[570] North River – Pete Hamill

” He was a doctor, but medicine was not an exact science. There was no cure for everything. As in life. The cause of death was always life. Across many years now, he had comforted people he knew would soon die. He hoped his consoling whispers would do them no harm. ” (3:46)

North River is what know as the Hudson that separates New York from New Jersey. In this novel, set in the 1930s, against this river that symbolizes both impermanence and closure, Peter Hamill gives us what he knows best—New York City. Rich in ambiance and period details, North River draws closely and intensely from the city, in the tight grip of Depression, where people are addled, desperate, and lonely.

But he had lost prayer somewhere along the way, along with faith. He had been educated to deal with the body, not the soul. In the Argonne, he lost what remained of the affairs of the soul, among the torn and broken bodies of the young, until the day came that he cursed God. (Ch.5, p.94)

In winter 1934, 47-year-old James Delancey ministers to poor patients in the tenements of Lower West Side. They are burst-outs who cannot afford to pay him but he treats them nonetheless. Among his patients are old stubborn heads who refuse to go to hospital, neighbors who blame him for loss, and lush husbands who beat their wives. On a snowy morning he finds his toddler grandson at his door with a note from his daughter, who is off to Spain looking her husband, a revolutionary from Mexico pursued by the FBI. Although flustered by his grandson’s impromptu arrival, the little boy infuses life and warmth into his home. To cope with his new domestic arrangement, Delancey enlists the help of Rose, a tough, decent and intelligent Sicilian woman with a secret in her past.

But across the days of other people’s illness and damage and painful unhappiness, the days of endless casualties, he carried Rose with him now. She and the boy had formed a current in his life, like a secret stream flowing south through the North River . . . It was a stream that was always in the present, not in the past, nor the future.” (Ch.9, p.164)

Indeed the past has haunted him that the nobly beleaguered doctor has transmuted his attention to the poor and needy. The influenza pandemic claimed both his parents’ lives. His wife Molly was furious with him for volunteering duty overseas. Unable to shake off her angry feelings of abandonment, she walks off to the river leaving him with his daughter Grace. This new life with Carlito and Rose is threatened by a mafia who is angry at Delancey’s treating the bullet would of a rival and refusing to reveal his whereabouts.

North River is both character- and plot-driven. Stewed in guilt, self-doubt and misery until his grandson arrives, the doctor has always lived in the past, held captive by dreams of his disappeared wife and haunted by the carnage of battlefield in France. Portraits of rouges and rule benders, along with the budding romance with Rose propel the novel, which truly evokes the Irish, for no other ethnic group so easily lends itself to such fertile inner conflict as shown in Delancey and the characters that populate this book.

341 pp. Back Bay Books. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

Pete Hamill

With 17 books under his belt, I have a lot to catch up with Pete Hamill. I have recently bought North River and Forever and started the former. The story is simple enough: a stroller with a three-year-old boy was left at the door of James Delancey’s walkup on asnowy morning. The boy, Carlito, is his grandson. His mother left for Barcelona to look for her revolutionary husband who was a member of the Mexican Communist Party. So the beleaguered doctor who ministered to the poor and the down-and-out now has one more person under his roof, a little boy who needs more than just nourishing—an emotional upbringing and a safe home. Hamill’s New York is one that is cottage industry in literature and film—the Irish misery. But the ground has been covered so often at this point that it risks cliché. Presumably the only trick left is to go even farther than your predecessors did, pile on the misery even thicker. At 77, Hamill is at his best when he writes about his city. He knows New York present and past, and he is able to make us taste the early-20th-century time frame of “North River”, which is the Hudson River.

