Novel Reviews by Dennis Littrell

During my late childhood I developed a passion for reading fiction, especially novels. I read virtually all the American and European masters of the twentieth century and some of the greats from the nineteenth as well. I felt that this was essential to my education as a writer.

I could list what I think are the best novels ever written or the best novels I've ever read, but there are top 100 lists on the Web that can be found by Googling "best novels." I've read most of the novels on those lists.

Anyway, what I am going to do in this blog is present some of my reviews of novels that I have read. Unfortunately I didn't start reviewing until 1999 when I had already read most of the novels I would ever read. Still I think these reviews are worth reading, especially for those of you who have read the novels.

NOTE: My reviews often contain spoilers! Why? Because my intent is to discuss the novel much as one might in a book club.

Here is the list of novels reviewed. There are forty of them. The reviews follow the list.

Bataille, Christophe. Absinthe (1999) ****

Bataille, Christophe. Annam (1996) *****

Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day (1956) *****

Bogosian, Eric. Mall (2000) ***

Cain, James M. Double Indemnity (1936) ***

Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) ****

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep (1939) ****

Chevalier, Tracy. Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) *****

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama (1973)****

Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace (1999) ****

Doyle, Roddy. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996)****

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (1925) *****

Flanagan, Richard. Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish (2001) *****

Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections (2001) *****

Glavinic, Thomas Night Work (2006) trans by John Brownjohn (2008) *****

Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)*****

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies (1954) *****

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter (1850) *****

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) ****

Hesse, Herman. Siddhartha (1951)*****

Highsmith, Patricia. A Game for the Living (1958)****

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) *****

Littrell, Dennis. A Perfectly Natural Act (1973) ****

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) *****

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005) *****

McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden (1978)****

McCarthy, Cormac. A Child of God (1973)

McCarthy, Cormac No Country for Old Men (2005) ****

Mills, Tanya Parker. The Reckoning (2008) *****

Mirolla, Michael. Berlin (2009) *****

Moravia, Alberto The Conformist (1952) *****

Mughal, Mohamed Resolution 786 A Novel in Three Acts Telling Cuneiform Tales of Love and War and God and Lust and Loss (2008)

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (1955)*****

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (1992)****

Orwell, George. 1984 (1949) *****

Pamuk, Orhan. The White Castle (1979) ****

Sager, Larry No Guns, No Knives, No Personal Checks: The Tales of a San Francisco Cab Driver (2007) *****

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) *****

Voltaire. Candide (2002) ****

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughter-House-Five (1966) *****

Bataille, Christophe. Annam (1996) *****

In far off Vietnam during the time of the guillotine

There is a dreamy otherworldly quality in the work of Christophe Bataille, the kind of quality that intrigues and seduces our sensibilities. Here the story is about some monks and nuns who leave France just before the revolution to travel by ship to Vietnam. Ultimately this is a love story, a sweet and tender tale of the spirit becoming flesh in a far off land where creepers creep and the rain is incessant and where everywhere there is greenery. There is a lyrical quality in Bataille's prose, something like poetry that pleases the eye and the ear even in translation. Perhaps some of that is due to the sensitive work of translator Richard Howard.

Bataille tells a story with simplicity. He tells it chronologically but tersely with just a stroke of color here and there, a bit of dialogue, a snatch of inner monologue, and from time to time a little catching up of details not previously mentioned. He begins with a child emperor from Vietnam who has come to France to implore Henry XVI to help his father the Prince Regent regain his position of power taken from him by a peasant's revolt. But the strange child, who became a toy of "bored courtiers hungry for novelty" is ineffectual and dies of pneumonia.

And then we have the former Bishop of Adran, who had been taken with the child, commission two ships to sail to Vietnam to bring salvation to the heathens there; and so we have our main set of characters, a small group of Dominican clergy and nuns who brave the long and tortuous voyage to eventually arrive at the city of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. And after some long years we have Brother Dominic and Sister Catherine living in utter simplicity as peasants in the highlands of Vietnam in a place called Annam.

This is a tale that emphasizes the earthy quality of life, the spirituality that comes with living a life of Zen-like simplicity in contrast to the world of affairs of church and state and war and trade. It is a search for a return to the Garden of Eden. On another level this tale hints of a world to come with France as a colonial power in Vietnam and then as France removed.

The book is short, 87 pages. Temporally speaking it is like a novel as each paragraph and the space between consume so much of time, and yet it is like a short story in its compression of the lives and times of its characters. Bataille is a fine talent and I will read more of his work.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Bataille, Christophe. Absinthe (1999) ****

Dreamy, atmospheric, poetic

Not being an imbiber of absinthe myself, I read this book because I had previously read Christophe Bataille's poetic novel Annam. This novel is written in a similar fashion, the novel in part as a historical memoir, composed in a captivating style that captures atmosphere and feeling. In a round about fashion Bataille tells the story of absinthe from the days when it was the height of French fashion in the late 19th century and prior to the Great War through its prohibition beginning in 1915. Today absinthe is again legal in most countries of the world that do not prohibit alcoholic beverages. But, as I understand it, absinthe is not legal in the US.

Absinthe is a green (Bataille has it glowing in the dark), bitter, very strong alcoholic beverage flavored with wormwood, anise, and other herbs that is diluted with water and often served with sugar. When I was a young man in France in the sixties I recall seeing absinthe served in the cafes and bars. There was then and continues to be a certain mystique associated with the drink. Many people believe it has mysterious powers, and Bataille makes much of this in his novel. Two of his characters imbibe just a bit of the drink through a sugar cube and go into a trance-like state or a swoon. The central character of the novel, Jose, a round, charming distiller manages to mesmerizes women (or so it is hinted) with his charm and the absinthe.

Absinthe was prohibited because many people believed that it was a dangerous drink that could drive men mad, make women easy, and/or ruin their health. However the current view is that absinthe is no more or no less dangerous than other distilled liquors, the herbal ingredients notwithstanding. When I was in France in that long ago I may have drunk some myself. It has a licorice flavor from the anise or fennel that is added to the alcohol. We called it "Pernod" after the main distributer Pernod et Fils. And then again I may not have actually tried the drink and only imagined its taste. It's hard to remember.

There are a number of paintings showing someone in the throes of absinthe intoxication and a similar number of books written on the history of the drink. On the cover is Albert Maignan's painting from 1895, "The Great Muse," which shows a man dreamily intoxicated by a woman (the muse) with her hands about his head. Presumably this could also depict absinthe intoxication.

I don't think this very short (71 pages) novel is as good as Bataille's first, mentioned above, but it is interesting in that it recalls the France of the early part of the 20th century, especially some people of the hills and villages of Provence. There is a brief almost extraneous story as an "Overture" about one of them who spent most of his time in "Buenos Ayres." Bataille's narrative style is to wander about and then return seamlessly to the main sequence. It is a technique that I would like to master.

Perhaps what Bataille does best is evoke in the reader a deliciously sensual feeling for the women admired by his characters. He does something similar in Annam. Again I am impressed with Richard Howard's lyrical translation.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day (1956) *****

A short novel, representative of Bellow's work

"Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow" is what Horace wrote at the end of his first book of Odes a couple of thousand years ago. And ever since, youth has been urged to make hay while the sun shines since the bird of time is on the wing--to toss in a couple more homilies. But what Saul Bellow has in mind here is entirely ironic since his sad protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm Adler has never seized the day at all, much to his unfeeling father's disgust.

This then is a tale of failure (one of Bellow's recurring themes) and the shame and self-loathing that failure may bring; and yet there is a sense, or at least a hint--not of redemption of course--but of acceptance and understanding at the end of this short existential novel by the Nobel Prize winner.

The way that Bellow's drowning, existential man experiences the funeral as this novel ends is the way we should all experience a funeral, that is, with the certain knowledge that the man lying dead in the coffin is, or will be, us.

And we should cry copious tears and a great shudder should seize us and we should sob as before God with the full realization that our day too will come, and sooner than we think--which is what big, blond-haired, handsome Jewish "Wilkie" Adler does. And in that realization we know that he has seen the truth and we along with him. An existential truth of course.

The structure of the novel, like James Joyce's Ulysses, begins and ends in the same day. Through flashbacks from Adler's nagging consciousness, the failures and disappointments of his life are recalled. When he was just a young man he foolishly thought because of his good looks and the assurance of a bogus talent scout that he might become a Hollywood star; and so he spurned college and instead went to the boulevard of broken dreams as it runs toward Santa Monica.

And so began the failure and dissolution of his life. As Bellow tells it, Wilhelm has slipped and fallen into something like a watery abyss. He can't catch his breath. He is drowning. He reaches out to his father, who turns away from him. He reaches out to Dr. Tamkin, the mysterious stranger, the clever fox of a man who swindles him and then disappears into the crowd of the great metropolis. He reaches out to his wife, who will also not extend a helping hand. Meanwhile, the waters about him have grown, and he is lost.

We are all lost, more or less, except those who delude themselves, who have their various schemes and delusions to distract them, is what Bellow seems to be saying. Those of us who have not seized the day, a day that is fleeting and subtle, indefinite and hard to grasp, become so much water-logged driftwood.

With resemblances to Albert Camus' The Stranger and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Bellow's Wilhelm is the essence of the anti-hero, literature's dominate strain of the mid-twentieth century. Such men have no firm or deep beliefs. They exist for the day, like butterflies, tossed about by circumstance all the while wondering why, but without any ability to rise above their predicament, a predicament that is so ordinary, so banal, so patently unheroic to be that of Everyman.

And what is the answer? For Bellow and Camus and Miller, the answer is the finality of death. A man lives, goes about craving--"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want"--and for what and because of what? Like the tentmaker, Omar Khayyam, we wander willy-nilly without a clue, and then become so much dust in the wind.

For life IS a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying in the end, nothing. All our labors are like those of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill only to watch it roll back down again.

We cannot help but feel in reading this novel both a sense of empathy for the man who has failed, but at the same time, we might feel like his father and want to give him a kick and say, "Wilkie, get a grip on yourself. Quit making the same mistakes over and over again."

But we know that for Wilhelm it is already too late. He cannot change his nature anymore than the leopard can change its spots. We sense the great hand of fate upon him, and we shudder. For in some respects--different respects of course--we could be him. And we straighten up our frame, we return to our duties and responsibilities, to our work and the rhythms of our lives secure in the knowledge that we are stronger that Wilhelm, that although the waves may toss us about, we will not sink. At least not yet.

In reading this for the first time now half a century after it was written, I am struck with how different the zeitgeist is today. We have wildly successful heroes and larger-than-life murderous villains, and nowhere is there the existential man.

This short work is a splendid representative of one of my favorite genres, the short, sharply focused American novel from the early or middle 20th century. Other--widely differing--examples are John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, Nathanael West's Miss Lonely Hearts, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to name a few.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Bogosian, Eric. Mall (2000) ***

A grunge movie in the making

Alienation, frustration, self-loathing and other afflictions of the mall crowd are celebrated here in a kind of David Lynch/Quentin Tarantino movie made into a novel. Well, actually, what wordsmith and cultural shock artist Eric Bogosian, who indeed does weld a mean pen, has in mind is something the other way around. His novel first, a six-figure option next, and then the screen play (at ten grand per week), and finally an exploitive cinematic production for the grunge crowd.

He has served up, for our delectation, the following characters:

MAL, short for Malcolm, a kind of fat boy urban soldier of fortune on speed, who pops mom one (or two actually) in the head with his .22 before setting off for the mall with his real arsenal for further fun and games.

DONNA, a pleasingly plump bored housewife who has a gargantuan appetite for all things food and a whole bunch of things sex, the kind of extreme darling that empties a half gallon of ice cream while watching the first ten minutes of Jerry Springer. She wanders over to the mall to try on some threads and provide a peep show for

DANNY, a sexually confused, uptight yuppie who hasn't been in marital bliss for awhile--actually he hasn't been in marital bliss for so long that his doctor recommends...well, Amazon.com has a taboo against what he recommends, but perhaps you can guess.

JEFF, a counter-cultural mall groupie on an acid trip who's read Steppenwolf (the book, not the band, duh) and imagines he will be a great writer some day, but right now he hasn't the time to actually DO any writing since he is finding himself and pursuing his need to hang with

ADELLE, a sweet young underprivileged thing with the pure heart of a sadist who shows DANNY what it's like to feel helpless in handcuffs.

Etc.

The plot revolves around the central deed, performed by MAL just so he can REALLY FEEL ALIVE. All the characters are like spokes in the wheel to this center that leads to the mall. The prose is sound-bite smart and the chapters are short. Bogosian's average word length is little more than four letters, while the pages practically turn themselves.

It would seem that there is little redemption here, but it all depends on who's doing the reading. Bogosian does serve up some adolescent Zen-like philosophy that is sure to please any thirteen-year-old. In fact, since I feel compelled to pan this opus, it will undoubtedly become a cult classic and the defining novel of a generation.

Well, maybe not. Anyway, JEFF is the character Bogosian identifies with and he gets all the philosophic lines. For example:

"What difference does it make if I think or I don't think? We're just these bags of flesh with sensors designed to make us think we're so precious." (p. 150)

"This is a place I cannot escape--myself. I cannot escape myself...I am locked into this moment, this self, this place forever. How did I get here? Why here and not someplace else?" (p. 199)

"Jeff was infected with a brain disease that forced him to try to make sense of his life." (p. 244)

Bottom line: this is an X-rated novel for young urban…philosophers.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Cain, James M. Double Indemnity (1936) ***

Raw material for a film noir

This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour with one hand tied behind your back.

Let me try that again. This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour without breaking a sweat.

Okay, how's this? This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour even if you're the kind of person who moves your lips when you read.

This is not to imply that Cain is the kind of writer who mixes his metaphors or hasn't gotten beyond primer prose. I mean, Shakespeare mixed his metaphors. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Cain wrote literature then it was by accident. Come to think of it, Shakespeare was only trying to turn a shilling, please a patron or give an actor some range. I guess real literature comes about when you're just trying to make ends meet and somehow you get inspired and don't even know it.

Cain didn't think much of this, calling it something like tripe and saying it would never be published as a book. He wrote it to appear as a serial in Redbook magazine, but Redbook rejected it so it appeared in Liberty magazine in 1935. It didn't make hardcover until the forties just before it was made into an excellent movie by Hollywood great Billy Wilder starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. In fact, to be honest, the movie is better than the book, which as everyone knows, is usually not the case.

He also wrote this to take advantage of the surprising success of his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), which Knopf published to critical acclaim on its way to bestsellerdom. Cain's stream-lined and hard-boiled faux Hemingway style charmed the critics and made the dime novel reader feel like he was reading Nathanael West or maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald. Re-reading Cain's first person narrative today is a lot like watching a movie from the forties, mainly because the movies so often imitated him with their film noir voice-overs and desperate crimes for love or money. Indeed a number of Cain's novels have been made into movies, Double Indemnity, Postman, and Mildred Pierce, the most memorable.

Here we have a painstakingly planned murder for the insurance money. It is so perfectly conceived that it would take a miracle for everything to fall into place. And yet it does, and yet something goes wrong. In the Wilder movie, insurance salesman Walter Neff (Walter Huff here) does it mostly out a irresistible desire to put something over on the insurance business he has worked at all his adult life, while in Cain's novel, Huff explains his motivation to Phyllis Nirdlinger, sociopathic wife of the intended: "Just pulling off some piker job, that don't interest me. But this, hitting it for the limit, that's what I go for. It's all I go for."

He means that the "accident" has to take place on a train so that they can collect a double indemnity from a standard clause in the policy. Today's amoralist might proclaim that he did it for the rush of doing something almost nobody ever got away with.

My problem with the novel is not the convenient way everything fell into place for the murder to work, or with how unlikely it was that Keyes figured it out so neatly, but with the stupid ending. You've got to read it to believe it, actually. Billy Wilder changed the ending in the movie to something more plausible. He, along with Raymond Chandler, who worked on the script with him, actually improved on the Cain novel in several places. As in Postman, Cain's antihero does his dirty work from the back of the car while the wife drives and the victim rides shotgun. Here he applies the kind of brute strength usually attributed to mobster heavies. (The contrivance needed to get him into the back seat strains credence but Wilder fixes that.) In truth, Cain was right: this novel needed a little work. He does NOT, however, repeat the sexual "celebration" beside the car after the murder in Postman, a scene that so shocked depression era readers. Indeed, here the two murderers are already beginning to sour on one another.

What Cain does so well is to probe into our dark psyches and to let loose the dogs of dirty deeds done dumb so that we might experience vicariously the hell they might lead to. Notable in the novel is the character of Phyllis, an ex-nurse with the psychopathic mind of a serial killer. (In fact, she IS a serial killer.) That part was played down in the movie. In the movie Cain's antihero is given human dimension through the mutual affection he has with Keyes. In the novel that affection is muted, but Cain humanizes him by showing the sincere, but apparently hands off, love he has for the dead man's 19-year-old daughter.

