Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday March 18, 2011
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MR. CHARTWELL
Rebecca Hunt
Dial
ISBN 978-1400069408
242 pages
$24
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
"Mr. Chartwell" arrives with the mark of the beast. Yes, it's another animal novel. Worse, another talking-animal novel. Worse still, another novel with animals talking about depression. But wait -- put your Prozac down for a moment. This first novel by a 30-year-old British artist named Rebecca Hunt is a spirited tonic, maybe just the thing to rebalance your humors.
Set in the summer of 1964, "Mr. Chartwell " depicts the week leading up to Winston Churchill's retirement from Parliament. A slim, quirky novel would seem a cramped space for the valorous 20th-century statesman, but that's hardly this story's boldest move. The second character we meet is "a massive thing": a large, black dog.
Students of Churchill or psychology will recognize that apt metaphor. Like his father and several other ancestors, Churchill wrestled with bouts of depression, which he referred to wryly as "the black dog." That phrase is so closely associated with the legendary prime minister that one assumes he coined it, but he probably got the term from his childhood nanny, and it shows up as a euphemism for melancholia all the way back to the writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson . Hunt's bold innovation is to bring that "black dog" to furry life as an insistent, insidious and enervating presence, sometimes known as Black Pat and sometimes -- taking the name of Churchill's home -- as Mr. Chartwell.
The shelf of layman's books on depression is already heavy with great volumes. Sufferers have their favorites, but most would include "An Unquiet Mind ," by Kay Redfield Jamison; "The Noonday Demon," by Andrew Solomon; and "Darkness Visible," by William Styron. The founder of Elle magazine in England, Sally Brampton, recently borrowed Churchill's phrase for her memoir, "Shoot the Damn Dog." As a work of fantastical fiction, Hunt's novel makes an odd member of this pack, and of course it's not meant to help in the way those nonfiction books do, but it's still a profoundly insightful story about our response to the magnetic hopelessness that pulls on so many of us.
Hunt is a careful miniaturist, capturing moods and places in just a few sentences. Her story's brief chapters alternate between two settings. In one, we see the 89-year-old Churchill gruffly preparing to leave public life and confront all that dreadful free time. He drinks, he tries to paint, and he makes an effort to stay pleasant to his dear wife, Clementine. (Among other things, this is a beautiful portrayal of a long, loving marriage taxed by depression.) But in the privacy of his study, Churchill regards his impending retirement as a living death. "My work is over," he thinks. "I don't have future work to look to, something I've always relied on to carry me through -- the promise that I will do better; that I will mend mistakes. ... Not any longer. This time I am out of time. It is surely a savage thing to do to a man."
This scene of despair is made all the more unsettling by Hunt's personification of Churchill's mental state, a description that will sound eerily familiar to anyone who's wrestled with the black dog:
"Churchill's legs were weighed down intolerably. Black Pat draped over his knees and thighs. The hot, bristly torso was contorted in a way that wasn't comfortable for either of them, the animal stench almost physical at such a close range. Black Pat would not be roused. He wasn't asleep; he was in a state of sullen hypnosis, silently waiting. Churchill couldn't shake him off, the dog heavier than he could bodily move. He was trapped underneath, imprisoned in a maroon armchair."
In the book's other setting, we meet a young librarian named Esther, whose husband died two years ago. Surely it's time to move on, she thinks, and so she decides to rent out his den. The only one who answers her ad, though, is a slovenly black dog. That talks. Hunt handles this absurd encounter just right, in the spirit of Jose Saramago. Esther feels alarmed but also too polite to say anything rude to a guest, even a canine guest.
And how brilliantly Hunt portrays Black Pat. Although he seems generous and accommodating, even vaguely comforting to a grieving young widow, there's something menacing about him: those powerful haunches and massive jaws. Esther realizes she's being naive to let this grotesque figure into her home -- the slobber, the black hair, the paw prints everywhere -- but Black Pat can be so flirtatious with his joking hostility. "Could I come in there with you?" he asks the first night outside her bedroom door, whining like a puppy. "If you let me love you it will be the longest love of your life. ... All you have to do is consent."
