Enchanted Prose

Romance, danger, and the practice of medicine “at the edge of the world” (Grand Canyon National Park, present day): After thirty years as a private practice family physician and teaching at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine, Sandra Cavallo Miller set out to fill the gap of not enough fiction featuring female doctors and family/community medicine, writing a series of three entertaining Dr. Abby Wilmore medical mystery novels. What the River Said, the third and final installment, is the focus of this review; the other books also cited. Each can stand alone.

Since I had the opportunity to read all three – fast reads averaging 225 pages – I’m confident you can read What the River Said all by itself. You will, though, miss some of the details of the romantic relationship between Abby and Dr. John Pepper when she joins the Grand Canyon Clinic at the South Rim.

The national park setting, also not common in novels, enables Miller to infuse her hobbyist passions in volcanology – for ancient geology like the Park’s limestone “over two hundred million years old” – and astronomy’s “intricate stars” and planets. Allowing her to also strike the right balance between medicine and the healing powers of Nature. A balance between practical, preventative, and challenging running a medical clinic in a place overrun by tourists (nearly six million prior to the pandemic) – meaning Abby and Pepper have a lot of emergencies on their hands – and escaping reality to inhale geological wonders and the mysteries of the unknown.

By creating a female character who “finds solace fleeing in the infinities,” who needs to find a balance between work and play, and has anxieties and vulnerabilities like us, Miller makes sure we’re invested in what happens to Abby. Which means we’re also invested in Pepper, since this medical and nature story and series is also a heartwarming romance. Both feel they’ve failed relationships so they’re cautious, sometimes sending wrong messages about how they really feel. Enter Pepper’s cute “stick-figure” cartoons Abby adopts to add lightness and heart.

By Book 3, Abby and Pepper have become one half of each other’s heart that must be together to feel and stay alive. What the River Said poses the greatest danger to the couple as too many tourists and campers are dying of cardiac arrest, mysterious and suspicious until they start figuring out why but don’t know who is the cause. So much of the flirty, sexual tension in Book 1, The Color of Rock, turns into a different type of tension in Book 3 to the point they almost “never relaxed, never let down their guards, always mindful of where the other walked or drove or sat . . . they orbited each other like double planets, linked by this strange gravity.” They’ve gone from a budding, playful romance to living together, from attraction to a deep, caring, protective, tender love. (Book 2, Where Light Comes and Goes is the exception. Abby and Pepper are apart; she’s accepted a summer job at Yellowstone National Park to decide if she’s ready for commitment.)

The prose has a natural rhythm that’s pleasant to digest, considering something suspenseful happens in every chapter. It’s also poetic when it comes to Miller’s nature writing. She’s a poet too.

One takeaway, among many, is that family/community medicine is a balancing act, necessitating wearing other professional hats: “Roles as a counselor, an orthopedist, a gastroenterologist, and an otolaryngologist.” All on view, packing a lot in without seeming to.

A colorful cast of clinic staff characters send a message about the importance of teamwork. Dependable, competent nurse Dolores, the oldest, isn’t quirky like the other two. Assistant Marcus, exceptionally calm under pressure, is a godsend remembering everything patients tell him at the front desk that he tells Abby. He manages to work alongside the thorn in the group, Priscilla, secretary/receptionist. She adds a humorous tone to the hectic clinic, dressing in inappropriate, outrageous, low-cut tops to attract handsome Dr. Pepper who “talks with his eyes as much as his words,” despite knowing he and Abby are a thing.

Two new characters add storylines and depth to relationships. One is Maddie, fifteen-year-old niece of Pepper who adores him and desperately needs to escape her terribly dysfunctional home for a few summer weeks; her mother is Pepper’s sister who drives him nuts. He tries to hide his angst from Abby, but that only goes so far. Both are very uneasy about the prospect of having this teenager come live with them after all the bad things her mother has said about her, and their inexperience of being role models to a child, let alone a supposedly out-of-control adolescent. Who surprises and delights everyone by turning into a bright spot when trouble happens.

