Men, Women, and Animals: The Dolphin House

22 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: The Dolphin House, by Audrey Schulman
Europa, 2022. 307 pp. $15

In summer 1965, Cora quits her job as a waitress at a men’s club in Tampa, Florida, and buys a one-way ticket to St. Thomas. At twenty-one, she doesn’t know what to do with her life. As a deaf person, she feels at a keen disadvantage in a speaking and hearing world, though her habit of watching in silence allows her to identify danger, especially from men:

Men tended to speak in a deep voice with little emotion. They made statements . . . . They talked at length, assuming all were interested. They didn’t ask questions. Their hair was flattened with grease. They sat with their legs spread as though something in their pants needed the room; perhaps it was all the keys in their pockets, to their homes, their cars, their offices.

With animals, however, she’s completely at ease, having grown up on a farm and worked at a riding stable, where she learned how to get horses to trust her. Consequently, she’s absolutely perfect for the job she walks into on St. Thomas, working with dolphins at a research center established by an ambitious, manipulative Harvard neuroscientist named Blum.

The three researchers have had an artificial lagoon built and study the four dolphins swimming in it, seized from the wild. Oddly, though, the men won’t go in the water, so how can they observe anything? Worse, they perform “surgeries” on the dolphins, and she’s not mollified when Blum tells her that they implant electrodes in their heads. All she knows is that the dolphins scream in terror, and that the procedures leave wounds.

NASA photo of bottlenose dolphin, 2004, Florida (courtesy NASA via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

In his ham-fisted way, Blum’s trying to tabulate what dolphins can or can’t do with their large brains—so long as they imitate humans. He hopes to cash in on government grants to scientists studying cognition and make a name for himself. Eventually, he realizes that Cora’s more than an animal trainer in a bathing suit and takes an interest in what she discovers about the dolphins.

But he does so only for his own purposes, and his two colleagues refuse to see her as anything but a sex object. Welcome to the Sixties and the obstacles faced by women in science.

But Cora, who can’t get her hearing aids wet or they’ll short out, must go into the water without them, and what she learns excites her beyond measure. She senses the dolphins’ sounds in her body and studies them much as she observed the horses, focusing on their relationships rather than what they can imitate. She’s the expert, though she lacks the vocabulary to describe what she’s seen.

I love this premise: the woman who can’t hear understands more than the men who can. But what makes The Dolphin House worth reading is the novel’s animal protagonists, the four creatures unwillingly captive to the greed and fantasies of humans. The sequences in which Cora tries to learn their ways and teach them what Blum will recognize as “communication” have a beauty and drama that sweep me away.

The dolphins’ empathy, playfulness, aggression, temper tantrums, and sociability never cease to amaze me. That’s communication, whether or not a human can interpret it. But Blum, chasing ever-larger grants and fame, wants her to teach the dolphins human speech and tells her that’s the only way to spare them the surgeries. And Cora, recognizing this manipulation for what it is but also hungering to be thought of as a researcher rather than just an animal trainer, agrees.

The Dolphin House has a wide scope. Besides the science, which Schulman introduces with a light hand, the novel asks what real communication is. Those who can hear define it as words, which these scientists assume is the superior way.

None of these guys possesses an ounce of poetry or sense of drama, nor does any man in the book understand the physical world, for all their study of it. That’s Cora’s realm, but to one scientist in particular, if he can’t tabulate something, it doesn’t exist. Right there, that says a lot.

Where I have trouble is how far Schulman seems to wish to take this division between the sensitive, feeling Cora and every man she meets, only one of whom has any decency or even a positive trait. The others are greedy, lecherous, exploitive, narcissistic, and denigrate women; two seem like rapists waiting their chance to strike. Cora senses that none would have the faintest idea how to pleasure a woman, assuming they even think it a worthwhile goal.

This blanket portrayal goes far beyond the sexism-in-science theme or even the sexism of the Sixties. Schulman could have made the same points without fashioning her male characters out of straw so that they’re easier to knock down. I also wonder why the physically adept Cora never tries to defend herself against passes, looking only to escape. She seldom pushes back against verbal insults or injustices, either, though she’s not the type to think “a lady wouldn’t say that.” So she’s too much one way as well.

All the same, The Dolphin House is a brilliant novel, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Murder in Little Tokyo: Evergreen

15 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: Evergreen, by Naomi Hirahara
Soho, 2023. 280 pp. $28

It’s 1946, and Aki Nakasone and her family have finally been permitted to return to Los Angeles after their imprisonment at Manzanar internment camp and forced relocation to Chicago. But nothing’s the same in LA. Like other Japanese Americans, they’ve lost jobs, property, and their home and have little left except pride, endurance, and determination.

Pettit’s Studio photograph of downtown Los Angeles, 1946 (courtesy Pettit’s Studio via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Aki has one thing to look forward to, however: the return of her husband, Art, from army service in Europe. Married just before he shipped out, the couple has spent almost no time together. They’re essentially newlyweds, and Aki can’t wait to start their lives together.

But Art’s return brings her no joy. He’s moody, withdrawn, tells her nothing. And Aki, who feels overwhelmed by marriage and has been taught to submit to her husband’s wishes, hesitates to ask the questions that might ease her mind and reestablish the rapport they once had.

