Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday January 20, 2011
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DAMAGE
John Lescroart
Dutton
ISBN 978-0525951766
399 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
These are good times for fans of legal thrillers. Perhaps inspired by the success of Scott Turow and John Grisham, new talent keeps emerging. Young lawyers such as Justin Peacock and Robert Reuland have written fine novels. Michael Connelly has taken time away from his Harry Bosch series to give us three delightful books about the cynical but irresistible Los Angeles defense lawyer Mickey Haller. And the ex-bartender and rock singer John Lescroart has written a series of increasingly popular novels about the law, love and skullduggery in San Francisco.
Most of Lescroart's novels have co-starred defense attorney Dismas Hardy and homicide detective Abe Glitsky, close friends who sometimes find themselves on opposite sides in the courtroom. In addition to legal fireworks, Lescroart does more than most lawyer-novelists with the domestic lives of his characters and with the visual, cultural and culinary joys of San Francisco. His 22nd novel, "Damage," follows the pattern of the earlier ones, except that Hardy is relegated to a walk-on while Glitsky -- now the city's chief of detectives -- works with the city's new district attorney to stop a rich sociopath who embarks on a killing spree.
Wes Farrell, a defense lawyer, has been narrowly elected district attorney, and he's not at all certain that he's suited for the job. His uncertainties mount when a man named Roland Curtlee, after serving 10 years in prison for the rape and murder of a servant in his family's home, has his conviction overturned and awaits a new trial. The problem for Farrell is that the killer's parents, owners of the (fictional) San Francisco Courier, gave money and editorial support to his campaign. They soon arrive in Farrell's office and demand that he take action to keep their dear boy from returning to prison. Farrell wants to do the right thing, but he's aware of how much damage the Curtlees, their money and their hatchet-wielding political columnist can do him.
So is the judge who promptly grants bail to the young man. At that point, the blood starts to flow. A potential star witness against young Curtlee -- another young woman he raped -- is murdered. So is the wife of the foreman of the jury that convicted him. The freed convict even knocks on Glitsky's door and seems to threaten his wife and child. Farrell and Glitsky have no doubt that Curtlee is the killer, but local judges, who must run for reelection and fear the Curtlees' money and editorial power, refuse to put the young cutthroat back behind bars where he belongs. The new mayor, too, fears the publishers and pressures both the district attorney and the homicide chief to go easy.
Lescroart paints his story in broad strokes. Curtlee and his family's Guatemalan bodyguard are monsters -- we see them in action -- and Curtlee's parents, the publishers, are equally evil, although they pay others to do the wet work. Sometimes Lescroart's plotting is a bit too casual. The police, for example, fail to have Curtlee followed long after it becomes clear that he's out killing people. (By contrast, in Connelly's recent "The Reversal," when a killer is set loose pending retrial, the first thing the police do is follow him 24/7.) The Guatemalan blows a man's head off and then takes the murder weapon back to the mansion and says he'll dispose of it later -- which makes no sense except as a favor to the police. Still, as the killers menace the story's good people, a great deal of suspense ensues. In popular fiction, page-turning almost always trumps logic.
Lescroart touches on several topical issues. He's making the case that the election of judges leads to the politicizing of justice. He makes chillingly clear how vulnerable law-abiding people can be to amoral killers. He offers dramatic examples of how gutter journalism can damage innocent lives. He even has a scene based on recent incidents around the country in which gun owners have affirmed their Second Amendment rights by turning up with unconcealed guns in public places -- a Starbucks in this instance. Lescroart offers his own sardonic twist, however, when he has the two sociopaths mug a "paunchy, middle-aged, balding" gun-lover and steal the "big, semiautomatic with custom-made grips" that he sports in a holster on his hip.
The novel ends with a bang. Several bangs, in fact. A veritable Fourth of July of bangs. We mustn't be too precise, endings being sacrosanct, so let's just say that decency returns to San Francisco amid bloodcurdling violence and a good many surprises, as Lescroart again demonstrates his fiendish delight in keeping those pages turning.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE MISTRESS OF NOTHING
Kate Pullinger
Touchstone
ISBN 978-1439193860
250 pages
$24
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
It's a sad fact of American publishing that a literary award given in Canada is like a tree falling in the forest. Despite our shared language, our integrated economy and the world's longest friendly border, we're still a lot more attentive to our old masters in England than to our amicable neighbors up north. Every American newspaper that takes book coverage seriously writes about who's nominated for the Booker Prize 3,000 miles away, but Canadian award winners right next door generate all the excitement of Victoria Day.
