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Robert Weibezahl

Nonfiction

Well Read: March 2019

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

If you attend author readings, you know that some of the most frequently asked questions involve a writer’s methods: Do you write every day? Longhand or computer? Morning, noon or night? This fascination with writerly habits is really an attempt to understand the slippery mystery of creativity rather than its bare mechanics, and it provided the impetus for Mason Currey’s immensely popular Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013). Currey took some flack because he only included 27 women in that book, so as a corrective he has put together a follow-up volume, Daily Rituals: Women at Work.

Of the 143 artists profiled, 63 are writers (a handful of others count writing among their multifaceted accomplishments). The rest run the gamut—visual artists, filmmakers, dancers, choreographers, actors, performance artists, composers, costume designers, one scientist (Marie Curie) and a few who share that peculiarly French occupation, the salonniére, or a host of literary salons. Most are Western, and the majority are white (a fact that may open up Currey for further censure), but the selection is broad enough in disciplines and chronology to offer an interesting cross section of daily approaches to art. We learn that Edith Wharton wrote in bed each morning, avoiding houseguests until noon. At the opposite end of the economic spectrum, Harriet Jacobs wrote “at irregular intervals, whenever I could snatch an hour from household duties.” Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple in the brief hours when her daughter was at school, while Katherine Anne Porter, whom Marianne Moore called the world’s worst procrastinator, wrote in fits and starts, producing only one novel and 27 stories despite living to 90.

Many of these profiles underscore the struggle to carve out creative time amid wifely or motherly duties, as well as other constricting expectations placed on women. Painter Stella Bowen ceded to the needs of her husband, Ford Madox Ford, lamenting, “Pursuing art is not just a matter of finding the time—it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.” Others, such as painter Lee Krasner and actress Lynn Fontanne, cherished the symbiosis they shared with their equally accomplished husbands. Workaholics like Coco Chanel, Edith Head and Martha Graham subsisted on very little sleep, while Tallulah Bankhead admitted, “I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.” 

There are many pearls of creative wisdom strung throughout Daily Rituals. Still, the overriding lesson one takes away from this charming book is that the path to achievement is as specific to each artist as her art is unique to her vision. We cannot replicate genius by copying another’s idiosyncrasies—we need to cultivate our own.

A second volume from Mason Currey explores the idiosyncratic daily rituals and survival strategies of women in the arts—and beyond.

NonfictionMemoir

Well Read: Love of language

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

The Comma Queen confesses her passion for everything Greek—language, history, landscape and culture—which was born out of her love for words.

Mary Norris, whose memoir of her years as a copy editor at The New Yorker (Between You & Me) was a surprise bestseller, reveals her nearly 40-year devotion to all things Hellenic in her captivating Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen.

Inspired by an unlikely moment—seeing Sean Connery’s cameo as Agamemnon in the movie Time Bandits—and spurred on by her boss and mentor in The New Yorker’s copy department, Norris took advantage of the magazine’s generous tuition reimbursement policy for “work-related courses” and enrolled in modern Greek at New York University. A new (well, in fact, ancient) world was unleashed for her. Before long, she was studying ancient Greek and deciphering classical texts. She found herself performing original-language versions of Elektra and The Trojan Women as a “mature” student with the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group (and soliciting character advice from Katharine Hepburn). She immersed herself in the arcane language as best she could, fascinated by its foundational alphabet and the ways Greek survives in so much of modern English.

Most significantly, she went to Greece when she could, exploring the mainland’s many corners and its islands’ many charms. Daring to travel alone to even the most far-flung locales often proved to be an eyebrow-raising heresy in the patriarchal, tradition-centric country, but Norris persisted. Her adventures took her to places few tourists go, to nationally divided Cyprus (birthplace of Aphrodite) and to remote Kardamyli, where the English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor—whom she calls her literary father—lived and wrote.

