Michael Moorcock's THE LAUGHTER OF CARTHAGE

 Do I hate myself? Sometimes I'm pretty sure I hate myself. Or at least the imp of the perverse sitting on my shoulder really hates me, because I had the terrific idea that now, while Ukraine is dealing with a Russian invasion/occupation effort and state legislatures all over the U.S. are trying their hardest to roll back every bit of social progress our country has made in my lifetime and before, I somehow decided it would be an interesting time to read the rest of Michael Moorcock's sprawling, challenging and really hard-to-handle Pyat Quartet, also known as Between the Wars, being the continuing first person account of pretty much the whole of the 20th Century by a narrator so unlreliable as to make Severian seem like Walter Cronkite.

I first encountered the character of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski , aka Colonel Pyat, back in 2015, back when The Former Guy was just an annoying game show host and we still believed in things like the political norms we'd come to take for granted like peaceful transfer of power and presidents getting to nominate and confirm supreme court justices no matter at what point in their terms vacancies occurred. The first novel in the quartet, Byzantium Endures, took Pyat from his birth in Kyiv on January 1, 1900 (Julian calendar), through the Russian Revolution and a little beyond. It introduced us to the thoroughly unsavory (as in self-aggrandizing, lying, womanizing, alcoholic, cocaine-addicted, anti-semitic, racist, paranoid, etc.) figure, first as someone the author (Michael Moorcock's self-insert-stand-in) met late in Pyat's life in London and to whom the author promised to see Pyat's memoirs into print, sight unseen, sure they'd be fascinating. But as the fictionalized Moorcock takes great pains to explain to us in a vast prologue to the text of the novel, Pyat's memoirs were really just a mess of ramblings in multiple languages, newspaper clippings, blueprints for inventions he claimed to have come up with first and other messy and barely legible ephemera, i.e. we're already pretty annoyed by the very idea of Pyat before we see a page of the novel's actual text. Furthermore, Moorcock took even greater pains to create a text as a sort of afterword to give us a glimpse of what the fictionalized Moorcock had to work with to produce the work in our hands, and it's a masterpiece of the kind we'd expect more from Philip K. Dick than Michael Moorcock. I compared it in my original review to Confessions of a Crap Artist and to that I still hold. Jack Isidore, eat your heart out.

Volume 2, The Laughter of Carthage, picks up more or less right where Byzantium Endures left off, in about 1920. After a long ship voyage as an exile/refugee from Odessa to Constantinople in which Pyat has shared a cabin with the future mother of Eternal Champion Jerry Cornelius but established a torrid shipboard romance with a widowed Russian Baroness, Pyat lands in Constantinople and starts debauching himself, continuing to see his Baroness, who hopes he'll run away with her and her exquisite daughter to Berlin, but also finding a young Romanian sex worker who is a dead ringer for his childhood sweetheart, Esmé, Pyat takes a while to get back to his career as an inventor.

Before we know it, though, he is rescued/taken prisoner after almost getting to try out his flying machine, in which all the parts, including a fuel tank and propeller, are strapped onto a human being, somewhere in Anatolia. Pyat bullshits his way into getting a free ride back to Constantinople, where all he has are lady troubles and a healthy dose of paranoia that Carthage (his synechdoche for, confusingly, both the Jews and the Muslims and, for good measure, the Catholics -- basically everybody who isn't "Byzantium", which, as he established in the first novel, he considers to be, basically, Tsarist/White Russia and whomever else he can convince himself is Protestant and White enough to be worthy of continuing to bear the Torch of Civilization) has never stopped pursuing him in the form of Bolshevik spies. Before escaping Constantinople, Pyat has to do some unsavory tap-dancing to avoid getting reported to the local authorities as a pedophile, ending by complicating his situation still further by convincing the Baroness that "Esmé" is actually a spy in whose trap he is haplessly caught. As he plots to "rescue" Esmé, the Baroness plots to rescue him, and it's all vintage Pyat. Whatta jerk. But there's so much worse to come.

Within a year I would become so famous the matter of one small factory and an insignificant municipal airport would seem a petty concern indeed. I had been given the opportunity to conquer the entire new world with my genius. A strong, scientifically advanced America would be the most powerful country on Earth. Once celebrated here, I would automatically come to influence the world. Then at last Russia, my old spiritual Russia, could be rescued from the Bolshevik scavengers. The steppe would grow green and beautiful again; the wheat-lands would bloom, the forests retain their tranquil profundity and the new golden cities would arrive, the cities of reborn Byzantium.

Such are our man's thoughts as he escapes from his latest collapsed effort to make his fortune from his "genius" invention of a slightly better airship and the development of Memphis, TN as the airship capital of the U.S., if not the world, rescuing the American South from its economic woes endured since the Civil War. Alarm bells should be ringing at this. And they should ring even louder when I tell you this scene takes place in 1922. And that our man Pyat's favorite movie is Birth of a Nation.

That's right, Pyat's new path to fame, fortune and influence is gonna be as a traveling rabble rouser for the second version of the Ku Klux Klan (hilariously exposed and lampooned by Robert Evans and friends as a proto-Multi-Level-Marketing grift in this episode of Behind the Bastards. Indeed, this second volume of Moorcock's most despicable anti-hero contains a murderers row of main characters from that podcast, with even Old Shatterhands and his creator, Karl May, getting name checked here. We could almost call The Laughter of Carthage "Behind the Bastards: The Novel" except it was published way back in 1984, likely before anyone involved with that show was even born. But I mean, Pyat even found the White House "disappointing" compared to the Klankrest in Atlanta, GA). But first we have a charming interlude in Europe, in which Pyat spoils Esmé rotten in luxury hotels, going to movies and clubs in 1920s Rome where he rubs shoulders with lots of actual historical figures who eventually become close friends/supporters of one Benito Mussolini, of whom Pyat already approves, of course, and then makes a stop off in Paris, intending next to join Mrs. Cornelius in England but only after he's extracted some profit for his genius airship ideas which, of course, come to nothing when "Carthage" strikes again and bankrupts the nascent airship company he and several French speculators have formed, and his French partners have all naturally made poor, innocent Pyat the scapegoat and never mind that he was living entirely off money he borrowed from an old friend from his Odessa days who, of course, has a disgusting homosexual crush on Pyat (never mind that Pyat is himself quite comfortably bisexual, and his joyful reunion with a Russian Prince from the first novel quickly turns into an affair as passionate as what he continues to have with the underaged Esmé, whom he has convinced everybody is his sister) and is thus pretty much yet another avatar of "Carthage", and it was only the extravagance with which he spent and "invested" his borrowed money (mostly on cocaine) that convinced the French partners that he was sound enough to trust with their capital and credit in the first place... 

