Under the Covers with Paul Marron: the Golden Age!

When last we left our hero Paul Marron, he had overcome a disastrous fashion mis-step and gone back to his roots, as it were, to find renewal and new hope. Romance had rekindled in his supermodel heart, and the Romance world had begun to reciprocate, with a vengeance. Traditionally, Romance novel covers displayed the customary imaginative partition: there was a beautiful young woman in the process of being enraptured, and there was a handsome young man doing the enrapturing. During the puritanical 80s and 90s, book cover designers were chary of having their products look like actual snapshots from mid-coitus, so the positions these young couples tended to take were more athletic than functional (one - unintended? - side-effect was that often on those covers it looks like the handsome young man is rapturing the beautiful young woman ... er, Brokeback Mountain-style), but both sides of the Romance equation were accounted for. Women (and, presumably, one out of every ten men) reading these novels could either fantasize about being that ravished heroine, or they could fantasize about being ravished by that handsome young man.

Our boy Paulie changed all that. Cover designers were clearly overwhelmed by the sheer Kelvin-range of his cheeky smolder, the tectonic pout of his lips, the sexy swivel of his svelte shoulders. They discovered that when Paul Marron, sultry and perhaps a bit dishevelled, is glaring out at you from the cover of a Romance novel, he's actively fulfilling both fantasies at once - he balances the equation all by himself. Soon, dozens of Paul Marron covers were appearing every month in bookstores across the country, all sporting variously manipulated images of Paul - and only Paul. For the first time since the era of Fabio, a male model was judged sufficient to sell a Romance novel to women without any women on the cover. Who needs direct imaginative identification when you've got those intense Italian eyes lasering into you?

Kresley Cole realized this early on, and the cover of her 2008 entry in her "Immortals After Dark" series shows it! There's our boy - in this case, masquerading as a full-fledged demon (complete with forehead-horns!) by the name of Cadeon Woede, who manages to become erotically fascinated by the mortal woman Holly Ashwin even as supernatural forces conspire to reveal that she's the chosen Vessel, so called because every 500 years a woman is fated to give birth to a child who'll change the otherworldly balance of power for good or evil (yep, the female lead is called a vessel, and it turns out super-macho para-military demons like Paul can only really tell if a woman is destined to be his by sleeping with her ... this isn't a fantasy novel aimed at Gloria Steinem's night-stand). He abducts poor Holly and, um, auditions her rather strenuously, and in the course of the book she discovers that she herself isn't what she seems ... yet another exponent of the disturbing Twilight-ethos in which a young woman can only achieve self-awareness through getting rogered good and proper by a man. Although at least in this case the man was a sturdy little super-model and not a mush-faced bent-chested little Gothling ...

We go from primal supernatural fantasy to primal supernatural fantasy by turning next to Pamela Palmer's "Feral Warriors" novel Desire Untamed, which features a truly astounding cover-image of our hero in mid-crouch, buck-naked except for a lion-head arm-band. Palmer, wise woman that she is, clearly has a thing for Paul - he's appeared on a number of her book-covers, but never to more mesmerizing effect than here: caught in steamy red, muscles taut, eyes glowing, hair unabashedly Fabio-esque. In this book Paul goes by the name of Lyon, the leader of a band of Feral Warriors, the Therians, who are seeking a woman - a woman they call the Radiant, who's destined to renew their fading race (three guesses how)(sigh). Unbeknownst to her, that woman is ordinary every-day preschool teacher Kara MacAllister, who discovers in the course of the book that she herself isn't what she seems ... so yes, Palmer and Cole have essentially written the same book, with our boy Paul doing double-duty as both a sexy demon and an enormous house-cat. But the point is: look at that cover! In many ways, it's unlike any Romance cover seen before: not only is it explicitly erotic in ways that all that Brokeback Mountaineering couldn't hope to be, but it's explicitly personal - directed squarely at the reader in open invitation. It's instantly one of the very best Paul Marron covers of all time.

Urban fantasy gives way to science fiction in Susan Kearney's Rion, the second instalment in her "Pendragon Legacy" series. Here Paul goes by the name of, you guessed it, Rion, a half-breed space explorer from the planet Honor who kidnaps sexy human telepath Marisa Rourke because she unwittingly holds the key to the salvation of his ... OK, OK. So it's just possible there's a trade-off going on here. It's possible this astounding new level of Paul Marron covers comes at a price - not just to Gloria Steinem but to women everywhere, who are here reading adventure after adventure of female main characters who have no clue about their capabilities or even identities until those things are revealed to them, through sex, by a sultry Paul-avatar. And the Paul-avatar uses the (allegedly) affectionate adjective 'little' in conjunction with her name/title for the whole book. And the sex happens because she's been abducted and sprawled forcibly on the bed/chamber floor/forest sward/starship bridge. OK, OK, so this trend is pretty bad. But again: look at that cover! This one takes the Marron Gamble to new levels: there's nothing promised here except the promises implied by our hero's stunning face. That's a far cry from horny Brazilian millionaires.

We come right back down to Earth for Stephanie Tyler's Hard to Hold, in which Paul appears as Lieutenant Jake Hansen, hard-bitten (and yet gorgeous!) Navy SEAL who's ordered to darkest Africa to spirit feisty, sexy Dr. Isabelle Markham out of harm's way. Since he's ordered to do this with or without her cooperation, we're talking about our fourth abduction in just this one entry, although at least nobody's expecting poor Isabelle to save an entire planet (or are they?). And the cover doesn't disappoint: there's our boy, steamily glancing off to his right, sweaty torso clad in a tight tank top, taut little chest sporting Special Op dog-tags, handsome face drawn to sharp, intense focus. Pre-Marron, such a cover would have been unthinkable - cover-editors would have said it lacked any kind of story-line. And they'd have been right: any other model couldn't manage to convey a story-line simply by pouting there. But this particular model has been forged, as we've seen, in countless adventures - he's known apocalyptic wastelands, English country villas, immortal vampire-queens, and more than a few tightly-bound perils, and he's emerged from them all with a cover-confidence never seen before in the Romance world.

Where will it take him, you wonder? Why, to a series of ever-more-satisfying climaxes, of course! We'll seize on one in our next thrilling chapter!

Eight (more) Great Historical Novels!

What better way to end the week than with yet another lavish, happy list of book-recommendations? Our sub-genre is once again that of my beloved historical novels, those perfect embodiments of Horace's famous split mission of delighting and entertaining, so let's get right down to brass tacks, shall we?

When Knighthood was in Flower by "Edwin Caskoden" (1898)

Charles Major wrote this book in 1898 under the pen-name Edwin Caskoden, and it sold like hotcakes. Month after month, year after year, customers would walk into bookstores from Boston to Boise and ask for "the knighthood book" - and long-suffering clerks knew exactly what they were talking about. Major was a hard-working Midwestern lawyer when the book first came out, but it was such a huge best-seller that he was soon able to retire to writing full-time - although none of his subsequent books managed to recapture the fire and fun of this, his debut. It's the story of the love that grows suddenly and unstoppably between Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, and Charles Brandon, the King's best friend, and in its perfectly-tuned sunlit descriptions, it was the most irresistible piece of historical fiction to appear since Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur. Given the Tudor-mania that's recently been sweeping the reading public, I'm amazed nobody's reprinted this with a trendy cover. If an enterprising publisher were to dig deep enough, they could find a glowing blurb from none other than Theodore Roosevelt

The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci by Dmitri Merezhkovsky (1902)


The 1963 Washington Square Press edition of Merezhkovsky's monumental best-seller greatly expands the truncated version authorized by the Merezhkovsky in 1901. Despite its limitations (translators and audiences today would likely find them unacceptable), that 1901 translation done by Herbert Trench sold millions of copies around the world - month after month, year after year, customers would come into bookstores from Boston to Brest and ask for "The book about Leonardo" - and long-suffering book clerks knew there could be no other (despite the presence throughout the decades of some very good actual biographies of Leonardo). And with good reason: even in the 1963 translation by Morris Gurin and Helen Gourin (which improves on Trench but is still mighty damn creaky), the glow and pageant of the Renaissance lives again - and the central port of Leonardo is so perfectly researched and rendered that it's small wonder half the used bookstores in in the world accidentally shelve this thing under Biography.

