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Robert Weibezahl

FictionWorld Fiction

The Shadow of the Wind

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Recent reports indicate that very few foreign language books are being translated into English. This is mostly due to economics, but the upshot is that American readers are missing out on some marvelous books. Fortunately, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is not among the casualties. A huge success in Ruiz Zafon's native Spain, where it spent more than a year on bestseller lists, the novel is being published in more than 20 countries. It arrives on our shores with the full force of its publisher's promotional machine behind it.

Happily, The Shadow of the Wind lives up to the advance hype. Formidable in size and scope, it is a literary mystery calculated to appeal to book lovers because its plot hinges on books. It begins in a marvelous place called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a repository for literary works no longer remembered by anyone. A 10-year-old boy named Daniel is taken there by his bookseller father to assuage the lingering pain of his mother's death. The old caretaker tells Daniel to choose one book from the labyrinthian stacks, take it away and make sure it never disappears. Daniel selects The Shadow of the Wind by an all-but-forgotten writer named Julian Carax.

The boy is mesmerized by the book and immediately sets out to read all of Carax's novels, only to discover that they are impossible to find. Carax never reached a wide readership, so very few copies of his work were printed. Yet the real explanation for the shortage, Daniel soon learns, is that a shadowy, disfigured man named La’n Coubert has been methodically hunting down and destroying every extant copy. Intriguingly, La’n Coubert is the name of one of Carax's own characters, a fictional embodiment of Satan.

Over the next few years, Daniel embarks on a mission to figure out who La’n Coubert is and why he is bent on destroying Carax's literary output. As he roots around in the past, Daniel pieces together the fragments of Carax's fascinating story, but soon runs into serious danger as it becomes apparent that more than one person wants to prevent the truth from coming to light. This is Spain circa 1945, and the villain of the piece is an ur-fascist police detective, Fumero. Fumero's connection with Carax dates back to their school days, and the source of his abiding hatred unfolds along with the mystery of Carax's sketchy life story.

Daniel's search for information entangles him with many people from Carax's past, none of whom seems to be telling all. It is this array of colorful characters that brings Ruiz Zafon's novel to life. He creates a gothic Barcelona that borrows not only from the Spanish literary tradition, but from the noir atmosphere of period detective fiction as well. The odd blend works The Shadow of the Wind is certainly a tour de force of storytelling.

More than just a well-crafted mystery, though, the novel also provides a deeper look into questions of familial identity and our attachments to the past. Daniel's coming of age is a central component of the story, and his life begins to mirror Julian's in significant ways, not least in his love affair with Bea, the sister of his best friend. This turbulent liaison, as well as Daniel's own childhood heartaches, provide him with insight into Julian's ill-fated life and work.

The Shadow of the Wind is about the way books can tie us to the past and how easy and dangerous it would be to destroy that connection. The English translation is by Lucia Graves, daughter of poet and novelist Robert Graves, and she has rendered Ruiz Zafon's distinctive sensibility with the seamless invisibility of a good translator. Her unsung efforts make it possible for the English-reading world to enjoy this gem of a novel.

Robert Weibezahl's book, A Second Helping of Murder (Poisoned Pen Press), has been nominated for an Agatha Award.

Recent reports indicate that very few foreign language books are being translated into English. This is mostly due to economics, but the upshot is that American readers are missing out on some marvelous books. Fortunately, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is not among the casualties. A huge success in Ruiz Zafon's […]
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

The Known World

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Before reading The Known World, Edward P. Jones’ staggeringly accomplished first novel, I had no idea that there had been free black people in the antebellum South who themselves owned slaves. This strange and disturbing footnote to African-American history forms the core of a truly remarkable work of fiction by a writer who was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his 1992 collection of short stories, Lost in the City (just reissued by Amistad Press).

Set in the 1850s, the novel begins with the death of Henry Townsend, “a black man of thirty-one years with thirty-three slaves and more than fifty acres of land that sat him high above many others, white and black, in Manchester County, Virginia.” Henry had been born a slave. His father, Augustus, bought his own freedom with money saved doing carpentry work, then freed his wife, Mildred, and finally Henry. In the intervening years, though, Henry becomes a favorite of his owner, William Robbins. By the time Henry is freed, he has absorbed Robbins’ keen business sense, and that includes the knowledge that land, and the slaves necessary to work it, are the sources of power in the agrarian South.