Anyway, soon he has to get out of France quick, but can't swing a trip to England yet OR afford passage for both Esmé and himself to his next destination, the USA, where he pretty much repeats his French adventure except this time it's down in Memphis, and instead of escaping to another country to try again with his airship schemes (which again have blown up through no fault of his own), he falls in amongst the upper echelons of the Ku Klux Klan, who  bring him aboard a fancy paddle steamer on the Mississippi to give a special briefing to the colorfully hooded and gowned elite of the KKK about the dangers of Bolsheviks, Muslims, Catholics and International Jewry from his first-hand knowledge. His remarks are so entirely to the Klan's liking that he gets booked for repeat performances all over the country in the company of a formidable and sexy-yet-mature woman who chaperones him about the nation and fucks his brains out in train cars and hotels from coast to coast while he spreads his message of Peace and Love but only if you're "Byzantium." Along the way, Pyat manages to continue to learn nothing until this, too falls apart and he now has the Invisible Empire on his tail, another set of enemies that should be pretty hard to square as "Carthage" but he kind of starts framing them that way in his head anyway because Pyat and then, wonder of wonders, he is once again rescued by Mrs. Cornelius, who made her own way from Constantinople but also got sidetracked into the USA as part of a dance troupe of British Beauties entertaining in vaudeville-type theaters up and down California with the vague hope of being Discovered and made into a Movie Star, which is where we leave her and Pyat, who is absolutely convinced that he can make her dreams come true and never mind his track record on bringing his own fantasies to reality. Hey, he's only 22.

Many reviewers have complained that this second volume of the Pyat Quartet is not as interesting as the first, and they have a point in that Byzantium Endures is set against one of the most dramatic backdrops 20th century literature had to offer: World War I and the Russian Revolution. It also gave us genuine pathos in the stories of Pyat's mother and their neighbors, including the sad fate of Esmé the First, who only ever wanted to become a nurse and save the lives of Ukraine's brave fighting men, but, in Pyat's absence while he was off fighting and getting lost and getting conscripted as an agent by both sides at various times, got herself raped multiple times when the triumphant Red Army invaded and did what conquering armies do best in the early days of conquest. The Laughter of Carthage continues with the painstaking research and recreation of bygone days that made the first volume even more special, but replaces the drama with mere movement -- a picaresque -- in which we watch Pyat comically misunderstand his place in the world, the nature of his companions, and, as I said, fails ever to learn from his experiences, choosing at every failure to simply blame it on "Carthage" and shake his fist at enemies who barely know he exists.

Where the book, like its predecessor, succeeds enough to be worth the comparative tedium, though, is how brilliantly it achieves Moorcock's primary goal in telling us his ultimate anti-hero story here in our mundane real world: helping its readers to feel at last like they understand how capital H Hate happens, how people who seem perfectly ordinary and might even be ok to have a beer with once in a while are actually monsters who think the only people who count as people and deserve to share the Earth are able-bodied, well-educated, fair skinned, Protestant, cocaine-snorting fascists like Maxim Pyatnitski. It's an understanding that isn't pleasant to have, but is necessary for us in this dumb century -- a care package full of survival tips from the dumb century that came before it. Anyway, I really just want to see what kind of ridiculous adventures Pyat has had -- or believes himself to have had, or expects us to believe he had -- before he winds up a cranky old fart running a junk shop in Portobello Road. According to the blurb for the third volume, Jerusalem Commands, he's going to Egypt next. I'm down.

Dean King's PATRICK O'BRIAN: A LIFE REVEALED

Throughout life, O'Brian had been a consummate outsider: an intellect who had not gone to Eton or Oxford; an elite who was not from the upper classes; a citizen of the twentieth century who was more at home in the eighteenth. O'Brian was an Irishman who was not Irish; an Englishman who lived in France; a brilliant author in a spurned genre. He had even given up his family name and abandoned his family ties.

Recently I discovered that there is, at long last, a podcast devoted to the Aubrey/Maturin novels* that are so dear to my heart, and that is called, delightfully, The Lubber's Hole. I haven't listened to any of it yet, because of course I decided I wanted to re-read the whole series again and listen to episodes as I went, but before I got to that, I remembered that long ago I hit a big sale on nonfiction ebooks that included a biography of the man himself, Patrick O'Brian.

Having now read Dean King's excellent volume, I can conclude that Mr. O'Brian (real name: Russ. And therein lies a tale best covered in the book itself) must join the likes of Harlan Ellison on my mercifully-still-small list of Authors I Admire Utterly But Am Glad I Never Got To Meet. Because, well, look at that mug, for a start. There are people who do not suffer fools gladly, and then there's this man. Who would incinerate them with a fiery glance (which, doesn't he kind of look like David Troughton playing the Duke of Wellington in the Sharpe TV adaptations?) in nanoseconds, if that were a thing human anatomy would allow. 

And, as one quickly learns in reading Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, he earned that face, both by how he interacted with others even from young childhood (which was an unfortunate one in many respects; he was not born into the happiest of families, for all that he did not lack for siblings) and by how his work seemed never to get its due until relatively late in his life. But ultimately, neither he nor we would want it any other way; he would not have achieved the attention and praise he did late in life by writing what was common or popular, and we, well, there are plenty of nice authors in the world (and I am lucky enough to know many, some quite well) but there was only ever one Curmudgeon of Coullioure,** and I, for one, forgive him his brattiness as fair exchange for his books.

I love a good literary biography and have a handful of favorites in the genre (Mary V. Dearborn's The Happiest Man Alive, about Henry Miller, and Victoria Glendenning's Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West are two that I've read to pieces and can almost quote by heart). I believe I'll be adding this one to the list, for if nothing else, it does what even these favorites of mine don't do very much of: look in on some of Patrick O'Brian's detailed processes. We don't see them firsthand, don't get a lot of descriptions of how his prose went from inspiration to final typescript, but we do get to peek in on correspondence between O'Brian and his various editors and agents over the years in which he passionately defends his choices of verbiage, the correctness of his research, etc, all while also making great wine, plowing and tilling and planting and harvesting and immersing himself so completely in the 19th century that even his edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was one from the Napoleonic War era, the better not to include any anachronistic knowledge or ideas in his fiction.

We also get, delightfully, quite a lot of insight into his pre-Aubrey/Maturin fiction, and his work as a professional translator of no less than Simone de Beauvoir.*** And a pretty thorough (as thorough as possible under the circumstances, anyway) account of his time in World War II as a member of British Intelligence, which, yes, the guy who wrote the single greatest fictional spy of all time (I see you, Ian Fleming fans, and John LeCarre fans, but come on), Stephen Fucking Maturin, was himself a spy! Or at least an intelligence analyst! I had no idea!

