Reel & Read: Jaws!

Our book today is Peter Benchley's mega-bestselling 1974 novel Jaws, which was subsequently made into an obscure art-house film some of you may have seen. That film caused three horrible things to happen (well, four if you count prompting millions of people to go sit in dark movie theaters instead of taking a walk in Central Park): it made every single person in the Western world permanently terrified of swimming - or even wading past knee-deep - in the ocean, any ocean; it declared an open season on the killing of sharks which hasn't lessened in fervor in the last forty years, even though most species of large shark are now all but extinct; and it took a wrecking-ball to the writing career of its author, who was capable of good work and might have been capable of great work (his father and grandfather certainly were) but who instead will be known forever only as "the author of Jaws." Those are three heavy indictments to lay at the feet of a movie, but despite its gazillion readers, the book is largely innocent.

I'm turning my attention to the book today even though I wrote about it only (!) two or so years ago here. The reason? Why, because my "Reel & Read" partner in crime, Mr. Anderson, has decided to take time out from his wall-to-wall schedule reviewing new-release movies in order to take in Steven Spielberg's super-hit again, and I really don't need much excuse to revisit this novel.

Last time, as some you may recall, I brought up the parts of Benchley's novel that were not only effective but essentially impossible to capture on film. In retrospect this seems to me a snotty and short-sighted assertion: of course virtually anything that can be conveyed in prose can be conveyed on film, if the film-maker has some talent and puts his mind to it. Re-reading Jaws for this post, I could easily picture all of it being filmed - but the book is in so many ways so different from the Spielberg movie that I found myself imagining the unimaginable: a "Jaws" remake directed by somebody else. That somebody else might decide to stick closer to the actual plot of the novel, in which there's a lot more subtlety and land-based goings-on than makes it to the screen.

I read the novel before I saw the movie (I remember its original, dorky cover), and re-reading it has reminded me of all those goings-on. In the novel, ichthyologist Matt Hooper is still the idealistic nature-lover who can blurt out things like "Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful - God, now beautiful they are! They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth" (apparently, Benchley's Hooper isn't much of a reader, or he'd know not ever to say such things in a book ... it's just bound to, er, bite you) - but he's also a stuck-up little prick quite a lot of the time, one who happily goes along when a distraught Ellen Brody awkwardly approaches him about having an affair. She and Hooper meet at a restaurant safely up the coast from Amity, the Long Island beach town where Ellen's husband is chief of police, and the scene that follows, in which they fantasize aloud about what they'd like to do to each other, certainly wouldn't be impossible to film - but it would sure as hell be impossible for Spielberg to film. I doubt he could even understand the words on the page.

Benchley is expertly parsimonious with words, when he's narrating such hard-edged, adult scenes. There's one excrutiating sequence where Ellen throws a small dinner party and Chief Brody, broiling with resentments he can only half-name, proceeds to get very nearly drunk enough to torpedo the whole evening. Benchley keeps the narrative focus tightly on Brody, and yet there's no sympathy in the action at all ... the reader hears all of Brody's internal complaints and justifications and yet is never moved to empathy, is horrified the whole time by how he's behaving. It's expertly done: it's a shame so many readers probably missed it while thumbing forward looking for the next shark-attack scene.

Naturally, this being a work of prose not film, there's a good deal more straightforward exposition than any action-movie could support - including a scientific digression (by Hooper, of course) that might ring some bells for modern readers:

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there's enough down there to support whales, there's enough to support sharks that big. Just because we've never seen a hundred-foot white doesn't mean they couldn't exist. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn't float to shore, because they don't have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?"

Fortunately, thanks to later masterpieces, readers in 2011 need not wonder about such things (although they might wonder how such a careful researcher as Benchley could get his archeological time-tables so scrunched up) - nor, indeed, does the book itself ponder on them for any length of time. Instead, it unfurls its various plot-lines with careful skill, including one plot-line that owes everything to what a certain wind-bag once described as the anxiety of influence. In the book, it turns out that Larry Vaughan, Amity's mayor, has a clear-cut motive for insisting that Chief Brody open the town's beaches even though two people have died, and his motive is cinematic: he's in debt up to his eyeballs to ... the Mafia!

That would be more or less the same Mafia that starred in the book-world's previous mega-bestseller, Mario Puzo's The Godfather from 1969. That novel had done the ultimate magic trick in the publishing world: it had become its own currency, an immediate part of every single Western individual's functioning cerebellum. Long before the Harry Potter books or The Da Vinci Code or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it had become a cultural phenomenon - and that phenomenon was quadrupled by the 1972 movie. Peter Benchley would have been something more than human if he hadn't hoped, at least in some part of his heart, that someday he could write a book that would do the same thing.

He did exactly that. He squeezed the not-so-innocent town of Amity between a feckless mayor who needs to keep the beaches open if he's ever going to repay his mobster 'partners' and a remorseless predator prowling beyond the surf. And it's not just Larry Vaughan: most of the characters here (with the notable exception of Quint, who's every bit as ridiculous a figure in the novel as in the movie, but who's at least graced in the movie by an indelible performance by Robert Shaw) are caught between the lone shark and the loan shark, and none more than Ellen Brody, who belatedly comes to regret her fling with Matt Hooper:

As she pondered what Vaughan had said, she began to recognize the richness of her life: a relationship with Brody was more rewarding than any Larry Vaughan would ever experience; an amalgam of minor trials and tiny triumphs that, together, added up to something akin to joy. And as her recognition grew, so did her regret that it had taken her so long to see the waste of time and emotion in trying to cling to her past. Suddenly she felt fear - fear that she was growing up too late, that something might happen to Brody before she could savor her awareness.

Nothing happens to Brody, of course - unlike in the movie, he's the sole survivor of the Orca, who returns alone to tell the tale. Benchley's book outsold Puzo's by two or three to one, and then a few years later the movie made from that book out-grossed the movie made from Puzo's by more than twice as much (although, again, you'll have to check with Mr. Anderson to see how it holds up after all these years). And most importantly, Puzo's novel reads like it was written in fifteen minutes by a megalomaniac 15-year-old, whereas Peter Benchley - may he rest in the deep - wrote a really good book, an almost perfect intelligent summer-read, provided you're not on a raft at sea.

I'd Do It Again!

Our book today is the greatest American political memoir ever written, by the greatest American politician who ever lived: of course I refer to James Michael Curley and his 1957 memoir I'd Do It Again.

Curley will be more of a myth than a reality to most 21st century Americans, and there's just a faint possibility that he would have liked that state of affairs. He was born 1874 in Roxbury to a poor family of Irish immigrants, and through dint of his oratorical skills and his predilection for high-purposed violence, he embarked on a political career like Boston had never seen and would never see again. He was four times mayor of Boston, he was governor of Massachusetts, he was a representative in Congress, and he was immensely popular with the people of Boston despite the fact that he never saw a kickback or pile of sluch-money he didn't like and was under one federal indictment or another for most of his adult life.

When that life - what he called 'tumultuous years' - was almost over, he was convinced in 1957 to write an account of it, in large part because the previous year Edwin O'Connor had won fame and fortune with his novel The Last Hurrah, which was as clearly based on Curley's life and career as it could be without actually owing the man royalties. I'd Do It Again became a regional and then something of a national bestseller, and although its sales numbers never approached those of The Last Hurrah, it's every bit as entertaining a book - maybe a bit more so, in fact, since Frank Skeffington, the hero of O'Connor's book, is a frail old man, whereas the frail old man Curley wrote a book that's blazingly, wondrously young in its every page and paragraph. If The Last Hurrah is one of the most eloquent, funny, tender eulogies ever written, I'd Do It Again is an Irish pub-song sung so boisterously it makes the Dropkick Murphys sound like Donnie and Marie.

When Curley writes of fighting in the 1890s to get his name printed at the top of the ballot for office ("since many illiterate voters were apt to put a cross beside the first name they saw"), he's not using euphemism - he and his "score of brawny friends" barricaded the entrance to the filing office on Milk Street and fought off assaults from rival candidates (and their own brawny friends) all through the night to make sure Curley's name topped the ballot. At the end of every such anecdote, Curley always offers a Catholic school nod toward the advance of civilization: "Years later the law was changed, and ballot position was determined by lot" - but he makes it clear he wouldn't change his raucous past for all the tea in China.

There are a thousand stories in I'd Do It Again, and every one of them is a winner. Curley is always the hero, but there's almost always a twinkle of self-mockery in these tales, as when he recounts leaving his heavy fur coat in the car while he gave a speech in front of St. Augustine's Church on Dorchester Street in South Boston:

'It is therefore fitting that one of the closing rallies of this campaign be held here in the shadow of this sacred edifice dedicated to the greatest religion the world has ever known. This entire campaign, in fact, reminds me of that passage in The Lord's Prayer which reads:  "Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us ...'"

As I intoned these words, I saw a bum lifting my coat out of the open car. Lowering my voice, I turned to one of my lieutenants and said, "Get that son-of-a-bitch who's trying to run off with my coat." I then continued with the concluding passage of the inspiring prayer, saying, "'and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.'"

The coat was recovered, and the culprit got the bum's rush.

