Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday September 9, 2010
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THE VANISHING OF KATHARINA LINDEN
Helen Grant
Delacorte
ISBN 978 0 385 34417 3
287 pages
$24
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, the mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Helen Grant brings a rich tradition to bear on "The Vanishing of Katharina Linden": German folk tales and rites, especially the eerie variety, from trolls to the Brothers Grimm and beyond. A local legend figures into this first novel: Unshockable Hans, the only fellow who dared live in a valley that "had to be the most haunted place on earth." And the country's Nazi past comes into play, adding another shuddering layer. The result endows a briskly entertaining story with creepy depths unavailable to thrillers set in less fraught lands.
Grant is an Englishwoman who in 2001 moved to Bad Munstereifel, Germany, where the novel takes place (she now lives in Brussels). She has given her own nationality to the mother of Pia Kolvenbach, the novel's 11-year-old heroine. The father is German, the mother is unhappy about being away from home, and the parents quarrel frequently over German customs and food (the mother is anti-wurst). Mom is not very diplomatic in voicing her complaints, dad is quick to take umbrage, and the marital tension increases as, first, Katharina, and then other children, go missing.
Pia's troubles began even before the first disappearance, when her grandmother exploded -- or so the girl's classmates like to put it. In fact, the old lady, Oma Kristel, burned to death at a family gathering when she lost control of a match while trying to light the Advent wreath and her heavily sprayed hair caught fire. Losing her oma was bad enough, but Pia then became a pariah at school; her classmates not only laughed at her, they also feared her as a jinx. She is reduced to keeping company with the only kid who has nothing to lose by befriending her, StinkStefan, "the most unpopular boy in the class" -- who turns out, however, to be quite adept at sneaking into other people's houses to look for clues.
Pia gets no help from her parents, lost as they are in their bickering. In one thoughtless moment, Pia's mother compares a rash of broken windows in town to Kristallnacht, the 1938 rioting that featured the smashing of windows in shops and houses owned by Jews, and Pia's father is so offended that you can almost see the marriage itself shatter. The kids' only adult ally is Herr Schiller, an octogenarian with a remarkable ability to relate to children. His main contribution is to act as a sounding board as Pia and Stefan make their discoveries, but in a town where everyone else is too terrified by the serial disappearances to want to talk about them, Herr Schiller's accessibility is not to be discounted.
Grant narrates her story with admirable economy, smoothly working in folk tales and seasonal rituals. A particularly creepy moment comes at the annual St. Martin's Day parade (in honor of the paragon who cut his cloak in two and gave half to a shivering beggar). By now the schoolteachers have become obsessed with counting and recounting the children in their care. The problem is that everyone puts on a mask for the festivities, and one teacher doesn't realize that, although the count keeps coming out right, the children are not the same ones she started with.
Grant seems to want readers to be surprised by the killer's identity, but she concentrates on such a small set of characters that it's pretty easy to figure out whodunit. No matter. As travel writers are always reminding us, often the best part of the fun is getting there. The same is true of "The Vanishing of Katharina Linden." Steeped in spooky legends and set in a country that, for all its present-day serenity, can't fully escape the burden of its harrowing past, this is a mystery with unusual resonance.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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CHARLIE CHAN: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History
Yunte Huang
Norton
ISBN 978 0 393 06962 4
354 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
We Americans go at life freestyle; we ignore boundaries, break taboos, appropriate and exploit the arts, cuisines, styles and beliefs of every people and country we encounter. There's nothing clean and pure or thoroughbred about us. We're a nation of alley cats and mongrels. As Stanley Crouch put it, "the catalyst of American experience" is "cultural miscegenation."
So it seems appropriate that this study of Charlie Chan, the Chinese-Hawaiian detective created by Earl Derr Biggers and the hero of more than 40 movies, should itself be a heady mixture of scholarship, essay and memoir. "In many ways," writes Yunte Huang, "Charlie Chan is a distillation of the collective experience of Asian Americans, his resume a history of the Chinese in America." Chan is also a lens through which one can examine 20th-century anxieties about race, the "yellow peril," immigration and class.