And, of course, since just this last summer I read the biography of Noor Inayat Khan, I got to entertain myself with the idea that, while it doesn't seem their actual paths crossed, their work certainly did, as she was embedded with the French resistance while he was involved somehow with that nebulous organization on behalf of the UK. Or at any rate, his work chiefly concerned France...

Above all, Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed is simply an enjoyable read, whether you're an established fan of the man, or just thinking about having a look at him. I, for one, am now going to embark on another Aubrey/Maturin re-read with a lot of new insight for having read this, and I'm also planning to seek out O'Brian's non-Napoleonic fiction one of these days, as well, because Dean King got me very interested. Which a biographer should, if at all possible.

*Which, you may note, I haven't covered to completion on this blog. As I approached the end of the series on my first go-through, I found I couldn't bring myself to finish it (kind of like what I've done with rationing Philip K. Dick). Each time I re-read the series, though, I go one book closer to the end. Ah, me.

**My own coinage, as far as I know. Coullioure is the region of France near the Pyrenees where he and his second wife, Mary, settled down to farm, raise grapes for wine, and write books that are among the great treasures of 20th century literature.

***And of Papillon! Which means that I'd read Patrick O'Brian decades before I first picked up Master and Commander!

Hugo Claus' EVEN NOW

I review this collection of Belgian poet Hugo Claus' finest work over at Insatiable Booksluts. The Sluts "dare you to read [this review] and not want to read the collection."

Edith Wharton's THE DESCENT OF MAN AND OTHER STORIES

I'd read a handful of Edith Wharton's short fiction (the most memorable of which "Xingu" especially prepared me for the title story of this book) before taking up The Descent of Man and Other Stories, so I was pretty sure about what to expect from this collection. Wharton is always a graceful and insightful writer, but in her shorter fiction, she's a bit wicked, in the best possible way.

Take, for example, the title story, "The Descent of Man", which concerns an eminent scientist who has decided to have a bit of a joke on the general public by publishing a perfect parody of the kind of pseudo-scientific nonsense that never goes out of fashion, always needs debunked or at least critically examined, and is often just a little bit too believable to make disproving it an easy task. His book a resounding success and the public clamoring for more, the professor faces a dilemma: let everybody down by exposing his satire, thus earning eternal enmity and likely ostracism, or give in to the public demand for more of the same. The title of the story should give some idea of how this goes. Like I said, a bit wicked, in the best possible way, is Ms. Wharton.

Wharton also explores upper-crust divorces and their exquisite discomforts in "The Other Two" as a man who is happily married to a twice-divorced woman keeps running into her prior husbands as he goes about his business, realizing he sort of has them to thank for her skill at making men happy even as he comes to like one of them and learns to tolerate the other, who is, after all, the father of her child. As this story was originally published in 1904, it also shows us that all of these entanglements are nothing new -- and they've rarely been treated so incisively and with such dispassionate amusement as Wharton, herself to later become a divorced though not remarried woman, gives them here.

Another amusing reflection on "modern" family life, "The Mission of Jane" almost reads like a long and drawn-out joke as a couple, disappointed in their marriage, adopts a child in the hopes of improving matters. Their resulting parenthood winds up being an even bigger disappointment as Jane turns out to be an insufferable know-it-all, but does eventually fulfill her purpose after a fashion. One can almost hear Wharton chuckling, genteelly, to herself as the story moves briskly along.

Other entries are almost farcically romantic, like "The Letter", which concerns a last letter penned by an Italian patriot executed by the Austrian regime, a letter which was never delivered to his grieving wife and sister. The tale is told from the point of view of an English adventurer in love with the sister, who in finding the titular letter finds an advantage he can use to discredit the rival for the sister's affections! One can hear the violins all but screeching in the background; sometimes in the foreground threatening to overpower the narrator's voice! Pass zee smelling salts and steer me towards the fainting couch! This together with the ghostly gothic silliness of "The Lady's Maid's Bell" seem more like pages from Vita Sackville-West's juvenalia than the work of the author of The House of Mirth. But hey, she wanted to stretch herself. I respect that.

Even those stories, though, aren't what one could call bad. Indeed, they might be taken as very delicate and subtle satire, which seems more Wharton's style. I'm just not sure.

What I am sure of, though, is that this collection is still a must-read for Wharton fans or those who are curious about her, if at least for its inclusion of the searingly amazing "Quicksand", in which a woman finds herself struggling to dissuade her prospective daughter-in-law from marrying, not because the girl is not good enough for the woman's son, but because the woman sees herself in the girl and also sees that her son would make it too easy for the girl to lose herself and all the qualities the woman admires, repeating the woman's own experience of marriage. It's exquisitely done, painful and challenging stuff, the story most like an Edith Wharton novel in this collection.

So, The Descent of Man and Other Stories is a bit of a mixed bag, but it shows off Wharton's versatility, talent and, perhaps most importantly, that she refused to take herself too seriously. She would have been fun to know socially, I'm pretty sure.

Sigrid Undset's THE WILD ORCHID

Wow, does it seem criminal that this book, and its sequel, The Burning Bush, seem to be out of print, at least in English. I know Sigrid Undset is best known for her great sprawling historical fiction (Kristin Lavransdatter, The Master of Hestviken, etc) but she didn't just get a Nobel for being the Dorothy Dunnett of Scandanavia, you guys.*

The Wild Orchid is little read now, I suspect, because its theme is very much out of fashion. It is, at bottom, the first half of a novel of conversion, specifically conversion to Catholicism, which was just re-establishing itself as a valid, legal religion in Undset's native Norway during her lifetime. As such, it's perhaps more than a little autobiographical, this book, in spirit if not in fact. Undset herself converted to Catholicsm as an adult, after years and years of dwelling emotionally and mentally in the pre-Lutheran Norway of her most famous novels.

About a third of the way through the book, she presents what I think must have been her own feelings about her decision in a nutshell, as her protagonist witnesses a historic event, somewhat bemused:

"If one could only reach out with one's soul and come in contact with an invisible one -- who would help one to a deeper or higher vision of all that was irritating and disturbing, to look past the stupidity and platitudes and ridiculous expressions, into what was valuable in those one associated with, a common charity, a common vow which bound one to them."

Hell, it's enough to make me miss organized religion myself!