Robbins sells Henry a parcel of land and his first slave, Moses, who will become overseer of the Townsend place. Augustus and Mildred’s joy over having secured their son’s freedom is spoiled by the fact that he would choose to own other humans. Henry marries Caldonia, a light-skinned, free black woman, and sets about running his farm. When Henry dies, Caldonia has the moral support of Robbins and a small group of fellow free blacks, but she turns increasingly to Moses for the day-to-day running of things. Before long, the two begin a sexual liaison that blurs the line between owner and slave, and gives Moses dangerous notions about his “place.” Meanwhile, the fragile balance of the Southern caste system is teetering throughout the county. The local sheriff is John Skiffington, an anti-slavery Southerner. When he and his Philadelphia-born wife are given a young girl as a slave for a wedding present, they choose to raise her almost as a daughter. Yet despite his personal views, Skiffington has vowed to uphold the law of the land, which means hiring patrollers to round up escaped slaves. When Augustus is sold back into bondage by one of these men, Skiffington’s unfortunate destiny is sealed.

There are so many characters and sub-stories in The Known World that it is impossible here to convey adequately the elegant complexity of this tale. Even the minor characters have rich interior lives. We get a clear understanding of what motivates each of them as they navigate through this complicated world where it is not uncommon for people to own their own wives, children or other relatives. Indeed, one of the most admirable things about the novel is that every character is flawed there are good blacks and bad, just as there are good and bad whites.

Jones’ narrative style is leisurely, and the impact of his story builds slowly yet steadily, until its full meaning takes shape. While the storytelling is never overtly political, the underlying message is strong. Even in this world where people are marked by the color of their skin, it is not always clear who is enslaved and who is free. Who’s to say if Alice, a seemingly simple-minded slave who wanders the woods at night, is less free than Henry, who is saddled with the responsibilities and shame of slaveholding? Or than a white man like Skiffington, who does not have the freedom to exert his own beliefs in the circumscribed racist community? Wise reviewers tend to be cautious, but I’ll go out on a limb here and assert that The Known World is a masterwork of fiction. If the talent he displays with this new book is any indication of things to come, Edward P. Jones is poised to join the rarefied ranks of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker among contemporary black writers.

Robert Weibezahl has worked as a writer and publicist for 20 years.

Before reading The Known World, Edward P. Jones’ staggeringly accomplished first novel, I had no idea that there had been free black people in the antebellum South who themselves owned slaves. This strange and disturbing footnote to African-American history forms the core of a truly remarkable work of fiction by a writer who was a […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Magician

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Fourteen years ago, Colm Tóibín gave us the exquisite novel The Master, a lyrical and probing portrait of Henry James that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Magician takes a similar approach to Nobelist Thomas Mann, and though Tóibín has not quite captured lightning in a bottle a second time, this deeply researched, highly accomplished fictional narrative still makes for compelling reading. While The Master focused on just five years in James’ life, The Magician covers some 60 years in Mann’s, lending it a more sweeping trajectory. In many ways, it is as much about Mann’s eccentric family as about the great writer himself.

Tóibín has assuredly drawn heavily on Mann’s diaries, which were published to great attention in 1975, 20 years after Mann’s death. Those private papers revealed truths the circumspect writer had been careful to conceal during his lifetime, particularly regarding his sexuality. Since the 1912 publication of Death in Venice, speculation existed about Mann’s attraction to men, but the father of six was largely able to deflect such talk. Tóibín makes Mann’s generally repressed but occasionally acted-upon sexuality one of the throughlines of the narrative in The Magician, but it is by no means the sole focus of this meaty fictional biography.

Mann lived through the shattering events of the first half of the 20th century, but he was born into the placid, privileged world of the fin de siècle German bourgeoisie—a world he re-created in his 1901 masterwork, Buddenbrooks. Propriety and discretion were his watchwords, so it is all the more remarkable that he sired a brood of rule-breaking offspring. The opposite of their cautious father, three of Mann’s children were openly gay, and two of those, Erika and Klaus, were political and artistic provocateurs. The family also had deep-seated emotional disorders; Mann’s two sisters and two of his children, as well as his sister-in-law, died by suicide.

