A matter of opinion?

He wasn't following any preconceived plan. He was going forwards, wherever that might be, trying above all not to form any opinions.

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Nahour Case

Following the evidence, not one's opinions or "gut feelings," would seem wise for any detective, actual or fictional. Too many detectives in the mysteries I've read and the TV shows I've watched seem to settle on one early suspect until that well runs dry, then settle on another until finally, almost through the process of elimination, they find on the real killer.

The great Parisian police detective Maigret stays true to his ideal in Maigret and the Nahour Case (1966) by Georges Simenon.  Or does he?

Maigret is woken in the middle of the night by a physician friend in whose home he and his wife had had dinner just a few hours ago. The doctor has just treated a young woman with a minor bullet wound, who had then skipped out with the man accompanying her before the doctor had gotten her name and other details.

The next morning a murder victim is found who turns out to be this woman's husband. She and the man with her are traced to Amsterdam, but are soon brought back to Paris.

Everyone involved in the case seems to be telling a string of lies. Some change their stories under questioning, while others stick to one version. But where does the truth lie?

Some of Maigret's methods seem questionable to me. For example, he lets suspects and witnesses spend the night in the house where the murder took place, even before all the evidence has been gathered. In one passage where he is supposedly questioning a prime suspect, Maigret actually answers more questions about the case than the suspect does.

Someone is arrested and convicted by the end of this 163-page novel, yet Maigret never actually discovers conclusive evidence. A lingering doubt remains at the end. Are Maigret's conclusions perhaps swayed by his own opinions because he feels compassion for one suspect, not another?

Getting lost

They knew that browsing was the primary activity the space would be meant to support and that the browsers' ability to lose themselves would be of paramount importance.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

In the comment above, Jeff Deutsch is describing the objectives given to the architect charged with designing new quarters for the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, right,  before it moved from Chicago Theological Seminary. It was designed intentionally to be a place where book browsers could get lost in.

I assume this means both figuratively and literally, both a place to lose track of time and a place to lose track of where you are.

In my long life of bookstore browsing I have been in just three bookstores in which I wasn't entirely clear at all times in which direction the exit might be. These are Powell Books in Portland, John K. King Books in Detroit and the Book Loft in the German Village section of Columbus, Ohio. I've visited two huge bookstores in Cleveland and Toronto that, despite their size, were fairly easy to navigate. The so-called World Largest Bookstore in Toronto, for example, is essentially just two large open floors. I may have been able to get lost in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, but unfortunately I wasn't able to stay there long enough to find out.

A few days I wrote about book browsing being a solitary activity ("Solitary search," Jan. 13). A bookstore one can get lost in is one that makes solitary browsing easier. There are so many rooms, as at the Book Loft, and so many shelves and so many pathways, that it is becomes easy to get separated from other shoppers, even if there are dozens of people in the same store at the same time.

If I were to design the bookstore of my dreams, I believe a structure one could get lost in would be one of my top priorities too.

Do people change?

Fiction teaches you that people change. History, experience, and poetry all teach you this is a lie.

Mark Winegardner, "The Visiting Poet," That's True of Everybody

Mark Winegardner

In fiction, as in the short story from which the above quotation comes, characters change. Mark Winegardner suggests that that itself is fiction. People don't really change.

Or do they?

Personalities, it seems to me, rarely change, and when they do it is often a matter of concern. Why is this normally placid person suddenly so belligerent? Why is this person, who usually ignores me, suddenly being so nice to me?

But this doesn't mean that real people, like fictional characters, don't sometimes change their minds, often in life-changing ways. Two people who were madly in love when they were married five years ago now can't stand to be in the same room with each other. Some who marched with leftists in their youth become conservatives in middle age.

I think of the Apostle Paul in this context. When he was still called Saul, he persecuted Christians. Then he became the first great Christian missionary. His personality didn't change. The passionate nature that made him so effective when he was stoning Christians to death also made him effective when he started defending Christ.

Personalities rarely change in fiction either, at least not in first-rate fiction. We may remember movie comedies in which a cowardly Bob Hope or Don Knots turns heroic when it comes time to save the girl. In better stories change comes more subtly.

Each of us, at one time or another, makes decisions that change our lives profoundly, and so in a sense change us. We get a job rather than going to college. We get married. We accept one job over another. We may start drinking too much or taking drugs. When we have children, we may become more responsible, more serious about what we do, where we live, how we handle our money.

Real people, like fictional characters, do change, even while staying the same.

Terrific Swedish thriller

Two amazing coincidences, both involving a Swedish police officer named Hannah Wester, are the only things that mar Hans Rosenfeldt's thriller Cry Wolf (2020). Amazing coincidences do happen, of course, and we might be willing to accept that the people who find a large quantity of drugs and cash belonging to a Russian mob are the nephew of Hannah's husband and his wife. The second coincidence near the end of the story is much harder to swallow, even as it adds significantly to the novel's impact.

