Too many memories

In The River We Remember, the fine 2023 novel by William Kent Krueger, it is not just the river that characters remember. Most of them have torn pasts they would like to forget. In many cases, that past involves their World War II experiences.

One of the characters is Sheriff Brody Dean, a war hero who doesn't feel like a hero. The year is 1958, and Brody is called to the bank of the Alabaster River, where the body of Jimmy Quinn, one of the most prominent, and least loved citizens of Jewel, Minn., has been found.

Brody would like to believe the shotgun death was either an accident or a suicide. If it was murder, he figures Jimmy Quinn probably deserved it. He wipes all prints off the shotgun to protect whoever might have done it.

Yet as much as everyone, including members of his own family, hated Quinn, there is someone they hate even more. That is Noah Bluestone, another war hero. But he is also a Dakota Sioux, and he married a Japanese woman. Soon evidence forces Brody to arrest Noah, against his own will.

There's much more going on in this novel. Brody carries on a long-term affair with his brother's wife, then falls for Angie, a former prostitute who runs a local diner in her new life. Unwise behavior by Angie's teenage son and his friend put them dangerously in the middle of this murder case. Both Noah and his wife refuse to talk about what really happened on the night Jimmy Quinn was killed.

This is a wonderfully written murder mystery that reads like a literary novel. Don't miss it.

Reflections on a life

John Mortimer's father gave him the same advice I once gave my granddaughter. If you want to become a writer, first seek another career. This will pay the bills while you struggle as a writer, and it will also give you something to write about. It will put you in daily contact with real people in real-life situations.

Mortimer took his father's advice and became a successful barrister, as well as a successful author, most notably of the Horace Rumpole stories. He tells all about it in Where There's a Will, his 2003 book of essays that can also pass as a memoir.

Much of this book is about his experiences practicing law and the amazing people and situations he encountered in this profession. There is much here, too, about the writing profession. Yet most of these essays are simply about the art of living. They have titles like "Getting Drunk," "Listening," "Lying," "Living with Children," "Male Clothing," "Giving Money to Beggars," "Eating Out," and "Looking after Your Health." They are all short and, in most cases, amusing. And sometimes full of practical advice.

He suggests, for example, to avoid eating at restaurants with menus full of page after page of entrees. Those restaurants with few options, he says, probably know how to prepare those meals very well.

He says he learned to listen to others because that is part of a lawyer's job, and he highly recommends the practice. Most people have fascinating stories to tell, if only we can stop talking long enough to listen to them.

Mortimer says many things worth quoting:

"One of the miracles of life is that few people pass through it without finding someone to love them."

"Murder has this in common with Christmas, most of it goes on in the family circle."

"The trouble with double-beds is that people tend to go to sleep in them."

Mortimer's Rumpole stories make wonderful reading, and this is no less true of this short book of short essays.

The solution is the mystery

They had met in France, where the worthy Inspector Pyke had come to study the methods of the Police Judiciare, and of Maigret especially, and had been surprised to discover that Maigret had no method at all.

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Ghost

Most of the great fictional detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Columbo, are smarter than their fans. Even so we have some idea how they work. At the very end, at least, we learn how they got from Point A to Point B. Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, however, has no method at all, as Georges Simenon tells us in Maigret and the Ghost (1964). We have no clue how he reads his clues, or even in many cases what clues he is reading.

Even so, these relatively short novels make compulsive reading, and this one is no exception. And no, this is not a ghost story.

One of the other detectives in the Paris police force is a man named Lognon, but behind his back he is usually called Inspector Luckless or Inspector Hard-Done-By. Although a clever detective, something always goes wrong with his cases. Even when they reach a successful conclusion, somebody else always gets the credit. Now Lognon is found shot and near death just outside the residence of a young woman, with whom the married detective had been spending each night.

An extramarital affair gone wrong? Not to Margaret's eyes. He goes across the street to try to discover what has been going on in the home of a notable art dealer and his beautiful wife. Why has Lognon been watching this house every night?

Maigret may be famous and mystifying, but in most respects he is an ordinary man with a wife he loves and a home he loves to go home to. Madame Maigret usually appears in these novels, and here he credits her with helping to solve the case, even though she has no idea how.

Neither do the rest of us, but it is fun watching it happen just the same.

Pretend reporters

"I'm just trying to get as much information as possible. To really write the truth, you know. I want to paint as objective — and truthful — a picture as possible."

Virginia Feito, Mrs. March

Virginia Feito

The words above are spoken by a fake newspaper reporter in Virginia Feito's novel Mrs. March. They are spoken by Mrs. March herself, a suspicious wife well on her way toward insanity. She is trying to gather clues to prove her husband is a murderer.

Even mad Mrs. March, pretending to represent the New York Times, knows very well what is required of a good reporter: gathering as much information as possible, writing the truth, being objective.

