Turtle Diary, by Russell Hoban

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."
                                                     --Wallace Stevens
                                                      (from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction)


The journey through books can sometimes be an uncanny thing. As I was reflecting on my recent read of Turtle Diary, I was thinking how apt this epigraph was. It only gradually dawned on me that it was the epigraph of an entirely different book, which I was more or less concurrently reading. On the face of it, the books bear no relation to each other. Turtle Diary is a short novel told in intertwined voices by two more or less lonely people living separate lives in London, circa 1975. The Particulars of Rapture, where the epigraph actually resides, is an extended and scholarly meditation on the book of Exodus by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. And yet it turns out that one book has very much to say about the other.

Turtle Diary is not a love story, at least not in a conventional sense. And it has a rhythm that we do not expect from more conventional tales. Things that we might think impossible to accomplish are managed relatively easily, while things that might seem quite manageable are actually nearly impossible for our protagonists. They are conscious of need, but they are also conscious of their own necessities. A middle-aged life, as both of these characters make clear, is already at least "half-baked". It can't be molded into just any old shape anymore. The near solid edges have to fit together. Salvation must come in an unconventional form, as it does for the Israelites in Egypt. It gives not much away to say that for William G. and Neaera H., the deus ex machina comes in the guise of sea turtles.

William and Neaera are not exactly opposites--rather too much alike in some ways, William thinks. But they do represent masculine and feminine principles all the same, and according to Wallace Stevens and to Avivah Zornberg, the particulars of rapture are dependent on this mysterious embrace of opposites. Although other things happen in the book, it is their particular comingling that will launch change.

Zornberg, I think, has much to say about what precisely is ailing these two. It isn't just loneliness, although that is an aspect of it. In her understanding, Egypt in Exodus represents the place of constriction, paralysis and silence.

"This is the fundamental issue of Exodus: how to be redeemed when Egypt, that enervating soulscape, has one in its pincer grip? From such a perspective, Israel in Egypt cannot be redeemed--no separation is possible..."No slave ever escaped Egypt" (Mekhilta) What makes release possible, or, in midrashic language, what makes the people fit for redemption? What is the turning point in the history of unarticulated misery? And what, again in midrashic language, is the secret of redemption?"

How one person--or one people--escapes this pincer grasp is what both these books set about to find out.

When I bought this novel, the salesclerk happened to have read it and spoke enthusiastically about it, but said, it is bleak, though. I told her that bleak didn't bother me. What's odd, though, now I've read it, is that, though it does indeed have its bleak moments, it's nowhere near as bleak as another Hoban book I've read, The Mouse and His Child. And that was a children's book. Talk about your constriction and paralysis. But as John Clute is quoted as saying in an intro to Turtle Diary, all of Hoban's adult books are tales "of glorious escape from physical and psychic bondage".   And, spoiler alert, even a clockwork mouse in a children's tale has some hope of that sort of redemption.

(The illustration above is from the edition of the book illustrated by Hoban's then wife, Lillian.)

The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson

I assume most people come to know Tove Jansson through her Moomintroll books, but for whatever reason, they never came to my attention when I was a child. So my introduction to her was through the New York Review of Books reissue of The Summer Book , which we had a very nice discussion of over at Goodreads awhile ago. And in some ways, I don't think True Deceiver quite meets the mark of The Summer Book, which seems to me a  near perfect thing. But that's not to say that there isn't plenty of treasure to be found in this short novella.

The novella essentially revolves around three characters--well, four if you count the dog, as you probably should: Katri Kling and her younger brother Mats, her nameless German shepherd, and a famous children's book illustrator, Anna Aemelin. As the story opens, Katri is living over a shop with her brother, but she doesn't get on with the shopkeeper, and is looking for a way out of her predicament. When she realizes that there is plenty of room in Anna's big old family home, she finds a way to work herself into Anna's household.

Katri is the kind of prickly personality who doesn't really have friends. She is perhaps too singleminded to want any. I feel that this is a kind of female character that we have seen before--she reminds me a bit of Temple Grandin as played by Claire Danes. Based on what I read about Jansson last time around, it may not be very far off from Jansson herself. At the same time, though, Jansson's own life must figure in Anna Aemelin's as well, as the serious artist who has somehow been overtaken by her childrens book creations. (In the story it's adorable bunnies, painted with flowers).