While Norris has a keen eye, zeroing in on the peculiarities and beauties of her beloved Greece, her always witty and self-aware narrative tends less toward the descriptive than to the country’s indelible psychic charms. At every turn, the past inextricably intertwines with the present as Norris seeks the origins of ancient Greek culture, rooted in both perceptible landscape and intangible myths. Nostalgia, from the Greek neomai, to return home, “may mean a yearning for a place,” Norris ponders, “but it is also a yearning for a time when you were in that place and therefore for the you of the past.” 

Norris’ inviting book thrives on the writer’s unabashed enthusiasm to learn, to immerse herself in the new and to find clues to her own past in the newly discovered. “I knew a lot of Greek, but I wouldn’t say I spoke Greek or call myself a classicist,” she admits. “I was more in love with the language than it was with me. . . . I had not mastered the language, ancient or modern, but I got glimpses of its genius, its patterns, the way it husbanded the alphabet, stretching those twenty-four letters to record everything anyone could ever want to say.”

The Comma Queen confesses her passion for everything Greek—language, history, landscape and culture—which was born out of her love for words.

NonfictionBiography

Well Read: May 2019

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

Brian Jay Jones offers a richly detailed, admiring biography of Theodor Geisel, the man whom children and adults the world over would come to love as Dr. Seuss.

Is there anyone who doesn’t like Dr. Seuss? There may be a few grinches out there, but for the rest of us, his children’s classics never fail to evoke some blend of delight, amusement, wonder and nostalgia. However, nearly 30 years after his death, few people may know the story of the sui generis illustrator and writer whose real name was Theodor Geisel. Brian Jay Jones’ capacious new biography, Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, provides a meticulously detailed yet thoroughly engaging look at the life and artistry of this American original. 

Jones, who has previously written biographies of George Lucas and Jim Henson, gives the full measure of the imaginative man who, from childhood, “turned minnows into whales.” Geisel was born in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of a German-American brewer who was prosperous until Prohibition destroyed the family business. At Dartmouth, Geisel found his true calling working on the university’s  humor magazine. An ill-advised stint at Oxford did not secure him a graduate degree, but it did introduce Geisel to fellow American student Helen Palmer, who became his first wife and invaluable, albeit uncredited, collaborator. After Oxford, with dreams of writing the Great American Novel, Geisel tried the Jazz Age bohemian life. (He frequented the same Parisian cafe as Hemingway but never had the nerve to speak to him.)

Back in New York, Palmer convinced Geisel to concentrate on his true talents: humor, illustration and cartooning. The man who would give us Horton and the Cat in the Hat first hit it big in advertising, drawing humorous ad campaigns for such pedestrian products as mosquito repellent and motor oil. The work was lucrative, if unfulfilling, and Geisel flexed his creative muscles with cartoons, both topical and, during World War II, political. But still, he hankered to write children’s books. Considerable persistence and a stroke of luck led to the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1937. While fame (and book sales) were slow, Dr. Seuss had arrived.

Becoming Dr. Seuss chronicles Geisel’s wholly creative, if not particularly scandalous, life but doesn’t shy away from darker aspects—particularly Palmer’s suicide, which may have been tied to Geisel’s affair with Audrey Dimond, who became his second wife, or Geisel’s lifelong wish to be taken more seriously as an artist rather than a “mere” children’s author. 

Overall, Jones paints a loving portrait filled with telling details. And when the 82-year-old Geisel returned to Springfield to find the real-life Mulberry Street lined with hundreds of cheering schoolchildren, it’s hard to imagine even the most hardened grinch’s heart failing to grow at least three sizes.

Brian Jay Jones offers a richly detailed, admiring biography of Theodor Geisel, the man whom children and adults the world over would come to love as Dr. Seuss.