A flashpoint between them is Art’s best man at their wedding and former comrade-in-arms, Babe Watanabe. Aki has always thought him irresponsible, even immoral, and when Babe’s father shows up with strange bruises at the hospital where she works as a nurse’s aide, she suspects physical abuse. So when Mr. Watanabe is murdered in a seedy residential hotel in the neighborhood known as Little Tokyo, Aki worries that Babe’s the killer. A son murdering a father? Unthinkable, yet . . . .

But she can’t say a word against him in Art’s hearing, partly because she rarely sees her husband anymore. He’s been spending his evenings supposedly chasing down stories for the Little Tokyo newspaper that has hired him as a part-time reporter but has also been socializing with his colleagues, among whom Aki feels outclassed and unsophisticated. She wonders whether she knows Art anymore.

As you have probably figured out, she takes halting steps to solve the murder, unsure of herself at almost every turn, which I like. The story moves quickly, if not always smoothly, and the author keeps you guessing the solution until the end. She re-creates the gritty, sometimes hand-to-mouth circumstances forced on Japanese Americans and the bigotry they face daily. I particularly like the premise, which places insecure Aki struggling to solve the mystery that’s her marriage, that of the crimes affecting people she knows, and how the two puzzles intersect.

Hirahara offers occasional glimpses into social attitudes I’d never heard of and wouldn’t have anticipated, as when Aki recalls the suffering at Manzanar:

We had lined up for our inoculations, almost like cattle and sheep. . . . Rumors flew fast and furious. The government was poisoning us with these shots, many claimed. But often our camp-wide digestive problems could be traced to food that was left out too long before being cooked and served.

But despite these virtues, Evergreen leaves me unsatisfied. The male characters are flat, having one or two salient qualities, and that’s it. The narrative explains Art and records his behavior but doesn’t suggest his inner life, or even that he has one. (And for all his symptoms of post-traumatic stress, I don’t believe he ever saw combat. It doesn’t live inside him in any other way.) The couple never grapples with their problems, and as a consequence, the resolution feels hollow and anticlimactic. Just a finger snap, and life’s good again.

Much of the information imparted about the internment, dispossession, and bigotry reads like information dumps. Some scenes seem to have no other purpose than to teach this sadly neglected history. Maybe too Hirahara would have done better to explore one issue in depth rather than drag in, say, the Ku Klux Klan.

I thought Amy Chua did a more cohesive and powerful job integrating the history into her novel, The Golden Gate. But neither author thought to link the persecution and dispossession of Japanese Americans to German concentration camps, which I find startling. And Hirahara has a perfect segue; after all, Art fought in Europe.

Finally, her narrative style gets on my nerves. At one point, Aki hears of a badass named Ox and thinks, “Obviously not his given name.” Later, she gives someone a penicillin shot and observes that the drug would reduce the chances of infection. You don’t say!

I’m not sure what to think when—no exaggeration—an author plays Captain Obvious on every page. Is she a pedant, unaware she’s talking down to her readers, and her editor goes along? Or do most readers want everything spelled out, no inferences necessary, and I’m the outlier here?

Granted, Hirahara’s not writing literary fiction. But even so, Evergreen goes to ridiculous lengths to connect every dot. And if Aki has to explain each conclusion she draws, that makes her seem none too clever, hardly the type to solve a crime.

Too bad this novel doesn’t live up to its premise.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Eye of the Storm: A True Account

08 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: A True Account, by Katherine Howe
Holt, 2023. 268 pp. $29

One blistering Boston day in June 1726, Hannah Masury attends a hanging of three pirates, whose sendoff is ministered to by no less a personage than Cotton Mather. Having played hooky from a wharfside inn where she toils for pennies, that night she decides to bed down in the barn, where she finds a boy, desperate and terrified, demanding a bite to eat.

Against her better judgment, Hannah leads him to the inn kitchen; two men pursue them. Hannah evades them, but they cut the boy’s head off with a machete and hunt her too. Knowing that he signed on as a cabin boy on a certain ship, Hannah makes a snap decision. She chops off her hair, takes his boots and clothes, and visits the ship, intending to take his place.

However, the ship’s master is Ned Low, an infamous pirate, a mercurial man who knows no restraint or mercy:

Near as I could fathom, Ned Low was actually many men imprisoned in one compact sailor’s body, with never a sign of which one might be shown to the world at any given moment. He was one minute laughing and swallowing Madeira in his open mouth, spraying it in the air like a mermaid, and the next cracking one of my shipmates across the jaw for laughing too loudly. . . .

In choosing to join Low’s search for booty, to which everyone aboard is sworn upon pain of death, she’s taken a tremendous risk. They might strike it rich—for a time, until capture and punishment bring them down. But Hannah faces a closer threat, for the moment Low finds out who she is might be her last. One day, she learns what it means to sail in the eye of a storm, amid a pocket of calm while everywhere else is chaos. What a metaphor for her predicament.

Edward Lowe, aka Ned Low, rendered by unknown artist; date unknown (courtesy National Maritime Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

A century later, Radcliffe Professor Marian Beresford wants to throw Kay Lonergan out of her office. Kay, an undergraduate who seems to have neither ability nor strong character, is pressing an antique book on Marian, allegedly a fragment of Hannah’s memoirs. Marian, having never heard of Hannah and alert to other details, suspects that Kay has swallowed a hoax.

