Matthew Geyer
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A Promised Land by Barack Obama

1/3/2021

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​Well, it’s happened two months in a row.  Seven hundred pages of non-fiction.  What’s become of me?
 
The first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoir, A Promised Land, takes us very quickly through his early life (covered in prior works, but I’d not read them, so I was grateful for the background) and his Senatorial term.  Then he turns to his decision to run for President, the primary campaign that followed, and his first three or four years in the White House.  A whole team assisted in the research, writing and revisions, but the voice is Obama’s throughout and it rings true.  He mostly proves capable of acknowledging his own missteps, and always acknowledges the good work of the team around him, both in the White House and the Pentagon.  He expertly describes the workings of the House and Senate, and the politics that inform the actions of all the principals.  This is history, but it’s history we all lived through not so long ago, and the level of detail is just right, bringing it all back without bogging down the narrative.
 
His account of the election—from a fulsome treatment of the Iowa caucuses, to the unveiling of a new President who looked like no other in Grant Park in Chicago—strikes me as even-handed and true.  His treatment of the first nine months of his presidency—from the fall of Lehman Brothers even before the inauguration, to the repayment of most of the $67 billion lent to the country’s nine largest banks—is detailed but succinct.  Key decisions here are described both as they were made and in retrospect, usefully comparing the two, and the detail provided is exceptional but not overdone.  A real cliff-hanger it was, the first of many.
 
Through each chapter in the saga, he takes time to recognize the criticisms some liberals level—even today—that he missed opportunities to bring about more radical change in our economy and society.  With regard to the banking crisis, for example, he acknowledges that “many thoughtful critics [regard] the fact that I had engineered a return to pre-crisis normalcy as precisely the problem—a missed opportunity if not a flat-out betrayal.  According to this view, the financial crisis offered me a once-in-a-generation chance to reset the standards for normalcy, remaking not just the financial system but the American economy overall.  If I had only broken up the big banks and sent white collar culprits to jail . . .  .”  Obama takes time to respond, in measured tones making salient points, to argue his case that radical changes suggested by liberal critics “almost certainly would have made matters worse.  Not worse for the wealthy and powerful [but] for the very folks I’d be purporting to save.”
 
He goes on to lighten the narrative here and there as needed.  He tells of being taught on the morning of his inauguration how to deliver a proper salute, before diving back into the serious business of finding a way out of Iraq and dealing with Afghanistan.  He tells of dealing with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, knowing the “real power in Russia” was still Vladimir Putin, “the leader of what resembled a criminal syndicate that had its tentacles wrapped around every aspect of the country’s economy.”  And of the moment in law school when he realized his future would have little to do with law practice, and everything to do with politics and public service.  He traces the story of the Affordable Care Act coming into being, with plot turns that would make a scriptwriter proud, all of it true.  And he doesn’t leave that terrain without making clear that, while the ACA meant little to large swaths of the American public, it meant everything for the many poorer families among us.
 
The book closes with a chapter on getting Bin Laden.  It’s certainly the most dramatic, owing in part to its exquisite detail, and it was the perfect choice for ending this first volume.
 
I did have one recurring qualm as I read.  Hillary Clinton is almost uniformly referred to as just “Hillary,” even when she hasn’t been mentioned in fifty pages or more (I half expected her citation references in the Index to be listed under H).  I found this off-putting, perhaps even demeaning, and can’t recall anyone else being repeatedly referenced in this way.  Had I been on the vast team of editors and other contributors working on this project, I’d have said something.

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To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss

1/2/2021

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This talented and successful novelist came out in November with her first collection of short stories.  Much of the collection has been published in one or another of the leading American magazines, two of these then republished in Best American Short Stories in 2003 and 2019.
 
The first, “Switzerland”, was published in The New Yorker in November.  It tells the story of Soraya, a sexually and emotionally precocious classmate our teenage narrator befriended in school in Geneva.  It’s a coming-of-age story, so delicately drawn it transports even an old man back to the time when sex was mysterious and frightening and fun, all at the same time—even, indeed perhaps especially, when you were in over your head.
 
