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 Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje

This 2011 novel is an admirable work. Beautifully written. And it is in my wheelhouse, a tale of youth told by from the perspective of a mature mind years later. In this case, it is the tale of a sea voyage taken by an 11-year-old boy, Michael, from his native Ceylon to London. He is to meet his mother there.

The work comprises his encounters with adult passengers, encounters he shares with two other young boys, the restive Cassius and the reflective Ramadhin. They have fun roaming the ship, as Ondaatje writes, “like freed mercury.” And absorbing the adult lives around them, even as they often do not understand what is really happening among the crew and their fellow passengers.

For a long while, the novel presents us with a series of disconnected incidents, all of them interesting and entertainingly told. And yet…what is the purpose of these adventures, the reader wonders. There is a stray dog, meetings in the bowels of the ship, a theatre troupe, a shackled prisoner, a mysterious garden, a burglar who deceives the boys into helping him, etc. The most spectacular adventure occurs when Michael and Cassius have themselves tied on the ship’s deck to experience a storm at sea.

And there are also the mysterious adults, beautiful cousin Emily, a mystifying mature Miss Lasqueti, a musician Mr. Mazappa, a wealthy aunt, Flavia Prins, a card-playing roommate, Mr. Hastie, plus others. Many of them eat at Michael’s assigned table, called the cat’s table because it is the most unworthy, the furthest from the captain’s.

But there is no connection between these adventures, which read like short stories, except showing the boys being exposed to adult life. Until…at certain intervals the author moves the story ahead, to Michael’s life in England and later in Canada, and his subsequent connections to his two pals and to Emily. Whereupon, we understand how all those shipboard adventures helped to form the adult lives of these youngsters. Nothing that happened on that voyage directly affected their future lives, no, but such disparate adventures helped prepare these young people for the adult world.

It is the voyage that is the heart of this novel, but it is those glimpses of future lives that give this novel its body. The novel would have no direction without them. And what works is that these incidents are interpreted from the perspective of adulthood, and that Michael’s later understanding of those experiences gives the work its emotional impact. In this, I disagree with Maslin in the Times who writes that “the melancholy of adult life seems ordinary by comparison.” No, it is the later reflections about that voyage that bring a focus and a sense of completeness to these characters, especially to Michael.

This work is quite different from The English Patient. Its characters are so young, and its setting is basically on a passenger ship. But it is also similar in that it exists on two time levels, and it is the connection between those two levels that gives the novel its meaning. In this case, the adventurous voyage that the boys experience, but do not fully comprehend, has a meaning that influences their later lives. And that influence, like the shipboard adventures, sometimes has a positive impact and sometimes a negative one.

Maslin quotes Ondaatje’s narration: “There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feel it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.” This is exactly how this work is constructed. The boy, innocent in the ways of the adult world, receives a lesson he is not aware of at the moment. And this experience of a world without supervising adults, of a time of no responsibility, will create in him a sense of independence that will both help him and frustrate him in his later attempt to give his life direction.

This novel reads as a very autobiographical work, because it captures so well a youthful rambunctiousness and innocence. But Ondaatje takes pains at the end to state that it is not autobiographical, neither its passengers, its crew, nor its narrative. However, I believe he may well have extrapolated from the impact on him of a real voyage to create this fictional voyage. Certainly, the presence of the ocean, the port of Aden, and the Suez Canal, as well as the shipboard atmosphere (the cabins, the dining room, the deck, the engine room, etc.) are convincingly real. The author had to have had similar shipboard experiences before he created these fresh characters and his narrative.

Michael has two relationships as an adult, one that fails, one that is inconclusive. He marries Massi, the sister of Ramadhin, in what seems an inevitable romance, but the marriage is dissolved by the author as quickly as it is generated, as if Michael’s failure is what matters, not the romance. But I was much more interested in Michael’s relationship with his cousin Emily, who on the ship awakened in him an awareness of sex. As the book closes, he meets her off the coast of Vancouver, and their relationship is left incomplete, but it is an intriguing relationship that the author might well have further explored.

Whether I shall read more Ondaatje may well depend on the story his has to tell. I was intrigued here by a story of youth, as seen from an adult perspective, as I was before by a story of war and responsibility. I am also impressed by Ondaatje’s style, which is simple, yet rich and reflective. And I am most impressed by the emotional and psychological issues that reverberate out of their past. (February, 2013)

The Silent Cry, by Kenzaburo Oe

As soon as I began this 1967 novel. I realized I was in the hands of a master. I understood why Oe had won the Nobel Prize, and wondered why I had allowed this work to sit on my shelves for so long. Because here was an interesting family situation, with a story that involved past history and present-day Japan. And because the overall perspective reflected the Western approach to literature. There was also a beautiful style, even in translation, with continuous imaginative and appropriate metaphors. And I could not wait to see what would happen when this family explored its past.

And then, the master began to fail me. I could not accept some of the developments, particularly as the author introduces his explanations for the actions of the hero’s younger brother. The narrator Mitsu, weak-willed and an intellectual, is distraught because his young son has been born deformed, and his best friend has just committed suicide. So he allows his younger brother Taka, emotional and assertive, to persuade him to move back to their native village so they can start a new life together.

