Jennifer Egan – Manhattan Beach

Tags

1930s setting, Book Review, Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach, Novels about America, Second World War

A big, old-fashioned, absorbing historical narrative – America in Depression and At War

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach follows the story of two different tranches of the American immigrant experience, and is set during the Depression and the Second World War.

There are 3 stories followed, which interlink with each other through Anna’s story. At the start of the novel Anna Kerrigan is nearly 12, a young girl idolising her father, and close to her mother and her sick sister. Father Eddie struggles, as so many working men did, at this time, to make a living. He has lost much in the crash and is now working as a kind of muscle for a longshoreman union official. Keeping the family together, particularly with the medical needs of Anna’s sister Lydia, is not easy.

Eddie has decided to take a chance on getting more lucrative work – but this must come at a price, as he intends to offer his expertise to Dexter Styles, a man with mob connections, who has hidden his Italian background, and is riding high in society, happily married. The family he has married into is old money, established class. Everyone knows he is somehow connected, still to ‘a shadow government, a shadow country..A tribe. A clan’ He is though someone who is good at subterfuge, though there are plenty of rumours about him, and as long as no one looks too closely at the source of his wealth, and is just happy enough with that wealth, he, and they, will get along fine.

Eddie has taken Anna along to his job ‘interview’ with Dexter, as knowing something about a man’s family gives him a certain edge and information. And Eddie will be offered employment

Egan then takes a forward jump, and we, like Anna, are in the position of ‘something happened’ – but we don’t quite know what. All we know is that at some point, some years ago, Eddie disappeared. Anna still holds a memory of the mysterious Mr Styles, and the glamour of his house, on that day Eddie took her along. It is now Anna’s job to keep the family together. America is now at war. War has created opportunities for young women, working in fields never open to them before. Anna is now one of a female workforce employed in Brooklyn’s Naval Yard, measuring and inspecting tiny parts for battleships. She has a better dream – the desire to be a diver, to inspect and repair vessels underwater.

This whole section of Anna’s story, her struggle to work in an area thought unsuitable for a woman, was particularly fascinating.

There is also a more conventional story beginning – a chance encounter between Anna and Styles in a nightclub – she recognises him, but he has no idea who she is, especially as when she introduces herself she gives a false last name – a story which will be in part a detective story, and in part a love story. Anna wants to find out the truth about her father’s disappearance, and the mysterious Mr Styles is a sensible place to start

Anna’s story, Dexter’s story – and also the story of Eddie’s disappearance. And it is also the story of capital, labour, and the American Dream

I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever….Not the Romans. Not the Carolingians, Not Genghis Khan or the Tatars or Napoleon’s France….How is that possible you ask. Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible

High money and low money, muscle, graft, honest labour and labour less honest, corruption, class, race and sexual prejudice – it’s a big canvas.

I did not get to read Egan’s Pulitzer, A Visit From The Goon Squad (though I am minded to, now) That was, I understand, a far more experimental/unusual structure. This is not, though we do have the 3 voices, and the 3 stories, but the structure is a conventional narrative. I found it a fascinating read, particularly because I am drawn to books which engage with describing hard physical work – stuff of craft and muscle.

I could not resist adding this YouTube first part upload of John Adams’ magnificent Harmonielehre, a version conducted by Simon Rattle. The spur to its composition was the idea of a great tanker rising through the air. As I read the physicality of the Naval Yard workplace sections, Adam’s amazing piece, with its incredible opening, was in my mind’s ear

I received this as an ARC from the publisher, Simon and Schuster, via Netgalley. Gratefully.

It will be published on October 3rd

Manhattan Beach Amazon UK
Manhattan Beach Amazon USA

Advertisement

Philip Roth – American Pastoral

Tags

American Pastoral, American politics and society, Book Review, Novels about America, Philip Roth

Endlessly reflecting mirrors

Philip Roth’s Pulitzer prize-winning American Pastoral is beautifully written, deeply disturbing and at times offensively misogynistic. It is also bitter, angry, sharply incisive about the frailty and illusion of the American Dream – and, heart-breakingly tender about the ties that bind us, particularly the love of a parent for their child, however wayward, however lost.

And, as well as all this, it is a fascinating series of challenges about the nature of writing and the nature of the writer. Roth throws down the gauntlet from the start, asking us not to forget that one of the central characters is his continuing alter-ego , Nathan ‘Skip’ Zuckerman. The story we reading, presented by Zuckerman, into the life of Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, Zuckerman’s childhood hero, is possibly Zuckerman’s invention. Certain events happen to Levov, but the reason they happened, the psychoanalytical unpicking of them, may be only the writer in the book (not to mention the writer of the book) shaping a chimera.

Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, whose story Zuckerman tells, was a gifted athlete, an inheritor and emblem of the aspirational dream of America’s European immigrant community. Looking like a WASP, he is Jewish, his family, a generation or so back, by hard work, dedication and talent, rising in the Promised Land. Swede’s success at football, basketball and baseball, and his upright, hard-working personality have made him envied and adored, a kind of hero to others. One of whom is the slightly younger Zuckerman. Meeting again, in late middle age, it is now Zuckerman who has achieved fame, as a writer, and he is long past a time of adulating the seemingly much more simple character of a former sporting hero. Zuckerman in fact perceives the apparently settled straight as a die, unthinkingly patriotic, successful businessman, husband and father that Levov has become as a bit of a simp. The writer rather takes a position of intellectual, metropolitan, sophisticated arrogance. Though written in 1998, there are definite pointers and echoes here of the roots of our divided nation – both here and in the States, between the cultural intelligentsia and those who ‘seem’ as if they inhabit and engage with nuance less. Zuckerman indulges in various fantasies and theories, trying to worm behind the simple, satisfied persona Swede seems to represent. There are several writerly inventions Zuckerman engages in, each of which, again and again, proves wrong. Finally, Zuckerman, sophisticated in his cynicism, dismisses Levov

There’s nothing here but what you’re looking at. He’s all about being looked at……..He always was…..You’re craving depths that don’t exist……The guy is the embodiment of nothing

And then Zuckerman finds out how wrong, how very wrong he has been, and how he knew nothing of Swede, nothing of his life.