“Zusya on the Roof” is a nearly inscrutable parable, about an old man who has survived a fortnight at death’s door, trying to retrieve the insights all the delirium had yielded (if he had it right).  “Restored to life, he could no longer parse the infinite wisdom of the dead.”  I found it lacking, to be honest; and I found “I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake” completely inscrutable, never a good thing in a short story.  Both of these stories, and several others included here, are examples of the writer’s turn toward postmodernism, perhaps having become bored with writing just good literary fiction.
 
Eventually I came to one that had not been previously published.  “Amour” is largely the story of Sophie and Ezra, who had a long relationship that satisfied them both over a span of many years.  The story is told by an unnamed narrator who knew Sophie “when we were very young,” but was never able to win her heart, especially after she met Ezra.  He’s always wondered why Sophie and Ezra never married.  When he spots her, many years later, in a refugee camp, she tells of how they broke up after all the years.  The vignette is so simple and yet so powerful that I dare not give any of it away, for it holds in it a jewel that shines the brightest light on what long, loving marriages that go the distance are made of; and why some relationships that otherwise could make it, do not.  So simple and so true, we have here a gleaming example of what great short stories are made of.  It alone is worth the cost of the collection, because you can’t read it anywhere else . . . yet.  Look for it next year in Best American Short Stories of 2020, is my bet.
 
Another contender for that volume is “The Husband”.  Here we meet a pair of adult siblings, their respective mates come and gone, and a stranger who’s come in a mysterious way to befriend their widowed mother, who’s nobody’s fool.  At the center of the story is the grown daughter, Tamar, who is so full of suspicion about the stranger and his intentions toward her mother, she can’t see past all that to the happiness it may promise.  Told in five chapters, we get some wonderful lengthy digressions, in one of which we learn not only more about the characters, but more about Alzheimer’s disease—what it is and isn’t—than I’ve ever been able to piece together.  It’s a story told on a high wire, that itself delivers “the awareness that the people who arrive to us from nowhere and nothing are only ever that: a gift, received without our having known to ask, with only the wonder of how life delivers and delivers.”
 
I look forward to digging into one of Krauss’s four novels.  A bit of research suggests the last three have been more post-modernisms, which is not particularly tempting to this old coot.  But I welcome any of your suggestions.

P.S. 1/10/21  I hadn't read the last story in the collection when I wrote the review above.  It's the title story, "To Be a Man", and it's the best in the whole collection, and the contender for the Best Stories volume, hands down.  First rate literary fiction with a bit of post-modernism structure.  Just the right balance.  Bravo.

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Santa Fe Sunset 01/01/2021     © Matthew Geyer

1/1/2021

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Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel

11/27/2020

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I can’t recall the last time I read 700 pages of fiction or nonfiction, but I read Ninth Street Women with relish all the way through.  It tells the story of five American painters, all of whom were women and most of whom were associated with what is often called “The Second Generation” of The New York School of Abstract Expressionists.  The writing is exceptional; Gabriel is a master at the nonfictional approach to telling a great story.  Her prose flows like fiction, attending to the arc of the various subjects’ stories, laying out the ups and downs of their careers and their lives.
 
Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning were married to First Generation artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.  Somewhat overshadowed early on by their more famous husbands, Krasner spent much of her early years minding her more famous alcoholic mate and unable to find the time to develop her own work.  But she eventually got the chance to make some terrific abstract paintings. (click here and use the back button on your browser to return) https://whitney.org/collection/works/6153 Elaine de Kooning developed a career in art journalism along with her own work, which eventually moved past strict abstraction to painting portraits that employed abstract brushwork and combined the emotional feel of abstraction with recognizable imagery, producing wonders like John F. Kennedy’s presidential portrait.  https://npg.si.edu/blog/elaine-de-koonings-jfk
 
Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler were younger and never lived in the shadow of more famous mates, although Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell, another First Generation artist, somewhat later in life.  Hartigan sometimes incorporated human figuration into her abstraction.  https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79636  Mitchell developed the use of colorful brushwork into a signature style that was perhaps the purest abstraction of any of these artists, and far and away my favorite. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79586  Frankenthaler is most often associated with thinning and pouring paint onto linen or canvas to create color fields she left alone or used as background for abstract designs.  I dare say this one early Frankenthaler bears some relation to two of the best First Generation painters, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/69050 
 
Along the way we get entertaining accounts of all the New York School’s hangouts, like the Cedar Bar and The Five Spot where the downtown artists drank and talked all night or listened to a young Thelonius Monk and others; and the Club, where the downtown and even uptown artists talked serious shop through the Fifties and Sixties.  We learn about the various galleries and gallery owners who showed their work, the writers who covered them, and the East Hampton and Provincetown getaways where they spent summers and beyond.  Their personal lives, and the number of lovers they took—both the women and the men—are covered in appropriate and entertaining detail.  Having thought the Sixties didn’t really start until the Summer of Love, and the Fifties were more Ozzie & Harriet, I was a bit surprised at some of this.
 
I came across Gabriel’s delightfully engaging account of all this as part of my research for a novel set in the same time and place, involving some of these and related historical figures.  For my money it’s the best nonfiction treatment, and certainly the most accessible for a general audience, of anything I’ve come across. 
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Self-Portrait with Russian Piano by Wolf Wondratschek

11/26/2020

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I teased this little volume last month based on a slim review by Ethan Hawke in the New York Times Book Review.  I was hoping to find another first-rate foreign writer, whose back catalogue is ready to appear in English two or three books a year once he or she has been translated.  Patrick Modiano a few years back came to mind.
 
I doubt that’s going to happen.  In part, it’s the eccentricities of the writing.  Here, Wondratschek eschews quotation marks to denote dialogue, while writing in first person from the point of view of the narrator sometimes and the separate protagonist other times.  That’s a wicked combination, which while it lends mystery and intrigue sometimes, yields frustration and consternation often.
 
The story is a good one.  Set in Vienna, it concerns an old Russian concert pianist, Suvorin, who tells an anonymous café acquaintance his story.  The mystery this setup (one might say conceit) yields feels intriguing at times, and just plain false and unnecessary at others.  The book shines when it has Suvorin telling his story in large stretches over drinks in his favorite café late into the night.  And it’s a good story, of how he was a leading Russian pianist who gave up his position out of an irrational but very real dislike—a violent dislike, bordering on rage—of . . . wait for it . . . applause at the end of a concert piece.
 
"The final note, it hasn’t even completely faded yet—and immediately you get screaming, noise, people shouting bravo.  Not a moment of quiet, not even half a second.  What ignorant people!  What barbarians!  No last reverberation, no lingering in that last echo, no trepidation, wonder, not a hint of abandon in those who had been listening.  . . .  What kind of people are they who, after a sonata by Schubert, the late one in B minor for example, completed two months before his death, break out into cheers?"
 
It’s a good point, but can you build a novel around it?  Actually, this author could.  But he didn’t, in my view, largely because that wasn’t enough of a challenge.  Rather than write clearly enough that we can all follow, he muddies the rest of the tale with ambiguities of every sort.  Eventually we do see that Suvorin happily served the rest of his days—after the authorities in Moscow relieved him of his career—playing at night in bars in places like Vienna.  But even that part of the story is denied us: It’s in the past when our unnamed narrator meets Suvorin living out his days alone, missing his deceased wife, but enjoying his talks with he-who-shall-go-unnamed.  And when our correspondent returns from six months away from Vienna, Suvorin is nowhere to be found.
 
I don’t think Wondratschek’s back catalogue is in danger of extensive further translation.  But the failure of this foray into works-in-translation convinced me to write about the singular phenomenon of Patrick Modiano.
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Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

11/25/2020

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Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014.  He writes in French, and for the next several years a small cadre of translators went to work producing English versions of all his novels.  I believe the one who has translated the most is Mark Polizzotti.  His work on one of the early translations, a book of long stories called Suspended Sentences, was one of the first to market and I fell hard for this talented writer.  Unfortunately, I must have lent that one to somebody and couldn’t find it in the bookcase.  So I picked one off the stack I hadn’t yet read.
 
