Mountbatten!

Our book today is Philip Ziegler’s massive 1985 biography of Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Battenberg, better known to history as ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten. Ziegler’s book is superb, but even so, that ‘better known to history’ line is trembly: Mountbatten might very well be the greatest unknown man of the 20^th century.

Friends of mine who’ve seen the Mountbatten books on my shelves (I have four biographies of the man – including one very good one that remains unpublished – and several books in which he features as a key player, such as Collins & Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight, previously reviewed here at Stevereads) have all wondered at the weirdly obscure people whose biographies occupy so much of my time. Usually, I don’t protest, since there’s an element of truth in the comment. But the truth is relative as well: in 1950, casual observers of my bookshelves (same books, different dogs) would have noticed far fewer obscure names – but the books would be the same. The reason is obvious: the observers have changed, or rather, their schooling has. In 1950, every single active reader looking at my shelves would have recognized the names of Cellini, Fremont, or Gaskell. Today, with active readers under the age of 60, I’m lucky if Custer gets an ‘ah, yes.’ Schools don’t teach history anymore, and schools have never properly taught biography. It’s a shame, but we can make up for lost time right here!

And the irony is, Mountbatten has the excuse of neither antiquity nor obscurity to warrant his neglect: he was one of the architects of the world we now inhabit, and his life was of the larger-than-life variety that the public ought to eat up. Queen Victoria was his great-grandmother (he knocked off her spectacles at his christening), his nephew Philip married Queen Elizabeth II, and he was college chums with the future Kings Edward VIII and George VI. During World War Two he helped plan the epic combined-force ventures that eventually retook Fortress Europe from Hitler, and in the years afterward, he was the Supreme Commander of the British forces in Southeast Asia and the last British Viceroy of India (before it calved Pakistan and gained its independence). And for the last four decades of his long and vigorous life, he was the driving, unifying force – the living game-plan, as it were – behind the very idea of the modern British monarchy, largely through his very close advisory relationship with Prince Charles (look at any random public shot of the Royals during those years and you’re likely to see him, sitting or standing right behind Charles in a disconcerting imitation of Edgar Bergen). He was still vigorously going strong when an IRA bomb planted on his fishing yacht detonated directly under his feet, killing him instantly. Regarding roughly 100 men and 10 women, we can honestly say: “the 20^th century would have been very different, had they not been alive,” and Mountbatten is certainly one of those people.

So why the neglect, especially considering the fact that Ziegler’s biography is utterly engrossing, as jauntily readable as the best kind of fiction (it’s an ‘official’ life, but the royal family, perhaps knowing how lucky they were to have a writer of Ziegler’s caliber interested in the job, wisely put no restrictions on him – as a result, there are many passages that would have infuriated Mountbatten, but none, I think, that would have moved him to call a lawyer)?

Oddly enough, I think it may have to do with the subject’s weird brand of humility. That’s not a word anybody who knew him would have associated even distantly with Mountbatten, and in its more pietistic meanings it definitely doesn’t apply. He was tall, extremely handsome, bottomlessly tough despite nagging health problems, and thoroughly entitled in the most literal sense of the word (the Battenberg line of the royal family changed their name to Mountbatten during the anti-German hysteria of World War One, at the same time the Saxe-Coburgs became the Windsors). As Ziegler points out time and again, Mountbatten was childishly vain and apt to preening – hardly humble in the normal sense of the word.

But he had a way of disappearing into the enormous, historical tasks that he took on as a matter of course; he was a team-builder, a consensus-former, and once he had a goal in mind, the goal became more important than his individual part in achieving it. The ruthlessly egalitarian 21^st century will be loath to admit it, but these are royal traits, when royalty is at its best (and the overwhelming implication about Mountbatten – made in whispers even in the halls of Windsor – was that he made a far more impressive king than either of his college chums, even though he was never crowned).

Ziegler is an old hand at chronicling royalty; he uses the same techniques here, shifting from grand to simple, from wry to sympathetic as the occasion warrants. When summarizing the Japanese attack on the desperate, outgunned British outpost of Arakan in 1944, he hits his notes quickly and surely: “’Hold on, and you will make history,’ was Mountbatten’s message. They held on, and they did.”

When detailing his subject’s typically merciless sense of humor (a Windsor trait, alas), he assumes the more relaxed gait of a raconteur:

He relished the royal tours in Britannia above all; the jokes and informality when the ship was at sea, the grandeur and consequence of the state occasions. He had always been a devotee of funny stories and used to bandy them over the table with George VI, each provoking the other to fresh excesses. When the King died, Princess Margaret inherited his mantle. She shared with Mountbatten a passion for perverted proverbs, such as that inspired by a team of pelota players who all tried to get out at the same time through the revolving doors of the hotel in which they were staying. Their impatience was very properly punished when the door collapsed on top of them and killed them all. Moral: never put all your Basques in one exit. One of the royal tours was believed by Mountbatten to have given rise to another of these monstrosities. A tribal chief had two thrones which had last been used in the days of King George V. As his grass hut was rather small, he had them pulled on ropes into the roof. Unfortunately, when the time came to use them again, the ropes broke and the thrones crashed down on top of the chief. As he died, the moral no doubt flashed through is mind: people in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.

All the portraits in this magnificent book are as perfectly rendered as that of its star. The glamour of 1920s Hollywood, the high-strung sensibilities of Edward VIII, who became the forlorn Duke of Windsor, the bombast of Winston Churchill, the no-nonsense force of old Queen Mary (she gets the best quotes for the first quarter of the book and dominates its events even after she’s, as Ziegler puts it, “safely dead”), the grubby purity of Gandhi, most of all the driven, passionate, and illusion-free pillar that was Mountbatten’s wife Edwina … all are given three-dimensional life in the course of a rolling, fast narrative you don’t want to end.

Those 21^st century friends who see this book on my shelves and wonder openly at the weirdly obscure folk I read about really ought to read it; Ziegler wrote for them, and Mountbatten certainly hoped his life would fascinate people long after he stopped living it. Of course, it would help if it were readily, easily in print, but in this day and age of electronic marvels, that matters less and less: everything is obtainable. And if you’re stumped and still really interested, of course I’ll send you a copy. All part of the service, here at Stevereads.

Comics: The Children's Crusade!

Comics this week held lots and lots of interest, but surely the most interesting – and best-executed – item on the list was the first issue of the new Avengers mini-series “Children’s Crusade,” written with extremely appealing understatement by Allan Heinberg and penciled with his usual eye-catching mastery by Jim Cheung.

The plot revolves around two members of the so-called Young Avengers, Billy Kaplan, code-named Wiccan, a young mutant magic-caster, and Tommy Shepherd, code-named Speed, a young mutant super-speedster. Something in the confluence of those descriptions will strike old-time comics readers as familiar, and that’s the plan: Marvel readers have seen the sibling-mutant-one-does-magic-the-other-runs-really-fast combination before, in long-time (grown-up) Avengers Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (we won’t belabor the obvious fact that Stan Lee could think up ten code-names in his sleep that were better than ‘Wiccan’ or ‘Speed’ … yeesh …).

The aforementioned plan hauls in so much back-story that it literally can’t be effectively summarized here (suffice it to say a) the similarity in powers leads young Billy to think he and Tommy must share some kind of connection with the Scarlet Witch, b) the Scarlet Witch’s powers recently drove her homicidally crazy, and c) both Billy and the grown-up Avengers are very curious to know if there is a connection and what dangers it may pose for everybody) – this is most certainly a mini-series for long-time in-depth Avengers fans to savor and discuss, but it will almost completely baffle every other person on Earth (this is the signature flaw of the Young Avengers in general – the whole thing is very much an ‘insider’ series and always has been).