Swede had reached adulthood and maturity shortly before the end of the Second World War. Enlisting as a marine, trying to meet the manly, right, patriotic challenge of the war, he was still going through boot-camp training when the bomb was dropped at Hiroshima. He took his desire to serve his country into the post-war world. A model citizen, he worked hard, had a developed awareness of social responsibility, married his childhood sweetheart, Dawn, entered and successfully ran the family glove-making business, and fathered a beloved daughter.  Meredith, the daughter, was a teenager in the 60’s, at the time of the Civil Rights movement and resistance to Vietnam, and she became intensely radicalised, revolutionary.  Merry, the apple of Swede’s eye, committed a shocking and violent act whilst still at high school, and then went on the run, hunted as a terrorist. Swede’s family, marriage, business and life suddenly shattered.

Belatedly discovering these events, Zuckerman then weaves this into story. He creates a narrative of motive, a narrative to ‘explain’ how this normal family, and privileged, loved child could have so violently changed. However……because of the constant reminders earlier in the book that narrator Zuckerman was inventing stories and sub stories which were wrong, Roth is reminding us that this too is narrative, story, invention. We know certain facts happened, but the interpretation of why Swede, Merry and Dawn got to where they did, may not be right. Zuckerman ‘blames’ a childhood event for Merry going to the bad – but the event is Zuckerman’s imagined narrative, and may never have happened.

     Patty Hearst kidnapping/Symbionese Liberation Army – a kind of sign of those times

Going forward, to after Merry has gone underground, is a deeply disturbing, highly misogynistic section in the second part of the book, with the introduction of a young Jewish woman who may have been responsible for Merry’s violent radicalisation. This is a section distasteful to read, and highly unsettling – are we being shown an unconscious misogyny, particularly towards Jewish women, which comes from Roth himself, through his alter ego as Zuckerman – or is the author placing himself firmly and consciously on a slab, for the reader to dissect Roth himself?

And then, at the point where the reader might think they have been able to negatively ‘get’ Roth himself, as the creator of all this, comes a section, where, after many years of searching for his vanished daughter in hiding from the law, Swede finds her, living in utter degradation, weirdly, most weirdly, transformed. This is a section of utter heartbreak, riven tenderness and almost unbearably painful humanity. Roth took my breath away in this raw exposure of all our suffering, poor, magnificent, broken complex humanity. Like Zuckerman with Swede, we get it wrong with each other, again and again.

American Pastoral rightly won its Pulitzer prize. It is not in any way an easy book; it is a greatly, painfully challenging one – by turns horrible, horrific, stony, violent, hating and hateful – and full of compassion and suffering. Published in 1997, looking back over a roughly 50 year sweep, it is far from dated, and seems horribly pertinent today.

I shall for sure, read more of Roth’s later work, though I am still, months after finishing this one, processing it.

Radical Group of the times, The Weathermen, took their name from a line from this Dylan song as featured in the film Don’t Look Back

Finally I have been a long, a very long time coming to this one. FictionFan strongly, strongly endorsed this, in her GAN quest, indeed naming it as The Great American Novel. I bought it, and there it sat on my bedside table for a couple of years. I think I had been too riven by other GANs to be able to handle further deeply uncomfortable, brilliant GANnish journeys. I got to it via a small subsection of my book group, who have embarked on some challenging American titles, and a slow, sectional read of them. This was my choice. Lacerating, and amazing, all together as FictionFan suggested, You can read her review

American Pastoral Amazon UK
American Pastoral Amazon USA

Sara Taylor – The Lauras

Tags

Book Review, Novels about America, Sara Taylor, The Lauras

“home for me was a place I was going to, rather than a place I could occupy” : A story of wanderings

Sara Taylor’s first novel, The Shore was a stunning debut, a collection of individual stories which were interweaving, deeply entangled exploring the history and geography of a small group of islands off the coast of Virginia, and the families and their descendants who marked the place, and were marked by it

So I was extremely interested (and with some trepidation) to read her ‘can you follow THAT – always a challenge when a debut writer sets a very high standard for themselves to meet again.

Well, I need not have worried. The Lauras is a very different book, but it is equally immersive, equally assured, equally wonderful.

Out of the dark, foaming ocean a sun was rising, massive and red. It balanced on the black line of the horizon and spilled its blood across the sky, tore the scudding clouds with pink and caked the wet sand, and for a moment, I wondered if, in the course of my sleeping, we’d made it to the end of the world, where the sun rose out of the ocean like a newborn thing in the way I’d always imagined seeing but never had

“Where are we?” I asked

“Florida,” she said

Taylor, originally from rural Virginia, clearly has a love of the landscape of her country, and this is evidenced in this book, effectively, a mother and child road trip. However, Taylor chose to complete her education in the UK, where she now lives, so she also brings that interesting outsider’s eye to her native country. Something being explored here, in many ways, is identity, and those who, in different ways, do not fit into the world which mainstream cultural thinking, and existing structures, have designed. Her interest is in misfits – which to some extent must mean almost all of us. Few are perfectly round pegs easily happy in perfectly round holes.

The mother in this story is clearly an outsider – child of Sicilian immigrants, she is not quite Sicilian, not quite American. Circumstances led to her having a wild, disrupted childhood, and she was fostered. The road trip is towards a journey back to her own past. She is married, with a thirteen year old child, but the marriage is foundering. Alex, the 13 year old is torn between whether to follow mother or father as the primary identity role model, as children of breaking marriages often can be. Ma rather takes matters into her own hands, following a particular row. She has been planning on escaping this marriage for some time, and has had hidden bags packed in readiness. Alex is scooped up in the middle of the night, without really knowing what is going on, and the two set out on a two year and more road trip, sometimes hunkering down so Alex’s schooling can continue, whilst Ma works at menial jobs. She is searching for some specific friends from childhood and young womanhood. Friends, and more than friends. Ma has a fluidity around her sexual orientation as well as her nationality and cultural identification. Coincidentally a few of the early significant friends were called Laura, so the name has acquired potency.