[565] The Château – William Maxwell

” Paris seemed to be withdrawing piecemeal from the world. At first it didn’t matter, except that it made the streets look shabby. But then suddenly it did matter. There were certain shops they had come to know and to enjoy using. And they could not leave Harold’s flannel trousers at the cleaners, though it was open this morning, because it would be closed by Monday. The fruit and vegetable store where they had gone everyday, for a melon or lettuce or tomatoes, closed without warning. ” (Ch.16, p.282)

Spontaneous and unpredictable, occasionally encumbering, The Château does not have a clear pot. The narrative is simplicity itself: Harold and Barbara Rhodes are young, well-to-do American couple who decide to take a four-month vacation in post-war Europe in 1948. Although their trips cover England, Germany, and Italy as well, The Château focuses on France, where they stay with Mme Vienot and her family in a château that takes in lodgers to make ends meet.

Feeling tired and bruised by their own series of setbacks, they hurried on up the stairs, conscious that the house was cold and there would not by any hot water to wash in and they would have to spend still another evening trying to understand people who could speak English but preferred to speak French. (Ch.8, p.148)

Most of the actions take place in the château, where they spend two uncomfortable weeks, with meager amenities, rationed commodity, but strict formality. The book relays, in day-to-day, almost excessively, prosaic details of meals, social gatherings, and other happenings in the mansion. They deliberate if they should depart early but only to change their mind upon the next warming on the part of their hostess. Obviously France is far from ready for receiving visitors. Travelers like the Rhodes receive food coupons upon having their passports inspected. They have traveled with four month’s supply of everything from coffee, cigarettes, to cold cream—commodity that would be scarce in post-war Europe. Means of transportation is limited. But they manage to travel extensively and see many sights.

He put himself in her shoes and decided that he would have been relieved for a minute or two, and then he would have begun to worry. He would have been afraid that they would find in Paris what they were looking for—they were tourists, after all—and not come back. (Ch.8, p.140)

So the entire book sees the Americans hitting one site of attraction after another, gradually becoming enmeshed in their host family’s doings. Account of their misunderstanding of the French is shrewd, poignant, and funny. Even in their bliss moments of attachment to France, they are reminded of their foreignness and awkwardness. Lurking in their mind is the question: “Do you think there was something going on that we didn’t know about?” (350) Maxwell captures the feelings of alienation in a traveler. There are social disappointments, the inadvertently offense given and the anxiety about being taken advantage of.

I don’t mind three-hundred pages of culture shock and social solecism (and all the wonderful descriptions of French sights) because Maxwell intersperses his subtle accounts of character with sharp observations about human nature. His writing is also supple and contemplative. But what trumps the whole reading experience is the indulgent, distracting, and clunky epilogue that aims to demystify the French’s “mystery.” Yes, the Rhodes are puzzled and hurt by the French refusal to warmth and charmed when it’s given unexpectedly. But they departed with a much lighter spirit and what transpired to a friendship with the host. The epilogue becomes a poor structure that answers questions not necessarily any answer.

402 pp. Vintage International. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[556] The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton

” She had suffered for the very faithfulness with which she had carried out her part of the tacit compact, but the part was not a handsome one at best, and she saw it now in all the ugliness of failure. ” (Book II, Ch.4, p.240)

The House of Mirth is a caustic novel about a girl, Lily Bart, who is “born to be ornamental,” and her pursuit to social status and wealth in a society rife with financial scandal and sexual intrigue. Lily, whose vocation is marriage, is very fond of Lawrence Selden, a lawyer, but doesn’t want to marry him because he hasn’t got enough money, though he is sufficiently wealthy to travel for his legal cases. The chance encounter with Selden establishes her heedless nature and determines her future. For as she climbs the social ladder and triumphs in soirées, using her beauty as a power tool, and hoping to secure a palatable future, Lawrence Selden’s presence always has the effect of cheapening her aspirations, and he will be the one who witness her ultimate fall.

It was not the first time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt. This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured. (Book I, Ch.12, p.145)

Failing to ensnare the wealthy heir Percy Gryce and later the noveau rich Rosedale, it’s inevitable for a girl who has no financial means but with expensive taste should become laden with debts. Dubious business deals and accusations of liaisons with a married man diminish Lily’s social status. Although later Lily obtains a potential lethal hold over her nemesis, Bertha Dorset, who interrupts Lily’s courtship with Percy Gryce, she refuses to take revenge against her enemy with evidence of her infidelity in order to rehabilitate herself in society. Deep in her she knows her marriage to Gryce, Dorset, or Rosedale would have been meaningless because she despises the society she is trying to enter.

