Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday October 28, 2010
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MISSING LUCILE: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew
Suzanne Berne
Algonquin
ISBN 978 1 56512 625 1
296 pages
$23.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post
Here's the back story of "Missing Lucile": Suzanne Berne's great-grandfather was B.H. Kroger, the Cincinnati grocery magnate who once owned a zillion grocery stores all across the Midwest. "He shouted," Berne writes, "he swore, he insulted with breathtaking dexterity." B.H.'s first wife died after rapidly having borne him seven children. He was Mr. Nouveau Riche, rough, tough and uneducated, but you couldn't argue with the fact of his money.
His children would make do in different ways. Suzanne's grandmother, Lucile, went to Wellesley College, came home during World War I and became treasurer of the Kroger company, as well as her father's private secretary. Then, when the war ended, she had to give her job back. She joined a rescue unit organized by Wellesley that journeyed to a small, war-torn village in France. She spent almost a year teaching mothers how to be good parents and little children how to play games. When that mission folded, Lucile went back to Cincinnati to live in her father's house. She was over 30. She spotted a genteel, refined but poor German baritone, and they were married within two months. She built a beautiful house (with her father's money), had two darling little boys of her own and died at the age of 43, of stomach cancer, in 1932.
But here is the plot point in all this: Lucile was evidently not a very good mother. Suzanne's father got it into his head early on that his mother never loved him. "He has always been sad," Berne writes. "Melancholy. Inconsolable. A man who is missing something." Because not only did Lucile die when Berne's father was 6, she had been remote and cold when she was alive. She never smiled at him, which gave him a justifiable case of the sulks for the rest of his life.
The author, upon whom all this sulking impinged, decided to conjure up this missing mother for him. A novelist who teaches at Boston College, she really put her heart into this enterprise, except for when she didn't, which results in an infuriatingly uneven biography.
Thus: The emblematic moment in her father's childhood, as Berne recounts it. While his mother was working in the garden, "he was eating little red cinnamon candies, Red Hearts, as they were called then, and still are, I believe. At some point she ... asked him if she could have a few of the candies. He said no. She looked at him closely, then asked if he really couldn't give a Red Heart to his mother. He shook his head." Then, the author speculates and lets her imagination run charmingly, as she is wont to do in this narrative: "I only wish he had been eating peppermints. But such is the tenacity of metaphor: this memory wouldn't persist, most likely, if my father hadn't been hoarding Red Hearts. As for my grandmother, the bulbs she was planting were surely narcissus." Most people who have ever bought candy at the movies or decided to make cinnamon apple sauce will suspect these candies were cinnamon Red Hots, made by the Ferrara Pan company beginning in 1932, which would make factual sense, but Berne seems unwilling to investigate this -- or much else -- further.
The author obtains much of her information about the Kroger family from a coffee-table book called "The Kroger Story," published in 1973. "I bought it," she writes, "off Amazon.com for twelve dollars." About an early ancestor in the mid-19th century, she says, after imagining that his parents lived in poverty: "The mother sits tiredly at her spinning wheel with a hank of tallowy grayish wool while the father puts on his green felt hat with the little red feather and trudges over to the (BEG ITAL)Rathaus(END ITAL) to hear the latest bad news."
One might wish that the author didn't rely so heavily on a book that was probably commissioned for publicity by the Kroger company decades ago. But Berne appears to blossom most when she has the least material to work with. That's how she gets to bring in Harry Thaw, Benjamin Harrison, Mark Twain, Alice Longworth and others. During Lucile's high school years, about which there is the least available information, Berne decides that Lucile went to two different boarding schools in Washington, because their names appear in a copy of a book she had, even though Lucile's Wellesley College transcript says she went to "the College Preparatory School for Girls in Cincinnati." No, Berne says, "let's just say she went to high school in Washington. I myself went to high school in Washington and I don't remember it very well either." Besides, this way we get to hear about Alice Roosevelt: "Alice was nineteen and preparing to marry Ohio representative Nicholas Longworth, from Cincinnati. Longworth was thirty-three. A famous roue who played the violin, swilled whiskey, ran after women, and could charm even the most bumptious crowd of voters."