Like most of Modiano’s novels, Sleep of Memory is really a novella, this one particularly slim at something like 22,000 words by my estimate.  Like many of his books, it uses first-person narration, and here he blurs the line between the protagonist narrator and the writer himself; it thus reads in places like autobiography, or historical fiction in which the protagonist is the narrator.  Another familiar factor is the setting—Paris, in the years following the Second World War—where a young man is trying to make sense of what happened to him and his parents in the war, and where to go from here.  All this is Modiano’s home turf, and you can almost hear Édith Piaf on the soundtrack.
 
We first meet Mireille Ourousov, a woman staying in his mother’s abandoned apartment, where he lives a sort of latch-key teenager’s life in Paris in the early ‘60s with her friend, Jacques de Baviére.  Then comes Geneviève Dalàme, whom he meets in a café as he wanders in the still-dark mornings, and who lives in a hotel in the 13th and works at Polydor Studios.  He gives her a copy of
A la mémoire d'un ange by Gabrielle Veraldi, and she introduces him to a middle-aged woman, Madeleine Péraud, who lives in a high-ceilinged salon with tall windows in the Vale-de-Grâce.  Dalàme urges him to speak with Péraud about “the meetings.”
 
“One evening, she placed on the red sofa between Geneviève Dalame and me a volume called Meetings with Remarkable Men.  Today, fifty years later, that title and the word ‘meetings’ make me think of something that had never occurred to me: Unlike many people my age, I never tried to meet the four or five intellectual guides who dominated university life in those days, or become their disciple. Why?  In my capacity as an absentee student, it would have been natural for me to seek out a mentor, living as I did in a state of solitude and confusion.”
 
As he walks Geneviève home that night, she repeats more than once about Pèraud, “You really should talk to her about it,” sounding anxious even.  “She’ll get you up to speed . . .”
 
A few days later, he rides the bus with Geneviève to her work at Polydor Studios, then heads to the Val-de-Grâce to see Péraud.  “I read the book you lent me . . . I’d already heard of it.”  A friend he’d known in boarding school had parents who were in a group that met with its author, G.I. Gurdjieff, in the Haute-Savoie, and he’d met a few of his disciples.  She reacts to all this with a worried expression.  And she urges him to get Geneviève Dalàme to come live there, in the salon apartment, and he can come live there, too. “We must help Geneviève,” she says, in a tone “so serious that she ended up convincing me Geneviève Dalàme was in imminent danger.”  What that danger might be is unclear.
 
Until we turn the page, and a new chapter begins:
 
“Six years later, I was walking along Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, near the Mosque and the wall surrounding the botanical gardens.  A woman was walking ahead of me, holding a little boy by the hand.  Her nonchalant gait reminded me of someone.  I couldn’t help staring at her.

​I quickened my pace and caught up to the woman and little boy.  I turned toward her.  Geneviève Dalàme.  We hadn’t seen each other in those six years.  She smiled at me as if we’d just parted company the day before.”
 
Modiano is reported to have said that he has felt as if he were writing the same book over and over again.  This, I think, is because the books don’t rely much on plot, are mostly set in Paris and environs, and are about a man who’s lived a life very much like his own.  He has developed a distinctive and intriguing style he’s comfortable in, and so are his readers.  But many great writers explore over and over the place they grew up in, or lived their adult lives in, or both: Russo gives us Central Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, Richard Ford gives us Coastal Maine or New Jersey, Paul Auster gives us New York City, Colm Tóibín gives us Enniscorthy.  Because the plots and characters change, they don’t feel like the same book.  With Modiano, the plots are generally so light, the protagonists are largely himself, and the other characters are those who peopled his life during his teenage years during the war, and beyond.  And we feel them, and their world, like nobody’s business.
 
