Love conquers all

Illustration from Bleak House

Bleak House by Charles Dickens may be a long, complex and even convoluted novel, yet its central message seems simple enough. Love and family mean everything. Everything else, not so much.

The entire story circles around, but rarely dips into, a civil suit over a will that has been sitting — rarely moving at all —in court for years, even decades. Most of the novel's many characters are involved in the suit in one way or another. The happiest ones manage to ignore it and just get on with their lives.

Dickens gives us two narrators. One is a young woman named Esther Summerson, raised by a woman not her mother who treated her like sin itself. Upon this woman's death, Esther comes under the guardianship of John Jarndyce, one of the principals in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit. Her life and sense of worth improve significantly and don't even change much after a serious illness destroys her physical beauty. Everyone, it seems, loves Esther, as does the reader. Three men want to marry her.

The second narrator is omniscient, who in present tense tells us everything going on that Esther is not a witness to. The characters and subplots are too numerous to mention. Two characters that should be mentioned, however, are Sir Leicester Dedlock and Lady Dedlock, members of the aristocracy who return to the story again and again. Lady Dedlock, whose extreme haughtiness turns out to be a pretense to hide her guilt, has a secret she shares only with Esther.

The novel first appeared in serial form in 1852, so it is worth noting that Dickens gives us one of the earliest detectives in fiction, Mr. Bucket, who investigates both a murder and a disappearance in these pages.

When this is not an exciting detective story, it most often becomes a love story. Couples marry. A son returns to his family, where he is welcomed like the Prodigal. Old couples remember what drew them together in the first place.

Bleak House itself is one of two stately residences described in these pages, and despite what its name may suggest, this turns out to be the happy home, the one where Esther goes to live. It is the other house, where the Dedlocks live, that seems haunted.

I would not rate Bleak House as Dickens's best novel, as many people do — I prefer Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend — yet there is no denying its sweeping power and vibrancy.

An odyssey home

William Kent Krueger echoes Homer's Odyssey in This Tender Land, his magnificent 2019 coming-of-age novel about a boy's search for God and home.

Odie (Odysseus) O'Bannion, the story's narrator, is one of four orphans who escape the Black Witch (Thelma Brickman), who runs a school for Indian children in Minnesota in 1932. Only one of the four is an Indian, a Sioux boy called Mose whose tongue has been cut out. The others are Albert, Odie's older brother, and Emmy, the daughter of a teacher killed by a tornado who is taken in by Mrs. Brickman.

Albert remembers an Aunt Julia in St. Louis, all the family he and Odie have left, and so St. Louis becomes their goal. They flee in a canoe, pursued all the way by the Black Witch and her obedient husband. The journey includes many trials and temptations. They are kidnapped by a one-eyed farmer (Krueger's Cyclops). As for sirens, these include Maybeth, a girl Odie falls in love with in a temporary Depression settlement of homeless people, and Sister Eve, a beautiful faith healer. Odie wants to go to Chicago with Maybeth's family and then wants to join Sister Eve's traveling crusade, yet somehow, even after abandoning his three fellow travelers, he keeps heading toward St. Louis, where he hopes to find home and family. And perhaps a loving God he can believe in.

Many surprises await Odie in St. Louis at Aunt Julia's house on Ithaca Street (Homer again).

Krueger tries to give his tale the nature of a myth, although this comes a little late to be convincing. Myth or not, Homer or not, the novel tells an uplifting story of tender youth in a tender land discovering a place to belong.

The efficient book

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

Northrup Frye

Northrup Frye

One could argue against Northrup Frye's bold statement on at least a couple of points.

First, can a book be described as a machine? A definition of machine found on the web is: "an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a definite task." A book has several parts — a cover and numerous pages — each with a definite function and together performing a definite task. As for mechanical power, a person has to turn the pages, much as a person to turn the knob on a can opener. If a can opener is a machine, then perhaps a book is as well.

But if it's a machine, is it the most technologically efficient machine ever invented? Well, what about that can opener? Or a pair of scissors? Or a door on hinges?