She had, to a shade, the exact manner between victory and defeat: every insinuation was shed without an effort by the bright indifference of her manner. But she was beginning to feel the strain of the attitude; the reaction was more rapid, and she lapsed to a deeper self-disgust. (Book I, Ch.9, p.106-7)

Laden with debts, disinherited by her aunt, left with a small legacy , Lily is left to fend for herself. She does not wish to impose herself on the goodwill of Selden’s cousin Gerty Farish. She takes up apprenticeship with a milliner, but knowing with dismay that even if she could learn to compete with hands formed from childhood for their work, the small pay she receives would not be a sufficient income. Wharton emphasizes throughout that Lily is alone in the world, cut off from and bad-mouthed by everyone. Ironically her descent is by way of the selfish, self-indulgent, and materialistic people whom she admires and aspires to be. Lily dies for a scruple in a tragedy that seems both avoidable and inevitable. She could have married any of her well-heeled suitors, used the incriminating letters against her enemy, but blackmailing Bertha would have betrayed Selden and made her complicit with the repulsive. In that she achieves a spiritual victory and proves her love. She embodies lost illusions and destructive melancholy, which Wharton despises. Through her tragic descent Wharton metes out judgment on the lack of social responsibility of the high society—anything is allowed as long as the transgressors are wealthy and maintain a respectable façade.

360 pp. Barnes & Noble Classics. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[554] The Secret History – Donna Tartt

” His students—if they were any mark of his tutelage—were imposing enough, and different as they were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks—sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated. ” (Book I, Ch.1, p.30)

There is a hypnotic erudition to The Secret History, a story told by in retrospection by Richard Pipen, a young man who, ashamed of his humble past in rural California, finds at a small Vermont college the life of privilege and intellect he has long coveted. By chance, he becomes part of a closed circle of Greek classics students whom he looks with awe, envy, and an outsider’s detachment. They are under the tutelage of Julian Morrow, a charismatic scholar who guides them through the study of ancient Green culture and its philosophy on beauty. He has a favorite saying that “beauty is terror,” and that one has to “leave the phenomenal world and enter into the subliminal.” To translate this into action, the group, behind Julian’s back, carries out a Dionysian rite at a farm in which a farmer is gorily killed.

And it wasn’t just a question of having kept my mouth shut. I thought, staring with a sick feeling at my blurred reflection in the windowpane. Because they couldn’t have done it without me. Bunny had come to me, and I had delivered him right into Henry’s hands. And I hadn’t even thought twice about it. (Book II, Ch.8, p.458)

Henry, leader of the pack, is cold and calculated. His erudition in Greek studies earns his respect from the other students. He has orchestrates the Bacchae and seamlessly covers the trace of the crime with plausible alibi. Furious that he has been excluded from the plan, Bunny, the oddball of the group who always imposes himself in others’ goodwill, throws tantrum and sublimates his anger toward Henry into his dealings with the rest of the world. His random eruption of hysteria compound his already volatile personality—the primary reason for his exclusion fro the rite in the first place. Fed up with his malicious jokes and insinuations, and fear that he will betray the secret, the group believe in the necessity of murdering Bunny.

The danger which he presented was, after all, not immediate but slow and simmering . . . Benny, unawares, had himself supplied us with such an impetus. I would like to say I was driven to what I did by some overwhelming, tragic motive. (Book I, Ch.5, p.214)

And so The Secret History proceeds with dangerous tension—the first half elucidates the “whydunit,” and the second the horrible mind-purging aftermath. It’s a compelling tale of deception and complicity, examining not so much the moral resonance as the banality of evil. In retrospect the narrator looks in dismay how his passivity and desire to ingratiate pull him into a course of destruction. In the face of these faultlessly orchestrated schemes he becomes willfully blind. Tartt’s prose is supple, decorous, and poetic. Despite the outrageous acts depicted, and the implication that Henry might be Dionysus or the Devil himself, her prose conveys a familiar life of students. As these students inch toward a terrible conclusion, they don’t so much lose their innocence as make a series of pragmatic, amoral decisions. They are chilling creatures. Therefore, real guilt and suffering do not truly take place within the novel’s realm; neither does redemption.

