Meet the Lasts, Downton Abbey’s future
January 18, 2012
Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust satirizes Britain’s landed gentry, whose power and influence diminished between the World Wars. It’s a book that gets called out on “best” lists, such as Time magazine’s All-TIME Best Novels and Modern Library’s Top 100. Last July, John Self in The Guardian tagged it as Waugh’s greatest achievement in an article about writers being famous for the wrong book. I get that now, being a big fan of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and presently a bigger fan of A Handful of Dust.
This greatest achievement became a beach read for me during a recent Florida visit. It came along in the suitcase as a book I’d intended to read before the close of 2011 and missed the deadline by a week. I didn’t think of it as beach material but wanted to meet my goal. Classics and bests carry a hovering stigma of something to be trudged through. That aforementioned Modern Library list also includes Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, hardly sun, sand and surf material. Nevertheless, I sat in the beach chair – actually, a balcony chair overlooking the beach – and there read Waugh’s masterpiece for long hours of escape, completely surprised and delighted by this classic’s engaging force. This is one wickedly funny novel.
The book focuses on Tony and Brenda Last, who live on Tony’s inherited country estate, Hetton Abbey. It requires every penny they have to keep it going. Weekend visits by the London social set fill the Gothic structure’s cold, uncomfortable rooms. And while Brenda’s bored with the old house and its requirements, Tony lives for it. Not surprising, then, that Brenda escapes to London, where she engages in an affair with John Beaver, the novel’s moneyless social climber.
Waugh’s ingenious send-up includes many lively characters whose affiliation with the Lasts helps exaggerate their arrogant blindness. One most enjoyable is their literal-minded son, a young boy who, when told the London socialite Lady Cockpurse looks like a monkey, imagines her to be a ”hairy, mischievous Countess:”
“When kindly people spoke to him in the village he would tell them aboutt her and how she swung head down from a tree throwing nutshells at passers-by.
‘You mustn’t say things like that about real people,’ said nanny. ‘Whatever would Lady Cockpurse do if she heard about it.’
‘She’d gibber and chatter and lash round with her tail, and then I expect she’d catch some nice, big, juicy fleas and forget all about it.’”
Even though we realize Waugh is on a mission to ridicule country estate heirs and their privileged friends, he creates these characters without the drag of giving a lesson. It’s his witty, acerbic digs and savage humor that do the educational work and make A Handful of Dust so much fun.
A tragic accident on a fox hunt at Hetton Abbey hurdles the Lasts toward their downfall, with Brenda making a very telling and shocking remark. It’s an unforgettable moment in reading history, a blurted “Oh thank God” positioned with enormous implication. Despite the dark turn of events, Waugh skillfully controls the experience so we stay within bounds of the book’s irony and satire. He shocks us, and then lifts us right back up into the amusing divorce proceedings and a threat to Hetton Abbey, such as, in this scene, when Brenda’s brother negotiates with Tony:
“The truth is that Beaver is cutting up nasty. He says he can’t marry Brenda unless she’s properly provided for. Not fair on her, he says. I quite see his point on [sic] a way.”
“Yes, I see his point,” said Tony. “So what your proposal really amounts to is that I should give up Hetton in order to buy Beaver for Brenda.”
“It’s not how I should’ve put it,” said Reggie.
My reference to Downtown Abbey in this post’s title is a bit cheeky, considering I’ve not seen the popular PBS show, what with no TV in the house; however, from all I’ve read about it, I couldn’t resist the juxtaposition, for a Last perspective, so to speak. Because Waugh would’ve had a field day with this show about an English country estate and its inhabitants. But then, maybe he already has had that day in A Handful of Dust, which ends with Tony lost in a South American jungle and to Hetton Abbey. Indeed, Waugh’s greatest achievement.
Beware your assumptions
January 9, 2012
I’ll start with the ending, but I’m not going to reveal what happens in this story about Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker, who “wouldn’t know a clue if it jumped up and bit him on his pecker.” I’m going to tell you that I got angry. Reading the last two pages of this triple murder mystery, I thought I’d been duped. I thought the author, Percival Everett, had written this suspenseful story about an unusual detective, exploring issues of racism, loyalty, identity and a purposed life – all the while keeping me guessing about who committed the murders — and then he writes a conclusion that’s unbelievable and feels like a smack in the face.