NonfictionMemoir

Well read: June 2019

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

Aleksandar Hemon, the Sarajevo-born writer and MacArthur grant recipient, offers a singular approach to memoir in two new books, published together in one volume in a quirky back-to-back, flip-to-read format that literally adheres the two narratives while intentionally keeping them separate. This unusual layout underscores the innate duality but inevitable divide in the story being told—well, stories. One half recounts the lives of Hemon’s father and mother both in their homeland and as immigrants in Canada, while the other is an impressionistic series of vignettes from the author’s childhood in what is now Bosnia. Collectively, My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You is about memory and loss, survival and resilience and an entwined sense of self and place.

Hemon’s parents were born in the years just before World War II reshaped the map of Eastern Europe and, with it, their futures. His mother’s family is ethnically Serb; his father’s family consists of Ukrainians who migrated to present-day Bosnia before the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the unification of Yugoslavia as a socialist state under Tito, the Hemons would have benefited greatly from the nation’s rapid, if long-delayed, move into the 20th century. But then the collapse of the Balkan state and its incendiary violence destroyed the Hemons’ civilized life. In their mid-50s, Hemon’s parents sought refuge in Canada and became the proverbial strangers in a strange land. Their story is one of unspoken trauma, masked beneath existential pragmatism. In their son’s assured narrative hands, it is also one filled with charm and wit.

Hemon’s own reminiscence of prewar Sarajevo, which makes up This Does Not Belong to You, is laced with many normal childhood incidents—stealing coins from his mother’s pocketbook, allowing a bully to destroy a cherished toy car—yet is marked by the knowledge that the world it evokes no longer exists. “Why revisit memories?” he asks early in the book, and this question becomes the watchword for both of these memoirs. The answers lie in the final sentences of This Does Not Belong to You, when Hemon’s mother asks her 6-year-old son for the details of a small ordeal he has weathered. “Tell me, Mama said, how you survived the flood. I want to hear it. Tell us.” So, the writer recalls, “I started telling them.” This is a writer’s testament to the act of storytelling, the art of writing and the impulse, to paraphrase Joan Didion, to tell stories in order to live, to make sense, to survive.

Hemon has taken the raw material of his family’s lives and preserved it in an unexpected way, excavating with it the sources of his own personal history.

In a wholly original memoir, Aleksandar Hemon relates his family’s large encounters with history and their smaller everyday concerns.

NonfictionBiography

The complicated legacy of Rudyard Kipling

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

Once among the most widely read writers in the world, Rudyard Kipling has fallen from grace amid the reappraisals of post-colonialism. Viewed by many as the embodiment of the British Empire at its glorious and inglorious apex, his work—with the exception of adventure stories such as The Jungle Book and the perennially inspirational poem “If”—has been relegated to arcane status. In If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years, Christopher Benfey takes steps toward resurrecting Kipling’s reputation, focusing on a little-scrutinized but seminal decade during which he lived in, of all places, Brattleboro, Vermont. 

Born in Bombay, Kipling spent parts of his childhood in India and parts in England, which shaped his rootless future as a newspaper reporter and bestselling writer. His wife, Carrie, was American, and soon after their 1892 marriage they settled into a cottage in her native Vermont. Kipling had first visited the U.S. three years earlier, at which time he made a pilgrimage to meet his role model, Mark Twain. Benfey marks this meeting as the beginning of the Englishman’s American decade, and Twain was only the first of many prominent men of the Gilded Age whom Kipling would encounter, befriend and occasionally cross swords with. He toured the recently opened National Zoo with Theodore Roosevelt, for instance—a magical moment for this writer of animal tales. (Despite Teddy’s passion for the grizzly bear, Kipling preferred the industrious beaver.)