However, as a sharp-eyed historian, Marian has noticed intriguing facts about the fragment that prompt a second look. And since her father is a big wheel at the Explorers Club, with the money to finance an expedition. . . . you can guess what happens next.

Usually, I find the trope of The Manuscript and the Researcher insipid fare, especially with the earnestness that so often sugars it. But something about A True Account compelled me to read it, and I’m glad I did.

First, you can guess only part of what happens next, and Howe twists her narrative with skill and a keen eye for human foibles. Nobody’s too good here. Little is as it seems, and Marian quickly discovers that her bland student knows a few tricks. Also, our professor has no excitement in her tweedy life, so she’s glad to do something that promises thrills, might even be daring—though she suffers guilt about them, fearing humiliation every other second. Her biography might be titled Of No Account—or so her famous father treats her, and so she believes, deep down.

Meanwhile, Hannah’s life as a pirate is as gripping as it gets. Not only does she have to remain constantly vigilant, the violence of the life she’s chosen forces her to think about who she is at heart. At the inn, she led a hard life, but at sea the perennial threat of bloodshed raises the stakes, even as the promise of wealth beyond her dreams drives her onward.

A woman of her time had no way to earn such a fortune. Howe wishes to show that a pirate crew had more liberty and potential than any landlubber—circumscribed by the threat of hanging from a yardarm, to be sure.

Both narratives benefit from Howe’s prose, which zips along like a ship under full sail, running before the wind. I admire how she introduces physical detail, which permeates the narrative. Hannah’s amazement at the nature the city girl has never seen provides a clever contrast to Marian’s frustration with just about any physical circumstance outside Cambridge. Be warned that the pirate scenes are grisly, though the violence never feels gratuitous or sensational.

My only complaint, admittedly minor, is the intended feminist parallel between Hannah and Marian. Each has her struggles, yes, but the risks one character takes to assert herself far outshine the other’s and lie in a very different realm, despite what it says on the jacket flap.

Even so, Marian too has a trick up her sleeve, and just when you think you can predict the ending, guess again.

I highly recommend A True Account.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary

01 Monday Apr 2024

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Review: Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, by Laura Stanfill
Lanternfish, 2022. 334 pp. $19

The nineteenth-century French village of Mireville has a peculiar destiny and makeup. Not only does the sun never shine, which makes growing anything edible a pointless chore; the key industry, so to speak, is fabricating elaborate music boxes called serinettes. These gadgets perfectly imitate pitches that birds sing, except the music is popular songs.

Why would anyone want that, you ask? To teach canaries to sing music recognizable to human ears—of course!—and to hold competitions. Or such is the case in America, the market for the serinettes produced in the Blanchard family workshop.

A serinette made by Bonnard, dating from 1757 from Mireville (courtesy Rama, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Though Mireville has lace makers, grocers, and even luthiers, the Blanchards rank among the best families there. This status is duly impressed on every firstborn Blanchard male, who’ll one day run the business. Accordingly, the village wives whose husbands make lace or violins pay social calls on Mme Blanchard—of whatever generation you care to name—hoping to prepare the groundwork for a match between the Blanchard scion and their daughters.

This social-climbing pipe dream has even less chance of fruition once Georges Blanchard, as an infant, somehow chases the rain away and earns the sobriquet of Sun-Bringer. His mother, Cérine, doubts he did anything of the kind, but her husband insists, so that’s that.

Her child’s difficult infancy confirms for Cérine what she already knew—women do the work, and men make the rules:

As was expected of all music-makers’ wives. Cérine raised Georges to stifle skinned-knee yelps and to lift his chair away from the table, lest the scuffs trigger his father’s temper. Silence was sacred—not for women or children to break. But sometimes she hummed under her breath, or dropped a knife on the stone hearth, or smashed a plate just so she could pick the pieces up and throw them down again, allowing herself a lingering measure of joy at each small thud and crack.

The legacy of Sun-Bringer sticks to Georges with untold consequences; his son, Henri, feels keenly the need to do something extraordinary, except he can’t. Not at first, anyway.

What he can do, though, is listen and show great empathy, sometimes to an excessive degree. Those qualities will figure in his attempt at heroics, but their everyday impact is equally remarkable. Henri’s closest, only friend is Aimée Maullian, a lacemaker’s daughter. He takes heat for choosing a friend of the opposite gender, but by the time he’s twelve, the young female population of Mireville is eating out of his hand—which he recognizes only dimly, so intent is he on having friends.

I’d sooner believe Henri’s father ordained the sunshine that now roasts Mireville. But Singing Lessons is a gently magical tale, and greater truths sometimes lie beyond literal fact. If men believe they can and should teach canaries to sing, they can’t be expected to listen to their wives and daughters. In theory, that leaves a tremendous competitive edge to any boy who’s got open ears and a good heart.

But that boy will also suffer guilt and terrible loneliness, because his father, expecting great accomplishments like changing the weather, and will ignore him if they don’t occur. Henri also knows he has a rival for his father’s favor, acknowledged but seldom spoken of. It follows, then, that Henri will try to earn Georges’s love by working a miracle. And when that attempt falls flat, the boy, now seventeen, must leave Mireville.