A who's-who of the great political figures of the early 20th century parades through these pages, including President Taft (who was once so entranced by the Curley oratory that he turned down lunch to keep listening - surely one of the least believable of all Curley's whoppers) and President Franklin Roosevelt, who's always something of a comic book adversary for our hero (in 1957, unlike today, it was still permissible for a politician to dislike FDR in his memoirs), including the time FDR tried to give him quite literally the worst job in the world: US ambassador to Poland - in 1933. Curley turns him down, despite the fact that he was "devoted to the fine people of Poland - particularly to those Polish people in Massachusetts who had always so intelligently voted for Curley ..."

The big, sad point of The Last Hurrah is that Frank Skeffington's brand of politics was disappearing forever. I'd Do It Again is not so sentimental on the subject - Curley fought his battles cheerfully (and bore up resolutely under more tragedy in his personal life than any three or four people usually have), and he wrote a cheerful book about them. It's for later historians to wrangle the question of whether or not Curley's style of government-by-graft was more of an evil than a good in American political history. But I'd Do It Again certainly gives the impression that it was a simpler style - more direct, more personal, and perhaps ultimately more conscientious just for those reasons.

Curley could have written a very different book - a darker, angrier one - but if he had, some of that simplicity would have been lost. As it is, say what you want about the man, his memoir makes it possible to believe what one Boston newspaper man wrote about him all those long decades ago: "He never forgot a promise, and he always helped the poor and unfortunate."

Katherine Powers!

Allow me to add my quick and completely enthusiastic 'Hear, hear!' to the interview my fellow book-blogger Eric Forbes just conducted with the mighty Katherine Powers (it's located here, and if you don't already have Eric's blog bookmarked, by all means do that while you're there).

Powers writes a bi-weekly book column called "A Reading Life" for the dear old Boston Globe, and in that column readers will always find three things: her formidable intelligence, her deep reading experience, and best of all, her utterly unpredictable eclecticism. She can open a column with a review of a new collection of Sumerian mythology and end up recommending her four favorite books on natural history, and the chain of causation will enchantingly sensible, link by link (the first of you who can parse the chain linking my examples will win ... wait for it ... a free book!). That eclecticism is the key to both the charm of her column and its longevity, and oddly enough, roamers who come to her words from the wilds of the Internet will find them very familiar. By using her own readerly sensibilities as her pole-star, she allows the focus of "A Reading Life" to wander all over her aesthetic landscape. In this sense, she's been book-blogging longer than any of us.

Let's take this last Sunday's column as a quick example, shall we? Her large subject is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, and just as I am myself, she's getting her share of galley copies of new and upcoming books commemorating that event. It's certainly a fruitful subject - it's certainly possible to argue that the King James has had a deeper and more pervasive impact on Western culture than any other book with the possible exception of On the Origin of Species, and on Western literature there is no rival that's even close. So you'd think quite a few of the books written specifically to celebrate the event would rise to the occasion.

Not so the two unfortunate new volumes she uses to open her discussion. "The entire book is written in this bland, annual-report flavored style, made all the more ludicrous by the majesty and grace of its purloined subject," she writes about one of them, and the other she characterizes as "an obeisance to the strange god of calculation." Hee.

In most other book columns appearing in great metropolitan newspapers, these condemnations (this is one of the most cheering aspects of Powers' column for me, and it's an aspect of book-writing I sometimes fear our non-Irish practitioners too often forget: book critics don't only praise - they also smite the wicked. Powers is a first-rate smiter when the mood strikes her)(like most veteran readers, she intensely dislikes having her time wasted, I suspect) would be followed by a longer notice of a new book she actually liked.

But not so a book-blog, which is what Powers has secretly been writing all these years! On the best book-blogs, the readers are blissfully in the hands of the blogger's reading acumen, not slaves to the New Release lists. Powers no sooner finishes politely stomping on the two new books before her than she pulls a quintessential blogging move by saying "but here's something on the subject that you really should read" - and then doing the written equivalent of jumping up and finding that one perfect book on her jam-packed shelves and proceeding to sing its praises even though it's not new and isn't the basis for a Robert Pattinson movie.

The book she picks this time is Adam Nicolson's entirely worthy God's Secretaries, about the diverse collection of men who were commissioned by King James I to do the epochal translation that James knew perfectly well was the main thing for which he'd be remembered. And in just the span of four paragraphs, she not only does the book justice but serves up a mighty effective recommendation in the process.

Which is exactly what we want from our best book-bloggers!

Pompous Pundits in the Penny Press!

I had intended to make the first Stevereads post of 2011 – the first of a new decade! - entirely wombat-related. But then I noticed the little “symposium” unfolding in the New York Times, a group discussion on the Role of the Book-Critic Today, and I swerved in my course, like a great white shark suddenly sensing the proximity of a wounded elephant seal. An intensely narcissistic subject, served up in fresh steaming piles of self-importance? Wombats will keep.

And I wasn't disappointed, except in the sense of being intensely disappointed. It being The NYT Book Review, I expected the thing to be more full of bromides than Granny's medicine chest – but even I was underestimating how bad it could be. The salt in the wound was the feature's invocation of the great literary critic Alfred Kazin as a sort of ghostly moderator, using his entertaining essay “The Function of Criticism Today” as a trampoline on which these six fat little babies could exhaust themselves until they reached their word-count. But the aggravation started before any of those babies could open their yaps – it started in the Editors Introduction, which included this precious line: “But where does it leave the serious critic, one not interested, say, in tabulating the number of “Brooklyn novelists” who receive attention each year in publications like this one (data possibly more useful to real estate agents and sociologists than to readers)?”

Gotta love that sniffing tone! Gotta love that hint of genteel mystification that anybody (except maybe a – sniff – real estate agent) might suspect the Book Review of being clubbish, of seeking to be cool, of assigning some of its reviews for less-than-Olympian reasons of pure literary quality. Wanna gut somebody's latest novel because they refused your drunken advances at a Tribeca party? Wanna praise somebody's uncle so you'll get invited to their fabulous loft in Dumbo? Well, then, you better peddle your wares someplace else, buddy! Here at the Book Review, we're entirely above such petty game-playing – perhaps you'd have more luck with – sniff – a sociologist.

But then, Editors Introductions are pretty much always bad (I ought to know – I've written my share of them), so we can take that with a degree of stoicism. But geez, did the rest of the feature have to be so bad? Granted, it's a boring subject, and granted (despite its serial bemoaning of the slapdash nature of the Internet) it was obviously pulled together about a hung-over half-hour before deadline, but even so, these six essays made for grim reading. Even the ordinarily-good Sam Anderson and Adam Kirsch were defeated by the Times-dictated bloat of the central conceit, and the others – derivative egomaniacs at the best of times – never stood a chance.

Stephen Burn's densely idiotic essay was the worst of a bad bunch (there are more cliches and mixed metaphors in this one piece than in all the others combined), and as horrifying as his prose is, his underlying sentiments are even worse. At one point he writes: “And while the removal — or more accurately, the redistribution — of the evaluative task is likely to dilute critical standards, it can also free up the critic to engage in more serious tasks that might bleed back into the culture, providing a stronger skeleton for a range of literary activity. The critic who reviews contemporary novels now might valuably turn her attention to different kinds of vertical or horizontal mapping.”

If you can get past the imaginative log-jam of bleeding skeletons providing range, if you can focus past the pompous vagueness of “vertical and horizontal mapping,” you'll see what I mean: it's bad enough that he writes about the diluting of critical standards as though it's just something that's going to happen, no big deal, but what follows is even worse – that muddy implication that it's a good thing that critics now won't have to bother so much with those boring critical standards, because now they'll be free to do more of that vertical and horizontal mapping we're always complaining we don't see enough of. Yeesh. Alfred Kazin might not have been pleased with a tribute like this.

I wish I could say that the implicit contempt for book-criticism that runs through Burn's piece was unique to it, but all six of these essays are lousy with it. Pankaj Mishra's piece has this astonishing opening: “I don’t think of myself as a literary critic. I write about novels and short stories. But I am reluctant to describe what I do as “literary criticism,” as I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text — whether narrative techniques or quality of prose — and its aesthetic pleasures, to engage with the author’s worldview ...” OK, fine – since you like to get past the, hee, literariness of the text, then by your own admission you're not a literary critic – but you spend the rest of the piece gassing on about Tolstoy as if you still think you are a literary critic, and more importantly, you're here, in a feature about the role of the literary critic today. And again, the implications here are worse than the statements. When somebody says “I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text” (in order to find out what the author thinks about Tamil refugees, or something important like that, not all this frilly folderol about prose), their implied conclusion couldn't be clearer: “...because really, who can tell whether the literariness of a book is any good or not? And really, given the state of the Indonesian economy, who cares?” When the literariness of a text is viewed as some niggling little obstacle, something to be quickly got beyond, the state of book-criticism is dire indeed.

But then, book criticism hardly seems to be on the minds of most of these writers. Most of them hit the same note about what a critic's really important job is. Adam Kirsch hits that note more fatuously than the others, but he'll stand for everybody when he writes: “Whether I am writing verse or prose, I try to believe that what matters is not exercising influence or force, but writing well — that is, truthfully and beautifully; and that maybe, if you seek truth and beauty, all the rest will be added unto you.” Say 'unto' much in your day-to-day speech, Adam? Think it comes across any less affected here? And although it's a little dispiriting that such a normally-smart critic would find it necessary to put so much elephantine stress on something so self-evident (yes, all publishing writers should strive to make their prose excellent … and?), the worst part, again, is in the implications. What, after all, is he talking about when he says 'the rest will be added unto you'? You're doing your best to write truthfully and beautifully, and somewhere along the line, 'the rest' will be added unto you – but what's that? It's obvious: 'the rest' are those pesky 'critical standards' – once you're done making your prose as pretty as you can, you'll just have to hope you accidentally drop some hints to your readers as to whether or not the book in question is any good. The important thing is that you get in lots of pseudo-literary swanning. The rest will either happen or it won't.

