And Next Month's Book Is...

...Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy, by something of a landslide.

It is a very short novella, so hopefully everyone who wants to read it will be able to fit in into their schedules. We'll reconvene, then, on March 31st for discussion and reviews.

Time To Choose Again!

I love getting to choose the selection for the next Slaves’ book meet, but I find it so hard to decide which books to offer. I ended up with two lists this time. The first was a list of classic novellas, because I thought it seemed a while since we’d had a classic, but I didn’t want to condemn us all to a chunkster. But then I wondered whether we wouldn’t be better off with a really fun and entertaining contemporary novel. So I asked Mister Litlove what I should do, and he suggested I pick out the best and combine the two lists, which is what you will find below.


Henry James – The Aspern Papers

‘In an elegant and crumbling palazzo old Miss Bourdereau lives on with her niece, closely guarding their most precious treasure, a hoard of letters written to her in her youth by the great American love poet, Jeffrey Aspern. Adopting a nom de guerre the tale’s narrator, a literary researcher, arrives at the palazzo and inveigles the two ladies into taking him in as their lodger. There he watches and waits for the moment to pounce. For he is determined to gain possession of the Aspern papers and willing to pay almost any price. James’ tale – in part a warning to over-zealous historians and biographers – grips the reader with steadily mounting suspense and is regarded by many as the most brilliant of all his stories.’


Willa Cather – My Mortal Enemy

‘Through the eyes of a young girl, Nellie, we view the life of Myra, a legend in the Southern town where both were born. Myra has romantically abandoned the luxury she was born into to elope with the impoverished Oswald Henshawe. Twenty-five years later, Nellie is dazzled when she meets them living in the elegant poverty of an apartment frequented by singers, actors, poets – in the heart of the artistic community of old New York. But this shabby gentility gives way to real poverty in a jerrybuilt West Coast hotel, and the high purpose of Myra’s life – love itself – is revealed to be the enemy within. A finely-wrought study of the great rewards and punishments love brings, My Mortal Enemy is an exquisite example of Willa Cather’s art.’


Justin Cartwright – Other People’s Money

‘The Trevelyan family is in grave trouble. Their private bank of Tubal & Co is on the verge of collapsing. It’s not the first time in its three-hundred-and-forty year history, but it may be the last. A sale is underway, and a number of important facts need to be kept hidden, not only from the public but also from Julian Trevelyan-Tubal’s deeply traditional father, Sir Harry, who is incapacitated in the family villa in Antibes. Great families, great fortunes and even greater success collide in this gripping, satirical and acutely observed story of our time.’


Daphne Kalotay – Russian Winter

‘When Nina Revskaya, once a great star of the Bolshoi Ballet, decides to auction her jewellery collection, she believes she has finally drawn a curtain on her past. Instead she is overwhelmed by memories of her life a half-century before. It was in Russia that she fell in love – and where, spurred by Stalinist aggression, a terrible discovery led to a deadly act of betrayal. Now living in Boston, Nina has kept her secrets for half a lifetime. But two people will not let the past rest: Drew Brooks, an inquisitive young associate at the auction house; and Grigori Solodin, a professor who believes the jewels may hold the key to his past. Together these unlikely partners unravel a literary mystery whose answers hold life-altering consequences for them all.’


Tom Rachman – The Imperfectionists

‘The newspaper was founded in Rome in the 1950s, a product of passion and a multi-millionaire's fancy. Over fifty years, its eccentricities earned a place in readers' hearts around the globe. But now, circulation is down, the paper lacks a website, and the future looks bleak. Still, those involved in the publication seem to barely notice. The obituary writer is too busy avoiding work. The editor-in-chief is pondering sleeping with an old flame. The obsessive reader is intent on finishing every old edition, leaving her trapped in the past. And the publisher seems less interested in his struggling newspaper than in his magnificent basset hound, Schopenhauer. The Imperfectionists interweaves the stories of eleven unusual and endearing characters who depend on the paper. Funny and moving, the novel is about endings - the end of life, the end of sexual desire, the end of the era of newspapers - and about what might rise afterward.’

I’ll tot up the votes next weekend!

The Boy Genius

When publishers fall over themselves for a book by a Columbia writing school graduate, eventually paying almost $1 million for it, the result is entirely counterproductive. Any reader is going to look at the hype, look at the price tag, look at the book and say: Is this really worth it? After all, which great experimental classic would you pay a million bucks to keep in print? Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? Joyce’s Ulysses? Samuel Johnson’s dictionary? A Clockwork Orange? See, books work best as a great big literary ocean of interestingness, and if you hook one out and subject it to intense pressure to perform, it invariably comes out badly. The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen is the book with the golden price ticket, and it is a curious hybrid indeed, comprising great charm and whimsy and inventiveness and also socking great flaws.

T.S. Spivet is one of the staples of literary fiction, a misunderstood boy genius whose quirky first-person narrative offers us a delightfully precocious and distinctive perspective on the world. T. S. lives in Montana in the requisite dysfunctional family. His father is an impassive farmer fostering an obsession for cowboys and a deep-rooted nostalgia for the Old West. He’s like the Marlboro man reincarnated; strong, silent and emotionally constipated. His mother is equally loveless, only she is an entomologist on a quest for a beetle that probably doesn’t exist. His older sister, Gracie is a pessimistic and petulant teenager, and his younger brother, Layton has recently died in a shooting incident, for which T. S. feels at least partly responsible.

The tragedy has magnified the cracks in T.S.’s already odd family and thrust him back on his singular way of dealing with the world. For T.S. is an obsessive cartographer and illustrator, moderating the messy unruliness of existence by mapping it out. He is not interested solely in the contours of the land, in fact far from it; his maps are often about intangible or unexpected things, people’s facial expressions, the flight path of bats, Gracie’s method of shucking corn, the rise of MacDonald’s. He has a mentor, a Dr Yorn, who (mostly) unbeknownst to T.S has been sending his drawings and diagrams out for prizes. The novel opens with T. S. receiving a phone call from the Smithsonian Institute to say he has won the prestigious Baird Award for the advancement of popular science, and will he come to Washington to collect it?

