The manners masquerade

Manners are masquerade, something we all learned while our mothers were trying to teach us to say "please" and "thank you." You don't have to mean it to say it.

Amor Towles plays with this idea in his impressive debut novel Rules of Civility (2011). Spanning the year 1938 in New York City, the story brings together three attractive young people looking ahead to a promising post-Depression future. Our narrator, Katey Kontent, grew up in a lower middle-class family in the city, while Eve has a more well-to-do family back in the Midwest. They work in a secretarial pool.

One night they meet Tinker Grey, handsome, well-tailored and well-mannered. Eve claims him as her own, even though Tinker appears to prefer Katey. Yet when they go out at night, it is always the three of them together. Then Eve is disfigured in a traffic accident while Tinker is driving. Out of guilt, he takes responsibility for her care and moves her into his apartment, while Katey becomes more distant.

What begins with the suggestion of a love triangle evolves into something else, and this something else relates to, of all things, 110 "Rules of Civility," which George Washington studied as a young man striving to make a success of himself in the world. Tinker, too, has studied these rules, and Katey comes to realize the rules hide a different Tinker Grey. (The book includes the 110 rules in an appendix.)

Towles writes with wit, subtlety and grace while revealing that Tinker is not alone in hiding a true self behind good manners.

Women's writing

So long as we hear about "women's writing" but not about "men's writing" — because the latter is assumed to be the norm — the balance is not just. The same signal of privilege and prejudice is reflected in the common use of the word feminism and the almost total absence of its natural counterpart, masculinism. I long for the day when neither word is necessary.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. Le Guin

I have long argued that to patronize is to discriminate. We all tend to patronize those we sense are in some way inferior — the very young, the very old, the infirm, etc. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, as in the case of veterans whom we honor for their service or our bosses whom we honor because they can fire us. But even this is a kind of discrimination, a setting apart of certain people.

The current administration in Washington seems committed to patronizing certain groups of Americans. What I find interesting is that most members of these groups seem to like being patronized.

The late Ursula K. Le Guin was smarter than that, as the above quotation from the very first page of Words Are My Matter reveals. As long as her books were lumped into "women's writing" instead of just writing in general, and as long as she was compared only with other female writers and not all writers, she sensed she was being patronized in its most negative sense.

Not being a female writer of fiction as Le Guin was, I am probably not as sensitive as she was to the discrimination that still exists in the literary world. Even so I have always avoided collections of stories by female writers and anthologies of writing exclusively by women. I have never wanted such books on my shelves. Nor did I ever review such books when they were sent as review copies. Yet I have countless books by women on those shelves and have reviewed countless books by women, not because they were written by women but because they are books that interest me and that I consider worth reading and reviewing, such as Le Guin's.

The hole in his memory

He was surprised by how well he knew the house, how perfectly it fitted the hole in his memory.

Sam Taylor, The Amnesiac

Is Sam Taylor's 2007 novel The Amnesiac brilliant, or is it a confused (and confusing) mess? I am not entirely sure, though I am inclined to go with the latter.

A young man named James Purdue can't remember a chunk of his life, and he passes up the chance to continue his relationship with a beautiful woman in the Netherlands to return to England to try to reclaim that part of his past. His pursuit of his past continues even after it becomes clear that his past might be best left forgotten. He knows, in part because of the way people treat him, that he must have done something terribly wrong, but he can't stop searching for answers.

This sounds like a more conventional psychological thriller, but Taylor has bigger ideas. He aims for art through surrealism and mystery that makes little sense in the real world. For example, some anonymous person hires James to remodel a house that seems vaguely familiar to him. Inside this house, sometimes hidden behind wallpaper, he finds clues to the forgotten part of his life. Meanwhile the omniscient narrator sometimes brings himself into the story with lines like, "Watching him, I couldn't help laughing." When this narrator finally reveals who he is, it only adds to the weirdness.

Taylor gives us some wonderful moments and some beautiful lines worth rereading. With a bit more realism amid all the surrealism, his novel might be a success.