Singing Lessons is a pleasant, heartwarming novel, so I almost feel churlish for pointing out its weaknesses. Henri’s the crux of the story, but he doesn’t begin the book; his father does. That’s understandable, in that the father’s legacy shapes the narrative. Besides, Stanfill has to explain what a serinette is, how it works, and its social place in Mireville.

Even so, that setup takes a while to get rolling. And when Henri has to leave town, I expect him to suffer serious reversals before the end, yet he doesn’t. He faces obstacles, but mostly they grant him experience that has a salutary effect. I’m glad for him, but it also seems a bit neat, as does the final resolution. Whether that’s pleasing or less satisfying depends on your taste.

I wonder whether Stanfill might have begun with Henri’s story, interposing his father’s as needed, and used the space saved to draw out the boy’s wanderings. But she apparently spent fifteen years writing the book, so no doubt she tried that option and decided against it.

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary offers a sweet story about fathers and sons, with wry observations about male pride. Read the novel for either reason, and you’ll be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Celebrity Murder: The Golden Gate

25 Monday Mar 2024

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Review: The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua
Minotaur, 2023. 362 pp. $28

It’s March 1944, and Walter Wilkinson, a frequent guest at the fancy Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California, is found murdered—shot at twice, surviving the first confrontation but not the second. However, Wilkinson is more than just a prominent out-of-towner; he ran for president against FDR in 1940 and was presumed a candidate for the ’44 election as well. (Chau has based him loosely on Wendell Wilkie.)

Consequently, the murder has enormous implications, and Detective Al Sullivan has a thousand pieces to fit together in this jigsaw puzzle of power and privilege. The Bainbridge family, one of San Francisco’s wealthiest, provides several persons of interest, if you count cousins, as Sullivan must. Isabella Bainbridge, in fact, is drinking with him in the Claremont bar when he’s called upstairs to investigate the first murder attempt—and when he comes back downstairs, she’s gone.

Curiously, Isabella’s late sister Iris died fourteen years before in the Claremont, presumably by accident—and evidence from that death may pertain to the current case. Coincidence or not? But even without that complication, Wilkinson’s infamous philandering and political views have earned him many enemies, from radical leftists to, perhaps, Mme Chiang Kai-Shek, who lives in Berkeley and, it’s alleged, had an affair with Wilkinson.

Incidentally, I thought this bizarre—what was she doing in Berkeley?—but apparently, she did live there and was rumored to have had an affair with Wendell Willkie. Wartime rumors deserve their reputation, but I like what Chua has done with Mme Chiang.

Wendell Willie, Republican presidential candidate, 1940 (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

So there’s pressure on Sullivan, and the district attorney to whom he answers cares less about guilt or innocence than building his career. If he can send a Bainbridge heiress to the gas chamber for murder, so much the better. Apparently, a socialite jilted him a week before their wedding, and he’s got an ax to grind. He’s also got a dozen prejudices, which he treats as fact.

From this maze of secrets and motives, Chua has crafted a first-rate mystery with more twists than fifty yards of rope, starting with the two separate gunshots, only one of which hit the target. I like how she conveys psychological disturbance (caveat: her portrayal of psychiatrists speaks of prejudice), and I’m not surprised to read that she’s a law professor, given how she deftly explains procedure. I also like how she re-creates the wartime Bay Area, inundated with men in uniform, shipyards clanging away, and the rules of child labor, say, going by the boards.

The place is also blatantly racist, which figures prominently, as the credibility of witnesses or theories about who done it depend on who’s got what skin color. Since Sullivan has Mexican heritage—he changed his name to aid his career—that provides the chance to test him at every turn. He’s a dedicated lawman, but he’s also trying to make his way, and he wrestles with his conscience—or tries not to, which tells you something.

In a clever parallel to the D.A., Chua plays on Sullivan’s own social prejudices against the rich, whom he brushed up against while attending UCal Berkeley:

Kids who felt guilty—no, resentful—about being born with a gold spoon in their mouth. Kids trying to escape who they were. Trying on different personas like normal folks tried on shoes. . . . Too many choices, that was the problem. They had no constraints, no debts, no need to work—they could be anything they wanted, barring only a total lack of talent, which was actually not uncommon.

Consequently, when he questions the beautiful, intellectually nimble but manipulative Isabella Bainbridge, he has to steel himself to resist her charms and doesn’t always succeed. He also loses his temper at his bright but untrustworthy niece, whose mother is a deadbeat. Uncle Al winds up looking after the girl a lot, and he resents it. So he has sharp edges and weaknesses, what every hero needs (but which some authors don’t provide).

But his biography is as fake as a three-dollar bill (and I can’t understand why Chua would make such a mistake). I’ll readily believe he’s got a Mexican father but can pass, and I’m shocked to learn that these United States deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans during the depression, including people born here. (Nothing’s new under the sun.) But I don’t believe that Sullivan is one-quarter Jewish, and I could have done without that. I could also have done without the slur he utters about the relevant relative.

More significantly, did Al really work a passel of jobs to pay his way through Cal, get stellar grades, and star on the baseball team? Did he really fight on Guadalcanal in 1942, get discharged because of a knee wound, try to reenlist and get rejected? That knee never even gives him a twinge; he even runs three miles a day. What a guy.

