Dogs are the most popular American pet, according to Forbes, but faithful canines do not inspire mystery writers. No, cats are the preferred companions of amateur detectives in cozy mysteries. Felines are shrewder, more observant and more secretive than, say, a poodle. Nothing against poodles. Still, I love cats.
Why are cat mysteries so charming? In these novels, cats speak a special language that conveys criminal details to their owners. Mine do not do this, except when a fellow cat poaches their crunchies. Still, a meow at the critical time, a nudge that topples a mug of arsenic-laced peppermint tea… What would mystery writers do without cats?
I have read dozens of these, but they become indistinguishable after a while. Here are some I remember and recommend.
Dolores Hitchens is famous for her hard-boiled classic mysteries such as Fool’s Gold and Sleep with Strangers. She also had a soft for cats: in her Rachel Murdow series, the heroine, Rachel, is a mild-mannered spinster with a penchant for solving crime, and she is always accompanied by her cat, Samantha. In The Cat Saw Murder, published in 1939, Rachel travels with her sister and cat to visit their niece, Lily, an heiress whose life has been threatened. When someone attempts to murder the cat, Rachel is horrified, but no one anticipates the horror that lies ahead.
You may be familiar with the Disney adaptations of That Darn Cat, based on Undercover Cat, a mystery by Gordon and Mildred Gordon. I have not yet found a copy, but who wouldn’t love a mystery featuring a cat who helps the FBI catch bank robbers? This novel has also been published under the title, That Damn Cat.
Lydia Adamson’s cat mysteries are what I call smart-cozy. In A Catby AnyOther Name, the witty Alice Nettleton, an off-off-Broadway actress who cat-sits for a living, attends a party to celebrate a cat lovers’ herb garden. While the guests sip peppermint tea, a man jumps or falls out a window. Was it suicide? Alice and her cats say no.
Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Easyis not quite a cat mystery, but an orange Persian cat, Wonky-Pooh, plays an important role.
Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who… mysteries are addictive. They are comfort reads, because all of them are the same. These amusing books are the kind of mystery to read if you are ill or in need of a comfort read. The series hero, Quilleran, a retired Chicago journalist, moved to Pickaxe City in Moose County after he inherited a fortune. He wanted to get away from the big city, but life in the north is not as sleepy as he’d anticipated. Helped by his Siamese cats, Yum Yum and Coco, he stolves murders at modern art musems, amateur theatricals, antique shops, and even on the Bonnie Scots Tour in Scotland. On the back cover of The Cat Who Wasn’t There, we learn that “Koko may have been miles away from the murder scene – but he’s just a whisker away from solving the case!”
And now for recommendations on my Golden AgeCat Mysteries TBR
The GingerCat Mystery (1935) by Robin Forsythe \
The Puzzle of the Silver Persian, by Stuart Palmer (1934). I love Stuart Palmer’s Golden Age mysteries, and this one is on my list!
Cat’s Paw, by Roger Scarlett (1931
The Case of the Careless Kitten, by Erle Stanley Gardner (1942)
Please let me know your favorite cat mysteries, or dog mysteries if you must!
The fabulous Carnegie public library, still standing but long deserted, and now occluded by towering skyscrapers, was the destination of thousands of readers in our small town in the twentieth century. Here I discovered some of my favorite English books: Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Angela Carter’s bafflingly beautiful fairy tales, and Rumer Godden’s lyrical novels.
Just as the old library building is obsolete, Godden’s books were out-of-print when I decided to reread them in the early 2000’s. All of her adult books, except An Episode of Sparrows, which was reissued as a children’s book; In This House of Brede, a fascinating nun novel reissued by Loyola Press; and Kingfishers Catch Fire, a pre-hippie novel set in Kahmir, and reissued by Milkweed Editions, had to be hunted down at used bookstores and online bookshops.
Godden is a complex writer, not given her dues. In some of her novels, she uses modernist techniques to connect scenes. Her playful temporal jumps recall Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Years. And yet only Godden’s best-selling third novel, Black Narcissus (1938), the story of a convent in the mountains of India, seems to be remembered, perhaps because it was adapted as a film with Deborah Kerr, and more recently, as a TV miniseries.
Godden is a distinctly odd writer, a kind of pop-literary modernist, who breaks up her narratives with temporal antics and intersperses sudden switches to outsiders commenting on the situation. The opening scene of her fifth novel, Breakfast with the Nikolides (1942), is told from the (third-person) point-of-view of a dog. The plot radiates from the axis of this tormented scene.
