Author: Robert A. Parker

Robert A. Parker, a retired writer and editor, currently writes the blog, A Literary Cavalcade, that offers reviews of 20th and 21st century fiction. His past reviews, written over six decades, have been published in six volumes, also called A Literary Cavalcade. His commentaries on cultural subjects have appeared in America, The Critic, Sign, Communication Arts, Americas, Vuelta, and other publications. He has designed, edited, and written 20 volumes that summarize the Parker family’s literary and photographic careers.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

This highly imaginative 2010 novel is far different from Cloud Atlas. There is one setting, Nagasaki, one time frame, around 1800, and one hero, Jacob de Zoet. It offers a rich blend of romance, adventure, and international intrigue in this story of Western vs. Eastern love, slavery vs. freedom, isolation vs. global trade, and a closed vs. an open society, plus the ramifications of murder and revenge, corruption and integrity, and justice and death.

Jacob de Zoet is a Dutch clerk who commits himself to five years in the Orient in order to earn his fortune and be able to marry a Dutch woman back home. But events conspire to keep him on the Dutch island enclave of Dejima, next to Nagasaki. He falls in love with a disfigured midwife, Orito, and fails to act when he sees her kidnapped. Eventually, the guilt he feels will guide has subsequent actions and enforce his later integrity.

Because Jacob has been sent by the Dutch East Indies Company to end the corruption at the outpost and to straighten its books, he becomes involved in the political intrigue there and its power players. As a result, he makes many enemies, and is even demoted when he refuses to accept the corruption of the departing chief. But he does find one friend in Doctor Marinus, a Dutch doctor who was training Orito before she was kidnapped.

Meanwhile, the reader follows the kidnapped Orito to a temple where she helps other kidnapped women give birth to babies that later disappear. This temple life leads to two brilliant scenes. In one, the better, Orito contrives to escape, only to turn back in order to help a close friend through a difficult birth. In the other, her Japanese suitor attempts to storm the temple with a band of armed men, only to be betrayed. His is the first of the deaths that will flavor this romantic tale with a dose of reality.

Reality also includes a conflict between the Dutch and Japanese cultures, and between the Dutch and British empires. The cultural conflict is more significant in literary terms, as it involves tradition vs. innovation and fate vs. risk. The tradition and fate come from the Japanese culture, a culture the author experienced when he himself taught for many years at Hiroshima. (Was it fate when he discovered the actual Dutch island redoubt at Nagasaki?)

The cultural clash is re-enforced by amusing sidebar conversations among de Zoet, who is learning Japanese, and various translators. In this way, Mitchell continually reminds us that his Western and Eastern characters have such different ways of looking at the same world.

That world also includes the rivalry between the Dutch and British empires, which is brought to a head when a British warship enters Nagasaki harbor with the intent of taking over Japan’s trade agreement with the Dutch. We board the English warship Phoebus and witness the political and military maneuvering of its crew and its Captain Penhaligon. There is also a debate, as in the Dutch enclave, about the integrity of their strategy, which is resolved here somewhat arbitrarily when the captain sees in the courageous de Zoet the image of his own late son.

This is the climax of the novel, which then winds slowly down, revealing the eventual fate of the surviving characters. It is a routine ending that has been the product of a vivid imagination and a fascinating exploration of the contrast between cultures and the different values in those cultures.

Several years ago, Mitchell said in an interview: “My intention is to write a bicultural novel, where Japanese perspectives are given an equal weight to Dutch/European perspectives.” He has certainly done so here, especially when he takes us from the rooms of the Dutch enclave and the cabins of the English warship to the halls of both the villain and the Japanese magistrates. There is a blend of the fantasy of a storyteller and the realism of a historian.

Mitchell has also written: “One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of my mind is to ask why would anyone want to read this…People’s time, if you bought it off them, is expensive. Someone’s going to give you eight or ten hours of their life. I want to give them something back, and I want it to be an enjoyable experience.” And this he certainly achieves in this flowing and fascinating story of an innocent Dutchman encountering corruption, then love, then integrity, and finally courage in a foreign world with a far longer perspective toward life than exists in Western culture. Indeed, the title that refers to the thousand autumns of Jacob also refers to the perspective with which Japan regards its own history—and perhaps to Jacob’s identification with that history.

To sum up, this story of Westerners struggling to survive in a Japanese world of different values is a marvelous achievement. It also required considerable research to bring that Japanese world alive. For it is a world of isolation, cruelty, and fate, and yet a world of decorum and mystery.

It is also a world of fantasy, especially the temple of sacrificed children, as well as a world of reality, such as the English warship that actually entered Nagasaki harbor—although, historically, a few years later. But this later point demonstrates how Mitchell used his research and actual history in order to make real not only the action of this novel but also the cultural context of this strange world in which that action takes place. One critic calls this novel, “the triumph of decorum and honor in a world of corruption and perversion.” It is true, if you understand that the decorum and the perversion belong to both cultures.

As Nathan Weatherford notes in his review, “By methodically showing us at the outset of the novel how outwardly different in custom and costume the two cultures are, he makes the personal similarities between characters on each side of this cultural divide that much more apparent in subsequent chapters, [as] the choices made by characters from each culture all hinge on the same basic fears and loves.” He also calls the “intricately structured” international relations, “a metaphor for the inner struggle going on in each character’s soul.”

This work achieves all of that, blending history and imagination, romance and reality, innocence and evil, and the justice of fate. (November, 2015)

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

This 1960 work is magnificent history. I had expected Shirer to depict the German side of World War II through his own experiences, but this is Shirer portraying the German leadership’s experience as recorded in official records captured after the war, plus the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, and the diaries and memoirs of German leaders. And what is remarkable is that Shirer was able to absorb these hundreds of sources, fix them in his memory, and then organize them into a fascinating narrative.

The effort required five years. Perhaps colleagues helped him find and organize such voluminous information, but it is a marvelous achievement nevertheless, and was produced in a world without computers, a world that make researching facts and organizing them so much easier today. And yet one also wonders, will such paper records ever be available again. Mainly, because the German culture seemed to make such record-keeping second nature, but also because computerized records are more susceptible to obsolescence.

As I recall, this work made a deep splash when it was published, and certainly deserved it. But it is rarely spoken of today. So much has happened, including three major wars that have supplanted our memories of the major war of the last century. But that war offers a lesson that confirms the old adage by Santayana that Shirer quotes at the start: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Shirer begins by focusing his work on Hitler himself, portraying him as a modest hero in World War I, earning the Iron Cross twice, once first class. It is a wise decision, for it lays the groundwork for what is to come. Shirer thus follows Hitler through his early years without true friends, his abrasive personality, and his years of poverty in Vienna. But throughout these years his resentment of how Germany was treated after World War I fuels his ambition to somehow redress those wrongs.

After the failure of his Munich beer hall putsch, Hitler is imprisoned, and in prison he writes the first half of his Mein Kampf. In it, he reveals the strategy he will follow when he rises to power, and one senses a certain respect from Shirer for a man who so successfully follows his own roadmap. Hitler’s most important strategy is his determination that the German people will vote him into power. He will not overthrow the government. And he succeeds, of course—primarily because German society lost faith in a government that allowed high inflation and was unable to lift them from the poverty that followed the worldwide depression of 1929. The result is that with each election, until 1933, Hitler’s promises and his appeals to the nation’s past earn more and more votes.

What becomes fascinating is the step-by-step process by which Hitler undercut’s the judicial, political, economic, and military forces in contol, until his Nazi party completely control the lives of every German. Underlying this history, however, is that many of the professional army men, including generals, were reluctant to follow Hitler’s aggressive plans, primarily because they did not feel the German army was strong enough to face the French and the English. The plotting of these generals reached its peak just before Munich, but then they backed off when they saw that war was not coming.

When war did come in Septembe, 1939, the Nazi blitzkrieg overran Poland; but then hostilities paused, and the Allies tended to relax. Hitler, however, surprised them by invading Denmark and Norway in 1940. He wanted Norwegian airfields for bombing Britain and Norwegian ports for gaining control of the North Sea and ending the Allied blockade. He had quick success because the English were caught completely off-guard.

France also fell easily, because its army was no match for the new German armor. At this point, Hitler expected the British to admit defeat, and when they did not he began bombing London and other centers. But the British also had their own bombing strategy, which called for raiding the Channel ports where the Germans were amassing thousands of boats.

The invasion never happened, Shirer reports for two reasons. First, these raids destroyed the boats the Germans needed to cross the Channel. Second, the German army and navy could not agree on an invasion strategy. The army wanted to invade England all along the Channel coast, but the navy said there were not enough boats to do so. The navy wanted to assault a narrow area, for which they had enough boats, but the army feared the British could amass a large enough army in that small area to repel the invading Germans. So much time was lost in this debate that Hitler postponed the invasion until the spring.