I don't exactly recommend that you read this, but it's worthwhile to compare it to the movie and to see how two great screenwriters (Wilder and Chandler) handle material from a novel. It is also worth reading for the snapshot of pre-World War II Los Angeles afforded. Of course any true film noir fan or student of American lit ought not to miss this. I suggest however that you write your own ending.

a review by Dennis Littrell

Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) ****

Hemingway stream-lined and accelerated

I spent some time trying to find out why this potboiler turned literature is called "The Postman Always Rings Twice" since at no place in the novel is a postman even mentioned. At first I thought it might be an echo of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, dreamt up by Knopf, Cain's publisher, to lend some literary pretension to a novel they weren't sure about; but that play wasn't written until some years after Postman was published in 1934. It was recently suggested to me (by Joseph Feinsinger, one of Amazon.com's best reviewers of literature) that it might be a rejoinder for the saying "opportunity knocks only once," which was the sort of pabulum given to out of work people during the depression. Cain's original title was "Bar-B-Que," which is entirely appropriate for a couple of reasons (the café, the burning car), but was perhaps a little too morbid for Knopf's sensibilities.

At any rate, the title finally chosen is somewhat magical as is the novel itself, the first of Cain's hard-boiled, loser tales that somehow caught the imagination and psyche of depression America. Re-reading the novel today one wonders why, but then again, I can see why.

First there's the raw sex with Frank forcing himself onto Cora, biting her lip, etc. and she loving it, that was somewhat shocking for its time. Ditto for the spontaneous sex they have in the dirt outside the car after Frank has beamed Nick. Then there is the fascination we have with stupid people doing vile deeds rather clumsily (with whom we might identify). But more than anything else it's the style. Cain raised the dime novel to something amazing with his no nonsense, no time to chat, no description beyond the absolutely necessary--a pared-down to raw flesh and bones writing style that made even some of the icons of literature sit up and take notice. Edmund Wilson, long the dean of American literary critics, was intrigued by the novel, as was Franklin P Adams who called it "the most engrossing, unlaydownable book that I have any memory of." (Quoted from Paul Skenazy's critical work, James M. Cain (1989), pp. 20-21). And Albert Camus said that his internationally famous masterpiece The Stranger was based in part on Postman. The alternate English title, "The Outsider," perhaps reveals its debt to Cain more clearly. Today the sex seems rather tame and the terse style seems almost a burlesque, having been so often imitated. I personally think that Cain, who was a one-time editor of The New Yorker and a relatively sophisticated literary man, was actually taking Hemingway's primer-prose style to its logical conclusion by simply cutting out all of Hemingway's poetic repetitions and anything else that didn't move the plot.

Well, how well does this stand up after almost seventy years? It was made into two movies, a 1946 version starring John Garfield and Lana Turner and a 1981 version starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, which you might want to compare. You can read the novel faster than you can watch either movie. I read it in an hour and I'm no speed reader. There was also a play and, believe it or not, an opera. The atmosphere is suburban naturalistic, set in the environs of Glendale, California, just north of L.A. where there really are (or mostly were) oak trees. (The name of the café is the Twin Oaks.) The story is a little confused in parts, and a little unlikely elsewhere (Cora really would not be such an adept at gun toting, and the Frank would not be so quick to fall for the D.A.'s line of chatter and turn on Cora, nor could Nick be quite so blind to the hanky-panky going on behind his back). But what Cain got so, so very right was the underlying psychology. This is a classic triangle, the old guy with the resources who can't cut the mustard anymore with a young wife who longs for love, a little excitement and to be rid of "that greasy Greek." Even deeper (and this is characteristic of Cain) is the suggestion that Nick encouraged Frank and kept him around, using his presence to spice up his own libido. Furthermore, Frank is a kind of depression-era anti-hero, who beat up on the hated railway dicks, the kind of guy who has become a film noir staple, a man who acts out his basic desires in an amoral, animalistic way. I see woman. I take woman. I eat when I'm hungry, drink when I'm dry, and sleep when I run out of gas, a kind of natural man on the run, the kind of guy we think we would like to be for a change (a brief change) in our daydreams around two p.m. on a blue Monday afternoon.

Cain followed this up with Double Indemnity (using some insurance fraud research he had left over). Double Indemnity appeared as a serial in Liberty magazine after being rejected by Redbook. It was also made into a classic Billy Wilder movie starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson in 1944 a year after it finally appeared in book form.

Cain, along with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Nathanael West and later Ross MacDonald created a kind of southern California milieu that Hollywood has mined again and again with such postmodern films as, e.g., Chinatown (1974) and L.A. Confidential (1997). Read this (during lunch) for its historical value as a precursor of film noir and the hard-boiled detective novel.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep (1939) ****

Pulp fiction at the apex

This was Chandler's first novel, written when he was 51-years-old, although he had published a number of hard-boiled pulp fiction stories in the six years previous. The title refers to his hero, Philip Marlowe's idea of death. Not very original, but apt enough.

I read this to compare it to the famous Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall film directed by Howard Hawks released in 1946. The structure of the book and the movie are very similar, but there's a subtle difference in the characterizations that gives the movie and the novel an entirely different feel.

The movie is a romantic mystery with something like a happy ending. The novel is an existential slice of one man's life as a worldly wise straight-shooter in a corrupted world of thieves, murders, predatory females, and assorted grifters. In the movie the part of Vivian Regan, General Sternwood's older daughter, is prettied up and expanded for Lauren Bacall so that she and Bogey can work on the romantic chemistry. In the book romance takes a third tier seat to manliness, cynicism, and loyalty to the client. Indeed, Marlowe prefers Mona Mars, whom he calls "Silver-Wig," to Vivian. But what he prefers even more than any of the women who are constantly throwing themselves at him is hard liquor and nicotine. He drinks morning, noon and night, always hard stuff, whiskey, rye, brandy. He spends a lot of time lighting and smoking tobacco and describing others doing the same. He even smokes a pipe, as did Chandler himself. With prohibition just a bad memory, and lung cancer something ugly that happened to coal miners and old people, the mass American mind thought it sexy and oh so sophisticated to toss back a few and indulge in the ritual of the cigarette, a ritual for tough guys that included striking the stick match with a thumbnail, dangling the cigarette out of one side of the mouth while talking out of the other, or pausing to eye the babe before flipping open the Zippo. Such an innocent world it was then.

Chandler wrote the novel in a white heat from chapter one to #30 at the end of the text on the last page in about three months. He had intended to make a few bucks, this being just a longer short story, but a funny thing happened. His unconscious took over and Chandler ended up projecting not only a hauntingly atmospheric Los Angeles during the thirties and a reflection of the entire culture, but a nearly heroic notion about right and wrong personified in his alter ego, the shamus Philip Marlowe. Note above all that Marlowe is a highly moral person who doesn't take advantage of women, refuses money that doesn't belong to him, and is something close to fearless in the face of personal danger. In a short Introduction to the Modern Library Edition of this book, it is noted that when Chandler himself fell on hard times in 1912, he borrowed money from an uncle and made a badge of paying it back, "Every penny...with six percent interest." Chandler never imagined at the time that he was writing "literature." Indeed he would have scoffed at such a notion and pretended not to know what it is, just as Marlowe pretends not to have heard of Proust.

So perhaps the secret of Marlowe's appeal is that Marlowe is the man Chandler would be on his best days, an essentially honest man, a very worldly man, a courageous straight-shooter, loved by women and admired by men, a man who is true to himself and his code. The average reader and moviegoer could easily identify with such a man, and his character became a formula for success in the private eye genre for another four or five decades. One reviewer insightfully recalled the Harrison Ford character from Blade Runner (1982). I am thinking of James Garner's "Jim Rockford" in the long running--it's still running, actually, in between infomercials on channels with numbers in the fifties--"The Rockford Files," whose character bears more than a token resemblance to Chandler's creation.

Besides this creation of an existential hero, the other striking feature of Chandler's novel is the sharply observed first person narrative spun out by Marlowe, and his quick, hard-boiled wit. He was not only brave, but had an eagle's eye for detail and more street smarts than an alley cat, and a nasty habit of speaking his mind in a way that penetrated. He describes the characters with precision, right down to their tie pins, and the scenery with enough verisimilitude to spring it to life, and he cuts through the crap with the repartee of a swordsman. His running analysis of the motives of others and his observations about himself are immediate and to the point.

There are of course contrivances. Marlowe does indeed seem to observe more than his fair share of action, and he seems to be where he should be nearly all the time. The scene (not in the movie) at the oil sump with Carmen near the end could never have been anticipated, not even by Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan working in tandem, and yet Marlowe did anticipate it, and was able to recreate an unlikely sequence of events to unravel the last mystery.

The Big Sleep is pulp fiction at the apex, a novel squarely between a fancy Bel Air hotel and a skid row flophouse, eagerly read by the clientele of both establishments.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Chevalier, Tracy. Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) *****

A romantic historical novel of grace and power

In this radiant novel we are introduced to the minutia of family life in 17th century Holland as seen through the eyes of the maid Griet, a sixteen-year-old girl who became the subject of a famous painting by Johannes Vermeer. This is in fact the story of how she became his subject. As such it is a fiction fused into history, an imagination of Vermeer and the life of one of his models. It is a tale that makes us see with alacrity the poverty of choices that a girl without means had in that world, a world caught between feudalism and the rise of the mercantile class. Indeed, Griet had only her cleverness to stay her as she maneuvered among the men and women of privilege who would control her life.

Novelist Tracy Chevalier has a gift for expression and a great talent for telling a tale and weaving into the fabric of her story the poignant details of everyday life. Somehow she makes those details and the acting out of the petty politics of domestic life utterly enthralling. Her first-person narrative of an illiterate girl charms and disquiets by turns. Although this may seem a far-fetched comparison, I was reminded of Mark Twain's Huck Finn, also illiterate, who nonetheless waxed poetic with not just a novelist's but a painter's eye for detail. The words they use are everyday words, but spun out so beautifully, so aptly that they become something close to poetry, all the while maintaining plausibility. In truth no maid nor elegant lady of learning could express herself so well as this girl, but that is the novelist's license, and Chevalier uses it well.

Griet has these choices: a butcher's son with blood under his fingernails; Vermeer, who has a wife and five children (and a sixth on the way); and van Ruijven, Vermeer's rich and lecherous patron, who also has a family. She cannot move to another city, although sometimes she vaguely expresses this childish dream. She, like the vast majority of humankind before the Industrial Revolution, was fated to live and die in the town of her birth. Her life was controlled by the choices she had in men; and what would become of her depended on how she handled those choices. She could not take a job and live alone. She could not abandon her poverty-stricken parents. She could only steer between the rocks and the shoreline, torn between her heart's desire and her good Dutch rationality. Thus, on one level, this is a disturbing tale of how people, especially women, were subject to the dictates of property and privilege, without real choice, working six days a week, from sunup to sundown, for subsistence wages in economic subservience to the privileged few. On another level this a Horatio Alger story of how one might, through hard work, right morality, a bit of clever common sense and--in this case--a pretty face, rise above one's predicament in life. Or, perhaps how one might try. This is also a tale of how our emotions lead us to ends both desirous and disastrous. Griet loves her master, as all good maids should, almost inevitably. Hers is a restrained and protracted love, beyond her control, so that she is caught. In this sense Chevalier's book is a romantic novel, a woman's interest tale of how the heart's desire may or may not be fulfilled. The beloved is a station above Griet; he is an accomplished artist, and he is taken--consumed in a sense--with his work and his large family, and yet she, as her brother points out, "wants him."

One of the nice things about this book is the reproduction of the celebrated Vermeer painting, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" on the cover. As one reads, one can easily refer to the painting again and again; and this is valuable because part of Chevalier's story is an imagination of how the work was painted through an intense study of the painting itself. Those in the visual arts I imagine will find this part of the novel fascinating, and may speculate on how closely Chevalier came to a truth about the process of artistic creation. Chevalier's interpretation includes the idea that the painting was the artist's way of making love to the girl. There can be no doubt of that.

I wish I could write with such grace and with such a feel for the felicitous detail and the absolutely apt phrase that is the hallmark of Chevalier's prose. I also wish I had the cunning to construct a novel so carefully. I knew I was in the thrall of a master as early as page nine when Griet learns that she is to clean Vermeer's studio without disturbing anything so that every object is returned to exactly where it had been. Chevalier has Griet remark: "After my father's accident we had learned to place things where he always knew to find them. It was one thing to do this for a blind man, though. Quite another for a man with a painter's eyes." Or, on page 163, Griet is home visiting her mother, and a "neighbor, a bright-eyed old woman who loved market talk," was there amid the rumors that Griet would appear in a painting alongside the lecherous van Ruijven. Griet tells her mother, "my master is beginning the painting that you were asking about. Van Ruijven has come over...Everyone who is to be in the painting is there now." Griet then observes that the gossipy neighbor "gazed at me as if I had just set a roast capon in front of her." Griet adds, "That will take care of the rumors."

Such skilled and subtle writing moves the reader along with a sense of deep involvement, and opens wide the eyes of other writers, who might learn from the very accomplished and gifted Tracy Chevalier.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama (1973)****

A "SF classic" ageing gracefully

Celestial objects are traditionally named for the gods of Mediterranean peoples, although neither Yahweh nor Allah has yet made an appearance to my knowledge. And so perhaps the very cosmopolitan and worldly Arthur C. Clarke, celebrated author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and long time resident of India's neighbor Sri Lanka thought it was time the people of the Ganges got some due, and so he named the artificial world that is the center of this splendid novel, Rama, after one of the manifestations of God in the Hindu pantheon. This is "old school" science fiction, written in a not very fancy, but entirely agreeable style that emphasizes communication first and curlicues not at all. This is "hard" SF with a firm scientific basis from which to take flights of fancy. Political correctness, space age romance, galactic shoot outs, ghastly horror, laser light swords, etc., and other stables of the contemporary genre are pleasantly absent in favor of a carefully developed plot based on plausible events. One gets the feeling that something like this could really happen.

Rama is a self-contained world that is both space ship and planetoid. It is a 50 by 20 kilometer cylinder that has entered the Solar System and is headed for the Sun. The time is 2130 and humankind has colonies from Mercury to Titan and a governing body called the United Planets. The story of the novel is the exploration of Rama, which Clarke does with clarity and a sense of wonder so that we are carried along, enthralled. There are charming Clarkean touches, the "simps," lovable human-engineered monkeys who clean and fetch for humans; world leaders whose simple emotions remind us of our neighbors; aliens that are cute rather than venomous; and bad guys that are not really all that evil. There is a certain rational morality to Clarke's view of humankind that I wish were more in evidence in our own lives. In Rendezvous with Rama, the lawyers argue over the number of objects orbiting Jupiter that should be called satellites, not over how to extract as much money from their adversaries as possible. Those who would destroy and murder aliens, just to be safe, are in the minority. World leaders disagree but no one brands the other as a hated enemy, etc.

Some observations: On page 31 Clarke implies that a proper human population for the earth would be about one billion. Elsewhere he has gotten rid of automobiles. I like both ideas, imagining they lead to a more idyllic biosphere. On page 35 he has 1,000 miles a minute as a reasonable speed for earth transportation. On page 259 he mentions a US president named Perez...

As with other works of Clarke, what really charms here is an infectious sense of wonder, something most of us lost many years ago, a sense of delight in the possible, recalling the magic of childhood and first love. For that, Sir Arthur, thanks.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace (1999) ****

"My case rests on the rights of desire" (p. 89)

I really love how this novel begins, so directly, so effortlessly. And I like the clean, crisp way Coetzee moves the plot. The third person narrative focused on one-time romantic literature professor, now "communications" professor, David Lurie, allows us to see the world from his point of view. The asides and interior monologues are mostly from him, yet seamlessly some are from the author. Lurie is 52 years old, divorced and quite straightforward in satisfying his sexual needs. But the first sentence in the book, "...he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well" proves in a few pages to be ironic.

But note this: for a man of his age there is the problem of sex--not the Joy of Sex, not the urgent need of sex, not the romance of sex, not even the Job of Sex, but simply the problem of sex. When he loses his sexual partner we begin to see he is a man who will go to some trouble, some extreme to find a solution. And when he chances to fall into a position of being able to seduce one of his students, he does it. Clearly he is drawn only to her youth, to the call of Eros, as he terms it.

This is his disgrace, a disgrace he brought upon himself and, to his credit, acknowledges. One does not use one's position to take advantage of one's students, even if they are above the age of consent. Lurie knows this. But what internationally acclaimed novelist Coetzee does--and this is a brilliant stroke--is to juxtapose Lurie's disgrace with a more significant and more horrific disgrace that befalls his daughter. It is this device that makes the reader see how terrible is the act of rape and how it is clearly a crime of power, as the feminists have been telling us for years. Interesting and highly argumentative is the question of how far the act of rape is from that of seduction. In one sense they are light years apart; in another, especially if the seduced is very young, they are to some extent similar.