Ma and Alex are dependent on the kindness of strangers, at times, but are also at risk from the unkindness of others, and sometimes, they will have to be the ones offering kindness, or seeking to right wrongs and dispense rough justice

Narrator, now an adult, looking back some quarter of a century, is Alex, so the narrative voice is adolescence through the filter of maturity

Memory is slippery, not even like a fish but like an eel, like an ice cube, like a clot of blood whose membranous skin can barely contain internal shifting liquidity. It’s something that, the firmer you try to grasp it, the weaker the hold you have on it, the less trustworthy it becomes. But it doesn’t matter what really happened, does it? Reality matters less than how it is perceived, that edge or feather or scale that you catch onto as it flickers by. And after a year or ten in a dingy pocket who can say if it was a lizard’s scale or a dragon’s in the first place?

Unfortunately, so very much about this book might be spoiled for a reader if further information is given, yet I’m aware that a review this evasive or woolly might fail to lure a potential reader. I will have to err on the side of evasion. Like things are in this book for Alex, who does not know the destination Ma is heading for, it is the unknown journey – road, or book, which is the point. Naming, defining, holding out signposts for readers would be destructive

Humans – most of us, at least – have the incapability of pondering the really terrifying things for any serious length of time. It’s probably what keeps us from throwing ourselves off cliffs in mass fits of existential crisis

Taylor tells a wonderful story, and her writing of it is beautiful, crafted, sure.

I recommend this very strongly. I read it in digital version for review, from the publishers via NetGalley

I await Taylor’s next book with even higher hopes. Tremendous

The Lauras Amazon UK
The Lauras Amazon USA

Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road

Tags

1950s, Book Review, Novels about America, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates, The American Dream

The long, little emptiness of life

Revolutionary Road is as bleak a novel about the mismatch between the hopes and dreams of youth, and the realities of maturity, as any I have read. It’s a novel which breaks the heart to read – not just because of the way Yates makes us feel for his characters, but the way it confronts the reader with themselves. It’s a kind of Everyman morality tale, except there are no gods, there are no demons, there are no solutions. And yet…and yet..this is so far from some kind of nihilistic howl of rage and despair. What saves this, what makes it bearable is that Yates does not condemn his characters, indeed, he does not separate himself from them. Neither does he separate himself from us, nor us from them.

However flawed the central characters are, their flaws are human, and a result of that mismatch between a hope of happiness and personal fulfilment, of individual striving and the long littleness which most of us will inherit. I found myself comparing Revolutionary Road to a much more edgy and hip look at the sense of waste and meaninglessness of a life, a reaction by a more current generation to their version of the American Dream – Bret Easton Ellis, Rules of Attraction. What I loathed about that book was the superciliousness of the writer; we were invited to despise these silly, so unlike us creations, wasting their stupid lives. The genius of Yates (aside from the masterful writing) is that we are brought to care about these flawed, disappointed, bruised characters, because they are us. Ellis was like one of those nasty documentaries where we are comfortably invited to gaze in superiority at car-crash lives, and left smugly above it all. Yates makes us peel off the mask of someone else’s persona, and discover our hurting own, beneath

The central characters, Frank and April Wheeler, see themselves as special, or about to be special, standing outside the mainstream. Frank views himself as ‘an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre kind of man’. He is working deep within a soulless corporate, a company making advanced calculation machines – on-the-verge-of computers. Frank sells them, but does not understand them. His workplace is full of corporate clones, but he believes himself different because he mocks them in his head, and consciously wears the mask of being one of them. He doesn’t quite realise they are all consciously wearing the mask and believing themselves different.

How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the street, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.

Still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927. Flicr, Commons

April had ‘attended one of the leading dramatic schools of New York less than ten years before’ She wears this badge as something to set herself as more than the haus-frau she is, having married a man she has told herself (and him) is ’ the most interesting person I’ve ever met’.  Frank believes April is ‘a first rate girl’ almost out of his league. Neither see each other, or themselves, clear, without terror, hatred and rage at what their reality is. Needless to say, beneath the carefully constructed veneer, huge cracks are spreading.

Their closest friends are Shep and Milly Campbell, a less shiny and glamorous couple but one who also believe they are somehow more than cut from a mould. Despite the close friendship, underneath they despise and distrust each other, as couples and as individuals

The elderly real estate broker and her retired husband, Helen and Howard Givings, with the skeleton in a cupboard son, (John is an inmate in psychiatric hospital) give a third portrait of a marriage which is bleak, inside its superficial veneer. Yates offers us the small, lacerating image of the wife who prattles endlessly on in a pretence that everything in the garden is lovely, though his description of her physical life – tell-tale hands twisting in her lap – belie the bright, social manner. Meanwhile Howard sits blissfully, phlegmatically silent, reading the paper. He has turned off his hearing-aid, as is his habit,  and the two are existing in isolation, lacking awareness of each other or willingness to be aware of each other.

Yes, the book, with its inevitably tragic movement shows the bleak underbelly of the American Dream, but it goes far further – it shows the bleak underbelly of the hopeful, growing dreams of ‘being special’ which are part and parcel of adolescence and twenties, and presents the sour regret of maturity for opportunities missed, mistakes made, and the necessary accommodations which most of us will make.

And where can we salvage a true meaning? Is there any hope?