But that’s OK. Fans need their bon-bons too, right? And for those fans (among which I count myself, since a) I’ve been reading  Avengers forever, even during its most wretched eras, and b) the plot could bring about some major changes in some very big, very good story-lines), this series looks to be the treat of the summer. Not only are Cheung’s pencils full of his trademark detail and gentle, almost implied feel of motion (he always uses a more low-key tempo when drawing these characters, who clearly fascinate him), but Heinberg’s dialogue wonderfully straddles the line between sounding authentic and crackling with drama.

From first to last, this is a quintessential ‘Marvel’ production: there’s an opening ‘splash’ page, lots of character-driven conflict, some smile-inducing humor, and a hum-dinger of a final cliffhanger page. But the interest-factor here is amped just a bit by one thing Stan Lee and Don Heck never got around to showing us in the original Avengers: the gays!



Because in addition to being a magic-wielding mutant with mommy issues, Billy is also gay (perhaps there’s something causal? After all, many of the young gay boys I know are also magic-wielding mutants with mommy issues …). And the book doesn’t just archly hint at it – Heinberg confronts it directly, mainly because Billy’s boyfriend Teddy (no Bill and Ted jokes, please) is also super-powered and also a member of Young Avengers. At one point in this first issue, he gets all protective of Billy with Captain America, no less (Cap turns out to be wonderfully tolerant, of course, which is odd for somebody who grew up in 1930s Brooklyn, but he’s the artistic type, so …). In the first few issues of their own comic, the relationship between Billy and Teddy was pretty clearly implied but virtually never given the kind of direct exposition it’s given here, and if that’s a sign of the times, it’s mighty refreshing.

There are two roads open to this mini-series: it can either fiddle around on the margins of one of Marvel’s biggest story-arcs of the last twenty years (the reality-altering Scarlet Witch despairingly uttering those three words: “No more mutants”), or it can confront that story-arc directly and perhaps fundamentally change Marvel’s current continuity. I’m guessing it’ll do the former, but there’s always hope for the latter. Either way, I’ll be watching.

Penguins on Parade: The Princess Casamassima!

Some Penguin Classics are a bit guilt-inducing, even with the best of intentions. Surely there’s no author in the last century who induces guilt quite so readily – if unintentionally – as Henry James? We sense at once how formidable he is, but we cannot love him as we know he wants us to, and we feel guilty about that. Plus, his novels don’t tend to be idle strolls in the park – not only are they full-blown college lectures, but they’re lectures at which you have to wear a tie.

This is true for everything the torturous old windbag wrote, but surely it reaches its peak in his strangest, weirdest, and least successful major novel, The Princess Casamassima? Here is the Henry James guilt-trip doubled, tripled, and squared: a massive political novel from a mandarin social observer who was seen to pale visibly whenever politics came up as a topic at a country house dinner. If Henry James had lived in the era of Youtube and decided to make a rap-video, the result couldn’t be any more awkward than this.

And yet, as I’m gradually, belatedly coming to realize, there’s a softly shining charm woven through everything James wrote – even this ungainly behemoth of a book.

The plot is pure mechanics: young Hyacinth Robinson is brought up by a poor-but-honest seamstress after his mother kills his nobleman father (just in case you were afraid James would take us all the way into Dickens territory with no trail ‘of bread-crumbs back). He’s a good boy, a hard worker, and he’s entered on the book-binding trade when he falls into bad company (worse company, that is, even than the bookish trade): political radicals who lead him on with heady talk of valorous actions against social oppressors. Hyacinth makes a vow to assassinate one such figure (he’s not picky about which one) when suddenly the plot intervenes and he’s befriended by the title character. The Princess sees only the good in Hyacinth and invites him to her manor for an evening.

Predictably, it has the Brideshead effect: Hyacinth becomes aware, has his awareness opened to the broader spectrum of life (including the fact that actual fallible three-dimensional people inhabit all those spectra), and he stops wanting to be a fire-breathing political radical. Because James himself was easily and instantly intoxicated by the world Princess Casamassima represents (so much so that he abandoned his own country when that world but merely beckoned)(but I’m gradually coming to like the man’s books very much, so that’s the last word you’ll hear from me on that touchy subject), he portrays Hyacinth’s seduction as something that happens quite literally overnight. Here’s the transforming moment, and because this is Henry James, it’s eighteen friggin pages long:

The night before, at ten o’clock, when he arrived, he had only got the impression of a mile-long stretch of park, after turning in at a gate; of the cracking of gravel under the wheels of the fly; and of the glow of several windows, suggesting in-door cheer, in a façade that lifted a variety of vague pinnacles into the starlight. It was much of a relief to him then to be informed that the Princess, in consideration of the lateness of the hour, begged to be excused till the morrow; the delay would give him time to recover his balance and look about him. This latter opportunity was offered him first as he sat at supper in a vast dining-room, with the butler, whose acquaintance he had made in South Street, behind his chair. He had not exactly wondered how he should be treated: there was too much vagueness in his conception of the way in which, at a country-house, invidious distinctions might be made and shades of importance illustrated; but it was plain that the best had been offered him. He was, at all events, abundantly content with his reception and more and more excited by it. The repast was delicate (though his other senses were so awake that hunger dropped out and he ate, as it were, without eating), and the grave mechanical servant filled his glass with a liquor that reminded him of some lines in Keats –in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. He wondered whether he should hear a nightingale at Medley (he knew nothing about the seasons of this vocalist), and also whether the butler would attempt to talk to him, had ideas about him, knew or suspected who he was and what; which, after all, there was no reason for his doing, unless it might be the poverty of the luggage that had been transported from Lomax Place. Mr. Withers, however (it was in this manner that Hyacinth heard him addressed by the cabman who conveyed the visitor from the station), gave no further symptom of sociability than to ask him at what time he would be called in the morning; to which our young man replied that he preferred not to be called at all – he would get up by himself. The butler rejoined, ‘Very good, sir’ while Hyacinth thought it probable that he puzzled him a good deal, and even considered the question of giving him a glimpse of his identity, lest it should be revealed, later, in a manner less graceful. The object of this anticipatory step, in Hyacinth’s mind, was that he should not be oppressed and embarrassed with attentions to which he was unused; but the idea came to nothing, for the simple reason that before he spoke he found that he already was inured to being waited upon. His impulse to deprecate attentions departed, and he became conscious that there were none he should care to miss, or was not quite prepared for. He knew he probably thanked Mr. Withers too much, but he couldn’t help this – it was an irrepressible tendency and an error he should doubtless always commit.

“Is it really true,” the Princess asks him later in the book, animated by her customary wide-eyed and non-judgemental nature, “that you have never seen a park, nor a garden, nor any of the beauties of nature, and that sort of thing?”

That sort of thing. Hee. Yes, Hyacinth informs her, it’s really true: he was raised by a seamstress in Lomax Place. The Princess is delighted, not disdainful: she’s never had a chance to show anything real to somebody before, and she’s always wanted to.

And there you see the book this might have been, poking at the fraying seams of the book it is: if you go through The Princess Casamassima with a black pen and strike out all the political content – for which James was almost ridiculously ill-suited - there remains  a quite lovely story of two alien worlds finding each other, being gifted by each other. Of course you’d have to change the clunky, tragic ending of the present story, but vast heaps of James’ trademark baroque verbiage could remain untouched.