The other is Abby’s patient whom Maddie befriends. A female farrier for mules, not horses. (A farrier works with the hooves of horses and mules and knows some blacksmithing, but a blacksmith is solely concerned with the metal on the hoof. Had to look that one up!) Presented as rare for a farrier to be a woman, Miller shows the struggles of women in male-dominated jobs, and hints at the use of mules, not horses, at the Grand Canyon. 

There’s a second mystery haunting Abby, involving a missing woman, Heidi, she met running on one of the Park’s trails to clear her head. She works at the Kolb Studio, bringing out history dating back to the early 1900s when the Kolb brothers opened up a photography studio that closed in the 1970s. The building was renovated about ten years ago, now a bookstore perched right at the edge Miller writes so atmospherically about.

The Grand Canyon National Park is a place where someone could commit suicide by jumping off a ledge. Miller reminding us of innocent tourists taking selfies or not watching where they’re going plunging to their deaths, and warning visitors to have your wits about you out in the steep, unpredictable wilderness. At 7,000 feet above sea level at the South Rim. (8,000 at the North Rim.) And, when hiking some of the Park’s famous trails, like South Kaibab and Bright Angel Trails.

Beware of stress fractures; not carrying enough water and food; ignoring your diabetes or other health conditions; formidable weather; feeding squirrels – squirrel bites more frequent than you think – and the list goes on and on.

Sometimes the stress causes Abby to have panic attacks. Not what we expect in doctors we trust. Yet almost everyone trusts Abby (except ornery and angry patients) since she’s so competent, caring, and puts her patients’ needs before her own, though she constantly questions herself. Sometimes, not wanting to burden Pepper, she reaches back into her past for support from her friend/advisor/therapist Lucy, with whom she worked with in Phoenix, from where she’s fled. A sixty-year-old gynecologist, she understands women’s moods. Abby also seeks out her “telephone psychologist,” Dr. Karen Goh.

Abby knows when people get sick they’re not their best selves. Miller’s novels delve into “what makes a good person and what makes a bad person, why some people are kind and others turn mean.”

 “Welcome to Family Medicine.”

Lorraine

What happens when a biracial couple escape racism in America for France in the late 19^th century? (Paris and the Languedoc region; 1892 to 1937): The Pink Dress, the alluring painting on the cover of Christopher Tilghman’s new novel, was painted by French artist Frédéric Bazille just twenty years before Thomas and Beal in the Midi begins.

Thomas Bayly and Beal Terrell are characters from two of Tilghman’s earlier novels set on the Eastern shore of Maryland: Mason’s Retreat and The Right-Hand Shore. Adeptly weaving in the couple’s backstory on Thomas’ family estate and farm on the Chesapeake Bay, this novel reads as a stand-alone.

Seductively alive, the plot centers on finding “a place to call home” after two childhood friends fall in love and marry illegally since interracial marriages were banned in Maryland back then. (Shockingly, Maryland didn’t repeal the law until the late ‘60s civil rights movement.)

Thomas is twenty-one, white, and privileged; Beal is nineteen, black, and her ancestors were slaves. She and her mother were servants at Mason’s Retreat. When Thomas and Beal wed, they fled to France during the Belle Époque era, when the country was at peace and the arts flourished. The elegance of the prose; Beal’s elegance; Thomas’ dignified handling of Beal’s awakening; and the revolutionary spirit of their marriage suit the Beautiful Age. 

A stark contrast to the history of slavery in the bucolic and coastal Chesapeake Bay two hours outside Washington, DC known for its world-class sailing and blue crabs. But this region was also home to slaves and activists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Christopher Tilghman grew up here too and his family’s roots also go back to the 1600s, so it’s not surprising he was deeply affected by the history and landscape, infused in his writings.

Opening with another character – Madame Lucy Bernault – summoned by Thomas’ older, “austere,” sister Mary who’d been a student of the nun, to watch over Thomas and Beal, she’s waiting in Le Havre, a major port city, to meet the young couple when they disembark from their luxury ocean liner, the SS La Touraine.