Mann himself, as Tóibín presents him, was a stoic observer of all of this familial drama, trussed by his Teutonic restraints. Only the horrific disruption of World War II, which scattered the family and jettisoned Mann and his wife, Katia, to Los Angeles, seemed to awaken the elder statesman to the evils of the wider world and the fragility of his family. The pages of Tóibín’s novel dealing with the war years crackle and soar above the rest.

In addition to the colorful Manns themselves, The Magician is populated by literary and cultural icons—Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden (who married Erika to protect her with British citizenship), Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt—underscoring how Mann lived within the circumference of more than one great circle. His children dubbed him “the Magician” because he performed tricks for them at dinner, but Tóibín suggests Mann was more audience than performer—“the Observer,” perhaps, transfiguring his observations of others into enduring art, even though he never fully understood himself.

Colm Tóibín paints an elegant fictionalized portrait of a literary great, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann.
NonfictionBiography

The Writer’s Crusade

Review by Robert Weibezahl

When it appeared in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five turned Kurt Vonnegut—until then an admired, if pigeonholed writer—into a bestselling celebrity overnight. The novel, which drew on Vonnegut’s wartime experiences as an American soldier during the Battle of the Bulge and, most saliently, the Allied firebombing of Dresden, which occurred while he was held there as a POW, was anything but a straightforward war chronicle. With its darkly humorous tone, time-traveling structure and groundbreaking use of the author as a character/narrator, the novel hardly seemed mainstream. But its absurdity struck a chord with America in the midst of cultural upheaval, and Vonnegut’s unique vision spoke to two generations at once: those who had fought in World War II and those who were coming of age amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War.

A journalist outlines the story behind Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, and the wartime trauma that inspired it.

In The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five, journalist Tom Roston revisits the story behind the book, which Vonnegut struggled to write for many years until he finally found the right voice to use. The engrossing tale Roston reconstructs is twofold. It begins with an absorbing biographical study that explores what made Vonnegut Vonnegut, including not only the events of his war years but also traumas from his Indianapolis childhood and early adulthood that shaped his singular blend of pessimism and humor. Famously quirky in his demeanor as well as in his manner of writing, Vonnegut played by his own rules, even if that meant being incorrectly viewed as only a science fiction writer at the start of his career.

Roston ties Vonnegut’s sometimes peculiar behavior and outlook to his past, and in the latter part of The Writer’s Crusade (whose title is an homage to The Children’s Crusade, the alternate title of Slaughterhouse-Five), he contemplates whether Vonnegut suffered from what has come to be called PTSD. To this end, Roston speaks with other novelists whose work focuses on war, such as Tim O’Brien and Matt Gallagher, as well as with a number of veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He also talks with Vonnegut’s three adult children and others who knew him well. The verdict is inconclusive, but Roston does make a strong case that the roots of the novel—and its ultimate message—stem from Vonnegut’s attempts to process all he had witnessed in the war. Interestingly, Roston suggests that one of Slaughterhouse-Five’s legacies may be the role it played in changing public perception of PTSD, helping Americans recognize its existence and causes.

There will always be mysteries surrounding what is truth and what is fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut himself was cagey and inconsistent when talking about what happened to him or what transgressions he may or may not have committed in Dresden. “So it goes,” he enigmatically wrote after each death in the novel. Still, Roston hopes its writing brought the author some closure and that Vonnegut was able to make peace with his past.

Journalist Tom Roston outlines the story behind Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, and the wartime trauma that inspired it.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Man Who Lived Underground

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The long overdue publication of Richard Wright’s short novel The Man Who Lived Underground could not be timelier. In the opening section, which he began writing in 1941, Wright (Native Son, Black Boy) constructs a harrowing episode of a falsely accused Black man named Fred Daniels who is beaten near senseless by police officers intent on getting a confession. Sadly, Wright’s brutal realism still resonates 80 years later. When his agent and publisher originally rejected the book, Wright pared down the material into a truncated short story with the same title. This new edition, which languished in manuscript form among his papers, restores Wright’s original vision.