But a religious journey isn't the only thing that's going on here; The Wild Orchid, first volume of a two part novel published as The Winding Road (the second book, The Burning Bush, is one I'm planning to read very soon, if not indeed right away. We all know what a fickle reader I've become) is also a portrait of its age, the turn of the last century (ca. 1905 as the novel opens), that is, perhaps startlingly, not all that unfamiliar to a 21st century reader.

Paul Seller is the child of divorced parents. His father remarried a blowsily bourgeois woman for whom Paul has no respect, preferring his own mother, Julie, who is a distractingly awesome character that surely any son would prefer to a fussy, conventionally motherly showoff like Paul's stepmother. Julie, finding herself divorced with four children to raise, cheerfully struck off for the country, found a nice plot of land, built herself a house and furnished it very simply, and set about planting and raising crops and carpentering and turning herself to all sorts of other traditionally masculine tasks, never once, it seems regretting not having a man about the house to whom she didn't herself give birth. Oh, I would gladly read a novel just about Julie Selmer! But as it is, she merely serves as background, as the early example of womanhood against whom Paul will compare other women, to their detriment; more importantly, as establishing Paul's starting position of regarding religion as a quaint folly of days gone by, not to be taken at all seriously.

At times The Wild Orchid, in its long passages of dialogue between its hero and various avatars of Catholocism, chiefly a woman of his own age whom he has known since childhood who grew up in the faith that  he only ever observed from the outside, reads almost like a religious tract as the woman holds forth for pages and pages about the necessary role dogma plays in human society and how non-Catholics are always more interested in the one priest who breaks his vows than in the 200 who uphold them and how it wasn't really the Church that burned heretics but Society. A reader with zero skin in that game, as I am, is challenged to read through such passages with patience and sympathy, but it's good to make that effort once in a while, no?

And that effort is quite often rewarded, in this book, for it is still Sigrid Undset after all, which means lovely prose and an infectious love and enjoyment of her native land, its seascapes and wildflowers and saeders and farms and little towns and pieces of folk art and buildings old and new, which she shares with her characters and thereby with her readers. I now want to visit Norway almost as much as I want to visit Iceland. Fjord.

*Though really, chronologically, I suppose Dorothy Dunnett was kind of the Sigrid Undset of Scotland?

**It's pretty hard not to think of Scotland's current efforts to secede from the United Kingdom, reading about this. I don't think Scotland will offer to take on, say, Prince Andrew to be their replacement king the way Norway took Hakon, though.

John Fowles' THE COLLECTOR

People who know me and my love for insects might be a bit surprised to learn that I really don't approve of, and don't understand, the mania for collecting them. I had to for an assignment once in college -- for a whole semester, I was out there with a killing jar and a set of pins and all the other accoutrements. I was going to be graded on my collection, on its variety and the quality of its specimens and all the rest. As excuses for being outdoors when everybody else was (supposed to be) studying in the library or whatever, it was all right.

But I would have rather been given a quality camera and a notebook to scribble down observations about how the insects behaved while they were, you know, still alive.

The male protagonist, Frederick "Call me Ferdinand" Clegg, in John Fowles' astonishingly creepy The Collector feels differently about things. To see a rare or unusual butterfly -- he only collects butterflies, though he thinks of going into moths -- is to want it dead and pinned in a box. And since he's a very socially maladjusted man, as certainly all insect fanciers are*, he takes the same attitude towards certain specimens of other species as well. Such as lovely (human) art student Miranda, whom he encounters in one of those unfortunately magical moments in which a young man is prone to mistake an anima projection for true love, right around the time he also happens to win the football pool at work, meaning he has stumbled into the mid-century equivalent of Eff You Money.

To his credit (I guess) he decides that this specimen is better enjoyed alive, the better to someday live out his fantasy that she is going to, I guess, succumb to Stockholm Syndrome** and fall in love with him and marry him and have his babies. So he takes most of his pool winnings and buys and furnishes a human-sized terrarium for her, in the cellar of a secluded country cottage. As one does.

The fascinating thing through these early chapters is watching our man engage in some serious mental gymnastics: he's not really going to do this thing, but what if he did? He pretends to himself that he's treating it all as an elaborate thought experiment and is thus astonished, in a way that we readers are not, to find himself actually doing the things he's thought of. Buying the house. Fixing up the cellar. Stalking the girl. Carrying a cloth soaked in chloroform in his coat pocket.

This would all be very interesting reading right there -- watching a still-pretty-ordinary-despite-his-peculiarities-guy fighting this impulse he's had. But Fowles takes us from thought to deed, and just as we're thoroughly squicked out and sick of this character, Fowles seems to agree and flips the perspective; the second half of the novel is told from the perspective of Miranda, the collected, the victim.

And that's the other fascinating thing in this book, because we learn, long before Miranda becomes the author of chapters of The Collector, that while Clegg may think he's captured a pretty, helpless butterfly, he's really captured something much more powerful. Some kind of bee, maybe; Miranda has a sting. Miranda is smart and self-possessed and has a highly developed emotional intelligence that leaves Clegg floundering from their first face-to-face onwards. Not one scene between them goes according to Clegg's script; its only his extraordinary grip on his delusion, or his delusion's grip on him, that defends him from her deft emotional manipulations.

Unfortunately, that's all either of these characters turn out to be: fascinating, Clegg in his maladjusted inability to resist his icky and absurd impulses, Miranda in her repulsive fixation on class and on her idea of herself as one of the few rare and talented special ones who must battle against the ugly ordinary people. She's a mid-century epitome of the know-it-all feel-it-all fix-it-all College Girl Who Is So Much Better Than You. Though her fate is horrifying, the reader (at least this reader, who may have personality problems of her very own, oh yes) winds up kind of relishing watching her endure it, a little bit.

Which means that Fowles is a genius at eliciting reader complicity in the horrors he is depicting. This one goes on the strongly-disliked-but-undeniably-admired shelf next to Robert Silverberg's Book of Skulls. It wasn't quite the hate read that Book of Skulls was, but it certainly was not a pleasure read, either.

But it sure is remarkable.

*Sideshow Bob Grumble.

**Though that phenomenon and its terminology were not described until ten years after The Collector was first published.

John le Carre's A MURDER OF QUALITY

Quite possibly my favorite George Orwell essay is "Such, Such Were the Joys" in which our man Eric Blair recalls his days as a sort of charity case at a posh English boarding school that thought it was even posher than it actually was. He was miserable there, of course; one can see the beginnings of the great man whose every work is in some way or another a crie de couer against the banal (and not so banal) evils of collectivism. It's also, because Orwell was a prose stylist and a storyteller so close to perfect as makes no odds, a fascinating read, descriptive and honest and sort of bleakly lovely. His Crossgates was a place one survived, rather than graduated from.

