An Infinity of Mirrors, by Richard Condon

This 1964 novel has been on my shelves for many decades. I think I originally bought it because of an interest in how the Nazis built their control of Germany in the 1930s. And I may have left it unread because I considered it more a commercial work than a literary work.

But it is an easy novel to get into. It is about a beautiful Parisienne, Paule Bernheim, who is Jewish. Her father, Paul-Alain Bernheim, is a famous actor also famous for his love affairs. And who also makes a point of instructing his daughter in Jewish history, in order to make her proud of her heritage. The daughter then meets a handsome German officer, Willi Von Rhode, whom she pronounces as Veelee, when he is stationed in Paris. Her father is distraught when she falls in love with this Prussian officer. But he does seem to be a good man, and she loves him so much that she follows him back to Germany when he is re-assigned in 1932, and marries him there.

Whereupon, the author spends a number of chapters recapitulating the growth of Nazi power in Germany, including the campaign against the Jews. This dip into history explains why this novel began with an Author’s Note that thanks the scores of people who enabled him to capture that era of German history. This recapitulation is very easy reading, however—colorful history as a novelist would tell it rather than the dry recitation an historian might make. Indeed, this recital of German history is so vivid that one never regrets leaving the adventures of Paule and Veelee, since one knows that this history is setting up the danger Paule faces in Nazi Germany, as well as a potential conflict in her marriage to a German officer.

Paule herself does not recognize this danger, believing her husband will protect her. But her friends do realize it, and recommend she move from Berlin into the countryside, where hatred of the Jews is less prominent. This, they say, will enable Veelee to take on a more important job and not remain in his dead-end assignment at a training school because it enables him to be close to his wife.

But Hitler then turns over in the army’s leadership, and Paule, becoming concerned about the future of her husband, returns to Berlin. Her rational is that her son Paul-Alain is now of school age, and she wants to find a good school for him. Back in Berlin, however, Paule is assaulted by a German officer, Colonel Drayst, and then is caught in an anti-Jewish riot, which she barely escapes. This makes her realize that she is no longer safe in Germany and that she must leave. Which means that she must also give up Veelee, whom she loves. This is in 1938. There is then a break in the novel, which jumps two years.

Before focusing on Paule back in Paris in 1940, the author again becomes the historian, and explains how the Germans are using local French institutions to administer Paris and much of France. Then we return to a restless Paule, who begins various affairs, much as her father also did in Paris years earlier. One of her affairs is with a Spaniard, Count Miral, with whom she shares a deep devotion. The title of the novel, in fact, comes from their relationship. “He and Paule,” the Count thinks,” were like figures facing and reflecting each other endlessly in an infinity of mirrors, which were the past and the future.”

Their companionship appears to settle her down, but it becomes significantly unsettled again when Colonel Drayst re-enters her life. He is intent on possessing this beautiful woman to revenge himself on all Jews. This threat also makes her more protective of her young son. Then, to complicate the story, Condon introduces a black market businessman named Piocher, who is in league with the British.

Plus, to complicate the story even further, Condon returns to Veelee, now the chief of staff of a large panzer army. We learn he has been horrified by Nazi atrocities in Poland, and yet his career advances until he is badly wounded in Africa, losing one eye and one arm. He also discovers others who believe Hitler has betrayed the German army and the German people and must be eliminated. He then manages a new assignment in Paris, where he has a cordial reunion with Paule and rediscovers his love of his son. And so, there is further intrigue, regarding both Paule’s future and Veelee’s involvement with the rebellious officers. Which raises the issue: is this a commercial work or a literary one? For the plotting is commercial; but the substance, such as the opposing cultures, approaches that of a literary work.

The tension grows as the novel races to its conclusion. Drayst begins his plot to possess Paule. There is an extended heart-rending scene in which Jews in Paris are rounded up and confined to an old arena with little food and water, no sanitation, and spreading illness. This is followed by with Paule intent on protecting her son and deciding where her true commitment lies, and with Veelee joining the army’s plot to end the war.

The climax of the novel is dramatic, but relies a little too much on history, first on the sabotage that helped to disrupt the German reaction to the Normandy invasion, then on Stauffenberg’s failed attempt of July 20, 1944 to kill Hitler, and finally on the plotters’ failure to use the army to take over their country. Paule and Veelee then emerge to play only a subsidiary role as, with the help of Piocher, they plan their own revenge on Colonel Drayst. But they do re-enforce Condon’s theme of the horrors of war, for he has Paule realize at the end that in their revenge, “We have become the monster.”

