Human monsters

Two orphans, a girl and a boy, separated by 360 years, are marooned on the same island off the coast of Australia in Jess Kidd's beautiful 2022 novel The Night Ship. And when I call it beautiful, I refer not just to the story she tells but also to the clothbound book itself. Publishers don't always give such artistic attention to novels, but Atria did so here with the cover design and the inside art. The pages are even a physical pleasure to turn.

As for the story, Mayken is aboard the Batavia bound from Holland to the Dutch Indies in 1629 in the company of her nursemaid, Imke. But while Imke sleeps at night, Mayken loves to explore the ship, even breaking all rules, disguised as a boy, to roam below decks in search of a monster she believes to be hiding there. Through her wanderings she meets a variety of men and women aboard the ship, many of whom will later help her and others who turn out to be worse than any imagined monster.

The Batavia wrecks, with most of the passengers finding their way to a small island with no fresh water and little food other than what can be salvaged from the ship. The novel turns into The Lord of the Flies revisited as men divide and seek to conquer the limited resources, women included.

In 1989, the death of his mother sends young Gil to this same island, where his grandfather, Joss, is a fisherman at odds with most of the other fishermen on the island. Gil is described as weird, and some of his actions deserve that adjective. Like Mayken so many years before him, he becomes targeted, especially after other boys come to the island to summer with their fathers.

Meanwhile scientists on the island dig for artifacts to try to determine exactly what happened to the Batavia and its passengers. Much of this story is based on historical events.

Kidd takes us back and forth in time to tell two stories that gradually become one.

Peaking too early

War makes everything simple. There's a tunnel in front of you and you put your head down, and you struggle forward for the light at the end of it, one bloody impossible step at a time, and that frees you up somehow.

Louis de Berniece's, So Much Life Left Over

Peaking too early in life can cause a problem for many people, such as athletes, gorgeous movie stars and fashion models, ballerinas, chess masters, mathematicians, the best boy sopranos, whatever. What do they do with the rest of their lives?

Louis de Bernieres applies this idea to soldiers and nurses in the years between one world war and the next in his provocative 2018 novel So Much Life Left Over. They survived the war. How can they survive the peace?

Although there are many characters, most of the attention falls on Daniel Pitt, a pilot who didn't expect to live through the war. Now he looks for a career involving planes or motorcycles or anything fast and dangerous. He marries Rosie, who lost the man she loved in the war. They have a daughter and then a son, losing a boy in between. Done having children, Rosie turns Daniel away and then tries to turn the children against him.

Daniel turns to other women, first a girl in Ceylon, where they live after the war, and later a housemaid in England. Rosie's sister, a lesbian, wants children and invites Daniel into her bed, with her lover's permission. They have two children together, with Daniel called their godfather.

The lives of these and other characters don't seem to come into focus again until a new war with Germany breaks out. War makes everything simple again.

Whose fault?

When you read something that you don't understand, do you blame the writer or do you blame yourself? Most of us probably blame ourselves most of the time. I'm not smart enough to understand that. I didn't read carefully enough. I couldn't concentrate. Any of these may be true, of course, but writers sometimes need to share the blame.

The whole point of writing is to communicate, to convey one's thoughts, one's ideas, one's information, one's inspiration or whatever to others. When the message doesn't get across, the writer may be as much to blame as the reader.

Thomas Pynchon

A writer's message may be intended for certain readers, of course. Scholars write for other scholars, not for ordinary people on the street. Poets write for those who appreciate poetry. Thomas Pynchon didn't write for the same audience as Danielle Steel. The writer is more likely at fault when the intended audience doesn't understand.

I often don't understand what I am reading. Certain Bible passages baffle me. Sometimes I tackle books about black holes or time travel that are mostly beyond me. But then that was also true when, in the first grade, I first encountered a Dick and Jane reader. Some of the Robert Frost poems I've been reading lately I can appreciate, others not so much. Some of those William Trevor stories I reviewed here recently left me perplexed. My fault? Trevor's fault? I don't really know, but I'm willing to take the blame.

How to celebrate a birthday

Writing in Oh Reader magazine, Mary Ellen Collins says she wanted to do something special to celebrate her 50th birthday, something in addition to the trip to Africa she was planning with her husband. Her decision was to purchase 50 books, all at the same time.

And so the two of them headed to a Barnes and Noble with her list of desired books. She found all if them, she reports: Running with Scissors, Blue Shoe, The Art of Happiness and all the others. They stacked books on the checkout counter while they went back to search for others, drawing admiring fans as they went. They left with several shopping bags full of new books.