In If, Benfey ties Kipling’s stateside experiences to the literary works that germinated during his time here. The Jungle Book, Benfey speculates, grew out of a fascination with wolves, long eradicated from the surrounding New England woods. Captains Courageous, written amid a U.S.–U.K. diplomatic crisis that unsettled Kipling, was his first genuinely American story. And Kim, regarded by many as Kipling’s masterpiece, owes a great debt to the quintessentially American Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Kipling reluctantly left America in 1896 amid a family altercation. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” he claimed. “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.” Benfey suggests that Kipling held a conflicted affection for America similar to the one he had for India; both outposts shared an appealing unruliness and offered a limitlessness that stodgy old England could never supply. Yet his belief in the “white man’s burden” (a phrase he coined) clashed with U.S. notions of imperialism. For Kipling this idea was not merely about exploitation and profit but was tied to better intentions about helping “sullen peoples.” As leaden, misinformed and racist as Kipling’s views are in the 21st century, the complexity of his message endures.

An engaging account of the years Rudyard Kipling spent in the United States considers how America shaped him and his work—and how he shaped America.
NonfictionMemoir

Home and hurricanes in New Orleans

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

Reaching far beyond the boundaries of memoir, Sarah M. Broom revisits the world of her childhood, decimated by Katrina, as she searches for the meaning of home and family.

Sarah M. Broom’s evocative, addictive memoir, The Yellow House, is more than the story of a girl growing up, or of her sprawling African American family, or even of the eponymous shotgun house where they all lived. It’s more than the story of her native New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina. This capacious work captures more than the particulars of a place or a state of mind. It infiltrates the very state of the soul, revealing a way of life tourists never see or, as the destruction of the hurricane and the post-storm neglect would underscore, pay any mind.

The youngest of 12 children born over a span of 30 years in a blended family, Broom begins this story with her clan’s circuitous journey to New Orleans East, a once sparsely populated outland that grew in population and promise when, at the height of the Space Race, NASA began building rocket boosters there and other industries followed. Broom’s father, Simon, who worked maintenance at NASA, died when she was 6 months old, and her mother, Ivory, was left to fend for herself and the children still living in their yellow shotgun house that Ivory had bought for $3,200 in cash when she was 19.

By the time Broom was born, NASA and much of the industry had all but abandoned the blighted area. Despite chronic financial struggles, Ivory proudly strove to keep up appearances. Indeed, one of the most fascinating features of the narrative is Broom’s subtle exploration of class distinctions within the African American communities of New Orleans.

When Katrina hit in 2005, Broom was grown and gone—working at a magazine and living in Harlem—but she has assembled the often-harrowing testimony of her family members who survived the cataclysm. Sacrificed by the powers that be, the largely black neighborhoods in New Orleans East suffered devastation. In the aftermath of Katrina, when the ruins of the Yellow House are deemed in “imminent danger of collapse” and slated for demolition, Broom realizes that the house “contained all of my frustration and many of my aspirations, the hopes that it would shine like it did in the world before me.” The house, she comes to see, held more than the memory of her father or the past. It sustained the very concept of home. And she understands that without the physical structure, she and her family are now the house.

The Yellow House is a lyrical attempt to reconstruct home, to redraw a map that nature and a heartless world have erased. The melodies of Broom’s prose are insinuating, its rhythms as syncopated and edgy as the story she has dared to write. With a voice all her own, she tells truths rarely told and impossible to ignore.

Reaching far beyond the boundaries of memoir, Sarah M. Broom revisits the world of her childhood, decimated by Katrina, as she searches for the meaning of home and family.
Nonfiction

Well Read: November 2019

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

Most readers today know Dorothy L. Sayers as a mystery writer—creator of the golden-age detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane—but in her lifetime she was also renowned for, among other things, her theological essays and a popular translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But as Mo Moulton tells in The Mutual Admiration Society, Sayers was also at the center of a circle of female friends, formed as Oxford University undergraduates, who became lifelong supporters of one another and their socially progressive work in the arts, academia and the advancement of women’s causes. Moulton’s detailed portrait of these smart, tradition-breaking women highlights not only their lesser–known accomplishments but also the strength they derived from each other at a time when women were only just beginning to demand and receive their due.