It's hard, then, for someone like me, so in love with that essay, not to keep thinking of it as our man George Smiley, ex-intelligence man whose life is still very much shaped by his experiences plying his then still unofficial trade during World War II, finds himself in the role of cozy mystery detective again as he comes to a posh English boarding school, Carnes, to help figure out who killed a schoolmaster's wife in a bloody, gruesome and bizarre fashion. I always thought Bingo and Sim had more going on than poor little Eric Blair realized, don't you know, and I feel the little boy who would be come my hero sort of peeking around corners and watching Smiley at work throughout the book.* I wish he could have seen someone like Smiley, at any rate, to see that not all grown-ups are perfidious jerks. But of course, he wouldn't have grown up to be the hero he was if he'd had an easy, trusting childhood, would he?

But that's neither here nor there. Except in that it takes place at an English public school (like so many other novels and plays and films and whatnot, hmm? But as Orwell observed, for many people, their school days were the most eventful and dramatic and interesting of all their days. Poor benighted souls, they, hmm?) at which Secrets Are Being Kept. But of course, where in Orwell's essay, those secrets are largely socio-economic and class-based, in A Murder of Quality, well, there are elements of socio-economic and class struggle there, too, no doubt, and these elements are thwarting the murder investigation in true Town vs. Gown fashion, but... this is Smiley, dammit. Smiley! Come on, bust out the spy stuff!

News flash: there isn't much spy stuff, except in Smiley's back story and insomuch as it has formed his character as a careful thinker and observer and analyst -- who has a tremendous loyalty to his circle of colleagues from the War. One of whom edits and writes an advice column for a journal, and who received an alarming letter from the murder victim just before her death, a letter that may be a Giant Freaking Clue or an equally Giant Red Herring. And since the victim is very much Gown and the police are very much Town, the investigation could use someone like George, sometime academic, mild-mannered, unpretentious but trustworthy and obviously intelligent, to cut through the bulldung and figure out what happened.

Look, murder mysteries really aren't my thing. I always get a little depressed about how a person can be and usually is regarded as Only Interesting After She's Dead and only because someone Did A Bad Thing by killing her (or him). And yes, I know, a life only really takes shape when it's complete, i.e. over, and all that, but mostly I like watching lives in progress, decisions being made, actions taken or not taken, conversations had or suppressed, etc. There is plenty of this in a murder mystery, of course, but it's generally on the part of the detective, to whom the victim is usually a stranger; the detective is not, therefore, showing us the victim/stranger so much as leading us through a careful examination of the hole she has left and who might have wanted to make that hole happen. We're not really interested in the victim, but in the detective; the victim is just a means to the detective's end. See? Depressing. But lots of people like that stuff, and they're free to. It's just not usually for me.

But every once in a while, I like to take a look at a genre that I usually avoid, just to make sure that I'm avoiding it for good reasons and not just out of habit or of intellectual (or pretend anti-intellectual) posturing. And sometimes I do find that I've been unfair; witness my great enjoyment of Louis L'Amour's Sackett novels, "frontier tales" which, while not precisely westerns, are still more like westerns than most other kinds of stories, and thus are generally chucked into my mental "avoid" bin. I'm terribly, terribly glad I grew up to give those another chance.**

And so, A Murder of Quality, which basically seduced me into reading a straight up mystery novel, just out of love for its hero. Tsk tsk, Mr. le Carre. Now my guard is up, you!

That being said, there's still a lot to recommend this novel. As one could expect from a novel taking place largely at an upper-class school, there are a lot of moments in which the class-consciousness of certain elements of the community gets wickedly skewered. The best bits of these happen whenever a minor character, a teacher's wife named Shane, speaks, to wit:

"I'm never quite sure about funerals, are you? I have a suspicion that they are largely a lower-class recreation; cherry brandy and seed cake in the parlor."

And:

"Baptists are the people who don't like private pews, aren't they?"

Oh, is she ever quotable, is Mrs. Shane Hecht. And everything that comes out of her mouth will make you want to slap her.

Strangely enough, Shane is not the murder victim, or really anyone of any importance at all, except as a mouthpiece for the gentry, struggling to reassert their dominance over English life after the great social leveling of two world wars and not coming off well at all. No apologia for the ruling class, here (another quality, one might say, that this book shares a bit with Orwell's work, no?)! No, the murder victim is another teacher's wife, who comes off as a bit of a paragon of humility and independent thought for most of the novel, until [REDACTED] is discovered.

Through it all, Smiley is Smiley. Utterly forgettable, unprepossessing, mild, hard even to notice, but with a mind tuned by years of unglamorous spy work for uncovering secrets that makes him a perfect amateur detective. We only occasionally get a hint of what he's thinking, which I appreciate, not being a fan of the omni-omniscient narrator who knows all characters' thoughts anyway. Even when a nasty so-and-so like Shane teases him about his "unfortunate" marriage to a woman far above his social station (and who just happened to have grown up in the neighborhood of the Posh School in Question), he keeps his cool and just calmly lets her think she's gotten the better of him. She can sneer all she wants; in the end she has to keep being nasty old Shane Hecht (who, now that I think of it, reminds me rather a lot of Bingo from "Such, Such Were the Joys") and Smiley gets to keep being Smiley, knower of things he doesn't tell, friend of people of actual quality versus upper-crust Quality.

I know with whom I'd choose to pass an evening, at any rate.

*This is of course odd because Orwell/Blair was a little student many, many years before the period in which this novel is set, but those English Public Schools do have a sort of timeless quality to them, don't they? One would almost think it an effect for which they strive deliberately!

**I still avoid romance novels, though. Like the plague. Unless they're written by close and dear friends to whom I can't say no and find entertaining no matter what they're doing.

100 Books #124 - Joseph Roth's THE RADETZKY MARCH

"A word, a word so easily spoken; it is not spoken."

I am developing a minor obsession with the literature of the 19th and early 20th century Hapsburg Empire, and I can't quite put my finger on why, or how it started, unless it was when I read about Robert Musil in Philip Ball's amazing Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. Ball's interest was in Musil's unfinished two-volume novel, The Man Without Qualities, and its depiction of a mathematician's dispassion for the world, which doesn't sound terribly promising on the face of it, does it? But it's quite an engaging read nonetheless, and one that I look forward to re-reading again soon; I'm a Robert Musil fan (see also my look last year at Musil's first novel, The Confusions of Young Torless, from last year), loving his way of examining moral and social paralysis and its consequences, as well as how his German prose becomes English.