But Taka also has an ulterior motive for moving back. He identifies with family lore, and is haunted by a village revolt that occurred in 1860, and was led by his great grandfather’s younger brother. The revolt failed, many were killed, and his ancestor fled and was never heard from again. Taka identifies with that other younger brother, and wants to redeem the family honor by redressing current injustices, especially those he traces to a local Korean shopping center mogul.

There are further complications to this family history. Another brother has been killed in a kind of retribution for an assault on local Koreans, and it is not clear whether or not he sacrificed himself to balance an earlier death of a Korean. In addition, a sister has committed suicide. Also, Mitsu’s wife has become a drunkard and is estranged from Mitsu following the birth of her deformed baby.

Oe’s major mistake, I believe, is in trying to tie many subsequent developments together. For Taka is involved in his sister’s suicide, and also seduces Mitsu’s wife. And then Mitsu learns the true fate of his grandfather’s younger brother, but it is too late to affect the fate of Taka. Indeed, all of these events reverberate from the opening suicide of Mitsu’s close friend, a suicide that introduces issues concerning the ending of various character’s lives.

What Oe attempts to do at the end is suggest that Mitsu is responsible for the fate of his brother Taka. But for me this is less ironic than a manipulation by the author. For just as I was not willing to accept some of the earlier actions of Taka, I was not now persuaded by the psychologically complex relationship that Oe tries to establish between the two brothers.

The silent cry in the title refers, I believe, to Taka’s pent-up emotion as he tries to atone for his family’s conduct both more recently and a century ago. His character is the opposite to the cool, insecure Mitsu, for Taka boils inside as he attempts to atone for the family by leading a new revolt by the villagers. Of course, we learn that he also wishes to atone for the suicide of his sister.

This novel is built around the contrast of and the conflict between the two brothers. But translator John Bester also notes that “all kinds of themes are hinted at—the quest for identity; Japan’s relations with the outside world during the past century; the breakdown of tradition; the peculiarities of the Japanese mentality—these and a dozen other subjects are touched on, often with a biting irony.”

This is all true, and they do enrich this work, particularly in those early pages that so enthralled me. But this work depends on the relationship between the two brothers, an attempt to balance who is responsible for what, and a resolution that attempts to contrast the fate of the brothers.

I am not drawn to other Oe works, although I do find intriguing his other novel that centers on the impact on the hero of the birth of a deformed son. This is because of my own back history, even if our family’s case was not as deeply consequential.

Overall, this is a rewarding but imperfect work. It is perhaps too ambitious for the given situation. (February, 2014)

November 1916, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interim comment. I write these words after reaching page 350 of this 1,000-page novel that was completed in 1984 but not published until 1993, in Russia. And my preliminary conclusion is that Solzehnitsyn is no longer novelist; he is an historian. He is not writing about the personal lives of people. He is writing about people discussing and reacting to historical moments. Yes, the people are well drawn, but they have no emotional lives.

The purpose of this work appears to be to portray the incompetence of the Russian army, the Russian government, and the Czar. To make inevitable the Revolution that is to come. It is as if after his Gulag series Solzhenitsyn is no longer comfortable in creating fiction. For fiction exists for its own sake, creating real characters in a real world, whereas this author has a message to convey to his readers: that the Russians saw the leaderless plight their county was in, took no action, and so brought on the Revolution themselves.

I have now finished this novel, which Solzhenitsyn calls Knot II of The Red Wheel. And my reaction has not changed. This work is an interpretation of history in the form of a novel. In the form of a novel, but not a novel itself. If there is a main fictional character, it is Colonel Vorotynstev, whom we follow in perhaps 25 percent of the book. But of that percent, only about half is concerned with his personal life. In that half, he become disillusioned with his wife Alina and then fascinated by the seductive Olga. It is a routine triangle of a disappointed husband and another woman, which does remind some of Tolstoy.

But this work is no War and Peace, much less an Anna Karenina. Whereas Tolstoy told us a personal story of how his characters lived in and were affected by war, there is no impact of the war—or the budding revolution—on these personal lives. Instead, Vorotynstev spends the other half of his time discussing the inept conduct of the war with his fellow soldiers, with friends, even, in fact, with Olga.

Vorotynstev is portrayed as a sensible and practical colonel, who, aside from his personal intrigue, is concerned about the conduct of the war. He sees the inevitable failure to come, and is concerned about the survival of the Russia he knows. We follow him as he joins a movement to find the right military leadership for the army. And, like some, he concludes that the only answer is for Russia to get out of the war. That that is the only way this incompetent country can survive. And, of course, no one is persuaded to act. Whereas the reader, of course, knows the tragic result of this inaction, the triumph of Lenin and his revolutionaries, and the changing of history.

In the remaining 75 percent of this work, we are basically overhearing political discussions by soldiers based in the capital, St. Petersburg, and (less so) by civilians on the homefront and in Zurich. Of course, Solzhenitsyn is skilled enough to make these conversations believable and effective. In fact, he usually sets them up with well-drawn portraits of the characters and their environment.

But these novelistic skills for me go to waste, because the author is interested only in history, and his version of history, meaning the ineptitude of the Russian government and the political maneuvering of the many characters opposed to the government.

In fact, in his Author’s Note, he tries to cajole the reader into reading what he terms “the historical matter” that he spreads throughout the work—frequently in small print, as if to make its historical excerpts more official. But after my first exposure, I skipped these historical matters. And, indeed, I skipped through much more. For example, the long section on Lenin in Zurich, much of which was earlier published as a complete book. For example, the lengthy section in which we enter the royal palace and then the mind of both the Emperor Nicholas and his wife, the Empress Alexandra. Solzhenitsyn seems particularly intent on using them to portray for us the impact of Rasputin, often called Grigori.