The best thing about this book is the voice of T. S. Spivet, which, even if implausible for a twelve-year-old boy, even a very smart one, is funny, engaging and endearing. The book is oversized and its wide margins are full of his drawings, along with sometimes lengthy notes in the margin that must be followed from the main text by means of dotted lines and arrows. It’s like a Boy’s Own annual and a technical drawing textbook have mated and the result is, like T. S. himself, whimsical and lively and more than a little exhausting. Having decided to take the Smithsonian up on its offer, T. S. then has a proper map to follow, as he steals away at dawn and embarks on a cross-country journey, hitching an illegal lift on a freight train headed to Chicago.

Having put his main character in a conveniently located Winnebago for several days’ worth of travelling across central America, Larsen backs himself into a narrative corner. T. S.’s voice is charming, but a 100-hour eventless stretch of it would tax the most dedicated reader. So, hey presto, T. S. recalls he has packed one of his mother’s notebooks in his suitcase and it turns out to be a narrative fiction she seems to have written about his great-grandmother. This could have been a clever idea, and the new voice is again beautifully conjured up; but the story stops just at the point at which it could have become interesting and significant. A point T. S. himself makes, which doesn’t actually compensate for Larsen pulling his punches. But anyhow, T. S. now arrives in Chicago and it suddenly becomes clear that something has happened en route: the narrative has decided it no longer wishes to be a cutesy bildungsroman, but turns into an oddball steampunky adventure with wormholes and bloodshed and secret societies and mad schemes about the President. Having had very little happen for the first 200 pages, it’s like the plot goes beserk in an act of overcompensation. Hmmm. My guess is that Larsen sold this novel when he had only the first half of it written.

So, what to make of it all? It’s always fun to see writers pushing the boundaries and trying new things. And my greatest fear when embarking on this novel, that the narrative voice would drag, was completely unfounded. There’s a lot to enjoy here before the plot implodes, or even while it’s imploding, because Larsen can certainly write. But here’s the thing with experimental fiction: when it works, it opens up new dimensions of experience to the reader, allowing us to think about reality in more profound and sophisticated ways. T. S.’s maps and drawings are fun, but in the end the consequence of them, their importance for understanding the situation T. S. finds himself in, are minimal. The marginalia becomes just a device, or as I experienced it, a foreshadowing of hypertext links in the ebook, that will take you out of the immersive experience of reading sometimes for no good reason. But to be fair, I never even liked footnotes in academic books. I’m really glad I read this, and I think Larsen is a talented writer, but the next book he publishes will come, I hope, from a more coherent map in his imagination.

T.S. Spivet

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen is one of those books it is hard to tell if you will like until you actually start reading it. But even starting to read it is a bit off-putting. The book is a little oversized which also makes it heavier and rather awkward to hold. Then when you open the book you discover it has wide margins that frequently contain illustrations and diagrams and long notes with arrows pointing to them from the text. But if you can get past all of that, the book is a pretty fun read.

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, or T.S. for short, comes from a long line of Tecumseh Spivets. T.S. is a precocious twelve-year-old boy who lives on Coppertop Ranch in Montana. He is compelled to spend his time mapping everything. When he talks about maps, these aren't just maps of land or places, but also maps of actions, facial expressions, blood cells, or sounds. For T.S., a map translates the unknown into the witnessed and the known:

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here ad there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

T.S. is so good at mapping that his illustrations have appeared in science magazines and even at the Smithsonian. And one day, the Smithsonian calls to tell him that he has been awarded the Baird Fellowship. They do not know he is only twelve.

T.S. finds himself in a dilemma. Does he tell the man on the phone that he is twelve or does he just show up? And if he shows up, how does he get there? He doesn't feel as though he can tell his parents because he doesn't think they will understand. His father is the practical, ranch owning and working sort, the kind of man for whom physical ability is important and other things just aren't quite graspable. T.S.'s mother, Dr. Clair, is a scientist. She spends her time in search of a beetle that may or may not actually exist. There is also a teenage sister who is a pretty normal teenage girl. And there used to be a brother, Layton, a few years older than T.S., who died in a tragic accident just six months ago. T.S. feels the accident might have been his fault and in memory of his brother, hides "Layton" in all of his drawings.

T.S. decides he will just show up at the Smithsonian and tell no one. So one night he takes his suitcase and hops a freight train to Chicago. From Chicago he catches a ride with a trucker to D.C.. Of course much happens on his trip. This section of the book is also taken up with T.S. reading a notebook he stole from his mother. In the notebook he discovers the story of Emma Osterville, a precocious girl who is an ancestor of his mother's. Emma became a scientist when women scientists were few. Emma's is an interesting story but I haven't been able to satisfactorily connect it to the rest of the book.

The Smithsonian is surprised to say the least that T.S. is only twelve. But they see an opportunity to exploit his youth and run with the story, making up more and more details and taking it ever further away from the truth. How it all ends, you'll have to read it and find out for yourself.

At first the very adult voice of T.S. was rather disconcerting. Once I got used to it, I began to notice that while he talks knowingly about maps and science, he is still very much a boy who likes boy things and doesn't understand as much about the world as he thinks he does. The marginal notes and drawings turned out to be fun little side trips of their own and, I thought, didn't detract from the main story at all. The book got a little bogged down in the middle, just before he found the wormhole in the Midwest (I've been through that wormhole, it's called "Iowa"), but once on the other side and in Chicago the story picks up again and speeds on to the end.

I very much enjoyed all of the musings about mapping, what maps do, how they help us see things and make connections, how they create their very own world that isn't necessarily the same as the real world. I can honestly say I will not think of maps in the same way ever again.

Overall, the book is not amazing, but it is a very good read which has got to be worth something.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Next for The Slaves of Golconda

It was so close, but 'The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet' narrowly beat 'The Bingo Palace' I think, so we'll be reading Rief Larsen's novel next.

Thanks to everyone for voting. Discussion begins on 31st January.

January's Choices

It’s a bit of a random list of choices for the group this month. There’s no unifying theme, it’s just a list made by an excited book gazer looking at shelves. I’m so thrilled to get to pick the list this month and I hope everyone sees something they like the look of.

‘White is for Witching’ – Helen Oyeyemi: (Publisher copy) ‘In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and her father. When one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.’