The (delightfully!) occasionally ornithological Radetzky March* both does and not partake these qualities (or, I guess, lack of qualities) as it details the misadventures of three generations of the Trotta family: a grandfather ennobled as a reward for sort of blunderingly saving Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's life in battle, a son whom the new Baron forces into a civil service instead of a military career**, and a grandson who takes up the family's military mantle again, only to very nearly disgrace it.

But this makes it sound like The Radetzky March is a book in which things happen, and really, it's not. It's more a book in which things are felt and perceived, and what is perceived is mostly that the Empire is in a period of stasis and stagnation, a period in which the gloss of civilization is polished to a blinding brightness, the better to conceal the turmoil it hides, the turmoil of an empire that purports to bind a staggering variety of cultures, religions and ethnicities into one people*** but really hasn't, except in that all those different peoples are temporarily too busy buffing and polishing (under some duress) to get on with the business of being themselves and hating each other. But don't worry, they'll get around to it. Boy, will they get around to it.

But even that makes it sound like stuff is happening. Which is erroneous. I mean, these people don't even eat:

"The baron had a bizarre relationship with food. He ate the most important morsels with his eyes, so to speak; his sense of beauty consumed above all the essence of the food -- its soul, as it were; the vapid remainders that then reached mouth and palate were boring and had to be wolfed down without delay."

And:

"He was sorry that Trotta had missed the schnitzel. He would have gladly chewed a second one for the lieutenant -- or at least watched it being eaten with gusto."

Nor do they ever really seem to talk to each other, especially not the Trottas. Especially not the youngest Trotta, who is constantly struggling over whether or not to utter even the most banal pleasantry: "Carl Joseph almost replied reverently 'Good evening, Herr Doctor!' But all he said was 'May I?' and sat down."

And things get worse when young Lieutenant Carl Joseph Trotta (the grandson), posted to a border village whose chief employer is a bristle factory, suddenly faces his duty as a soldier to put down an insurrection at said factory. He insists to a colleague that he "simply won't order the men to shoot!" because he now realizes that the factory workers are "poor devils" but another tells him "You'll do what you have to, you know you will." And what he has to do right away is get drunk... And do things improve from there?

"Immense files swelled around the Trotta case, and the files grew, and every department in every agency splattered a little more ink on them, the way one waters flowers, to make them grow."

So, uh, not so much, then.

And then there's the dreary love affair and whatnot (in general, women are not well-regarded in Radetzky March, but what are you gonna do? This is a story about a young man raised motherless by, apparently, a motherless son of a military hero, said son spending most of the novel either in military school or in the military. Sausage fests everywhere). Sigh.

But so then why bother to read this stuff at all, you might ask? Because it's good. As a masterful evocation of the spiritual paralysis of an entire society, as a look at the consequences of too much civilization as something that does not require robot butlers and flying cars to happen, as a vivid portrait of the twilight years of Emperor Franz Joseph (who had "lived long enough to know that it is foolish to tell the truth.") and the Hapsburg Empire just before the outbreak of World War I****, and, yes, as an exquisite piece of writing for its own sake -- as all of these things, The Radetzky March is a very, very good book.

*The book's title comes from a piece of music by Johann Strauss, Sr., which a military band plays outside of the grandfather's house every Sunday to salute their local hero. It's a nifty, stirring tune if you care to enjoy:



As for my characterization of Radetzky March as occasionally ornithological, dude, it is loaded with references to birds, from a servant's caged canary to the different birds singing outdoors in every season in Austria and the empire -- a very charming touch. Seriously. More birds than anything I've read this year that wasn't by Michael Chabon. Birds signal changes in scene and setting and sometimes provide the strongest of dramatic counterpoints (hello, wild geese and Russian ravens!). This is wonderful!

**The grandfather's insistence that the son have any career but military stems from a misunderstanding regarding a children's history book that presents a tarted up version of how the grandfather saved the Emperor's life, to which the grandfather takes great but ultimately ineffectual umbrage in one of the more bitterly humorous sections of the novel.

***All in the service of allowing the Hapsburgs, once Holy Roman Emperors and lords over most of Europe in one form or another, to feel like they still had an Empire and were still a relevant power in world affairs, big terrifying inbred jaws and all (though yes, I'll admit to having been a little sad when they finally had to cut down the Sisipalm in 2008).

Oh, and check out the people, as seen through the eyes of a somewhat minor character, Count Chojnicki:

"The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners, the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes, whom he called Cravats and Slobbers, were brushmakers and chestnut roasters, and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers and fashion photographers."

So, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was basically the Golgafrincham B Ark, then?

****Weirdly, it was only when the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was communicated (very dramatically) that it hit home for me that the events of this novel were taking place in the 20th century. The book otherwise feels so timeless, so universal, that a particular historical event's depiction, even second-hand as happens here, is really jarring, but not in a bad way. Just a wow way.

100 Books #90 - John le Carre's CALL FOR THE DEAD

As I begin the last quarter of a year in which I have spent a lot of time slogging through a lot of big, bloated genre novels and their big, bloated sequels, there is something tonic and refreshing about a short, tightly plotted mid-20th century number like this one that very likely renders my enjoyment entirely out of proportion to the actual book's quality.

But perhaps not.

George Smiley has become an iconic character, at least in my little corner of the world, even without my ever having encountered him directly and consciously before now.* Tom Ripley was much the same for me, until my fangirl passion for Wim Wenders and Bruno Ganz led me to discover The American Friend, which featured Dennis Hopper as Ripley, a Ripley to which no other performance shall ever measure up, and I proceeded to gobble up all of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels in quick succession, to rush to acquire them in collectible hardcover, the better to gloat over them in my barrister bookcase...

I suspect I'll be doing the same with John le Carre, too.

Call for the Dead spends a lot of its time sort of slyly masquerading as a cozy mystery, with Smiley, ordinarily an operative for the British Secret Service in a very low key sort of way, filling the amateur detective role. A Foreign Office employee whom Smiley interviewed pro forma after an anonymous letter had identified the man as a former Communist has overreacted to said interview and killed himself in a fit of despair -- or has he? As the mystery unravels and a trail of bodies is found, a dashing and charismatic frenemy from Smiley's past surfaces. Watching Smiley sort all of this out in his methodical, thoughtful, occultly brilliant way is a genuine pleasure; so is watching his friends, one in the police and one fellow spy.

But it is the grieving widow who steals the show, as such. Elsa Feenan, Holocaust survivor, pragmatist, broken yet still strong, is a riveting figure from her first scene with Smiley, in which she effortlessly teases out his own anxieties about what he does and how he does it:

"It's like the State and the People. The state is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don't they, and imprison people. To dream in doctrines -- how tidy! My husband and I have both been tidied now, haven't we?"