Call me frustrated and furious, except a persistent internal voice suggested I might have missed something along the way. Assumption is a literary class act, and I couldn’t imagine Everett would blow off the ending. It just didn’t fit. So I went back through the book looking for clues to herald the surprise ending, and I found them, demonstrating Everett’s written not only a remarkable crime novel off the typical grid, but also a cautionary message about the danger of assumption.
Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker, a former employee of the U.S. Military Police, works for Sheriff Bucky Paz in the fictional “middle of no place” Plata County, New Mexico. His boss gives him free rein, despite Walker’s unorthodox ways, but then the quirky but reliable Sheriff Paz is pretty much into being left alone to eat his doughnuts. Don’t think for a minute we’re getting a tired policeman-doughnut cliché here. The Mrs. sends a nutritional bag of carrots to the office with her large hubby to replace the high calorie sweets, and the play between the foods and the frustrated fat man, who’s always looking for the easy button, is a trip. So, too, is Walker’s sharp wit, frequently given.
The murdered dead that turn up in this book include a bigoted woman no one much liked, two prostitutes who try to scam their pimp and a game and fish patrolman. Walker seems to get strung along while solving them, but his nose to the trail inevitably unfolds the mysteries that have clever, unpredictable twists and turns. He ends up in bars and brothels in Denver, a car dealership in Albuquerque and a nursing home in Tempe in search of answers, as well as the surrounding canyons and desert. This emotionally detached deputy rarely carries his gun and appears undaunted by threatening situations. Some say he has a messiah complex.
The crimes occur in three loosely connected sections of the book. You’ll have to read very carefully not to be whomped with the ending like I was. Although, even if you do read carefully, you’ll still be whomped, I’m sure, because Everett is playing a lot of cards in this well-crafted novel. Each one is designed to fit into a fanned out, calculated display that illustrates nothing makes sense in the way we perceive it to make sense. And that ending? Our thoughts and beliefs about people we know may not be their reality. It’s a kind of assumption that messed with me in the end. (Point made via experience.) Bravo, Mr. Everett.
“19 Pictures, 22 Recipes”
December 31, 2011
I found this unusual, 58-page book on a table at Brooklyn’s Spoonbill & Sugartown. The sales clerk told me the author brought it in, the store decided to sell it and purchases have been steady. I understand why. There’s something seductive about this self-published book: the soft feel of the pages; the intriguing black-and-white, muted photographs; the simple recipes with easy instructions and a handful of fresh ingredients; and the narrative about what we see and taste.
19 Pictures, 22 Recipes, while sub-titled “A Cookbook by Paola Ferrario,” is neither a photography book with recipes, nor a cookbook with pictures. It’s a sensual congregation of both, including essays. Ferrario tells personal stories, philosophizes about cooking and life, and provides interpretive thoughts about the photos. All the while, she emphasizes the exquisite pleasures to be experienced through simplicity. No need for expensive photography equipment to create a meaningful photograph, let alone some chef’s super meal to experience great taste.
Ferrario writes,“The photographer/cook only has to take what the planet has given and transform it into pictures or dishes with as little alteration to the original as possible.”
Consider her “Pasta with Tomatoes & Basil.” You just need a few Roma tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and basil, a simple recipe that makes a jar of Prego or Newman’s tomato sauce seem pointless. Ferrario pairs it with a Polaroid of a woman’s hips in a flowered polyester dress taken with a camera Ferrario purchased in a thrift shop.
“When I look at this picture I remember that my youth was serene because I was a dreamer with simple desires. I envied people who could dance well and read fast but never the ones that had more than I. Whenever I feel old or poor I make this dish, which is as beautiful as youth seems through the eyes of a happy middle age. It takes a little time to make and it costs almost nothing. It’s the perfect meal when we are assessing our needs.”
