Suffering

I have GOT to lighten up.  So far this year the books I have blogged have revolved around a murder in Central Park, a marriage disintegrating in Colombia, and now I have moved on to a book of a mere 832 pages about a character who suffers almost unimaginable abuse as a child – A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.  

The novel begins with a familiar premise – four friends from college move to New York to begin their adult lives. Is this an updated male version of Mary McCarthy's “The Group”? The men are all smart, talented and witty, and it's entertaining to watch as each finds his footing in his profession – art, architecture, acting and law. But gradually the story begins to narrow its focus onto Jude, the most enigmatic of the four. What he has endured in his childhood, revealed in flashbacks, has left him in such physical and emotional pain that he resorts to cutting himself to try to gain control over it. His friends try to help and protect him, his kindly and paternal law school professor adopts him, but his past continues to haunt him. Are you still reading this? Yes, it is just as grim as it sounds.

Why did I keep going? It was hard to look away. And in between the dark scenes of trauma and brutality were tender scenes of friendship among the four men that continued over decades. The writing is uneven, and did all the characters have to turn out to be SO successful? But the book relentlessly asks serious questions about the meaning of suffering, the limits of psychiatry, the power of friendship.

Colombian Idyll

Sometimes it takes a while. Respected Colombian writer Tomás González published his first novel, In the Beginning Was the Sea, over thirty years ago, but it has only recently been translated into English. Like many first novels it is autobiographical, but it does not seem like the early attempt of a young writer.

Elena and J. are a young couple who have left their life as intellectual dilettantes in Medellín for a life of simplicity and sustainable agriculture on the coast of Colombia. Or at least that is their idealized vision. It's the 70's, and their hippy naivete allows them to believe that they are perfectly suited for this endeavor. But their backgrounds of urban privilege have left them totally unable to deal with real life. They alienate the locals, their farming attempts fail, and the omniscient narrator discloses early in the novel that J. will not survive. Their disintegration is uncomfortable to watch, but I couldn't look away.

The story is based on the real life tragedy of González's older brother.  But their is no trace of filial empathy in the narrative. The prose is spare and straightforward but powerful, whether describing the beauty of surroundings or the poignant intricacies of a marriage breaking down. I hope this translation will allow González to gain greater literary attention.

Too Big to Blog

My New Year's resolution...blog! No, I didn't stop reading. I just stopped writing about it. The books stacked up but the words just rattled around in my head. The start of my troubles was probably when I tackled Garth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire – all 911 pages of it. By the end I was exhausted and overwhelmed. How to get down on paper (figuratively) my thoughts on this sprawling, complicated story? The setting is New York of the 1970's. The city is approaching bankruptcy, drug addiction is rampant, punk rock and the rad art scene are emerging, the rich are getting richer by making their own rules. Hallberg puts a character in every one of these camps - young, old, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor. They are all fleshed out human beings, complicated and compelling. The center of the story is the murder of a a young NYU student in Central Park on New Year's Eve, but in Dickensian fashion Hallberg weaves interconnected subplots, flashbacks and flashforwards, coffee-stained reporters notes and teenage zines into a staggering story that climaxes with the July 13, 1977 New York City blackout.

The characters belong to such different social strata that it seems each of their stories is separate strand, and yet by the end they are all braided together in ways that I didn't see coming, but didn't feel forced or artificial. This is Hallberg's first novel. I can't wait to see what comes next.

Good Grief, Eileen

Have you ever read a book that you couldn't put down but you couldn't recommend? I kind of feel that way about Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. It's not that I felt it was a waste of time (to obtain that miserable feeling, read “The Girl on the Train”). Maybe it's closer to the way I felt about “Gone Girl” – these people are all despicable but I can't stop reading. But Eileen isn't despicable, just depressing.

Eileen Dunlop, 23 year old resident of a small coastal Massachusetts town she calls X-ville, is planning to escape from it all – her alcoholic father, her dead-end job at a correctional facility for adolescent boys, her marginal existence – for a new life in New York. And since she narrates from a remove of fifty years, we know she made it. We even know as she begins the story – a week before Christmas – that by Christmas Day she will be gone. And I was certainly rooting for her. But as she piled on detail after detail about her life – her father's abusive insults, her disgust with her own body, her sad workplace crush on a prison guard– I couldn't imagine how she would gain the strength to succeed.  Every time I thought her self-esteem couldn't get any lower, it did.