As it is, we have the vast, haltingly ambitious Nonesuch that is The Princess Casamassima. In the gorgeous Penguin Classic edition (adorned by Sargent’s quite thrilling portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, which shows that the Penguin Classic art department cannot be surpassed in its quiet knowledge of what it’s about; in real life, the sitter was as perfect an illustration of the meeting of those two worlds as you were ever likely to find), the huge editorial chores are undertaken by Derek Brewer, and the extensive, invaluable notes are by Patricia Crick. As is so often the case, the Penguin version of this work is so much better in every way than any other version (precious few other versions, in this case) that the comparisons aren’t worth making.

No, if you’re in the mood for Henry James at his most fallible – if you find yourself less intimidated and more charmed by a work of genius that’s nevertheless a failure as a novel (this is certainly how it worked on me, to the betterment of my understanding of all James’ books, eventually), the Penguin Classic of The Princess Casamassima is the book for you.  Everything James wrote gives the impression of those vague pinnacles rising into the night at Medley, but at least this book has foundations of clay, to aid the overawed visitor.

The Master's Violin!

Our book today is The Master’s Violin, a heartfelt and sure-footed novel published in 1904 by Mrytle Reed – and the book is chosen in part because so many of you responded to the entry on Cowardice Court with a kind of jet-lagged incredulity that active, enthusiastically read and reviewed book-publishing was actually happening 100 years ago.

It’s the strangest thing: we’re naturally willing to think about publishing in Johnson’s day, or even to debate the state of the business in Shakespeare’s day. But when we think about the dawn of the last century, our thoughts jump in a preconditioned way to Henry James, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce … we tend to forget that bookstore shelves were as full then as they are now, that midlist authors then, as now, had to publish in order to eat and send their kids to school, and that then, as now, the best-selling books were almost never written by the immortals.

Booksellers at the time would have had at their mental fingertips dozens and dozens of writer-names that are now entirely unknown to the reading public. Just as today a good bookseller will only need a portion of an author’s name, a part of a book title, or a snatch of the plot to divine what the customer is looking for (since then, as now, the customers themselves can’t be expected to remember what it is they want), so too then – only with an almost entirely different cast of likely suspects.

One of the most likely suspects, at the beginning of the 20th century, was Myrtle Reed. She wrote fast and published frequently – two books a year wasn’t uncommon – and although the mandarin voices of the day decried her as just so much hyperventilating claptrap (one anonymous reviewer for the Boston Transcript called her gazillion-selling novel Flower of the Dusk “a brambly patch of deadly nightshade in the garden of Arcadia”! Yes indeed, they pulled no punches back in the Edwardian era!), the books sold like crazy.

It’s easy to see why. The key to their success was the key to the whole era: not just naked sentimentality, but buckets and buckets of naked sentimentality – blankets of it, piled higher and higher on the reader until no movement or thought was possible except to sigh and remember when (this trick hasn’t exactly gone out of style – both the financial empire of Thomas Kinkade and the current ‘Tea Party’ political movement are wholly based on manipulating the public’s natural, sentimental semi-belief that a warm, fuzzy golden age has only just ended, must be endlessly savored, might even be reclaimed, if we work fast to disenfranchise women and bus all the uppity niggers out of town).

All of Myrtle Reed’s bestselling books make liberal use of this tactic. They open on a setting of relative tranquility, they introduce a small cast of characters who are all nursing some hidden sadness, and then they lay on the sentimentality with a trowel. And before the modern age rejoins such an enterprise with its customary irony, two things should be remembered: a) millions of readers found deep, genuine satisfaction while absorbed in these books, and more importantly, b) the books work. They don’t aim for the heights of Olympus, but what they try to do, they do very nearly to perfection.

Any one of them would serve as a good enough example (Reed scarcely ever broke formula), but The Master’s Violin is my favorite. The plot is easily summarized: the lovely, two-hundred-year-old East Lancaster home of grand old lady Peace Field and her lovely young adopted daughter Iris Temple is suddenly disordered by the arrival of her estranged relations, the widow Margaret Irving and her boyishly handsome son Lynn, who’s come to East Lancaster in the hopes of studying with the village’s world-renowned violinist, Herr Franz Kaufmann (there wouldn’t have been quite so much disorder, but the letter Mrs. Irving sent seeking permission to come has been sitting in the East Lancaster Post Office for days, with nobody from the house going to retrieve it – and no telephones or Internet to take its place).

There, in two or three quick strokes, you have all the dramatic scaffolding you’ll ever need in a Myrtle Reed novel: the cast is riddled with dark family dissatisfactions and hidden passions. Not only does young Lynn fall for Miss Temple in about ten seconds, but we gradually, heartbreakingly learn that Margaret herself carries a secret sorrow: she once loved young Franz Kaufmann but was forced by her blueblood family to marry a man she ‘only respected’ (when she first hears the instrument of the book’s title – an ancient and gorgeous Cremona – after twenty-five years away, she’s struck speechless).

The visitors quickly insinuate themselves into the routines of Aunt Peace’s household, including the weekly visits by Doctor Brinkerhoff (the next town over, West Lancaster, is positively teeming with German immigrants to the area, lest all these Teutonic surnames give you the vapors), who’s entertained with great hospitality despite the oft-repeated fact that he ‘has no social position.’ There is longing here too, deftly implied by the author and quickly perceived by the reader: it’s possible that Aunt Peace’s frequent reminders to anybody who’ll listen that Brinkerhoff is a wonderful and a good friend but simply not ‘our kind of people’ start to look like the codified justifications of a love long denied. The patiently repeated rituals of his weekly visit – from which there is no deviation – looks like the kind of quite mania only love could inspire.

It’s a mystery to me why Myrtle Reed didn’t call this book “Aunt Peace” (but then, authors’ choice of titles for their works have almost always bewildered me) – the serene old lady utterly dominates the first half of the book and casts a long shadow over the second half, whereas Lynn’s apprenticeship with the Master is a sub-plot only infrequently emphasized (and Lynn doesn’t even get to look at the Master’s prized Cremona) at the book’s beginning. Aunt Peace, on the other hand, is a marvelous creation – a kind, tranquil old lady who’s not much given to controlling people, even though she holds all of her opinions with the unchallenged certainty of being life-long mistress of her little world. She values the elegant, simple chores of upkeeping her ancient house (chores she’s taught to Iris with a patient crushing of her original wild spirits – for her own good, of course), and she has no use for the modern innovations of society outside her untroubled valley. This was the dawn of the women’s rights movement, but when the subject of “the shrieking sisterhood” comes up, Aunt Peace expresses a rare note of intolerance:

“I have no patience with such foolishness,” Aunt Peace observed. “Since Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden, women have been home-makers and men have been home-builders. All the work in the world is directly and immediately undertaken for the maintenance and betterment of the home. A woman who has no love for it is unsexed. God probably knew how He wanted it – at least we may be pardoned for supposing that He did. It is absolutely – but I would better stop, my dear. I fear I shall soon be saying something unladylike.”

Needless to say, she’s brought up Iris to think entirely differently about a woman’s place in the world – and yet, Iris is young and can’t help dreaming! This is especially true when she starts receiving passionate, anonymous love letters at the Post Office (it will take the reader about a nanosecond to discern that they’re written by Lynn, although Iris herself virtually needs to read it on a highway billboard before she figures it out), but it’s a wayward bend of imagination that Aunt Peace has inadvertently encouraged by giving Iris full access to the old house’s wonderful library. As our narrator rightly tells us, “Ten years of browsing in a well equipped library will do much for anyone,” and the subject sparks one of the book’s many apostrophes:

Of the things that make for happiness, the love of books comes first. No matter how the world may have used us, sure solace lies there. The weary, toilsome day drags to its disheartening close, and both love and friendship have proved powerless to appreciate or understand, but in the quiet corner consolation can always be found. A single shelf, perhaps, suffices for one’s few treasures, but who shall say it is not enough?

