[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.

[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]

[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.

Baldwin

To me James Baldwin is more American than any American writer during his time. While he creates the conscience of his race in his works, he refuses to allow that destiny to be shaped by an obvious plot in which being black could only lead to mayhem and tragedy. His being gay further complicates his role. He once said he cannot handle both issues in the same novel.

In an essay in 1960 called ‘Notes for a Hypthetical Novel’ he had mused on the white people he met in downtown New York in his early twenties:

In the beginning, I thought that the white world was very different from the world I was moving out of and I turned out to be entirely wrong. It seemed different. I seemed safer, at least the white people seemed safer. It seemed cleaner, it seemed more polite, and, of course, it seemed much richer from the material point of view. But I didn’t meet anyone in that world who didn’t suffer from the same affliction that all the people I had fled from suffered from and that was that they didn’t know who they were. They wanted to be someone that they were not.

Thus is Baldwin: sharp, biting, and calm. In Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar, Colm Tóibín explores how the changing world impacted on the lives of people who kept their homosexuality hidden, and reveals how natural desire affected their works.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

My next read of Baldwin will be Go Tell It On the Mountain. “Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It On the Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

[540] Light Years – James Salter

” He knew he had talent, intelligence, that he was not going to perish like a mollusk washed up on shore. All the past, he told himself, all that had been so difficult, that he had struggled with like a traveler with too many bags—idealism, loyalty, all your virtues, your decency—they will be needed when you are old, they will preserve you, keep you alive . . . ” (271)

Light Years is a very quiet novel that chronicles the uncoupling of Nedra and Viri, a golden couple living in a gilded, countrified life of incessant, candle-lit dinner parties, interesting friends and beautiful children. Viri is a faltering architect who commutes to Manhattan and wishes he is famous, instead of wishing he’s a better one. Nedra is his beautiful, decorative wife who shops in the city, gives lavish parties, and sleeps with the neighbor. Despite her lack of remorse and self-pity, she is at least to her husband the pledge of sanctity and order.

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere . . . (23)

Salter has a jeweler’s eye for human frailties. Depicted in this moody and tender book is the inexorable passing of years in a troubled marriage. Fragility is not limited to the many cracks that spread in the marriage; Salter writes about vulnerability in life’s every facet: families, love, sexuality and personal achievement. While the Berlands are basically good people, who, adulteries set aside, claim a fugitive happiness, Salter is not lenient with them. Beneath their affluence’s surfaces are also frustrated ambitions, enervated passions and a bagging fretfulness that life should be richer still, though neither of the Berlands possesses the clear-sightedness to make that life happen. As their marriage slowly disintegrates, they become disengaged and glib, knowing that they live life of no serious consequence.

The lay in the dark like two victims. They had nothing to give one another, they were bound by a pure, inexplicable love. (125)

But this love doesn’t bind them together, because Nedra doesn’t believes in happy couples. The novel, therefore, is a decrying against a casulness in the face of truth. It’s no mystery that of what it considers ill—trivializing and exploiting life. The Berlands are confused about what will make them happy or unhappy in life, and they mis-identify superfluity as progress, bad as good, until the marriage is beyond repair. James Salter is the master of a mandarin style that is not a whit less virile for being exquisite. His prose is lyrical and provocative, with never a word too many or too few. Salter’s subject, which is human desire in its many manifestations—strongly reminds me of my last read, Linda Grant’s We Had It So Good: erotic longing, jealousy, ambition, curiosity, obsession, the needs to triumph, to achieve perfection, to experience life, to be loved, to merely belong—except Salter’s execution is all the more superior.

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

[535] The Witches of Eastwick – John Updike

” The three women, meeting downtown on Dock Street, checking in with one another by telephone, silently shared the sorority of pain that went with being the dark man’s lover. ” (Part ii, Maleficia, p.208)

In Eastwick, Rhode Island lives three witches: Sukie, gossip columnist for the local paper, is known for her superior beauty and liveliness; Jane, cellist and music teacher, is known for greater intensity and commitment to witchiness; and Alexandra, a sculptress who can create thunderstorms. Divorced but hardly celibate, the trio finds friendships with local married men—the minister, the choir director, the plumber—that come with benefits. They might be the last comfort to these men in stale marriages. Aside from these affairs, they devote themselves to artistic enterprises. Together they form an infrangible triangle on which their life rhythm depends—until one day they find themselves quite under the spell of the new bachelor in town, Darryl Van Horne, a wealthy New Yorker and inventor whose strobe-lit hot tub becomes the scene of satanic pleasures.