Richard Wright’s forgotten, foreboding allegory has now been published 80 years after his original publisher rejected it.

Triggered by a true story that Wright read of a man who lived underground in Los Angeles for a year, the novel is set in an unidentified city. Once Fred Daniels escapes police custody, he descends through a manhole and encounters a dank, subterranean network of tunnels that leads him to the cellars of a series of businesses—butcher, jewelry store, insurance company with a safe full of money, greengrocer. His thefts from these establishments come to mean nothing, for he now lives in a world where such material possessions are meaningless. He listens to hymns through the walls of a church and begins to view sin and salvation from a new perspective. He becomes alienated from the “normal” world, seemingly forgetting that he has left a wife and infant behind, and his alienation frees him in ways that can be viewed as either liberation or insanity.

While issues of race launch the story, these issues weren’t the impetus for the novel. As Wright explains in an accompanying essay, “Memories of My Grandmother,” The Man Who Lived Underground is an attempt at something far more complicated: an allegory for religion, guilt and alienation. It was inspired by Wright’s deeply religious grandmother, who lived apart from the world even as she lived among people—hating anyone who did not share her beliefs but adhering to society’s rules. It’s informed, too, Wright says, by blues rhythms and surrealistic perceptions, and it borrows, consciously or not, from the hard-boiled urban fiction of the era.

Wright also reveals in his essay a long fascination with stories about invisible men, and The Man Who Lived Underground at times pulses with a certain pulp fiction sensibility, located somewhere between Wright’s usual gritty realism and a more heightened, fabulist realm. “I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom,” he writes. Enigmatic and haunting, Wright’s restored novel adds layers to his legacy as one of the leading Black writers in American literary history.

Enigmatic and haunting, Richard Wright’s restored novel adds layers to his legacy as one of the leading Black writers in American literary history.
NonfictionLiterature

The Letters of Shirley Jackson

Review by Robert Weibezahl

On the strength of the short story “The Lottery” alone, Shirley Jackson endures as one of our most important American writers. More devoted fans also cherish her novels, such as The Haunting at Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, or the inspired domestic comedy of Life Among the Savages. Yet because she wrote in such wildly different modes—gothic, comic, stark realism—it can be hard to pin Jackson down, and the woman behind the work has remained something of an enigma. The Letters of Shirley Jackson, edited by her son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, makes some headway into our understanding of what made this one-of-a-kind writer tick.

A capacious collection of never-before-published letters from one of America’s most enigmatic writers

Hyman reports that his mother loved writing letters as much as she loved writing fiction and essays and that she fully expected her correspondence to be published one day. (She implored her parents to save everything she wrote to them.) Despite this forward glance toward posterity, the letters are never ponderous or myth-building. Indeed, Hyman attests that they perfectly convey his mother’s natural voice, which seems a congenial mix of insouciance, sardonic wit and exasperation. Jackson wrote these letters on her trusty manual typewriter in a kind of conversational stream of consciousness, mostly in lowercase (which requires some adjustment by the reader).

Of the 500 or so extant letters Hyman could locate, he chose about 300 for this collection, written to some 20 recipients. He has made a bit of a miscalculation, perhaps, by including so many of the early love letters Shirley wrote to her future husband (Hyman’s father, New Yorker writer and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman); the kooky, unconventional tone of their courtship could have been equally well captured in fewer pages. Once the Hymans are married and settled into their own brand of domestic and professional chaos, however, the letters become more engaging.

While the letters are largely quotidian in their concerns (Jackson learns to drive or frets about the household bills or enjoys a martini lunch with her editor), her take on life is generally entertaining and occasionally hilarious. She adroitly expresses the frustrations of trying to write amid the exigencies of motherhood and midcentury housewifery, although her prolific talents seem to win out in the end. On another, obviously unintentional level, the letters beautifully capture a bygone era when one could make a solid living writing short stories—solid enough to raise four children in a rambling house with a domestic attendant or two in ever-changing rotation.

Jackson, who died at 48, never wrote an autobiography, so her letters must stand in for a more polished view. While one feels suspicious of this collection’s elusiveness around revealing certain difficult truths about her personal life, the rough spontaneity of the letters nonetheless make this view into Jackson’s simultaneously conventional and unconventional life extremely intriguing.