Hooked on golf

Richard Armour's 1962 book Golf Is a Four-Letter Word might be seen as a long introduction to his doggerel about golf, which comes at the end and makes reading the first 80 pages worthwhile.

Not that the humorous memoir that makes up most of the book is not worth reading. It may not be as amusing today as it once was, yet readers will at least smile several times along the way. Armour tells about getting hooked on golf as a teenager and staying hooked despite never becoming accomplished at the game.

One line that made me smile is this one: "Putting on the carpet my wife didn't mind, except when we had guests and I kept asking them to move their feet."

Most of the book tells of his youthful efforts to master the game. While in college, he says, he would wear his golf clothes and carry his clubs to his classes so that he could get to the course without delay afterward. Noticing this, the college president asked him for golf lessons, even though the president was already a better golfer than Armour.

Yes, all this is fun, but the real fun comes at the end when Armour, who himself became a college professor, presents some of his best light verse about golf. It is only a small sampling, he confesses. "Since I write more light verse about golf than could ever be published (there being a limited market), our attic and cellar are filled with boxes and bales of the stuff, and there is little room left for clothes in our closets."

One need not be a golfer — I am not one — to enjoy Armour's verses. My favorite:

            The locker room's one

            Place at least, where a guy,

            When the round is done,

            Can improve his lie.

Modern classics

Nick Hornby

In an angry column Nick Hornby wrote for Believer magazine way back in August 2005, the novelist sounds off on the term "modern classic." His anger is not directed at the term itself but rather at a "pompous twit" he heard on the radio complaining about Money by Martin Amis being republished as a Penguin Modern Classic. How, the twit had asked indignantly, can a book less than 50 years old be considered a classic?

Hornby counters, quite reasonably, that "in this context the word 'classic' means simply, 'of the highest class.'" It would be nonsensical to insist that a Penguin Modern Classic be more than 50 years old. How could a book be both modern and a classic using the 50-year rule?

Classic is word that seems to mean different things in different contexts. A classic car, for example, simply means it is old. There seems to be no suggestion of quality. My first car was a 1955 Hudson. If I still had that car, and I wish I did, it would be considered a classic simply because it was more than 65 years old. Actually it was a pretty good car even if it wasn't a Jaguar.

A brand new symphony, meanwhile, might be called "classical music." It wouldn't be old and might not even be particularly good, but it would be considered classical because of the type of music it is.

Classic literature, as Hornby's twit argued, suggests both age and quality. A classic book is a book generally recognized as great years after its publication, whether or not it was recognized as great at the time it was published. It usually does take 50 years or more to know whether a book stands out as a classic or not. Most books are forgotten long before those 50 years are past. Books considered great at the time of publication may have nothing to say to readers a half century later.

So the phrase "modern classic" does imply a contradiction, sort of like describing someone as "an attractive ugly guy" or ordering a plate of "jumbo shrimp." Yet I agree with Hornby that it makes a useful term, a way of describing contemporary literature that already stands out above the rest and has a good chance of actually becoming a classic someday.

Hornby's diatribe is only a way of introducing his review of Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. He writes, "It's a beautiful, rich, unforgettable work of high seriousness, and you don't need to know that the book has already won the Pulitzer Prize to see that Robinson isn't messing around." I agree. This novel does qualify as a "modern classic," and may one day be recognized as a true classic. But who knows? We still have to wait a few years to know for sure.

From the window

With a bow to Rear Window and The Girl on the Train, A.J. Finn gives us a passable thriller in The Woman in the Window (2018)

Anna Fox spends her days watching her neighbors through her windows and watching old movies, including Rear Window. She also drinks too much and takes too many pills. A psychologist trained to help others with their mental and emotional problems, she is now a basket case herself. Since a traumatic accident, she is afraid to leave her house. She rents her basement to a younger man, but otherwise has little contact with the outside world other than those who regularly deliver her food, drugs, alcohol and whatever else she requires.

One day a new neighbor, Jane Russell, pays a visit, and not long after that she sees that same woman in the next-door house with a knife in her chest. The police don't believe Anna's story because of her obvious mental problems but especially because a different woman identifies herself as Jane Russell. Her husband, Alistair Russell, gets angry at Anna's spying, while their teenage son appears to know more than he is telling. Anna tries to enlist him as an ally. She has no one else to turn to.

