Lives and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon

“She devils are beyond nature: they create themselves out of nothing.”

I expect that many people who read this post will have seen the film, Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. The film is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t really do justice to the Fay Weldon novel on which it’s based. The film with Roseanne Barr and her rival in life and love played by Meryl Streep is really very funny, but the book is much, much darker, and while like the film version, this is a tale of revenge, the book is much more subversive and its humour is black. You’ll laugh at the film but chances are you won’t have the same reaction to the book. Lives and Loves of a She-Devil was the first Fay Weldon novel I read, and it sealed me as a fan. Weldon is an outspoken feminist writer who’s come in for her share of controversy, and simply because she is a figure of some controversy, she’s all too easy to misquote. 

While Weldon’s work obviously fits in any feminist canon, her work can also be considered Transgressive fiction for the way her marvelous characters subvert societal norms. Weldon’s frequent themes include gender inequality, female reinvention, female identity and self-image and the often vicious relationships between women. Lives and Loves of a She-Devil is a tremendously powerful story–the tale of how one woman, a wife and mother, is abandoned by her husband and replaced by a prettier, sexier woman. Rising from her despair and thrusting aside all societal norms, maternal concerns, & obligations the discarded woman eventually triumphs over her enemies. Yes, a story of female empowerment and a rather frightening tale of a woman scorned who, because she’s willing to go as far as necessary, learns to live her life according to an entirely new set of rules.

Ruth, an overweight, unattractive woman who’s 6′ 2″, is an excellent wife and mother. While she’s appreciated by her somewhat scatter-brained in-laws, she’s neglected and undervalued by her accountant husband, Bobbo, who at the best of times says that Ruth is “no beauty, but a good soul.” Ruth, who is virtually powerless in the relationship, does everything to please Bobbo, even tolerating his announcement that he wants an “open marriage.” She’s aware of his extra-marital affairs which he discusses with relish, but now Bobbo has fallen in love with one of his clients, Mary Fisher, a wealthy, prolific author of trashy romances. Ruth is trying her best to ignore the affair, but after a particularly degrading scene, Bobbo moves out of his home in the suburb of Eden Grove, abandons his wife and two children and moves to Mary Fisher’s splendid home, the High Tower.

Fay Weldon’s style is spare, low on descriptions and high on mythic qualities. This is how the novel, alternating between first and third person narrative, opens:

Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.

Mary Fisher is forty-three, and accustomed to love. There has always been a man around to love her, sometimes quite desperately, and she has on occasion returned that love, but never, I think, with desperation. She is a writer of romantic fiction. She tells lies to herself and to the world.

Is that hate or contempt lying under the description of Mary Fisher? Probably a bit of both, but add envy to the mix too as Mary Fisher is the embodiment of everything Ruth isn’t: small, petite, feminine and highly desirable. And here’s a quote that shows just how well Fay Weldon can write:

Now outside the world turns: tides surge up the cliffs at the foot of Mary Fisher’s tower, and fall again. In Australia the great gum trees weep their bark away; in Calcutta a myriad flickers of human energy ignite and flare and die; in California the surfers weld their souls with foam and flutter off into eternity; in the great cities of the world groups of dissidents form their gaunt nexi of discontent and send the roots of change through the black soil of our earthly existence. And I am fixed here and now, trapped in my body, pinned to one particular spot, hating Mary Fisher. It is all I can do. Hate obsesses and transforms me; it is my singular attribution.

While Bobbo and Mary Fisher have the looks, the power and the money on their side, Ruth is dumped with the two squabbling children, a gluttonous vomiting dog who humps anyone lower on the totem pole, a cat who fouls the house, and an unfortunate guinea pig. Bobbo and Mary live in sex-soaked idyllic bliss while Ruth suddenly has to worry about money–how to pay bills and buy food (there’s one great scene in which Ruth directs the children to search the house for coins). To add to the worries, Bobbo tells her to move to a smaller, cheaper home. Part of Ruth accepts what has happened to her–after all, she reasons ”to those who hath, such as Mary Fisher, shall be given, and to those who hath not, such as myself, even that which they have shall be taken away.”

Ruth has always behaved well and put Bobbo’s needs before her own. Why shouldn’t she accept divorce, destitution and displacement and be happy for the few years she had? But Ruth doesn’t see it that way, and she doesn’t react the way Bobbo expects her to.  Strangely, once removed from the position of wife, something begins to happen to Ruth. Liberated from her own repressive behavior,  ”Hate obsesses and transforms” her, and she has revenge in mind. As events unfold, it becomes clear that revenge is an emotion that can take you to the place you want to go. Ruth abandons the roles assigned to her: doting wife, patient mother and begins a transformative journey–both literal and figurative, and along the way she confronts other women in various miserable circumstances including a clueless welfare mother who’s impregnated by a series of transient rogue males, a group of Wimmin, and also the much-abused wife of a judge who has a secret “passion for bondage and whips.” As Ruth continually reinvents herself, she leaves an imprint on the lives of everyone she touches, and rather magnificently, she becomes all the things her husband, to assuage his guilt, accused her of. She becomes a She-Devil who “creates havoc and destruction all around,“  and by abandoning the roles she is expected to endure, and breaking all the ”rules” she plots her revenge…

Since this is a Weldon novel, the economic poverty of women is evident, but Weldon is not a man-hater; rather she revels in the power of sexuality, and she’s also very funny:

“She’s such a good wife,” said Bobbo’s mother, moved almost to tears. “look at that ironing!” Bobbo’s mother never ironed if she could help it. In the good times indeed, she and Angus liked to live in hotels, simply because there’d be a valet service. “And what a good husband Bobbo has turned out to be!” If she thought her son was narcissistic, staring so long in the mirror, she kept her thoughts to herself.

But Bobbo looked in the mirror at his clear, elegant eyes, his intelligent brow and his slightly bruised mouth, and hardly saw himself at all; he saw the man whom Mary Fisher loved.

review copy

Everything and More by Geoff Nicholson

Another entry in my Year of Geoff Nicholson project, and this time it’s Everything and More–a Nicholson novel I loved for its originality and sheer compressed scope–you’ll see what I mean later. The novel, with a few minor exceptions, is set inside Haden Brothers, a vast, seemingly endless London department store (“including 12 different eateries,“) designed as a replica of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel & built in the 1930s by “maverick visionary” Edward Zander, the architect who mysteriously disappeared once the project was completed.

However, Zander’s building has few of the rhythms, repetitions or classical form of its supposed model. Rather it suggests a series of multiple codings, elements of Russian Constructivism, Italian Renaissance and stuccoed Baroque. It is decked, as though at random, with crenellated parapets, pantile roofs, ogee arches, steel balconies, oriel windows and flying buttresses. Carved into the fabric of the building are angels, putti and mythological beasts. There are gargoyles, caryatids, mosaics, expanses of Moorish tiling and some magnificent stained glass. Zander had envisioned a menagerie on the ninth floor and wanted the whole building to be painted blood red, but he was talked out of these schemes.

 This story is the perfect vehicle for Nicholson’s frequent themes of collection and obsession, for after all, doesn’t shopping encompass both of these neurotic pastimes? And what better place for the compulsive shopper to hang out than Haden Brothers–the 400 department emporium that boasts that it sells “everything and more,” where shopping is an experience rather than a mundane activity.