In the opening line, there’s a designation after Bernault’s name: RSCJ. The Catholic Society of the Sacred Heart was founded in France in the 1800s. When Thomas and Beal immigrated to France, the “Mother House” was located in Paris. Educating poor girls was (is) its mission; Hôtel Biron, the site of their boarding school, today houses the sculpture museum, Musée Rodin.

The society’s missionary boarding schools spread to many countries, but the specific reference on page one to Lucy’s Louisiana experience teaching there introduces the religious order’s disturbing connection to slavery, bridging the gap between then and today’s reparation urgings.

As Sister Lucy watches the passengers walk down the gangplank, she first sees a chained black man, a prisoner, and thinks: “In all her years in America, the horror of American slavery had never left her.” The concept and ideal of equality are a big draw. Her intentions are full of grace and love. Throughout the novel, the couple’s friendship and gratitude for all she does is heartening. Highlighted here, in addition to the slavery messaging, as an example of the impressive research the author has fleshed out into Thomas and Beal’s story of love.

The nun is the first of many characters to behold Beal’s “solid beauty.” The “delicacy of her hands and fingers.” Her “strikingly pale eyes.” How “her dark skin was absolutely flawless.” Her tall height and wide shoulders. When she also spots an “extremely tall African man,” she humorously wonders whether “everyone in this story is a giant?” Indeed, this is a giant tale but that’s not the question she would have asked had she been on the ship and seen how the well-dressed, well-spoken, domineering man eyed Beal.

Monsieur Diallo Touré is from Senegal, “where our people are rising” he tells Beal. A diplomat in the French National Assembly, part of France’s Parliament, he gets under Beal’s skin for the arrogant assumptions he makes about her white husband. Like so much that goes through Beal’s mind, she keeps this incident secret, assuming this will be the last she’ll see of this charismatic man. But it’s not.

On page 39 of this nearly 400-page novel, Sister Lucy utters prescient words that drive Beal’s coming-of-age story: 

“Your love will be tested; otherwise, how will you ever know its depths? None of us knows what lies ahead of us. But you are brave and in love, and perhaps that’s all you will need in the end.”

Beal’s eyes are just beginning to open in a city famous for doing that. She loves the fashions that suit her elegance and beauty; early on befriends two women artists who are copyists at the Louvre, so she spends time there observing and recording her thoughts in a journal – Thomas’ idea to help her grow, also helping her fit right in the Latin Quarter where Lucy found their apartment and where artists and writers hang out.

Initially, Beal wants nothing to do with the American artists, but they’re a persistent bunch. Interestingly, during artist Bazille’s early years he hung out with pioneering artists there that led to Impressionism.

How did Tilghman find such a perfect image for his novel? Did he see the painting at the Musée d’Orsay, where it hangs?

Racism in Paris isn’t seen. The artists Beal encounters see the beauty of her “coloring,” not that she’s “colored.” Would she have been treated differently if she wasn’t beautiful?

Tilghman’s evocative and atmospheric storytelling feels old-school in the sense that he takes his time to tell it in long-flowing, often flowery prose.

Beal’s beauty is both a blessing and a curse, testing her. Male artists crave drawing and painting her; two compete for her as their muse. One is a Jewish man, Arthur Kravitz, who’s moody and angry, reminding us this was the time when the Dreyfus scandal consumed France. Again, Tighlman finds a way to bring dark history about human rights into his love story.

Do you believe there can only be one “true love, in life and literature”? The novel asks us to consider this question as both Beal and Thomas become conflicted. Thomas’s adoration and love translates into quiet patience as he wants Beal to figure out who she is and what she wants, aware she hasn’t tasted life and freedom to understand the depths of love Sister Lucy spoke of.

Meanwhile, he experiences a different type of attraction, also quiet about it, meeting and befriending a very helpful Irish bookseller, Eileen, in a Paris bookstore with a comprehensive collection of English-language books on French industries. Spending his days there, Eileen’s assistance is pivotal, sparking the second part of the novel set in the Midi: a cultural geographic region in the south of France bordering Spain, where the language spoken is called Occitan.