Still this is a terrific, fast-paced novel that makes me eagerly await the next book in an apparent Hannah Wester series set in the small, far northern Swedish town of Haparanda.

The mob sends a young female assassin named Katja (among other aliases) to reclaim both the drugs and the cash and to kill whoever took it after the mob's courier was killed in a hit-and-run near Haparanda. Rosenfeldt switches rapidly from one point of view to another, keeping the reader, like the characters themselves, very much on edge. Even the town itself has a point of view.

As you would expect, the novel builds to an exciting climax, with just enough mystery left over to suggest another installment.

Books waiting for their readers

(F)rom a purely profit-driven perspective, the good bookstore is bound to stock books it shouldn't.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Jeff Deutsch

The average bookstore leaves new books on their shelves for 132 days before taking them down and replacing them with newer books. So says Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores. Deutsch, who manages Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, says his business leaves their books on the shelves for 280 days to give browsers a better chance to find them, even though this makes little sense from "a purely profit-driven perspective."

I like the sound of that, for I am someone who often doesn't hear about a book and start looking for it until after it has already disappeared from bookstore shelves — assuming it was ever there in the first place. (Even large Barnes & Noble stores don't always stock the kinds of books I often go there looking for.)

One hundred and thirty-two days may seem like plenty of time to leave a book on a bookstore shelf. That's more than four months. But while that may be a long time for a clothing store or an electronics store, for a bookstore that's nothing. Some people may not even enter a particular bookstore more than once or twice a year, especially if the store is some distance away. Even if they visit more often, they may not spot a book that might interest them on just one visit. I rarely look at bottom shelves, but hope the books down there will work their way up to a higher shelf by the time I return. Or, like me, people may not hear about a certain book until it has been out for several months.

Best-sellers usually stay around longer than 132 days, and classics are likely to stay on the shelves permanently. Obscure books from obscure publishers may never appear at all. You can order them, they will always tell you, but if you don't know they exist, how would you ever do that?

The ideal bookstore, if such a thing existed, would carry virtually every book published and keep it on a shelf until somebody buys it. Am I not describing Amazon? Well, no. The ideal bookstore permits, even encourages, browsing, something you can't really do on Amazon. It's OK if you already know what you want, but not if you don't. Browsing in a bookstore allows you to discover the treasure that's been waiting there for you, in some cases just for you. There may be nobody else in an entire city drawn to that one particular book. That's why the longer books are kept on shelves, the better.

To quote Deutsch again, "Of the 28,000 titles the Seminary Co-op sold in 2019, nearly 17,000 were single copies. In other words, each of those 17,000 books was sought by a unique reader." One book, one reader in the huge city of Chicago. Note to booksellers: Keep books on the shelf long enough to be discovered,

Being Mrs. Lindbergh

The wives of famous men must sometimes feel invisible. That was not quite true of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of Charles Lindbergh, once the most celebrated human being on the planet. She was his copilot on many record-setting flights and the first American woman to fly a glider by herself. She wrote several books, most notably The Gift from the Sea. She got much more attention than she ever wanted after the kidnapping and murder of her first-born son. She had to wear a disguise to go shopping or to a play, even before the age of television.

Melanie Benjamin, whose insightful biographical novels are among the best being written these days, covers all this and more in The Aviator's Wife (2013). One might think it would be difficult to make a cohesive story that stretches all the way from their first meeting, soon after Lindbergh's solo flight to Paris in 1927, to his death in 1974, yet Benjamin pulls it off nicely.

Like everyone else, young Anne never thinks Charles would ever choose her. Elizabeth, her more beautiful older sister, is the one the Morrow family pushes in front of the hero when he comes to visit. Yet he sees in Anne someone more like himself — someone intelligent, orderly, reserved and adventurous. Yet Anne isn't quite the female version of himself Charles imagines her to be.

She yearns for a more traditional family, with husband and wife living in the same home and sleeping in the same bedroom, surrounded by their loving children. Yet Charles always has somewhere else he has to be and often leaves for months at a time, then is distant even when he comes home. His children admire him, yet also fear him. He is demanding and rarely lets his feelings show.

Anne doesn't learn until near the end of his life that her husband has other families in other countries, although by this time she has already been involved in a longtime adulterous relationship with the family doctor.

As in her other novels, the authors sticks close to the facts, filling in the blanks, such as those regarding emotions and private conversations, to build her story.