Enter two eager job seekers: Vita Carlisle and would-be artist Charlie Mayhew. Charlie applies for a job because he’s an unwelcome guest sleeping on the sofa of the only friend who’s still talking to him. Vita has a boarding school & university background along with an impressive resume, and while her determination to work at Haden Brothers seems a little odd, her professionalism and apparent fanaticism about the workings of the sprawling shopping metropolis really can’t be faulted or penetrated. Vita could obviously do a lot better than Haden Brothers, but she insists that she’s in love with the place and working there is her dream. Both Charlie and Vita are employed on the spot by Derek Snell, who’s officially head of personnel and unofficially, the pimp for the reclusive owner of Haden Brothers, Arnold, the last of the line. Arnold lives in the penthouse suite, accessible by a private lift, on the very top of the Haden Brothers building, and he hasn’t stepped into the outside world for years. Derek Snell, a rather sleazy character, has an eye for the sort of women his boss prefers, and since he is, in essence, the pimp for the king of Haden Brothers, he has a position of some power:

Derek Snell was no fashion victim, or at least he had been victimized in about 1975 and had never entirely recovered. He wore a brown Viyella suit with wide lapels and deep turn-ups, a chunky knitted wool tie, a shirt with a flapping collar and a pattern of tiny veteran car motifs. He was a toothy, slim-chinned man, about forty-five with a lot of gingery hair that curled round his head like a tarnished halo.

Vita becomes part of the so-called Flying Squad–a sort of troubleshooter, and here she is in the toy department with “raw, lean, adrenalin-driven, toy buyer,” Carl:

On Vita’s first day in the department he took her aside and told her, ‘We sell a lot of merchandise here on the basis that we’re educating the little fucks, stimulating their imaginations, fostering hand-eye coordination, that kind of crap. The truth is, what we’re struggling to do here is sedate and socialize a generation of would-be Adolf Hitlers.’

Vita looked at him uncertainly but still managed a smile.

‘The thing to remember is this,’ Laughton continued, ‘all children are thugs, fascists and megalomaniacs. There was a time when they wanted scaled-down versions of the real world; toy animals, toy soldiers, dolls, building blocks to make miniature cities. Then they pulled the eyes out of the animals, tore the dolls limb from limb, massacred the soldiers, razed the cities.

‘These days, they play with computer games, and they can play at destroying whole life forms, whole planets and galaxies. They take to it like ducks to water. It all comes perfectly naturally to them. And they genuinely believe that when they grow up they’ll be able to do all this stuff for real. But when they do grow up they discover, with one or two important exceptions, that they don’t get to blow things up at all, and that really hurts them. It’s a discovery nobody ever quite recovers from. I know I haven’t.

‘That’s why toys are so attractive to adults, why they carry so much nostalgia with them, because they remind us of a time when we were power-mad, conscienceless dictators.’

While Vita moves from department to department as part of the elite Flying Squad, poor Charlie becomes a furniture porter. The subliminal messages piped out over the sound system geared to make shoppers and employees alike behave don’t seem to work on the porters who take the example of their subversive leader, Anton, and spend most of their time devising elaborate ways of not working. This means hiding when there’s work to be done, spending hours quibbling over payroll deductions in the accounting office and engaging in “extravagant pilfering.” What’s so interesting is that Vita is involved in the day-to-day activities of ensuring that Haden Brothers runs smoothly, while Charlie becomes snared in the subversive shadow life of Haden Brothers, the bomb threats, the mysterious graffiti that appears periodically on the shop’s windows, the hidden, fully operating miniature railway, and the secret passages down deep in the basement. Only the Head of Security, Ray Chalmers seems to recognize that there are elements undermining the efficient day-to-day operations of the huge department store, and since everyone connected with Haden Brothers seems to lose all sense of proportion, Chalmers declares war on the subversives:

I’m not trying to say that it’s like Vietnam out there, but in a sense it is. It’s a jungle. The enemy’s hard to spot. The terrain is difficult and we don’t always get the backing we need. There are goons. There are traitors and double agents. There are men from our side who’ve abandoned discipline and gone native. At least in Nam they were allowed to use defoliant, napalm, cluster bombing. I wish we could do that at Haden  Brothers. That would shake the buggers up, flush them out so they could be punished with loads of prejudice.

The newest furniture porter seems like a suspicious character to Chalmers. After all, what’s his first name?

Initially Charlie isn’t thrilled with his job, but over time he becomes entranced with the fabulous exotic extravagance of the building as he begins to note “strange faces and African masks carved into the woodwork, wrought iron archways with swastikas and pentagrams, staircase finials that looked like simple spheres but turned out to be intricately carved globes of the world.”

While on the surface, Haden Brothers is a monument to shopping and materialism, there’s a lot of peculiar goings on, and Charlie begins to be aware of just what some of those peculiarities are even as the unfathomable Vita becomes increasingly involved in the surface management.  One of my favourite scenes takes place when a customer lodges a complaint and is summarily whisked off to a seductive paradise hidden away in the secret corners of Haden Brothers. And here, in exotic hypnotic luxury, the half-dazed customer, is grilled:

He wanted to be cooperative  but he was too entranced by the room in which he now found himself. The carp pool was undoubtedly the most imposing and unexpected feature, but then he had not been expecting the Persian tapestries either, not the ornamental fountain, not the parakeets on their perches, not the bejeweled mirrors and tables and fireplace, not the ornately carved golden couches on to one of which he was now being guided. It was impossible to sit on these with any degree of formality and he found himself lying back, reclining like some Roman hero.

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

Fellow blogger Kevin from Canada read, reviewed and enjoyed The Privileges, an earlier novel from American author, Jonathan Dee, and so when I saw a new title A Thousand Pardons from the same author, I knew I wanted to read it. Kevin had mixed feelings about The Privileges–enjoying it immensely at first (well this is my interpretation at least) but then feeling not-so-happy with an ending which he felt did not live up to the novel’s excellent opening. I say all this because I had the same reaction to A Thousand Pardons, a novel that had an absolutely tremendous start with a gripping plot, but then the novel appears to move into a different zone, dropping the storyline I so badly wanted to continue. And then the ending…well I’m still chewing it over, and now after reading A Thousand Pardons and re-reading Kevin’s review of The Privileges, I’m about to conclude that the ambiguous ending which I found disappointing, was a decision by the author–not to disappoint us, of course (who wants to do that to a reader?), but to show the emptiness and disenchantment of the American dream.

Now to the plot…

The novel begins with a view of a marriage–Ben, a New York attorney commutes to work from a gorgeous home in a small affluent town while his wife, Helen, is a stay-at-home mother to their 12-year-old adopted Chinese daughter, Sara. Ben pulls impossibly long hours at the office, arriving home just long enough to grab something to eat, walk around ”like the walking dead,” and go to bed. Not much of a life.  Things have deteriorated to the point that Helen is trying to retrieve their relationship and their 18-year-marriage through therapy. Ben arrives home later than usual one night–a “passive-aggressive” move on Ben’s part, Helen is certain, and they barely make it to their therapist’s office for their weekly session and an unpleasant revelation:

“Because it’s all so unsurprising.” Ben said, very much as if he hadn’t heard anyone else’s voice. “I’m scared of it. I’m scared of every single element of my day. Every meal I eat, every client I see, every time I get into or out of the car. It all frightens the shit out of me. Have you ever been so bored by yourself that you are literally terrified? That is what it’s like for me every day. That is what it’s like for me sitting here, right now, right this second. It’s like a fucking death sentence, coming back to that house every single night. I mean, no offense.”

“No offense?” Helen said.

Helen knows that she and Ben should divorce, but she’s in that mode of punishment and endurance:

She knew what the right thing to do was. Dismantle it together: help him find a new place, work out the money, sign whatever needed to be signed, put on a united front for poor Sara, who’d already had two parents abandon her, after all. But for once in her life Helen didn’t want to do it. Why should she make it easy for him? She’d made everything easy for him for eighteen years, and he’d repaid her by making an explosive, weepy public display of his horror at the very sight of her. Screw the right thing. If he hated her so much, if life with her was such a death sentence, then let’s see him be a man about it, for once, and devise his own escape.

