What I Read in December 2012

John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. I had thought I was pretty good with numbers, but Paulos would like to get me onto a higher plane with logarithms and probability. His ideas are worthwhile and most of his complaints are valid, but he is a bit of a scold.

Laura Lippman, Charm City. Tess Monaghan continues to develop her skills as a private investigator in Baltimore — “charm city.” If you are following the series, this is the book in which Tess acquires Esskay, the rescue greyhound. She also has a boy friend but that relationship is not working out as well as the one with the dog.

Philip Roth, The Counterlife. The two Zuckerman brothers grow up together in New Jersey. Henry becomes a dentist; Nathan becomes a famous novelist. One lives, one dies. Two live, two die. Lives are exchanged, lives are fantasized. Characters are created, characters die, characters just up and leave.

Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott. Another biography of the 19th century author, read as part of my continuing preparation for my ABC course: Alcott, Boston, Concord.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale. Wry 1930s novel about love and the literary life. No, not love exactly, but gentility and what it permits the class-bound characters to know of love.

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I like Hardy and his stories of country people, people who are not so simple as they may first appear. Still, life goes hard for his characters. They may be the authors of their own doom, but does it need to be so bad?

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins. One of Alcott’s books for young people, written several years after her very successful Little Women. One girl, Rose, plus seven Campbell boys make up the eight cousins. The sequel, Rose in Bloom, follows Rose into young womanhood.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street. Life in Gopher Prairie is not easy for a young wife who does not know what she wants, but does know that she can’t find it in this dusty small town in the upper Midwest.

Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria ha Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years. Some promoter must have written that subtitle. Nevertheless, this story of malaria convinces me that malaria has been important in human history and is not going to away any more than the mosquito is going to go away.

Tea and Books Challenge

I am joining The Book Garden’s Tea and Books challenge in 2012. As you can see in the quote, no cup of tea is large enough or book is long enough. For more information and to join the challenge, click here.

My local Ex Libris book group is taking on some very long ones during the coming year. My contributions to the challenge will be The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Both are new and unfamiliar authors for me — should be fun. Expect to find comments here as I read, with links to others in the challenge.

Roses and Cousins

By1875, when Louisa May Alcott wrote Eight Cousins, she was well-known as the author of Little Women, and her books for children were in demand. Eight Cousins tells the story of orphaned Rose Campbell who goes to live under the care of her Uncle Alec and in close proximity with seven male Campbell cousins (1 Rose + 7 boys = 8 cousins) and six aunts.

The book reprises many of the themes of Little Women – the love of a close family, the pleasures of innocent fun, the importance of learning self control – but the tone is more straight-laced. Rose is no Jo March, and does not rebel against Uncle Alec’s strictures of no coffee, no corsets, plenty of fresh air and exercise. Alcott takes a few swipes at education also.

“I’ve been at boarding school nearly a year, and I’m almost dead with lessons. The more I did, the more Miss Power gave me, and I was so miserable I ‘most cried my eyes out. Papa never gave me hard things to do, and he always taught me so pleasantly I loved to study.”

Good Uncle Alec takes over Rose’s education in all branches, and her lively boy cousins take over her social life. The strength of the book is in the children. The older generation are mostly stock characters: remote Uncle Mac, hypochondriacal Aunt Myra, benevolent Aunts Peace and Plenty. Still, it all moves along briskly enough and we enjoy seeing Rose gradually transformed from a timid and sad little girl into a lively teenager, unafraid of all those male cousins and more than ready to join in the fun.

The sequel, Rose in Bloom written the following year, is less successful. Rose, now twenty, has been taken off to Europe for travel and culture, and returns a young woman. The oldest of the cousins are potential marriage partners, so the plot of the book becomes rather standard Victorian romance. Who will marry whom? Since the course of true love never does run smooth, we can expect some difficulties. One of the difficulties is that Rose is rich.

The heiress was the attraction to most of the young men whom she met. Good fellows enough, but educated, as nearly all are nowadays, to believe that girls with beauty or money are brought to market to sell or buy as the case may be.

