Smiley out west

Jane Smiley is certainly a versatile writer — fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction and popular fiction, books for adults and books for children. She has even excelled at westerns, as she proved with The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and now again in A Dangerous Business (2022).

Writing the novel itself may have been dangerous business for Smiley for she writes about a prostitute in California in the 1850s with more sexual detail than one would expect in a Jane Smiley novel. Again, there's that versatility.

Eliza goes to Monterey with her husband soon after the Gold Rush. She was forced into marrying a man she doesn't love and who doesn't treat her well, and so she doesn't mourn when he is shot and killed. But then, how will she make a living?

She is recruited by Mrs. Parks, one of the madams in a town with relatively few women. Eliza takes the job and comes to like it, discovering that most of her customers are much nicer than her husband. And they always go home afterward, while her savings pile up.

But then the bodies of other women in this same "dangerous business" begin showing up, brutally stabbed. There is not much law in Monterey at that time, and nobody seems to take the murders seriously. Eliza and her new friend, Jean, another prostitute who specializes in female clients, begin reading detective stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. They decide to discover the murderer themselves.

This is a short novel, barely 200 pages, but it remains fascinating every step of the way. 

May or must?

In most situations you may is the most polite and you must the most rude.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb

After making the statement above in his book Word Play, Peter Farb goes on to explain how the two phrases you may and you must can be confusing to those for whom English is a second language. As he says, in most situations the first usage is more polite than the second. But if that is true "in most situations," it means there are exceptions.

As a general rule, most of us prefer hearing the word may rather than must. The latter sounds like an order, while the former gives us permission. We like having a choice. It sounds like a kindness, while must sounds severe. Even when we were children, "you may go outside and play" sounded much better than "you must go outside and play." Even if we wanted to go outside and play, we didn't want to be ordered to do so. It took away some of the fun.

Yet as Farb suggests, there are exceptions to this rule. The example he gives is when a hostess at a dinner party passes her special dish to a guest and says, "You must try some of this." Is that an order? No, it is more of a recommendation. It means she thinks the dish is outstanding. If she had said, "You may try some of this," a person who grew up speaking English could think there was something questionable about it. They may like it or they may not. If you are finicky eater, you may very well pass on that dish.

Or suppose a friend tells you, "You must be crazy." This is neither an order nor a suggestion. Rather it is a joke, and obviously so to anyone who grew up speaking English. The words "you may be crazy" somehow seem less light. Perhaps your friend actually thinks you're crazy.

If you are learning English as a second language, these exceptions to the rule must be confusing. Or is it, may be confusing?

Shy books

One of the problems that comes with having coffee shops in bookstores is that they can turn bookstores into gathering places or social places, which doesn't sound like such a bad thing but can be. (Another problems is that those sitting in the coffee shops are often free to browse through books or magazines as they eat and drink, then put them back on the shelves when they are through with them.)

Just as silence has always been favored in libraries, so it is important in a good bookstore. Browsing for the right book takes concentration, privacy and some measure of silence. You don't want children running around, friends trying to chat or strangers trying to make friends.

Christopher Morley

Quoting Christopher Morley, bookseller Jeff Deutsch says this in his book In Praise of Good Bookstores, "This is how the browser recognizes their book: privately, usually in silence, 'for often the most important books are shy, and do not press forward to the front counters,' as Morley observes. We must maintain quiet and allow for concentrated browsing, understanding that our role is drawing readers across the threshold, that they might confront these volumes."

I like the idea of shy books. So often the right book for you never finds its way to the front of the store, on a table with best-sellers. It may be hiding away on a corner shelf, or on a bottom shelf or top shelf, and thus more difficult to find.

The right book may take some time to locate, and the search may require quiet solitude.

Novelist Ann Patchett says she made a deliberate decision not to sell coffee or food of any kind in her Nashville bookstore. She wanted to sell books, just books, for people who like books. But then she and her co-owner decided to allow dogs in their store, and so customers who aren't talking to each other are probably talking to dogs.

Saying our lines

One of the wonderful things about the English language is that, unlike French, we welcome new words and phrases from anywhere. And one prime source has always been show business. Josh Chetwynd brings these many words and phrases together in his 2017 book Totally Scripted.

We all love repeating, and sometimes rephrasing, favorite lines from favorite movies. Who among us hasn't found opportunities to say lines like "I'll be back," "here's looking at you, kid," "Houston, we have a problem" and "an offer he can't refuse"? Even if we never saw the movie these lines came from, we have probably heard the lines said by friends and repeated them ourselves.