Fortunately, Mr. Perfect has his flaws. The Golden Gate is a terrific book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Nobody’s Noble: Essex Dogs

18 Monday Mar 2024

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Review: Essex Dogs, by Dan Jones
Viking, 2022. 450 pp. $30

In July 1346, King Edward III of England invades France, claiming that the throne of that country belongs to him, igniting what would later be called the Hundred Years’ War. Among the invading host landing on the Norman coast is a band of men self-styled the Essex Dogs, led by Loveday FitzTalbot, a former thief turned soldier-of-fortune.

But hardened veteran though he is, Loveday feels the strain of this campaign. Signed on for forty days at a penny per and all the booty they can carry, the Dogs have no particular loyalty to their monarch’s pretensions.

Oh, they shout the war cry praising his name and dutifully call the French king, Philippe, a usurper. And when the blast of war trumpets in their ears, the excitement of battle carries them along. But their chief goal, aside from filling their purses, is to make it home alive, as a group.

Edward the Black Prince receiving his knighthood of the Garter, ca. 1440-1450 (courtesy British Library via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Good luck. Jones, a historian, portrays medieval warfare in its most gruesome face, sparing nothing. Crossbow bolts and arrows fly with appalling results, and in the scrum of knights and men-at-arms, armor is no guarantee of safety. The crush of men and horses struggling for footing on blood-soaked ground brings terror and confusion.

But these relatively brief, intensely violent moments are only part of a soldier’s lot. There are long marches in summer heat; inedible food and brackish water (when available); disease and voracious insects; boring days spent in stinking encampments; and hostile civilians who find ways to make the invaders even more miserable.

Most of all, the Dogs have their leaders to contend with, starting with Sir Robert Le Straunge, the knight who’s promised to pay them at campaign’s end. From his first days in France, Loveday, starting to grow sick of war, anticipates what lies ahead:

Robbing towns. Hurting civilians. Stealing food. Taking orders from idiots like Sir Robert, the latest of a long line of Essex knights of that name, whose whole purpose was paying lesser men to work their estates and risk their lives in wars, in the hope that the Le Straunges might earn the favour of greater lords and kings.

The divide between noble and commoner pervades Essex Dogs, as it should. Some of the leaders, such as the earl of Warwick and Lord Northampton, the army constable, are capable tacticians. But whether they deserve their commands on merit or not, their mistakes, fits of temper, or foibles must be tolerated, even applauded, because of their high birth. By contrast, any commoner who steps out line will hang before sunset.

Also, where Warwick and Northampton sometimes seem on familiar terms with their underlings, the latter have to take care never to presume. Their lordships seem like employers too impatient to consider anyone’s needs except their own—I’ve worked for such people—except that these guys have the power of life or death. The only trait they share with their men is the foulest language I’ve read in many years. I’ve known sailors with cleaner mouths.

Essex Dogs shows clearly and repeatedly that there’s no nobility in war or warriors. The way the English abuse the French peasantry and townsfolk is absolutely hideous. I sympathize more with the civilians, faceless though they are, than with the Dogs, one or two characters excepted.

Maybe that’s because invading another country on a flimsy pretext appalls my modern ears; I can read that in a history book more easily than a novel, where motives and characters are supposed to compel me. But this plot-driven story pays too little attention to character.

Only two members of the Dogs show anything beneath their surfaces: Loveday and Romford, a sixteen-year-old boy on his first campaign. But even they feel rudimentary, a point to note, because this book is the first of a planned trilogy. I think Jones will have to develop his crew to much greater depth if he is to sustain his saga.

Still, the novel offers plenty of action; there’s always another (mis)adventure to propel the story, and I had no trouble turning the pages. Each chapter opens with a quotation from a contemporary chronicler describing a particular incident, which Jones then portrays as it might have looked on the ground, a startling contrast to the heroic description. I like that twist.

I also find amusing how Jones renders Edward, the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, who figures prominently. The heir to the throne is a whiny teenager with more bravado than common sense, no martial gifts whatsoever, and a thirst for liquor, which he can’t hold. That’s Edward, the Black Prince we’re talking about, who’ll grow up to rank among the most celebrated soldiers of his time. As Jones’s end note says, this story is fiction.

Essex Dogs has a plot that moves rapidly, driven by vivid historical detail. I was glad to read the novel for its antiheroic depiction of medieval warfare. But after this first volume of three, I think I’ve had my fill.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

War and the Mind: Sergeant Salinger

11 Monday Mar 2024

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Review: Sergeant Salinger, by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue, 2021. 286 pp. $29

When we first meet Sonny Salinger, he’s twenty-three, it’s April 1942, and he’s not liable for military service because of a heart murmur. He has the luxury, therefore, to visit the Stork Club, the famous Manhattan night spot, to see his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, the impossibly beautiful Oona O’Neill (the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s daughter).

The club fashions her a debutante, an attraction for visitors but also, be it known, for lecherous power brokers like the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, a regular there. Speaking of regulars, Sonny meets his idol, Ernest Hemingway, and dances a rhumba with Oona that Fred Astaire would have been proud of. To look at Sonny, a gawky six-footer with big ears, you wouldn’t think he could dance a step or court a great beauty.

But Sonny Salinger, whose real name is Jerome, has more to him than anyone knows, and his life is about to change, with consequences for him and for American literature.