‘The Bingo Palace’ – Louise Erditch: (Publisher copy) ‘At the crossroads of his life, Lipsha Morrissey is summoned by his grandmother to return to the reservation. There, he falls in love for the very first time—with the beautiful Shawnee Ray, who's already considering a marriage proposal from Lipsha's wealthy entrepreneurial boss, Lyman Lamartine. But when all efforts to win Shawnee's affections go hopelessly awry, Lipsha seeks out his great-grandmother for a magical solution to his romantic dilemma—on sacred ground where a federally sanctioned bingo palace is slated for construction.’

‘An Equal Stillness’ – Francesca Kay: (Publisher copy) ‘Jennet moves to London in search of a more exciting life and finds it in her new environment and in the handsome and enigmatic figure of the painter David Heaton.

When Jennet falls pregnant, her parents more or less force the two to marry. In the post-war austerity of the 1940s, the young couple struggles to make ends meet and Jennet finds that her home life is gradually eroding everything she has fought to achieve. Aware that David is becoming increasingly reliant on drink and tired of the dank and drab bed-sit in which they live, Jennet suggests they move to Spain. There, the bright blue skies, warm air and sunlit beaches give the couple and their children a new lease of life.

Jennet begins to paint again and an agent takes an interest in her work. But as Jennet's own career begins to take off, her relationship with David sours and the two enter a destructive spiral with tragic consequences.’

‘The Selected Works of T S Spivet’ – Rief Larson: (Publisher copy) ‘T.S. Spivet is a 12-year-old genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His father is a tight-lipped cowboy and his mother is a scientist who for the last twenty years has been looking for a mythical species of beetle. His brother has gone, his sister seems normal but might not be, and his dog - Verywell - is going mad.

It's odd, but then families are. T.S. makes sense of it all by drawing beautiful, meticulous maps kept in innumerable colour-coded notebooks: maps of the countryside, maps of his family's behaviour, maps of animal and plant life. He is brilliant, and the Smithsonian Institution agrees, though when they telephone with news that he has won a major scientific prize they don't suspect for a minute that he is twelve years old.

So begins T.S.'s life-changing adventure, fleeing in the dead of night, riding freight trains two thousand miles across America to reach the awards dinner, the fame, the secret-society membership and the TV appearances that beckon. But is this what he wants? Do maps and lists explain the world? And why are adults so strange?’

‘The Electric Michelangelo’ – Sarah Hall: (Publisher copy) ‘Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.’

Voting ends on 18th Dec and the discussion of whichever book is chosen will take place on 31st Jan 2012. Eeep, how is it 2012 already?

- Jodie (Bookgazing)

Wild Life

Like Danielle, I had mixed feelings about Molly Gloss’s novel Wild Life. To begin with the positive, there were times in this book where I felt thoroughly engaged. It’s in part an adventure story, and the main character, Charlotte, does have some great adventures. The novel takes place in the west, somewhere around the Washington/Oregon border, in the early 20th century. It’s logging territory, and a pretty wild, uncertain place. Charlotte lives with her five children, trying to carve out a writing career. Her husband is not in the picture, but she has a woman who acts as nanny, which allows her to sneak off now and then to get some writing done. The adventure begins when the nanny’s granddaughter disappears in the woods. When search parties fail to find her, Charlotte decides she needs to go search for her herself. She takes off into the wilderness and soon enough gets lost herself. These passages were exciting. I could imagine all too well what Charlotte was experiencing as she struggled to find her way back to civilization.

The book has fantasy elements to it, but they don’t become part of the story until Charlotte gets lost: while wandering around the woods nearly starved to death, she comes across a group of large human-like creatures, frightening-looking but kind animals, who slowly adopt her into their community. The creatures’ lives are endangered by the encroachments of logging; they need space in which to wander and forage for food, but that space is quickly disappearing.

All this works pretty well, although the fantasy element comes too late in the book to feel natural and properly-integrated. The book’s structure is odd in one way — the pacing is wildly uneven — but quite interesting in another: it is a mix of several genres. The main story is told through Charlotte’s diary, but interspersed throughout are fragments of her fiction, stories that are sometimes based on her own life and so rework the material in the diary, and also Charlotte’s essay-like ponderings on what it means to be a woman writer. These materials reinforce each other by exploring themes and ideas from different perspectives, so we can see Charlotte’s life told through her diary and also transformed into fiction.

What bothered me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling although I’m not sure how fair this is, was that Charlotte felt unrealistic, too much of a fantasy figure. For her to be able to write as much as she does without a husband and with five sons seems improbable, even given the nanny. But even more so, her feminism seemed fashioned purposely to please 21st-century audiences rather than to capture a truth about the time period. I know that feminism at the turn of the last century was well-developed and that people were making arguments about women’s writing similar to Charlotte’s, but Charlotte seems just too perfect. She defies stereotypes about women at every turn, in the way she dresses and acts, in her conversation, in the way she treats men, in her writing. I am all for strong female characters who defy gender stereotypes, but I don’t want to be jerked out of the world of the story by the feeling that I’m being presented with an argument rather than a character.

All in all, it’s a pretty odd book, although not entirely in a bad way. The book’s various elements — the wild west, the fantasy, the feminism, the theorizing about gender and writing, the experimenting with structure — don’t quite cohere, but it’s interesting in parts, and it’s fun when the story finally hooks you and you absolutely have to know how Charlotte is going to make it out of the woods.

Wild Life

Wild Life by Molly Gloss takes readers to 1905 America in the Pacific Northwest when logging was tearing through forests and civilization was a small town on the Columbia River. Our heroine is Charlotte Bridger Drummond, writer of popular adventure novels, mother of five boys, and widow or abandoned wife (we never know for sure and neither does Charlotte).

When the book opens Charlotte is living a happy existence, escaping everyday to a shed in the yard to write while Melba, a woman she has hired, takes care of the house and her children. Charlotte is a staunch feminist and a woman with opinions who is not afraid to express them. She also tries her hardest to scandalize as many people as she can by her cigar smoking and riding around town on a bicycle while wearing men's pants. She is a stark contrast to Melba who is motherly and believes that cooking and cleaning and raising children is what a woman is supposed to do.

Not a lot happens for the first third of the book and I found myself disliking Charlotte quite a lot. She is so concerned about not being put down because she is a woman that she goes overboard in not allowing herself to exhibit typical female traits. When word comes down the river that Harriet, Melba's granddaughter, who was at a logging camp with her father, has gone missing in the woods, Charlotte makes light of Melba being upset and worried to the point of it being rather cruel and heartless.