Yates doesn’t offer much – in his view of Frank and April’s parents, and what we see of the potential little Frank and April in their already neurotically developing, vulnerable children, Niffer and Michael, he shows that the previous generation bleakly created the present one, and that the next generation are already struggling hard to please and be whom they think their parents would like them to be, pretending in their turn that the life-garden is full of pretty things, and studiously shutting their eyes to the hard, unforgiving rocks beneath

And yet…………in with the sour despair, there is a wit within the dialogue, the characters play their parts in being bravely ironic for each other – and ARE amusing, and do invite the reader to appreciate their sometimes mordant humour. It’s the mark of a brilliant writer to do this, so that the book is lifted out of unremitting angst. The brittle, sophisticated surface is like some modern version of Restoration Comedy; the knowing wearing of the mask and of the misery beneath play brilliantly against each other. This is both darkly tragic and full of sharp, amusing touches, which makes the reader wince whilst laughing

This is a wonderfully rich book, with a multiplicity of layers and meanings. One of those magical books where the reader discovers that they can go deeper and deeper, and discover more and more, that the craft of Yates’ writing is extraordinary, the images he offers, both economical, subtle, and deep. We are not smacked in the face, instead, small touches, reflected upon, will bring more and more realisations, thoughts, reflections.

As an example, the opening of the book is the staging of a play by a newly formed community theatre group. It is meant to be the foundation of an aspirational, sophisticated, intellectual circle of people who will challenge the status quo, who are more than duped swallowers of 1950s corporate, consumerist, sentimentalised capitalism. The play they are performing is The Petrified Forest, by Robert Emmett Sherwood, later made into a film with Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis. (and even later a TV adaptation) The play/film has as its central characters a writer (Howard) trying to discover the meaning of existence, to find some reason for his being, some purpose, an aspirational artist who feels suffocated by the narrowness of her world (Davis) and someone living on the margins, outside the norms (Bogart) who is the challenge/catalyst.

There are parallels in the lives of the central couple in Revolutionary Road, who are just such a pair, Frank Wheeler, still on the edge of that expansive, excited feeling from youth that he might ‘be something’ and April Wheeler, his wife, whose dreams of being a fine actress never lived up to the reality of the modest talents she really had, but who is feeling that suffocation of the narrowness life offers, as a wife and (reluctant) mother. John Givings, the son of their real-estate broker, an inmate of a mental hospital, brought out from time to time on rehabilitation visits, is the outsider catalyst whose analysis of the Wheelers, his parents, and society at large is the brutal, revealing lamp showing the Wheelers their own reality.

And then, there is the title of that play/film ‘The Petrified Forest’ – a forest is a lovely thing, dynamic, life giving, life creating, endlessly transforming through photosynthesis, sappy, magical – but, when petrified, ossified, it is stifled and stifling. There are echoes of this elsewhere – Giving’s mother Helen, the successful real-estate broker, gives Frank a box of sedum plantings, for the garden he is in theory constructing. It’s an unwanted gift, given at the wrong moment, and gets shoved in the cellar and forgotten. The box is discovered, later, by Helen ‘all dead and dried out’, and she bemoans how ‘a perfectly good plant, a living growing thing’ has been completely neglected.

Revolutionary Road was made into a film by Sam Mendes, with Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet. I can see that this, not to mention the 1936 Petrified Forest Film (and possibly the 1955 TV remake with a much older Bogie, reprising his role, with a luscious young Lauren Bacall) may make their several ways into my viewing.

Now many thanks are due to a determined group of bloggers who urged me to embark on this one. First amongst them my dear bloggy buddy FictionFan, whose stunning review of this well over a year ago as part of her excellent GAN quest, finally got this snail (so many, many excellent books, suggested by so many, many of you) over the starting line. I then turned into a dynamic hare of a reader riding on the back of a slow and steady tortoise. Finishing thoroughly as well as with some degree of speed (reading at every opportunity)

FictionFan’s urgings were reinforced by Marina Sofia on Finding Time to Write, and crimeworm Thank you all.

Recommended? Of course, and how
Revolutionary Road Amazon UK
Revolutionary Road Amazon USA

John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath

Tags

Book Review, John Steinbeck, Novels about America, The Grapes of Wrath

A book to make the reader rage; a book to make the reader weep in shame and despair

John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel was both a colossus of a book, an infinitely worthy winner, and a far-from perfect book, a flawed book.

Reading it, with that mixture of complex, uncomfortable emotions plus a sense of, at times, a critical, not to mention slightly jaundiced eye, I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, for the following eulogy, of the deeply flawed Antony, given by Cleopatra:

His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm
Crested the world. His voice was propertied
As all the tuned sphere, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder.

Of course this is hyperbole, but it also recognises ‘giants amongst men’

And this is such a flawed giant among novels. At a time where it is routine to praise the literary at-best-mediocre, as if it were exceptional, how can the shaken, uncomfortable, disturbed reader find words for a book such as this, written out of such a searing sense of a cruel and indifferent world, filled with a humankind sleepwalking towards its own destruction. This book is indeed gargantuan – in subject matter as well as number of pages.

On the front of the paperback version I started to read (before downloading from Kindle, as there was just too much I needed to underline) was the following quote from Steinbeck:

I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied

The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939 when the machinery of war was providing a terrible solution to the stock market crash and depression of the 30s, which is the subject of this book. It is a book written out of white-hot, red-raw rage, disgust and righteous polemic against an indifferent, blinkered and self-obsessed capitalism.

The book follows the fortunes of one small family, the Joads, Oklahoma small farmers, homesteaders, as the move from small family farming to larger and larger conglomerates, changes and destroys our connections to the land itself, and to each other.

nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates, and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself

The Joads stand for the thousands of others, unnamed, the small men and women.

The crash of 29 had (as do more recent depressions and recessions today) ripple-down effects on all, and, as ever, the disadvantaged, those without much financial leeway, those whose belts are already notched tightly, have fewer places to go, fewest savings which can be made, the closer to the breadline they were, before fall.

Like thousands of other homesteaders, losing their land and their livelihood in the face of conglomerate rapacity, the Joads follow the lure of jobs to be had, fruit-picking (for virtually starvation wages) in California

Steinbeck for sure uses and manipulates his readers, hectors them, lectures them, throws the red book at them, shoves our faces up against our own indifference, our sentimentality, our complicity. Having lacerated us with bruising accounts of our hard-heartedness, of our denial of the beggars in our neighbourhood, he cunningly and deliberately rubs salt in our wounds by exploiting our sentimentality.