But then the glamorous and mysterious Rebecca comes to work at the facility, and forms an instant bond with Eileen. Eileen sees her as an escape route, and in an unexpected and shocking way she is. But by that time I was exhausted. Did I really need to endure that much misery to get to a semi-happy ending?

I have to admire Moshfegh’s ability to make a character and story so compelling that I couldn't stop reading. And amazingly I did come to care about what happened to Eileen – as opposed to that stupid girl on the train. But be warned – it's the most disturbing Christmas story you'll ever read.

Best Friends

II resisted as long as I could. I had read about Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, much admired by literary critics and other writers, but I'm always wary of translations, and did I really want to commit to reading all four? But I was intrigued by that fact that in this day when authors seem forced to relentlessly promote their works, the mysterious “Elena Ferrante” (her pen name) has managed to keep her identity a secret and do only the bare minimum of interviews (written only).

I've now finished the first – My Brilliant Friend, and am halfway through the second – The Story of a New Name, and there's no stopping me. The books follow the lives of two childhood friends, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, beginning in postwar Naples, where there is little escape from grinding poverty and limited opportunity. Both girls are bright and ambitious, and they imagine exciting lives for themselves. Although Lila is the stronger, the more imaginative and determined of the two, her parents refuse to educate her past elementary school, so it is Elena, her “brilliant friend” who continues her education, while Lila marries young and seems locked into the life she had hoped to escape. And maybe she ultimately does?? I'm only on book two.

I wonder if part of the reason that Ferrante wants her privacy is that her works seems so autobiographical. Elena and Lila are such vivid characters, with a friendship and a rivalry that is fierce and complex, and all the neighbors (and there a lot of them – the index of characters at the beginning of the book is extremely helpful) are rendered so sharply that they are completely convincing. Was Ferrante taking notes all through her childhood? That's how it feels.

Elena and Lila are strong women, and they are angry, sometimes at each other, often at the world. I have to find out how it all ends.

A Year in the Life

Jane Smiley has undertaken a daunting task. In the course of three books she follows the lives of a Midwestern family for one hundred years. Some Luck starts in 1920 and follows an Iowa farming family, Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their five children, until 1953. Then Early Warning picks up the story of Walter and Rosanna's children and their offspring until 1986. The third book of the trilogy, “Golden Age”, will be released in the fall and will complete the one hundred year cycle.

Each chapter covers a single year, with the point of view switching from character to character. Smiley clearly understands farming, as some chapters deal with the intricacies of crop rotation, corn prices, chickens, pigs and the occasional sheep. But she also captures the growth of the characters (or lack thereof). Walter remains an uncomplaining and determined farmer, while Rosanna evolves from vivacious and beautiful young mother to a somewhat crotchety old woman who nonetheless learns to drive and widens her view of the world outside the farm.  The children grow from toddlers adults, choosing very different paths.

For the most part they scatter far from the farm, marrying and starting families. They occasionally brush up against historic events (Viet Nam, Jim Jones, the AIDS crisis). Smiley does an admirable job of fleshing out the growing cast of characters. And it does help that a family tree is included, since I had some trouble remembering who's child was who's.

But I had a couple of problems with the format. Jumping forward a year with each chapter means that there's no real narrative arc, just a series of unconnected events. And as the novel expands to include both children and grandchildren of Walter and Rosanna, there are a lot of storylines to follow.

“Early Warning” ends with a surprise revelation, and there are many dangling plot threads that I'm interested in following, so I will definitely read the third book. But if you're only going to read one Jane Smiley book, be sure it's “A Thousand Acres” which I consider to be her masterpiece.

Reading For Pleasure

Of course I read for pleasure. It's not as if I have a paper to write or test to take. And thanks to the Kindle “Try a Sample” option, I can easily start reading and then reject a book without even buying it. But that doesn't mean that all books are equally pleasurable to read. Sometimes reading a book can be hard work, but the rewards are well worth the effort (I'm looking at you, Karl Ove Knausgård). At other times a book can be just good enough to keep me going, but in the end leaves me feeling as I sometimes do in a restaurant – the meal tasted fine but I expected something a little more satisfying (Sorry, Rachel Kushner). And then sometimes a book hits me just right, Whether it's because of my state of mind, or the weather, or the phase of the moon, I'll never know, but reading Willa Cather's The Professor's House was an effortless pleasure. 