Finn keeps the tension building, first gradually, then with heart-pounding speed. Every few pages he reveals a new shocking surprise. The story has a manufactured feel to it, yet that doesn't make it any easier to put down.

Committing genre

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) had a chip on her shoulder, as becomes evident in her late-in-life collection of essays, speeches and reviews Words Are My Matter (2016).

Regarded as one of the best writers in the science fiction/fantasy genre, Le Guin's beef was getting stuck in that particular box and, worse, that that box has never been highly regarded in literary circles. The better literary publications and literary critics don't give much attention to fantasy and science fiction. Le Guin thought she deserved better, and she was probably right.

"The word genre came to imply something less, something inferior, and came to be commonly misused, not as a description, but as a negative value judgment," she said in a speech she gave in Seattle in 2004. "Most people now understand 'genre' to be an inferior form of fiction, defined by a label, while realistic fictions are simply called novels or literature."

She puts it more succinctly and sarcastically in an essay called "Le Guin's Hypothesis," "So. Literature is the serious stuff you have to read in college, and genre is what you read for pleasure, which is guilty." Similar comments pop up here and there throughout the book.

In that Seattle speech she said, "Some 'literary' novelists have performed amazing contortions to preserve their pure name from the faintest taint of genre pollution." In her book reviews she named names, including the likes of Margaret Atwood. Jose Saramago and Jeanette Winterson. About the latter, she complained, "Winterson is trying to keep her credits as a 'literary' writer even as she openly commits genre" in The Stone Gods. She lets H.G. Wells off the hook because he wrote his classic stories like The Time Machine before there even was a genre.

It is not clear whether Le Guin was really critical of those who "commit genre" without ever getting charged with the crime or simply envious of them. She got stuck in the genre ghetto and was never able to escape.

Don't worry about grammar

One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and in reading or one does not. What Sophomore English does (or tries to do) is little more than naming of parts.

Stephen King, On Writing

Stephen King is right. We don't learn grammar in school. We learn it before we even get to school. We may not know an adjective from an adverb or what past participle means (I still don't), but if we are raised in a home where reasonably good grammar was spoken and if we've watched Sesame Street and other television programs, then we already use reasonably good grammar. One thing small children can do better than adults is learn a language.

People complain that they have never had to use the algebra and geometry they had to learn in high school. Well most of us never use the grammar we had to learn in high school either. That's because, as King says, what we learned was mostly the "naming of parts," the vocabulary. And one doesn't need to know the vocabulary of grammar to use good grammar, either in speech or in writing. You don't need to know what the phrase "the object of the preposition" means to use prepositions correctly.

Yes, we may sometimes think back to old lessons about whether we should say me or I, or who or whom. Yet these are minor problems. The grammar most people use most of the time is just fine. Spelling can be a big problem. So can using one word when we actually mean another. But grammar? We learned that before we were in the first grade, or we will never learn it.

That's why King devotes so little space to grammar in his book of advice for writers. His advice just boils down to this: Don't worry about it.

Out of the past

Events from the past returning to haunt the present is certainly a familiar theme in fiction, and British writer Andrew Taylor runs it into the ground in his 2006 novel A Stain on the Silence.

James, a happily married, moderately happy man, knows he's in trouble when he gets a call from a woman who calls him Jamie. The only person who has ever called him Jamie is Lily Murthington, the stepmother of Carlo, his best friend during his teenage years. A British version of Mrs. Robinson, Lily had seduced James during his visits to the Murthington home.

Now dying, Lily summons James to her bedside to tell him his daughter needs his help. James didn't know he had a daughter. Kate, now pregnant herself, is in hiding, both from the police, whom she fears may suspect her of killing her boyfriend, and from Carlo, whom she fears wants to kill her.