The author doesn't back away from the aviator's admiration for Hitler in the 1930s, his negative attitude toward Jews and his strong opposition to America's involvement in the war. Anne, like Melanie Benjamin herself,  doesn't stand behind everything Charles Lindbergh does or doesn't do, believes or doesn't believe. Yet she never stops regarding him as a hero.

Follow the science, Sherlock

Sherlock Holmes was a pioneer in forensic crime-solving, a pretty good feat for a fictional character. Now Stewart Ross has written The Science of Sherlock Holmes (2020) about the great detective's methods for gathering evidence and making brilliant deductions.

Ross writes about Sherlock's use of his magnifying glass, his analysis of both fingerprints and footprints, his expertise regarding such things as tobacco ashes and bicycle tires, his knowledge of horses and handwriting, his use of telegrams and trains, and so on.

Unlike some Holmes scholars, Ross shows himself quite willing to criticize the great detective. He says things like "great storytelling, but questionable forensic science," "not sound science," and "Conan Doyle was not prepared to let science get in the way of a good story." The later Holmes stories, Ross reports, were not nearly as scientifically sound as the earlier ones were, in part because Arthur Conan Doyle was not keeping up with the latest scientific developments and also in part because the author had lost interest in the stories. The stories were always more about brain power than technology anyway, Ross points out.

Of course, Ross is not the most accurate of writers either. At one point he refers to O.J. Simpson as a "baseball superstar."

Solitary search

Books are written in solitude, and they are also read in solitude. In each case, the fewer distractions the better. Each requires focus, concentration, thought.

In his book In Praise of Good Bookstores (2022), Jeff Deutsch observes that what's true of book authors and book readers is also true of bookstore browsers. Shopping for books is rarely a communal activity in the usual sense. You may enter a bookstore with a friend, a spouse or even an entire family, yet almost as soon as you walk in you separate and go off in different directions. One person heads for new fiction, another for the history section or the biographies. Children aim for the kids' books.

I was in a small independent bookstore a few days ago when a family entered. There was a burst of conversation at first, mostly the parents — or were they grandparents? — giving instructions about order and silence — and then I didn't notice them again.

I'm sure there are people who can browse bookshelves and hold a conversation at the same time, but I believe them to be rare. They probably aren't that interested in books anyway. For most of us who haunt bookstores, browsing involves a sense of solitude, pulling back within ourselves as we deliberate over authors and titles and cover illustrations and blurbs until we find something we yearn to read, once again in solitude.

And yet Deutsch adds something profound, "In book-filled rooms, solitude and community are simultaneously present." We may ignore them, yet we somehow feel something in common with our fellow browsers. Oh, they may sometimes get in our way, yet they are so much like us, solitary readers in a solitary search for just the right book.

A passion for animals

Susan Orlean loves animals, as you may have gathered if you are lucky enough to have read her book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. The celebrated nonfiction author brings her passion for animals front and center in her latest book, On Animals (2021).

The book consists of previously published magazine articles, mostly from The New Yorker, where she is a regular contributor. Some of these go back as far as the 1990s. Some are very personal, as when she writes about the many animals on her family's small farm in rural New York. Others are more objective, as when she writes about a show dog named Biff. All are witty and fascinating.

She writes about a New Jersey woman with so many tigers she has lost count. When a loose tiger walks through a residential area and eventually has to be shot, she doesn't know if it was one of hers or not. Orlean says there may be seven times as many pet tigers in the United States as there are registered Irish setters.

Another essay discusses homing pigeons. Another is about the animals used in movies and television programs. (Even worms and insects that appear on film cannot be harmed in any way.) Separate articles deal with mules and donkeys. She writes about a highly infectious disease that threatens all rabbits, both wild and domestic. There's even a piece on taxidermy. Another is about a lion whisperer.

Orlean's prose draws the reader in quickly and leaves one both entertained and educated. You need not share her passion for animals to love her book.

Four friends, two marriages

Of all the people I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is.

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Novels about friendship are numerous, but how many of them deal with the friendships of married couples (especially without marital infidelity entering the plot)? Not many. So Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety (1987) stands out for that reason alone. Plus it's a terrific novel.

Larry and Sally Morgan meet Sid and Charity Lang soon after moving to Madison, Wisc., where Larry, our narrator, will teach literature at the university. Sid is another young member of the English department. The couples become instant friends.

The novel covers decades and the ups and downs of their respective careers and marriages. Larry is a compulsive worker and a talented writer whose success in publishing begins early. Sid, less talented and less driven, inherited great wealth, so academic success may be less important to him, yet he doesn't think so. More importantly, his wife doesn't think so.