Because Hitler really understood land warfare rather than sea warfare, he fixed his eyes on Russia in 1941. To protect his southern flank, however, he first invaded the Balkans. And there he made a disastrous error, Shirer says. Because when Yugoslav patriots resisted his assault, he became so enraged that he ordered their country destroyed. Which happened. But this temper tantrum delayed his attack on Russia for a month, which meant that his army had one month less to execute his war strategy before the Russian winter arrived. And this proved fatal to his initial invasion.

Another major mistake occurred when the Germans advanced hundreds of miles into Russia on three fronts, and then were faced with a decision. The generals wanted to focus their attack on Moscow, center of the government, transportation services, and industry, but Hitler had set his sights on the grain and oil in the Ukraine to the south. Hitler had his way, of course, and Shirer quotes his generals as saying that this decision might well have cost Germany total victory.

Because shortly afterward came rain and mud, and then an early winter, with temperatures dropping below zero. The Russians were able to counter-attack because their soldiers had clothing and armaments that worked under these conditions, whereas the Germans did not. Equally significant was that Hitler lost faith in his generals, because their army had been stopped for the first time. As a result, he took over command of the army himself.

As the Russians made their winter advance, four major developments marked the first change in the war’s course. First, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Germans were confronted with a new adversary that they grossly underestimated. Second, in Africa, Rommel advanced to El Alemein, where he asked for re-enforcements for a final drive to conquer Egypt; but Hitler refused, and Montgomery’s quick counter-attack pushed the Afrika Corps back into Libya. Third, the Allies landed a large force in the French colonies of Morocco and Algeria in November, their first step in conquering Southern Europe. And fourth, to replenish his army in 1942 after a loss of a million men in Russia in 1941, Hitler drafted soldiers from Hungary, Rumania, Italy, and other eastern nations, soldiers who were far inferior to the German, less well armed, and had no will to fight for Germany in Russia.

With these soldiers, the Germans did advance that summer deep into the south, toward Stalingrad and the Caucusus’ oil. But again Hitler made a poor decision. He split his forces rather than concentrating on one objective, resulting in their again being stopped. And when winter returned, the tide again turned. For Hitler refused to let his troops retreat, resulting in the complete destruction of his southern armies near Stalingrad. And this obsession never to retreat would decimate still more of his forces in many battles to come.

As the tide turns, Shirer pauses here to report the atrocities that were taking place in German-held territory. As his armies occupied neighboring countries, Hitler ordered that their citizens be used as slave labor in his military industries. He also began ordering the mass killing of Jews and, in Russia, of Bolsheviks. These were executed by gunfire, after the victims were ordered into large pits. While Shirer acknowledges that casualty figures are difficult to even estimate, he suggests that as many as one million died in this manner.

But the Final Solution called for Jews to be killed in far greater numbers. And so the concentration, or extermination, camps were created, where Jews, mainly, but gypsies and others, were gassed. This was more efficient, as Auschwitz records showed that as many as 6,000 could be executed in one day. Again, numbers are elusive, but Shirer says that of the 10 million Jews that lived in territories captured by the Germans, at least half of them were killed. Thousands of others, of course, and not just Jews, but women and children, were the victims of medical experiments.

As Allied forces captured northern Africa in May, 1943, and turned their eyes toward Sicily and Italy, Mussolini became despondent. So much so that his army rebelled, incarcerated him, and put the king of Italy back in power. But Hitler reacted quickly, and sent his armies to occupy all of Italy down to Salerno, where the Allies had landed. He also rescued Mussolini in a daring raid on a mountaintop hotel. Shirer cites Hitler’s affection for Il Duce, even with the Italian’s bravado and incompetence.

The tide had turned, in fact, by 1943, as the Russians began their first summer offensive, British and American bombers were devastating German cities, and German u-boats were driven from the Atlantic, enabling America to ship its military supplies to England in preparation for D-day.

In 1943, the army generals continue to plot against Hitler. I did not realize this. A time-bomb was put on a plane as Hitler is returning from the Russian front, but it did not explode. A suicide bomber concealed a bomb in his coat and attended a meeting with Hitler present, but the bomb’s timer needed ten minutes, and Hitler limited his visit to only eight minutes, so the bomber cancelled the attempt. Although these attempts failed, the rebels, including many generals, continued plotting. They were hampered, however, when many field marshals at first supported them and then backed out. But their plans came to a head when a severely wounded veteran, Count von Staffenberg, a young colonel who had lost an arm and an eye in the war, joined them.

The story of the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt is a remarkable one. Staffenberg was action-oriented, the type of leader the movement needed, for the older generals who had started it were too cautious, many fearful without the leadership of their superiors, others waiting for the coup to succeed before they joined. The Count finally realized only he could plant the time-bomb that was to be used. Called to a meeting with Hitler, he planted the armed bomb under a heavy oak table, then left. He was at the gate when the bomb exploded, and assumed Hitler had been killed. But an officer at the meeting had moved the bomb out of his way under the table, moving it from one side of a heavy oak table support to the other side, which shielded Hitler from the blast.

This is only a part of the story, however. With a successful assassination, the plotters had intended to take over Berlin, announce Hitler’s death, and seek from the Allies an end to the war. But they frustrated their own plans when they delayed acting until they knew Hitler was dead. And then failed even more when they did not cut phone communications, take over the local radio, arrest Goebbels and others, and convince the strong local troops to support them.

Once Hitler’s forces took back control, they shot Stauffenberg and others immediately, and arrested and tortured still more to learn who was involved. In all, more than 5,000 plotters were executed, many hung by wire from a meat hook. When Rommel, recovering from a bomb explosion, was betrayed as a collaborator, he was given the opportunity to take poison, and then given a promised state funeral. Meanwhile, all Germans, both military and civilian, condemned the plotters as traitors, and rallied behind Hitler. Shirer asks how this could happen when everyone could see the destruction that Hitler had brought upon this nation. He concludes that the German culture made “a blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man, and put a premium on servility.”

Meanwhile, the D-Day invasion forces had landed, completely fooling the Germans by choosing Normandy and using inclement weather. Now their armies were advancing into France. These final days in the history of Nazi Germany and the life of Hitler are both calamitous and sad. The calamity follows continually from Hitler’s refusal to allow his soldiers to retreat. He calls it dishonorable, whereas the generals see it enabling their troops to fight another day. This debate reached its climax in the West with the Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler’s last gamble to stop the Allies, and it required a great Allied effort to defeat his desperate army. Also, because Hitler withdrew soldiers from the East to execute it, he left the Eastern front vulnerable to the Russian latest winter advance.

The sad element was Hitler’s physical and mental condition. By then, he was a sick man. The toll of continued defeats, life underground in bunkers, poisonous drugs prescribed by his doctor, and continued temper tantrums left him nearly unrecognizable to friends. His left arm hung loosely, his entire body trembled, he limped, he suffered dizziness as a result of the July 20 explosion, and his face revealed complete exhaustion. “All his movements were those of a senile man,” wrote a young captain. The dictator had also lost all touch of reality, ordering attacks from his Berlin bunker by armies that no longer existed, and accusing those who recognized this reality of treason.

Shirer details the final hours of Hitler, as he shot himself, Eva Braun poisoned herself, the Goebbels killed their six children and themselves, and a few escaped from the Bunker, although not Martin Bormann. The war had lasted five years, eight months, and seven days; and the thousand-year Nazi Germany had lasted twelve years, four months, and eight days. And in this work of about 1,250 pages, William Shirer has written what the esteemed Hugh Trevor-Roper once called, “a splendid work of scholarship, objective in method, sound in judgment, inescapable in its conclusions.”

This work justly received rave reviews on its publication, and racked up tremendous sales. But it is not often referred to today, which is a commentary on a current society interested only in today’s headlines. Granted that there is much to concern us today, and it is usually not centered in Europe, but there are still cruel, unjust killings geared, as there were in Germany, to eliminate different peoples. And, indeed, one of those people is the same, the Jews.

To sum up, this work of history should never be forgotten and never be unavailable. It contains lessons for all world leaders. That the earlier you are aware of and act against unscrupulous men or women who would take over their corner of the world, the more effective you will be in defeating their efforts. And that any delay in your response will allow immeasurable harm to you, your enemy, and your neighbors.

This work also offers a lesson to historians. That history is based on facts, on original sources, and that a journalist has different tools to discover and interpret those sources than does a historian who prefers to consult the work of other historians from his ivory tower. Not that bias is not in the journalist’s repertoire. Shirer wrote this book, I would suggest, because he despised what Nazi Germany imposed on the people of Europe, especially the Jews. But his bias also included the thinking of his time when he negatively characterized homosexuals.

One wonders how the world of historians will change in today’s era of technological change and ephemeral social media. How will today’s historical records survive? Will contemporaneous thinking be preserved, rather than refined later in a leader’s memoirs?