Meanwhile, his wife leaves him, suspecting Kate of being his young lover. James considers the truth — and Lily and Kate are only part of it — even more damaging than the suspicion of an affair. Yet, as in most TV situation comedies, the truth would actually be the quickest way to resolve the problems. The lies and the deceits about both what happened in the past and what is happening in the present multiply until Taylor manages to get everything royally confused, at least in the reader's mind.

I wanted to like A Stain on the Silence, and sometimes I did, but over all it proves a disappointment.

Fools in Bath

A decade or so after Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool ends, his Everybody's Fool (2016) begins. Sequels don't come any better.

If the title character in the earlier novel was Sully, an aging working man who discovers his place in the world is more important to more people than he ever realized, the title character this time has several contenders, for there are many fools here, but "everybody's fool" would seem to best describe Doug Raymer. the incompetent young police officer in the first book who by now has become the incompetent chief of police. He campaigned for the office with the slogan "We're not happy until you're not happy," yet was chosen anyway, suggesting perhaps that everybody's a fool in Bath, N.Y.

That the police department operates with any efficiency at all is due to Charice, his young, black dispatcher, on whom Raymer has a crush even as he still mourns for Becka, his wife who died in a fall down a flight of stairs while hurrying to run away with another man. His only clue to the identity of that man is a garage-door opener. Finding which door that device opens distracts the chief from his duties, even as those duties escalate with a series of crimes in normally placid Bath. One of those crimes, digging up a judge's grave in the middle of the night, is committed by Raymer himself, with the help of Sully and Carl Roebuck, the playboy builder whose business hangs by a thread.

Sully now has a serious heart problem and is given just a year or two to live, at most. Other characters, some of them reprising roles from the earlier novel, include Rub Squeers, a simple-minded man who only wishes to be Sully's best friend; Jerome, Charice's hot-shot brother who turns out to have even bigger problems than Raymer; Ruth, the woman who operates the local diner and whose not-so-secret affair with Sully is now on hold; Zack, her seemingly worthless husband who may actually be worth more than she realizes; and Roy Purdy, their son-in-law, who constantly updates his grudge list of those upon whom he plans violent revenge.

Russo keeps his story moving spritely, humor and pathos alternating and sometimes striking the heart at the same time. These novels are as pleasurable as any one is likely to find. You'd be a fool not to read them both, preferably in order.

Fun with place names

Bill Bryson has a lot of fun with place names in his book Made in America. But then, who hasn't had fun with place names? Many of us have probably picked up a state map or a road atlas, at least back in the day when people still used maps and atlases when they traveled, and laughed at some of the places we found. On the two pages of a Florida atlas I have open before me now I find places called Two Egg, Dogtown, Sink Creek and Welcome Church Road.

Bryson does better with the likes of Who'd A Thought It, Ala.; Greasy Corner, Ark.; What Cheer, Iowa;  Looneyville, Texas; Knockemstiff, Ohio; Tightwad, Mo.; Wynot, Neb.; East Due West, S.C.; Superior Bottom, W.Va.; and Embarrass, Wisc., among many others. Both Ohio and Texas have a Lickskillet. Bryson errs when he refers to Two Egg, Fla., as Two Eggs. Two Eggs might make more sense, but what do place names and their spellings (or their pronunciations) have to do with sense?

Many odd place names in America, Bryson tells us, simply result from Americanizing names from other languages. The Indian name Hopoakan was turned into Hoboken. The Dutch Vlachte Bosch and Thynevly became Flatbush and Tenafly. Wabash sprang for the Indian word Ouabasche and Peoria from Peouarea. Similarly, Ouisconsing turned into Wisconsin, while Ouaouiatonon somehow became Iowa.

Chicago got its name from an Indian word meaning "place that stinks of onions," while in French Baton Rouge means simply "red stake."

In many places across the country it is easy to tells outsiders by the way they pronounce the town's name. Locals pronounce Fries, Va., as "freeze." Peru, Ind., is "pee-roo," Beatrice, Neb., is ""be-at-riss," Pompeii, Mich., is "pom-pay-eye," Pierre, S.D., is "peer."

If you want to be the one laughing instead of the one laughed at, perhaps you should just stay home and look at maps.