Quibble as we may, Frye's central point seems true. The book has staying power. Despite all the alarm about ebooks and the Kindle and the Nook, most readers still seem to prefer books. Bookstores and publishers may be shrinking in number, but there is no sign of them disappearing altogether. The problem, instead, may be a shrinking number of readers.

Books take up space, as I well know with a storage unit full of them. They collect dust. They require organization. For these reasons, there have been campaigns to transfer books to actual machines, such as microfilm and computers. Yet new technology always seems to become obsolete before books do, and computers require electric power, never a sure thing in today's world.

The book, like the cockroach, is likely to survive just about anything.

Freewriting

I have never had enough patience for "stream of consciousness" novels, which dominated the literary scene a century ago thanks to such writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner. Whatever goes through the writer's mind goes down on the page, or so it seems. Periods and other punctuation are optional. A single sentence can go on for pages.

This kind of writing came on the scene on the heels of impressionist art, which led to even more abstract art. I credit — or blame — the invention of photography for this. Previously artists were judged on their ability to accurately reflect reality. When you hired a painter to produce a portrait of your daughter, you wanted it to look like your daughter. You didn't want to see her with three eyes. And you wanted a bowl of fruit to look like a bowl of fruit.

Photography threatened to put portrait painters and other artists out of work. Art was saved by the impressionists, whose art showed not reality but the artists' impression of reality. And if painters and sculptors could do this and get away with it, why not novelists and poets? And so stories no longer had to follow a straight narrative, and poetry no longer had to rhyme. Poets like E.E. Cummings created verse that seemed to make no sense at all.

Peter Elbow

All this is a roundabout way of introducing the subject of freewriting, described by Peter Elbow in his book Writing with Power and underscored by Roy Peter Clark in his book Murder Your Darlings. Elbow explains, "To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes."

It doesn't matter what you write about or whether it even makes sense. In effect, you produce a stream of consciousness. This is not intended for publication, however. It is simply an exercise. You write in a random way just to see what happens, sort of in the way you might wander around aimlessly at a county fair or an art museum. Maybe you will discover something interesting. Maybe not. "The only point is to keep writing," Elbow says.

Clark says he sometimes tries this when traveling by plane. He has a general topic in mind, then just scribbles in a notebook anything he can think of that relates to that topic. Sometimes these random ideas can take shape into something worthwhile.

The closest I have come to this in my writing comes when I am uncertain about what to say on a certain subject. When in doubt, I just start writing. It will be terrible, guaranteed. Yet it eventually may begin to make sense to me, and I can go back to the beginning and start over. 

Stream of consciousness writers, however, leave it to their readers to make sense of it all. I've just never had that much patience.

Finding gold

The wise readers have a talent for finding the right book at the right time — they are masterful prospectors and know that wisdom rarely bestows unearned rewards.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

There seems to be a lot to unpack in that sentence from Jeff Deutsch's recent book In Praise of Good Bookstores. So let's try to  unpack it.

Because he is writing about bookstores, we can assume his subject is wise readers in bookstores, although there are other places where one might find the right book, such as a public library or even one's own bookshelves. What Deutsch says about wise readers seem equally applicable wherever those wise readers happen to be where books are also present.

And who are these wise readers? His statement defines them. They are those who seek without knowing specifically what they are looking for or where they are likely to find it. In other words, they are what we might call casual browsers, although casual seems hardly the appropriate word for those who take book browsing seriously.

Have you ever noticed the serious looks on people's faces as they are going through a buffet line? Browsers have similar looks on their faces. This may be loads of fun, but it is also serious business.

The "right book at the right time" is a meaningful phrase. Books we might have ignored on our last visit to the same bookstore can jump out at us now. Perhaps we have heard something favorable about the book or its author in the meantime. Perhaps the book's subject matter has since become more relevant to our lives. The time wasn't right for this book previously. Now it is the right time.