 

The more I think about it, the more I think that there's a level to this story that is about different parts of the psyche coming together. There is a way in which all the characters have to incorporate parts of the other, or take the advise of another to move beyond their current state. I found myself particularly intrigued with what Katri offered Anna. Anna is living frozen in time, at least until spring when she can begin to make her intricate study of the forest floor again. Katri helps her get rid of some of her immobilizing past--the weight of the family history--not by sorting through it, but by just taking a whole pile of old furniture out on the ice, ready to sink beneath the surface once the ice melts. Talk about your decluttering.

Anna has also been negligent about her finances, carelessly letting people do her out of her profits. Anna is getting by okay without it, but Katri helps her see that what she is really doing is turning a blind eye to the potentiality that money represents. But in the end, as this seems to be a book about finding balance and perspective, Katri herself wonders if she has gone to far.

This isn't a heartwarming book. It is really the story of how three highly individual people acclimatize themselves to each other, and in some ways, how they don't. It has a lot to say about the life of community, both in the household form and in the larger community sense, and if it's a bit cynical in that regard, well, it is a winter story...

There's a nice piece by novelist Ali Smith on the book, which you can read HERE .

  

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

I had an unusual reading experience with this book. I picked it up as part of the New York Review of Books reading group choices over on Good Reads. It was one I'd heard about for a long time, and knew a few people who had found it very funny. Still, I'd never gotten around to it, and decided this would be a good time to check it off the list. The story of a struggling young academic, under the thumb of a dunderheaded old professor and entangled with an older woman whom he doesn't really love or even like very much held up well in some ways, less well in others. Misogynistic is one of those words that was overused at one point and draws suspicion when used now as a result, but let's just say the story isn't kind to women unless they are quite young and very beautiful.

On the other hand, I think most of us can remember being young and struggling to make our way, and so Jim Dixon does make for a kind of Everyman, even if he is not that compassionate toward Everywoman. He isn't the most noble character, and is not intended to be, but most of his pranks are relatively harmless, even if there was one involving insurance policies that I wasn't so sure about. And in the end, perhaps I was convinced that Margaret, the entangler, was more of an emotional vampire than I initially gave her credit for.

I found Keith Gessen's introduction to this edition illuminating, claiming as it did that Lucky Jim was really a combined portrait of Amis and his close friend, the poet Philip Larkin. Originally conceived as a fictional portrait of Larkin, it was Larkin himself who apparently wrote back and suggested that Amis take himself as a model for it--as he was the one with the habit of pulling faces.

My funny experience with the book was that I looked around from the table I sit and have my coffee at in the morning, and there was another copy of Lucky Jim, which was must have been sitting there all along. It was an old battered Penguin paperback that I must have picked up used somewhere, thinking I would get around to it someday. The funny thing was that, as I opened it at random here and there, I was suddenly able to see its funniness and freshness, and perhaps especially its excellent sentences a good deal more clearly. Was it just a matter of reading the lines out of context? Or was it that reading it in a nostalgic old copy, I was now reading it in the right context? I don't know.

At the time of its publication, Gessen says, Larkin had begun to garner some acclaim for his poetry, but Amis had not for his prose. He expressed his frustration in letters to Larkin and it is the kind of frustration that can be empathized with from many angles. Without wanting to give away too much of the plot, it's fair to say that Amis's title is not ironic in the long run. And the solutions to Dixon's problems are of a nature that might seem improbable in a more serious work.

However, it's fair to say that Amis himself, in the writing of the book, fashioned just such an improbable denouement for himself. He wrote the right book at the right moment and his fortune was made.

Lucky him.

 

The Expendable Man, by Dorothy B. Hughes

More than most books, this novel is one you should just jump into without preamble. So don't read the back cover, don't read any reviews that reveal plot, and so on. What I thought I would do here is write around all that, and so encourage you to pick it up without specifically telling you the story.

I first discovered Hughes many years ago, probably the mid to late eighties, when she was already having a revival of sorts. It was a time when major publishing houses still quite frequently brought older, half forgotten works to the reading public's attention again and it was through these auspices that I discovered the likes of Josephine Tey, Mary Roberts Reinhart, Edmund Crispin, Margery Allingham and many more. I believe there were about four Hughes novels reissued together, the ones I remember best, because of the arresting titles, being The So Blue Marble and Ride a Pink Horse. I read these two and I may have read others; in fact, there were times as I read this one, that I thought I may have read it back then as well. I don't think so--I think it's because Hughes' protagonists share some similarities. For one reason or another, they are isolated people, forced into increasingly desperate circumstances.