Finally, this work has a completely novelistic ending that is difficult to evaluate. It is highly effective, as we follow a woman, Zina, who has been seduced and abandoned by her married lover Fydor (whom we have met earlier in the company of Vorotynstev). She has lost her mother and her young child, she believes, because she has abandoned them for her lover. She enters a church and confesses her sins, and finds as a result a certain peace. But is the scene’s inconclusivness intended to represent the historic inconclusiveness of the entire novel?

This appears to be the conservative Solzhenitsyn stressing his rightist roots. For he has spent much of this work exposing the selfishness and manipulations of the leftists, along with the government’s ineptitude. This ranges from the plotting of Lenin to the Empress’ foolish belief in Rasputin.

Nothing dramatic occurs in historic terms in this work, unlike Knot I, which revolved around the initial invasion by the Germans. Here, all is political talk and political maneuvering, either by the revolutionaries, the government, or the military hierarchy. Which leaves the reader without any narrative interest, or any emotional interest (except for the two triangular affairs that have no impact on the historic substance of the work).

It appears that Solzhenitsyn is now a moralist at heart. He started out as a true novelist with Cancer Ward, etc. But then he moved to the Gulag series, and he has not been a novelist since. What he has tried to do here is use his novelistic skills to create reader interest in his historical theorizing. But I skipped his historical sections because I was interested in reading a novel, not in reading about history. Of course, one must marvel at the research that went into this work, a work written when Russia was still under the Soviets and, later, when the author was in exile in Vermont.

In the Times, both Bernstein and Bayley praise this book. Both say that Solzhenitsyn has caught the tenor of the World War I times in Russia. However, I notice that Bayley acknowledges my reaction to the work. He says that the author himself “knows that human beings interest him more as social phenomena than as unique and individual creatures.” And at the risk of sounding too much a traditionalist, I would ask, what is the purpose of a novel? Is it to involve the reader with a person (or persons) or is it to involve him in understanding history?

Bayley points out that the (historic) detail of this work reveals that the fate of Russia that we know today was not inevitable, that it resulted from the detailed (in)activity that this work portrays. And he has a point. But I would ask whether this point should apply to a work of history or to a work of fiction. We are obviously in separate camps. Is my camp so old-fashioned? That I want to be the fly on he wall of a bedroom rather than of an imperial palace.

My reaction to both Bernstein and Bayley is that they have reviewed the work that Solzhenitsyn wanted to write. And to me they have rationalized their interpretation of this work. They evaluate the author’s intentions more than his achievement. They compare him to Tolstoy: (Bernstein) “ambitious, panoramic yet intimate, prodigiously researched, invested with a strong sense of verisimilitude.” And compare Vorotynstev to (Bayley) “heroes who will never resolve their problems or escape the confrontations that in the Russian novel constitute the true livingness of life.”

But, as I see it, this “livingness” in fiction should concern one’s personal life, not the historic environment in which the characters live. Much like Solzhenitsyn, who in his personal life is more politically conservative, revealing it here in his critique of the leftist machinations, I find myself conservative in my appreciation of literature. So will I be left behind, like the Russians of 1916 were? Or will I emerge, like the Russia of 1990, as a true interpreter of our literary heritage?

Bernstein writes that, given our knowledge today, the “story has a piquancy that can come only from watching people marching toward a tragedy that they could avoid if only they knew what we know.” On the level of history this is true, but it is not on the level of the human beings we meet. Vorotyntsev’s emotional distraction between two women certainly cannot stand in for the nation’s political divide.

My own rewriting would give 75 percent to that emotional conundrum and 25 percent to the political environment. But I am not Solzhenitsyn, and I have certainly not experienced what he did. I believe, however, that fiction should be ruled by the heart, not by the intellect. He is a great man and a great writer, but here he has traded fiction for history. And the loss is literature’s. And ours. (January 2013)

the thorny grace of it, by Brian Doyle

Because I am acquainted with the author, I feel a certain trepidation in commenting on this new (2013) interesting collections of essays, essays in which each one carries a small spiritual or family message. The emphasis is on the smallness, for these essays run only three or four pages. But each makes a pithy statement that crosses our spiritual heritage with our common humanity.

In fact, I would not ordinarily write a comment about a book like this. But I do so, because I relate to it. The author has a spiritual perspective that I share. And I have long realized that making a comment helps me to think further about a book—and appreciate it more.

In retrospect, what strikes me first is that, in this era of Church factions, it is impossible here to assign Doyle within the Catholic political spectrum. He comes closest when he evaluates Pope John Paul II, both his strengths (“a man of stunning presence and charisma, a corporate leader of wonderful creativity, a figure of light and hope for many millions”) and his weaknesses (“ a man who choked off liberation theology…a man who presided over a church riven with the rapes of children…a man who…dismissed women from any serious role”).

And one senses that this political reticence is deliberate. That neither he nor the publications he wrote for wish to make a political statement regarding Church doctrine. Instead, he explores the common elements in our daily human experience, an experience that often but not always arises out of our spiritual life.