For this work carries the reader into the inner sanctums of Nazi Germany. Here is what their leaders were thinking at each step of the war. We witness their daring assumption of power in Germany, their diplomatic challenges to the nations around them, their sense of inevitable success as they expand their empire, their refusal to acknowledge their mistakes as the war advances, the infighting as their armies are halted and turned back, their refusal to acknowledge the tide has turned, their desperation as their fate becomes certain, and the final madness of their leader.

This is remarkable history. Without the inherent evil of Nazi Germany, its rise and fall verges on tragedy. For there is an inevitability to its fate, a fate that is inherent in its culture and in the character of its people. And yet…how different is the Germany of today, a representative democracy and an economic bulwark of the continent.

It is the only error Shirer made. Probably because he got too close to the evil of the 1930s and 1940s. He could not see what Germany was to become. He could not see the possibility of change in these people so renowned for their philosophy and their music. Just as Americans could not see back then the economic powerhouse that Japan would become and the source of stability it would represent in the Pacific. How the world changes. How it stays the same. (October, 2015)

Three novels by Ellery Queen

My favorite author as a teenager was Ellery Queen, a pseudonym for two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. What appealed to me was the blend of their literate style and the intricate crime puzzles they created. I was particularly fascinated by the challenge they offered each reader in their early novels. For just before their detective solved the crime, the authors stopped the story and told the reader that he or she now had all the facts that Ellery had, and challenged the reader to solve the crime before reading on. This appealed to an adolescent mind just encountering the challenge of the adult world.

Since I had read most of the Queen mysteries before making my literary comments, I began wondering how I would evaluate Queen’s works today, more than seventy years later. Would they justify my adolescent interest? Or would they expose the shallowness of that early focus? So I decided to read one early work, which featured the reader challenge, one later work that developed the humanity of the chief characters, and a final work that, as I recall, showed author Queen at the height of his literary powers.

            My three comments follow.

 

The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932)

As a literate description of a wake and funeral open this mystery, followed by the discovery of a murder victim, I realized I was evaluating this work with an eye on the past as well as on my reaction today. That is, I was analyzing what was there that made me love Ellery Queen so much in the past. Now that I know that when Dannay and Lee created their works, that one was strong on the literary side and one strong on the puzzle side, I can separate those aspects and realize that it was the puzzle side that originally intrigued me.

In the opening third of this work, the focus is on Ellery puzzling out how a dead body could have been placed in a coffin. It is a variation on the locked-room mystery. And he puzzles out what did not happen to find his way to what did happen. It is still today an intriguing process that Ellery goes through, but also a very self-aware one. In addition, the authors stress that this is Ellery’s first case chronologically, that he is still wet behind the ears, and this is why in the investigation he takes a subsidiary role to his father, Inspector Queen.

Written in the early 1930s, the work is set in the 20s, and its structure reflects its era of detective fiction. The main characters belong to a central household, in this case an East Side, Manhattan mansion. Also, the characters are portrayed more in their relationship to the victim or the crime, than in their relationships with one another. And, like the detectives of the era, they have their own idiosyncrasies. In this case, Inspector Queen has his snuff box, while Ellery has both his pince nez and an obnoxious tendency to quote classic literature as he summarizes or comments on the latest scene.

In the center of this work, Ellery begins coming up with potential solutions, but in each case a new fact negates his solution. Each new development is logical, but for me each also reflects an intrusion by the author to complicate the situation. What is interesting is Ellery’s approach to these solutions. He reaches them by a process of elimination, by explaining what could not have happened, how a particular person could not have done such and such. Until, finally, he is left with one conclusion, that only this could have happened and only this person could have done it. It calls for a painstaking explanation in each case, but what Ellery calls his logical approach is intellectually convincing.

An art context helps to make interesting the pursuit of the villain, and adds cultural seriousness to the story. The key to the villain’s motivation is a painting by Leonardo. Parallel to the search for the villain is the search for the painting. Where is it? Is it real or a copy? Why is it in New York?? Who is its legitimate owner? Will it be returned to London?

During this work, Ellery comes up with four different solutions, each more complicated that the preceding one. One solution is even a false one intended to trap the true killer. And the final solution, in fact, becomes so complicated that the final identification of the killer is a complete surprise. It is truly the least expected person. And yet, also, it is so surprising that, despite all the logic, it carries an air of being contrived by the author rather than by the actual circumstances.

Concerning the challenge to the reader, it is true that the reader has all the facts. But a number of such facts are slipped in so casually that the reader does not make anything of them at the time. So, yes, the authors are strictly fair, but they are also too clever by half. No one can be expected to pick up such clues when they appear, although one can recall many of them in retrospect. Such challenges, I think, were made simply to separate Queen’s mysteries from his competitors.’ And they certainly were the element that intrigued me.

This has been an exercise in logic more than an adventure in crime, more about the actions of its characters than the characters themselves. But the writing is in keeping with the genre of those times. And the emphasis on logic not only separated it from other detective stories of that era but also appealed to my interests of that time. Which was that of a youth unaware of the emotional connections among people but becoming aware of his own intellect and the means it offered to understand more about people and about life. (September, 2015)

Halfway House (1936)

This is much better, a far richer mystery novel. Because the characters are real. Because their relationships are real. Ellery is merely an observer, remaining in the background until the dénouement.

Ellery is a friend of Bill Angell, whom he meets casually during a stop in Trenton, New Jersey. A murder immediately occurs, that of Joe Wilson, Bill’s brother-in-law. The uniqueness of the story is that Joe is really Joseph Gimball of a wealthy New York family and he has been living a double life with his middle-class wife Lucy in Philadelphia. The title of the work comes from his regularly changing his identity at an abandoned shack in Trenton about halfway between New York and Philadelphia, and in this shack he is killed.

One wonders, in fact, if Queen changed his title format with this volume—from the more austerely titled Egyptian, Greek, and Spanish, etc. mysteries to Halfway House—because he decided to change his approach to writing mysteries. That he wanted to make them closer to true novels by emphasizing character and relationships, which in turn opened the door to a more literary treatment.

And I believe the naturalness, the believability, of this tale stems from this more novelistic approach. For it is not Ellery’s role here that intrigues us, nor his relationship with Bill, which keeps him on the scene. What draws the interest of the reader is the tensions between the Wilson and Gimball families, and, even more, within the Gimball family in New York. From beautiful daughter Andrea Gimball, who likes Bill and whose relationship warms up and humanizes this mystery, to her mother Jessica, to her fiancé Jones, to the family lawyer Senator Frueh, to family friend and advisor Grosvenor Finch. These people are continually discussing and debating their proper response to the revelation of Joe Wilson/Joe Gimbell’s double life and murder.

Interest is also enhanced by the seventy-page description of a trial in the center of the book. It is the trial of Lucy Wilson for the murder of her husband Joe. The police theory is that she was angry at the deception of her husband, but the reader suspects, despite incriminating evidence, that she is not guilty. What is impressive, however, is that the trial is so brilliantly and suspensefully presented—with both the prosecutor Pollinger and Bill, who is defending his sister, making telling legal points in both presenting evidence and cross-examining witnesses. Seldom have I come across a trial scene that presented both sides so objectively and so effectively, with the outcome constantly in doubt.

Ellery remains basically a witness to events until the solution to the murder is revealed. He is also more self-aware of his celebrity, and has thankfully toned down his quotations from the literary classics. What is remarkable, however, is that when he finally stands front and center, when he begins his explanation of the crime and it stretches out to more than forty pages, I remained continually engrossed. For rarely does one come across such a fascinating and dramatic dénouement, one so different from the dry, long-winded explanations that top off many a detective story.

The dénouement is basically in two parts, first a description of the crime itself, related at the actual crime scene with all the suspects present; and then a presentation to the judge and prosecutor at Lucy’s trial, describing the characteristics of the killer, showing that it is not Lucy but another who fits all of Ellery’s requirements to be the killer. And Ellery does this without revealing the actual identity of the killer until the absolute end, while the reader keeps shifting his choice back and forth among the suspects. It is a marvelous feat of writing, sustaining the drama to the end.

As for Ellery’s solution to the crime, he again challenges the reader before revealing the criminal’s identity. And the key discovery comes from six match stubs found at the murder scene, a discovery he highlights but which appears to mean nothing until he logically explains their significance. Is it an irony or a coincidence, by the way, that it is pipe-smoking Ellery who reaches this logical conclusion? Then, as in earlier works, the detective’s logic is confirmed by apparently innocuous seeds of evidence that Queen, as the author, has carefully planted. Which is not a criticism, merely an observation.