Yet newspapers across the United States today are in trouble, in part, because their own reporters don't know this. Or if they do, they ignore it. And now more and more people are ignoring them.

I am a former newspaper reporter who practiced journalism more the way Mrs. March practices it than the way most current reporters on the New York Times, Washington Post and other prominent newspapers practice it. They are more propagandists than objective reporters. They do public relations for the political left. the Biden administration and the Democrat Party. They scoff at objectivity and truth. They ignore any facts that don't fit the chosen narrative.

This, of course, is not the only reason newspapers are in trouble. They have been in trouble for decades now. Thanks to their televisions, phones and computers, people have access to many other sources of information. They can get whatever flavor of "truth" they desire, whether it is really true or not. They don't have to buy newspapers, and newspapers, having lost any pretense of objective reporting, keep making it easier to ignore them.

Something snaps

Comedy quickly turns to tragedy in Virginia Feito's 2021 novel Mrs. March.

The wife of a best-selling novelist, Mrs. March is shocked when a woman in a pastry shop raves about his latest book, then adds that the main character, a plump and unattractive woman, appears to have been inspired by Mrs. March herself.

Something snaps in Mrs, March, who appears to have been not all that stable to begin with. Without bothering to actually read the novel, she listens to conversations about it and suspects people are talking about her. She steals and destroys copies of the novel. She starts lying  about everything, however unreasonable the lies. She has always been one who puts on airs, but that trait intensifies. When she spots a cockroach in her kitchen, she won't call an exterminator for fear of what people might think.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in the town near her husband's hunting cabin, she concludes that he must be the murderer and begins looking for evidence, even to the point of visiting that town and searching for clues in the cabin.

The biggest mystery in Feito's novel is what George March saw in Mrs. March in the first place. And Mrs. March is what she is called throughout the novel, even in flashbacks to when she was a little girl. Her mother, we are told, was "pregnant with Mrs. March." Was she ever truly stable, and what is she capable of now that she is truly insane?

Secrets and lies

Chris Pavone cheats his readers in his thriller Two Nights in Lisbon (2022). Whether readers feel cheated or, on the contrary, feel rewarded by one more plot twist, is up to them. I felt cheated.

Ariel Pryce, a middle-aged newlywed, wakes up alone in a Lisbon hotel room. Her much younger husband has taken her there on a business trip, but now he has disappeared. Later that day comes an appeal for a ransom, much more money than she has.

She goes to the Lisbon police and the United States embassy for help, and the CIA gets involved.

To get the money she blackmails a man high in the U.S. government by threatening to reveal a secret about him.

Much of the novel comes as flashback as we gradually learn what that secret is. Meanwhile the authorities, who at first think Ariel is just overreacting, take the situation more and more seriously. And the tension builds.

Pavone's story gets complex, and the characters can be hard to tell apart. Readers will have fun trying to guess what's really going on. If the author told us the truth that would be too easy, which is the reason for his deceit.

Different contexts

Susan Cheever

Biography is an exercise in context.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

Think about your own life, the home you grew up in, the neighborhood you lived in during your youth, the choices you made, the people you loved,  the defeats you suffered as well as the victories you celebrated, the culture that shaped you. What you look like, where your talents lie and what ailments you suffer from are mostly the result of genetics, but most everything else in your life was influenced by environment, and each of us experiences a somewhat different environment. Or to use Susan Cheever's word, a different context.

She goes on to explain what she means in the above-quoted line: "In writing a life, biographers must create the time in which that life was lived."

Some biographers fail to do this. She observes, without naming names, "Sometime biography looks back in judgment, condemning a subject's action with the advantages of modern knowledge and customs. Sometimes a biographer will try to re-create circumstances in which a subject's action may be understood in a way in which they could not be understood at the time of writing."

In other words, biographers — and also readers of biographies — need to show a little tolerance, a little understanding, a little grace. People of a different time just didn't think the same way you do. For that matter, other people living today don't necessarily think the same way you do. They come from different contexts.

An amazing world

Virtually every species experiences the world in a unique way, in most cases a very different from the way humans experience it. Ed Yong gives us countless examples of this in his eye-opening 2022 book An Immense World.

Each species has the sensory perception it needs to survive and reproduce. If it doesn't need to see, because it lives where there is no light, then it is blind. Orher animals need strong vision. Some may need a powerful sense of smell or a powerful sense of hearing. Others have senses human beings can only imagine, such dolphins, which can use sonar to detect buried objects, and bumblebees, which can sense the electric fields of flowers.

Yong offers up one jaw-dropping natural science fact after another. Mice sing, though our ears cannot hear it. Catfish are, in effect, "swimming tongues" because of their ability to taste with their entire bodies. Some insects can hear with virtually every part of their bodies.