He subtitles this book Essays for Imperfect Catholics. For he is often exploring the human weaknesses in our family life and our spiritual life. That we do not always live up to our idea of spiritual perfection. Or human perfection. And what Doyle does here is recognize this—and in doing so acknowledges his past naïveté, his current regret, or his often belated understanding.

Most of his essays reveal something of his own inner life, but a few also touch the reader’s own sensibility. For me, these include: exaggerated speculation on Jesus’ life in his missing teenage years; a humorous evaluation of Catholic writers by the imaginary Saint Francis de Sales Parish Book Club; an archbishops letter of resignation at age 75; a brother’s advice on how to keep a priest off-balance when in confession (keep bringing up lust); and the memory of hauling storm windows up from the cellar each winter.

Some essays are humorous, some are touching, some strike a cord of memory. An example of the humor: “From the age of thirteen when a boy in Jewish tradition enters manhood, to the age of thirty, when a boy in Irish-American tradition enters manhood.” An example of both empathy and self-awareness: “On the way home, I thought about…how these sweet honest funny moments [a baptism] are so holy I cannot easily find words for them, which is why we share these stories, which is what we just did.”

Other essays range from a regret at the life Osama bid Laden chose; to an essay on his father, his own fatherhood, and the Father; to the story of a star basketball guard who turns down scholarships to enter the marines—and loses his left hand in battle.

The range of these essays portrays a man who understands that a full life includes a spiritual life. He is a man who understands the meaning of family, of community, and of our eternal destiny. But he is also a writer who understands the power of a revelation to be found in a single moment, a moment we may all have experienced but most likely have never thought of again.

This is a modest book. It is for a very special audience. An audience which acknowledge its spiritual life and makes it a part of its daily living. It is more a book to be dipped into as a reminder of that life than a book to be read in one sitting. It is a book that enriches the reader who pauses and thinks for a moment after reading each essay. And in offering a special opportunity for reflection, each of these essays opens to ourselves an opportunity to review our own experience with our family and our church in a timeline of eternity. (January, 2014)

Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith

This 2010 work is a disappointment. Cruz Smith still has his novelistic skills, but he reaches here too high in terms of a mystery story. That is, there is still the marvelous atmosphere of Moscow, the Russian environment, and the Russian people, especially Arkady Renko, his hero detective. And he has set up two intriguing stories, and some intriguing relationships. But the stories never come together, the criminal intrigue is too complex, and the resolution comes after a car chase, meaning with too sudden a burst of action.

The first story is about a prostitute, Maya, fleeing to Moscow with her newborn baby, and then distraught because her baby has been stolen. The second is the mysterious death of a ballet dancer in a construction trailer, her body left to suggest she was a prostitute. Arkady’s renegade foster son, Zhenya, becomes involved with Maya, trying to help her. And Arkady himself is suspicious of the ballet dancer’s death, with his efforts to determine if it is suicide or murder increasing his conflict with his boss Zurin, and resulting in his being suspended. (And not the first time.)

The action for theses two stories occurs mainly around the Three Stations in Moscow, where train and bus lines come together, and where the poor and criminal elements congregate to prey on others. And these underground people complicate the story when they come into possession of the baby. In fact, we are sidetracked from both Maya’s and Arkady’s stories every so often, in order to check out what is happening to the baby. (Not to mention the violent deaths these underground people suffer when they unwittingly disturb the local drug trade.)

For perhaps two thirds of this book, however, I was fascinated by the Russian atmosphere; the critique of modern, capitalist Russia; Arkady’s problems with his bosses; the conflicts within both the law enforcement officials and the criminal rings; the mysterious billionaire, Vaksberg, who seems to be running a charity event; the ballet company which seems to be hiding something; and Arkady’s young neighbor, Anya, a journalist, who is violently assaulted in the same way the ballet dancer was.

But as I realized the end of the book was approaching and a resolution was needed for all these developments, and as Arkady seemed to be no closer to the facts (plus, the author had left behind Zhenya’s concern for Maya, as well as Maya herself), I became restless. And soon after that the violence begins, with physical attacks on Arkady and a car chase, ending with an accusation of guilt that, despite only circumstantial evidence, is quickly confessed to.

I cannot deny the reading pleasure offered by the first two-thirds of this book. Yet it is as if Cruz Smith has dug himself into an intriguing narrative hole that he cannot dig himself out of. And this makes one suspicious that the author may have lost some of his technical ability to tie together disparate story lines.

Which suggests that future works may be fun to read, even enlightening, but that they will lack the sense of unity required for literary success—and negate any suggestion that in his future work Cruz Smith may take the next step in creating a true novel. (December, 2013)

The Words, by Jean-Paul Sartre

This 1964 work is a difficult book to review. It is billed as an autobiography, but it really is not. It is an intellectual exploration of Sartre’s formative years from about when he was five to when he was nine. The exploration is primarily that of his relationship with his mother and his grandfather, more significantly the latter.

Sartre’s grandfather kept challenging the boy, and to prove himself to himself Sartre imagined himself acting as a hero in different worlds (shades of Walter Mitty?). These worlds first existed as visual images, and then became expressed in words. The result here is a book of self-analysis, as Sartre tries to explain to us, and to himself, the origins of his intellectual life.

But it is an abstract analysis, an analysis of the intellect of a child, an analysis in which Sartre often needs to employ metaphors. It is not a practical analysis of external events. So with a child’s mind having no depth at that age, we see it only through the mind of this author of 50 years later.