A book, unlike any other friend, will wait, not only upon the hour, but upon the mood. It asks nothing and gives much, when one comes in the right way. The volumes stand in serried ranks at attention, listening eagerly, one may fancy, for the command.

Is your world a small one, made unendurable by a thousand petty cares? Are the heart and soul of you cast down by bitter disappointment? Would you leave it all, if only for an hour, and come back with a new point of view? Then open the covers of a book.

Readers may snicker, but extended asides like this one – which serve no dramatic purpose and tend to jolt – were once the standard stock-in-trade of novelists high and low. Fielding would be stripped bare without it, Trollope and Dickens indulge in it shamelessly, and the Brontes would be lost without it. It only looks tinny or artificial in this case because Reed’s works are forgotten, and forgotten novels always appear vaguely ridiculous (because we assume, hugely erroneously, that there must be a good reason why they’re forgotten - when in Reed's case, as in so many cases, there are reasons, but none of them are good).

Say what you want about her more lachrymose tendencies, but Myrtle Reed knew what she was doing. Her books were meant to be a refuge from the grit and bustle of the world, and the peaceful summer evenings she crafts are surpassingly gentle and welcoming:

Midsummer moonlight made enchantment in the garden. Merlin himself could have done no more. The house, half hidden in the shadow, stood waiting, as it had done for two centuries, while those who belonged under its roof made holiday outside. .. . The tall pine threw its gloom far beyond them, and the moonlight touched Aunt Peace caressingly. Her silvered hair gleamed with unearthly beauty and he serene eyes gave sweet significance to her name. All she cared for were about her – daughter and friends.

“Nights like this,” said the Doctor, dreamily, “make one think of old fairy tales. Elves and witches are not impossible, when the moon shines like this.”

The reading public was utterly shocked to learn that Myrtle Reed had killed herself (her suicide note – phrased beautifully, of course – was published as news in all the nation’s papers, and editions that carried it sold out repeatedly), but going back and re-reading her novels, it’s perhaps not such a surprise. She had her own passions and her own mangled reasons for her suicide, but quite apart from that, there breathes in her books a sureness, a hope, that the 20th century would soon crush beyond any chance of reclamation. Aunt Peace couldn’t live in such a new century, and Myrtle Reed couldn’t write in it either. Even in The Master’s Violin, that tone of hope is vaguely embattled; it’s on just such a beautiful summer evening that Aunt Peace asks Doctor Brinkerhoff the quintessential question of the 19th century. He gives the quintessential 19th century answer, but the 20th century is lurking in Margaret’s well-meaning rejoinder:

“Do you think, Doctor, that the world grows better, or worse?”

“Better, madam, steadily better. I can see it every day.”

“It is well for one to think so,” observed Margaret, “whatever the facts may be.”

On the whole, I think that crusty old Boston Transcript reviewer was wrong about Myrtle Reed; I bet if he were around today, he'd admit it.

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.

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: Spock Must Die!

From its publication date of 1970, you’d think Spock Must Die! by James Blish must certainly be the first original Star Trek novel. It’s true that Blish himself had been adapting the individual episode scripts into short stories for a year at that time, but the show itself had only just been cancelled by an indifferent parent company, which hardly left the time or inclination for a Star Trek novel.

You’d be wrong on a couple of technicalities. A different licensing arm of that indifferent parent company had commissioned the release of a hardcover kids book called Mission to Horatius – it was called a Star Trek novel, and for that reason it would technically qualify as the first, but the physical description of the ship, the characters, the general fabric of known science … all of it was entirely generic throughout. It’s clearly a prefab space-opera scenario onto which some thankless, faceless Hasbro flunky hastily pasted on the specific brand-names of this obscure TV show. I suppose all beginnings are inauspicious, and perhaps I’m reacting naturally when I want to disavow Mission to Horatius as the first Star Trek novel (although, as we'll see, it was hardly the last cut-and-paste job in the series' publication history).

And if that’s the case, how much more must it apply to all the various Star Trek novels written but not professionally published prior to 1970? I refer to ‘fan fiction,’ of course, which by that point was already operating at a strong pitch. The novels it produced, however, though better versed in Star Trek specifics (indeed, often way, way too versed), were usually documents displaying deeply unbalanced psychological pathologies (and to those of you who say that applies to all science fiction, I say kroyka!). Again: unacceptably inauspicious.

No, in true Star Trek form, we’ll just have to settle for a couple of alternate beginnings to things. We’ll call James Blish’s book the first non-continuity Star Trek novel, and we’ll deal with an entirely different first book when we get to carefully numbered, continuity-safeguarded, corporate-overseen Star Trek novels.

First, we have the precursors, the trailblazers in the Wild West of Star Trek novels – and the first of those is Spock Must Die!

As you might be able to guess form the lurid title, it’s a deeply imperfect book – almost as inauspicious a start as all those Spock-whips-Kirk-unconscious-then-nurses-him-back-to-health weirdo fan fictions of the late ‘60s. The story opens with the Enterprise on standard cruising exercises ‘not far’ from the Klingon Empire but still enjoying the peace treaty imposed by the super energy-beings from the planet Organia (as seen in the episode “Errand of Mercy,” which introduced the Klingon commander Kor, played by veteran character actor John Collicos). It’s a peaceful interlude, during which Captain Kirk joins in a discussion between Commander Scott and Dr. McCoy (who’s called ‘Doc’ rather than ‘Bones’ throughout the entire book, revealing a little-known fact about pioneering fan favorite Blish: he never actually watched the show) about how the ship’s transporters are actually death-chambers, since they have to annihilate a person’s original body in order to reconstitute it elsewhere. But since the reconstitution is instantaneous and molecule-perfect, Scotty can’t see the problem. As he puts it, referencing Mr. Spock, “a difference which makes no difference is no difference.”

McCoy, predictably, believes otherwise, and Kirk remains wisely uncommitted. But soon it’s everybody’s problem, when a transporter malfunction (where would plots be without those?) duplicates Mr. Spock. Suddenly, Kirk and the rest of the crew must deal with the moral and philosophical (as well as ship security) problems of having two identical Spocks, each claiming he’s the real one. The crisis is only heightened by a subplot involving a major disruption in the Organian Peace Treaty and the warlike return of some of the show’s best known Klingon bad guys.

The writing is competent enough (Blish was an old-school hack in the best sense of the word, never late with a deadline, never great, never unprintably awful – the periodic attempts to reappraise his writing at the level of artistry, usually by citing his novel A Case of Conscience as some kind of lost sci-fi masterpiece, are so misguided he himself would have chuckled at them); the book’s imperfections spring mainly from its unintended resemblances to Mission to Horatius. The problem here is that this is only nominally Star Trek: there are no physical descriptions of the characters, barely any character descriptions, and none of the interplay of character personalities that made the show special in the first place. Kirk is just Starship Captain X, Spock is just Victim of Anomaly X (the veneer of ‘logic’ Blish gives him is actually just a liscense to cut him out of cardboard and leave him that way), and poor ‘Doc’ is just a nameless, faceless exposition machine:

As a replicate, and a mirror image, he [one of the duplicated Spocks] was left-handed, just as we had guessed, but he was suppressing it, as we had also guessed. Now, Jim, handedness is the major physical expression of which hemisphere of man’s brain is the dominant one, the one chiefly in charge of his actions. It’s a transverse relationship; if the left hemisphere of your brain is dominant, as is usually the case, you will be right-handed – and vice versa. And so, Jim, the retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed – in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles – badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and among other bad outcomes, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering. You thought Spock One was stuttering from emotion or confusion, and that puzzled you. And well it might have. But in fact, he was stuttering because he was countertfeiting not being a mirror image, and hadn’t gotten all his reflexes for the impersonation established yet.