524 pp. Knopf. Hard Cover. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

Cult Classic

Finishing An American Tragedy is an accomplishment. Now moving on to another book of daunting size that has been sitting on the shelf, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I must have acquired it during college but never got to it. The book has been become an international bestseller and cult classic twenty years after it was first published in 1992. The novel’s narrator is Richard Papen: 19, gawky, insecure and anxious to fit in. He’s an Everyman, or at least an Everyteenager. Arriving at Hampden, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, from his hometown in California, Richard is overwhelmed by his new surroundings. Richard’s fellow Greek students hold themselves apart from the rest of Hampden, openly disdaining its partying, chattering hordes. Together they form a very tight and closed group, almost cultish, under the tutelage of Professor Julian Morrow, who directs their studies in ancient Greek culture and its beauty. Added to my pleasure and interest is the fact that it’s been clear from the first page that they were doomed. The novel’s prologue opens with a dead body at the bottom of a ravine and the narrator’s confession of murder. It’s a literary whydunit. I cannot wait for the pages to unfold, for there is a continuous sense of psychological tension.

[553] An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser

” On the other hand, while Roberta was not of that high world to which he now aspired, still there was that about her which enticed him beyond measure. Day after day and because so much alone, and furthermore because of so strong a chemic and temperamental pull that was so definitely asserting itself, he could no longer keep his eyes off her—or she hers from him. ” (Book Two, Ch.15, p.254)

An American Tragedy is based on an actual New York murder and in it Dreiser describes, with almost excessive details, the arc of a young man’s life up the ladder of social success and how a secret relationship with a factory girl threatens to destroy that success. Clyde Griffiths is the eldest son of a street preacher. Throughout his childhood the family is on the move, thus depriving him of a proper education. When is a teenager, determined to break away from the world bound by Bethel Independent Mission, he becomes a bellboy in a fine hotel in Kansas City. An escapade with a borrowed motor car, ending in tragedy, forces him to leave the city. A chance meeting with his father’s brother, Samuel Griffiths, a wealthy collar manufacturer of Lycurgus, N.Y., seems to promise a reversal of fortune.

And so disturbed was he by the panorama of the bright world of which Sondra was the center and which was now at stake, that he could scarcely think clearly. Should he lose all this for such a world as he and Roberta could provide for themselves—a small home—a baby, such a routine work-a-day life . . . A sense of nausea seized him. He could not and would not do this. (Book Two, Ch.38, p.414)

The uncle gives Clyde a small place in the factory, and despite the opposition of his cousin Gilbert, Clyde with his smart look and warm personality, sees the road to wealth and social position unfolding before him. He even manages to make headway with Sondra Finchley, the daughter of one of Lycurgus’s upper-class families. Unfortunately he has succumbed to the beauty of Roberta Alden, and has been injudicious enough to enter an affair with her. By the time he is tired of the poor operative in the collar factory she is to become a mother. Fascinated by two girls, trapped by one (who is pregnant) and desperately in love with the other (who is rich), on the hook of the dilemma he is impaled. He has to get rid of one before he can be with the other, and be discreet about Roberta’s pregnancy. He is fastened upon Sondra and all that she represents. He has the incurable selfishness that sometimes leads to success, but he lacks the intellectual strength to extricate himself. In Sondra he sees his opportunity to wealth and success, but he does not understand the world she lives in. He sinks deeper and deeper, being led on by his vanity and desires. A chance news clipping imbues in him a gruesome idea that will ruin his life for good.