From these very different, yet similar disgraces, Coetzee weaves his theme of rape as a literal statement of power politics acted out in South Africa. We speak of the rape of the land, the rape of a people, and the rape of individuals. This interlacing of such ideas is part of what makes this an excellent piece of work.

One of the weaknesses of the novel is that it is too didactic in the relative ease in which Lurie learns his lessons about what it is to be a woman in this world. Coetzee plays a little too obviously to his female readership. Nonetheless the lessons that Lurie learns are real and valid, and the only artistic harm here is perhaps in a too calculated delineation.

In the last part of the novel, unfortunately, Coetzee begins to lose his bearings. First, Lurie's ready adoption of his new way of life in the country seems unlikely. He is a cultured man of the city. Then there is the daughter's obstinance which has become ridiculous, so much so that the reader begins to believe she has some kind of irrational or hidden motive for staying on the farm and embracing those who have done her harm. Of course her "condition" was no surprise, but her reaction to it really makes a statement that is in conflict with what has gone on before. Is she masochistic or does she feel a kind of moral imperative to be used and exploited as the black people of South Africa have been used and exploited by the Europeans? Is it Coetzee's message that Lucy wants to shoulder the guilt of her ancestors while merging reproductively with the black community?

Note too that Lurie defends himself against the charge of fornication with a student by calling upon the "rights of desire." Are his "rights of desire" any different than those who rape? I don't like the idea of equating seduction with rape, but if the defense in either case is one of desire, then is it any defense at all? Perhaps this is Coetzee's point.

One other thing: why is it that Lucy's mother is not more involved with her daughter? Also it would appear that Lucy is holding some sort of grudge against her father, but that is never explained. And why is Lurie so drawn to the mercy killing of the animals? Somehow it doesn't seem to fit his character. Are these just loose ends that Coetzee never bothered to tie up? Also a man so taken with "girls" is not likely to be enthralled enough to sleep with the likes of Bev Shaw, except as an act of atonement. Perhaps that is what Coetzee had in mind. If so, it seems a bit clumsy.

But perhaps I have misread Coetzee. At any rate this is a quick and easy read with a controversial mix of thematic ideas by a master prose stylist.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Doyle, Roddy. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996)****

The man was the door

This Irish novel about a battered and alcoholic Dublin woman owes a little to a proletariat and naturalistic traditional of novel writing (James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan comes to mind) that I thought was dead. The first person narration by the central character, Paula Spencer, is painfully real. It's hard not to identify with her. She seems trapped by her poverty and lack of education and her attraction to the wrong kind of man. I found Doyle's treatment of this all too familiar scenario interesting, especially as we see her many years later, but somewhat one-sided. The Irish terms and the lower middle class venue enlivened the narrative and Doyle has a fine eye for sexual and social detail. Nonetheless the tale is dreary in an all too familiar way and his obvious pandering to his female readership is a little embarrassing for a writer as good as he is. I suspect that Doyle was torn between attraction to his central male character, a violent, macho wife beater; but because of his need to be politically correct with feminism, he was never able to develop his character beyond the straw man.

The clever title on one level is a euphemism for a battered woman, but on another suggests something deeper, a blind tropism that the woman couldn't help. I think Doyle needed to develop that potential in the character of the husband as well. For a novelist the toughest thing often is to tell the psychological truth in spite of, and in the face of what your readership expects. Although I have no sympathy for wife beaters, and certainly none for Doyle's pathetic wretch, it is not enough to show that the wife is a victim. The husband is as well. And she makes choices. In the proletariat tradition the cause was poverty; today it is either the "daemonic nature" of males or the values of the patriarchy that lead to the violence. None of these answers is the whole story.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Ernaux, Annie, trans Tanya Leslie. A Man's Place (1983) ****

A stylistic tour de force

This thin book contains a "fiction"--it is shorter than a novella, but somewhat long for a short story. Perhaps one might call it a fictionalized memoir. In experience and scope it is a novel, that is, after one has read the lean 99 pages, one feels that one has experienced an entire life, such is the effect of Ernaux's distinctive prose. She writes: "I shall collate my father's words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life...No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral style of writing comes to me naturally." (p. 13)

This book, and the companion volume, A Woman's Story, was a best seller in France and has become part of the national culture. What Ernaux has done and does so well is to bring to vivid reality the mundane details of the small town life of twentieth century France. Her style is deliberately "flat" without any striving for effect. There is no satire, and as she intends, no irony, no higher view; indeed the nameless first person narrator, whom the reader must take as Ernaux herself, makes no effort to romanticize any aspect of her story including the part she herself plays. She reveals herself as a creature of her culture and her class just as surely as her father was.

She is a secondary school teacher, apparently in her thirties, something of an incipient intellectual, with a two and a half year old son and a husband who also has nothing in common with her unschooled father. The story begins when her father's death at age sixty-seven goads her into recalling his life and her relationship with him. They are two people joined in blood but apart in both a social and a temporal sense. And this distance is part of what she explores. She speaks of something "indefinable," that had come between them during her adolescence, "something to do with class...Like fractured love." Perhaps we might call it the alienation of generations. He was proud of her because she was accepted by those who would not accept him. She had risen from the working class to the middle class, just as he had risen above his father's station as an illiterate peasant.

There are some intriguing curiosities. For one, the blurb identifies Ernaux as having grown up in the small town of Yvetot, while the narrative uses the quaint transparency "Y-" to identify the town, as though this were a roman a clef. For another, there is a sense of something resembling warmth between her and her father, but no more than that, and this "distance" is never really accounted for except as some inexplicable fact of life. Also, Ernaux's narrator thinks of herself as bourgeois and having risen above the station of her working class parents, yet they are totally bourgeois themselves; indeed more so that she, since they own their simple cafe and store and adjoining property in the small town, while she is the equivalent of a civil servant, her education paid for by the state so that she could be employed by the state. This ingenuous self-revelation persuades us of her honesty and guilelessness and lends a queer sort of very deep veracity to her story.

I will not call this a masterpiece, although I think all writers of fiction ought to read it for the magic of its style. She has quite a nice touch, without artificiality, without contrivance.

Tanya Leslie's translation of the French, often tested because of the large number of idioms used by Ernaux, is natural and very agreeable.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (1925) *****

The social life of the rich in the Jazz Age

Gatsby was a bootlegger and a penny stock hustler. He was "great" only in a delusive sense. Thus the title of Fitzgerald's celebrated novel is ironic, and that is something to keep in mind when reading it.

But Gatsby is seen as a step above the tony East Egg society that lived in their plush estates across the Long Island sound from his nouveau riche mansion--at least that is the revelation that narrator Nick Carraway eventually comes to as we learn from his famous line, "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole dam bunch put together."

It is ironic and proper that Daisy Buchanan, the wispy, languid and privileged beauty escapes blame for the tragedy near the end of the novel. It is her class that had always escaped blame, that had always lived on in its narrow-minded, greedy luxury. We can see their class--the Buchanans and their crowd--as Eloi-like children of the robber barons. Although Gatsby was dishonest and a criminal at least he had some gumption. And in the end we see he had some sense of integrity and courage as well.

He is "great" then as compared to the listless, privileged people who had inherited much of the vast wealth that this young nation had accumulated during the westward expansion following the Civil War. Gatsby's failing and the failure in general of the rich was that they knew not what to do with their leisure and privilege. Gatsby threw lavish parties and affected an air of mystery while the Buchanans indulged in racist and class war philosophies while they pursued adulterous affairs and the mind-numbing qualities of drunkenness.

When I first read this as a young man I thought it was a rather mediocre novel. The infidelities that so drove the story were commonplace to me at a time past mid-century, and I really missed the deep irony that Fitzgerald intended. The Great Gatsby was not "great," that much was obvious; but that he was great relative to the Buchanan crowd was what I missed. He serves not only as the "up from poverty" character so often seen in Jazz Age and depression novels, but he is a more deeply realized character. Not a brutal man like most bootleg operatives, instead he is almost a dilettante bootlegger, yet a hugely successful one, so much so that hardly any of the details of his business now occupy him; indeed one of the reasons that I mistook his character upon a first reading is that the actual reality of the lifestyle of those who fed the speakeasies is not in the novel. Fitzgerald was more interested in the social life of the degenerates and how they looked upon social climbers like Jay Gatsby.

Nick the modest narrator is in-between. An educated man of the upper middle class, a graduate of Yale, he represents the objectifying device in the novel. We see everything through his eyes and through his sensibilities. Initially in ambivalent admiration of both his cousin Daisy and Gatsby, Nick eventually becomes disillusioned with their differing but shallow lifestyles and their shallow values while he comes to realize that while Gatsby is a cut above, he is still a man with a tragically limited vision.

In short, The Great Gatsby is an indictment of the Jazz Age and its easy money mentality with attendant moral corruption. Perhaps this is why it did not sell well when it was published in 1925--the jazz agers were not interested in self-portraits--but now has become a stable of American literature, and certainly Fitzgerald's most read and most celebrated novel.

Fitzgerald the man may have borne witness to the excesses of the Roaring Twenties but he did not learn its lessons. He died young in Hollywood in 1940 of a heart attack, an alcoholic trying to write pot boilers for magazines and scripts for B movies. The tragedy of Jay Gatsby in some strange way may have foreshadowed the tragedy of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Flanagan, Richard. Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in 12 Fish (2001) *****

An extraordinary tale, funny, fascinating & debased

A madness at once divine & profane is all that Gould sees & experiences in his wretched life, & all that he wants is rum & a soft place to lay his head. Yet all about him are madmen & such, Pickwickian monsters of depravity--& all about him are poverty & debauchery of the most bestial sort, & all he wants is a fine name to call his own & some legitimacy. Instead he finds himself a convict in Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) in a penal colony on "Sarah Island" in a cell set near the rocks that line the shore, a cell that twice a day fills up with water forcing him to bob like a cork until his head nearly hits the ceiling, & then twice a day is emptied out to allow him to write his tale in cuttlefish ink & blood dipped from beneath his scabs upon a parchment of pages that contain his previously painted fish. The time is the early nineteenth century.

It is the melancholy fortune of a modern Australian forger of antiques (to sell to gullible American tourists) & a kindred imbiber of spirits to discover in a decrepit "meat safe" this extraordinary book, Gould's Book of Fish, & to be mesmerized by it & its author only to discover that all the authorities in nineteenth century antiquities to whom he presents the book disparage it as a fraud & a fake & show him the door. And then, what is worse, as he is taking his physick of beer at a tavern it is lost or stolen, at any rate disappeared from him, so that it haunts his memory to a great distraction until at length he is forced to rewrite from memory the entire oeuvre.

Thus we have the premise & the frame for this rather extraordinary historical novel from Down Under. It is a wicked tale of the debasement of humanity, spun out in a humorous & satirical style reminiscent at once of the great novelists of the nineteenth century, of Hawthorne & Dickens & Melville with backward glances at Voltaire, set in a milieu that suggests adventures in distant lands with pirates & various other scallywags, infused with the peculiar spirit of nineteenth century science, which Richard Flanagan both deprecates & celebrates. Overlaid is a veneer of artistick struggle & accomplishment culminating in the portraits of fish.

Yes, fish. These fish (& a lobster & two sea horses) are reproduced in this beautiful volume in color prints at the beginning of chapters so that one can see how Flanagan's narrator (& himself) were taken with the artistry of the painter. The type in the pages of this book (which is interestingly enough published by Grove Press) is set in wine vermillion & sea creature green & in octopus black & some other colors--I believe. The beguiling colors fade & return on these old eyes like faint visions, depending on whether I am using artificial light to read by or have the advantage of the sun streaming in.

In short, this is an extraordinary read, like nothing else coming out of the publishing factories these days, original to a startle, fascinating & funny, a work of art that gives one once again a reason to read fiction.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections (2001) *****

Real fiction

I was trying to figure out why some reviewers don't like this rather extraordinary novel. At first I thought it was the "American Beauty" thing, you know, the desecration of middle America through satire that the Heartland will not tolerate in either Oscar-winning movies or attempts at The Great American Novel (such as might be mentioned on Oprah). Then I thought it was the sheer length of Franzen's tome (as one reviewer so succinctly and dryly observed, "He left nothing out") and his "Look Ma, I'm writing" grandstanding. But along about page 370 or so I realized the truth: yes, it is some of the above, but more than anything it's the sexuality and especially the sexual portrait of Denise Lambert that some people don't like.

Did Franzen come up with a living, breathing Portrait of the Lesbian as a Young Woman? I don't think so. I don't think that Denise's character and her sexuality were properly integrated. He has Denise learn her attitude or "technique," if you will, from three different older men, a somewhat crude threesome that no self-respecting Sappho would imitate even for contrast. Her "childlessness," (that Enid frets over) is a result of being involved with the wrong men.

Additionally, while circumspect and careful to avoid the grossest of crudities in his recollecting of human sexuality, Franzen nonetheless sometimes shows a distinct lack of sensitivity.

Furthermore, the depressing story of Alfred Lambert, particularly his physical and mental decline told in excruciating detail, made us wonder about the purpose of life and left us more than a little afraid for ourselves when contemplating our declining years.

Could Franzen have used a better editor? Perhaps. But what editor would have the confidence to trim a Great Artist in the Making? Editors today are largely acquisition experts and salespersons. Today's novelist is essentially alone. Maxwell Perkins died a long time ago.

Okay, what is the strength The Corrections? (Incidentally the title refers to not only to the Heartland of America in need of corrections scenario that Franzen so well chronicles, but with the coming "correction" in the stock market, and the corrections that Enid urged on everyone including herself, and finally the correction of life itself with death.)

Franzen's strength is in his vivid and consistent characterizations, his complete narrative control, his sharp dialogue and his inner monologues, as right as rain, and his veracious social and cultural detail. He recalls the spats of domestic infighting so vividly that we feel we are there (perhaps again). He can take both sides in equal appreciation and then show us in commentary and steams of consciousness just how delusive are the combatants, just how blind they are to their narrow-minded, selfish behaviors.

For example, Gary and Caroline are arguing about whether they should go to his parents for Christmas (the main plot line of the novel). Caroline faults her mother-in-law: "...as soon as I leave the room she's going to...take food from the trash and feed it to my children–" At the same time she tells Gary he is clinically depressed and needs to seek treatment. Meanwhile Gary sneaks gin and obsesses with control issues. He feels laughed at in his own home (and he is). It is all a battle for the upper hand, domestic politics at the front, which means in bed, at the dinner table, using the kids as allies, blaming the in-laws for the bad nurturing and the flawed genetic input. In other words, life at home next door.

Naturally this will not sit well with some people. Life seen up close and full of warts is not the sort of thing that many people want in their fiction. They want to be uplifted and made glad. If they wanted gross reality and the sheen rubbed off they'd go see an art film or visit THEIR in-laws. So I can understand how some people feel that a sign reading "this way lies depression" ought to be affixed to this novel; indeed Franzen's characters leave us uninspired and a little sad realizing how close we are to them. They achieve a superficial level of self-awareness and then stop. Cold. (Do we do that?) They are the blind, and Franzen has cleverly persuaded us that we the readers are the sighted.

There's a lot of sex in this novel, but then again there's a lot of sex in human beings, whether we like it or not. Franzen's technique is to employ an unsettling honesty. His inner monologues with Chip and Gary may seem excessive, but if we can recall ourselves at thirty-something we know that sexual obsession was always just beneath the radar of overt consciousness, occasionally rising bodaciously to the surface.

In the final analysis I think that Franzen tried to do too much. Some of his readers are annoyed that they had to read such a long novel, and "had to" is appropriate because Franzen's narrative is compelling. We want to finish the book because his characters are interesting and we want to find out what happens to them. This in itself is a great triumph for a novelist. I just think that Franzen could have spared us most or all of (for example) Denise's sexual misadventures. The satire of the seniors aboard the cruise ship was fine and the Lithuanian and biomed excursions familiar but tolerable. The long drawn out decline and fall of Alfred and how it affected his family, especially his wife, was really the emotional and thematic heart of the novel: We are flesh; partly sighted, partly blind; we decline, decay, lose our faculties and expire. Rhyme or reason notwithstanding.

Read this book. You may like it, you may not. Regardless, it will be hard to deny that this is a genuine novel, an all-too-rare attempt at going inside the human psyche to reveal something psychologically real. As I like to say, "What could be truer than fiction?" Real fiction, that is.

-a review by Dennis Littrell

Glavinic, Thomas Night Work (2006) trans by John Brownjohn (2008) *****

Kafka-esque treatment of the "alone in the world" theme

Thirty-six-year-old Jonas, a resident of Vienna, Thomas Glavinic's everyman-type protagonist, wakes up one day and finds that everybody but himself has disappeared: gone without a trace. It's not clear whether other forms of life are also gone, but he hears no birds nor does he see any stray dogs. No flies buzz and no mosquitoes bite. He does see trees, and the electricity and the hot water (somehow) work.

