Another evil town

Entire towns that have turned as evil as any of the people who live in them is a familiar theme in fiction, and David Downie resurrects it in good style with The Gardener of Eden (2019).

Downie's previous books, both fiction and nonfiction, have mostly been centered in Paris and Rome, but here he turns to Carverville, a fictional town along the northern California coast. Following the death of his wife, James returns to Carverville, where he grew up and where he experienced his first love with a girl named Maggie. Forty years have passed since Maggie ran off with a college professor, and James, now a broken man covered in facial hair, comes home after a successful career as a lawyer and judge. He wants to roam along the beach and the trails to try to rekindle the magic of his younger years and perhaps find the will to live again.

Beverly, a talkative older woman who thinks like Sherlock Holmes, runs Eden Seaside Resort and Cottages, and puts James to work fixing up the landscape, thus the novel's title. Taz, a strange-looking teenager with a flair for the latest technology, also helps her, and he and James soon form a bond. Beverly hints that Carverville is an evil place, despite its total lack of crime. This lack of crime, as well as its lack of racial minorities and anyone else considered undesirable by the town leaders, may have something to do with the helicopter that patrols the beach and a feral hog trap containing human bones that James finds. 

Where the novel fails the smell test is that virtually everyone in Carverville that James meets is someone he knew in high school. These include Harvey, the school bully who has become the sheriff, and Clem, who is both the mayor and the editor of the town's newspaper. Even in a small town, this dominance by one high school class seems extremely unlikely. And then Taz's grandmother turns out to be, as readers will have already guessed, Maggie herself.

So the novel often fails to reflect reality — Downie even portrays the FBI as a sinister right-wing agency instead of the sinister left-wing agency it has become — yet much of the prose is quite stunning and the ending quite exciting.

Remembering Peter, Paul and Mary

I was in college when I first saw Peter, Paul and Mary perform live. Like everyone else in the audience, I was enthralled seeing them run onto the stage, listening to the amazing harmony of their voices, laughing at Noel Paul Stookey's comedy routines and, perhaps most memorably, watching Mary Travers's long blonde hair fly around like living poetry.

Some of this magic is recalled in Peter, Paul and Mary: Fifty Years in Music and Life (2015). Although Mary died six years before this photographic biography was published, it is written in first person plural, as if all three of them participated in the writing.

The book covers the folk trio's entire career, but the best part of the book, like the best part of their career, comes early. They tell how they found each other, how they rehearsed for long hours in Mary's tiny Greenwich Village apartment and how their act soon exploded, coming on the scene at the perfect time when folk music became mainstream. The first song they ever sang together — just to see how their voices blended — was Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Photographs occupy nearly every page, with the text used as filler around the edges. Some of these images, especially one taken by Annie Leibovitz taken late in their career, are stunning.

The latter half of the book mostly concerns the group's many progressive political and social causes. The book notes that despite their leftist views, which they never tried to hide, their fans included many people on the right and center of the spectrum. The book even includes a letter from a Warner Brothers Records executive who tells them how much he enjoys their music, while at the same time urging them to tone down their politics. The group was so popular they didn't have to listen to his advice.

Not so funny novel

The turning point in Barbara's life comes when she wins a beauty contest — then turns it down. She realizes that being Miss Blackpool means having to stay in Blackpool carrying out her responsibilities for the next year. Inspired by I Love Lucy — this is 1950s England — and determined to become the next Lucille Ball, she leaves her father behind and heads for London. In short order she does become England's Lucille Ball and the star of a hit television comedy. She also gets a new name — Sophie Straw.

This is the beginning, and in fact the best part, of Nick Hornby's 2014 novel Funny Girl. Show business novels tend to bore me, and this one is no exception. The novel covers Sophie's life, right up to her old age, yet it never again rises to the level of those opening chapters.

The hit show is Barbara (and Jim), and the lead character played by Sophie happens to be a beautiful young woman from Blackpool named Barbara. Although someone with no acting experience whatsoever, Sophie stars, while Jim is played by a famous actor named Clive, disgruntled at being trapped forever in parenthesis.

Hornby traces the evolving relationship of Sophie and Clive, as well as the show's producer, Dennis, and its writers, Tony and Bill. The story, such as it is, never really develops into anything compelling.

The author's worst mistake may be that he never convinces us that Sophie really is a "funny girl." He tells us that she is the equal of Lucille Ball, but he never actually shows us. The closest he comes is in an early scene, my favorite passage in the novel, when Sophie comes to audition for a bit part in a planned, still unnamed television show and wows the writers with her witty and insightful comments. That's how she lands the lead role. After that, she's just not very funny at all, nor is the story. For that matter, neither is Lucille Ball when she makes a brief appearance.

