Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday July 30, 2010
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WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER
Howard Norman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978 0 618 73543 3
243 pages
$25
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Nobody screams in Howard Norman's new novel, although they should. This Washington writer maintains such a measured tone that his story seems shocking only in retrospect. At the time, you lean in, trying to catch every word, lulled by his voice as he describes the most ordinary lives that just happen to be punctuated by macabre accidents and bizarre acts of violence.
Everything in "What Is Left the Daughter" sounds smothered in regret, worn smooth in the closet of a man's guilty conscience. It's a World War II tale that reminds us, again, of the innumerable tragedies spawned by war but born thousands of miles away from battle. The story opens, like his most famous book, "The Bird Artist," with a confession: "I've waited until now to relate the terrible incident that I took part in on October 16, 1942, when I was nineteen."
The narrator is 43-year-old Wyatt Hillyer, who will spend the next 26 nights writing this long letter to his estranged daughter. It's a petition for her understanding and forgiveness, which Wyatt knows he can't expect. "I have no way of knowing," he writes, "if, after you've read a paragraph or two, any curiosity you might've had will abruptly sour to disgust, or worse." We never learn how his daughter reacts to this strange testimony, but you'll find it hard to resist his earnest appeal.
An award-winning translator who teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, Norman offers a kind of rough-hewn poetry throughout, starting with that Yoda-like title, "What Is Left the Daughter." Wyatt is not a pretentious narrator -- he dropped out of high school and works as a maritime garbage collector -- but he's a determined student of language, who prizes the frayed "Webster's" he bought from a pawnshop for a dollar. There's an antique patina to his diction, although it's not pronounced: passing allusions to "mute angels," a stillborn birth as a "ghost child" or a blacksmith "taut of build." In the opening pages of his confession, he refers to John Keats and Emily Dickinson, an indication of the ardor that simmers just below the surface of his carefully chosen words.
The odd disconnect between the novel's sober tone and its outrageous plot is on display as soon as Wyatt begins: "Let me say it directly ..." Twenty-six years ago, on the day his parents discovered they were both having an affair with the same switchboard operator, they leapt from separate bridges in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Orphaned but almost a man, Wyatt moves in with his aunt and uncle and begins making mail-order toboggans. He also falls in love with their adopted daughter, Tilda, who works as a professional mourner at funerals. (Yes, the story is marked by distinctly unusual jobs; Howard Norman and Anne Tyler should open a Weird Employment Agency.)
Wyatt's unrequited love for Tilda remains the foundation of his entire life -- "She was too much beauty," he recalls -- but the story is propelled by his uncle's growing anxiety about the war. Like the father in Philip Roth's "Plot Against America," Wyatt's uncle senses the danger of Hitler early but then lets it unhinge him. Hypnotized by static-laced radio reports of the U-boats prowling Canada's eastern shore, he can think and talk of nothing else. "Your aunt complains that I'm becoming more and more agitated by the day," he tells Wyatt. "Truth is, she only knows the half of just how agitated I am." Soon, the walls of his workshop are plastered with newspaper headlines of U-boat attacks, a reflection of the obsession colonizing his mind. It's a sad portrait of justified alarm and corrosive rage that ruins those he most wants to protect. (It's also a disturbing lesson on a bit of obscure history about what our northern neighbors suffered during World War II.)
All of this develops with a muted but insistent sense of menace, which Norman signals by a series of surreal images, such as a bed covered in broken bits of Beethoven records. "This war," a neighbor tells Wyatt, " -- all of us are coming apart at the seams." When the "terrible incident" of Oct. 16, 1942, arrives, it's somehow shocking and inevitable, and Wyatt's culpability is brilliantly complicated. With just a few ordinary characters -- all strict, upstanding people, in a remote town that should feel safe and tranquil -- Norman catches a stray spark of war that incinerates several lives.
The structure of the novel, though, puts considerable pressure on Norman's ability to maintain momentum. The act that alters the rest of Wyatt's life comes just halfway through the book, and even though it's a short novel, that leaves the whole second half for the narrator's stunned reflection on that tragedy. "I've sometimes raced over the years like an ice skater fleeing the devil on a frozen river," he says, and that rushing survey of the years causes the story to flag as it sinks into the dark waters of his despair.