Most bothersome — for me at least — is Rose’s continued dependence of Uncle Alec to form her character. She constantly seeks his approval even as he claims to stand back and let her learn from her own experiences. Rose cannot buy the shimmering opal silk for a new gown because Uncle Alec has taught her that it would be better to be charitable with resources. As said, Rose is no Jo March.

The silk gown is as close as Rose comes to temptation, but one cousin at least is not so fortunate. Most of the characters in the story express the conventional hope that the love of a good woman will show him the right path — no wine at parties — and keep him there. Alcott is a strong enough writer to do a small twist on that expectation and get away with it.

Sonia Shah, The Fever

The cover of Sonia Shah’s The Fever declares “How MALARIA Has RULED MANKIND for 500,000 YEARS.” Emphatic enough, but not altogether true. Some of us have been ruled but others have mostly escaped. At any rate, malaria and mosquitoes and their human targets have evolved together. Forget the big number — 500,000 — and limit yourself to the most recent 25,000 and the story is still very impressive. As we have changed ecology by draining swamps, building dams, cutting trees and plowing the land we have also changed the mosquitoes’ habitats, encouraging and discouraging the various breeds. Some species transmit malaria to humans, while other do not. Some prefer other animals but will bite people if nothing else is available. Besides more than one species of mosquito and we also more than one variety of malaria. The situation is complex.

Shah spells this out in perhaps more detail than some readers want, but she makes her point. Her description of the various forms the malaria parasite takes during his life cycle convinced me I do not have the patience to pursue that kind of essential research.

The best chapter in the book is “The Karma of Malaria.” Step aside and look at the big picture: the perceptions of the people on the ground who cannot completely avoid mosquitoes and malaria.

 In their lived experience they know that the overwhelming majority of the parasite’s incusions are trivial. Most of the time, carrying the parasite means next to nothing: no fever, no chills, no readily discernible symptons, especially against a gray backdrop of other, more pressing ailments.

This attitude has consequences for the results of campaigns to eradicate malaria.

Most of the ways we’ve devised to destroy malaria rely upon the committed participation of malaria’s victims. It is they who must drain the standing water, swat the mosquitoes, wear the repellant, sleep under the bed nets, go to the clinics, and take the drugs.

Anti-malaria campaigns which fail or are abruptly discontinued because of budget problems may make the victims’ experience worse, by causing them to lose the temporary immunity given by previous mild infections. Shah also writes knowledgeably of past and present drugs, as well as the politics of malaria. Welcome to the fight. My money is on the mosquito.

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

I am preparing a course devoted to 19th-century writer Louisa May Alcott, her life and times. Her best-known book is, of course, Little Women. This story of the four March sisters– Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy–was published in 1868 and is still in print today.

Any book which can hold reader interest for almost 150 years must speak to universal values and concerns. One of the sessions of my course will be devoted to the story of this book. I have summarized my Little Women discoveries in a slide show which you can access here.

I’ll be adding more Louisa May Alcott material to the Pages section of this blog.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

Cakes and Ale starts out as a tale of literature and litterateurs: the writers and promoters of writers in London in the early 1930s. Each critique has me wondering, which popular writer is he talking about now?

The most shining characteristic of Alroy Kear was his sincerity. No one can be a humbug for five-and-twenty years. Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job…. Though I have finished few of his novels, I have begun a good many, and to my mind his sincerity is stamped on every one of their multitudinous pages.

Maugham’s story evolves into something much more interesting, as hinted by the otherwise inappropriate cover shown here. 1930 was, after all, the era of trains and motor cars, so why the coach and horses? They suggest that the narrator and his literary friends are stuck in concepts of gentility from an earlier day. Ashenden, the narrator, recalls his childhood in the Blackstable vicarage:

No one thought her [my aunt] a snob. It was accepted as perfectly reasonable. The banker had a little boy of my own age, and, I forget how, I became acquainted with him. I still remember the discussion that ensued when I asked if I might bring him to the vicarage; permission was reluctantly given me, but I was not allowed to go in return to his house. My aunt said I’d be wanting to go to the coal merchant’s next….