Children do it better

Steven Pinker

There aren't many things that small children can do better than their parents. Crawl into tight spaces might be one of them. But five-year-olds can't drive a car very well, and not just because their feet don't reach the pedals. You wouldn't ask a toddler to do your taxes or cook a meatloaf. Yet any child with virtually any IQ can learn any language in the world with ease just by hearing it spoken.

In A Far Off Place, a novel I reviewed here on April 4, a European boy raised in Africa can speak the Bushman language, one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn because it uses clicks as well as words, because he heard it spoken as a small child. Children need to go to school to learn to read and write a language, but they can speak it when they are barely a year old just by hearing others speak it, preferably actual people rather than images on television.

So how can small children learn languages — even multiple languages at the same time — with such ease, while adults struggle with any new language and, in most cases, will always speak it with an accent?

Steven Pinker has some interesting things to say about this phenomenon in his book The Stuff of Thought. Here are a couple of them:

— Children don't just memorize language. They analyze it. 

We know this, Pinker says, by the many cute things they say as they learn the language. A child never heard an adult say something like "Don't tickle me; I'm laughable" or "All the animals are wake-upped." But they have heard adults use other words in similar ways, leading them to think that such phrases are proper. And in fact they could be. We just don't happen to say these things in this way. What children say, however, is in most instances perfectly understandable and using excellent grammar.

— Children don't need to hear a great deal of conversation to learn a language.

They are able to make a lot out of very little. Many adults make the mistake of speaking baby talk to children or using only short, simple words in short, simple sentences. Despite this handicap, children learn the language anyway because they hear what adults say to each other. From these snippets of conversation, perhaps overheard while their minds are actually focused on their play, they rapidly learn not just the vocabulary of a language but all the rules by which that language works. They soon know what nouns, verbs and modifiers are even if they have to go to school to learn what they are called.

It remains a mystery, at least to most of us, how virtually every child is able to perform this magic. Perhaps a bigger mystery is why adults can't do it.

Many murders to solve

It's not often that one reads a mystery with more unsolved murders at the end than at the beginning, but that's what we have with Peter Robinson's Many Rivers to Cross (2020).

Despite the fact that murders seem to happen in mostly rural Eastvale faster than Detective Superintendent Alan Banks can solve them, he is an excellent police detective and this novel, like others in the long series, is outstanding.

The main case involves an unidentified boy in his early teens who has been stabbed to death and left in a dumpster. He appears to be of Middle Eastern descent, but such families are still rare in this part of England. So who is he, what was he doing in the area and who could have had a reason to kill him?

Then the body of an aging drug addict is found in an old house. Drug overdose or possibly murder? And might this death have anything to do with the other one?

Meanwhile Robinson develops a subplot that actually becomes more exciting than the main event. Zelda, a recurring character in these novels, had been kidnapped and turned into a sex slave when a teenager. Now free, she uses her uncanny ability to never forget a face to help Banks and others identify those involved in the slave trade. But when she spots one of the men who kidnaped her and abused her terribly, will she report him to the police or seek personal revenge?

Finally there is a wealthy developer who enjoys associating with gangsters and who owns the house in which the old man died. And his car was spotted in the vicinity where the boy's body was found. Is he somehow tied up in the whole mess?

Even after so many books Banks remains a fascinating character whose passion for music and desire for a woman to share his life with bubble up whenever there is the slightest break in his work. Reading this novel just makes one want to read the next one all the more, especially with all those unsolved murders left at the end.

Today's doddle

I have been slowly working my way through Barbara Ann Kipfer's Word Nerd, focusing on words I never knew existed, probably because, like most people, I have never had a need for them. Here is the next installment.

dasypygal — having hairy buttocks

decumbiture — going to bed when sick

Dedans at Wimbledon

dedans — spectators at a tennis match

diddledees — fallen pine needles

doattee — the drop of your head when you fall asleep while sitting

doddle — an easy task

dohada — the unusual cravings of pregnant women

dottle — tobacco left in a pipe after smoking

dunch — doughy and heavy bread

eadness — the happiness that comes from luxury and wealth

eggtaggle — wasting time in the company of people who misbehave

electuary — medicine mixed with honey or syrup

elenge — being unhappily alone

ensile — storing something for the winter

faffle — hard work with little reward

feff — a disagreeable smell

figurant — an actor who appears only in crowd scenes

fike — something that causes one to fidget, such as an itch

flodder — to disfigure one's face by crying

flurn — to give a look that shows contempt

flychter — running with outstretched arms

franch — to eat greedily

fritlag — a worthless man

Intended to confuse?

