Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday February 18, 2011
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BEING POLITE TO HITLER
Robb Forman Dew
Little, Brown
ISBN 978-0316889506
304 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Rachel Basch, the author of the novels "The Passion of Reverend Nash" and "Degrees of Love"
"Being Polite to Hitler" opens in the middle of the 20th century with a middle-aged Agnes Scofield in need of a change. Early widowhood had forced her into teaching to support her children and maintain the Scofield family home. By 1953, her children are all grown with children of their own, and Agnes realizes that she never wants to teach another day in her life. As the novel distills 20 years of family life -- accidents and illnesses, marriages and separations, births and deaths -- the reader will, as Robb Forman Dew writes, "come to the inevitable conclusion that the profound and the mundane are joined at the hip, and each one is dependent upon the human ability to recognize the other."
Readers fortunate enough to have been introduced to the Scofields of Washburn, Ohio, in "The Evidence Against Her" and "The Truth of the Matter," novels chronicling the lives of the family from the late 19th century until just after World War II, need no inducement to seek out this third book in the series. While Dew's novels can be read independently of one another, taken together they're a remarkable achievement, a vividly detailed and deeply textured mural of a century of American life.
"Being Polite to Hitler" is a red herring of a title. It refers to an accusation that Agnes' daughter-in-law, Lavinia, hurls at her husband, Claytor, after the Garden Club Christmas party. Claytor's need for propriety had trumped his morality, silencing him during an argument about the Rosenberg executions. Dew uses the Scofield family to illuminate postwar America, and she uses the country's history to explore the characters in her novel.
Dew deploys a dazzling number of narrative perspectives. The story is sprinkled throughout with cameos by cultural icons: Robert Lowell, the poet; Peter Taylor, the writer; Martyl Langsdorf, the artist responsible for the rendering of the Doomsday Clock; and Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist. Occasionally, Dew abandons her fictional characters altogether and allows a narrator who seems to be part-social scientist, part-tribal elder to hold forth on current events: the 1957 Asian flu outbreak in Louisiana, the integration that same year of Little Rock Central High School, or even the decreasing popularity of ball-fringed cafe curtains and the fad for the color turquoise. With a metafictional wink and a nod from Dew, the narrator comments, "In fact, not until the second decade of the twenty-first century would Sputnik's connection to the demise of Desert Rose dinnerware ... be noted and remarked upon in a novel written late in the career of one of those three-named women writers who initially cropped up in the 1980s."
The novel is most powerful when sweeping historical and social changes are registered within the framework of Dew's fictional creations. In 1953, a young child playing outside hears a factory's noon whistle and is sure that it's "a siren foretelling the end of the world. ... Martha sprang up from the ground and stood gazing up into the scudding distance, not even aware that she herself had let loose a long shriek of anguish, a continual wail of horrified aloneness, despair, and resignation, uncommon among children who live in a country that's not under siege."
Dew zooms into the hearts and minds of her characters with the kind of acuity that reminds us why we read. Chief among the rewards of this novel is the delineation of a stage of human development given little attention in popular culture, that of the older woman. While reading the newspaper, Agnes sees an advertisement for a department store sale and acknowledges that she's never liked wearing hats. "She always felt sorry for Mamie Eisenhower whenever she was photographed in a hat perched over her jauntily sad, ringlet-like bangs. As Agnes looked over the illustrations of wool pillboxes, a crushed satin pancake hat with a feather quill, and a handsome, brimmed, modified felt fedora, she realized that it was unlikely she would ever buy another hat for herself as long as she lived. The idea took her by surprise on various levels -- the casual acknowledgment of her own mortality, as well as her sudden conviction that only she would ever again be the source of her autonomy. ... It was a recognition of the end of vicarious yearning. It was about reclaiming and slaking her own desires after the long years of their being defined by the people to and for whom she felt responsible."
Throughout the novel, Dew renders the political personal and the personal incandescent.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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DESTINY AND DESIRE
Carlos Fuentes. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Random House
ISBN 978-1400068807
415 pages
$27
Reviewed by Marcela Valdes, who recently received the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism from the Center for Fiction
Carlos Fuentes is known for writing serious books about Mexico, and despite all its silliness, his latest novel, "Destiny and Desire," is clearly not intended as an exception. The book fairly smokes with acid commentary on Mexican history ("It has all been betrayal, lies, cruelty, and vengeance") and political manipulation ("Throughout Latin America homage is paid to the law only to violate it more thoroughly").