A capacious collection of never-before-published letters from one of America’s most enigmatic writers makes its debut 56 years after Shirley Jackson’s death.
NonfictionLiteratureAmerican History

Americanon

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The concept behind Americanon: An Unexpected U.S. History in Thirteen Bestselling Books is nothing short of brilliant, and journalist Jess McHugh delivers on her inspired premise with insight and aplomb. As the book’s subtitle explains, she looks at the history of America through the success of 13 bestselling books, but the curveball is that these are not the sort of titles that immediately come to mind when we think of bestsellers. There’s no Gone With the Wind here, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or Roots. The bestsellers McHugh explores are true megasuccesses, to be certain, each having sold tens of millions of copies. They’re even books many of us have on our shelves. But they’re probably not titles we’ve given much thought—such as Webster’s Dictionary, Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book and Emily Post’s Etiquette. But according to McHugh, these books have both reflected and shaped society and the American character in ways that far surpass any novel.

This refreshing dive into American social history uses the unexpected lens of reference books, primers and how-to guides that shaped our national identity.

McHugh recounts the origins of these books as she investigates their content and influence, beginning with The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which published during our country’s infancy, and ending with two New Age self-help books that are still influential: Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life and Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Along the way she delves into Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). She also looks at books that we in the 21st century may not remember but that played seminal roles in molding many generations, including the McGuffey Readers that educated children for decades and Catharine Beecher’s 19th-century domestic guides, which defined a particular ideal of womanhood and launched many imitators.

McHugh’s well-supported argument is that while these books grew out of the particular needs and mindsets of their times, they were all built on societal underpinnings that support our national mythology: that self-reliance, self-sacrifice and self-improvement pave the road to success and to becoming a “good” American. Of course, this is a white-, Protestant- and male-centric mythology. Even something as seemingly benign as a dictionary is complicit. As Hugh reveals, Noah Webster’s impetus for his speller and dictionary was to codify the way “proper” Americans speak and write, with no room for immigrants and outsiders to dilute the language with regional or cultural variants. Historically, even sex manuals, despite their titillating aspects, generally hewed to conventional, heterosexual norms. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* was blatantly homophobic and racist, despite being published and gaining popularity on the cusp of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s.

Some of the most astute observations in this penetrating history are about how these books’ creators did not always live by the same rules they imposed upon their rank-and-file readers. McHugh’s book is essential reading—illuminating, engaging and absorbing. You’ll never look at the dictionary or cookbook on your shelf in quite the same way.

Jess McHugh’s book is essential reading—illuminating, engaging and absorbing. You’ll never look at the dictionary or cookbook on your shelf the same way.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Though their poetry, personalities and lives were vastly different, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are inextricably bound in the public imagination. Just a few years apart in age and hailing from the same Massachusetts town, these two poets pushed boundaries in their highly confessional work. Additionally, the fact that both women died by suicide fuels their legacies.

Plath and Sexton did know each other, though not well. In 1959, shortly before Plath moved to England, the two women attended a Boston writing workshop led by Robert Lowell. After class, they would convene at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton to talk poetry and, one presumes, share some intimate details from their lives. These undocumented, informal gabfests provide the thin thread with which Plath scholar Gail Crowther connects the pair in Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, her thoroughly engrossing examination of these two disparate, talented and troubled poetic geniuses.

The casual acquaintance of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton takes on a greater significance in an engrossing new study.

Crowther synthesizes Plath’s and Sexton’s individual stories into a seamless narrative. Many details will be familiar to die-hard acolytes of either or both poets—the bouts of mental illness and failure of psychiatric treatments, the turbulent marriages and sexual indiscretions, the unyielding resistance they encountered when they dared to play by their own rules—but Crowther’s clever integration of these two lives reveals the strong connections between them in new and surprising ways. For example, she rightly identifies both women as rebels who fearlessly pushed against social constraints before second-wave feminism made it more acceptable for women to bare the truth about their inner conflicts, contradictions and sexuality.

Crowther also searches for the differences between how Plath and Sexton conducted their lives—as daughters, wives, mothers and poets. Although the contrast between the orderly Plath and the wild-spirited Sexton could at times be dramatic (a difference that plays out in their poetic voices as well), there is a shared poignancy in the personal struggles these women experienced.

