Bill Bryson's mood swings

The first note I wrote on the 3x5 card I used as a bookmark for Bill Bryson's The Road to Little Little Dribbling refers to the line "vital ugliness of our age" at the bottom of page 23. The last one mentions the phrase "the world's largest park" on page 376. Both lines refer to Great Britain, Bryson's adopted home (he was born in Iowa) and the subject of his book.

The extremes of the two phrases, from "vital ugliness" to "world's largest park," nicely summarize the entire book, which is a roller coaster of extremes in moods and impressions. On one page he marvels at how wonderful, how beautiful, how amazing Britain and its people are. On the next he rants about all the ugliness and stupidity he encounters. He remarks several times about getting older, and in fact he writes like a sentimental old man one minute, a grouchy old man the next. I have read several Bill Bryson books, but I don't recall any in which he is so angry or cruel (imaging all sorts of violence against those who annoy him) or so generous in his praise.

The book, published in 2015, is something of a followup to an earlier one, Notes from a Small Island. Rather than retrace his steps from that book, he follows a different route on his tour of Great Britain, although returning to a few of the same places. This time he takes a winding road more or less following what he calls The Bryson Line, or the longest straight line one can draw on a map of Great Britain, from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath. Nowhere on his map is Little Dribbling, but apparently it sounded better than Cape Wrath.

In his positive moods, Bryson writes such things as this: London "is centuries of happy accidents." A drive through Britain "is just miles of accidental loveliness." The whole country is "casually strewn with glory." He mentions more than once how many of the world's greatest works of literature and greatest scientific discoveries have come from this small island.

As in his other books, Bryson is at his best when off on a tangent. He digs into the history of places he visits and has a way of making that history fascinating in a manner your high school history teacher never possessed. Sometimes his tangents appear, at least at first, to have nothing at all to do with his travels, yet they can be more interesting than his main subject.

Three times he tells of moments that changed his life. One was a bomb dropped by the Germans during the war, long before he even came to the country. Another was a poster he saw that led him to Great Britain and to the woman he married there. Another was finding two books in the London Library. Reflecting on a life gone by and how one got from there to here may be another trait Bryson shares with other senior citizens. He is now 66 and should have a few more journeys to take and books to write.

Literature in a game of tag

Francine Prose's Mister Monkey reads like a game of tag, one character carrying one chapter, then tapping another character on the shoulder to take over the story until tagging the next. One might be tempted to call this a collection of related short stories except that there really is one story here, even though, as with most novels, there are a number of subplots. In this case, the subplots are sequential. Add them up and you get the plot.

I know this sounds like a major league bore, yet somehow Prose pulls it off. Each of the 11 chapters proves absorbing, as does the novel as a whole.

A popular, if overrated, children's book called Mister Monkey has been adapted for a stage musical, now being presented off -Broadway. Tickets sell well, mostly on the reputation of the book, but a little boy in the audience in the opening chapter seems to speak for everyone, cast included, when he says loud enough for everyone in the theater to hear: "Grandpa, are you interested in this?"

Rather than turn this into comedy, which would have been too easy, Prose turns it into serious literature, making numerous references throughout her novel to the likes of Anton Chekhov, J.D. Salinger and Leo Tolstoy. The passages she mentions speak of failure, sacrifice, devotion and grace, themes that echo through her own story. The author of the children's book had meant it to atone for his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, yet somehow through changes made by his publisher and then the theater adaptation, all that has been lost. Actors see their careers going nowhere. A grandfather's love for his grandson now seems the only thing giving his life purpose. A waiter who gets free tickets as tips actually loves seeing the play. The director secretly loves an actress, as does the boy playing the monkey and that waiter. A nurse who moonlights on stage plays the villain in the play but off-stage plays the hero.

Most of us can remember how much fun we once had playing tag. Francine Prose shows us how much fun tag can be even while sitting in our easy chair with a book in our hands.

Snubbing the queen

It is hard to imagine a modern writer snubbing the President of the United States in this way.

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life

The above line from Claire Tomalin's 2011 biography of Charles Dickens seems laughable just a few years later in the age of Donald Trump, when writers and artists of all sorts, professional athletes and people of all walks of life regularly snub the president of the United States. Even members of Congress threaten to boycott the State of the Union address. The old days of honoring the office even if you don't like the person holding that office seem to be over, although I'm not sure this trend didn't begin earlier, perhaps with George W. Bush or even Richard Nixon. Republican presidents haven't been honored as much as Democratic presidents for some now, it seems to me. Never mind that the voters keep electing them.

Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens

The president Dickens snubbed was John Tyler, who invited the great English writer to the White House for dinner while he stopped in Washington during his tour of the United States in 1842. Dickens decided "he had nothing of interest to say or ask" and so declined the invitation. Even then Dickens's reputation was greater than that of Tyler's, so perhaps the author felt he was in a position to snub a mere president.

Yet a decade later Dickens snubbed Queen Victoria not once but twice when she asked to meet with him, "a considerable breach of etiquette," Tomalin writes, for in Great Britain a monarch's request is considered a command. Amazingly, Victoria did not seem to take offense at the refusal but had her secretary send the writer a letter of congratulations for something he had written. True, Dickens never became Sir Charles Dickens, although knighthood does not seem to have been bestowed then as often as it is today, when almost any British subject who excels at almost anything is likely to be made a knight.

Years later, near the end of his life, Dickens did finally meet with Victoria at Buckingham Palace, properly standing during the long interview when the queen sat. Perhaps he was bumbled by that time by age and illness. He was, after all, just a writer. She was the queen of England.

History as a rough draft

So this is the thing about time travel that means anyone with even the slightest bit of common sense would stay away from it. Because if you went back in time, the history that made you what you are would not have happened yet. And you would revert. You would become someone else.

Dexter Palmer, Version Control

The Time Traveler's Wife is the title of another book. In Dexter Palmer's brilliant Version Control, it is the wife who steps into the time machine made by her physicist husband. But Philip objects to the term time machine. He prefers to call it a causality violation device, and his experiments involve placing a robot inside and using instruments to try to measure movement through time. The results prove inconclusive.

The true focus of Palmer's novel is not Philip, however, but his lonely wife, Rebecca, who feels shut out of the part of his life, his lab, that occupies most of his time and attention. It is, she realizes too late, his one true love. Things really turn interesting when Rebecca, after catching her husband in bed with his lab assistant, gets drunk and, as an act of vengeance or just frustration, spends a few moments in his CVD. She is unaware that anything has changed, yet everything has changed. Readers will rush ahead eagerly to discover what will happen when she steps into it again, as we know she will eventually.

The story occurs just a few years in the future. We already have self-driving cars, but in this future such cars are commonplace, and one of them lies at the novel's turning point.   Rebecca can step into a clothing store and, thanks to cameras and computers, dresses that will fit her perfectly are ready to be shown to her on a screen by the time she reaches the counter. No changing room is necessary. The president of the United States, or at least computer simulations of the president, can pop up on screens in any home or business at any time and join in the conversation. The only people who still use Facebook live in retirement homes.

Palmer fills Version Control with fascinating ideas about the future, about time travel, about science fiction (he calls it "a fantasy in which science always works"), about history (perhaps, he suggests, this is only a rough draft) and about human relationships. At nearly 500 pages, it seems too long, but what should he have left out?

Quality of attention

I need not retract what I said last time about writers reading their own work in public, but I do need to amend it. I said Friday that the writers I heard read from their work at Writers in Paradise events at Eckard College in St. Petersburg shouldn't give up their day jobs. There were good readers among them, but none of their readings measured up to what they wrote, Andre Dubus III coming the closest to being an exception.

Russell Banks

Then on Saturday night, the finale of the week-long conference, Russell Banks read two of his short stories. Here was someone who, like Charles Dickens, might actually be able to charge admission for reading his work. Partly this was true because of the strength of his stories. "Outer Banks" tells of a retired couple, living in their RV as they travel the country, stopping to bury their dog that died along the way. In "Transplant," Banks writes about a middle-aged man recovering from a heart transplant who consents to meeting the young widow of the man whose sudden death gave him a new heart and a new life.

These stories were simple, powerful and moving, yet the fiction was enhanced by the author's reading, rather than weakened as in the case of some of the other writers I heard last week.

Later Banks responded to questions posed by a fellow writer, Les Standiford, and by members of the audience. He talked about living in St. Petersburg in his early 20s, how he was fired from his job as a department store window dresser and how he fell in love with literature at the public library, thus lighting the spark that made him a writer.

Later he spoke about the "quality of attention," a phrase he said he learned from the poet Ezra Pound. Writers, he said, need to be more attentive, more honest and more intelligent in their work than at other times of their lives. "No other aspect of life requires the same quality of attention," he said.

To some extent, this is true of anyone in any field of endeavor. While trying to make it as a writer, Banks worked as a plumber. To become a successful plumber, he would have had to be more attentive, more honest and more intelligent in that work than in other parts of his life. That is how one succeeds in anything.