 

The Devil in Velvet by John Dickson Carr (1951)

Carr wrote dozens of novels, perhaps hundreds, under his own name and many others. He was a quintessential hack, churning out perfectly (and sometimes not so perfectly) plotted mystery yarns at a rate that makes Anthony Trollope look like a slug-a-bed. Carr never took days off from writing, never revised a single word he wrote (a word of his fiction, that is - like many hacks, he could be meticulous about his nonfiction)(his 1963 book The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey is very much worth your time), and never agonized over the woof and weave of his plots' deeper meanings. Instead, he just kept at it, even when afflicted with a stroke. In this tangled and immensely rewarding pot-boiler, Carr's intrepid Professor Fenton makes a deal with the Devil that sends him back in time to Restoration London in order to solve a murder. Carr takes great pleasure in summoning all the gaudy details of that oft-fictionalized period, capping everything with his signature puzzles and sudden revelations.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (1819)

It's almost a sin to mention the words "historical fiction" without mentioning "Sir Walter Scott" in the same sentence. His book Waverley, first published anonymously in 1814, changed the genre of historical fiction completely - indeed, it would be fair to say it created what we now know as the historical novel. It and all Scott's subsequent novels (none more so than Ivanhoe) exerted an influence on virtually every literate person in the Western hemisphere, and the strength of that influence can never be fully mapped and has thus, to my mind, never been given its proper due. Partly this is due to the uncomfortable fact that Scott is an atrocious writer of English prose - this famous story of the virtuous Saxon knight Ivanhoe, the various villains of King John's court, the sweet young Jewess Rebecca, and Robin Hood himself is a great galloping inelegant thing, full of purple passages and cardboard characters. And yet, Scott wrote with that particular magic that's only vouchsafed to hacks, and his millions of readers over the centuries (long may their line continue!) have willingly surrendered to the spell.

The Lord of the Two Lands by Judith Tarr (1993)

Alexander the Great is a tough choice for a fantasy writer, because his life reads more grippingly - and less believably - than most fantasy novels. Tarr takes the story of the young man who conquered most of the Western world before he was thirty and weaves into it a second narrative, a sinuous story of ancient Egypt and the many temptations it could offer somebody of Alexander's messianic tendencies. The temple priests of Amon send Meriamon, the artistic, insightful daughter of the Pharaoh, to the sweeps of Persia to find this rumored phenomenon, this unbeatable Macedonian warlord and convince him to turn south and come to Egypt, where a godlike destiny beyond his imagination awaits. Tarr creates an Alexander to remember, but even more she creates an ancient Egypt steeped in magic and the pretense of magic - what results is like a turbo-charged variation on the theme of Marc Antony and Cleopatra - a meeting not only of religions but of living gods. A well-made new trade paperback of this wonderful book would be a good idea.

Katherine by Anya Seton (1954)

Publishers have recently been very good at keeping the great, under-appreciated Anya Seton in print, and it's understandable why: in her taut narrative tempos, effective but not cumbersome 'period' dialogue, and powerful female characters, she's an obvious precursor to that Attila the Hun of contemporary historical fiction, Philippa Gregory (a fact to which Gregory herself pays ample and becoming tribute). Katherine is easily Seton's best book, the gripping story of Katherine Swynford, the smart, sharp long-time mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt (and the sister-in-law of that rising man about court, Geoffrey Chaucer). Historians look at Katherine Swynford mainly as the fons et origo of the Wars of the Roses, but no reader of this novel can ever do that - for us, history's Katherine is forever Seton's Katherine, inquisitive, passionate, self-assured yet self-doubting, and thoroughly, three-dimensionally human. And unlike some of her later disciples in the genre, Seton manages to impart something of that complex humanity to almost all of her characters.

Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell (1959)

This immensely popular historical novel about the life of Saint Luke was a best-seller for years, reprinted innumerable times, and month after month, year after year, in bookstores from Boston to Buenos Aires, customers would come in wanting "that Gospel book" - and long-suffering book clerks would know exactly what they meant. The author was prolific, and yet a great many of the novels are resoundingly good, and Dear and Glorious Physician (one of three of her books derived from the New Testament, the other two being Great Lion of God about Saint Paul and the vividly excellent I, Judas co-written with Jess Stearn) is one of her best. Her Lucanus is an early scientific sceptic, a rational young man who resists the Good News even while he's interviewing healed people and talking with Mary, the mother of Jesus. There's plenty of action and character here, but it's the lavishly detailed depiction of the grudging stages by which a deep-thinking man acquires an unthinking faith that's the most memorable thing about the book.


My Lord John by Georgette Heyer (1975)

At this point, need I say it? Month after month, year after year, in bookstores from Boston to Burundi, customers would come in looking for "her last book" and long-suffering book clerks would know exactly what they meant: My Lord John, the big, intensely ambitious historical novel by Georgette Heyer, published posthumously by her husband from the vast sea of notes and plot outlines and written drafts she left behind. Heyer was a monumental best-seller in her day, famous both for her fizzy murder mysteries (picture the novels of Agatha Christie, only well-written) and for her extremely lucrative Regency romances, which fell as the gentle rain from Heaven onto book shop front tables every Christmas and parted customers from their money as gently as a single raindrop. My Lord John - even in this truncated version (I often wonder if some enterprising Heyer archivist someday will give us a much, much longer version of this book - I'd clear my calendar to read it) - is a much weightier matter, the story of John, the nice-guy brother of King Henry V (and, coincidentally, the grandson of the aforementioned Katherine Swynford). The sweep and quiet swagger of this achievement will make just about any reader wish Heyer's public had been a bit less demanding for more of those damn Regencies, so that she might have had the time to do this epic justice.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory (2009)

I'm well aware that this surprisingly gripping novel of Elizabeth Woodville has been, um, very enthusiastically reviewed elsewhere, but I could hardly let this little round-up of historical fiction conclude without hauling in the very Philippa Gregory we've been hinting at and alluding to, now could I? Gregory of course made her name with The Other Boleyn Girl (bringing us full circle to those damn Tudors!) and its companion Tudor novels, but in this book and its mirror image The Red Queen, she explores the equally-fascinating (though far less popular) period of the aforementioned Wars of the Roses. The idiot ur-realityTV star Woodville is at the heart of that period, the wife of Edward IV and the mother of the famous Princes in the Tower, and The White Queen brandishes the same machinery that brought Gregory mega-success: short, fast chapters, naked first-person narration, and just the right seasoning of book club-friendly anachronisms. This book's portrayal of Richard III will, incidentally, both intrigue and in part infuriate any remaining adherents that wretched character might still have in this day and age.

And there you have it! Not only eight meaty historical novels to tempt you, but also, I can't help but notice as I look back on the list, a handy little illustration of that hoary old concept, the Wheel of Fortune: just look at how many of these authors are now entirely unknown despite once having their names on the lips of bookstore customers from Boston to Byzantium and back. Gregory had better salt something away for the proverbial rainy day.

In the Year of the Jubilee!

Our book today is George Gissing's 1894 novel In the Year of the Jubilee (referring of course to the Golden Jubilee in 1887, marking Queen Victoria's 50th year on the throne), a lesser-known effort by the man who gave the reading world The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft and The Odd Women.

This novel was written in Gissing's best, strongest period, the decade or so immediately following the battery-charging winter trip he made to Italy, which acted on him the way it always does on writers, by igniting hidden layers of talent he didn't even realize he possessed. Prior to that 1888-89 trip, he'd written novels so turgid and craftless even he couldn't stand to read them. The rejuvenating atmosphere of Italy (and the attentions of several comely Italian women - at the time, Gissing was still extremely good-looking) not only filled him with new ideas but - far more importantly - helped him to discover that most elusive of all a writer's tools: his voice. He came back to England knowing not only what kinds of things he wanted to say but also how he wanted to say them.

In the Year of the Jubilee is fairly typical of this period. It's a multi-faceted satire exhibiting passion, intelligence, and long patches of imperfect control. The center of the book is the courtship and disastrous marriage of Lionel Tarrant and Nancy Lord, each of whom in their separate way has bought into some impossible version of the social optimism that afflicted the aspirations of the middle class at the height of Victoria's reign. Their marriage was never a good idea (Gissing rather ham-handedly makes sure we know that), and it inevitably shatters under the weight of their expectations. More than any of his contemporaries, Gissing was the laureate of dysfunction (the more you know about his lamentable personal life, the easier this is to understand), and In the Year of the Jubliee, like its more famous cousin New Grub Street, is full of unsavory characters striving in vain to stave off calamity.

