Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday August 5, 2010
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THE HOUR: A Cocktail Manifesto
Bernard DeVoto
Tin House
ISBN 978-0-9825048-0-2
127 pages
$16.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
"When evening quickens in the street," writes Bernard DeVoto, "comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain. But it cannot make the grade alone. It needs help; it needs, my brethren, all the help it can get. It needs a wife (or some other charming woman) of attuned impulse and equal impatience and maybe two or three friends, but no more than two or three. These gathered together in a softly lighted room and, with them what it needs most of all, the bounty of alcohol. Hence the cocktail."
Bernard DeVoto's "The Hour," first published in 1948, is a paean to the restorative powers of a quiet drink at the end of the working day. Today, it reads very much as a period piece, directed at male readers, arguing fiercely that there are really only two adult beverages worth caring about: straight whiskey (rye, bourbon or scotch) and martinis made with gin and dry vermouth. Fans of the television show "Mad Men" will feel right at home.
DeVoto heartily loathes fruity concoctions, especially those based on rum (such as the daiquiri), and, as Daniel Handler notes in his splendid introduction, the word "vodka" never even appears in the book. Neither is there any discussion of wine and beer, nor of such popular summer standards as the gin-and-tonic or the Tom Collins. In fact, apart from the martini, DeVoto views mixed drinks as abominations: "Put it this way. Maybe you like a good Burgundy, or a Pouilly, or a Champagne. How would you like it mixed with root beer and Veg-8?"
In short, the author of "The Hour" is a purist. Martinis must always be prepared just before serving, and any leftover in a pitcher should be thrown out once the first round has been poured. A smidgen of lemon rind is acceptable but not essential. The recommended proportion of gin to vermouth should be 3.7 to 1, though 4 to 1 may be allowed in the case of those who have trouble with fractions.
Like many right-thinking people, I myself incline toward W.H. Auden's view that the vermouth bottle should simply be waved over the tumbler of Tanqueray. But then -- horrors! -- I do sip the gin on the rocks: Being of a meditative character, I like to study the ice cubes while slowly jiggling the glass. DeVoto and I do agree that all you need for hors d'oeuvres is "a couple of good cheeses and a couple of kinds of good crackers. ... Make one of them ordinary American cheddar, as snappy as it comes, and the other a fairly high one."
To our loss, we no longer refer to a drink as "art's sunburst of imagined delight becoming real" or "the reconciliation that knits up the raveled day." In "The Hour," DeVoto repeatedly aims for such poetic flourishes, as when he speaks of "a moroseness of tired and buffeted men." We are more austere writers now. Still, as an amateur historian of the West, DeVoto won a 1948 Pulitzer Prize for "Across the Wide Missouri" and for 20 years graced Harper's Magazine with a column called the Easy Chair. It was, as they say, another time. At one point, DeVoto stops at his club, which he describes as "stuffy":
"Tiptoeing across the almost dark cavern of the lounge (at the hour all lamps should be shaded and only a few of them lit, for if the body is in shadow the soul will the sooner turn toward the sun), I take my drink to a chair so big that one's head cannot be seen above its back, by a window that faces a cross-town street. We are near enough the avenue to hear the traffic diminishing. This is an hour of diminishing, of slowing down, of quieting. Thus islanded in dimness and the murmur of traffic fading toward silence, one is apt for the ministration. Calm against background tumult is an essential of the hour; it is the firelight shining through the cabin window on the snow of the forest, the strong shack beside a lake whose waters a gale is hurling up the shore."
Despite this evocation of solitary patrician ease, DeVoto generally believes that the cocktail hour should be enjoyed in company. "May six o'clock never find you alone." He is, however, leery of big parties and contributes a scathing chapter about bars in suburban homes where the whimsical utensils are nude women's torsos and the wall placards proclaim: "To the Bar. Check your Morals" or "Danger: Men Drinking." He also believes in moderation: "Don't overdrink," he advises, bluntly.