Paola Ferrario is a Guggenheim award-winning photographer represented by the Sue Scott Gallery in New York. She also is a cook by nature, telling us in the essay “La Scampagnata: An Apology” that hers is a generation of women who grew up having been taught how to cook and then choosing to cook in their adult lives. That choice is becoming more and more a rarity; however, given Ferrario’s musings here, it’s apparent we’ve needlessly complicated and avoided kitchen life.
My favorite pairing is “One-Egg Cake,” featuring the photograph of a newly built house. “The image freezes the moment when desire has become reality through labor, will and destiny,” the author writes. She adds, “A freshly baked cake and this photography produce in me a sense of admiration for people who can do tasks which require skills that are no longer routinely imparted in our society.”
It’s hard to detect detail in many of the slightly blurred photographs, but that doesn’t detract from their purpose. Together with the recipes and narrative, they create intimacy, bringing us close to the people sharing an ordinary moment with the camera lens. These are old photos Ferrario collected from flea markets and antique shops. The recipes – family recipes from Ferrario’s Italian childhood – include pasta alla carbonara, cantaloupe with prosciutto, waffles, minestrone, perfect steak, sugar cookies, strange rice and others.
You can read the book’s introduction on Ferrario’s website in PDF format. Published by Ferrario, the book is available for purchase on the site, or you could contact Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers. 19 Pictures, 22 Recipes is edited by poet Daisy Fried and designed by Ken Botnick at emdash studio in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Shopping Brooklyn bookstores
December 6, 2011
Oh that every city had indie bookstores like those in Brooklyn. I visited five in the New York City borough this past weekend and was reminded what we miss out here in the other-land that sells books via food markets, big-box “I can sell you everything” stores and, of course, Barnes & Noble. The browsing was extraordinary, tables covered not with the typical and predictable, rather the unusual and hard to find in novels, art books, travel memoirs, classics and literary non-fiction. Here I found shelves devoted to the New York Review Book Classics Series and Melville House Art of the Novella Series. I found signed books in paperback and hard-cover, including The Day Before Happiness by Italian author Erri de Luca at Book Court in Cobble Hill. A very nice store with a wide space for author readings. This independent has been around since 1981.
The Community Bookstore in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn is a small, comfortable shop filled with literary discoveries. A cat snoozed beside a bookcase and a lizard chirped in the back of the store. This is the kind of shop we all think about when imagining an independent bookstore, crowded with books but easily navigated and smartly organized, cozy in lighting and exuding a sensory feel of profound riches. One shelf provided the personal recommendations of authors who reside in Brooklyn, including Paul Auster, Mary Morris and Jonathan Safran Foer.
I came away with one of those Melville House novellas, Henry James’ The Lesson of the Master, and also Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, which recently won the National Book Award for fiction – a choice copy because it’s a first edition without the NBA award sticker. Also, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, which somewhere in my reading this year someone said must be read, and also The Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis.
Greenlight Books is nearby in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a bright modern space offering a plethora of signed books, many of them paperbacks stacked among the unsigned, the signature within signified by a sticker. Here I purchased a signed copy of my all-time favorite Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem and also a debut novel by Justin Torres, We the Animals, which I’ve been meaning to read since it came out this year. A glance at their literature shelf, and there I saw not only Hans Fallada’s popular Everyman Dies Alone, but also his lesser-known books. It’s just that which is so lacking in literary mega-store retail and depriving us of possibility and exposure – the lesser-known books kept in stock to be discovered.
Most impressive for its distinctive selections is Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers (“I’ve been to Sugartown, I shook the sugar down”*) in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. I couldn’t figure out its focus at first, seeing eclectic art, philosophy and design books among recently released novels on its large center table in the 
small space. The bookseller told me “it’s not a literary bookstore,” and then added the owners don’t like it when she says that, but it’s true.
There’s something very different about Spoonbill & Sugartown, as if the selections come from someone’s vision for the store, which has been around since 1999. The store’s website says, “We also hand pick thousands of good books every month for our voracious clientele.” The bookseller told me the owners are descended from a former gallery owner in New York City and that the bookstore opened with books from his personal library. I wish I could’ve spent more time asking questions about the store’s history, but it was time to move on. I came away with a copy of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Hard Travel to Sacred Places.