Yet still I see Banks's point. Writers, at least the best writers, exhibit an attention to detail, an honesty and an intelligence that shines through in their work. All three were evident in the two stories Banks read Saturday night.

Reading what they write

If money was the basic reason for the reading tours, something else kept him always eager to continue with them. Whatever the physical and emotional strain, his audiences nourished his spirit.

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life

I recall hearing someone say that songwriters can interpret their own songs better than anyone else. This must often be true. People like Willie Nelson and John Denver began their musical careers writing songs for others, then became big stars when they started singing their own songs in public. But just because you can write a song doesn't mean you can sing.

Tim Dorsey

This came to mind this week while listening to five writers read from their work at the Writers in Paradise nightly public readings in St. Petersburg, Fla. Clearly just because you can write a good story doesn't mean you can read it in public.

Comic novelist Tim Dorsey succeeded mainly because his material was so funny. He admitted he doesn't often read to audiences, and it showed. Yet he has an engaging personality that carried through into his reading.

Crime novelist Laura Lippman gave two short readings. The first, an excerpt from her upcoming novel Sunburn, was unremarkable. She read too fast, and it sounded like she was reading a story rather than telling a story. Much better was a first-person piece of nonfiction about getting called to the principal's office at her daughter's school. Like Dorsey's reading, this was good because it was funny, but it was also good because it was true and personal.

For the same reason Andre Dubus III did well on Thursday night. He read an essay about illegally having a rifle in his New York City apartment as a young man and the surprising consequences. His tale was totally captivating even if, like Lippman, his pacing wasn't the best.

Cathie Pelletier

Cathie Pelletier read from her novel The One-Way Bridge. Although she is often known as a comic novelist, the excerpt was about a character's memories of Vietnam and was anything but comic. It was effective because it was good, not because the author was a particularly good reader.

The same was true of Lan Samantha Chang, who read from a novella she has yet to finish. It was about a young Chinese woman who, against her better judgment, accepts a ride from a smiling young American.

For these writers and the others who are reading in St. Pete this week, their reward is an attentive audience and the opportunity to sell a few books. I bought Pelletier's novel and enjoyed my chat with her. (She said she lives in Maine within a mile of the Canadian border and was delayed by the weather getting to Florida in time for her reading.) Some of them might read well enough to record their own works for sale, although probably not as well as professional actor would do.

Certainly none of them could do what Charles Dickens did. Because of his reputation as a novelist and his gift for public performance, he earned a significant amount of money with his reading tours. Near the end of his life he read more than he wrote and was a huge success, even though the strain probably contributed to his early death.

Whatever their skill as readers, I enjoy hearing writers, especially those I admire, read from their work. I hope that, as Claire Tomalin says of Dickens, it nourishes their spirit. It certainly nourishes mine.

The life of Charles Dickens

Leaving out the women in Dickens's life made appreciation easier.

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life

Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man, but he had one ordinary fault: He always thought he was right and everybody else was wrong. He could be blind to his own failings, and as Claire Tomalin suggests near the end of her biography of the great Victorian writer, those failings often had to do with women.

He kept his wife, Catherine, almost constantly pregnant, and after she had given birth to 10 children, most of whom (especially the sons) he didn't want, he abandoned her and took up with an actress, Ellen Ternan. Even while still living with Catherine he preferred the company of her sisters, one of whom managed his household affairs for the rest of his life. When another sister died young, he was so heartbroken he openly declared he wanted someday to be buried beside her.

Dickens had other failings as well. He would break contracts and friendships while blaming the other party. If a friend stayed friends with his former friends (or his wife) he no longer considered them his friends. He sent his sons, at a young age, to faraway places, including India and Australia, seemingly just to be rid of them. Yet he was not altogether blind to his sins, for he once said he saw himself in all of his characters, the bad ones as well as the noble ones.

For all his weaknesses, Dickens worked for good to an amazing degree. In his fiction he campaigned on behalf of orphans, child workers, fallen women, the poor and the sick. Social betterment was also his goal as a journalist and as a citizen. For several years, with the help of a wealthy donor, he ran a home to rehabilitate young prostitutes.

Except for his youngest son, who became a successful lawyer, his many sons proved to be failures. For all his impatience with them, Dickens paid their debts and tried to find jobs for them. He also supported his wife and her sisters, his daughters, Ellen Ternan and her sisters and various servants besides. That he worked so hard as a novelist, as a journalist and as a public speaker, giving readings of his work, had to do not just with his personality but also with his need to pay his bills.

