Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday August 20, 2010
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THE DOCTOR AND THE DIVA
Adrienne McDonnell
Pamela Dorman/Viking
ISBN 978-0-670-02188-8
26.95 422 pages
$26.95 422 pp
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books regularly for The Washington Post
Some novels just naturally enslave you, and this is one of them. "The Doctor and the Diva" (what a frivolous title for such a serious and gripping book!) is a carefully researched period piece, covering the period from 1904 to 1914, set in very respectable Boston, wild and uncharted Trinidad and the operatic community of Florence, Italy. It's about a musically gifted matron, Erika von Kessler, who dreams of running away from her husband, Peter, a prosperous cotton importer, and pursuing a career as a professional opera singer abroad. Peter, although he is aware of his wife's gifts and proud of her singing ability, is utterly oblivious to her longings. His desires point in another direction: He wants a child. But Erika has been unable to conceive, and the couple has already visited several fertility doctors.
Enter a new, young Boston physician, Dr. Ravell, who once saw the beautiful Erika at the funeral of an eminent colleague where she alighted from a shiny black motorcar at twilight during a snowfall in an ermine cloak to sing an aria. The deceased had requested it of her before his death: "When they bury me, I want you to send me up to heaven with that song."
When Peter and Erika visit Ravell the reader becomes aware that Erika and the doctor will fall in love or, at the very least, have an affair. But the trio, of course, have no knowledge of this, and their tale is like watching three cars converge on an intersection: We know disaster looms but the drivers aren't so lucky.
Peter, the husband, is virile, strong-willed, exuberant, adventurous, and Erika is very physically involved with him. If asked, she would certainly say she loves him and would certainly say that she wants his child. But she also wants to go to Italy to sing. She cannot see why she shouldn't have everything she wants. That question hasn't come up yet in her life. But by page 14, Ravell has discovered that Peter has no sperm in his semen. Without revealing too much of the plot, we can say that Erika does give birth and that she does escape from Boston to pursue her dream.
In a postscript, McDonnell reveals that Erika and Peter are based on relatives from her husband's side of the family. There was a loving wife who ran away to become an opera singer, an export-import businessman who spent time on a coconut plantation in Trinidad and, yes, a darling little boy lost in the shuffle of divorce, who wrote "heartrending letters ... from boarding school." The details of the novel -- such as the long coach rides down a Trinidad beach where the sands are firm as pavement -- gets its richness from diaries, clippings and letters. The effectiveness of the narrative comes from the novelist's striking skill. From the very first pages we are utterly engaged in what's going to happen to these three people -- they become as close to us as family friends. Each has legitimate ambitions and dreams; each is capable of acting with astonishing selfishness and self-interest.
The worldview of this novel is based upon the pleasure principle: The world is so sensuously beautiful -- rivers and oceans and operas and dance and even suffering. Each in his or her own way is so alluring. These three people give themselves over to their passions. They smell every perfume, every last flower, every last drop of human sweat. (That sense of smell, in fact, is used insistently and dramatically here, with striking, almost perfect effect.)
We forget it all too often, but the world offers us immeasurable enchantment -- if only we keep our eyes open, our ears alert, and remember to inhale. In this brilliant, debut novel, Adrienne McDonnell gives us bouquets of fresh flowers in modest apartments overlooking the Arno, where passing strangers pause, enraptured, to listen to the exquisite music being sung from above.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH
Rick Moody
Little, Brown
ISBN 978 0 316 11891 0
725 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by John McNally, whose most recent novel is "After the Workshop." His next book, "The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice From an Unrepentant Novelist," will be released in September.
In a recent interview Rick Moody described "The Four Fingers of Death" as "a 900-page comic novel about a disembodied arm set in the desert in 2026." And maybe that's all you need to know about it because, let's face it, the idea for such a novel will appeal to you or it won't. In fact, I bet this very minute you're either reaching for your credit card or moving on to the next article.