Sartre’s effort to prove himself to his grandfather resulted in his imagining himself to be other people, much like an actor does. And much like a writer does when he tells a story through imagined people. Which meant to the author 50 years later that he was an imposter even as a child. He was pretending in order to win the praise of one man.

Sartre also states that his stories of imaginary heroism usually had no ending. That, in fact, he sought no endings. As if endings did not really matter—suggesting 50 years later that life did not need answers, or really had no answers. That faith was not an answer. All that mattered was one’s existence, the now.

The other repercussion of this false reality is that he later found it difficult to relate to true reality, to other people, and nurtured a sense of his own insignificance. As a youth, he even despised himself for this play-acting.

Of course, any anticipation that nine-year-old Sartre has about his future profession, his future philosophy, is not truly that of the boy. It is that of Sartre as he is writing this 50 years later. As he is trying to explain how his professional life emerged from his years with his grandfather and his widowed mother.

Sartre deals briefly with his turn to atheism after a religious upbringing. Very simplistically, he appears to attribute it to a religious paper he wrote in school that received a silver medal instead of a gold medal. Later, after accidentally burning a rug, his guilty conscience senses an accusation from God, and he curses Him. And 50 years later he writes: “He never looked at me again.” Which I interpret to be the determination of a mature man to lightly toss aside the reason for his lack of faith, and to suggest how insignificant any faith has become to him.

Note that it is only in the final pages that Sartre consciously leaves his boyhood years, and tries to connect his current thinking to those youthful years. He also suggests he plans a similar treatment of his mature years, but it is a book he never did write. Actually, I wish he had written it, and combined the two into one book, but at the same time omitted some of the speculation of this book. Surely, there were significant events, and even more complex thinking in his adolescent years, that led to the mature Sartre.

To sum up, this was not the type of work I expected. It is not the story of a life but an intellectual interpretation of the formative period in the life of a boy who became an intellectual. It reflects too much the author of today rather than the boy of yesterday. It also digs deeper into that boy’s mind than I cared to follow, and at times found difficult to follow. Because while the writing style is perfectly clear, and we understand what Sartre is writing about, his classical and metaphorical references cloud the relevance of these early days to his eventual career. That is, for one who does not possess the same intellectual and cultural context. (January, 2014)

Canada, by Richard Ford

This 2012 work is a beautifully written novel, but one I did not find that interesting. (Is my reaction too personal, for I like Ford’s work.) It is the story of a family, and then about the son in that family. It is thus two stories, but not quite two novels, for it continually recalls for us this family of four.

The Parsons family consists of father Bev, mother Neeva, and twin children, daughter Berner and son Dell. Their story is narrated by Dell 50 years after the jailing of Bev and Neeva, who robbed a bank in order to pay back criminals for beef stolen from them. The novel then moves to Dell’s life in Canada, to which he has fled in order to escape being institutionalized because there are no parents at home. In Canada, he confronts murders that were mentioned on the novel’s first page, along with the bank robbery. It is the first of the author’s foreboding, presumably to create interest in this otherwise run-of-the-mill family.

The Parsons family is dysfunctional, however. Bev is a retired air force bombardier who got Neeva pregnant (with Berner and Dell) and was obliged to marry her. And they soon become incompatible, even as they stick together. Bev is a funny, talkative, imposing person, while Neeva is shy, artistic, and barely pretty. Compounding this is that Bev becomes a failure at business when he leaves the air force to establish their home in Montana, and Neeva is never comfortable married to someone below her station.

Because we know about the bank robbery on the first page, there is little suspense in the outcome of the family story. The novel’s substance comes from the relationships among its four members, and this I grant is very well done. We feel the incompatibility of the parents and the rivalry between the children during their life together in Montana.

This family situation never intrigued me, however, as well presented as it is. And as effectively as it conveys the adults’ impact on the lives of their two children. It catches a breath of life from the parents’ incompatibility, and even more from the relationship between the two children—in which, born a few minutes earlier, Berner senses she knows more about adult life, and Dell acknowledges and accepts this.

It is just that despite the compassion of the author in presenting both their relationships and the homey details and conflicts of family life, I did not care for these people. Especially for the children, these victims of the family’s circumstances. Perhaps it is because Berner is too domineering and Dell too acquiescent. While the parents are too self-centered, refusing to make any change and refusing contact.

Once Dell is sent into “exile” in Saskatchewan, after his parents are in prison, the novel changes. It is now about Dell alone, and how he accommodates himself to his new situation. And, here again, he is not involved with a set of interesting or sympathetic characters. Which does emphasize that he is on his own. And, yes, we are interested in what will happen to him, not least because of more foreboding. Apparently there is something wrong about Arthur Remlinger, who runs the small-town hotel where Dell is working and who has taken him under his wing. Remlinger is quite a pleasant man when we meet him, however, even if he does have a mysterious past.

The atmosphere of this rural area is a strength of the novel, with Dell helping visiting huntsmen shoot the local geese as sport. But the huntsmen are not characterized, and the hotel personnel he works with barely so. He is closest to Charlie Quarters, whom he finds unpleasant, and who seems to be used mainly to inform Dell about Remlinger’s past.

But the mysteriousness of Remlinger never came across to me. He is supposed to be fleeing the U.S. because, in a union’s struggle against management, he planted a bomb which accidentally killed a man. And lives in fear that U.S. authorities will come after him. When they do, there is abrupt violence that I have not been prepared for. Apparently it comes out of the mysteriousness of Remlinger, but his character has not been sufficiently developed for me to accept that final violence.

