The Body of Jonah Boyd: David Leavitt

David Leavitt’s The Body of Jonah Boyd is narrated by Judith “Denny” Denham, a secretary who’s having an affair with her psychology professor boss, Dr. Ernest Wright. It’s the 60s and the story is told in retrospect thirty years later by Denny, and while it’s her story, it’s also the story of the Wright family.

It’s sticky enough that Denny is having an affair (one in a long series of affairs) with her married boss, but the entanglement doesn’t stop there. Nancy Wright, Ernest’s wife, “found” Denny at the hairdresser’s and insists on inviting her home as a “four-hand partner” for the piano. The idea is that Denny is supposed to replace Nancy’s former piano partner and best friend Anne. Denny accepts and so begins her relationship with the Wright family. Denny is frequently a guest at the Wrights’ home, and her invitation to Thanksgiving is secured. On weekends, Ernest and Denny often scurry up to his office above the garage for some gropey sex, while Nancy and the Wright children: Mark, Daphne and Ben are in other parts of the house. Denny doesn’t have a problem with all these complications and claims to keep her relationships with Nancy and Ernest cleanly separate, stating that “my friendship with Nancy was in certain crucial ways remote from my relationship with her husband.”  But is that true?

When Thanksgiving 1969 rolls around, the Wrights’ oldest child, Mark is a draft dodger in Canada, and that’s the Thanksgiving that Nancy’s best friend, Anne and her second husband, Jonah Boyd come to visit.

Denny, whose role was to replace Anne at the piano, has heard so many nauseatingly positive things about Anne that the reality is a shock.

Anne was wearing a wool coat that had been torn near the pocket and then clumsily restitched, and she carried an enormous, shapeless handbag. She had shaggy red hair that was graying at the roots, nicotine-stained teeth, a thick middle. Also her eye makeup was smudged in a way that suggested she had been weeping. 

All at once, a sensation of misplaced triumph welled up in me. This Anne was a far cry from the willowy creature Nancy had described. Certainly they could never have shared clothes! I admit, my rival’s sordid demeanor–not to mention the expression of concern and disappointment that claimed Nancy’s face as she gave Anne the once-over–sparked in me an unexpected confidence, and I shook Anne’s hand heartily. 

There are obvious marital problems between Jonah and Anne, and while Anne seethes and drinks too much, Jonah sets out to charm everyone. The fact that he succeeds so easily seems to bother Anne, and so she airs some of the marital dirty laundry. It’s not a particularly pleasant evening–especially when, after Jonah gives a reading of his soon-to-be-published novel, teenager Ben insists on reading some of his angst-ridden poetry.

It’s an evening to remember, and as Denny narrates the story we learn about the terrible things that subsequently happened to several of the people who attended Thanksgiving that evening. Years pass and then Denny runs into Ben again. …

Every story must begin somewhere and end somewhere. The author (or the narrator) takes a cookie cutter to life and offers readers just that piece. A large portion of Denny’s time must have existed outside of the Wrights but it seems that they are the most important part of her life. And what a tangled relationship she has with this family. At times she seems to wish herself Nancy’s daughter, and she admits “yearning” “to have been Daphne.” But when you put that in the context of Denny’s affair with Ernest, it seems rather incestuous–especially when there are a few times she sees her affair with Ernest as a sort of revenge against Nancy’s slights. Then there is another time Denny admits that she’s “besotted” with Nancy.  The Wrights seem to have various “needs” for Nancy too, so the relationship between Nancy and the Wrights isn’t a one-way street.

This was a reread. I was struck this time by Ernest’s philosophy to life. Ernest believes that “what people get, most of the time, is what they want,” and this philosophy seems to work itself into the later relationship between Danny and Ben. I wasn’t as convinced by the character of Denny this time around. This is a young woman who has a series of affairs with married men, yet asks nothing from them. Given her feelings about various members of the Wright family, somehow she seems  needy and not the cool I-need-my-space serial mistress type.

Advertisement

The Day of the Dead: Nicci French

The Day of the Dead is an ominous title for the final book in the Frieda Klein series from husband-and-wife writing team “Nicci French” (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French). For those playing catch-up, this is the eighth book in the series which follows London psychologist Frieda Klein. I’ll add here that in spite of the fact that this book includes many repeat characters, it can be read as a standalone, but if you want to get a bit more out of the story, I’d recommend that you read at least the first one in the series: Blue Monday.

The Day of the Dead begins with a horrific incident in London which leaves many people wounded, but as the police begin to investigate what seems like an accident, the incident turns into something much more sinister. This murder case initially baffles police, but then another body surfaces, and another, and another…..

Meanwhile, Frieda Klein (who doesn’t appear until we’re really deep into the plot) is in hiding. In Blue Monday, she met serial killer, psychopath Dean Reeve, and although he was supposedly dead at the end of the book, Frieda has insisted to the police for years that Dean was still alive. And considering how her life has been turned into a theatre of blood and murder since meeting Dean, she may be onto something.

Dean Reeve is the ultimate predator, and over the course the series he’s played a cat-and-mouse game with Frieda, always close by, always circling. To some, Frieda’s claims about Dean Reeve are too fantastic to be believed, and she is regarded as an attention seeking nut, a woman “who has left a trail of havoc behind her,” but Frieda also has her defenders.

In The Day of the Dead, the police finally have to acknowledge that Dean Reeve is alive, and into his current string of showy murders stumbles a young confused criminology student named Lola who has become so interested in Frieda that she decides to write a dissertation “deconstructing” the psychologist. Lola seeks Frieda and manages to find her, but with Dean Reeve circling, Lola doesn’t want to leave Frieda’s side. Frieda is in hiding for a reason as she knows that those close to her are in danger from Dean. Frieda knows that Dean “is reaching the end. One way or another.” 

Although this book clocks in at just over 400 pages, it was a very quick, addictive read. The novel’s strongest point, IMO, is that Frieda, having dealt with Dean Reeve, never underestimates him. Psychopaths are underestimated by novices who cannot even begin to imagine how someone like Dean thinks. Most of us are lucky enough to live our lives without ever crossing the path of a psychopath, but if you’re unfortunate enough to ever tangle with a sicko and survive, you move forward into an unsettling life. The authors nailed this feeling.  As the novel builds to its inevitable crescendo, the pacing is excellent. While Frieda seems to have reached a zen-like plateau in her acceptance of this, her final duel with Dean, the character of limpet-like Lola is rather annoying. The authors pulled a bit of a switcheroo with the plot, and I might have been a bit annoyed about it had I not already guessed it. Still, if you are in the mood for a a crime novel that sucks you and and refuses to let go, then The Day of the Dead may fit the bill.

Julia Paradise by Rod Jones

While Australian novelist Rod Jones’s first novel, Julia Paradise, set in 1920s Shanghai, could appear to be about the enigmatic, mysterious and deeply troubled wife of a missionary, the story is really about her Scottish physician/Freudian analyst/lover Kenneth Ayres. Given that Julia Paradise included an element of psychoanalysis, one of my pet subjects, plus the exotic allure of 1927 Shanghai, I read the blurb, and committed to the novel. Later I almost put the book aside, more of that later, but after concluding this novel, an uneasy, deeply disturbing read, it’s fair to say that author Rod Jones risks alienating his readers at one point with the very details which paradoxically entice analyst Kenneth Ayres into Julia’s intricate sticky web of deceit. Intrigued?… Read on…

It’s Shanghai 1927, and physician Kenneth Ayres, age 34, a man of considerable bulk at eighteen stone, lives at the Astor Hotel and spends time at the “Shanghai Club, to which he had been given a temporary membership which never quite became permanent and never quite expired.” His hotel apartment also conveniently  serves as his consulting rooms, and it’s here he treats his female patients who seek his help for various “nervous disorders.” Ayres dominates the scene as he “propelled his bulk from the club and back to his hotel,” while on foot, he has to “stop often, panting for little rests.” This is a remarkably visual novel full of the terrifying memories of a childhood in the Duck River region of Northern Australia and the exotic sights and sounds of Shanghai. Of course, it’s exotic for the foreigners in Shanghai–not so much for the locals:

Rickshaw drivers had to struggle to get Ayres’ weight into motion in a stream of Shanghai afternoon traffic.

 Apart from this comic and yet sad image (the underfed rickshaw driver dragging around a fat Scotsman who’s too out of shape to walk a few 100 feet), we immediately gain, or so we think, a very clear picture of Ayres. A bon vivant, and a great table companion for other westerners in Shanghai, he has three favorite topics of conversation: his home town of Edinburgh, his former professor Freud (Ayres’s beard increases the resemblance between the two men), and J.M. Barrie. Ayres specializes in the “treatment of nervous disorders” and after his wife died, he sailed for Australia, but “on a whim disembarked in Shanghai and had been there ever since.”

Socially, the British there treated him with a polite and deferential suspicion. It was as though, with his appointment book full of the names of their wives and their daughters and their cases of petit mal, hysteria and the nervous collapses which followed broken love affairs, he had learned quite enough of their secrets, and they tended to exclude him.

But is this the only reason that Ayres is held at a polite distance? There’s an early hint that there may be something else that keeps Ayres from being treated as a friend by other Europeans who live in Shanghai. Could it be his taste for pre-pubescent girls? For a Freudian therapist who is supposed to help his patients uncover the secrets locked in their subconscious, Ayres is a man whose self-awareness is remarkably shallow and righteously self-indulgent:

He knew well Freud’s remark that ‘some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people’.

One day, Ayres observes a woman as she dashes into the hotel and just as frantically, exits. Then a moment later, she returns, a bundle of nerves, “panicky and disoriented” on the arm of her husband. The woman is Julia Paradise married to William Paradise, a Methodist minister, there to see Dr. Ayres. In the doctor’s consulting rooms, Julia’s story is told by her husband, and he describes Julia as a narcoleptic who during periods of drowsiness began spouting German, her father’s language. Sedatives were given and then withdrawn, and Julia became increasingly worse and more dysfunctional, hallucinating, swinging wildly between periods of withdrawal, and periods of creative energy during which she ran off to Shanghai with her camera to take photographs of the denizens who inhabit the seediest areas.

Initially Ayres sees Julia’s case as “common to the point of banality,” as he’s seen a steady stream of women who are “victims of  their husbands’ ambitions in the colonial services.” To Ayres, for these women “the cure was as simple as a steamship ticket home.” The details of Ayres’s behaviour as he listened to Rev. Paradise reveal that Ayres, a man of enormous appetites, is hardly compassionate. He agrees to take the case, but there’s a sense of brutality and boredom to his acquiescence–what can Julia’s story contain that he hasn’t heard a thousand times before. But while Ayres doesn’t bother to hide his disinterest (after all, he’s the only game in town, so where else is Rev. Paradise going to seek help), it’s clear that Julia’s disintegrating behaviour is rooted in some deep, dark psychological disturbance.

The root cause of Julia’s mental problems is gradually revealed through her ‘sessions’ with Ayres. If there were any doubts about the doctor’s lack of integrity, those doubts are confirmed by his completely unprofessional, exploitive behaviour as the layers of this morphine-soaked tale reveal the horrors of incest.

There was a moment when I wasn’t sure I could continue with Julia Paradise. The vibes around the incest tale were so repulsive, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read on. I mean, really… who wants to read about incest? As a subject, incest might be a deal-breaker for some readers, and while I understand that choice, I’ll add that incest is used here as a ‘tool,’ and it’s not until the novel is over that we realize exactly what we’re read, and exactly how we’ve been seduced along with Ayres.  Julia Paradise is a very clever novel, and once past the incest, something shifts, and the novel becomes a different tale than we were originally led to believe. Julia’s tale of a past full of depravity, shrouded with images of death and decay, draws Ayres into her web, and he’s attracted to her malignant childhood and finds her “the most suggestible patient he had ever come across in his life.” Ayres is entranced with Julia, and completely and utterly seduced by her tale, his ego takes him along a path where his fate awaits him.  We go along for the ride.

Julia Paradise, a tale which takes place against the upheaval of the Chinese civil war, and which examines the many layers of human exploitation, is a tale of moral redemption. Julia is a fractured human being, an enigma, and long after the tale is finished questions remain:

She was like a brilliantly-coloured jigsaw puzzle dismantled and spread across the floor of his mind. His thoughts continued to inhabit small sections of her life–or what he increasingly thought of as her ‘lives’. He talked aloud to her, pleading with her to clarify this point, to explain the apparent contradiction between this and that to make sense of the brutal pantomime he played over and over. In short, he became obsessed.

In terms of its exotic location and the theme of moral redemption Julia Paradise, reminded of Maugham’s wonderful novel, The Painted Veil, but for its insidious plot which examines the complexities of human sexuality, this book should appeal to fans of Jeannette Winterson.

Review copy/own a copy

Say You’re Sorry by Michael Robotham

“We disappeared together, Tash and me. That was a summer of hot winds and fierce storms that came and went like, well storms do. It was on a clear night at the end of August after the Bingham Summer Festival, when the funfair rides had fallen silent and the coloured lights had been turned off.”

A few years ago I read Australian author Michael Robotham’s Suspect, the first in the Joe O’Louglin series.  In this novel, the London-based clinical psychologist, just diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, is drawn into a murder investigation and lies about his past relationship with the victim. Say You’re Sorry is the sixth novel in the series (Suspect, Lost, Shatter, Bleed for Me, & The Wreckage). Since I have a weakness for books that feature psychologists, I’d been meaning to get back to this series, but somehow, 4 of them have passed me by, so here I am with number 6. I’ve missed a bit along the way. Joe has moved back to London, and he takes medication for Parkinson’s which seems to be helping. He’s separated from his wife, Julianne, and his daughter Charlie is now a rebellious teenager. Joe works 2 days a week for the NHS and the rest of the time he works on “referrals [from] the Crown Prosecution Service.” There’s the sense that Joe’s work has become a little too routine and predictable, but all of that is about to change when Joe is pulled away from his commitments to make a psychological evaluation of a murder suspect.

The plot revolves around two crimes: the disappearance three years earlier of the two 15-year-old “Bingham girls” Piper Hadley and Tash McBain, best friends from school. Good-looking and confident Tash came from a rough home life and had a bad reputation. Fully aware of her attractiveness, she played teasing games with many of the males in her circle. Piper, who came from an upper-class background, seems an unlikely friend for Tash, and when Piper’s friendship with Tash began to lead to trouble, her parents shipped her off for to a re-education centre. But intervention from Piper’s parents inevitably backfired, and the two girls disappeared without a trace one summer night. The consensus is that the girls ran off to London.

The second crime takes during a blizzard at the remote farmhouse which used to be the home of Tash’s family. Joe is heading for a long weekend in Oxford “to talk at a mental health symposium” when he’s co-opted to provide a psychological evaluation on the suspect of a bloody double homicide. Initially the crime has the hallmarks of a classic home invasion. The husband was trying to run when his assailant bashed in his skull with a blunt object. Nasty, but the wife met a worse end. She was tied down onto the bed and set on fire. The police have a suspect–Augie Shaw, a handyman employed by the victims. The handyman has a history of mental problems and he’d recently been fired over a matter of missing underwear. The police are happy with an open and shut case, but Joe can’t fit the crime to the handyman, and then again there are some very troubling clues at the crime scene that leads Joe to think that the double homicide was linked to something else that occurred at the farmhouse.

Joe makes an interesting series character, and in this novel, former Det Insp. Vincent Ruiz (from Suspect) is back and joins Joe in his hunt for the truth. Joe finds himself investigating the cold case of the missing Bingham girls, and just as a crime scene can become contaminated as people inadvertently trammel clues, the stories about the girls have become distorted with time, and Joe has to wade through the myths built up around the two missing teenagers.

Everyone had a story about us–even the people who never liked us. We were cheeky, fun loving, popular, hard-working; we were straight A students. I laughed my ass off at that one.

People put a shine on us that wasn’t there for real, making us into the angels they wanted us to be. Our mothers were decent. Our fathers were blameless. Perfect parents who didn’t deserve to be tormented because of the posters and my collection of crystals  and my photo-booth portraits of my friends.

Narrated in turn by Piper Hadley and Joe O’Loughlin, Say You’re Sorry is the perfect distraction read, and by that I mean that you can be on a train or a plane or surrounded by annoying conversationalists, but you won’t hear them; you’ll be turning the pages of this book. On the down side (and this may seem a strange comment), I didn’t want to put this book down as by doing so, I was prolonging a crime. There’s an uncomfortable complicit feeling of reading a book while a crime is in process. I had the same feeling when I watched the film, The Cell. Almost fast forwarded the DVD for that one.

While Say You’re Sorry is a crime novel with a strong psychological bent, it’s also qualifies as a thriller towards the end. I didn’t guess the perp for this one, and the book kept me guessing to the end….

Mirrors have an interesting effect in interview rooms. People struggle to lie when they can see themselves doing it. They become more self-conscious as they try to sound more convincing and truthful

Review copy.