This coming just pages after a summary of Smiley's career -- which started out in the days when the spy trade barely was one, was just a loose affiliation of smart and careful people who had the wisdom to see that action on the front of a war cannot be the only action, and continued, perhaps a bit uncomfortably, into the age of professionalization and bureaucracy -- is devastating. And that scene is hardly her only bravura performance. I find myself wishing le Carre had written a series of Elsa Feenan novels in addition to, if not instead of, the Smiley ones.

But that's how good chronicles should go, isn't it? We'd tire quickly of a series in which Our Hero/point of view character is relentlessly and only what our attention is drawn to; he or she must have foes and foils, must encounter other equally interesting (if not more interesting) characters in his adventures. And by this reckoning, these Smiley novels are quickly going to become compulsive reading favorites right up there with Ripley novels, and Sharpe novels, and Aubrey/Maturin novels, and Miriam Black novels.

Hooray!

*I saw snatches of some film adaptations of Smiley novels when I was still a kid at home with my parents, but only sort of paid attention to them. Oh look, Obi-Wan is playing some sort of spy chap. Yawn. Small smile for Mom, who is enjoying the film, back to the pages of whatever Michael Moorcock or Jack Chalker or Piers Anthony mega-series had my real attention at the time. Ah, teenagers.

100 Books #77 - Gene Wolfe's THERE ARE DOORS

Well, if anyone was going to pull off a third person unreliable narrator right, it was going to have to be Gene Wolfe, and yes, he did it, brilliantly. Which is to say that my brain hurts kind of a lot right now from being turned inside out, marked with chalk, tried on by a crazy man to see if it will fit, altered by a seamstress and worn in a blizzard by... well, is it the same crazy man? Most likely. But then, is it the same crazy man in the same crazy world?

There Are Doors' protagonist, occasionally known as A.C. Pine or Mr. Green but most often simply as "He"* is either a mental patient in the sweetly harmless tradition of the guy in the bunny slippers in Twelve Monkeys, or a voyager between only slightly dissimilar dimensions via the titular doors, or both. Nor is his love interest, Lara/Laura/Lora a woman with a reliable nature and identity. Nor is the maternal owner of the Italian restaurant they frequent -- a place that, incidentally, seems to be in both worlds, as he demonstrates with a cash register experiment: when he breaks a bill, his change is in the "real" world's currency, while his lunch companion gets change native to that other world.

And, in that other world, it is apparently possible to get fat sheafs of high denomination real world currency, sold for spirit money in a Chinese junk shop for pennies on the dollar. And buildings and places are similar in that world, but have the heavy analog quality of the 1950s, with the exception of the cars. And, most importantly (or not), men do not long survive after having sex, dying off like drone bees; Lara, we are told, left the sort-of-named protagonist behind after living with him for just a few days because she couldn't bear to watch him die.

And the pronouns get confusing, because there is a he protagonist and she object whom he chases, neither named very often, interacting with other, pronoun-denominated hes and shes, lending a funky extra layer of ambiguity to a novel that, let's face it, didn't really need one. But that's Gene Wolfe for you. Really, the man drives me mad.

For my part I imagine Gene Wolfe having obsessively read Doctor Zhivago and Confessions of a Crap Artist and watched Invasion, that fantastic old Argentinian film written by Jorge Luis Borges and Aldolfo Bioy Cesares, just as I imagine China Mieville, decades later (There Are Doors dates back to the 1980s), poring obsessively over this novel as he wrote The City & The City. I'm probably very wrong in both notions, but they did keep occurring to me as I read.

I wonder what I'll think of next time -- for there will be a next time. There must, always, with Gene Wolfe.

*But not in that H.P. Lovecraft way.

100 Books #70 - J.G. Ballard's HIGH RISE

Look at this novel's entry on GoodReads, or at least at its user reviews, and you'll find dozens of people saying that High Rise is basically Lord of the Flies with a cocktail hour, but I find a bit more than that going on. Specifically, I find that this book feels more like a tribute to H.G. Wells and The Island of Doctor Moreau* with a dash of Jose Saramago's Blindness thrown in for extra flavor.

We start off the novel in a flash-forward to its ending, with one of its triple protagonists (and the most typically Ballardian-as-I-so-far-understand-that-term), Robert Laing, finishing off a meal of a roasted Alsatian dog on his balcony amid the high rise's presumable last convulsions of self-destruction. He might well do as an Edward Prendick stand-in (Prendick being the unfortunate who washes up on Doctor Moreau's island), rational, reserved, scientifically trained, somewhat familiar with his new host's reputation but presuming that in arriving he has reached something that can pass (or more than pass) for civilization, only to learn to his horror that not only his first but also his second and maybe even his third impressions are horribly wrong; his host, Anthony Royal, the Moreau-esque architect of the high rise seems a bit eccentric for choosing to live in his creation (albeit in one of two penthouses), but rational enough for all that, until things in his creation start to deteriorate and, far from deploring his fellow-residents' abandonment of civilized standards of behavior, he is covertly encouraging it, all but rubbing his hands together in glee at the prospect of his captive population's devolution into savages, if not outright animals. For his last act, he plans to take his Alsatian and a pack of other dogs down into the depths of the building, a-hunting, and to open up all the high rise's windows to let in the teeming flocks of gulls and other birds that have attended him on the roof over the last year. And yes, there's even a Leopard-Man, Richard Wilder, a TV news man who starts off with the aim of making a documentary about the high rise but finishes stalking its corridors in improvised war paint, brandishing a spear, raping and pillaging (pretty much literally) his way up from the second floor to the 40th.


And as I said, High Rise almost reminds me more of Blindness. Say, Blindness with sighted people, and sighted people living in luxury at that. The comparison might not seem a logical one to make, but stick with me here. In Blindness, victims of a sudden and inexplicable plague are quarantined and left to fend for themselves in a disused mental institution. The rest of society sort of pokes food at them now and then but they're otherwise isolated and unsupervised and helplessly revert to an animalistic proto-society centered around resource-grabbing, bullying and despair. And, like in High Rise, this proto-society winds up living in amazing squalor, the kind of squalor that only hundreds of newly-blind people who can not even find the toilets, much less keep them working -- or, in the case of High Rise, two thousand maniacs who have vandalized all the sanitary systems in an early wave of passive aggression and then in a later wave of real aggression and savagery just start letting the sacks of garbage pile up everywhere -- can be squalid. Both novels are books you can smell.