Gissing was by this point in his career a thorough professional about his craft. He took copious writing notes, wrote copious drafts, and like all literary pack-rats, he found a way to use just about everything good that came from his pen. Lyrical scene-settings are plopped into the sordid events of this novel not only because Gissing wanted them to ironically offset the darkness of his plots but also because they came out well, and he couldn't bear to set them aside:

But inland these discontents are soon forgotten; there amid tilth and pasture, gentle hills and leafy hollows of rural Devon, the eye rests and the mind is soothed. By lanes innumerable, deep between banks of fern and flower; by paths along the bramble-edge of scented meadows; by the secret windings of copse and brake and stream-worn valley - a way lies upward to the long ridge of Haldon, where breezes sing among the pines, or sweep rustling through gorse and bracken. Mile after mile of rustic loveliness, ever and anon the sea-limits blue beyond grassy slopes. White farms dozing beneath their thatch in harvest sunshine; hamlets forsaken save by women and children, by dogs and cats and poultry, the labourers afield. Here grown the tall foxgloves bending a purple head in the heat of noon; here the great bells of the convolvulus hang thick from lofty hedges, massing their pink and white against the dark green leafage; here amid shadowed undergrowth trail the long fronds of lustrous hartsglory. Here, in many a nook carpeted with softest turf, canopied with tangle of leaf and bloom, solitude is safe from all intrusion - unless it be that of a flitting bird, or of some timid wild thing that rustles for a moment and is gone. From dawn till midnight, as from midnight till dawn, one who would be alone with nature might count upon the severity of these bosks and dells.

Even at his best (and this novel has some of his best published stuff, lean and often daringly elliptical), Gissing never displays the tight-fisted narrative control possessed by so many of his writing contemporaries. He can get carried away. He can get sloppy. At one point he has whining, self-pitying Nancy pause from her busy day of woe-is-me-ing:

Fatigued into listlessness, she went to the lending-library, and chose a novel for an hour's amusement. It happened that this story was concerned with the fortunes of a young woman who, after many an affliction sore discovered with notable suddenness the path to fame, lucre, and the husband of her heart: she became at a bound a famous novelist. Nancy's cheek flushed with a splendid thought. Why should she not do likewise? At all events - why should she not earn a little money by writing stories? Number of women took to it; not a few succeeded. It was a pursuit that demanded no apprenticeship, that could be followed in the privacy of home, a pursuit wherein her education would be of service. With imagination already fired by the optimistic author, she began to walk about the room and devise romantic incidents. A love story, of course - and why not one very like her own? The characters were ready to her hands. She would begin this very evening.

Gissing has her reflect that this story-writing could be done from the comfort of home - and then, clearly, in Gissing's mind she is home. She begins to pace and immediately tells her house-mate that she's got a wonderful new idea for self-employment; both she and Gissing have forgotten that she's supposed to be in a lending-library. When reading Gissing, this is the price you pay for his impetuous, often scathing vision.

And in In the Year of the Jubilee, the reader also gets all those lyrical bits! They continue to crop up right to the end of the book, Gissing simply expanding on whatever reflection his own writing has prompted in him. As is perhaps fitting in a novel whose title is a prepositional phrase, the scene-setting in these pages is quite often the most memorable part of the book:

It was one of those cold, dry, clouded evenings of autumn, when London streets affect the imagination with a peculiar suggestiveness. New-lit lamps, sickly yellow under the dying day, stretch in immense vistas, unobscured by fog, but exhibit no detail of the track they will presently illumine; one by one the shop-fronts grow radiant on deepening gloom, and show in silhouette the figures numberless that are hurrying past. By accentuating a pause between the life of daytime and that which will begin after dark, this grey hour excites to an unwonted perception of the city's vastness and of its multifarious labour; melancholy, yet not dismal, the brooding twilight seems to betoken Nature's compassion for myriad mortals exiled form her beauty and her solace.

Readers new to Gissing shouldn't start here. He didn't write enough truly first-rate stuff to justify starting anywhere except with his first-rate stuff - so off to The Odd Women you all go, and lucky you are, too! But for those few of you who take a liking to this author's peculiar ways and means, In the Year of the Jubilee will bring an hour of great delight - and maybe a little insight into an age eerily like our own.

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Handling Scandal!

When last we checked in on our chisel-cheeked hero Paul Marron, he'd done the seemingly impossible: he'd bounced back completely - and quickly! - from what my dear old friends "The Guys Next Door" would have called a "Bad Hair Day" (links to either of those quoted terms would be too cruel even for me - let's just say there were dark by-waters of the '90s where only the foolhardy went, and from which few returned unchanged). Paulie had regained his mojo by returning to his roots: brooding, brooding, and more brooding! Sometimes, you just have to get out of your own way and let your perky pecs and perfect puss do what they were made to do - this is the essential life-wisdom of the male model. Our boy has let his body lead him into the strangest places: extraterrestrial paramilitary outfits, corporate boardrooms, post-apocalyptic wastelands, the shackles of ravenous vampire queens; he's seen Fortune's Wheel turn, and at times perhaps he's questioned whether or not he had what it takes to smolder for a living.

But the same pendulum-swing that brought him down so low he was toying with his hair color and considering going back to school (economics or environmental studies? Hmmm) has now begun its upward arc at last, and suddenly the feral confidence we all saw many months ago on the cover of our very first entry in this epic series. Suddenly, the Romance world knows that Paul Marron is synonymous with scandal, and it can't get enough.

A fairly sedate start to this up-tick, then, in the decorous confines of Julia London's A Courtesan's Scandal, in which Paul goes by the name of Grayson Christopher, the Duke of Darlington. In London's fast-paced story, the Prince of Wales wants his good friend Paul to act as a kind of decoy, pretending to squire and conquer the beautiful Kate Bergeron so that polite society doesn't realize the Prince himself is visiting her in the off-hours. Even here, in 1806, Paul is that classic male model combination of haughty and naughty as he accepts the arrangement and begins to lock horns - and other applicable parts - with the lady in question. Kate prides herself on her self-control, but which of us could count on much self-control around our boy Paul in a snug silk vest? Pretty soon, they're both fogging up the windows:

Kate had never felt anything more than tolerance at the prospect of physical relations with a man, but tonight ... tonight she felt urgency, a strong and natural flow of desire for Grayson. She sought his body, her hands beneath his shirt, raking down his chest and back. Her mouth was open beneath his, her tongue twirling around his. She pressed her breasts against him, and when he pushed her hands away to unbutton his shirt, she boldly moved her hand to the front of his trousers and slid her palm down his erection.

Grayson lifted his head as if he meant to say something, but he didn't speak at first. He could only look at her with eyes darkened by his longing. She cupped him, rubbed her hand against him.

"Kate," he said hoarsely.

Fans of well-done romance can't go wrong with London, but fans of Paul will know that an arrangement such as the one cooked up here by the Prince of Wales is simply impossible - our molten little model masquerading as somebody else's love-dupe? Hardly! Paul doesn't feather his hair in the morning in order to have it tousled as some kind of consolation prize. There can only be one cock of this walk.



Paulie moves forward a generation - to 1848 - but appears to change very little in Liz Carlyle's A Touch of Scandal, where he calls himself Adrian Forsythe, Lord Ruthveyn, he of the 'impossibly' black hair and eyebrows, a stern and sultry man very much in the Duke of Darlington mode, a hard, private man who's spent a good deal of his life "Haring about Hindustan risking life and limb in the service of Her Majesty's government and its well-shod bootheel, the East India Company." Carlyle's distressed heroine Grace Gauthier (whose shipping-magnate employer has just been brutally murdered, a crime of which the police believe she might not be entirely innocent) has a decidedly mixed first impression of our brooding hero:

The man - Ruthveyn - seemed disinclined to say more, and Grace resisted the impulse to ask anything. Save for his thick raven hair, sun-bronzed skin, and a nose that was perhaps a tad too strong, he could perhaps have been an Englishman - or Satan in a pair of Bond Street boots.

Naturally, that first impression isn't quite mixed enough to stop them from flinging each other's clothes off, but to her credit, Carlyle serves up a more complicated story than the simple fireball of lust we've all experienced with Paul so many times by now. Nothing is quite what it seems in One Touch of Scandal, and beneath his rough exterior, our hero is a haunted man:

"Do you see those shadows, Grace?" He was staring at the row of houses beyond the glass. "They come creeping relentlessly across the street, every day, without fail, ever destined to shroud us as the sun sets. That is what fate is like to me. Like an impending shadow that cannot be evaded. And we know that it is coming. Sometimes, just before the veil falls, we can even glimpse what lies within. And sometimes what we see is but a chimera - or the reflection of our fears."