When it becomes clear that Harriet really is missing, Charlotte decides she will go up to the logging camp herself and help in the search. Even though she has no experience in the woods, she figures she has written enough adventure stories that she can handle herself. Plus, even when she arrives at the remote logging camp, Charlotte still believes that somehow, even after the loggers have been looking for Harriet for a week, she, Charlotte will miraculously find the girl alive and well albeit a bit hungry and dirty.

But events don't work out that way and after several days of searching, Charlotte gets separated from the search party and quickly finds herself impossibly lost. But she has a compass and a little food and decides that she can find her way back to camp. Three days later and still lost, she has to admit that she was wrong.

Spring in the Pacific Northwest is a generally damp affair and while the season had begun drier than usual, this quickly changes. Charlotte has to contend with the wet and the cold and without food or any knowledge of what she might be able to eat in the forest, she comes to understand she is in rather dire straits.

But there is something else in the forest besides bears and dear and mountain lions. "Wild men," hairy "giants" or what we might call "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch" are also in the forest. Charlotte comes across a family consisting of a mother and three children. She begins to follow them and eat what they eat. Eventually she becomes an adopted part of the family.

When I write it out like that it sounds stupid and hokey but it isn't. Being reduced to living like what Charlotte at first believes are simply gentle and shy animals, strips away nearly all the "human" from Charlotte. And while it is cliche to learn about what being human means from creatures other than humans, it is handled in such a matter-of-fact way without being sentimental or didactic that I liked this part of the book best which surprised me because I was expecting to not like it. Charlotte eventually returns to civilization a changed woman to say the least.

I liked the book but I didn't love it. The pacing is a bit off especially in the beginning. One thing I did really like about the book is the way it is structured. It is basically Charlotte's journal with news articles, pieces of stories Charlotte has written, character sketches, and various other documents interleaved. While Charlotte is lost in the woods she continues keeping the journal. The journal provides comfort, documentation, a lifeline, and an outlet for her voice. When Charlotte returns to the world of people, she is unable to speak for quite some time but still manages to continue writing. Charlotte's writing is the thread she holds onto throughout the story that keeps her sane, keeps her from completely losing herself.

After the book ended I found myself wondering what sort of person Charlotte would become next, how much of the wild would she retain? Could she, can any of us, keep in contact with the wild parts of ourselves? And if so, what would that mean? What would such a life look like? Any book that prompts one to think about such things is definitely worthwhile.

Cross posted at So Many Books

The Next Slaves Book is...

Wild Life by Molly Gloss.

Discussion will begin on Wednesday, November 30th.

Happy reading everyone!

Time to Pick a New Book

Margaret Atwood is publishing a book this October about science fiction which inspired me to put together a list of books that are considered science fiction (or fantasy) that you may be surprised by. As Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide says, Don't Panic! All of the books on the list were nominated for, or won a Tiptree Award. The award is given to a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores gender. The books on the list are from all along the genre spectrum from you'd-never-know-it-was-scifi-unless-someone-told-you to the "way out" and "totally bizarre" if the group feels like it wants to be daring. So without further ado...

1. The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. From Amazon: "If I had not been what I am, what would I have been?" wonders Lou Arrendale, the autistic hero of Moon's compelling exploration of the concept of "normalcy" and what might happen when medical science attains the knowledge to "cure" adult autism. Arrendale narrates most of this book in a poignant earnestness that verges on the philosophical and showcases Moon's gift for characterization.



2. Wild Life by Molly Gloss. From Amazon: Molly Gloss delivers a rare blend of “heady cerebral satisfactions, gorgeous prose, and page-turning adventure” (Karen Joy Fowler). Set among lava sinkholes and logging camps at the fringe of the Northwest frontier in the early 1900s, WILD LIFE charts the life — both real and imagined — of the free-thinking, cigar-smoking, trouser-wearing Charlotte Bridger Drummond, who pens popular women’s adventure stories. One day, when a little girl gets lost in the woods, Charlotte anxiously joins the search and embarks on an adventure all her own. With great assurance and skill, Molly Gloss quickly transforms what at first seems to be pitch-perfect historical fiction into a kind of wild and woolly mystery story, as Charlotte herself becomes lost in the dark and tangled woods and falls into the company of an elusive band of mountain giants. Putting a surprising and revitalizing feminist spin on the classic legend of Tarzan and other wild-man sagas, Gloss takes us from the wilds of the western frontier to the wilds of the human heart.



3. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh. From Amazon: In its pages, we enter a postrevolution America, moving from the hyperurbanized eastern seaboard to the Arctic bleakness of Baffin Island; from the new Imperial City to an agricultural commune on Mars. The overlapping lives of cyberkite fliers, lonely colonists, illicit neural-pressball players, and organic engineers blend into a powerful, taut story of a young man's journey of discovery. This is a macroscopic world of microscopic intensity, one of the most brilliant visions of modern SF.



4. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. From Amazon: Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's Dickensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.



5. Life by Gwyneth Jones. From Amazon: "Life" is a richly textured fictional biography of the brilliant Anna Senoz, a scientist who makes a momentous discovery about the X and Y chromosomes. Anna's discovery provokes widespread sexual rage and impacts cruelly on her career, her marriage, and her child. Ultimately, Anna faces a challenge that the practice of science alone cannot meet. You can also read more about the book from Nic at Eve's Alexandria

Voting will be open through Saturday, October 15th.

The Golden Mean

Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean is the latest selection of the Slaves of Golconda reading group. The novel tells the story of Aristotle's life, focusing particularly on his relationship with the future Alexander the Great. It's told from Aristotle's first-person perspective, and for me, this was the chief interest of the book: imagining what it might have been like to be Aristotle. We see him disagreeing with his former teacher Plato's ideas about the nature of reality, developing his ideas about tragedy as a genre, and thinking about the danger of extremes and the importance of the middle way. We also see him dealing with a complicated relationship with his wife and facing disappointment in his career. He runs into political trouble because of his association with Athens at a time when he was living in Macedonia, Athens's enemy. All of this makes it possible to conjure up an image of life as it might have been so long ago and to think of Aristotle as a real person with regular-person worries and needs, when generally I think of him as nothing more than a brain and a set of ideas.