I happen to be a believer in the idea that some people (with the exception of natural disaster, disease, or just plain bad luck) get what they want by hook or by crook. They may not be honest or straightforward about getting what they want, but somehow things just seem to ”happen.” Back to that passive-aggressive thing. In Ben’s case, he seeks freedom from his boring, predictable life without taking firm, direct action, and just how he achieves his desire through sabotage takes up the first, gripping section of the novel. Shortly, and with virtually no warning except the fact that her marriage has been on the rocks for some time, Helen finds herself seeking work, and this section, covering Helen’s subsequent career takes up quite a chunk of the novel.

The section dealing with Ben’s self-destructive sabotage of his life is unbelievably good–after all a married father who’s affluent, and with a secure, enviable career has a lot to lose, but there’s also a lot of protective padding. So it’s logical that Ben is going to have to sabotage all his advantages in a spectacular way if he wants to jettison from his established life. But then the novel moves on, leaves Ben and follows Helen’s job hunt in New York. The move from Ben’s gripping, incredibly insane actions to the plod of a job hunt is a tremendous change of pace, and one that is not without its narrative problems. Helen has been out of the job market for over 10 years, and even when she did work she was a sales manager at Ralph Lauren. Somehow, with no experience whatsoever, she lands a decent job at a pathetically small PR company. I had problems with swallowing that part of the plot and could only conclude that she was hired because her new boss must have fancied her. My annoyance with this plot development was premature as the author addressed this issue later on.

As a reader I had also issues with Ben’s mental shift as he morphs from a man adamantly denying a mid-life crisis and making a complete idiot out of himself into the one character in the book who seems to have it all together. I began to wonder if he was on medication as he stoically swallows his pride and suffers through humiliation after humiliation in some sort of penance. Meanwhile Helen takes on the PR management of the sins of a small business owner, mega corporations, a film star and even the catholic church. She’s spent the last ten years of her life being the perfect mother and the perfect (here I invoke that rather sickening word,) “homemaker.” I suspect that Helen was as sick of her life as Ben was; he just expressed it better. Once in the work world, Helen gets a taste of just what it’s like to juggle parenthood with career demands, live with a judgmental teenager, spend hours on a ridiculous commute and come home too exhausted to do anything except sling take-out meals on the table for dinner.

 In spite of its flaws, this was a compulsive, addictive read which I finished in two sittings. While the ending left me scratching my head (back to Kevin’s response to The Privileges), some of the scenes and the characters were phenomenal. Jonathan Dee certainly has a knack for recreating the suffocation of upper-middle-class life with its markers of success, gleeful pettiness at failure and its delight in gossiping about those who’ve fallen off the middle-class wagon of respectability. There aren’t many likeable people here, and most of them are as sad and lost as Helen and Ben. One of my favourite characters was the rather bitter, deeply unhappy Bonifacio, hired by Ben–a hungry small-town lawyer who rents a space above a hardware store. He can’t hide just a sliver of glee at his client’s downfall:

When she looked over at Bonifacio, he wore a smirk like he was enjoying a bad TV show. How he must have hated guys like Ben, Helen thought–lawyers who rode off to Manhattan every morning while he climbed the stairs behind the hardware store and tried to act outraged over whatever sad grievance one of the locals might bring in.

So, not a perfect novel, but Jonathan Dee is certainly treading in the literary footsteps of Richard Yates with his themes of inertia, the dreary treadmill of routine, the slow death of romance and love, and the utter disenchantment with the American Dream.  Dee offers us a frightening, claustrophobic look at the American Dream which has somehow or another turned into the American Nightmare–Ben and Helen, initially at least, have everything we are supposed to strive for, and yet Dee shows us that this soulless existence is something no sane person would want, and as it turns out Ben and Helen don’t want it either. The conclusion leaves us with the uncomfortable, hollow feeling that there’s not much to replace our pathetic social goals and meaningless social status markers.

Review copy

Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Private Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn

“Sisters are,” author Jane Dunn tells us “special,” and with a backlist which includes the book, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, it’s easy to conclude that the author, Jane Dunn, is drawn to these “protean” relationships. Dunn admits in the intro to Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Private Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing to a fascination with the du Maurier sisters: Daphne, Angela and Jeanne. Not only does the author find it “psychologically interesting” that Daphne’s fame “so eclipse[d]“ her siblings, but she found it even more “intriguing” that the three entirely different sisters who led vastly dissimilar lives were so ”strongly imprinted with family values.” Before arriving at the book, I was unaware that Daphne du Maurier had any siblings at all, but then again, although I have read many of her novels, I knew very little about her private life other than a few facts about the fabulous du Maurier family and Daphne’s connection to the “lost boys” who inspired J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. For those who enjoy reading biography, Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Private Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing comes highly recommended especially for those who have a healthy appreciation of Daphne du Maurier’s work. Some readers, I’m aware, prefer not to know the details of the private lives of the authors they read and enjoy. With this book, Daphne du Maurier fans will gain an almost-blow-by-blow account of exactly how each of her books came to be created. I’ve read my fair share of biographies and yet I can’t remember one in which events in the author’s life so clearly morphed into a novel, and author Jane Dunn carefully fleshes out Daphne du Maurier’s life, the books and the themes that became signposts of the various events that took place as well as the places that inspired several of her better-known works.

But here I am allowing my description of the book to concentrate on the very talented Daphne du Maurier to the neglect of her siblings. As Jane Dunn explains, searching for information about Angela led to an “intriguing journey“ while the search for Jeanne has been “blocked” by her lifelong partner who retains all of Jeanne’s paintings and papers and is “adamantly set against” any biography of the sisters. This explains why a clear image of Angela emerges while the portrait of Jeanne remains somewhat murky.

Taking a chronological approach, the book opens with the unusual and privileged childhood of the three du Maurier girls–the last of the du Mauriers. Their father, Gerald, an actor and later a theatrical manager, wanted a son, and Daphne, the middle child became his clear favorite serving as a surrogate son while the youngest daughter, Jeanne became the favourite of the girls’ actress mother, Muriel.  Gerald appears in these pages as a glamorous figure, dashing and gregarious, and yet at the same time there is a darker side. While the three girls were definitely brought up in a protected environment, conflicting values emerge in their upbringing. They were mainly taught at home, and their education sounds wildly erratic with a maid, at one point, “engaged in trying to teach six-year-old Jeanne to read.”  While in some aspects of their lives, the girls were shielded, yet they also regularly attended the theatre and were given  a great deal of freedom when it came to their creativity and their imagination. Beyond a doubt, for the eldest two girls, Angela and Daphne, Gerald, “the grand panjandrum of his universe“ emerges as the most formative figure of their lives who “alternated between laxity and ridiculous strictness,” and was, according to Angela “an emotional bully“ capable of moments of cruelty. Gerald “hated and feared homosexuality,” an attitude that seems significant when considering the adult lives of his daughters. Gerald’s relationships with his daughters was problematic–he was domineering and possessive, and ”burst into tears and cried, ‘it isn’t fair’ ” when he heard the news of Daphne’s upcoming marriage. He also somewhat bizarrely confided his amorous adventures to his daughters:

Unusual for his generation, Gerald enjoyed his daughters’ company and this intimacy meant his influence on their growing minds was all the more powerful and potentially malign. Unusually for any generation, Gerald, confided his romantic entanglements with young actresses to Angela and Daphne and made an entertainment of it, inviting them to scoff at the young women’s naivety and misplaced hopes, and compromising the sisters’ natural loyalty to their mother, who was not included in these confidences. These young actresses were nicknamed ‘the stable’ by his daughters, who were encouraged to think of them as fillies in a race for the prize of their father’s attention. His daughters ‘would jeer, “And what’s the form this week? I’m not going to back [Miss X] much longer”,’ and they laughed as their father brilliantly mimicked the voices and mannerisms of the poor deluded girls.  