Giving himself fuel to burn, Fuentes sets "Destiny" in a law school, a prison, a presidential palace and the headquarters of a telecommunications billionaire who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mexico's richest citizen, Carlos Slim. For those who like a flash of magic, there's also a heaven where angels play poker and a windy graveyard dominated by the ghost of Mexico's old ideals.
The novel opens, however, in a much sweeter location: the postcard-perfect beaches of Mexico's Pacific Coast. There lies our narrator: the decapitated head of 27-year-old Josue Nadal. A bloody noggin may be a surprising choice for raconteur, but Josue's story feels familiar. It starts with his idealistic strivings and ends with his disastrous introduction to the backrooms of Mexican power.
The day that marks his fate occurs when Josue is 16. Bullied by classmates for his long, thin nose -- "Anteater snout," they call him, along with "Monster schnoz" and "Elephant honker" -- he finally defends his honor by punching the schoolyard leader. He's saved from a retaliatory beating when one of his tormentors suddenly turns coat and jumps to his aid.
Josue's new ally is Jerico, a 17-year-old as mysterious as James Bond: He claims to have no family and no last name. Such freakish isolation might give a normal young man pause, but Josue's domestic situation is equally strange. He has no memories of a mother or father; he's been raised by a chilly guardian who barely speaks, and, like Jerico, his expenses are all covered by an invisible and anonymous "senor."
Having triumphed over the epithet-shouters, Josue and Jerico seal their alliance by committing themselves to a "project for life." Their goal is intellectual independence: "We would not permit anyone to inculcate in us opinions that weren't ours" -- no small feat for two lonely musketeers enrolled in a stern Catholic school. Their first step is to debate the merits of Saint Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche in the gym showers. Nietzsche, however, proves a kind of gateway drug. Soon enough, the boys have moved from sharing books to sharing mentors to sharing an apartment to sharing a favorite whore.
What they don't share is Jerico's will to power. The older he gets, the more Jerico craves public position, while Josue aches mostly for love. They might have run happily along parallel courses -- one chasing votes, the other chasing skirts -- if it weren't for two interfering factors. Powerful men have stakes in their careers. And Jerico likes criminals. "Above all things," he tells Josue, "I admire the man who murders what he loves."
In theory, all of this -- cynical social commentary, anonymous benefactors, dangerous friendship -- could be marvelous. But the unavoidable fact is that not a single character in "Destiny and Desire" won my affection, or even my curiosity. Fuentes suggests alternately that Josue and Jerico are like the Greek demigods Castor and Pollux or like the Biblical brothers Cain and Abel. Sure. The problem is that they feel too much like ideas, not enough like men.
And their female paramours are worse: a mute whore whose husband becomes paralyzed after an energetic sex act; a femme fatale who is all ice and calculation; a drug-addicted nymphomaniac who nicknames one of the boys "Savior." Had these women strutted through an old Chandler novel, I may well have enjoyed them, or at least enjoyed laughing over them. But Fuentes lacks Chandler's lightning style. On being asked by a taxi driver, "Where to chief?" Josue falls into high-toned reverie:
"Where to? It was enough to look outside the car at the vast desert of the Anillo Periferico, the outer beltway that foreshadows the funeral that awaits us if we don't choose to turn ourselves into ashes first. Sacrificed after all, we die on the cement perimeter that reflects and celebrates a new city that has shed its old skin ..." and on and on for more than a page. Wading through this soliloquy, I found myself empathizing with the cab driver, whom I imagined drumming his fingers on the wheel, impatient for the plot to lurch ahead.
But let's give Fuentes the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he adopts such turgid prose intentionally, to convey something about Josue's character. Something like: Aching to be a great intellect, Josue has trouble seeing reality. Or maybe: Abandoned by his parents, Josue finds reality so painful that he defends himself with abstractions.
Either of these could be true. Nevertheless, the author's job is to make the reader want to stay with a novel page after page. Fuentes never really pokes fun at Josue's self-importance, never gets around the young man's humorless perspective, the way Howard Jacobson got around his narrator's delusions in "The Finkler Question."
Instead, we're trapped inside the mind of a tendentious young man who is by turns boring, pretentious, insightful and ridiculous. Reader, I would have decapitated him, too.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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SWAMPLANDIA!
Karen Russell
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307263995
316 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Every morning at my parents' condo in South Carolina, alligators appear in the back yard. Lying statue-still in the crisply cut grass, they look as fanciful as unicorns, though unicorns wouldn't snatch neighbors' poodles or lunge at the lawn mower. Forty years ago, my little brother and I used to feed them marshmallows (illegal now; incredibly stupid then). In one of our old 8 mm home movies, you can see the sugary white dots disappearing as a seven-foot monster glides through the water before turning sharply toward the shore where we're standing. A hail of marshmallows rains down as the alligator runs up the bank -- then the empty plastic bag, then the screen lurches and goes black.