Erasing the past

The clock on the dashboard was an hour behind. They had never fixed it for daylight savings. Loo reached forward and pushed the buttons and spun the dial, moving the numbers out of the past and into the present.  In that moment, it seemed like the most important thing she'd ever done.

Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

Spinning the dial, moving the numbers out of the past and into the present is essentially what Hannah Tinti's amazing 2017 novel The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is all about.

Loo Hawley is the daughter of a badly scarred man with a mysterious past. She doesn't remember her mother, who drowned also mysteriously. Samuel Hawley has lived a violent criminal life that involved much bloodshed, most of it his own. He has been shot repeatedly, and Tinti tells a series of terrific stories about how he got each of his wounds. Along the way he met Lily. They got married and had a daughter, Louise, whom they called Loo.

Now in middle age, Samuel tries hard to be an honest citizen and a good father, but his past threatens to catch up with him. Meanwhile Loo snoops, studies and explores while attempting to discover and, at the same time, erase her father's past. 

Tinti keeps her story moving, supplying rich characters and memorable episodes. There is much to admire here.

On trial again

Anyone who has read Scott Turow's classic courtroom thriller Presumed Innocent (1987) should read the 2010 sequel, Innocent, for the rest of the story. Yet amazingly one need not read the first novel first, even though  Innocent picks up the story two decades later. Somehow Turow manages to refer back to the events of the earlier novel repeatedly, yet without disclosing the earlier book's surprise ending. So reading the novels in order may not be a requirement, but it certainly is a good idea.

Innocent begins with the death of Rusty Sabich's wife, Barbara. Unfortunately for him, he waits 24 hours before reporting the death, something a candidate for the state supreme court should know better than do. That delay suggests an apparent death from natural causes might be something else.

The county prosecutor is the same Tommy Molto who prosecuted Rusty 22 years before for the murder of his mistress. Rusty was found not guilty in that trial, but Tommy has never believed the verdict. Now he has a second chance to put his nemesis behind bars. We know he's wrong again — the title tells us that much — but once again the truth of what really happened comes as a shock at the end of a long, probably too long, novel.

To complicate Rusty's situation, he is guilty of a second affair, this time with Anna, his former law clerk. (Funny how each time he has an affair, he gets charged with murder.) Then, after Rusty has the good sense to break up with her, Anna and his son, Nat, become lovers. Barbara dies the night after Nat and Anna come to the house for dinner.

Once again Rusty is defended by Sandy Stern, the brilliant defense attorney who saved him in his first murder trial, but Sandy is now dying of cancer. I find it amazing that after so many years the names of Rusty Sabich, Sandy Stern and Tommy Molto still sound familiar. That speaks to the power of the first book. The second comes close to that level of intensity.

Pirate treasure

Jama knew he had to kill her. She knew his name. Except he'd like to get to know her better first.

Elmore Leonard, Djibouti

Djibouti (2010), written by Elmore Leonard when he was in his mid-80s near the end of a long and productive life (he died in 2013), may not be his most compelling novel, yet it is still a marvel. Leonard always carefully researched his novels, and he seems to know Djibouti as well as he knows Detroit, Miami Beach and Hollywood in so many other books. This story is about a documentary filmmaker in Djibouti, and it has the realism of a good documentary film with the pace and tension of a thriller.

Dara Barr plans to make a film about the pirates preying on merchant ships around the Horn of Africa and holding them for huge ransoms. But to get the footage she needs for her film, she must get close to the action and to the pirates themselves. Yet the pirates seem almost tame in comparison with some of the other characters in the novel.

There's Harry, for instance, a wealthy American auditioning Helene to become his next wife. His objective, other than Helene, heavy drinking and shooting guns, is to blow up a ship laden with liquified natural gas just to see what happens.

Then there's James Russell, an American who changed his name to Jama Raisuli and became a terrorist because he likes killing people. Now he's out to kill anyone who knows his real name, including Dara. Sometimes he tells people his name just to have an excuse to kill them. And he, too, wants to blow up that ship just for the fun of it.

This is wild stuff, sometimes confusing, told by Leonard in brief and vivid scenes. sort of like the cuts in a film.