Huang comes at Charlie Chan from four different angles. First, he takes up the life and career of Chang Apana, the actual Honolulu police officer who loosely inspired the fictional detective. Apana -- unlike the rotund and cultivated Chan -- was small, wiry and illiterate. In his youth he worked as a Hawaiian cowboy and later made the bullwhip his signature tool of law enforcement. While describing Apana's tough and colorful life, Huang also provides a potted history of Hawaii and its Chinese population.
Chan's creator, Biggers (brought up, appropriately, near Canton, Ohio), naturally provides the book's second thread. After graduating from Harvard in 1907, the future novelist worked as a reporter for various newspapers and was occasionally taken to task for embroidering the facts to produce better stories. Eventually, though, Biggers -- planning to marry and needing money -- drew on his nascent talent for fiction, and in less than three months he produced his first mystery: the evocatively titled "Seven Keys to Baldpate" (1913). Its success -- there have been at least seven filmed versions -- encouraged him to become a full-time writer and to produce a second mystery, "The House Without a Key" (1925) in which an obese Charlie Chan appears halfway through as a relatively minor character, but one who quickly caught readers' imaginations.
To account for Chan's appeal, Huang surveys various images of the "Chinaman" in the American psyche. He looks closely at Bret Harte's notorious poem "The Heathen Chinee," P.T. Barnum's Siamese twins Chang and Eng, our fascination with the insidious "devil doctor" Fu Manchu, Richard Condon's classic thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," and the long-held view that Charlie Chan is nothing more than an Asian Uncle Tom played in yellow-face by Caucasian actors.
The Chan movies are the third theme of Huang's study. Because of the popularity of Biggers' novels -- there were six before his death at age 48 -- Hollywood started to make Charlie Chan films as early as 1926, though the series only took off in the 1930s when the Swede Warner Oland assumed the role. Oland specialized in Asian characters, maintaining that some touch of Mongolian blood through his Russian mother allowed him to forgo any special makeup. Oland made 16 Charlie Chan movies, and after his death he was succeeded by Sidney Toler, who acted in over 20 more, presenting a rather more acerbic and irascible Chan.
In perhaps his most sensitive pages, Huang counters the accusations of racial stereotyping and reductionism that have often been assigned to Chan and the Chan films. He notes that the moguls who made and financed these movies were Eastern European Jews, themselves outsiders. He discusses Stepin Fetchit's campy histrionics in "Charlie Chan in Egypt" as a form of stylish black mockery of the white establishment. He underscores that Charlie Chan is throughout presented as an affectionate father, a sagacious and admired professional and a valued friend. Some of the movies even address the issue of anti-Chinese prejudice. When I recently watched "Charlie Chan at the Opera," I was surprised that one of the film's themes is Chan's admirable poise as he gradually wins the respect of a choleric, deeply xenophobic police detective.
The fourth and last thread in this model of popular scholarship is the author himself. Having emigrated from China in 1991, Huang first lived in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he attended college and ran a restaurant before going on to graduate studies at SUNY-Buffalo. In many ways, his own experiences as a Chinese in America are as important to this book's appeal and authority as his actual research. Today Huang is a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Still, while "Charlie Chan" is almost as wide-ranging as it is enthralling, Huang does somehow neglect the most obvious aspect of the Chan books and movies: their status as mysteries, as minor works of art. Two or three times he hints, to no good purpose in my view, at the solutions to Biggers' whodunits, but he otherwise tends to employ the books as sociological documents, seldom giving any indication of their particular merits. Are the books still worth reading? Which is the best? You won't find the answers here.
Similarly, while Huang does comment on the charm of Chan's pseudo-Chinese turns of phrase and his enigmatic Confucianisms ("Theory like mist on eyeglasses -- obscures facts" or "Door of opportunity swing both ways"), he fails to note the likely literary influence of Ernest Bramah's immensely popular tales of Kai-Lung. Starting with "The Wallet of Kai-Lung," which appeared in 1900, these stories contain the very same kind of odd diction and fortune-cookie aphorisms that we find in the Chan whodunits. Significantly, Bramah was also a major writer of mystery stories, being the creator of the blind detective Max Carrados.