The deaths of many, through starvation and illness because of starvation, and the deaths and the suffering of some of the individuals whose journeys we follow, in the book are intercut with the casual death and suffering of animals, whether by our carelessness, or the carelessness of a red in tooth and claw natural world.

Where are we most hurt, where do we weep most – is it for the suffering of our own kind, or is it for the suffering of another species. I knew my tears and my grief for the death of an animal were manipulated by the writer. But I also knew why, and I knew what he was showing me about myself, and could not, in any way, fault his manipulation here.

Steinbeck shows how nature itself is struggle, a survivalist struggle – but draws a very different conclusion about the rightness of ‘survival of the fittest’ from that drawn by right-wingers; he does not take the slightly later Randian view of the triumph of individual struggle, rather, sees collectivism as the only solution, the choice which must be made.

He punches the reader, again and again, with the righteousness of left wing politics, the infamy of capital. Yes, we live in a world where it is now easy to see that communism and socialism (not to mention other isms) can be as self-serving of its own ideology, as much inclined to sacrifice the individual on the alter of its own drive to ‘progress’ and ‘the ends justify the means’ – but I don’t personally have any problem with his polemic, placed in its own time.

Artworks by Thomas Hart Benton in the Kindle download version of the book are stunning accompaniments to the text

Yes, for sure there are long sections which are boring, where, for example, pages and pages are devoted to the hard graft of repairing cars – but, again, I don’t mind, because he is wanting to make the reader realise the skill and the dignity of manual work. And yes, there are also at times problems with trying to give a flavour of the speech of the common man – at times the setting down of dialect gets wearing, and makes characters sound a bit simple or idiotic (my prejudices showing, clearly) , whereas this is not what is intended, and I think, again, Steinbeck is trying to offset a literature which is written by, and for, the ruling classes and the intelligentsia.

I have to forgive all these ‘flaws’, these niceties, about what literature should be, how it should NOT be polemic, how we should NOT be so at times crassly manipulated, because this is a book whose power, whose beauty, whose hugeness overrides its imperfections.

My nerves are indeed ragged, I am sick and sore, hurt and confused. I feel as if I have been run over by a proverbial ten ton truck, repeatedly, and then, offered exquisite flowers, delicate, fragile moments, writing of transcendent glory, before, again Steinbeck punches me in the gut and delivers yet another knock-out blow, of polemic, putting me through the emotional wringer, or boring me with the innards of motors.

But I don’t care. This is a book which seethes with enormous power, and the roughness of its sometime edges are part of that power. ‘Perfection’ would be, in this case, something to inhibit the power.

I’m grateful, very grateful, to  my fellow blogger and friend FictionFan whose own superb review kicked me into reading this. Even if it may well be to the detriment of whatever-I’m-reading-next as I can’t NOT read, but what do you turn to after reading amongst giants?

Finally, this particular Kindle download version is brilliant, interlaced as it is with wonderful reproductions of paintings and drawings and stills from the movie which was made of this book. Thanks, again, to FictionFan for persuading me to this version .

The book of course was filmed, powerfully, by John Ford. starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, with Jane Darwell as the towering, dignified figure of the matriarch of the family, Ma Joad. The reach of the film, like the reach of the book, was long.

Here  is a rather wonderful collage of edited sections of the film cut and accompanied by a Judy Collins version of the song ‘Brother, Can you spare a dime?’

I discovered that Woody Guthrie had composed and performed folk songs to Tom Joad, narrating his story (not included here, as they are spoilers). Not to mention, much later, Bruce Springsteen produced his own tribute to the power of Steinbeck’s book, reaching deep beyond its time : The Ghost of Tom Joad

Steinbeck’s book was both lauded, hence, that Pulitzer prize, and his later winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature, – and banned in its year of publication from the public libraries and schools of parts of California, as the second part of the book is a searing indictment of the greed of Californian agribusiness. The Associated Farmers, opposed to the organisation of labour, were one of the groupings instrumental in that ban, which was in place for 18 months. They for sure understood the power of this particular pen.

The Grapes Of Wrath, Kindle Illustrated Edition Amazon UK
The Grapes Of Wrath, Kindle Illustrated Edition Amazon USA

Jane Smiley – Early Warning

Tags

Book Review, Early Warning, Family Saga, Jane Smiley, Last Hundred Years Trilogy, Novels about America

The low-level hum of a mushroom cloud

At the conclusion of my review of Some Luck, the first volume of Jane Smiley’s trilogy of 100 years of America, as seen through a single farming family from Iowa , I wrote the following :

It was when I finished Some Luck, and sat down to think about what Smiley had done, and the manner of her doing it, that I realised how brilliantly the novel had been crafted. She is not a writer who stuns with her showy brilliance, but one who, when you stop and look at the piece, has crafted beautifully, properly, harmoniously. There is integrity to her work. And I can’t wait for volume 2, which will cover the 50’s to the 80’s, and where, I suspect, the sense of timelessness which still clung to the early part of Some Luck, will be wrenched asunder

And now, having concluded Early Morning, the second volume, I see no reason to change my earlier opinion about Smiley’s qualities as a writer, nor the difference I thought there would be between the world of Some Luck and the world of Early Morning.

Though Joe, the second son of the initial patriarch and matriarch, Walter and Rosanna Langdon, by continuing to be the one who connects to place, whose prevailing love is the land itself, does seem to try to hold to roots and to history, farming itself is completely different from the scratched out, un-mechanised work his father did.

The focus in Early Warning is the second generation and beyond, that generation affected by the Second World War, the Cold War, whose children would feel the effects of Vietnam, the sexual revolution, gay rights, feminism, the civil rights movement, enormous social and cultural changes.

Smiley continues to allocate a year per chapter, and in that year will snapshot various members of the family, their wider families, friends and work relationships.

I have stayed utterly absorbed. She looks at her individuals in close-up, their lives, loves, and place in society, but at the same time, each of them stands for more. This is both a marvellous narrative, and at the same time a snapshot of society.