"The Hour" isn't an important book, but it is almost a cocktail in itself, being at once soothing and refreshing. And perhaps that's all we require from a book in July. Certainly DeVoto should make the final romantic toast to his subject:
"This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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AS HUSBANDS GO
Susan Isaacs
Scribner
ISBN 978 1 4165 7301 2
342 pages
$25
Reviewed by Lloyd Rose, a former chief theater critic for The Washington Post
Wisecracking Susan B. Anthony Rabinowitz Gersten needs all the attitude she can muster, because life is about to throw her a Strasburg-caliber curveball. At the opening of Susan Isaacs' new novel, "As Husbands Go," Susie, as she calls herself, learns that her handsome, plastic-surgeon husband has been stabbed to death in the apartment of a call girl, one Dorinda Dillon, formerly Cristal Rousseau, who, to add insult to injury, looks like a sheep.
What's a wealthy, not-that-far-from-gorgeous (if she does say so herself), loving mother of 4-year-old triplets, society florist widow to do? Why, shrug off that tea-green Loro Piana cashmere bathrobe, dab on a little Bio-Molecular firming eye serum, and solve the crime! It helps that Susie has not one but two Norwegian au pairs to take care of the boys while she sleuths. Not to mention the assistance of her scandalous, foul-mouthed, bisexual granny, still strutting around in pink Chanel at 80.
And Susie needs these allies because, frankly, she's surrounded by losers. Her mother is an unemotional slug, and Dad doesn't exactly have an expansive personality: "Other than despising my mother, an emotion he projected mostly by flaring his nostrils whenever she spoke, he had few strong opinions." Mom-in-law is a meddling witch, brother-in-law is a whiny jerk, and the best that can be said for dad-in-law is "you could take being with him."
Fortunately, aside from Grandma Ethel and her sensible lover, Sparky, Susie has the aid of her snobby upper-class business partner, Andrea Brinckerhoff, who comes through for her in some tough spots, although Susie doesn't seem to find Andrea all that satisfactory: She puts down her marriage, sexual promiscuity, emotional shallowness, self-indulgence, bad haircut and lack of intelligence ("Andrea was hostile to words over three syllables"). All around Susie, in fact, people come up short: A cop has offensive body odor, the maid cleans with a spittle-coated Q-tip and forgets to change the soap in the shower, and one of the au pairs never washes her neck. Poor Susie, beset on all sides by people who just won't quite do.
Some of Isaacs' snarkiness is very funny, like this shot at Susie's mother: "She went through an environmental-activist phase. It lasted about three weeks. But that was just when I ... landed a designer job with the best florist in New Haven. When I told her about it, she did her quiet 'oh' first. She just says 'oh,' then stops. Gives you enough time for your heart to sink. Then she said, 'There are some of us who believe nature is a not-for-profit corporation.'"
Or this little classic of cattiness: "Her nails, coated with Gigi de Lavallade's Creme Caramel, precisely matched the hue of some new liver spots her dermatologist hadn't gotten to."
A lot of the novel is like this, a freewheeling comic monologue, part satire, part whine, socially acute and skillfully vicious. But Susie's superiority to almost everyone else drains off the fun. Yes, she's on a righteous mission. She's not just trying to prove that her husband would never have slept with a call girl; she really believes poor Dorinda is innocent. So she's gutsy and ethical. And smart -- she works out who the real murderer is (though later than the reader will).
But she's also self-regarding, self-pitying and just generally a snot, which Isaacs either hasn't noticed or doesn't mind. At one point, Susie, brooding in a Regency chair with gilded arms and legs and creamy silk upholstery, concludes: "Even in that instant, petrified that life was about to give me the cosmic smack in the face that would make every woman on Long Island tell her best friend, 'Thank God I'm not Susie Gersten,' I knew if I were sitting in a repro Regency covered in polyester damask, I would feel worse." You wait for Isaacs to deliver a satirical slap. Not gonna happen. Looking back on her experiences, Susie reflects, "Maybe I'm still shallow, just deluding myself that after all that's occurred, I've become a better person." Maybe so, yes.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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LADY OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Fiona Mountain
G. P. Putnam's Sons
ISBN 978-0-399-15636-6
533 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who regularly reviews books for The Washington Post
Here comes another very hefty historical novel -- this one running more than 500 pages and neatly straddling two genres: the sober, fact-filled narrative and the bodice-ripper. Its heroine is based on the real-life Eleanor Glanville, who in the late 17th century devoted much of her life to the study of butterflies, and thus became one of England's first natural scientists -- all this at a time when most of England's population was still seeing the bad doings of witches everywhere.