With roughly 100 pages remaining, the author reveals a spoiler about the fate of Thomas and Beal in the Languedoc. I don’t intend to do that, perhaps my only quip with this thoughtful novel. Suffice it to say it shows the impact of Thomas’ kinship with his Chesapeake heritage.

The novel reflects the same effect on the author, also an English professor and Director of the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing Program. Tilghman acknowledges the resources he used to inform this gorgeous novel. No surprise it took years to craft.

Lorraine

Disintegration (Germany, 1938): Justly hailed by the publisher (and many others) as a “remarkable literary rediscovery,” The Passenger is remarkable in a number of ways.

First and foremost: for eighty years German-Jewish refugee Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s original manuscript was presumed lost like its twenty-seven-year-old author who perished during WWII, along with 361 other passengers, on a British Military Transport Ship bound for England. Released from a prison internment camp in Australia, the HMT Dunera was attacked by a German U-boat.

Discovered in an archive at the National Library in Frankfurt, Germany, the chilling historical novel was published in 1939 to little fanfare and has now been given new life at a pivotal time: when the world’s largest refugee crisis is at an all-time high, and another dangerous wave of antisemitism (and other hate crimes) is also rising dramatically.

This literary discovery is also remarkable in the sense that it feels semi-autobiographical. Boschwitz’s real story escaping Nazism pulsates in his fictionalized one in which his German-Jewish protagonist, Otto Silbermann, was living in Berlin in 1938 when The Night of Broken Glass or Kristallnacht ignited, marking the start of the Holocaust. Otto’s on the run, hopping on and off trains as a passenger on the German National rail system not knowing where to go where he’ll be safe.

Remarkably, Boschwitz’s and Otto’s perception of what was going to happen to the Jewish people was prophetic. Acclaimed writer and Distinguished Professor of Comparative literature André Aciman tells us in his succinct, informative Preface that what Otto went through in the aftermath of Kristallnacht happened before Jews were forced to wear yellow stars that humiliated and vilified them as Jews; before millions were hauled into railroad cars like cattle to be taken to concentration camps in Germany and Poland most infamously, but by the end of WWII a numbing 980 extermination camps had spread throughout Europe.

More than any novel I’ve read recently, Otto’s psychological state – his anxieties, fears, impulsivity, vacillation, disorientation, and falling apart – are revealed through dialogue that exposes the intensity of how loathed Jews were and the trauma inflicted on one’s sense of self.

Substituting the author’s true story of seeking refuge from the Nazis traveling from country to country, Silbermann travels back and forth only within Germany booking first-class, second-class, and third-class train seats unsure where the best place to blend in is. While he tries to remain calm not to call attention to himself, that lasts only so long. Otto is an astute passenger observing and eavesdropping; sometimes desperate to talk to other passengers, including a couple of men he suspects are in a similar situation and a woman he’s ridiculously attracted to. Jumping on trains from “Berlin to Hamburg, from Hamburg back to Berlin, then from Berlin to Dortmund, Dortmund to Aachen, back to Dortmund, and eventually back to Berlin,” he’s caught up in a maze of daunting dead-ends.

Throughout, he ruminates over why he didn’t escape Germany sooner. What Otto goes through is more innermost reflective, angst-ridden, and existential rather than plot-driven. Feeling trapped and frantic, he becomes crazed like a mouse in psychological experiments in which the creature is stuck going round and round on a wheel going nowhere. Some consider Ottos’ nightmare of powerlessness and hopelessness during an extraordinarily dark period in history Kafkaesque. (Interestingly, award-winning translator Philip Boehm translated one of Franz Kafka’s books, Letters to Milena).

Business is one reason Otto didn’t leave Germany. He’s even prescient in choosing scrap metal as his profession as it was sought after during WWII. What he didn’t know for over twenty years was that his partner, Becker, was anti-Semitic, playing into the stereotype of opportunistic Jews who become wealthy. The dialogue between the two men when Becker finally releases his pent up resentment and prejudices astounds Otto, and feels so real. So does Otto’s hopeful reaction: “There still have to be people who maintain their decency and humanity no what opportunities might come their way.”