Blackstable does indeed have a local coal merchant who is called, in jest, Lord George because he is so grand in his dress and manners. Blackstable also has a local writer, not respected because his father was a Miss Wolfe’s bailiff and he has married a bar maid. Ah, the bar maid — there’s a character to set your class teeth on edge — and she is perfectly charming.

Driffield, the writer who married the bar maid, later becomes subject to gentrification by his second wife. His biographer now needs to purge Driffield’s earlier life of unsuitable tendencies.

“Do you remember what he sang?”

“Perfectly, ‘All Through Stickin’ to a Soljer’ and ‘Come Where the Booze is Cheaper’ were his favourites.”

“Oh!”

I could see that Roy was disappointed.

“Did you expect him to sing Schumann?” I asked.

“I don’t know why not. It would have been rather a good point. But I think I should have expected him to sing sea chanties or old English country airs, you know, the sort of thing they used to sing at fairings–blind fiddlers and the village swains dancing with the girls on the threshing floor and all that sort of thing. I might have made something rather beautiful out of that, but I can’t see Edward Driffield singing music-hall songs. After all, when you’re drawing a man’s portrait you must get the values right….”

The story is perfectly ironic. The fashionable biographer places his subject in an English-village style of life known only through literature. The writer, who really lived that life and tried to tell it true, can no longer be seen as what he was. Cakes and Ale is a morality story of how our class limitations control our understandings of both life and literature.

Philip Roth, The Counterlife

The Counterlife is one of Roth’s Zuckerman novels — Roth’s life, presumably, as seen through the eyes of Nathan Zuckerman.

Two Jewish brothers grow up together in New Jersey. One stays in New Jersey to become a perfectionistic dentist. The other moves to New York and becomes Nathan Zuckerman, novelist, former husband to three different gentile wives.

The fates of the two brothers can develop in a variety of ways. Henry can become impotent as a result of his heart drugs and opt for surgery and die. Henry can survive the surgery but find life disappointing and make aliyah to Israel. Nathan can become impotent as a result of his heart drugs and opt for surgery and die. Nathan does not have a heart or potency problem, but he can have a Jewish problem as he acquires a fourth gentile wife, this time English, an unborn child and an uncertain life in a new culture.

One can have a life and one can have a counterlife. It can be this way, or it can be that way. But who are these characters, Henry and Nathan? Are they any more real than Maria? Maria is a slippery one. She may be Henry’s great lost love who returned to Switzerland. She may be Nathan’s potential love, the woman from upstairs. She may also be Nathan’s English wife, his effort to achieve the normal encumbrances of a wife and a house and a child. Maria has had enough to dancing to Nathan’s tune.

What I’m saying is that all the way back on page 73 I saw where you were preparing to take us, and should have got myself up and out before  your plane even landed, let alone rushing to the airport to catch you sky-high still on the Holy Land.

Maria wants out of Nathan’s obsessions with Jews, with being Jewish, with his brother Henry, with her impossible family — all created so that he can make his points, not hers.

To be a Jew at Grossinger’s is obviously a bit of a bore–but in England being Jewish turns out to be difficult and just what you consider fun. People tell you, There are restrictions, and you’re in your element again. You revel in restrictions. But the fact is that as far as the English are concerned, being Jewish is something you very occasionally apologize for and that’s it.

Henry — the living dentist not the born-again Israeli — also does not want to continue being a character is Zuckerman’s books, as he takes it upon himself to destroy the Henry-life Nathan has depicted. Books with multiple or ambiguous endings sometimes irritate me, but this one, where the novelist’s characters turn on him and destroy his work, is just right.

Neither Gone nor Forgotten

I am aroused by an article in this morning’s Salon: “A Fond Farewell to the Hard-Wired Phone.” It’s not farewell in our house yet in part because, when everything else shuts down during one of our storms, the landline phone still works. Also, in second part, I wear hearing aids and landline phones work better with them than with any cell phone or VOIP system. (Those systems may be designed by 20-year-olds who don’t want to talk with their grandmothers if they can help it.)