Heart murmur or no, he’s drafted. At first, he has a desk job with Counterintelligence, stationed in Devon, England. But come D-Day, he’s part of the second wave at Utah Beach, for the boys from counterintel have to interrogate prisoners.

However, little happens as planned in wartime, so Sergeant Salinger, though he questions suspected enemy agents, French townspeople, and captured soldiers from time to time, spends most of his war firing a rifle. He earns five citations for bravery.

Utah Beach landing, June 1944 (courtesy National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But Sergeant Salinger isn’t a war story in the strict sense. It’s about a writer who gradually loses his mind because of what he sees and does as a soldier. As we know, J. D. Salinger recovered enough of his faculties to write Catcher in the Rye, a notable collection of short stories, and a couple lesser works, none published after the 1960s.

What stilled his writer’s voice temporarily after the war and eventually for good? What drove him to seek seclusion for decades? Charyn offers answers. Though many scenes seem improbable on the surface—his stock in trade—quick research will show that the facts are correct. Charyn may exaggerate how these scenes unfolded, as a bold novelist will, but if the details appear improbable or surrealistic, the effects are entirely plausible and well grounded. And as with other novels of his I’ve read, he has a gift for bringing real-life figures to the page, which is often a treat.

In those novels, I’ve admired Charyn’s keen eye for historical detail, which again figures here. That’s as it should be, for if we’re to believe that Salinger breaks under the strain of combat (and its aftermath), we have to see what disturbs him. Here’s his first look at Utah Beach, a relatively benign moment:

He leapt out of the landing craft into a wallop of water, flailing a bit, like a bat lost in a storm. Sonny had a life preserver that was almost a strangulation cord, plus a combat pack on his shoulders that pounded as the water pounded. He couldn’t afford to get his manuscripts wet. He had the melody of words inside his skull as he could hear the terrible whine of bullets all around him. A dogface fell and disappeared into the undertow, then resurfaced with one of his fingers shorn off.

But the following days and weeks provide a nonstop horror show in which you wonder how things could be worse, only to watch them spiral downward. It’s not remarkable that Salinger cracks; rather, it’s remarkable how much he tolerates when others fall to pieces. And part of what bothers him is the hypocrisy his superiors display, as when small-time Nazis take their punishment while rocket scientists and high-ranking intelligence officers get flown to the States and given jobs.

The portrait of the writer as a young man wouldn’t be complete without portraying his family. I must confess I doubted some of his parents’ antics, but I believe they ground their son into dust, and how that might have happened. The writer lauded for his depiction of adolescence isn’t allowed to grow up or have his own thoughts or feelings. Only his older sister, Doris, helps him escape that booby-trapped existence.

I found Sergeant Salinger hard to take sometimes, mostly because I wasn’t sure whether I was reading a deliberately absurd novel like Catch-22, in which we’re meant to laugh until we cry, or a re-creation of actuality. Charyn’s blunt, unsparing prose carries the ring of truth, yet what happens seems incredible, a contradiction that can be hard to stay with.

But the psychological observations, some of which occur through fantasy sequences, seem spot-on. Whether J. D. Salinger actually suffered what Charyn describes is, in the end, immaterial; he might have, and that’s worth thinking about.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Island Hypocrisy: The Marriage of Opposites

04 Monday Mar 2024

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Review: The Marriage of Opposites, by Alice Hoffman
S&S, 2015. 362 pp. $28

The second line of this novel reads, “I rarely did as I was told.”

No kidding. Rachel Pomié, growing up in St. Thomas in the early nineteenth century, has a hard road ahead. Born to a family of Marranos, Portuguese Jews who fled the Inquisition for Danish territory where they might live and worship freely, she finds little freedom. Her best (only) friend is Jestine, daughter of a slave, who has even less. However, both girls swear they’ll have true love, and from the youngest age, Rachel steeps herself in African lore about magic, spirits, and herbal remedies, many of which are meant to allow love to take possession of her.

But the Marrano community, fearful that Danish tolerance will go only so far, polices itself rigorously so that no news of scandal reaches the motherland. Strict rules limit women from inheriting property or making their own decisions, but that’s only part of it. Men may have mistresses, as some do, especially among the African population. But children from these unions are quickly disowned, and women take the fall. Even in her girlhood, Rachel grasps the hypocrisy that rules the island and senses how deeply gossip and ostracism can cut.

For a while, her father shelters her, teaching her how to read ledgers at the family store and granting her the run of his library, both unheard of for a girl. Already, rumors of her unearthly nature have circulated, possibly fanned by her mother, whom she detests and who returns the favor.

But around the time Rachel turns twenty, her father tells her that the family business is literally foundering—storm have wrecked the ships in which they’ve invested, and which provide the goods they sell in their store. The only way out, he says, is for Rachel to marry a well-off widower much older than she, who’ll help restore the business. Papa won’t hear any objections.

To her surprise, Rachel takes to her stepchildren, and vice versa. Her husband, though kind to her, is another matter, and they both know it. She wants passion to sweep her away, and though they have many children together, whom she loves, she’s unsatisfied. Worse, the business continues to suffer; her self-sacrifice seems in vain.

So you know that Rachel will pursue a forbidden love. And since, as the jacket flap says, she will give birth to a son who’ll one day become a famous painter, her life has only just started.