An optimistic, responsible, peaceful man, he fights to retain those qualities but as he becomes lonelier, alienated, and hysterical realizing his country would do anything to destroy him and his family to erase his identity and existence those strengths unravel.

Another reason Otto doesn’t want to leave Germany is his wife, Elfriede. When the Storm Troopers (Brownshirts) invade their home, Silbermann manages to escape yet he spends the rest of the novel anguished not knowing where his wife fled. Despite not being Jewish, her life was in danger through marriage.

What’s also remarkable is the prose: so raw and fierce because it was written within days of the Kristallnacht. Words penned feverishly over warp speed, apparently in a month’s time. This isn’t historical fiction written years or decades later; it’s coming to us, hitting us, while it was happening. While our President is warning “democracy is in peril,” a few years after The Washington Post adopted a new tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Silbermann’s disbelief that what was happening was in “the middle of Europe, in the 20^th century!” descends into psychic despair and deterioration as he fully grasps Germany’s commitment to “the utter despoliation of one’s identity, of one’s trust in the world, and ultimately of one’s very humanity,” explains Aciman.

Otto’s son Eduard is stuck in Paris unable to get a visa at a time when a newspaper reports on “The Murder in Paris. Jews Declare War on the German People.” Germany’s grip is spreading across Europe. We feel it palpably.

Several people Otto encounters tell him he’s lucky no one “can tell by looking at you that you’re Jewish.” A stereotypical, offensive question, but even Otto thinks about this, often. In a particularly visceral scene, Otto is torn when his old business friend, Fritz Stein, wants to eat with him at a Berlin restaurant but frightened he’ll give them both away because of Fritz’s “Jewish nose.” Not looking like a stereotyped Jew is not Otto’s biggest asset. It’s his wealth, which he lugs around in a heavy suitcase thinking the money may come in handy to bribe German authorities.

Another stereotype is Jewish surnames. Silbermann is a German Jewish name. On a train the female passenger he’s enthralled by asks him why he doesn’t change his name. He has the money to falsify documents, but he replies: “If I give a false name I’d be breaking the law. It’s terrible. The state is practically forcing one to commit an offense.” His moral compass is admirable but when it comes to survival it’s beyond irrational. Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s stamped passports with a big red J. We can’t help but wonder if they made such life-and-death pronouncements based on stereotypes since European Christians also had Jewish surnames. 

Another distinguishing feature about the storytelling is its effective mix of first person narrative and dialogue, in addition to observations and commentary by a third-person narrator.

There’s one hope for Otto and it isn’t money. It’s dignity. “Dignity, he thought, a person has his dignity and that’s something you can’t let anyone take away.” 

Does he keep his dignity in tack? Wouldn’t that be a remarkable outcome? The reader hopes.

Lorraine

Going to extremes to drive home a message about respect, open-mindedness, and discovering who you want to be (North Baltimore, 1975): Bursting-in-song is one way to describe this enormously entertaining historical novel.

Set in 1975, a notable year for rock n’ roll music, the year John Lennon’s Rock N’ Roll album was released, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, along with George Harrison, Patti Smith, Eric Clapton, Queen. An eclectic, inclusive year too as Love Will Keep Us Together (Captain and Tenillle), Rhinestone Cowboy (Glen Campbell), Laughter in the Rain (Neil Sedaka), and James Taylor’s How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You) also came out. Music, inclusiveness, broad-mindedness are Mary Jane themes.

Jessica Anya Blau curated a playlist of the thirty-three songs in her fifth sing-its-praises novel. To give you a sense of the awakening of the novel’s main character, Mary Jane, and the uplifting feelings the reader experiences, you might want to listen to the first song on the list: Morning Has Broken, sung by Cat Stevens. The lyrics, accompanied by the beautiful Nature images in this video, match fourteen-year-old Mary Jane’s feel-good transformation during one life-changing summer:

Mary Jane Dillard’s coming-of-age story gives us an intimate look inside two very different families: Mary Jane’s very conservative, play-by-the-rules, narrow-minded, middle-class family in which the only rule is to be “obedient” and “respectable” versus the new Cone family she becomes part of when she accepts a summer job as a nanny for a precocious, precious, curly red-headed five-year-old girl, Izzy, whose family is very liberal, broad-minded, hippy-ish, and doesn’t follow conventional rules. The furthest thing from respectable if the Dillards only knew.

