A Literary Cavalcade

By Robert A. Parker

Writer and editor Robert A. Parker has followed up his six-volume A Literary Cavalcade with a seventh volume. This volume of criticism covers mainly the fiction he has read from 2013 to early 2017. His comments are informed by his Jesuit upbringing but also by an independent critical view that balances a moral and literary sensibility.
The writers here represent a broad range of writing styles, cultural influences, and moral philosophies. And all are rated on their literary achievement, the effectiveness of plot, character, and setting, plus their recognition of the moral, ethical, and spiritual values of mankind.
Here is a unique critical perspective that measures the meaning of literature against the meaning of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365962479

Book preview

A Literary Cavalcade

A

Literary

Cavalcade

VII

Also by Robert A. Parker

Photography

Images (with Margot Parker)

Images: Spain

Images: Venezuela

Images: Europe

Images: America

Travel

Three Steps to Easter

The Measure of Time

Leaving Home

Venice: A Tender Craft

Literature

Heaven & Earth (six plays)

A Literary Cavalcade: I, II, III, IV, V, VI

23 Stories and Five Poems

Art Direction and text: Robert A. Parker

Entire contents copyright ©2017 by Robert A. Parker

The author retains the sole copyright to his contributions to this book.

ISBN: 978-1-365-96247-9

To Margot,

Andy, Karen, and Dave,

and all readers

Preface

This book complements six volumes of book reviews that I previously published in 2013, reviews written over a period of sixty years. This seventh volume critiques serious works that I have read since then, from 2013 to early 2017. All content is again organized alphabetically by author.

Most of the works represented here, perhaps 95 percent, are fiction. That has always been my main interest. But also included are non-fiction works that have literary value or reflect significant moments of history. I have also added a few reviews that missed the initial volumes, as well as evaluations of theatrical works written over five seasons.

Because the most important element in my enjoyment of fiction is its plot, these reviews rarely discuss a novel’s conclusion. Style, theme, character, and the plot situation, yes, but not the ending. I have not wanted to spoil for others that most enjoyable benefit of reading fiction.

That is also why I rarely reread books. I have done so in two situations. First, when I wished to comment on a book I had already read, either a book assigned in school or one read before I began writing my comments. And second, when I wanted to compare my evaluation today with the evaluation I had made earlier.

Do I have any favorite authors? Clearly, they are those authors for whom I have read the greatest number of works. But any determination of favorite authors must include those authors represented in the initial six volumes. In any event, I do think I may be harsher on these favorite authors, because I set for them higher expectations. (Indeed, what critic does not expect more from his favorites?) And because they may not reach perfection in terms of the qualities I most admire.

What are those qualities? Despite the attraction that a story line offers, I am most interested in works that explore the inner workings of characters. These inner workings include the moral, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of human beings. With my Catholic background, I am particularly drawn to those who explore spiritual values. And even if the reader will find that such fiction represents only a fraction of the books represented here, he or she will nevertheless find that my critical evaluation of any book often includes a moral or spiritual perspective.

I call this a cavalcade because my entries represent a procession of reviews. After being listed alphabetically by author, each item is offered chronologically by the date of composition within each author.

A.B.

C.D.

DANIEL ALARCON

Lost City Radio (2007)

This is a complex novel about a dictatorship, a revolt, and the lies and the deaths that inevitably follow, and also include many who have mysteriously disappeared. It is a story about Norma, a radio announcer; Rey, an apparent rebel, her husband, and one of many who have disappeared; Victor, her husband’s 11-year-old son by another woman, Adela; Manau, a teacher who takes Victor to the city after Adela has died; and Zahir, a villager who has betrayed Rey to the authorities.

It is a complex novel primarily because the events are not told in chronological sequence, with the reader as a result often not understanding the significance of what is happening. The confusion is confounded when Alarcon will switch without typographic warning from one dramatic scene to another scene at a different place or a different time. The logic is that these scenes appear to be bits of memory, primarily Norma’s, prompted by the original scene.

The novel begins with Victor arriving at Norma’s radio station, and then backtracks to tell us how and why he has been brought there. He is there with the names of the disappeared from his jungle village, for Norma to read over the air. Then we backtrack again for an update on Norma’s life, how she met her husband Rey, how he was arrested, and how he returned and married her—memories which are reverberating incessantly in her because he has now joined the missing. 

Her memories of Rey flood back because Norma does not understand him; he was secretive about whether he was working with the rebels (the IR), what his real name is, whether or not his father is alive, and whether he really visits the jungle regularly to study its botany. And this is compounded because we do not know the politics of the government he may be rebelling against, such as whether it is leftist or rightist—which leads to generalizations rather than the specifics needed in a literary work.

The novel was obviously inspired by he disappeared of Argentina. Norma’s job on the radio is to take calls from people searching for loved ones who either disappeared in the 10-year revolt or who vanished when they left the poverty of the jungle for a job in the capital city. It is the government’s way of controlling its rebellious citizens by giving them hope that they can be reunited with their loved ones.

After spending time with Norma, we visit the jungle village, and meet the teacher Manau, the landlord Zahir, whose hands were cut off by the government, the children Victor and Nico, and their dealings with the occupying soldiers. The big decision Norma faces is whether to read over the radio the list of names that Victor has brought from the village. Because it includes the rebel name of Rey, and there is an implication that the other names on the list might also be rebels.

Much of the second half of the novel concerns more past history of Rey, his life with Norma, and past years back in the village with Victor, Manau, and Zahir. This slows the narrative, and emphasizes the control the author has in slowly revealing the novel’s back story. These revelations will lead to Norma’s decision of whether to read over the radio that list of missing villagers.