I found the book disappointing, though. Like Stefanie, I thought it was a little dull. The main problem is the lack of narrative tension. I don't need an exciting plot, but I do need some kind of tension to pull me through a book, or, failing that, I want some interesting ideas, beautiful writing, and/or characters I enjoy spending time with and thinking about. I didn't find enough of any of these things. There are interesting things to think about, the tension between being a warrior and a scholar that many of the characters experience, for one. I was also intrigued by the way the first person perspective makes Aristotle come across as a sympathetic human being, one who treats the mentally disabled with tremendous compassion unusual for the time, but who also owns slaves and assumes that women have limited capabilities and value. There is something fascinating about getting into the mind of a person who thinks about the world in such a fundamentally different way than we do today.

But the ideas don't seem to lead anywhere in particular. I was interested in Aristotle in a general and vague kind of way, but I wasn't worried about what would happen to him -- he was clearly going to get back to Athens eventually -- and his thoughts and observations weren't interesting enough to keep me happily reading. I think I would have preferred the book in the third person with some more insight into the culture of the time from an external narrator's point of view. The advantage of first person, of course, is getting to see the world through Aristotle's eyes, but perhaps an exterior view would have helped bring his character into sharper focus and would have allowed more commentary on the social and political values of the time. In the abstract I like the idea of historical fiction that doesn't get bogged down in explaining all the details of the time and place -- where the author isn't showing off her research on every page -- but in this case, I wanted a little more guidance.

At any rate, I started off the book with high hopes and did well at first, and then found myself less and less eager to pick it up. Other people have enjoyed it very much, though, and you can read Lilian Nattel's very positive review here.

Liberties Were Taken with the Facts

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon is narrated by Aristotle and tells the story of his time spent teaching Alexander soon to be "The Great." In the process we also get some flashbacks of Aristotle's boyhood and how he came to be the great philosopher.

As with all historical fiction one must remember this is, well, fiction, and not history or biography. Curious about Aristotle's real life, I checked out his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a fantastic and reliable resource by the way). In the novel liberties are taken with Aristotle's timeline and just how close his relationship with Alexander was. According to the encyclopedia, Aristotle was 38 when he became the teacher of 13-year-old Alexander (my math on Aristotle's age) and taught him for only two or three years, though some scholars dispute this and say it was as long as eight years. But we do know that by the time Alexander was 15 he was already going out on campaigns with his father, Philip II. The book takes what seems to be the eight-year number approach.

In the book Aristotle sees himself as providing a balance to the martial education Philip is providing Alexander and insists that to be a good ruler, Alexander must find the "golden mean," the balance between extremes. Aristotle is presented as a pacifist of a sort, but some sources I read in addition to the Stanford article, indicate that Aristotle encouraged Alexander to conquer Asia. Whatever the case, little concrete information is known about what Aristotle actually taught Alexander and what kind of relationship they had.

A very curious change was made to one real historical figure in the book, Alexander's half brother, Arrhidaeus. In the book he is made to be severely mentally disabled and Alexander hates him. In the book Aristotle takes Arrhidaeus under his tutelage, treats him like a person, teaches him letters and music, how to ride a horse, essentially lifts him up from being an animal into being the mental equivalent of a young boy with the body of an adult. However, in reality, Arrhidaeus had only a mild mental disability and Alexander lover him dearly. On Alexander's death, Arrhidaeus became Philip III of Macedon. Granted, he was more a figurehead than anything and neither his life nor his reign lasted long, but why the big change about this in the book? It really doesn't serve any purpose to have written Arrhidaeus and Alexander's relationship to him so very differently.

Ok, so like I said, The Golden Mean is a novel, fiction, it doesn't have to adhere to reality. But even forgetting all of the historical transgressions, I didn't much like the book. When I was still in the first third of the book a coworker asked me what I was reading lately and I mentioned The Golden Mean and what it was about. She commented that it sounded interesting. I replied that I had thought so too but that it was actually a boring book. If it weren't for the fact that I read it for the Slaves discussion, I would not have finished it. It got marginally better by the end but I still didn't enjoy it. Nothing happens in the book, which isn't a bad thing, but if nothing is going to happen in a book it needs to have interesting characters. The characters should be interesting, I mean Aristotle and Alexander, but they are not. Nor is their relationship. Nor are there any secondary characters or relationships that are interesting.

Nonetheless, when I finished the book and read all the glowing blurbs on the back cover I feared I had missed something. I mean, it was a bestseller in Canada, published in six languages, was nominated for the Giller prize and won a few other prizes. Maybe the book was better than I thought? But after I did a little research on Aristotle and Alexander I began to trust my reaction a bit more. And then Rebecca didn't give it many stars on Good Reads and suddenly I feel much better about my take on the book.

But it is my take. Lots of people in Canada liked it so not everyone who reads it will come away with the same experience I did. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone though.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The Golden Mean wins -- plus more books!

Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean has won the most votes, so that will be our next book for September 30th. It's available in paper in the UK and Canada and will be available in paper in the U.S. on September 6th. There are a lot of used hardcover copies available on Amazon right now, though, if you would like it sooner. Thanks for voting everyone and thanks to Lilian for choosing the list!

And now for a few more books that couldn't quite make it on the list. Lilian's editor sent these along as possibilities, but they didn't arrive in time for the voting, so I thought I would include them here for those who are curious. These are books published recently by Canadian authors that might be of interest:

• The Lizard Cage, by Karen Connolly
• Consumption, by Kevin Patterson
• Fauna, by Alissa York

I'm looking forward to the discussion in September!

Time to Choose Again!

It's time to choose the next book! Lilian has very kindly put together a list for us, this time of recent Canadian fiction. So, let's finish up voting by Wednesday of next week (August 3rd) and have our discussion beginning on September 30th. That should give everyone time to read and post on the book. As always, anyone is welcome to join the group! All you have to do is read the book and participate in the discussion on your blog and/or on the discussion board.

• Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (the original title), otherwise known as Someone Knows My Name (the U.S. title).
  
• Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road.
• Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.
• Heather O'Neill's, Lullabies for Little Criminals.
• Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean (this one is available in paper on September 6th in the U.S.).
  

Vote in the comments!

