Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday July 9, 2010
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THE QUICKENING MAZE
Adam Foulds
Penguin
ISBN 978-0143117797
259 pages
$15
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
While a quartet of literary gladiators battled for the Booker Prize last year, a young poet sat on the far edge of the shortlist looking on. Nobody thought Adam Foulds had a chance against Hilary Mantel, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters or J.M. Coetzee for England's most prestigious literary award. The bookies called "The Quickening Maze" a "rank outsider," and almost everyone bet correctly on Mantel's spectacular story about Thomas Cromwell. But while all the other books on the shortlist were published in the United States months ago -- several climbed up our best-seller list in 2009 -- Americans have had to wait more than a year to see the underdog for themselves.
That tardiness seems wholly appropriate for this curious historical novel about a collection of oddballs who stepped to the music of a different drummer. Foulds draws us into Epping Forest in Essex around 1840. In those ancient woods, a progressive doctor named Matthew Allen set up a mental asylum called High Beach. By treating his patients with respect and allowing them a measure of freedom and useful work, he hoped to calm their nerves and return them to the rhythms of normal life.
Early in the novel, for instance, we see Dr. Allen teaching a "lunatic" how to chop wood with an ax. (Don't try this at home.) Violently deranged people were still kept restrained in a separate building -- you'll never forget the emergency enema scene -- but as much as possible, his patients ate and interacted with the doctor's family on a daily basis. Indeed, after a visit to High Beach in 1831, Thomas Carlyle's wife described the asylum as "all overhung with roses and grapes and surrounded by gardens, ponds and shrubberies without the smallest appearance of constraint." It was, she claimed, "a place where any sane person might be delighted to get admission."
OK, that's just crazy talk, but Dr. Allen's asylum serves as the darkly enchanted setting for "The Quickening Maze." In this graceful blend of history and fiction, Foulds moves through a year-and-a-half when two important poets fell under the influence of the magnetic doctor. The first poet you know, Alfred Tennyson, but it's unlikely you know this weird chapter of his life: Around 1840, depressed by the death of a close friend, Tennyson visited High Beach and formed a disastrous partnership with Dr. Allen.
The other poet is not nearly so famous, but he plays the larger role in this impressionistic novel. John Clare was the son of a farm worker who managed to get a book of his verse published in 1820 when he was 27 years old. He wrote voluminously, and his poetry attracted good reviews, but by the mid-1830s he was desperately poor and schizophrenic, claiming to be Lord Byron and Shakespeare. Friends eventually directed him to High Beach, where he lived for four years of further decline, before making a grueling 80-mile walk with no food back to his home in Northborough.
"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" that I used in college dedicated a scant four pages to Clare's joy-filled peasant poems. But his reputation has risen considerably since then, particularly with the publication in 2003 of Jonathan Bate's celebrated biography and a new collection of his verse. Bate makes the case that "Clare achieved a technical accomplishment, a range of styles and subject, a distinctiveness of voice and visionary power unmatched by anyone of his class before or since." Foulds' novel can't provide the historical depth or breadth of Bate's biography, but its finely tuned sympathy will bring you close to the soul of an exuberant poet.
"The Quickening Maze" covers seven consecutive seasons, a structure that reflects Clare's close attention to the natural world. Disparate lines of the plot run through strange, loosely connected moments. We see the patients consumed with their own manias, such as Margaret, an anorexic preserving her body for Christ, or George, who believes he's solely responsible for the ever-growing national debt. (Where is George when we need him?) These are difficult characters because they're so easy to play for laughs or sentimentality, but Foulds conveys the profound loneliness of mental illness, the anxiety of being at least partially aware of one's own peculiarity.
That's particularly true with poor John Clare, who craves literary respect in London and wild freedom in the woods, but neither is possible as he's increasingly ignored by publishers and restrained by doctors. The novel's most moving scenes show him wandering around Epping Forest, falling in with a band of Gypsies whose nomadic life is equally endangered by the industrial forces transforming England. "It was common land a few months back," a Gypsy woman tells him, "and what grew and bred on it was common as God's air. Now it's the railway's and the boys are gaoled. And you could only tell it from signs they couldn't read, not having the art." His only real happiness comes during boisterous episodes of madness when his stomach is full of roasted hedgehog and he challenges men to boxing matches he can't win.