Unlike many of Cather's works, this book is not about frontier life but university life. Professor Godfrey St. Peter teaches history at a mid-western college in the 1920's and is a successful academic author. But when his family moves to a new home, he finds himself unable to abandon the shabby attic study in his old house, where he does his writing. His reluctance mirrors his unwillingness to accept the more modern and materialistic life which his wife and married daughters have embraced. He reminisces about his favorite student, Tom Outland, a brilliant scientist who was engaged to his daughter and was killed in World War I.

In middle section of the book, titled “Tom Outland's Story”, Cather leaves the professor and his comfortable life behind to let Tom tell the first person story of his life before his arrival at the college. Most memorable is his description of his discovery of an ancient abandoned city of cliff-dwellers on a mesa in New Mexico. Here Cather's love of natural beauty is reflected in the beautiful prose she uses to describe the colors, smells, textures of this idlyllic spot.

In the final section Cather returns to the professor and his struggle to come to terms with the modern world, so far removed from the natural world of the desert that Tom revered, and with a family to whom he no longer feels connected. He finds no easy answers. I expected this story to feel somewhat dated, but Cather has created a universal depiction of a man out of step with the times. Thanks, Willa – it was a pleasure.  

Norwegian Angst

Surely Norway can't be as depressing as it's depicted by its fiction writers, can it? Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" paints a bleak picture, Jo Nesbø's 'Nordic noir' crime novels are dark and brooding, Per Petterson’s "Out Stealing Horses" is full of melancholy and regret. But Petterson’s newest novel I Refuse is darker still. Just look at the book cover!

It opens in 2006 with a powerful scene of the chance meeting in early morning between Jim and Tommy on a bridge outside of Oslo, where Jim, shabbily dressed, is fishing and Tommy, in a sleek new Mercedes, is on his way to work. The two have not seen each other in over thirty years. Tommy comments obliquely about “the way things can turn out”, and then drives away.

From there the story jumps back in time to 1966 in the small town of Mørk, where the two boys share a friendship forged in part by their loneliness, isolation, lost parents, and, in Tommy's case, domestic violence. The narrative continues to shift back and forth in time between their adolescent years and the day of the bridge meeting. Some passages are told in the first person by Tommy, his sister Siri and Jim; others are told in third person, in a way that is impressionistic but not confusing. Gradually these fragments fill in the events that have shaped their lives, including one that has driven a wedge between them. In some ways they have moved in opposite directions, but both have been scarred by their pasts and share an inability to fully connect with life.

The prose is sometimes taut but sometimes rambles in long sentences (could these have been better translated?). The most powerful and unforgettable scenes occur as the two teenagers are both connected and tested by their friendship. On the other hand, it was distracting to feel as if I needed a map of the Oslo area to follow the detailed driving descriptions.

This is a sad and poignant story and you will have to judge for yourself whether hope remains at the end. But I warn you...it's Norwegian.

Forgotten

Recently our Book Club read “Stoner”, a wonderful 1965 novel by John Williams which had gone out of print until its success in France led to its reissue in the United States. It reminded me that one of the books on my 'Hope to Get To' list had a similar history. I had read an article in the New Yorker about Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower, whose works had been out of print for many years until, in 2012, the Australian publishing house Text reissued them and persuaded her to publish her last novel, which she had withdrawn just before it was to be released in 1971. The article declared The Watch Tower to be her greatest novel, so I decided it was time to read another forgotten work.

Although the story is set in the Australia of the 1940's, I kept being reminded of novels from earlier times. Laura and Clare Vaizey are not orphans like Jane Eyre, but they might as well be. Their heartless mother yanks Laura out of her academic high school so that she can support the family, then abandons the girls completely to return to England. Laura sacrifices her own dreams and attempts to save her sister's future by marrying Felix Shaw, her boss at the factory where she works. Harrower describes him as “a swarthy nuggety man of forty-four who looked closer to fifty”. All I could think of was poor Dorothea stuck with boring, insensitive Casaubon in "Middlemarch".

But Felix turns out to be much worse than the pompous Casaubon; in fact, he proudly compares himself to Bluebeard. What follows is a harrowing psychological tale, as Clare attempts to escape the toxic household that Felix has created around Laura and herself. If you've ever wondered why a woman stays in an abusive marriage, this novel provides a vivid case study.

Harrower's language is precise and controlled, sometimes witty, always honest. The story was terrifying, but I couldn't look away.