Then there are phrases like "get out of Dodge," "stage fright," "Hollywood ending," "in the limelight," "Looney Tunes," "stay tuned" and "the peanut gallery." They may have had their origins in movies, television, vaudeville or some other form of entertainment, but their use has since expanded  metaphorically to mean many other things. 

We can get out of Dodge any time we evade a difficult situation. We may get stage fright when we have to speak to a group, stage or no stage. Any goofy behavior can be termed Looney Tunes. Anything simple can be called Mickey Mouse.

The origins of many of these terms and famous movie lines can sometimes be surprising. Arnold Schwarzenegger objected to saying "I'll be back" in The Terminator. He didn't think it was very manly. Also, because English was his second language, he admitted to not understanding contractions.

The phrase "peanut gallery" did not begin with Howdy Dowdy, as many of us older folks might think. It first referred to the cheap seats in theaters, where patrons often ate peanuts during a live show. The TV children's show simply gave the phrase a new meaning.

Chetwynd's small book will delight anyone who loves language and/or popular culture.

Finding a book for Dad

My email includes something from Barnes & Noble practically every day, and lately they have been sending out Father's Day teasers. Every merchandiser tries to make money out of every holiday, but for bookstores, Father's Day can be a challenge. I visit a bookstore at least once a month, but I see mostly women there.

When I look over the tables covered with the latest novels, spotting a book written by a male author can be a challenge. Not only are most new novels written by women, but they are mostly intended for female readers. I am currently in the middle of a novel written by a woman, which I am actually enjoying, yet I have noticed that virtually every important character is a woman. I expect the murderer will turn out to be a man, but otherwise it is a story about women for women written by a woman.

And so, how does one pick out a book that Dad might enjoy?

I think Barnes & Noble has mostly done an admirable job in their selections for the upcoming holiday. Mostly they focus on nonfiction, which are the books men may be most likely to read.

Among these suggestions are The Fate of the Day by Rick Atkinson, a book about the start of the American Revolution; The Determined Spy by Douglas Waller, about the early days of the CIA; the massive new Mark Twain biography written by Ron Cherow; How Countries Go Broke by Ray Dalio, and Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski.

As for fiction, they recommend the latest Stephen King novel, Never Flinch; Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones; The First Gentleman by Bill Clinton and James Patterson; Twist by Colum McCann; and I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger.

All these are books written by men, many of them expressly for men. Relatively few women read books about war or baseball.

There is still something for Dad in bookstores. You may just have to look a little harder than you did when you were shopping for Mom last month.

Missing mermaid

A detective having a ghost as a sidekick may not be an original idea — Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge listens to the spirit of a soldier who served under him in World War I while he is solving cases — yet Jess Kidd's Things in Jars (2019) still seems unique.

The novel, as strange as its title, features a young female detective named Bridie Devine. Her Watson is a half-dressed, tattoo-covered former boxer named Ruby Doyle, whom she can see and hear even though nobody else can. Having an invisible companion turns out to be advantageous.

The action takes place in London in 1863, although there are flashbacks to events in Bridie's troubled youth, which then impact the present story. Bridie is hired to find Christabel, supposedly the daughter of a wealthy man. This man turns out to be a collector of odd animate objects, those things in jars. Christabel, thought to be a mermaid, was, in fact, stolen. Now she has been stolen again.

Bridie was herself sold as a child, and she has a great deal of sympathy for Christabel. She assumes the girl has probably been sold to a circus, or perhaps to another collector.

Kidd, gifted at telling strange stories, excels in this one. Weird characters and situations abound. Bridie even falls in love with Ruby. Those things in jars are not the only oddities to be found here.

From novel to movie

Never before have I attempted to review both a novel and the movie adapted from that novel at the same time, but I happened to watch the Jean-Pierre Jeunet film The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet just before finishing the Reif Larsen novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), so why not?

The title changed between book and screen, yet the story changed little. Jeunet, the director responsible for such wonderful French films as Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, stays remarkably true to the novel. Most of his changes actually improve the story.

The basic plot is this: As in the Young Sheldon television series, T.S. is a young prodigy growing up in an ordinary family. In this case, it's on a ranch in Montana. His initials stand for Tecumseh Sparrow. His father is a silent man who loves cowboy movies and clearly loved the boy's older brother, who died in a gun accident. His love for T.S. remains unclear. The mother is supposedly a beetle scientist, yet seems more devoted to writing a romantic story about an ancestor. His older sister talks mostly about beauty pageants. T.S. feels out of place, "not a creature of the ranch," as he puts it in his narrative.