Since Barbara Cartland first put quill to parchment, the crux of all romance novels has been a fairly simple trade-off: the hero saves the heroine from some incipient danger (brigands, blackmailers, bad husbands, or all three), and in exchange, the heroine saves the hero from just that kind of creeping darkness. Carlyle stays true to this pattern, but she stocks her novel full of twists and turns - and even a slight element of the supernatural - so that the reader can't comfortably predict where the happy ending will come from.

One thing readers can certainly predict - especially if they're loyal Stevereads fans! - is that the pattern shown on One Touch of Scandal's covers is the one that will win the day. In the book's inset, we see our boy sprawled on a red velvet couch, frilly shirt parted to reveal his V-neck and collarbone - an almost monkish arrangement that feels like a throwback to the timidity we know Paul has discarded like some clinging turtleneck. And so it is - on the book's front cover, we see two of the essential Paul Marron elements on full display: nakedness, and indifference to whatever female happens to be sharing the frame. Those elements have never let our hero down, and they're now carrying him to greatness.

They carry him one crucial step further, in our next chapter!

Eight Great Books - by Women!

Once again, I got emails - of a far less welcome kind this time, but book-bloggers can't be choosers. Many of you wrote in response to my recent "Eight Great Books" post not to share my enthusiasm or to discuss my choices but rather to point out that the eight novels I picked were all written by men. My very first internal response to this was "Yes? So what? It's possible they were all written by right-handers or blue-eyes too." My second internal response was "No really - so what? I was rhapsodizing about how much the books in question moved and delighted me - it never occurred to me to check who was going to which bathroom."

It shouldn't have occurred to me, and it shouldn't have occurred to any of you either. It reminds me of all the worst reasons why I left academia.

I dislike almost everything about this kind of non-issue. I dislike the insinuations that can't help but come along with pointing out that everybody on my first list is a man - the foremost such insinuation being, of course, that I intentionally planned it that way and was hoping nobody would notice, the insinuation of wrongdoing. I dislike the reductivism of it all, the sense that readers today aren't actually reading anything anymore but rather just checking off boxes and prepping their outrages for when they find trumped-up reason to pounce. Of course personally I dislike the inattention of it all - a casual glance at Stevereads over the years reveals absolutely no gender-bias (and, on a not-unconnected point, a casual glance at the books I've personally given to many of you reveals no such imbalance either). In short, the implicit accusation/complaint isn't valid.

It prompts what I think is a natural - though entirely wrong - response on my part, which is to defend myself. To point out how many female authors I've championed over the years, to marshal a barrage of links back to the appropriate Stevereads postings, and maybe links elsewhere as well. But not only is that impulse entirely wrong, but it's deeply unpleasant to feel, even for a moment, even long enough to call it wrong. Just like it would be deeply unpleasant for, say, the female readers making this point to go back over their last year's reading and count up how much of it was by black people, or gay people. The instinctive response to go  back and count up is irritating because it's already complicit, even when no guilt can be assigned.

Still, I did say I disliked 'almost' everything about such a non-issue, right? There is, in fact, one part of it I like: it gives me a reason to concoct another book-list, and that's fine by me (I also, as some of you were canny enough to point out, can't resist a challenge). So here are eight really, really good modern novels written by women, even though that attribution is entirely irrelevant!

When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (2000)

Grant's harsh and luminous novel about postwar British-administered Palestine stars strong-willed and intensely memorable Evelyn Sert, who opens things as forthrightly as she carries the whole book:

Scratch a Jew and you've got a story. If you don't like elaborate picaresques full of unlikely events and torturous explanations, steer clear of the Jews. If you want things to be straightforward, find someone else to listen to. You might even get to say something yourself. How do we begin a sentence? "Listen ..."

Twenty-year-old Evelyn journeys to the hot, mesmerizing international city of Tel Aviv (wonderfully evoked in these pages) and there finds every aspect of her relatively pampered and privileged life challenged by the no-nonsense women (and one sensuous but deceitful man) who are working to get a nation born:

I told her my Hebrew wasn't that good.

"Fine," she said. "I speak six languages. Pick one."

"English is all I know fluently."

"Then you are a fool."

When I Lived in Modern Times confounded a number of critics when it first appeared, and even now it holds the power to confuse in almost equal measure as it pleases. An apolitical novel about politics? A coming-of-age novel that seems at times almost disinterested in its heroine? And yet, re-reading it in 2011, I found it every bit as sharp and interesting as it was when it first appeared.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison (2008)

I haven't been a big fan of Morrison's writing over the years, usually finding it deceitfully arch and faux-oracular (whenever some young person tells me Beloved is their favorite novel, I always want to advise them to get out of the house more often). But this slim, almost mythic novella of a wild and disconsolate 17th century America reads like one long prose poem. At its heart is the question of ownership in the free world, and one of its main characters, Jacob Vaark, embodies all the contradictions of that question - he has slaves, servants, a mail-order bride, and is himself owned by his vanities. Morrison sets up the happy beginning of his married life to Rebekka so deftly you know it's all going to unravel horribly:

 

They settled into the long learning of one another; preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on. The weak religious tendencies that riled Rebekka's mother were of no interest to him. He was indifferent having himself withstood all pressure to join the village congregation but content to let her be persuaded if she chose. After some initial visits and Rebekka choosing not to continue, his satisfaction was plain. They leaned on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency. Or so they believed.

Morrison's handling of her human characters can be as arch and unconvincing as always, but there's a guiding spirit moving powerfully through this skinny book, elevating it from her usual stuff and repaying multiple re-readings.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin (1971)

This novel also features prominently on every 'Top 50 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novels of All Time' list I've made since it was first published (all the other 49 are by men, of course), and like most of the best Sci-Fi and Fantasy, it can be read and enjoyed by strangers to the genre. It's the story of George Orr, a hapless citizen of the near future who seeks medical help for all the disturbing dreams he's having. Unfortunately for him, he goes to Doctor Haber, a budding megalomaniac, who quickly realizes the unbelievable: George Orr's dreams change reality itself. Haber of course wants to harness this power - first to get George to 'fix' everything that's wrong with the world, and then eventually to simply transfer the power to himself, so he's no longer limited by this well-intentioned milquetoast. And passive George is more than happy to let him shoulder the burden, although with a warning:

"Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes ... But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. The must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully - as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?"

Haber doesn't see, and in true Frankensteinian fashion, his power goes horribly awry - and reveals a layer to the book which Le Guin prepares carefully but which will still catch the reader deliciously off-guard. This author is a legend for other works - her beloved "Earthsea" series, and her two landmark science fiction novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, but this is her best book, as tense and elegant as a modern myth.

A Much Younger Man by Dianne Highbridge (1998)

This beautiful, wise novel has been a source of frequent irritation to me since the moment it was published, and the reason is the only thing it shares in common with the great World War Z: it's virtually impossible to force people's minds to remain open long enough to recommend it. I plugged World War Z way back at the very beginning of Stevereads, and I'm plugging Highbridge's book now, for all the good it'll do me - those of you who haven't already dismissed it because of its cover will certainly read no further than knowing that the book's plot is summarized in its title: mid-30s school teacher Aly falls in love with Tom, the teenage son of her best friend. There: the world faces a zombie plague. Sigh. Highbridge takes this very simple premise and treats it in a manner, as one critic put it at the time, "openly sexual but without a hint of lewdness or smirking." Aly falls in love with Tom (and he very much with her) despite every caution sounding in her right from the beginning:

"Did you wonder why I didn't play [his lute, for company] the other night?"

"No. I just assumed you didn't feel like it."

"I didn't. Not like that, on show." Then he says, with the barest pause: "I would've played for you."

A small alarm bell rings somewhere in her head. She looks quickly at him, half-afraid to see the tell-tale intensity of an incipient crush in his eyes. Not really a problem if so, but better if not. He's looking straight back at her. His eyes aren't almost blue, as she thought, they're grey and completely guileless. Somehow this is not reassuring. "I'd like to hear you some day, but I don't know much about that kind of music," she says.

"You don't have to. You'll see."

And Highbridge unfolds it all with a deeply respectful intelligence. The result is one of the most honestly affecting novels of love and society that you're likely to read in a full year - but Heaven and Earth couldn't move you to try it, because you're still staring at that cover. Sigh.