While Dreiser illuminates us on his character’s motives and how emotions translate into physical actions, An American Tragedy is longer than necessary. Dreiser leads us, across nearly a thousand pages, to understand a killer, and to regret his fate. The novel is a massive portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde’s tawdry ambitions and seal his fate. All of society conspires to persuade him that his goals are admirable, perhaps even sacred. It is also portrayal of achieving American dream at the expense of one’s fundamental moral value. To break through the barrier, lifting from poverty to wealth, he must resort to criminal means. As it happens, he does not commit the murder he has planned, but he might as well have, for he is trapped in the machinery of social punishment and destroyed. His weakness is the essential shoddiness of mortality, thus making the novel timeless, despite its occasional awkwardness.

828 pp. Signet Classic. Mass Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

Tragedy Awaits

This book has been the longest resident of my bookshelf, gathering dust and begging to be read. This is Theodore Dreiser’s 930-page realist epic of 1925. Except for Sister Carrie assigned in AP English, I have not read Dreiser. My suspicion is that Dreiser’s books are now considered too long for high-school students, too earnest for college literature classes, and too odd for many common readers. The morale reminds me of The Great Gatsby, also a portrait of life in the Roaring Twenties, but Dreiser’s is more realist. The novel is based on an incident that occurred in upstate New York in 1906, when a factory worker named Chester Gillette murdered a young woman on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. The woman, Grace Brown, had been pregnant with Gillette’s child. In a well-publicized trial, Gillette was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. His conviction was upheld on appeal. After Governor Charles Hughes refused to grant a stay of execution, Gillette was put to death on March 31, 1908.

I devoured 92 pages this morning during breakfast. Dreiser introduces his main character, Clyde Griffth, with a modest pace. He is determined by forces beyond his control: primarily environmental and hereditary. Born in the slum, of weak parents, romanticizes the idea of wealth and success, associates it with beautiful women, and longs for a life of pleasure and wealth. The scenes of the book whet his appetite—until he is struck down by a misfortune as a result of what he desires. Interesting enough to keep me engaged.

[551] Dreams of Joy – Lisa See

” What haven’t disappeared are rats. They’re everywhere. So here’s what I don’t understand: Old Shanghai, my Shanghai, had plenty of sin on the surface but was shored up by the respectability of banking and mercantile wealth underneath. Now I see the so-called respectability of communism on the surface and decay underneath. ” (Pearl: Dusts and Memories, p.106)

Dreams of Joy is a sequel to Shanghai Girls, after Joy comes to know about the truth about her parenthood. The book is set during a more recent and forbidding era, that of Mao’s ambitious Great Leap Forward, which began in 1958 and mandated the collectivization of Chinese agriculture and led to catastrophic famine in the early 1960s. Although the novel presents these events through the eyes of Joy, both Pearl and Joy take turn in the narrative. Furious that everything she thought she knew about herself was a big fat lie, and that both her mother and aunt were in love with the same man, the artists Z.G. Li, the headstrong 19-year-old flees across the Pacific to find her birth father in Red China.

Except I could never escape the fact that Shanghai was once my other and aunt’s home . . . My mother? She’s tried her best—I know she has—but I came to get away from her. I don’t want to be reminded of the past. (Joy: A Small Radish, p.164)

The story is most unusual, and rather un-heard of: someone who voluntarily goes into exile behind the Bamboo Curtain, during high McCarthyism and Red China, while many strive to go the opposition direction. Like its predecessor, Dreams of Joy constructs a world of political turmoil and extreme personal struggles. Joy is enthusiastic and naïve about Red China and Chairman Mao’s plan to overtake Great Britain and the United States. As much as she embraces this new-found motherland, she is ignorant of this place. Little emotional resonance is attached to her finding Z.G. Li and telling him he’s her father. Following him to the countryside where Li controls the form of his punishment and teaches peasants Mao-sanctioned forms of art, she falls in love for no reason with a country bumpkin who would later purge her publicly. Her blind idealism feels like a plot contrivance more than an organic part of her character. Her narrative far less nuanced than her mother’s. The details about her choices in life at a remote village are unconvincing although the description of the hypocrisy and deceit of the regime is truer than life.