Some writers would seem to be able to turn their hand to anything, and Hughes' writing life was more varied than most. Before she was a novelist, she was a journalist, but before that, she was a poet dazzling enough to have hard her first book, a poetry collection, published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Her poetic gifts come through in this novel as well. This is a book of fairly terse prose, but in her descriptions of place and particularly of the Southwestern desert where much of this takes place, she reveals her poet's eye.

The time of the book is somewhere around 1963, when it was published. It is a very particular moment in American history, and Hughes gets this moment exactly right. It stood out to me because after watching so many episodes of the much vaunted Mad Men, it's very clear that there is a big difference between throwing in period detail, and chronicling the period in which you live. I am not sure that even Hughes herself could hope to get this particular story right, but the sense of what people believed and feared and felt possible is much truer to my own childhood memory of the era than our 21st century simulations of this.

It's funny that I thought at first that this novel was perhaps a bit derivative. It reminded me a bit of Red Lights, an American novel by the great Belgian writer, Simenon, which, like this edition, is another  reissue of the wonderful New York Review of Books imprint,  and which I wrote a brief review of HERE . And it also recalled the movie Kiss Me Deadly, a 1955 film that I only saw within the last few years. What all three share are a road trip and the hazards of the road.

Trust me, though. This one is different. 

NYRB podcast from The Mookse and the Gripes

As the occcasional reader here will have figured out, a fair percentage of the books I read these days are from the New York Review of Books imprint. This is partly because I'm the NYRB book group on Goodreads (an open group--join in!), and partly because I think it's one of the most intriguing imprints going these days.

Now Trevor and Brian Berrett over on The Mookse and the Gripes website are adding a whole new dimension to the discussion by doing a monthly podcast about some NYRB favorite. The first one is on Butcher's Crossing, by John Williams. I haven't read this one yet, but apparently it's a 'western' in the same way Cormac McCarthy's books sometimes are. Check it out HERE, or on ITunes.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by G. B. Edwards

I've been thinking about this book for awhile now, without quite finding the time or the way to commit my thoughts to print. This was yet another of the books I read for the New York Review of Books book group over on GoodReads. We were enticed into reading it by the video down at the end.

Ebenezer Le Page is the longest book we've read for this group and it perhaps bogged us down a little. I don't think I was entirely prepared for its style by the video, although I understand the video better after reading the book. The book of the title is basically the book that the eponymous character decides to write at the end of his life--a kind of reckoning or accounting. Le Page lives on the isle of Guernsey for his entire life, with perhaps the exception of a trip to neighboring Jersey. Or maybe the Jersey team comes to Guernsey--I can't remember. Guernsey's position in being closer to the French coastline but a British Crown dependency gives it a complicated history and complex population for such a small place. It was also occupied by Germany during World War II, which caused other divisions and allegiances.

I was expecting this to be full of a lot of colorful island lore, and I didn't quite find that to be the case. As I found myself constantly thinking, the tale of Ebenezer's life on Guernsey reminded me of nothing so much as of the stories my dad used to tell us about his life in a small farming community in northern Illinois. There is an intense preoccupation with local concerns, and the same sense of small local events being stored up in memory for a lifetime. It's interesting, because in fact, it's not as insular a community as it might sound (nor was my dad's). People do take off for North America--mostly Canada, if I remember right, and of course the two great wars of the last century impact the story in all kinds of ways.

Early on, Ebenezer falls for a girl who is either very right for him, or very wrong, and without giving too much away, let's just say it doesn't work out. Although several people reading this in our group thought that Ebenezer's friendship with Jim Mahy had more than a little of the homoerotic to it, it's indisputable that Ebenezer spent a lot of time inviting the lasses to lie down with him under the bushes. What I found interesting was that Ebenezer himself considers Liza Queripel "the one", and he abandons hope of having her very early on. One of the things I found most intriguing about the book was to see how Ebenezer lives a life without hope for about forty or fifty years longer.