The main achievement of this novel is the atmosphere created by this authoritarian government somewhere in Latin America, although the work never does clarify what prompts the desperate but futile reaction by the rebels. The title, Lost City Radio, stresses the atmosphere of hopelessness. It is about both a city being destroyed by the government in its pursuit of the rebels, and its lost citizens who have disappeared.

At the same time, Alarcon creates quite sympathetic characters. These characters, all caught in the jaws of history, are trying to survive. They doubt they will ever return to a normal life, however, because they will never see their loved ones again. Norma is the most obvious example, especially when she begins wondering about the love of Rey. Indeed, the author leaves her decision somewhat arbitrarily until the closing pages, as he does the fate of people like Ray and Zahir—as if to create a cumulative climax where none exists in his basic story.

This delayed information is consistent with the books structure, in which events are conveyed out of sequence. Now, I am usually uncomfortable with such a structure, and I am here. Because it is often used to lend a sense of drama to a narrative that otherwise has no drama. Alarcon might respond, however, that his major theme here is the search for hidden information about the various missing characters, and delaying information about these characters from reaching the reader is consistent with his theme.

Because Alarcon leaves politics out of this dictatorship, its main characteristic is its control over people’s lives, and the methods used to achieve that control. The result is the lack of a concrete guiding principle. For example, it has renamed all the villages after numbers, such as 1797. It also acts arbitrarily, such as torturing Rey as a rebel, and then hiring him to help out in a census. Which, in turn, leaves the emphasis on the desperation of the people rather than on the specifics of the government.

As the reviews suggested, this is an effective novel from a new and young Latin American voice. It is a voice that understands how individuals function, how society functions, and how power functions. The nameless power in the government is an abstraction, however, which diminishes the human emotions of its characters. One hopes that in the future Alarcon will gain greater control over his narrative, that he will learn reader interest is better created by the events themselves than it is by his slow revelation of the significance of those events. (September, 2013)

KAREN ARMSTRONG

The Spiral Staircase (2004)

Armstrong subtitles this probing, thoughtful work, My Climb Out of Darkness. For me, it is both a reminder and a mirror image of The Seven Story Mountain. Merton’s book was about his disenchantment with the secular world and his search for spiritual fulfillment in a monastery. Armstrong’s book is about her disenchantment with the spiritual life of nuns and her search for fulfillment in the secular world.

Both of these works have their immediate appeal to me because they are personal stories. The emphasis here is on Armstrong’s struggle to discover a career and her relationship to the people around her, all within the psychological strait jacket she is trying to escape from. Yes, both stories are told within a spiritual context, but it is not about their spiritual life itself, but about how their spiritual life intersects with their secular life—granted, the two authors are going in the opposite direction.

Armstrong enters the convent at age seventeen on a spiritual quest to find God. She leaves seven years later having suffered a mild break-down, obscurely broken and damaged, which is nobody’s fault. She says nobody’s fault because, although it was the time of Vatican II, the sisters at her nunnery resisted many of the Council’s changes, training her to be strictly obedient, to keep her eyes downcast, and never to think for herself.

So when she re-enters the secular world, she finds it to be a changed world of war, youthful rebellion, and sexual revolution, often expressed in loud music and energetic dancing—in short, a world difficult to adjust to, a world of culture shock. She confronts it as a shy, reserved woman who cannot think creatively. But she does discover T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday, and it is from this poem that comes the title, The Spiral Staircase, a metaphor, as Jane Lampman says, for spiritual progress that seems to go in circles while, in fact, moving upward into the light.

Highly intelligent, Armstrong continues as a student of literature at Oxford, after she is released from her vows; but she finds no one, even Catholics, who understand her difficulty in adjusting to this new world. Moreover, she still draws her literary insights from others, meaning she cannot evaluate literary works on her own. The nuns had trained her to seek deeper insights only in terms of higher states of prayer—and she had always failed.

As a nun, perhaps in rebellion, Armstrong began having fainting spells, and these continue after she leaves the order. Finally, confronted by abnormal visions that fill her with horror, she is sent to a psychiatrist. But such visions of an abnormal reality also start her thinking about God and wondering if He were real. After all, she had never got close to Him in the convent.

As a doctoral candidate, Armstrong takes a room with an atheist couple, the Harts, who have a teenage autistic son, Jacob. She cares for him in exchange for her room, and they quickly relate to one another. And yet, she cannot relate to others. She even cuts down on eating, telling herself it is to save money; but her psychiatrist insists the panic attacks she has are a symptom of repression, that she has built an ivory tower around herself, and he believes the source to be in her upbringing.

Meanwhile, that tower had also locked her away from a belief in God. However, one day she is asked by the atheistic parents to take Jacob to mass, thinking he will take to its ritual and be comforted by the community worship. And Jacob does love it, and insists she take him there regularly.

But at this point, Armstrong’s life is turned upside down, when she swallows sleeping pills and ends up in a hospital. She is 27, and has made a cry for help. Rescued by the Harts from a psychiatric ward, she recovers. And then, inspired by a lecture on Ash Wednesday, she realizes that she cannot undo the past, that she must now find her own way. That way, however, unlike Eliot’s, is to move further and further away from God.

Armstrong is telling many stories here. There are her relationships with the Harts, including Jacob; with fellow students, like Jane and Charlotte, and the faculty at Oxford; and with a sickly nun, Rebecca, from her past life. There are also her mental issues, including her sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr. Piet. And there is her inability to relate to God. She weaves all of these elements into a rich and fascinating self-portrait.

But, again, Armstrong’s life changes. She moves to London and takes a job at London University while she finishes her thesis. But that thesis is rejected because her Oxford examiner is biased against her close reading of literature. The rejection prompts a scandal, but nothing can be done.