There is of course a challenge for the reader who has not read the first volume, as some of the references won’t quite make the same emotional impact, stir the same memories as they will for those who experienced the characters now at centre stage as babies, toddlers, adolescents, young men and women whose natures were forming.

And there are also some challenges simply because you are following several stories, several lives, across thirty years, so it’s harder work for the reader to hold all these stories which are simultaneously going on.

Reese Homestead, photo by Karen Reese Bird from
Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation Site

But the tapestry is, to my mind, a gorgeous and richly patterned one, and what makes it work is Smiley’s integrity, her interest in her characters, and her resistance to going for the easy option of just bombarding the reader with high drama on every page. She is as interested in the small detail of small lives as in the actions happening on a world stage – in fact, more so, as it is the effect of the world stage on the daily lives of ordinary people that form the fabric of this.

I do have one small criticism, to do with the way Smiley, or her editors, have chosen to help the reader keep track of the expanding characters across the generations, as marriages, partnerships, the families of the partners and new births happen. This is done at the start of the book via a family tree which takes the reader from book 1 to the end of this book. This takes an element of surprise from the story, as it might give clues as to who for example lives and who might die, early, simply because they leave no heirs, and we might, given knowledge of the first book, and the time of the second, be able to work out why. As the children of Frank, Joe, Lillian and the others reach maturity we might also be able to predict immediately that someone who appears on the scene as a partner for one of the children is not going to be ‘significant’ simply because the format of the family tree tells you who is going to be the partner who fathers the next generation.

I would have liked to see something along the lines of a tree which gave birthdates, and where applicable, deathdates of all the family in 1953 when this book starts, but no indication of any later births, partnerships etc. And perhaps a ‘mini-tree’ at the end of each year which might record only any changes which happened that year – deaths and births – and which could then be a chapter conclusion, easily found in the book, or in an e-reader, which would be a useful way for the reader to keep track of the ages of the appearing (or departing) characters, and their relationships in the tree at large.

‘Relationships’ being of course a major thread of this book. The land itself, however changed by fashion and global economy, and the lives of family members, however changed by global scattering far from that Iowan beginning, exert tendrils and roots which bind them together.

The title of this book nods to that fear which formed a low-level background, and some-times a right-up-close-and-personal stuff of nightmares, from the Bay of Pigs onwards.

buzzards, flicr, non-commercial use photo by George Pankewytch

Smiley does that shivering thing, where the characters (and the reader) are deep in the minutiae of day-to-day, skating on the thin-ice surface, and suddenly, some film gets whisked aside, and you are face to face with ‘here be monsters’:

What he remembered….was standing near one of the windows and being revisited by a feeling from that trip he took for Arthur to Iran; at the sight of buzzards feasting in the moonlight on some carcass, say a goat, he had known all of a sudden how little intervened between the hot breeze on that runway and death itself. Death had shimmered in the air – as close as his next breath – and in that satin-draped consulate, looking out on Sixty-ninth street, he had felt that once again. Now, he thought, right now, at the Russian Tea Room, it was even closer, if still beyond the boundary. The thought made his hand resting on the table look vivid, still, pale like marble

And no doubt, the times and the changes will run even faster, not to mention the scatterings, despite global communications, become even more dizzying, when the third volume takes on the age of the world-wide-web, social media and all the rest.

I received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine programme UK. Publication date is the 28th April USA/7th May in the UK

Early Warning Amazon UK
Early Warning Amazon USA

Dorothy B. Hughes – The Expendable Man

Tags

1960s setting, Book Review, Crime Fiction, Dorothy B. Hughes, Golden Age Crime, Novels about America, The Expendable Man

Stunning Golden Age crime thriller which will leave the reader reeling

Being more than a little tired of the interminable violence-graphically-described-in-titillatory-fashion-against-women which seems to be the clichéd bedrock of some crime writing, I have been turning my attention to some earlier writers, particularly those whose work is literary fiction, subject matter: crime.

And so it was that I discovered the American author Dorothy B. Hughes, 1904-1993. For some reason, Hughes stopped writing, or, at least, was not writing for publication any more by 1963, and this novel, The Expendable Man, was her last.

It has been picked up, and re-published by the ever-excellent Persephone Press. Persephone publish/republish forgotten classics by women, many of them from the early part of the twentieth century. Where they differ from other publishers with a similar intent, is in the individual beauty of their physical books – cover and end-papers, particularly, are wonderfully designed to subliminally, rather than glaringly, hint at the flavour of the book within.

The Expendable Man’s cover is curious – a uniform, (as if trying not to project anything noticeable, remarkable, out-of-the-ordinary) unbroken grey. The inside covers are a strange, unsettling, oppressive series of compressive, abstract shapes – chocolate brown against a dull, dark turquoise/teal background, with a peppering of white dots. A rather brave choice in all – not alluring, yet, nevertheless, compelling in an odd manner.

The Expendable Man is set in America – Los Angeles to Arizona, in 1963, and is most firmly rooted in the politics of that time. Politics and law both at large, and how they play out within the hearts and minds of individuals.

This was a golden time in America’s view of itself, the American Dream – at least for those who already were the haves of society. America had a charismatic, dynamic young president, championing liberal values, respected at home and abroad. But the times also had (when do they ever not) darker, more sinister undercurrents.

This is actually a book which is very hard to adequately and enticingly review – because there is very little a reviewer can say about it, if they are not to spoil the necessary journey which each reader must make. I’m particularly glad I picked this up without any prior knowledge, except that being a Persephone book, it would be well-written, that it was a ‘golden-age crime’ and that it had been described, on publication, by the New York Times as :

the author’s finest work to date, of unusual stature both as a suspense story and as a straight novel

And, that NYT reviewer spoke truly – this book delivered. Here is as much as I can say:

Hugh is driving from Indio to Phoenix. Against his instincts, he picks up a young female hitchhiker. He knows this is probably not a sensible thing to do, but he is a decent man with younger sisters, and thinks it is better that he be the one to do this, rather than leave her perhaps to be picked up by some other, less decent man. The highway is deserted and dark is approaching. The girl, who definitely looks and acts more than a little aggressively, is clearly someone with something to hide. And appears to be one of the dispossessed poor. And everything moves downhill from there on in. Quite rapidly, and quite unstoppably.