I'm not sure how much this tale tells us about Lucile. But perhaps it tells us something about the author. Remembering the famous Alice Longworth quip "If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me," Berne suggests her own motto might be: "If you don't know what you're talking about, have a seat." She said it, I didn't.
Her father, the melancholy one, got his Ph.D. from an unaccredited college and remained in a funk for the rest of his life because he never rose above adjunct professor. Presumably, he didn't want to do the boring work that went along with a bona fide degree. If I can speculate -- certainly the author's favorite pastime -- this may be an inherited family trait.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, Salvatore Settis
Belknap/Harvard Univ.
ISBN 978-0674035720
1,067 pages
$49.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Now here is a fabulous book -- and a bargain to boot. Harvard has produced this gigantic volume, packed with color plates and essays by some of the greatest scholars alive, for the price of a couple of hardback thrillers. Better still, while "The Classical Tradition" may look like a work of reference, it's actually one of the best bedside books you could ask for. I know because I've been browsing around in it with immense pleasure for the past two weeks.
"The Classical Tradition" aims to "provide a reliable and wide-ranging guide to the reception of classical Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its dimensions in later cultures." This means that this "guide" -- the editors are careful not to call it a full-scale lexicon, dictionary or encyclopedia -- examines "the continuing influence of ancient Greek and Roman culture in the post-classical world." The back cover shows, in miniature, what they mean: On the left is a picture of the famous sculpture representing Laocoon and his sons being strangled by a serpent. On the right is a Charles Addams cartoon depicting a butcher and two assistants struggling with a huge length of sausage. It's the very same pose.
The arts have always gone back to the classics for inspiration and templates -- think of James Joyce's "Ulysses" or the great Brazilian movie "Black Orpheus" or the recent epic films "Gladiator," "Troy" and "300" or even DC Comics' Wonder Woman, aka Princess Diana of the Amazons. In Washington (D.C.) we work in buildings modeled after those one might find in ancient Rome. Fraternities and sororities are commonly called "Greek" societies. Gay theorists regard Plato's "Symposium" as a sacred text. Even in the digital age, anyone with any education whatsoever deeply envies those with a solid knowledge of Latin and Greek. Antiquity pervades our 21st-century lives, whether we realize it or not.
"The Classical Tradition" is organized as a series of 563 articles by 339 scholars and ranges from "Academy" and "Achilles" to "Xenophon," "Zeno's Paradoxes" and "Zoology." Besides the very distinguished editors, the contributors include esteemed figures from Britain (Mary Beard, Simon Hornblower), dozens of academicians from around the world and such eminent local heavyweights as Walter Stephens and Marcel Detienne (Johns Hopkins), Martin Winkler (George Mason), Mortimer Sellers (University of Baltimore School of Law), Jan Ziolkowski (Dumbarton Oaks), James O'Donnell (Georgetown), Philip Jacks and Elizabeth Fisher (George Washington) and independent scholar Pamela O. Long.
While some of the articles in "The Classical Tradition" are just a few paragraphs long, many of the best are substantial essays. I can't pretend to have read every entry, but I've already gobbled up 30 or 40 on the subjects that most interest me. These include "Apuleius," "Asterix," "Automata," "Richard Bentley," "Circe," "Comic Books," "Homosexuality," "Horace," "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," "Leda," "Liberal Arts," "Loeb Classical Library," "Magic," "Melancholy," "Novel," "Ovid," "Presocratics," "Rhetoric," "Joseph Justus Scaliger," "Sexuality," "Sirens," "Suicide," "Translation," "Ut pictura poesis" and "Urlich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff."
At the very least, such a short and highly personal list does give some inkling of this guide's enormous sweep. "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," by the way, is a hauntingly suggestive and erotic Renaissance allegory -- full of classical motifs -- that has attracted several modern fantasy writers, including John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand. Horace's catchphrase "Ut pictura poesis" ("as is painting, so is poetry") embodies the influential doctrine by which a work of visual art is read as a "mute poem" and descriptive poetry is seen as a "talking painting." J.J. Scaliger (1540-1609), Richard Bentley (1662-1742) and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931) are, arguably, the three greatest classical scholars of all time. I was sorry that America's most influential classicist, Johns Hopkins' astonishing Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924), was left out.