Don, a spaniel who spends his days romping with Emily and Binnie, the children who own him, becomes suddenly desperately ill, befuddled, nervous, and excited. “There was nothing he wanted, but he could not be still, he could not feel or behave quite like himself. He had been a serene and normal dog, quietly engaged in completing himself from a puppy to an adult, but now, and all day, he was like the mirage of a spaniel, lifted out of himself and thrown distorted and heightened on the air. He had to run and run and run.”
What a sad phrase, “the mirage of a spaniel.” There is nothing sadder than the death of a pet, and I was already crying on the first page. Then Godden switches scenes: she jumps back a few months. And we meet Charles Pool, a college professor and director of the Government Farm in Amorra in India, who has taught Indians to modernize agricultural methods. Every night he listens to the radio news about the outbreak of World War II, but is surprised when his difficult wife, Louise, who left him eight years ago, writes that she is returning with the children. Terrified of the war in France, she travels from Paris to India with their two daughters, Emily and Binnie, the latter of whom Charles has never seen, because she was born after the separation.
Dismayed by the sight and smells of India, Louisa is appalled and remember why she left. The children, however, love the large house, love being with their father, and especially love their dog, Don, whom Charles gives them against Louise’s wishes. Louise already has two Pekineses, but Emily and Binnie do not think they are “proper” dogs.
As so often happens in Godden’s novels, there is a conflict between man and wife and a tussle over the children. When the dog gets ill, Louise is hysterically sure that it has rabies and insists that he be put down. Charles is more sensible: he sends for the vet, Narayan, who is another of the main characters: Narayan is unhappily married to a young Indian wife, and is having an affair with a rich, beautiful young man, a college student, Anil. Charles and Louise hustle the children off for breakfast with their Greek friends, the Nikolides, because they want to protect them from news of the dog’s illness. But Narayan is slow, in coming and Charles must go to work, so he tells Louise that the dog must not be killed before Emily and Binnie have a chance to say good-bye.
You will not be surprised to learn that haughty Louise disobeys: she immediately orders Narayan to kill the dog. Narayan is intimidated by this arrogant white woman, but he insists on examining the dog, says it’s too early to tell if it is rabies, and they should observe him for a few days. Louise commands him to kill the dog – the murder, as Emily says – and this decision leads to tragedy. No one gets off unscathed, and Louise’s poor management of the situation has repercussions. Even when Louise is right, her inability to consider other people causes trauma. And, surprisingly, we see parallels between Louise and Anil, Narayan’s boyfriend: both are beautiful, arrogant, and disdainful of other people’s feelings.
One quirk I very much like: Godden inserts bits of remembered dialogue in parentheses. In a conversation between Emily and her father, she is trying to make sense of home.
(“What do you call people who live in a country always, Charles?”)
(“Natives, I suppose.”)
(“No, not natives. People who come to it and want to belong to it and never go away.”)
(“Domiciled citizens.”)
(“Then Binnie and I should like to be domiciled citizens, Charles.”)
Breakfast with the Nikolides is one of Godden’s best novels, partly because of the ambiguity. White Louise survives while the Indian aristocrat Anil is quelched. Godden, who grew up in India and ran a ballet school there for many years, is aware of the racial issues. I also recommend her autobiographical novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953), the story of a young, impecunious, pre-hippie mother, Sophie, who moves with her two children to a tiny village in Kashmir, having no idea that their presence will upset the alien culture.
It is a hot, grueling day in late August. Five of us sit in a seminar room. One (that would be I) is armed with a cup of coffee from the Burger Dungeon; another has a cigarette; another brims with health after a wholesome breakfast; a stammering freshman has joined our ranks: and a spaced-out graduate student in English seems bored and negligent, presumably because he needs to study for his comps.
And then the professor strolls into the room.
Like all graduates of college prep schools, who go on to earn Ph.D’s. at Ivy League universities, he refers to us as “Miss” and “Mr.” (Never Ms. or Mrs.) He is a chain-smoker who lines up the cigarettes on the chalk ledge. We wait for him to mistake a cigarette for chalk. He explicates the political and personal background of Cicero’s racy speech, Pro Caelio, which we will read in Latin, marveling over convoluted grammar and figures of speech.
The professor likes to tease us. He says, weeks later, referring to me: “Miss ___ has a BBC accent.” Is it a compliment or an insult? (I think it was affection.) He also exchanges witty, affectionate repartee with the smoking student, who flippantly refers to particles as “throwaway words.” Like us stoic classics majors, Smoking Student just smiles.