When Sayers arrived at Oxford’s Somerville College in the years before World War I, women were allowed to attend the same lectures, do all the same coursework and take all the same exams as their male counterparts, but they were denied an actual degree. (That “privilege” came a few years later, along with the right to vote and other overdue liberties.) Undeterred, Sayers and her female peers threw themselves into their academic and extracurricular pursuits with sometimes giddy abandon. A fluid contingent of six or seven of them banded together to form a writing group they dubbed the Mutual Admiration Society with intentional irony—preempting any outside criticism from those who would invariably accuse them of being elitist or clannish. The young women were all from similar middle–class Edwardian backgrounds, although their political leanings and worldviews varied to some degree. 

After university, the women’s lives followed sometimes concurrent, sometimes divergent paths. Most became writers or scholars, although one became a midwife, child-rearing expert and birth-control advocate. Moulton chronicles their public accomplishments and personal episodes with evenhandedness, including their romantic attachments to both women and men and the small scandals that shaped them individually and as a group. 

What Moulton best accomplishes in this intimate and scholarly book is a re-creation of a world in transition. The Mutual Admiration Society came of age at a vital juncture in history, a time of new opportunity for women (although still limited by today’s standards). Steadfast, these women seized that opportunity and formed what Moulton calls “a profoundly optimistic project”: “Loving one another, they built a kind of family beyond the structures of patriarchy. . . . Offering one another space for reinvention, they helped to change what it meant to be born female in the twentieth century.”

Most readers today know Dorothy L. Sayers as a mystery writer—creator of the golden-age detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane—but in her lifetime she was also renowned for, among other things, her theological essays and a popular translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But as Mo Moulton tells in The Mutual Admiration Society, […]
NonfictionBiography

Well Read: December 2019

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

An admiring new biography enshrines the great American poet’s formidable work and complex life.

When Elizabeth Bishop died 40 years ago, she was a respected poet with a small core of devotees, says Thomas Travisano, author of the new biography Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop. In the ensuing years, Bishop has come to be recognized as a significant American writer of the 20th century, whose precise, sometimes elusive work is built on technical mastery and filled with lyrical, singular observations. Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, is an unabashed fan of the poet, but his study, while admiring, is hardly a blind-eyed hagiography. An impressive blend of erudition and enthusiasm, Love Unknown offers an insightful, engaging look into this complex woman’s life and work.

Travisano suggests that much of what came to define Bishop—including her shyness, her chronic health problems, her drinking and, one would surmise, her poetic talent—grew out of two defining events from early childhood: her father’s death when she was only 8 months old and her mother’s subsequent mental breakdown, which essentially rendered young Elizabeth an orphan at age 5. Her upbringing was placed in the hands of both her paternal family in Massachusetts and maternal relatives in Nova Scotia, and this rootless shuttling back and forth most likely played a role in her lifelong wanderlust. As a child, Bishop was chiefly a loner, yet despite the emotional remove of those early years, she became an engaging, if retiring, adult. 

The portrait Travisano paints is one of a likable woman in control of her own destiny, good to her friends, comfortable in her own skin and certainly not apologetic about her eccentricities. Love Unknown is not a juicy tell-all, for Bishop’s life was not scandalous or scabrous. Even her lesbian identity in a less-accepting age seems to have been a fact she accepted and absorbed with little turmoil.

Travisano has spent decades immersed in Bishop’s work, and he beautifully incorporates her poetry and other writings throughout the narrative, finding both its sources and significance. Exploring Bishop’s seminal relationships with other poets, including Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, Travisano considers their reciprocal influences and places Bishop squarely in the context of her time, solidifying her place in the midcentury literary canon. Another friend and poet, James Merrill, famously remarked that Bishop “gave herself no airs. If there was anything the least bit artificial about her character and her behavior, it was the wonderful way in which she impersonated an ordinary woman.”

Bishop was anything but ordinary, as Love Unknown reminds us. And like the poet herself, the peerless poetry she left behind is also anything but ordinary.