The comparison of browsers to prospectors seems apt. Thar's gold in them thar bookshelves, and we aim to find it. Every bookstore, I'm convinced, contains treasures, different treasures for different prospectors. Finding it is the delightful challenge.

"Wisdom rarely bestows unearned rewards." So what does that mean? It means that discoveries that may seem like luck or serendipity have more to do with wisdom and talent, as Deutsch has already suggested. And with effort. Wise browsers find their gold because they keep looking, while others stop too soon.

Deutsch puts it this way: "On some level, discoveries occur because we are searching. It's that simple. If serendipity is the discovery of something useful while on the hunt for something else, the expert browser doesn't even bother with the conceit that there need be a something else for which to hunt."

Breaking the rules

Kate Atkinson breaks all the rules for murder mysteries in Case Histories, her 2004 novel that introduced Jackson Brodie. This helps explain why the book is so sensational.

Atkinson begins with three "case histories," each separated by time and space. This itself is unusual for a mystery novel. A married couple who don't deserve to have any children nevertheless have four daughters, the youngest of which disappears one summer night. A young woman is slashed to death on her first day working at her father's law office. A depressed young mother kills her husband with an ax.

Years pass before Brodie, a former police officer now working as a private investigator, is hired by three different people to look into all three cases. Two of the surviving sisters want to know what happened to their missing sibling. A still-grieving father wants to know who killed his daughter. The sister of the woman who killed her husband wants to find that woman's daughter, adopted by someone else after the murder.

As if this isn't enough of a caseload to deal with at one time, someone is trying to kill Jackson Brodie by such means as sabotaging his car and blowing up his house. That Brodie continues his investigations in the company of his young daughter is the part of the novel that is hardest to swallow. Wouldn't a loving father return the girl to her mother while his life is in danger, even if the mother does plan to take their daughter to Australia with her lover?

The narrative flits from one case to another, often within a single paragraph. Brodie often seems like a minor character rather than the hero. Perhaps the most significant rule Atkinson breaks is that the secrets are ultimately revealed not by Brodie but by the omniscient narrator who tells us what really happened in the startling closing chapters. Brodie is close, it turns out, but no cigar.

One rule the author doesn't break is to keep the reader guessing until the very end.

Soul on a shelf (and in a box)

Cicero

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Cicero

My bathroom is soulless, apparently. Otherwise I'm with Cicero. I live in a two-bedroom condo with books everywhere else, including the kitchen,

I recently purchased two large IKEA bookcases to add even more soul to the condo and allow me to take several boxes of books out of storage. Even so, my storage unit still has more soul than my condo does.

I have written previously about the joy of removing books from boxes, and I experienced that joy again a few days ago. It doesn't seem to matter whether these are new mail-order books or your own books stored temporarily in a box. The thrill is the same, like Christmas morning for bibliophiles.

The labels on my boxes didn't tell me much. "Unread nonfiction. ""Biographies." "Unread fiction, A-F." The "A-F" refers to the last names of the authors. Mostly I tried to rescue unread books, naturally enough. The books that ended up in my new bookcases are not always the ones I would have chosen had I been able to open every box and sort through the books before deciding which to take to the condo. Chance was involved, and that seemed to add to the fun.

As I read these books, I will exchange them for others in storage. We wouldn't want soul to get stagnant.

The science in Agatha Christie

Carla Valentine helps us admire Agatha Christie all the more.

Valentine is a pathologist — she even runs a dating site for people in her profession called Dead Meet — and the author of The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie (2021). She is also a longtime Christie fan.

She enjoys the mysteries themselves, just like the rest of us do, adding, "But when I first began reading her books as a child, it was the many clues she provided about dead bodies — the blood, wounds, and confusing  decomposition artifacts — that I found the most ingenious, and this cemented the love of forensic pathology that would go on to shape my whole life."

Christie learned much about blood and wounds when she worked as a nurse during both world wars. Mostly, however, she was just a good student who read medical journals, questioned experts and worked hard to stay on top of the latest developments in crime solving.