Karen Russell's first novel, "Swamplandia!," took me back to that surreal childhood encounter. With a mixture of comedy, terror and nostalgia, she conjures up a run-down theme park 30 miles off the Gulf Coast of Florida, a tourist trap run by a family of phony Indians named the Bigtrees: "Catch the late show, Saturdays. Alligators! Starry nights! It's like Van Gogh meets Rambo." Indeed, this is no Disney World; the major attraction is "Live Chicken Thursday," when alligators leap out of the water to snatch hens from a clothesline. People come by the hundreds for a swampy serving of grotesque death and macabre slapstick. An experienced alligator wrestler, Chief Bigtree, warns that the reptile "can hoard its violence for millions and millions of years. ... It's pure appetite in a leather case."
Russell's work has appeared in "Best American Short Stories," and she's been blessed by the New Yorker, Granta and the National Book Foundation, so this is a debut with an unusual amount of momentum behind it -- all well deserved. If you read "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" (2006), you'll recognize this novel as an expansion of the opening story in that celebrated collection. But at more than 10 times the original story's length, "Swamplandia!" gives those giant lizards room to roam.
As the novel begins, Mrs. Bigtree, who dazzles spectators by diving into a dark pool of several dozen alligators, is killed instead by a fast-moving cancer. The park slips into bankruptcy, and the family stumbles around in a daze of unexpressed grief. Grandpa is consigned to a nursing home, and Dad takes off to the mainland with vague plans to raise money. "Swamplandia!" needs to dispatch its adult characters quickly because this is a story about three lost siblings, young people burdened with more responsibility, affection and sorrow than they can possibly carry alone.
Russell has perfected a tone of deadpan wit and imperiled innocence that I find deeply endearing, but readers allergic to self-consciously quirky characters should take precautions. On this almost make-believe island, the Bigtree children home-school themselves with moldy books from a Library Boat abandoned in the 1950s. They speak with preternaturally mature knowledge without realizing how little they know of the real world. One wrong move and the novel's poignancy could slip into cuteness.
Thirteen-year-old Ava narrates half the story, and she's an irresistible blend of earnestness and courage. Determined to save her family's business by winning an alligator-wrestling competition -- wherever it might be -- she sends letters to the Smithsonian, the state universities and the Florida Wildlife and Gaming Commission: "I was an alligator wrestler," she explains, "accustomed to bold movements. ... I didn't brag exactly, but I made sure the commissioners understood that I was the real deal; I wasn't some unserious church girl from Nebraska who had only ever handled pet-store geckos, or some inlander, 'Rebecca' or 'Mary,' a pigtailed zoo volunteer."
But Ava's more immediate problem is saving her older sister, Ossie, whose depression draws her to spiritualism and a psychotic romance with a dead dredgeman. At the center of the novel is Ava's rescue mission through the mangrove-choked waters of the Ten Thousand Islands in a 14-foot skiff. Russell is trafficking in some classic stories here, from Huck Finn's adventures down the Mississippi to Odysseus' voyage across the River Styx, and you never know when a riptide of tragedy might pull away the humor of "Swamplandia!" As in her short-story collection, she's charted out a strange estuary where heartbreak and comedy mingle to produce a fictional environment that seems semi-magical but emotionally true.
In alternating chapters, a separate strand of the novel follows Ava's older brother, Kiwi, as he tries to make his way on the mainland by working as a janitor at a competing theme park called the World of Darkness. The novel's insistence that each of the Bigtree children go to hell may strike you as a heavy-handed metaphor, but Russell has a lot of fun with this brimstone resort (the Devil's Oven concession stand sells Hellspawn Hoagies and Faustian Bargain Fish Tacos). Like his youngest sister, sweet-hearted Kiwi is a hilarious character, a bumbling, adolescent genius constantly running up against his own naivete. He's desperate to fit in, but he's handicapped by a giant vocabulary of impressive words that he's never heard out loud (he "pronounced 'ominous' so that it rhymed with 'dominoes'").