After which, the novel effectively ends, as the narrator Dell returns to his current life 50 years later and describes the fates of the other three members of his family. Which becomes a typical wrapping up, a narrative; it is not dramatized.

To sum up, I was not drawn to this family, to their situation (even if it helps recall my own loneliness after my mother’s death—with my family life also disrupted), nor to Dell and his empty life in Canada.

As Andre Dubus III says in his Times review, this family portrait is beautifully rendered. But for me language is not enough. I need to begin with character and story. And I could not identify with the characters at home in Montana, nor get interested in this story of Dell’s lonely life in Canada. I think I needed Dell to interact emotionally with someone in Canada, rather than simply be exposed to two unpleasant characters.

The novel begins in Great Falls, Montana, which Ford wrote about in a previous novel, so one wonders how much Ford identifies with this area, and perhaps has transformed a personal experience into this novel. Yes, he is from the South, but so is Bev, and these family events could have occurred anywhere in the country. This would make the origins of this novel completely understandable, and certainly Ford has put his technical skills to excellent use here.

But I did not feel the loneliness in Dell’s life that I felt in my own life, and missing even more was an emotional connection within the family that I always find to be moving. Dell’s only connection is with his twin sister, and she escapes from family ties after their parents go to prison, leaving them both to lead separate lives. (December, 2013)

Parrot & Olivier in America, by Peter Carey

This is quite a feat. This 2009 novel is about a Frenchman (Olivier) who comes to America and falls in love, and about his aide, Parrot, an Englishman who serves his needs in America and also falls in love. It is a very entertaining novel, as well as a very penetrating one, both in its portrait of the two men and in its portrait of America.

While it works completely as a novel, it is also a fictionalization of history. It is the story of Alexis de Tocqueville, and his adventures that produced Democracy in America. I am not a student of history, so I do not know what is true here and what is imagined. But it does not matter. What matters is that Carey has created here real characters in a real world.

The novel begins slowly, as it reveals the early life that brought these two men together. Olivier is an unformed, privileged aristocrat who is sent to America when French revolutionaries threaten his and other noble families. Parrot, who lives a more confused life as a printer’s apprentice, loses his father in a fire and ends up as the servant of the aristocratic Marquis de Tilbott, who takes him under his wing as an apprentice, betrays him in Australia, then brings him to France, where he is assigned to report on the activities of Olivier in America.

But once the two board ship, meet its American passengers, and arrive in New York, their encounter with the new culture, and its contrasts to the old, introduces the novel’s solid substance. For while Olivier has an assignment to investigate prison conditions in America, he soon becomes captivated by the social and cultural differences, a development that he will explore in a classic equivalent to Democracy in America.

However, it is not the culture of America that entices the reader, but the personal stories of each man, and of some of the people they meet. We are particularly drawn to the love lives of the two men. Will they find their true love, will their love be acknowledged, and will they each find happiness? It is not an original theme, but a reliable one serious novelists rely on to draw the reader into the substance of their work.

Here, the substance is the contrasting cultures of America and Europe, the aristocratic leadership of the latter and the democratic leadership of the former. Which is what inspired de Tocqueville, of course. And the novel ends with the consequences of that contrast on the lives of our two heroes.

But I find Carey’s conclusion a little too pat. Perhaps because it lacks drama—and because the ending itself lacks any emotional impact. For while there is a contrast in the fates of the two men, even an intended irony, the result comes more from the head than the heart. And their fates seem somewhat arbitrary: one love affair seems to end for the flimsiest of reasons, at least flimsy for our day; and one man strikes it easy, too easy, as he discovers an unexpected, and convenient, source of income.

This novel is told with just enough of the 19^th century style to convey its historic portrait of two lives and two countries. But Carey paid more heed to the novel’s structure, which is built around the contrasting experiences of Olivier and Parrot. The emphasis is slightly toward the former, but his fate is less satisfying than Parrot’s. Is this because his character is based on a real de Tocqueville, while Parrot is strictly imaginary? Indeed, the imaginary Parrot is there to create for Carey the contrasting viewpoint that de Tocquville’s actual companion did not.

The contrast exists in the two men’s upbringing, their intellectual acumen, their effort to control their own destiny, their reaction to America, their eventual integrity, and the destiny of their love. While they come together with a certain mutual respect at the end, after alternating chapters heighten their differences, the novel’s conclusion fails to reach a sense of completeness regarding Olivier. His classic work is not enough.

So what does it all mean? Carey wanted to present here, I believe, two reactions to the encountering of America by two young Europeans, one an impractical French aristocrat and one a much more practical, underprivileged Englishman. How their understanding of America differs, how their ambitions differ, how their success differs.

Olivier is allowed to reach certain conclusions about America that are both perceptive and half-baked. Of the former, he believes that the country’s leaders will come from all walks of life and some will be “barbarians at the head of armies, ignorant of geography and science.” He also wrongly holds that a society of equals will never produce great art, that only an aristocracy has the leisure needed to appreciate and create it.

These conclusions are reached after a series of entertaining encounters by each man with the people of America. The most interesting one comes from Olivier’s encounter with the family of Amelia Godefroy, whom he loves. Her father is a wealthy, perceptive man who introduces Olivier to much of America, both fascinating him and disillusioning him.