Story Time

It's always nice to have someone read to you, especially when it's a writer you admire. The special treat of The New Yorker:Fiction podcast is that the reader, a New Yorker fiction writer, chooses a story that was published in the magazine and that he or she particularly admires. After the reading, the writer and fiction editor Deborah Treisman discuss the story and its author. Sometimes I know the author well; I may even remember having read the story. But at other times it's a revelation.

That's what happened in January when Joseph O'Neill, who wrote the wonderful novel Netherland, read Muriel Spark's short story “The Ormolu Clock”, originally published in the New Yorker in 1960. The story was terrific and O'Neill's admiration for her technique and her 'nastiness' made me enjoy it even more. Spark is best known for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, but I wanted to try one of her less known works, so I settled on The Girls of Slender Means.

The 'girls' are living in London in the spring of 1945 in an Edwardian mansion called the May of Teck Club, which “exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means”. Somehow Spark manages to make this large cast of women of different ages, experience and ambitions into fully realized characters, as they were in 1945 and as they are when she revisits them many years later. In the early chapters the tone is light and droll, as when she describes one resident: “she lolled in the distinct attitude of being the only woman present who could afford to loll”. But she subtly weaves a darker thread into the story, and a tragedy ultimately colors many of their lives.

I'm not sure I liked this book as much as I liked the short story on the podcast, but may that's because I like being read to by an Irishman.

Household Help

At first it seems to be a story revealing the changes in society in post World War I London of 1922. Frances Wray and her mother, once part of a genteel family living in an elegant Edwardian home, are forced to dismiss their servants, do their own cooking and housework (actually Frances does it all – her mother can't even boil water), and rent out their upper floor to married couple Leonard and Lilian Barber, The Paying Guests of Sarah Waters's novel. The Barbers are roughly the same age as Frances, but from a lower social class. Lilian's flapperish style - kimonos, paper flowers, feathers, beads and tambourines – is a striking contrast to Frances's staid and sober demeanor, although it is gradually revealed that she too led a more bohemian life before her family's reversals forced her back home to her mother.

So would this book be a nuanced examination of the clash of social classes? Decidely not. What starts as character study turns into an action-filled, high tension page-turner which is at once dark, shocking and occasionally comic. I hate spoilers so I'll say no more. Sarah Waters tells a tale that feels totally authentic to its time period but bracingly contemporary.

An Irish Portrait

It seems appropriate that I start the new year with an old favorite. I've always had a soft spot for Irish writers, and Colm Tóibín, whose Brooklyn was one of my favorites of 2009, has written another powerful book. Set in Enniscorthy, a town in southeastern Ireland, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nora Webster tells the story of a middle-aged woman whose husband, a much beloved schoolteacher, has died of heart disease. Nora is struggling to deal with her loss, and to help her four children, especially her two young sons, come to terms with this new reality.

And honestly, not a whole lot happens. The book is the story of Nora's everday life. She sells a vacation cottage she can no longer afford, she goes back to work, she worries about her older son's stutter and his withdrawn attitude, she discovers a love for classical music and an interest in singing. There are no fireworks, no dramatic upheavals (although the events of Bloody Sunday are referenced), no shocking revelations. But that's what I love about Tóibín. His understated prose and matter-of-fact narrative carry a force that I can't explain. He revealed in an interview that he lost his own father at a young age, and that the stammering, angry son Donal is a version of himself. Maybe that's why his plain language seems to carry so much emotion.

Nora is no saint – at times she's not even very likable. Her evolution is gradual, but by the end of the novel she has squared her shoulders, faced her grief and moved forward into life. Tóibín has painted a subtle, honest portrait of a ordinary but complicated woman.

2014 Favorites

It's time once again for me to pick my three favorite books of 2014, and once again I have had trouble narrowing down my list. But I have to go with the ones that really knocked my socks off, each for a very different reason.

The Son by Phillipp Meyer (Texas Saga), a multi- generational story that held me in its grip from the very first chapter, which ended with this foreboding line from the family patriarch: “The only problem was keeping your scalp attached.”

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast (The Graphic Truth), a graphic memoir that is hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (A Girl and a Boy), the haunting story of two young lives that cross amidst the chaos of war.

My books are already stacking up.  I'm looking forward to hours of great reading in 2015.  Happy New Year to all!