And yet, Armstrong feels suddenly liberated. With nothing to prove, she begins to think on her own. And then two remarkable events become quite moving. First, she collapses again, and is diagnosed, finally, with having epilepsy. This fills her with joy, for she now knows her mental issues are physical, not emotional or a threat to her sanity. And it liberates her further, for she no longer needs to avoid people for fear she may have a seizure in front of them. She can live a normal life. She has a future.

Second, Armstrong becomes godmother to Jacob at his baptism, and this unbeliever sees the son of atheists receiving the sacrament with joy. She sees the irony, too, but the reader wonders if it heralds more. For she also rooms with a Jewish girlfriend, who introduces her to the relaxed rituals of Jewish worship.

At this point, Armstrong refers briefly to a love life that this reader had wondered about. She calls herself a failed heterosexual, because she has had a number of affairs, all brief, she says, and all unsatisfactory, not worthy of mention. One has to agree with her that they do not belong in this book that is a memoir of her internal life. But the brief reference is necessary.

During six years of teaching at a wealthy girls’ school in London, Armstrong’s life takes a new turn. A teacher friend Sally persuades her to keep a diary, and the result is the author’s first book, Through the Narrow Gate, about studying to be a nun and then leaving the convent. The book is a critical success, and when a paper edition is issued, she is invited to give a talk for a proposed Channel 4 series, and urged to treat any subject that is punchy and controversial. She gives a spontaneous and striking talk on women in the Church that resonates with this reader. This is my body, she quotes and then remarks how little the Church has valued the body, especially the female body, and so failed to integrate the sexual with the divine.

This, in turn, leads to a six-part television series on St. Paul, for which she travels to Israel, to the holy sites that she has heard so much about. It is a remarkably evocative visit that leads to an emotional connection to her former faith. In addition, Paul becomes to her not a typical male figure from the New Testament but a human being. She comes to like this man whom she originally intended to expose as a founder of the Church she now despises.

But even more significant, she grasps the heart of the Jewish faith, and its being a precursor to Christianity. After the television series succeeds, she is asked to write a series on the Crusades. But as she studies the Moslem faith, the television money runs out. And then she is suddenly inspired. For three years, I had steeped myself in the deadly hostility that had separated Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Why not study something they held in common? The Abrahamic faiths worshiped the same God, for instance. Why not study the way they all had seen this God over the centuries?

And so, she begins her next major book, The History of God. Now able to see the other’s viewpoint, as well as to bring her own original thinking to the subject, she focuses on her own inner life. And concludes that religion does not bring us the meaning of life but is the means to discover how to be fully human. That: Men and women have a potential for the divine, and are not complete unless they realize it within themselves.

But in the middle of writing this book, she is struck by the negative reaction of people to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the claim that the Islamic faith is a faith of violence. And so she writes a corrective life of Mohammed, revealing that he preached, like the Jews, a faith not of belief but of action, a faith of physical prostration and human compassion.

Back with The History of God, she revels in being alone with her books—and falls in love with her subject. Studying literature has helped her see that theology, like religion itself, was really an art form…Like all art, theology is an attempt to express the inexpressible. This is to be her vocation.

Her book concludes that the theologians of all three faiths reached similar conclusions. None of them had a monopoly of truth. And the basis for that truth was to have compassion for others, to feel with the other, to understand why they felt or thought as they did.

And then the author reaches the most profound truth of her book. Does this mean I believe in God, she asks. And she both ducks the question and answers it. God is not a being, she says, not an unseen reality, because God is beyond our world, is on an entirely different level of existence. As Cantwell Smith showed her, she says, faith was the cultivation of a conviction that life had some meaning and value…an attitude also evoked by great art.

And: The one and only test of a valid religion, she writes, is that it leads to practical compassion. And again, Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Mohammed, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tzu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.

God cannot be reached through reason, she concludes. He transcends either personality or objective fact. Whereas, the practice of compassion can bring us directly into the presence of God….It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of selfishness that holds us back from the experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy…

The inner dynamic of all these great religious convictions can work effectively,’ she continues, only if you do not close your mind and heart to other human beings. And a friend tells her, You are constantly living in the dimension of the sacred. You are absorbed in holiness all the time."

To sum up, this is a personal book and a profound book. It works, first, because the author takes us through a series of defeats, first the convent, then her health problems, then the failed thesis, then the dissatisfaction as a high school teacher, then her solitariness and her inability to relate to others, then the failed television series. This is a confused and struggling human being we are reading about.

But the memoir works primarily because it is a story of the author’s search to find God. It is about her internal life, along with her external life. And it is unique because she finds a different God than most of us seek, a transcendent God beyond our level of existence, a God that is revealed through her compassionate relations with those around her as well as in the aspirations within her. She learns the organized spiritual life where she first sought Him actually closed down her brilliant mind rather than opened it up.

This is not a work that the orthodox of any religion would be comfortable with. But it forces us to see the real world around us, the world we share, a world of searching, and of personal failure and frustration; and through it, we become aware of our own often superficial reaction to that world, a reaction that focuses on us rather than on others. And on our relationship to what we call a personal God that, she says, conceals the truth of a relationship that is beyond our power to conceive.