This is a familiar science fiction premise, but Glavinic's treatment is pure Kafka. He doesn't attempt in any way to account for the disappearance (much as Kafka did not attempt to explain how Gregor Samsa became "a monstrous verminous bug"); instead he shows us how Jonas copes with this stupendously extraordinary event. Jonas seems to think it has something to do with his mind, and that he is missing something ghostly, and so he sets up cameras to record himself and his surroundings. Turns out that "the Sleeper" walks and does other unremembered things while sleeping. Jonas also seems to think that there is somebody (or something) else about and so he leaves his name and phone number and address everywhere. He carries around a shotgun and a knife for protection from God knows what.

To be honest I almost gave up on this most unusual novel after the first few pages, it seemed so flat; but I'm glad I didn't. Glavinic uses the reader's interest in learning more about what has happened and why, and whether Jonas will find other survivors, as a device to keep the reader wondering, while what the novel is really about unfolds. And what the novel is about is the human predicament.

Jonas is alone physically as we are all alone psychologically. His life with other people now exists only inside his head, in his memory of them. He tries to return to the comfort of his childhood by going back to the apartment he grew up in and restoring the furniture and the artifacts of his childhood. He tries to return his fiancée Marie to himself by finding her clothes and smelling them.

But ultimately Jonas is besieged by demons and the subconscious forces of self-destruction. He finds little things out of place. He hears sounds that aren't there and movements out of the corner of his eyes. He turns quickly in an attempt to catch something that is going on behind him. He becomes obsessed with the idea that something is happening when he isn't there and can't see it, and so he gets more cameras and more cameras and sets them up at intersections and other places in Vienna and elsewhere and has them run all night hoping to catch what his eyes miss. He spends hours viewing the film, looking for something out of the ordinary, something ghostly. He begins the see that "The Sleeper," has turned perverse and instead of sleeping begins to work against Jonas and his efforts. But Jonas can't catch him in the act. Jonas becomes afraid of the Sleeper and tries not to sleep at all. He drives at high speeds on the empty roads and begins taking pills to stay awake. He seems to be rapidly disintegrating.

What happens to the human alone? Can the mind really cope with the silence, the lack of movement, the absence of touch, the utter isolation? Is Jonas' experience in some way akin to being in solitary confinement, but without any hope of ever emerging? Will the last human left on earth patiently travel around the world looking for some other living being, or will he gradually go mad? Or, will he destroy himself?

And if we are all ultimately alone, what is it that allows us to hold onto sanity and to find some purpose in life?

Like Kafka and Freud (two other sometime residents of Vienna), Glavinic writes in German. (The English translation by John Brownjohn is very readable.) And like Kafka and Freud Glavinic sees the absurd in our lives, and in the individual a perverse longing for death.

This is the kind of novel that challenges the reader psychologically and philosophically. It draws the reader in and does not let go until the last page is eagerly read.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)*****

The Great American Novel as a Japanese love story

This begins as Charles Dickens might have written it, had he such visions, continues as a fairy tale, and concludes as a strange and touching story of love spanning decades and ending in happiness and fulfillment. But primarily this is a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales there is beneath the surface an underlying current of the dark nature of humanity that can only be glimpsed through the use of symbolism. Just as the wolf in grandmother's bed represents something more than a wolf, so it is with the men attended by the geisha. And so it is with her as well. She projects the image of fairy tale beauty and an attentive loveliness, but is in fact a woman of business whose attentions are bought and sold, just as with any service or commodity. This is the illusion and the pretense, and the soft, embroidered veil between us and the truth that is paid for.

This is also a beautiful novel, charming and witty with just the barest touch of satire, an original work of a cunning genius, as readable as a best seller, as satisfying as a masterpiece. Although written as realistic fiction and presented as the memoirs of someone who really did exist, the story and especially the action are veiled reality. Notice that Sayuri is fifteen when she first learns of the significance of her virginity. Since her captors would have put a very high price on maintaining that virginity until they could sell it, they would have taken very careful measures to ensure that she could not lose it; consequently, being the clever girl that she was, Sayuri would have understood what that meant. And to suppose that she knew nothing of sexual intercourse until Mameha's story of the lonely eel and the cave... Well, this is part of the contrivance and illusion maintained by geisha and its tradition. But make no mistake, the girls know, but their knowledge must be expressed and understood euphemistically.

There are a number of other "contradictions" in the novel that are of no real import because the world of the geisha is the world of illusion and fairy tale. Although Chiyo never says so directly, she knew quite well what was being done to her sister in the house of ill-repute that she visited in the poor section of Kyoto. There is something wonderful and alluring about this duplicitous view of human sexuality found in all cultures. One of the wonderful things about Golden's novel is how he shows us its expression in the Japanese tradition. When Hatsumomo's vagina is forcibly investigated by Granny and Mother looking for evidence of semen (and Chiyo is about ten years old) she understands what was found because she had seen the man between Hatsumomo's legs in the dim light through the partially opened door. Adults find comfort in the illusion of a sexless childhood, comfort that can only be maintained through the artifice of self-deception. Please note that this is not a criticism of the novel; on the contrary. It is part of Golden's vision to realize that a fairy tale view of Chiyo's sexuality was necessary. Note also the scenes with Mr. Tanaka when she appears as a naked nine-year-old. Read carefully we can see that his sexual desire for her is apparent and is symbolically acted out through the device of her sister with the Sugi boy and Mr. Tanaka's bare touch of her cheek. Incidentally Nitta Sayuri's narrative is coy by design, and it is this structure that allows Golden to so beautifully present this fairy tale world with its illusion of a foreign and bygone reality.

But the fairy tale ends three-quarters of the way through, and then begins a counter point as the war and the hardships are brought home to the Japanese people and to Sayuri personally. Now we have a tale stripped of illusion, devoid of symbolism, replete with the harsh reality of a civilian population with dwindling resources, impending loss, and the sound of bombers overhead...

This is the kind of commerically and artistically successful novel that makes other novelists despair of ever coming close. The exquisite style, the confident scholarship, the ample energy so gracefully expended, the unerring sense of what is appropriate, the generous and apt use of metaphor, the clever plotting, the rich detail, the sure commercial feel: a publisher's dream, an agent's adrenal rush! I expect a lavish movie production, an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, and perhaps even the first important opera of the twenty-first century to follow.

Or maybe a Disney cartoon in the tradition of Snow White and Cinderella. On second thought, probably NOT.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies (1954) *****

Innocence lost, or boys will be cruel

Golding is a deeply symbolic novelist who relies, especially in this novel and in The Inheritors (1955), on ideas from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology and anthropology. The central symbol of The Lord of the Flies is that of a pig's head upon a stick stuck in the ground, a totem in the making perhaps, but seen by Golding as Beelzebub, the "lord of the flies," the devil, a head of rotting flesh enveloped by flies.

The central idea is that without civilization we will degenerate into predatory animals ruled by superstition, the will to power, and the primordial need to survive. When Piggy's glasses, which symbolize the tools and knowledge of our culture are broken, it signals the degeneration, the return to the wild in which, as Thomas Hobbes has it, there are "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

That a group of English school boys could degenerate so quickly after crash-landing on a deserted island may be seen as a bit fanciful, or more exactly, as the artifice of the artist; nonetheless, the premise of this extraordinary work may well serve as a cautionary note for our times. Should we, through nuclear warfare, a runaway greenhouse effect, sectarian violence on a global scale, or through the exhaustion of the fossil fuels that power our civilization, regress to the state of savages, we have this warning.

Instead of the noble savage, instead of a return to the Garden of Eden, instead of the Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson Crusoe, Golding takes us step by step from the world of the boy's school to life and death power struggles and a fascination with savagery to the beginnings of tribal warfare. As in The Inheritors, Golding sees not the good in humans, but the viciousness. In The Inheritors we homo sapiens murdered the gentle Neanderthal, here we children become gangsters of the island, on our way to becoming tribal chieftains as murderous and vengeful as the God of the Old Testament. I understand that Golding wrote the novel in part to answer the pollyannaish naivete of R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), which I haven't read.

Clearly cruelty is one of Golding's main themes. Left to their own devices and without the restraint of civilization's justice, humans will be cruel sometimes just to be cruel and sometimes as a means of gaining power. The boys Ralph and Piggy naively try to set up a democratic sort of government, but are defeated by the brutality of Jack and his will to savagery.

The loss of innocence that the boys experience is seen as not the loss of something they intrinsically had, but of something superimposed upon them by civilization. In reality, Golding is saying, there is no innocence in children, that is only a fairy tale idea to which we romantically subscribe.

This is one of those novels that has found its way onto the high school or even the middle school curriculum because it is easy to read and because it is easy for young people to relate to. But the strength of this novel lies not only in its theme and readability but in the fine characterizations of the individual boys. As in all great works of literature, it is the combination of character and story that compels us to turn the pages, and invites our admiration.

It should be noted that Golding deliberately left out one of the central drives of humans, probably because he did not want to muddy up his theme of savagery, or perhaps because he felt the task too great or perhaps because he didn't find the task palatable. I am referring to the lack of sexuality in the novel. Not only are there no girls on the island, but the boys do not, at least overtly, involve themselves in sex. We can see that Golding's artistry anticipated this criticism since it can be argued that the boys in this situation and at their tender age are not yet ready to express themselves sexually. I wonder if postmodern psychology would agree. Certainly Freud would not.

Bottom line: a great read, a terrific adventure, but not a book in my opinion that should be read by preteens, in other words, you need to be older than the characters in the book in order to read the book without fear of nightmares.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter (1850) *****

The first masterpiece of American literature

"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," might well be Nathaniel Hawthorne's theme in The Scarlet Letter. Certainly, by all community standards Hester Prynne's adultery is a sin. Worse yet Arthur Dimmesdale has triply sinned since he has had carnal knowledge of a member of his flock, and through a deep and abiding cowardice has failed to acknowledge his sin; and what is even worse yet, he allows Hester to bear the weight of public condemnation alone.

However the worse sin of all belongs to Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband who is not dead at all, but returned in disguise as a physician who has learned the efficacy of various medicinal concoctions from the Indians during his captivity. He pretends to befriend Dimmesdale in order to extract his long and torturous revenge. But it is Chillingworth's character itself more than anything that marks him as the worse of the sinners. He lives only for revenge and to give pain and suffering. He cares nothing for his wife and her child. He cares nothing for anyone, not even himself. He lives only to avenge.

Dimmesdale's sin is that of a weak character. In a sense Dimmesdale is Everyman, the non-heroic. We see the contrast between the proud bravery of Hester and the all too human weakness of Dimmesdale who cannot bring himself to confess his sin, but looks to her strength to do it for him. We see this in the first scaffold scene as he pleads along with Chillingworth for Hester to reveal the father's identity. "Reveal it yourself!" we want to say.

While some have seen Chillingworth as the devil incarnate--and indeed I suspect that was Hawthorne's intent--it might be closer to the truth to see him as the vengeful God of the Old Testament with his lust to mysterious power and his desire to see the sinful suffer. At any rate, Hawthorne's masterpiece--and it is a masterpiece, one of the pillars of American literature, to be ranked with such great works as Melville's Moby-Dick and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--is about sin and the effect of sin; and this is only right since the central tenet of Christianity itself is sin and the forgiveness of sin.

By employing and investigating deeply three types of sin--Hester's from love and even something close to innocence; Dimmesdale's from lust, pride, neglect and cowardice; and Chillingworth's from hate--Hawthorne came up with a most felicitous device for examining the human soul.

The Scarlet Letter is regularly taught at the high school level, but surely this is a mistake. The novel is difficult and challenging even for honors students. The architectured sentences, with their points and counterpoints, their parallel construction, their old school rhetorical cadences are strange and even wondrous to the modern eye. It is a good practice for the teacher and for the student to read aloud Hawthorne's prose so as to grow accustomed to his words the way one must for Shakespeare. If this is done and the edifice of Christianity and especially the fatalism of the Puritan mind brought to bear, then with leisurely pace and a steady concentration, the terrible beauty of Hawthorne's novel might be made immediate.

Although the story itself is compelling, and the prose rich and poetic, the real strength of this great novel is in its characters. How true to life are all of them including even little Pearl who is defiant and willful in her beauty and her promise, so like a heroine-to-be of a modern novel. And how despicable and loathsome is this bent old man who embodies the very soul of the despised! And how attractive on a superficial level is this pretty young pastor whose actions are not the equal of his looks. And how strong and faithful and heroic is Hester who invites both envy and admiration, something like a flawed goddess of yore.

What stuck me when I first read this, and remains with me today, is that it is those who presume to punish sin who are the real sinners. Chillingworth's life is one devoid of human feeling, devoid of any real joy as he lies in the stone cold bed of hatred and revenge. And to a lesser extent so it is with Dimmesdale who cannot forgive himself, who secretly flagellates himself so that his life becomes a hell on earth. On the other hand there is Hester who finds forgiveness and love with good works and in the joy of her beautiful and precious Pearl and in her unstinting love for Dimmesdale and her hope and faith that a better life will come.

This is a deeply Christian novel although it is usually seen as a criticism of Christianity in the sense that the Christian community condemns the least of the sinners while the hypocrisy of its clergy is made manifest. Looking deeper we see that it is forgiveness of sin and the redemption that comes from good works that is exemplified. Hester knows the joy of life because she is a loving and giving person; and on another level she is forgiven because we the reader forgive her. How could we not? And most of the Puritan flock also forgave her since it came to be said that the scarlet "A" she wore upon her person stood not for "Adultery" but for "Able."

It is also good to realize that when Hawthorne published the novel in 1850 the scene of the story was nearly two hundred years removed. Thus Hawthorne looked back at Puritan America from the standpoint of a more secular society greatly influenced by Jeffersonian deism and the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. In some respects, Hawthorne's brilliant treatment of the ageless theme of sin, guilt and redemption was a serendipitous, even unconscious, artifact of his literary skill. No artist composes a masterpiece without some deep talent at work independent of his conscious efforts.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) ****

A mannered mock epic?

Hemingway invented a terse style using King James biblical cadences with an awful lot of and's and very few commas in his rhythmic sentences. Certainly no semicolons, God forbid. The shorter the word, the better. The more ordinary, the more often in common usage, the better--but sprinkled here and there we find a highbrow word thrown in as if for spice. In The Old Man and the Sea, which is a short story posing as a novel, Hemingway offers an example of the Sisyphean heroic tale.

Each day for eternity Sisyphus rolls a heavy ball up a hill and at the end of each day the ball comes rolling down again. Albert Camus famously said that one imagines that Sisyphus was happy. The old man of Hemingway's story embodies the karma of the Sisyphean hero in that most days throughout his long life he has gone to the ocean to fish. And each day he comes home, and then the next day he goes out again. The forces he is up against, the sea itself, the leviathan monsters of the deep, the unpredictable weather, the seasons of dearth and plenty in unpredictable fashion--all of these things and more, including the wiles of women who are influenced by the moon, all of these things are like the ball and the force of gravity that Sisyphus labors against.

And for what? And to what avail? It is the struggle itself that is the glory and the purpose and the reason for being. So saith Hemingway in the way he meticulously details the laborious struggle of man versus fish: of the old man, not as strong as he once was, not as full of the desire that once burned in his soul, not as keen in discernment or vision, yet still a man with a man's pride and a man's duty; and the primordial fish, the great marlin, powerful and beautiful, full of great dignity, smarting now, suffering now with a hook in its mouth.

Who will win? Will the marlin break the line or will the crafty old man lead out just enough to keep him hooked, and then as the fish tires, slowly gain a little line, inch by inch?

Some great or seemingly great event may define a man's life. Here it is the off chance of hooking an especially huge marlin, and with diminished strength, bring him in for all to see, that defines the old man's life. It is good that it comes late when for most the highlight of life was long ago. It is good that the effort nearly kills him, and it is especially good that there was much doubt about the outcome.

This is the heroic or machismo view of this celebrated novel. Since this was first published in 1952 its reputation has waned, or not so much waned as become something seen from another direction. Instead of the heroic old man and the gallant marlin we see a kind of anthropomorphic delusion in which a hook of steel and a large brain torture a huge, dim-witted creature to death. Instead of an epic struggle we see one predator taking advantage of another. Instead of heroism we see a kind of tedious Darwinian incident made into something akin to a Greek myth.

And so it is with Hemingway himself. Now seen as incorrigibly sexist and as more of a stylist than a writer of substance, Hemingway is no longer revered in the English departments of our great universities. Instead he is remembered for shooting defenseless animals in Africa and imagining that such activities made him a man. Instead of being one of America's greatest writers, he is now recalled as a good short story writer whose stylish mannerisms eventually grate on our sensibilities. From being a great artist he has fallen to being a minor one, from being a best selling writer, the literary lion of his time, Hemingway is now remember as the man who blew his brains out because, as he is quoted as saying (in anticipation of course), something like, "I could no longer make love good." Too bad he lived before the age of Viagra.