The book is best summed up by the Reading Group Guide: “Both Parrot and Olivier are profoundly affected by the democratic leveling of class distinctions they find in America. Olivier is alternately repulsed and fascinated, disdainful and admiring of the new democracy, while Parrot, after drifting aimlessly, finally finds the freedom he’s been denied all his life. By showing us their reactions to the fledging democracy, Carey gives readers a visceral sense of just how thrilling and baffling a place America could be for new arrivals from Europe — and how unsettling of old-world social conventions.”

Carey is always entertaining, and I look forward to reading other works by him. He has a unique way of interpreting past reality. It becomes a starting point for his own imagination. And his embellishments, his unique interpretation, convert the result into literary art. (December, 2013)

Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane

This 2012 work is a gangster novel to end all gangster novels. It is Lehane being a serious writer again, producing a work far superior to Moonlight Mile, even if this is not quite a literary work. Why? Because it stresses action, which I like, but at the expense of character, depth, and human values.

It is the story of Joe Coughlin, a minor character in The Given Day—a story of the Coughlin family, and a novel that is literature.

Joe is the black sheep in the family, the son who is impatient, who is greedy, and who does not respect the moral standards his family claims it stands for. He does not, in part, because his father Thomas Coughlin, a severe Boston police captain, is not the upstanding man he appears to be.

The novel begins with a spectacular first paragraph. Joe’s legs have been put in cement by Tampa gangsters who are preparing to dump him overboard, and he recalls how everything began with his meeting a cool beauty, Emma Gold, as he robbed a Boston speakeasy of mobster Albert White. This sets up both the Boston and Florida settings, even as the reader wonders if this first paragraph, besides being a teaser, is actually telling us about Joe’s final fate.

This novel is thus in two parts. It begins in Boston, where Joe calls himself an outlaw rather than a gangster, as he rationalizes his rebellion from his father’s strict moral code. Nevertheless, he works for one Irish boss, Tim Hickey, who is in conflict with another, Albert White. And Joe’s initial fate is sealed when he falls for a woman, Emma Gould, who is the mistress of Albert White.

Joe’s partner in the Hickey gang is a boyhood chum, Dion Bartolo. Joe’s Boston fate is determined when he robs a bank with Joe and his brother, and they are betrayed. As a result, Joe ends up in jail in Charlestown, the most powerful section of the novel, where Joe’s fearlessness impresses Maso Pescatore, the incarcerated but powerful leader of a Mafia gang. Fearful of Maso’s threat on his own and his father’s life, Joe becomes subservient to Maso. And Maso, after Joe’s effective scheming in the jail, even against Maso, is impressed, and sends Joe off to Tampa, Florida, to run Maso’s operations there.

The Tampa section is more interesting than Boston’s, because in Boston Joe was following the orders of his boss, whereas in Tampa he is the boss, even as part of Maso’s empire. Thus, he is making the decisions rather than reacting to orders; and he is joined there by a loyal Dion.

While the dramatic highlight of the book is the Charlestown jail sequence, the Tampa section has a carefully planned robbery of guns from an American supply ship. The weapons are intended for the Cuban underground trying to topple Machado, the island’s dictator. Joe commits himself to this plot—it is here he meets Graciela—because he needs the local Cuban contacts for his gangster empire.

Many Cubans are at risk in this plot, of course, and, as elsewhere in this novel, when someone dies there is no sentiment involved—either from Joe or the novelist. Perhaps because this is a gangster world. Everyone, including Joe, lives with the expectation of death. And, note, it is without an expectation of reward or punishment in an afterlife.

As I said, Joe now meets Graciela, a Cuban beauty who wishes to accomplish good in the world, but is conflicted because she doesn’t believe good deeds can follow (Joe’s) bad money. She and Joe make an emotional connection, however, and he discovers he is over his love for Emma, whom he believes is dead. So Joe and Graciela begin living together, even as they work separately.

It is in Tampa that Joe’s character is hardened, for he reasons with some but is forced to kill others who threaten him or his friends. Not to be ignored is how Lehane has made us identify with and sympathize with this gangster killer. This is probably the book’s major achievement—getting the reader committed to a complex man who breaks all the rules of society even as he remains loyal to Dion, his closest friend, and to Graciela, his lover. This, in its own way, mirrors good coming out of bad.

I have two major issues with this novel. The first centers on police chief Irving Figgis and his beautiful daughter, Loretta. Figgis is introduced as an accommodating but no nonsense chief, and his daughter as an innocent. But she soon suffers an unexpected fate worse than death, and then responds unbelievably, while her father rescues her, then changes, also unbelievably.

My second reservation is the ending. After the Tampa power struggle has ended, Lehane moves his characters to Cuba for a quiet ending. Why, one asks? Nothing is happening. We witness the creation of a tobacco farm, and Joe resolves his love life. Then, on a return to Florida, a final violence seems tacked on, as if Lehane felt that some kind of justice needed to be meted out. I am not convinced, however. There is too much coincidence involved, plus an unconvincing perpetrator.

To sum up, this is an admirable gangster novel. It blends the evil of man and some of the humanity of man, with the former triumphant because this is a gangster novel. While it has a few interesting foregound characters, it kills off a lot of faceless people, producing a heartless novel, a novel of characters who live by a criminal code and accept their fate.