The success of this story rests entirely on Foulds' voice, which perfectly captures Clare's mind. Listen as he describes the poet spending a night with his Gypsy friends: "He loved lying in its lap, the continuing forest, the way the roots ate the rot of leaves, and it circled on. To please himself, to decorate his path into sleep, he passed through his mind an inventory of its creatures."
Another storyline, far lighter and more comic, follows Dr. Allen's teenage daughter as she tries to woo Tennyson while he's "sinking into the grief that will make him famous." Nearsighted, smelly, deeply depressed, he's a bizarre object of affection for a romantic young woman, but the pickings are pretty slim in an asylum, and teenage crushes are a kind of insanity anyhow. In fact, by the end, everybody seems to be staking out a spot on the spectrum of mental illness. What species of madness leads Dr. Allen to imagine he could make a killing with a wood-carving machine? And why does Tennyson sink his entire savings into the doctor's ridiculous scheme? These are not questions the novel can answer, but like the mystery of John Clare's wondering spirit, they're all portrayed here with arresting beauty.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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SPIES OF THE BALKANS
Alan Furst
Random House
ISBN 978 1 4000 6603 2
268 pages
$26
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
I read my first Alan Furst novel nine years ago and urged readers to do themselves a favor and seek out everything this talented writer had in print. Now, having read Furst's 11th and latest novel, "Spies of the Balkans," I find that my advice holds. About all that has changed since 2001 is that Furst was relatively unknown then, and today he is widely recognized as one of the finest spy novelists active.
Furst has made a specialty of portraying conflicting intelligence agencies -- usually the Nazis vs. the communists, the British or the French Resistance -- in the years before and during World War II. Like many of today's best spy novelists -- such as Robert Littell, Daniel Silva and The Washington Post's David Ignatius -- Furst began as a journalist, and his books combine exhaustive research with exceptional narrative skill. Few writers have brought the Hitler era so vividly, painfully to life.
Furst tends to alternate between long, complex novels that span several years, such as "Night Soldiers" and "The Polish Officer," and shorter, more narrowly focused ones. The latter include "Kingdom of Shadows," in which a Paris-based Hungarian aristocrat returns home to oppose a Nazi takeover, and now "Spies of the Balkans," in which a Greek police officer joins the anti-Nazi underground even as Hitler's army is poised to invade his country.
The policeman, Constantine Zannis, is an honest but pragmatic fellow who handles sensitive political assignments in the Greek city of Salonika. As "Spies of the Balkans" opens, in 1940, it seems likely that the Germans will invade Greece soon. When that happens, Zannis plans to join forces that will resist the invaders from bases in the mountains. In the meantime, the plot is built around three missions that the anti-Nazi policeman undertakes. First, he helps a wealthy Jewish woman in Berlin smuggle her friends to safety. In another mission, he journeys to German-occupied Paris, where he works with the French Resistance to help an English scientist escape. Finally, using his police contacts and credentials, Zannis goes to Belgrade to assist in an anti-Nazi coup d'etat. All these adventures are exciting and entirely persuasive.
Furst understands the big, strategic picture in wartime Europe, but one of the pleasures of his books is the small details that glitter in the fictional mosaics. Lest we forget the bloody history of the Balkans, he shows us a tower of skulls the invading Turks built in the 19th century, using "the severed heads of Serbian rebels." There is often a timelessness in Furst's work. For example, "Spring, the war-fighting season in Europe, was just beginning: once the fields were planted, the men of the countryside would take up their weapons, as they had since the Middle Ages." He even introduces a cynical SS officer who reflects, "The joke about Nazi racial theory said that the ideal superman of the master race would be as blond as Hitler, as lean as Goring, and as tall as Goebbels." The publicity that arrived with the novel asserted that it has more romance than Furst's previous books, and, as best I can recall, that's true. Zannis is 40, handsome and single, and although busy opposing the Nazis, he manages to meet no fewer than five attractive women in the few months of the story. Two of the women are too high-minded (or perhaps too busy) to succumb to his charms -- the Jewish woman in Berlin and an "aristocratic" Resistance fighter in Paris -- but three others are readily available: a British woman who proves to be a spy, an ex-girlfriend who keeps turning up and the gorgeous young wife of a rich, dangerous Greek tycoon.