I wish this were the prelude to a harangue about the provincialism of American literary taste (Yes, Canada has more to offer than Margaret Atwood!), but sometimes a nation's book prizes do it no favors. Case in point: the Governor General's Literary Award, which since 1936 has strived to identify the finest in Canadian literature. Even accounting for the usual politics and distortions of the judging process, what can justify passing up Alice Munro's "Too Much Happiness"  and giving the $25,000 prize to this little historical romance by Kate Pullinger called "The Mistress of Nothing"?
Based on the true story of a wealthy 19th-century writer named Lady Duff Gordon and her personal maid, the novel promises themes that should resonate with modern-day readers: class conflict, feminism, Muslim-Western relations and political unrest in Egypt. But its exploration of these rich subjects never disturbs the ruffles of costume drama.
Drawing on Gordon's "Letters From Egypt" (1865) and Katherine Frank's biography "A Passage to Egypt" (1994), Pullinger retells and remakes a story that, frankly, plays better as history. (Gordon's great-great-grandson, British historian Antony Beevor, has already objected to the novel's blurring of fact and fiction in the Guardian.) By all accounts -- her own and others' -- Lady Gordon was an extraordinary woman: a successful translator, a fearless international traveler, a witty social observer and a charming iconoclast. That she accomplished all this under the shadow of a medical death sentence makes her life even more remarkable.
When Pullinger's novel opens, Gordon is struggling to find a climate that might tame the symptoms of her tuberculosis. In desperation, she leaves her husband and children behind in England and travels to Egypt, where she settles in Luxor and becomes a local curiosity and respected hostess. She learns Arabic, dresses as an Egyptian man "with a dash of Bedouin tribesman thrown in," sets up an ad hoc clinic during epidemics, entertains local officials and visiting Europeans, and composes letters that are entertaining and, at times, daringly critical of the tyrannical Egyptian government.
Pullinger's innovation is to retell the story of Gordon's life from the point of view of her personal maid, Sally. It's like a female version of Ronald Harwood's play "The Dresser," a close examination of the fraught relationship between an employer and a servant who must slide deftly among the roles of friend, confidant, nurse and slave. Gordon made friendly references to Sally in her published letters about her adventures in Egypt, but Pullinger knows how badly this relationship ended. In fact, "The Mistress of Nothing" opens with Sally's bitter announcement: "The truth is that, to her, I was not fully human. ... She loved me, there's no question of that, and I knew it and had felt secure in it, but it transpired that she loved me like a favored household pet. ... When I did wrong, I was dismissed."
Announcing this eventual rift at the opening allows us to see the approaching crisis from thousands of miles away, which poses a dramatic problem in a novel short on drama. And, disappointingly, when their breakup does occur, Pullinger offers little more insight or analysis than we received on the first page. Gordon remains the bright though capricious mistress, and Sally remains the dutiful though disappointed servant, prone to making thoroughly self-aware comments about her situation that any sociology major at Mount Holyoke would applaud.
We get little inklings about the political unrest in Egypt, but it's seen through a gauze, as are Sally's sexual explorations with Gordon's dragoman. "My Lady had come to Egypt to evade death," the virginal narrator tells us, "but in Egypt I found life." And when the scarves start to fly, that 19th-century Harlequin style takes over: "He drew me down beside him on his sleeping mat and we began. We began and we began and we began and it was perfect. I had not known it could be so perfect." I've never been to Egypt, but I don't believe that for a moment.
After the stork arrives and shatters the harmonious British salon in the desert, the rest of the novel is held hostage by Lady Gordon's hissy fit, as this dying grande dame drags herself through the halls like a jealous dorm mother trying to catch her horny kids in flagrante again. Sally wonders how she'll survive without her employer's protection, while her inscrutable lover promises that everything will work out fine. She's having none of it: "My life was ruined," she sighs. "I was destroyed."
Like most things in this novel, the rumors of Sally's destruction are somewhat exaggerated. As a light romance with a certain historical flair, "The Mistress of Nothing" is diverting enough. But a great nation's greatest novel? O, Canada, that's loonie.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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AND THE SHOW WENT ON: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris
Alan Riding
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307268976
399 pages
$28.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books every Thursday for The Washington Post
Alan Riding is an esteemed journalist, long a European cultural correspondent for the New York Times and, before that, the author of what is still the best modern introduction to Mexico, "Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans."  Since 1985 the book has sold nearly half a million copies. "And the Show Went On" deserves a comparable success. It is certainly one of the finest works of serious popular history since the heyday of Barbara Tuchman. If you're a Francophile or a Francophobe, this is the holiday present you should have received.