And the added twist to all this 'the important thing is the writing' bull-hooey is the hypocrisy of it all. The very first question asked by every one of these oh-so-exquisite aesthetes, upon being approached by the Times to desecrate Alfred Kazin's memory, was: How much does it pay? And no matter how feelingly they declaim that the quality of the writing is everything to them, if the Times had said, “why, we're not paying you anything – it's a friggin' symposium,” each and every one of these oh-so-exquisite aesthetes would have refused to contribute even one mixed metaphor. I care most about the truth and beauty of my writing – but you can't have it, because The Rumpus is offering me 5 cents more a word. Ah, the glory that was Athens.

Not to mention the obvious fact that it's a very tricky business, claiming that the only important thing to you is the quality of your own prose – it invites scrutiny of that very quality, like Achilles hanging a bulls-eye on his ankle. Needless to say, most of our Kazinites don't hold up well under that scrutiny. Katie Roiphe is no better than any of the others when she turns in a paragraph like this:

Before the requiem begins, we have to admit that critics have always been a grandstanding, depressive and histrionic bunch. They — and by “they” I mean “we” — have always decried the decline of standards, the end of reading, the seductions of mediocrity, the abysmal shallowness and distractibility of the general public, the virtually apocalyptic state of literature and culture. Yet somehow the bruised and embattled figures of both the writer and the critic have survived lo these many centuries.

Pretty much the only smile I had during the whole ordeal of this feature came in imagining how a paragraph like that would have fared in the general edits of Open Letters. From John Cotter's gentlemanly “Hmmm. Doesn't really work, does it?” to Greg Waldmann's grunting “can we nix this … and this … and this” to Rohan Maitzen's playful “We'd be doing her a favor if we 'nixed' the whole paragraph” to Sam Sacks' damningly curt “Cut this graf” ...and this is somebody writing about the role of the book-critic today, in the New York Times. The thing is a stunning comment on its own irrelevance; the swanning of the critic has firmly supplanted any other function, and the reason it's done that is disgustingly craven: because here in the most-read book review forum in the world, post-modern textual cowardice has entirely won the day. The reason this gang of six is concentrating so much on lo the gorgeous prose they're giving unto us is because they've turned and run from the task of actually analyzing prose (Anderson and Kirsch, at least, aren't usually like that – I tend to give them a pass for this “symposium” and just hope to see them back to work soon).

Fortunately, it's only the Book Review: it's been somewhat dimly bourgeois since the Eisenhower administration (Ike's response to reading his one and only review in the Times: “Well does he like the book or doesn't he? Gee, I can't even tell!”) - we mustn't expect the truth from a publication dedicated to providing comfort. But still, more people are going to read it in a single morning than read most other review-publications in an entire month, and I worry that many of those people will unconsciously absorb the defeatist implications everywhere throughout this “symposium” (the accompanying pod-cast is, if anything, more grotesque – is there anywhere on the Internet a literary pod-cast that's actually good? Or are they all doomed attempts to recapture the glory of the previous night's book-talk over wine and sleeping basset hounds?). I worry that these six pieces and their sniffing introduction will serve in some readers' minds as an actual examination of the role of the book-critic today, when actually they hardly come near it.

Sam Anderson, bless him, comes the closest when he talks about book-critics being 'evangelists' – that'll serve well enough if we recall that evangelists also condemn. The book-critic (all books, incidentally – our six writers here seem unable to conceive it possible to review a book that isn't a novel)'s job is the same now as it's always been: to serve as the more dedicated, more experienced, faster, and better-prepared reader all readers wish they had time to be, to employ a specially sharpened acumen and a lifetime of experience in order to assess the merits of the day's literature, for the sole purpose of determining whether or not it deserves the wider audience all published writing seeks. There's nothing in that purpose about the critic showing off his own literary talents, and there's nothing in it about getting beyond the literariness of the text – the literariness of the text is everything. And those texts must be judged, and judgement is not only possible but necessary. Book-critics use those 'critical standards' to uphold a dialogue between the readers they represent and the unending texts that confront them.

We're lucky the Internet has blossomed – we have more book-critics than ever before, and just in time, since we have more books than ever before too. So yes, this “symposium” in the Times disappointed me, but it's over now, and at least a couple of its better writers can now get back unto work.

And I'll be getting back to that work myself, here at Stevereads! 2010 here was a lot of fun, and I have high hopes for 2011 – I plan on resuming all my old favorite hobby-horses, and I plan on introducing some new ones, and I plan a good many other changes as well – I hope it entertains you all, and I invite your comments for all of it. And now that I've been clued in to how culturally important it is, I'll be adding lots and lots of vertical mapping – at no extra charge!

Best and Worst!

Despite the much-ballyhoo'd defeat of books at the hands of electronic gadgets, and despite the much-ballyhoo'd sloth of the general reading public (one book a year? Come on, people! That's not even trying!), 2010 saw the usual torrent of titles pour off the presses - books in an endless array, almost infinitely augmented by the burgeoning self-publishing market. Far, far more books than anybody can actually read, even me. But the key isn't the reading, it's the sorting, and trust me, I'm a very good book-sorter. When confronted with a vast, heaped-high canvas tub full of books - let's sat that represents the publishing world's output in English in 2010 - the first thing you need in order to make any headway is a finely-honed instinct for the noteworthy stuff, good or bad. But the next most important thing you need is a muscular, heartless, instantaneous capacity to sort, to plunge into that heaped tub and hurl books to the left of you and books to the right of you, to see, snap, and shovel, to allow an almost super-tactile sensitivity to guide you when discarding instantly about ninety-five percent of it all.

The ultimate litmus test is - has to be - boredom. If a book is only its table of contents, no table of contents can save it: for good or evil, the execution is everything. The explosion of self-published novels has removed even the slightest shred of merit in merely plotting a story, and the pervasiveness of Wikipedia has removed even the slightest shred of merit in merely assembling facts - now more than ever, only the writers who do more than that (regardless of how well or poorly they do it) are worth any attention at all. In the great, grinding, mechanical threshing and sorting of a tub full of books, it's only those writers who are worth a pause and a second look.

I dove into that tub in 2010, as I try to do every year. To date in 2010 I've read 703 books (that total will likely exceed 215 by year's end), almost a personal best for me. And in 2010 a greater percentage of those were new books than in any previous year (I did less of my beloved re-reading than ever in my life, because I simply didn't have the spare time) - new and self-published works of fiction, history, biography, natural history, politics, sociology, literary criticism, science fiction, mystery, romance (Paul Marron-related and otherwise!), theology, and even a little philosophy and poetry. I read young adult novels, graphic novels, teen novels, experimental novels, 'alternate' histories, crackpot conspiracy theories, political diatribes - and I considered all of it when tabulating our annual Stevereads Gotterdamerung. The only things I'm excluding from contention among the things I read all year long are dissertations, manuscripts, and all works in languages other than English (fortunately, you've all got Scott Esposito to keep an eye on the foreign stuff!). In that way only is the following not actually representative: I read plenty of stuff in 2010 that I knew perfectly well would never be up for possible inclusion here - either positive or negative. Because I routinely fail my own litmus test: I read far more boring books than I should, even after I know they're boring and should throw them at the nearest basset hound. My curiosity far too often gets the best of me.

As always, I put that curiosity - and the many excruciating reading hours it provoked - at your disposal at this time of year! I often call Stevereads the autobiography of my reading, but it's also true that I usually leave my reviews of new and current books for Open Letters, concentrating instead here on all the miscellaneous old wonders of my various bookshelves. At this time of year I open Stevereads up to the publishers' lists and tell you about some of the current reading I do (no Gerald of Wales in any of the upcoming lists!).

So I hope you enjoy. The playwright Aeschylus tells us we must suffer, suffer into truth, so we'll have to slog our way through the bad to get to the good. We'll start next time with the Worst Fiction of 2010!

Blue at the Mizzen!

Our book today is an inadvertently sad one, Patrick O'Brian's Blue at the Mizzen from 2000 – sad because it's the last of the great Aubrey/Maturin novels. I scorn utterly the pathetic fragment that was pulled from the author's dead hand by his greedy publishers, and I say further that despite the implications of that fragment, O'Brian was very consciously ending his long series with this book, which accounts for its sadness even though the actual events of the book itself are both happy and, paradoxically, cheering.

The story is populated by so many of our old friends: bluff, enormous Commodore Jack Aubrey, grizzled and hyper-intelligent doctor and spy Stephen Maturin, many tried and familiar hands aboard the Surprise (now ostensibly a privately-commissioned hydrographical survey vessel, but a mighty well-armed one), and in fact the Surprise herself, a trifle long in the tooth but wonderfully spry. There's a voyage to South America, and there are doldrums, and there are the terrors of rounding the Horn, and there's Jack cuckolding an admiral, and there are long, interminable letters being written to loved ones on the other side of the world, and there are lovely interludes ashore both at home in England and in far-off marshes and swamps where Maturin (and the new object of his awkward affection) goes exploring. There are action sequences of superb excitement, and there are wonderful character bits and routines that practically glow with our long-standing affection.