Every reader should be grateful that Karen Armstrong has bared her soul to them, for she crystallizes our frequent inability to understand the meaning of this life we live. What she has done here is to show us the spiritual world beyond religion, a view that will not please everyone but does show that that spiritual world is out there, even if it may be difficult for some to find that elusive being called God. (February, 2015)

KATE ATKINSON

Life After Life (2013)

This is a strange novel, a marvelous novel, a puzzling novel. As the title suggests, it is about its heroine Ursula Todd dying and then not dying. It is also about premonitions she has, as a child, about others dying, and her efforts to prevent that from happening. Her parents send her to a psychiatrist at age ten, a man who introduces the idea of reincarnation, which Ursula and the reader rejects, for reincarnation does not apply precisely to her situation. But the psychiatrist also introduces the idea of the circularity of time, and while this does not fit Ursula’s life, it does fit the construction of this novel.

Ursula is the daughter of Sylvie and Hugh Todd, he a doting father, she a snobbish mother. Ursula has an older brother Maurice, aloof and supercilious; an older sister Pamela who is bossy as a child but becomes Ursula best friend as an adult; a younger brothers Teddy, who is her favorite brother and will join the air force; and Jimmy, less significant, who will leave England after the war. They represent the strong base of this novel, an upper middleclass family that represents the heart of English society.

But the reality of this family shifts from the moment Ursula is born. Because Ursula dies, strangled by her own umbilical cord, but then does not. She falls off a roof and dies, but then does not. Influenza kills her and a faithful servant, but then does not. A neighborhood girl is raped and killed, but then, with Ursula’s help, is not. Ursala herself is killed in the World War II, but then is not. What is going on here? It is not easy to determine, for the author jumps back and forth in time as she blends Ursula’s disruptive life and modern British history.

Then come three dramatic moments that do not seem to belong, that even seem a misjudgment by the author. First, Ursula is raped at age sixteen, by an American who seems to exist only to be a tool of the author. And she becomes pregnant. But that life is replaced by another, in which Ursula marries an abusive schoolteacher. She flees, but he tracks her down and attacks both her and her brother Teddy. Darkness falls, which is the repeated sign of her dying, but we never read the consequences of that attack, not on Teddy and not on the schoolteacher. The event fades into non-existence.

Then, in an alternate life, Ursula meets a boy on a visit to Germany, falls in love, and remains in Germany throughout World War II. Here, Atkinson suggests, through Ursula and her alternate self, parallels between how one experiences the bombing of Berlin and how one experiences the bombing of London. Indeed, the London blitz scenes are the most memorable in the book—and not simply because Ursula dies once in a cellar, then dies while trying to save people in that cellar, and finally lives on when a dog’s presence, which led to her second death, now leads to her survival.

And at this point, this reader realized two things. Atkinson was through this one family trying to convey mid-twentieth century English history; and, even more important, she was dramatizing how a single event, a single decision in one’s life, can change that life dramatically. (Do I subscribe to this because my marriage, my own life, was so changed?) There is at the end even an explanation for a mysterious opening scene, in which Ursula seems poised in 1930 to kill Adolf Hitler—with speculation about how that could have changed modern European history.

At the end of her novel, the author attempts to tidy up her many divergent stories. Just as Darkness fell heralds the frequent deaths of Ursula, Practice makes perfect heralds some of these reversals of death. A near-death experience of Ursula at the beach had followed her actual death, and now this event is tidied up by becoming the drowning of the handicapped and illegitimate child of her Aunt Izzy. Or is this an example of a past drama altering one’s memory? In fact, which event is real? Then Ursula tells a lie to save the family servant Bridget from going to London to catch influenza and die with her lover Clarence. (Ursula, in one instance, had failed to achieve this when she pushed the girl down some stairs.) This recapitulation is also when the psychiatrist asks ten-year-old Ursula to draw something, and she draws a snake swallowing its tail—representing, he says, the circularity of the universe. Aha!

This section is also when we learn Ursula is a good shooter, which hearkens back to her confrontation with Hitler (although not how she got in that situation). We also learn why a neighbor Nancy died on one level, due to Ursula’s actions, as earlier we learned why she did not die, also due to Ursula’s actions. Finally, the novel has a happy ending in its next-to-last chapter, an ending that seems unnecessary. A character everyone thinks has died in the war has not died, and is reunited with a lover. Yes, it illustrates the uncertainty of life, as well as of war, but it seems unnecessary—mainly, I think, because we never see the consequences of that return to life.

Speaking of circularity, there are also the dogs in the life of Ursula and her family. They keep dying and then being replaced. Not always, but many are also given the name of Lucky. Their dying and rebirth as another dog surely is intended as a parallel to both Ursula’s shifting life and the novel’s construction.

A major plus of this novel, which helps the reader accept this English version of magic realism is Atkinson’s style. It is reminiscent of Muriel Spark, and early Waugh, in its clear, aloof, arbitrary, witty, godlike treatment of the lives and the fates of these characters. Not to be overlooked, either, are the relationships established among the many characters, whether within Ursula’s family, including with her naughty Aunt Izzy, with the family servants, or with Ursula’s various lovers, air wardens, and German friends, even Eva Braun.

This is one of those rare novels in which I did not mind trying to puzzle out Ursula’s life, the reality of its events, or the meaning of this novel. Nor was I frustrated that the novel offered no clear answers. Not why her power to foresee calamity faded after childhood. Not why she has the power to die and return. And not what the power of recreating history means.

This was for Atkinson, I believe, an exercise in the imagination. What if one could die and come back? What if one could affect the lives of others? What might a novelist do with that? Atkinson has seemed interested in her other novels with the idea of connections. Here, the connection is with destiny. Not, what happens to us after death, but what if our destiny in life changes, or what if we could affect that change.

As Francine Prose sums up in her excellent Times review: Atkinson sharpens our awareness of the apparently limitless choices and decisions that a novelist must make on every page, and of what is gained and lost when the consequences of these choices are, like life, singular and final.