I have walked out of Barnes and Noble with a single shopping bag full of books, and I know how exciting just the heft of the bag can be, knowing what's inside. Imagine having four such bags at once.

If I walked into Barnes and Noble with a list of 50 books I desired, I doubt they would have even half of them in stock. Even a large store rarely has on its shelves the books I most desperately seek. So I am not sure I could pull off what Collins does, even if I had the funds for it. I would have to search a number of independent book stores, used book stores and, as a last resort, Amazon to find what I want. That would at least stretch out the pleasure. But that is pretty much what I do anyway, without the birthday excuse.

I already have more than 80 books waiting their turn to be read. Even so, my 80th birthday appoaches, and a man can dream.

Misdirection

Although not a mystery writer in the usual sense, the late William Trevor was nevertheless a mystery writer. Each of the 10 stories in his final collection of short stories, Last Stories, is a little mystery, full of subtle clues that lead to a final resolution. Or don't. Sometimes the resolution, like the clues themselves, are so subtle readers may be left scratching their heads.

As in any good mystery, there is a lot of misdirection in Trevor's stories. Even the titles misdirect the reader. When the title refers to someone, the story is most often about someone else. "The Piano Teacher's Pupil," for example, is actually about the piano teacher, not the pupil. Once she had a lover who in time abandoned her, yet she treasures that time when he was hers. Now she has a student, more gifted than any other, who steals something each time he comes to her house. Yet she treasures having him as a pupil. Paradise comes at a price she's willing to pay.

"The Crippled Man," rather than being about the crippled man, is mostly about the woman who takes care of him, although it turns out that he is taking care of her.

In "The Unknown Girl," Trevor's focus falls on Harriet, a woman whose home this girl had sometimes cleaned before stepping into traffic and being killed. Gradually Harriet comes to realize that the girl's death may be related to her unrequited love for Harriet's son.

Trevor's stories are like paintings on which the artist adds a dab of paint here and a dab of paint there. Not until the final brushstroke does an observer realize what the painting reveals. At times he even refers to different characters in alternate sentences in the same paragraph, requiring careful reading (and rereading) to understand what exactly is going on.

His stories don't make easy reading, yet they are so tender, so beautiful, so delicate that they are all worth the effort.

Curses!

Except for the two years I lived in a college dormitory, I have rarely been around people who swore habitually. My family, my friends and, for the most part, my work associates have rarely used profane or obscene language.

Most of my exposure to such language has come through novels, movies and, increasingly, television. Yet I recall so many great novels, movies and TV shows in which bad language was nonexistent, or in the case of Gone with the Wind, virtually so. The absence of crude language may have sometimes actually been a significant factor in their success. I recall how the television comedy Seinfeld used such words as "master of my domain" and "shrinkage" to avoid crude language, thus creating classic episodes.

Rarely have I mentioned the bad language in the novels I review here, although I did on Aug. 14 when I called Lee Smith's Silver Alert a "surprisingly potty-mouthed novel." The only other book by Smith I had read was her memoir Dimestore, from which I got the picture of her as an elegant, older Southern lady. So I didn't expect cover-to-cover cursing in the novel. Some of her characters might be expected to swear, making their language choices more understandable, yet even Smith's narration was curse-filled. What made this even more surprising was that her story will appeal mainly to older readers, especially older women, the very people most likely to be repelled by such language. What did Smith hope to gain by this?

The television show Gutfeld! bleeps out most of the obscenities, often leading to sentences where so many words are bleeped that the TV audience has to guess not just what words are being spoken but also what point is being made. Is this an argument for not bleeping bad language? No, it's an argument for avoiding language that must be bleeped.

Timothy Jay, a college professor, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "People who have better vocabularies, which is related to intelligence and education, are better at swearing." True or not, this makes little sense to me. Better vocabularies should mean better alternatives to crude words. And the fact that those same Gutfeld! guests refrain from swearing when they appear on other television programs demonstrates that they know other ways of making the same points.

The headline on that Journal article, published last April, was "Curses! Why All The Crude Talk?" I pose the same question.

Stick to the stories

Any fan of P.G. Wodehouse might think a book called A Brief Guide to Jeeves and Wooster (2013) would be irresistible. Yet spending more than a few minutes with Nigel Cawthorne's book is enough to find it unnecessary.

The most unnecessary chapters are those in which Cawthorne gives long and detailed summaries of every short story and every novel featuring Bertie Wooster and his gifted manservant Jeeves, but with none of the wit. If one wants to know what happens in these tales, better to read them. That would at least be amusing, while these summaries are just dull. He said this and then he did that? Who needs this?

