Reading a Mystery after a Long Break: "A Banquet of Consequences," by Elizabeth George

As I have mentioned here before, I have read a lot of mysteries in my life, starting from the beloved Nancy Drews of my childhood, proceeding to Agatha Christies, and onward. I tend to read mysteries in phases; for a while I read many of them, and then for a year or two or more, I don’t read any at all. I have been in quite a long phase -- several years -- of not reading them, although a couple of years ago I did read the latest Maisie Dobbs (by Jacqueline Winspear). This is all prologue to saying that I recently read Elizabeth George’s latest, “A Banquet of Consequences” (Viking, 2015). After reading a review or two, I just suddenly had the urge to read it, and I read all 574 pages on two days, one of which was a day in which I was sick and stayed in bed all day. Talk about binge-reading! This is “a Lynley novel” (as stated on the title page), as are most of George’s novels, so readers have become very familiar with -- and fond of -- him and his story. Lynley is an aristocratic (but in a low-key way), thoughtful detective with Scotland Yard, and over the years I have been fascinated by him as a character and by his complicated relationships with the women in his life, his friends, and his colleagues. Of course, as readers of this blog probably know, I have a very big soft spot for (almost) all things British, accents and all, and I do prefer English mysteries and main characters. In the early years, Lynley was part of a complex foursome of friends/lovers with shifting relationships, and that tended to be very melodramatic and intense, almost too much so, but nonetheless gripping. George’s writing continues to be intense, but has smoothed out a bit over the years. In the last novel, a tragic event happened in Lynley’s life, and he is still recovering in this current novel. An interesting set of interactions always happens between the patrician Lynley and his colleague Barbara Havers, who is from a working class background and defiantly unwilling to play the traditional female role, which becomes a real issue in this current novel. Havers’ boss, also a woman, puts Havers on a short leash until she shapes up (in her work -- because she tends to be a maverick rather than a rule-follower) but also in her dress and presentation). Lynley and Havers are very close (not in a romantic way) and their relationship is fascinating. Oh, yes, this is a murder mystery, so I should mention the mystery itself! The mystery involves a very dysfunctional family and the family members’ relationships with each other and with outsiders. This novel, like many of George’s, has a definite psychological aspect. Although the author is good at the usual murder mystery tropes – dropping hints but not too many, spinning out the suspense, etc. – and although her mysteries are always satisfying, to me the personalities and the characters are the most interesting parts of her novels. And I love that she is maximalist rather than minimalist, thus the length of her novels. So am I back to reading mysteries, or was this a one-time aberration from my current years-long “no mysteries” phase? I’m not sure, but I will of course post about it here, either way!

"M Train," by Patti Smith

I wrote here on 2/17/15 about how fascinated I was with singer/poet/writer/artist Patti Smith’s memoir, “Just Kids.” When I saw she had published a new memoir/essay collection, “M Train” (Knopf, 2015), I hesitated to read it, thinking it could not possibly live up to the first memoir. I also read that it was less linear, less explicitly memoiristic, more impressionistic, all of which could be good things, but also could go very wrong. But I did plunge in to “M Train,” and it was all of the things I just mentioned. At times it felt slightly meandering, but in a good way. “Just Kids” was about Smith’s youth in New York City, her early career as a musician and writer, and her relationship with her fellow artist and soulmate, the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. “M Train” is about her later life, including her years in Michigan with her husband, the musician Fred Sonic Smith, who unfortunately died suddenly and too young. Most of the book focuses on her current life back in New York City, with many forays into the past. She writes of various journeys, actually pilgrimages, that she has made to places where her admired writers and artists lived and/or died. These iconic figures include Jean Genet, Haruki Murakami, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Sylvia Plath, and Frida Kahlo. The journeys become important ceremonial occasions in her life, and also inspiration for her writing and photography. Throughout the book, Smith shares her dreams, her reading experiences, her love of coffee and cafes, her feelings about getting older (she was 68 at the time the book was published in October), her attraction to Rockaway Beach and her buying a ramshackle house there, which soon after was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy but is now being rebuilt, and much more. I so appreciate the seeming openness of her writing. Most of all, the writing is highly poetic, and captures both the author’s creativity and her feelings. The sometimes impressionistic aspect reminds us of how we all think and dream, not always linearly and certainly not always logically. And it reminds us of the importance of the life of the mind and the artistic life. Of course Smith portrays this condition much better and more poetically and effectively than we readers could do, but all of us can live better and more transcendent lives if we spend more time on thinking, dreaming, writing, and paying tribute to the writers and artists who have influenced us. This book includes about 50 photographs, almost all by Patti Smith herself.