Also in the Williamsburg area, selling used books and specializing in literary fiction, both classic and contemporary, is bookthugnation. I didn’t spend much time here, but I came away with a vintage paperback, Aldous Huxley’s After the Fireworks and Other Stories. It was originally published as Brief Candles by Harper & Bros. and likely one of those paperback editions bestowed with a passionate,romantic illustration to sell more copies.
Across the street, not a bookshop but the Brooklyn Art Library where the Sketchbook Project is underway, a collaborative series of art books created by 5,000 artists. Anyone can participate. The Brooklyn Art Library sells vintage notebooks, art supplies and stationary inspired by the past.
If you go to Brooklyn, here’s where you’ll find the bookstores:
- BookCourt 163 Court Street, Cobble Hill
- Community Bookstore 143 7th Avenue, Park Slope
- Greenlight Bookstore 686 Fulton Street, Fort Greene
- Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers 218 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg
- Bookthugnation 100 N. 3rd Street, Williamsburg
*Quoted on the Spoonbill & Sugartown bookmark, this line is from a Bob Dylan song, Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.
The title of this post was changed 12.13.11. It formerly was ”I’ve been to Sugartown.”
History is now and England, 2060-1940
September 21, 2011
Connie Willis is at the top of her game. She won her 11th Hugo Award last month in the category of “best novel” for her two-book time travel story Blackout/All Clear. The Hugo Awards, presented annually since 1955, are science fiction’s most prestigious awards. Normally, I wouldn’t chomp at the bit to read a sci-fi novel, even an award-winning one — I’m a reader who likes her novels to take place on planet Earth with present-day or historical elements. No Miles Vorkosigan of planet Barrayar, thank you very much. But Blackout/All Clear intrigued me with its focus on Oxford historians in 2060 traveling back in time to World War II. I thought, this may be a science fiction adventure I can get into, and that proved true. Except I’m only halfway through this fascinating two-book novel that concludes with All Clear. Willis states in the acknowledgments of Blackout, “I want to say thank you to all the people who helped me and stood by me with Blackout as it morphed from one book into two and I went slowly mad under the strain.”
In Blackout, we follow three Oxford historians performing on-site research in 1940 England. They are Polly Churchill, who observes shopgirls during the London Blitz; Michael Davies, who studies the heroes of the Dunkirk evacuation; and Merope Ward, who observes children sent to safety in the English countryside. They’re implanted with key historical information that ranges from pronouncing words correctly to knowing when and where the Germans will drop their bombs. And they’re secure in knowing they can always get back to 2060 Oxford through their drops, the time-travel portals. Should these curious historians have problems returning home, a retrieval team will fetch them.
But things don’t go as expected. Merope is detained in 1940 because of a quarantine, due to her young evacuees contracting measles. She can’t get to her portal and then, when she does, the drop won’t open. Polly discovers a similar problem with her drop in a bomb-devastated London street. Michael inadvertently gets taken to Dunkirk to help bring home the British soldiers. Dunkirk is a divergence point, a place where historians are forbidden because their presence risks changing the course of history.
This is the stuff that adds tension and mystery to Blackout, whether it be the worry about Polly, Michael and Merope getting back to their real lives in 2060 — no retrieval team showing up for any of them – or the grave possibility they’ve changed the course of history. But what’s equally inviting is the dearth of period details. They are so engaging, so intricately woven into the story, they make Blackout a delightful let alone very convincing time travel story. An advertising sign in a department store reads,”Hitler can smash our windows but he can’t match our prices.”
The story takes a while to gear up, with Polly, Michael, Merope and others dickering in Oxford over their schedules, but it’s worth the set-up time. Indeed, Willis creates the sense this is exactly what it would be like to time travel to the past, given we could, especially to London during the Blitz. Now, onto the conclusion in All Clear because, at the end of Blackout, I still don’t know the fate of Polly, Michael and Merope.
“History is now and England” is from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and quoted in the front of Blackout.