This book crept up on me a bit. I never found it hard to read or a slog, but I didn't find it to be quite as dynamic as I expected either. There is no true suspense in it, as the narrator gives away much of the story as he goes along. But suspense isn't everything. In the end, I've come to feel that it is a wisdom book, a "how are we to live" sort of book. Perhaps it is a book geared for the middle-aged more than the young, because in a way it addresses how to live once youth's hopes and illusions have faded. It is mysteriously "like life" in the way it conveys how life goes on with its own mysteries, rewards and consolations despite our disappointments in it. The ending is actually quite beautiful in its picture of how one man transcends his own individual life and marvels at the whole.

If  you are willing to take this book on its own terms, without preconception, then I highly recommend it.  

Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser

"Good Morning, Giantess!" So the first chapter of this collection opens as the newly arrived Swiss citizen takes stock of his subject, the  great city of Berlin. We were recently reading this over on GoodReads--me, at least, at what I hope was an appropriately leisurely pace, for Walser strolls through the city--he never runs. 

 

In an interview on BBC's Night Waves (it's about 30 minutes in) Susan Bernofsky, the translator of this collection, calls Walser the blogger of the early 20th century. I think there is something in that, although there is a humility in Walser, an ability to make his feuilletons about any number of small, easily missed things and not about himself, that is someitmes absent from the blogosphere. He often writes not of "I", but of "we", which is never a royal "we", but his way of including us more fully in the experience. Then again, his "I" often dissolves instead into a "you".

It is very kind of him to write so, because most of us will never on our own enjoy the pleasures and observations of urban living as he did. Read his piece "In the Electric Tram" if you'd like to learn more about how to get the most out of a simple ride on public transportation. Some modifications will have to be made, but it helps to know that Walser would have risen to that particular challenge.

Walser paints a very beautiful portrait, but all the same life was not easy for him, here in a foreign capital. His brother was a much sought after set designer, so Walser rode on his coattails a bit, and I think sometimes both brothers were thought of as a bit eccentric in Berlin society. He doesn't seem to have let it bother him much. Although he had a famous brother, he was not a famous person pretending to be humble and obscure, but actually obscure and struggling. I think it helps to know that he was able to write what are mostly incredibly joyful pieces despite this.

 

One of my favorite pieces, though, is an uncharacteristic one. It is later in the book, and Walser is no longer a recent arrival. It struck a chord with me when I read it--probably after a long day of retail-- and is called "Food for Thought":

How uncertain, how difficult people make one another's lives. How they belittle each other and are at pains to suspect and dishonor. How everything takes place merely for the sake of triumph. When they leave things undone, this occurs because of external exigencies, and when they err, it is never they who are at fault. Their fellow men always appear to them as obstacles, while their own person is always the highest and most noble of creatures...It's strange how quick people are to dismiss one another, to invoke a scornful tone, trifling with what is most noble, precious and meaningful. And how they never grow weary of finding fault, how it never occurs to them to hope there might be greatness, goodness and honesty on earth... 

Purely by chance, I seem to have read three pieces on Berlin in the twentieth century recently, and though only one century, all are completely different periods in the life of that city. Having earlier read In the Garden of Beasts, the title of which refers to the famous Tiergarten of Berlin and is set in the time of the rise of the Nazis, I have since read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, set in the period directly after the war when the Berlin Wall is being very firmly hammered into place. And now this lovely book which is made sad by the fact that it it set in the opening decades of that century, and we know all that will befall Berlin and Walser does not. Another sadness is that Walser's own life did not ultimately end well.

Here's a link to a lovely podcast of one of the stories, "Frau Wilke". The narrator, Sam Jones, keeps up blog called Wandering With Robert Walser , which is worth keeping track of if you fall for this stuff.

As I have.

The Post-Office Girl, by Stefan Zweig

I really enjoyed this bittersweet novella of Zweig's. I'd long heard of  him but this was my first plunge into his work. It's a bit of an anti-Cinderella story, I suppose, where the princess does get to go to the ball, but the prince doesn't bother to come find her later. Christine is working in a remote Austrian village in between the two Great Wars. Her mother is an invalid, they are poor and Christine works at the post office, without much hope of change. Out of the blue a wealthy aunt extends her an invitation to join her in a luxury hotel, and Christine begins to live, breathe and dream again. We've had a great discussion over on the New York Review of Books discussion forum over at GoodReads , which is an open group--feel free to join us--we're on to Berlin Stories by Robert Walser. 