It was nice to have yourself known by a man; it was getting to be known that was embarrassing: all that self-conscious verbalization over too many drinks, and then the bodies revealed with hidden marks and sags like disappointing presents at Christmastime. But how much of love, when you thought about it, was not of the other but yourself naked in his eyes . . . (Part I, The Coven, p.83)

The overbearing but flirtatious Van Horne spurs the women on to higher artistic aspirations. Into them he imparts new creativity and motivations. Part social drama and part chick-lit, The Witches of Eastwick is sexy and playful, exploring gender issues in an era of moral confusion, when the country is overshadowed by the war in Vietnam. When the town minister runs away with a teenager, and the editor of the local paper takes his life after killing his wife, women assume men’s roles and become pillars of the local society. The novel takes a turn for darkness when the most eligible bachelor takes a wife who is neither of the witches. Pinning this new bride as the ultimate traitor, who is indebted to the witches’ kindness, they take revenge with their magical power—with undesired consequences.

That’s the kind of thing men are supposed to do. They’re supposed to adore us. They’re shits, try to keep that in mind. Men are absolutely shits, but we get them in the end because we can suffer better. A woman can outsuffer a man every time. (Part ii, Maleficia, p.160)

This book is light and fun to read. It’s fresh and constantly entertaining, although I won’t read another with the same subject matter. As the witches wield their power over the unknowing people in town, Updike’s writing also brings the history and culture of England radically to life. The friendship between the three women and how they live in mutual respect despite the differences are the triumphs of the novel. They are given a forceful sexuality and wit whereas the men are dupes wandering around with their penises. The ending is unexpected but reassuring.

307 pp. Ballantine. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[534] Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner

” That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. ” (Part Vii, Ch.3, p.382)

Angle of Repose is an intense portrayal of the lives of Susan and Oliver Ward in late 19th century and Lyman Ward in the 1960s. Lyman is a retired historian who is dying of a bone disease. Confined to his wheelchair and estranged from his family, the old man researches his grandparents’ lives—almost a hundred years ago—in order to find out why they were alienated in their later years. Through the letters of his grandmother, Susan Burling, written to her lifelong friend Augusta, Lyman pieces together Susan’s life in the late 19th century America.

She was a factory—a lonely factory, depressed, bravely industrious, afflicted with worry and insomnia, perhaps a little poisoned with self-pity. Yet she stayed away. (Part VIII, Ch.1, p.461)

Susan has been a successful artist and writer from the East Coast. She marries mining engineer Oliver ward, who dedicates himself first to mining and later to irrigation projects. She follows her husband to the West with a romantic deception that it’s a transience. Things are not as uncivilized as she thought, but nothing like back home. A pioneer at heart, Oliver chases after dreams that never quite pan out until his later years. Susan moves with him to the America West, from California to Colorado, Mexico, and then Idaho. She captures the rugged beauty of 19th century western America in her work, while struggling to maintain a marriage and a family under difficult conditions. She is conceited and snobbish, and he handy, unromantic, but endowed with sensibility.

Miserable, both of them, everything hopeful in them run down, everything joyous smothered under poverty and failure. My impulse, and I hereby yield to it, is to skip it all, to document not one single miserable hour until a day in November 1888. (Part VII, Ch.6, p.432)

While he chronicles his grandparents’ days spent carving civilization into the surface of America’s western frontier, Lyman also comes to terms with his own troubled life. A family tragedy that Stegner fully reveals at the end of the book has lessons for Lyman’s own estrangement from his own wife. Although the stories of Susan and Lyman are separated by two generations, they are woven together remarkably well. Susan reveals in letters to her friends that she is trapped in a life of failure, and that she wants to disengage from the stubborn, articulate man she is married to, and the scheme he was married to. Likewise, Lyman has trouble coming to terms with the emotional and physical aspects of his handicaps.

At its heart Angle of Repose is about personal endurance and self-discovery. Despite the beautiful rendition of the prose and the perfect capture of the Western frontier, this book is very hefty that the reading might call for patience. The novel is too long–there is far too much down time—sometimes the plot appears to repeat itself. The novel also seems too hurried toward the end: Stegner has spent so much time drawing out the first 15 years of Susan and Oliver Ward’s marriage that the remaining 40 some years, which are crucial to their alienation, are dealt with summarily. I have no doubt this book shall be added to the canon of great American literature, but because it might not be for everyone, I am leery of recommending it.

569 pp. Penguin. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]