The Best Books I Have Read in 2015

It’s that time of year: time for a “best books" list! But I don’t claim to have covered the territory well enough to call my list “best books”; instead these are “the best books that I read this year,” otherwise known as my thirteen favorite, most enjoyed, most admired, and most valued books of 2015. I list them in order of when I read and posted about them. After each title, I note the date I posted about the book here on this blog, in case you want to read more about why I chose these particular books as the "best." Here is the list: “Last Hundred Year Trilogy” ("Some Luck," "Early Warning," and "Golden Age"), by Jane Smiley (11/4/14, 5/23/15, and 12/17/15); “Lila,” by Marilynne Robinson (2/23/15); “Family Life,” by Akhil Sharma (3/1/15); “Honeydew: Stories,” by Edith Pearlman (5/2/15); “The Children’s Crusade,” by Ann Packer (5/8/15); “A God in Ruins,” by Kate Atkinson (6/8/15); “Our Souls at Night,” by Kent Haruf (6/21/15); “The Green Road,” by Anne Enright (7/3/15); “A Spool of Blue Thread,” by Anne Tyler (7/13/15); “The Illuminations,” by Andrew O’Hagan (7/17/15); “After the Parade,” by Lori Ostlund (10/19/15); “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (10/24/15); “Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories,” by Bonnie Jo Campbell (12/19/15). Some quick observations on the list: 12 are fiction, 1 nonfiction (“Between the World and Me”); 10 of the 12 fiction books are novels, 2 are short story collections; 9 books are by female authors, 4 by males. On another note, please keep on shopping in independent bookstores!

"Killing and Dying," by Adrian Tomine

I have read and posted about several graphic novels over the years, finding some of them amazingly creative and of high literary quality. One of the best known American graphic fiction writers, some of whose work I have read, is Adrian Tomine. I have just read his most recent book, a collection of six short stories in graphic form. It has an off-putting title, “Killing and Dying” (Drawn & Quarterly, 2015), but the stories are about seemingly small-scale, quirky and rather sad topics. A man spends years of his life trying to sell the odd and unpromising idea of “hortisculpture.” A young woman receives unwanted attention everywhere because of her resemblance to a porn star. A man secretly goes into someone else’s apartment regularly, always leaving it the way he found it. A nerdy young girl decides to be a stand-up comic, despite her parents’ lack of faith that she has talent. The stories and drawings are full of the small, revealing details that show us people’s characters, interactions, failings, hopefulness, deceptions, and self-deceptions. It is possible to read these stories fairly quickly for the plots, but it is worthwhile to force oneself to slow down and savor the details of the words and, especially, the drawings.

"Negroland: A Memoir," by Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson’s “Negroland: A Memoir” (Pantheon, 2015) is a fascinating study of middle-to-upper-middle class African-American society, especially during the middle of the twentieth century, the time during which Jefferson herself grew up. This group of American Blacks has called themselves “the colored aristocracy,” “the colored elite,” “the colored 400,” and other such names (p. 7). They descend from the group that W.E.B. Du Bois famously titled “The Talented Tenth.” These Black leaders and families took pride in their status, and also felt an enormous responsibility to represent their race well, and -- by their example -- to contradict and counteract negative stereotypes that many White Americans had about Black Americans. “In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians….The Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity” (p. 51). Jefferson, who grew up in such an upper-class family, writes of her childhood in Chicago, her parents, and her own inner conflicts and concerns. She strove to be the perfect girl, working hard at school and at extracurricular activities, dressing correctly, displaying perfect manners in all situations, and being a high achiever. Later, as a young adult, she took up more radical ideas about race. She went on to be a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, a writer on many topics, and a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. She does not write much about her life beyond college years, focusing instead on her formative years. She puts her own life in the context of African-American history, writing about several prominent Black leaders and public figures throughout the years, and analyzing the phenomenon of the elite group to which her family belonged. Being part of that group brought privilege, yes, but also the tension and emotional drain of having to be constantly on guard, constantly worried about upholding the reputation of her group and her race. Jefferson’s blend of memoir, history, sociology, and fearless and candid analysis of herself and of her cohort is an effective one. The details about her own life and those of others illuminate the more general points she makes. At times the book is wrenching to read, but at other times it shows us everyday life for her and those in her social stratum. The book is enhanced by photographs of her and her family and of others Jefferson writes about.