On this lush island, anything can happen, so it’s a hothouse for conflict and for Hoffman’s trademark magical realism. Witness the first page, as Rachel introduces herself and her place of birth:

Other people shivered when the rains came and were chilled to the bone, but I longed for cold weather. Nights on our island were pitch dark, the air fragrant and heavy, perfect for dreaming. As soon as the light began to fade it was possible to hear the swift footsteps of lizards rattling through the leaves and the hum of the gnats as they came through the windows. Inside our stucco houses, we slept within tents made of thick white netting, meant to keep mosquitoes away . . . All the same, huge clouds of insects drifted through the heat, especially at dusk, bringing a fever that could burn a man alive.

I’m not sure people in 1807 connected insects to disease, but the truth here is greater than that. To be precise, Rachel appears in the historical record, as do a few other characters. But read this book for the seething prose and the people who also seethe; nobody here is self-contained, even the biddies itching to punish Rachel or anyone else who challenges convention.

Camille Pissarro, Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas, 1856 (courtesy National Gallery, Washington, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

And nobody challenges convention like an artist. The boy who will drop a couple of first names and become Camille Pissarro appears around page 200, whereupon he kicks the narrative into higher gear. Not that the story needs kicking, mind you, because Rachel and Jestine and others have been doing plenty of that. But from the first, Camille challenges his mother, testing her willingness to extend him the same latitude she demanded from her parents. In most ways, she fails, which makes her a hypocrite too, and creates even more conflict.

Also, Hoffman has brilliantly reimagined how an artist learns to think about color, even at a young age, and what he does with it. I have no idea whether this is historically accurate, but I don’t think that matters. By her description, the child Pissarro paints from nature with a vividness that reminds me of Henri Rousseau in content but Van Gogh in style—interesting, because Pissarro became an Impressionist. I associate him with Parisian street scenes.

His mother tells him, however, “The way you paint doesn’t look like anything in this world. I worry that you have something wrong with your vision.” Perfect.

My only criticism of The Marriage of Opposites is the ending, which seems flat, as if the story just peters out. Whether that’s the problem with biographical fiction, trying to adjust the demands of storytelling with the narrative of a life, I don’t know. But I highly recommend the novel anyway.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Man of Mystery: City of Ink

26 Monday Feb 2024

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Review: City of Ink, by Elsa Hart
Minotaur, 2018. 338 pp. $26

The year 1711 sees Li Du in Beijing, the place from which he was exiled, and to which he has returned, hiding the past two years in a modest clerkship at the North Borough Office. But when a double murder occurs at a roof tile factory—of a man and a married woman—he must play a public role, assisting his boss, Chief Inspector Sun, in the investigation.

The Kangxi Emperor, who ruled for 61 years, ushered in the era known as High Qing, the zenith of that dynasty. Anonymous court painter, probably early eighteenth century (courtesy Palace Museum, Beijing, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

At first, Li Du’s chores are minimal, taking down statements at Sun’s direction. But soon the scribe fastens on details that others have missed or dismissed as unimportant, which lead him to question the presumed verdict of a crime of passion.

The magistrate breathing down Sun’s neck, however, wants no part of this. In his view, all that remains is for the suspect in custody, the dead woman’s husband, to confess—and once he does, he’ll probably be set free, for the law protects his right to avenge his honor.

However, the husband insists he had nothing to do with the killings. And as Li Du amasses evidence the crime of passion fails to explain, that poses a problem for Sun. The chief inspector believes in justice and deplores corruption, but he also likes his job and loves his family, who’d suffer with him if he were disgraced. Disputing a magistrate is a poor career choice.

Nevertheless, he accepts Li Du’s theory that multiple motives and perpetrators may be involved. He gives his assistant four days to gather more evidence, under the guise of writing the detailed, accurate report the bureaucracy insists on. But if Li Du slips up or steps on the wrong toes, Sun can’t and won’t protect him.

City of Ink is a terrific mystery, and I like it even better than Jade Dragon Mountain, which introduced Li Du. City of Ink feels more sure-handed and avoids the few instances of melodrama and improbable derring-do on which Jade Dragon Mountain relied, but that’s not all. The later novel presents a mystery independent of the murder investigation yet also connected: Li Du himself.

Why has the onetime rising star in the civil service, reprieved from exile, not taken up his former life and aspirations? The humble clerkship at the North Borough Office doesn’t use his talents. He hasn’t remarried since his wife divorced him after his disgrace, and he lives an extremely modest existence at the Water Moon Temple, renting a room from the monks. Yet he’s on a private mission, a search for documents having nothing to do with his current duties. Why?

Connecting these dots requires careful plotting and, to be credible, a natural, unforced storytelling style. Hart excels at both. As Li Du’s sleuthing unravels the murders—with starts and stops and setbacks—he upsets established figures among the elite, likely to take revenge. Meanwhile, his search for documents about the past gradually bears fruit, and the two narratives connect.

As in the earlier novel, Hart provides a detailed, fascinating historical background, re-creating eighteenth-century Beijing street life through Li Du’s eyes:

A bright red spot amid the brown and gray clutter of leaves and mud caught his attention and made him stop. He stared at the tiny pool at the edge of the street, his thoughts suddenly saturated with the seeping color. His gaze shifted upward to where the decapitated body of a rat dangled at knee height from a length of twine strung beside the door of a dumpling stall. The proprietor, following Li Du’s look, indicated a roughly painted sign above the little body. A warning to all rodents who conspire to enter my shop. He pointed invitingly at the dumplings sizzling in a pan. Li Du swallowed, shook his head, and hurried away.