His special gift takes the form of illustration. His drawings can be found on virtually every page of the novel, illustrating everything from the Mormon cricket to how he and his sister play cat's cradle. He has been sending his scientific drawings to the Smithsonian Institution, and he is surprised when the Smithsonian, not realizing how young he is, invites him to Washington to accept a prize and give a speech.

Without telling his family, he hops aboard a freight train and heads East.

The change Jeunet makes that I least liked was in making T.S. the inventor of a perpetual motion machine. Larsen's version, in which he is someone who can illustrate virtually anything, seems less fanciful. Yet in other ways the film is better for being less fanciful. Larsen sends T.S. through a wormhole in the Midwest and makes him the youngest member of a secret scientific society with underground tunnels in the District of Columbia. Jeunet ignores all that nonsense and tells a more believable story (other than that perpetual motion machine).

The movie also ignores the boy's mother's book, which T.S. takes with him the train. Larsen makes her novel a part of his novel, and it simply isn't very interesting and adds little. The movie is better for leaving it out.

In the film T.S. is 10, not 12, perhaps because the actor who plays him looks 10, not 12. The movie also turns an important male character into a female character, but without much change in the story.

Otherwise the stories align nicely. Both are enjoyable. In both T.S. discovers that he is not a creature of Washington either and would rather be home.

One should read the novel so as not to miss all those wonderful drawings, which T.S. calls maps. One should watch the movie for all those beautiful images Jeunet is justifiably famous for. To experience both at the same time is pure joy.

Good guys, bad guys

German soldiers in World War II

Readers continue to devour novels set during World War II, even though most of these readers — and the authors, as well — were not even alive during the war. In recent weeks I have read The Book Spy and The Book of Lost Names, both of them about young women who use their forgery talents to help defeat the Nazis. I have several other World War II novels waiting in line.

An article in The Wall Street Journal observes that the hottest trend in children's books is stories with World War II themes. In one of these, Rescue by Jennifer A. Nielsen, a 12-year-old girl becomes part of a dangerous mission in occupied France during the war.

How does one explain the popularity of these books 80 years after the close of the war? It may have something to do with the clarity of the evil. During that war the Nazis we're so evil and the Japanese so savage that it has always been clear who the bad guys were and who the good guys were.

In today's more relativistic world, it is not so easy to differentiate between heroes and villains. Movie makers seem to wrestle with the problem of identifying a villain all the time. There are certain groups of people who cannot be the bad guys for one reason or another. The Chinese, for example, cannot be bad guys if Hollywood wants their movies shown in China. In the new Mission Impossible movie, the "bad guy" is an artificial intelligence called The Entity to avoid this problem. Meanwhile, the good guys must have enough flaws to be believable. In David Baldacci's novel The Innocent, which I reviewed here a few days ago, the hero is a paid government assassin. 

In a World War II setting, there are no such difficulties. When I was in Germany a few years back, our tour guides readily confessed that their Nazi ancestors did evil things. There is no debate about it. Nobody is offended.

The days when the heroes in western movies wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats are long over, yet perhaps readers and moviegoers still yearn for a clear distinction. World War II stories give us that.

Donna Leon's wandering

... I am feckless and unthinking by nature and have never planned more than the first step in anything I've done.

Donna Leon, Wandering through Life

Anyone who reads Donna Leon's 2023 memoir Wandering through Life hoping for insights into her popular Venice-set mystery series featuring Guido Brunetti is likely to be disappointed. By my count she refers to her books just three times, and then just in passing.

Mostly this book, a very readable one, is a collection of personal essays about her life when she is not writing. As the title suggests, her long life — she is now in her 80s — has been mostly one of aimless wandering from one thing to another, from one country to another. She spent periods as an English instructor in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Her life changed when she took a job teaching English at an army base near Venice. She fell in love with the city. How that love affair led to her mystery series she doesn't bother to tell us.

Leon, born and raised in New Jersey and without a drop of Italian blood, has long had a passion for opera and the music of Handel. She devotes one chapter to her interest in bees, which she was able to work into the plot of her novel Earthly Remains, the only one of her novels she mentions. There's another chapter about a cat named Tigger.

Several chapters relive her childhood — Halloween memories, her first day of school, one particular Christmas turkey. She has one chapter called "Drugs, Sex, and Rock 'n' Roll" that hardly mentions any of the three. Other people are the ones who took the drugs — and apparently had the sex. There is no mention of a significant other.

While in Saudi Arabia she helped develop a game based on Monopoly that she called Saudiopoly. She and other Americans there played it in secret until they could finally leave the country.

Leon wanders through this book the way she has wandered through life. It makes fine reading, but readers of her Brunetti novels will probably not enjoy it any more than anyone else.