Adventures in vintage drug paperbacks
July 31, 2011
Early this summer, a friend gave me a framed poster she found at a garage sale. It’s an uncut sheet featuring six rows of 36 vintage paperback covers from a box set of cards. At first, the books seemed to be random pulp fiction titles but then, it dawned on me, they were all about drugs: Marijuana Girl by N.R. de Mexico, The Pusher by Ed McBain, Black Opium by Claude Farrere and Acid Party by Anthony Yewker, to name a few.
I got it in my head to try to find these vintage books, realizing some might be beyond my budget because I recognized #17 on the poster, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict by William Lee. Lee is a pseudonym for William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and famous Beat Generation drug addict. The first edition price of this 1953 confessional paperback tends to head north of $1,000. It’s Burroughs’ first book.
Undaunted and unknowing of what I might be getting into with this decision to acquire the books, I headed to Pulpfest 2011 in Columbus to see what I could find among the 36. As is typical of most book shows, dealers are in a large room with their books spread over tables and in display cases. For the first-timer to any show, it can be overwhelming. All I could see upon entering the room was a sea of paperbacks on and under tables and in boxes. Also, I realized, to ferret out my books, I would have to ask, “Does someone here deal with books on drugs?” It sounded comical and naïve.
I approached the booth for Hooked On Books where the owners Wayne, a retired reference librarian, and Deb, a retired CPA, took a look at my list and began educating me about which ones were hard to find (expensive) and easy to find (less expensive) and also, which ones were pornography (ok, good to know). Then I talked with Scott Edwards of Dearly Departed Books in Alliance, Ohio, because displayed on his table was a beautiful copy of #16 on my poster, Marihuana by William Irish. Scott explained why the book was the narrative size of a short story — it was sold in 1941, along with other similar-sized books, in vending machines for 10 cents. William Irish, I learned, is a pseudonym for noir crime novelist Cornell Woolrich. The Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” is based on Woolrich’s short story “It Had to Be Murder.”
The vending machines explained the stories I found by such classic authors as William Somerset Maugham in those small-sized, 10-cent books. As written on the back of Maugham’s 64-page paperback The Beachcomber: “Now for the first time you get famous stories by famous authors that first appeared in higher-priced books or publications, attractively produced in a pocket-sized book at a price of 10 cents each.”
Authors listed thereafter on this Dell paperback under current and forthcoming titles include Wallace Stegner, Pearl S. Buck, Edna Ferber, John O’Hara and Fannie Hurst. BTW, the original title of Maugham’s 1931 short story is “The Vessel of Wrath.” It became a movie under “The Beachcomber” title.
I came away from Pulpfest much wiser and with an affordable purchase for my poster collection — I Made My Bed published in 1958, written by Celia Hye. It happens to be the first book of the 36 on my poster and has all the dramatic blurbs written on it that you could want of this vintage literary art form: “A blazing novel of delinquency — intimately … frankly … shockingly revealed by a teenage addict.” To balance the tawdriness, I’ll add that I also came away with not only the classic Maugham (above left) but also a 1965 first printing Ballantine paperback of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, which, on the back, has a blurb by the aforementioned William Burroughs.
Last year’s beach read, this year’s movie
June 10, 2011
Last summer, David Nicholls’ novel One Day hit the U.S. summer reading lists. This year, the movie will be released in August, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, the novel’s romantic couple. Early comments about the movie, such as “it won’t be able to capture the magic of the book” and ”the trailer gives everything away,” drove me to read the book first because it consistently received rave reviews. The inventive narrative premise is a big part of the book’s irresistibility and tension. Can the movie keep us similarly bewitched?
One Day begins with Emma and Dexter the day after college graduation in 1988, wondering what their future holds while hesitantly attracted to one another. It is July 15, and each chapter checks in on them, together and separately, on that one day every year — the anniversary of their meeting – for the next 20 years. According to the U.K. Telegraph, the intention of author David Nicholls is to “create the impression of looking through a photo album, so that the characters seem to change, yet remain the same. Twenty years is a substantial sprawl, so my initial instinct was to cover landmarks – births, marriages, deaths. Instead, I’ve taken one day at random – like a date on a bank statement.”