An admiring new biography enshrines the great American poet’s formidable work and complex life. When Elizabeth Bishop died 40 years ago, she was a respected poet with a small core of devotees, says Thomas Travisano, author of the new biography Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop. In the ensuing years, Bishop has […]
LiteratureArts & Culture

Reflections on the main men of fiction

Review by Robert Weibezahl

One ardent Rabbit fan is novelist and critic Anne Roiphe, who offers her own idiosyncratic take on Updike's most famous character and six other male literary figures in For Rabbit, With Love and Squalor: An American Read. Hemingway's Robert Jordan, Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, Fitzgerald's Dick Diver at first glance these might seem unlikely heroes for an avowed feminist writer. But Roiphe is a perceptive reader and an engaging writer, and her sharp observations, juxtaposed against events from her own life and experience (she is roughly the same age as Updike and Roth) illuminate these modern classics in ways that combine the personal and the political. These fictional males, Roiphe explains, "served as my friends, my counterspies in the gender wars, my distraction. Beginning with Holden Caulfield, who spoke first to her own generation and has endured as a coming-of-age symbol for each succeeding one, Roiphe calls upon these "friends to help her sort through some of the big questions of literature and life: love, sex, belief, parenthood, death. How can you not love a book that puts Maurice Sendak's Max (Where the Wild Things Are) among these other literary heavyweights? Robert Weibezahl Excerpt "He's not a swell, no outstanding marks of mind or talent that might lift him out of his place and let him soar limitless in the wide American sky. I understand perfectly well that Rabbit is a stand-in for America's failure of moral courage, paltry attempts at spiritual life, coarse bestial behaviors in roadhouses, motels, gropings in the back of cars. I know that he and his friends are vulgar, uneducated, bigoted provincials. I know that the book is ironic and satiric sometimes. I'm clear that Rabbit is an updated woebegone Babbitt slipping on the banana peels littered across America's Main Street. He has a den and some yellowed newspaper clippings of his high school triumphs and not a lot more to his name. Still. Who could resist loving Rabbit? Not me. . . .

"Rabbit is an example of the twentieth-century contribution to the crawl of humankind toward whatever waits us. Not to love him is not to love ourselves. For Rabbit, With Love and Squalor by Anne Roiphe

 

One ardent Rabbit fan is novelist and critic Anne Roiphe, who offers her own idiosyncratic take on Updike's most famous character and six other male literary figures in For Rabbit, With Love and Squalor: An American Read. Hemingway's Robert Jordan, Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, Fitzgerald's Dick Diver at first glance these might seem unlikely heroes […]
FictionShort Stories

Rabbit returns

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Readers who have missed John Updike's chronically imperfect Harry Angstrom since his demise in Rabbit at Rest have cause to celebrate, because Rabbit is back. Well, sort of. The second half of Updike's new short story collection, Licks of Love, is a novella, Rabbit Remembered, which resurrects Harry in spirit if not in his perpetually libidinous flesh. Updike has written a Rabbit novel every 10 years or so since the first in 1960, with the story progressing along the same time line. With Rabbit Remembered it is now 10 years after Harry's death. His long-suffering wife Janice has married his friend and rival Ronnie Harrison. Son Nelson, who lost the family Toyota dealership and his marriage to a cocaine habit, lives with his mother and stepfather and has become a painfully sincere, slightly sanctimonious therapist.

Enter Annabelle Byer, who says she is Harry's daughter from the affair he had with Ruth Leonard 40 years before. Though she doesn't doubt the truth in the girl's claim, Janice wants nothing less than to stir up the memories of that painful past. Nelson, however, is taken with the idea that he has a sister (someone to replace the baby girl his mother accidentally drowned perhaps? Or at least a tangible link to the father for whom he had such a tentative love.) He tries to bring Annabelle into the family, with predictably uneasy results. A Thanksgiving dinner ends with insults and tears, prompting Nelson to move out of the family home. Yes, even dead, Rabbit manages to stir things up.