But there are exceptions.  Sundays in August, from 1986, is set in Nice on the French Riviera and reads more like a traditional crime novel than the others.  It opens with the protagonist spotting a character from his shady past hawking leather coats on the Promenade des Anglais, on his way to meeting up with a lover who’s wearing the huge stolen jewel they are trying to offload on some wealthy but unsuspecting tourist.  Little Jewel, from 1992, features a female protagonist and narrator, who spots her long-lost mother—or is it her mother, and is that the same yellow coat she’s wearing?—on the Paris metro.  She follows her, of course, into an overdue examination of everything that matters.  

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The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

10/12/2020

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I don’t know how it was received in 2004, but in 2020 Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America reads like The Great American Novel of Our Times—a book written for our present moment.  It tells the tale of an American celebrity politician, Charles A. Lindbergh, who consorts with the Nazi government in the run up to World War II to keep America out of it.  With the pacifist agenda of staying out of the war, Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the 1940 election, and deals with American Jews in his own way—installing government programs designed to “assist” them to “assimilate” into the broader American society.
 
At the center of the story is the Roth family, and the narrator-protagonist is young Philip.  After Lindbergh is elected, the family takes a trip to Washington, DC to see the monuments, and hears half-hushed comments from strangers about the “loudmouth Jew” father who likes Roosevelt and can’t stop saying so, openly to his children in what’s now decidedly Lindbergh country.  After that the older teenage brother, Sandy, a gifted artist, is “invited” by a government program to spend a summer working on a farm in Kentucky.  He returns with tales of eating pork, harvesting the tobacco crop, loving all of it and thinking Lindbergh is the answer.  Alvin, the even-older cousin who lives with the Roths after losing his own parents, doesn’t trust anything about Lindbergh; he travels to Canada and signs up to fight Hitler and the Nazis in the European theater.  Young Philip isn’t sure what to think, given that his father is vehemently opposed to Lindbergh, seeing him as a Nazi collaborator who has it in for America’s Jews.
 
Into the family circle comes one Rabbi Bengelsdorf, an official in the Lindbergh administration who helped Lindbergh get elected by “koshering Lindbergh to the goyim,” as Alvin had put it, preaching in the largest temples about his confidence in the candidate’s bona fides toward America’s Jews.  Philip’s aunt—his mother’s sister—now works for and eventually marries the much older Bengelsdorf, all of which adds to the many cross-currents that are confusing young Philip and tearing the family apart.
 
"A rabbi was a rabbi, but Alvin meanwhile was [battling] Hitler, and in my own house—where I was supposed to wear anything except my good clothes—I had to put on my one tie and my one jacket to impress the very rabbi who helped to elect the president whose friend was Hitler."
 
In short order, Lindbergh’s government assists in the rejuvenation of the German-American Bund, a formerly pro-Nazi organization now trimmed out as an anti-Communist movement, “as anti-Semitic as before, openly equating Bolshevism with Judaism in propaganda handouts and harping on the number of ‘prowar Jews’” in a rally that fills Madison Square Garden, featuring lapel buttons reading “KEEP AMERICA OUT OF THE JEWISH WAR”.
 
All of which leads, eventually, to a government-sanctioned forced-relocation of American Jews across the land.  As Walter Winchell, the muckraking lone voice in the American media’s treatment of the Lindbergh administration, has been saying all along:
 
"Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.  Let’s go to press! Flash! To the glee of rat-faced Joe Goebbels and his boss, the Berlin Butcher, the targeting of America’s Jews by the Lindbergh fascists is officially under way.  The phony moniker for phase one of organized Jewish persecution in the land of the free is ‘Homestead 42’.  . . . Two hundred and twenty-five Jewish families have already been told to vacate the cities of America’s northeast in order to be shipped thousands of miles from family and friends.  This first shipment has been kept strategically small in order to escape national attention.  Why? Because it marks the beginning of the end for the four and a half million American citizens of Jewish descent. The Jews will be scattered far and wide to wherever Hitlerite America Firsters flourish."
 
It doesn’t stop there.  The plot thickens, hordes of hooligans appear everywhere, a few patriots here and there.  A long, rambling account is given by our young narrator, Philip, of what he did and thought and dreamed to cloud out the seemingly endless nightmare he was living through.
 
