from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s, or the time when the Brooklyn Bridge was under construction. This was the Gilded Age, when those who made fortunes in business thanks to the war enhanced those fortunes, when immigrants flooded into the city and when, to accommodate the growing population and growing business, developers started building up as well as out.

The story centers on one of these businessmen, Joshua Turner, who came out of the war with a wooden leg that in no way slowed his ambition. His bright idea is to build multi-story apartment buildings for the middle class. His even brighter idea is to marry Mollie Brannigan, a sharp-as-a-tack Irish woman who, because she is over 20 (and still a virgin despite growing up in her aunt's brothel), has resigned herself to spinsterhood. She meets Joshua while working at Macy's.

Yet this is also the period when the Boss Tweed political machine is in power and when criminal gangs are exercising power of their own. Then there is a rival businessman who made life miserable for Joshua when he was a Confederate prisoner of war and is now willing to do anything, including kidnapping or killing Mollie, to claim Joshua's success as his own.

Those in Joshua's corner include a resourceful dwarf who knows how to make steel, Mollie's aunt  whose business has provided her with many valuable contacts in the business world, and a pawnbroker who seems to know everything going on in New York but whose true loyalty remains in doubt until the end.

Swerling makes New York history an important part of her story while at the same time keeping it in the background, so readers may not even realize they are learning anything.

Living in a bookstore

A bookshop can be a magnet for mavericks and nomads. A community hub, a haven, a platform for cultural ideas. A centre of dissent and radicalism.

Henry Hitchings, Browse: The World in Bookshops

Henry Hitchings was talking specifically about Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore in San Francisco when he wrote those words, but he just as easily could have been thinking of Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookstore in Paris within sight of Notre Dame Cathedral. Shakespeare and Company and its long-time owner George Whitman are the subjects of Jeremy Mercer's fascinating 2005 memoir Time Was Soft There.

Mercer was a crime reporter for a Canadian newspaper, and at times in trouble with police himself, when he made the mistake of revealing a source, who then threatened revenge. Mercer fled to Paris with little money and no prospects. Like so many young people in Paris under similar circumstances, Mercer found his way to Shakespeare and Company. For decades Whitman, a devoted socialist, had operated the bookstore as a free boardinghouse for "mavericks and nomads," with preference given to aspiring writers. Over the years some 40,000 people had spent nights in the bookstore, some for years at a time, sleeping wherever they could find room.

Whitman, an American, liked to tell people he was the son of Walt Whitman, which was true but it wasn't THAT Walt Whitman. He was in his mid-80s when Mercer was his guest, but still not nearly old enough to be the poet's son. Despite his socialist ideals, Whitman enforced a class system in his shop, allowing those he judged to be the best writers to use actual bedrooms on the upper floors, while others, like Mercer, had to look for space on the floor. Whitman also favored new guests over those he was starting to get tired of and attractive women over everybody else. Even at 86 he was still falling desperately in love with young women.

Whitman, Mercer tells us, was also a petty thief, stealing from his own guests. His favorite reading in his own bookstore were the diaries he stole from women who stayed with him. Mercer describes Whitman wrestling with a priest over a book being sold cheaply at a book sale. He wanted the book to resale in his shop. The priest presumably wanted to read it.

For all Whitman's faults, Mercer came to admire him and to want to help him protect the future of the store, which was being sought by developers because of its prime location. Mercer was able to track down Whitman's daughter, his only child and the product of his brief marriage to one of the women he fell in love with in his store. Today, following Whitman's death in 2011, Sylvia Whitman operates the store.

Mercer's title refers to prison slang. For prisoners there is hard time and then there is soft time. At Shakespeare and Company, he says, time was soft.

I visited Shakespeare and Company when I was last in Paris two summers ago. How I wish I had read Mercer's book first.