Cakes and Ale

I first read Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale when I was in my early twenties and an ardent admirer of his prose style, which I admired for its supple, civilised elegance. Maugham always seemed so in control of his narrative, entering his stories behind the façade of an ironic and urbane first-person voice, a witness to the vagaries of the human condition. These he described with a sharp but sympathetic eye ever intent on pointing out the messy, less than noble reality that lies underneath his character’s attempts to dress up life as something respectable and meaningful. I liked all of that, but I was probably more attached to the lingering romanticism in Maugham’s works, that always made his characters quest after an ideal of achievement or a perfect relationship – although of course they were destined to be disappointed in both. In Maugham’s stories that’s okay, though, since experience is all that really matters in the end; to live life fully is as much about the stupidities and self-deception of ambition and desire, as it is about success and admirable behaviour.

All these things I still appreciated about Cakes and Ale when I reread it for the Slaves. But I was surprised to note that there was much about the narrative that irked this time, too. The story is told from the perspective of William Ashenden, a successful writer in late middle age who is approached one day out of the blue by another writer friend of his, Alroy Kear. Ashenden is suspicious about Kear’s motives from the start. The trouble is that Kear represents a kind of superficiality that he really dislikes. Kear has won himself a tremendous reputation in the world of letters by being a suck-up, basically, a sycophant and a social climber, trading on his bluff, hearty manner and the impression he emanates of being a sound, reliable chap, the right sort. Kear is conservative with a small c, someone who buys into the ongoing ideology, who doesn’t rock boats or wake sleeping dogs, and it’s for these qualities that he has been asked to write a biography of a now eminent Victorian novelist, Edward Driffield, a man who Ashenden knew well in his younger days.

Ashenden knew Edward Driffield all right, but not in the guise of the great writer Kear wants him to be. The Driffield Ashenden knew was a bit of a rogue and a bounder, a man who sang music hall songs accompanying himself on a banjo, who came from humble roots and wrote vulgar books that no one cared to read, and who had an attractive, easygoing wife, Rosie. It’s Rosie, in fact, whom the young William really gets to know. She is an ex-barmaid who has a reputation for being free and easy with her favours, and when William spots her one evening, arm-in-arm with the local coal merchant, laughingly known as Lord George for his pretensions, he is both shocked and intrigued. Rosie and Edward Driffield eventually depart from Blackstable under a cloud and several years pass before Ashenden, now a young man studying medicine, meets up with them again in London. And this time his relationship with Rosie will become his first love affair.

When I first read this book, I think I found all this quite satisfyingly romantic. Now, in my more callous years, I rolled my eyes a bit at the old tart-with-a-heart routine. The portrayal of Rosie seemed patronising and incomplete; she was pretty and sensual and dumb, just the kind of woman, then, who could be slept with and cast aside, idolised in later years as generous and loving but thankfully not really one’s sort. To be fair, a little historical sympathy is called for – this is the early twentieth century, a time thoroughly steeped in class divisions, when respectability was of primary importance, and working ‘in trade’, indicated a lower social standing. If women were in any way sexual, they were not suitable marriage material. Life was spent policing the behaviour of one’s neighbours, reinforcing the boundaries between castes, and urgently covering up any faults or indiscretions.

And it’s from this sort of cultural conditioning that the most interesting part of the book arose for me. What I did appreciate on this reading, was the almost anthropological depiction of the literary world. Edward Driffield remarried later in life and his second wife is determined to turn her husband into the star of literature that he deserves to be. With the help of a mentor, the deliciously formidable Mrs Barton Trafford, Driffield has risen to great eminence, and his recent death has left his widow determined to set the seal on his reputation. Literary success is dependent on social acceptability. His early misdemeanours – described by our narrator as Driffield’s genuine source of vitality and interest – must be whitewashed. There’s a gently savage attack going on across this narrative on people who prefer image to reality, who revile the warts and the blemishes of humanity when they could be seen as our most authentic and sympathetic parts. And of course, the notion that we really must have our geniuses likeable, charming, and noble is surreptitiously but repeatedly challenged. Is this a vanquished world, or do its traces live on still today? That’s the question that remained with me, long after I had finished reading.

Cakes and Ale

I think I read Of Human Bondage years ago, but I have no recollection of it, so at this point Cakes and Ale represents the sum total of my knowledge of W. Somerset Maugham's oeuvre. Based on what I know about Of Human Bondage, though, it would be a mistake to attempt any generalizations about Maugham based on Cakes and Ale--so I won't!

Cakes and Ale struck me as quite an odd book. It has many passages in it that are amusing, interesting, and eminently quotable, such as the set pieces on the role of beauty in art and criticism, or on the place of the first-person singular in the art of fiction. The book is about a writer writing about a writer, narrated by another writer; between this set up and the embedded commentaries on fiction and criticism, the book overall seems as if it must be metafiction of some kind, and yet it doesn't seem so, and this is one reason I found it odd: I can't quite see how to connect all this self-referential potential with the story the novel tells about Edward Driffield and his putatively enchanting first wife Rosie, bar-maid turned society beauty turned scandalous absconder. That is, the metafictional commentary doesn't seem to be saying anything about the kind of book Cakes and Ale actually is. I suppose this means it isn't metafictional after all but incidental, just the kind of stuff a narrating writer would write about. Here's a bit from the excursus on first-person narration, for instance:

A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. . . . I was much concerned, and forthwith asked Alroy Kear (who reads everything, even the books he writes prefaces for) to recommend to me some works on the art of fiction. On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.

Amusing, as I said. Ashenden goes on to conclude that the value of first-person narration is that in an increasingly confusing life, it makes sense to focus on our own limited experience, which is, after all, all we can really be sure of and hope to understand. Yet Cakes and Ale is not really about him, is it? Or, is it? If so, it does a good job effacing his part in it: he's a Nick Carraway type, significant (or so it seems) primarily as a device for delivering Maugham's gentle literary and social satire and for telling us about other people, especially Driffield and Rosie.

Driffield, too, is a fairly absent main character: in his case he seems to be there to provide the occasion for the literary commentary, as well as for some pretty funny stuff about the rise and fall of literary reputations and the dubious reliability of critical judgments. Ashenden does not admire Driffield much himself:

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm, and of nestling habits; it was his longevity. . . But why writers should be more esteemed the older they grow, has long perplexed me. . . . After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of an author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grown older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author who wrote them.