This multifaceted novel is fun to read. Entertaining us through music and love, humor and outrageousness, it also conveys serious messages about respect and belongingness, benevolence, tolerance, and prejudices.

The title has multiple meanings too. Foremost is the protagonist who awakens to how lonely she was in her unaffectionate family until she met the Cones. Her mother is “stiff” as an “ironing board”; her lawyer father barely aware of her. An ultra-conservative, conventional family and an off-the-charts, free-spirited one couldn’t be more extreme. Which is the point.

The two families live on the same street in the same Roland Park suburb her mother says is the “finest neighborhood in Baltimore” gives that impression from the outside, designed by the Olmstead Brothers of Central Park fame. Dig deeper and you’ll learn that this planned community was designed for whites only. Blau doesn’t have to tell us that, she shows us what “segregated politeness” looks like and then the chilling descent. Blau used to live and teach creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which explains why we feel she’s imagined this place fifty years ago authentically. From California, a Berkley grad, thus her familiarity with hippydom.

On Day 1 when sheltered Mary Jane enters Dr. and Mrs. Cone’s house to meet Izzy, her first reaction was: “Do people live like this?” Remarkably cluttered and dysfunctional unlike her orderly, regulated house, she empathizes with a little girl being brought up in this atmosphere, “a world that was different than mine,” but she doesn’t show it. Nor tell her in-command homemaker mother who loves choir music, Broadway show tunes, and plays the guitar (music their connection), immediately picking up on Izzy’s need for stability and basic nurturing like home-cooked meals Mrs. Cone seems incapable of preparing. When she shows Mary Jane Izzy’s bedroom decorated with Impeachment stickers, we’re reminded 1975 was also the year Gerard Ford was sworn in as the 38^th President after Nixon’s resignation. How utterly relevant fifty years later.

Little girl stuff is here too: nostalgic toys like Etch-A-Sketch, an Erector Set, a Snoopy poster, and stacks of coloring books. Coloring is the first activity Izzy wants to do with Mary Jane. Fine idea except the coloring book she chooses is the Human Body Coloring Book for Kids and they’re in the kitchen with Izzy’s parents! Dr. Richard Cone, a psychiatrist with “goaty sideburns,” clearly adores Izzy, but the drawings are graphic and embarrassing for an adolescent girl who’s never even kissed a boy. Grinning and bearing it, Mary Jane puts her charge’s needs above her own. Which is why Mary Jane is such a winning protagonist.

A week later the Cones’ house is “shimmering and gyrating.” Dr. Cone explains to Mary Jane “doctor-patient confidentiality” trusting her not to say a word about his famous client, Jimmy, or his famous wife, Sheba, coming to live with them so Jimmy can finally overcome his addiction. Who are Jimmy and Sheba? He’s a rock n’ roll star and she’s a long-time actress Mary Jane knows from TV. Sheba (and Mrs. Cone) dress promiscuously, and Jimmy’s shirt is always open. Who’s Mary Jane? A sweet, innocent girl who wears saddle shoes and oxfords at a private all-girls school. Hmmm.

As Dr. Cone occupies himself with Jimmy’s care and Mrs. Cone and Sheba become girlfriends, soon Izzy is calling Mary Jane and herself “snuglets,” feeling safer from a Witch. Who or what is the Witch? What we interpret is the witch is Izzy’s way of expressing her anxiety about something.

To help Jimmy withdraw from the high of drugs he consumes quantities of sweets and junk food. Do you remember the old-fashioned candy Mary Janes, still around after a century? The title could also refer to that.