I do have one criticism, however. I cannot find, through rereading, how the killer knew the victim was going to the Halfway House on that particular evening. Plus that the victim was going there to reveal his double identity. For such knowledge was needed in advance to enable the killer to set up the patsy for the crime. Did the telegrams come to light, for example? Otherwise, why would the murderer have been there exactly then? In addition, the killer’s motive is generally stated, as revenge for Joe’s betrayal of the New York wife, but it does not seem to be a driving force in the killer’s life.

These would seem to be negatives that require an editorial adjustment, but author Queen was so popular at the time, and his logic so mesmerizing, that his publishers may have refrained from suggesting any editorial change. Who knows? Maybe, somewhere early on, my objection is accounted for. But I just could not find it. (September, 2015)

I now surprise myself by discovering at the end of this volume a commentary I had written in 1988. Which means that this is the third time I have read this novel—suggesting that the positive impression it made on me earlier is why I have read it again. Here is my 1988 review, one that is basically consistent with the above:

“A return to Queen proves very entertaining and rewarding. This book works because of the human relationships: Queen to the hero, the hero Bill to his suspect sister, the victim’s dual relationship to two families, and the wealthy family’s internal relationships. The puzzle is not great, although adequate, the solution not truly surprising (yet logical), the setting of Trenton not vivid.

“But the book works because this is a group of people caught up in interesting, crossing relationships, with a murder committed in their midst. Plus, the pacing is good, the trial scene well done, the dialogue mostly effective, and Ellery has a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward himself—all contributing to the book’s effectiveness. This may have been a transition point in Queen’s writing career, as it was for the victims in the story. One should read more Queen to find out, first back, and then forward.”

Which I am now in the process of doing.

Calamity Town (1942)

I must precede this commentary with an anecdote. I was so impressed by this mystery as a teenager that I mentioned it to a college colleague, a fellow writer. Oh, yes, he said, and I never suspected that so-and-so was the killer, naming that actual killer. Oh, no, I said, I had forgotten who it was and wanted to read it again. He apologized, but it did me no good. Because from that day to now, nearly seventy years later, I have not forgotten the name of the killer. And so I read it today with that foreknowledge. Which perhaps will enable me to appreciate better the artfulness of the telling. We shall see.

 

Ah, what fools these mortals be! For all these decades I have misinterpreted what my college friend said. He had been surprised, he said, that Pat—and I quickly interrupted, assuming from how he began that he was naming the killer. And so I had not wanted him to continue. Because I wanted to read this work again, and wanted to be able to rediscover who was the actual villain.

Except, my new reading reveals that the killer was not Pat. That I had forgotten who was, and that this reading enabled me to discover again who truly was. Which I will get to—with the caveat that my mistaken memory has not affected my response to this work.

For now, I suggest that what may have impressed my friend, and prompted his opening comment, was the surprising relationship that developed between Ellery Queen and this girl named Pat. Never before had Ellery become emotionally involved with one of the characters in a mystery story. Yet here it was, beginning with casual flirting, and then evolving into an emotional connection.

What, I wondered, was author Queen going to do with this? (Of course, I was also wondering how on earth, given the events, Pat could be the murderer.) Well, in truth, author Queen ducked out on the romance issue —and not that convincingly. For Ellery simply returns to solving the crime, and to demonstrating the emotionless brain power that he has long been known for. So the starting of the relationship was a surprise, but not its ending.

But to the novel itself, and the fond memories which prompted me to revisit it. I can see why. Because the setting is so different. Author Queen has created at entire town, Wrightsville, presumably located in upstate New England or New York. It is so different from Queen’s metropolitan environments that one was used to encountering. It is a town filled with taxi drivers, hotel clerks, a newspaper publisher, reporters, pharmacists, real estate brokers, bar owners, nosey neighbors, and a town drunk, as well as a police chief, prosecutor, coroner, and judge, as required by mystery stories.

Another difference is the family that the author has created at the center of his mystery. This is the Wright family, whose ancestors founded the town, and who represent the pinnacle of society. There are the older parents, Hermione and John F., daughters Lola, Nora, and Pat, Nora’s former fiancée Jim who fled on the eve of their wedding and has now returned, and Jim’s sister Rosemary. Complicating the relationships is that the newspaper publisher Frank Lloyd still loves Nora and the county prosecutor Carter Bradford loves Pat.

Ellery becomes involved with this family after choosing to settle in Wrightsville to write a novel, and he rents a house that originally was to be the home of Nora and Jim. And then he gracefully gives it up when Jim returns and Nora accepts a new marriage proposal. The family is grateful to Ellery, draws him into their home, and then he becomes fascinated when, first, letters appear that threaten the life of Nora, and then another person is killed, apparently in her place. It is an intriguing situation that involves the reader as well, and I can see why I liked this work so much—both the rural setting created by Queen and the involved family relationships—and why Ellery himself was equally drawn into the situation.

There is again an interesting trial for murder. In this case, Jim is accused of murder, and prosecutor Bradford tries to prove his guilt, while Ellery, his rival for Pat’s affection, looks for evidence that the reader assumes will exonerate Jim. The evidence is more circumstantial than in Halfway House, while the trial itself ends abruptly after an arbitrary action by one of the characters. Or should one say the author? In any event, we then come to the ending, and to Ellery’s detailed logic that explains who is the villain. And I must say it is richly complex, and fascinating in its complexity. Its twist, in fact, is worthy of an Agatha Christie.

But while it ties the actions of these characters together as a logical possibility, it is not convincing to me as the only possibility. It involves, for example, a major moral change in one of the characters, a sudden psychological weakness on the part of another, and a false identity for two additional characters. This is a lot to chew on, as Ellery lays out his surprising theory of what actually happened.

The result is that I remain impressed but unconvinced. Impressed by the writing, the family dynamics, and the setting, but not convinced by the solution. Nor by the deaths at the end that re-enforce the tidy solution. I sense that author Queen wanted to create a surprise ending that turned the story back on itself. And in theory he did. But, with the two arbitrary deaths capping it off, it was simply too much for me. (September, 2015)

With this reading, I complete my brief current review of Queen’s works. I explained earlier what drew me to this series. And I remained interested as author Queen stretched the usual parameters of the mystery format. He wanted to move beyond the genre level, and one can only admire him for that literary ambition. On the other hand, I can see why Ellery the detective is often seen as too egotistical, too detached, and too comfortable with his own logic—even with the humanizing introduced in the third work here. It is this emphasis on logic that primarily concerned me in the last two of these works, in that it leaves no room for other possibilities. It appears to be a hallmark that author Queen introduced in order to make Ellery distinctive, but I believe he emphasized it too much.

The Daughters of Mars, by Thomas Keneally

Keneally is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and this 2012 novel is one of his best. It offers a broad historic canvas, and through the experiences of two nurses it explores the blend of pain, dedication, and heroism triggered by war, in this case World War I.

The nurses are volunteer Australian nurses, Sally and Naomi Durance, who in 1915 are sent off to Europe to treat wounded soldiers on hospital ships and in hospital tents. And they quickly learn the harrowing effect of war on men’s lives, a major point of this novel. But first we get to know the nurses themselves. Naomi is more aggressive, Sally, whom we get closer to, less so. Prior to the war, Sally has stayed home to nurse, while Naomi has gone to the big city to serve its more prestigious doctors.

The two sisters are united, most strongly, by a single incident that troubles Sally, their having collaborated in the mercy killing of their mother who was suffering unmercifully as she neared death. And while they do not regret her death, they do have a guilty conscience about their plotting—and this has separated them. For whenever they are close, it forces them to acknowledge what they planned together.

Two amazing scenes enliven the first 150 pages. The first is on a hospital ship, as its nurses and doctors receive the first wave of horribly injured soldiers from the battlefields at Gallipoli. The second is the torpedoing of a converted troopship, and its dramatic sinking while soldiers and nurses cling to drifting lifeboats. But as the two scenes convey the horror of war, this shared experience by Sally and Naomi also brings the sisters closer together.

After Sally and Naomi reconcile, they are separated by the vagaries of war when Naomi breaks discipline and is sent back to Australia. This, however, allows Keneally to broaden his canvas, to include more of the home front as well as more seaboard life. When they eventually rejoin, it is in France.

Something interesting happens in the center section of this novel. We move back and forth between Sally and Naomi as they become nurses in France and move closer to the front. But in dramatic tension, in the movement of the plot, nothing really happens. Each gets closer to a man, each becomes gradually aware that a new satisfaction may come from such a relationship. But nothing happens that makes the reader ask what these characters will do next. And yet, this section of the novel is continually fascinating—a tribute, I think, to the skill of this novelist. One reason is that Keneally brings to life the details of that era, along with the uncertainty of warfare and the physical pain that engulfs the nursing stations.