Sounds just like Bones, doesn’t it?

No, Blish’s intentions were undoubtedly good, but he, um, badly bollixed up his core characterizations (at one point Lieutenant Uhura hopes – aloud, on the bridge – that a new duty officer will be “cute”), and the core characterizations were the heart and soul of what differentiated Star Trek – and by extension Star Trek novels – from cookie-cutter pop sci-fi like Mission to Horatius.

Spock Must Die! did some things right – it was competent science fiction, for starters, playing some interesting speculation with some interesting ideas. And it was respectful to the original series, making plentiful references to pertinent episodes (the references came not only in the text itself but also as footnotes, the first time any popular TV series had prompted such textual respect … as we’ll see, Star Trek footnotes form an interesting little footnote in our ongoing history of the Star Trek novel). But it was the equivalent of that first Wright Brothers flight at Kill Devil Hills: sketchy, inexpert, and really, really short. A first trickle only – of a deluge the volume of which James Blish couldn’t have guessed in his darkest nightmares. We’ll continue to delve that deluge in our next thrilling chapter!

Cowardice Court!

Our book today is George Barr McCutcheon’s breezy little 1906 romance Cowardice Court, written at top speed by a seasoned professional (McCutcheon, the author of Brewster’s Millions, churned out an average of one novel a year in the first decade of the 20^th century, plus lots of plays, poems, and even pseudonymous reviews, the bounder) to please a burgeoning market. Grosset & Dunlap put the thing out and did so very handsomely, with four full-color illustrations by Harrison Fisher and every page prettily decorated along its borders.

Cowardice Court is set in the Adirondacks and opens with the transplanted family of diminutive blowhard Lord Brazelhurst experiencing a little turbulence. It doesn’t come from matrimonial tension, as it might in the hands of a writer striking out for deeper waters (Lady Brazelhurst is an American, the daughter of an uncultured New York millionaire; Lord Brazelhurst is not only a good deal older than she is, he’s also entirely dependent on her, since her money saved his debt-encumbered estates back in England) – no, the tension is due to a man: stalwart, handsome young Randolph Scott – er, I mean Shaw, Randolph Shaw. He owns the adjoining large mountain estate to Brazelhurst Villa, and the border between the two properties is a much-contested trout-stream. As it the novel begins, Lord Brazelhurst is furious that this “demmed American” (the British characters in the book all talk exactly like you’d expect an untraveled Hoosier would make them sound, and let’s not even get started on how many times his Lordship’s monocle pops off and falls into his drink) has been seen fishing on the Brazelhurst end of the river, and he instructs his groundskeeper to throw the interloper into the stream if he sees it happen again.

As Lord Brazelhurst storms into his own home fuming about the matter, he’s greeted by his imperious green-eyed wife, who coolly eggs him on in his outrage. Lady Brazelhurst is the villain of this book, although she’s only tentatively revealed as such. She’s altogether a more interesting character than the book’s nominal heroine, Penelope Brazelhurst (who’s very pretty, very spirited, and, inexplicably, very much younger than her brother the Lord) – maybe McCutcheon throttled back on developing her for fear she’d steal the novel. Or maybe he was writing so fast that he had no time to perceive the potential of the character he’d created. Or maybe he was just inept. He’s not around to ask (a useful collection of his private and public papers - plus some manuscripts - is in the keeping of the University of Texas at Austin, should anybody want to write the short, light biography this crabby, hustling writer deserves).



In short order, Lord Brazelhurst’s groundskeeper and his ruffian assistant stagger back to the Villa, roughed up and soaking wet. It seems they saw Randolph Scott trespassing again, offered their ordered threat, and got beaten up and dunked in the river for their trouble (and then saved from it, since neither one of them could swim). Young Penelope begins to like the spirit of this American she’s never even seen, but the Lord and Lady are furious:

“No one but a coward would permit this disagreeable Shaw creature to run affairs in such a high-handed way,” said her ladyship. “Of course Cecil [Lord Brazelhurst, to you] is not a coward.”

“Thank you, my dear. Never fear, ladies and gentlemen; I shall attend to this person. He won’t soon forget what I have to say to him,” promised Lord Brazelhurst, mentally estimating the number of brandies and soda it would require in preparation.

“This afternoon?” asked his wife, with cruel insistence.

“Yes, Evelyn – if I can find him.”

Lord Brazelhurst rides off alone to confront this ruffian, and he does indeed find him – and ingloriously attempts to flee from the man and his faithful dog Bonaparte. Randolph Shaw is happy but scornful of the ineffectual old coot, and he’s no sooner turned back from their encounter than who should he find trespassing on his land than Penelope! He takes hold of her horse’s bridle and tells her – with a good deal of light-hearted banter, that he shall have to escort her off his property. She goes willingly (“I am quite in your power”), but it’s clear the two young people have taken a liking to each other. Over the next few days, Penelope will contrive to escape the deadly boredom of Brazelhurst Villa and deliberately trespass on Shaw’s land, merely for the pleasure of having him show up every time and slowly escort her off again.

McCutcheon’s few scattered acidic comments about the company at Brazelhurst Villa constitute the closest that Cowardice Court comes to social satire. The place is full of the American version of the country house smart set, and it’s clear our author shares Penelope’s disgust with it all:

Nightfall brought half a dozen guests to Brazelhurst Villa. They were fashionable to the point where ennui is the chief characteristic, and they came only for bridge and sleep. There was a duke among them and also a French count, besides the bored New Yorkers; they wanted brandy and soda as soon as they got into the house, and they went to bed early because it was so much easier to sleep lying down than sitting up.

But even while love is blossoming between our game young things, trouble is brewing at the Villa: Lord Brazelhurst, infuriated at failing to intimidate his American neighbor, threatens to instruct his men to shoot him if he trespasses again. He knows he can’t very well give them such instructions – it’s six years into the 20^th century, after all! – and he’s unaware of the fact that Lady Macbeth takes those groundsmen aside and tells them they must indeed shoot on sight.

As luck would have it, Penelope hears the shots the next day and comes across Randolph crying over the dead body of his dog - “it’s as if he were a – a brother, Miss Drake. I loved him and he loved me” – and swearing bloody revenge against the cowards responsible.

Tensions are therefore high at dinner that evening, when Penelope becomes furious at the blasé comments of everyone present when they learn it was ‘only’ the man’s dog that was shot. Heated words are exchanged between Penelope and her haughty sister-in-law, and Penelope impulsively packs a bag and flees into the night and an oncoming storm, rather than remain one more moment in the house she’s scathingly named Cowardice Court.

Without really thinking about it, she makes her way to Shaw’s house through the gathering wind and rain, only barely making it in time – only to flee again when she realizes how her impulse action will make him look to everybody else. He hurries after her, and the two of them take refuge from the breaking storm under the porch of an old abandoned house nearby (like Aeneas and Dido, they finally yield to their passion while sheltering from the wind and rain). Long before the storm ends, they are pledged to each other, and to give McCutcheon his due, these scenes retain even now a hint of the fragile sweetness that once made this author a reliable seller in the bookstores of Boston, far away from his homeland of Indiana. Cowardice Court never sold out, never went into a second edition, but it didn’t pass its season on Earth unknown, etiher.