Zannis and this beautiful woman ("Olive skin, golden hair -- truly gold, not blond -- pulled straight back, eyes just barely suggesting an almond shape, as though wrought by a Byzantine painter") fall in love. Their affair is nicely handled, but it remains rather improbable given everything else Zannis has on his plate. Still, novels about the Nazi takeover of Europe aren't a bundle of laughs, and Furst may have decided to lighten the mood this time. As the novel ends, the Nazis are invading Greece, but Furst manages to have a number of people escape to freedom who might just as easily have been captured, tortured, killed or sent to the death camps. Their good fortune may be unlikely, but I bought it. The elegance of Furst's style works its magic. If you haven't read him, this is a perfectly good place to start, but after this book I suggest you go back to the earlier ones and work your way forward. You won't regret it.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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AN AMERICAN TYPE
Henry Roth
Norton
ISBN 978 0 393 07775 9
283 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Troy Jollimore, the author of "Tom Thomson in Purgatory," which won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry for 2006
"An American Type" is the third and final novel from Henry Roth, who for many years looked like he was going to be a one-book wonder. Roth made his name with "Call It Sleep," a vivid portrait of a Jewish childhood spent in the New York slums of the early 20th century. The book sold poorly when it was published in 1934 but received strong reviews and has gone on to be regarded as an essential American novel and, in many critics' and readers' eyes, a masterpiece.
But by the time it became sufficiently recognized to establish Roth as a major writer, he no longer appeared to be writing much of anything. A case of writer's block had set in, one that lasted, it turned out, for decades. Most fans of "Call It Sleep" had long since given up hope of hearing any more from him when, in the 1990s, he surprised the literary world by publishing a massive novel in four volumes, "Mercy of a Rude Stream."
Writer's block is in fact one of the main subjects of this new, posthumous work, whose protagonist, Ira Stigman, is struggling to make some headway on his second novel. Like all of Roth's fiction, "An American Type" is heavily autobiographical. It is probably not quite fair to say that Ira Stigman is Henry Roth, but the similarities are uncanny: "Some promise," Ira thinks. "Hung up on the meat hook of a second novel, but don't tell anybody. Writer of promise. Author of a book, a novel that had won wide critical acclaim, except from the Communist Party, his comrades. That was in 1934. 1934 to 1938. Four years wasted, up the flue."
"Mercy of a Rude Stream" ended with Ira moving in with Edith Welles, an older, wealthy poet and academic who was willing to support his writing career. The beginning of "An American Type" finds him at the Yaddo artists' colony, struggling with his recalcitrant second book and falling in love with a fellow guest, a vibrant and charming pianist identified only as M. (Those familiar with the author's life will know that M represents Muriel Parker, who did indeed meet Roth at Yaddo and spent the rest of her life with him.) His passion for M compels him to break things off with Edith and, for reasons that are not entirely well thought out, leave both her and M behind to embark on a cross-country odyssey in search of financial security.
Accompanied by his domineering and highly unstable friend Bill, a communist who continually rants incoherently about the sins and stupidity of "the boojwasie," Ira spends an interlude in Cincinnati before reaching his intended destination, Los Angeles. He hopes to find work as a screenwriter, but these aspirations are soon dashed. The rest of the book recounts his difficult and at times perilous return journey to New York and what happens on his arrival.
Though there are some interesting bits, and the Depression-era details about hitchhiking and riding the rails evoke a sense of lived history, "An American Type" does not, ultimately, add up to a satisfying novel. The explanation is not hard to find: As New Yorker fiction editor Willing Davidson explains in his "Editor's Afterword," the book was assembled from material extracted from about 1,900 draft pages left by Roth when he died in 1995. "An American Type" is not, then, a Henry Roth novel so much as it is a narrative constructed from his leavings. And the leavings, on the whole, appear not to have been exceptionally rich: There are few memorable sentences or passages here, and many of the individual scenes have the dull awkwardness of a rough draft.