What’s so fascinating is that even though these three girls had, arguably, the same childhood environment albeit tainted with “manipulative favouritism,” that could so easily have led to bitter rivalry, individual characteristics were quickly clearly apparent.

Already very unalike in character, both girls seemed to inhabit parallel universes, Angela’s emotional, connected to others and Daphne’s bounded only by her imagination and peopled with her own creations. With a macabre detachment she could dispassionately watch the gardener at Slyfield nail a live adder to a tree, declaring it would take all day to die, and return at intervals to watch it writhing in its desperate attempts to break free. Aunt Billy had given Daphne two doves in a cage and she found it tiresome to have to feed and care for them when she would rather be out doing interesting things. She was struck how Angela loved administering to her pair of canaries and sang while she cleared out their droppings and sprinkled fresh sand on the base of their cage. Daphne’s solution was to set her doves free and accept without complaint the scolding that would be forthcoming, for this was the price of her freedom from care.

These sorts of patterns of behaviour only became more reinforced as the girls grew older. Angela became a great lover of Pekinese, a careful, devoted owner while several of Daphne’s dogs seemed to meet a sticky end. All three sisters exhibited a tremendous emotional bond with the houses they lived in and which they imprinted in various ways. Jeanne settled in “an ancient house and remarkable symbolic garden in the heart of Dartmoor,” while both Daphne and Angela were deeply rooted in Cornwall, and of course, all Daphne fans know about Menabilly– –”the love of her life.” This love of the region naturally seeped through to Daphne du Maurier’s work, and the novels Jamaica Inn, the House on the Strand, Frenchman’s Creek, and The King’s General were inspired by places in Daphne’s beloved Cornwall.

The book charts the lives of the sisters through their relationships and creative careers. Angela was also a novelist, but unfortunately her novels were not as well-received as those of her sister, and now she’s almost completely forgotten.  There’s a great moment recounted from Angela’s memoir,  It’s Only the Sister in which Angela tells of an incident in which she was mistaken for Daphne and how a woman who seemed delighted to meet her, turned away, her disappointment blatant, with the utterance that became the book’s title. Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters gives the sense that the three sisters were all fascinating, unique individuals, but also fascinatingly different. I came to the book with a deep appreciation for Daphne du Maurier’s work, and I left with a feeling that I would rather have liked Angela, one of the two forgotten sisters and also that it is a great shame that Jeanne remains in the shadows.

Review copy

They Don’t Dance Much by James Ross

“The Riverbend Roadhouse. Dine and dance. Drink liquor and make love. Slot machines and high dice. Name your sin and your favorite utensils. We’ll have it.” 

Originally published in 1940, They Don’t Dance Much by James Ross is back in print again thanks to Mysterious Press. James Ross, who died in 1990, published just one novel and a few short stories before making a permanent career in journalism. They Don’t Dance Much didn’t exactly make a splash when it was first published, but the novel’s reputation as a rare gem is gaining momentum. My digital copy comes with a grabber intro from Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone):

So we are sitting in a greasy spoon, a tavern, a living room, talking about books that we love that didn’t catch a break, hard-luck books of such obstinate appeal that, though they died early, just won’t stay dead.

After reading They Don’t Dance Much, a very dark, gritty tale, it’s easy to make the literary connections between James Ross and Daniel Woodrell, and it’s clear why this “country noir“ set in rural North Carolina in the depression years of the 1930s has a timeless appeal. The story is told in a no-frills, laid-back style by a young man, Jack McDonald, who’s inherited a small farm but is about to lose it thanks to $40 back taxes. Drowning in petty debt, including the cost of his mother’s funeral, Jack jumps at the chance at a job at a roadside tavern owned by local bad boy Smut Milligan who has somehow, and somewhat suspiciously, made good after disappearing for a few years and then reappearing with some cash.

When Smut was twenty-one or twenty-two he left, and I didn’t see hair nor hide of him for three or four years. Then in 1935 he came back. One Saturday afternoon I walked into the City Bowling Alley. He was running the joint just like he’d been there all the time.

He had some money–he was bound to have had–and it wasn’t long before he bought out the River Bend filling station. There was a murder down there. The boy that owned the place was mixed up in it and had to go to the pen. I heard Smut got it at a bargain.

Before he blew town, Smut Milligan had a hot and heavy relationship with town sexpot, Lola, the daughter of the local horse doctor, and in common with Smut, Lola also wanted the good things in life. Smut plans to hit the big time by expanding his filling-station business with a roadside diner, backroom gambling, and illegal corn whiskey. In addition, since the human vices are always lucrative, Smut’s crafty plans include several secluded cabins rented by the hour for adulterous assignations or for courting couples who’ve been drinking too much. Lola doesn’t have the same business opportunities as Smut, but she does have a killer body, so using her natural assets, she’s managed to snare the town’s richest man, Charles Fisher, the only son and heir of the region’s richest man who owns the local hosiery mill.

There’s nothing pretty or marginally decent about any of the characters in the book; this is a hard-scrabble town during the Depression with people ready and willing to do whatever it takes to get by, so there’s no quibbling about feeling guilty or wavering in a moral dilemma. A couple of the regular customers are Bert Ford, a reclusive man, a former strike buster, who’s rumoured to have a fortune buried in his back garden, and Wilbur Brannon, a disbarred doctor and former jailbird caught selling morphine as a sideline. Smut’s employees are a motley bunch of hard characters whose desperate lives careen into criminality; there’s Rufus, the cook, fresh from a chain gang, Catfish Wall, maker of bootleg corn whiskey, and Badeye Honeycutt as the bartender. The attitudes of many of the characters in They Don’t Dance Much reflect the racial attitudes of the times, so the black characters are ridiculed and seen, not so much at the bottom of the food chain, but outsiders tolerated for their usefulness more than anything else.

The town is run and controlled by various shady figures with an inflexible hierarchy in place. When Jack loses the family farm at the beginning of the novel, the scene is set for the idea that wealth and assets are sucked upwards, so Jack’s only means to make a grueling marginal living are seized by the government. Fletch Monroe, the town’s perpetually drunken newspaper editor who disappears on “three-week benders” is a tool for the moneyed classes, and his “news,” when it’s not months behind, reflects the interests of the local power-barons, who include the unsavory Smathers family who own and operate the Smathers Furniture and Undertaking Company as well as the Smathers Finance Company. By starting the Riverbend Roadhouse, Smut is trying to move out from the underclass, and become a man of substance. The Roadhouse, with its card games (some crooked), dance floor, steaks, and spittoons, has a hopping business, and that, unfortunately, brings attention to the joint. The sheriff “You do a little remembering for me and I’ll do a lot of forgetting for you,” turns a blind eye to Smut’s illegal corn whiskey operation. The banks are itching to call in any late loans, and then there’s Astor Legrand, a lawyer who has the local and state government in his pocket, and if anyone wants anything done in the region, Legrand gets a piece of the pie. Smut’s success attracts the murky, shadowy power structure in the county, and on the cusp of belonging to a different class of citizen, he knows it’s just a matter of time before someone tries to take the roadhouse away from him. Smut drags Jack into some very unsavory business, and this begins a sequence of violence and greed.

“If you start out on the bottom you got to be tougher than all the folks that’s between you and the top,” Smut said.

