[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]

[558] Mrs Queen Takes the Train – William Kuhn

” She had been used to following the rules since she was a little girl. She always did what she was told. She’s been taught that it was her job as a constitutional monarch always to stick to the program, to follow the Government’s advice, to adhere to the timetable, to act according to precedent. For most of her life she’d done that, and been rewarded for it . . . Playing by these rules, however, had not saved her from the disasters that had befallen the monarchy at the time of the breakup of the Prince and Princess of Wales. ” (Part III, 119)

Mrs Queen Takes the Train imagines The Queen stepping outside of her royal life on a spree to an impromptu visit of the Britannia in Edinburgh. On a rainy December afternoon, feeling bored and disconcerted, provoked by the song My Favorite Things, Her Majesty reflects on some of her happiest memories before they were marred by family troubles and disasters. Also sadly provoked by the recent decommission of the royal train, she toys with the idea of making a solitary trip to see the yacht.

Then Diana had died in Paris and the little boys had been pulled, against The Queen’s will, by public demand, into the midst of media circus. The orgy of public grief was, in The Queen’s eyes, not Britain’s finest hour. If she’d only wept then, perhaps everything would have been all right. But The Queen’s tears were internal. (Part IV, 173)

A visit to the Mews where she feeds her favorite horse, Elizabeth, cheddar offers an opportunity to slip outside Buckingham Palace. With the help of a cheese-shop clerk, she boards an Edinburgh-bound train to fulfill her nostalgia for the lost era embraced by the yacht. Fellow passengers don’t recognize her since she was wearing a hoodie borrowed from the stable girl. Soon the retinue of servants in the royal household has discovered her missing, flummoxed. In pursuit of Her Majesty is a motley group that would never have mingled under ordinary circumstance: a lady-in-waiting left with a small legacy, a seamstress-dresser sworn to never marry, a gay butler whose impeccable service invokes Stevens from The Remains of the Day, a military equerry traumatized by Iraq, and a Britain-born, Eton-educated son from wealthy Indian family who never fit in, and the stable girl. Together the servants keep their eyes on The Queen from a tactful distance, while the equerry strives to keep The Queen’s absence from the palace a secret lest it erupts into a full-blown scandal.

She knew she was struggling with some kind of indefinable grief, but she had been only half conscious of what she was doing up to now. She felt so unhappy that a bit of cheese and a visit to Britannia had seemed like good ideas. She’d not anticipated being at a table discussing a film that troubled her, no matter how sympathetic its portrayal of her had been. (Part V, 245)

Sharing much in common with Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, Mrs Queen Takes the Train applies insight, wit, originality, and a touch of humor to the remarkably restricted universe of The Queen, to whom “life beyond the palace walls was foreign.” (Part V, 273) Kuhn is careful to steer clear of and not claim too much knowledge of her life, but he does present a story that tweaks the pomp of monarchy and reveals, beneath its rigid formality, permeating from Her Majesty down to the servants, the human heart of a woman. It touches on how The Queen internalized her grief about Diana trouble and tragic death. The book also gives an intimate portrait of the complex relationships between The Queen and her staff, illuminating the British class system that is still at work. Most charming of all is how the odd group of servants has sealed into more than a camaraderie under the peculiar circumstance in which The Queen makes an impromptu sidestepping of her routine.

374 pp. Harper. Hardcover. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[555] The Uninvited Guests – Sadie Jones

” All stared as the knob turned and the door opened, wider and winder . . . Shuffling together, the passengers began to emerge. The room tipped them out like beetles poured from a shoebox. These seemed so many of them, surely there had only been a dozen or so? Now they were at least twenty-five. ” (Ch.3, p.116)

At a glance The Uninvited Guests appeal is two fold: the setting in an Edwardian house and the scene is Downtown Abbey territory. The estate, called Sterne, somewhere not too far from Manchester, is the home of the Torrington-Swifts, who are, at the beginning of the novel, deep in preparation for a birthday of Emerald, the middle child of the family. The manor has fallen into disrepair and is caked on debt. Jones luxuriates in delineating the details of preparations, affording a mood that is both light and hallucinatory. The story unfolds slowly like a reverie, as if we’re gliding through a dream in an isolated house that generates its own society.

Safely ensconced in her room with Lady, behind her stout, locked door, restored by smelts and grateful for the continued distraction of the demanding survivors, Smudge applied herself to the animal’s portrait with renewed vigour. (Ch.3, p.147)

The light and comic tone quickly peters out and is replaced by a more surreal nuance. What happens next will show how lightly we perch on what feels like solid ground. When the guests arrive for Emerald’s birthday dinner, they bring upsetting news: A dreadful train accident has occurred nearby, and the Great Central Railway has decreed that Sterne must take in the survivors. Soon, to the distracted annoyance of the Torrington-Swifts and their guests, an entourage of third-class passengers, torn and tarnished, emerges into the house and is promptly deposited into the morning room so that the family can get on with its dinner.