But for all its erudition, "Lady of the Butterflies" doesn't lack for impetuous heroes and heroines engaging in misunderstandings and steamy sex, and riding hell-for-leather from somewhere to somewhere: "I watched the two riders streak away across the moor. ... Their cloaks billowed out behind them like black sails as they splashed along through an area of marsh, the spray flashing in the moonlight as silver bright as their swords. ... I felt my hair tear free from its pins and whip away behind my back. I yelped with the thrill of it, understanding exactly why Richard had suggested this wild, starlit chase." That's bodice-ripper talk.
And in case anyone isn't convinced, there's this scene, which I swear the author must have been dared to add, as homage to this hoary form: Eleanor's tempestuous and gloomy second husband, Richard, the love of her life, is attempting to have sex with her; she's already "smoothed the loose tendrils of hair from her face and he's trying, without much success, to undress her, when she exclaims, "Rip it ... I want you to rip it."
So, is "Lady of the Butterflies" serious literature or meretricious trash? Probably a little of both. The tipping point may be how much human hair is mentioned, curling and swirling and framing and caressing, so that it almost becomes a major character, suggesting all kinds of wanton behavior.
But this author is also terribly earnest. She wants to tell us about the advent of the Royal Society and the beginnings of science in England, and how it might have been used for both good and evil. She deplores British developers who would have used technical expertise to drain British wetlands for their own material gain, and thus exterminate certain species; she examines that interesting psychological place where scientific method and religious belief collide (when, for instance, the hated Jesuits discover the quinine that could cure the dreaded "ague" -- later determined to be malaria -- but Protestant prejudice prevented its use).
The character of Eleanor Glanville is based on fact, as is that of James Petiver, whose butterfly collection "formed the foundation of the British Museum, later the Natural History Museum," as the author reminds the reader in her concluding notes.
The plot traces Eleanor's life from its patrician beginnings through her many tangled loves and painful losses. Pretty, precocious little Eleanor is the heiress of Tickenham Court, a lovely manor house with its surrounding village and lands, but the land is problematic, being several feet underwater for most of the year. The church congregation must row to services, for instance, and during the long winters, villagers live on the second floors of their cottages. (No wonder developers get itchy when they think of how this land might be "improved.")
Early on, the orphaned Eleanor marries charming and decent Edmund Ashfield. According to the laws of coverture, when she marries she must cede all legal rights to her husband. Edmund exerts minimal control over her, but unfortunately, he's terrible in bed and soon dies.
Then Richard Glanville, who's been swashbuckling around for a hundred pages or so and claims to love her more than life itself, becomes her second husband. He instantly turns from a glamorous lover into a churlish, petulant, whining toad. He nags; he criticizes; he complains; he's unfaithful. And though Eleanor has had a marriage settlement drawn up so that she may keep her property, Richard begins to circulate rumors that she's crazy so that he can snatch up Tickenham Court for himself. But the conventions of the bodice-ripper dictate that the meaner Richard is, the more Eleanor loves him. (And can I just say that if sex were half what bodice-rippers say it is, no one on Earth would ever get up and go to work on a Monday morning.)
Fortunately, Eleanor has a third love -- her passion for butterflies, and she knows a scientist who shares that passion, James Petiver. But sadly, the butterfly scenes and those between Eleanor and James are the novel's least convincing. We see her collecting these lovely creatures, and we watch her, disguised as a boy, eavesdropping on the musings of the great scientists of the day in a London coffeehouse. The scientists talk funny, as in, "Are you content to go down in history as the father of British entomology, the man who made natural science popular?"