A Year-end Present to Yourself

Run, don't walk, to the nearest library, bookstore, computer or e-reader and get a copy of Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher.  Then set aside an afternoon or evening (it's a small book) for a joyride.  But be sure it is in a place where you will not be embarrassed to laugh out loud (really out loud, not just a smile) again...and again...and again on almost every page.

The structure of this novel is a series of LORs (letters of recommendation) written by a college English professor for his students, his faculty colleagues and a few fellow students from his graduate school days.  These are unlike any recommendation letters that you might imagine.  It makes me wonder what those letters are really like.

Julie Schumacher herself is a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota and admits to writing "more letters of recommendation that she cares to recall."  Included in the letters are large doses of college politics, driven by the increasing tensions between the arts and sciences resulting from the pervasive budget constraints affecting most colleges these days.  But it is her arguments supporting the study of English and writing that will stay with you long after the laughter ends.

And if you are familiar with Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener then so much the better (but not necessary.)

I am desperate to talk with someone who has read this book.  If that is you, please leave a Comment below.

Family Bonds

I can't really blame Eileen Tumulty, the main character in Matthew Thomas's debut novel We Are Not Ourselves. Growing up in the 50's in a blue collar Queens apartment with alcoholic parents whose marriage is fragile, it's only natural that she is determined to do better. So when she meets Ed Leary - intelligent, serious, reliable, a talented scientist - he seems the perfect choice. She envisions a bright and prosperous future with a home in her version of Shangri-La – Bronxville. Perhaps she misses some early clues that his seriousness might be tinged with rigidity, or that his idealism might conflict with her ambitions. When reality finally sets in, her desperation to get out of Queens causes her to commit an act of betrayal.

But she has little time to enjoy her Bronxville fixer-upper with Ed and son Connell before she is hit with a stark truth. Her fifty-two-year-old husband has Alzheimer's disease. As anyone who has dealt with it knows, the course of this disease is relentless, and Thomas's description is unsparing (his own father died from it in 2002). Connell stumbles badly in his attempts to face his father's illness and his mother's need for his help, and Eileen is no saint, but Thomas makes them sympathetic even in their failings. I have to admire Eileen's grit and determination in the face of the crushing obstacles she must tackle.

Thomas paints on a small canvas – his characters lead ordinary lives in a circumscribed world (he reminds me of Alice McDermott, who was once his teacher). But his characters have a resonance beyond their own small stage, and the title, taken from King Lear, expresses this well.

We are not ourselves

When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind

To suffer with the body.

Sour Grapes

Count me among the avid fans of Edward St. Aubyn's semi-autobiographical series of Patrick Melrose novels (see my blog). These five books swing wildly from harrowing to hilarious on virtually every page. So when the fifth novel, “At Last”, was ignored by the Booker prize committee in 2011, perhaps St. Aubyn felt a twinge of annoyance, although he has steadfastly denied this.

But you know the old adage “Don't get mad, get even”? Well, clearly St. Aubyn knows it too. In his latest novel Lost for Words he imagines the Elysian prize, funded by a chemicals manufacturer, and proceeds to satirize everyone connected with it in any way. The judges, some of whom are identifiable to those tuned in to the London literary scene, for the most part don't bother to read the books and use their own idiosyncratic agendas to make their choices. The books themselves range from wot u starin at, a portrait of Scottish drug addicts written by an Edinburgh academic, to “The Palace Cookbook”, an actual cookbook mistakenly submitted as a postmodern novel. The character of Sam Black, who seems to be a stand-in for St. Aubyn himself, loses the prize but gets the girl.

St. Aubyn writes elegant prose and can be wickedly funny and insightful, but the plot meanders and it's all just a little too snarky for me. Better to stick with Patrick Melrose.

The Graphic Truth

If you are a New Yorker reader you're familiar with Roz Chast, the cartoonist whose squiggly-lined drawings manage to make the mundane, the maudlin, or even the misanthropic events of everyday life seem unexpectedly funny. My favorites often involve parents and children, and the ways in which they can drive each other crazy. So I expected that her graphic memoir “Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant” would offer similar enjoyment. And it does. But this book is so much more than that.

Chast's parents George and Elizabeth are an eccentric, mismatched pair, essentially friendless, who have lived in a decidedly untrendy section of Brooklyn for over sixty years. Her father is gentle and kind, but also fearful of everything and ineffectual. Her mother is angry and critical. No surprise that Roz exited as soon as she could. But old age begins to take its toll on both of them, and Roz reluctantly accepts that she has to step in. What follows is the familiar litany of memory loss, emergency room visits, hospital stays, confusion, guilt, financial worries, resistance, anger. As grim as this sound, it is also very, very funny.