But trust him. More strange revelations await in Wyatt's plea to his daughter. The novel gains traction again as he nears the conclusion, vowing that "the truth is the truth, and in the end it can't be lost to excuses, cowardice or lies." It's a convincing demonstration of the truism he throws off so casually on the first page: "Life is unpredictable."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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STORM PREY
John Sandford
Putnam
ISBN 978 0 399 15649 6
408 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Richard Lipez, who writes the Don Strachey private eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson
John Sandford is one of the busiest and most popular practitioners of the airport potboiler. "Storm Prey" is the 20th Lucas Davenport thriller, a series that has produced so much fictional grisly mayhem in the upper Midwest that there must be people who think Vlad the Impaler spoke with a Minnesota accent. Putnam is doing a 500,000-copy first printing of "Storm Prey," and the company's shareholders are unlikely to be disappointed. Sandford sells.
Like Robert B. Parker in his last sad years, however, Sandford seems to be operating on automatic pilot in this one. All of Sandford's writing habits -- good or bad, depending on how you look at them -- get a workout here. Scenes are short and punchy, keeping the narrative moving at full gallop. At times, though, Sandford seems to be producing these bursts of typing for people with severe ADD.
He has done his usual crackerjack job of research. In "Storm Prey," we learn all about twins conjoined at birth and the complexities of surgically separating them. Who knew that 1 percent of conjoined twins required "craniopagus separation," which involves complex brain surgery? A lot of this data, however, feels as if it was transferred directly from a Google source into the mouths of Sandford's characters.
Sandford also serves up his customary graphic, hideous murders, for which some of his hundreds of thousands of fans probably shell out the hardcover big bucks while others could maybe do without them. The ghastliest murder is of a mom carjacked on the way to pick up her kids at day care. As she's strangled by a psychopath, we get to see her bug-eyed and spasming.
Front and center, at least in the early chapters of this "Prey" episode (others include "Shadow Prey," "Wicked Prey" etc.) is Weather Karkinnen, the surgeon wife of the Porsche-driving, hockey-playing, "hawkish"-nosed Minnesota State Police investigator Davenport. (What kind of name is Weather Karkinnen? Sandford loves implausibly weird names, and I had to reread a paragraph where it seemed that Sandford had named the couple's children Shrake and Jenkins. Shrake and Jenkins turned out to be a couple of cops.)
Karkinnen is brilliant, cute as a button, and makes paddlewheel-boat whistle sounds during sex. On her way into work one dark winter morning, she catches sight of a goon who's part of a gang that has just robbed the hospital pharmacy and killed an attendant. So Karkinnen is a witness the robbers think they need to rub out. She is also an essential component of the surgery team for the twins. They are fading fast, so she can't leave town or hide. Will there be a noisy climactic scene near the operating theater involving gunfire and grenades? (Yes, grenades.) Don't let me ruin anything.
Sandford's good guys and gals are a bit blurry -- I think we are supposed to know them from earlier books -- but his thugs are plenty believable enough. The most frightening is Caprice Marlon "Cappy" Garner, named after his father's Chevy. He's a skinhead psycho who was beaten as a child and has devoted his adult life to hurting people. There are the dumb Mack brothers, Lyle and Joe, who believe that "if God had meant people to ride horses, He wouldn't have invented the Fat Bob (motorcycle)." A Lebanese surgeon named Barakat is a cokehead who finds "the whole concept of crime ... interesting: the strong taking from the weak, the smart from the stupid."
While part of Davenport's appeal is his fallibility, in "Storm Prey" he sometimes just seems dense. It's skinny little Garner who makes the first attempt on Karkinnen's life -- firing a gun at her from a motorcycle -- but for another 100 or so pages Davenport and everybody else keep looking only for the taller, bulkier men who pulled off the drug heist. After an earlier inexplicable blunder, he tells a fellow cop, "I'm so dumb." This and other lapses in "Storm Prey" made me wonder if it isn't Sandford who is being held hostage, not by criminals but by a publishing contract that calls for a book a year. As publishers' profitability dwindles, best-selling authors like Sandford have turned into cash machines publishers depend on to survive. They seem unable or unwilling to recognize when a writer may need to take a break.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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CAPTIVE QUEEN: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine
Alison Weir
Ballantine
ISBN 978 0 345 51187 4
478 pages
$26
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews book regularly for The Washington Post
The historical novel is a strange genre: very demanding on its author, filled with pitfalls and traps. Beautifully done, it can tell us about a slice of history; we can't be sure if what we read is actually true (unless we check the fictional events against historical sources), but still, such a novel can exercise our minds, something like an intelligent crossword puzzle. If we're lucky, we're visited by a vision of what it may have been like in 15th-century Spain or 19th-century Africa or -- in this case -- the 12th century in what is now England and the South of France.