There is a lot to say about this book, but as someone pointed out to me early on, Zweig was exquisite at rendering subtle psychological states. I was particularly struck by this one, because it shows the mind still remembering its cage:

In this new world even sleep is different: blacker, denser, more drugged, you're completely submerged in yourself. As she awakens Christine hauls her drowned senses out of these new depths, slowly, laboriously, bit by bit, as though from a bottomless well. First she has an uncertain sense of the time. Through her eyelids she sees brightness; the room must be light, it must be day. It's a vague, muffled feeling, followed by an anxious thought (even while she's still asleep): Dont' forget about work! Don't be late! The train of thought she's known for the last ten years begins automatically: The alarm clock will ring now... Don't go back to sleep... Responsibility, responsibility, responsibility... Get up now, work starts at eight, and before that I'll have to get the heat started, make coffee, get the milk, the rolls, tidy up, change mother's bandages, prepare for lunch, and what else? There's something else  I have to do today...Right, pay the grocer lady, she reminded me yesterday...No, don't doze off, stay alert, get up when the alarm goes off... But what's the problem today...What's keeping it...Is the alarm clock broken, did I forget to wind it...where's the alarm, it's light in the room...Goodness, maybe I overslept and it's already seven or eight or nine and people are cursing at the wicket the way they did that time when I wasn't feeling well, right away they wanted to complain to the head office...And so many employees are being let go these days... Dear God, I can't be late, I can't oversleep...The long-buried fear of being late is like a mole tunneling under the black soil of sleep. Abruptly the last of it falls away.

It seemed fitting that my blog friend PQ was talking about a similar supression of life over on his blog, A Building Roam , where he is currently much taken with Robert Anton Wilson, among others. Here, he is quoting Buckminster Fuller, a figure not unknown in Santa Cruz:

Let us regard wage-work---as most people do, in fact, regard it---as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure.
"But without working for wages we'll all starve to death!?! Won't we?"
Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment.

The mentality of the wage earner seems to be reported on from many angles in my life right now, and not usually in the most positive light. It makes me wonder what is coming...

Don't Look Now, by Daphne DuMaurier

I finished this book a few days ago. It was another one I read for the Good Reads discussion group. We knew of the creepy nature of some of DuMaurier's stories, so thought it would it be a good pick for spooky October. I think we all pretty much enjoyed it. It was a bit longer than some of our other choices, and perhaps a tad more uneven. The first tale in the book, the title piece 'Don't Look Now', was made into a Nicholas Roeg movie that you may have seen--I'll definitely be renting it at some point, as others in the group seemed to have thought it was good and faithful to the story.

Another filmmaker seemed to have diverged a bit more, and not to DuMaurier's liking. Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' was taken from DuMaurier's tale of the same name, but he shifted a few things, including the locale, and perhaps even the larger meaning. It's easy to understand why it might irritate her, but I thought that the deeper tale, which is about our individual helplessness before natural events we are powerless to control, seemed to me to be carried through faithfully. I had the same creepy feeling from both. And Hitchcock, as I learned from a friend, had his reasons for setting it in Northern California. He had read a newsclipping from my very own community, where the birds were mysteriously attacking people. There was a logical reason rather than a supernatural one in this case, though. The birds had conumed an element from a red tide in the bay, which was messing with their tiny little heads.

I found the stories had their strengths and weaknesses. They are definitely of a period and reminded me a lot of certain movies of the forties. There is nothing wrong with that, but some of the stories seem slighter because of that, and read in a row, it can be like watching too many B movies. But DuMaurier's strengths more than compensate. She is excellent on setting, and when she lavishes attention on a character, like the usherette in 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger' she usually nails them.

The introduction to this edition is provided by Patrick McGrath, who is known for writing fiction in the Gothic style himself. I think both McGrath and DuMaurier demonstrate that there is still plenty of room in fiction for this sensibility.

Skylark, by Dezső Kosztolányi

This is another book I've chanced upon because I've been part of the NYRB book club over on Good Reads. It's really a quiet gem of a book, short and in some ways simple. We've been having quite a good discussion of it over there if you want to take a look--although you might have to join the group to see it. I'm not really sure how that part works.