Tomalin's book, published in 2011 in time for the bicentennial of Dickens's birth in 2012, covers in detail each of the author's major books, most of which were serialized in magazines, including his own magazines. She writes of his extraordinary friendships, including with Wilkie Collins and many other major literary figures of the time, his love of the theater (he could have been a successful actor had not writing proved more lucrative), his annual Christmas stories, his travels (including two trips to the United States) and the many other aspects of his short but full life.

Clearly, Tomalin admires him greatly, especially when she can ignore the women.

Book power

Never underestimate the power of a good book.

Connie Willis, Crosstalk

It is the real power of a book — not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself.

Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer

That books, at least some books, exert power has long been known. Consider the impact of the Torah, the Christian Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Harriet Beecher Stowe and many others down through the centuries. But what Connie Willis and Matthew Pearl suggest, through characters in their novels, is that even lesser books by lesser authors hold power over those who read them. Willis specifies “good book,” but almost any book can be thought good by somebody. Thus, almost any book can hold power over someone.

How does this power rexert itself? Let us count the ways.

1. The power to change

Changing anyone’s mind about anything is never easy. Most sermons, lectures and political speeches change nobody’s mind, perhaps because changing minds is so clearly their intent. We all tend to resist attempts to change our minds. Books, however, are more subtle.

Consider To Kill a Mockingbird. There is no way to know how many minds have been impacted by this story about children growing up in the Deep South in the middle of the 20th Century. Perhaps everyone who has read the novel, and that includes millions, has somehow had a change of heart about race, justice, mental illness or whatever as a result.

2. The power to entertain

Most people read books for entertainment. We’re looking for a good time. Thus, those writers who entertain readers sell more books than those who don’t, giving them economic power, if nothing else. But entertainers, from Bob Hope to Madonna to John Grisham, also feel the power of holding a large audience in their hands, however briefly.

3. The power to motivate

Self-help books don’t always work. Even so, many of us sometimes read them to try to lose weight, do a better job of raising our children, feel better or whatever. Just buying or borrowing the book shows motivation. When we’re lucky, reading it will actually motivate us enough to improve whatever needs improving.

4. The power to educate

I am not convinced textbooks are the most educational books around. They have the advantage of packing a lot of information between two covers, but they usually aren’t that interesting. We read them only because we have to in order to get passing grades. We may be more likely to learn from those books we read because we want to learn more about a particular subject, books we choose rather than books chosen for us.

5. The power to inspire

I just realized that to illustrate this point I need only point to the two quotations at the top of this blog post. Both were found in books, and together they inspired these ideas about the power of books.  The ideas contained in books inspire other ideas, which can  result in other books or any number of other kinds of creative actions.

Protecting language

In the United States, the term language police is just a metaphor for those who unofficially try to enforce political correctness. In Quebec, however, there is actually a government agency charged with protecting the French language, which mostly means limiting the spread and influence of English within the province.

Even though the former French colony was ceded to England in 1763 — that’s more than 250 years ago — and is a province in Canada, a member of the British Commonwealth, Quebec continues to have French as its official language. The language laws are intended to keep it that way. Last month a new law passed, by a vote of 111-0, telling merchants to greet customers by saying “Bonjour” rather than “Bonjour hi,” which is considered a little bit too bilingual for some in the province. Merchants who want to sell their goods to English-speaking tourists would prefer more leeway in how they address customers.

I’ve noticed when driving in Ontario that road signs are bilingual, both English and French. In Quebec, however, they are in French alone. Most other signs are in French only as well, although English is permitted as long as it is kept to the equivalent of fine print.

The concern about protecting the French language is understandable, at least up to a point. In Ireland, the battle to preserve Gaelic has been all but lost. In many other nations native languages have been lost, or nearly so. There are those in parts of California, Texas, Florida and other states who worry that English could give way to Spanish.

Because of movies, popular music and especially the web and social media, it is impossible to ban all English usage from Quebec. Most conversations, especially among the young, usually involves many English words scattered among the French. In many cases, English words win acceptance simply because there is no French equivalent

Indeed, the English language includes a great many French words that have been accepted over the centuries until they seem like good English words. History shows that all attempts to guard the integrity of English from foreign influence (or from slang) have been unsuccessful. There really is no way to protect a language in the way the most diehard Quebecers desire.

Language evolves, changing with time and circumstances and the people who speak it. Laws may slow the change but will be unable to stop it.

