Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday December 31, 2010
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FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR: An Extraordinary Marriage
Hazel Rowley
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374158576
345 pages
$27
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post
Here's some old-time Republican humor: Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt are sitting in the White House living room during World War II. "Do you notice anything different about me, dear?" Eleanor asks. "No, dear, I don't," Franklin answers. "What can it be?" "I'm wearing my gas mask," Eleanor responds. Ha, ha, ha.
Women all over America -- if they were a certain type -- could take comfort in the fact that even if they were poor, uneducated and stupid, there was one person more homely than they were. Eleanor was the proverbial mud fence, and because she believed in good causes, social justice and the essential humanity of Negroes, she also got to be the national pill. Put another way, in their 40-year marriage, Franklin Roosevelt was the hipster, Eleanor the square.
They were both of New York aristocracy, of Dutch heritage. They were fifth cousins, once removed. Eleanor's uncle was the beloved president Theodore Roosevelt. They were rich, and had -- theoretically -- every advantage. Franklin, in fact, did. His father was an invalid, but his mother, who was immensely wealthy, made Franklin the apple of her eye. He was handsome, sunny-tempered, perhaps a little slick. Things were different for Eleanor. Her mother, a great beauty, was disappointed in her girl's looks; her father was a classic sociopathic charmer -- extremely kind and solicitous when it occurred to him, absent the rest of the time. Once "her father asked her to wait for him in the lobby of the Knickerbocker Club, and she waited, holding his three fox-terriers on their leashes, until six hours later the doorman sent her home in a carriage." Plainly speaking, she was never loved.
Then, when she was a young woman fresh from boarding school and Roosevelt was still an undergraduate at Harvard, the pair recognized each other on a tram. One of Franklin's relatives had just made a scandalous and sordid marriage, and perhaps it was this that convinced Franklin she would be good wife material. There was a courtship, the young couple married, and Uncle Teddy came to the wedding and stole the show: "My father," Alice Roosevelt Longworth wrote, "lived up to his reputation of being the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral and hogged the limelight unashamedly." Afterward, they went to live in New York City in a home that opened directly on Eleanor's mother-in-law's home. Sara Delano Roosevelt proved to be a classic gorgon, holding on to the purse strings, criticizing her daughter-in-law at every turn. Eleanor gave birth to six children; five survived.
If I've spent a long time on the early stages of the Roosevelt marriage, so does Hazel Rowley, the author of this enticing new biography. Her research, both meticulous and extensive, does not bloat the book into a doorstop. "Franklin and Eleanor" is less about history than about relationships, and it reads like a wonderful novel at times, giving us a vision of what parts of American life were like then. No matter how rich you were, life was hard.
Illness bedeviled Eleanor and Franklin. They managed to have typhoid fever at the same time. When she discovered Lucy Mercer's love letters, he was down with double pneumonia. That mother-in-law never stopped interfering. But -- the author implicitly suggests -- it was all this, along with Franklin's natural ebullience and Eleanor's implacable desire to do good, that gave them the strength to cope with Franklin's polio (described here in appalling detail), to survive election after election after election. (His mother opposed his political career with all her might.)
Their personal lives turned radical and subversive. After his affair with Mercer, Franklin had a series of adoring females around him, and for the most part Eleanor never objected. She herself had some form of romance with her bodyguard-chauffeur; he was a handsome chap and plainly devoted. And just about the time of her husband's first presidential inauguration, she embarked on a passionate affair with Lorena Hickok, at that time the foremost female newspaper reporter in the land.
A blend of characteristics -- Franklin's flamboyant confidence, Eleanor's passion for social justice -- generated the exceptional energy it took for the pair to change the world. Their ability, so well captured in these pages, to gather friends and followers into a coherent and powerful community and their willingness to exchange affection until the very end remain awesome. This is much more than a book about politics.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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HOLLYWOOD HILLS
Joseph Wambaugh
Little, Brown
ISBN 978-0316129503
356 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air." She teaches literature at Georgetown University.