She would stand at her open window to cool down, and, after a good scrub with lye soap, she would rub lavender water into her hands to banish traces of silver polish. No one would know she had downgraded herself. (Ch.2, p.80)

The Uninvited Guests is no Downton Abbey, although Jones takes upon sharp class distinctions and snobbery. Keeping appearance is what supersedes everything else—even when it comes to being kind and giving to those in need. Charlotte would make sure she is alone and unobserved before she gets her hand on the house chore—the work of a maid. The maid herself also adopts the high attitude of her mistress, treating the hapless passengers with distaste. As the night works up a storm, physically and metaphorically, more unsavory survivors arrive, demanding sustenance, the family’s youngest child leads a pony upstairs for her charcoaling portrait. In a most unpleasant game the low and lusty past of the lady is unmasked. Amidst all these events, everything that seems permanent becomes uprooted and subverted. Despite the stark change in narrative tone, the twist is obvious to me from early on, leaving not much to expect. Jones writes well and thoughtfully, but I was primarily attracted to the novel for the particular period and plot, not so much the twist. I wish she has pursued more about the cultural and social clash between the host of the house and its recipients. The book is nonetheless an enjoyable read but it doesn’t measure up my expectation.

254 pp. Harper Perennial. 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]

[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]

[546] The Disappeared – Kim Echlin

” The strangeness of my love for you is that it has made me dead in life and you alive in death. I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your life. ” (Ch.63, p.194)

Cambodia has long been a country roiled in warfare. Wallowed in such miasma the Cambodian people become refugees in their own land. The Disappeared is set during the Cambodian genocide (1975-79) in which two million people died, and through the Vietnamese occupation. The story begins in Montreal when 16-year-old Anne Graves, rebelling against her father’s wishes, embraced a relationship with Serey after a chance encounter at a jazz club. That meeting seals her fate. Serey was on exile to escape the genocide.

All through Pol Pot time people could not speak freely. Neighbor against neighbor. Children trained to report on their families. People tried to hide inside the same skin. People pretended not to be city people, pretended not to understand foreign languages, tried to disguise as soft hands, tried to pass as farmers, taxi drivers, and vendors. (Ch.22, p.78)

When the borders of Cambodia are reopened after the Khmer Rouge, Serey feels he must risk his life and returns to search for his family. About a decade later, baring her soul to the memory of her lover, she embarks on a journey to find Serey in Phnom Penh. Despite the downfall of Khmer, the government takes on a policy of adamant denial: it does not admit that any wrongdoing happened, although horrifying evidence of massive burial sites suggests otherwise.

You were the one I fell in love with and you were someone who lost everyone in this place where ghosts haunt the grieving and the corrupt and I felt something catch in you, a sob or a startle, and light drenched the dark room. (Ch.20, p.72)

Echlin’s poetic language not only elevates Anne and Serey’s relationship to an almost mythic level, it also stresses the importance of words that intertwine throughout the text. During Anne’s childhood bedtime stories, her father’s voice would peter off to an absence while gazed at a photo of her mother. When Serey returned to Cambodia, he was appalled at how “the Khmer Rouge used words to kill people” and to “cleanse the enemy”, enemy being those who express the slightest disagreement.

No one can help me. Despair is an unwitnessed life. The ones who murdered you came and went, going about their business. And my trust in the world was destroyed. (Ch.71, p.218)

The terrible actions that unfold, as inspired by mind-controlling propaganda—”To keep you is no benefit, to lose you is no loss” and “Better to kill the innocent than to overlook the enemies” target the like of Serey, who works in clandestine opposition effort. Echlin’s subtle language and sensuous style bring to life the chaos, poverty, and corruption of a country that has suffered decades of war but chooses to deny justice to its victims. The ways in which the absence of words is used as a weapon under Pol Pot until eventually those who have disappeared (and perished) are not spoken about are far more evil than the physical atrocities. Love and death pulsate through the pages, interlaced. The Disappeared is a memorial, a liturgy, to the nameless missing. It begins with Anne’s addressing to Serey, but the “you” slips into the generic to direct readers to the horrors of Cambodia.

235 pp. Black Cat NY. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[542] The Expats – Chris Pavone

” Kate leans back in the chair, the pistol in her palm, thinking about these people: this other couple, strangers who she thought were friends who were pretending to be enemies. And her surprisingly diabolical husband. And her own behavior, both questionable and justified. And what she’s about to do. ” (Ch.23, p.321)

For a debut in the literature of espionage, Chris Pavone, a book editor for twenty years returning to New York City after an expat sojourn in Luxembourg, sets the bar really high. The book is electric and addictive. In Kate Moore, whose life pervades with deceit and secrecy, Pavone has created a startingly real and unforgettable heroine, who is a mother, wife, and ex-CIA operative. When her husband Dexter, a computer network security specialist, is offered a lucrative contract, Kate cut short her 15-year career and jumped at the chance to leave behind her double life and started anew in Luxembourg.