This novel really shouldn't work. I know it sounds maudlin, even obscenely silly, a grown-up version of Eeyore who encourages people to slit their wrists and swallow pills. But Hunt maintains the story's poignancy on a razor's edge, balancing the light romantic comedy involving Esther and her friends at the library with the tragedy of her stoic grief at home. And as an allegory of depression, "Mr. Chartwell" is remarkably illuminating. While Black Pat grinds away on Churchill's soul and tries his hardest to insinuate himself into Esther's life, the suspense gains traction; it's a strange kind of psychological thriller about psychology itself. "The dog's genius," Hunt writes, "was to make orphans of hope and brotherhood." Poor Churchill seems a lost cause, so leashed to the animal that he'll never escape, no matter how valiantly he fights on, but could he help a lonely young widow in the House of Commons library?
It simplifies matters, of course, that this story takes place before antidepressants were so commonly prescribed (according to one recent estimate, Americans spend $86 billion a year on antidepressant medication), but in another way "Mr. Chartwell" is surprisingly relevant to an age more and more open to the methods of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Churchill's rousing advice to a fellow sufferer is just the kind of self-conscious mental treatment that many people are turning to as the bright promises of psychotropics dim: "You must hurl yourself into opposition, for you are at war," he says. "Do not consent to the descent."
There's a genuine sweetness to this novel that a more sophisticated writer wouldn't have had the courage to allow. But Hunt knows the black dog has fangs, too, and that's what makes "Mr. Chartwell" so valuable. If the old beast is on your back or a spouse's or a friend's, a few hours with this beguiling novel might not be a bad way to shoo it away for a spell -- or maybe longer.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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GHOST LIGHT
Joseph O'Connor
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374161873
246 pages
$25
Reviewed by Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at the American Scholar and a frequent contributor to The Washington Post Book World
Molly Allgood, the heroine of Joseph O'Connor's moving new novel, was the lover of playwright John Synge; they were engaged to be married when he died from Hodgkin's disease at age 37. Under the stage name Maire O'Neill, she created the role of Pegeen in the original Abbey Theatre production of Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World." But "Ghost Light" is not merely a fictional rendering of factual events, although it contains razor-sharp portraits of William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory and a nuanced assessment of the riotous Dublin premiere of "Playboy." This is Molly's story as imagined by a sensitive, empathetic artist, and the conclusions O'Connor draws from it have less to do with her professional life than with her qualities as a human being.
Molly is not a prepossessing figure when we meet her on Oct. 27, 1952, reaching for a bottle beneath her bed in a seedy London lodging house. She is 65, broke and hungry. Her son was killed in World War II; she hasn't seen her daughter or her grandchildren in eight months, since she quarreled with her teetotaling son-in-law. Nonetheless, she insists, "life abounds with blessings." She clings to her dignity as she requests "a gill of inexpensive brandy" from a pub owner who knows perfectly well she won't be using it to soak fruit for a Christmas cake. Good-natured Mr. Ballantine not only gives her the brandy, he hands her a paper bag with a pair of socks, a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of milk.
Less sympathetic eyes see only a tramp begging for pennies, a shabby old woman staggering through the National Portrait Gallery, a disgraceful drunk passed out in Trafalgar Square at midday. Molly keenly feels the shame of her current state, yet as her internal monologue reveals, outward truth is not necessarily the same as essential truth.
Flashbacks to 1908 chronicle Molly's affair with Synge, which appalls her working-class Catholic family as much as it does his affluent Protestant mother. Their "transgressive liaison" mirrors the Abbey, a showcase for Irish culture run by Protestant rebels whose productions frequently offend the common people whose folkways they aim to celebrate. "In a playhouse who would want to see life?" Molly's grandmother asks Synge at a hilariously disastrous family dinner. "Bad enough havin' to endure it." O'Connor pokes gentle fun at Synge, who quotes Gaelic proverbs to people who don't speak a word of "Irish." His heroine is more forgiving, realizing that her much older, mortally ill lover's plays are self-portraits: "About wanting to live, when you know death is close. Withering to be loved, when to love is so hard."
It's hard for Synge to love Molly, and vice versa. Age, class and religion separate them no more than their profoundly different temperaments. He is critical, aloof, arrogant. She is warmhearted and accepting. After Synge's death, when his uncle coldly informs Molly that his executors have destroyed all her letters to him, "to protect the confidentiality of the friendship and its particular circumstances," she tells herself, "Don't be harsh. He is elderly and frail. He has suffered a loss, too."
Glimpses of the desolate period following that loss show a darker side of Molly: drunk, angry, jealous of her sister Sara's greater success as an actress. "There are eras of every life that have a carapace about them, a scar grown out of woundedness," O'Connor writes.