They Don’t Dance Much is one of those novels with a deceptively simple style–so simple, in fact that there are times when it’s easy to gloss over the underlying talent. Ross creates and gathers together a simmering cauldron of desperate characters with murder, greed and violence gnawing away in the shadows of the plot. When murder occurs, it’s grueling, hard work but casual violence–the manipulation of a body to a financial purpose:

It was lightning off in the northwest, but it was too far to hear the thunder. Most of the time it was still, but sometimes a little breeze would spring up and rattle the leaves on the oak trees. They sounded dry as dust. It was late July or early August, and the leaves weren’t supposed to sound like that then. But that’s the way they sounded; brittle. That was the way I felt that night too. Brittle, and dry-mouthed, and a little uneasy. Like I was going to do something that didn’t have anything to do with anything I’d ever done before.

Review copy

The Odd Women by George Gissing

In 2012, George Gissing’s novel, New Grub Street made my Best-of-the-Year list, so in 2013 it was time to pick up The Odd Women, and after reading this remarkable novel which I can’t praise enough,  I can easily say that George Gissing has become a new favourite author. Published in 1893, in late Victorian England, The Odd Women examines ‘The Woman Question’–the shifting roles of women in a world of social change, and given the topic, it should come as no surprise that the novel concentrates on the lives of several women who make various choices–some traditional and some courageously non-traditional. Under examination is the societal expectation that women will marry and move from their father’s economic cloak of care to suitable husbands who can take over that role. But what happens if there is no husband–by fate or by choice? What happens to these Odd Women (and there’s a double meaning here) who remain single?

So many odd women–no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives.

The novel opens in 1872 with the family of a widowed Dr. Madden who has six daughters ranging from 19 to 5 years of age. Although Dr. Madden isn’t an affluent man, he has tried to ensure that his daughters receive an adequate education–a decision he sees as “the next best thing to saving money,” and the assumption is that, if for some reason he can’t support his daughters or they don’t marry, then they will be able to seek genteel employment as teachers, companions or governesses. As the novel continues and leaps forward to 1887, we see just how this ‘genteel’ employment decimates the Madden girls.

The Madden girls are middle class with a marginal education, so when they are forced to seek employment, they are not skilled enough to seek positions with the upper classes. Instead, Alice and Virginia Madden find themselves accepting live-in positions with people barely above their own social sphere, and these are jobs in which they are overworked and sometimes receive ‘board and care’ and no wages whatsoever. Humiliations pile on to humiliations, and years later,  in 1887, Alice and then Virginia, the latter who becomes an alcoholic, drift to a bleak London boarding house where they share a room. All their hopes and concerns rest on their youngest sibling, Monica, the beauty of the family, her health under threat, who works 6 exhausting days a week, typically 18 hours a day, as an underfed and overworked shop girl.

Enter Rhoda Nunn, a very determined young feminist “with zeal for womanhood militant,” who works at a business school which trains “young girls to work in offices,” owned by philanthropist, Miss Barfoot. Rhoda knew the Madden girls years earlier, and when she runs into them again in London, she’s shocked by what’s become of them, and she is determined to help the sisters rise out of their economic quagmire. Monica withdraws from the exhaustive, exploitive work as a shop girl and is enrolled at the school, but she’s courted by a much older, dour bachelor, Edmund  Widdowson who loves her with an unhealthy, possessive fixation.

While the novel opens with the Madden family, Rhoda Nunn is at the novel’s centre. Rhoda, an extremely attractive and self-possessed young woman, is determined not to marry and believes that she needs to set an example to the school’s female pupils. Rhoda is more far radical in her attitudes towards men and marriage than Miss Barfoot, and some of their differences float to the surface after a former pupil, a Miss Royston, a young woman who ran off with a married man and was subsequently abandoned, writes to Miss Barfoot for assistance. Rhoda harshly and coldly insists that Miss Royston not be allowed to return to continue her abandoned studies whereas Miss Barfoot has pity for their former pupil:

“Personal feeling is misleading you,” Rhoda pursued. “Miss Royston had a certain cleverness, I grant; but do you think I didn’t know that she would never become what you hoped? All her spare time was given to novel-reading. If every novelist could be strangled and thrown into the sea we should have a chance of reforming women. The girl’s nature was corrupted by sentimentality, like that of all but every woman who is intelligent enough to read what is called the best fiction, but not intelligent enough to understand its vice. Love–love–love; a sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won’t represent the actual world; it would be too dull for their readers. In real life, how many men and women fall in love? Not one in every ten thousand, I am convinced. Not one married pair in ten thousand have felt for each other as two or three couples do in every novel. There is the sexual instinct, of course but that is quite a different thing; the novelists don’t dare talk about that. “

Rhoda’s hard-line position comes under assault after she meets Miss Barfoot’s relative Everard Barfoot, a man of the world who is attracted to Rhoda and sets out to test her defiant declaration to abstain from any relationships with men. Barfoot has a bad reputation when it comes to women. Is that bad reputation deserved? Gissing is very clever about this aspect of this brilliant novel; he first introduces Barfoot as a bit of a cad, and then Barfoot later explains away what happened. But then later still, Barfoot gives his side of the story to his male friend, Mickelthwaite, and there’s something rather chilling about Barfoot’s cold delivery. Then there’s Barfoot’s relationship with Rhoda–at times he’s genuinely intrigued by Rhoda’s radical feminism, but his cold, calculated seduction of Rhoda suggests that she represents a challenge more than anything else.

Marriage and male-female relationships are under scrutiny in the novel, and so Monica and Widdowson’s miserable, disastrous marriage becomes the perfect late Victorian example of just how wedlock corrupts both partners. Monica realizes too late that she’s trapped in a suffocating marriage. This was a marriage that was supposed to free her from degrading servitude, but Monica discovers there’s a terrible price to pay. The very traditional Widdowson assumes the patriarchal role, and he seems genuinely confused when Monica refuses to obey him. For her part, Monica is unable to grasp her husband’s frustration. Monica has spent time with feminists and thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to sally forth in London alone; her husband, however, contends that he’s there to ‘protect’ his wife, and that basically translates to not letting her out of his sight. Unfortunately, Widdowson’s efforts to control his wife do not stop there; he also demands that she read certain approved books, and he sees her refusal to bend as “rebellion.” Widdowson somehow always misses the point. He suspects the wrong people of being a bad influence and he sees a threat in the wrong man. But there’s fault in Monica’s view too. She married for security and material ease but discovers that’s no enough. Where’s the love and the romance? Clearly Monica is not ready emotionally or mentally to keep the bargain she made, and Gissing hints at Monica’s frame of mind through her selection of reading material.

Similarly there’s an element in Barfoot’s relationship with Rhoda that demands a type of submission–a bending of her will to his seductive powers. So much for male-female relationships. Miss Barfoot, not so radical as Rhoda, has a sliver of romance in her heart, and she accepts that marriage, for most women, is inevitable and perhaps a better choice than the life of a spinster. Miss Barfoot’s goal is to train ‘genteel’ (middle-class) young women for careers that offer a reasonable alternative to virtual shop or domestic slavery, but for those who opt for marriage, Gissing gives examples which show that wedlock is a corrupting institution that forces a destructive, forced and unnatural relationship. Gissing lands on the idea, however, that marriage is a questionable state for all parties involved with no one sex more of a victim than the other. Mr Barfoot, whose own brother is a victim of his wife’s capricious whims, also holds his friend Poppleton up as another example of a victim of an impossible marriage. Poor Poppleton now resides in a lunatic asylum  as a result of years spent under the same roof as his humourless, dragon of a wife. Then there’s Mr. Orchard “worn to skin and bones” who fled his wife when he became suicidal. Miss Barfoot, Everard Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn discuss these relationships one evening:

“Why will men marry fools?”

Barfoot was startled. He looked down in his plate smiling.

“A most sensible question,” said the hostess, with a laugh. ”Why, indeed?”

“But a difficult one to answer,” remarked Everard , with his restrained smile. “Possibly, Miss Nunn, narrow social opportunity has something to do with it. They must marry some one, and in the case of most men choice is seriously restricted.”

