A Year-end Roundup
As an antidote to the sadness I experienced from the recent election, I needed a diversion from current events. So here are three books that took my mind off, to some extent, of what one wants to forget.
“Razor Girl” by Carl Hiaasen
In one of his funniest sagas about life, low-life, corruption and general mayhem in Southern Florida, this is a wild ride among phony businessmen, ruthless real estate operators, Mafiosi, exotic critters, reality-TV shenanigans and much more, as the honest-cup-demoted-to-restaurant-inspector attempts to unravel a very raveled storyline. That storyline is of secondary consequence in Carl Hiaasen’s series of novels over the last thirty years: the point is the exaggerated but eminently recognizable cast of characters who are prototypes for whichever foibles of humanity he chooses to satirize. Hiaasen, who is also a journalist and columnist for The Miami Herald, has been producing these treasures of hilarity that number, by now, some fifteen novels. They have provided me with welcome amusement for many years; may he continue to produce them. “Razor Girl” is the latest one of the lot, one of the best. If you need laughter, read it.
“Mister Monkey” by Francine Prose
I had been reading Francine Prose’s articles and essays for a long time, but somehow never her novels; “Mister Monkey”, recently published, is the first one, and a wonderfully rewarding experience it has been. The book is one of those masterly balancing acts that manage to be incredibly sad and extremely funny simultaneously, breaking your heart with recognition of people you know. It is written somewhat as a series of short stories: we proceed through events with the changing viewpoints of several of the protagonists. It all begins at a dim, off-off-off-Broadway production of a children’s play, "Mister Monkey", and the sad, passed-their-prime theater people involved in it; the grandfather and grandson in the audience; the author of the book on which the play is based; an “admirer of the Theater” who happens to be a waiter in the restaurant in which an earnest young teacher is having a date from hell. They all interconnect and we are privy to their thoughts. It is about the discrepancy between early expectations and hopes and the dim achievements of middle and old age; the painful difficulties of being young, the near-hopelessness of finding reciprocated love or professional success commensurate with young ambition. Lest you should think it all too depressing, the achievement of “Mister Monkey” is that it has deep sympathy for all its characters, and that it finds the hope and the amusement in the human condition it depicts.
“Exposure” by Helen Dunmore
Once again, I encountered this newly published and well-reviewed novel by an author who had written several during the past twenty years, and yet this is the first one I had read. “Exposure” could be characterized, I suppose, as a “spy novel”, though that would not be fair to it, it is so much more than that. Taking place in the late fifties and early sixties in London, during the worst period of the Cold War and the notorious events concerning Burgess, McLean, Philby and their ilk, we are in Le Carre country. But this book is not imitation Le Carre. Helen Dunmore chooses to tell her story obliquely, her protagonists are not the main players of the drama but innocent people unwittingly caught up in it. The noose tightens around the ordinary family: the husband who inadvertently becomes a suspect and then a prisoner; the refugee wife whose secure life in law-abiding England turns on its head, and the children who have to grow up very fast to cope with an incomprehensible change in circumstances. This family is beset, on the one hand, by the real culprits who need them as scapegoats, and on the other, by the authorities who see a criminal where none exists. Meanwhile, each player in the drama has his or her own past to contend with, a past that always reaches into the present. “Exposure” is a page-turner that does not resolve until the very last page, and by then we have come to care deeply for the people we have met and rooted for.
*
And now I will do what most comforts me: return to something I have loved in the past. “Dance to the Music of Time”. Anthony Powell’s giant, twelve-volume saga of between-war and post-war England is one of the several life-changing reading experiences I have been fortunate to have; and now is a good time to disappear into it for however long a time it will take to re-meet Charles Stringham, Peter Templer, Nick Jenkins, and last but not least Widmerpool, whose career so reminds one of the rise some current politicians. Rereading these books is a promise I made to myself long ago and I am about to fulfill it.
“Razor Girl” by Carl Hiaasen
In one of his funniest sagas about life, low-life, corruption and general mayhem in Southern Florida, this is a wild ride among phony businessmen, ruthless real estate operators, Mafiosi, exotic critters, reality-TV shenanigans and much more, as the honest-cup-demoted-to-restaurant-inspector attempts to unravel a very raveled storyline. That storyline is of secondary consequence in Carl Hiaasen’s series of novels over the last thirty years: the point is the exaggerated but eminently recognizable cast of characters who are prototypes for whichever foibles of humanity he chooses to satirize. Hiaasen, who is also a journalist and columnist for The Miami Herald, has been producing these treasures of hilarity that number, by now, some fifteen novels. They have provided me with welcome amusement for many years; may he continue to produce them. “Razor Girl” is the latest one of the lot, one of the best. If you need laughter, read it.
“Mister Monkey” by Francine Prose
I had been reading Francine Prose’s articles and essays for a long time, but somehow never her novels; “Mister Monkey”, recently published, is the first one, and a wonderfully rewarding experience it has been. The book is one of those masterly balancing acts that manage to be incredibly sad and extremely funny simultaneously, breaking your heart with recognition of people you know. It is written somewhat as a series of short stories: we proceed through events with the changing viewpoints of several of the protagonists. It all begins at a dim, off-off-off-Broadway production of a children’s play, "Mister Monkey", and the sad, passed-their-prime theater people involved in it; the grandfather and grandson in the audience; the author of the book on which the play is based; an “admirer of the Theater” who happens to be a waiter in the restaurant in which an earnest young teacher is having a date from hell. They all interconnect and we are privy to their thoughts. It is about the discrepancy between early expectations and hopes and the dim achievements of middle and old age; the painful difficulties of being young, the near-hopelessness of finding reciprocated love or professional success commensurate with young ambition. Lest you should think it all too depressing, the achievement of “Mister Monkey” is that it has deep sympathy for all its characters, and that it finds the hope and the amusement in the human condition it depicts.
“Exposure” by Helen Dunmore
Once again, I encountered this newly published and well-reviewed novel by an author who had written several during the past twenty years, and yet this is the first one I had read. “Exposure” could be characterized, I suppose, as a “spy novel”, though that would not be fair to it, it is so much more than that. Taking place in the late fifties and early sixties in London, during the worst period of the Cold War and the notorious events concerning Burgess, McLean, Philby and their ilk, we are in Le Carre country. But this book is not imitation Le Carre. Helen Dunmore chooses to tell her story obliquely, her protagonists are not the main players of the drama but innocent people unwittingly caught up in it. The noose tightens around the ordinary family: the husband who inadvertently becomes a suspect and then a prisoner; the refugee wife whose secure life in law-abiding England turns on its head, and the children who have to grow up very fast to cope with an incomprehensible change in circumstances. This family is beset, on the one hand, by the real culprits who need them as scapegoats, and on the other, by the authorities who see a criminal where none exists. Meanwhile, each player in the drama has his or her own past to contend with, a past that always reaches into the present. “Exposure” is a page-turner that does not resolve until the very last page, and by then we have come to care deeply for the people we have met and rooted for.
*
And now I will do what most comforts me: return to something I have loved in the past. “Dance to the Music of Time”. Anthony Powell’s giant, twelve-volume saga of between-war and post-war England is one of the several life-changing reading experiences I have been fortunate to have; and now is a good time to disappear into it for however long a time it will take to re-meet Charles Stringham, Peter Templer, Nick Jenkins, and last but not least Widmerpool, whose career so reminds one of the rise some current politicians. Rereading these books is a promise I made to myself long ago and I am about to fulfill it.
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