March in Review

All over the place last month, running the gamut from new literary efforts to old classics, popular fiction to nonfiction, massive tomes to novellas!

The "massive tome" was Dan Simmons' Drood, which left me a little conflicted. Simmons chronicles the last five years of Charles Dickens' life, using Wilkie Collins as a narrator and inserting a mysterious London underworld character as Edwin Drood as the source of suspense. Collins and Dickens seem to have been the original frenemies, with Dickens feeling superior and jealous and Collins feeling inferior and jealous. The opium addiction that plagued Collins is also used to good effect in same ways, but in others, I felt a little annoyed by the implication that I might be spending so much time with an unreliable narrator. A deceptive narrator is an interesting device, but as a reader, I tend to resent it if I end up feeling as though I've been on a literary snipe hunt. Perhaps the basic issue was just that "skeleton" and "skin" weren't well-matched - the old silk purse/sow's ear dilemma. It was well-paced and atmospheric, held my attention for 750+ pages and was just enjoyable to read, but I think I wish he'd expended his efforts on a slightly sturdier plot.

John Harwood's The Seance suffered from some of the same problems, I think. Harwood's first novel, The Ghost Writer, was so ostentatiously cryptic that I still don't really know what happened, but it was well-written enough that I thought I'd give his second effort a try. I found The Seance more enjoyable, a fairly light Gothic tale with all the classic elements - ghosts, decaying family manors, missing people, fog, etc. My only complaint was that near the end, I felt that Harwood was intentionally trying to muddy the waters, for effect, not purpose. He's a very skillful writer and creates wonderful settings, but there seems to be constant obfuscation for obfuscation's sake. The Seance represented an improvement, I think, over The Ghost Writer, so perhaps he'll continue to evolve.

After all this literary second-guessing, I enjoyed a nonfiction break with David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Grann neatly conveys the story of explorer Percy Fawcett who, after several successful trips through the jungles of South America, disappeared with his son and a friend in the 1920s. Fawcett was one of those fascinating historical figures, an obsessive personality who followed his obsession literally to his death, and I came away wondering why it is that some obsessions lead to wondrous discoveries while others lead to madness and why it is so hard to tell them apart in the beginning. Some people persist and achieve success, while the same persistence in others, persistence in the face of ridicule and poverty and resistance, leads to destruction. As is often the problem with nonfiction, it can be difficult to get the story to conform to a traditional story arc, especially if your protagonist wanders off into the jungle and disappears permanently, despite the best efforts of hundreds of searchers to turn up some clue. Grann drops the story a little abruptly on the doorstop of modern archaeological efforts, and I would have appreciated a stronger connection, and think Grann would have achieved a stronger ending, with present-day discoveries.

So, I left the tropics and followed Lincoln Child to the Far North in Terminal Freeze. What can I say? No one writes great rip-roaring tales in the classic storytelling tradition like Child (and his writing partner, Douglas Preston). This was Raising the Mammoth meets The Thing from Another World. Scientists on a grant provided by a Discovery Channel-esque network find a prehistoric creature frozen in ice, native people warn them to leave it alone, the warnings are ignored and bloody chaos ensues. Formulaic - absolutely, fun - absolutely.

I followed that with Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, which was just sad. It's hard to discuss without giving too much away, but the cruel ironies, the damaging secrets and the unrelenting sadness made it one of those books you mull over for quite awhile afterward. Schlink has been criticized for a simplified version of events, and it is, despite some literary window-dressing, a simple story. He's also been criticized for encouraging people to identify with the perpetrators of war crimes, and he certainly does put a "human face" on them, but I felt one of the central questions was can you commit horrible atrocities without being scarred and damaged by them yourself? That's not saying the damages to victim and perpetrator are equivalent, but with the tragic stories now coming out of Africa about child soldiers forced to rape and kill, it is a question worth asking and one we're still struggling with. Sometimes I take away the smallest of concepts from books, and in this case, what I remember is how clearly Schlink defines our struggle to deal with things beyond our ken: "When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling that I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding." Those two sentences seem to sum up the ideological struggles to cope with no only World War II and other horrors of war, but of all our discussions of crime and punishment in our legal and penal systems.

Thankfully, Jan Elizabeth Watson's Asta in the Wings was lighter. Set in 1978, the story of Asta and her older brother Orion is billed almost as science-fiction. After being kept in a boarded-up, decaying house all of her life because of "the plague" that her mother says has killed off so many children, Asta finds herself forced out into the world with her brother after their mother fails to come home. Asta, a precocious and endearing little personage, is reminiscent of all sorts of wonderful precocious children in literature from authors like Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy) to Fannie Flagg (Coming Attractions). The book wasn't what I expected, because the premise almost seems to promise something more far-fetched, but it was delightful to just watch Asta move out into the world, trying to cope and to keep her brother close and to value her family, regardless of their oddities and dysfunction. Two things sum up how enduring Asta is as a character - early on, whenever she met someone new, I worried for her because of her lack of worldly knowledge, silently chanting, "Please be nice to her. Please be nice to her," and, at the end of the book, I found myself yearning for a sequel, wanting to see her evolve and reach out further into the world. Subtle, gentle and beautiful.

Somewhere in here, perhaps fittingly displaced amongst the clutter, was Franz Lidz's Ghosty Men, a brief biography of the Collyer brothers, interspersed with anecdotes of Lidz's own hoarder uncles. The Collyer brothers are true American Gothic - wealthy and well-educated recluses literally buried in a three-story house filled to the rafters with the detritus of decades. Homer Collyer, who had gone blind and suffered from crippling complications from rheumatic fever, lived with his brother Langley, whose paranoia allowed him to only venture out at night on junk-collecting runs, in Harlem. After an anonymous call reporting a dead body in the house, police broke in (through an upper-story window) and found Homer, dead only a few hours from starvation in the midst of mounds of booby-trapped rubbish and newspapers. It speaks to the incredible state of the house that it took police more than two weeks to discover the body of Langley, only a few feet away from his brother. He'd been felled by one of his own traps, buried under an avalanche of junk, leaving Homer, blind and helpless to waste away. Lidz tells the story with compassion, dealing out doses of his own family struggles with compulsive collecting, and the Collyers emerge from his treatment less horrific than sad, almost figures of tragic absurdity on the scale of Samuel Beckett.

Finally, Andrew read A Girl of the Limberlost to me. Perhaps no great shakes literarily-speaking, but sometimes a person just needs to have the kind of story where good people do good things, confront surmountable problems, and get the good things they deserve in the end. In a dark and cynical world, it's nice to visit with a character who believes in the rewards of kindness and sacrifice, who knows that dark times are just a reminder to keep your inner light in good working condition. Ask yourself the old question of whether you'd rather be smart, beautiful or good, and then go read about Elnora Comstock.

And with eight holds at the library and books piling up all over with the spring publishing rush, there'll be plenty more to talk about next month!