And yet, there's a sadness that permeates the book, and perhaps it's not all inadvertent. O'Brian takes many opportunities to let readers know that even in his Napoleonic Lothlorien, time touches his characters. Not only are all of them older and scarred from their various adventures, but some of them are absent, dead, and keenly missed (not only Bonden, Jack's stalwart subordinate, but also Stephen's endearing potto, the sight of whose carefully-preserved bones briefly chokes him up at one point in the book). And there's a young new generation springing up all around them – in this book most winningly portrayed in the form of engagingly deferential ensign Horatio Hanson, who might just be the bastard son of the Duke of Clarence, the future idiot-king William IV.

Despite the numerous fantasy elements of his huge epic, O'Brian was enamored of a certain realism, and he periodically spruces up his various chapters by slowly advancing Jack Aubrey through the chain of command in the British Navy. Since the one thing we're guaranteed from the very first book is that our two main characters will prosper in the end, there's only one real destination for all those assignments and promotions of Jack's: the admiralty (and unlike in the case of James T. Kirk, there'll be no going back from that august rank). And there's something even a grass-combing swab can intuit about the admiralty: its members (again, not including Jim Kirk) don't go haring off on wild adventures. They're august and well-salaried bureaucrats, especially when there's no Napoleon to fight.

So when in Blue at the Mizzen we see Jack fretting over whether or not he'll ever become a 'blue' admiral, we know, even without the assurance of the book's title, that he shall become exactly that, and soon. And such knowledge can't help but cast everything in the book in a valedictory light. When Stephen Maturin is briefly at Jack Aubrey's home in England, touring the neighboring fields with his daughter, the beauty of it all is the beauty of a long, lingering sunset:

What pleasant days they were – an English summer at its best, and English countryside at its best, enough night-rain in the hills to keep the trout-streams fine and brisk, and there were reports of a hoopoe seen three times at Chiddingfold parsonage. This year was happy in unusual numbers of birds (nesting-time had been particularly favourable) and Stephen and Brigid wandered along the smooth hay-meadows, by the standing corn, and along the banks, he telling her the names of countless insects,l many birds – kingfishers, dippers, dabchicks, and the occasional teal: coots and moorhens, of course – as well as his particular favourites, hen-harrier, sparrowhawk and kestrel and once a single splendid peregrine, a falcon clipping her way not much above head-height with effortless speed. A hare in her form: two dormice: an infant weasel, unalarmed: and such quantities of butterflies.

“The sea,” we're told, “if it teaches nothing else, does at least compel a submission to the inevitable which resembles patience.” And certainly the last six or seven Aubrey/Maturin books at times required patience – shot and incident became distinctly rarer, and more and more pages were given over to O'Brian's sharp and lilting but occasionally stultifying social comedy. Whole books would elapse without anything in the way of exciting happening, which can be a trial no matter how entertaining the author is. Blue at the Mizzen, fortunately, doesn't suffer from that – hell, it opens with the nautical equivalent of a hit-and-run, and it seldom slows down after that. There's political intrigue, romantic interludes, and plenty of action to keep the reader engrossed. And as always there's the O'Brian humor:

Jack Aubrey pushed back his chair, loosened his waistcoat, and said, “I had no idea I was so hungry: I am afraid I must have eaten like an ogre.”

Killick could be seen to smile: Jack's appetite always pleased him – his one deviation into amiability.

But even while you're reading along, pleased beyond measure at seeing the thing done so supremely well, there's that persistent melancholy. The book's last paragraph runs like this:

After the last salute Jack glanced aloft – still the sweet west wind – an then he looked fore and aft: a fine clear deck, hands all at their stations and all beaming with pleasure; and turning to the master he said, 'Mr. Hanson, pray lay ma course for Cape Pilar and Magellan's Strait.'

All that's missing is a 'and they lived happily ever after' to choke you up a bit yourself.

Sick-bed comforts!

Sometimes, when you're not feeling all that good, only a certain type of old friend will serve. When you're walking around town or waiting at an airport or trying to pretend you're not at a poetry reading, your best old book-friends are just who you want to help you out - for me, these are my big guns, the unchanging voices I listen to over and over (I'll spare you all the list, especially since its names are fairly obvious by this point).

But when you're feeling sick, when you're laying on the couch swaddled in blankets and basset hounds, those very best book-friends feel wrong. You worry that in your present condition, you'd be wasting their time (yes, I know that makes no sense - book-people aren't very sensible). No, in such miserable circumstances, you reach for a different kind of friend entirely. Voices at once more casual and more comforting.

My list of such second-tier book-friends is very, very long, but this weekend I reached for five that will serve very well as a thumbnail for all the rest:

The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse is, I suspect, on many and many such a list as this one, and deservedly so: absolutely nobody writes more cheering-up books than he does, and this 1938 classic is, in my opinion, his single best. I have the paperback with the J. C. Leyendecker cover, and this weekend I smiled again to read the adventures of hapless, good-hearted Bertie Wooster and his all-knowing valet Jeeves. The Code of the Woosters involves a vicious little dog, a disastrous flirtation with the M-word, a touchy French cook, and a ghastly little cow-creamer, but no matter how dire the circumstances seem to be, nothing serious is of course ever at stake, as you can tell from the caliber of curses Bertie's feisty Aunt Dahlia calls down upon her foe:

May green flies attack his roses. May his cook get tight on the night of the big dinner party. May all his hens get the staggers. May his cistern start leaking, and may white ants, if there are any in England, gnaw away the foundations of Totleigh Towers.

Strong stuff, as Bertie comments, and I trust I may not be misconstrued when I say the book is full of it.

The Daughter of Time - Naturally, when bedridden, there's nothing that answers quite so well as a murder mystery (I once had an old friend who used to contrive being bedridden, solely to stimulate this feeling); they feel so neat and controlled right when we ourselves are feeling anything but. And this 1951 staple of the genre is quite possibly the best murder mystery ever written, despite being so preposterous it ought to provoke appreciation only for giggles, not craft. It's the story of Inspector Grant, who's laid up in the hospital with a broken leg but can't stop investigating - so he turns his deductive powers to one of the greatest mysteries of British history: what happened to the Princes in the Tower? Did Richard III have his nephews killed so that he could seize the throne? Grant spends a great deal of time reading books of history, and it's a testament to Tey's narrative ability that she makes it all as exciting as a Glasgow car-chase:

He [Grant, of course - the book is very nearly a one-man show] reached for More's History of Richard III. It had as preface a short life of More which he had not bothered to read. Now he turned to it to find out how More could have been both Richard III's historian and Henry VIII's Chancellor. How old was More when Richard succeeded?

He was five.

When that dramatic council scene had taken place at the Tower, Thomas More had been five years old. He had been only eight when Richard died at Bosworth.

Everything in that history had been hearsay.

And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than any other it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Well, OK - that does prompt some giggling, but still - it never fails.

Probably understandably, most nonfiction won't work in circumstances like the ones we're talking about here, but the books of Stephen Jay Gould are happy exceptions - probably because they're largely composed of short columns he wrote for a smart popular audience during the heyday of Natural History magazine, so they're primed to entertain. The first of these volumes, 1977's Ever Since Darwin, has been one of my go-to sick-books for thirty years now, mostly for bright-eyed segments like this one on the growth of the human brain:

But what about our preoccupation with ourselves; does anything about the history of vertebrates indicate why one peculiar species should be so brainy? Here's a closing item for thought. The most ancient brain cast of a primate belongs to a 55-million-year-old creature named Tetonius homonculus. Jerison has calculated its encephalization quotient as 0.68. This is, to be sure, only two-thirds the size of an average living mammal of the same body weight, but it is by far the largest brain of its time (making the usual correction for body weight); in fact, it is more than three times as large as an average mammal of its period. Primates have been ahead right from the start; our large brain is only an exaggeration of a pattern set at the beginning of the age of mammals. But why did such a large brain evolve in a group of small, primitive tree-dwelling mammals, more similar to rats and shrews that to mammals conventionally judged as more advanced? And with this provocative query, I end, for we simply do not know the answer to one of the most important questions we can ask.

The King Must Die - This brawny 1958 historical novel by Mary Renault is now a staple of school reading assignments, so who knows but that it might not become immortal, but my affection for it dates to well before it achieved such deification - although really, like with Wodehouse, I'll reach for any Renault when I'm feeling under the weather. This novel tells the story of wily young teenager Theseus, recasting all his mythological adventures from Edith Hamilton into a authentic-feeling evocation of pre-historical Greece. Renault is a pleasingly subtle writer, and that subtlety is stamped on every page of this great book, including the end of a riveting scene where young Theseus hosts the slightly older king Pylas at an outdoor feast and incites the curiosity of his followers as the night winds down:

The fire crumbled; the ashes grew red and gray with a few sparks of gold; the dogs mumbled their bones full-bellied. As it grew quiet, we leaned and fell to whispering; I could seem more than one of my Minyans lying awake to watch if he would make love to me. We agreed together to press for war that autumn rather than wait for spring ... He laughed and promised. Then we slept; I on my face, because my back was sore. Next morning when we all set off home, he gave me his gold-rimmed cup as a guest gift. The Companions stared, and wondered if they had stayed awake long enough.