There are also a dozen short stories in Licks of Love, most of them the kind of gems that show why Updike is one of the masters of this form. As has always been the case in his short fiction, the men at the center of many of these stories seem to share elements of Updike's own life his Pennsylvania childhood, the suburban middle class experience in America during the 1960s and '70s.

There has always been more than a whiff of nostalgia in Updike's short fiction, and this seems to be even more true as the writer ages. Many of the stories are fond reconsiderations of flawed mothers and fathers, or memories of youth triggered by high school reunions or chance encounters with lovers from the past. Not surprisingly, all are beautifully etched with the elegance and intimacy we've come to expect from one of our finest writers. Robert Weibezahl is a writer who lives in California.

 

Readers who have missed John Updike's chronically imperfect Harry Angstrom since his demise in Rabbit at Rest have cause to celebrate, because Rabbit is back. Well, sort of. The second half of Updike's new short story collection, Licks of Love, is a novella, Rabbit Remembered, which resurrects Harry in spirit if not in his perpetually […]
FictionDebut Fiction

A first novel that follows in the footsteps of a master

Review by Robert Weibezahl

It is a brave writer who would all but invite readers to compare her first novel to those of a master. With Loving Graham Greene, Gloria Emerson does just that, and by and large her gamble pays off. Her fiction debut set in a foreign locale with a plot that hinges on the clash of cultures and good intentions gone awry is the kind of story that Greene himself might have written. And Emerson, an accomplished journalist best-known for her Vietnam-era book Winners & Losers, proves a deft enough novelist to weather the inevitable comparisons with the great English writer. The spirit of Graham Greene permeates and propels the book both metaphorically and literally.

The main character, Molly Benson, is a minor heiress who met Greene once in Antibes and carried on a correspondence with him in the years just before his death. A liberal, wealthy woman who craves purpose, Molly parcels out her money to good causes and travels to far flung war zones to ameliorate human rights violations. She is inspired by Greene's moral anger, but she lacks his insight into the human complexity of the Third World, a failing that will have disastrous repercussions by story's end.

To honor Greene after his death, Molly orchestrates a mission to Algiers, where she plans to bring financial and political support to some outlawed Algerian writers. Molly and her foolhardy friends blunder through their misguided mission and, before returning unscathed to their privileged lives, leave a muddle in their wake, with dire consequences for a number of innocent bystanders.

Emerson is not simply trying to emulate Greene, of course, and while she clearly admires his work, she is well aware of the foolish, ultimately dangerous aspects of Molly's idolatry. Indeed, the way in which she casts a cold eye on her characters calls to mind the emotionally stark novels of Joan Didion more than the more humanistic books of Greene. Either way, that's awfully good company for a first-time novelist to keep.

Los Angeles-based writer Robert Weibezahl considers Graham Greene's The End of the Affair one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

 

It is a brave writer who would all but invite readers to compare her first novel to those of a master. With Loving Graham Greene, Gloria Emerson does just that, and by and large her gamble pays off. Her fiction debut set in a foreign locale with a plot that hinges on the clash of […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Life in the back alleys of London

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The year is 1837. The streets and back alleys of London teem with squalid poverty. Jack Maggs, the title character of Peter Carey's arresting new novel, has returned furtively to England, from the penal colony in Australia to which he has been deported for life. An accomplished thief from the earliest days of childhood, the fugitive Maggs easily slips back, unnoticed, into the city. But why, and for whom, has Maggs risked his life to return?

Maggs arrives at his destination, a grand house in Great Queen Street, and finds it vacant. Its master, a young man named Henry Phipps, has dismissed his household and disappeared into the night. But, while lurking on the property, Maggs is mistaken for an applicant for a footman's job by Mercy Larkin, the maid at a neighboring house. He accepts the position, seeing it as an opportunity to wait for Phipps's return in relative secrecy.