But instead of innocent victims of an inexplicable plague of "white blindness", High Rise features a self-selected population of well-to-do tax accountants, doctors, lawyers, airline pilots and television executives, living in more splendid isolation, but isolation just the same, their tower of luxury condos cut off from the rest of the world by acres of parking lot, food and liquor poked through to them via a floor of shopping in the building, all their needs accommodated on-site (swimming pools, an elementary school, the aforementioned shopping level) -- and, with no municipal authority aside from what they invent themselves, these people also revert to a state of low-level tribalism, the pet-owners versus the parents, the upper floors versus the lower**, the common areas and especially the elevators the battlegrounds.

All of this is ultimately and essentially Anthony Royal's creation. Revealed as a secret hater of the uniformity, simplicity and elegant functionality of mid-20th-century industrial design, he has created its apotheosis in this building and is gratified to see that his hatred is justified; all that sameness and ease and tedium drives people insane, and he gladly goes along for the ride, strutting around in his white suit with bloody handprints on the hips and chest, his take on a new executioner's uniform, even as Wilder hunts him from below and Laing disappears into the middle floors, Ballard's typical passive spectator saying "Huh, well. How about that?"

And yes, there are elements of Lord of the Flies, too, of course, in the demented, gleeful perversity exhibited by these three and all the other residents of the building, most of whom are only designated by their occupation and floor, e.g. the newspaper columnist from the 37th***, as they explore the "limitless possibilities of the high rise."

Thus, with High Rise, Ballard proves that you don't need an environmental catastrophe to bring out the strangest and worst in people; sometimes you just need an enclosed space with minimal supervision**** and too many resources held in common. Which is to say that Ballard totally outdid himself here.

Frighteningly enough, he also made all of this seem plausible. Very much so.

My friends who are Ballard fans (and really, I seem only to have two kinds of friends, Ballard fans and people who just haven't read him yet) seem mostly to name this as their favorite of his novels, if not their favorite novel ever. Certainly it's my favorite of what I've read so far -- and it's going to be pretty hard for the Master to top himself. But we'll see. I have a few yet to go, after all!

*Interestingly enough, the film director/screenwriter Richard Stanley wrote both the 1996 film adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau and the upcoming one of High Rise.

**Even before all the really interesting stuff happens, a new class system has developed in the building, with the residents of the upper floors literally looking down on the middle and lower floors' residents, even though the outside world would homogenize the lot of them as privileged upper class white bastards.

***So we first come to know each other, in this modern civilized world, and so, mostly, we remain. How much do you know about your neighbors? And how much, do you suppose, do you merely think you know? And how much do you care?

****Readers who object to the non-presence of police or emergency services are missing the point. Part of the residents' madness is their commitment to keeping it all "within the family", counting on the awe and envy in which they believe the rest of the world holds them to keep curiosity at bay. From the outside, as Royal notes at one point when every single floor has erupted into furious, angry partying on the balconies, the luxury high rise looks like it's just one swingin' good time that never ends. And everyone keeps showing up for work, more or less decently groomed despite the lack of water and electricity, right up until the very end, to maintain the facade and the fiction that everything's just fine and don't you wish you were as awesome as we are.

100 Books #48 - Elaine Dundy's THE DUD AVOCADO

A casual look over the blurbs and whatnot for The Dud Avocado might make it seem like its heroine is just a blonde* Holly Golightly amuck in Paris (our narrator even mentions Audrey Hepburn at one point). And sure, Sally Jay Gorce has things in common with that famous character: she is beautiful, seems a bit careless (especially about her love affairs), and has a tendency to show up for lunch in an evening dress for complicated and amusing reasons. But really, she is more like a Henry James than a Truman Capote/Hollywood heroine, except with even more going on upstairs.**

The Dud Avocado reads like a story told over a long and leisurely lunch by a sly older woman who has lived more than you have, but still, somehow, has kept the ingenue's breathless "oh golly" quality even as she shrewdly and candidly analyzes her possible errors, her weird sort of luck, the impression of herself she has given to others and her impressions of others, both on the surfaces and down in reality. She never goes so far as to break that fourth wall and directly address the reader, but that sense of her looking over the reader's shoulder as the pages turn (or the e-ink screens click by) is palpable. She never crowds us, having much better instincts than that (though she'll insist she doesn't, that she's really just blundering along, but don't let her fool you. Every word counts, perhaps most so when it most seems like it wouldn't), but she's watching our reactions under her carelessly perfect eyelashes.

She is, after all, an actress, and great actresses are not just good performers but powerful students of human behavior. Or, at least she is now, over that imaginary lunch. And she was then, too, in the story she's telling, but she wasn't so good at applying her insights, by golly!

Sally Jay has been turned loose on Europe in much the way her spiritual ancestor, Isabel Archer, was: an older male well-wisher wanted to "give her her freedom" (i.e., financial independence) to see what she would do with it. Sally Jay gets just two years of this freedom, after which she is expected, more or less, to make her own way, by marriage or perhaps a job of some sort where her intelligence and creativity an attractiveness are put to use; times have (sort of) changed since Isabel's inheritance set her free to be manipulated into marrying a fortune hunter.

But there's that pesky "sort of". Once Sally Jay sort of backs into her "first real relationship" she finds herself part of a circle of couples giving each other dinner parties and when her painter boyfriend learns that she can't cook, he gives her  "a wry sort of some-women-are-made-for-only-one-thing smile." She doesn't quite resent this, but that's partly because she is still free, although she's starting to see, at this point, an unappealing end to that freedom. "Here I was practically fresh out of the egg... and here was everybody telling me to stop drifting and start living in this world; telling me to start cooking, and swering, and cleaning, and I don't know what. Taking care of grandchildren." Italics Dundy's.

Because of course a young woman who hasn't allowed herself to be trapped in a life of domestic bondage can only be drifting. Even at the dawn of the sexual revolution (for of course, Sally Jo is sexually liberated -- how do you think she backed into that relationship. Ah, me).

But still, she is free, and free in a way that few people ever will be, ever again, in our age of Four Square check-ins and GPS-equipped everything: “Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.” When was the last time you felt like that?

And that, along with the funniness -- the out-of-the-mouth-of-a-babe wittiness, the accounts of clumsiness, the unintended consequences of that will to say "yes" to every opportunity -- is what keeps this book bubbling along. You'll finish it in no time, but it will stay with you, for while it may look light and frothy on the outside, it's quite tart. And sharp. Mwee wappa.

Many, many thanks to Rob, the BardoRobot, for telling me about this book!

*Well, okay, for most of the story it's actually pink.

**Not to say some of Henry James' women are not very intelligent, it's just that we only ever see them from the outside, usually gracefully posing near a window or in a garden. Sally Jay tells us exactly what she's thinking about everything and everyone she encounters, puts everyone and everything in its place and never stands still.