Time has moved on, of course – except as a period piece dripping in unintended irony, it’s impossible to conceive a book like Cowardice Court coming back into print in the 21^st century (where Penelope would be a lesbian and Shaw would waste no time cuckolding poor old Lord Brazelhurst and breaking the spirit of his redoubtable wife, probably on the pantry floor). But in its own day, it was a harmless, bubbly way to spend an afternoon, as innocent of ulterior motives as a bright summer cloud.  Seems to me the 21^st century could use some novels like that, once in a while.

July in Open Letters!

The vaporous, malodorous, sulphurous month of July opens bright and fresh today with a new issue of Open Letters Monthly! Hoo-ray! What better way to celebrate America’s birth than by taking your iPad out to Central Park and reading our big, bursting issue as the beautiful day unfolds? We’ve got something for everybody in this issue: pieces on two aspects of the American Revolution, a wonderful appreciation of the great, fun novel Vanity Fair, a round-up of critical responses to Martin Amis’ new novel, a sensitive reading of the latest God-bothering tract from Marilyn Robinson, some scintillating common sense (don’t believe they can go together? Read this piece!) on the much-vexed subject of President Obama, even some of my usual tub-thumping on our old friends the Tudors – and don’t under any circumstances miss Brad Jones’ jazz column: it’ll teach you stuff, make you laugh, and put a lump in your throat. All this, plus lots more! It all awaits you in the July issue of Open Letters, so click on over and read, read, read!

Believing the hype in the Penny Press!

The Penny Press bounced around quite a bit last week on the profundity scale (or rather I did the bouncing, by reading all kinds of stuff), and of course near the low end of that scale is where you’ll always find anything connected with the latest Hollywood micro-phenomenon, pint-sized himbo Taylor Lautner.



In the latest GQ, Mickey Rapkin is given the thankless task of sleepwalking through yet another high-profile interview with this kid, who’s clearly been given a somber talking-to since he nearly outed himself under Neil Strauss’ careful supervision in Rolling Stone. As a result, Rapkin gets absolutely nothing for his trouble except the standard entirely hypocritical “I’m just amazed to be here!” line. At one point Lautner self-servingly exclaims, “Is this really happening? Am I really here?” In response (to us, not to Lautner, who would have burst into tears), Rapkin gets in a good observation:

Those are pretty good questions. He might also ask: What on earth did I do to deserve that $7.5 million contract and the adoration of millions? He’s handsome, yes. But in two Twilight films, Lautner has logged fifty minutes of screen time. Total. In the first movie, he spoke 239 words.

In other words, the hype associated with this tiny little packet of muscle and mindless ambition far, far exceeds any thespian payoff that’s yet happened or is ever likely to happen. Apart from the Twilight saga, Lautner’s next movie is a special effects extravaganza called Stretch Armstrong – but then, Tom Cruise did Legend and still ended up being a gigantic pain in the ass.

And we’re not free of hype even at the opposite end of the profundity scale! In last week’s TLS, Iain McGilchrist turns in a witty, wonderful review of Raymond Tallis’ Michelangelo’s Finger, a popular science book touching on many subjects, mostly related to the particularly human capacity to charge a pointing gesture with meaning. McGilchrist is chugging along just fine until he gets to the subject of non-human animals – one species especially:

Dogs are particularly sensitive to human attention, to the direction of our gaze, and, for example, whether we will be able to see them stealing meat. They make use of a very human feature, the whites of the eyes, thought to have developed precisely because of our sensitivity to gaze direction, a remarkable turn of events that Tallis oddly does not mention. Tallis says dogs don’t – can’t on principle – understand “meant meaning” associated with a sign, the basis of human communication. But the evidence suggests they almost certainly do just that. Without any training, they will fetch things if merely shown a photograph, or presented with a replica, and, of course, they understand the intentional nature of words and commands. Walkies, anyone?

I don’t know what canines McGilchrist has been hanging out with, but if any dog in the history of the world has ever, “without any training,” gone and fetched an item after being shown a photograph of that item, I’ve never met that dog. I doubt even Taylor Lautner could do that, although he probably understands what ‘walkies’ means.

Soft Porn in the Book Review!

As anyone involved in the thankless task will tell you, there are several kinds of book reviews. There shouldn’t be; they should all be voiced with and motivated by the exact same tone and tenor of honest inquiry, regardless of their subject matter or their author’s fame. But that would only happen in a dream-world where, say, the fiction editor of a literary journal wrote his own reviews – otherwise, all book reviewers have to deal with editors, and whereas the ideal book reviewer has only one motivation for writing a review (I read this book, here’s what I think is important about it), an editor can have several kinds of motivations for running one. Is the author a big name, making the book something your journal can’t simply ignore without looking foolishly provincial? Is the author a friendly person (or even a friend) whose therapy bills will skyrocket if some earnest tyro parses his every typo? Is the author’s publishing house one from which the editor in question wants a long and fruitful relationship (perhaps for future publication of the editor’s own book? Who knows – the poor schmuck writer certainly doesn’t)? Will a savaging of some new book get you dropped from that publisher’s list of future books (a calamity, since if an editor had to buy even a single book, ever, the world would come screeching to a halt)?

Editors tend to accommodate these various intervening factors by developing several kinds of book reviews. There’s the standard straight-up rave, where the only real challenge is to clutch some small strand of dignity to the dancing and cheering of the piece; there’s the roundhouse slam of a once-popular author’s latest, usually done when a) the publisher in question is too big to stop all its galley copies, and b) the author is somehow perceived has having it coming (we don’t beat up on saintly elderly Japanese writers, for instance, even though they’re all completely untalented, but a snotty young white American is fair game – Nick McDonnell won’t be able to breathe easy until he’s collecting Social Security); there’s the undisguised placeholder review, where the book in question is too ‘big’ or ‘buzzworthy’ to ignore but the only reviewer who could deliver a piece in time was an incompetent nincompoop who does nothing more than summarize the plot; and then there’s the ever-popular ‘soft pan’ review, in which the reviewer seems to have mightily disliked the book but is being charmingly coy about it.

I admit, that last kind really bothers me – because the only possible motivation for such a reviewer to obscure what he thinks is naked self-interest: I can’t bash this book because I might meet its author at an Upper West Side literary soiree, or I might want to sleep with its author, or I might want a favor from its author for my own forthcoming collection of elegiac interconnected short stories. It’s perfectly fine to watch out for such eventualities, but not in a full-length essay that’s supposed to be a review of a book. Facebook instead, I always want to shout.

In any given week, you’ll find good examples of all of these various book review types in that bête noir of all serious readers, the New York Times Book Review. That’s why I love it so: every issue gives you a little survey course in the natural history of book reviewing.

Take today’s issue, for example. You can see the political statement right away: the cover is given to a debut novel by Adam Ross rather than to Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (and if you don’t think the cover spot is a coveted status symbol, you’ve been listening to too many lyingly self-deprecating authors). The review is by a woolgathering Scott Turow, and it’s mostly plot summary and vapid boilerplate (“Mr. Peanut is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage”), with a few nonsense-mysticisms thrown in (“The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality”). The point of the piece isn’t to review the book (I’ve read Mr. Peanut, and trust me: it only inhabits the reality-plane of puerile crapola) but to anoint the author, a benediction the Book Review is better situated than anybody to bestow.