Now I understand how that happened, because there have been no riots, protests, or uprisings here either. We’re too weak, tired, and scared to do these things. We’ve been brainwashed through hunger, and people still believe in Chairman Mao and the Communist Party. (Joy: A Good Mother, p.280)

Dreams of Joy should be more aptly titled Nightmares of Joy, for all the nightmares she had created for her family. Whatever her dreams are, and those of the ambitious government, they are not coming true. While Joy becomes less and less consequential as the novel moves toward its soap operish neat ending, Ms. See gives us a textbook scenario of China under Great Leap Forward, but with more grisly detail: how crushed glass is plowed into earth because it’s a government-recommended nutrient, how fields are overplanted that crops cannot thrive, how people are encouraged to melt all scraps of metal to smelter iron. As for Joy’s coming to her senses, all I can say is, “Duh!”

354 pp. Random House. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[548] Girl in Translation – Jean Kwok

” It was also in the eighth grade that we finally got a phone at home. I knew the monthly payments pained Ma, but I was too ashamed to be the one omission in the staple school telephone directory everyone received. It seemed to be a public declaration of poverty that came too close to showing everyone the truth about the way we really lived. ” (Ch.8, p.155)

Girl in Translation is the coming-of-age story of 11-year-old Kimberly Chang who emigrates with her mother from Hong Kong to America in what appears to me as the late 1960s. References to rationed water and lack of telephone in Hong Kong give that period away, although panic sentiment about the colony’s handover to China in 1997 had yet to penetrate the public. Recently widowed and laden with debts, Kimberly’s mother hopes for a better life in New York, where she will start afresh and yet the culture is totally incomprehensible. They find themselves in a squalid, dilapidated apartment in Brooklyn lacking heat and real furniture. Like many young immigrants who yet to develop the ear for English (myself included when I arrived 26 years ago) Kimberly finds herself in a tough position adjusting in school and taking over everything that requires any kind of interaction with the world outside of Chinatown.

A shipment needed to go out at the factory the night before my oral exam, so we didn’t go home until past two a.m. I stayed up the rest of the night studying and didn’t sleep at all. Wrapped over many layers of clothing, I wore a robe made of the stuffed animal material, which Ma continued to recycle as I grew. There was only Ma’s sleeping body to give me comfort and the night was damp, filled with the taste of my own fear. (Ch.9, p.187)

Despite her cultural barrier and constant fear, Kimberly realizes the only way to rescue her mother (and herself) from her parsimonious,jealous aunt’s sweatshop where her mother is paid pittance doe long, barebacking labor is to achieve academic success. The struggle from being an underachiever to the star student only seems easy compared to the physical miasma and emotional stress to which staggering poverty subject her. It’s typical Chinese to disguise poverty let alone to accept benevolence. In time, Kimberly learns to translate back and forth between the two worlds that she strives to separate. The private school where white kids from privileged background surround her by day seems worlds away from the claustrophobic Chinatown sweatshop that breaks labor law and pays workers by the piece.

All I wanted was to have a break from the exhausting cycle of my life, to flee from the constant anxiety that haunted me: fear of my teachers, fear at every assignment, fear of Aunt Paula, fear that we’d never escape. (Ch.9, p.184)

Although the writing of Girl in Translation is sophomoric at best, Jean Kwok has found the right voice for her underage narrator who is coerced to mature quickly in order to negotiate the adversity in her face. I disagree with reviewers who call the book lacking in depth and complain that all Kimberly talks about is the horrifying condition of her apartment at the long hours at the factory. For the teenage girl who has no financial resource and has to live hand-to-mouth this is her only reality. In order to disguise her poverty she has to hide from her best friend where she lives. The financial strait means she cannot afford social ambitions. She has been constricted to her daily routine that consists of going to school and working to cover the living costs. It was not until years after their arrival that they visited the Statue of Liberty. The book has some twists at the end although it’s rather rushed. But overall it conveys the harsh reality that faces many immigrants.

293 pp. Riverhead Books. Hardcover. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]