Dr. Cone is ahead of his time medically approving the use of marijuana to calm Jimmy’s uncontrollable “whirly-twirly-creative-genius brain,” revealing another meaning of the title. Did you know Mary Jane stands for marijuana? That the song Mary Jane, sung by a rock artist in the late seventies, wasn’t a love ballad to a woman but to marijuana?

Between Jimmy’s “cello sounding voice,” Sheba’s voice like “notes landing on my skin like feathers,” and Mary Jane’s “gorgeous” (news to her) harmonizing voice, this unconventional group becomes “an unbreakable chain of love” – although we know chains can break. Sheba loves and accepts Jimmy, isn’t afraid to show her affections, while he’s a roller coaster of emotions and an apologetic abuser of inappropriate language and behavior. Above it all, Mary Jane feels “the thrill and intimacy of being in on things with adults.”

A page-turning set-up, but the only way the reader can appreciate its deeper meaning is to follow Mary Jane: push aside prudishness, squeamishness because that’s what Blau is asking us to do. Then you’ll see how important valuing a young adult’s “thoughts and feelings and abilities” – treating them as a “real person” – can be.

Spontaneity is ever-present. Love and Music make the novel sparkle, and dreamily could make the world go round. Ignore the Cones’ alternative lifestyle as nothing compares to the ugly prejudices of Mary Jane’s parents, newly discovered thanks to the Cones and a charismatic couple trying to find themselves in a bewildering world.

“Being a doctor makes up for being a Jew,” Mrs. Dillard says. (She doesn’t know he’s not a traditional doctor.) “What do they have to make up for?” Mary Jane asks. To which her father says Jews are “a different type of person.” He goes on to say Jewish people are “another breed of human. We’re poodles. They’re mutts”! To which Mary Jane replies to her religious family: “So Jesus was a mutt?” Mary Jane is aghast at her parents’ attitudes having studied the Holocaust, painfully realizing that “sometimes the people who kept those ideas alive were the people you lived with.”

So, which family is a Good or Bad influence?

Lorraine

Why we’re addicted to a Venetian detective (Italy, contemporary times): Can you read the 30^th book in a mystery series as a standalone?

As a new reader of Donna Leon’s long-running detective series, reading her newest, Transient Desires, the answer is a resounding YES. It’s exceedingly entertaining, atmospheric, and thoughtful all by itself, along with calming prose fitting the good-natured, gentlemanly protagonist, Guido Brunetti, Commissario or Superintendent of Venice’s civilian police force headquartered at the Questura. (You’ll also discover why legions of fans keep returning to Brunetti, year after year.)

To be sure, I went back 15 years to read Through a Glass, Darkly, then another 15 to Brunetti’s debut, Death at La Fenice. Donna Leon, an American from New Jersey, lived in Venice for thirty years. (She now lives in Switzerland.) Considering her novels have been translated into 34 languages, it’s not surprising that an entire industry has sprung up inspired by them. You too will want to join a Venetian tour of all the places Brunetti visits, carrying a copy of Brunetti’s Venice: Walks with the City’s Best-Loved Detective. If you’re a cook, you might also savor Brunetti’s Cookbook, since Brunetti’s wife Paolo, a “radar of love,” is a marvelous cook. (She’s also a professor of English literature at a nearby university, Ca’Foscari.)

Inside the front and back cover of the 30th book is a map of Venice, the islands around it, and points beyond. The only caveat for a new reader unfamiliar with Venice and the series might be a more detailed city map if you want to follow Brunetti more closely along all the narrow streets called “calle,” all the bridges crossing over all the canals, churches and cafés everywhere, to investigate cases. Perhaps a list of commonly used Italian words translated into English would be helpful too, but you can pretty much guess their meanings. 

Brunetti serves as a vehicle for expressing Leon’s love for this magnificent ancient city as they both know Venice intimately. (Brunetti is a history buff.) Through Brunetti, Leon also spotlights their disappointment that even a great city isn’t immune to modern-day woes: bureaucracy, corruption, overcrowding, economic/political/social concerns, and ecological/environmental threats (see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/15/donna-leon-interview-commissario-brunetti-earthly-remains). Not wanting to offend the Venetian people she also loves, none of her books have been translated into Italian.