Note the psychologically correct use of the adjective "good" instead of the grammatically required but artificial adverb "well." Hemingway, like Mark Twain, made a point of not being a slave to grammar.

Regardless of the rise and fall of his reputation and even regardless of the lack of political correctness of his writings, it is nonetheless the case that The Old Man and the Sea is a striking piece of work, sentimental to a fault, simplistic in philosophy and even shopworn in theme, yet still it is a book that must be read if only to add to our understanding of the progression of popular American literature from James Fenimore Cooper to Mark Twain through James T. Farrell and John O'Hara to Larry McMurtry and Stephen King.

The Old Man and the Sea is in a sense a story best experienced young, which is one of the reasons it is on the high school curriculum. It is striking and totally fulfilling the first time it is read. Read it a second time and the mannerisms and the mock heroics begin to be discerned. Read it a third time and it becomes tedious. If read a fourth time and the temptation is toward parody and burlesque.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Hesse, Herman. Siddhartha (1951)*****

Beautiful, poignant, uplifting: a great novel

This beautiful and poetic novel about the life of the Buddha is not about the life of the Buddha, per se, or so Herman Hesse (it's a German name: the final "e' is pronounced like a soft English "a') would have us believe. "Siddhartha," meaning "the accomplished one" is one of the traditional names of the Buddha, but in this novel Siddhartha (from the Sanskrit so that the "h's" are silent) encounters the Buddha in his travels and gains by what he learns from the Enlightened One. Yet the life so wondrously depicted here is closely patterned after the traditional life of the Buddha, and where it is not, it is highly plausible. I think Hesse started out to write a life of the Buddha but at some point realized that his sometimes spiritual, sometimes profane depiction might offend some Buddhists, and so he had Gotama, the Perfect One himself, appear as a separate character while keeping the life and the traditional name for his hero.

At any rate, this is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, or any century for that matter. It begins with Siddhartha's royal birth in India in the Sixth Century BCE into a Brahmin's life of privilege and wealth, continues through Siddhartha's traditional discovery of poverty, death, disease and pain as he wanders outside the royal estates, and his consequent desire to conquer or somehow come to terms with what he sees, things he had been sheltered from since birth. Thus we have the fundamental tenant of Buddhism: Life is suffering. The scene where the young Siddhartha confronts his father and stands up all night to show his resolve is one of the greatest "coming of age" scenes ever written.

And that is what really makes this novel: the character of Siddhartha himself. Hesse has created a seeker who is a real life hero: kind, brave, strong of will and decisive, intelligent, modest, confident, honest, hardworking, unprejudiced, self-questioning and sometimes self-doubting, somebody we can identify with and admire. He goes through the temptations and the travails of life, sometimes weakening and sometimes distracted, finally finding salvation only after he has tried not only asceticism, but indulgence, not just renunciation, but a Tantric-like embracing of all things social and profane. In a sense this is a generalized life of the true seeker after spiritual enlightenment, a life that pleases not just Buddhists, but Christians and Hindus and those from other faiths as well because it is a portrait of humanity at our finest and our truest, out of the entangled bank and toward the stars.

The deceptive simplicity of the story makes it accessible to readers of all ages and walks of life, and greatly rewards a second and a third reading. In the United States it is often part of a superior high school curriculum. It is inspirational not only for the spiritually inclined, but for young people of all ages, and in writing it, Hesse did a service for humanity greater than a thousand sermons.

I should add that the English translation of the German by Hilda Rosner is itself a work of art, graceful, balanced, every word so natural that one is unaware that the work was written in another language.

The story ends with Siddhartha finding the peace that passeth all understanding, learned from a simple ferry boatman as he listens to the timeless voice of the river as it flows, expressing all that is or has been or will be.

This novel is a treasure.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Highsmith, Patricia. A Game for the Living (1958)****

Atmospheric mystery with psychological depth

This is my first encounter with Patricia Highsmith, and I've very favorably impressed and looking forward to reading another of her novels immediately. Not being really conversant with the "who done it" genre, if indeed that is her genre, I can only compare her to Georges Simenon. There is the same intense concentration and a similar interest in the psychology of people at cross purposes. She does a fine job with the third-person introspection of her leading character, Theodore Schiebelhut, a well-to-do Swiss artist living in Mexico. There is an unusual feel not only to her character developments, but to the picture she paints of the upper middle class lifestyle of Mexico in the fifties with their easy privilege amid a restrained carnival atmosphere. Yet there is never a sense of unreality or of anything fake or pasted on. Highsmith doesn't reach for effects nor does she contrive. She carries the burden of veracity very well while giving "reality" an original twist that is hard to define.

Theodore, the contemplative Protestant is contrasted with Ramón, the fiery Latino Catholic, both lovers of the same woman who is found murdered as the novel begins. I was able to guess who did it fairly early on, although I am not sure why. Highsmith produces some red herrings en route to a neatly packaged conclusion, but plays fair at all times. Noteworthy is the easy-going, yet savvy police inspector Sauzas. The tension between the sin-filled Catholic Ramón, and the nearly agnostic Theodore is nicely developed and maintained. The feel of the Mexican hotels and the easy Mexican lifestyle is vividly rendered while the contrast between the well-to-do and the poor is presented in a straightforward manner. Highsmith's plot is well thought out and dovetails nicely with the resolution of the psychology of her characters. It's a little slow-going in the middle but finishes well without any artificiality.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) *****

Splendid psycho/sexual study of a sociopath

Patricia Highsmith, one of the grande dames of the mystery genre, as usual transcends that genre in this meticulously wrought study of a sociopath. The action is set in Europe in the fifties, mostly Italy, at a time when the Yankee dollar bought a whole lot of cappuccino, and an American accent still commanded some respect. In her intense exploration of the 25-year-old Tom Ripley, Highsmith implicitly asks the question: Is the difference between a sociopath and a "normal" person only a matter of degree, or is there a distinct difference between "us" and "them"?

First published in 1955, The Talented Mr. Ripley has since been made into a couple of excellent movies, the first a Hitchcockian venture by French director Rene Clement entitled Plein Soleil "Purple Moon" (1960) and recently the interpretation by Anthony Minghella using Highsmith's title. Neither picture was entirely faithful to Highsmith's novel, yet both caught the spirit of the sexually ambiguous Tom Ripley, who might more properly be called, "The Murderous Mr. Ripley."

In effect, Highsmith asks, is Ripley's love of self so complete and exclusive that it precludes any other love? Note that his love for the rich and spoiled Dickie Greenleaf takes form as a step by step assumption of Dickie's life and personality. It is only when he becomes Dickie that Ripley is able to love Dickie and thereby to love himself. In other words, to love himself Tom Ripley must destroy the self-loathing that he has always felt. He does this by becoming Dickie Greenleaf and assuming Dickie's witty, confident personality and all the accoutrements of wealth, leisure and status that Dickie enjoys. While we note Ripley's repulsive feelings toward Marge and a kind of identification and interest in gay men, an interest that Dickie finds disgusting--witness the scene on the beach with the men making human pyramids--our answer to the simplistic question, is Tom Ripley gay? is...not really, and anyway it doesn't matter. He is interested only in loving himself, and finding ways to do that.

There is a strong sense of the psychoanalytic approach in Highsmith's somewhat euphemistic study, which is not surprising considering that the 1950s were perhaps the heyday of Freudian analysis and suppositions, at least in the popular culture. The movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Robert Lindner's popular, The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytical Tales (1954) come quickly to mind, and Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was not far off. But Highsmith does not allow us to draw any set conclusions about her anti-hero.

The ending is disturbingly ironic and daring, surprising both us and the slippery Mr. Ripley.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Lightman, Alan. The Diagnosis (2000) ****

A novel of despair and dark humor

This is a novel about the numbing of our lives. What is our disease? We don't know. What is the cure? There is no cure.

Is this the price we pay for the guilt we feel for never being man enough? How is it that we fail in the midst of success? We are sick, but what is the disease? What is the diagnosis? Where is the pain? It is not physical. We feel it in our minds and in our souls. We are tired, weary. We know the prognosis--it is death, of course--but what is the cause?

In this tortured comédie noire, Professsor Alan Lightman gives us his vision of the materialistic horror that is our lives, the information and subsistence overload that is suffocating us to death. Bill Chalmers, second level management cog, begins to unravel. First his memory goes, and then is recovered, but then the numbness sets in, in his fingers, his legs. And it advances. We watch as he fills up with bile, bile, everything is bile.

We are angry, but like Bill Chalmers we cannot lash out. We are married to the corporation, as Chalmers is to Plymouth where he "processes information." We do not learn that he does anything more specific. It doesn't matter what the information is. He processes it. The company's motto is "The maximum information in the minimum time." The vagueness of the content of their information mirrors the emptiness of our lives. More information for what? Faster for what? To what end? We do not know.

The doctors, who would diagnosis us, Lightman assures us, are like gleeful clowns in their vast ignorance, playing with their high tech toys, a cyclotron for PET scans, a "cell separator...like a portable washing machine...," spinning dials and writing articles for the Annals of Psychosomatic Disease, comparing notes with colleagues over the Internet, by cell phone. Meanwhile the patient is but a curiosity, a subject for examination and study.

Lightman uses the empty dialogue of our lives for comedic effect. We say nothing to one another and we answer with nothing, although sometimes we cry out, and life goes on. Chalmers's wife is numbing herself with alcohol while she conducts a bloodless affair by e-mail. Like Chalmers and his wife, we are estranged from life itself. "He hated the mall the same way he hated himself, except that he hated himself more because he was a part of the mall and he knew it" (pp. 343-344). Yes, the mall and our vast hunger to consume are symptoms of our disease.

Chalmers is angry (as his shrink Dr. Kripke so astutely discerns, although that is all he discerns). Chalmers cries out in his mind: "I'm going to break every machine on this planet...I'm going to rip the phones out of the wall" (p. 303, no exclamation marks). But he never has and he never will, and that is "the problem" that has become "an illness."

How real is Lightman's "diagnosis" of our society? Consider this, the fastest growing class of disease in this country is autoimmune disease, e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, etc., diseases of unclear cause in which the body is apparently assaulting itself. (Compare Lightman's delineation on p. 274).

Juxtaposed among the pages is a tale of the last days of Socrates and of one of the men who condemned him. Somehow Anytus, the ancient Greek, and Chalmers, the American, are brothers in their strange failure amid the trappings of worldly success. Anytus killed Socrates, the flower of Grecian civilization. Chalmers is killing himself. Why? Again, they do not know. We have a stupendous wealth of information, but all of it is useless, as Mrs. Stumm, the wife of one of the information executives, tells Chalmers as she waves a hand at a stack of papers, "What is this crap?...Useless. This stuff is useless." (p. 255). She speaks the truth, but they cannot hear it.

Lightman's art owes something to the imagination of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, in the latter chapters, and something to the spirit of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 throughout. There are shades and echos of the black humor of Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West. This is a fine novel with a strong sense of the spiritual emptiness of our corporate existence. One senses that Lightman feels that in love there is a flicker of hope, but that is all. The mind goes, like the mind of Chalmers's mother, and with it, the possibility of love. Or perhaps there is a moment of redemption in the intense experience of the minutia of our lives, as when Chalmers studies and lovingly draws the leaf he sees outside his bedroom window. Only this and nothing more interrupts the bleak and lonely landscape of Lightman's vision.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Littrell, Dennis. A Perfectly Natural Act (1973) ****

Flawed but thematically ahead of its time

It is a dubious thing for a man in his senior years to apologize for a book he wrote in his twenties. So I won't. And it wanders just a bit in the direction of megalomania for such a man to review his own book. However, it should be noted that I am not the same person I was thirty-some years ago. None of us are.

The manuscript title of this short, ironic, comédie noire (not to be confused with film noir) novel was THE INVISIBLE MAN. My protagonist, John Schofield, a young school teacher, suffers from what he perceives as his being dominated by sexuality and his need to have sex with women. That is the theme more or less: sexuality controls us to a greater extent than we like to believe. And John Schofield did not like to be controlled.

We can see this as the plot develops. In a fit of anger he accidentally kills his young wife, whom he has married merely because he found her sexy. The sense of guilt and the knowledge of what he has done pushes him over the edge and he goes insane and imagines that he is invisible.

I worked very hard on writing all the scenes in the novel in such a way as to make it ambiguous about whether he was or was not actually invisible. The conceit was that his invisibility (unlike that of H.G. Wells's protagonist) took this form: he himself was completely invisible, and anything that he lifted, carried or otherwise released from gravity, became invisible. Consequently the clothes he wore were invisible. The objects that he picked up became invisible as he picked them up. In Wells's novel only the body of his protagonist was invisible; therefore if he put on any clothing that clothing would define his body and be visible.

Invisibility as a metaphor had been done before, most notably by Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man (1952). In that novel his protagonist, who was a black man in America, experienced himself because of the racism in society as being in some respects invisible. I was much influenced by this idea, and extended it in my novel by making Schofield want to be invisible and then through that desire and need become invisible so as to hide from society. It was his escape and his means of dealing with what he had done.

As far as the writing goes, this is very well written and an easy read. The plot flows quickly. A good part of the credit for the writing must go to my editor Clyde Taylor, then at Putnam's, who went over the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb and made many excellent suggestions. He also requested that I rewrite a number of passages, thereby contributing to the modest success of the book.

It was reviewed briefly in both the New York Times (although they misspelled my name, leaving out one of the t's) and the Los Angeles Times and other publications. The reviews ranged from mildly favorable to mixed to downright hostile. Pinnacle bought the paperback rights and therefore there are two editions of this book, one in hardcover and one in paper. Both are out of print; however used copies can be found thanks to the Internet.

The problem with the book was manifold. First, it was written in an ironic style that was lost on my readers; second it dealt with sexuality in a way that I believe was ahead of its time (and still is); and third, the novel has little in the way of inspiring qualities and my protagonist is anything but heroic. At the time I was influenced by ideas from Albert Camus and the existentialists. Schofield was unable to come to grips with the demons that haunted him and could only escape into fantasy.

Putnam's understandably did not want to use my title, The Invisible Man; and in fact I had used the title only as a means to catch an agent's or an editor's eye with the audacity. However the title finally chosen, "A Perfectly Natural Act"--meant ironically of course--referred to rape, which Schofield began to practice after he became invisible, may have mislead the book-buying public into imagining some OTHER "perfectly natural act," such as God knows what.

I was disappointed with the fact that almost no one understood the novel and its ironic intent, so much so that I didn't bother with writing a follow up. I had other things I wanted to do, and I felt at the time that I could always return to writing fiction. Although I have since written several other novels, thirty or so short stories, and some poetry, I have yet to find royalty publication for any of the novels and only a few of the stories have found their way into magazines or literary journals.

I believe that my dream as a young man of following in the footsteps of Hemingway, Steinbeck and others was a dream defeated by a changing book marketplace, and of course my lack of discipline. With rising costs and consolidations in the book business, publishers became more and more reluctant to publish what were called "mid-list" novels and instead concentrated on books with best-seller potential and books with built-in publicity and other guarantees of financial success. Thus any celebrity could write a novel regardless of artistic merit and find royalty publication, but few publishers would take a chance on a novel by someone without celebrity no matter how well written it might be.

How does A Perfectly Natural Act read today? It seems a little young to me, and perhaps a bit more rhetorical than it should be, and there are some mannerism that I would avoid. All in all, however, it is not a bad piece of work from someone so young.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) *****

A tragedy beautifully rendered

In this faux journalistic tale, Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about the lives of ordinary people in a small town along a navigable river. A well to do man with matrimony on his mind arrives and picks out the young lady of his desire. Marquez focuses in on the values of the people and their traditions as the wedding approaches. The man buys her a house on a hill in anticipation presumably that she will bear him many children and he will be a leading citizen of the town.

Such is the dream of this relatively fancy man from a bigger town.

The dream of the young woman who is to be the bride is a bit different. We cannot know for sure, but like young women everywhere she would prefer to marry for love. But how can a woman from a poor family that makes its living slaughtering pigs turn down such an offer?

She can't and yet because she does not fake the virginity with a red-stained sheet that could be hung out to dry on a clothes line the next morning for all to see, she allows circumstance to dictate her future. Her shamed brothers in essence do the same. They act because no one will stop them from acting.

Marquez tells the story as a journalist narrating an event from the past. The suspense in this short novel comes not from what happens to the man who stole the girl's virginity: we know that from the very beginning, but from the aftermath and from the details of how the events transpire. What is easy to miss (and I missed it at first) is that brothers who believe they are duty-bound to perform the honor killing really wish to be stopped. In this we see the old ideas of the society being reluctantly continued by the people. They know there is a better way, but because they are small town traditionalists, they are powerless by themselves. Note that the bishop comes but doesn't stop. The Church itself does not help is perhaps the symbolic meaning.

And why doesn't the town act to stop the murder? Why were they all indifferent? Do we say that something like the disgrace of one family and what they do about that disgrace is something for them to decide alone, and that we should take no action in the affair, that we should let events run their course?