(By contrast, the Ellis review was handed to the literary editor of the OTHER Times, Erica Wagner, who pays proper acknoweldgement to the cultural landmark-status of Less Than Zero and then proceeds to pulverize its new sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, ending with a school-mistress admonition of a type only the Brits can pull off: “’History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,’ runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out.” Hee.)



But the type of review most prominently on display this time around is the aforementioned ‘soft pan.’ This would be annoying enough in the Book Review under any circumstances, but two of the times it happens today really irk. First, David Carr turns in a full-length review of Bill Clegg’s new memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and resolutely stops short of slamming a book he obviously disliked. Clegg’s memoir details his descent from cutie-patootie hotshot literary agent to slightly unkempt crack addict, and you might think the reason Carr goes soft on it is because he has high hopes for a similar book of his own – but no: he already wrote that book, Night of the Gun, and it’s considerably, comfortably better than Clegg’s book. And yet, everywhere in his review he stops just short of calling Clegg narcissist pedaling a third-rate survivor’s tale, and it becomes so noticeable it starts to beg for explanation. My best guess is that Carr is a nice guy who didn’t want to beat up on a fellow recovering drug addict. For which, if true, I say again: Facebook, not the New York Times Book Review.

The second ‘soft pan’ is mercifully shorter – Mike Peed’s seven-paragraph notice of Justin Cronin’s 700-page new novel The Passage. For the privilege of getting to watch an author sell his soul in public, the entertainment industry has showered The Passage with the kind of adoration usually reserved for incarnations of the Buddha (although I’m going to hope there was an element of irony in Stephen King’s “The best book EVER WRITTEN! The best book that ever CAN be written!”), and Peed clearly knows this (“If there’s a class at Iowa on exploiting publishing crazes, Cronin surely aced it”). And yet, his seven paragraphs condemn nothing about the book. Instead, all is gentle plot summary (no spoilers!) and guarded pretension (“The Passage, then, is fundamentally an investigation into the creation and destruction of a flawed race”). To put it mildly, a book that was written for the sole purpose of getting its author piles of money deserves rougher handling. And the reason it doesn’t get such handling here is likely connected to the ad revenues generated for the Times by Ballantine Books in promoting The Passage. Plus, you don’t want to be the only person who didn’t like such a hot, hot book, do you? You won’t get invited to any of its parties!

Still, the Book Review this time around ends with a fun piece about how boring, watery Borges loved fantastic, vital Robert Louis Stevenson – if that piece prompts even one of Borges’ pretentious name-dropping fans to try Stevenson, some good will come out of this issue after all.

Geographica!

Another amazing issue of National Geographic hitting stands this week, and it starts off in true mind-expanding Geographica fashion with three little pieces on three different kinds of contamination.



First is the evil, lunatic idea being pursued by Project Tauros, a European scientific consortium currently dedicating their efforts towards using existing Limiana and Maremmana cattle-stock to bring an extinct form of cattle back into the world. The dead animal in question is the auroch, a massive bovine that once roamed Europe’s forests – the last remnants of its population died out many centuries ago, but Project Tauros wants to use bits of the animal’s DNA ginned up from miscellaneous auroch teeth, combined with the random auroch genes still carried by the aforementioned cattle-breeds, to breed the species again. Juli Berwald, the little article’s author, tries to put a positive ecological spin on things:

Aurochs were herbivorous behemoths, and in the past they browed on beech, a type of tree now choking Europe’s woods. Today such housecleaning would help regrow native flora – as one resurrected species gives other, threatened ones a chance at survival.

But you’d have to have the brain of an auroch to buy that for a moment. None of these Frankensteined creatures will ever come within ten miles of unrestricted European woodland – aurochs averaged half a ton heavier than modern cattle: these poor magnificent creatures are obviously being brought back from extinction in order to be crammed into slaughter pens and carved up alive to satisfy mankind’s endless appetite for cheap meat. And even if some ‘wild’ aurochs were released into those European forests, what they’d eat would be anybody’s guess – they fed primarily on beech centuries and millennia ago because it was natural for them to do so, in their natural environment. Maybe they hated it but had no choice because the enormous woolly rhinoceros of the time ate all the really good stuff. And even if they do somehow target beech, what happens when they do their job? Europe no longer boasts saber-toothed tigers or dire wolves capable of taking down a bull the size of an SUV - so we get just another hapless animal to cull whenever they decide to live in a way mankind finds untidy.



The second kind of contamination in this issue was certainly meant in a much lighter tone, although its implications are just as sickening – literally. National Geographic takes on the infamous “five-second rule” that states if you drop a piece of food onto the floor and immediately scoop it up, you can still safely eat it.

Not so, says Catherine Barker, this delightful piece’s author. It turns out “salmonella and other bacteria can survive up to four weeks on dry surfaces and transfer to food immediately upon contact.” The lip of a shared cup of water (or any other beverage – like all the cheap beer found in those innumerable red plastic cups going into use by the thousands in Allston and Brighton as we speak, it being a Friday night) can have more than 10,000 bacteria; even chopsticks can be swimming in germs (they don’t come in cellophane wrappers, after all). Barker doesn’t mention the risks you’d be running with your first auroch burger, but I wouldn’t be hopeful.



The third kind of contamination is of a decidedly bigger scale than the bacteriological. Michael Lemonick turns in a fascinating, disturbing piece on the vast shroud of man-made, man-launched, man-forgotten space junk currently orbiting the planet (and Sean McNaughton provides a fantastic graphic that will stop you dead in your tracks – it’s exactly the kind of weird, instinctively-effective visual at which National Geographic excels). The numbers are staggering: 11,000 objects in low orbit, and another 10,000 further out, all of them flying around at thousands of miles an hour, some of them slamming into each other harmlessly, but still … it’s only a matter of time until, say, five of them smash together simultaneously and give everybody a bigger problem to worry about than chopsticks.

Of course the rest of the issue is marvelous as well (National Geographic being, as I’ve said before, the world’s only actually perfect magazine)(sorry Open Letters! I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em!), including a very funny little essay by Virginia Morrell (with arresting photos by Tim Laman) about the male bowerbirds of New Guinea, who frantically, obsessively, and masterfully create elaborate nest-decorations in the hopes of attracting females willing to settle down and start laying eggs. The bowerbirds will use anything shiny to further their home-decorating efforts, including discarded CDs and, um, glistening caterpillar feces (the things you learn …), and reading about them is always a treat. And they aren’t even remotely endangered … which helps, in this day and age.

Comics! Superman #700!

Well, I could hardly let this one go, could I?

This week in comics, Superman turns a whopping 700, numbered with pretty much nebulous continuity since the title premiered around A.D. 645, and DC Comics gave the occasion an oddly appealing low-key commemoration.

It’s odd: Batman turned 700 last week with an issue that couldn’t have been more generic and scatterbrained if it wanted to – an incredible milestone (what American comics ever reach 700, for the love of Mike?) treated almost entirely negligently. In Batman’s case, the cause was easy enough to see: missed deadlines and work delays (read: pampered, spoiled writers and artists) made it impossible for Bruce Wayne to show up for his own mega-anniversary: he’s still trapped back in time, struggling to endure his way back to the cape and cowl in the 21st century. The perfect culmination of that story line would have been for it to move right into issue 700, starting things fresh for the post-700 future. But instead, Bruce Wayne won’t return to his own comic until probably issue 704 or 705 – an odd anticlimax, that.