Alas, this brilliant, even likable, professor is vicious to the weak. When the freshman translates peior avis as “worse bird,” rather than “worse than our ancestors,” he rips him to shreds. And truly, avis (nominative singular) can mean “bird”; just as avis, from avus, means “than our ancestors.” The Latin vocabulary is sparse, and the same words, and forms of words, have a dozen different meanings. It all has to do with context. I was sorry for the freshman, who did not belong in the seminar (yet).
In recent years, I have reread Pro Caelio with great pleasure: Cicero deflects attention from his client, Caelius, to Clodia, allegedly Caelius’s former girlfriend, and embarks on a sexist attack. He says that Clodia is an older woman, an adulteress who strolls around the pleasure gardens and preys on young men, and that Caelius has dropped her. Thus, she is getting revenge. Very little is known about Clodia: it is supposed that she was also the model for the poet Catullus’s girlfriend, who is known as Lesbia in his poems. But historians forget that there is a persona of the poems, that the “I” is not necessarily the poet, and that many such “loose” women are portrayed in Greek and Latin poetry.
Decades later, I appreciate Cicero’s sophistication and brilliant sentences even more. And yet I constantly worry about him. The republic is dead. He has powerful friends, and serves as consul and in other political positions, but he also collects many enemies along the way.
Even in his early oration, In C. Verrem, “Against Gaius Verres,” I am terrified for him. He is attacking the powerful Verres for corruption during his governorship of Sicily, where he extorted money and confiscated valuable art works from the Sicilians. He also killed many Sicilians.
Cicero goes to Sicily and investigates, and finds damning evidence, but there are delaying tactics in Rome to keep the case from going to trial, and a plot to keep Cicero from being elected aedile.
Fortunately, he does have friends: one of them comes to report on the politics behind the scenes. A powerful Roman official looks into the bribery, and sends some Sicilians home who should have testified in the case.
Cicero writes,
You may be sure that this incident did not please me. I understood very well what I must fear from it. Trustworthy friends and allies reported everything; that baskets were full of Sicilian money, and transferred by a certain senator to a Roman equestrian; and from these, as it were, baskets, ten were left for the senator, on account of my associates. The companies of all the voting tribes were called at night.
One of these men, who thought that he owed everything for my sake, came to me that same night. He explained the points of the speech: the corrupt politician had reminded them how liberally he had treated them before, when he sought the praetorship (office of governor), with many close friends among consuls and praetors. Then he went on to offer a huge bribe, whatever amount they wished, to keep Cicero from procuring the aedileship.
Cicero was known by all the famous people of his day. Catullus addresses a short poem to Cicero. I interpret it as a satire of Cicero’s style, though some think it is a heartfelt thank you (not Catullus’s style).
It is impossible to duplicate the effects of Catullus’s spare, elegant, comical Latin in our verbose English, and I don’t write poetry anyway. But calling himself “the worst of all poets” and Cicero “the best of all patrons” is hyperbolic and fulsome, very much in the style of Cicero’s letters.
This is essentially what Catullus says, but is NOT the poem.
Marcus Tullius, most fluent of Romulus’s descendants, as great as they are and were, so great will your descendants be: Catullus thanks you; Catullus, the worst of all poets, as much the worst of all poets as you are the best of all patrons.
And now I will end my homage to Cicero with a historian’s viewpoint. Anthony Everitt says in Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician:
If few people read his speeches today for pleasure, his philosophical writings are masterpieces of popularization and were one of the most valuable means by which the heritage of classical thought was handed down to posterity. Cicero was not an original philosopher, but all his life he read philosophy and his writings are infused with a humane skepticism that reflects his character more than his age. In that sense, his greatest gift to European civilization was the man himself – rational, undogmatic, tolerant, law-abiding and urbane.
Let me assure you that Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is not science fiction. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, it is a cross-genre collection of character sketches and vignettes. Don’t buckle up: nothing much happens.
Harvey describes a day in the life of six astronauts. On their eighty-eighth day on a space station that orbits the earth 16 times a day, they are overwhelmed by the wonders of Earth seen from outer space. They observe the gorgeous colors on the planet, note the effects of climate change on the terrain, and muse on space travel as politics. Each researches the effect of the lack of gravity in his or her special scientific field: in one cruel experiment, a group of mice learn to fly, while others wither. But the astronauts suffer equally from the lack of gravity: despite their two hours of exercise daily, their muscles weaken and their responses slow.