Positioned at the end of the novel is a nearly thirty-page Postscript, which helpfully separates fact from fiction, with true accounts of all the primary historic players, and shorter notes on other real persons who figure in the narrative.
 
Finally, a request.  I’ve dipped into Roth’s catalogue only a few times.  The first was American Pastoral, which on one level is a baseball book and on another his best work, according to some. I didn’t get through it, for whatever reason.  Later, I did enjoy both Everyman and The Ghost Writer, and the experience of reading The Plot Against America has me looking for another in the near future.  Any recommendations out there?  Just hit the Comment button (or write me an email) and let me know.

 
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Want, by Lynn Steger Strong

10/12/2020

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This is the second novel, after the excellent Hold Still, from a young writer who lives and teaches writing in New York.  The protagonist, Elizabeth, is also a young writer, as well as a high-school teacher and grad student, living in the boroughs.  Steger Strong knows contemporary New York as well as anybody writing fiction today, and getting one’s fix without a scary flight in a pandemic is worth the price of admission.  But the sights you’ll see won’t be those you’d pick on vacation.
 
Elizabeth is a mother with two very young girls, three or four teaching jobs, and a husband who gave up working for the big bucks after Lehman Brothers imploded and the markets crashed.  He now installs cabinets and other renovations for people with homes like he (and his family) will never live in after making that life-changing career choice.  But it was a decision they both supported, and they love each other and their kids, all of which is a good thing because they have landed in bankruptcy court, buried in debt as the book opens.
 
As Elizabeth learns to live without money or credit cards, she looks back on her relationship with Sasha.  They had been great friends in their early-twenties, lounging around the boroughs’ bars, Sasha entertaining the men she attracted while Elizabeth read novels stashed in her purse.  Elizabeth sees Sasha in such attractive terms, I wondered if there had been more to their relationship, or would be.
 
After the bankruptcy, Elizabeth’s parents invite her to bring the babies to Long Island for a stay while her husband does a job and school is out.  “I don’t want to say yes and know that it won’t go well,” she tells us as she mulls it over.

"My parents came from nothing and worked hard for their money, which also meant they thought anyone who was not also successful was not successful because they did not work hard enough.  They loved us, tracked every grade and track meet . . .  .  Food was good but not-thin was disgusting.  Flaws were fine but not ever when others might see."
 
                                                                    *  *  *
 
"I was depressed is a clear, clean thing that I can say that might explain things.  That my dad probably was too was not ever discussed.  My whole life, I’d watched as he got sad and quiet and my mom yelled at him and he left the room and did not talk again for days.  . . . [I would] beg him later—when she yelled again and he walked out of the house, standing in the backyard, locking himself in the garage, pulling the car over so he could get out and walk along the highway—not to leave."
 
                                                                    *  *  *
 
"We spend a week not really talking."
 
Elizabeth lives her life with all this negative patrimony, and with the weight of the choices she and her husband have made bearing down on them.
 
For the most part, Elizabeth lives her professional life far better than her private one.  Her work with high school students from poor backgrounds is rendered in quiet tones and occasional glimpses of a teacher worth her salt.  She cares far more for her students, and her own babies, than herself.  But she has great difficulty concentrating on her work with high schoolers, with the weight of her family’s circumstances bearing down on her.  She buys books she can’t afford, and ducks out on her duties when the students don’t need her and nobody will notice.
 
The novel is full of spot-on descriptions, not only of what it feels like to be this Elizabeth, but what it feels like to be her parents, and Sasha, and others around her.  The narrative arc is a little thin, but the point the novel makes is there at the end.  In the main, this is a story of how hard it can be for one generation to follow another into a life that is anything like comparable financially.  Elizabeth’s parents are part of a post-war generation that encountered a world of opportunity; their adult children can face a very different world indeed.  All of them overlook all this at their peril.


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Book Club Anyone?