Told By An Idiot by Rose Macaulay (1923)

Macaulay is unknown today except for her quirky The Towers of Trebizond (those NYRB people again!), and I myself treasure her Personal Pleasures as I treasure few other books of occasional essays, but this book is her masterpiece, and it's a mystery to me why Told by an Idiot isn't both recognized as a masterpiece and taught as one (I can only assume it's because made the tactical mistake of being a woman). It's the story of the unforgettable Garden family - the clergyman father, his saintly wife, their vibrant, incredibly diverse children, whose stories unfold over decades and are chronicled by their sister Rome, the ultimate family-observer, who first goes through her own heartbreak, when the man she loves confesses that he's already married and gets a typically Garden-family rejection:

"Rome, you can't do it. Don't you know, now you're in my arms, that you can't, that it would be to deny the best in us?"

"What's the best, what's the worst? I don't know, and nor do you. I'm not an ethicist. All I know is that your wife, while she wants you, or thinks she wants you, has first claim ... It's a question of fairness and decent feeling ... or bring it down, if you like, to a question of taste. Perhaps that is the only basis there really is for decisions of this sort for people like us."

"Taste! That's a fine cry to mess up two lives by. I'd almost rather you were religious, and talked of the will of God. One could respect that, at least."

"I can't do that, as I happen not to be sure whether God exists. And it would make nothing simpler, really, since one would then have to discover what one believed the will of God to be. Don't do religious people the injustice of believing that anything is simpler or easier for them; it's more difficult, since life is more exacting ... But it comes to the same thing; all these processes of thought lead to the same result if applied by the same mind. It depends on the individual outlook. And this is mine ... Oh, don't make it so damnably difficult for us both, my dearest ..."

Miss Garden, who never swore and never wept, here collapsed into tears, all her urbane breeding broken at last. He consoled her so tenderly, so pitifully, so mournfully, that she wept the more for love of him.

The Virago Press reprinted this great book in the 1980s twice - once with a hideous cover and once with a good cover. I'd take a plain brown wrapper, if I could see it reprinted today.

Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree (1985)

No, I'm not losing my nerve and desperately trying to work in a hated man onto our list! James Tiptree is of course the pen-name used by the late Alice Sheldon to write some of the best science fiction of the 20th century. Her novel Up the Walls of the World is a tour de force, and her short stories (such gems as "The Women Men Don't See" and "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," and "Painwise") likewise superb, but this novel - the last one she wrote before she killed her husband and herself - burns with a genius all its own, a genius I was at first slow to grant. The book tells the story of the planet Damien, where years ago the beautiful native species was horrifically tortured to produce a wildly valuable substance called Star Tears. In the present, a mixed group of tourists comes to visit the planet and threatens to re-awaken the tragedies of the past, since, as we're told, the darkness that bred those tragedies never went away:

"All over this Galaxy, for as long as you live, there will be big crooks and little crooks and lonesome weirdos, Human and otherwise, dreaming up ways to get their hands on Star Tears stuff. Too abhorrent? Don't you believe it. On the Black Worlds there are Human beasts who salivate over the prospect of torturing children. And passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat."

This dark and almost hopeless note is struck throughout this novel (horrible to think of the suffering Tiptree must have been enduring herself, to tap into all this and then put it down so cleanly on the page), and yet, impossibly, hope looks to prevail. Even if you think you don't like science fiction (and surely you don't think that, right? Wouldn't want to be discriminatory, would we?), you'll like this book, one of the late classics of the genre.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (2000)

Those of you who've known me personally for a while might recall that I've been fervently recommending this book for over a decade, despite the fact that I'm a well-known Internet misogynist; even before The Last Samurai achieved its current mind-boggling and entirely deserved status as both a cult classic (this is one of those books that makes you feel like it was written for you, personally) and a literary landmark, I was telling any open-minded reader I could find that this was a literary landmark destined to be a cult classic. It's one of the most dazzling literary debuts since This Side of Paradise - indeed, it raised the bar for dazzling literary debuts so high most first-time novelists can't stand to look at it. It's the story of a harried, hopeful young single mother named Sibylla and her odd, prodigiously gifted son Ludo, a monster autodidact whose intellectual appetites quickly outstrip even his mother's high expectations:

Early March, winter nearly over. Ludo still following scheme I do not understand: found him reading Metamorphoses the other day though he is only up to Odyssey 22. Seems to have slowed down on Odyssey, has only been reading 100 lines or so a day for the past few weeks. Too tired to think of new places to go, where is there besides National Gallery National Portrait Gallery Tate Whitechapel British Museum Wallace Collection that is free? Financially in fairly good position as have typed Advanced Angling 1969 - present, Mother and Child 1952-present, Horn & Hound 1920-1976, and am now making good progress with The Poodle Breeder, 1924-1982. Have made virtually no progress with Japanese.

The irony threaded through even that brief passage (with the texts Sibylla is typing for money silently commenting on her efforts to raise Ludo on her own) is choice, and it's on display throughout the whole of this novel, which delights and surprises and ultimately moves with its strangeness and stanzas of staggering virtuosity. If Open Letters Monthly had been around in 2000, this is exactly the kind of book I'd have hoped Sam Sacks or John Cotter would decide to review.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

If this last title seems familiar, it should: not only did I give it rapturous praise over at Open Letters Monthly, but I was the very first person anywhere in the world to pronounce it brilliant, long before its publication, long before it won its shelf of awards: when two bits of it were excerpted in the Penny Press, I confidently predicted it might well end up being the best Tudor novel ever written - and I did all that despite the fact that its author is a woman!

Very few of the novel's characters are - this is mostly a man's book (with the very notable exception of the odious Anne Boleyn), featuring one of the most brutishly masculine main characters in recent fiction: Thomas Cromwell, the mysterious street lawyer Henry VIII came more and more to rely upon to do his dirty work, a character virtually all Tudor fictionizers have almost automatically chosen to portray as a plain-and-simple villain. In Wolf Hall, we don't think of Cromwell that way, even though he's ruthless and dangerous. We see him being underestimated by every grandee in the land (except for one devastatingly sharp moment with the king, where Cromwell learns the unpleasant lesson that having a Tudor estimate you accurately is most definitely NOT a pleasant experience), even when, as with the old Duke of Norfolk, they know they're underestimating him while they do it:

"I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine."

"Will they be the same, my lord?"

The duke scowls. He paces; he rattles a little; at last he bursts out, "Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a ... person? It isn't as if you could afford to be."

He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a room so that you don't see him; but perhaps those days are over.

"Smile away," says the duke. "Wolsey's household is a nest of vipers. Not that ..." he touches a medal, flinching. "God forbid I should ..."

Compare a prince of the church to a serpent. The duke wants the cardinal's money, and he wants the cardinal's place at the king's side: but then again, he doesn't want to burn in Hell. He walks across the room; he slaps his hands together; he rubs them; he turns. "The king is preparing to quarrel with you, master. Oh yes. He will favor you with an interview because he wishes to understand the cardinal's affairs, but he has, you will learn, a very long and exact memory, and what he remembers, master, is when you were a burgess of the Parliament before this, and how you spoke against his war."

"I hope he doesn't think still of invading France."

"God damn you! What Englishman does not! We own France. We have to take back our own." A muscle in his cheek jumps; he paces, agitated; he turns, he rubs his cheek; the twitch stops, and he says, in a voice perfectly matter-of-fact, "Mind you, you're right."

Like many people in this splendid, bottomlessly re-readable novel, Norfolk finds himself casting around searching for a reason to validate the visceral dislike he feels for Cromwell. In this case, the duke (whose spindly body Cromwell has already taken in with a glance) pounces on Cromwell's admission that he himself had once been a soldier:

"I was a soldier myself."

"Were you so? Not in any English army, I'll be bound. There, you see." The duke grins, quite without animosity. "I knew there was something about you. I knew I didn't like you, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Where were you?"

"Garigliano."

"With?"

"The French."

The duke whistles. "Wrong side, lad."

"So I noticed."

The fast-paced bounce of this dialogue is maintained throughout the book, which is similar to The Lathe of Heaven in being a genre-buster, something you can hand to even the most adamantly anti-historical fiction reader, confident that the book will hook them. I've never known it to fail, which certainly hasn't been the case with any of Mantel's earlier books. This one is a bolt from the sky, it's so good.