Much better are those chapters which describe Bertie's aunts, and there are many of them; the many women Bertie becomes engaged to or nearly so (who knew he is engaged to marry Florence Craye four times and escapes each time?); his buddies, all with nicknames likes Sippy and Gussie; and the grumpy older men and policemen who always seem to block Bertie's path. These chapters help us keep the characters straight (for when we wonder, where have I seen this name before?) and, best of all, include a sampling of Wodehouse's humor, the reason for reading the stories in the first place.

This book might make a decent reference for a diehard fan. Otherwise pick up an copy of The Code of the Woosters or Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and actually enjoy yourself.

Sucking up space

The woman is a word plague/A literature Barbie doll/Nearly every damn journal/I subscribe to, she's there/Sucking up space

Fred Harrington, A Crawdad's Rhapsody

Now that's not very nice, is it? But I can appreciate the sentiment.

Joyce Carol Oates

Those lines above come from a poem called "The Quotients" by Fred Harrington, found in a collection of his poetry, The Crawdad's Rhapsody. Most of his poems are tender, sometimes beautiful. But everyone loses his temper sometimes, and this time Harrington's anger is directed at the prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates.

Oates writes books faster than many of us can read them, and short stories, plays, articles and poems besides. She has been doing this for decades. Now 85, an age at which most people have slowed down if not died, she continues to produce quality material. She has written at least 58 books. The Wikipedia article may be dated.

She has also written a number of mysteries under the name Rosamond Smith.

I have read relatively few of her books, the novel Black Water among them. I have liked what I have read, and there is one of her novels that I am itching to read now. Perhaps her massive output discourages me and others from reading her more than we do. Where do you start? How do you finish?

More seriously, however, her prolific career may impact her critical appreciation. She has won literary honors, to be sure, but the very number of her books makes it difficult for any of one book to stand out. She won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award, for example, yet Fitzgerald is revered for The Great Gatsby and perhaps Tender Is the Night. Literary critics can read all of his work in a brief period of time and compare one book against another. How could one do that with Oates?

The 19th century British author Anthony Trollope may be under appreciated for the same reason. As soon as he finished one novel, he started another and churned out books by the dozens. Scholars would much rather deal with Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy. 

And so Oates intimidates both readers and critics. As Fred Harrington observes in his poem, she also intimidates other writers. This "literary Barbie doll," as he calls her, sucks up the space.

Reading experiences

William Styron

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end," said novelist William Styron. "You live several lives while reading."

That simple statement requires at least three comments:

1. I doubt that a book has to be great to leave the reader with a variety of experiences. Most books, being more than just a few pages long, tend to be a collection of facts and ideas in the case of nonfiction books or incidents, images and conversations in the case of fiction. Each of these, for the diligent reader, can produce a new experience, something to ponder, something to question, something to inspire. Mostly we just keep reading to find out what comes next, but the potential for new experiences is always there.

2. After a movie at a theater, I often like to sit for awhile to watch the credits. Not that I am interested in the credits, but I do like to listen to the music and think about the movie. Am I a little exhausted by the story? Perhaps. But I do like to spend a few moments thinking about what I have just watched.

In the same way, books often require a few moments for thought. Or maybe a few days. In the case of a novel, we may need to take the story apart and put it back together again. What does it mean? Do we really believe it? Has it changed us?

3. Living several lives at once may be the best reason for reading fiction. We get to be different people and enter minds very different from our own yet in so many ways just like our own. Reading The Elephant of Belfast recently I got to be a young female zookeeper trying save a young elephant's life, an older woman oppressed by sorrow, a member of the Irish Republican Army willing to do anything for his cause and several other people, as well.

All this while sitting in my easy chair just being myself.

Not as it seems

Innocent-looking communities that turn out not to be so innocent after all can often be found in fiction. Consider Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives or "The Lottery," the classic Shirley Jackson story. Megan Miranda successfully revisits this idea in her 2021 novel Such a Quiet Place.

Hollow's Edge is a small neighborhood where residents tend to be relatively young, seemingly friendly and employed at a local college. Yet this quiet place hasn't been quite the same since two neighbors died of carbon monoxide poisoning and Ruby Fletcher was convicted of murdering them.

Now Ruby has been released from prison after the discovery of new evidence and without asking permission moves back into the home of Harper Nash, our narrator. Everyone else in Hollow's Edge still believes Ruby to be a murderer, and Harper, although she testified in Ruby's defense, isn't sure. Soon it becomes clear to her that Ruby, who acts so strangely and so mysteriously, has scores to settle.