10/11/2020

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The next review is not yet written.  But fifty pages into Self Portrait with Russian Piano by Wolf Wondratschek, I thought I'd preview a book I'll feature next month, which has the look of a real winner.  Shades of Julian Barnes’s wonderful The Noise of Time, except the Russian at its center lives, like so many, in Vienna; and unlike Shostakovich, this entirely fictional protagonist here is not a composer but a concert pianist, looking back on his long career and life.  Ethan Hawke, fresh off performing the audio recording of Kerouac’s Big Sur and writing in last week’s New York Times Book Review, says its author, Wolf Wondratschek, “has matured in ways Kerouac never did.  This novel is at once egoless, sly, profound, funny, authentic and utterly mysterious—without ever seeming to break a sweat.”
 
It’s a short novel, not to be gobbled up but savored.  If you’re in, click on Comment below (or write me at MatthewGeyerWriter@gmail.com) and we can compare notes before or after I post my next batch of reviews.  Cheers.

 
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The Disappearance of Adéle Bedeau                            by Graeme Macrae Burnet

8/31/2020

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A young writer from Scotland, who has lived for a time in a string of cities I’ve long had on my Gotta-Get-There list (Prague, Porto, Bordeaux), is already a master at literary crime novels.  Graeme Macrae Burnet’s second novel, His Bloody Project, was short-listed for the Booker Prize a few years back, and while I’ve not yet read that one, the book that preceded it is a great piece of work.
 
In his debut novel, The Disappearance of Adéle Bedeau, which was originally published by a very small house then republished following the Booker business,* Burnet carefully constructs the interior architecture of two characters we’d have to call protagonists here.  One is the subject of a criminal investigation, Manfred Baumann, who was orphaned early in life and became a bank manager in the backwater of Saint-Louis; and the other is Inspector Georges Gorski, chief homicide investigator who also grew up in this humble little burg.  Both Baumann and Gorski—they share the point-of-view in Burnet’s skillful telling—are people to root for, even though one comes under suspicion for a long-ago crime he may not have committed if mature intent is one of the elements, and the other can’t seem to shed a wife who so clearly seems to deserve it at times.
 
The beauty of the book, for me, is its unerring balance of literary and crime fiction elements.  Wonderful renderings of the interior lives of both men are balanced with the unspooling of plot lines that drive crime fiction.  Free of the excessive factoids and buried clues all too common in detective stories that never really get inside any of the characters, but just lay out clues as if fashioning a crossword puzzle, here the investigation is free to become one of not just whodunit, but who these two people really are . . . and how they resemble so many of us inside.  Allusions to the character studies common in works by Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye) and many others may be useful.**  This is the crime fiction I’m interested in.  (Click on Comment below to shout out your own favorites.)
 
The principal driver of the crime fiction plot is, of course, the event noted in the title.  Baumann is questioned because he hangs out in the restaurant where Adéle worked, and left just after she did on the night she was last seen.  In the process of answering questions about anything he saw or heard, he tells an innocent falsehood that turns out to plague him when Inspector Gorski can’t understand how it could be true or why Manfred would lie about it.  It’s a complete irrelevance, really—everything he could have told was discovered by the detective in short order—but because it must be a lie, he’s under a cloud of suspicion for the unresolved disappearance, which won’t lift until he comes clean.  Manfred is a man who mostly means well but can’t seem to get out of his own way, and not just in his dealings with Gorski.  And the ending is not to be forgotten.
 
Burnet is the real deal.  I will not be surprised to see him win lots more prizes in the many years of writing he has in front of him.  His third novel, The Accident on the A35, is another Inspector Gorski novel that two of my favorite sources rave about, and it’s waiting here on the shelf.
 
*    For a hilarious send-up of Booker Prize machinations, see Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn.
 
** Examples going back many years include John Banville (writing as himself in The Book of Evidence, and as Benjamin Black in Christine Falls and others); Patricia Hightower (The Talented Mr. Ripley; Strangers on a Train; and The Price of Salt, renamed “Carol” for the film version); Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest); Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear and Brighton Rock); Caleb Carr (The Alienist); John Fowles (The Collector) and Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).
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    Matthew Geyer

    Matthew Geyer is the author of two novels, Strays (2008) and Atlantic View (2020). ​.

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