Much of the information contained in "The Classical Tradition" is simply nifty stuff worth knowing. Heraclitus is remembered for the observation that you cannot step into the same river twice. Why? Because his philosophy is built around the notion that "everything flows." The Greek for this phrase, the Heraclitus entry tells us, is "pantha rhei." Saint Jerome complained that monks concentrated so much on sacred texts, ruminating on every word, that the result was "lugentes non legentes" ("mourning, not reading"). Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche was not only used for an opera libretto by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies but also served as the model for Eudora Welty's "The Robber Bridegroom" and C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces."
Within limits, the authors of the various entries are allowed to be as individual as they like. In the course of a superb brief account of Horace's poetry and its afterlife, Glenn Most tells us that Milton's translation of the famous Pyrrha Ode "is generally regarded as the worst rendition in English." In the article on translation, Stuart Gillespie notes that "a recent bibliography records more than 40 book-length translations and imitations of Ovid in English from 1950 to 2004." Throughout this same essay, Gillespie returns again and again to the various styles of classical translation, a polarizing issue made famous in a debate between Matthew Arnold and F.W. Newman. "Should the archaic and alien be registered by a translator, disrupting the English-language norms of his days (as Newman argued), or should Homer be made to sound simple, natural, unquaint (as Arnold did)? Subsequent English versions of Homer -- and there was no shortage -- could go in either direction."
To repeat, every page here provides some fascinating bit of information. Who are the five figures who kept alive the liberal arts during the Dark Ages? Answer: Saint Augustine, Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, Boethius and Isidore of Seville. There are individual essays on all of them (except the 6th-century Cassiodorus, who founded a monastery called the Vivarium, or Fishpond, where the monks preserved and studied the ancients as well as the Bible and church fathers).
Certainly anyone even mildly interested in the Western cultural heritage will find "The Classical Tradition" a necessary purchase. It belongs on the shelf next to the similarly organized, and similarly essential, "A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature," edited by David Lyle Jeffrey. Together these two books show us how deeply the stories, iconic figures and ideas of antiquity succor our imaginations and still suffuse the world we live in.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE FINKLER QUESTION
Howard Jacobson
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-160819
307 pages
$15
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/RonCharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Howard Jacobson's comedy about anti-Semitism, "The Finkler Question," won the $79,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction in London, beating "Parrot & Olivier in America," by two-time winner Peter Carey, and Emma Donoghue's popular "Room." Jacobson, 68, who remains far better known in his native England than in this country, has been a prolific writer of comic novels, mostly about Jews and Jewish identity, since 1983. Several have landed on the Booker long list.
That Jacobson could write a comedy about anti-Semitism isn't shocking nowadays. A springy piece of barbed wire runs from Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" through Mel Brooks' "The Producers," TV's "Hogan's Heroes," Sarah Silverman's Nazi riffs and all the way to Tova Reich's outrageous satire "My Holocaust," which dared to tweak Elie Wiesel and the schlocky aspect of the "never forget" industry.
Although there is a plot, "The Finkler Question" is really a series of tragicomic meditations on one of humanity's most tenacious expressions of malice, which I realize sounds about as much fun as sitting shiva, but Jacobson's unpredictable wit is more likely to clobber you than his pathos. In these pages, he's refined the funny shtick of "Kalooki Nights" (2007) to produce a more cerebral comedy about the bizarre metastasis of anti-Semitism and the exhausting complications of Zionism.
So yes, it's witty, but is it good for the Jews?
I'll leave that to Rick Sanchez, but no other book has given me such a clear sense of the benevolent disguises that anti-Jewish sentiments can wear. And no one wears them more attractively than Julian Treslove, the handsome, middle-aged gentile at the center of "The Finkler Question." Chronically anxious and poisonously romantic, Julian works as a celebrity double. He "didn't look like anybody famous in particular," Jacobson admits, but he "looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility." That chameleon-like nature, along with his favorite fantasy of a lover dying poetically in his arms, gives some idea of the grasping, blood-sucking quality of this pleasant, lonely man, "whose life had been one absurd disgrace after another."
The story opens with a tiny burst of action -- the only real action you'll get in this ruminative novel. Julian is walking home from a pleasant dinner with two old Jewish friends who have recently lost their wives. Their grief, Jacobson notes, allows him to luxuriate vicariously in widowed reveries. As usual, Julian is imagining the calamities that could befall him -- a crane dashing out his brains, a terrorist opening fire, a road sign bruising his shin -- when suddenly he's mugged. By a woman. His injuries are minor, but while emptying his pockets, she mutters what sounds like "You Ju!" Julian is exhilarated.
That Chekhovian touch of absurdity adds some essential buoyancy to what can be an excessively brooding tale. Julian becomes obsessed with the mugger's obscure curse. "You Jules"? "You jewel"? "You Jew"? Could his assailant, his "muggerette," have been an anti-Semite lashing out at Julian's "essential Jewishness"? It's a conundrum that awakens his long-simmering envy of his two Jewish friends and makes him determined to be a Jew himself -- the ultimate celebrity identity to stretch over the husk of his soul. "He wondered about training to be a rabbi. ... What about a lay rabbi?" Should he get circumcised? Should he read Maimonides?
One of his two Jewish friends is Libor, a retired celebrity reporter, still deeply shaken by the death of his wife and shocked by the predicament of surviving her. The other fresh widower is Sam Finkler, an old schoolmate, the first Jewish person Julian ever met, the prototype in his mind of all Jews -- thus "The Finkler Question." Finkler is confident and bold, a successful TV personality and the author of a series of pop philosophy books, such as "The Existentialist in the Kitchen" and "The Little Book of Household Stoicism."
"What Sam had," Jacobson writes, "was a sort of obliviousness to failure, a grandstanding cheek, which Treslove could only presume was part and parcel of the Finkler heritage. ... Such confidence, such certainty of right. ... They always had something you didn't, some verbal or theological reserve they could draw on, that would leave you stumped for a response." Desperately afraid of stereotyping Jews, Julian nonetheless luxuriates in all the classic caricatures, envying their legendary success, their history-dominating grief, even the flawless timing of their dismissive shrugs.
Jacobson is like a man playing with a knife who starts pretending to aim for our feet. When is he joking, when is he not? Even while we're trying to disentangle what's so disturbing about Julian's special regard for Jews, the book pursues (and belabors) another line of comedy, this one about self-loathing Jews. Finkler, always desperate for attention and a public platform, takes over a group called "ASHamed Jews," an anti-Zionist group that holds endless Talmudic meetings to hammer out the precise dimensions of its members' shame, the crucial distinctions that define "ashamed of being Jewish," being "ashamed as Jews" and being "(BEG ITAL)Jewishly(END ITAL) ashamed." And all this is woven through vituperative, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tedious arguments about Israeli exceptionalism.
Jacobson has stirred this pot before (and Philip Roth stirred it before him), but the novel's real depth develops slowly beneath the satire, as anti-Semitic attacks begin to filter into the story from around London and the world -- a boy blinded, a grave covered in swastikas, a man beaten: little echoes of the horror of the mid-20th century. "It's not Kristallnacht," Libor says with a shrug, but who knows what the next trigger will be? The great one-liners keep coming ("She dressed like a native of no place one could quite put a name to -- the People's Republic of Ethnigrad"), but the laughter starts to die in your throat as sorrow and fear accumulate on these pages like stones. "After a period of exceptional quiet," one character thinks, "anti-Semitism was becoming again what it had always been -- an escalator that never stopped, and which anyone could hop on at will."
There are certainly reasons to find this novel annoying. Chief among them, of course, is the tiresomeness of Julian's obsessive, if benevolent, racism. All but the most severely self-loathing Jews will grow weary of Jacobson's badgering parody of self-loathing Jews. And the plot frequently gives way to lectures, discussions and set pieces that could be read in almost any order.