Atkinson herself has written: People always ask you what a book is ‘about’ and I generally make something up as I have no idea what a book is about (it’s ‘about’ itself) but if pressed I think I would say Life After Life is about being English (on reflection, perhaps that’s what all my books are about). Not just the reality of being English but also what we are in our own imaginations.

Atkinson has explained that she was born after World War II, and her family rarely discussed that era; but that she intended here to write a novel about that war. And that the dark, bleeding heart of that novel would be the blitz. In this she certainly succeeded, because the lengthy treatment of Ursula’s work as an air warden is the most memorable section of this work. But Atkinson also realized that in order to write about someone in the war she had to give her a back story—which in this case turned out to be the heart of the novel. And its theme of worldly life after worldly death certainly reflects the wishful thinking that takes place after any war—as one recalls its senseless and horrible death toll.

One should also note that Atkinson’s next novel, A God in Ruins, is to be about Ursula’s brother Teddy, who is shot down during World War II. He was Ursula’s favorite brother, and apparently of the author as well. One awaits learning whether Atkinson will explore that war further, or whether she has something else in mind—even, again, the theme of endless death. Indeed, one wonders if a final, incongruous appearance of Teddy in this novel was written in order to set up this next 2015 work. One also wonders if the word God in the title has any significance. It would seem doubtful, based on the spiritual beliefs held in this novel. But…

To sum up, this is a novel about life, not about death. And a novel about this world, not the next. It works because of its solid family portrait and its vivid capture of the historic context, including but not limited to World War II. It certainly entices me to read more of Atkinson’s work. For the degree of control she has over her characters, which turned me off in Case Histories, she uses here to her advantage, as she integrates it into the structure of this excellent work. (February, 2015)

A God in Ruins (2015)

This is not a novel about resurrections, as was its predecessor, Life After Life. But it is about that novel’s characters, the Todd family. It is also about World War II England, post-war England, and about one branch of the Todd family over three generations. And, oh yes, this sequel is a marvelous novel.

This work is about Teddy, the brother of Ursula, the heroine of Life after Life. There is little here about Ursula. It is also about Teddy’s wife Nancy and their daughter Viola. And about Viola’s children, Bertie and Sonny. It is thus about three generations, and extends into the 21st century.

The purpose appears to be to draw a picture through this family of life in England in the 20th century. Not a historic portrait, but a personal one. A portrait of travail (Teddy in the air force), of a self-centered life (Viola), of an unsettled youth (Sonny), of a harrowing death (Nancy), and of old age (Teddy again). On second thought, it is more a portrait of life itself, through this family’s life.

And yet it is more. It is also a portrait of mankind’s nature, his violent nature, exemplified mainly by the bombing of Germany in World War II. In fact, the author says that the inspiration for this novel was an urge to write of that bombing, just as the London Blitz inspired her writing of Life after Life. But if that was her inspiration, she has written here about much more. Indeed, she also writes that this book is about the Fall (of Man). And it is. Such as being about the treatment that many family members endured.

These family events range from mercy killing to child abuse to emotional indifference, and then to cruel foster parents and cruel nursing homes. And one marvels at how well the author gets inside the separate family members, who are either involved in those events or are victims of those circumstances. In Teddy, in Viola, in Nancy, in Sonny, etc. And these characters remain consistent, even if the events are unconnected, like distracted memories. At certain points, Atkinson even advises us of events decades into the future, rounding out a character’s life when least expected.

She has thus written a portrait of life that includes death, but a life that also encompasses tragedy, suffering, and acceptance, as well as dreams of happiness and fulfillment. This scope is underscored as the author moves back and forth in time, taking the emphasis away from the narrative flow of family history and focusing on the separate events and the significance behind those events. More on the meaning of what happens to this family of man than on what the family members achieve themselves.

Deserving particular mention are the scenes of Teddy piloting his Halifax bomber in various runs over Germany, not knowing each time whether he is going to survive, but believing in what he is doing, even if it means this quiet, reflective boy is raining tons of explosives onto innocent women and children. And all this, with anti-aircraft shells bursting around him, with German fighters buzzing at him like gnats, and with neighboring bombers, carrying flyers whom he knows, suddenly bursting into flame and crashing below. It is a marvelous feat of research and imagination—even if the bombing is not condemned, as in an anti-war novel.

And then comes the ending, when the author turns things upside down. The reality of the novel becomes fiction and the author’s fiction becomes our reality. That is, the reader is asked to accept that Atkinson has made everything up—just as Aunt Izzy early on turned Teddy’s real life into that of a fictional character named Augustus. The author writes: This sounds like novelist’s trickery, as it indeed perhaps is, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of trickery.

Oh, yes, I think there is. It did not with Life After Life, where the trickery, the resurrections, were at the heart of the novel. But it is wrong here, when it comes only at the end—and as a surprise. No. It is too arbitrary. We are asked to accept that what has happened in such detail has not happened. I was going along with the ending, with Teddy dying in his nursing home, and imagining that he has actually died in the war. For it makes death come alive to him. And to us. It even makes psychological sense for a novel that is about death—as well as about life. And, indeed, exemplifies the Fall of Man.

And I also admired the figurative collapse of a building at the end, as buildings did fall, both in the Blitz and in Germany as a result of the Allied bombing. And I accepted this as a metaphor for the ending of a life, Teddy’s life. There is even the paragraph that begins: Moment’s left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. It is a beautiful description.

And then this is taken away from me? In order to mirror Life After Life, when a death is not a death. That now a life is not a life? Atkinson calls it a great conceit, says it is "the whole raison d’être of the novel." I think not. I do not accept that the walls of her novel collapse, revealing fiction rather than reality. Fiction must be real, internally, for the reader to accept it.