By His own testimony, the main reason Jesus suddenly adopted the parabolic style had more to do with hiding the truth from hard-hearted unbelievers than explaining the truth to simple-minded disciples.

John McArthur, Parables

The parables of Jesus were more about confusion than clarity? That idea, argued by John McArthur in Parables (2015),  runs counter to the prevailing assumption — that Jesus told his stories to make his message easier to understand.

Yet Jesus rarely spoke in parables early in his ministry, such as in the Sermon on the Mount. He attracted many followers, but also many powerful enemies who tried to use his words to trap him. McArthur points out that Jesus switched to parables to make his teaching more challenging for those in the religious hierarchy who were out to get him, while at the same time making it easier for his followers to understand and remember.

It is worth pointing out, however, that some of his parables, especially the one about the good Samaritan, were easy enough for the religious leaders to understand and, in fact, were intended to challenge them.

McArthur dissects that parable and a number of  others, explaining in detail what each one means. Also controversial is the author's argument that each parable has but one meaning and that all other interpretations are problematic. "He was not inviting His hearers to interpret the stories any way they liked, and thus let each one's own personal opinions be the final arbiter of what is true for that person," he writes.

My own view allows for secondary interpretations. The parable of the prodigal son means this, for example, but it can also suggest something else. Otherwise all preachers would have to preach the same sermon.

Be careful what you hear

Gretchen Berg is much too young to remember the 1950s, yet she captures middle America of that era with great skill in The Operator (2020). She also nicely describes Wooster, Ohio, a town I know well and where I have spent a lot of time over the years.

Berg's story begins just a few days before Christmas in 1952 when Vivian, a telephone operator in Wooster who sometimes listens to other people's conversations, overhears gossip that turns over her world.  Betty Miller, daughter of Wooster's mayor and a woman who prides herself as being the most prominent and most fashionable woman in town, learns in a call that Edward Dalton, Vivian's husband, has another wife in another state.

Rather than just confronting Edward, Vivian stews and plots and snoops. She even hires a private investigator to track down the other woman in New York State, then tracks her down herself. When she and Edward remarry in a civil ceremony just to make sure they are legally married, you may think the story should be over, but it is just beginning. There are more revelations and more surprises to come.

Strangely Edward turns out to be the most sympathetic character in the novel, with the possible exception of their teenage daughter Charlotte. But then he is the only key character into whose mind Berg does not take us. He is portrayed just as a hapless man trying to swim through his troubles while making minimum waves. It's the women, especially Vivian and Betty, who are shown as petty, spiteful  and vain.

Berg's novel, which includes a bank embezzlement subplot, is loosely based on a true story.

All readers will find this novel fascinating. Those of us old enough to remember the time of telephone operators and party lines will find it sobering.

Swimming in words

What if we imagined that we lived inside the language, a fish breathing in the ocean? Writers swim inside words. When you see words from the inside out, you learn the absence of pure synonyms. Sofa is no longer interchangeable with couch.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

Sofa or couch?

Swimming inside the language may not always be a good thing. Consider the difficulty had by the first black woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States when she was asked to define what a woman is. She didn't know, thanks to the way political considerations have poisoned the language. Ketanji Brown Jackson, like so many people these days, wasn't so much swimming as drowning.

Yet Roy Peter Clark's advice seems wise on the whole. Writers, or anyone else who uses the English language, should be aware of the associations and connotations that words have. A sofa is not necessarily a couch. A fragrance is not necessarily an odor. Mirth is not necessarily levity.

English is blessed with a broad vocabulary. Over the centuries we've picked up words from Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek, Spanish and numerous other languages. We tend to use Anglo-Saxon words when we want to make our points bluntly and French-based or Latin-based words when we want to put on airs. The words may mean the same thing in the dictionary, but in real life they suggest shades of difference.

Of course, good writers and especially poets can sometime do something wonderful by choosing what may seem at first to be the wrong word but which, on reflection, offers a new insight.

Now if the next Supreme Court justice could only figure out who the heck we were honoring during Woman's History Month.

The problem with genius

In J.D. Salinger's world, you don't want to be more gifted than everyone else. It only leads to trouble. And that's if you're lucky.

This theme in Salinger's work was evident even in his Nine Stories, published in 1954. The first and last stories in this classic collection, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Teddy," are most striking, even shocking, in this regard. In the first, Salinger introduces Seymour Glass, a brainy character found or at least mentioned in much of Salinger's later work, who engages in an imaginative conversation with a little girl at the beach, then returns to his hotel room and calmly shoots himself in the head while his wife sleeps in the bed next to his.