I will follow more Lehane, but I have had enough of the gangster milieu here. I think families offer a much richer environment for exploring the nuances of humanity. The gangster world is too black and white, even if Lehane attempts to mix that black and white. The family setting of The Given Day, on the other hand, offers built-in shades of grey, of good and evil, that provide for far greater character nuances. (December, 2013)

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth

Again, a book sat on the shelf for a long time, and I kept avoiding it. Because it is about the terrors of a slave ship, the horror of kidnapping the blacks of Africa and transporting them for profit to the West Indies. Who wants to read that? Who wants to know the details of that brutal voyage?

But, surprise, surprise, that is not what this 1992 novel is about. It is about greed, the drive for profit, the sacred hunger of the title. Yes, there are the details of the brutality on board a slave ship, but it comprises only a quarter to a third of this book. The rest is about two cousins, Erasmus Kemp and Matthew Paris. Erasmus hates Matthew because when a boy Matthew picked him up and carried him away from a miniature dam he was building. Erasmus didn’t understand that Matthew was saving him from being swamped by a surge of water, just as he does not understand others as a grown man—beginning with Sarah, to whom he proposes and imperiously assumes her consent.

As the real story starts, Matthew has been unjustly disgraced; he has written “blasphemies,” such as supporting Darwin. And he has lost his wife, for whose death he blames himself. So, to escape a sense of guilt, he signs on to a slave ship, Liverpool Merchant, leaving England, a ship that is owned by his uncle, Erasmus’ father. The captain of the ship, Thurso, is a brutal taskmaster and a vital character in his every scene. Resenting Matthew’s relation to the owner, he makes his shipboard life doubly hard.

The heart of this book is the contrasting portraits of Erasmus and Matthew. Erasmus is full of himself, distorts every motivation to his own benefit, and is blind to reality. The reader recognizes this from his early dealings with Sarah. But while she sees through him, others do not. And Matthew, who has not dealt with him for years, does not realize that Erasmus still remembers their affair on the beach, and is intent on revenge. And, indeed, Erasmus sees the perfect opportunity when he learns of the fate of the slave ship Liverpool Merchant; he will see that Matthew is hanged for mutiny and murder.

Meanwhile, we have followed Matthew aboard the ship. As a doctor, he cares equally for the crew and the slaves below deck. Through his journal, we come to understand he is a just man, not worthy of Erasmus’ resentment. This pursuit of justice culminates with a small community he helps build on the shore at Florida following the sinking of the slave ship. It is a community of equals, whether white survivors from the crew or the black slaves. Together, they live under a fair administration of justice, including the sharing of women by the men who far outnumber them. It is a community that lasts a decade, with no awareness of Erasmus and the English justice waiting in the wings.

These are the story details, but more significant is this portrait of mercantile life in the 1750s and 1760s. The priorities, the selfish motivations, the duel between fairness vs. justice, the cutthroat dealings, the physical brutality, the greed, the role of influence, etc.—all enrich that portrait. And on a more practical level, this novel puts the reader in bars and whorehouses as a crew is “recruited” by force, then on the deck of a rolling ship in the Atlantic as cruelties abound in the name of discipline, then below in the filthy hold with the slaves, and, finally, prowling the jungles of Africa and, later, Florida.

Unsworth himself commented on the choice of his theme in a 1992 interview. “It was impossible to live in the [19] Eighties without being affected by the sanctification of greed. My image of the slave ship was based on the desire to find the perfect symbol for that entrepreneurial spirit. The arguments used to justify it [then] are the same used now to justify the closure of these pits and the throwing out of work of all these miners. I used the term ‘wealth creation’ deliberately. I knew it was anachronistic.”

And not to be overlooked is the large cast of believable characters that populated that life of greed, ranging from English capitalists to angry sailors to despairing slaves. Some live for the moment, some for the long term. Some think only of themselves, some of others. Some are brave and confident, some afraid. Some relate to others and learn how to survive, some do not. Some seek to dominate, some to get along, and some to help the unfortunate. Each one is distinctive, and alive on these pages.

The finale of the novel is written to be inevitable, given the violence of those distant times. And the final confrontation between Erasmus and Matthew does work. But the fate of Matthew, for me, does not. It reflects too much an author’s choice, an author’s denial of the justice he has created, an author’s attempt to create for the reader a “justice” he can be comfortable with. In addition, Unsworth shows Erasmus reaching a self-understanding at the end that seems too brief, too tidy. and is barely credible.

A review in the Manchester Guardian sums up the novel’s qualities. “It’s a cracking adventure story. It isn’t pleasant – slavery is a disgusting business – but there are rewards. The story moves at a smart pace, the cast is huge and colorful, and there’s enough detail to make us feel we are breathing in the salt air, the scent of the ship’s timbers and the claustrophobic stink of the slave’s quarters – but not so much that it smells of the lamp. Above all, there is fine writing. As with the period details, Unsworth’s prose has enough 18th-century inflections to create the right mood, but not so many that it feels laboured.”

This work has to be the highlight of Unsworth’s literary career. It has breadth, it has power, and it has strong emotions. One marvels at the research into that era’s shipboard life, the inhuman treatment of the enslaved, the primitive level of medicine, and the daily environment of that distant era.

I need to catch up on more of Unsworth’s work. It has the broad vision I seek, and yet a concern for individual souls. There is a philosophy of life, a sense of humanity, that underlies the surface action. (April, 2013)