During a conversation about what inspired them to become astronauts, Nell says it was Challenger, which exploded in seventy seconds, with seven astronauts on board. “I realised space is real, space flight is real, a thing real people do, die doing. Real people, like me, could actually do it, and if I died doing it that would be OK.”
And that’s very sad, don’t you think?
Now can you buckle up, you ask?
Well, no.
Some miss their families, others prefer space. At one time or another, all wish they could stay in space forever. Another spaceship is headed for the Moon, and they would like to take that journey, too.
But the action, such as it is, happens off-stage. A Japanese astronaut’s mother dies, and she dreams about her mother. Another astronaut, Pietro, has a radio conversation with a woman in Vancouver who questions the value of their mission.
There is a discernible structure, but Orbital hasn’t the grace of Ishiguro’sThe BuriedGiant, a quietly beautiful novel which enraged SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who said in her review at The Guardian that literary writers could not and should not write SF. (It is one of my favorite books, though I do not consider it science fiction.) Harvey’s slim volume is not science fiction, either, but it is surprisingly wordy, often more awkward than lyrical, and Ursula K. Le Guin would be annoyed.
We have a tottering stack of books on the bedside table. There is no rhyme nor reason to it: the books appear, as if by magic. Should we try Philip Roth’s dystopian novel, The Plot Against America? Or a translation of Arrian’s The Campaign Against Alexander? How about Susan Howatch’s literary-pop Silverbridge series, which was taught in a seminar at a university?
The question is: when will we sleep?
And so I am switching to anthologies, a more soothing form of bedtime reading, and more appropriate for the bedside table. One can dip into an anthology of poetry or stories and not be overwhelmed by a magnum opus. One can doze.
Here are some recommendations of great anthologies.
The Oxford Book of English Verse. There are two or three editions of this classic. I recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1915, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. (We used to have an updated version, too, but I cannot find it.) If you’re like me, you will binge on Anonymous, or, if you prefer, Thomas Wyatt, Andrew Marvell, Christina Rossetti, and hundreds of other poems.
From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories Selected by Michael Ondaatje. This marvelous collection features many Canadian writers we have read for years but just as many who have not found an audience in the U.S. There are brilliant stories and excerpts from novels by Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Sandra Birdsell, Carol Shields, and Bharatee Mukherjee, but also lesser-known writers like Leon Rooke, Ethel Wilson, and Sheila Watson. N.B. We need to read more Canadian writers.
Dictionary of Saints, by Donald Attwater with Catherine Rachel John. This is a reference book, not an anthology, but the entries are fascinating. Who was Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr, you may ask! Or Isidore the Farm Servant? Why didn’t we study the saints in catechism? If only we’d gone to Catholic school!
The Oxford Book of Short Stories, edited by V. S. Pritchett. I highly recommend this anthology for common readers and for teachers who are tired of The Norton Anthology. Pritchett has chosen a short stories and novellas by writers of different eras and nationalities: Mary Lavin, R. K. Narayan, Eudora Welty, Joseph Conrad, Walter de la Mare, Doris Lessing, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Trevor, to name a few. You know I hate writing notes in books, but I did make a few marginal notes in The Secret Sharer. I scribbled either “dual secrets” or “duel of secrets.” It is illegible, but I’m inclined to go with “dual secrets.”
Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real, edited by Celia Correas de Zapata, with a foreword by Isabel Allende. “There never really was a women’s literature, strictly speaking, in Latin America,” writes Celia Correa de Zapata in the introduction. She introduce us to many women writers not commonly translated into English, among them Helena Araujo, Olga Orozco, and Maria Teresa Solari. In the biographies in the back of the book, you can learn more about their lives and works. Very few of their books have been translated. And yet there are all those Latin American men!
Perhaps an anthology will be more soothing than the expensive herbal remedies that should but do not help us sleep.Anyway, I like the look of an anthology on the bedside table.
One wonders why it took so long – for you, for me, and the rest of the world – to rediscover Bette Howland’s Blue in Chicago (1978), a stunning collection of stories and essays. Howland published only three books, and did not care to talk of her work in terms of genre: when asked if they were stories or essays, she vaguely said it was all about finding the right form. Some of the “stories” are definitely essays, particularly “Twenty-Sixth and California,” a description of the culture of a criminal courtroom in a poverty-stricken Chicago neighborhood. Blue in Chicago was rescued from oblivion in 2019 by A Public Space and reissued as Calm Sea and a Prosperous Journey. Picador in the UK reissued it in 2020 with the original title.