Something about the book is, right from the start, implacably tense and oppressive, even the description (which hooked me immediately) of the landscape, in the opening paragraph :

Across the tracks there was a different world. The long and lonely country was the colour of sand. The horizon hills were haze-black; the clumps of mesquite stood in dark pools of their own shadowing. But the pools and the rim of dark horizon were discerned only by conscious seeing, else the world was all sand, brown and tan and copper and pale beige. Even the sky at this moment was sand, reflection of the fading bronze of the sun

Hugh has something about him. He seems more than a little uptight; more than a little fearful; perhaps, even a little prone to suspicion and paranoia. Yet the reader must accept that he is a good man, and senses that his motivation for picking up the teenage girl is exactly what we are told it is. Hugh’s tension, Hugh’s curious nervousness instantly infects the reader, and we too make the journey, uneasy, and compelled.

More can’t really be said…..but if you are looking for a wonderfully taut, psychologically authentic, brilliantly written suspenseful crime thriller, which will deliver surprising and truthful shocks, and set you thinking hard – do read it. It’s a stunner! Highly recommended

In a rather wonderful afterword, in this Persephone book, which analyses the filmic quality of Hughes’ writing (several of her books were made into films, and she  did work as an assistant on Hitchcock’s “Spellbound”, is the quote below, from a publication where Hughes describes her work method:

The germ or seed was always a place, a background scene. And against that background, there began a dialogue or monologue; whatever it was, a conversation. Then I would begin to recognise the characters. The plotting was the final step; it was people and places that interested me, not gimmicks

Dorothy B. Hughes in 1923

All of which rather reinforces the sense of authenticity in this undoubtedly page turning book. Sure plotting there is, but this proceeds at a correct pace. Having set the oppressive opener, that sense of a huge and weighted landscape, the journey of this was pretty well inevitable, and did not really rely on barrel-loads of coincidences.

And…….sorry Statesiders, for some unknown reason this marvellous American writer does not seem to be available on Kindle, YOUR side of the pond, nor is your wood book version the delectable Persephone one.

The Expendable Man Amazon UK
The Expendable Man Amazon USA

Richard Powers – Orfeo

Tags

Book Review, Classical music, Novels about America, Orfeo, Richard Powers

Music of the spheres; music in the genes

The subject matter of Richard Powers tellingly titled ‘Orfeo’ is immense – immortality and transcendence, the desire to make sense and purpose of it all, and what remains always outside our ability to grasp its intangibility, but is always on the edge of our yearning reach.

Orpheus in classical mythology is a poet and musician of such power that all of the natural world is charmed by his music. In one version, he is the son of Apollo. He descends to the world of the dead to bring back his wife Eurydice, a task which ultimately fails as he disobeys the instruction to not look back.

Corot – Orpheus leading Eurydice from the Underworld Wiki Commons

The central character of Powers’ book, Peter Els, though initially trained as a chemist, with a particular interest in its metaphysics, the secret at the heart of matter, falls as passionately for the metaphysics of music, becoming a composer. The book charts not only the history of music, the intense experience, the yearning, the transcendence, the way, which, if we pay attention to it, it can be felt almost at a cellular level, but also, through the central character in space and time (America, 1960’s onwards) the life of that country.

And there is more. At the start of the book, Els is 70. He has begun, in his search for a music which is present and meaningful, to return to his earlier training, and look at the building blocks of living matter, the alphabet of DNA, and how parallels can be found with the alphabet of music. He is exploring the music of biology, at cellular level

Unfortunately, in a world fearing chemical and biological terrorism, the discovery of a home lab where genetic engineering is taking place, makes Els a fugitive, on the run from the security forces.

Els’s ‘run’ also takes him into a spiralling run backwards and forwards into his own personal history, through first and last loves, the start and ending of relationships, with women, with his closest friend, and with his child.

This is a weighty, difficult, challenging read in many ways, exploring music and specific pieces in immediate depth, diving into the heart of them, and Powers uses language most potently, but demands work from the reader. His clear craft of language, the sense that every sentence is constructed with care, like notes perfectly placed, holding their hidden harmonics, meant it was important to understand precisely the meaning of often complex words. I was using the dictionary frequently. I was also highlighting, almost on every page, observations about art, about music, about biology, chemistry, philosophy, metaphysics, which were telling, weighted and beautiful

And most of all, the wonderful, illuminating journeys through musical works, both real, and imagined (some of Els’ compositions) sent me back to listen, or to listen for the first time.

Proverb Music by Steve Reich, Text Wittgenstein. One of the pieces of music explored in Orfeo

In this, Powers’ reminds me a little of another American author, Siri Hustvedt, another fierce intellect, who in ‘What I Loved’ with a central character who is a visual artist, creates invented pieces of art through words so real that I could see them, and went vainly searching for them via Google, convinced that Hustvedt must have seen or made them. I had exactly the same response to Els’s compositions. Powers writes so impeccably and presently within the heart of specific ‘real’ pieces, that, surely he must have heard the pieces his central character composes.

This will no doubt be a particularly potent novel for those steeped in the Western classical music tradition, as practising musicians, and probably even more so for composers.

The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits

It may not be the book if music holds the space of background:

Half the clientele have their own earbuds, the other half use this music, if at all, only as protection from the terrors of silence

Music…………..doesn’t mean things. It is things

Orfeo Amazon UK
Orfeo Amazon USA

Jane Smiley – Some Luck

Tags

Book Review, Family Saga, Jane Smiley, Mid-West America, Novels about America, Some Luck

A hundred years in the Mid-West, stirred through a family saga, and blending in the wide, wide world

Jane Smiley’s ‘Some Luck’ is Volume 1 of a trilogy, examining a tumultuous 100 years from just after the end of the Great War to 2020. Smiley does this by taking an ordinary family from Iowa, from mixed European settler stock, and following them forward through the generations, as children grow and become parents, and those children grow, in a world which is endlessly, rapidly in change.