Moody himself is just such a divisive writer. Most avid readers I know are either loyal fans or, like Dale Peck, who famously called Moody "the worst writer of his generation," staunch detractors. However you feel about him, though, Moody is a major attraction on the literary landscape, and his new novel, beginning with its dedication to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, is Moody's attempt to plant himself alongside such literary luminaries as Thomas Pynchon and Vonnegut himself.
To be fair, "The Four Fingers of Death" is a mere 725 pages long, and it's about more than what Moody says it's about. It opens in the year 2024 with Montese Crandall, a woebegone writer of one-sentence short stories, married to Tara Schott Crandall, an obsessive gambler and recipient of a double-lung transplant. In need of money because of his wife's addiction and illness, Montese plays a game of chess with the mysterious D. Tyrannosaurus in order to win the chance to write a novelization of the campy 1963 sci-fi movie "The Crawling Hand." ("The Crawling Hand" is a real movie, by the way, available on Hulu.)
Montese's novelization of "The Crawling Hand" composes the bulk of Moody's behemoth novel, and it's the story of astronauts on an ill-fated trip to Mars, culminating in the return of our chatty narrator's severed arm to Arizona, where, missing a finger, it wreaks havoc. Along the way, we encounter, among other things, flesh-eating bacteria, Mexican wrestlers and a United States that is losing population.
There are two kinds of novelists: those who are like method actors, inhabiting the consciousness of a narrator so as to put us in that narrator's shoes, and those who are puppeteers, standing above and manipulating their narrator. Moody is the latter. Unfortunately, the result is that I couldn't respond to his novel on a visceral level. In fact, I rarely felt any emotions at all as I was reading it.
At times, the entire story seems to be a platform for Moody to show off his talent for digression, whether it's about bookstore readings, irritable bowel syndrome in outer space or acronyms like CBFs (chipped beef flakes). But there is an unnerving iciness to the way Moody spends several pages detailing Montese's wife's double-lung transplant. The details become increasingly fetishistic, as when Montese observes "both (lungs) were full of pus and fluid and dead carbon-based gunk, stuff that Tara could no longer eliminate from her bronchi, stuff the color of turned mayonnaise." Or, Tara "didn't want to corrode her new lungs with the same mucoid rice pudding that had gummed up the last pair." How much of this does the reader need?
Any similarities between Vonnegut's work and Moody's novel are superficial. The best of Vonnegut's novels were lean and focused; he didn't need 700 pages to write "Cat's Cradle" or "Slaughterhouse-Five." A more notable difference is that in those classics, you feel Vonnegut's presence on every page, but you also invest yourself in the plights of the main characters. He makes you care. Vonnegut's best work never feels self-indulgent.
No, Vonnegut's torch wasn't passed on to Moody, but Moody may well be our new Richard Brautigan, another writer whose work inspired both love and hate, and I suspect that Brautigan, author of the international best-seller "Trout Fishing in America," would have supported Moody's claim in Bookforum that "the realistic novel still needs a kick in the ass. The genre, with its epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement, its conventional humanisms, can still entertain and move us on occasion, but for me it's politically and philosophically dubious and often dull."
If, like me, you still find pleasure in those tired, old conventions that bore Moody, you may have serious problems with his latest, which never really transcends its own cleverness. But if you crave a novel that achieves the opposite of what he finds dubious and dull in the realistic novel, "The Four Fingers of Death" may just be the book you're looking for. Moody has certainly achieved his goals, even if they are often predictable and conventional and dated in their own postmodern ways.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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BLIND MAN'S ALLEY
BLIND MAN'S ALLEYJustin Peacock
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385531061
465 pages
$26.95
THE QUEEN OF PATPONG: A Poke Rafferty Thriller Timothy Hallinan
Morrow
ISBN 978-0061672262
312 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
Justin Peacock's first novel, "A Cure for Night," published two years ago, was the hard-edged story of a young lawyer trying to choose between the grubby life of a public defender in Brooklyn and selling his soul for riches at a big Manhattan firm. It won praise and was nominated for an Edgar award. Peacock's new novel, "Blind Man's Alley," explores the same issues but is longer, more complex and more ambitious than its predecessor. Peacock is a lawyer-turned-novelist who wants to show us Manhattan's interlocking empires of law, politics, journalism, real estate, banking, law enforcement and organized crime. It's an angry portrait of Big Apple corruption and the efforts of two young people, a lawyer and a journalist, to resist its embrace.