.Neighborhoods, borders, boundaries, and perimeters are important to Bette Howland. In the title story, the unnamed narrator, a graduate student, reluctantly prepares to attend her cousin’s wedding. Her Jewish family bands together for all festivities, holidays, and celebrations, but they do not visit her in Hyde Park, a poor neighborhood on the South side, near the University of Chicago, where the crime rate is high. Her parents live on the north side in a working-class white neighborhood; her grandmother lives in the poorest place of all, Uptown, a slum with cheap apartments inhabited by old people who eke out their final days chatting in lobbies or in front of their buildings.
Howland is also keenly aware of the divisions of race, religion, rich and poor, crime and safety. At the beginning of “Blue in Chicago,” the narrator hears on the radio that a university student has been killed in a hold-up in Hyde Park. “I listened for details – the time of night, a number, a street. You always want to know how close. You always want to know how close these things have come to you.”
But Howland also has a sense of humor. The narrator dutifully takes a long mass transit journey to her parents’ house, and then they go to the wedding. There is much slapstick humor as Uncle Rudy, the driver, refuses to follow the directions on the mimeographed sheet. He insists on taking the Edens Expressway, and gets thoroughly lost, despite the objections of all the women in the car. When they finally arrive, the wedding is in full swing, but there is much muttering on both sides of the aisle about the interfaith marriage: cousin Gregg was born Jewish but no one knows what he is now, while the bride is Catholic. “’Jewish?’ the ladies on the other side were saying. ‘You really think he’s a Jew?’”
One of the most delightful stories is “Public Facilities.” The narrator works as a part-time intern at a branch of the Chicago Public Library, where old men gather every day to read the financial pages of The Wall Street Journal and Barrons’ and stay till closing time. They may be penniless, they may have nowhere to go, but they remember when they were young and either dreamed of money or at least had enough.
The description of the relationships between the librarians and patrons is gently humorous. Miss Rose is friendly and chatty, a modern librarian, who keeps the newspapers in her desk for the regulars, and is sometimes shushed by the patrons. On the other hand, the head librarian is a “Shhh” librarian, who demands that patrons show ID before they are allowed to return books. She also keeps all the new books in her office for months, because she doesn’t trust the cataloguing of the librarians at the main library. In fact, she would prefer not to allow the patrons to get their hands on nice, clean, new books at all. Miss Rose is the arbiter of reason and diplomacy: she does her best to soothe everyone. But even libraries are not safe: one day a young man who has stalked one of the women employees comes in and attacks, screaming that they are all “lousy Jews.” The old men stand up and gallantly try to defend the women, ihough their blows are ineffectual. Still, the young man goes away. But they don’t have security guards at the branch library and uneasily worry that he might come back.
Howland’s brilliant novella, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, jumps back and forth in time from June 1 to June 6. The narrator is a former lover and the mother of an acolyte of Victor Lazarus, a philosopher who is dying of cancer. She is weary and frazzled, thoroughly fed up with all of Victor’s friends, his second ex-wife, referred to as X, who is persona non grata with Victor, and his academic “friends,” who betrayed him after a secretary checked his resume data and squealed to one of the profs that Victor never finished his Ph.D – or rather, two Ph.D s. Although Victor had taught at the university for decades, ans was a celebrity philosopher, who lectured all over the world, and published innumerable books, they fired him. This is the kind of world Howland’s narrator bears witness to during Victor’s sad, painful death, as she struggles to care for him, and he struggles to breathe and swallow, with a trachea that never healed.
BOOKER PRIZE GOSSIP
In the NB column in the TLS (August 8, 2024), the columnist, M.C., analyzes the history and politics of the Booker Prize. She writes, “Another year, another longlist for the Booker prize. Another chance as well, then, to marvel at the media’s various attempts to generate excitement about this weariest of marketing devices.”
In the column she wonders what excitement there can be about the number of Americans on the list (the yearly average, she says, is four, ), and what the deal is with “the first Dutch writer on the longlist.” After reading the Dutch novel, I certainly wondered! Yes, the Booker announcements are the same every year.
One year I participated with other bloggers in reading the longlist. I gave up after the fifth book, a but the late Kevin of Canada took it seriously and was, by the way, no PR maven – he was tough on books and read every last one.