Let's not start naming contemporary authors we think might be unduly revered for just this reason! Again, this is funny, with just enough sting to make it interesting too. But the novel does not give the issue of literary merit any momentum as a theme (by, say, really focusing on whether Driffield does have any genius besides longevity), and I don't think it also takes it on as a formal problem by trying to embody in its own narrative any special genius.

The only element of the novel that has much forward momentum is the story of Rosie--but to me, she was too flat a character, and too representative of a kind of male fantasy of undemanding available amoral female sexuality, to captivate me the way she (to me, inexplicably) enchants young Ashenden. So enamoured is he that even after she has run off with the coal merchant of Blackstable and started a new life as Mrs Iggulden in America, he defends her for having "carried on" behind Driffield's back: "She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love." Challenged on this sappy conclusion ("Do you call that love?"), he responds,

Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone, it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn't lasciviousness; it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.

Well, not so artless she doesn't welcome the gift of a very expensive fur cloak from one of her lovers, and not so fond of giving pleasure to others that she hesitates before causing them pain. Her acts have little effect on her character because Maugham (or Ashenden) gives her very little character to begin with. The absence of complexity in her personality is not liberating: it's limiting, if you intend the portrait to be in any way related to reality. But maybe Rosie isn't intended to be more than an animated, good-natured fantasy figure. Or maybe there's something dimly progressive about the freedom with which she enjoys her own sexuality, and about Maugham's (or, again, Ashenden's) refusal to judge her for it--but I'm not convinced.

And yet--near the end we learn a bit more about Rosie's history, something that adds darker shades to the radiant glow in which she always seems bathed (her skin is so "dewy" that at one point Ashenden asks if she rubs vaseline on it). More interesting still, that sad past is linked to the one novel of Driffield's that Ashenden particularly admires, for having a "cold ruthlessness that in all the sentimentality of English fiction strikes an unusual note." This novel, The Cup of Life, is also the novel that drew censure down on the novelist for being "gratuitously offensive [and] obscene." The incident in the novel that so outrages the righteous public turns out to be taken almost straight from life. So perhaps there is a metafictional angle after all, and it turns on Rosie: perhaps her story, and her character, with its overt and unapologetic sensuality, is a challenge to Maugham's (or Ashenden's?) readers, to see, for instance, if they will appreciate her beauty without decrying her morality, or find beauty in her freedom from social constraints. Is the novel about the relationship between beauty and virtue? Does that help us make sense of the title? But again, I'm not convinced, because I just don't find Rosie, or the novel as a whole, for that matter, substantive enough to hang a theory on.

The novel is funny, though, if only in strange fits and starts, so to close, another of the many quotable passages, this time about a poet who becomes, for a time, the rage of London literary society:

Now that he is so completely forgotten and the critics who praised him would willingly eat their words if they were not carefully guarded in the files of innumerable newspaper offices, the sensation he made with his first volume of poems is almost unbelievable. The most important papers gave to reviews of it as much space as they would have to the report of a prize-fight, the most influential critics fell over one another in their eagerness to welcome him. They likened him to Milton (for the sonority of his blank verse), to Keats (for the opulence of his sensuous imagery), and to Shelley (for his airy fantasy); and, using him as a stick to beat idols of whom they were weary, they gave in his name many a resounding whack on the emaciated buttocks of Lord Tennyson and a few good husky smacks on the bald pate of Robert Browning. The public fell like the walls of Jericho.

Maybe fun is the key: Maugham had an idea for Rosie, he tells us in his Preface, and wanted a book to put her in, and he also had a lot of experience with the vagaries and vapidities of literary celebrity and the satirical skill to write them up elegantly. Why not put these ingredients together into a little confection of a book?

(cross-posted at Novel Readings)

Cakes and Ale

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles.

Cakes and Ale is the fourth Somerset Maugham novel I’ve read, and with each book I keep changing my opinion of him. I really liked Of Human Bondage, which was my first book, and then I listened to The Painted Veil, which I loved. So far so good; I thought at this point that I should eventually read everything he wrote. Then I got to The Razor’s Edge, which I didn’t like at all. It felt dull and ponderous. I like idea-driven novels, but in that one, I didn’t care about the ideas and didn’t like how they were presented. With Cakes and Ale, I’m beginning to think Maugham may not be quite as good as I thought. There were interesting aspects of the novel and enjoyable moments — particularly the discussions of authors and writing — but I was hoping to love it and I didn’t.

The novel tells the story of the Driffields — Edward Driffield, a famous author, and two Mrs. Driffields, his first wife, Rosie, and his second, Amy. (My edition has a preface by Maugham that says Edward Driffield is most emphatically not Thomas Hardy, in spite of what anybody says, which meant that I spent the entire novel thinking of him as Thomas Hardy, of course.) It’s narrated by William Ashenden, a writer himself who knew Edward and Rosie at various points in his life. There’s another writer involved as well, Alroy Kear, who is planning on writing a biography of Edward, who in the present tense of the novel has passed away. Alroy approaches the narrator in an effort to gather information about Edward’s life, which sends him off on long reminiscences of his time with the Driffields.

The difference between what the narrator remembers about the Driffields, what he chooses to tell Alroy, and what Alroy will actually put in the biography is the novel’s source of tension. The Driffields — Edward and Rosie — were…not quite proper. The narrator first meets the couple when they move into Blackstable, his hometown. Edward’s father was a bailiff and Rosie had worked as a bar maid, which was a big part of the problem, but they also never quite followed the rules as they were supposed to, and everyone knew it. Eventually Edward’s fame as a writer comes to make up for his social deficiencies, but Rosie was always a bit of a scandal.

The novel is really Rosie’s story in many ways, in part because of the narrator’s fascination with her and her bohemian ways that stayed with him all his life. But there’s also the problem of what to do about the troublesome, sexually-suspect first wife after she is gone and the second wife is trying to establish her husband’s reputation as a respectable, important writer. How should that first wife be portrayed in the biography, and what to do about episodes such as the time the Driffields skipped town with debts and servants left unpaid? And what about Rosie’s sexual history?