If you or anyone you know has dealt with the struggle of aging parents, you will find this story unerringly accurate and brutally candid. Chast does not paint herself as a saint. In fact, her drawings of her angry and frustrated self – bulgy-eyed, teeth-bared, hair crackling - are searing (and hilarious). But her humor and honesty make this a powerful and compelling story.

A Girl and A Boy

Time for my beach read, and this year it is All The Light We Cannot See. It's a story about a girl and a boy. In August of 1944, in the waning days of World War II, the picturesque Breton town of Saint-Malo, occupied by the retreating German army, is being bombed by Allied forces. Alone on the top floor of a tall narrow house, a French sixteen-year-old blind girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc fears for her life. Five blocks away eighteen-year-old German private Werner Pfennig, a radio specialist stationed in a grand old hotel, is assigned to intercept messages from Allied sympathizers and eliminate them. The two have never met.

Having set them so close together, author Anthony Doerr then jumps backward to 1934, to tell the parallel stories of their childhoods. Hers is the tale of a comfortable life in pre-war Paris near the Jardin des Plantes, with a loving father who teaches his daughter that her blindness is no handicap. His is the harsher existence of an orphan in a coal mining region outside Essen, but he is saved from a life in the mines or on the front lines by his extraordinary talent with radios. In brief chapters, Doerr cuts back and forth between Saint-Malo of 1944 and the paths each took from the start of the war to their current precarious state.

I know, I know. Blind girl, orphan boy, war, danger, love conquers all, sentimental and predictable. Not at all. This beautifully written book is many things – suspenseful, emotional, nuanced, heartbreaking, joyous – but it is resoundingly unsentimental. Yes there are a few coincidences, but none that disturb the flow of this haunting story. An added plus – short chapters! Beach, plane trip, waiting room, DMV line – this book is the perfect choice.

Everyday Life

What possessed me? Why did I want to read volume one of a six volume autobigraphical novel, translated from Norwegian, short on plot, frequently described in reviews as boring and banal? But My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard has also generated a firestorm of interest, both in Europe and the US, generating lavish praise from literary figures and bitter criticism from a few unimpressed critics, as well as from family members who objected to Knausgaard's frank depictions.

So, what's it like? It's like being inside someone's head. You're a witness to everything Karl Ove is thinking, from his deeply felt views on art, death, parenthood to his adolescent plotting to obtain beer for a New Year's Eve party. His style is straightforward and reportorial, but not without lyricism. Most of the second half of the book revolves around Knausgaard and his older brother dealing with the aftermath of their father's death. Karl Ove's relationship with his father was difficult, so as he cleans up the mess (literally) that his father has left behind he speaks frankly of his self-doubt and his attempts to come to terms with the loss of this cold, judgmental man.

What makes this book so unusual is Knausgaard's willingness to risk being boring by talking about ordinary, everyday events – a haircut, a cleaning chore, a train ride – without losing the reader's interest, and to examine his life with unsparing honesty. Somehow, it worked for me.

Act Three

How would the story of “Pride and Prejudice” look through Mr. Darcy's eyes? In fiction we're always locked into the view that the narrator chooses. But Jane Gardam, God bless her, has broadened the vista. In “Old Filth” she gives us Edward Feathers - Raj orphan, QC and judge in Hong Kong, husband of Betty, sworn enemy of fellow QC Terry Veneering – looking back on his life from old age. In "The Man in the Wooden Hat" it's Betty's turn, and unsurprisingly much looks different from her perspective, and secrets unknown (or maybe not?) to Edward are revealed. Now the third leg of the triangle is put into place, as Gardem's tells Terry's story in Last Friends.

The novel begins with Old Filth's memorial service, but quickly jumps back to Veneering's humble beginnings in the fishing village Herringfleet, his improbable escape from death during the war, his later success in law, his lifelong passion for Betty. Unfortunately Gardam also spends time with some less interesting characters, but even then her lucid, flowing prose keeps things interesting.

If you've ever been annoyed that the last 50 pages of a novel seem flabby or uninteresting, fear not – Jane Gardam must share your annoyance. She manages to reveal powerful secrets near the end of each of these books, without in any way seeming gimmicky. These novels make great summertime books, since they are best read in quick succession, and they are almost impossible to put down.