In the end, this novel is much more about men than butterflies. The author knows that men divide women into Madonnas and whores, while women tend to divide men into good guys (who finish last), bad guys (whose misdemeanors we forgive) and best friends, whom -- if we're luckier than Eleanor -- we may actually marry and spend some happy times with. Evidently, that behavior hasn't changed much through the centuries. Horses may turn into sports cars; science evolves, but women continue to loosen their hair, and churlish cads inevitably score.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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NO PLACE FOR HEROES
Laura Restrepo. Translated from the Spanish by Ernesto Mestre-Reed
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
ISBN 9780385519915
272 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Gaiutra Bahadur, a journalist and book critic in the New York area
"No Place for Heroes" begins with an interrogation, of a kind. A cheeky and precocious young man, just barely out of adolescence, is questioning his mother about a dark episode in their past. It involves his father, and when she mentions that soon his shoulders will be as broad as that absent parent's, he cuts her off brusquely: "OK, back to the afternoon, in the park." He plays both good cop and bad, alternately sarcastic and affectionate. It's a fitting way to launch this novel because Argentina's Dirty War of the 1970s and early '80s, conducted by the military dictatorship against its own citizens through torture and interrogation, forms the backdrop.
During that dark period in Argentina's past, Laura Restrepo belonged to the underground resistance. It was not her country -- she's Colombian -- but it did become her fight for a time. She moved to Argentina after several years in the Socialist Workers Party in Spain. Restrepo gives her lead character, Lorenza, the same activist trajectory. Seeking distraction after her father's death, Lorenza joins the struggle in Buenos Aires, where she falls in love with a resistance leader. His nom de guerre is Forcas. Everyone in the movement has an assumed identity, an allusion to acting or theater, a motif as significant to the book as interrogation.
Restrepo lets us know just how significant early on. The resistance has dispatched Lorenza to deliver smuggled microfilm and forged passports to Forcas. Don't contact him, she is told; he will contact you. As she waits and waits -- Forcas is "nowhere to be seen" -- she starts "to doubt his existence, like in that play by Ionesco where the characters yearn for the arrival of the Maestro and the Maestro doesn't show." Restrepo's clue here is brass-knuckled: "No Place for Heroes" unfolds as a conversation over several days between Lorenza and her son, Mateo, two decades after the Dirty War. They have traveled to Buenos Aires from Colombia to search for Forcas, who is the boy's father. Neither has seen him since he kidnapped Mateo (then 2) in a desperate bid to regain Lorenza's love.
In the novel's present, mother and son talk nonstop about Forcas. With one exception, everyone else who appears in the story does so either in flashback or offstage. With no chapter breaks, the story proceeds in a shapeless gel of meandering talk and memory.
The nature of memory, not surprisingly, concerns Restrepo. To the extent that people in the resistance couldn't talk to each other about their lives, the Dirty War forced them to kill their memories. They didn't even know each other's real names. Restrepo shows us how memory can be warped and rearranged by trauma, as when Lorenza's friend consecrates the rest of her life to a husband disappeared by the regime, keeping a book open to the page he was reading when seized -- as if he were likely to return to it, as if they had not in fact already separated when the police came for him. Lorenza's memory of her own dark episode is stubborn and uncooperative, "a black box lost in the sea after a midair accident, unwilling to give up its information."
Her son raises doubts about the precision and even the honesty of her recall. He also interrogates the values of her generation. (Too obsessed with ideology, he thinks.) And he challenges her storytelling technique: "I don't care about the color of the sky in Bogota," he says. "I want to know what happened." Eventually, the reader, too, begins to question her narrative. Was the couple's flight from the regime exactly what it seemed? Was Forcas really to blame for the dark episode? Is he a hero or a bad guy? The novel's virtue is that it poses these destabilizing questions. It's as enamored of interrogation as Mateo is.
What's less winning is the way the novel constantly, questions itself, asking what type of story it is. ("Escape From Alcatraz," Batman and "Doctor Zhivago" all come up in the text as models.) When Lorenza tells her friend Gabriela how the dark episode ends -- in remote snowy mountains, as the junta loses both the Falklands War and its grip on the populace -- Gabriela interrupts: "This was turning into a porn movie, and now you're telling me a war story."
So, ultimately, what kind of story is "No Place for Heroes"? It's as domesticated as a fight about eating your vegetables or embarrassment over being seen with your mother at a Rolling Stones concert (two incidents found in the book). Like Argentina's secret military prisons, the story's tragic backdrop is hidden amid ordinariness. With its habits of reference and self-reference, it is ironic and postmodern, an appropriate response, perhaps, to Argentina's silent war with itself.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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