Unflattering images of Venice surface in relation to the crimes. Brunetti is politic and subtle so he typically conceals his feelings, though not with Paolo and his two good kids, Raffi, the oldest, and Chiari. They all try to make it a priority to come home for lunch; when Brunetti can’t this otherwise genial man with a strong ethical and moral compass and a heart of gold does get cranky.

Brunetti’s compassion and empathy shines when it comes to the original crime (there are two) in Transient Desires. He doesn’t jump to conclusions, so he goes out of his way to interview as many people he can identify to solve the crime. Smart and savvy, he knows his way around his ornery boss, Vice-Questore Guiseppe Patta, who cares more about his ambitions and reputation that anything else. (Patta’s secretary, Signorina Elletra is his go-to person.)

The author clearly cares and thinks deeply about the messages she wants to convey. Calling herself an Eco-detective, she created Brunetti (and his family) in the same light. Coming from a happy family, she also wanted Brunetti’s family life to be happy. Another reason he stands out pleasurably.

Leon explains that her mysteries standalone because Brunetti (and others) doesn’t age or change much over the years.

Fatherhood, though, must have deepened Brunetti’s empathy for young people as victims, suspects, or persons of interest. The original crime in Transient Desires involves four young people: two young women, the victims, and two young men, the perpetrators. The “profound sadness that youth could be so rash and so vulnerable and so damaged” challenges his generally upbeat demeanor as one of the women is so badly injured (both are in the hospital) his hands tremble. He feels for young people who are “so fragile . . . their self-assurance is a thin layer.” Coupled with a man who “loathed, above all, “bullies,” you can see why he takes a boating accident so seriously even if may be more morally egregious than illegal, thus hard to prove criminally.

Since he cares about the young male friends who’ve gotten in over their heads, one more than the other, it leads to his identifying the second crime, far more sinister. The starting point for both crimes is in an area of Venice set away from the major tourist center. Brunetti refers to it as the “horror of the Marguera,” the location of Venice’s industrial complex. For the reader and tourist, it may come as a shock that industries are still dumping toxic waste into the waters, invisible in the stunning blue lagoon embracing the city. A murder in Book #15 is based on that toxicity, whereas in Book #30 the second crime flows out of the Marguera to twelves miles off the coast of Venice, into international waters Brunetti isn’t in charge of, so even harder to prove. Brunetti shows us how experienced, strategic, and careful to wheedle himself among multiple entities to help solve what’s been happening in the dark of night.

There are many other reasons to love and respect Brunetti.

Brunetti also cares about the “voice of the people.” To “their concerns, their preferences, their crimes.” To the daily life of a gossipy city, which is why he doesn’t just read the main local paper, Il Gazettino, but also La Repubblica he calls “Vox pop.” (He and Paolo read widely, another treat.) This makes sense since Brunetti comes from working-class roots contrasted to Paolo’s parents who are aristocrats, a Count and a Countess. His relationship with his in-laws is the only hint of discomfort involving his beloved Paolo.

Brunetti is an astute observer of people’s behaviors. He picks up on and loathes prejudices that are “sucking down all hope of friendship, all hope of love, all hope of common humanity.” In a memorable scene involving his own prejudice towards southern Italians, he’s painfully honest with himself, asking: “Do people from the South appear more cultured and intelligent when they adapted to Northern standards?” Mortified that the person who’s also astute picked up on his prejudice is his trusted colleague, Commissario Claudio Griffoni, from Naples. In book #1, we learn he spent five years in the Naples police before coming to Venice, but apparently up until now he’s concealed his true feelings.

Consistent with Brunetti’s investigative style and persona is delightful prose that’s easy-flowing and rhythmic, out-of-sync with fast-moving, edge-of-your-seat thrillers. The thrill is gentler and moves more slowly, a wonderful testament that not every bestseller must use words that shock and come at a furious pace.

German television has produced twenty Brunetti episodes with subtitles. Why hasn’t American TV produced an English-language version? Surely, it could be as addictive as Brunetti’s books.

Lorraine