Good adjectives gone bland

Philip listened to her stories with rapt attention. “That was interesting,” he’d say (and Rebecca was thinking that on their second date, which she was already taking as a given, she’d gift him with a thesaurus as a well-meant tease).

Dexter Palmer, Version Control

In Dexter Palmer’s novel, Philip is a brainy, socially awkward scientist who, however complex his work may be, simplifies his conversation through the use of a single adjective, good for all occasions: interesting. It grates on Rebecca, but she marries him anyway.

In truth, many of us are like that. We tend to overwork a single adjective until it becomes meaningless. Lately I’ve noticed restaurant servers, store clerks and others using the word perfect as their standard response to everything. I fail to see how an order for a meatball sub can be perfect, or any more perfect than an order for a grilled cheese sandwich.

This reminds me of when we were on a cruise ship , and at dinner there would be just three or four entree choices. Around a table of eight people or so, each entree would be selected by someone. Yet to each order the well-mannered waiter would say, “Excellent choice.” That might have been flattering at a table for two, but under the circumstances it seemed blatantly phony. Any adjective, even when it is accurate and sincerely used, loses meaning when it is overused.

When someone asks you how you are, how do you reply? Most of us say “Fine” or some other standard, one-word response. We all know it means nothing, but it does help get the conversation started.

Ernest Hemingway used relatively few adjectives in his work, but you may notice that the word nice, among the blandest of adjectives, shows up frequently in some of his books. I've seen it argued that this overworked word actually shows Hemingway’s skill as a writer, but it seems just as likely that he, like the character Philip in Dexter Palmer’s novel, simply didn’t want to hunt for the most appropriate adjective, so just used an all-purpose word so he could move on to the verbs and nouns that interested him.

My own overworked adjectives seem to be wonderful and very good. Two weeks ago my wife called me on saying “very good” in a conversation with a medical provider about why my insurance company hadn’t paid anything toward a hospital bill. It seemed that at the end of a year in which I had faced a mountain of medical bills, I still hadn’t met my deductible for the year. Very good? Obviously meaningless.

Magic in a name

A young woman from Kathmandu was a guest in our home last summer.

My in-laws lived for a time in Kuala Lumpur.

In 2005 I stayed two nights in a Killarney hotel.

Each of those statements is true, and each is unremarkable but for the cities mentioned, which for some of us have a bit of magic in their names. Thanks to movies (think Casablanca), literature (think The Snows of Kilimanjaro), songs (think It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary) and travel articles and brochures (think Honolulu and Cozumel), certain place names just sound more exotic, more romantic, more adventuresome than others.

It also helps to have three or more syllables. If you had your choice of going to either Tampa or Tallahassee and knew absolutely nothing about either city, you would probably choose Tallahassee just because it sounds like more fun. You might also choose Chattanooga before Nashville. Paris, among the most magical of all cities, is often called Gay Paree perhaps to give it that third syllable.

Here are some other places in the world that sound a bit exotic: Timbuktu, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Tripoli, Algiers, Kyoto, Bangalore, Singapore, Rangoon, Mandalay, Samoa, Rio de Janeiro, Vienna, Valencia, Marseille, Palermo, Lincolnshire, Wells-next-the-Sea, Mexicali, Guadalajara, Alcapulco. You can probably think of others.

My friend from Nepal doesn't seem to find anything magical in the word Kathmandu. It's just her home town. So the romance to be found in a place name may also depend upon how far away it is. I'm from Ohio, so Cuyahoga Falls don't sound that exciting to me, but if you live in Italy or Japan you may think differently. Most of the U.S. towns that sound a bit exotic to me are relatively far away, such as Albuquerque, Pasadena, Santa Rosa and Petaluma.

A little stone house in Charlevoix, Mich., built by Earl Young.

An exception for me are certain towns in Michigan. During my childhood one set of grandparents lived briefly in Houghton Lake and I would hear them mention towns in the northern part of the state that somehow sounded alluring to me. Also, as a teenager I listened to a Detroit radio station that frequently mentioned towns from around the state. And so even today the sound of places like Cheboygan, Charlevoix and Bad Axe set off a smidgen of excitement in me.

I have vacationed twice in Charlevoix in the past five years, and partly because of the many stone  "Hobbit houses" designed by Earl Young in that community, I can attest that sometimes places actually live up to the magic promised by their names.