After a lifetime on Swamplandia, he's like a space alien who knows about teen life only from reading Margaret Mead. With his childlike enthusiasm and his guileless expression of hope, he's a giant Kick Me sign among the thugs and druggies who toil away for minimum wage at the World of Darkness. "Every day, Kiwi's colleagues taught him what you could and could not say to another person here on the mainland," Russell writes. "This was a little like having snipers tutor you on the limits of the prison yard." Eager to prove his heterosexuality, while cleaning one of the rides he recites "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "believing that the beauty of the poem would be self-evident and exonerate him." Alas. And somehow, using the word "pulchritude" in reference to another janitor's girlfriend doesn't win him any points, either. "What was wrong with these philistines?" he wonders.
Despite all the charms of "Swamplandia!," pacing is a problem, as it was for Reif Larsen's "Selected Works of T.S. Spivet," another novel about a precocious child's dangerous, grief-fueled journey. Good short-story writers like Russell know how much depends on endings, those final few breaths of ineffable melancholy, but landing a novel requires something more. After half-a-dozen detours, skating along a thin layer of plausibility, Russell runs through the final pages as though she's being chased by a seven-foot gator. I know that feeling, but I wish she'd taken her time and given this finale a little more room to breathe. After all, she sends her smart, vulnerable characters to hell. We want to know just how deeply they've been singed.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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SHORTCUT MAN
P. G. Sturges
Scribner
ISBN 978-1439194171
209 pages
$24
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, the mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World
I was prepared to do the right thing by P.G. Sturges. That is, to mention only in passing, perhaps at the end of this review, that he's the son of Preston Sturges, the Hollywood screenwriter and director who gave us such witty classics as "Easy Living," "Remember the Night," "The Lady Eve" and "The Palm Beach Story." The child of a genius has a tough enough lot in life, I told myself, without having somebody else harp on the connection.
But then several things happened as I read "Shortcut Man," the younger Sturges' first novel. He had the good sense not to compete directly, instead tackling a genre (the noir thriller) that his father never tried. And then, about halfway through, P.G. himself brought up his dad. Or, rather, his protagonist, Dick Henry, did, mentioning Preston Sturges while driving past the site of the Los Angeles nightclub whose failure sent the director into a long financial and artistic decline. And, finally, the book turned out to be what the elder Sturges might have called "a wow." So I feel free to address the subject right off: The kid (who is now in his 50s) is a credit to his old man.
Dick Henry, an ex-cop for the LAPD, bills himself as the shortcut man because he specializes in bypassing the legal system to take care of wrongdoers who exploit it to keep doing wrong. In the opening vignette, for example, a landlord hires Dick to budge a tenant who will neither pay his rent nor move out, taking advantage of laws and judicial procedures to outstay his welcome for months on end. Henry brings this "professional nonpayer of rent" around by roughing him up. The beauty of hiring Dick is that he still has enough friends on the force to be assured of impunity in case one of his victims is silly enough to complain.
Soon Dick is working for Artie Benjamin, a wealthy porn producer who wants to find out what virtually all noir husbands do: Is my voluptuous wife, the one I married after making it big, cheating on me? The fee Benjamin offers to pay for this sleuthing is sweet, but the job turns sour when it emerges that the adulteress is none other than Lynette, the beautiful and sexually adventurous flight attendant with whom Dick is having an affair. Lynette, of course, isn't a flight attendant at all -- she pretended to be one in order to account for the limited amount of time she can spend with Dick. When confronted with her duplicity, Lynette -- real name Judy -- explains, "I gave you all the me I could give you."
This is an interesting variation on a theme from "The Maltese Falcon," "Double Indemnity," "Red Rock West" and many another noir vehicle (whether novel or film, or both): A money-hungry dame ropes in her pursuer, who wants to believe her when she tells him that she's made a pile of mistakes in her hard life but now, having met him, has figured out at last what love really is.
"Oh, you're good," Humphrey Bogart tells Mary Astor in "The Maltese Falcon" when she goes into her sincere-at-last mode. Judy is good, too -- as well as sexy enough to stop conversation in a restaurant when she walks in -- and the driving question of "Shortcut Man" is whether Dick has it in him to be better.
Sturges has an ample supply of authorial ingenuity, which he distributes throughout the novel. Besides saddling Dick with the burden of, in effect, investigating himself, he puts this shortcut man in the predicament of having "to kill, convincingly, someone who never lived." Occasionally, Sturges might have given his story a bit more room to breathe -- some of the action scenes seem rushed, more like stage directions than narrative -- and it's difficult to put much credence in a jocular flashback about a little boy masquerading as a priest in a confessional.
But overall, this is an assured and diverting performance, with an ending that should impress even the most seasoned fan of hardboiled detective stories. You thought every twist ending in the noir bag had been taken out and used up, P.G. Sturges seems to be saying as the book rushes toward its final page. Well, get a load of this.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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