As Sally and Naomi develop their relationships with two men, however, the reader does wonder whether they will find happiness with these two figures at the end of the novel. Because this is a serious work of literature, and given that men are being maimed and killed all along the battlefront, the fate of these lovers is uncertain. It also becomes morally complex when Keneally raises a matter of conscience, and of justice. For Naomi’s lover, Ian, is imprisoned after he has volunteered as a Quaker to serve in a medical unit to save men, but then refuses an order to take up a rifle and kill men.

One problem I had was differentiating among the various nurses. Each has her own characteristics, but they do not sufficiently motivate their actions. And so I found it difficult to separate them whenever they reappeared on the scene. Perhaps they would have been better individualized if they had interacted more, influencing each other, especially Sally and Naomi. Matron Mitchie stands out because she did exactly that, as well as because of the injury she suffers.

The same difficulty applies to the doctors and soldiers with whom the nurses form attachments. They exist primarily in their relationship to a particular nurse, a nurse whose own existence is not separate enough from her fellow nurses.

Just before the ending, Keneally hints at how he will handle the fate of the two sisters. The issue is the fate of their mother as she suffered her excruciating death. And Keneally does not tell us the cause of that death. Was it a natural death, or a mercy killing? And which of the sisters is telling the truth? The lack of a clear answer hints at what is to come.

Then we do come to that ending. Shades of the French lieutenant. There are two endings. We have a choice. Who will live and who will die? The author appears to leave it to the reader. Did he want to have his literary cake and eat it, too? I cannot decide. Both endings are beautifully written. And one wants to be convinced by both. But is Keneally being fair? Is this even a matter or artistic integrity? Bottomline, it is as if Keneally has decided that a major character must die if his novel is to have literary stature, but he cannot decide who it is to be.

Overall, this is a marvelous novel. It is a portrait of two sisters, primarily, but it is also a portrait of war and even more of the nursing profession in war. One lives with these characters off the shores of Gallipoli, then in lifeboats plunging with the sea, and finally moving back and forth through the mud and poppy fields of France.

And yet what one remembers here are not the individual nurses, except Sally and Naomi. What one remembers are the nurses’ loyalty to their profession, as they physically lift and carry these soldiers, wash and bandage their wounds, fed them or inject morphine, cheer them with talk or watch over them in sleep. It is indeed a marvelous achievement to put the reader in the casualty wards of this suffering and recuperating army so far from home.

Indeed, one should note that this war is vividly created without one battle scene. The war is made real by its wounded and its dead. And one may surely argue that this justifies the significance of this novel. That while it lives through the adventures of the two sisters, its literary stature emerges from its exposure of the sufferings of innocent youth.

Keneally was 77 when he published this novel. May he continue to explore our humanity within the sufferings that life brings. (September, 2015)

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Second reading. I read this 1960 novel many years ago, but with the recent publication of Harper Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman—which she wrote before this one, and which covered the same characters twenty years later—I decided to reread this classic. I wanted to compare my response today with the review I wrote more than five decades ago. Because that review had not been entirely positive for a novel that is now recommended reading in every schoolroom. What had I missed?

My initial reaction to this second reading is to see why it has become so popular, so recommended by both parents and teachers. For this is the ideal book to put into an adolescent’s hands. It has a real story. It is about children; and it is told from their viewpoint, especially that of a young tomboy named Scout. And most important, almost every page teaches a lesson about how both children and adults should conduct themselves.

There are examples of how children should behave toward siblings, friends, and parents, as well as toward teachers, authorities, and neighbors—indeed, toward everyone they encounter. And also how adults should conduct themselves with their children, their relatives, and their friends, as well as with strangers of any age, any social level, and any race. Readers learn this primarily from Scout’s father, Atticus, but also from Scout’s reactions to others, especially to her brother Jem.

In some ways, this novel’s portrait of Southern society recalls The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—perhaps because that novel is also related from a child’s viewpoint. But this work is a far cry from Twain’s classic. Because the events presented here are completely on the surface. There is gossip but no true social satire, and there is no subtle Southern texture, no psychological complexity, no hidden meanings boiling just below the surface.

Indeed, the Gregory Peck movie version was so successful, I believe, because there is so little under the surface to bring forth. And movies, with their emphasis on the visual, belong to the surface. They always find it difficult to capture the complex subtleties inside any work of fiction.

Three children are at the center of this novel, Scout, her brother Jem, four years older, and their friend Dill, a smart but immature boy supposedly based on the author’s friend, Truman Capote. Much of the action and most of the social observations revolve around Scout’s father Atticus Finch. He is a respected lawyer, with a black servant, Calpurnia, running his household.

Beyond Scout’s home are gossiping neighbors who provide simple social satire, and downtown are Judge Taylor and Sheriff Tate, both involved with the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. This trial and its repercussions are the centerpiece of the novel. Finally, there are the Cunninghams and the Ewells, lower class whites derided by the upper levels of white society, and Boo Radley, a neighbor who represents innocence.

Early events in the novel show Scout’s childhood life, from tensions on the school playground and in the classroom, to the scouting of recluse Boo Radley’s house, to the building of a snowman and its loss in a neighborhood fire, to, finally, the arrival of Aunt Alexandra to “civilize” Scout and Jem.

Then the rape of an Ewell girl and the trial of Tom Robinson is introduced. In my original reading, I suggested that the rape and the subsequent events exist in an adult world that the children do not belong to, and that they had to be forced into that world (as downtown witnesses at night, and joining the blacks in the courtroom balcony). I did not feel that earlier concern this time, but that reaction does have validity. Meanwhile, town events ranged from the people’s reaction to Atticus defending a “nigger,” to a dramatic confrontation with Atticus before the jail, to the extended treatment of the trial itself. Some critics, note, attribute the details of the trial to Lee’s interest in the law, and to her father having been a lawyer.

I wondered, however, in my first review whether Scout’s innocence might have been better joined to the heart of her childhood if Boo Radley had been identified more as an outsider, like the blacks were, and that Scout could have seen in her treatment of Boo much of what she objected to in the treatment of blacks. Or, if rather than Tom Robinson being accused of rape, someone in Calpurnia’s family was accused, for this would have given that trial much more significance in Scout’s personal life.

For its conclusion, the novel switches back to Scout’s childhood, specifically to her school’s Halloween pageant in which she wears a clumsy costume. On heading home from the school at night, she is attacked and falls, and during that confusion a man is killed. In both readings, I found the circumstances of that attack quite arbitrary, because it represented a return to Scout’s childhood, and it had no connection to the preceding events, except its justification of Boo Radley’s presence in the novel. There is also a lengthy discussion between Tate and Atticus about whom to blame for the death, which bothered me until I realized that underneath was a debate about how not to charge a good man with the death of the evil man who attacked Scout.

When Go Tell a Watchman came out last month, we learned the story behind the creation of Mockingbird. That Harper Lee wrote Watchman first, and that her New York editor convinced this young author that the real story was in Scout’s youth twenty years earlier. And so Lee wrote Mockingbird, a novel that created a very different Atticus Finch. For the Atticus of Watchman is a member of the White Citizens’ Council, while the Atticus of Mockingbird is himself mocked for “defending a nigger.” (Although one might note that Atticus does say that the leader of a lynch mob in Mockingbird is “basically a good man,” with “blind spots along with the rest of us.”)

All of which started me speculating. For Watchman was written in the late 1950s, when the civil rights movement was just picking up steam, and I wondered if the New York editor was perhaps not comfortable with publishing a beginner’s novel in which a main character is a member of the White Citizens’ Council and the work is filled with racist venom. And so to get around this, my theory holds, she suggested that this novice author refine her work and focus on an innocent child as the heroine who is just confronting the racial reality of that era, the 1930s. Which the young author did. Whether or not this happened, it is interesting to note that there is a trial of a black man in both novels, and that the outcomes are reversed—as if Lee chose a negative result in the 1930s novel to make her racial point stronger.

But it is also interesting to note law professor Monroe Freedman, who observed that Atticus did not change that much. That he went along with the white supremecist times in each case. In Mockingbird, he defended Robinson only because he was assigned that task; and he did not object to the prevailing norm of no black jurymen, nor to their segregation in the courtroom. Whereas in Watchman, when the civil rights movement is beginning and white Southerners are reacting with White Citizens’ Councils, we learn Atticus stays with the politics of his fellow Southerners.

Is the shift simply because the older Atticus is more conservative, more resistant to social change? And being a politician in Mockingbird, he is geared to remain so in Watchman?

A current New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani helps to set up the differences in the two novels. “Mockingbird… represents a determined effort to see both the bad and the good in small-town life, the hatred and the humanity; it presents an idealized father-daughter relationship…and views the past not as something lost but as a treasured memory. In a 1963 interview, Ms. Lee, who now lives in her old hometown, Monroeville, Ala., said of Mockingbird: ‘The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.’”