On the other hand -- cue Yiddish accent -- "The Finkler Question" is often awfully funny, even while it roars its witty rage at the relentless, ever-fracturing insanity of anti-Semitism, which threatens to drive its victims a little crazy, too. This is, after all, a comedy that begins and ends in grief.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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OUR KIND OF TRAITOR
John le Carre
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022243
306 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle. Drabelle is mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World.
No shortcuts for John le Carre. The acknowledgments at the end of his splendid new novel indicate that in writing it he consulted experts on the Russian mafia, the Mumbai stock market, tennis, Swiss geography and several other topics. The guidance he received, combined with his longstanding knowledge of spycraft and the British Secret Service, makes for a tale that rings with authenticity at every stage.
The protagonists are three: Perry Makepiece, an Oxford tutor on the verge of switching to the more demanding job of secondary-school teacher; his girlfriend, Gail Perkins, a young hotshot lawyer; and Dima, a loud, bearish Russian whom they meet while on holiday at a Caribbean tennis resort. Dima first challenges Perry to a match, then yanks the couple into his boisterous family circle, and finally divulges his ulterior motive in coming on so strong. He has been laundering money, a trade he would like to drop -- except that he knows so much, including facts that would incriminate a high official of the British government, that he believes his life is in danger. Surely, he presumes, an Oxford don and a rising barrister can put him in touch with the right parties to help him make a safe exit and put down new roots in England.
And in fact, Dima has chosen well. Perry and Gail are indeed well-connected, and Dima's story captivates them both. Gail has another incentive for coming to his aid: her blooming friendship with Dima's troubled teenage daughter, Natasha. The action now shifts from Antigua to London, where Perry and Gail get a thorough grilling on exactly how the overture was made, what they think of Dima, and whether they are willing to continue serving as go-betweens. Their interrogators are Hector, a rogue agent who washed out of Her Majesty's employ some years back but has been rehired after making a fortune as an investment banker; and Luke, whose womanizing has nearly destroyed his career and for whom this case is a last chance to redeem himself.
Le Carre supplies credible backgrounds and motives for all five main characters. Luke in particular exerts a complex appeal. His disgrace stems from his folly in sleeping with the boss' wife at his last overseas posting. Luke loves his own wife, wants to do well by his son, but has a habit of falling in love with attractive women, who tend to return the favor. Since Gail is a knockout, Luke must patrol his own libido while balancing Dima's demands against Britain's needs.
Hector also bears watching. His bumptious candor can be disarming, as when he explains what's being asked of Perry and Gail: "Are you as a couple, attracted to the idea of doing something ... dangerous for your country, for virtually no reward except what is loosely called the honour of it, on the clear understanding that if you ever bubble about it ... we'll hound you to the ends of the earth?" But often Hector seems overly sure of himself, so hard-charging as to awaken forebodings in the reader.
Le Carre pulls the various threads together cunningly. Hector and Luke must extract enough preliminary information from Dima to convince their superiors that he will be valuable to them; Dima has to worry about giving away too much before he's sure that he and his family will be given sanctuary; Perry and Gail have to keep both sides happy -- and Natasha complicates matters by getting pregnant and refusing to confide in anyone but Gail. Nonetheless, everything seems to be falling into place -- until the spy bureaucracy threatens to ruin the deal.
Le Carre will turn 80 next year, and he's written a score of novels. Some of his later works have suffered from tendentiousness (his characters' objections to U.S. foreign policy can sedate even readers who agree). Perhaps his main fault as a novelist, however, has been a certain muddiness in the narration. The otherwise admirable "Absolute Friends" (2004) struck me that way: a novel in which the author's storytelling skills did not quite measure up to the depth of his vision. Happily, nothing of the kind mars "Our Kind of Traitor." There are no speeches or convolutions, not even when, toward the end, le Carre ratchets up the suspense by cutting quickly from Dima to his handlers to Perry and Gail. The denouement comes as a shock, but not an unjustified one.
With so many other le Carre novels to compare this one with, one hesitates to give it a ranking. But if we narrow the time frame and widen the scope, I have no hesitation in saying this: If a better thriller than "Our Kind of Traitor" has been published this year, I'd like to see it.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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