“I should have thought,” replied Rhoda, elevating her eyebrows, “that to live alone was the less of two evils.”

Gissing seems to say that marriage, Victorian-era marriage at least, is an institution fraught with peril and difficulties–perhaps as Rhoda says, an institution best avoided, and it does not appear that one sex is to blame here. Marriage may claim its victims in The Odd Women, but Gissing offers us Micklethwaite and his middle-aged bride as a sort of consolation. After a seventeen-year engagement, Mickelthwaite can finally afford to marry (and blissfully so), and with this note of optimism, shrouded with bitter economic reality, Gissing’s novel lands firmly not against the vagaries of men or the narrow-mindedness of impossible wives, but on criticism of Victorian society and morality.

The Odd Women is also available FREE for the kindle.

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov

I’m going to throw a question out there… Would you want your life to be defined by history? In my mind, the question is accompanied by images of Ulysses S. Grant,  Mannerheim, and Makhno–men who happened to be born at a crucial time in history and whose lives were swept up in war. But cast these images aside, and let’s start looking at something a little less famous, a lot less stature, and this brings me to The Black Russian, a non-fiction book by Vladimir Alexandrov–an incredible tale of how one man’s life was ripped apart by history and the dominant, brutal attitudes to race and class.

This book tells the remarkable story of the life of Frederick Bruce Thomas who was born in 1872 to former slaves who were farmers in Mississippi. Just looking at the date of the date of Frederick’s birth tells us that he was born to a whole new Southern world, but a society that was still in a great deal of post-Civil War turmoil. Frederick’s parents must have been remarkable people as they managed to amass, at one point, 625 acres of land which they successfully farmed. But their very prosperity led to a powerful local, white landowner tricking them out of their land with a “multilayered trap” which included false threats and manufactured debts. Basically run off their land penniless, Frederick’s family fought back seeking legal redress, but after Frederick’s father was brutally murdered, the family sank into poverty once again.

Frederick set out in the world on his own and always seemed to make very concise intelligent decisions, and even though the choices he could make in his work world were very limited due to his race, nonetheless, a clear pattern emerges which “prefigures his future life and career.” Frederick quickly attached himself to those who could afford luxuries. He didn’t get stuck working in a back water dump of motel but always lived in large cities which attracted the wealthy who had money to spend.

he [had] entered an elegant service industry, one that existed for the benefit of people with money and social standing. No matter how lowly or demanding Frederick’s own labours might have been, he was nevertheless involved in providing adornments for those who could afford to pay for such luxuries.

Frederick worked as a waiter, but again, only in the most expensive restaurants and then after a successful career in Chicago and New York, in 1894, he sailed for London. Unfortunately, we don’t know what Frederick thought of England, but there are many quotes included from white Americans visiting London during the same time period who expressed a range of views–some outraged and some delighted–at the way “American negro[s]” “can go into the finest restaurants and be served just like a white man.” Frederick ran a boarding house in Leicester Square but it was a short lived endeavor, and then off to Paris where he worked for a few years and quickly learned French. But he was still restless and moved onto Brussels and the Riviera. It’s as though he auditioned countries to find his next home, and then, rather surprisingly, he finally settled in Moscow, married, started a family, and became one of the most successful variety theatre & restaurant owners in Russia. His theatres attracted the curious and those with money to throw away, and in one of his establishments, Maxim’s, he introduced the “theme space” which appears to foreshadow the outrageous hotels of Vegas.  With Frederick as an affluent millionaire, bribing local officials to look the other way for the risqué acts he searched the globe for, this should have ended as a happy story, but 1917 rolled around and a penniless 47-year-old Frederick, with his second wife and children found himself fleeing from the Bolsheviks and boarding a ship in 1919 full of American refugees. Good thing the American consul had no idea that Frederick had become a Russian citizen in 1915 under special dispensation from the Czar.

The Black Russian tells a tale of courage, ingenuity, dizzying success, flight, and then disaster. Frederick’s incredible life was bookended by racism and class-hatred, and what a tragic roller-coaster ride. He fled a country in which his class held him to the lowest, domestic positions, then, with his own unique talent and nose for business, he reinvented himself and was a phenomenal success in Russia, of all places, only to have it ripped from him by the Bolsheviks who saw him primarily as upper class and not as a black man who’d succeeded against the odds. This is one of those stories that if it were fiction, the average reader who toss aside after a few chapters thinking that the story was too implausible.  The Black Russian begins as  a gripping adventure story as Frederick’s family flees a panic-stricken Odessa, and then the book segues back into Frederick’s beginnings, his search for success, his dramatic failures in Constantinople and his ignominious end. The book also provides a backdrop of the society of the times, and while this is, at times, essential, the information is sometimes anticlimactic when compared to the main story.

At the peak of his success, Frederick was worth “about $10 million in today’s currency.”  While The Black Russian is the tale of one man’s rise and fall, the book also shows that Frederick, once liberated from the racial attitudes that held him to menial domestic positions in America, soared in a society in which his colour was no impediment. Intelligent, forward-thinking and unleashed in a country in which his colour was not an issue, Frederick showed just how successful he could be. It’s impossible not to read his story and consider how Frederick’s life would have been contained and limited if he’d stayed in America. Not only do we see  Frederick’s intelligence and strategic planning, we also see his sense of humor and how he loved to play with the American tourists who came his way, acting out–somewhat outrageously–their lowest expectations of a “semiliterate” subservient American black domestic–even though quite obviously diamond-flashing Frederick did not fit their stereotypical racist ideas and was, in fact, at the height of his success, a cosmopolitan figure, a successful, worldly millionaire who carved a fortune with his intelligence and adaptability.

Review copy

The Retrospective by A. B. Yehoshu

A. B. Yehoshu’s elegant and compulsively ruminative novel The Retrospective examines the tricks of memory, the slipperiness of motivation, and the many versions of the ‘truth’ –all through the life of aging Israeli film director Yair Moses. Moses once had a solid, collaborative working relationship with screenwriter, Trigano, a former student, but this relationship was irrevocably ripped asunder during the filming of their seventh film,  The Refusal when the female star, and Trigano’s lover, Ruth, refused to perform a scene. Moses took Ruth’s side against the screenwriter, and Trigano never worked with Moses again. This incident, seemingly trivial in nature, marked a turning point in the lives of Moses, Trigano and Ruth. Now decades later, Trigano has vanished into obscurity, Moses has become an acclaimed film director whose style–without Trigano–is vastly different and more accessible, and Ruth has become Moses’s companion and sometime lover. The uproar over the scene that Ruth refused to perform is buried deep in the past, and yet it offers an apparently simple explanation for the rupture, and forms an established narrative for why Trigano, Moses and Ruth’s lives took a completely different direction. But there’s another person missing from Moses’s past, and that’s Toledano, the cinematographer who gave the films a branded look. While Moses mourns the fact that Toledano who died some years previously is absent from the festival, he only has painful memories of Trigano.

When the story begins, Moses is invited to a retrospective of his films in Spain to be held in the pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela over the course of a few days, and Moses and Ruth arrive tired yet ready to perform for the audience and hosts.  Oddly, and Moses begins to suspect it’s no coincidence, a painting which hangs over the bed in the hotel room depicts the same sort of scene that was cut from The Refusal and led to the rupture between Moses, Ruth and Trigano. Moses is initially surprised that only his first films, now dubbed in Spanish, are represented at the festival–after all, some of these films he’s almost entirely forgotten and he considers them his early work–not necessarily his best. 

