This was the first hot weekend of the summer, so we got a lot of reading done. Really, there’s little else to do in the heat: I optimistically set out on a brisk walk, but returned so sweaty that I couldn’t even peel my sopping shirt off to shower.
I’ve long been a fan of Penelope Lively, and this weekend I galloped though two of her 1980s novels, According to Mark and Judgment Day. Lively won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger in 1987, but I first heard of her at a rather tedious literary society meeting, where a smart, effervescent woman said that she had ordered all of Lively’s books, even the children’s books, from Blackwell’s in England. (Blackwell’s? England? What? This was before the internet.)
Lively’s According to Mark, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, is a charming, witty novel about a biographer, Mark Lamming, who is having midlife crisis. Mark is writing a biography of an obscure literary figure, Gilbert Strong, whose appeal is partly that he “hasn’t been done” yet. When Mark arrives at Strong’s house in Dorset, now a National Trust museum, to go through Strong’s letters and diaries, he is attracted to Strong’s granddaughter, Carrie, who runs a garden center on the premises. And his infatuation seems more like a crush than love, because Carrie, though a sympathetic character, is not particularly pretty and is only semi-literate. She has no interest in books or her grandfather. Mark’s wife, Diana, who works in an art gallery, has an inkling something is up, but she can’t monitor him all the time. Mark thinks he loves Carrie, but Carrie knows it’s about his research on her grandfather.
Anyway, it’s a comedy of errors, with a road trip through France, Carrie’s discovery of the joys of reading Austen’s Emma (she loses two copies on the trip and has a hell of a time finding replacements in France), Mark’s attempted interview with Carrie’s horrible mother (an eternally bored English expatriate who wanders around Europe with various men ), and Diana’s arriving to sort everything out in the nick of time.
According to Mark is one of Lively’s best.
Lively’s Judgment Day (1980) is simultaneously lovely, entertaining, and sad, a simpler but more startling book than According to Mark. It revolves mostly around Clare Paling, who moves with her husband, Peter, and their two children from London to the village of Laddenham . Clare is an outsider who spends most of her time reading: the social life in Laddenham revolves around the church, and she is an atheist. But she admires the architecture and art, and becomes involved with researching the church history for a fete with a historical reenactment.
All the villagers have different relationships to the church: there’s George the irritating vicar, who accidentally got into this line of work; Sydney Porter, a keen gardener with a tragic past who loves church because the words are always the same; and the horrible Bryans, who have such poor values that they desert their sad-sack son Martin so the mother can gallivant in London and the father can run off with a floozy. Fortunately, both Sydney and Clare try to normalize the child’s life. And Clare’s attitude shifts to the church, if not religion.
Alas, there is danger and violence even in an English village. This did not end as I’d expected…. I guess I’d expected coziness!
Bingeing on Anthony Trollope’s novels has its pros and cons. He was one of the most prolific Victorian writers, and he wrote some masterpieces and some duds.
The Small House of Allington is a stunning novel, because Trollope really knew how to write by this point.
There are many, many characters in this novel.
All right, I’ve done it. 
In the opening chapter of Fall, we meet Richard
Annie Ernaux’s exquisite book, The Years, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer, is a hybrid of memoir, autofiction, and history. I learned about The Years when it was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. There was a controversy about its eligibility: it
Her masterpiece, The Golden Notebook, opened up new worlds to women in the mid-twentieth century (and later). Anna, the heroine, is a “free woman,” a single mother, and a blocked writer who despises her own best-selling first novel. She refuses to write another “sentimental” novel and instead she writes for hours every day in four different-colored notebooks. She is brittle and unhappy because her married lover has left her: she writes a fictional version of this. There does not seem to be much future in love for her. When I first read this remarkable novel, I had never visualized a future where a woman’s primary goal wasn’t marriage or motherhood. Life is difficult for Anna, but it shatters the myth that all women attain what is supposed to be the feminine dream.
And then, after her death in 2013, Lessing was attacked by several journalists and critics on the basis of her personality: in short, as a woman, not as a writer. They sternly dubbed her “a bad mother” because she “abandoned” her two children to be raised by their father in Africa. That seems a very sexist criticism to me. And then they turned around and criticized for having a third child who lived with her until his death. The logic of this utterly defeats me. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
If you are a fan of witty cozies with vivid characters, Patricia Moyes’s Inspector Henry Tibbett series has stood the test of time. I loved Murder à la Mode, set in the 1960s at a London fashion magazine. Moyes used to work for Vogue, so she knows fashion and magazines. When somebody puts arsenic in the assistant editor Helen’s tea, Inspector Henry Tibbett investigates–and it helps that his niece has been interning there.
Syndicate Books has reissued Margaret Millar’s classic crime fiction in omnibus editions. My favorite is Do Evil in Return (1950), an eerie exploration of the consequences of illegal abortion. The twist is that a young woman dies, not from an illegal abortion but because it is illegal: she cannot find a doctor to perform one. You can read this addictive novel in Collected Millar: Dawn of Domestic Suspense.
I was utterly engrossed by Vera Caspary’s Laura,a brilliant 1944 crime classic reissued in Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940 (Library of America). This stunning mystery has many angles: it’s like being in a hall of mirrors. Told from three different points-of-view, this is a psychological novel about the murder of a successful advertising executive whom everybody liked. In 1944 Laura was adapted as a popular Otto Preminger film with Gene Tierney.
You can’t go wrong with Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series. I especially like Have His Carcase, in which Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur sleuth, and Harriet Vane, a mystery writer, collaborate on solving the murder of a ballroom dancer. Harriet finds the body on the beach, but by the time the police get there it has been washed out to sea. How do you solve a murder without a body?
What are your favorite mysteries?
In the 21st century, Anthony Trollope is a trendy Victorian writer. Whether or not he is taught in school I cannot say, but he has a vast fan base. Some critics consider him a hack, but he has also provided them with endless new subject matter.
The “hero” is Mark Robarts, an ambitious clergyman who, at 25, has never slaved as a curate: he has a splendid job, the prestigious Framley living, given him by his friend’s mother Lady Lufton, who has known him since boyhood. Lady Lufton loves to maneuver and manipulate: she even picked out Mark’s wife, Fanny. (Fortunately, Mark and Fanny love each other.) But we’re not surprised when Mark rebels against Lady Lufton and asserts himself, visiting a “fast set” of well-known men she disapproves of: Mr. Sowerby at Chaldicotes, a politician who is heavily in debt, and the Duke of Omnium, who is something of a roué. But Mark ends up foolishly signing one of Mr. Sowerby’s “bills”—saying he will be responsible if Mr. Sowerby can’t pay the debt—and, naturally, Mr. Sowerby cannot.
Foyle observes that we are “floundering in our digitally saturated environment.” He says that Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger may “seem impossibly quaint” today in their objections to TV (Merton) and the typewriter (Heidegger).