And there you have it! Eight great novels - by women! The cosmic scales of justice are re-balanced, although how they could ever have been un-balanced I don't know. After all, the field of fiction is almost thoroughly dominated by women. Against our paltry Tolstoy, Thackeray, and Fielding, women have a dozen giants right off the tip of the bat - a preponderance so great it's only become seriously endangered since the late 20th century, when the proliferation of make-weight MFA programs with delusions of cultural oppression began graduating legions of utterly talentless female degree holders, thus muddying the waters almost opaque for genuinely promising young women like Tea Obreht.

But that's a worry for another day - for right now, the universe is restored to order, and with luck Stevereads is restored to the good graces of all those of you who wrote in giving me dirty looks! I whole-heartedly recommend each of these woman-authored books, and I could easily double the length of this post with additional names, many of whom I've also praised on Stevereads in their own right over the years. So now perhaps the issue of my raging misogyny can be tabled, and I can return my attention to higher literary matters ...

Eight Good Reads!

According to the calendar, at least, autumn  approaches (in Boston in the last week of September, it's 85 degrees with the humidity hovering somewhere around 95 % - in other words, very uncomfortably hot, with absolutely no sign of a more merciful season coming), and autumn traditionally means a crush of prestigious new titles crowding bookstore shelves and tables in anticipation of the major literary awards - and the holiday book-buying season.

The autumn is also often characterized as the time when readers come back from their ramshackle beach-houses and buckle back down to work and 'serious' reading - and this characterization has persisted even though there hasn't been a shred of truth to it in thirty years. It goes hand-in-hand with the very idea of 'serious' versus 'light' reads - a distinction I've never really understood in any but personal terms. The labels certainly can't be referring to the work necessary to generate them - it takes far more work to whittle a Jeeves & Wooster novel into perfect shape than it does to maunder around for 200 pages about suburban angst. I think the distinction itself is so much bunk and does a great deal of harm to the republic of letters, but if there's any truth to it (even artificial truth), surely it comes from the handling of plot more than anything else? Surely we've come to think of 'light' reads are more formally observant of plot - Thing X builds, Thing X happens, Thing X happened - whereas 'serious' reads can let even major story-lines just sort of drift off into clouds of precious prose.

I'm recommending eight contemporary novels today, and all eight of them quietly defy the whole concept of 'serious' and 'light' fiction. None of them is long, none of them boasts the tangled, verbose prose style currently considered 'genius,' and almost all of them are written by authors who once upon a time would have fallen comfortably into that disturbing old catch-all, midlist. I recommend them mainly because they're all really enjoyable - the perfect things to cleanse your mental palate before the autumn publisher lists force you to read whoever's Jonathan Franzen this year. So consider this post the two of us walking through a bookstore's fiction section and me pointing out some things that are worth your time.

Diamond Dogs by Alan Watt (2000) - the story of handsome young star quarterback Neil Garvin, whose brutish father is the town's autocratic sheriff. The book is an insistent (almost tiresomely so) Oedipal conflict between the two - a conflict that scorches everybody else who comes in contact with it, including Neil's best friend and teammate (the book's homoerotic elements are handled so delicately the reader almost doesn't notice them at all):

"He's been pushing me my whole life and I'm sick of it. I'm sick of doing whatever he tells me to do. I just don't want to play anymore. I just want to be left alone." I couldn't understand why it sounded empty. All of it was true but when I heard the words come out of my mouth they just sounded silly. I didn't know what it was but I knew that he didn't believe me.

When a crime-plot enmeshes Neil, it brings every single issue of power and complicity between him and his father to the forefront, and you can't resist getting caught up in it all.

Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald (1998) - Speaking of brutish - McDonald's main character Syms Covington leads a brutish, almost sub-human life from his earliest childhood, and yet he stubbornly developes - or refuses to yield - a tender sensibility and a sharp eye for the natural world. These things do him no good landing a berth on the Beagle at the commencement of its legendary voyage, but they come in very handy once he meets that vessel's oddly curate-like special guest of the captain:

That was when their gent grunted up the side and for the first time in all creation met Covington's eye - the boy registering a round coppery face and lubberly sea legs - one, two, and a clumsy haul, and Covington had his man to observe, all the height of him uncoiling shy. All he knew of him at present was that he liked to go out with his gun and his dog in the rain. He was, some said, a young squire of the sort who passed time with philosophers discoursing on whether Greeks ate melon seeds, or if they had privies in their gardens. He came from dockside in a cutter near sinking under the weight of extra goods that he wanted this late, everything awkward-shaped and dripping in the December mist as it was hoisted: a bundle of guns, a crate of jars, a sack of books, a rectangular basket lined with paper that was meant for dead birds. As he wondered, 'Might he trouble them with his extras?' Covington held his gaze and heard the words, but the gent's brown eyes still looked through him. 'I am ashamed,' thought Covington, 'to be who I am.'

An oddly touching relationship develops, and a really good historical novel is born.

Lit Life by Kurt Wenzel (2002) - In this hilarious satirical romp through the literary world of Manhattan and the Hamptons, Wenzel is able to let a whole brace of personal demons off their leashes, and he centers most of them on the formerly hot not deeply blocked youngish writer Kyel Clayton, who's such a lazy waster he actually floats to his cutthroat agent the possibility that he just won't write his next book. The response is not particularly passive:

"If you say no?" Trevor answered, his tone now quietly ferocious. "If you say no, I bury any book you submit after six months; it does me no good after that, and by contract I've got your next one by the balls. If you say no, I tell all future houses what an unproductive pain in the ass you've been - a real chop job, so that by the time I'm done, Kinko's will view you as a publishing risk. If you say no, I'll have my lawyers pull a gang bang on your ass that'll have you howling like a banshee, not to mention in paralyzing debt until the third millennium. If you say no, Kyle, you drunken bastard, I will personally dedicate my life to tracking you down - even if I have to visit every bar in the city - and sink my shoe into your rotted cantaloupe of a head and laugh as you shit bicuspids and sip single-village mescal through a straw for the next fifty years. If you say no."

This is by far the funniest book on our little list today (although there's one moment in Mr Darwin's Shooter that will make you laugh mighty damn loud despite your finer instincts), and it hits a number of fairly sensitive home-spots for any reader involved in 'the scene.'

Raymond + Hannah by Stephen Marche (2005) - This is the love story of Hannah, who's leaving to study the Torah for nine months in Jerusalem, and Raymond, who's doing his doctoral dissertation on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. The two of them meet and say some cute/clever things and then end up having sex, and the whole encounter - the whole book - is accompanied by printed marginalia glossing the action of the narrative. It's a gimmick that should get old in about fifteen seconds, but through the heartfelt poetry of Marche's prose, it doesn't. Instead, we get passage after passage like the one the marginalia terms "Toronto aubade":

Transport trucks, go slowly. Pull yourself over on the side of the road. Bring the night with you into your bunks. Let Raymond and Hannah anticipate endlessly on the stairs up to attics. Nights in August in Toronto are too short besides. And go slowly, street-washing men. Just let the dirt by dirty for now. Let the streets seize with filth. Let your engines stall, and stop the morning from coming. And more slowly, smokestacks; in fact, completely shut yourselves down. Nights in August in Toronto are too full of light besides. For once let all the power in you not flow, and leave Raymond and Hannah asleep in bed alone.

Dedication by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (2007) - These two authors shot to super mega-stardom with their nondescript little book The Nanny Diaries, but readers shouldn't hold that against them. This book is entirely more genuine and eventually heartwarming, and it centers on the character of Kate Hollis, who's spent every year since high school listening to the world sing the songs of her life: because her former almost-boyfriend Jake Sharpe went on to become a Justin Timberlake-type international sensation who's based all of his hit songs on their time together. When they finally confront each other, the encounters will remind readers of the witty, fizzy big screen romantic comedy this book has somehow managed not to become:

Flailing the blankets off, I pull back and stare at his sheepish expression, determined. "If you don't do right by my friends, there is no 'you' I want to know. Are we clear?"

He sits up, flirtatious boy energy suddenly dissipated. He looks me in the eye. "Clear."

"Really? You'll tell Jocelyn and your lawyers? You'll sign the papers?"

"Yes." An unfettered lightness floods through me as he takes my face in his hands. "I need you - Kate," he emphasizes my adult name. "I think I keep writing songs about you just to keep your voice in my head."

"I'm your Jiminy Cricket?"

He laughs. "You are the best thing that ever happened to me."