Like Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" and "The Guns of August" -- her portraits of European society and politics in the years leading up to World War I -- Riding's account of "cultural life in Nazi-occupied Paris" is actually larger than its announced subject. As he writes in his preface, "How, I wondered, had artists and intellectuals addressed the city's worst political moment of the twentieth century? Did talent and status impose a greater moral responsibility? Was it possible for culture to flourish without political freedom?" Riding's triumph lies in refusing to affirm any simplistic answers. Instead, he plunges the reader into the French cultural scene of the 1930s and '40s and shows us how real men and real women dealt with the devil.
"On June 14, 1940, the German army drove into Paris unopposed. Within weeks, the remnants of French democracy were quietly buried and the Third Reich settled in for an indefinite occupation of France." Many French fascists and anti-Semites, including the important novelists Cline and Robert Brasillach and public intellectual Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, welcomed the Nazis. A few writers and artists elected silence (essayist Jean Guehenno), exile (surrealist Andre Breton) or cunning (Picasso). But most chose various forms of accommodation. Where, though, did accommodation leave off and collaboration begin?
Despite the Wehrmacht uniforms on many members of their audiences, French artists still wanted to make movies and music, mount plays and ballets, publish poems and novels. Between 1940 and 1945, Albert Camus brought out "The Stranger,"  Colette created "Gigi," Jean-Paul Sartre presented "The Flies" and "No Exit,"  and Marcel Carne directed his epic film "Les Enfants du Paradis." Was it not, after all, essential to maintain French cultural institutions at such a dark hour? Or was it simply that, as Guehenno acidly observed in his journal, the Parisian man of letters was "incapable of surviving for long in hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print. ... 'French literature must continue.' He believes that he is French literature and thought and that they will die without him."
Marshal Philippe Petain similarly justified the Vichy regime, in which the southern half of France was permitted limited autonomy in return for pledging loyalty to her conqueror: Thus, Gallic culture and traditions would survive, perhaps even be reinvigorated. The Nazis, of course, simply wanted the French pacified or co-opted: It made ruling them all that much easier. As Hitler once told Albert Speer: "Let's let them degenerate. All the better for us."
Then, again, even Aryan warriors need occasional R & R. So the Reich also wanted Paris to remain Paris -- the world's favorite playground. Educated Germans, like the novelist Ernst Juenger, could enjoy its salons, theaters and dining at Maxim's. Gerhard Heller, who oversaw cultural activities for the Propaganda Staffel, soon counted distinguished novelists, critics and editors among his new best friends. The actress Arletty and the couturier Coco Chanel took German lovers; the playwright Sacha Guitry preened for Teutonic attention; and the frivolous genius Jean Cocteau enthused about the monumental sculpture of Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite artist. Meanwhile, goose-stepping foot soldiers could visit those other high-kickers at the Folies Bergere, or shop for silk underclothes for girlfriends back home. And not all of these were back home. It's been estimated that "collaboration horizontale" resulted in 100,000 to 200,000 children with German fathers.
All in all, life in Paris could continue with a degree of normality -- if you weren't a Jew. In short order, all Jewish businesses were Aryanized, art collections seized (Hitler liked Old Masters), and innumerable scholars, teachers, actors, musicians, writers and intellectuals banned from working. Later came the yellow stars and the "rafles," in which undesirables were rounded up and sent to a camp at Drancy before being loaded onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. The government actively assisted their new masters in this loathsomeness. And yet, as Riding reminds us, "the record of the French as a whole was more heartening. Three-quarters of the Jews trapped in France in 1940 escaped deportation and ... most survived because they were in some way protected -- or at least not denounced -- by their French neighbors."
Various chapters in "And the Show Went On" focus on the movie industry, publishing, the art trade, nightlife, opera and ballet, magazines and newspapers, as well as Nazi cultural events. It's nonetheless shocking to learn of the questionable performances, in all senses, of pianist Alfred Cortot, soprano Germaine Lubin, actor Maurice Chevalier and chanteuse Edith Piaf. Each had his or her reasons, and Riding seeks to understand them.
Still, there were clear heroes and heroines. Dina Vierny, a very young model for Maillol, Bonnard and Matisse, guided escapees through the mountain passes to Spain. The waspish diarist Jean Galtier-Boissiere recorded every aspect of the betrayal of the intellectuals. Jean Paulhan, the longtime editor of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, led a Scarlet Pimpernel existence as an habitue of salons and a leader of the resistance. Rose Valland, a nondescript employee of the Jeu de Paume, risked her life to keep a secret record of the art -- more than 20,000 works -- looted from Jewish collections.
One entire chapter chronicles the birth of organized resistance by the long revered "Reseau du Musee de l'Homme," that is, the Museum of Man network, so called because many of its members were, believe it or not, ethnologists. Twenty-eight of them were killed by the Nazis. Riding notes that "at a time when most of the French were coming to terms with the occupation, they were almost alone in acting on their belief in the idea of resistance." That idea, however, spread. Eminent poets, including Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, organized underground movements; Rene Char commanded an army of 2,000 maquis.