Yong points out that earlier scientists have been dead wrong time and again about what animals can sense. Fish don't feel pain, for example. Well, yes they do. But if earlier scientists can be wrong, so can the scientists represented here. If any of them are wrong, however, chances are the real truth is even more amazing than the amazing information gathered here.

War as muse

More than any other before or since, World War I was our literary war.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

Susan Cheever

E.E. Cummings took part in World War I. In fact, he was a prisoner of war for three months. Susan Cheever lists several other writers from that war, some of whom died in it: Yeats, Owen, Brooke, Sassoon, Graves and Hemingway. There were a number of others, such as Erich Maria Remarque. Most of them were poets.

By the time World War II came along, just two decades later, poetry was in decline. This may be one reason why fewer writers emerged from that war. Yet still there was Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, James Jones and many more.

The Vietnam War inspired others.

These wars, as well as others, continue to motivate writers, even those writers who have never experienced war. War has just about everything that makes a dramatic story, or in Heller's case, a comic story. There's conflict and death, certainly, but also suspense, love, desperation, poignancy, fear, hope, heroism. Put war in the background of almost any story and you get a more powerful story. Take Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See as one example.

So every war is a literary war. But I agree with Cheever. The Great War produced great literature.

Books that have known passion

A book is like a woman. She should leave your bed with her hair tangled and her clothes on backward. A book without creases is a book that has never known passion,

Terri-Lynne DeFino, The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses)

Passion is hardly the only explanation for books with creases. Misuse is just as likely, if not more likely. Pages are dog-eared. Books are stored in damp places. Dogs chew on them. They are left face down for long periods. Dust jackets were not removed before the books are read. They are covered in dust.

Terri-Lynne DeFino

Yet the character in Terri-Lynne DeFino's The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (And Their Muses) does have a point. Books that have been read but don't look like it may have never known real passion.

Books with passionate readers are often books with passages underlined.

They have been read more than once — and show it.

They fall open to certain pages where favorite passages — or poems — have been read over and over again.

The covers show signs of having been carried around, taken from place to place.

The top of the spine indicates the book has been pulled down from a shelf repeatedly.

All this is particularly true of Bibles. A Bible that looks like it has never been opened probably hasn't been opened. One that has been read passionately over the years shows it on almost every page.

Look at your favorite books, the ones you would never part with. Chances are your passion for them is apparent just by looking at them.

Two for the price of one

Writers like to hang out with other writers — at writing retreats, at book fairs, at book festivals. So why not a retirement home just for writers? Terri-Lynne DeFino imagines that very thing in The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers (and Their Muses) (2018).

Alfonse Carducci, the most famous of the famous writers, enters the home as the novel begins and is given the best room in the place. He is dying and so doesn't expect to be there long.

Alfonse is as famous for his adventurous love life as he is for his books, and one of the facility's other residents is Olivia, a former lover. While he still has feelings for her, his real reason for holding onto life for as long as possible is Cecibel, who quite literally is two-faced. An accident destroyed half of her beautiful face, leaving her a monster on the other side, she thinks. She wears her hair long to cover that side of her face. She lives and works at the home, stopping in to see Alphonse each day.

Lacking the energy to write a book by themselves, Alfonse, Olivia and another writer compose alternate chapters in a novel about a love triangle, complicated when another man and another woman enter the picture. And so we get to read their novel even as we read Defino's.

Cecibel finds herself in a love triangle of her own. She feels drawn to the dying Alfonse even as Finley, another employee with a tragic history, falls in love with her.

And so readers get to enjoy two stories at the same time, each quite different yet each about the mystery of love and the difficult choices it requires of us.

First form, then freedom

The energy in Cummings's poems comes from the strict forms that seem to be barely containing their passionate subjects and images.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

E.E. Cummings

The poetry of E.E. Cummings isn't nearly as popular as it once was, although that is true of poetry in general. What people are most likely to notice about his poems is their lack of form — not just the absence of rhyme but also his words that run together or are spread out over a page, the lack of punctuation and capital letters and the seeming nonsense of so many of his word choices.

Yet Susan Cheever makes a valid point in her biography of the poet. The freedom of his verse sprang from his mastery of form. He knew very well how to write a standard poem — and often did. But once he had mastered form, he felt free to wander from form into new directions. It's sort of like moving into a new city. First you find your way around by traveling the main streets and highways. After that you explore, looking for short-cuts, more interesting ways of getting from here to there, less congested routes. Freedom follows form.

Cheever puts it this way. "Much of Cummings's poetry plays with form in the way that only a formalist can play — this was the whole idea behind modernism as he embraced it."

One can find evidence of this sort of thing in the work of other artists. James Joyce wrote The Dubliners before he wrote Ulyssses. The early paintings of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali show they knew very well how to paint women who looked like women — two eyes, two breasts, etc. After they had mastered form, however, they sought freedom.