"Golden Age," by Jane Smiley

Reading the wonderful first two novels of Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy made me eager to read the third one, and now that I have read it, it more than lives up to the anticipation. “Some Luck,” about which I posted on 11/4/14), and “Early Warning” (see my post of 5/23/15), described the ever-growing Langdon family. The third novel, “Golden Age” (Knopf, 2015), brings the story up to the year 2019. As in the other two novels, Smiley organizes the novel through providing one chapter for each year. The Langdon family has proliferated, and further spread out across the country, so less and less of the story takes place in the original Iowa farm setting, but still the family farm is the historical and emotional center and core of the family’s experience, its reference point. The original six siblings (children of the founding family, Walter and Rosanna Langdon) and their spouses are now elderly or have died. The six siblings’ children and grandchildren are the focus of this latest novel. When I started reading it, even though I had just read the second novel a few months before, I felt plunged into the storylines helter-skelter, and it took some pages to find my footing again. But I soon remembered the connections, and then the story swept me along. I can’t say what it would be like to read this third novel without having read the first two; I think it would be fine, after the first 50 pages or so, but I highly recommend reading all three novels, and of course in order. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, the number of characters caused me to look frequently at the family tree diagram at the front of the book to remind myself who a certain character was, or how a certain character was related to another. The novel, like the other two, is longish (443 pages) and stuffed with story. As with the other novels, Smiley interweaves the stories of the family and the specific characters with the events going on around them in the United States. There is a particular focus on climate change and the environment, and even more particularly on how climate change affects farmland and farming. Another focus is the financial misdeeds leading up to the crises of 2006-2008. These two focuses are intertwined, as financial crimes affect farm owners in terrible ways; together, the two forces are harmful beyond measure. As mentioned above, the author takes her story up to 2019, and the events of the last few years edge into the apocalyptic. Clearly the author strongly believes that the U.S. is on an incredibly self-destructive path. There are many ironies along the way, or perhaps baleful views of humanity; for example, one of the characters in the world of finance is directly and maliciously responsible for dreadful harm done to other characters and to the family farming tradition. But I don’t want to leave the impression that this novel is mostly an issue-driven one, or mostly an apocalyptic one; it is those things, but our interest is always drawn back again and again to those stalwart qualities of good fiction: plot and character. And what characters Smiley creates! Various, fascinating, and oh so human. What an amazing accomplishment this trilogy is! I believe that it will be a longlasting one, one that is truly a great American novel capturing the sweep of time in 100 years of American history and culture. Although it is a real commitment to read these three long novels, I can say with great confidence that readers will find the time investment more than worthwhile, and will enjoy themselves along the way.

"Citizen: An American Lyric," by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s book of prose poems and essays, “Citizen: An American Lyric” (Graywolf, 2014), is wrenching and heartbreaking. It forces the reader to face the harsh realities of racial prejudice in the United States (and elsewhere), and the terrible, ongoing effects of that prejudice on every Black person. The poems, the essays, the artwork all connect and reinforce each other. Some of the work is elliptical and indirect, while other sections could not be more direct. Many of the prose poems refer to specific events and people. For example, there is a section about the great Black tennis player Serena Williams, and the blatant prejudice and discrimination she has experienced. I knew a little of this reaction to Williams, but not the extent of it, and Rankine makes sure we see it up close. One section is a memorial to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, when it became crystal clear that Black lives did not in fact matter. Other sections are also memorials, to Trayvon Martin and other victims of prejudice that destroyed these young men’s lives. Still other sections delineate the “small” moments of everyday life, when White people choose not to sit next to a Black person on a train, for example, or when they treat a Black woman differently than they treat her White friend in a shop or restaurant. Rankine shows us how these moments can wear a person down. This book will not let readers turn away from the evidence, so much evidence, of ongoing racism, devastating racism that plays out in large and small ways all the time. The author also shows us the obliviousness of many White people to this racism all around them. A small but telling example is of the White man who steps ahead of the (Black female) narrator in the line at a store, and when the clerk points out that the woman was there first, the man is genuinely surprised, and says “I didn’t see you.” I highly recommend this beautifully written and hugely painful but instructive book.