Not least, I wish that Huang had properly pointed to the most obvious appeal of the Charlie Chan films: They are, in general, excellent puzzles. Some, like "Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum" and "Meeting at Midnight," are highly atmospheric; many -- deftly observing the Aristotelian unities -- restrict the entire action to a single setting and a small number of suspects. And they really are clever. Why, for instance, would the murderous villain of "Charlie Chan in Paris" draw attention to himself by wearing dark glasses and an unmistakable costume?
But, to coin a Chanism, "picky reviewer like fly on Ming vase -- fly soon gone, but valuable vase remain." Yunte Huang's "Charlie Chan" is a terrifically enjoyable and informative book, one that should appeal to both students of racial history and to fans of one of cinema's greatest detectives.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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RED RAIN
Bruce Murkoff
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 27207 2
330 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Peter Behrens, author of "The Law of Dreams"
Bruce Murkoff's "Red Rain" is a rich, thick stew of a historical novel, a powerfully imagined and thoroughly believable vision of America in its nadir summer of 1864. The protagonist is Will Harp, a young army doctor just returned to his family's farm in the Hudson Valley from the Southwest, where he was an unwilling participant to the U.S. Army's campaign of genocide against the Shoshone Indians.
Dr. Harp arrives home hoping to renew his connection to a beloved landscape and to come to terms with the atrocities he witnessed. But American violence is not so easy to escape. This is, after all, a monstrous time, and the country is wading deep in the bloodbath of the Civil War. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia are doing their best to break each other's spirit in formless battles of attrition.
When the bones of a mastodon are extracted from a swamp adjacent to Harp's land, the troubled young doctor becomes intrigued by prehistory and determined to acquire the ground -- which is also desperately desired by an entrepreneur who has railroad dreams. A mastodon may be ancient history, but any history can be vital and dangerous when dragged out of the swamp, as one farmer learns during an excavation: "It was a huge horn," Murkoff writes, "the damndest one he'd ever seen. He held his hands out just as the sharp, ragged point ran through the soft skin of his upper thigh, just below his right testicle, dragging him upward as it twisted out of the mud."
"Red Rain" is no Ken Burnsesque slab of the American past, delivered in sepia tones with tinkly piano music. Murkoff offers a substantial and resonant vision of what was arguably America's worst summer. Violence and displacement had thoroughly wormed their way into the country's soul, and these characters live in a culture that's entrepreneurial, often deadly, intensely focused on the price of real estate. Had Dostoevsky sailed up the Hudson in the 1860s, he would have recognized this place.
The novel offers a rich cast of secondary characters. Mickey Blessing, the little town's goon-for-hire, has a gentle sister, whose soldier-husband has gone missing after that shapeless, lost battle known as Cold Harbor. There are Irish bullies, and bullies who hate the Irish; Jewish storekeepers; a gay photographer; and a young river-rat orphan boy whose allegiances switch in the fight over land. All these people live in the psychic shadow of the war in Virginia, which seems poisonous and unstoppable.
Murkoff is sensitive to the wildness and the surprising ruggedness of the Hudson Valley landscape, too. Though it was in a section of the country that had been settled for 200 years, his Rondout, N.Y., in 1864 still has the lawlessness of a frontier town, suggesting there may be something in American life -- something buoyant and thrilling, and sick and dangerous, too -- that keeps settlements from ever really jelling into communities.
The novel suffers, though, because Murkoff is unable to resist weaving in too many stories and too many secondary characters. The struggle between Will Harp's passionate desire to dig up the past and his opponent's ruthless determination to bury it and to get on with the business of business is intriguing and suggestive, but it develops rather slowly. The texture of the writing is gorgeous, but it's sometimes clogged with what feels like period detail for its own sake. Consequently, the story's momentum suffers. However, should you want to spend a while in the summer of 1864, "Red Rain" is an engaging and bloody-minded read, a historical novel of great conviction that hints at a dark vision of the American present through its confident handling of our past.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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GROWING UP JUNG: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks
Micah Toub
Norton
ISBN 978-0393067552
261 pages
$23.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books regularly for The Washington Post.