Valentine points out how her stories reflect her growing knowledge about such things as fingerprints and trace evidence and how these are used to solve crimes. In her early books, Christie didn't seem to know the difference between a revolver and an automatic handgun, yet she learned, just as she learned about poisons, autopsies, handwriting analysis, blood spatter and all the rest.

Speaking of blood spatter, Valentine points out the difference between blood spatter and blood splatter and also between blood that spouts and blood that spurts. Christie also knew these differences, and this is clear from her books.

There is actually more blood in Agatha Christie novels than we remember. We tend to associate her with poisonings, something she became an expert on. Yet shootings and stabbings also occur frequently. Valentine provides a Murder Methods Table in the appendix that shows at a glance how victims die in each of her books. In And Then There Were None, for example, there is a shooting, a poisoning, a blow to the head, a drowning, an ax murder, a hanging and a person who is crushed to death.

Christie closely followed true crime news and sometimes modeled her plots on these actual events. Other times her characters make reference to these crimes.

Valentine tells us a lot about the use of forensics in solving crimes, both the history and the science, yet she never strays far from Agatha Christie. Thus her book never fails to stay interesting.

Books to chew on

Sir Francis Bacon

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.

Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon's food metaphor applied to the reading of books seems apt to me.

We taste new books in the same way we taste a new dish or a more familiar dish prepared in a new way. That first bite is small, taken cautiously. Is it any good? Will we like it? Will it satisfy? With some books, as with some foods, we never get past that first taste. Some readers rarely get beyond the first chapter or two. A taste is enough.

Just as there are comfort foods, so there are comfort books. We  seek out books by authors we know and who have pleased us in the past. These we devour. Unfamiliar authors make finicky readers uneasy, just as unfamiliar foods make finicky eaters uneasy.

The trouble with most of the books we devour is that they give us little to chew on. I love a good thriller as much as anyone else, but after the last chapter there is not much to think about. The thrill, quite literally, is gone. One fast-food burger is pretty much like the last one.

The books we can chew and digest thoroughly are the ones we read more slowly and can talk about, think about, perhaps even write about and then reread later with just as much pleasure, if not more, than the first time.

A superior person's insults

If you were challenged, say as a party game, to create a string of insults, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet, could you do it? I might begin like this: "You are an asinine, bigoted, corrupt, dim-witted ...," but I would soon run out of gas.

Yet in the 1979 book The Superior Person's Book of Words, Peter Bowler provides just such a string. And not only that, but each word in his string is probably a word you have never used in your life and could only guess at its meaning. Here it is:

"Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalia, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte."

Even the speller on my computer  hasn't heard of most of those words. But what do they mean? Here's Bowler's translation:

"Sir, you are an impotent, conceited, obscene, hairy-buttocked, brainless, wicked, toadying, goatish, indecent, stable-smelling, hunchbacked, thick-lipped, stinking, turnip-shaped, feeble-minded, pimply, trashy, repellent. smarmy, foul-mouthed, greasy, gluttonous, loathsome, wooden-headed, whining, extremely low form of animal life."

That's telling him..

A thousand lives

George R.R. Martin

Some author, perhaps it was Anne Tyler, once said she wrote novels to live more than one life, or something to that effect. Readers do the same thing, of course. George R.R. Martin put it this way: "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies."

Read a mystery and you can be a detective in pursuit of a killer. Or you might even experience what it's like to be a killer on the run, without the inconvenience of actually having to murder someone.

Read a romance and you can feel all the excitement, passion and misery a lover experiences while you sit alone in a room. It's not quite the same thing, of course, but it's better than just sitting alone in a room.

Read one of the classics and for a few hours you can be Pip or Scout or Huck or Holden or Hester and know what it's like to live their lives in the comfort of your favorite chair.

I don't believe in reincarnation, but I do believe in living a thousand lives in one lifetime.

The single book

 "Beware the person of a single book," Thomas Aquinas said.