If you're the author, you can pick an obscure person to pin your story on and thereby exhibit your expertise in leather tanning or falconry or the brewing of beer. ("Kristin Lavransdatter" is the gold standard for this kind of book. By the time Nobel Prize-winner Sigrid Undset got through with that woman, readers felt they had put in a year or so living in a medieval Scandinavian household.) Or the author can pick an important person, dig into the scholarship and come out the other side of this intellectual quest with mountains of history to put to use. The disadvantage is that reality is apt to constrain imagination or leave the novelist with a lot of dull mechanics. I once had a heartfelt conversation with the man who wrote the miniseries of "The Scarlet Pimpernel." It became the curse of his life, he said, to be stuck writing scenes with a coach riding up the gravel path to the manor house and then turning around and driving back from the manor house.
And so we have "Captive Queen," a novel by best-selling biographer Alison Weir. Many of us know something about Eleanor of Aquitaine already. She was active in fostering troubadour poetry, which was a literary side effect of the Crusades and the tradition of courtly love. Her vile-tempered husband, Henry II, threw her in prison on and off for years because she may have aided and abetted rebellion by two of her sons, Henry the Younger and Richard, who grew up to be Lionheart. After Henry II finally died -- and not a moment too soon; he seems to have been mean as a snake -- Eleanor was accorded much love and respect. She seems, even from the highly stylized portraits of the day, to have been a strikingly beautiful woman. But that's pretty much it. According to this novel, she wanted to rule on an equal footing with Henry, to be a liberated woman, to be equal to her man, although I frankly doubt many women of those days declared their wishes to be liberated and equal, or if they did, it meant something other than it does now.
When the novel opens, Eleanor is married to King Louis of France, who is a wuss. She'd rather be married to Henry, 11 years her junior, who has ambitions to be king of England and put the Plantagenet dynasty on the map. Eleanor has some "tumultuous thoughts" and remembers "coupling gloriously between silken sheets" with Henry's father, Geoffrey. Even though Louis "fumes," when Eleanor sees Henry she feels "the lust rising again in her. God, he was beddable!" She makes a few remarks "lightly," and then, "framed with a cascade of coppery tresses," she, "the greatest heiress in Christendom," finds herself in bed with Henry by page 17, and, for another 460 pages, we're off to the races.
The trouble is, as a rule, even if they're Eleanor of Aquitaine, women in history don't do much. Eleanor does plenty of embroidery and gets lost in a labyrinth toward the end of the book, but most of the time she bickers unceasingly with Henry, who won't let her rule Aquitaine, even though she wants to. "You and I are meant to be a partnership," she hectors him. "We agreed. I am no milksop farmwife to be cast aside: I am the sovereign Duchess of Aquitaine, and I will be deferred to as such! Do you heed me?" She's pretty tenacious about it, actually. She reminds him again, "I am the Duchess of Aquitaine, and I am fit for higher things than the company of women and babies." They spend years disagreeing, with Henry taking only an occasional breather to say things like, "I will write to the Pope, and to Frederick Barbarossa. ... I will demand that the excommunications be revoked."
Henry philanders, of course, remarking to a prospective mistress that "the only Hell is the one we make for ourselves on this earth. The rest is just a myth put about by the Church to frighten us into being good." (That's pretty hellbent, isn't it, for someone who lives in the 12th century? Did he ever say anything like that, really?) Thomas Becket gets murdered, but that happens offstage, and Eleanor's sons try to overthrow their father, but we never see how that works exactly. We do read a huge amount about what she is wearing on different occasions, because so many portraits of her remain, but 12th-century France could be the dark side of the moon for all we learn about it by the end of this book. (The citizens of Limoges are made to pull down the city walls because they get on the king's nerves, but that promising scene is over in a page or two.)
The author is frugal to a fault with her use of language. She recycles "lightly" and "tartly" as adverbs; she's crazy about "thunderous" and "glorious" as adjectives. She reuses "fumes" as a verb and "lust" as a noun. Her English is modern, and she must like it that way.
Who's at fault here? (Because this isn't a very wonderful book.) I think we have to pin the blame on Eleanor. She's a historic figure, so she can't be jolted too far out of that position. We don't know all that much about what she actually did. And who knows what the woman thought? She seems to have preferred her sons to her husband, but it's hard to make a book about that. She spent a lot of her life within prison walls. It's a good thing she had an extensive wardrobe! It's not that the author doesn't know everything about her subject, but that what she knows isn't enough.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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