Since there was no fly on the wall during those martini-soaked afternoons at the Ritz, we, like Crowther, can only surmise what was said. And with little evidence to draw on beyond a few passing comments in diaries and letters, and one poem Sexton wrote after Plath’s death, Crowther perhaps speculates a bit too much about what each of these women may or may not have thought of the other. Despite this leap, she makes a convincing case that the ripple effects of Plath’s and Sexton’s not-so-quiet rebellions are still being felt. “Plath and Sexton are still with us,” she writes near the end of this passionate and affecting study, “agitating with their voices, exposing all those wrongs that still exist, and all those universal themes that will never go away: love, death, sex, pain, joy.”

In an engrossing new study, Crowther reveals the parallels between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—two disparate, talented and troubled poetic geniuses.
NonfictionLiterature

Lolita in the Afterlife

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and most maligned novels ever written. Is it a work of literary genius or unrepentant smut? A madman’s confession or a justification for pedophilia? A sendup of American provincialism or a shocking depiction of the dark human soul? It could—and has—been argued that it is all these things. The heated dialogue that began when the book roared onto bestseller lists more than 60 years ago continues to burn today, deepening the conundrum of the book, the girl and the dangerously charming protagonist, Humbert Humbert. 

Publisher Walter Minton introduced Lolita to a wide readership when he released the book in America in 1958. Minton took his knocks for this bold decision, but he also made a fortune from it. His daughter Jenny Minton Quigley was born long after Lolita’s splashy arrival, but she still grew up under its shadow, with some ambivalence. Now an editor herself, she recently found herself contemplating the book’s place in our more socially conscious age, marked in particular by the #MeToo movement. And so Quigley assembled Lolita in the Afterlife, an engrossing collection of smart and thoughtful essays by an array of contemporary writers reckoning with this indelible and shocking novel.

The contributors, mostly women but with a handful of men as well, hold up Lolita like a prism, examining it in different lights and from a range of angles. Tapping her own conflicted reaction to the novel, Roxane Gay examines whether there are boundaries she and her fellow writers should not cross, while Susan Choi and Bindu Bansinath connect their own intimate adolescent sexual experiences to the text. Biographer Stacy Schiff and literary historian Sarah Weinman offer some fascinating historical context, and screenwriter Tom Bissell watches film adaptations of the novel with fresh eyes. Novelists Andre Dubus III and Jim Shepard (who, incidentally, taught Lolita to Quigley in college) provide 21st-century male perspectives, while Alexander Chee juxtaposes Lolita’s story against his own sexual coming-of-age as a gay man. 

A number of books about Nabokov and Lolita have been published in the last few years, but Lolita in the Afterlife seems to be the first to wholly reassess the work’s legacy as our society grapples with the harm caused by white male privilege and the age-old propensity to look the other way. All tallied, the book’s 30 essays (as well as Quigley’s own incisive introduction) are, by necessity, contradictory, bracing, uncomfortable, thought provoking, informative, entertaining and, in the end, inconclusive—not unlike Lolita itself. Perhaps Lauren Groff says it best in her essay “Delectatio Morosa” when she calls Nabokov’s troublesome masterpiece “a paradox . . . unparalleled as a profane and dirty and gorgeous mirror of America.”

Is Lolita a work of literary genius or unrepentant smut? A madman’s confession or justification for pedophilia? These essays wholly reassess this masterpiece's legacy.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Tom Stoppard

Review by Robert Weibezahl

One of the greatest English-language playwrights of the last half-century, Tom Stoppard is known for such canonical plays as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing and Arcadia. He also won an Oscar for his Shakespeare in Love screenplay. Stoppard is now 83 and still creating (his play Leopoldstadt was the hottest ticket in London before theaters were shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic), so an authoritative biography of this celebrated writer may seem premature. But the highly accomplished biographer Hermione Lee, at Stoppard’s behest, has produced just that. Tom Stoppard: A Life is a capacious and exhaustive book that attempts to infiltrate his art while chronicling his life’s journey—and what a journey it has been.