"Can your lawyers draw up something to that effect as well?" I laugh with him, finally able to let myself feel the elation of being right where I am.

Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi (2003, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson) - music also threads its way throughout Niemi's grotesquely grim and buffoonish story of the coming-of-age of young Matti in the isolated wastes of Northern Sweden. Whether it's Niemi or his translator, there's quite a bit of rather ham-handed satire in this utterly absorbing novel, and several bits of that satire are aimed squarely at the book's audience, as when the boy gets some sage warnings from his father:

The most dangerous thing of all, and something he wanted to warn me about above all else, the one thing that had consigned whole regiments of unfortunate young people to the twilight world of insanity, was reading books. This objectionable practice had increased among the younger generation, and Dad was more pleased than he could say to note that I had not yet displayed any such tendencies. Lunatic asylums were overflowing with folk who'd been reading too much. Once upon a time they'd been just like you and me, physically strong, straightforward, cheerful, and well balanced. Then they'd started reading. Most often by chance. A bout of flu, perhaps, with a few days in bed. An attractive book cover that had aroused some curiosity. And suddenly the bad habit had taken hold. The first book had let to another. Then another, and another, all links in a chain that led straight down into the eternal night of mental illness. It was impossible to stop. It was worse than drugs.

 

Away by Amy Bloom (2008) - It's difficult for me to tell with any accuracy (I'm not really aware of the careers - before or since - of most of our authors today), but it get the distinct impression Bloom isn't usually 'my kind of author.' Something in the tint of her sentimentality, perhaps, or maybe it's just this book's fairly gender-specific cover. But however that may be, this book - the story of plain-spoken heroine Lillian Leyb, whose search for her daughter takes her across the breadth of mid-20th century America and brings her into contact with all variety of people and their prejudices:

He had thought she might be a Jew, not that he's known many - one good boxer and his pretty, wild sister had said they were Jews, but they had also said they were the illegitimate children of Harry Houdini and he had not pursued it with them.

"Jewish. You're far from home."

Lillian opens her mouth to say that, on the contrary, Jews are found from China to everywhere else, but really, she is far from home.

"You people sure do land in the skillet."

This is either the kind of not-unfriendly remark Lillian has gotten used to in the West (in its darker versions, You people sure do have all the money; You people sure do stick together) or just a statement of fact and so observably true in this world that no Jew anywhere would dream of arguing the point.

"Yes, we do," Lillian says and she does not say, And just what do you make of those skillets, mister?

The Night Villa by Carol Goodman (2008) - Unlike with most of our authors today, I was already familiar with at least something Goodman wrote, the fantastic novel The Lake of Dead Languages. Our current book is equally classically oriented: classics professor Sophie Chase is recovering from a violent episode that happens at the beginning of the novel, and like all good classicists, she chooses to do her recovering on the island of Capri, uncovering the secrets of the long-buried Villa della Notte - which not only allows for a parallel narrative set in AD 79 on the eve of the eruption of Vesuvius but also facilitates her meetings with mysterious businessman Paul Lyros:

We walk slowly and Lyros stops often at water fountains to drink and at benches to retie his sneakers, or at tempting vistas to point out the Marina Grande below us and Monte Solaro towering behind us, or to point past a gate at some villa that lies drowsing in a lemon grove behind mounds of fuschia and azalea, geraniums and jasmine. He always picks a spot well shaded by an umbrella pine or cypress to regale me with a piece of Caprese history and give me a chance to catch my breath. "And this," he says at one gate, "is the Villa Lysis, once home to Count Jacques d'Adelsward Fersen, who so scandalized the Caprese that he had to leave the island. He did return eventually and lived here until he died of an opium overdoes at forty-five."

"What was the scandal about?"

"Oh, just another one of those old Caprese stories of degenerate foreigners made up of gossip and lies," he says, turning back up the path.

"You sound like you don't approve of the locals."

"I guess I'm afraid of what they say about me - that I'm just anther in a long line of eccentric foreigners come to live out his fantasies - or to escape the demands of Empire like our friend Tiberius." He points upward and I see the ruins of Tiberius's villa have come into view - a mass of sun-struck brick and limestone crowning a high peak above us.

No particular dominant theme governing these eight choices, mind you - just eight very good reads for your consideration on a very hot, very humid fall day.

Desolation (and small consolation) in the Penny Press!

I made my faithful way through the main attractions of the latest Harper's in order to reach the end. I read about evil Mormons, and I read some bombastic editorializing, and I read an entertaining little squib of a story by Justin Torres (clearly a young author to watch - still prone to gimmicks, still not quite seeing that they are gimmicks, but with a very alluring confidence in his own prose), but the whole time I was holding my mental breath, waiting to get to Zadie Smith's "New Books" column.

As I've mentioned here before, I consider (somewhat to my surprise, having been underwhelmed by her fiction) Smith one of the best fiction reviewers working today (my Open Letters Monthly colleague Sam Sacks would also be on that short list), and it was an amazing, unlooked-for little gift when she suddenly started writing her detailed, lively pieces regularly for Harper's. She's one of the only literary journalists who can so naturally meld the personal with the professional that her pieces always feel like sparkling, invigorating talk about books, rather than the considered and reworked essays they are. She differs from Sacks in this way; his own reviews are almost awe-inspiringly removed from the purely personal - they read like scripture: "And Jereboam begat Gath, and Gath begat Askelon, and Askelon thought the metaphorical underpinning of the latest Julian Barnes was splenetic at best," etc. Smith will sometimes swoop in mid-review from a stunning textual survey to a childhood vignette on her mother's porch, then back again, whereas watching Sacks attempt such a thing would be as painful as watching William James try out his signature fox-trot on "America's Got Talent!" ... each to their own strengths: neither can Smith match Sacks' gravitas. An author reading a pan of his work by Smith can put the magazine down and say, "Well, that's just your opinion." The same author reading a pan of his work by Sacks (at a surgical 200 words, in the Wall Street Journal) is likely to say, "Well, I think they're still hiring down at the sawmill."

I celebrate all these first-rate critics for their differences (except when they differ from ME, as each and every one of the scamps has been known to do at one time or another), and I eagerly look forward to reading their latest thoughts in the venues lucky enough to have them. Sometimes, this can be distressing - in the latest Harper's, Smith begins by singing the praises of the great science fiction author Ursula Le Guin, and that immediately set off alarm bells. First-rate critics of science fiction are extremely rare, and Smith certainly doesn't qualify (nor does Sacks - "Due to the number of moons in the night sky, the reader must surmise that Equinox of the Lobster-Men does not, in fact, take place on Earth at all ..."). But all begins well enough - she heaps much-deserved superlatives on Le Guin's two masterpieces, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and only occasionally does she inadvertently reveal her underlying discomfort with the genre. Whenever her snobbish instincts begin to bubble too near the surface, she taps them off by tossing in a term in German - we get Verfremdungseffekt and Jus for no conceivable reason other than Smith wanting to avoid having her fellow Po-Mo lit-snobs pull her hair in the hallway after class. What remains is a solid, inviting appreciation of Le Guin's work and attitude, which is always welcome.

Smith follows the Le Guin foray up with something in many ways even less comfortable: the latest book by the fantastic Magnus Mills. An author (and, one suspects, a reader) like Smith has absolutely zero chance of ever fully getting an author like Mills, but she's game to try. It isn't a pretty attempt - at one point she starts just jerkily reciting the names of Shakespeare plays in order to regain her balance (call it the book-nerd's "Serenity Now!"), and it's clear the whole encounter has shaken her a bit. She finishes up by wholesale retreating - she runs to the comforting arms of Rimbaud.

And then she drops her bombshell!

I have to fess up to my own irrational fantasy - the one where it's possible to write a novel, teach class, bring up a kid, and produce a regular column: at the moment a speculative fiction for me. With regret I must say good-bye to New Books - at least for a while - and welcome my brilliant successor, Larry McMurtry.

I moaned aloud over my zuurkoolstamppot: No! Perhaps the most important thing Smith shares in common with Sacks - and Clive James, and Ferdinand Mount, and Michael Dirda, and Sam Anderson, and Anthony Lane, and even Christopher Hitchens - is perhaps the one essential trait all first-rate literary journalists must have: humility in the presence of the written word. The author under review might screw up, he might misfire, he might be an idiot - but he's engaged in a holy task, and it trails a holy solemnity behind it. The author might make the biggest mess since God created basset hounds, but the best literary critics take that mess seriously because the act of creation is holy to them (which is why they can get so all-fired angry when a thing is done poorly, or lazily, or insultingly).