Perhaps we might conclude that both novels are a tale of innocence. It is a sin to kill the mockingbird of the 1930’s book because the bird is an innocent. As Scout is an innocent girl in Mockingbird when, from the ages of five to eight, she discovers the real world and thinks she understands a father who is totally good. While in Watchman, now called Jean Louise, she returns home to discover her father is not who she thinks he is, but is actually a bigot.

In my original review, I speculated that Mockingbird might end up being Lee’s only novel because “the first half is truly her own life and the second half is mainly her imagination.” And that she may have “written herself out of her childhood memories.” But I also wrote that I would be interested in reading her next work, because “she can create children, can create the Southern scene, can be humorous, can be compassionate, can know exactly what she is doing in framing her scenes, and can create an interesting variety of people. {But] can—will—she do it again?”

It was worth reading To Kill a Mockingbird again. But the earlier, and less accomplished according to critics, Watchman is not at this point on my reading list. (August, 2015)

Homer & Langley, by E. L. Doctorow

I bought this 2009 novel because I have long respected Doctorow. But I hesitated at picking it up to read, because I was not drawn to its story of two elderly recluse trapped in their trash-filled Fifth Avenue mansion, which is based on an actual event. What finally prompted me to read it was Doctorow death just a few weeks ago.

As soon as I entered the world of Homer and Langley Collyer, however, I became entranced. For it was a world of teenage brothers, one of whom, the narrator Homer, is slowly losing his sight and is in the process of adjusting to his new life. In other words, this tale has a voice, and one is quickly involved in this strange world.

For a while, this approach works, as these two young men become mutually supportive, especially when they lose their parents to the flu after World War I. Homer even has a brief romance. But at a certain point, their relationship no longer advances. Instead, interest comes from the various people who enter their home, the brothers’ relationship with the city and its services, and the alienation Homer and Langley have toward all those who violate their sanctuary.

We also learn that Langley is beginning to collect newspapers and other materials and is storing them away in their mansion. But I was never convinced about his reasons for doing this. It is not enough that he suffered brain damage from mustard gas in World War I. Nor is it that he has conceived a Theory of Replacements, meaning, for example, that children replace their parents. Most of all, it is not clear how this has led to his idea of replacing newspapers by creating a dateless newspaper comprising all of history. How this newspaper works never becomes clear to me, much less convincing. In addition, Homer accepts all of his brother’s decisions rather than challenges him. Mainly, he does not try to stop Langley’s impractical hoarding of other useless items, like placing a Model T in the dining room.

Nor does Homer, now blind, challenge his brother’s continual duels with the city and its services. The emphasis in every case is on the situation of these two men besieged in this Fifth Avenue mansion. Whereas, the richness of this novel should be inside the mansion, should be in the relationship between these two men. How does Langley justify, even to himself, what he does? And why is Homer so accommodating to his brother’s idiosyncrasies?

Even so, around the half-way point, this novel changes gears. It focuses even more on what is happening in the outside world, and how the brothers recognize and/or react to those events. There is a Depression. There is warfare in Europe, Japan, and Korea. There are the Sixties protests and assassinations. There is a landing on the moon. There is a city blackout. All of which recalls recent comments in Doctorow’s obituary that all his novels together comprise a century and a half of American history. This work certainly attempts to capture much of the 20th century.

Yes, there are occasional dramatic moments, such as when a young piano student whom Homer liked leaves and becomes a nun, and the brothers learn much later that she has been raped and killed in South America (such as actual nuns were). And also, when a gangster family whom the brothers had met earlier now seek to hide in their mansion after their leader is wounded.

Doctorow winds up his novel with Homer turning deaf, and so losing his ability to play and appreciate music, whereupon he is persuaded to become a writer, and to tell the story, via Braille, of the Collyer brothers, the story we are now reading. Sorry, this is too much a contrivance by the author to round off and conclude his novel. Also unconvincing to me is the clutter inside the mansion, the narrow aisles between the piles of newspapers, boxes, and debris. It is continually described, but I never felt the supposed claustrophobia. I never felt how these brothers had entrapped themselves in their own folly.

To sum up, after a promising beginning, this becomes a disappointing novel. It is too much about the surface of these brothers’ lives, whereas it should tell the internal story of why these brothers became recluses, the debates and disagreements they would have had, and the drama of how they antagonized each other rather than how the outside world antagonized them. It relies too much on known fact, on the outside world, and not enough on the author’s imagination, on what was happening inside these brothers’ minds.

This is the last of Doctorow’s novels I shall read. Unfortunately, it is not one of his better ones. (August, 2015)

The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert

One senses on the very first page of this 2013 novel that Gilbert is a master of the novel’s craft. After introducing the birth of her heroine, Alma Whittaker, she says: let’s give her time to grow up. And so, instead, she tells the story of Alma’s rich Philadelphia father, Henry Whittaker, who was raised in poverty in England.

And one thinks: Oh, no. But immediately, we begin a fascinating tale of this poor lad whose father teaches him all he can about plant life. And then a rich patron sends the boy abroad, first, with the last expedition of Captain Cook to the Pacific, and, second, on an exploration of Peru. There, Henry encounters the cinchona bark that contains a cure for yellow fever. It is the bark that will be the source of quinine, and it will make Henry rich.

Even as Alma is introduced at age five, the novel continues more as narration than as drama. This was understandable when offering a summary of Henry’s life, but it also seems reasonable when Alma is young and less able to think and act on her own. But we do wonder if this narrative approach will continue.

But it does not. As Alma grows older, she develops her own instincts, and her scenes amid Philadelphia society are dramatized. Thank goodness! Interest comes from two young friends, Prudence and Retta, each taken into the Whittaker household under different circumstances—and both eventually marrying, somewhat to Alma’s distress. Meanwhile, she grows at 21 or so into a respected scientist, focusing on the study of moss.

And then, suddenly, the book jumps ahead 25 years. Alma is 48 and still unmarried, and we are less than half-way into this novel. So, we wonder, what interest we will find in this tall, large, plain-looking, middle-aged woman? Answer: romance. It enters in the form of Ambrose Pike—and culminates in the most unusual sex scene in literary history. It seems Ambrose is a genius at drawing flowers; and Alma, seeing a colleague as interested in botany as herself, is happy with him like with no other person. Although, when she suggests marriage, he is a different kind of cat—or should we say a different kind of angel? And, inevitably, they part.

The final portion of the novel begins as Alma, disillusioned with her marriage, takes a Boston whaler around Cape Horn and across the Pacific to Tahiti, where her husband had earlier been banished. He had gone there to use his skills to portray more of nature. It is a marvelously created sea voyage for Alma, this middle-aged woman, as she survives both the male world of sailors and the ferocious power of nature. While this represents a remarkable transition to a vastly different world, the early Tahiti scenes lack the solidity of the Philadelphia setting, because Alma does not understand the language, the customs, or the culture of these natives.

Finally, however, she has a mission. It is to find the Boy whose figure her husband drew and who appeared to inspire his final days. But when she finds the Boy, he seems too perfect, too self-possessed to be real. He seems also, to the reader, to be a tool Gilbert uses to bring an end and a fulfillment to Alma’s Tahiti experience. Note it also brings a moment of sex that harkens back to her youth, but its symbolic intent does not for me enhance or enlarge her portrait.

Alma leaves Tahiti finally, and decides to settle in Amsterdam with the family of her dead mother. Here, as she lives her final decades, the novel’s meaning comes to the front, and Alma’s human experiences recede into the background. For on her voyage home, she has written an essay in which she draws on her study of mosses to explain her interpretation of nature itself. Her conclusion is that all life evolves and advances as a result of the struggle of living beings to survive, to overcome adversity, and to triumph over their environment.

This belief is, of course, remarkably close to Darwin’s belief in the survival of the fittest, and Gilbert draws on this scientific development to conclude her novel. For there is another scientist, Alfred R. Wallace, a real person, who has developed a theory similar to Darwin’s, and she invites Wallace to Amsterdam to lecture on his theory. It is an arrogant step by Gilbert to finalize the credentials of her heroine, who has held back on publishing her own treatise because she believes her theory has a hole—that evolution cannot explain the altruism of human beings, how people will sacrifice themselves for others, rather than try to survive them.

And now, Gilbert introduces the idea of a supreme being, an idea that even gives this novel its title. That idea is that God has left a signature of his existence in the perfectly designed things of nature, from the world of the smallest flower to that of the largest star. But, Wallace explains to Alma, he does not believe that evolution can account for human consciousness, the creation of the human mind, with its imagination and its search for beauty. He believes, instead, that there is a supreme intelligence “which wishes for communion with us….It draws us close to its mystery, and it grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us.”

Not that Gilbert is directing this novel or her scientific heroine toward God. Far from it. For Wallace declares he is an atheist still, that by his supreme intelligence he does not mean God. And Alma herself carefully explains that “I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me.. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others—why they must dream up beautiful and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere….All I ever wanted to know was this world.”