Synge's death is the wound that never heals in Molly's heart. Yet Molly's warmth with relative strangers is as important as her fabled romance with a famous playwright, O'Connor suggests. When, late in life, she is forced to sell her signed theater programs, the London bookseller who buys them can still see her "lovely spirit and gaeity for life."
Sentimental? Perhaps, but it's an apt reflection of Molly's character and experience. O'Connor, who similarly touched the heartstrings in such previous novels as "Star of the Sea" and "Redemption Falls, " doesn't gloss over the grim particulars of Molly's final days, he simply suggests they matter less than her generous spirit.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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CHARLES JESSOLD, CONSIDERED AS A MURDERER
Wesley Stace
Picador
ISBN 978-0312680107
389 pages
$15
Reviewed by Anna Mundow, a literary columnist for the Boston Globe
Wesley Stace's new novel, "Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer," is at first glance a straightforward period thriller. On a summer night in 1923, three people are found dead in a London flat. Charles Jessold, a celebrated young composer, has apparently poisoned his wife and her lover and then shot himself in the head. It seems tragically fitting that all three characters had just returned from the final rehearsal of Jessold's opera "Little Musgrave," a revenge tale whose plot bears an uncanny resemblance to the Jessold murders.
Leslie Shepherd, a friend who witnessed an altercation between the Jessolds earlier that evening, gives a statement to the police, but this seems to him inadequate. He is moved to write a longer and more personal account of the Jessold he knew. "I met Charles Jessold, the murderer, on 21 May 1910, the day after King Edward's funeral," recalls Shepherd. He's a music critic who encountered Jessold at a country house weekend where the neophyte composer charmed the jaded company, although "his touch is a little agricultural," as someone observes of Jessold's piano playing, "probably (due to) years of banging out 'Poor Wandering One' for the daughters of the local clergy."
There are strong echoes here of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," but Leslie Shepherd is no Charles Ryder. An arch and often snide narrator who embodies the arrogance and xenophobia of his age (he hates Wagner and German culture in general), Shepherd repels sympathy. "I do not care for the pastoral itself," he sniffs as he and Jessold set out during the weekend to unearth folk songs in the surrounding countryside.
This is the era of England's folk-song revival, and Stace skillfully evokes the excitement of the collectors' hunt for undiscovered songs and singers as well as the emotional power of the music itself. When Jessold and Shepherd come across a genuine shepherd who shyly responds to their request for a song, even the chilly critic is astonished. "What he gave us then was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard," Shepherd recalls of the man's rendition of "The Ballad of Little Mossgrave and Lydie Barnard." Stace reproduces the ballad, commonly known as "Little Musgrave," in its entirety, and the passage is one of the most affecting in the novel.
"Little Musgrave" both inspires Jessold's opera and foreshadows the nature of his death, but there is another uncanny reverberation sounding throughout the novel. It is the story that Shepherd relates to Jessold of Carlo Gesualdo, the 16th century "Prince of Venosa, musician, madrigalist ... and murderer" who laid a trap for his wife and her lover and then murdered them. Gesualdo and Jessold are clearly fated to have more than a first name in common. (Stace acknowledges that his novel was inspired by a 17th-century essay called "Carlo Gesualdo Considered as Murderer.")
The parallels between the dramas of Jessold, of Gesualdo and of the characters in "Little Musgrave" are so explicit that the novel's trajectory would seem to be as predictable as that of any revenge tragedy, but Stace has several plot twists in store for the reader. Fate will go about its stealthy business even as political and cultural upheavals rattle England's prewar complacency. Stace, himself a musician and composer under the alias John Wesley Harding, conveys particularly well the shocking effect, for example, of Richard Strauss' opera "Salome" when it is staged in Austria in 1906. "I may drop a few names," Shepherd recalls of the opening night, "Giacomo Puccini, the Lucchese, with straw hat and cigar ... a studious, rather pained-looking Gustav Mahler; Arnold Schoenberg ... and most notoriously of all, a young Adolf Hitler."