Teddy is a precocious 10-year-old on an ocean voyage with his parents and little sister. In a deck-chair conversation he tells a man about how his belief in reincarnation makes him unafraid of death. Readers may get a premonition about what happens next.

"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" tells of a young man with phony credentials who works for a shady company that, for a fee, gives advice by mail to aspiring artists with very little talent. Then he discovers that one of his students has extraordinary talent, but she is a nun whose priest and mother superior frown on her worldly pursuit of art.

Other stories in this priceless collection are almost as notable for their titles as for their subtle and masterful content — "Down at the Dinghy," "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut" and "For Esme — with Love and Squalor" among them.

I first read this book back in the 1960s. My paperback, purchased in a college bookstore, cost 50 cents. It was a pleasure returning to it all these years later.

Charlie's day in the sun

The Colors of All the Cattle (2018), the 19th No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel by Alexander McCall Smith, finds Precious Ramotswe trying her hand at politics, against her will, and Charlie, the long apprentice mechanic and short-time apprentice detective, solving his first big case.

Running for a seat on city council is not Mma Ramotswe's idea. Mma Potokwane, who runs the Orphan Farm, wants Mma Ramotswe on council to oppose the Big Fun Hotel planned next to the graveyard. Mia Potokwane claims she does not have time to run for council herself, although she does have time to run her friend's campaign. Grace Makutsi, the former secretary who by now has promoted herself to "joint managing director" of the detective agency, also pressures Mma Ramotswe to run for office because the other candidate is her longtime rival, Violet Sephotho.

Meanwhile there is a case to solve. An aged doctor was struck and injured by a hit-and-run driver in a blue vehicle. He and particularly his daughter want the driver found, even though the police have given up on the case. Charlie has an idea, and Mma Ramotswe puts him in charge. The cases in these novels rarely involve violence of any kind, but this one does, putting Charlie to a true test.

In a third plot line, Charlie starts dating a girl named Queenie-Queenie, who turns out to be from a wealthy family. She also has a protective brother regarded as one of the strongest men in Botswana. Again Charlie's courage is tested.

Like every other book in this series, The Colors of All the Cattle (we don't learn the significance of the title until the penultimate page) entertains from beginning to end.

A greater escape

We find many great escapes in movies and novels, including The Great Escape, The Shawshank Redemption, Escape from Alcatraz, Papillon and others. But none of those escapees had to walk across a thousand miles of the Kalahari Desert.

Laurens van der Post's stirring 1974 novel A Far Off Place is a sequel to A Story Like the Wind, which concludes with the massacre by Communist-led rebels of everyone living in the vicinity of an African farm called Hunter's Drift except for two teenagers and two Bushmen.

The killers don't know about the Bushmen, Xhabbo and his wife Nuin-Tara, or Nonnie, the girl who had just arrived at Hunter's Drift to join her family, but they do know that Francois somehow escaped death along with his dog Hintza and they must find him before he can report the massacre. And so the chase is on.

Francois may be young, but he is resourceful, having grown up in Africa, and incredibly brave. The Bushmen have lived in the desert all their lives and know how to find food and water where there appears to be none. The weak link is Nonnie, whose surprising strength and endurance make their escape possible.

One adventure follows another, even after their pursuers give up the chase. The final challenge comes when both Nonnie and Xhabbo contract sleeping sickness and have only weeks to live unless they can find help.

Van der Post writes beautifully, although his beautiful language sometimes does have a tendency to slow down the action.

More surprising words

Two weeks ago ("Surprising words," March 18, 2022) I listed some words from Barbara Ann Kipper's Word Nerd that surprised me because a) I didn't know they even existed and b) I couldn't imagine why they were necessary. Today I will list a few more such words.

batrachomyomachy — a battle between frogs and mice (who knew frogs and mice even had battles?)

bavardage — idle talk

begrutten — a face swollen from weeping

blatteroon — a person who will not shut up (actually I rather like this word)

bogart — to take more than one's fair share

brackle — to break bread

brewis — bread soaked in broth

butty — a slice of bread and butter

cagg — a solemn vow not to drink for a certain period of time

calaber — squirrel fur

causerie — light conversation (in other words, bavardage)

Jimmy Durante — a conky

chirk — to be in lively and good spirits

chirm — the sound of many birds, insects or children

chummage — the sharing of a room by two or more strangers

collifobble — to talk secretly

congee — water in which rice has been boiled

conky — anyone with a big nose

conte — an adventure story

convertite — a reformed prostitute

crose — to whine along with another person

My computer's speller questioned most of these words, so I guess I am not alone in not being familiar with them.