Which leads me to conclude that this is an honest novel, as well as a beautiful, a fascinating one. Its heroine is a scientist, and its purpose is to explore both the world of science and the role of this woman in that science. But it also allows for the possibility of a world beyond science. Indeed, such a world was suggested much earlier, by the presence of Ambrose. His was not a scientific world, and barely a physical world. Not only in his unusual sex with Alma, but also with his admission that he saw himself as an angel.

Gilbert sets up all of this beautifully with the creation of these characters. Alma, as we said, is tall, has a stocky body, and is plain-faced, and we are continually reminded of this. Because this is to be a portrait of her intellectual life, of her scientific life, not of her emotional, romantic life. And her two “sisters” are not blood-sisters, but two young woman who play a certain role: Prudence, who is beautiful, and Retta, now flighty but who will go mad. Each is a contrast to Alma, and each is to play a role in Alma’s spinsterhood. And there is also the Dutch servant Hanneke, who will explain to Alma the events of her youth that led to that spinsterhood. It is so beautifully done, because what seemed so natural from Alma’s viewpoint in her youth now becomes, we see, the author’s strategy to focus the reader on, first, Alma’s true destiny as a scientist, and, then, on the author’s theme of the dichotomy between science and religion.

This novel works not only because Alma is such a complex woman, so intelligent, so confident in her convictions, in an era when women play a family role and are given no professional recognition, but also because her world of botany is made so real and so understandable to the lay reader. It begins in the world of flowers, so beautifully drawn by Ambrose, but ends up with the world of mosses. Alma will draw her scientific conclusions as she studies why some mosses thrive in a damp environment and others in a dry environment, why some will advance on a rock surface and others will withdraw, why some will have a soft texture and others are brittle, while some will advance or retreat quickly and others will do so slowly.

We, the reader, are as convinced of Alma’s professionalism as are, at the end, her fellow scientists. And yet all this information is fed to us naturally, as Alma makes new discoveries and expands her knowledge. What we are really following is Alma’s personal life, and yet part of this life is these scientific discoveries that deepen her intellectual life and deepen our understanding of her. It is only at the end that we realize they also deepen our understanding of this novel.

The New York Times Book Review heads its front-page appraisal with the title, The Botany of Desire. This is so accurate. For sexual desire is on the surface of Alma’s life, from her early self-pleasuring to her desire for her husband Ambrose. But the true desire in her life is her desire to penetrate the world of botany, how plants propagate, how they transform themselves, how they conquer the world about them, and how moss, regarded as one of the lowest forms of plant life, does so. It is a desire that earns Alma, a woman, the highest respect of scientific society. The female species that is regarded as the fountain of desire has transformed itself from the desire for physical pleasure into the desire for intellectual pleasure.

This is truly a remarkable novel, in its scientific scope, its geographic scope, and its philosophic scope. It begins as the story of a family, and ends as the story of mankind. (August, 2015)

All the Names, by Jose Saramago

With each novel, Saramago creates his own world, his own physical world, metaphysical world, and literary world. He creates a premise, an uncommon premise, and then stretches its ramifications as far as his imagination will take him. And he evokes these ramifications in page-long paragraphs of dialogue among his characters, but within which the reader is never confused by whom is talking. While this review features certain plot revelations, what matters here is not the story itself but how Saramago tells his story.

This 1997 novel is the tale of a clerk, Senhor Jose, who works in his city’s Central Registry. The Registry is highly organized under the dictatorial Registrar, and contains the official records of everyone in town, their birth, marriage, and death certificates, etc., all on paper and all meticulously filed, the still living in one area, the dead in another.

Our hero, Senhor Jose, has the hobby of collecting information about famous people, such as in newspaper or magazine articles, along with copying their official records. And one day, while collecting the records of five unnamed famous figures, he finds attached to them, mysteriously, the record of an unidentified woman. Who is she? He becomes obsessed with finding out. And with this premise, Saramago takes off into his unique world.

Senhor Jose is a bachelor, middle-aged, subservient, cautious, and shy. He seems to be the last person to pursue the identity of this woman. And yet he does, drawing us into a world of regulation, of conformity, of tragic irony, of both the trivial and the search for elusive truth. On awarding Saramago the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy cited, “parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony,” which The Times of London called, “a description which perfectly captures [this] novel.”

The pursuit by Senhor Jose takes him to an elderly neighbor of the unidentified woman, to the school she attended, into the bowels of the Registry at night, and to a cemetery. And the richness of this novel comes through the extended description of these scenes. Senhor Jose has fabricated an official letter to legitimize his search, and when the elderly neighbor sees through this subterfuge, he confesses the truth and she becomes his only friend. Then, in a marvelously moody, tense, and hilarious scene he breaks into the woman’s school at night, even sleeping on the headmaster’s couch, in a futile attempt to learn more about this woman.

Living in a house adjoining the Registry, Senhor Jose continually sneaks into it at night in search of the woman’s papers, and, on discovering she is dead, explores the dark and dusty halls the dead people’s papers have been exiled to. He also must report to work each day, or create excuses for not doing so. And at one point, the dreaded Registrar seems to take an interest in him that neither his colleagues nor this reader understands. It certainly gives him more freedom for his search, but does this reflect the author’s need to explain this freedom, or did I miss an ulterior motive?

Senhor Jose’s visit to the cemetery is the philosophical climax of the novel. He goes there to learn more of the woman, finds her grave identified only by a number, and sleeps there overnight. He awakens in the morning surrounded by sheep, and the shepherd explains that his practice is to shift the numbers on the graves, explaining “that it’s possible not to see a lie even when it’s right in front of us.” The lie of the numbers Senhor Jose takes to heart, as he witnesses a burial and then changes its number. Whereupon, in typical Saramago fashion, he speculates that the shepherd may return and himself also change the number, returning ironically the original one.

At the novel’s actual end, the Registrar confronts Senhor Jose and explains that he knows what our hero has been doing. But, he explains, it is keeping with his own idea, a new idea, that the dead should not be separated from the living, as if they no longer exist. “Just as definitive death is the ultimate fruit of the will to forget, so the will to remember will perpetuate our lives.” And at the end, he sends off Senhor Jose to find the woman’s death certificate and place it in her living file. She will live on in everyone’s memory, just as she has in Senhor Jose’s life.

This is apparently Saramago’s celebration of life. That we live on in this world in the minds, the records, of others. It is consistent with his belief in a natural but not a supernatural world. While a believer in the supernatural, I have no problem with any of his works, since the literary world itself is limited, with rare exceptions, to the natural world.

To sum up, this is typical Saramago, inventive, elusive, ironic, parabolic, and intense. It exists more on the surface of the page than within its characters, and that surface has been stretched to its limits. And so, ironically, while the title of this novel refers to a sign at the cemetery gate, none of the characters in this work actually has a name—except Senhor Jose. The people are more symbolic than real, more reflective of the anonymity of their eventual death. And the message of this volume is to suggest that we return them to the world of the living, or at least to the card catalog of the living, so that they will not cease to exist but will be remembered.

The anonymity is deepened when we realize that none of the people here are described much less given a name. But, in contrast, there is a precise description of the Central Registry, its history, its architecture, the layout of its furnishings, the clearly defined hierarchy of its staff, and the exact rules of internal communication, all offered with extensive detail.

The book jacket cites, “The loneliness of people’s lives, the effects of chance and moments of recognition, the discovery of love, however tentative.” Yes, love. In his relationship with the elderly neighbor, but also a metaphor for his complex fascination with the unidentified woman.

This is not the best of Saramago’s novels, but it works in its own terms. It establishes a truth about one’s identity; and, to demonstrate this, stretches the familiar world to realistic limits—well, to limits of realistic absurdity. (June, 2015)

World Gone By, by Dennis Lehane

As I’m reading this 2015 novel, I’m thinking: this is the gangster novel to end all ganster novels. And then I remember: that is how I began my review of his last novel, Live by Night. So which is better? This novel. Because Joe Coughlin has more depth. He is tring to leave the world of violence behind, (Shades of Godfather!), and a ghost of the past haunts him. Moreover, as my interest grows, I realize that Dennis Lehane also loves his hero, and whether or not Joe survives at the end of this work might well depend on whether Lehane wants to write another novel about him. Which he could. But will he?

Joe Coughlin is still a gangster in Florida as the book opens, but he no longer sees himself as such, because he has retired from directing underworld affairs. He is now on the crime family’s, so to speak, board of directors. He has made a lot of money for his criminal friends, and they continue to benefit from his past actions. And so he tries for a life of comfort with his young son Tomas, from whom he tries to coneal his past, even as he persists in an affair and continues advising his underworld friends.