What’s neat about the article is not the headline but the wonderful series of pictures showing the evolution of the telephone over the years. I find there the first telephone in my memory. It was a candlestick phone in the hall at home. When you picked up the heavy receiver a voice said, “Operator. Number please.” This was a signal to giggle and hang up quickly.

By the time I could actually use a telephone, dials had come in. For years my parents had a phone like the “1938 classic 302″ shown. 1938, Hah! That phone was still in service when we sold my parents’ house in 1992. Which proves that those phones were built to last. They were heavy, impenetrable by small or even large children. Ma Bell had to service the phones (they owned them) so they made them really tough.

Which reminds me of Doris. All phones of my childhood were basic black and only black. In the early 1950s when colored phones came in, my friend Doris lusted after a beige phone. She said some fee to Ma Bell. Ma Bell continued to own the phone, but Doris was assured she was buying the right to color for the rest of her life. So when she moved house, Doris unplugged the phone from the old house, plugged it into the new location and called the phone company to tell them where their beige phone had gone. She was severely rebuked for messing with their equipment.

If you are still enjoying the Salon picture show, take a look at the “1965 Trimline phone,” described as “the last of the standard telephone designs created before the Bell System break-up.” Maybe the last design, but not the last phone. I have two of them, one of which I just bought recently for $9.95. I plugged it in. It works fine.

Laura Lippman, Charm City

I like a mystery series with a female investigator and a strong sense of place. Count me in for Sue Grafton’s A, B, C books set in a fictional version of Santa Barbara. I also enjoy Sara Paretsky’s stories set in Chicago. Books about smart women who know where they are really appeal to me.

I read the first f Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series several years ago, Baltimore Blues, and immediately added her to my list. My method for dealing with these series is crude. I see a book in the library or at a book sale. I buy it and read it. Other than liking to begin at the beginning, I don’t insist on chronological order. So sometimes I wonder who these characters are and why everyone (in the book) seems to know them, while I don’t.

This brings me to Esskay the dog. In many of the books Tess has a rescue greyhound dog with an affectionate nature and an undiscriminating appetite. Actually dogs are useful in the investigating business — people talk to people with dogs. Where did this animal come from? She was not in Baltimore Blues. Now, thanks to a good connection on BookMooch, I have the second book in the series, Charm City. Here appears Esskay, and I like her very much.

I have to take her home… We’ll figure something out. If Spike wanted me to take care of this dog, there must be a reason.

Smugly now, the dog took her position in the back seat, insisting on standing, just as she had the first night Tess had taken her home. But this time, Esskay was more firmly rooted, holidng her stance on the turns. A week ago, a day ago, even five minutes ago, Tess had firmly believed dogs could not smile. Yet this one was practically leering in her delight.

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

Having finished the third novel of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, I am trying to have some feeling for the series and where Powell is going with it. These are books which, like the great Victorian novels and like Proust’s meditations on time, don’t want to get there too fast. Middle-class Victorians were literate and had servants to give them some free time, but had no radio or television or Internet or 24-hour shopping malls. They wanted mileage from a book, for those long evenings when someone read aloud. Like them, Powell wants to slow us down. He seems to be saying that as we move through time we cannot really know what we have experienced until time has moved us along, past the experience.

And we cannot experience as other than we are. Mrs. Erdleigh, the fortune teller, explains this to Jenkins.

‘You expect too much, and yet you are also too resigned. You must try to understand life.’

Somewhat awed by this searching, even severe analysis, I promised I would do better in future.

‘People can only be themselves,’ she said. ‘If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.’

‘That is what I should like them to be.’

Jenkins tries, he does try to understand but cannot rise above his distaste for the ambitious Widmerpools of this world. His failure to understand is part of the story. Proust — and here too I have not moved beyond the first quarter or so of his oeuvre — who also seeks to understand people seems rather broader in his range. Proust is more of a sensualist. Jenkins eats and drinks but we have little sense of the experience itself, only of the effects. One may be drunk, but what did it taste like? With Proust you know; Powell does not ask the question.