Duncan Riley comes from a working-class background but made his way to Harvard Law and a white-shoe Manhattan firm, where he is about to become a partner. At the outset, he's working with a senior partner on two cases, one large and the other seemingly small. The large one involves protecting Roth Properties from liability for the death of three workers during the construction of a condominium tower. The Roth family includes Simon, an overbearing, 70-year-old billionaire; his son Jeremy, who's a drunken fool; and his daughter Leah, who's cold, calculating and likely to inherit the family empire. Leah rather casually seduces Duncan. He can't afford to say no to such an important client, and they both know that even in bed she's the boss.
In the other case, Duncan is representing, pro bono, a young Hispanic who's accused of murdering a security guard at the housing project where he lives. The lawyer becomes convinced of the young man's innocence and resists the demands of his senior partner to arrange a plea bargain that will send the youth to prison. Soon it seems that Duncan must choose between his duty to his client and the partnership that is within his grasp. Moreover, the two cases prove to be connected in ways that involve high-level corruption and even murder. A tough investigative reporter named Candace Snow is digging into all this. She and Duncan pool their resources and soon risk losing their jobs and perhaps their lives.
As this saga plays out, Peacock paints a caustic portrait of life at the top. Leah, the heiress, dismisses one competitor thusly: "The Donald's a haircut and a franchising plan, not a real developer." She also tells Duncan, "Did you know that back in the 1930s the rule of thumb on skyscraper construction was that one worker would die for each floor built?" Candace's editor, taking her off the Roth story, says, "I get that it sucks, but there're a lot of other dirty fish in this slimy sea of ours."
The novel's panoramic look at New York recalls Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Its portrait of a young lawyer disillusioned by the realities of practicing law echoes some of John Grisham's novels, although Peacock is a better writer than Grisham. Peacock's publisher is comparing him to Scott Turow, but that's a stretch. Peacock's book is intelligent and engrossing, but it lacks Turow's depth. His characters are vivid but a little slick, and his story's ending is a bit too easy. Still, "Blind Man's Alley" is a superior legal thriller by a writer with talent to burn.
Timothy Hallinan's "The Queen of Patpong" is also a study in urban corruption but on a smaller scale. The city is Bangkok, and the corruption is that of its thriving prostitution trade. Poke Rafferty, a travel writer, is married to Rose, a Thai who once worked in Patpong, a celebrated red-light district. Poke and Rose have built a good life for themselves. He recently published a successful book. Rose operates a house-cleaning service staffed by ex-prostitutes. Their adopted daughter Miaow, once a street child, is starring as Ariel in a school production of "The Tempest."
Trouble arrives in the person of Horner, a soldier of fortune who was formerly Rose's lover. They parted badly, and now he's back seeking revenge. It becomes clear that he's a psychopath and a killer. At this point, the plot is a familiar one: A decent man must protect his family from a monster. (John D. MacDonald's "The Executioners," filmed as "Cape Fear," is a masterpiece of this genre.)
"The Queen of Patpong" abruptly shifts gears when Rose decides to give her husband and daughter the full story of her early life. Her 130-page narrative tells you far more than you ever expected to know about the wages of sin in Thailand. Many young Thai women enter prostitution out of economic necessity, but Hallinan focuses on those who are forced into it by beatings or by being "sold" by their fathers to traffickers. We see Rose as a shy, beautiful teenager who loses her virginity to a crooked police captain but goes on to be the "queen of Patpong" before she escapes to a better life. Finally, when her story ends, we return to Poke's confrontation with the psychopath. Ultimately, the inside look at Thailand's vast prostitution industry is more real, and more interesting, than the clash between husband and monster.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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