The narrative depicts a city besieged by scholars waiting to sit for the all-important civil service exam—six thousand hopefuls for 250 places. Hart portrays their carousing, cramming, buying lucky charms from charlatans, and good, old-fashioned corruption to reveal the capital and its ways and to advance her story.

Beijing is also a city full of gates and soldiers to man them, and when the drum beats, announcing the hour of closure, everyone must spend the night in the district where they are. That circumstance creates tension, as Li Du races against time and space—and the gates figure in the solution to the mystery.

City of Ink, like its predecessor, does employ one trope, the investigator at risk, and you can see that coming for miles. But that’s the only predictable element.

I highly recommend City of Ink.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Fragments of a Famous Life: The General and Julia

12 Monday Feb 2024

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Review: The General and Julia, by Jon Clinch
Atria, 2023. 256 pp. $27

It’s 1885 in upstate New York, and time is running out. Former President Ulysses S. Grant is struggling to finish writing his memoirs, knowing he has weeks to live. He cares little for posterity. Rather, he wishes to secure his loved ones’ financial future, and his friend and publisher, Samuel Clemens, assures him that the book he’s writing will achieve that.

Guilt drives the dying soldier, in part. His family’s reduced circumstances are his fault, for he sank his savings in a scheme that turned out to be a swindle and persuaded friends and children to invest as well. Finishing the memoir is literally the campaigner’s last battle, and to see it through, he must steel himself against the excruciating pain of an advanced throat cancer.

The treatments his doctor provides—opiates injected or applied directly to the suppurating tissue—bring mere hours of respite at a stretch, often at the price of addled senses. But Grant doesn’t flinch, and as he forges on, he remembers scenes from his past, though sometimes he wonders whether they unfolded as he now sees them, or whether the drug has become the narrator.

Usually, I avoid novels told in retrospect, and impressionistic ones, at that. But it’s no secret when or how Grant died (his legendary addiction to cigars caused the cancer), so there’s no climax to spoil. And what makes such a story work is whether the author has chosen dramatic events and rendered them well. Clinch has, on both counts. I wish he’d fleshed out Grant’s life more, but The General and Julia has much to offer.

Civil War enthusiasts may be disappointed, for the narrative barely touches on Fort Donelson, only in the context of the cigar habit, and skips over Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Cold Harbor, for example. Two other battles (Chattanooga and Petersburg) and one confrontation (Appomattox) appear in outline, the narrative following the general’s emotions rather than the action or the military strategy.

That, however, is the point, for as Grant’s literary advisors (including Julia) have told him, the official reports of the war are already public record. What’s missing from those accounts is the man himself—and that’s where Clinch goes.

Portrait of Julia Dent Grant, perhaps as First Lady, photographer unknown (courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Julia’s legacy as a Missouri slaveowner’s daughter is the historical irony at the novel’s center. Clinch wishes to present the general/president’s evolving views on abolition and race, which, in their mature form, make him seem like a liberal for his time.

I’m glad to hear it, though I’m not entirely convinced, partly because the evolution feels rather sudden. (The general was also a known anti-Semite, a subject that never arises here.) But what rings true is his impossible father-in-law, “Colonel” Dent, as unreconstructed a Confederate as ever drew breath, and a nasty piece of work. You understand why Julia, at eighteen, wanted to marry Grant, in part to escape that father:

Nothing upon which his eye falls—the part in a man’s hair, the rhythm of a horse’s gait, the quantity of ice in a snifter of rye, the wag of a dog’s tail, the tinder expended to light a fire, the crust on a biscuit, the pepper in his gravy—nothing is entirely satisfactory. He is a Niagara of complaint.

Naturally, Dent has nothing but contempt for his accomplished son-in-law, treating him as an incompetent fool. But to Grant, he’s Julia’s father, and family’s family. The ironclad simplicity of Grant’s moral beliefs comes through on every page, a credible, well-developed characterization. That’s one pleasure of the novel.

Another is the way the many deceptively simple scenes capture an entire atmosphere. I particularly liked the glimpse of Braxton Bragg’s Confederate lines outside Chattanooga; the Wall Street swindlers in their element; the courtship of young Lieutenant Grant; conversations with a senator who’s also the president’s son’s father-in-law; and anytime Mr. Samuel Clemens enters the narrative.

I would have wanted to see more of Julia; despite the title, her portrayal feels incomplete, though she’s always in Grant’s thoughts. I’d have liked more about their married life, his presidential administrations—hell, I’d have liked to see at least a passing moment from the Mexican War. But that’s the limitation of an impressionistic biographical novel, and having criticized others for including events just because they actually happened, whether or not they make good reading, I can’t fault Clinch for leaving out as much as he does. He makes every scene tell.

That said, I’m not sure I the focus on racism and slavery works in the impressionistic format, which seems too narrow a scope. Also, a couple brief chapters from the points of view of Black characters feel perhaps a shade too neat, vivid though they are.

Nevertheless, The General and Julia provides a thought-provoking portrait of a significant historical figure, and since I own a copy of the great man’s memoirs, I’m thinking I should get around to reading it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.