Even though Emma and Dexter have a deep-seated instinct they belong together, they doubt and ignore their feelings and pursue what they think is right for them – for the beautiful and humble Emma, a life of meaning that makes a difference in the world; and for the charming, wealthy Dexter, a life of fun and fame. What keeps them apart and just friends feeds the humor and anticipation of what will happen next. And they are delightful characters – real, likeable and full of life – to spend 400+ pages.
One Day takes place for the most part in London. Some of the British locations, colloquialisms and cultural references were lost on me, but that in no way affected my enjoyment of the book. All that Emma and Dexter experience translates well into American 20- and 30-something ideals, motivations and beliefs. The book was originally published in the U.K. in 2009 and then in the U.S. as a Vintage Contemporaries paperback in 2010. The U.K. Telegraph described it as “a sleeper hit of huge proportions” and said the book became the highest-selling British novel of 2010. It did well in the U.S. also, landing on the New York Times best-seller list.
The New York Post claims One Day has ”the potential to be the kind of movie — like ‘Annie Hall,’ or ‘Two for the Road,’ or ‘Terms of Endearment’ — that offers both big laughs and a knockout emotional punch.” Since I’ve finished the book, time for the trailer, which The Guardian says gives everything away. I can’t resist. Besides, I already know all the twists and turns experienced by Emma and Dexter, as their lives intersect, including the final, devastating surprise.
The story of “Jasper Jones”
June 2, 2011
U.S. dust jacket
Craig Silvey’s new novel (his second) is categorized as a book for young readers by Alfred A. Knopf, which published the book in April. And yet it’s standing with adult literary heavyweights as a contender for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. That struck me as unusual, but then I realized the teen classification is from the U.S. publisher. I checked Allen & Unwin, the Australian company that first published the book in 2009, and Jasper Jones is listed there as literary fiction. Either way it falls, I had to find out what this book is about, and why so much attention is on it – Jasper Jones has won scads of awards in Silvey’s native Australia, including the Australian Indie Book of the Year Award 2009.
The novel is set in a small Australian town in the 1960s. It opens with the feral 14-year-old Jasper Jones seeking the help of 13-year-old narrator Charlie Bucktin in covering up a murder until he can find who’s responsible for it. Jasper can’t go to the police because he’s a social outcast whom everyone blames for whatever goes wrong in town. Also, Laura Wishart, the girl who was murdered, is hanging from a tree in his secret hideout. She was Jasper’s best friend.
While the story begins with a murder, it doesn’t predictably dissolve into a “whodunit.” Silvey brings other plots to the forefront: Charlie’s BFF relationship with Jeffrey Lu, a talented cricket player shunned by the town’s team because he’s Vietnamese and Australian soldiers are dying in the Vietnam war; his confrontational relationship with his mother; and his complicated love relationship with Eliza Wishart, Laura’s sister.
Australian dust jacket
One of the most entertaining elements of this vivid story are the conversations between the bookish Charlie and the amusing Jeffrey about who’s the better superhero, Batman or Superman, and how stripes get into toothpaste and why men have nipples. It’s like overhearing kids on a school bus. Maybe this is kid talk written for a teen perspective, but it’s also masterful character creation that makes Charlie and Jeffrey fully real to an adult.
Racism and social ostracism are powerful themes, but the concept of fear as a misguided source for belief and action is the most affecting one. Indeed, it’s at the root of all that goes wrong. At one point, Jasper says to Charlie: “See, everyone here’s afraid of something and nuthin. This town, that’s how they live, and they don’t even know it. They stick to what they know, what they bin told. They don’t unnerstand that it’s just a choice you make.”
Silvey packs a lot in to this enjoyable, intriguing and briskly paced novel, and he does it so well it’s as if we’re living and breathing the air of this small mining town. Teen lit? I’d say a definite yes, but it’s on the mature level of the Hunger Games, which I’m guessing will fill theaters with its adult readers when the movie’s released 2012. IMPAC winner? Definitely a worthy contender, and we’ll find out June 15.