As a 13th century priest and theologian, you might have expected Aquinas to make an exception for the person of a single book when that single book was the Holy Bible. Apparently he didn't.

Admittedly I am taking seven words out of context, so I don't know exactly what Aquinas was getting at. My paraphrase all these centuries later would be something like, "Don't trust a single source for all knowledge, all wisdom, all pleasure." This might apply to news sources as well as books.

Even if one holds one particular book as supreme — the Bible, say, or the works of Shakespeare — other books can complement that book, or in some cases contradict it. Reading more books can confuse, but in the end should make more clear to the reader what is actually important, what is most meaningful, what is true.

The Covid misinformation period we recently went through, which is now unraveling, illustrates the danger of relying on just one source of information. Physicians who disagreed with the official party line on Covid treatment were often shunned and even persecuted. They have since been proven right in many cases, while the official party line, spread by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC and others, was often wrong. Thus those warning of misinformation turned out to be the ones spreading misinformation. Allowing conflicting views might have saved lives.

Beware the person of a single book.

The summer childhood ends

Somewhere in what now felt like the distant past there had been a beautiful May morning when she had turned ten years old, and for the first time happiness and sadness, beauty and cruelty had begun to join together inside her, entwining themselves inextricably like the tendrils of a vine up the trunk of a tree.

Carrie Brown, The Rope Walk

Coming-of-age novels mostly follow the same outline — childhood wonder crashes into harsh reality — and Carrie Brown's The Rope Walk (2007) is no exception. Just the same, the novel is both original and exceptional. That it is not more widely read is a shame.

Alice, who lives with her widowed father, Archie, and much older brothers, celebrates her 10th birthday as the novel opens. And so begins the most wonderful summer of her life, and yet also the cruelest.

On that day, Theo, a mixed-race boy of about her age, comes to live with her temporarily. His mother is experiencing extreme depression and his grandmother has been hospitalized. Archie agrees to let the boy stay with them for a few weeks. He is like the best birthday gift ever.

Theo turns out to be a creative, game-for-anything child who brings a tool box with him, but very few clothes. The summer days become one adventure after another. "He was the kind of boy she didn't think she would get tired of," Brown writes.

Nearby lives Kenneth, a famous artist in declining health. Alice is asked to read to him each day, and Kenneth chooses The Journals of Lewis and Clark, a book that feeds Theo's thirst for adventure as he listens along with the old man.

As a secret gift for Kenneth, the children decide to build a rope walk through the nearby forest so that the old man will be able to experience nature on his own and find his way back home again. Their naive kindness leads to tragedy.

I don't know if The Journals of Lewis and Clark is a great book for reading out loud, but I'm sure The Rope Walk would be. Many passages in the story are utterly beautiful, and I discovered myself reading them aloud.

Like Lamb in Love, another Carrie Brown novel, The Rope Walk is a gem that deserves a comeback in bookstores.

Banks at the beginning

After becoming immersed in Peter Robinson's more recent Inspector Banks mysteries, I found it revealing to read one of the first, A Dedicated Man, published in 1988.

Banks, newly transferred from London to a rural part of England, is still a relatively young man whom young women find attractive. His wife, Sandra, hasn't left him yet, and his two children still live at home. He has yet to assemble the team of detectives featured in Robinson's later books.

Also unlike most of the later mysteries in the series, there is just one case to occupy his time, at least until a teenage girl disappears. The disappearance may or may not be related to the murder of a scholarly man whom everybody seemed to like and nobody seemed to have any reason to kill. Yet someone did murder Harry Steadman.

Because there seems to be no motive to be found in the present, Banks explores the past, old relationships and especially old love affairs. Where does the secret lie?

Had I read A Dedicated Man back in 1988 I think I might have liked it better than I do now, for now I have Robinson's later work to compared it with, and the author has improved with time. The ending fits the model of the traditional murder mystery, but seems a bit forced and is not as convincing as the conclusions of most of his later novels that are modeled more on actual police work.