Stoppard, viewed as quintessentially English and unquestionably one of the most brilliant manipulators of the English language, was not born British. Before he was 2, his family fled the Nazis from what is now the Czech Republic. First settling in Singapore, where his father was killed in a Japanese air attack, the family then sought refuge in India, where young Tom began his education in “Englishness.” 

After the war, the future playwright bypassed university in England and started a hard-knock climb in journalism. Hanging with the local theater crowd in provincial Bristol—including an up-and-coming actor named Peter O’Toole—Stoppard found his true home. As the swinging ’60s unfurled, Stoppard launched his theatrical career through a singular talent for infusing esoteric ideas and experimental concepts into plays with commercial viability.

Lee, who conducted more than 100 interviews and enjoyed unrestricted access to her subject, painstakingly details Stoppard’s personal life—his troubled first marriage, his personal and working friendships, his relationships with his mother and children. By her account, Stoppard is generally congenial and well liked, so there is little in the way of scandal or fraught behind-the-scenes show business drama. Stoppard himself admits to having a charmed life.

The most absorbing parts of Stoppard’s story involve his rediscovery of his Jewish roots and the ways he has indirectly mined his own family’s experiences in his work—not to produce autobiographical plays but rather to explore the political turmoil and tragedies of the 20th century. While Stoppard has often been accused of being an overly clever or cerebral playwright who avoids the personal and the emotional in his work, Lee makes a solid case for the true depth, as well as the surface brilliance, of his enduring plays. 

Mike Nichols, another émigré genius of the theatre, called Stoppard “the most expressive playwright of our time . . . the only writer I know who is completely happy.” Tom Stoppard: A Life affirms that appraisal.

This authorized biography of Tom Stoppard, one of the world’s great playwrights, sheds new light on his brilliant work and charmed life.
NonfictionEssays

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Joan Didion is not so much a chronicler of American culture as its velvet-gloved eviscerator. With spare and penetrating syntax that strips all excess from her narratives, she has, over the last seven decades, gone straight to the withered heart of the matter in novels and essays that have become legendary. Two of her nonfiction books, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have taken on well-deserved iconic, even mythic, status. 

Didion, who is now 86, has not published anything new in a while (her memoir of her daughter’s death, Blue Nights, appeared in 2011), but for the last few years she has been digging through her archives and notebooks and selecting fragments and abandoned pieces that offer a glimpse into her working process and her earlier self. Let Me Tell You What I Mean gathers 12 previously uncollected short pieces mostly written for magazines in the 1960s and ’70s, with a few dating to the tail end of the last century.

As a group, these essays are wide-ranging in subject, yet each displays the distinctive voice Didion has honed with precision. Whether she is profiling the studied perfection of then-first lady of California Nancy Reagan or the cultural significance of Martha Stewart on the cusp of her historic initial public offering, Didion allows her subjects to speak for themselves, inviting us to read between the lines and draw our own conclusions. At the height of the turbulent 1960s, this pioneer of new journalism could zero in on the discomfiting comfort of a Gamblers Anonymous meeting (“mea culpa always turns out to be not entirely mea”) or convey a proud veteran’s ambivalence about his son’s impending service in Vietnam during a 101st Airborne Association reunion in Las Vegas. Fans of Didion’s incisive fiction will delight in her candid reflection on why she abandoned the short story as a viable form early in her career.

Not unexpectedly, Let Me Tell You What I Mean is secondary Didion at best, but even minor offerings from this prose master are hard to dismiss—and equally hard to resist.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean gathers 12 previously uncollected short pieces by Joan Didion, the velvet-gloved eviscerator of American culture.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Conjure-Man Dies

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The first known mystery novel by an African American writer returns to print, transporting readers to 1930s Harlem.

Eighty-nine years ago, in 1932, a 35-year-old African American physician and writer named Rudolph Fisher published The Conjure-Man Dies: A Harlem Mystery, the first known crime novel by a Black American. Fisher died only two years later, when he was still tragically young, so we will never know what later works might have secured his place among golden age mystery writers. On its own, however, this trailblazing work of fiction is notable for its depiction of Harlem’s African American society and culture in the 1930s. Its characters are exclusively Black and, most significantly, so are its crime-­solving police detective, Perry Dart, and his forensics expert physician sidekick, John Archer. 