The result is a suspenseful novel that carries a message. It is a worthy message. As Condon writes, “evil must be opposed, [but] when it is fought with evil’s ways it must ultimately corrupt and strangle the opposer.” But an emphasis on such a message negates the novel’s literary pretensions. For after our long exposure to Paule and her loves, her final cry turns her fate into a symbol, whereas it should lead to a deeper understanding of her humanity. Of the tension in the life of this Jewish woman who falls for a German officer serving a Nazi regime he abhors, and her struggles with issues of love, patriotism, and survival. It focuses, instead, on this heroine’s failure to combat such evil—leaving us with a cynical reminder of what war and violence can bring to the human condition. (November, 2019)

Forgetfulness, by Ward Just

This 2006 work is another unexpected novel from Ward Just, a novel with little external drama but considerable internal tension. It is about an American in Europe, a successful portrait artist named Thomas Railles who in the past has made life more interesting by taking on odd jobs from two boyhood friends working for the CIA. But, now in his fifties, he has given up such dalliances with international intrigue, has moved to southwestern France, has married a local woman, Florette, and has settled down to sketch and draw portraits of the locals.

As the novel opens, his wife is injured while hiking alone in the nearby foothills of the Pyrenees, and we experience Florette’s fear and doubt as four mysterious men, speaking an unknown language, encounter her and at first seem to want to help. It is a beautiful introduction to this novel, for in her helpless condition she is prompted to review her past life and her contentment with her second marriage to this American artist. Here is a chapter that stands alone as we share this 54-year-old woman’s uncertain future, her inability to balance the intentions of her “rescuers” with their frustration, and yet her conviction that her absent but loyal husband will soon rescue her.

The remainder of the novel, however, is from her husband’s viewpoint, as Thomas, mourning the loss of his wife, now finds it difficult to survive in a distant corner of the world, with no close friends and unable to find the usual satisfaction in front of a sketch pad or an easel. What is he to do with his life?

But then another option confronts him, as his two CIA friends, Bernhard and Russ, return. They commiserate with him and offer to use their back-channel contacts to find the men responsible for his wife’s death. And thus “bring closure,” they say, to Thomas’ pain.

Except, Thomas is not interested in that type of closure, or in any type of revenge. He just wants to survive, to find meaning again in his life and in his art. And for much of this novel, the reader is inside Thomas’ mind, as the novel revolves around those concerns. Which means there is far less action and far less dialogue than in most novels. And yet there is no lack of drama. Even a walk home through driving rain offers Thomas a brief challenge. For, even then, his mind is reacting to nature’s unexpected onslaught; and we are learning more and more about this American abroad who is trying to survive, for he needs to adjust to both the lost of certainty that occurred after he lost his wife and to his county’s loss of innocence at the hands of the terrorists who razed the World Trade Center.

Thomas is forced to confront a further uncertainty when his CIA friends return to tell him that they have arrested four Moorish men whom they say killed his wife; and they invite him to witness the next interrogation. But as he witnesses a torture session at the hands of a policeman named Antoine, it does not offer Thomas the “closure’ his friends had promised him.

And so, he insists on confronting the men alone, showing them a portrait of the woman they killed, appealing to their humanity, and asking them why they did what they did. He takes this approach because to anticipate further violence, such as he has just witnessed being done to the prisoners, seems fruitless. Indeed, it has helped both Thomas and the reader understand better the failure behind the atmosphere of revenge that has recently permeated the American psyche. And it confirms both the author and his hero as being among those who believe that to be human requires that one forget any idea of revenge.

The word “forget” and its variations, appear frequently in the opening stages of this novel, but its implications are not emphasized, and it does not become an early theme. Instead, author Just seems more confortable in letting the idea slowly develop, until the final chapter, when Thomas retires to a sparse, foggy island off the coast of Maine. He is far from his Midwestern upbringing and his expatriate life in France. And his lonely life there, with little human contact, enables him to forget his espionage capers and the loss of his comfortable life abroad with his wife. He can at last concentrate on his art.

Whereupon, a visit from his former colleagues enforces, for him and for us, a final determination to forget the past. It is perhaps ironical, in fact, that this entire novel is built around Thomas being forced to remember his bachelor past, his espionage past, and his expatriate past, even as he seeks a world without that past.

This is a world, Harvey Freedenberg says in Bookpage, “where actions have consequences and moral debts must be repaid.” And this is what raises this novel for me to its true literary level. For it is about more than Thomas Railles. It also personalizes his and the author’s concerns about the change that terrorism, whether in the Pyrenees or in New York City, has introduced into all our lives.

But what is interesting is that the decision for revenge that Thomas faces is never itself addressed as a moral dilemma. Rather than the concept of there being a moral debt, which does exist, what he addresses is the practicality of revenge. To inflict pain on the four men will not relieve him of his own pain, he decides, nor of the loss of his wife. So why do it? Instead, relieving himself of his pain becomes a psychological decision—between forgetting and not forgetting. And he refuses to be swept up in the revenge atmosphere required by not forgetting. Because he is better than that. And we admire him for it. Indeed, we seem to admire almost any American hero who values his own independence above worldly concerns.