There's nothing more endearing than a family memoir in which the author is actually fond of his family. It's rare; it's close to miraculous. If a person wants to write about his youth and his parents, it's usually because he has scores to settle. Affection turns the whole thing into a miracle. Because parents -- God love them! -- have been put on Earth to embarrass us half to death.
Not that Micah Toub's mom and dad don't fit that bill. They're both Jungian psychologists, and while Jung seemed important and relevant back when Toub's parents were at the height of their respective careers, Toub gets pestered regularly these days by people who remind him that Jung is no longer taken very seriously as a rigorous thinker. (Just to refresh your memory: Jung was first a disciple, then a colleague and later a competitor of Sigmund Freud back in the first half of the 20th century.)
The key facts to remember while reading this book are that Jung theorized about the "collective unconscious," the importance of mythical archetypes that inhabit every mind; the "anima," most usually in reference to the feminine self that lurks inside every man; "synchronicity," which leaves sweethearts eternally marveling about what it was, exactly, in this Big World that allowed them to meet in the first place; and finally, "individuation," the process by which we separate from our parents and become our own independent selves.
The narrative begins in a Colorado suburb in the '8os with a family where the parent-therapists often work at home. That "meant that waves and waves of screwed-up, crazy, lunatic weirdoes were allowed to enter our altar of rational normalcy," Toub recalls. But home life was never all that rational or normal. What did pertain was a form of highly evolved psychological integrity, a commitment to trying to find out what was really going on in life in any particular moment. "Being the son of a psychologist ... meant saying exactly what you were thinking and feeling -- it meant telling the truth," Toub writes.
The first chapter, "The Marginalized," is a perfect mini-masterpiece about how good intentions and the best belief systems just aren't going to work out if someone in the group isn't prepared to go along with the program. The young Micah has an older, half-black half sister, who, in the fashion of all rebellious teenagers, is totally disgusted with her parents and family and everything that goes along with that package. (She detests anything and everything that seems in the least New Agey.)
The situation has gotten so far out of hand that a family meeting is convened, in which Micah's dad feels called upon to speak in his "fluffy-edged psychologist voice," while his sister's (unstated) position is: "I don't want to talk about it and you can't make me." Her stepdad tries to get her to talk about the ceiling: "Why don't you describe what you see?" He asks. "Perhaps you see a figure or a story in the shape of the plaster that will help us to know what's happening with you?"
Toub's parents live in a land of stories, of living room floors dotted with meditation pillows, a strict macrobiotic diet (except for the family's monthly jaunt to a seafood restaurant), a belief in spirit guides and mandalas and what they signify -- and above all, a touching belief that something big is going on beyond the everyday world. The wonderful thing Toub does here is stay away from the cheap-and-easy shot (except, perhaps, when he mentions that his dad's second wife divorces him because, she says, "I just can't grow old with a man who owns a Tarot deck.") He tries his best to show the reader that, past any surface goofiness, Jung's theories provide us with useful tools to talk about the human condition.
In the second half of this memoir, Toub takes particular events in his life and describes them in terms of various psychological concepts: The shadow in his life turns out to be watching porn and gobbling sweets. A friend of his gets control of his anima by walking around like the cutest girl in town instead of just lusting after her. A romance with a promising girlfriend is jeopardized by a lively familial conversation about incest, and so on. And yes, it is true that Micah likes his mom a little more than might be generally acceptable, but hey, nobody's perfect! That's what psychology is for, isn't it?
I hated to see this book end. I loved every person in it, from the wistful dad with his "fluffy-edged" voice, to Toub's kind and darling mom, his tolerant and loving ex-wife, even that volcanic teenaged sister, who refused to tell stories about the ceiling. "Growing Up Jung" is a gem.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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