Installed in the house of Percival Buckle, a grocer who has become a gentleman through inheritance, Maggs is recruited unwillingly as a subject in some experiments in mesmerization. This early form of hypnosis is the obsession of an up-and-coming novelist named Tobias Oates, who wants to uncover the phantoms he believes are haunting Maggs. Indeed, Maggs has a number of dark secrets and one grand objective, all of which unravel in due time.

From these mysterious beginnings, Jack Maggs takes readers on an unexpected trip into an 18th-century world of privilege and privation, of preconceptions and misapprehension. It would spoil readers' enjoyment of this ambitious novel even to hint at the strange directions in which Carey takes them. I'll only divulge that lost loves, old scores, tragic deaths, and surprise progeny all play a hand in the intertwined fates of Maggs, Oates, Buckle, Phipps, Mercy, and a number of others.

The most remarkable thing about this engrossing book is the novelist's achievement in bringing to life the historical setting. The authority of the work's narrative voice belies its late 20th century origins. In scope, in tenor, and in narrative inventiveness, Carey writes with the seeming ease of a true Victorian master—a Dickens, say, or a Thackeray. Yet, unlike them, he is able to infuse this uncanny 19th-century sensibility with modern psychological insight.

A book that should take its place proudly alongside the other works in Carey's impressive opus, including the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs is, above all else, a good and challenging read. Which is just what Carey's fans have come to expect.

The year is 1837. The streets and back alleys of London teem with squalid poverty. Jack Maggs, the title character of Peter Carey's arresting new novel, has returned furtively to England, from the penal colony in Australia to which he has been deported for life. An accomplished thief from the earliest days of childhood, the […]
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The ghosts of memory

Review by Robert Weibezahl

With a dazzling economy of words and precision of language, Pat Barker has constructed a quiet, elegant ghost story, in which the specter of the past literally and figuratively haunts a contemporary family. In just 278 briskly plotted pages, the Booker Prize-winning novelist deftly explores the emotional dissolution of a household, probes the complexities of sibling hatred, animates the horrors of a bygone war, and plumbs the power of old wounds to leak into the present.

During a muggy summer in the northern English city of Newcastle, a family moves into Lob's Hill, a Victorian house once belonging to a local industrialist named Fanshawe. Nick and Fran have each brought a child to the family—Nick's 13-year-old daughter Miranda and Fran's troubled 11-year-old son Gareth. Together they have a 2-year-old son, Jasper, and Fran is once again pregnant. It is, at best, a tentative family, given to frequent rows and strained communication. In an effort to involve them in a common activity, Fran corrals the family into a redecorating project. But when they scrape away the faded wallpaper in the living room, they find a disturbing image drawn on the plaster beneath a portrait of the Fanshawes, distorted with obscene details.

Ominously, the make-up of the Edwardian family mirrors their own.

Nick's research unearths the details of an ugly crime involving the death of the Fanshawes' baby and the incrimination of the older children. But he is preoccupied by a more immediate, imminent death, as his 101-year-old grandfather, Geordie, succumbs to the ravages of cancer. Muddled, Geordie imagines that he is dying from a bayonet wound he sustained three-quarters of a century before during the Great War. The symbolism of this misconception is not lost on Nick, who knows that memories of that vile war have haunted Geordie. What Nick does not know is the whole truth behind Geordie's lifelong guilt over the combat death of his brother.

There may be an actual ghost in Another World—the apparition of the Fanshawe daughter, who seems to appear to the children at pivotal moments that echo past events—but the real ghost is memory: lingering, slippery and magnified by time.

 

Robert Weibezahl is co-author of A Taste of Murder.

With a dazzling economy of words and precision of language, Pat Barker has constructed a quiet, elegant ghost story, in which the specter of the past literally and figuratively haunts a contemporary family. In just 278 briskly plotted pages, the Booker Prize-winning novelist deftly explores the emotional dissolution of a household, probes the complexities of […]

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