As an American, I liked to use the Booker list to learn about interesting English books and books of the Commonwealth! Gosh, now it is ruined. What a year for Americans, ay? And we have our own awards. Yes, we’re not in the dark ages here.
Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry
I am halfway through the Booker Prize longlisted novel, Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent, which was also adapted as a TV series. I am very enthusiastic about this novel, though it’s too soon for me to say, “Buy it!” Perry’s prose is gorgeous, and the characters are fascinating. Thomas Hart, a newspaper columnist (his graceful, whimsical columns are included in the novel), becomes obsessed with astronomy and the Hale-Bop comet. He is also curious about the abandoned Lowlands House, reputed to be haunted, where a woman disappeared in the 19th century. A museum director contacts Thomas and gives him the woman’s papers and diary, found under the floorboards of the house. They seem to be connected through Thomas’s new interests: Thomas learns that she was an astronomer and discovered a comet.
His alter ego is young Grace Macaulay, whom he has known since she was a baby. Grace’s parents and Thomas attend the same Baptist chapel, and he and Grace have always been great friends, with a kind of uncle-niece bond. But she runs away to London, and that’s as far as I’ve got. Gorgeous writing, innovative form, plenty of entertaining columns and diary entries to break up the page. a really entertaining book and I expect the second half will be every bit as brilliant.
The first inkling I had that English classes were changing came when I worked at a college bookstore. It was not a real bookstore: it sold mostly sweatshirts and book bags, and carried only the books on the college syllabuses.
Assigned to tidy up sweatshirts, a co-worker and I snuck down to the dark book basement to see what the professors were assigning. We questioned the inclusion of the beloved Anne Tyler and the brilliant horror writer Stephen King on an English literature syllabus. Students can read these two on their own: they should be immersed in the canon at the university.
Since then, I have come across other instances of pop fiction in college English classes. There are seminars on hobbits and The Lord of the Rings. There was an enticing course on Susan Howatch’s six-novel Starbridge series, which thrillingly describes politics and intrigues in the Church of England. I love those books, but was not sure they merited a college class. Yet Howatch is a brilliant writer of what I call literary-pop fiction, and has written in every genre from Gothics to family sagas to the more literary Starbridge books. Perhaps her fluid work does belong in the canon.
Why does the swing from classics toward pop fiction upset me? Most English departments still offer Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration Comedy, Defoe to Austen, and Virginia Woolf, as well as pop lit classes. The pop fiction is just the carrot to the donkey. Teachers use allure and magic to catch their students’ fancy. But if professors are looking for classics not quite in the canon, I recommend the Library of America collection. They publish omnibus editions of Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Spencer, Peter Taylor, Nancy Hale, Joanna Russ, S. J. Perelman, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
For one semester, I, too, taught a college English class. And now I remember: I assigned a mix of literature and pop literary fiction. It was a sad semester: I was ill much of the time, but had to bicycle in the snow to the college because the bus stop in our neighborhood was dominated by addicts. Sometimes I was so ill that my gallant husband substituted.
Looking back, I had a smart syllabus but I also pandered. I assigned Ron Hansen’s contemporary novel Atticus in conjunction with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer: Hansen’s book was partly a homage to Conrad. We also discussed E. M. Forster’s Howards End in conjunction with Bill Owens’s classic book of photographs, Suburbia. And I promiscuously gave extra credit for attending readings at the college, and for reading and journaling about these writers’ books.
When I criticize the pop-classics overlap, I am not considering the reality of teaching. Instead, I am remembering my own education. We stuck to languages and literature in those days. There were no home computers or cell phones to distract us. Anyway, we adored literature. My boyfriend and I did not even have phones. We made our arrangements in person.
Because the approach to teaching English literature is much more desperate these days, I prefer teaching Latin. (I always did: my degrees are in classics.) There can’t be much fudging when one translates Virgil, Horace, and Caesar.. Translation is flexible, but must be deciphered through a complex web of Latin grammar, and I asked the students to identify grammatical constructions. .Even those who had difficulty with translation could chant “ablative absolute” and “historical infinitive” in a bored manner. I am traditional: I drilled them in grammar. And Latin teachers still used books and paper, not computers. As late as 2011, in an adult education class, I was writing on a whiteboard.
If I were still teaching, I would pander, of course. The students have electronic distractions , and I suppose one can’t collect their phones at the door(!!!???). I feel a kind of despair, but we’ve been through the pandemic, we’ve had to Zoom, and there’s no going back.