Which is not to say I do not recommend this novel. I do. Highly. For its portrait of a family, of the uncertainty in war, and of postwar England. I just do not accept the author’s twist at the end. An attempt to merge its theme, perhaps its meaning, with the novel that precedes it. The two novels don’t need it. They are a pair anyway, with their portrait of a family, the portrait of separate aspects of a war, and the presence of death.

The title of this novel is taken from Emerson: A man is a god in ruins. The god in this case is Teddy. When men are innocent, Emerson continues, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Teddy’s life was defined by his bombing career. The truth was there was nothing else he wanted to do, could do. Also: Part of him never adjusted to having a future. Thus, his long life is passive. He fathers a child, oversees grandchildren, writes about nature, but does little else, and then dies quietly. He is truly in ruins. Also, an innocent. So…is this an anti-war novel, after all? (December, 2016)

JANE AUSTEN

Mansfield Park (1814)

This novel would be much better at about half its length. The first half merely sets up this extended family, how three sisters married at different levels of society and how various relationships developed among their children. There is no story and no tension, and at various points in the first 200 pages I was tempted to set down this novel and seek one with more interesting characters, people who were interacting at cross purposes. That is, a story.

But it is difficult to set aside a work by such a distinguished author, an author I was reading to broaden my literary knowledge. And so I persevered. But it required considerable concentration to bring into focus the relationship among the various characters. The three sisters are Mary, who marries Sir Thomas and becomes Lady Bertram; Miss Ward, no first name, who marries Rev. Mr. Norris and is very mean-spirited; and Frances who marries a hardy naval officer named Price. It was also not easy to follow characters who are called at times by their first name and at other times by their last name.

But the novel evolves around their children. There are Thomas, Maria, Julia, and Edmund Bertram, and William, Fanny, and Susan Price. Plus there are siblings, Henry and Mary Crawford, who belong to the Bertram social circle. The first half establishes the ambitions, characteristics, and relationships among these young people, how class plays a part in their lives, how morality plays a part, and how finding a spouse plays a part. It provides an opportunity for Austen’s wit and her own social consciousness. But there is still no story.

Instead, there is preparation. Fanny is transferred to Mansfield Park to relieve Frances of one of her many children. There is Fanny’s slow acceptance into this wealthy family. There is a compatibility between Fanny and Edmund, as they discover they share important values. There is a discussion to redesign a mansion, during which Edmund and Caroline are lost. There is the rehearsal of a play that a returning Sir Thomas views as immoral and stops.

Finally, there is a hint of a story when the cavalier Henry Crawford charms daughters Maria and Julia but fails to propose, resulting in Maria marrying a boor on the rebound, and Crawford turning his attention to young Fanny. He has confided to his sister Mary that he intends to play with her affections, and then leave her. But Fanny has seen how he treated her sisters and rejects him, while he discovers that in his pursuit he has fallen in love with her.

So finally the novel has tension, has a story. Will she or won’t she? We read the rest of the novel to find out. Like Fanny, we don’t trust Crawford, because we also have seen him with her sisters, plus heard his plotting with his own sister, Mary. And Austen loads the dice by having Mary, Edmund, Sir Thomas, and others encouraging Fanny to accept Crawford.

But the basic problem for me is that when Crawford, ironically, falls in love with Fanny, I could not accept it. He seemed too shallow to feel so deeply, despite all the favors he does to win her over. I could not accept this irony, even if his favors do persuade Fanny to see him in a better light. In counterpoint, note, is the romance between Edmund and Crawford’s sister. He has fallen for her, and is sure he can persuade her to marry him. Meanwhile, Fanny, politely but painfully, listens to the failures of his courtship, for he is the one she truly loves.

The resolution to these courtships not only comes too suddenly for me, it also betrays the manipulation of the author. It concerns two couples who run away offstage, and the repercussions among those left behind. That it is two couples seems to be overdoing it, as if Austen needed to make sure the impact is convincing. And, lo and behold, those repercussions pave the way to happy resolutions for Austen’s main characters. Indeed, she does not even dramatize those repercussions. She simply narrates them, and quickly winds up her novel.

Austen obviously understood family relationships, small town life, and the interaction among different levels of society. But in our modern age, one has to get used to her basic technique in conveying a story such as this. First is the use of narration instead of a dramatization. One must also get used to her circumlocutions that stretch out the meaning she wishes to convey. It is Henry Jamesish before James came along, although more concerned with precision than with nuance. And while paragraphs of conversation are limited, it is not always clear who is saying what.

Some modern critics have complained about Fanny’s passive character, but I have no problem with her. She had her own standard of personal conduct, and I was comfortable with it. She also reflects the reluctance of women in Austen’s era to deal aggressively with men in a male society. One can understand how today’s feminists are uncomfortable with this; but she is honest, loyal, and sensitive, all fine qualities even today.

For me, the most interesting character is the charming Mary Crawford. She is kind and understanding with Fanny, except when Fanny refuses to accept her brother. She is also fun to be with and is idealized by Edmund, who does not see her practical bent—and that she prefers sophisticated (immoral?) London to the quiet of rural Mansfield. She is interesting because she has more contradictions than Fanny.

Just as the reader’s view of Mary keeps changing, so does it of Henry. For Austen wants us to accept her irony, that Henry is truly in love with Fanny. But it is difficult to accept that he is indeed in love with her, especially if he runs away with another woman. Fortunately, even as Fanny’s feelings change, even as she begins to see his good side, she is patient until he eventually reveals his true self.

This is low on my list of Austen novels, but I need to return to her. One day. (May, 2015)

Persuasion (1818)

This is, indeed, an admirable work. It is old-fashioned, yes, in its style, Telling the reader more often than showing him. And it is obvious in its story, for we know the ending from the first chapter.