The imagined music composed by Jessold is audible in these pages, but Shepherd's domestic world is far quieter. He and his enigmatic young wife, Miriam, inhabit a cocoon whose fragility is tested first by his friendship with Jessold and gradually by a more mysterious intrusion. It is at this midway point in the novel that Shepherd's tone becomes more intimate and the narrative more opaque. A love triangle takes shape, but who are the players? As hints of forbidden passions and shameful secrets multiply, Stace's novel -- which has until then been clever and a little pretentious -- becomes morbidly engaging. The final twist is both affectingly pathetic and suitably operatic.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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READING WOMEN: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life
Stephanie Staal
PublicAffairs
ISBN 978-1586488727
275 pages
$15.99
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books monthly for The Washington Post
Stephanie Staal remembers her undergraduate work at Barnard College in the early 1990s with nostalgia. "Back then, I was on the brink of independence," she writes in "Reading Women." "Opportunity seemed to spread out before me like a pair of wings, delicate, but strong and broad enough, I hoped, to carry me into the future. Long cocooned in the classroom, bred on heady ideas, radicalized and politicized, I was impatient to swoop into what I saw as the real world. ... I fantasized about becoming a foreign correspondent, writing the Great American Novel, basically nothing short of changing the world; any thoughts of marriage and motherhood trailed distantly behind."
Staal viewed the whole human condition, in those days, through the dazzling prism of her own self. She seems to have been remarkably untroubled by any lack of self-esteem: "I worked like a dog in college, winning honors, awards, and coveted internships, then landed a fairly glamorous job upon graduation as a literary scout for foreign publishers and Hollywood producers. A few years later, I enrolled in a master's program in journalism and then worked as a newspaper reporter, my stories regularly appearing on the front page of the features section."
All this is a lovely, if standard beginning for an ambitious young woman in New York City, but it seems not to have occurred to the author that she was one of many, many girls who do well in school, collect awards and spend a few years in entry-level publishing jobs. Then, most of the time, these young women move aside, gracefully or resentfully, to make room for the next crop.
Often they get married, have some kids and settle down to raise their families. Staal readily acknowledges this. How familiar the plot: "And then I got married, had a baby, and everything changed." She just didn't think it would happen to her.
Part of this comes from her education, surely. Having given a couple of college commencement speeches myself, I've pondered saying, "Most of you will end up in a nice, unexceptional house, married to a nice enough spouse, having a couple of kids who tolerate you, working at a job that depresses you but pays the bills," but that isn't part of the brochure. Universities sell hope and intellectual elitism as their stock in trade -- women's colleges perhaps more than most. If these undergrads aren't special, why are they there?
For all her intelligence, Staal appears to have bought right into this rhetoric, particularly the stuff about women being the equal -- no, more than the equal -- of men. Then she got married, had a baby, and, as she says, everything changed.
There's nothing in the world more existentially demanding than a baby. When it's hungry, it yells. Or, it yells for nothing. When it defecates, it smells -- a smell you never get used to. A baby sweats and vomits. Other people don't like your baby very much -- though they pretend to. We all know these things, or we learn them, but like classes in personal finance and staying out of debt, they aren't the most popular classes at Barnard or anywhere else.
This particular baby played hell with the author's body, from birth on. Learning to nurse was a chore for both of them, and the husband, who had seemed an amiable enough chap when they married, all too soon developed situational deafness, neglecting to respond to her questions and comments, and took to leaving his dirty socks around the house as domestic decoration. (She dealt with this by throwing his laundry out the window.) Staal's yelps of dismay are palpable but, perversely, a little amusing. What in the world did you think was going to happen, honey? That they'd give you a Guggenheim for having a baby?
The poor woman suffered some post-partum depression, a self-diagnosed identity crisis and then, true to the way she was raised and trained, decided to study her way out of this intellectual dead end. She went back to Barnard and took a popular undergraduate class all over again: Feminist Texts. Staal reads Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf; she revisits that damned short story about the yellow wallpaper. According to Staal, Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" "promotes a simple plan: Women need to get an education and then get a job, whereupon everything will click into place." I was a friend of Friedan, and upon her behalf, I experienced a strong desire to dropkick Staal through the nearest picture window. But everyone gets to read these classics in her own way, and certainly the author must think as she pleases.
Staal means to unlock and explicate the secrets of feminism vs. biology, and she chooses to use her own life to do it. But from my point of view, since she and her husband both work at home with a high degree of autonomy, she manages to leave the one big problem of feminism unaddressed: child care. Who will take care of those noisy little ones until they're old enough to get their own juice boxes from the fridge? No one, to my knowledge, knows a good answer to that. Writing this memoir may have helped Staal though. At least she got a book out of it.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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