The story begins in a moment of nervous anticipation. Skylark,  the daughter of two aging parents, is leaving for a week in the country with relatives. The threesome has never really been apart before. Skylark, despite the lighthearted quality of her name is the unmarriagable spinster daughter in a provincial outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Though the novel was written many years later, after WWI had come and gone, the year is 1899 in the story--a year when it must have appeared that things would always be as they had been before. For me, part of the sadness of the book is that the characters do not know that in a few years time, extraordinary changes will have found there way even to sleepy Sárszeg. But the author certainly does, which made us wonder a bit why he had chosen this moment and represented it in some ways as eternal. More than one commenter in the discussion found there was a fairytale quality to the story.

Although this did not strike me as a purely satiric book, it is possible to read it as dark humor. In fact the author does signal this in some ways, because not only is Skylark one of the least aptly named people in the world--the parents apparently still call her that from a time when she would still sing--but she is not even the main character of the story. Most of the time she is offstage. This is not to say that she is an incidental character--she is in some ways the prime mover of the tale. Or maybe more accurately, the prime non-mover.

Once she is gone, the parents are left, very reluctantly, to their own devices. By stages, they rediscover and in turn show us this little town, which despite its provincial quality turns out to be quite a lively little place. I think this fits in with a realization that the journalist Miklós Ijas (who is surely a stand in for Kosztolányi himself, also a journalist) has at one point. He is one of those brilliant youths who is always longing to get away to the capital, as perhaps rightly, they should. He has a different destiny. But in becoming aware of the poignancy of the plight of this little family, whose members both love and are trapped by each other, he gains a deeper insight into the common bonds of humanity he shares with them. I had wondered how Kosztolányi, a famous and brilliant Hungarian literary figure, could write so penetratingly of people who shared none of these traits. A moment of similar empathy in  his own life probably lies behind this beautiful little novel.      

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson

I had a chance to read a very wonderful book last month, thanks to joining up with the New York Review of Books books discussion at Good Reads. The first book that was picked was this short novel by the Tove Jansson. Jannson is pretty famous for her Finn Family Moomintroll childrens' books, though somewhat oddly, not so much in the U.S. I guess Astrid Lindgren of Pippi Longstocking  fame was our token Nordic writer for that era, but I do plan on reading them now.

The Summer Book is a series of related stories about summers spent on a small island off the coast of Finland that center around the lives of a grandmother and her granddaughter, Sophia. Sophia's father plays a somewhat peripheral role. Jansson's niece and her own mother were the models for this very wise book, and the whole family in fact spent much time out on these lonely but beautiful islands.

The discussion we had over on Good Reads was very thought provoking and we all found a lot of things to love about this book. I think for me what was most intriguing was the relation between the very old and the very young, which I think Jansson nailed. Life is a different thing when we are not in the midst of all the striving. I think these two states often have a lot to say to each other, though often in a subtle and indirect way. 

Check out this beautiful book if you get a chance. I actually read it in the "Sort Of" edition, which has a fair number of photos. The NYRB edition has a lot of her drawings.

You are spoiled for choice, really.

Red Lights (Feux Rouges), by Georges Simenon

I'm on a bit of a New York Review of Books imprint kick lately. So much so that I recently joined the Good Reads NYRB Classics group in hopes that this would bump some of these great books up the list a bit for me. That idea has already paid off. But the idea of reading this roman dur from the great Simenon came through a slightly different channel, when I read fellow Good Reader James Henderson's brief review of the book. I was intrigued, because I had no idea that Simenon had written any novels that were not set in Paris or its environs, let alone in the U.S.

This novel came out here in 1953. It starts off on Labor Day weekend, when Steve and Nancy Hogan are preparing to leave New York and join the mad throngs heading to pick up their kids in parts north. For Steve and Nancy, the road leads to Maine.

As it's the nineteen fifties, they are of course going to have a drink first. For Steve, it's clear early on, that it's not going to be just one.