Every Ward Just novel seems to be far different from his companion novels. This novel has been no exception, which is why this reader looks forward to catching up with still more of his work. (November, 2019)

Home, by Marilynne Robinson

This 2008 work is a difficult novel for me to evaluate. It is about the Boughton family introduced in the writer’s previous work, Gilead, named for the town in which the family lives. But it is particularly about Glory Boughton and her estranged brother Jack. Glory has returned home to Gilead to care for her widowed father, Robert Boughton, a retired minister who is in ill health, when Jack unexpectedly arrives home as well, to be greeted warmly by Gloria but less so by his father, who resents his son’s twenty-year absence.

This novel has received favorable reviews, but it was difficult for me to identify with this family early in the work, when it is simply introducing its three main characters. But once it begins to develop their relationships, especially between Glory and Jack, my interest grew. For growing up in her father’s faith has instilled in Glory a sense of kindness and generosity, and one can easily identify with her. And, besides, she still loves her brother, who regrets abandoning his family and yet seems programmed to remain the black sheep among what were eight children. Glory’s relationship with her brother grows more and more complex for us, but it is through their conversations, their constant give and take, rather than through any physical actions. Indeed, their honest interactions represent the novel’s only plot, and one reads simply to learn where their relationship is headed.

Having been raised by their father, a minister, and having spent considerable time with John Ames, their father’s best friend and also a minister, we find that underpinning the complex family relationships is the idea of faith, a faith that obliges love and yet also carries its own obligations. Jack was the favorite of his father’s eight children, but the father both resents the boy’s abandonment of his family for twenty years and feels guilty with the realization that their alienation is partly his own fault. Whereas, Jack now has guilt feelings about his troubled youth before he left home. Glory, on the other hand, loves her brother despite his youthful indiscretions, and yet distrusts all males after having been abandoned by a fiancée whom she believed loved her. Having been raised by a minister, “faith for her,” she thinks, “was habit and family loyalty.”

The neighboring minister, John Ames, the main character in Gilead, is also a kind of father figure, and adds to the spiritual underpinning of these characters. As Robinson has Glory think, “Ames and her father had quarreled over [predestination] any number of times, her father asserting the perfect sufficiency of grace with something like ferocity, while Ames maintained, with a mildness his friend found irksome, that the gravity of sin could not be gainsaid.”

O. Scott in The New York Times suggest one explanation of these family relationships when he writes that “nothing in the novel rules out the possibility that Jack might exist outside the grace of God, and that this…might explain his loneliness and estrangement in the bosom of such a warm and generous family. Indeed, he also writes that “Home and Gilead are marvelous novels about family, friendship and aging…they are great novels.”

I myself would not go that far. But Robinson has certainly taken an intriguing approach to this family. That is, their continuous conversations bring out their innermost thoughts, as they cook for each other, clean the house, and tidy up the yard, all the while helping us to understand them as they strive to understand each other.

Michiko Kakatani, on the other hand, writes in the Times that “Home gives us scene after scene of Jack and Glory—and sometimes their father—talking to each other about their doubts and regrets and failed dreams. The result is a static and even suffocating narrative in which very little is dramatized…and it makes the characters, especially Jack, seem terribly self-absorbed.” Which also describes my reaction to the early sections of the novel. But then I began to relate to these same characters, began to see the pain, the restraint, their reaching out to one another, all of which enriched their mutual portraits.

The title “Home” is well chosen, for it focuses the reader on the essence of this novel, just as the title of “Gilead” focused one on the relationships in their town. Here, Glory and Jack have both returned home, having fled a sense of failure, of unfulfillment, of empty relationships and a resulting loneliness. What they seek from their father and their home’s familiar rooms is a return to their comfortable past, to an acceptance that will bring forgiveness, love, and self-worth.

There is also a sense of irony at the end. Jack misses out on a connection that might have answered certain needs. The scene is too underwritten, however, to carry the emotion it appears to strive for. And while Jack has returned home for some kind of acceptance, his father’s resentment reaches out through the love that he has long preached; and it is his refusal to pain his father further that prompts the boy’s departure. And so, while Jack does not want to remind his father of their past, his leaving further stokes his father’s bitterness.

This novel moves too quietly to prompt me to seek out further novels by Robinson. I write this, even though such a decision may be my loss. For this author certainly probes the subtle family relationships that so often appeal to me. And she underscores this probing through characters who retain their spiritual faith as they contend with guilt, forgiveness, and the reality of human emotions. (November, 2019)