It’s all a question of class, of course, about how Alroy and Amy Driffield try to transform Edward from his working-class roots into a solid bourgeois, respectable writer and how the narrator questions and resists them. It’s also about writers and writing. Alroy Kear is the object of much scorn from the narrator; not only is he going to whitewash Edward’s past in what is sure to be a bland biography, but his writing, at least according to the narrator, sounds blandly boring as well:

I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Thomas Carlyle is an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word … he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle.

There is no room in Alroy Kear’s world for the exoticism that someone like Rosie Driffield can offer, and so the narrator scorns him.

I was disappointed in part by Rosie as a character; the back cover of my edition promises that she is Maugham’s “greatest heroine,” but she never quite came to life for me. It was the moment when the narrator tells us what she wasn’t a big talker that did it: I had pictured her as vivacious and voluble, and when I tried to picture her being quiet, I couldn’t do it. Then I began to doubt that I had really understood her at all. I’m also not entirely sure I like the narrator. There are times his mildly ironic tone is amusing and I can’t help but agree with his dismissal of Alroy Kear, but there’s something off-putting about the voice, something distancing. I suppose the mildly ironic tone gets a little wearying after a while. I don’t think that we are meant to read the narrator uncritically; as a writer himself, he is not exactly a disinterested observer of the fates of Driffield and Kear, and his detached, judgmental attitude toward his subjects seems self-serving. But critiquing the narrator in this way wasn’t enough to make the book a satisfying read.

Something Missing

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

~Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham and I didn't enjoy each other's company all that much. It wasn't the story, I liked the story. It was Maugham. His voice rubbed me the wrong way and I hated how he would occasionally slip into using "you" in describing things, saying how "you" feel when this or that happens, or how "you" think about certain things. It makes assumptions about who the reader is and leaves the door wide open for the reader, as it did in my case, to say no, not me, I don't feel or think that way. And as for Maugham's voice, I can't say exactly what bothered me about it so much. It felt to me like it had an all-knowing and condescending sort of flavor to it, a sort of wink wink, nudge nudge quality due in part to the narrator revealing the whole story to the reader but not to the other characters in the book. That probably doesn't make sense. I could be making it all up and when I type it out it seems such a silly thing to not like a book over, but there it is.

As for the story, the narrator is William Ashenden, an author who was popular once but has now slipped to the midlist. Still quite respectable though. He is asked by his acquaintance and fellow author, Alroy Kear, who happens to be a bit of a golden boy type, to share his recollections of Edward Driffield for a biography Kear was asked to write by Driffield's second and now widowed wife. Driffield became the author of his day for his realistic portrayal of working-class people - the coal merchants, the tavern keepers, etc. Ironically, when Driffield first came on the scene, genteel readers were shocked by his subject matter. To say that there is much in this book about class is to state the obvious.

Driffield came from the class that he wrote about as did his first wife, Rosie. Our narrator Ashenden meets them when he is a boy and they move into the small town where he lives. Driffield teaches him how to ride a bicycle and both he and Rosie are kind to this teenage boy who got a transgressive thrill from sneaking to their house for tea while at the same time looking down his nose at some of their behavior and what he considered lack of manners. Things happen to cause Ashenden and the Driffields to lose touch until many years later when Ashenden is in med school in London.

Alroy Kear, the biographer, wants all the details, but he doesn't really. He only wants the socially acceptable side of Edward Driffield. Anything unsavory he sees no reason to include in the biography, though an occasional allusion might be okay. Much of what Ashenden knows about Driffield pretty much falls into the unsavory category especially as it relates to his first wife Rosie.

There are some amusing passages on writers and writing such as this one:

After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of the thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them. Of course he must go on; he must keep in the public eye. It is no good his thinking that it is enough to write one or two masterpieces; he must provide a pedestal for them of forty or fifty works of no particular consequence. This needs time. His production must be such that if he cannot captivate a reader by his charm he can stun him by his weight.

Mildly amusing but not enough to make the book come alive. And that, now that I think of it, is what is missing for me. The book had no spark. It should have, all the elements are there for it, but it was only meh.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Next Read: Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale is our June read. Discussion will start Thursday June 30. Thanks for voting everyone!

A Second Chance: The Runner-Up Round

It's time to vote for the next group read. There was an excellent suggestion that rather than coming up with a new list of books that we choose from the runners up from the last few rounds. Since these came so close to being chosen, these books are being given a second chance. Please drop your vote in the comments area. Votes will be counted on Wednesday April 13. Discussion will start Thursday June 30.

A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé: "Ivan, a one-time world traveler, and Francesca, a ravishing Italian heiress, are the owners of a bookstore that is anything but ordinary. Rebelling against the business of bestsellers and in search of an ideal place where their literary dreams can come true, Ivan and Francesca open a store where the passion for literature is given free rein. Tucked away in a corner of Paris, the store offers its clientele a selection of literary masterpieces chosen by a top-secret committee of likeminded literary connoisseurs. To their amazement, after only a few months, the little dream store proves a success. And that is precisely when their troubles begin. At first, both owners shrug off the anonymous threats that come their way and the venomous comments concerning their store circulating on the Internet, but when three members of the supposedly secret committee are attacked, they decide to call the police. One by one, the pieces of this puzzle fall ominously into place, as it becomes increasingly evident that Ivan and Francesca’s dreams will be answered with pettiness, envy and violence. "

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany: "All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed "scientist of women"; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires. These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany's remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world."

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham: "Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrassing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best."

Passing by Nella Larson: "The tale is simple on the surface--a few adventures in Chicago and New York's high life, with lots of real people and race-mixing events described ... But underneath, it seethes with rage, guilt, sex, and complex deceptions. Irene fears losing her black husband to Clare, who seems increasingly predatory. Or is this all in Irene's mind? And is everyone wearing a mask? Larsen's book is a scary hall of mirrors, a murder mystery that can't resolve itself. It sticks with you."

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson: "Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the center is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's solitary figures. Anderson's stories influenced countless American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Oates and Carver. "

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys: "Sasha Jensen has returned to Paris, the city of both her happiest moments and her most desperate. Her past lies in wait for her in cafes, bars, and dress shops, blurring all distinctions between nightmare and reality. When she is picked up by a young man, she begins to feel that she is still capable of desires and emotions. Few encounters in fiction have been so brilliantly conceived, and few have come to a more unforgettable end."