But as the novel opens, he is surprised to hear of a threat to his life. It appears to make no sense, because he has helped so many friends become wealthy. And then comes a very provocative and innovative scene, when Joe sees off in the distance the vague figure of a young boy. Is he real or imaginary? Who is he supposed to be? Himself? And if he is a ghost, does that means there is life after death, and thus exists the God that Joe says he doesn’t believe in? And if God does exist, is he sending a message to Joe?

As these mirages continue to pop into Joe’s vision, one senses that at a minimum they express a guilty conscience. And even Joe wonders, at times, if he will be damned. For peace of mind, however, he has compartmentalized his life, justifying to himself each person he has killed. It was out of loyalty, or self-defense, or simply to benefit the organization that relied on him.

The details of this book, of his search for the person who will kill him, do not really matter. What matters is that they kept me reading this novel in large gaps. In fact, I read it in three takes. Because each step Joe makes to discover his potential murderer leads to a new threat, a new risk, a new confrontation with friends who may not be the friends they seem to be. Or with enemies Joe respects and who respect him.

This historic context adds further interest and a deeper reality to this work. For the events take place during World War II, when the underworld controls many of the docks and the war effort depends on the shipping of men and material abroad. Moreover, Joe is dealing here with real gangsters, with Meyer Lansky. Lucky Luciano, and others. He even suggests an idea for getting Luciano out of jail after the war, and history reveals he actually was released. To which might be added a touch of Batista’s Cuba, and the inroads that Joe has helped to make there for Lansky.

There is also, as I said, a love affair, a surprising one for the reader; and it is milked until the very end. Will they or won’t they, go off together into the sunset? His lover is not sure, because he is a gangster, and she is a respectable woman, even if in thrall to him. But through her we see the sensitivity and the yearning for good that is inside Joe, and which he cannot express in his relationships with gangster friends.

He does express it regarding his son Tomas, protecting him at all cost. He even tries to protect him from the truth about himself, but fails. He worries, however, about his son’s future as well as his own. Will he be around tomorrow to protect him?

The internal morality of the gangsters also raises this work to a serious level, a literary level. The rationale is that an attack on a fellow crime family member is an attack on me. It is an eye-for-an eye philosophy that enables Joe and others to stand against the world. Thus, the violent death of any crime family member calls for an equal payback. This is true whether the killer is a member of an enemy gang or the same crime family. It is also true whether or not the killer was justified in killing the crime family member, such as when an enemy kills in self-defense.

The reason for the title is elusive. Does it mean that in his semi-retirement Joe has tried to leave his old world behind, or that that world has now left him behind? Does it refer to the ghost of the boy and his world? Does it suggest that Joe will leave this world for another world? It is provocative, like the rest of the book.

Which brings us to the ending. Three shocking events take place over the last eight pages, as if Lehane wants to top himself, and sock the reader—pow, pow. But are these events real? The first event is unpleasant but inevitable in the book’s terms, whereas the next is hopelessly romantic and contrary to the book’s terms, and the last is more an intrusion by the author, and might have worked only if it had been set up more carefully.

As a result, the author himself guides the action, and produces little satisfaction. Beause his ending is too arbitrary, and not a little puzzling. This is how it ends, the author says. That, in his mysterious world human actions have many repercussions, and worldly endings do not always make true endings. He ends with Joe hoping “there was more to this than a dark night, an empty beach, and waves that never quite reached the shore.”

I look forward to reading more Lehane. With that name, and a presumably Catholic background, he regards life much as I do, that humans are complex beings, that evil exists in this world, that another world may await beyond this one, and that earthly justice does not always prevail.

I have no idea, however, what his next novel will be about. Just as he plucked an inconsequential Joe out of The Given Day, will he pluck Tomas out of this novel and move a decade or so ahead? And whomever he focuses on, will he go back to Boston? Which I would like but do not really expect. Or might his hero move to Lehane’s new home in California, home of Latino gangs, racial violence, politics, water rights, and the entertainment industry?

It makes no difference. I am committed. (July, 2015)

Still Life with Bread Crumbs, by Anna Quindlen

From the moment Rebecca Winter awakens in her rustic upstate cottage in the middle of the night, thinking she has heard a gunshot, I was in that dark cottage and in the mind of this woman—and was committed to this 2014 novel. Because it quickly caught her fear, her questioning, her uncertainty about why she was in this cottage in this godforsaken town where she knew no one.

Indeed, loneliness is a minor theme of this novel, underpinning the empty life of this sixty-year-old photographer who was once famous but now is almost ignored. She became famous for a photograph that gives this novel its title, part of a series of kitchen counter photographs that caught the public’s eye, especially feminists, and made her wealthy. But the money has run out now, she is divorced from an egotistical man who never appreciated her, and she has now fled Manhattan to balance her budget and revive her creative juices—renting this cottage that has no heat, no telephone, little electricity, and a bad roof.

Rebecca becomes such an interesting woman, as she ponders her loss of fame, deals with her house, and wanders the woods with her camera, that I had as little need as she in wandering into town. And even less interest in getting to know her upbringing, her fickle husband, her Manhattan apartment, her film-maker son, and her now elderly parents. Because these scenes which fleshed out her past interrupted the flow of this work. But apparently Quindlen likes these abrupt shifts in time, for she says she is going to use this technique in subsequent fiction. I did not need such flashbacks, however, to sense the depths of this woman. Instead, I wanted to leave the past each time, and follow her as she adapted to her new rural life.

Rebecca does meet a roofer, Jim Bates, a tea shop proprietor Sarah, and Tad, a former boy soprano but now a party clown; and we sense something will come of these relationships. But more interesting are the tiny white crosses, each with a personal memento, that Rebecca encounters and photographs in the woods. Worried about her bank account, she also takes on a job photographing migrating birds, working alongside Jim who has volunteered to track them. Their conversations suggest a promising relationship may develop. She also takes in a stray dog, and as she begins photographing him one senses her creative juices beginning to flow.

And yet, too much background keeps slowing my interest. It is Rebecca and Jim I am interested in, and Rebecca and the town. They like her, and so do I. I do not need to know about Sarah’s husband, or even Tad’s unhappiness. What does keep me turning the pages are those white crosses. Who is leaving them around? What do they mean? And why, early on, did Jim spirit away one he found in the woods?

But finally, the plot clicks in. Rebecca and Jim spend a night together. But a misunderstanding then separates them. It is a conventional device, but both are likable people, and we want to see them back together. More plot mechanics take Rebecca to the funeral of her father, introduce a new agent for her, and take us to her grand opening at a gallery in Brooklyn. Each of these scenes works, not least the gallery opening because both Quindlen and Rebecca scorn the pretentious art world it represents.

And then comes the philosophical raison d’être for this novel. It is not about feminism. It is more about life alone, another’s life. It is about why the white crosses were set out. That they were personal. That they were an unspoken plea. And that Rebecca has taken their three-dimensional reality and reduced them to two-dimensional art, when: “They’re not just pictures,” Jim says. “They’re real…The point is…what they mean. Not what the pictures mean, what the things mean.” And we suddenly understand the solid reality Quindlen has implanted in this book, and why she has made her heroine a photographer.

The realization also comes to Rebecca. “She looked at the White Cross photographs again with her new knowledge about what had become before and after them, and instead of static images they seemed an infinite prolonging….She wondered if the great artists had ever considered this, da Vinci with the woman who would become Mona Lisa, Sargent with Madame X, whether they had ever considered the terrible eternity of immortality….

She sat in a chair in the dark, watching [Jim and the dog], and when she was tempted to use her camera, she was suddenly ashamed of herself for the very first time.”

It is a marvelous evocation of photography, indeed of all art. All artists. Even novelists. That we use life to create art. That life is real and art is not, and that we must not confuse the two. This is not to deny art its legitimacy. It is simply not to put it above man. I found this moment quite moving, surely because it made me more aware of my own photography.

In the background, Rebecca often refers to the women’s movement in describing her success. That she pointed her camera at commonplace subjects in the home, such as a new baby, or a kitchen. But I see this novel more as the portrait of an individual woman, not of a movement. What carries this work is Rebecca herself, her loneliness, her doubt, her independence, her conviction, her family responsibility, and her need for human contact. She is a believable human being, even a convincing lover, at 60, for a man of 45.

To sum up, this is an outstanding Quindlen novel. I remember my regret when she quit her New York Times column in order to write fiction. But she had that belief in herself that Rebecca has here. And like Rebecca’s, her decision was the right one. Like Rebecca, moreover, her approach to a novel here appears to change. The premise does not begin with a situation, a violent husband, a baby on the doorstep, but on the loneliness, the doubt, of her heroine. All develops from that. What she does retain is the detail, the tiny observation that reveals character, that captures a moment of time.

I look forward to the next Quindlen novel, knowing it will be filled with pertinent details, with personal strengths and weaknesses, and, one hopes, with a further comment on the human condition. (July, 2015)