In the end, Parisians were judged by the company they kept, and sometimes saved by whom they knew. During the occupation the fascist Drieu La Rochelle told Gerhard Heller to "make sure nothing ever happens to Malraux, Paulhan, Gaston Gallimard and Aragon, no matter what allegations are brought against them." These may have been ideological enemies, but they were also friends and former classmates. In 1945, after Drieu La Rochelle committed suicide to avoid being tried for treason, nearly all of them came to his funeral.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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STOLEN WORLD: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery
Jennie Erin Smith
Crown
ISBN 978-0307381477
322 pages
$25
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday
I'm trying to think of the best way to say how absolutely marvelous "Stolen World" is and wondering if the answer can't be found in the subtitle: "A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery." Yes, it's got all that, along with screwball comedy and a subtle, understated sermon on ecological values. But wait! -- as they say in those zany TV commercials -- there's more! At some point in her creative process, journalist Jennie Erin Smith has added, in semi-invisible ink, "And That Crazy Brother of Yours, Who Hides in the Basement and Plays With Mamba Snakes, Even Though He's 53 Years Old." Because reptiles, eternally repellent and charming, aren't really the main subject here, even though they're a constant ingredient. And petty crime, although wonderful to read about -- especially if it's not happening to you -- isn't the central theme either.
No, it's the guys -- and even as I type these words, I'm laughing: It's the guys who grew up fiddling with snakes, when everybody else in the class was out playing baseball, or the guy (in this case, one of the protagonists, aptly named Hank Molt) who drives around in a car with a gila monster in a paper bag on the seat beside him and absently puts his hand in the bag: "Gila monsters hang on and chew," the author reminds us, "grinding in their venom, and the pain was enough that Molt ran his Jeep off the road and ended up in a rural Georgia hospital, which he escaped from the next morning without paying."
"Stolen World" is a crazy history of the past 50 years of the reptile trade around the globe, but you could say its larger and loftier theme is the futility of much human endeavor. We meet underachieving, anti-social, weirdly attractive geeks whose circle of friends includes "fellow reptile dealers, carny snake handlers, kids from the suburbs, small-time poachers with something to unload." Out of this field of lowlifes, the author chooses Molt (as grumpy as the gila monster who bit him); Tommy Crutchfield, who seems a little more largehearted and a little less inept; and Crutchfield's sidekick, Edmund Celebucki, "a prison guard, a karate instructor, and a dedicated thief of antiquarian natural history books which he would liberate from public libraries and sell to specialty dealers."
Men like these have to find ways to make a living, and since they grew up isolated and staring at snakes and their scaly relatives, it stands to reason that they'd go into the reptile business, buying and selling these creatures among themselves and to various collectors, museums and zoos. What turns "Stolen World" from sober, well-researched nonfiction into a wacky comedy is that these men are at once stunningly innovative, dizzyingly incompetent, quite sociopathic and very low on bookkeeping skills. Doing business in a respectable way is too boring and utterly beyond them, and so they find themselves in one pickle after another -- stuffing half-dead baby pythons into cigarette cases, painstakingly rolling iguanas up into tube socks, and enduring encounters with customs officials across the world: "I had reptiles in my pockets and a six-foot diamond python balled up in the small of my back," Celebucki recalls. "They're running their wand over me and hit the python. The guy's squeezing it -- it's in a little tight bag. The guy said, 'What is this?' and I didn't know what to say, so I said, 'It's a tumor.'" Celebucki gets through unscathed.
This shady business couldn't continue without steady infusions of money from collectors and zookeepers who are just as in love with reptiles as the smugglers themselves, and thus, over the '60s, '70s and '80s, the illicit trade in exotic creatures flourished. To be fair, explaining the concept of honesty to these guys would be about as futile as tutoring them in the theory of relativity. They just don't seem to carry the honesty gene. It's like they're playing "Grown-Up Criminal." They compile elaborate price lists of rare reptiles they don't possess, or they bundle up shipments of, say, 100 snakes, except 48 of them are already dead. Buyers are forever not paying up, and sellers are forever planning vendettas to get revenge on the people who cheated them, and everyone is furious with everybody else. And there they live, day after day, in their "stolen world."
This is all disgraceful, of course. Real animals are suffering here. And dozens of zoos with impeccable reputations are committing crimes. But the author refuses to moralize or judge or look at the sad side. In her acknowledgments, she thanks Hank Molt "for being ruthless and intelligent ... one who 'stood up for evil in the Garden.'" She's captivated and enchanted by these goofy men, and if you're feeling a little lawless, this book is a treat.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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