“Are you high?” I was having an imaginary conversation with the 2024 Booker Prize judges. That’s because I was unimpressed with The Safekeep, a nominee.
Every year the judges are given a mountain of books, this year 156, to skim, scan, peruse, and, whenever possible, actually read. The Booker Prize judges are committed to positive thinking, or they would not be on the panel. They will not say an interview, “What a shit-load of bad books!”
And so it begins. The brave Booker judges launch their list.
And then I read one of them.
After finishing The Safekeep, a first novel by a Dutch writer, Yael van der Wouden, I wrote in my book journal, “It is barely literary fiction.” Let me elaborate: it is NOT literary fiction. It is pop fiction.
The plot is simple. There is a mystery surrounding Uncle Karel’s country house. It is 1962, and the strange, possibly Aspergers heroine, Isabel, has lived here since her family fled Amsterdam in 1944. Now Isabel lives alone in the house and devotes herself to cleaning and polishing her late Mother’s cherished things, special plates with the design of a hare, fancy silverware, and furniture. She also gardens maniacally. Everything looks perfect, though Isabel’s mental health is none too good.
Then her younger brother Hendrik tells her the things were not Mother’s at all, but came with the house. Isabel is uncertain. That couldn’t be true, could it? And when her older brother Louis installs his sexy girlfriend, Eva, in the house with Isabel, while he takes a business trip, she is outraged. She should not have to deal with this silly woman. Spoons begin to disappear. Either Eva or the maid is stealing. But the house belongs to Thomas, and he can move in and kick out Isabel any time he wants.
If this novel were by Evie Wyld, author of the superb novel, The Bass Rock, we would be on board. Wyld writes elegantly and lyrically about a house, and meticulously etches the characters and their surroundings. But The Safekeep is lumbering and lackluster, lacking complexity, even as the relationship between Isabel and Eva intensifies. The one saving grace is Eva’s diary, in the final part of the book.
The judges must have thought,. “Well, it’s not special but what about the ending?”
Yes, but… there’s the rest. It won’t win the Booker! The judges are not high: just diplomatic.
We are art tourists. We haunt art museums and read art exhibition catalogues. At The National Gallery, we are ecstatic but have fits of the vapors which we treat with inhalers, or rush outside to breathe fresh air if we can find the way out. It is difficult to experience the same rapture at small museums in the midwest. I calculate that we must travel 200-600 miles to see good art, and 600 or more to see great art.
This summer we are not traveling much, but recently visited two art museums in Iowa.
We are fond of Iowa City, though there has been so much “development” that I no longer recognize the skyline. There are hundreds of new condominiums built in a style I call Socialist Chic or Gulag Grit. And the stores are always changing: Iowa Book and Supply, once known as Iowa Book & Crook, no longer sells books, or even supplies, and technically should be renamed Iowa Sweatshirt. The Mill, a popular bar/restaurant, frequented by generations of Writers’ Workshop intelligentsia and carpenters with Ph.D.’s, has actually been demolished.
Mural, 1943, Jackson Pollock
One thing I was confident of: there was a new art museum. The 1969 building where I used to sit raptly cross-legged in front of my favorite Jackson Pollock painting was pommeled and destroyed by a flood in 2008. A gorgeous new museum finally opened a few years ago. I approve the building, but the most exciting news is: The Jackson Pollock is back. This painting, called Mural, 1943, was Pollock’s largest painting. And it feels like my painting, because I communed with it when I was young. Peggy Guggenheim, who donated it to the university, used to have it in the foyer of her house in New York.
Cedar Rapids is a bigger town, and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is a world-class museum: I do not say this lightly. If you are a fan of regional art, you will go gaga. I was enthralled by Grant Wood’s paintings, and also became acquainted with another regional artist, Marvin Cone, who worked with and traveled abroad with Grant Wood in 1920.
Grant Wood (1891-1942) was born near Anamosa, Iowa, and raised in Cedar Rapids, where he lived off and on most of his life. He is best known for American Gothic, a painting I have never admired. His brilliant American Impressionist paintings, slightly surreal landscapes, poignant portraits, and WPA murals must be seen to evaluate his versatile talent.
Young Corn, Grant Wood
Take a look at this rolling landscape with round trees. It looks a bit like pastry. It evokes the pastoral midwest of my childhood, before cell phone towers dotted fields and industrial farmers cut down all the trees. Everything is so very green. No interstate disrupts the peace. I’d love to live in the country – the country of the past.