Simenon is pitch perfect on his mid last century American suburbanites. It's not a surprise in one sense--he lived for some years in Connecticut.  We are in Mad Men territory, of course, but Simenon's vision is less of an exaggeration than the television show. But the feeling rising in the heart of our protagonist is very similar to that of Don Draper, without the mysterious past (which Simenon's book reveals to be an unnecessary dramatic twist). Despite the good life that they have, Steve feels somewhat strangled by it, which comes out when he drinks as a nasty sort of antagonism towards his wife, who has risen to a position of somewhat greater stature than Steve's and which he resents.

I was somewhat surprised that Simenon chose to characterize Steve's hostility to Nancy as a rare thing, brought on by the end of summer and an uncharacteristic overindulgence in alcohol. His manner, though truthfully rendered, would seem to me to be more realistic as a more common occurence. However, perhaps this is just a different kind of pattern. In any case, although Steve's longing for a more manly, freer, life comes across as selfish and immature, it also comes across as authentic. Faced with his part in the annual automotive migration north, which will restore all to domesticity come the end of the holiday weekend, anyone would resent that feeling of being a mere cog in the great wheel. And it is really only when he falsely turns Nancy into the prime denier of his wishes for freedom that he begins to go very badly wrong.

I happened to watch Goodfellas for the first time in its entirety the other night. I  am not particularly interested in gangster flicks, so I was probably a bit overdue to appreciate this one. It was good, and I was struck by a similar longing in the main character to escape what he considered the pathetic life of the schnooks--the ordinary, law-abiding, slightly boring civilians who in the end he finds himself among despite all his intentions.

Steve's story takes him to a different place. But the question of how to escape the subjugation of self that is part of what civilized life asks of us is not really answered. I have a feeling Simenon didn't answer it for himself completely, either. Nor have we.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household: on the value of imprints

At Bookshop Santa Cruz, where I work, we not only sell new books but used ones. Eventually, and inevitably, some books of both these categories end up discounted further, and are called Sidewalk Sale books. We haven't done an actual sidewalk sale for many a year, but occasionally we pull these

books away from their spot by the window and feature them a bit more prominently. You'd think that these would be the most sorry rejects in the store, but the truth is, many of the real gems are hidden there, and if I could only read books I found among these for the rest of my life, I would probably still die quite happy.

Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male is such a book. I'd heard of Household before, but never been tempted to pick up his work before. And with such a title, I certainly wouldn't have rescued this book from the bargain bin, even at a reduced price. Why did I? Because it was published under the imprint of the New York Review Books. Because I saw that it had one of their distinctive covers, I didn't reject it out of hand, but picked it up. And once I started reading--well, you know how it goes with good books.  You end up getting hooked.

Not that the cover illustration itself is a sure seller. It pictures what looks to me like a very frazzled and probably dead animal.  What an imprint says to someone like me is that a publishing house or a small wing of a publishing house that I respect has decided that this volume is worth backing. In the case of the NYRB books, these are often if not always reprints of work that has slid into some degree of obscurity. They may have had their heyday, they may not. Over on their webpage, they even have a slot where you can suggest an out-of-print title for them to think about republishing.

Rogue Male is a classic cat and mouse tale, with the also classic twist that the hunter soon becomes the hunted. The unnamed protagonist is a professional hunter who has decided on a kind of whim to see if he can  break through the defenses of a dictator and get close enough to shoot. He is not actually going to shoot the man, of course, just see if he can do it. He comes within a hair's breadth of success, but a miss is as good as a mile in this case. Tortured and then left for dead, the hero of the tale manages to escape and begin a thrilling journey across all kinds of terrain. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, but that's enough to set you off with. I will just add that there was one point in the story in which I had to break off and go to work, and I actually felt quite uncomfortable leaving the narrator in the predictament he had found himself in.

Victoria wrote what I found to be a very helpful introduction to the book (which I read afterwards), giving me a bit more context for the yarn Household spun. In particular, she explains what Household meant by 'Class X' in the novel. It had a sort of snobbish possibility in it that I was wary of, but in fact, I did Household a disservice. In his own life, Household was quite a traveler and one night shared dinner in a restaurant in Toledo with a Spaniard of limited means. After he left, Household got up to pay his bill, and found that the man had paid it for him ahead of him. This kind of gesture went a long way with him, and embodied the qualities of the Class X type of person far more than any outward credentials.

There is a moment or two in this tale that are definitely not for the squeamish, but if you're willing to entrust yourself to a writer from Class X  and if you're looking for a vivid and gripping read, this is the one for you.