The two wives may actually be the novel's key characters. Polio cripples Sally while she is still a young woman, and she bravely struggles to maintain a normal marriage and a normal friendship with Charity. As for Charity, she has a controlling personality that becomes more troublesome as the years pass. She insists on running everything, especially her husband's career. He longs to be a poet, while she demands he focus on serious academic writing to advance his career. Even at the end of the novel when she lies on her deathbed with advanced cancer, she manages to manipulate everyone so that she can die her way, whatever Sid or anyone else may think about it.

"She not only ran his life, she was his life," Stegner writes. In different ways, that is true of both couples. Addiction and dependence, to be sure. But the phrase "was his life" suggests a more important factor: love.

Two kinds of readers 4

Finally today we come to the fourth and final distinction C.S. Lewis makes between readers, between what he terms the few and the many. To review, he says in An Experiment in Criticism that:

1. Most people read a book just once. The few think nothing of rereading favorite books multiple times.

2. Most people read only as a last resort, because there is nothing more pressing or more interesting to do. The few make reading a part of their regular routine.

3. The lives of most readers are unchanged by the books they read. A few readers, however, can sometimes notice a profound change in their lives and in their thinking because of what they read.

The fourth distinction Lewis makes flows from the third. What they read, he says, "is constantly and prominently present to the mind of the few, but not to that of the many." That is, the experience of reading isn't over after the final page for some lucky readers. The story and characters, if it's a work of fiction, or the facts or ideas presented, if it's a work of nonfiction, continue to percolate in the reader's mind. The more one thinks about a book, the more insights one gains. And this is often what leads to a rereading of the same book, sometimes immediately after the first.

These are the kinds of readers who seek out other people who have read the same book to compare their experiences. These are not necessarily the kind of people who join book clubs, but they are the kind of people who join book clubs hoping for serious discussions about the books in question, rather than primarily to socialize.

Graham Greene in Havana

Certain book titles — such as Catch-22 and Brave New World — become a permanent part of the language, used by people who have never even read the books. Another example is Graham Greene's influential Our Man in Havana. Many of us have probably used some witty variation on that title in our conversation.

Now Christopher Hull uses it in the title of his own book, Our Man Down in Havana, managing to be neither witty nor clever. Still the title does describe what his book is about: Graham Greene's many visits to Cuba, both before and after the Fidel Castro-led revolution.

Greene had long experience on the fringes of British espionage, both during the war and afterward. He knew and at one time worked closely with Kim Philly, the infamous Soviet spy who betrayed the British and cost the lives of many agents. Greene had long kicked around an idea for a novel about an inventive British spy in a far-off place and had considered  other locales before a visit to Havana led him to believe Cuba would make an ideal location. It was, as it turned out. Much of what Greene wrote in his novel seemed to foretell the future after the revolution, which occurred just after the novel's publication, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But the novel, while important to Hull's book, is hardly its only focus. Just as important is Greene himself, his importance as a writer, his many romantic affairs and his constant roaming around the world, especially to dangerous places. Greene famously played Russian roulette several times in his youth, and his travels are seen as a more sophisticated version of that deadly game.

Havana before the revolution appealed to Greene because of its wide-open atmosphere that included rampant gambling, prostitution and graphic sex shows in the nightclubs. Greene seemed torn after Castro came to power. As someone who hated the United States and leaned left politically, he welcomed Castro's turn to socialism, yet he thought Castro went too far in many respects. And he missed the more dangerous, wide-open Havana of old.

Hull's book, despite interesting subject matter, proves disappointingly dull. I lost confidence in the author early on when he describes five P.G. Wodehouse novels read by Greene as "Jeeves and Bertie Wooster adventures." In fact, none of those mentioned are Jeeves and Wooster novels. If he is so blatantly wrong about that, what else is he wrong about?

Two kinds of readers 3

I have been commenting on the four differences C.S. Lewis finds between literary readers (the few) and casual readers (the many), as explained early in his book An Experiment in Criticism. Today let's look at the third of these.

The first reading of some books — and Lewis has already pointed out that most readers don't do second readings — can to some be "an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison." Lewis goes on, "Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before."

Such experiences rarely happen to most readers. A book may give momentary excitement, momentary pleasure, but is soon forgotten. The book probably isn't going to alter the reader's view of anything.

I think this may have a lot to do with the kinds of books people read. If you favor thrillers, murder mysteries or love stories, you are unlikely to ever find a book that will shake your world. There are exceptions, but not that many. More challenging books, read by more literary readers, are more likely to challenge us, more likely to open up new vistas to us.

Another factor, I think, is the age of the reader. Books we encounter in our youth, say from early teens to mid-20s, are more likely to profoundly impact our view of the world than those we read later in life. It is during this period that we are more likely to discover To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Book Thief and a number of other such books. For me, it was Franny and Zooey and several books by C.S. Lewis himself that upended my world while I was in college.

To discover such a book later in life is a rare blessing indeed. Something enjoyed only by the very few.