What fun it is to read Joseph Wambaugh! His Hollywood Station police procedurals -- peppered with the requisite gunshots and groin kicks, sleaze and sunshine -- are word-drunk wonders. If James Joyce had imagined "Finnegans Wake" as a crime story (hmmm, not a bad idea since plot was never Joyce's strong suit), it might have turned out something like Wambaugh's latest suspense story, "Hollywood Hills."
Take this bit of nonsense verse lobbed between two of Wambaugh's cops, a duo nicknamed Flotsam and Jetsam, who are standing on Malibu Beach, where a photo shoot is taking place. The shoot features a thonged female model flanked by two male models ineptly posing as surfers. The hipster cops are sneering at the two faux surfers:
"'I'm all dialed in to see what happens if the pair of rainbow donks actually hit the briny on their unwaxed legs.'
"'Get your happy on, bro,' his partner said. 'Forget the two squids. Just wax up and enjoy the gymnosophical gyrations of that slammin' spanker.'
"'Gymno ...?' said the tall surfer. Then, 'Dude, I hate it when you take community college classes and go all vocabu-lyrical instead of speaking everyday American English.'"
Rest assured that this bewildering syntax does straighten out some after the opening chapter, but Wambaugh clearly revels in catchy cop talk and overblown metaphors that make Raymond Chandler's similes seem sedate by comparison. "Hollywood Hills" would make the perfect last-minute holiday gift for any aging English majors out there who like their crime fiction lite and have fond memories of reading "Jabberwocky" out loud.
Wambaugh's plot is as loopy as his language is joyously loony. An ex-con named Raleigh Dibble has landed a comfortable job as a butler and cook to Leona Brueger, the widow of a cold-cuts tycoon whose mansion is perched in the exclusive neighborhood of the novel's title. Raleigh, like most crime noir saps, yearns for what's out of his reach. He meets his satanic tempter in Nigel Wickland, Leona's art dealer. During the ongoing Great Recession, sales have dropped off at Nigel's pricey art gallery, so Nigel, sensing Raleigh's restlessness, proposes that the men team up and substitute digitalized copies for some of Leona's more expensive paintings. As the plan progresses, Raleigh, wisely, gets cold feet:
"His thoughts kept returning to the months he'd spent in federal prison (for writing bad checks), where he'd met several inmates who had served very hard time in state penitentiaries. One of them had told Raleigh that comparing Club Fed to state prison was like comparing hemorrhoids to colon cancer, and the inmate was a man who had suffered both."
Meanwhile, a gang of teenage burglars known as the "Bling Ring" is breaking into the mansions of young celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Orlando Bloom. The tabloid accounts of the audacious exploits of these teen thugs fire up the imagination of a young parking attendant named Jonas and his sort-of girlfriend, Megan -- both OxyContin addicts. Jonas and Megan begin cruising the Hollywood Hills to sniff out a promising property to burgle and, you guessed it, Leona Brueger's mansion strikes them as ripe for the pillaging.
As all plotlines converge at the mansion, the LAPD cops who call Hollywood Station home base are busy with some extraneous distractions like shutting down a goth house party and chasing pickpockets outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. As ever, Wambaugh is alert to the ugly realities of police work, but overall "Hollywood Hills" is much more screwball than sinister. Throughout the novel, for instance, a female rookie named Britney is treated to some insider "cop-style girl talk" by an older sister-in-arms:
"'Don't go to work without shaving your legs. How'd you like it if a gossipy ER nurse told some of the Watch Five coppers about your stubble? You just know they'd all start calling you 'cactus legs.'"
"'No cactus legs,' the rookie said, 'Got it.'
"'And don't wear an underwire bra under your vest. I tried to take the vest off Millie Boyle after she got rear-ended in a TC at Hollywood and Vine, right before we put her into the RA. And her goddamn padded underwire bra popped off like it was spring-loaded.'
"'No underwire bra. OK, boss,' Britney said cheerfully. 'This is real good information to have.'"
Wambaugh's "Hollywood Hills" doesn't offer profound insights into the evil that lurks in the human heart. Instead, this series serves up something perhaps even more welcome as the drear days of winter settle in: an absurdist take on crime, as well as plotlines and sentences that perform buoyant loop-de-loops all over the page before making flawless landings.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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