For part of the novel, the story seemed, for this reader, to be about Trigano–a man whose absence creates an abyss in the lives of Moses and Ruth. Although he is not present, we see slivers of his talent, personality and his trademark “mystical and symbolic touches“ through the films Moses watches during the 7-film retrospective. But there’s yet another intriguing aspect of this novel, and that’s the way three men: scriptwriter, Trigano, director Moses, and cinematographer Toledano all love Ruth in their own fashion, and make her the centre of their lives even as they fail to see her as a human being but as a “character“ to be fashioned (by director Moses), worshipped (by cinematographer Toledano), and even to be a representation of ideas (by her lover, screenwriter Trigano). Moses has buried his damaged relationship with Trigano and its painful memories in the past, but now for the film retrospective, he’s forced to remember their working relationship, and he even finds himself forced to explain some of Trigano’s more obscure symbolism to an audience of enthusiastic film lovers.

And even though many years have gone by with no contact at all between the two, Moses still feels the stump of amputation, and he believes the screen writer feels it too, even if he is too proud to admit it.

After all, once they parted ways, Moses continued to make feature films, first from screenplays written by others and later, as success favored him, from scripts he wrote himself based on original ideas or adapted from books. Whereas the screenwriter’s output was confined to short esoteric films, and then, when his new collaborators proved incompetent and saddled the productions with financial problems, he stopped making films altogether and went into teaching.

Sometimes Moses feels a vague desire to get back in touch, but he never does. Reconciliation after a serious breakup is harder than smoothing feathers after an argument. when they ran into each other at public events, at festivals or symposia, they barely exchanged more than a few empty words. Moses had at first believed that Trigano left him because of the affront to his professional dignity, but when he saw that the writer had left his friend and lover too, Moses understood that Trigano’s pride was injured not only be a director’s excessive indulgence of an actress repulsed by a twisted script but also by the extreme kindness of another man to a distressed woman whom Trigano regarded as his own.

This is the established narrative of the events that took place many years ago, and it’s this narrative–honed to perfection–that helps Moses makes sense of the events that took place during the filming of his 7th and last film made with Trigano. During the retrospective, however, as Moses watches his early films, he’s forced to confront the artistic endeavors that he’s all but forgotten. In the very deliberate selection of the early films (the “marvelous ones,” according to the priest who organizes the retrospective) Moses “cannot shake off the suspicions that this retrospective was engineered by Trigano to compel him to defend the writer’s fantasies.” Moses senses the hand of Trigano at work, and after the festival concludes, he seeks answers through retracing the crucial moments in their collaborative careers.

As a film aficionado, for this reader The Retrospective was both an unusual and riveting read. We are taken slowly through the retrospective as Moses rewatches all seven of his early films and replays scenes from his past. Forced to confront an uncomfortable relationship he’d rather forget, he begins to question his version of events, and gradually his established narrative of what happened is dismantled. 

Memory, the ‘Truth,’ and motivation are not the only elements to be examined in this complex novel as through the lives of Trigano and Moses, we also see the destructive power of artistic differences and the role and responsibility of the artist in society. Rewatching and later retracing the early films, Moses comes to realize just how deeply intelligent Trigano was, and just how much of the symbolism and political content placed in the films by the screenwriter he initially missed. The book’s conclusion seems a little anticlimactic and disappointing–can’t say too much without giving away the plot. Luckily the ending didn’t undermine the power of the rest of this complex,  contemplative novel, but perhaps just how much we like or dislike Trigano and Moses and which one seems to be the worst, more difficult (insufferable) egomaniac may impact how we feel about the final scene.  This is a book that’s liable to generate a lot of lively discussion in book groups.

Review copy. Translated by Stuart Schoffman.

18% Gray by Zachary Karabashliev

“Nine days without my wife and I score a drunk Pamela Anderson.”

Ok, so here’s the scenario:

You’re a young Bulgarian man living in California. You once wanted to be a photographer but settled for a lucrative job in the pharmaceutical industry. After your wife, Stella, dumps you, you go down to Tijuana on a bender. There in a drunken haze, you get mixed up with some thugs and through a chain of circumstance, you end up with a huge bag of marijuana. Do you:

a)  turn it in to the cops

b) have a big party and invite all your friends

c) drop it off at the Salvation Army donation box

d) try and sell it.

Well if you’re Zachary, the narrator of Bulgarian author, Zachary Karabashliev’s novel, 18% Gray, you decide, somewhat precipitously on the latter option. Of course there are a ton of problems when it comes to selling somewhere in the region of  50-70 lbs of marijuana, and since Zach knows nothing about how to sell it and has no contacts to help, he decides to drive from California to his friend Danny in New York, taking the huge bag of purloined marijuana along in the car. For anyone who’s driven across state lines, then you know that this is not the best plan in the world, but then again Zach isn’t exactly thinking straight since Stella left.

In many ways this is a road trip novel. As Zach packs up Stella’s abandoned convertible with the marijuana and an adequate supply of indispensable Toblerone, he careens from one disaster and misadventure to another including a less-than-thrilling casual sex encounter and a clash with opportunistic car thieves as he passes through drab rural towns, stops at greasy spoon diners, isolated gas stations, and sleeps in bleak cheap hotel rooms. Along the way he buys an ancient Nikon camera and captures amazing images of the American landscape, and as he heads East, he reminisces about his past in Bulgaria, his relationship with Stella, and mulls over exactly what went wrong.

18% Gray (which is a reference to photography btw) is a fictional version of a Jim Jarmusch film. Narrator Zach combines the naiveté of the non-American adrift in the bizarre corners of the American social landscape with the sort of spot-on observations made by a foreigner who interprets the culture with a unique perspective:

At seven I’m in the car because I have to leave L.A. before the traffic really thickens. I take I-10 East. The sun is already up and glinting on the backs of the cars in front of me. I try to find a radio station that doesn’t irritate me. I know that every ten or fifteen minutes I’ll have to deal with the next attack of ads–something I have never learned to ignore after all these years in America. Most likely I never will. The locals handle this as if they have an implanted chip that switches their attention on and off during commercial breaks. Maybe this mechanism is formed in the first early years of television watching. I’m missing the “first seven” in this respect. I grew up somewhere else, with a different kind of television. There–I remember– we had similar reactions to the communist propaganda, which, just like the commercials here, kept the system going.

As Zach heads East, layers from his past are stripped away, and we learn how Zach and Stella met in Bulgaria, their exodus to America, and how they adjusted to a whole new vista of materialistic temptations.

Years ago, I was in a book shop in Santa Monica, which some of you may know is a mecca of sorts for British ex-pats like me. There while perusing the shelves, I overheard a conversation between other British ex-pats who were exchanging thoughts about living in America. One man noted that he fell into the “pitfalls” of the culture without thinking much about it. He said he’d ”gone with the flow” and racked up huge debts to match a lifestyle he really couldn’t afford. Not that this behavior is exclusively American by any means, but the man’s point was that he felt adrift in a foreign culture and made bad choices which resulted in painful experiences before he found himself reevaluating just how he wanted to live in his newly-adopted culture.  This overheard conversation came back to mind as I read the novel. As an ex-pat, I appreciated 18% Gray’s fresh and insightful view of American culture as seen through a foreigner’s eyes. When Zach lands in America, all things seem possible, and then he shifts his dream, opting for material gain over every other consideration. Not so Stella. This is, in essence, the experience of ever new-comer to a foreign land. You have to decide how you will adapt, what you will adopt, and what you will absolutely reject. For some, I think, it’s easier than for others. Zach initially loses himself with his new (forged) American identity, and it’s on the symbolic journey East that Zach reconnects with the man he used to be.

I love American roads at night. The prairie outside is dark and cold. The American West. Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a part of this. But why? Is it possible that I had simply been charmed by the idea of the West, the West of absolute, raw freedom? I grew up with my grandparents’ fairy tales, with innumerable stories of our own national heroes–my mom read me to sleep every night.