Marquez makes it clear that just about everybody knew what was going to take place. I see this as a passive acceptance of a way of life imposed upon a people by ancient custom and tradition. This is the way of human nature in a traditional society. This is a tragedy foretold but not forestalled. And note that the tragedy happens to both the man who is murdered and to his family and to the murderers and the family of the murderers.

Is an honor killing right? Clearly the law will punish the murderers, the town's people know; but perhaps there will be some leniency from a jury or a magistrate considering the nature of the crime. And no doubt the philandering man who took advantage of the young woman deserves at least in part what will happen to him. I wonder, however, if the man had been a popular person, a younger person, would everyone have stood by and let him be slaughtered?

Note that the young woman herself had the power to name a name and she did. She could have refused. She could have lied.

Still another thing to note, and this reveals an unavoidable artificiality to the story: some women lose their hymen not through the act of intercourse, but through some sort of mishap or even through the normal rough and tumble course of growing up. There are many women who have lost their hymens who are nonetheless virgins. She could have claimed that something like that was the case. She may not have been believed but at least the man who had stolen her virginity would not have died.

Note too that Marquez is careful from the very beginning of the story to show us that Santiago Nasar was a womanizer and a man who would take advantage of the maid or the cook's daughter. In this way we are predisposed not to like him. Undoubtedly the town in general felt the same way. Clearly the young woman had been hurt by this man.

What Marquez has done in this short novel is examine a tragic event and show the reader not just the consequences but the entanglement of perspectives and values that led to the tragedy.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005) *****

A lyrical little masterpiece

Memoria de mis putas tristes is a gorgeous novella written in a way that makes life, despite its hardships, uncertainties and inherent unfairness, beautiful. Marquez's protagonist is a 90-year-old man who is rather ugly but has the "instrument" of a "burro" (to paraphrase a woman who knows), a man who has found his only love among prostitutes. He has a certain timeless eminence about him that inspires people to call him "Don Scholar." He is something of a miracle, still active and full of energy, still writing a weekly column for the local newspaper, cynical yet sentimental, a man who loves women and sees their beauty regardless of age or station in life.

Now suddenly as his tenth decade of life is upon him he is seized with the desire to know an adolescent virgin once before he dies. He contacts his old friend and madam Rosa Cabarcas and demands that she come up with exactly that bill of fare and--time being of the essence in more ways than one when you're ninety--that she do it today, now.

Amazingly enough, Rosa Cabarcas, being the excellent business woman that she is, finds just such a girl. She is illiterate, from the country. She is 14-years-old and works in a button factory all day long to help support her younger brothers and crippled mother. Naturally she is tired when the old man arrives at the bordello. In fact she is asleep. And perhaps that is for the best, all things considered.

The old man does not wake her. He barely touches her. He admires her, feels vitalized by her youth, the feel of her skin, her scent, and the soft rise and fall of her breath. Just this and this alone he experiences before he falls sweetly, languidly, hopelessly in love with her. He becomes a man refueled with the fire of life. His column in the newspaper becomes the love letters he would write to her that instead go out to all who read the newspaper, and, because they are true and deeply felt, they inspire.

Gabo got his inspiration for this little masterpiece from the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, who wrote a novella entitled "House of the Sleeping Beauties." Marquez quotes the opening lines of that novella as a keynote for his own novella: "He was not to do anything in bad taste, the women of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort."

As the story progresses we learn bit by bit more and more about the old man's life and loves. We meet eventually the woman he jilted on her wedding day; we meet his maid who still comes in once a week and learn that he has had some fleeting "knowledge" of her; and we learn of his mother who through a clever subterfuge got him his first writing gig with El Diario de La Paz. All the while the story progresses as the old Don becomes "mad with love" for the first time in his life.

Ah, to fall in love with a sleeping beauty for the first time at the age of 90! And to feel it with such passion! Only a gifted artist and virtuoso craftsman like Gabriel Garcia Marquez could make this so sweet, so filled with the zest of life and so real. His prose is like fresh rose petals still on the tree in the spring, delicate, gorgeous, overwhelming in their vibrant color and strong like the tree itself from which they come.

Part of the power of the novella's prose is no doubt in the translation by Edith Grossman. The words race across the pages, delighting the eye and the ear as they sing of life and love and a very distant death in a way that makes the living magical.

If you have never read Columbian-born, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this is an excellent place to begin.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

McCarthy, Cormac No Country for Old Men (2005) ****

An artistic and commercial triumph

That is no country for old men. The young

in one another's arms, birds in the trees

--Those dying generations--at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

--the opening stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats

The theme of Yeats' poem is the impermanence of this world, and so he set sail "To the holy city of Byzantium" where things are made of more permanent stuff such "as Grecian goldsmiths make" and where things are eternal like ideas.

But what has this to do with Cormac McCarthy's mesmerizing and seductive narrative?

Well, perhaps not as much as McCarthy thought when he came up with the title or when he began his tale. One thing is clear, the bloody violence of the border towns of West Texas about which he writes resemble more "the mackerel-crowded seas" than the holy city of Byzantium, and the "sensual music" is the sound of bullet hitting bone from those dying generations at their song.

The novel is a triumph, both artistically and commercially for the gifted Mr. McCarthy, one of many. What I think aspiring novelists can learn from this is that the power of voice, story and character easily triumphs over any kind of defect that might exist in technique or composition. McCarthy makes his own artistic rules as spins out his tales like shining dimes shimmering across a waxed counter--or dimes thrown in the air to land on heads or tails to decide if you live or die, which is what happens to a couple of the characters in this tale.

Anton Chigurh is the ironically triumphant character in the novel, with the passably human Llewelyn Moss his counterpoint and foil. Chigurh is a psychopath with a code: you harm, insult or even inconvenience me and you die. (Maybe sometimes just for sport I'll flip a coin and if you call it right I'll let you live.) Moss is a fated character who made one fatal error. He's tough and tenacious but a bit out of his league versus Chigurh who is something like the terminator made flesh. All behave like driven animals with the exception of Sheriff Bell who is reflective and philosophic. He is the old man who learns that this is no longer the country for him.

The plot centers around a dope drop in the semi-desert gone bad that Moss stumbles onto some time after the shooting has stopped. Bodies everywhere. Bullet holes in vehicles, blood, etc. And one guy still alive begging for agua. I aint got no water, Moss tells him. Shrewd and with an eye to gaining something big, he's thinking about other things, like where's the money? He follows the bloody trail of someone carrying something heavy and finds him and it. It's a carrying case full of used hundred dollar bills.

He takes the case and heads home to his wife, has a beer, etc. But in the middle of the night he returns to the scene, and it is here that McCarthy begins to allow the plot to get a little shabby and the logic to go south. Why does he return? He says, "Somethin I forgot to do." Apparently what he forgot to do is give the dying Mexican some water. Funny thing about that. It's 12 hours later at one o'clock in the morning when remembers this and its another hour and fifteen before he reaches the Mexican who is now freshly dead with what appears to be a brand new bullet hole in his forehead.

When reading this I thought Moss had returned possibly to get the heroin or maybe to shoot the Mexican who might be able to identify him. But no, Moss's fatal flaw is his kindness.

His kindness! I guess he didn't realize that bringing the man who had been bleeding for a day or two some water wasn't really going to help. If he wanted to help he could have dialed 911.

There are some other minor plot problems and loose ends, but they really don't matter. What matters is McCarthy's brilliant prose, the flawless dialogue, the masterful sketches of the land, and especially his lean narrative that makes the action and the characters vivid and indelible.

Although I have termed this an artistic and commercial triumph I would not call it an unqualified success. The loose ends, the mixed narratives in which Bell appears both in the first person and in the omniscient third, the slight development of most of the characters--although what is developed is very good--and the admixture of an existential ending with Bell's attempts to find a greater meaning are disconcerting. But I don't think McCarthy was much worried about any of this. His intense involvement with the struggles and experiences of his characters is what probably gave him the most artistic satisfaction. Straightening up the details would not be as important.

By the way, the Coen brothers of Fargo (1996) movie fame, violence meisters themselves, whose first film, Blood Simple (1984), was set in Texas, have made a film adapted from McCarthy's novel set for release August 7, 2007. It will star Josh Brolin as Moss, Woody Harrelson as Wells, Tommy Lee Jones as Bell, and Javier Bardem as Chigurh. It should be a doosie. The screenplay must have been easy to write since McCarthy's novel is so very visual and so full of clever stuff.

I have to say I don't like the fact that one of our most successful and brilliant novelists is a master of violence. Is it an accident that the public has rewarded him, or is it the case that he is a product of his times and rides the Zeitgeist? We are living in an age of escalating violence and perhaps that is reflected in our literature.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Mills, Tanya Parker. The Reckoning (2008) *****

Unusual romantic thriller set in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

Part of the power of this first novel comes from Mills' skill in creating interesting characters, and part comes from the veracious atmosphere she creates, and part from a masterful command of narrative. Like all successful novelists, Mills allows the reader to know exactly what the reader needs to know, but no more. Or perhaps I should say there are enough plot twists en route to an edge-of-your-seat ending to please the most demanding of Hollywood thriller directors. Or maybe I could even say that when it comes to violence in the name of literature Cormac McCarthy has nothing on Tanya Parker Mills!

Here's the premise: Theresa Fuller, an American journalist, is arrested by the dreaded Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police, while chasing a story in Kurdish Iraq with her photographer friend Peter Cranston. It's August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq. She has entered the country illegally and has dyed her blond hair dark so that she will not stand out. She is in her forties, unmarried. A sadistic Colonel Badr takes a special interest in her interrogation apparently because of something her father did or did not do some forty years earlier when he was a professor at a university in Baghdad and she was nine years old.

Enter a handsome unmarried Mukhabarat Captain named Tariq al-Awali--or actually, he is the one who arrests her and begins the questioning. He is gentle and attentive, perhaps he is the good cop and the monster Badr is the bad cop. And perhaps this will end well and perhaps it will not. And can it really be the case that a man trained in the techniques of torture is to be the hero?

Tanya Parker Mills keeps us guessing as she combines elements of the international espionage thriller genre with a chick lit focus amid a dramatic plot that forces the reader to turn the pages to find out what happens next. And a lot of what happens is not pretty, as might be surmised considering that Theresa is in the hands of some of Saddam Hussein's most notorious henchmen. Even sadistic son Quasi appears in a cameo.

Personally I was a bit put off by the unusual love affair, but so skillful is Mills in the telling that I found it entirely plausible. As for the little detail of their births that threatens to keep them apart (I cannot be more specific without spoiling the plot), I thought it a bit anticlimactic, coming as it does in the midst of so much violence, so many deaths, and such appalling torture. Part of the story actually takes place in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison before the Americans gained control there. I could not help but think (although this is entire extraneous to Mills' intention: she is carefully non political)--I could not help but think how horribly ironic it is that Bush, Cheney and others actually continued there what Saddam Hussein had started there.

And speaking of torture, since this is a story of torture, physical and mental, including torture as a means to dehumanize, I could not help but think of George Orwell's 1984. In that story the final triumph of the Party (a party not so very different from Saddam Hussein's Ba'thist Party) comes when Winston Smith is broken both physically and mentally and defeated as a human being when in terror he cries out "Do it to her!" In Mills' story Theresa heroically says to Colonel Badr who is about to have the electrodes put on Tariq's mother, "Hurt me…Use it on me." (p. 359) In this I believe that Mills is countering the conclusion that Orwell came to. Instead of losing our humanity as Winston lost his, Mills is telling us that human beings can rise above the purely physical.

It is clear that Mills also believes that the religious differences between Christians in the West and Muslims in the Middle East are not as significant as the humanity and the belief in a personal God that both religions share. We can see this in the way Tariq and Theresa both look to Allah/God as a source of strength in their lives through prayer without the need to distinguish one from the other in any way. I certainly hope this sense of easy and obvious tolerance becomes the norm some day.

It should be noted that Mills herself spent part of her childhood in the Middle East which accounts in part for how comfortable she is with the all the cultural aspects of the novel. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that this is a fictionalized memoir. Clearly this is a work of fictional art in the best tradition of the form, and clearly Mills herself is not Theresa. Yet it is also clear, as is often the case with the best fiction, that the heroine is very much someone with whom the author strongly identifies; and in this way the reader is led to also feel a close affinity for Theresa and what happens to her.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Mirolla, Michael. Berlin (2009) *****

"There are perversions going on here." (p. 145)

It's the height of the Cold War. US President Ronald Reagan is about to speak in Berlin and demand that the Berlin Wall come down. But none of that matters. The Berlin that novelist Michael Mirolla writes about is more like the corrupt and degenerate Berlin of George Grocz from the 1920s. Many of Mirolla's characters are in fact gross caricatures of people just as George Grocz's drawings were. Seen through the eyes of Mirolla's unreliable and schizophrenic narrator/protagonist, logical (positivist?) philosopher Antonio G. Serratura, these Berliners are morphed by his delusions into dark Dada depictions of a depraved humanity filled with sexual perversions and Quixotic behaviors.

Mirolla begins with a third person narrative introducing Serratura's creator (or perhaps alter ego), Giulio A. Chiavetta, an "ex-stationary engineer by trade and self-styled freelance circus mime" who has apparently gone insane and is living in a clinic in Montreal while being treated by Dr. Wilhelm "Billy" Ryle, a psychiatrist. As the story begins, Chiavetta has apparently escaped from the institution and as the authorities look for this putatively harmless nutcase, Dr. Ryle gets access to Chiavetta's computer and discovers a document written by Chiavetta entitled "Berlin: A Novel in Three Parts." Thus we have a novel within a novel.

Ryle begins reading the first person singular novel, the contents of which are set in quotation marks--at least for a while they are. After a few pages the document becomes a third person narrative. This may seem complicated or abrupt or even unnecessary, but Mirolla writes so well and so engagingly that we don't care about the niceties of narrative construction. It seems that Chiavetta's protagonist, Serratura is on his way to Berlin to participate in the "Wittgenstein World Symposium on the Realism/Anti-Realism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy."

So. We have the makings of a satirical novel about modern philosophy and philosophers seen from the vantage point of the mentally disturbed. Naturally this is interesting to avant-garde writers and effete intellectuals such as myself, and so I read on. It doesn't take a lot of keen discernment to see that somehow Giulio A. Chiavetta and Antonio G. Serratura are more connected than as author and author's character.

All goes interestingly introspective as Serratura reveals his thoughts and meets and converses on the plane with a seller of restaurant supplies named Singer. It appears that a novel of ideas is developing. Perhaps a contrast between the airy, abstract world of philosophy and the practical world of business is being set up for some thematic development.

Serratura himself seems a down to earth and unpretentious philosopher, a man with a wife and daughter back in Montreal who has obviously achieved some success as a philosopher since he has been invited to speak at the symposium. Yet, something seems a bit amiss or a bit quirky. Serratura's wife has threatened to leave him, and has probably taken on a lover, "one of the plumbers or other handymen who'd swarmed their house as it underwent renovation," Serratura muses, although he believes that her leaving is just a threat. And there is something a bit too eager about this traveling salesman that is also a bit off.

As Serratura arrives in Berlin and secures his lodging at the weird Pension Aryana away from the campus where the symposium is being held, we begin to have forebodings of danger. There are riots in the streets to protest "the cowboy" Reagan's visit, youths throwing rocks and such; and at the pension Fritz, the proprietor and his sister Frieda, ("nutty as a breadfruit," Fritz informs Serratura) seem a bit odd. Furthermore, Serratura seems somewhat adrift and ends up that first evening at…

Well, enough of the plot. Mustn't give away too much. Suffice it to say that things turn quirky and odd and then bizarre and then something beyond bizarre. Mirolla's structure has the narrative return to Dr. Ryle who continues to read from Serratura's novel as the search for Chiavetta continues, so that we go back and forth from one reality to another.

In the end it is not entirely clear what is real and what is not. Much of what Serratura experiences did not or could not have happened outside his increasingly deranged mind, yet what is described in the final scene may be the truth about what happened to the author Chiavetta himself. Clearly Mirolla's intent is to play with reality just as philosophers play with reality, philosophers who, in the postmodern interpretation, cannot decide what is real and what is not real, or whether we can ever know, or even whether a question about reality even makes sense. A quote from the comedian Robin Williams as Mork in the old TV sitcom "Mork and Mindy" might be appropriate. What he said most profoundly was simply, "Reality, what a concept!"

Judging from the reality/unreality of this very interesting novel, I think that Mirolla would identify with that point of view, as do I.

Bottom line: a diabolic, rough-edged, violent and decidedly unPC black comedy of a novel with a few loose ends, well and humorously rendered.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Moravia, Alberto The Conformist (1952) *****

One of several brilliant novels by Moravia

The Conformist is a psychologically complex novelistic study of an Italian fascist, although not necessarily a typical fascist, done in an existential style with intense interior monologues and introspection by Alberto Moravia's protagonist, Marcello Clerici.

No doubt Moravia intended Marcello as the conformist, but ironically it is his wife Giulia who nearly always conforms to what is considered normal behavior and who harbors uncritically knee jerk beliefs and opinions formed by church and state. In fact, that is part of the reason he married her. In contrast, Marcello struggles mightily with what he considers his abnormal tendencies. As a child he killed lizards for sport as any boy might, but felt uneasy about the wanton slaughter, and so sought from a friend and his mother some indication that killing lizards was okay. Later he kills a cat, although this is mostly accidental, and as a young teenager shots a homosexual limo driver named Lino. He feels something akin to consternation for these actions, not guilt exactly, but an unease since doing such things is not what he thinks normal people do.

It is his need to be--or at least to appear--"normal" that drives Marcello to conform to society's mores and persuades him to embrace fascism. He only feels really at ease when he sees himself as part of the common herd, on the installment plan, buying ordinary furniture, living in an apartment like a thousand others, having a wife and children, reading the newspapers, going to work, etc. He is not a peasant of course, but an educated functionary in the Italian Secret Service, a man with impeccable manners who seldom says more than is absolutely necessary.

The idea that fascists in general follow the herd and adopt a superficial and uncultured world view is no doubt largely correct, but the essence of fascism is the belief in authoritarian rule, the stratification of society, intolerance of diversity, and a willingness, even an eagerness to use force and violence to obtain such ends. The psychology underlying Moravia's portrait is the idea that Marcello sees in himself the violent and selfish tendencies and so it is only natural that he should adopt a political philosophy that condones and acts out such tendencies.

Moravia treats fascism in the person of Marcello more kindly than I believe he imagined he would when he began the novel, given Moravia's hatred of the fascist movement that seduced much of Europe following the First World War. But this is the necessary consequence of being an objective novelist. In drawing a living, breathing portrait of Marcello, Moravia allows us to see him as a complex person with strengths and weaknesses who deals with the trials of life sometimes in a despicable way, and sometimes, indeed often, in a way that most of us would choose were we in his shoes. Therefore it is impossible not to identify with him to some degree. It is an artifact of Moravia's artistry that we do in fact in the end identify with Marcello and may even realize that in his situation, we too might have embraced fascism or at least tolerated it.

A secondary theme in the novel is that of unrequited love or of desire that is not returned. All of the main characters, Marcello, Lino, Giulia, Quadri and Lina love someone who does not return their love. Marcello briefly falls madly in love with Lina who is a lesbian who despises him. Lina in turn is desperately in love with Giulia who only has eyes for her husband, who does not really love her. The inability of the characters to love the one who loves them is played out partly through a disparity in personality and political belief, and partly through differing sexuality. Lino and his latter-day incarnation in an old British homosexual who drives around Paris picking up indigent young men seldom if ever find their love returned although they might temporarily quench their desire. No one in the novel experiences love both in the giving and the receiving.

Part of Marcello's unease with himself comes from his ambivalent sexuality. He cannot return the intense passion that Giulia feels for him although apparently he does manage to perform his husbandly duties adequately. Perhaps even more to the point, he seems to project a need for the "abnormal" experience. He is twice mistaken for a homosexual, and he falls in love with a homosexual of the opposite sex--thus the "Lino" and the "Lina" of his life. Marcello seems to have a blindness about invert sexuality just as he has a blindness about human morality. He is a man who does not what he thinks is right but what others think is right. He fears his natural impulses. Moravia illustrates this by occasionally having him nearly give into what he feels inside, as in the case of Lina, only to have him realize that to act from his heart is dangerous.

In the final analysis Marcello finds that "the normality that he had sought after with such tenacity for so many years...was now revealed as a purely external thing entirely made up of abnormalities" (quote from near the beginning of Chapter Nineteen).

Moravia (born Alberto Pincherle) is in my opinion one of the great novelists of the 20th century and The Conformist is representative of his best work. Incidentally this was made into a beautiful film by Bernardo Bertolucci while not entirely true to the novel, is nonetheless very much worth seeing.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Mughal, Mohamed Resolution 786 A Novel in Three Acts Telling Cuneiform Tales of Love and War and God and Lust and Loss (2008)

Artistically depicting a world in turmoil and confusion

I get a lot of novels even though I turn down most requests... Most of the novels are overwritten and self-indulgent. Usually they are also devoid of artistic talent. Everybody seems to think they have a novel in them (as the old saw has it). They don't. A real novelist is an artist who understands the needs of the reader, who understands that a novel is a communication between writer and reader and that the writer is not to waste the reader's time. Entertainment may be a purpose but a greater purpose is to enlighten, to inform, to share the meaning of life. Furthermore, a literary artist must make some effort at beauty, even if it is a twisted beauty. And above all a novelist must tell the truth, the psychological and literary truth. Few do.

Anyway, this unusual and beautifully written novel by Mohamed Mughal is a splendid example of the literary arts. Set mostly in the present, in Africa, America and the Middle East, amid religious differences and moral confusions, amid the stark struggle for life that is so subdued for most people in United States, this work allows us to share the life of Adam Hueghlomm from boyhood in Nairobi to a time in the future. Written in sharp poetic prose and organized in psychological time so that events have a temporal existence independent of the clock or calendar (which is the way life often is), Resolution 786 is without the bias and the kind of humbug that is so annoying in some novels about different cultures and different religions. Not taking sides unnecessarily is what is important when one writes about the clash of cultures, of differing ways of life, of strikingly different beliefs about what is right and what is wrong and how to interpret the world. Mughal does not take sides, except to champion the side of humanity.

Although clearly a work of art the novel is not entirely successful because it is not dramatically presented in such a way as to create and maintain tension, which is what propels the reader toward the next page. The episodes and scenes--with a platoon of American soldiers in Iraq, in a courtroom of the future with the Lord on trial (a bizarre second coming, perhaps), in the US with the intriguing, beguiling and ever confident Becca and her often distracted true love Adam Hueghlomm, etc.--are like vignettes tied together by an artistic logic but not by the logic of a narrative with rising action. I don't know how this could have been made more dramatic. Perhaps Hueghlomm needs to be seen as conflicted between differing world views. Or perhaps along with "the Lord" the Fallen One might have been presented, leading the forces of murder, mayhem and madness that Mughal depicts.

I also thought that "the Lord" was strangely inarticulate with his "I am who I am" and "things happened."

There are many poetic passages of striking beauty throughout the novel, some descriptive but others philosophic such as this from page 171:

'"The life of this world is an illusion,' said the Lord. 'Nothing but rearranged packets of light projecting so many images for your experiential pleasure.'"

Mughel has a knack for recalling how people pose and move and act when they are in the thrall of some emotion, and he presents the poses and the movements to draw us vividly into his characters. Here he is introducing a minor player:

"Major Shajid, the Pakistani liaison officer, swaggered into the Recreation Room, a thin, frail man with a wiry black mustache, flat nose and thick, full lips. His carriage exuded a manner of self-importance that the most casual observer could immediately assess as undeserved. Although his plain, black shoes were immaculately shined, his dirty brown uniform smelled like pungent spices and was almost always splattered with tiny spots of food. Shajid looked about and turned his nose up. 'This is how soldiers of a superpower live?' he asked sarcastically, his English forced, his accent deeply Indian, almost thick enough to be a contrived parody for a racist joke." (pp. 119-120)

Mughel also has a nice feel for authentic dialogue that is witty and sharp. Becca comes to life mainly because Mughel's sense of her voice is so true and vital; and the voices of the soldiers too are real and true to life. Here's a bit from Becca and Adam soon after they first meet:

"His seriousness made Becca rock with laughter, her head tilting back like it always did, her knees pulled slightly off the mattress, mouth thrown wide open, bellowing loud and riotous. Cackling, she stammered, 'I can't believe you ever got laid.'

'You lay me,' he said, composed, staring forward at the ceiling fan's still, wooden blades.

She turned to him, done laughing. 'Yeah, those are sympathy lays.' She scrunched her small nose and tapped his lightly with her index finger, her way of telling him that she'd just outwitted him.

'Well, are you feeling sympathetic?' Adam raised and lowered his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

'Hardly.' The jest in Becca's voice was at a rolling boil.

Adam continued his grotesquely poor Groucho Marx impersonation. 'You know, Karl was the fourth Marx brother. Yeah, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Karl. Karl wanted to join the comedy team, but the other guys always told him, "You know, Karl, you're just not funny." So he went and invented Communism. See what happens when you're not nice to someone?'" (p. 43)

The central character Adam Hueghlomm remains at the end something of an enigma, a person often deep in thought, a rationalist who writes poetry (perhaps like the author), a person, emblematic of today's world, caught between science and religion, between the rational and the irrational, between modern technology and the ancient ways, a world in transition.

-- a review by Dennis Littrell

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (1955)*****

A masterpiece on several levels

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of those rare books that is both a commercial and an artistic masterpiece. Like Joyce's Ulysses it is a tour de force of language seldom encountered in English outside the works of Shakespeare. It is a carefully crafted novel rich in irony and atmosphere, a novel of great psychological insight and poignancy, a novel to rival the masters of the nineteenth century and those of the twenty-first. Some have called it "The Great American Novel," that mythical tome of authorial genius that everybody was trying to write after the Second World War, and the best novel about America ever penned. Certainly Lolita can feel comfortable alongside The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, Moby Dick and a few others as a top drawer classic of American literature.

Of course what sets Lolita apart from other novels, at least at the time of its publication in the fifties, is its theme. A grown man making love to a pre-adolescent girl was quite a shock for a prudish America weaned on Ozzie and Harriet and Dwight Eisenhower. As such it was a courageous novel and a bit of a derring-do. It was the novel of a man ravenous for the fame and fortune he thought his talent so richly deserved, and so he took a chance.

Originally Nabokov had intended to withhold his name from the title page while dispersing throughout the narrative cryptic evidences of his presence, should he later want to claim authorship; but somehow, even before the novel's first publication in France, he was persuaded to admit paternity. Even so he remained uneasy about Lolita throughout most of his life, maintaining that other, less appreciated works of his were superior, especially Ada and Pnin, while insisting that Humbert Humbert, his nymphet-enchanted antihero, was no part of himself, merely a puppet on the master's string. After the rush of fame had subsided and he was comfortably ensconced en chateau with his fortune, Nabokov even grew weary of the attention Lolita commanded from critics and public alike, attention he saw as detrimental to his scholarly work, his autobiography (the splendid Speak, Memory) and his other works of fiction. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that more than once he spoke aloud the ancient warning and lamentation: "Beware of what you wish for. You may get it."

Still, one can survive such annoyances, and nowhere in Nabokov's life was he seen as more than slightly troubled by the very real belief that such a penetrating revelation of character (Humbert's) could only be achieved by having part of that character as one's own. This he denied to his dying day—as well he might and should. The "biographical fallacy" has a place in literary criticism, perhaps, but not here. His denial, while politically correct, was unnecessary since girls are desirable, and one can feel that desire without being a lecher. What is needed is the understanding, as with avocados and the rising of the sun, that there is a time appropriate to every purpose.

While reading Lolita for the first time, as with any rich piece of literature, do yourself a favor and don't try to catch all the subtleties. Just read it through. Those familiar with Nabokov know full well that he plays games with the reader just as he does with his characters. He likes to show off, and besides few of us are as erudite as the very learned professor himself. You might want to take a note or two to record how you feel about Humbert and his little charge, and then compare those notes to how you feel after a second reading. Like others, I found myself moved from the amusement and tolerance of a first reading to a fully sober appreciation, after a second reading, of what a "brute" (Lo's fair description) Humbert Humbert really is. It is a curious coincidence perhaps, but this is exactly what happened with the cinematic interpretations of the novel. The first, by Kubrick from the sixties, is a brilliant comedy that has us identifying with the tragedy of Hum's obsession, while the second, Adrian Lyne's more graphic recent production, makes it clear how violated and used and ultimately destroyed Lolita really was.

If you're writing a paper, buy the annotated Lolita with notes by Alfred Appel Jr. Although the annotations add only a little to an enjoyment of the novel, and in some cases seem a bit of a pedantic stretch, they will satisfy a scholastic urge.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (1992)****

Not the masterpiece I had hoped for, but good anyway

The novel is poetic and engaging, and I like the way Ondaatje handles time, as though painting in layers, going back to a point and elaborating on it, coming back to a "present" and then going back again and again, and then finally moving forward to the end, although I don't think the last parts of the book live up to the promise at the beginning.

I have remarked elsewhere that the book disappoints with its phony PC notions about how Kip and some others might have reacted to the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities, the author imagining that Kip would be offended that the bomb was dropped on "brown people" and not on Europeans; but in truth, few at the time really comprehended or cared about anything other than ending the horror of the worst war in human history. I was more horrified by the booby trap bombs left behind by the Germans that Kip had to disarm because they were left especially to murder people whereas the atomic bombs had at least one clear and laudable purpose: to end the war and to end it as quickly as possible and with a minimum of lost life. Would Ondaatje have wanted to storm the island of Japan? I don't think so.

But that is not the novel's only conformance with the current politically correct climate. The English Patient, like the preponderance of contemporary novels focuses on a woman, in this case the nurse Hana, surrounded by various interesting men, mainly because that is what the market place requires. My point is that even the most skillful and accomplished artists, and Ondaatje is one of them, must conform to the dictates of their age in commercial terms or not be published at all.

I saw the movie first and then read the book, something I almost never do, and I was reminded of a remark by a student of mine who said that she preferred to read the book first because that way she drew in her mind her own picture of what the characters were like. I found myself greatly influenced by the actress who played Hana (Juliette Binoche), so much so that I did not form any independent conception of the way Hana appeared in the book. I think my student was right: form your own view and then compare it to Hollywood's and the actor's interpretation.

Good book, but not the masterpiece I had hoped for.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Orwell, George. 1984 (1949) *****

Still relevant as a warning

When I was an undergraduate it was fashionable to compare and contrast the two famous dystopian novels, 1984 by George Orwell and the earlier Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Orwell was writing in reaction to communism with which he had become disillusioned while Huxley wrote in reaction to eugenics and the classical conditioning ideas derived from Pavlov and the behaviorists.

Which novel more realistically predicted the future? Which one gave a better critique of the world at the time of its writing? Which novel was more fun to read? All science fiction is grounded in the present of course and reflects to a lesser or greater degree not only the author's extrapolations from that present but his or her understanding of the world in which we live.

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948. His was not strictly intended as a prediction of any kind but a warning. We thought of it as a prediction though, and in the mid-sixties when I was at UCLA there was a tendency to favor Huxley since 1984 was less than a generation away and it didn't look like the dreary hell of Oceania and the thought police had any chance of materializing that soon. Clearly the feel good, feelie, drug-infused mindlessness of Brave New World was much more likely even if probably much more than a generation away.

So we decided Huxley had more realistically predicted the future (great seers that we were). But as to which one gave a better critique of the present, we were in agreement: it was Orwell's 1984. Not that we personally, as privileged members of the great American middle class had been reduced to drinking victory gin and going to rallies for two minutes of hate or had girl friends who were members of the Anti-Sex League. What we knew though was that a football rally, with just a little malevolent direction, could easily turn into a hate rally; and the Big Brother of Oceania was not at all that different in some respects from the Johnson administration that had (we believed) killed Kennedy and was now engaged in a senseless war in Vietnam from which we were spared as long as we maintained our college deferments. Orwell's idea that by reducing the words that one could legally speak, by a government imposed reduction in vocabulary through Newspeak, and by an indoctrination of our thoughts through the enforced concept of "thoughtcrime," and by maintaining a constant state of war from without, the populace could be controlled--this was something that seemed so very true. We had only to witness the relatively recent examples of what had happened in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The twentieth century was indeed the century of totalitarianism, and although it did not seem to affect us now, with flower children in the streets and free love and doobies on our waterbeds, it was clear that the danger was there lurking in the distance.

Furthermore we greatly identified with the secret and illegal tryst of Winston and Julia, who like us, stole hours away from Big Brother (actually we stole them away from parental authority) to meet and make forbidden love. But what I think really sold us on the psychological truth of 1984 and shocked us greatly were the rats about Winston's face that forced him to betray the only love of his life and in doing so lose his humanity and whatever smidgin of self-respect he had left. In other words what we saw was the overwhelming power of torture to completely subdue, and as it eventually happened, transform the vital human being into some kind of compliant animal filled with fear and the wretched worship of brute, physical power--humans reduced to defeated creatures glued to the telescreen, smoking government issue cigarettes, drinking government issue gin and cheering government issue soldiers on to the slaughter of distant, hated peoples, while all the while over every vacant space on a wall or billboard was pasted not the Marlboro Man but the face of Big Brother whom the populous had come to love as a beaten dog might love the sadistic human that beats it.

As to which novel was more fun to read it was a tossup and depended on your personal choice of genre. Those who preferred horror to fantasy chose 1984. Those who could take some secret delight in soma and free sex and in the security of knowing who you were in the stratification of society, chose Brave New World. A consensus view was that if you were a history or a poli sci major you tended to prefer Orwell's vision; and if you were a psych major, Huxley's.

