Restless by William Boyd

Don’t you love a good spy thriller? I do, except not the Cold War era ones. I also love William Boyd. I read Brazzaville Beach years ago and loved it, but hadn’t gotten around to anything else by him until now.

Restless is a classic World War II spy story, complete with the usual characters, but the spy is a woman, Eva Delectorskaya. The story is told mostly in flashback as present-day Eva (now known as Sally) finally confesses her history to her grown daughter Ruth. Up until this point Ruth had no idea that her mother was anything other than what she seemed: a middle class British housewife. Instead she discovers that her mother was a Russian-born emigree who spent the war years working for British Intelligence, eventually having to assume another identity after an operation that went horribly wrong. Now, Eva wants revenge on the spy who betrayed her, and she enlists Ruth to help her. Yet once a spy, always a spy, it seems, and Eva's ability to shade the truth and manipulate other people hasn't left her. Even one's own daughter can be a useful tool in a spy's arsenal, it turns out. It’s extremely satisfying.

My favorite aspect of this story is the way Eva’s past is gradually revealed to Ruth and how Ruth’s understanding of her mother changes. My children think I am very dull; how I would love to tell them that I really am a spy who knows how to kill someone using just a pencil. Or maybe not. Best to let them think I am harmless so as not to alert MI5.

The Guardian has a good review of this book. It came out in 2006, and this year Boyd has a new book out that sounds equally compelling; I was originally in search of that one when I came upon Restless.

(Book 11, 2010)

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

This was such a beautiful book, very moving, very sad. It’s one of those novels that are based on fact, about the affair between the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. These two met and started a relationship around 1907 when Mamah (pronounced “may-ma”) and her husband Edwin hired Wright to design a house for them in Oak Park, IL. Shortly after the house was built Mamah and Frank each left their respective spouses and children and ran away together to Europe. It was a huge scandal in turn-of-the-century Chicago society. Wright’s business suffered for years afterwards and Mamah lost custody of her children and was ostracized by society and vilified in the press.

Despite all the adversity Wright and Borthwick (she reverted to her birth name after her divorce) had a passionate, deep, and enduring love for one another. Borthwick was a suffragette and a feminist. She worked as a translator for an influential Swedish feminist named Ellen Key who strongly influenced Borthwick’s efforts to create “an authentic life” for herself, a life that was not defined by her husband, her parents, or her children, but which was hers alone. Horan writes sympathetically of Borthwick, who endured years of emotional pain and guilt over the lack of contact with her children. Wright comes across less attractively. He was a complicated man who could be difficult to deal with. Horan does a good job of presenting him accurately while still making us understand why Mamah loved him.

The tale of Mamah and Frank has a tragic ending. People familiar with Wright and with his Wisconsin home Taliesin will know the story but maybe lots of people who read this blog post will not. I don’t want to give it away, so I won’t talk about it any more. Nancy Horan has a really nice web site with information about Wright and his architecture and photos of Borthwick, Wright, and of the houses that Wright built in Oak Park in the early 20th century, including the house he built for Mamah and Edwin. The original newspaper articles that she links to are especially interesting, though they do give away the ending, so avoid those (and also Wright’s and Borthwick’s Wikipedia pages) if you don’t want to know what happens before you finish the book.

(Book 10, 2010)

The Believers by Zoe Heller

My mother used to remark on our odd habit of watching TV shows about people we wouldn’t want to live next door to. Reality TV hadn’t been invented when she said this; I think she was talking about All in the Family. But this book reminded me of what she said. The characters in this book are so unlikeable, yet at the same time so completely entertaining, that I couldn’t stop reading about them even though I really wouldn’t want to know them personally. The family, the Litvinoffs, are rude, self absorbed, and totally dysfunctional. The shrewish mother Audrey enables the 30-ish son in his continued drug addiction. The obese daughter, filled with self-hatred (compliments of her cold, overly critical mother) stays married to a controlling sycophant while engaging in an inexplicable affair with someone equally repellent. Through it all the father, Joel, lies in a post-stroke vegetative state in a New York hospital, where he is visited by his African American mistress and their illegitimate son. Wait till you get to the scene where she and Audrey accidently arrive at the same time! It’s like something on Jerry Springer (not that I ever watch that show).

Don’t worry, I haven’t nearly given everything away. I am making this book sound like trash, but it really isn’t – it’s very good. It’s funny and interesting and unique. Zoe Heller has a knack for writing excellent books about unpleasant situations. Her book What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal is about an affair between a female teacher and a very young teenage boy. That was also a great read. Both these books are evidence that a good writer can turn off-putting material into a thought-provoking book. Heller is brave to tackle these plots and I admire her for it, and enjoy the results.

(Book 9, 2010)

Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl’s first memoir, Comfort Me With Apples, introduced us to Mim, her mother. Clearly suffering from some form of mental illness, Mim is a terrifying figure, at once funny and dangerous, who wreaks all kinds of havoc on Ruth’s life. Now Mim is back in Not Becoming My Mother: and Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way, a short memoir by Reichl devoted entirely to Mim.

Apparently Mim took to heart the Catherine Aird maxim “If you can’t be a good example you’ll have to serve as a horrible warning.” Her disappointments (career, looks, marriage) are legion and she has left for Ruth, after her death, a box of letters and mementos that help Ruth process all of them. Ruth is grateful to Mim for giving her permission and incentive to have a career, and more importantly, to choose her own road through life rather than living the life dictated by her parents, as Mim had to do. Reichl writes movingly both of Mim’s troubles and of her own successes.

What I can’t figure out is why this is a book. It’s very short, only 112 pages of largish type on small pages; it’s kind of a miniature book, a guest room book, or maybe a gift book? But who would buy this for their mother? “Here mom, you were as nutty as Mim, so thanks a lot.” It would have made a perfectly good article in the Atlantic or the New Yorker where you could read it for $5.00 and get lots of other good articles at the same time. I liked it, but I’m glad I didn’t pay the publisher’s list price of $19.95 (or $25.00 in Canada!).

(Book 8, 2010)

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

It’s hard to know what to say about this book that hasn’t already been said. Moore doesn’t need me to plug it for her. It’s interesting that Jonathan Lethem, writing in the New York Times, says he only knows one person who doesn’t care for Moore’s writing. Actually, I know a lot of people who don’t care for her. Lethem says that Moore is “unpretentious and warm” but I disagree. I always found that her books and stories had an edge of nastiness to them. Friends who read this book before I did were not particularly effusive with their praise either. They pronounced it “not as sour as some of her other stuff,” and “better than expected.”

But I’ll go on record saying that I loved this book. It’s still a bit edgy, and it’s hardly warm. But it’s extremely moving, and the writing is wonderful – I love the way she uses language and humor. The story is about Tassie, a college student who works as a nanny for a neurotic white couple who adopt a mixed-race child. But it’s also a story about class, race, politics, love, lying, and growing up. I could find a little fault with some of the overly long descriptions, the various subplots that don’t quite go anywhere, and the times when Moore seems to be trying a bit too hard to be clever, but those would be really minor points. The book certainly adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

As a resident of Madison, Wisconsin, where this book is set (never mind the fictional city name of Troy) I found it hard not to get a little distracted trying to figure out what (and possibly even whom) Moore was using as models. I thought she did an excellent job of capturing the mostly unacknowledged class divides in a city like Madison: between university faculty (who have moved here from elsewhere), and native Madisonians; between UW students from rural areas of Wisconsin (“Sconnies”) and students from the East Coast (who are often Jewish, and known as“Coasties”) and between blacks and whites in a city with rapidly changing demographics.

The book is long, but it’s a fast read. And I do think Moore deserves her accolades.

(Book 7, 2010)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This was better than I expected, given its ubercute title, odd narrative structure, and overhyped back story. Did you know that the Channel Islands (located between France and England) were occupied by the Germans during World War II? I did not, before reading this book. Guernsey, along with Jersey, the largest channel island, and several other smaller islands, were occupied from 1940 to 1945. The citizens (the islands are British Crown Dependencies) suffered greatly under the occupation; many were deported to slave labor camps on the European continent, and shortages of food and medicine led to near starvation by the end of the war, and death by disease for many people.

This book is clearly well researched and tells the stories of a disparate group of islanders and how they coped with the occupation. The story is fiction but undoubtedly is based on fact. In the book a group of islanders forms a literary society as a way to conquer the intense boredom and frustration brought on by lack of contact with the outside world, but which also functions as a cover for resistance activities.

Here’s what I didn’t like: the literary gimmick of telling the whole story through letters between Juliet, a London-based writer and the various members of the literary society. Juliet is silly and a lot of time is wasted while we read about her social life. The islanders vary in their story-telling ability. Some are men of simple words, but others are loquacious nut jobs. Juliet does mature as the story evolves, and the plot advances, but I kept feeling like I just wanted someone to tell me what happened rather than forcing me to fool around with all these letters. But I am notoriously intolerant of alternate forms of story telling, so maybe this approach won’t bother you as much as it did me.

(Book 6, 2010)

Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box by Madeleine Albright

Not being a terribly close follower of diplomatic maneuvers, I was unaware of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s famous use of pins to telegraph her thoughts and intentions to world leaders and the press. But lots of other people were aware of it, and now Albright has written a book about it, to accompany an exhibit of her pins organized by the Museum of Art and Design in New York. It’s a good book to curl up with on an afternoon. It only takes about an hour to read through the text and look at the abundance of photographs of her pins, some quite valuable, but most costume jewelry, the kind we can all find in department stores and at thrift shops and garage sales.

Some examples of Ms. Albright’s pin-based messages include wearing turtle pins to signify that negotiations were progressing too slowly, and a famous incident where she wore a snake pin to confront Saddam Hussein. These events and others are related in breezy prose; Albright knows we are probably not reading this book to find out any deep secrets of international affairs. Instead we are treated to a mostly chronological account of the origins and history of her love affair with pins, including a story about wearing her future husband’s fraternity pin in college. I was charmed by Albright’s (brief) stories from her youth and her days as a young mother. I think I had just assumed that she sprang, like Athena, fully grown and ready for battle, from the forehead of Zeus.

(Book 5, 2010)

The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther

Someone recommended this to me as a good follow-up to Bitter Sweets, which I read a few weeks ago. It’s another immigrant story; Maryam moves from Iran to London as a young woman, marries an Englishman, and has a child. Eventually she feels an overwhelming urge to return to Iran to rediscover her girlhood and to reconnect with people she has lost.

Bitter Sweets was much more light-hearted than The Saffron Kitchen, which I thought was a bit overdone. Maryam is a drama queen, and takes herself very seriously. She is all scarves and jewelry and perfume and temper tantrums—I don’t usually like this kind of woman in real life, and I didn’t take to her in a book, either. At times the action is hard to follow. It shifts back and forth between third and first person, depending on who is narrating: Maryam, or her much more grounded daughter Sara. The story also shifts between the past and the present, and between London and Iran. It felt very choppy to me, like Crowther was too lazy to impose some kind of organizational structure on her work, and just wrote passages as they occurred to her.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of aspects of this book that I liked, including Maryam’s family dynamics, her interesting relationship with Fatima, a kind of nanny/housekeeper/mother figure, and an easy-to-grasp overview of Iranian politics in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Also the descriptions of the houses and the food, which everyone knows is why I really read these kinds of book.

(Book 4, 2010)

More About Brooklyn

Recently I find myself revisiting and rethinking some of my blog posts. Here's something I want to add to what I said earlier about Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin. I liked a lot of things about this book, but the most interesting was Toibin's depiction of early 1950's Brooklyn. He obviously did a lot of research, and I enjoyed reading about Eilis's life in a boarding house, and her job at a Brooklyn department store.

My complaints about this book had more to do with it not living up to the hype, rather than anything to do with the story itself. The book is not boring, and is definitely worth reading, especially if you like stories about Irish village life, and New York in the 1950's.