Fictional heroes, real villains

Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination abound even more than half a century after the fact. By contrast, the Lincoln assassination seems cut and dried. John Wilkes Booth did it, with a little help from his friends. But novelist Timothy L. O'Brien imagines a conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln as wild and outlandish as any of those invented to explain the John F. Kennedy assassination in The Lincoln Conspiracy (2012).

O'Brien's hero is Temple McFadden, a tall police detective with a bad leg whose cane is his weapon of choice. During a violent encounter at the Washington railroad station soon after the assassination, Temple recovers two diaries someone is willing to kill for and, he soon discovers, he may have to die for. One diary, written partly in code, is that of John Wilkes Booth. The other is that of Mary Todd Lincoln, the dead president's widow. Temple resolves to hide the diaries until he can uncover what makes them so important.

Trying to claim them are Allan Pinkerton, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and, the most ruthless of all, Union spy Lafayette Baker, all real individuals. Mrs. Lincoln, her son Robert and Sojourner Truth are among other real people with important supporting roles in the story.

On Temple's side are his wife, Fiona, one of the first female doctors in the country and a woman as resourceful as her husband, and Augustus, a former slave who is his right-hand man and very able in spite of his drug addiction. Temple himself has a gambling addiction, so it falls to Fiona, who appears to be perfect, to keep them straight.

In the early going of this novel, I was smitten. I wondered if O'Brien had written a second Temple McFadden novel yet. By the end, I didn't care, for I had no intention of reading it. The promising beginning of this historical thriller turns increasingly preposterous and disappoints in the end.

The company of books

When I really wanted company I read a book, and I was thankful for the little public library.

Sharyn McCrumb, Prayers the Devil Answers

The narrator in Sharyn McCrumb's novel is an introvert, a woman with no friends who feels uncomfortable whenever she's in a situation where small talk is required. Books, she tells herself, are all the company she needs. I know the feeling.

Peter Dinklage and Bobby Cannavale in The Station Agent.

I am reminded of a wonderful independent film called The Station Agent in which a dwarf named Finbar (played by Peter Dinklage) inherits an abandoned railroad station. A train enthusiast, he views this as a perfect place to sit and watch the occasional train go by while reading books about trains. He, too, is an introvert.

Trouble comes in the form of Joe (Bobby Cannavale), who is operating a nearby food truck for his ailing father. Joe is an extreme extrovert who constantly needs other people to talk with, but except for the occasional customer, Fin is the only one around. And Fin prefers the company of his books.

As an introvert, I love how the movie portrays the introvert as the strong one and the extrovert as the needy one. By the way, the town where this story takes place has a "little public library," like the one McCrumb mentions, where Fin meets a young librarian (Michelle Williams) with a problem. Once again, he gets to be the strong one.

In real life this is not always true, but I've found it to be true more often than you might think.

Changing the ending

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the detective story, we have known that a good murder mystery can also be good literature. Even so we tend to forget, isolating mysteries into their own genre and their own sections of book stores and libraries. Once in a while someone like Carolyn Parkhurst comes along to remind us of what we already knew.

Her 2010 novel The Nobodies Album is a low-key murder mystery with literary aspirations (just as her previous novel The Dogs of Babel was a sci-fi/horror story with literary aspirations). The narrator and heroine is Octavia Frost, a successful novelist who is rethinking her career just as she is rethinking her life. The new book she is about to deliver to her publisher is actually a collection of revised endings to all of her previous books. Couldn't they have happier endings?

Her own life, for all her literary success, has been less than happy. Her husband and daughter died accidental deaths some years before, and for the past four four years she had been estranged from her son, Milo, now one of the country's most popular rock stars. He had read something in one of her novels that, for good reason, he took very personally.

It takes a murder to bring mother and son back together. Milo has been arrested for killing his girlfriend. He was intoxicated and remembers little about that night, but he is discovered with her blood all over him and no other person in the house.

Octavia doesn't see herself as an amateur sleuth and doesn't act like one. She is just a mother who doesn't believe her own son could do such a thing and so looks for any other possible explanation for what happened that night. Can this story, too, have a different ending than the one that seems so obvious?

This idea of changing endings replays again and again throughout the novel, including when an aging rock star talks about rerecording some of his biggest hits. Can you go back and change what has already taken place, or must an ending be changed before the ends comes?

In the end, The Nobodies Album succeeds better as a murder mystery than as a literary work, yet both attempts are hindered by Parkhurst's inclusion of the last chapters of Octavia Frost's novels as well as the proposed revisions. Some of these are interesting enough, but they all interrupt her story more than they contribute to it.