One of the unanswered questions about 1984 is whether it really is possible to reduce the human ability to think by restricting vocabulary and distorting history. If some words are not allowed to exist and if history is constantly erased and rewritten in order to conform to the current party line, is it not true that we will more and more lose our ability to think independently and become more and more like cogs in a great repressive social/political machine?

Final thought: what would Orwell have made of the possibilities of the Internet to enslave the populace?

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Pamuk, Orhan. The White Castle (1979) ****

A case of intellectual incest?

Nobel Prize Literature Laureate (2006), Orhan Pamuk, in his first work translated into English from the Turkish, gives us in The White Castle an obsessive tale of a bizarre relationship. He begins with an old framing device, that of finding a manuscript which he then publishes. (Actually, Pamuk is even further removed since he has a fictional character, one Faruk Darvinoglu, find the manuscript and dedicate the book to his deceased sister.) Nathaniel Hawthorne used a similar conceit in The Scarlet Letter (1850). This manuscript is a first-person narrative by an unnamed Italian author who was captured by the Turks and taken into slavery in 17th century. He eventually becomes the personal servant of a Turkish man of similar age--and most importantly--of similar appearance. In fact the two could pass as twins.

This similarity of appearance begins to haunt the Italian, partly because the similarity is inexplicable and partly because the two become so intertwined intellectually and emotionally. Their relationship deepens as Hoja, the Turk who is obsessed with learning, especially learning what he considers science, begins to pick apart the narrator's brain. As time passes they exchange ideas and memories, beliefs and every aspect of their knowledge with the sense that it is the Italian slave who is tutoring the Turkish intellectual. Eventually Hoja with the help of the narrator's learning becomes an advisor of sorts to the young sultan. He interprets his dreams, predicts the end of a plague, constructs mechanical devices and toys for the sultan's amusement, tells stories for entertainment and generally becomes one of the favored members at court. He gains in power and influence and is rewarded with grants of land by the sultan so that he has a secure income.

Meanwhile the narrator, whom Hoja often abuses physically and mentally, has learned Turkish and has made himself indispensable to Hoja. The sultan senses that much of Hoja's impressive learning comes from the Italian slave, and eventually the narrator also becomes a favorite at the sultan's palace. It could be said that what we are witnessing in this story in a symbolic sense is the encroaching influence of science and technology on the Islamic state.

It is psychologically understandable and indeed perhaps inevitable that the narrator would form in his mind ambivalent feelings of love and hate for Hoja, whom he so resembles and with whom he is in nearly constant contact. As the years pass and their differences meld, and as each learns the heart and soul of the other, they become more and more alike until...

Is Hoja the doppelganger or is it the other way around? Is it possible that Hoja will leave Turkey and "return" to Italy after having so thoroughly gleaned the narrator's brain that he can pass as the narrator, even to his Italian family? After all these years, the suggestion that Pamuk makes--and this is really the brilliance of the novel--is that yes it could happen. And could the narrator stay on in Turkey, marry and have children while assuming the identity of Hoja without anyone really being able to tell the difference? Could time and acquaintance overcome the accident of one's birth, overcome even the accent with which one speaks so that one is the other and vice-versa? In a larger sense could such an intense, close relationship over several decades so confuse the minds of these two that they no longer know where the one begins and the other leaves off?

Pamuk's narrative is deliberate and slow-paced, as least by contemporary standards, intensely felt, and carefully wrought. You may find yourself putting it aside at first, so slowly does the story develop. It covers the span of several decades until the narrator is in his seventies. It is picturesque in the style of stories from centuries past which told of exotic places and strange adventures. There is a vivid sense of a world in transition from the feudal to the modern, of a world hungry for the renaissance, hungry for the knowledge of the West, and yet content within an Islamic society ruled by sultans and imams.

This is the first novel of Pamuk's I have read, and one of his earliest. It is obvious from this relatively modest work that he is a writer of vision and understanding. I am looking forward to reading his more recent work.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Sager, Larry No Guns, No Knives, No Personal Checks: The Tales of a San Francisco Cab Driver (2007) ****

Supercabman

He eats Cheerios after getting home at 5:30 a.m. What no Maui Wowie? No London Iced Tea? He dutifully calls his girlfriend. Well, actually they aren't that friendly. (The girlfriend is an untold story.) He doesn't do anything or report on anything or do more than allude to anything but driving a cab. And he's very serious about the money. And the tips, and how to get them and how you can blow them off. He gives us the meter to the penny, and reports on the tip to the dime. But you can tell he really doesn't care. He worries about getting mugged and barfed on. He's patience and tolerant. But he's always smelling things. He looks for a dump in the backseat of his cab after some smelly guy has left. He can't find it. So he drives to a more lighted spot and searches some more. Nothing. Maybe he's losing it. His mind.

It's hard to tell at the beginning whether this is a memoir or a reportage. It reads like a string of closely related vignettes. But there is something holding it together. Hard to tell what it is. Except for the cab and The City and the derelicts and the poseurs and the transvestites and the drunks and the old people and the fat people and the night and the lights and the fear. Fear of guns and knives, or fear of being trapped in the job? He isn't sure. He tells himself he's driving a cab for the experience, to get material for The Novel. It's a sick world out there in the inner city. People are weird. He's taking notes and transcribing them when he gets home, turning it into Fiction.

He has a hero. Supercabman--himself. And he's a good hero, a cabbie psychologist and a wordsmith with a sharp satirical eye. He sizes people up, notes what they're wearing from their black leather pants to the grease spots on their shirts to their nose rings and bad teeth and bad breath and bad dye jobs, and how they are comporting themselves. Especially how they are comporting themselves. He has to. At three a.m. you don't want to make a mistake. Somebody's waving you down. Does he want a ride or your wad of bills? Hard to tell sometimes. Supercabman sees the city and it denizens without pity but then again with a minimum of judgment.

The cab's computer beeps messages. Sometimes he sends one himself. It sets off car alarms of nearby cars (ha, ha). He has his "cab policies." No smoking. That's tough. He pretends he's on the nicotine patch for commiseration. He has nicotine gum on the dash. Also pepper spray. (No plastic Jesus, though.) He knows how to small talk with the clientele and when Not to Ask and when to shut up. He's shrewd and cynical. Larry Sager is also one heck of a writer. Here's a bit from the "Safe Sex" chapter:

"Circling back and forth between a few different South of Market establishments finally turns up some stragglers: three men coming out of a popular gay bar, THE STUD on Harrison Street. One guy, who could easily pass as a bouncer, is wearing a bright bleached white tank-top tee shirt emphasizing his steroid-induced muscular build--6'3" and at least 225 pounds. His two companions climb into the back seat. One guy could be a GQ model; his partner sports the escaped-convict look--head shaved, beard unshaven, dressed in a Goth black shirt and black pants. And someone, pray tell, has taken several sharp metallic objects and run them straight through his face. It looks painful, but doesn't seem to bother him. Of the group, I spotted him first and I wasn't going to stop. But when GQ playfully grabbed the metal-pierced escaped-convict's buttocks, and both seemed to enjoy the routine, realized they were together and figured they were a safe pick-up. If anyone looking like Thug is flagging me from a ragged street corner in the Tenderloin, I do NOT stop." (p. 99)

The real strength of the book is in the sharp observations that Sager's alter ego makes about his passengers and himself. A nice technique is for him say one thing and think another, or to reply directly in his head to something somebody has said, but not aloud, as in this exchange with a really, really BAD painter who has just shown him her canvas which he notes to himself is "hideous awful":

"I still have some touching up to do," she says, as if expecting to hear an objection

from me regarding her own "harsh" criticism.

How about touching it up with kerosene and putting a match to it?

"Oh," I nod instead, pursing my lips tightly. (p. 214)

There are some nice line drawings by Shanon Essex and one by Emil of some of the characters to grace the text. I think Sager might have intended this opus originally as journalism, but found as he wrote the improvised dialogue (both interior and exterior) and the flights of fancy he took with some of the characters, that this story of a time in his life was better told as fiction.

Finally I have to note that this IS a novel however episodically constructed, and a very clever and original one, because suddenly there is an ending that catches us by surprise. Suddenly there is a denouement in the last chapter as he lets a passenger take over his cab. Suddenly the novel is over and we see the point of all that has gone before. There are a few solitary whiskeys, a phone call to the offstage girlfriend, a bit of haziness and then the end to an experience.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) *****

A masterpiece of American literature

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is not only Twain's best work, but is considered by some, one of the greatest novels ever written. Episodic in form (as Twain warns, "persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot"), Huckleberry Finn is clearly, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, one of the three most ambitious and artistically successful novels of America's 19th century.

But what is it about Huckleberry Finn that makes it stand out? Most young people reading it will declare that they thought Tom Sawyer was better, and for them, they would be right. It is a difficult novel to teach. The dialect is actually difficult for some inexperienced readers. The satire and ironies are often lost on some readers, and some minorities are offended by what they think is its racist tone. That, however, is an historical irony if ever there was one. Twain's intent was to belittle and make fun of the racist attitudes of most Americans. The very fact that Jim and Huck were able to achieve a fast friendship and to negotiate together the epic journey down the Mississippi with Jim often showing superior wisdom and a right smart common sense did not sit well with some prejudicial mind sets. Today what offends is the language, in particular the use of the "n" word.

But what makes Huckleberry Finn a great novel is first and foremost the indelible character of the often self-effacing Huck Finn himself and his compelling, lyrical, and ever so beautifully observed narrative. There is only one other novel in American literature that can be considered in the same league as far as first person narratives go, and that is Nabokov's Lolita. Strange to say Humbert Humbert and Huck Finn have one thing in common, an uncommon ability to make their differing worlds extraordinarily vivid through painstakingly clever and absolutely authentic voices. Both Twain and Nabokov achieved this rare veracity because of their command of language, their sense of character, and their fine ear for the nuances of speech.

Sense of character is also what makes Huckleberry Finn a great novel. The characters are so real they practically jump off the page. Even the minor characters are Shakespearean in their psychological verity. It is not exactly a co-incidence that the Duke of "Bilgewater" and the "King of France," those ornery rascals rescued by Huck and Jim, were experts in ersatz Shakespeare and various dodges. Twain knew people, and he knew them well. Too well, one might say, considering his low opinion of humankind.

The effective--even rhapsodic--use of dialect is another thing that makes Huckleberry Finn a great novel. Writing a novel in dialect is a difficult thing to do well. Many have tried it and many have failed. Most writers are well advised to limit their use of dialect to the speech of their characters. But Twain was a master of dialect of many sorts, and was able to have Huck Finn narrate the entire novel in his voice while at the same time employ the various dialects of the other characters. Nabokov--although I don't think he ever acknowledged this--was undoubtedly influenced by Twain's authentic use of dialect; but because his narrator was a transplanted European professor of literature, he had to narrate in standard English; indeed a most eloquent standard English. Yet, one notices that Nabokov through Humbert took some delight in reproducing Lolita's authentic speech, her mid-twentieth century, New England, urban teenaged dialect.

Finally, what makes Huckleberry Finn a great novel is its humor. Twain was a master of all sorts of humor. (He was a great public speaker and story teller.) The language of the novel itself is replete with "malapropisms, puns, misquotations, understatement, exaggeration, incongruities, illiteracies, and absurd spellings," to quote from Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, p. 259--most done for comedic effect. Additionally, the yarns themselves, the "stretchers," as Huck has it, are wondrous funny, and Huck's commonsensical take on life often contrasted humorously with what he actually saw and experienced.

Here's one of my favorite passages from the book to illustrate the master's humorous style. The ragged "King" is about to divulge "the secret of" his "being" to the supposed Duke of Bridgewater and to Huck and Jim. He says, doing the "Duke" one better:

"Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!"

Huck writes, "You bet you Jim and me stared, this time. Then the duke says:

'You are what?'

'Yes, my friend, it is too true--your eyes is lookin' at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.'

'You! At your age? No! You mean you're the late Charlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least.'

'Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled, trampled-on and sufferin' rightful King of France.'"

It is the sheer density of Twain's artistry that most impresses me. I wish I had room to quote the rest of the page as Huck goes on to describe how they "majestying" him so that it "done him heaps of good." There is so much on practically every page. I know of no other writer except Shakespeare who can reveal so much in so few words, and who could use words so creatively.

This is a great novel and anyone who cares about American literature has read it or will.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Voltaire. Candide (2002) ****

Has the hand of time dulled Voltaire's rapier?

Ouch! That hurts!

(Reacting to the sorry metaphor of my subject line)

I found Voltaire's famous satire surprisingly tepid. Perhaps I've become jaded in my old age, or perhaps I should have read this in the 18th century when it caused such a sensation because of the scandalous way that Voltaire satirized the church, the clergy, and just about everybody else in any position of power or influence. Reading it now, it seems a bit tame. All the horrors and stupidities Voltaire describes seem almost commonplace considering what we have experienced since he made his attack on optimism in 1759. Today we can look back at two world wars, at the Holocaust and Hiroshima, at the war in Vietnam, at terrorism and the latest stupidity in Iraq. Nothing in Candide can compare to these real historical events that have so sorely tested human optimism. We can even look back to the French Revolution and the revolutions that followed in the 19th century, which in a sense Voltaire predicted with his devastating critique of the corrupt and degenerate European society. Or we can recall the Catholic priests and Ted Haggard from yesterday's headlines. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

It is difficult to appreciate how deliciously scandalous this was in Voltaire's time since today we are free to criticize the church and our governments, whereas in Voltaire's time such criticisms could land you in the Bastille. Voltaire's legendary reputation for rapier wit and shocking turn of phrase can be found in these pages, but much of it seems diluted because his style has so often been imitated. We have read and reread his imitators, and we have even read some who have improved upon him in some ways, people in America like Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. We tend to forget where they got their inspiration at least in part. An example from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (episodic in structure much like Candide, by the way) is in the rascals that Huck and Jim meet on the river, the Duke of "Bilgewater" and the "King of France," who, like the six "kings" that Candide sups with in Venice, are out and our frauds and represent the impossible, deluded aspirations of the average person.

This is the work in which we have Dr. Pangloss and his "best of all possible worlds." And this is the work which ends with Candide summing up all the philosophy he has learned in his travels with the words, "'Tis well said, but we must cultivate our gardens."

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughter-House-Five (1966) *****

Read it again

I know this novel fairly well having read it several times (once aloud to my students). It is about all time being always present if only we knew, or could realize it, or had a sense about time in the same way we have senses for light and sound.

It is also about the Allied fire bombings of Dresden which killed more people than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (And so it goes.) Kurt Vonnegut begins as though writing a memoir and advises us that "All of this happened, more or less..." Of course it did not, and yet, as with all real fiction, it is psychologically true. His protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, an unlikely hero, somewhat in the manner of unlikely heroes to come like Forest Gump and the hero of Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, transcends time and space as he bumbles along. This is a comédie noire--a "black comedy"--not to be confused with "film noir," a cinematic genre in which the bad guys may win or at least they are made sympathetic. In comédie noire the events are horrific but the style is light-hearted. What the genres have in common is a non-heroic protagonist.

This is also a totally original work written in a most relaxing style that fuses the elements of science fiction with realism. It is easy to read (which is one of the reasons it can be found on the high school curriculum in our public schools). It is sharply satirical, lampooning not only our moral superiority, our egocentricity, but our limited understanding of time and space. And of course it is an anti-war novel in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun.

Vonnegut's view of time in this novel is like the stratification of an upcropping of rock: time past and time present are there for us to see, but also there is time future. Billy Pilgrim learns from the Tralfamadorians (who kidnapped him in 1967) that we are actually timeless beings who experience what we call the past, present and future again and again. And so Billy goes back to the war and forward to his marriage, and to Tralfamadore again and again. He learns that the Tralfamadorians see the stars not as bright spots of light but as "rarefied, luminous spaghetti" and human beings as "great millepedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other." So time is not a river, nor is it a snake with its tail in its mouth. It is omnipresent, yet some things occur before and some after, but always they occur again.

And so it goes.

What I admire most about this most admirable novel is how easily and naturally Vonnegut controls the narrative and how effortlessly seems its construction. It is almost as if Vonnegut sat down one day and let his thoughts wander, and when he was through, here is this novel.

In a sense, Vonnegut invented a new novelistic genre, combining fantasy with realism, touched by fictionalized memoir, penned in a comedic mode as horror is overtaken by a kind of fatalistic yet humorous view of life. Note here the appearance of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter-ego, the science fiction writer who is said to have invented Tralfamadore.

Bottom line: read this without preconceptions and read it without regard to the usual constraints. Just let it flow and accept it for what it is, a juxtaposition of several genres, a tale of fiction that--as fiction should--transcends time and space.

--a review by Dennis Littrell

Novel Reviews by Dennis Littrell

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Novel Reviews by Dennis Littrell

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