She glances at each of her three companions, at the protective veneers they’re all wearing, trying to mask the different lies they’ve told one another. The lies they’re all continuing to try to maintain. Hoping these lies will carry them through the rest of their full and satisfying lives, despite the truths they’ve chosen not to tell the most important people in their worlds. (Ch.32, p.449)

Though discharged from the intelligence bureau, her sense of alert and natural acumen still reign. The arrival of an American couple, Julia and Bill Mcleans soon ruffles her and grates her nerve: They are not who they claim to be. Innately distrustful and professionally suspicious, she immediately knows they are involved in some covert behavior. Could they be assassins coming to revenge over her botched operation of a Latin American leader? Meanwhile she realizes her husband might be more clever, deceptive, and dubious than she has always believed. Over the years the things unsaid between Kate and Dexter were large beyond comprehension. Now the lies and secrets are accelerating, becoming what define their marriage. But she cannot broach about these suspicions without admitting that she was CIA.

But all people have secrets. Part of being human is having secrets, and being curious about other’s secrets. Dirty fetishes and debilitating fascinations and shameful facts and ill-begotten triumphs, humiliating selfishness and repulsive humanity. (Ch.15, p.205)

The Expats is intricately and meticulously plotted. The book is entertaining enough to kill time with as one is immediately drawn into the multiple facets that drive the story forward. Yes, there are selfish pursuits, ill-begooten triumphs, and very repulsive humanity involved. All these are not fully revealed until the end. Pavone never lets slip his portrayal of Kate and her quest to find meaning in her charade of an existence, which makes the book very powerful. As each pursues different conjecture, every turn of the page is a total paradigm shift as a result of many double crosses and unanticipated twists.

487 pp. Faber and Faber. Mass Paperback. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[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]

[539] We Had It So Good – Linda Grant

” I keep thinking of all the people I’ve known in London, all these years of living here. They pass through your life and you have got old and they must have got old, but if you saw them you’d cry, because you’d understand for the first time how old you are, and that it’s all long gone and we didn’t treasure it. We thought there was no way it would not last forever, together with our hair. ” (78)

We Had It So Good is a rich, multilayered novel that spans half a century, beginning in the 1960s, and entwining three generations’ secrets and longings. Young and ambitious Stephen Newman, born and raised in a Cuban-Polish immigrant family in Los Angeles, earns his ticket to postgraduate study in Oxford on a scholarship. His father works in a cold-storage warehouse that takes care of Hollywood stars’ fur coats. Some of Stephen’s most savored and vivid memories include wearing Marilyn Monroe’s mink behind his father’s back.

There was something not entirely adult about her husband, she thought. He retained a boyishness he should have long abandoned. It was her theory that in all marriages there is one person who is the grown up and the other who is the child, and she knew which role she fulfilled in this particular partnership. (139)

His promising career in Oxford is compromised, not by the surreptitious enterprise in making narcotics in the lab, but by the deforming of a library book. At the same time, his draft papers for Vietnam arrive, so out of convenience he marries Andrea, who happens to be his girlfriend at the time. The stale and stagnant life is Oxford is replaced by one that is characterized by poverty. Andrea takes up the job as a chambermaid and he a freelance science writer. They seem to find happiness in a communal squat in spite of being poor—and they remain faithful and married—to the utter surprise of their children who, in their adulthood, have grown somewhat estranged.

She felt a dismal failure both as a mother and as a therapist that her daughter told her nothing about her life, that her teenage bounce and gusto had been replaced by a reserve and secrecy, as if she was tending to some inner flame. (213)

The novel is a scrutiny of marriage and family; and although it captures the changing times, Grant never loses sights of the everyday details that define her characters. Through thick and thin Stephen and Andrea stay married, each trying to cope with their knot of anxiety. Time passes. The bright promise of the future darkens. Stephen feels trapped in Europe and longs for a different life; Andrea ruminates the thought that she shouldn’t have run her husband’s life. Both are stricken by the apprehension of their mortality.

We Had It So Good is a book that makes one live in it. It depicts how we struggle to come to terms with the mediocrity of lives, the unfulfilled dreams, the misplaced aspirations, as age takes the gloss off our dreams. Despite some slight clunkiness and slowness, Grant is dextrous in capturing the smallest moment of a character, as births and deaths, unions and ruptures, scatter through the pages with both the intensity and the ruggedness of real life. Sometimes life is like a series of banal accidents for the characters. There exists a vague sense of moral ambiguity to the story: it’s almost as if the couple should feel guilty for how good they have had it.

344 pp. Virago UK. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]