Larry McMurtry is 80 years old. He's the author of two very, very good novels (The Last Picture Show and Buffalo Girls) and two great ones (Lonesome Dove and Moving On) - think about that for a minute: two very, very good novels, and two great ones - that's more than almost all authors can do, or even approach. This is not a man who can be humble in the presence of the written word, and with good reason: this is a man in whose presence the written word is humble. Which makes him a great choice to write book-commentary for Harper's or anybody else on Earth - wherever it happens, I'll buy it. But it makes him a lousy choice to write a regular column dutifully reviewing new books. What's he supposed to say, about any of them? Larry McMurtry is supposed to set aside time to make notes on a jaggedly-written coming-of-age story set in contemporary Iceland? Larry McMurtry is supposed to patiently deconstruct the way a precocious author's circus-metaphor goes astray? Larry McMurtry is supposed to be doing this? What's next, making Herman Melville clerk in a customs house?

It won't work. McMurtry will stay on-target for one paragraph, perhaps two, and then the book will be forgotten and the rest of the column will be "and then Renny Price and Wally Stegner and I - all three of us drunk as newts - snuck into Katy Anne Porter's kitchen late at night and commenced a grand attempt to bake her a cake. She flicked the light on and covered us all with a sawed-off shotgun, and it was only a call from Bunny Wilson that saved our hides ..." And that will be undeniable fun to read, but the world of serious fiction-criticism will lose a very high-profile venue until such time as McMurtry sees fit to vacate it.

Don't mistake me: it'll be great to have more McMurtry prose in the world, in any venue, at any time. But I'm nevertheless wondering if Zadie Smith might respond to a good old-fashioned letter-writing campaign ...

It's Like This, Cat!

Our book today is Emily Neville's 1963 Newbery Medal winner, It's Like This, Cat, the lean and quirky and utterly touching story of a fourteen-year-old boy, David Mitchell, living "right in the middle of New York City" with his blustering, sharp-tongued father and his worrying, long-suffering mother. One of David's neighbors - one of his few sanctuaries from the drudgery of school and the tension of home - is an elderly woman named Kate, who, of course, keeps a small herd (gaggle? crash? who knows? It should be a 'disdain' - a disdain of cats) of cats in her apartment. It's from Kate that David adopts the Cat of the book's title, and from that point on, Cat serves as an entirely silent Greek chorus and a consistent touchstone for almost all the action of the novel. There are long stretches where the reader forgets Cat is even around, but Neville has an easy, natural way of bringing the action back to him at regular intervals.

The main stories of the book are intensely human, however. There's the tension between David and his father (Neville does a perfect job of neither softening nor vilifying David's father - and she never makes David himself a little plaster saint, either), the growing friendship between David and Tom, an older boy who's frustrated at his life's lack of direction, and most of all the sweet, budding romance between David and Mary, a girl from Coney Island who takes an interest in Cat, and then in David himself. And as with so many quintessentially New York novels, the city itself is a character - a rude, elbowy character who's constantly looking to upstage everybody else. Descriptions of New York - Coney Island, the Fulton Fish Market, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Macy's - spool lovingly through every page of this book, and readers less than half a century old will find quite a few of those descriptions as antiquated as tintypes from the Old West, even while they're registering the eternal parts:

The regular park man got sunstroke or something, so I earned fourteen dollars raking and mowing in Gramercy Park in the middle of August. Gramercy Park is a private park. You have to own a key to get in, so the city doesn't take care of it.

Real paper money, at this time of year especially, is very cheering. I head up to Sam Goody's to see what records he's got on sale and what characters are buying them. Maybe I'll buy something, maybe not, but as long as I've got money in my pocket, I don't feel like the guy is glaring at me for taking up floor space.

Along the way I walk through the library, the big one on Forty-second Street. You go in by the lions on Fight Avenue, and there's all kinds of pictures and books on exhibit in the halls, and you walk through to the back, where you can take out the books. It's nice and cool, and nobody glares at you unless you make a lot of noise or go to sleep. I can take books out of here and return them at the Twenty-third Street branch, which is handy.

The shops might change, but the sprawling inner geography of childhood never does, and it's captured with loving precision in this book (and in the delightful line-drawings by Emil Weiss, who also drew the original cover). David's adventures take him all over the landscape of a city that's radically changed since 1963 - his lawyer father and non-working mother couldn't possibly afford their West Side apartment these days, for instance, and young adult fiction has changed too. Violence, abuse, abandonment - these are standard things in our current fiction. Readers of The Hunger Games will find it difficult to believe the rather tame arguments between David and his father could once have been considered a daring step in fiction - and yet it was such a step, and Emily Neville was bravely championed in taking it by her fearless editor, the mighty Ursula Nordstrom, who brought this and so many other books into existence.

So a stinging, smart-aleck coming-of-age novel has been greened and softened by time into something that will strike most New York readers as wistfully sentimental. That certainly happens in fiction, but the power of the story has remained undimmed all these years. It'll move you and make you smile - and draw you back to periodic re-readings. If it can do that to a card-carrying dog-person, it can do that to anybody.

The Ogre!

Our book today is Michel Tournier's great, grim 1970 masterpiece, Le roi des Aulnes, translated into English in 1972 by Barbara Bray with the title The Ogre. It was Tournier's second novel, and it won him the Prix Goncourt and sold with fervor throughout France (even the paperback of the English translation sold well in America). The whole generation of Western writers born around the '20s (Tournier was born in 1924 and is still alive, composed almost entirely of tobacco and merlot) visited the Second World War when they reached middle age, and the works they produced are generally first rate, rich with mythic overtones. The Ogre is a magnificent example of this sub-set, a deceptively simple tale of a gigantic man-boy named Abel Tiffaugues who's portrayed as something insightful and quasi-human - with an innocence ripe for warping by the Nazis. Tiffauges has a fascination with children and a reflexive (ironically invoked) desire to protect them, even from such rarefied dangers as literary condescension, as when he finds a co-worker reading Pinnochio:

 I picked it up and looked through it, shrinking in advance from the atrocities children's stories are full of. As if children were dull brutes, dim and insensitive, who can be moved only be fearsome tales, real literary rotgut! Perrault, Lewis Carroll, Busch - sadists with nothing to learn from the divine Marquis.

Tournier's sharp commentary is buried at varying depths everywhere in the novel, often cloaked in folkloric colors, as when the populace is warned by posters that would have looked natural nailed to trees in the Middle Ages:

 BEWARE THE OGRE OF KALTENBORN!

He is after your children. He roves through our country stealing children. If you have any, never forget the Ogre - he never forgets them! Don't let them go out alone. Teach them to run away and hide if they see a giant on a blue horse with a pack of black hounds. If he comes to see you, don't yield to his threats, don't be taken in by his promises. All mothers should be guided by one certainty: if the Ogre takes your child, you will NEVER see him again!

Tiffauges for a long time is suborned into helping the Nazis (the scenes where he realizes his mistake are absolutely shattering, even in English), and he himself can be oddly, unconsciously brutal. But readers are never in any doubt who the real monster in these pages is:

"But why April 19?" asked Tiffauges.

The man looked at him incredulously.

"Don't you know April 20 is our Fuehrer's birthday? And every year the German people give him a whole generation of children as a birthday present!" He pointed proudly at the big colored photograph of Hitler scowling down from the wall behind him.

When Tiffauges took the road back again to Rominten the Master of the Hunt, with his shoots and trophies, his feasts of venison and his coprological and phallological science, had dwindled to the rank of a little, imaginary, picturesque ogre out of an old wives' tale. He was eclipsed now by the other, the ogre of Rastenburg, who demanded of his subjects the exhaustive birthday present of five hundred thousand little girls and five hundred thousand little boys, ten years old, dressed for sacrifice, or in other words naked, out of whose flesh he kneaded his cannon fodder.

Despite its initial burst of popularity and acclaim, The Ogre hasn't become quite the modern-day classic I've always thought it should be considered. Reprints of the Bray translation have been few and far between (there was a recent one I vaguely recall, but nothing in bookstores now), and the book is neither read nor taught today. That's a shame; as a portrait of monsterhood in all its contradictions, it's more honest and ultimately far more effective than something like The Kindly Ones from a couple of years ago. Maybe it's time for a new translation and a bit of hoopla.