The same thing very nearly happens in Superman 700 – the whole thing feels like a string of epilogues, because that’s exactly what it is. In the recent big Superman story line, the lost Kryptonian city of Kandor was found and restored to health and well-being – along with its thousands and thousands of Kryptonian inhabitants, who all instantly gained Superman-level powers. Kandor and all its Supermen-in-waiting was one of the dumbest ideas legendary Superman editor Mort Weisinger ever had; it pretty much totally undercuts the point, drama, and interest of Superman himself. When the Superman mythos underwent its drastic pruning back in the 1980s, I was glad to see the whole idea get quietly dropped (the loss of Superboy, a dreamy Midwestern team flying around in skintight lycra? Not so much. The loss of Krypto, the Super-Dog? Let’s not even talk about it)(fortunately, as you can see on this issue’s cover, Krypto is back)(and as you can tell from this recent cover of Adventure Comics, Superboy is back in the continuity of Superman’s past … and, shall we say, dramatically improved). I don’t know what possessed the current DC editorial board to resurrect it.

But they did, and suddenly the DC universe was flooded with superpowered Kryptonians, not all of whom were as altruistic as Superman. Tensions arose, naturally, since Earth would be pretty much defenseless against even a small fraction of such a population turned bad (and the current DC lineup of super-heroes features exactly six characters who can go toe-to-toe with even one such rogue Kryptonian, let alone hundreds of them). A new planet was found on which the Kandorians could settle, and Superman decided to go with them and help them do that – with the result that Superman himself has been missing from his regular comic titles. Superman 700 marks his big return.

So I guess I was expecting more high drama. Instead, Superman saves Lois Lane from the Parasite and the Prankster (although note to this issue’s many writers: Superman punching the Parasite, even in a triumphant 700th issue, should only make the villain stronger … the whole ‘absorbs superpowers’ thing, remember? Hence the guy’s name?), takes her home and pretty much immediately beds her, then complains for the rest of the issue about how hard the conflicts were that he had with his fellow Kryptonians. The issue featured a very pretty full-page panel of Superman hovering over Metropolis with Lois Lane in his arms, a very nice Ulysses-home-at-last feel to it. But there was no sense of introduction, no attempt to plant the character squarely center stage, and certainly no feeling of optimism for the next 700 issues. Don’t let the issue’s cover fool you: Superman spends most of the issue moping (and what’s with that cover, anyway? Why does artist Gary Frank have the two of them doing the Mashed Potato? Or is it the Shurg?).



I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the upcoming third mega-milestone in DC’s summer, Wonder Woman 600. Hope she doesn’t cry in her Amazon beer the whole issue.

A Room of One's Own!

Ah,  the two faces of home!





Now,  let the posting resume!

With a Little Help From My Friends!

Well!

After a nearly-terminal interruptus, Stevereads has returned!

Many people (two of them canine) helped to sustain me during said interruptus, and of course they deserve their thanks, but Stevereads being Stevereads, it seems only fitting that I pause here to thank those other invaluable old friends, who provided - as they always do - havens and safe harbors during 90-plus days and nights of worry and strain. As much to these old friends as to anybody else,  I owe my sanity and survival throughout this horrible, horrible spring.

So let's have a round of applause, and regular posting will resume here forthwith!

The Golden City!

Our book today is Henry Hope Read’s wonderful, prickly 1959 classic The Golden City, one long screed against the drift of architecture in his day away from the glories of classicism and into the uncharted function-driven wastelands of Modernism. Read fussed over this book for most of his life (our picture here is of a revised edition issued in 1970), but his main jeremiad was always the same: that modern architecture, forgetting the theatrical (“nay, operatic”) role of all art, has abandoned its own traditions in favor of ridiculous fads or barren utilitarianism.

He wrote, of course, during a heyday of so-called ‘urban renewal’ that cost American cities a great many beautiful streets and buildings, and the delightful fire of outrage kindles every page of his book. He looked at all the shapeless, unfinished monstrosities going up all around him in New York City (although it needn’t have been only there – in Boston, we’ve got a ‘new’ Public Library extension that manages to have four walls, a ceiling, and a skylight and absolutely nothing else … for the purpose of housing great works of literature and sheltering scholars, a less inspiring building would be hard to imagine), and he pined not only for the misguidedness of it all but also for the actual property loss necessary to bring it about:

The saddest consequence of originality is the element of destruction. Visual disorder, too much with us under any circumstance, has been compounded. Chaos reigns supreme as the drive to be original destroys the harmony we have inherited, not only in individual buildings but also in the urban scene and in the landscape. Today, not content with excusing the past, we must strike out at the work of our predecessors and try to crush it. “In order to get organize architecture born,” Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, has told us, “intelligent architects will be forced to turn their backs on antique rubbish heaps with which classic eclecticism has encumbered our new ground.”

The greatest strength of The Golden City (and the book abounds in strengths) is the author’s perception that philosophy must lie at the heart of any change as sweeping as Modernism – well, that and his willingness to chase down and belabor some of the most sacred cows producing those philosophies:

William James is the probably source of the fallacy that busyness with its acceptance of disorder is reality. In defining the nature of his philosophy, pragmatism, he compares it with “the world of concrete personal experiences,” that is, the life “in the street”; the traditional philosophical approach, termed “transcendental idealism,” he likens to “a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.” William James notwithstanding, the marble temple on the hill is as much a part of concrete personal experience as is the life of the street. To destroy the temple is to rob us of aim, and to take away aim is to deny reality with its attendant, mortality.

This isn’t meant to be a fun book, but even so – watching someone with Read’s intellect and passion take a sledge hammer to so many fraudulent institutions does end up being very amusing. Despite the fact that he often drew uproarious laughs at his lectures, Read viewed the process he was charting as a purely tragic one – as he was right to do, since the impoverishment of modern architecture in turn impoverishes everybody who uses it. So there’s heartache, yes, but also smiles when Read offers a kind of pictorial ‘before’ and ‘after’ segment, expanded for the 1970 edition.  There’s Port Authority, for instance:

One of the largest bus terminals in the world and the entrance to a great city, it offers a large front of brick and stone trim. There is no sculpture, no sculptural detail, and no ornament of any kind outside and none inside.

Which is naturally compared with Grand Central Station:

An elaborate entablature has as its central feature a broken round pediment, with a clock insert, which supports a colossal Mercury and two reclining figures. Swags and garlands of fruit, laurel wreaths, and voluted keystones decorate various parts of the façade.

And there’s the Great Hall of the Cunard Building:

The decoration is in a variety of classical detail mainly in cream, red, and blue, while placed in the ceiling at regular intervals are murals, with nudes and marine symbols in relief framed by lozenges.

Which is compared with the main lobby of the Secretariat Building at the U.N.:

No comment.

Hee. Sorry Henry, but I'm chuckling just a bit. You fought the good fight, but fads are stronger still.

June 2010 in Open Letters!

Morning has broken on a new month, and you know what that means! There in the comfort of your own legally-rented apartment or lawfully-bought house, you get to fire up your Tandy5000 and click on over to a new issue of Open Letters Monthly! Our June issue is huge, just perfect for a nice long intellectual wallow in the summertime. We have a batch of pieces on topics from history (Napoleon, World War I, World War II, the current war in Afghanistan) and biography (the Queen Mother at one end of the spectrum and Artie Shaw at the other!), in addition to which two genres get their biographical due: the novel, and the posthumous fame of Jane Austen.  There are regular features on new mystery novels, new developments in the world of perfume, new movies about video game characters and zombies, and a new look at another short novel. And there’s lots more, all capped with a poem by Tomas Transtromer and a striking ‘cover’ photo. So take advantage of the privacy guaranteed you by Magna Carta (and heavily implied in your Constitutional protection against illegal search and seizure) to snuggle up in the privacy of your own personal space and have a nice long read with us!