But the wisdom of the author, the understanding of the human character, the ability to create drama out of ordinary events, and the awareness that the realty of this distant world does not require detailed, realistic settings—all this contributes to the effectiveness of this novel two centuries after it was written.

This is the story of Anne Elliot, who was persuaded by her family to turn down a handsome but the poor officer, Captain Wentworth, whom she truly loved. Now, by apparent accident, he has returned to her life, a rich sea captain, and her heart is all aflutter. Will she or won’t she? Will they or won’t they?

Much stands in their way. Her father Sir Walter Elliot. Her adviser Lady Russell. Her sisters, beautiful Elizabeth and vain Mary, both of whom are more concerned with their own lives. And a lost cousin, Mr. Elliot, who has his own ideas about Anne’s future. Indeed, Anne herself is in her own way, having lost the bloom of youth along with her only love.

In a work of less than 300 pages, the reader absorbs this life of a distant era. There is no world here outside family estates, a seaside town, and the resort of Bath. There is no London, no Napoleon on the minds of these middle-class families concerned mainly with money, love, reputation, and social niceties.

The novel is helped tremendously by secondary characters. There are Anne’s father and sisters Elizabeth and Mary at the Kellynch mansion, which they lease for financial reasons to Admiral Croft and his wife, sister to Captain Wentworth. At Uppercross Hall, where Anne Elliot stays because her sister Mary is married to Charles Musgrove, there is Mr. Musgrove, his wife, and daughters Louisa and Henrietta. There are also Captain Harville and Captain Benwick at the sea resort of Lyme Regis, where Louisa has an accident and is cared for by them. Finally, at Bath, Anne renews her acquaintance with a former schoolmate, Mrs. Smith, who will play a key role, as well as members of a vain Bath society, from Lady Dalrymple to Colonel Wallis.

What is also admirable are the three settings: the mansions of Kellynch and Uppercross, the sea resort of Lyme, and the social life at Bath. Austen uses the first to establish family relationships, the second to introduce the change in Anne’s outlook and appearance, and the third to contrast the veneer of social life against Anne’s common sense. But in each case there is a solid, physical setting—because of the reaction of the characters to it rather than a result of detailed descriptions.

The general tone of this novel is typical Austen, a critique of family values and social values, which are contrasted here with Anne’s integrity and Captain Wentworth’s steadfastness. Whereas, Sir Walter and Elizabeth spend the family fortune and endanger Kellynch, while Mary thinks only of herself. And Mr. Elliot is a scoundrel in pursuit of money and a peerage, while a friend of Elizabeth’s, Mrs. Clay, is in pursuit of Sir Walter. Only the mourning Captain Benwick, a fan of literature, is serious-minded, and the reader wonders if he might be the right person for Anne.

The various characters introduce delays or obstacles to Anne finding happiness, some of their encounters being natural and some coincidental or arbitrary. The latter reflect, I think, the lack of technical skills among novelists of two centuries ago. It may also reflect a more optimistic view of life than is common among authors today. Thus, we are more alert to an author’s intrusion to make a happy ending.

Perhaps this is also because we look back on that era as one of innocence, and certainly women like Austen did not have a knowledge of the world that women have today, much less the novelistic skills. And yet, she did understand character, which is the strength of any good novelist.

What Austen did not understand in those early days of the novel, however, is how a satisfying ending is achieved. It requires logical actions by the characters. Here, however, the climactic moment of decision is too abrupt. And achieved by, of all things, a letter. The letter is set up by a pertinent conversation, but then is followed by a lovers’ dialogue that recaptures/explains the past rather than advances the situation dramatically. And this is followed by a round-up chapter that carries the various characters’ lives into the future, to give the reader a sense of completeness. This is my main, and primary, criticism of this work.

The theme of persuasion is present but not strong. Apparently, Austen’s brother named the novel when it was published after her death. Yes, Anne was persuaded to refuse Captain Wentworth’s proposal, and many repercussions followed, especially her unhappiness and decline, and the family’s reaction to the change in her. And Mr. Elliot’s pursuit of money and a peerage involves deceptive persuasion. Not to forget members of Bath society trying to persuade each other of their importance.

This work ranks below Pride and Prejudice for me, but is far better than Sense and Sensibility. Perhaps because Austen as an author has become here more aware of how to portray people’s strengths and weaknesses. And perhaps because she understands the impact on readers of a troubled heroine achieving happiness, as she gains control of her own destiny. Just as the spinster Austen did. Indeed, there is a striking passage toward the end when Anne announces why she will not accept literature’s treatment of the emotional lives of women: Yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

And this stands out for a woman who published her first book anonymously, a woman who had to earn her recognition in a male world. But, like her choice of a heroine, she believed in herself, in her own convictions. Yet was there a limitation? One does wonder how much the happy ending is because such endings were expected in her day.

Here is a perceptive view of all of Austen’s works by Adelle Waldman: Austen’s portraits of people and their milieus are animated not by satirical malice or mere eagerness to entertain but by a sense of moral urgency. With a philosophical eye, she sees through fuss and finery and self-justification. She gives us a cast of characters and then zeroes in, showing us who and what is admirable, who is flawed but forgivable, who is risible and who is truly vile. Delivered economically, her judgments are not only clever but perspicacious, humane, and, for the most part, convincing. Her real subject is not the love lives of barely post-adolescent girls, but human nature and society. Austen wrote stories that show us how we think.

Waldman is critical of Persuasion, however, which she says is not a polished work. That its characters are superficially good, middling, or bad, that its satire hits easy targets, and that it is not as funny as her other novels. That it is popular because its heroine is not young, appears defeated, and yet triumphs. All of which, she grants, may be because Austen did not have a chance to follow her usual practice of refining her initial draft, of producing a richer and deeper work. She died, at age 41, before she had the chance to do this.

And perhaps that is why I feel that much of the story is told to us rather than dramatized, rather than shown to us. Perhaps I am evaluating the intent of Austen as much as the achievement. But I am still impressed by this work. And it makes me more interested than before in Emma and Northanger Abbey. For I understand why this old-fashioned novelist has such passionate followers. (March, 2014)

NICHOLSON BAKER

U and I (1991)

This is a tour de force. A cleverly entertaining exploration of an author’s endearingly modest ego. The U is Updike, and the I is the author. Less than 200 pages, this book purports to be a hero-worshipping tale by a younger writer about an older and successful writer, the hem of whose garment the I deems himself not worthy to touch.

But let’s face it. This is a book about Baker, not one about Updike. One learns nothing about Updike here. One reads it for its agreeably false modesty, for a style that floats, almost subconsciously, from engaging idea to engaging idea, without really going anywhere. It is a tale of obsession, but an obsession so one-dimensional that it reveals nothing of Baker, much less of Updike.

This is a book for writers, for those who have hero-worshipped and then tried to identify with other writers. But it is not for writers who want to learn anything about Updike, or about how to become a writer. It is about Baker, period. If there is a lesson here, it is about how a writer can find anywhere a subject to write about, even in the depths of a personal obsession.

Baker exposes the artifice of this work when he will not reread any of Updike as he writes these pages. He even admits he has fully read perhaps only a half dozen of Updike’s work, plus only fragments of other works. Because, apparently, he wants to explore here his vision of Updike’s works at the time that he read them, not the actual works themselves. He also seems to be rationalizing when he stresses that as a young writer he was interested only in the work of Updike written when he was young as well. So when baker says he intends to write here an appreciation of Updike, what has resulted is an appreciation of his obsession.

What draws the reader on is the engaging but false modesty of this work. Yet it is very effective, enticing the reader to sympathize with, identify with, this obsession. Baker himself even writes in a parenthesis: Who will sort out the self-servingness of self-effacement? that about sums up my reaction to this book. Which may be unfair, which may seem to be a denial of its cleverness. But for me, this work is an exercise in self-centeredness. This, he really means, is an exploration of the ideas Updike has inspired in me.

The most interesting part of this work for me occurs toward the end during the two occasions when Baker actually meets Updike, indeed forces himself upon him. It is not the conversation they have that has interest, but Baker’s exploration of why he confronted Updike, and why each one said what he did. It is the one case in which they truly interact.

But then Baker spoils the ending, as he reverts back to his self-centeredness. He compares the physical affliction, psoriasis, that he shares with Updike, an then it sends him to the hospital, except, alas, not to the one Updike went to. And even more outrageous is his attempt to believe that because he referred to a callus in one of his essays, and that Updike used a callus in a later novel, that finally the his indebtedness to Updike was reversed. Some may smirk with him at this ending, but tome it was simply a

weak technical effort to round off his theme. (June, 2014)

RUSSELL BANKS

Outer Banks

Because I so much admire Banks’ mature novels, I have decided to read these three early works collected in one volume.

Family Life (1974)

This is Bank’s first novel. Really a novelette. It is cleverly thought out and cleverly written. But it has little substance beyond its subject matter, a subject matter that was possibly inspired by the dysfunctional family life that Banks endured as a child.

The work’s cleverness begins with the family being a royal family, with all it prerogatives, but existing in today’s America. Its cleverness continues with a casual style that cloaks death, jealousy, and revolution. This short work also moves cleverly in a single direction, from a casual family life to one of mutual self-destruction.

The novelette opens with a green man demanding that the king give him one of the three royal sons as his lover. As these three sons meet their unexpected fate, one speculates that the green man may well have been Death. But the king sets their fate aside when he discovers that his queen has a lover, and their subsequent dispute fills the rest of the work with rebellion and revenge.

Banks appears here to be sublimating into art his painful upbringing. But he writes with complete control of his subject, and with complete objectivity, allowing the selfishness and hypocrisy of these characters to speak for themselves. There is no need for him to comment on the self-centered stubbornness of each member of this family.

At the end, this work has for me no emotional impact. Nor is one able to identify with any of the members of this family. Indeed, as the book winds down, the separated, adversarial king and queen keep encountering one another, keep remembering their family past, and then keep going their own separate way. As a result, this work has the same inconclusiveness as does the couple’s relationship.

Let us see what comes next. Will Banks get closer to his characters, even allow us to identify with them? (April, 2014)

Hamilton Stark (1978)

This appears to be what is called metafiction. It is certainly Banks luxuriating in the possibilities of fiction. It is also a young author applying all that he has learned about the craft of fiction, as well as much of what he has learned about human relations.

One senses that Banks is attempting to stretch the parameters of the novel. Or at least how far he himself can go. The result is a novel that pays as much attention to technique as to content. That is, an interesting portrait of a middle-aged New Hampshire loner is probed from a variety of geographical, anthropological, psychological, and philosophical viewpoints. Not to mention that author Banks is writing a novel about an author who is writing a novel about a local named A, whom he calls Hamilton Stark in his book, and then learns that the subject’s daughter is writing her own book about her father, calling him Alvin Stock. And from her book Bank’s narrator appropriates much of his own content.

Nor to mention that the narrator keeps confiding to the reader how he is constructing his novel, how he will provide certain information later, for example. Which in turn is Banks confiding how he is constructing what we are reading. As a result, we are