Harper turns detective, attempting to discover what Ruby is up to and whether she is really a murderer. Then another mysterious death adds to the tension.

Everyone in Harper's Edge seems to have a secret to hide, and readers may find it difficult to juggle them all. At least I did. But confused or not, we must keep reading, and Miranda rewards us with an ending that proves both exciting and satisfying.

Mystery in Laos

By the time the Communists took over Laos in the 1970s, most of the doctors in the country had already left. Among the few who remain is Siri Pailboun, who loves his country even if he has his doubts about Communism. Despite being in his 70s, he becomes the national coroner. This is the background of Colin Cotterill's series of mystery novels featuring Siri.

The second of these is Thirty-Three Teeth (2005), in which a series of deaths seem to have been caused by a bear. Or perhaps a tiger. Or perhaps a weretiger? Siri investigates.

The strange title — and strange titles are a Cotterill speciality, including Curse of the Pogo Stick and The Rat Catchers' Olympics — refers to Siri's discovery that unlike most people, he has 33 teeth. The Buddha supposedly had 33 teeth, and this is said to be a sign of a bridge to the spirit world. Siri's unusual powers occasionally show up in this and other novels in the series.

The novel's mystery, although leading to a breathless conclusion, tends to be less interesting than Cotterill's characters and the details he provides about Lao history and life under the Communists. For example, he tells us that Laos children are frequently given ugly nicknames "to ward off baby-hungry spirits." Siri's brilliant nurse, Chundee Chantavongheuan, is called Dtui, meaning Fatty. In her case, unfortunately, the nickname fits. It is Dtui's peril that brings Siri to the rescue and leads to that exciting climax.

Where the magic happens

Sometimes I think I can't think at all unless I'm behind my typewriter.

Joan Didion

Joan Didion

There's not much that Joan Didion (1934-2021) wrote that I could have written, but those words quoted above are an exception.

I never thought I could write and certainly had no ambitions in that direction before that day in my early teens when I sat down in front of a typewriter for the first time. Suddenly, as if by magic, I could think and I could write. Words flowed out.

I no longer own a typewriter, but any keyboard (well, not a piano keyboard) will do. Usually I have no idea what I am going to say, or sometimes even what my subject will be, until I sit down at my computer to write another blog post. Once my fingers touch the keys, however, something happens. My mind focuses and words spring out.

Perhaps this is why many writers, Larry McMurtry being just one example, continued to write on a typewriter long after home computers made typewriters obsolete. Their old typewriter was where their magic happened.

Other writers find their magic elsewhere, to be sure. John Cheever wore a business suit when he wrote his stories. William Maxwell always wrote while wearing pajamas. Others have preferred to write naked or in their underwear, usually because in this condition they would be less likely to leave their writing room until they had accomplished something. Ernest Hemingway, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf wrote while standing up. Mark Twain, Eudora Welty and Jessamyn West did some of their best work while lying in bed.

Perhaps this is all just a matter of habit. Or maybe it really is magic.

Imposter

Ulysses S. Grant, broke as he was dying of throat cancer, managed to finish his memoirs just before his death to provide money for his widow, Julia, to survive on. In his novel Grant Speaks (2000), Ev Ehrlich imagines Grant living long enough to write two memoirs, one of which told the truth and was kept hidden for more than a century.

The novel is that hidden version, which for the most part follows the authorized version. Most of the characters and most of the incidents are historically accurate, even if conversations are imagined or embellished. Ehrlich strays from history by imagining not one Ulysses Grant but two and not one Julia but two.

Grant's original first name was Hiram. In his hometown there is a dominating upperclass boy named Ulysses Grant, often called Useful Grant. Hiram is called Useless Grant. The first Julia is Hiram's high school sweetheart, whom Useful seduces (or rapes?) with Useless as a witness. Useful wins an appointment to West Point, then loses his memory in an accident. Hiram's father convinces him to steal the other's identity and go to West Point in his place.

From there the author mostly follows history. The new Ulysses S. Grant becomes a capable soldier, fighting in Mexico with Robert E. Lee and other officers he would later fight with and against in a much bigger war. He meets and falls in love with the second Julia, the daughter of a slave owner.

Grant proves his greatness as a soldier in the Civil War, yet he proves hapless at everything else he tries before the war and even as president of the United States and in business after the war. And he keeps encountering Useful Grant, even though the other man doesn't recognize him. And by the end of the story, he again encounters the other Julia.

Ehrlich weaves a masterful novel out of truth and invention, causing both Grant and readers to wonder who actually won the Civil War.