One of the first Black men in the police force to be elevated to detective, the assured and perceptive Dart admits that “in Harlem one learns most by seeking least—to force an issue was to seal it in silence forever.” The mystery unfolds largely through his dogged and wily interrogation, and the plot is marked by a number of unexpected twists, particularly one halfway in when, after African psychic and “conjure-man” N’Gana Frimbo has been murdered and sent to the medical examiner, his body disappears, calling into question the very nature of the crime they’ve been investigating.

The narrative itself is typical of the wider genre during this period, heavy on explicatory dialogue and a bit short on action. Still, Fisher’s way with description is commanding. “Out went the extension light,” he writes. “The original bright horizontal shaft shot forth like an accusing finger pointing toward the front room, while the rest of the death chamber went black.” Likewise, the banter among his ragtag cast is both musical and, at times, extremely amusing. “You’re an American, of course?” Dart asks one suspect. “I is now,” she responds. “But I originally come from Savannah, Georgia.” The memorable Harlem denizens that people the novel include a self-proclaimed (i.e., unlicensed) private eye, a dimwitted numbers runner, that haughty Georgia churchwoman and Frimbo’s mortician landlord. 

With its sharp Harlem rhythms and abundance of wise-talk, one can easily imagine the jaunty black-and-white film that Hollywood might have made of this novel, had Hollywood been interested in making films centering authentic Black characters during the early 20th century. The novel was, however, turned into a play two years after Fisher’s death. If you’re interested in more of Fisher’s writings, this book also includes Fisher’s last published story, “John Archer’s Nose,” which reunites Dart and Archer. This story hints at what might have come to pass for this Holmes and Watson pairing had its creator not died of cancer, which he likely developed from his professional experimentation with X-rays at his private practice as a radiologist in New York.

Falling in and out of print over the years since it first appeared, The Conjure-Man Dies is now happily welcomed back to its rightful place both in the history of crime fiction and the wider canon of Black literature.

With The Conjure-Man Dies, the first known mystery novel by an African American writer returns to print, transporting readers to 1930s Harlem.

NonfictionShort Stories

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Review by Robert Weibezahl

George Saunders won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo and was a National Book Award finalist for his short story collection Tenth of December. But the acclaimed author has also taught for more than 20 years in Syracuse University’s prestigious MFA creative writing program. There, in a semester-long class, he and his aspirants parse Russian short stories in translation to better understand how masters of the form such as Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol built their work from the ground up. For an emerging writer, Saunders believes, this process is akin to “a young composer studying Bach. All of the bedrock principles of the form are on display.”

Now, in a true gift to writers and serious readers, Saunders has adapted the core of this coveted class into a commodious new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Beloved author George Saunders teaches the masters in his new book, sharing invaluable insights into classic Russian short stories.

With infectious enthusiasm and generosity of spirit, Saunders delves into seven stories that he calls the “seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world”: three by Chekhov, two by Leo Tolstoy and one each from Ivan Turgenev and Gogol. (The actual syllabus at Syracuse contains about 30 stories.) The primary texts of the featured stories are included in the book, and after each one, Saunders launches into his “seminar,” providing insights—both his own and some gleaned from students over the years—into the structure and subtleties of these works.

On the surface, this may seem a dry endeavor. However, in Saunders’ hands it is anything but. His love of literature is palpable, and his obvious qualities as an artful teacher are on full display. Saunders takes a different tack with each story, sometimes providing pulse-by-pulse dissections, other times analyzing the building of character or even how the excesses of a story somehow manage to contribute to rather than detract from its greatness. He also supplies an “afterthought” to each story’s analysis, in which he shares a personal anecdote from his own life as a writer and reader.

While the genesis of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain can be found in the creative writing classroom—and writers at any level of their careers will glean priceless pearls from nearly every page—the genius of Saunders’ book, and his clear intention in offering it up, is to elucidate literature for the engaged reader, deepening the reading experience. It is also a blueprint for a greater engagement with humanity. “The part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world,” Saunders writes. “It can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the audiobook for A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Beloved author George Saunders teaches the masters in his new book, sharing invaluable insights into classic Russian short stories.

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