Given a few more good working years, Roth might have reworked this material into a strong final novel. Sadly, this was not to be. "An American Type" will be of interest to fans of the unique two-book wonder that was Henry Roth, but it adds disappointingly little to his literary legacy.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE FROZEN RABBI
Steve Stern
Algonquin
ISBN 978 1 56512 619 0
370 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Jess Walter, who won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel and was a finalist in 2006 for the National Book Award. He is the author of six books, most recently "The Financial Lives of the Poets."
Among the wonders awaiting the reader of Steve Stern's exuberant new novel, "The Frozen Rabbi," is one of sheer logistics: How did he get all of this in here?
The book's 370 pages are packed to bursting with epic adventure and hysterical comedy, with grim poignancy and pointed satire, as Stern repeatedly shifts time and tone to craft a wildly entertaining tale of the 20th-century Jewish experience and the paradox of tradition.
The author of seven works of adult fiction and two children's books based on Jewish folklore, Stern grounds his fantastical tale within the perfectly recognizable: "Sometime during his restless fifteenth year, Bernie Karp discovered in his parents' food freezer -- a white-enameled Kelvinator humming in its corner of the basement rumpus room -- an old man frozen in a block of ice." It seems that while meditating near a pond in Poland in 1889, the mystic Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr was flooded, frozen, cut into a block of ice and eventually left in the care of Bernie's great-great-grandfather Salo King (or Salo Frostbite, as he's soon called).
This origin story of the Frostbissen/Karp clan and their rabbi-cicle provides one of the novel's two parallel tracks. Bernie's predecessors must negotiate savage pogroms and wrenching poverty in Eastern Europe, gangster-infested streets in old New York, even a short side trip to pre-Israel Palestine. This is all to explain how a family comes to have a rabbi inside its rumpus-room freezer in Memphis in 1999. The family's adventure provides enough chases, fistfights, love stories, rescues, escapes and human tragedies to plot five novels.
The other rail of the story concerns the acidly comic exploits of the old man once he's thawed, entirely unharmed, into a world of Oprah, "Reb (Jerry) Springer," the "orgies of MTV" and a synagogue so progressive, the joke goes, that "it closed its doors on Jewish holidays." The rabbi goes out into this America to restore the souls of people who "eat till their bellies swell by them like Goliath his hernia, and shop till their houses bulge from the electronic Nike and the Frederick of Hollywood balconette brassiere, but they ain't satisfied." Meanwhile, since defrosting the old man, Bernie has become strangely attuned to the mystical powers of faith and is experiencing out-of-body religious reveries for which he turns to the rabbi for explanation.
As a metaphor for the modern incongruity of ancient religious tradition, a frozen rabbi could be embarrassingly heavy-handed, but an actual frozen rabbi? That's just funny. Page after page, Stern embraces every outrageous possibility, in lush, cart-wheeling sentences that layer deep mystery atop page-turning action atop borscht belt humor. So while Bernie seeks wisdom, the rabbi goes in for all our modern culture has to offer, turning for salvation to Viagra, Botox injections and the Tantric Kabbalah group at his wildly successful New House of Enlightenment, where "I don't like to embarrass with too much Jewish stuff the goyim."
The rabbi has concluded that America's ease and opulence make it a kind of heaven on earth: "Paradise is where already you are," he announces. When Bernie assures him that this is definitely not heaven, the rabbi shrugs and says, "Is as good as" and goes back to pinching the bottoms of his growing retinue of female followers.
Of course, not everything Stern throws into the book (and he throws in a lot) works equally well. A few jokes are groaners, and a section from Bernie's grandfather's journal -- translated from Yiddish as Bernie reads aloud to his quirky girlfriend -- loses narrative steam and is eventually abandoned.
But this is like complaining about an extra mushroom on your kitchen-sink pizza. In all, it's a fine performance: Stories are told, points made, conventions flayed, and the reader comes to care about what will happen to poor Bernie, earnestly seeking transcendence from a fallen prophet. Of course, as the Frozen Rabbi assures him, he shouldn't worry; all the answers are in his book, " 'The Ice Sage,' adventures of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr and God ... which it's twenty-nine ninety-five retail."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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