…

I now realize that my American West was not a geographical place, but a sacred territory in my dreams. Perhaps everybody has their own Wild west. From a very young age, I knew with certainty that one day I would live in mine. I’d caress the yellow prairie grass and the wind would kiss my face. When did I lose all that? How did I manage to desecrate my West by replacing it with the plastic version of what I’ve been living in for the last few years of my life?

California, of course. The end came with California.

Review copy. Translated by Angela Rodel

Magnet of Doom by Simenon

Watching the films of Jean-Pierre Melville led me to Simenon’s novel, Magnet of Doom (The First-Born). Magnet of Doom is one of Simenon’s non-Inspector Maigret, Romans Durs (hard novels) so it’s highly recommended for noir fans. Melville’s version of the novel, a 1963 film called  L’Aine Des Ferchaux stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel, a washed-up boxer who latches on to a disgraced millionaire. With murder charges and a subsequent scandal about to break, Ferchaux employs Michel as his personal secretary and together they flee France.  Melville’s film strands the two men in the American deep south, and the film is a sometimes peculiar reflection of Melville’s fascination with American culture. You can see the film and then read the book without spoiling either. You’ll recognize the basic raw material, but that’s as far as it goes.

One of the frequent themes in the films of Melville is loyalty between men, so it should come as no surprise to Melville fans that Michel and Ferchaux develop an usual, and even unhealthy bond–you could apply the term ‘co-dependency’ here, but while Melville’s film is ultimately positive when it comes to analyzing the relationship between the aging millionaire and Michel, the Simenon novel on which the film is based is far darker. If there’s any truth to the idea that a relationship can be judged by the way it alters the people involved with each other, then the relationship between Simenon’s characters Ferchaux and Michel Maudet is toxic.

In the novel, Michel Maudet, the son of “small insolvent tradesfolk,” is desperate for work when he applies for the job as a secretary to the very wealthy Dieudonné Ferchaux. It’s rumoured that he’s a difficult employer and the number of secretaries he’s hired and fired in the recent past are proof that he’s not easy to please. Ferchaux isn’t at his home in the Rue des Chanoinesses–he’s retreated to the country, to his villa. Maudet leaves his long-suffering wife, Lina, alone in their bleak hotel room while he applies for the job, and when he learns that Ferchaux isn’t in Paris, he pursues him into the countryside stranding Lina with no money.

Maudet’s determination to get the job may seem normal, but it sets a precedent–at least as far as his priorities. Ferchaux quickly employs Maudet and the idea emerges that perhaps Ferchaux sees Maudet as a version of himself as a young man–hungry, ambitious, and eager to carve a place for himself in the world. But if Ferchaux feels this way, it certainly isn’t reflected in his initial  treatment of his new secretary who assumes the role of a possession rather than an employee who clocks off after a reasonable amount of time. Maudet, after overcoming his dismay at Ferchaux’s Spartan lifetstyle, admires his new employer and he absorbs his stories as if he might become more like Ferchaux through extended contact. While Maudet admires Ferchaux for his courage and the way he effortlessly flouts moral laws, he also envies the power and the fortune Ferchaux possesses. As their relationship continues, Ferchaux seems to envy Maudet’s youth, and there’s definitely a mutual predatory quality to their relationship–after all, each man possesses something the other man envies:

Ferchaux had his eye on him the whole day long, scanning him, watching for his reactions. Once he had said: “you’re impatient, aren’t you?”

There was no doubt what he meant. Impatient to live, impatient to taste and enjoy all that life had to offer. More than anything perhaps, impatient for power, impatient to get to the top.

“I’m still young,” he answered. “I’ve got time.”

Ferchaux had studied the boy’s pointed teeth, his nervous fingers, his sensitive nostrils. What was he feeling? Admiration, perhaps, and mixed with it, envy.

Wasn’t it his own portrait, his portrait at the age of twenty, that he contemplated in Maudet?

“Admit that if you had to do something a bit crooked to get your foot on the ladder … “

Even though Ferchaux is a phenomenally wealthy man, he has a stingy, mean side, and as the novel continues, it becomes clear that Ferchaux’s character was shaped in the Congo where he lived for over 40 years. Ferchaux may have been brutalized by spending most of his life in the Congo, but he is also one of the brutalizers. There are various stories circulating about his life there, and one of the uglier stories which includes murder of Congo natives is perfectly true–although, of course, Ferchaux has a different version of events. One of Maudet’s duties is to take dictation of Ferchaux’s memoirs, and in the beginning–the early days with Ferchaux, Maudet almost falls in love with his employer. Let’s say it’s a kind of homage, extreme admiration of a man who can command respect and put fear into the hearts of others. Maudet would like to be Ferchaux. There’s the underlying idea that a man like Maudet, a man with few principles to trouble his conscience, would also have thrived in the Congo and, just like Ferchaux, he would made a fortune on the blood on sweat of the natives. Dieudonné Ferchaux’s brother, Emile, also spent time in the Congo, but he minimized this period and got out as soon as he could. Emile lives a life of luxury with a chateau, a chauffeur driven car, wears expensive clothing, and mingles with the cream of French society. Dieudonné Ferchaux, on the other hand, nothing less than a bold unscrupulous adventurer who lost a leg in the Congo, has kept his rough edge, and rebuffs ‘the soft life.’

We could call the beginning of Maudet’s relationship with Ferchaux a honeymoon. After Lina reenters the picture to form an uneasy trio, there’s an emerging sense of jealousy, and she also senses a sort of “vicious” quality in Ferchaux’s attitude to Maudet. At first she doesn’t understand why Maudet admires Ferchaux–a man whose soiled reputation and crimes in the Congo have made headlines, but Maudet defends his choice:

“I’ve got a chance of entering into a world that was closed to me before, as it’s closed to most people. A world in which you juggle with millions–you call the tune and thousands of little people have to dance to it…”

Shortly the three characters-Ferchaux, Maudet and Lina go on the run. With 5 million francs in a suitcase, a large amount of money on deposit in a South American bank and a stash of diamonds, the plan is to live in exile in a godforsaken hole where French law cannot reach. Fate dogs our characters all the way from France to a South American hovel, and there the relationship between Ferchaux and Maudet simmers unhealthily as each man experiences a sick, growing dependence on the other and Maudet mingles with a strange crowd of ex-pats, prostitutes, rich, lonely socialites, and a seller of shrunken heads.

The book’s title, Magnet of Doom refers both to the relationship between the two men and to the idea that the conclusion is ominously unavoidable. In the Congo, Ferchaux did whatever he deemed necessary to bolster his success–he didn’t shrink from murder, torture, & there’s one great scene detailing the very deliberate humiliation of a groveling employee & his wife who’ve established a bourgeois “suburban villa” in the Congo. Morality is absent from Ferchaux’s mind, and so his actions are based on success and survival rather than any moral code. One of the issues between the two men is the question of whether or not Maudet is made of the same material:

“You see Maudet, the question you ask me is one to which no one has the right to answer…. A leopard doesn’t hesitate to jump over a paling, because it knows its strength. But when a jackal tries the same thing and gets caught on the pales….It’s not a pretty sight, that…. I’ve seen it….”

Clearly Maudet initially worships the much older man, but as his power wanes, so does Maudet’s admiration. It’s almost as if Maudet saps the strength from the other man, and perhaps some of this is a natural process. In these two men, however, a terrible and unhealthy dynamic exists with Ferchaux initially baiting Maudet  to see just how far he’ll go:

What Michel wanted to know and what he sought for in Ferchaux’s eyes was the answer to a question that was so vague and terrible, a question which he had never formulated, yet which both men understood, a question which could be summed up in the words: how far?

Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury