Excellent books

I just finished a book that I probably won’t write much about, but just thinking about not writing about that book made me think about all the other books that I have been reading and not writing about, and I think it’s time to get caught up on my slapdash incompetent book reviews. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir. Writer Susanna Moore had what would have appeared to anyone to be an enviable life. Think of a girl, so beautiful that she eventually became a part-time actress (this was the 1960s, when only beautiful women could aspire to be actresses) and a part-time spokesmodel (hence the title - she was actually Miss Aluminum for an aluminum trade group) whose father is a doctor in Honolulu in the prosperous middle of the 20th century. The very description suggests an enchanted upbringing; a beautiful, rich, and accomplished couple settles down in a tropical paradise, where they raise their five beautiful children in the freedom and wildness of early statehood Hawaii, with the added privilege of private schools and the social status of doctor’s children. It seems like a fairytale. It seems almost too good to be true. And it was. Moore’s fairytale girlhood was replete with monsters and dragons. Her father was neglectful and callous, her mentally ill mother died when Moore was just 12, and the stepmother who replaced her was monstrously cruel. Moore escaped by moving to Philadelphia, her mother’s hometown, where she lived with a doting Irish grandmother. She married a man who nearly beat her to death, and was later raped by a famous fashion designer who expected more from his models than a walk down the runway. 

Amid all this suffering and abuse, Moore lived a pretty spectacularly interesting life. She acted in movies (badly, if you take her at her word). She worked for a time as Warren Beatty’s assistant (unsurprisingly, he comes across as a bit of a jerk but when you stack him up against the other men in Moore’s life, he’s a veritable prince). She dated Jack Nicholson. She socialized with Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. It occurs to me that anyone who is younger than 40 (and definitely anyone who is younger than 30) might either not know these names at all or might know them but not know how famous these people really were at that time. Trust me when I tell you that these are big names to drop, and Moore drops them as though they’re just names of people she happened to know. This is not false modesty. This is how she writes about everything, really; she writes about events in her life as though these are things that just happened. It’s almost like she’s an observer and not a participant. Another review of this book described her as “passive,” but I don’t know that this is the right word. The word that I think of is “detached.” There is a distance, a sense of separation between the author and her subject, although they are one and the same. This might be intentional; or it might be an unintentional effect of lingering trauma. But it doesn’t matter. Susanna Moore is a beautiful writer and this book is very much worth reading. 

*****

Invisible Ink, Guy Stern. Guy Stern, who is 100 years old, is an American hero. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, he escaped the Nazis and came to the United States with the help of an uncle in St. Louis, where he attended high school and worked in a hotel kitchen and fell in love with his new country. His family remained in Germany, where they were murdered by the Nazis. Stern joined the Army, was assigned to Camp Ritchie in my own home state of Maryland, and became one of the Ritchie Boys, the famous Army Intelligence unit where native German speakers became spies and POW interrogators. After the war, Stern returned to college, eventually earned a PhD in German language and literature, and became an academic. 

Guy (born Gustav) Stern has lived a rich and interesting life and he comes across as a lovely man, but he is not a writer, at least not in English. Parts of his memoir are really good (especially the war stories), but it’s very inconsistent. In fact, it’s probably not the writing that is at fault, but the editing. The invisible ink of the title is a reference to Stern’s father’s warning that Jews have to blend in if they want to survive. “You have to be like invisible ink,” his father tells him. Invisible ink is a great metaphor for assimilation, but he mentions it just once or twice at the beginning, and doesn’t really do much with the idea afterward. He also tells us practically nothing about his family’s fate, nor about why they were not able to escape to the US or to South America. This is understandable, of course, but I really wanted to know more about Stern’s parents and brother and sister. HIs stories about his time with the Ritchie Boys are probably the best part of the book - both dramatic and hilarious. He even got to meet and hang around with Marlene Dietrich, who was a tireless supporter of the American war effort. But most of the book covers his academic career and unless you are an aficionado of modern German language studies and the internal politics of university language departments in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, then it’s not especially thrilling reading. At times, Stern just recites biographical details and calendar events - he attended this conference or socialized with that person in that city on that day. I’m reminded of P.D. James’ Time to Be in Earnest, but Stern is not as good a writer and except for the war stories, he’s not quite as good as putting the events of his daily life into historical and cultural context. 

*****

The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron. This one was a Kindle recommendation selected because, I suppose, the algorithm believes that one Ephron is as good as the next and that if I liked Nora then I’ll naturally like Delia, too. And you know what? The algorithm was not wrong. If I’d read a synopsis first (three women on the run for various reasons end up stranded in a North Carolina backwater where they take waitressing jobs in a bar where a lion lives in a cage), I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole, but it’s much better than that little summary would suggest. The characters are funny and believable, the story is rather touching, and the writing is quite good. My only real criticism is that two of the characters are supposed to be from Maryland and other than frequent mentions of Baltimore and the fictional small town where the two grew up, there’s really no Maryland local color. But that is a minor complaint. Really, I liked it better than Heartburn. I prefer Nora’s nonfiction to her fiction, any day of the week. Delia is on my list - my good list. 

*****

So Sad Today. Melissa Broder. I don't even know what to say about this book, which is beautiful in spots here and there but is mostly shocking, in that sort of intentional, contrived, look at me, OMG I am so radically transgressively honest that maybe I’m a little too much for you normies way that seems de rigeur among millennial memoir authors. It might seem silly to criticize a memoirist for writing too much or too honestly about herself, but there it is. Because even though this book was frequently shocking, it was also much more frequently boring. Not every thought that a person has is worthy of expression, even if that person has a book contract. 

*****

I had to refer back to my list again to remember what else I’ve read that I haven’t already told you all about. I read a Jennifer Weiner novel this summer. And I had to just look up the title because I couldn’t remember if it was The Summer Place, That Summer, or Big Summer. It was the latter. To be clear, I like Jennifer Weiner. I like her stories, I like her characters, and I like her writing. It’s just that her novels tend to blend into one another, and by throwing “summer” into the title of at least half of them, she does not make it easy to distinguish one from the next. 

Big Summer is a comedy of manners, a morality play, and a murder mystery, all in one pretty entertaining novel. The main character, Daphne, is a Jennifer Weiner archetype - a bit overweight (but still beautiful, if you read between the lines), hard-working and talented and scrappy, making up for in sheer pluck what she lacks in wealth and privilege. The other main character, Drue, is also a Weiner archetype - beautiful, brilliant, and insanely rich and privileged. In some Weiner novels, the rich girl also happens to be a wonderful person (Maxi Ryder, the movie star second heroine of Weiner’s first novel, Good in Bed, for example); but in this case, she happens to be rather awful. And she ends up dead under circumstances that place Daphne, her friends, and her new boyfriend, under suspicion. I didn’t immediately guess who the murderer was; in fact, I was convinced that it was someone else, so the story works on the whodunit level. It also has a lot of not super original but still thoughtful and interesting ideas about modern relationships, wealth and privilege, and social media influencer culture. It’s definitely light reading but sometimes light reading is just the thing. 

*****

British novels of the mid-20th century, especially those set during the war or during the years immediately following, are always obsessed with food. Every few pages or so, a scene will center around breakfast, lunch, tea, or dinner. What to cook, what to eat, how much (always too little), what kind of bread, what kind of meat, what to have for pudding. Kippers, beans, eggs eggs and more eggs, biscuits and sandwich cake and toast with jam or marmalade or butter - all accompanied by tea tea and more tea. Weak tea, strong tea, stewed tea (bad), in mugs (rarely) or thin cups and saucers, with sugar and milk or one or the other or neither. Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Jane Howard and Evelyn Waugh, all writing during or just after the war, were probably always a little hungry. Sometimes their characters are hungry, too; but sometimes, the food just seems to make its way into the novel where it becomes part of the scenery. 

This is what happens in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which I am just about to finish. The main character is constantly gathering food or planning, cooking, serving, or cleaning up a meal. All of this effort around food seems to serve as a metaphor for her life, a life of routines and tasks; a life of cleaning up one meal and immediately wondering what to do about the next one. Barbara Pym: I understand. I see you, girl. 

I’m not sure how this happened but until I found this book, I had never read Barbara Pym, a British author who wrote very observant novels about the English middle class in the middle of the 20th century. How could I have missed her? Anyway, now that I am almost finished with Excellent Women, I will immediately go and read all of her other novels. I think she wrote five or six. 

Excellent Women is about a woman named Mildred Lathbury, a brilliant name for a character; or rather, a brilliant name for this character who is exactly who you would expect a woman named Mildred Lathbury to be. Mildred is an English spinster in her late 30s in post-war London, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman who died and left a small income (another modern English novel trope - the character who either does not work or works very little, thanks to a “small income” left behind by a deceased relative) to Mildred, who lives in a small flat, goes on holiday every year with an old school friend, works part-time for a charity dedicated to assisting “reduced gentlewomen,” and is constantly taken advantage of by married friends and male acquaintances who assume that Mildred as a single childless woman will naturally have all the time in the world to run their errands, clean up their messes, and serve as their intermediary. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But it’s actually very funny and sometimes very moving. 

According to the introductory notes, Mildred is supposed to be a sad and pathetic character, with an empty and lonely life. But I find her interesting and lively. She is also the first-person narrator, sharply observant and wryly self-aware. She knows perfectly well that her neighbors and acquaintances and even her friends see her as a comically stereotypical spinster, and she cares about their opinions, but not very much. She knows that everyone she knows thinks that they know her, that they can guess what she is thinking and predict her future, and she doesn’t really bother to disabuse them of their perceptions. She just goes about her business and lets people think what they think. This seems to me a very good way to be. Mildred is a bit of a badass in her own restrained daughter-of-an-English-clergyman way. 

*****

Although Excellent Women is, well, excellent, it’s taking me forever to finish. I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time right now. I get away with this at work because at any given time I have a dozen or more projects, and I just toggle back and forth between and among them. Same thing at home. Sometimes when I’m writing, I walk away in the middle of a sentence, fold a few garments, vacuum a room, cut up an onion or something (I spend a really unreasonable amount of time with a knife in one hand and an onion in the other) and then come back and finish the sentence. 

But I also hate to walk away from a novel that I love. I miss the characters, and I miss the author’s voice. A good novel is good company, and I hate to see it go. I’ll miss Mildred when I finish Excellent Women. 

*****

Well, I do wish that Mildred had politely told the insufferable Everard that no, she didn’t have time to index his dull book and no, she was not interested in proofing his typescripts (for free, of course), but I’m choosing to believe that eventually, she’ll stand up to him and to all of the other men who presume on the goodwill and helpfulness of excellent women like Mildred. 

Yes, I did finally finish the book. I will start another one later today and maybe I’ll report back in haphazard and piecemeal fashion; or maybe the next book I read will be one of the ones that I read on autopilot, forgetting about it completely the moment I close the cover on the last page. Watch this space. Anything could happen.