See the joy of the intellect at play there? See the winking hints, so entirely adult in a genre that produces so much pap for children? We're told a practical reason why Theseus sleeps face-down, but no other reasons are excluded; we're told his Companions wondered if they'd stayed awake long enough not to miss some lovemaking, but we're not told they didn't miss something - Renault assumes there are some things her readers might like to decide for themselves. It's entirely refreshing, especially when you're curled on a couch lost in effluvia.

Collected Sonnets - that state of being lost in effluvia is conducive to a bit of self-pity, and when you're feeling so inclined, nothing quite caps things off like somebody else's self-pity. And nobody strikes that old lachrymose note quite as beautifully as the great second-rate poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her performances of these sonnets had to be seen to be believed, but even the unaided works drape down upon the reader like a fine shroud:

Not that it matters, not that my heart's cry

Is potent to deflect our common doom,

Or bind to truce in this ambiguous room

The planets of the atom as they ply;

But only to record that you and I,

Like thieves that scratch the jewels from a tomb,

Have gathered delicate love in hardy bloom

Close under Chaos, - I rise to testify.

This is my testament: that we are taken;

Our colours are as clouds before the wind;

Yet for a moment stood the foe forsaken,

Eyeing Love's favour to our helmets pinned;

Death is our master, - but his seat is shaken;

He rides victorious, - but his ranks are thinned.

See? "Our common doom"? I feel better already.

The Nature of Massachusetts!

Our book today is the gorgeous 1996 volume The Nature of Massachusetts, written by Christopher Leahy, John Hanson Mitchell, and Thomas Conuel to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Massachusetts Audobon Society, and given that the volume is lavishly illustrated with the wistful, evocative artwork of Lars Jonsson, it's hard to imagine a better tribute-volume.

Conuel's precision and Leahy's all-encomassing passion drive the book, but it's the quirky, passionate prose of Mitchell (author of the immortal nature classic Ceremonial Time, which we'll get to one of these days here at Stevereads) that lifts the volume to the status of a classic – one that all nature-lovers should own whether they've set foot in Massachusetts or not.

The book starts off exactly as it should: with a lengthy tribute to the indomitable Boston women who got the whole business of wildlife preservation started, properly organized, and properly funded. The essays is called “Founding Mothers” and pays heartfelt tribute to such pioneers as Olga Owens Huckins, Rachel Carson, and most of all Harriet Hemenway, and the playful perception the reader encounters here stays the same throughout the book:

Proper Boston women, it used to be said, liked getting old. They could wear their hair in the Queen Mother style with impunity, ignore fashion altogether, and say what they wanted. The Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and lived to be ninety-one, confided in her diary at the age of eighty-seven that she hoped the coming year would bring her useful work. Aging was like a cup of tea, she believed. The sugar was at the bottom.

The book takes us on a leisurely tour of all the various “rooms” to be found in the Bay State's “House of Nature” - streams and floodplains, grasslands, red maple swamps, oak-conifer forests, coastal heathlands, and many others. Each of these very different ecological niches is examined in vigorous detail, and each chapter comes with its own mini-bibliography. When our writers tells us that “The peaceful grandeur of the large estuarine salt marsh masks the orgy of biological activity taking place in and around it,” they're not pandering to sensationalism – their enthusiasm is as genuine as it is infectious. To them, the most commonplace physical setting invariably hides great riches:

Despite the characteristically depauperate plant and animal communities, a good bog is a naturalist's dreamland: often secluded by a surrounding wall of forest; the vegetation, water, and reflections laid out in a pleasing arrangement of planes and horizons; an unparalleled assortment of greens spotted with orchid pink in spring and splotched with moorland crimson in the fall; an assemblage of strange plants such as sundews and pitcher plants that must catch and digest insect food to survive; great multicolored dragonflies patrolling the water's edge; perhaps the ethereal piping of a hermit thrush floating on the spice-scented air; and of course the magic of walking on waves as you cross the undulating mossy mat.

And there's an appealing immediacy to all of it that seems to put the reader right into the imagined location – with our authors standing nearby, equally spellbound:

If you have never stood by a marsh before dawn during the breeding season and listened to the wails, moans, cackles, and lunatic laughter with which rails, bitterns, gallinules, and other marsh birds express their territorial jealousies and sexual longings, you have missed one of nature's strangest performances.

Of course, everybody has their own favorite ecological setting (those who favor a nice sinus-clearing desert will be out of luck in this volume), and I've surely made no secret of my own throughout the years. Yes, I'm fond of the ocean and its tidal pools, and of course I've poured affection on ponds right here at Stevereads, and I very much enjoy a patch of old-growth forest, but my heart will always belong to salt marshes, so I was particularly pleased by prose poetry they invoke here :

Anyone who lives near these sea-drowned prairies has internalized a host of indelible impressions: canoeing into the silent heart of the marsh via a meandering creek; squadrons of tree swallows hawking for mosquitoes in August; a snowy owl perched on a hay straddle in January; an unmistakable sweet tang in the nostrils; the dawn song of the seaside sparrow; the surprisingly painful bite of the greenhead fly; catching mummichogs with a dip net; watching a merlin plunge into a mixed flock of shorebirds; the mechanical jousting of fiddler crabs; the October scarlet of samphire ...

[caption id="attachment_1532" align="aligncenter" width="269" caption="northern harrier over miacomet plains, nantucket"][/caption]

Of course, content is the twin of context; you could hardly open this book knowing it's an Audobon Society production and not expect one of its strongest themes to be wildlife preservation and conservation, and that's certainly the case here – but not intrusively so. The volume was written ten years ago, at the very cusp of the modern 'green' movement that has seen such huge strides in Massachusetts since then (despite wide-scale Bush-era depredations elsewhere in the country) – the dark tidings our authors have to impart – about the fishability and swimmability of Massachusetts lakes and streams, among other things – have in many cases actually improved in the ensuing decade.

So when our authors geekishly inform us “River fishes are neurologically equipped to maintain a constant position in relation to the current without (so to speak) thinking about it – a trick called rheotaxis,” they're perhaps unaware of the neat little feat of rheotaxis they're documenting with their own efforts. Would that all upstream-swimming had monuments as nifty as this book.

.

Homage to Daniel Shays!

Our book today is Gore Vidal's 1973 essay collection Homage to Daniel Shays, containing high-point pieces from 1952 to 1972, spanning subjects from literature to cinema to theater to politics, presented in chronological order. The old Vintage paperback I've had for years is 450 pages long, which is a whole hell of a lot more hospitable than the wrist-straining 1100 pages of Vidal's surpassing masterpiece United States. I've praised that latter volume as one of the 20^th century's greatest works of nonfiction (although it occurs to me I've never posted the whole 50-item list here at Stevereads), but as a certain Dutch humanist well knew, sometimes we need a psalter in the field even more immediately – and more personally – than we need the big Bible back at home. You can carry Homage to Daniel Shays around in your pocket, and you should.

Vidal considered himself a multi-form genius, a Renaissance man capable of brilliant performance in almost any kind of endeavor. He was disastrously wrong, of course: his plays are almost unactably preachy, his novels are ill-disguised (and often ill-digested) history lectures, his screenplays are embarrassingly lachrymose, and his forays into actual politics exuded a dangerously Borgia-esque self-delusion that would make any sane person seek the good old-fashioned self-interest of a Johnson, or a Bush.

But as an occasional essayist, he was brilliant. And as a literary journalist, writing up long, discursive pieces for Commentary or The New York Review of Books or Esquire (pieces that were supposed to be book reviews but inevitably ended up being much more), he was unsurpassed in his century.

True, he has his hobby-horses, but any consistently good public writer will have those; they constitute a signature and are to be treasured in equal measure as they're lamented. If you read Homage to Daniel Shays with an evaluative squint, you can watch these writer-tics slowly worming their way right to the center of the apple (the collection's idiotically sensationalistic title is a good tip-off). Vidal's besetting hobby-horse was his megalomania, and it's a bit disconcerting to see it in embryo even half a century ago. In his famous essay on the writers of the 1940s, there's more than a hint of self-regard (which, for Vidal, is always mixed with self-pity):

On a social level, the hostility shown these essential artists is more important than their occasional worldly successes, for it is traditional that he who attempts to define man's condition demoralizes the majority, whether relativist or absolute. We do not want ever to hear that we will all die but that first we must live; and those ways of living which are the fullest, the most intense, are the very ones which social man traditionally dreads, summoning all his superstition and malice to combat strangers and lovers, the eternal victims.

But reading Vidal – and especially reading as taut and snapping a collection as Homage to Daniel Shays – with this kind of evaluative squint is just plain wrong. Not only are you thereby blinding yourself to the full register of what our essential artist is doing, you're depriving yourself of the wonderful sharpness of his wit – a quality that was never more obvious or brought to higher pitch than when he was using it to estimate the worth of wits that equaled it. Vidal could be an unforgiving colleague; in prose as in life, he didn't suffer fools gladly. When Mary McCarthy wrote a scathing review of Tennessee Williams' absurd play A Streetcar Named Desire, Vidal was outraged. But when it comes time to assess McCarthy's theater criticism as a whole (that criticism forms a briskly bracing little book we'll get to in the fullness of time here at Stevereads), he's not only fair but happily quotable:

But aside from Miss McCarthy's forty whacks at [Tennessee] Williams, when I finally came to read her collected criticism I was struck by her remarkable good sense. Uncorrupted by compassion, her rather governnessy severity, even cruelty, derives from the useful knowledge that the road to kitsch is paved with good intentions, and that one must not give the “A” for ambition without also giving simultaneously the “E” for the thing poorly effected. The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Naturally, Homage to Daniel Shays includes pieces on the Kennedys. How could it not? Their very existence in the realm of politics fundamentally upset Vidal's preconceived role as youthful denouncer of the musty exclusivity of the halls of power. If you've gained a large measure of your notoriety at Georgetown parties by being the best-looking anti-Eisenhower in the room, it's a bitter turn of events when a better-looking anti-Eisenhower gets elected lord of all Georgetown parties. Vidal took that bitter pill, wrapped it (poorly) in civic concern, and tried for thirty years to force it down his readers' throats, with no success whatsoever. But in the attempt, Vidal's unmatched eye for detail caught moments and currents that deserved preservation, as painful as they are to read today:

As Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges (at sixty-two the oldest member of the Cabinet) remarked, “There I was a few months ago, thinking my life was over. I'd retired to a college town. Now … well, that fellow in there” (he indicated the President's office) “he calls me in the morning, calls me at noon, calls me at night: Why don't we try this? Have you considered that? Then to top it all he just now asks me: Where do you get your suits from? I tell you I'm a young man again.”

As with most public pundits who overestimate themselves sufficiently to write about politics (as the aforementioned Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying, “Those who can, do; those who can't should shut the fuck up”), Vidal was never better than when writing about literature. Here as everywhere else in his writings, he was the voice of enlightened conservatism, the holder of standards, the champion of “the thing done right.” He was too much the craftsman ever to agree with the young writer's disdain of craft (however, eh, personally pleasing he might find the young writer himself), and he was too much the traditionalist not to agree in spirit with Norman Podhoretz's famous gripe, “A feeling of dissatisfaction and impatience, irritation and boredom with contemporary serious fiction is very widespread.” (He might have added, in that dry patrician tone of his, “of course when Norman says that, he means he's impatient and bored,” but what difference would that make? In this, Podhoretz was a pure weather-vane: brainless and accurate).

Hence if the avant-garde ever looked to Vidal as the most promising of the older literary lions on the scene, they were sorely disappointed to encounter after all an unapologetic purist:

No doubt there are those who regard the contradictions in [the charlatan Alain] Robbe-Grillet's critical writing as the point to them – rather in the way that the boredom of certain plays or the incompetence of certain pictures are, we are assured, their achievement. Yet it is worrisome to be told that a man can create a world from nothing when that is the one thing he cannot begin to do, simply because, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot dispose of himself. Even if what he writes is no more than nouns and adjectives, who and what he is will subconsciously dictate order. Nothing human is random …

United States is the gigantic banquet of which Homage to Daniel Shays is the exquisite sampler; here are all the strengths of Vidal the essayist with almost none of the weaknesses that began to creep to the forefront of his work in the late 1970s, as biting turned to gnawing and acid turned to acid reflux. The kind of death Vidal should have had – in an expensive hotel room, atop Bret Easton Ellis, after a glorious PEN/Faulkner speech, in 1990 (with United States to then be the posthumous volume it was so obviously meant to be) – has eluded him (only truly lucky bastards get what they deserve), and despite the counter-example of Vidal's eerily sedate doppelganger Louis Auchincloss, all work must eventually decline. But we'll always have these magnificent words, and it seems only fitting to let them have center-stage at the end:

Affluence, publicity, power, can these things be said to “corrupt” the artist? In themselves, no. Or as Ernest Hemingway nicely put it: “Every whore finds his vocation.” Certainly it is romantic melodrama to believe that publicity in itself destroys the artist. Too many writers of the first rank have been devoted self-publicists (Frost, Pound, Yeats), perfectly able to do their work quite unaffected by a machine they knew how to run. Toughness is all.

Writers, Readers, & Reptutations!

 Our book today is Philip Waller's massive, utterly delightful Writers, Readers, & Reputations from 2006, and it finishes off our little quintet of books about books this time around (I've read every such book that's ever been written – what can I say? Reading about reading fascinates me – and I'll get to all of them here sooner or later, but five is enough for now).

And boy, HOW it finishes things off! Waller's book is a stunning, almost overwhelming masterpiece. He's staked out the period of a “long” Edwardian era in England and completely, freakishly absorbed every last scintilla of information on his subject, which is nothing less than the whole world of letters during those years, from 1870 to 1918. He covers everything from writers' lives to reading tours to lending libraries to book groups to manufacture and distribution, and he does it all in such an winningly readable voice that you never feel crushed by the weight of his expertise. The pages fly by (all 1150 of them), and what emerges is a picture of the reading life of the Edwardian age in such pointillist detail that you can't help but wish we had similar volumes for every other era. That would be great, but I don't know where we'd find the scholars to amass the data, much less the writers to make it this engaging.

Two things mark this great book's strongest points: first, Waller has no particular pet theory to advance (he's mainly just interested in giving us as full an account as he can, in the liveliest language), and second, he's perfectly willing to let the writers of the time speak their piece at length – the book is full of great quotes, and they're given in full rather than in snippets. Here's the always-gloomy George Gissing on the perils of the literary life, for instance:

With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say that he who encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to 'literature', commits no less than a crime … Hateful as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the literary arena seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others. Oh, your prices per thousand words! Oh, your paragraphings and your interviewings! And oh, the black despair that awaits those down-trodden in the fray.

 

It's amazing how many different facets of the literary life Waller tracks down and shows to us in full detail. There are long, engrossing chapters on every aspect you could think of, including an amusing set-piece on authors as fashion-plates:

Jerome K. Jerome attracted [publicity] by wearing and old tweed cap, Keir Hardie-style, to offset an immaculate frock coat. This was scarcely big-league stuff. Nor was Bret Harte's trick of commanding a daily buttonhole from a Piccadilly florist, sent in a little box to him wherever he occasioned to stay. For a really booming statement, it was necessary to behold Mark Twain in his gleaming white suits. Equally magnificent, Wilde invented himself as an exquisite- or harlequin, Theordore Watts-Dunton preferred to call him … A 'great fat oily beast', thought Edith Somerville, who met him in 1888. This was only marginally more flattering than 'the great white slug' proposed in the same year by Lady Colin Campbell …

 

And Waller also makes some real contributions to a more fair study of the literary landscape, giving us long digressions on best-selling authors of the time who've now (in almost every case very deservedly) fallen into permanent obscurity. The foremost of these hindmost is surely novelist Hall Caine, whose insipid water-balloon books outsold everybody twice over and made their author a very, very rich man. Whenever I feel tempted to despair at the popularity of author like Stephen King or James Patterson, I remind myself of writers like Caine – and Waller could have settled for merely reinforcing the reductions of readers like me. But instead, he digs deeper and presents a better, more fleshed out portrait of the man and his counterparts. It wasn't until I first read this book that I learned Caine used a chunk of his fame and money to aid Jewish refugees of Tsarist oppression, for instance. Doesn't change the fact that the man's novels are junk, but it certainly makes him more interesting.

And what about book-reviewing, you must know I'd ask? Yep – the subject is fully covered (and in a gratifyingly early chapter) in all its heights and pitfalls, from log-rolling to the ever-popular topic of how authors (and later their publicists) can stack the odds in their favor when it comes to wooing reviewers:

Authors were not without means to influence the reception of their work, although Trollope's Lady Carbury, by sleeping with a reviewer, in The Way We Live Now, must be considered extreme. The complimentary copy system was increasingly favoured. The Society hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill, who had known Bulwer Lytton in his best-selling prime, noted in 1906: 'I always feel sorry that he never gave me his novels; in those days authors were not nearly so generous as they are to-day, when books are showered in all directions – more given than read.'

 

Writers, Readers, & Reputations is what's known in my immediate circle as a 'Steve book' – meaning it's so long and densely researched that I'm likely the only person in a hundred mile radius who'd every consider reading it, much less read it, bookmark it, and annotate it for sheer pleasure. My circle tends to groan when they see me toting around a 'Steve book,' because they know I'm not only going to read such tomes but also recommend them, and they consider that an impossibility (years ago, in response to such a recommendation about a very interesting book on Britain's King George I, an exasperated companion blurted out, “That's an entire year's reading for me! One year, reading nothing but that big, ugly, boring book!”)(I thought it best not to point out that the original German version was much better than the translation).

But impossibility or no, I do indeed recommend Writers, Readers & Reputations! Yes, it's formidably big – but it's also scrupulously, reliably enjoyable, one of the best books on books I've ever read. It's worth a year, if it comes to that.

Letters to Alice!

Our book today is 1984 novel Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, and the blurbs it garnered at the time (including an unsigned but adulatory little column the book review section of a newspaper in Gottingen, of all places) are s true today as they were back then: whatever else it might be, this is a first-rate book about books and reading.

That 'whatever else it might be' alludes to the fact that this is an epistolary novel comprised of exchanges between young college-age Alice and her middle-aged novelist Aunt Fay, so there's quite a bit of bleed-through from Weldon's own life, and as usual with this resolutely third-rate author, the reader is constantly forced to wonder how much of that bleed-through is intentional and how much of what they paid good money to buy and read is just more or less spontaneous riffing. Despite the shelf of novels to her credit, Weldon has never to my knowledge chosen to work at her craft. The result has been a body of fiction suffering from what we might call the Munro Syndrome: lots of stuff happens, 'the end' is stamped a few times onto the bolt of cloth as it spews out of the machine, and absolutely nothing memorable whatsoever is produced.

Letters to Alice is an exception and a delightful book – but even here, the lively writing takes frequent detours into being insipid or torturous, before returning to its better nature.

The plot, such as it is, can be easily guessed: Alice has gone off to school to study Jane Austen (among many predictable other names), and Aunt Fay has many, many opinions to share – about Austen, for instance:

It is idle to complain that Jane Austen lacked a crusading zeal. With hindsight, it is easy to look at the world she lived in, and say she should have. What she didn't seems to me more valuable. She struggled to perceive and describe the flow of believes that typified her time, and more, to suggest for the first time that the personal, the emotional, is in fact the moral – nowadays, of course, for good or bad, we argue that it is political.

 

But also about lots of other things, from the whole of the Western canon to the quiet little curse of the writer's life:

Writing is an odd activity – other people have occupations, jobs; the writer's life is work, and the work is the life, and there can be no holidays from it. If the pen is not working, the mind is thinking, and even as you sit and watch [TV] the unconscious ponders on. Even in sleep you are not safe: dreams pertain to life, and life to dreams, and both to work. There can be no time off, no real diversions, because wherever you go, you take yourself; and no pure experience, either, unsullied by contemplation, or by the writer's habit of standing back and observing what is going on – which writers will vehemently deny they do, because it sounds passionless and calculated, but is not.

 

But even so, problems crowd around the edges. Divorce that last passage from the spirited truths it's conveying and you'll see the biggest of those problems: Weldon simply cannot write good English prose, not for more than an isolated line at a time. This lack is of course no bar to fantastic literary success – but it's awfully inconvenient if an author is shooting for more. Weldon's ambitions to be taken seriously as a novelist have always been evident, and the number one obstacle to those ambitions is that she's never had much talent as a writer. It's funny how that works.

There's talent aplenty in Letters to Alice, however – here the joys and odd disappointments of reading, the thrill of book-hunting, and the pleasures of simply chatting with a fellow reader are all on triumphant display. I myself dearly love a good bookish snail-mail correspondence (some of you will have shared one with me and may attest that I'm fairly good at it), full of titles and authors and the give-and-take that happens when two lifelong readers butt heads. There's quite a bit of that here, mainly embodied on both sides by Aunt Fay, who does all the talking and most of the summarizing of other people's letters. She also gets in some choice wisecracks (one of Weldon's most reliable gifts):

Your mother reads books on tennis, I know: I doubt she's read a novel since an overdose of Georgette Heyer made her marry your father. Books can be dangerous.

 

Books can indeed be dangerous, and they – and their authors – can disappoint. But this one doesn't – you'll love it.

Comfort Found in Good Old Books!

 

Our book today is George Hamilton Fitch's 1911 volume Comfort Found in Good Old Books, a collection of the author's most popular book columns from the old San Francisco Chronicle. It's a collection the author never thought he'd make in quite the way he made it, but books are often like that. Fitch was a minor institution at the Chronicle and well-respected as a thorough-going example of what used to be called a “book man.” His columns regularly drew appreciative letters from readers, and publishers regularly sent him boxes of new releases and catalogs of forthcoming titles, in the hopes he'd choose to review them. And he often did (under his own name and pseudonyms, a curiously persistent practice in certain circles of literary journalism), but always striking the typical Edwardian note of worry that the modern world of streetcars and dry-cleaning was crowding out the eternal verities.

Even in that less skeptical age, his readers could be forgiven for wondering how much of this, after decades of repetition, was just empty cant. Possibly Fitch himself wondered. Then in 1910 his young son Harold suddenly died, and as Fitch wrote (in an eerie, heartbreaking echo of Theodore Roosevelt), his “death has taken the light out of my life.” No father and son could have been closer – best friends, near-constant companions, like minds, companions in adventure – and no loss more devastating.

True to form (a blogger at heart, long before their like was conceived), Fitch wrote about this tragedy soon after it happened, and he wrote about something else, too: it turned out that once the white-hot chaos of immediate loss had uncramped him, he actually did turn to those eternal verities for consolation. He turned to books, and not just any books but some of the greatest classics of the canon, the very works he'd always told people would be their most reliable comforters in times of trouble. He turned to them with his heart broken into a thousand pieces – and they did indeed comfort him. His note of surprise is audible – and understandable; it always surprises you, the first time it happens.

He'd thought his loss irreparable:

Now that this perennial spirit of youth is gone out of my life, the beauty of it stands revealed more clearly. Gone forever are the dear, the fond-remembered holidays, when the long summer days were far too short for the pleasure that we crowded into them. Gone are the winter walks in the teeth of the blustering ocean breezes, when we “took the wind into our pulses” and strode like Berserkers along the gray sand dunes, tasting the rarest spirit of life in the open air. Gone, clean gone, those happy days, leaving only the precious memory that wets my eyes that are not used to tears.

 

But only weeks later, he was able to report to his readers that the gospel was true in all its particulars: not only will reading the best books make you a better person, it will gift you with friends who are always there, always supportive, always themselves.

Naturally, readers wrote in by the hundreds. They offered their own stories, their condolences, and most of all, they asked Fitch to talk about which books had saved him. There sprang from those letters (and, one imagines, a deep sense of gratitude) a series of brief glimpses of some of those redemptive classics – glimpses Fitch then collected into a book that sold in huge numbers on both coasts for the better part of two years.

It wasn't just the origin story that was irresistible to readers. Through long practice and a wonderful open mind, Fitch had always been a book-reviewer well worth reading. He combined a strong set of guiding beliefs (he was a devout Christian) with a wide knowledge of his subjects, and he was also careful to present that history in a way his readers would find both enlightening and entertaining. In fifteen short chapters, he turns to a small handful of enduring classics – the Bible, Shakespeare, the Arabian Nights, St. Augustine, Don Quixote, Boswell's life of Johnson, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Milton, etc. - and first tells his readers something about them, then offers his thoughts, as here about Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress:

The miracle of this book is that it should have been written by a man who had little education and small knowledge of the great world, yet that it should be a literary masterpiece in the simple perfection of its form, and that it should be so filled with wisdom that the wisest man may gain something from its pages. Literary genius has never been shown in greater measure than in this immortal allegory by the poor tinker of Bedforshire.

 

Or here, on Dante:

In all literature nothing can be found to surpass the influence of this poem of Dante's, struck off at white heat at the end of a life filled with the bitterness of worldly defeats and losses, but glorified by these visions of a spiritual conquest, greater than any of the victories of this world.

 

Readers back then (as now) very much valued this tone of adoring certainty, and even in his grief Fitch could no more lose that tone than he could float in mid-air. Readers also valued Fitch's ever-present practical suggestions as to formats and editions, and he can't resist making those suggestions even in the middle of his mourning:

Many editions of The Imitation of Christ have been issued, but for one who wish to make it a pocket companion, non is better than the little editions in The Macmillan Company's Pocket Classics, edited by Brother Leo, professor of English literature in St. Mary's College, Oakland. This accomplished critic has written an excellent introduction to the book, in which he sketches the life of the old monk, the sources of his work and the curious controversy over its authorship which raged for many years. Buy this inexpensive edition and study it, and then, if you come to love old Thomas, get an edition that is worthy of his sterling merit.

Fitch always believed that cultivating the habit of reading was one of the cheapest and most incredibly worthwhile things a person could do for themselves. He was right, of course. But his other oft-proclaimed belief – that books could literally save you when pain threatened to blot you out – is something he only really learned through awful need. Maybe that's the only way to learn it; it's certainly the way I did. And time and time again since then, it's proven true. When I lost the best friend I'd ever have or am ever likely to have, a week later I first began to feel returned to the world by reading the endless prattle of a dear old companion, a diary entry about how he went to St. Paul's churchyard to inquire about how his book-binding was coming along, how his Chaucer was progressing but wasn't really neat enough for his liking, how he gave a few pointers to help out, how he had to remember to go to the clasp-makers and have clasps and embosses ordered to match the set …

It was the first time I'd smiled in a week.

The best, least foreseeable detail as far as Fitch is concerned is that his own advice has grown to enclose him: I turn to his book often, when I need my rudder righted a little.

The Joy of Books!

Our book today is Eric Burns' The Joy of Books, and it underscores a point I've made before: the most curious thing about good reading is how little good writing there is about it. Not that Burns' book is bad – not thoroughly bad, not bad straight through. But its subject sometimes brings out the very worst in him, as it tends to do in virtually every person who sits down to write about it (present company, I trust we can agree, excepted). Burns had a career as a journalist before he paused to woolgather this book, and not just any journalist but a readable one – a very small coterie! But the watchwords of that earlier profession – concision, incision, revision, derision, those sorts of watchwords – were blithely abandoned when he decided to collect a book of musings about What Reading Means To Me.

They always are. I've got a long shelf full of books written in the 20^th century about the specific situation of being in love with reading (somehow, I can't imagine such books existing at the end of the 21^st century – can anybody really love reading electronically? Even if they can, the 'long shelf full' will be gone, replaced by a file list … as long as your electric bill is paid, that is, and provided your provider doesn't decide to reach out and yank stuff off your device for legal, quasi-legal, or the-hell-of-it reasons), and virtually all of them bear no resemblance to the writing their authors did prior to tackling that subject.

One of the problems is that, like Burns, most of these authors wait too long. Burns writes from his fifties, with two kids and most of his career behind him. He talks about how revivifying reading is for him, but The Joy of Books is as maudlin an act of nostalgia (playin' stickball and watchin' Uncle Miltie make their dutiful appearances, and endless childhood summers are invoked) as a leisurely stroll through yellowed old photo albums. That always happens in books like this: their ostensible purpose is to praise the way books stay vital and effective in our mental lives, but their end effect is to make them seem like just another much-missed feature of a simpler, now-vanished past. At one point in The Joy of Books, Burns watches his young son settle under a tree and commence reading Peter Pan (a childhood favorite of Burns', naturally), but there's no joy of reading in the description – instead, watching the boy blow on a blade of grass or climb around in the tree before settling to read, Burns is clearly just missing his own boyhood, not thrilling to the fact that his kid is about to read a great little book.

So what's wrong with a little nostalgia, you might ask? Not much. But there's quite a bit wrong with a whole freakin' LOT of nostalgia, especially when it's combined – as it always is – with willful credulity. The combination prompts Burns to arias like this:

If, as Ezra Pound has said, literature is “news that stays news,” why are Flaubert and Balzac on the front pages of newspapers, Hardy and Dickens not on the covers of magazines, E.B. White and Truman Capote not on the tips of tongues where reasonable men and women congregate? Why not Anne Tyler on “Nightline,” “20/20” looking clearly at John Le Carre, “48 Hours” devoting at least that much time to Doris Kearns Goodwin?

When a former newsman assumes a lachrymose tone of writing and asks idiotic questions like that, you know one thing for certain: he's too busy setting up straw men to even think about what reading really does, or is, or can be (the straw man Geiger counter is always the summoning of a definition from “Webster's Collegiate Dictionary” - it's to be abhorred as a sure sign that the writer in question is mainly just yammering; Burns does it only three times in The Joy of Books).

There's some good, fun stuff here, of course – Burns can be an interesting common-touch writer, as when he laments the fleeting riches that afflict most of the literary world (then or now):

Maybe a writer can finagle a $30,000 advance for a book, but it will take him so long to write that his hourly rate works out to about the same as the guys who stuff the rodent remains into all-beef hot dogs. Maybe a magazine will pay him $2000 for an article, but by the time the check is in the mail. His is $3000 overdrawn at the bank and too depressed to start his next piece. Maybe a women's club will cough up $500 for a luncheon speech, but the chicken will be tough and the vegetables limp and in the question-and-answer period the ladies will find out that he and John Irving got drunk together one night after a seminar they were conducting on the future of the novel in the post-literate society and will hound him unmercifully for insights on Garp.

And he has the good sense to conclude his book with a list of books – lists of books, no matter whose, no matter where, are always good things. But for the most part, The Joy of Books is yet another misfire, yet another failed volume on the long shelf of books that are allegedly trying to anatomize this thing that gives us all so much pleasure. And maybe that's the problem: real books don't give pure, simple pleasure, and real readers don't look for it from the books they read … books are active company, sometimes joyful, yes, but sometimes aggravating or unsettling. Readers actively engaged in the daily grip of reading (as opposed to warmly, fuzzily remembering readin' under the tree down by the crick) wouldn't have it any other way.

Still, fair warning to Burns: if I ever get around to writing my own book on reading, I'm swiping his title just the same. Despite everything, I like its simplicity.

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Velvet Haven!

This is Paul Marron, a funny, articulate, down-to-earth guy with a pointy nose, a nasal voice, a limited but effective cooking repertoire, and a fine ear for music:



As you can see, he’s a good-looking young guy, but it’s only when you widen the frame and get him to take his shirt off (the latter being, it must be admitted, not particularly difficult) that an important extra point begins to dawn on you: Paul is rather gorgeous, in a well-sculpted, compact kind of way.



Paul himself must have realized this fairly early on, and it gives rise to a bit of irony: that this somewhat private, old-fashioned, and oddly shy guy (his sporadic attempts at blogging virtually scream ‘I really don’t much want to do this’) would make a very good living taking his clothes off and posing for pictures of his chiseled cheek-bones, his shapely shoulders, and most of all, his astounding abs. Readers of romance fiction can recognize those abs as quickly (and as fondly) as they recognize their own children, because Paul has appeared on innumerable paperback covers over the last few years.

Although the real-life details of his day-to-day are probably endearingly prosaic, Paul leads a vigorous double life as the characters in all these books, so it seems only natural (aesthetically and, um, otherwise) to peek in from time to time on those alternate adventures, just to see how busy the other Paul is keeping himself.

We could start anywhere, really (and not necessarily in romance – he’s popular on sci-fi covers too, as we shall see). At any given time in every bookstore in the United States, there are at least a dozen covers featuring Paul in one pose and costume or another. 2010 will see at least 50 such covers, and 2009 was the same way, with this one set of cheekbones magically morphing onto cover after cover.



So let’s start with Paul the magical being – in this case, code-named Bran, a prince of the otherworldly Sidhe (those of you who’re familiar with Celtic mythology need not get your hopes up, though) in Velvet Haven, the first book of Sophie Renwick’s “Immortals of Annwyn” series, issued as a trade paperback this year by Heat, a not-particularly-scholarly imprint of Penguin. Bran is described several times in the book as a handsome devil, and there’s Paul on the cover, flexing in leather pants and a leather vest-cape that looks like something his employers at Undergear would sell with a straight (well ….) face, plus a gigantic tattoo of a type Paul himself is perhaps a bit too squeamish (or is it sensible?) to inflict on his own body.

Paul is a bit of a jerk in this book, but perhaps with cause. It turns out he’s been cursed by Cailleach, his cool drink of water co-ruler back in the mystical realm of Annwyn, and the curse is just the type romance writers love to think up: he will never find true love, but his mystical powers will be energized by lots and lots of raw, passionate sex. David Copperfield never got that in his contract, but I bet he wishes he had.

So Paul is bitter – at Cailleach, at the evil twist of fate that has imprisoned his brother in stone for centuries, and at mortals in general, whom he despises even though they provide him with his magical Viagra. And when the ritually-murdered bodies of fellow Sidhe keep turning up in the mortal world Bran now calls home, he naturally suspects Cailleach of some further treachery – or perhaps the treachery starts with Suriel, the fallen angel who prowls the perimeter of the novel and steals every scene he’s in. Suriel is clearly playing his own game, and he can be refreshingly diabolical, as in the scene where he saves the badly-wounded Bran and then makes an inventively scientific threat when Bran refuses to do as he says:

“I wouldn’t make a deal with you if my last breath depended on it.”

Suriel laughed and stepped on his arm harder, making him scream inside. “So much pride,” he said. He clicked his tongue as if he were chiding a child. “It’ll be your downfall, you know. You’re not in Annwyn, King. You’re among mortals. And you know what mortals love? They love knowledge, science. They hunger for it. And wouldn’t you make a nice little science project for the doctors at the hospital.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Imagine what they would say once they started examining you, system by system.”

In the distance, Bran could see the big blue square with the large white H. “You blackmailing son of a bitch!”

OK, so Paul isn’t at his most articulate in Velvet Haven (nor his most poetic – at one point, in mid-coitus, he informs his bedmate “you fuck like a nymph”; even when the reference can be checked, it’s not the sort of thing a girl likes to hear right at that moment), but there’s a very good sense of word-rhythm on display in that center paragraph and many other such paragraphs in this smutty, smutty book. Renwick might not be able to show this novel to her mother (and if she can, I’d like to meet the woman), but she can hold her head up in the company of her romance author peers.

The key to the mystery in this book seems to be the mortal woman Mairi MacAuley, a knockout nurse with psychic powers (it’s all a bit much to take in, and it’s to Renwick’s credit that she never slows down and explains it all for more than a sentence or quick paragraph here and there – the story takes off running, and we get filled in on the bare minimum of exposition we need to keep up; science fiction and fantasy authors routinely pooh-pooh the romance genre, but Renwick unfolds her created world with a skill and control that most of those sci-fi authors couldn’t muster for all the gold-pressed latinum in the quadrant) who falls in love with Bran and may hold the key to lifting his curse.

Or at least providing him with lots and lots of acrobatic sex. Velvet Haven isn’t exactly a raunchy piece of straight-up porn – there’s too much plot for that, and the book’s two most interesting characters, Cailleach and Suriel, don’t even come within bodice-ripping distance of each other – but hoo boy, Paul gets several extended (so to speak) erotic workouts in the course of the book, including one climactic (so to speak) episode during which he’s tightly manacled.

And naturally in the course of the book (which very much has a first-chapter feel to it, intimating more “Immortals of Annwyn” books to come) Paul learns to un-harden (er, that is, soften) his heart and care for this mortal woman, despite his previous strictly dietary relationship with he species.

The archangel Gabriel puts in an appearance (he gets the worst of a verbal exchange with Suriel, as does everybody else), and the full extent of Cailleach’s villainy is gradually revealed. Paul doesn’t exactly end up happy at the end of the book, but that’s to be expected: although in real life he has an extremely infectious smile, happy endings don’t really match up well with the force-10 pout he’s got going on this book’s cover.

Will Paul find true happiness in his next adventure? I’ll keep you posted.