In 1934 Wood began teaching at the University of Iowa and also worked as the Director of the Public Works of Art Projects in Iowa. I have seen the spectacular murals he designed in Ames at The Iowa State University Library. Wood designed them: other artists painted them. Here is a panel:
Panel of WPA mural designed by Grant Wood
Cone (1891-1965) was obviously influenced by Wood’s style, but his work is quieter and his colors paler. He is famous for his cloudscapes, which are bizarre and indecipherable to me. Still, it is fascinating to see the echoes of Wood’s influence on Cone, who is himself an excellent artist, and it is satisfying to see the art in Cedar Rapids where both Wood and Cone lived and worked.
Jane Austen’s novels are my comfort reads. In her last complete novel, Persuasion, a gentle romance, Austen considers the power of persuasion. Persuasion ruined Anne Elliot’s life, though the gentle heroine blames no one. Persuaded by her mentor, Lady Russell, who was her late mother’s best friend, that it would be imprudent to marry Captain Wentworth, since he was in the Navy and beneath her in class, Anne, now 27, regrets the decision.
The truth is that eight years ago the opposition beat her down. Her ridiculous father, Sir Walter Elliot, who likes reading the Baronetage (a book listing baronets), said the match would be “degrading.” Lady Russell thought it “unfortunate” that a man of Captain Wentworth’s “uncertain profession” and lack of “connexions” would propose marriage.
Anne is confused, incoherent, and desperate to rationalize. “Had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up. – The belief of being prudent, and self-denying principally for his advantage, was her chief consolation, under the misery of a parting…” Captain Wentworth was hurt and furious: he left the country. And now he is a wealthy, successful naval captain – a suitable match.
Single daughters and widows in Regency England are often emotionally, if not financially, dependent on their families. Anne, a single woman, has and had no autonomy or power. Now at 27, she has lost her looks and is on the way to being an old maid, or so people say. Anne is dutiful, the one who visits and cares for her hypochondriac married younger sister, Mary, when Mary has a headache or an imaginary cold. Anne also looks after Mary’s unruly children.
This is not the fate of her unmarried older sister, Elizabeth. By a twist, Elizabeth is her father’s female double, treated more like his younger sister than like a daughter. Father and daughter are always together. Elizabeth, a vain, empty-headed woman, does not have to visit Mary. That is Anne’s duty. Elizabeth is still beautiful – almost a professional beauty – but slightly anxious about marriage now that she is 29. She has her eye on delightful Mr. Elliot, the relative who will inherit Kellynch after her father’s death, because Sir Walter has no male progeny. But delightful men are not always the most devoted, as we know from Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Crawford in Mansfield Park, and Wickham in Pride and Prejudice,
Very little of the novel is set at Kellynch (the Elliots’ home. Travel is very much part of the characters’ lives. Travel to Bath and Lyme gives the characters more scope for action. Anne’s father and Elizabeth move to an apartment in Bath, where they parade around in all their beauty, while Anne is taking care of Mary at Upcross. Here she encounters Captain Wentworth. Anne barely dares to look at him at first. He has not forgiven her. And yet he is always swiftly, discreetly helping her. He assists her into a carriage when she is tired; when Mary’s unruly little son climbs on her back and won’t get off, he swoops down and removes him.
Captain Wentworth is courteous, but when the Musgroves visit Lyme, she attracts two eligible men, one of them Mr. Elliot. Anne’s rivals, Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove, Mary’s young, vivacious sisters-in-law, are perfect marriage candidates for Captain Wentworth. Anne assumes that he will marry Louisa, the liveliest of the two.
The marriage plot proceeds. In Bath, Anne once again meets Captain Wentworth and Mr. Elliot. But we also contrast Anne’s not-particularly-enviable position with that of her old school friend, Mrs. Smith, an impecunious widow, who lives in a tiny room, crippled and poor. Having lost all her money and marital status, she entertains herself with gossip delivered by her nurse and the maid. Anne does not approve of gossip, but Mrs. Smith’s correspondence backs up her experiences with charming but devious Mr. Elliot. Anne’s instinct was right: she had not entirely liked him.
In this perfect novel, Austen portrays a mature heroine: Austen’s other heroines are in their late teens or early twenties. Certainly it is delightful to read about a woman blooming in her late twenties. If only Austen had lived longer, she might have written about even older women. That is not, however, in the tradition of the 19th-century novel.