Like Smiley’s Pulitzer prizewinning A Thousand Acres, this first volume of the trilogy shows the author as a writer with a deep connection to rural place and landscape, and to the powerful hold than ‘land’ can exert. She effortlessly shows how a story can be both deeply and uniquely personal, familial, and how the personal is always shot through with the ripples, tugs, and in-roads which the wider world and its history makes in the lives of each unique individual, as we all come from place, and live through time.

The structure of this first (and I assume the subsequent two) of the trilogy, takes each chapter looking at a year in the life of the family, exploring what is happening to them, in their relationships with each other, and their relationship with that world of which they are part. ‘Some Luck’ runs from 1920-1953

The central family is that of Walter Langdon, 25 in 1920, from Irish, Scottish, English settler heritage, a young farmer who had spent time in the Great War. His young wife Rosanna, from a German settler heritage has recently given birth to their first child, Frank.

Southern Iowa Drift Plain, Wiki Commons

The first few chapters present, stunningly, an inside into the mind of a small child, and the laying out of how personality is already clearly expressed. The relationships between parents, children, grandparents, the physical, rooted life in connection with the land, a sense of tradition, stability, and life unfolding in repeating spirals with change beginning to happen, faster and faster as the years roll by, is done with absolute assurance.

Things that he picked up, no matter how small, were removed from his grasp before he could give them the most cursory inspection, not to mention get them to his mouth. It seemed that he could never get anything to his mouth that he actually wanted to get there. Whatever he grabbed was immediately removed and a cracker was substituted, but he had explored all the features of crackers, and there was nothing more about them that he cared to find out

Smiley is in many ways a deceptively easy read. She tells a great story, and it’s clear this is and will be a marvellously absorbing narrative, an expose of social history, changing cultural landscapes, but she does this so apparently without effort, that there is never the sense of a character being manipulated to prove a point or to make something happen.

The influx of the wider world into the Langdon world, showing the effects of the depression of the 20’s, the move to war, the engagement of the second generation in that war, the rise of the Cold War, changing fashions in child care, the aspirations of modernity, a society where stability is giving way to rapid change, conservative capitalism versus consumerism, socialism, life post-Hiroshima and the shadow of the bomb, all this complexity is most beautifully revealed. Her book is as much educative social history as novel, without the history ever feeling like a information overload.

It was when I finished Some Luck, and sat down to think about what Smiley had done, and the manner of her doing it, that I realised how brilliantly the novel had been crafted. She is not a writer who stuns with her showy brilliance, but one who, when you stop and look at the piece, has crafted beautifully, properly, harmoniously. There is integrity to her work. And I can’t wait for volume 2, which will cover the 50’s to the 80’s, and where, I suspect, the sense of timelessness which still clung to the early part of Some Luck, will be wrenched asunder

as long as the words were not said…..(she) didn’t have to react, didn’t have to feel that thing that she was going to feel, that thing that was like an empty house with the windows smashed and the paint peeling and the pillars of the porch broken and the porch roof itself collapsing, which was something she had never seen, but became something she would never forget

Recommended, most highly recommended.

I received this as a digital review copy from the publishers

Some Luck Amazon UK
Some Luck Amazon USA

Ellen Feldman – The Unwitting

Tags

Book Review, Ellen Feldman, McCarthy, Novels about America, The Cold War, The Kennedys, The Unwitting

Politics, like love, can be a dirty game

Ellen Feldman’s tautly written, reflective book set in post-war America is a splendid, page-turning book, exploring the territory of the Cold War, rife with darkness and suspicion from both sides of the ideological divide, as seen through the prism of one marriage.

Nell and Charlie Benjamin, at the start of this novel, set on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, are a couple who have it all. She is a journalist, he is the publisher of a respected liberal left leaning magazine. Both of them have secrets. Some of these are in the field of their personal relationship, some of them are where individual and state connect, particularly at a time when there were real battles for hearts and minds going on between ideologies which were carving up the world.

Both America and Russia at that time were claiming some sort of higher moral ground; both had far less moral ways of seeking to exert control.

Feldman expertly weaves her way through a period in American history from 1948 to 1971, exploring attitudes to race, sexual politics, and lifting the lid on the difference the myth and the reality between public face and behind closed doors.

Singer Moses LaMarr singing spirituals to children in Gorky Park, Leningrad, Russia in December 1955 – American Theatre Troupe Production of Porgy and Bess, tour to Moscow and Leningrad,

Just when the central character, Nell, has a handle on ‘what is right’…she gets presented with nuance and ambiguity again and again.

This is a pacy, fascinating read, heroes have feet of clay, the corrupt have surprising integrity. The reader, like the central character, is forced to interpret and reinterpret a life and events, backwards. What happens now, what we know now, may force us to reinterpret what we thought we knew then.

This is a book full of absolutely believable twists and turns. Nell and Charlie are fictional, but the stage on which Feldman sets them, and the manipulations that went on to control that stage, were not

I was past the point in life when I believed people were of a piece. I had learned to live with ambiguity. If you can’t you have no business falling in love

The title of the book refers to unwitting, because unknowing, collusion in what goes on; however, the unwitting might have asked the questions which were staring them in the face. Sometimes innocence looks like an unwillingness to face the unpalatable

This is in some ways, a difficult book to review, because to explain much of the ‘about’ is to spoil the reader’s own journey.

I recommend this very highly, and will read more of Feldman’s work

The book reminded me, in some ways, of Sebastian Faulks’ similar time-set On Green Dolphin Street, but also, a more recent, factual read, the excellent A Spy Among Friends, Ben MacIntyre’s account of post-war politics amidst the cold war, and how Britain, America and Russia accommodated themselves, losing and gaining power and ideological empire

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK

The Unwitting Amazon UK
The Unwitting Amazon USA