Enchanted Prose

The Fatherhood Project (New York City, present-day):  Judge this warmhearted book by its winning cover!  By page 290, 84.30232% read – a detail to honor Don Tillman, the beloved forty-year-old genetics professor first introduced in The Rosie Project – I found myself laughing out loud.  Up until then, I’d been smiling, chuckling, marveling, and shaking my head at the antics and witty prose echoing Don’s gifted scientific mind and “general oddness,” but now I was laughing like crazy.  Not at Don, but with Don: at the absurdity of predicaments he digs himself into in the name of love for:

Rosie, “the world’s most beautiful woman,” Don’s wife of 10 months and 10 days, who throws his rigorously structured-for-maximum-predictability-and-success world topsy-turvey when she announces an unplanned pregnancy.  Even her phrasing of “we’re pregnant” sends Don into a tizzy – literal thinking one of his trademarks – and begins unraveling his fledgling albeit “incredible” marriage.

Don, who sees life as “scientific problems to solve,” immediately seizes upon the news with characteristic intellectualizing, concluding that his task is to protect Rosie from undue stress that would raise her cortisone levels, which would be harmful to the “Baby Under Development” or B.U.D.  Thus setting off our intrepid protagonist on a series of crazy incidents, in this once again charming novel by Australian author Graeme Simsion.

In The Rosie Effect, Don and Rosie have moved from Australia to New York City, so Rosie can complete her PhD thesis in bipolar disorder at Columbia University’s MD program; Don got himself hired there as a visiting professor.  The timing couldn’t be worse, and because he doesn’t pick up on social cues, for too long he’s unaware he’s driving Rosie nuts and worrying her about his fitness to be a father.  He convinced Rosie he was “wired for love.”  Can he convince her he’s capable of being a father?  That he can be loving and sensitive to a baby’s needs when he has major issues with physical contact and interpersonal skills?  If you thought Don was so different than the rest of us in The Rosie Project, Simsion wants us to think again.  Parenthood is an anxious time for all who enter into it, intended or not.

My mildly hysterical reaction was sufficient proof that this sequel is as good as/maybe better than the first.  Fresh humor and clever prose only partly the explanation.  So, in a manner befitting our list-making hero, let me enumerate why:

1. Don Tillman may be the most self-aware and accepting of his human imperfections than anyone you’ll ever meet. He recognizes his “innate logical skills” are far superior to his social ones, consequently he’s “extremely experienced at dealing with embarrassment resulting from insensitivity to others.”  Still, with enough concentration, research, and practice, which he is willing to expend in copious, intense amounts, he can achieve successful outcomes.  Prime example: Rosie, whom he won over executing the Wife Project.  Don loves Rosie deeply, but he has a hard time expressing his feelings.  Although, he’s been quick to hide a few meltdowns, Rosie, impulsive and disorganized, the complete opposite of Don, surely knows his “limitations.”  (She “encouraged me to look beyond my limitations, was the reason for my life being more than I had ever envisioned.”)  One of the sage offerings is that just because you’re socially challenged, doesn’t mean you lack feelings or can’t feel emotional pain.  In a rare moment of anger, Don shares his frustration with a:
   

   “whole world of people who do not understand the difference between control of emotion and lack of it, and who make a totally illogical connection between the inability to read others’ emotions and inability to experience their own.  It was ridiculous to think that the pilot who landed the plane safely on the Hudson River loved his wife any less than the passenger who panicked.”

2. Don allows himself to get mixed up in numerous situations that are not in his best interest, but he’s a man of integrity. Case in point: the Gene Sabbatical.  Gene, who Don lists in the opening as one of his “total of six friends,” is Rosie’s thesis advisor from Melbourne (in the midst of his own Gene and Claudia Marriage Problem; Claudia, a clinical psychologist, is also on Don’s list of friends), has temporarily moved into Don and Rosie’s Manhattan apartment.  Despite the awkwardness of the arrangement and the disruption to their marriage, Don’s ethos means he cannot turn away his friend, whom Rosie dislikes because of his boastful extramarital affairs.  Gene just so happens to be another of the many psychologists (evolutionary psychologist) in the novel – meaningful given the “oddness” of Don’s persona and professional attempts to label him.  The lay reader may perceive Don as an extremely high-functioning man with Asperger’s syndrome, but Don cautions us that “humans consistently over-recognize patterns and draw erroneous conclusions based on them.”  He’s been misdiagnosed as “schizophrenic, bipolar, an OCD sufferer,” which highlights dangers in stereotyping.  His friends understand him well, leading to an overabundance of goodwill and support. Their affirmation, helpfulness, and warmth is what we all wish for in our friends.  Don, then, is not someone we look down upon.  Rather, we admire his gifts and good-naturedness, which is why we care about the mess he’s gotten himself into.
3. Safeguarding Rosie and proving he’s capable of fatherhood have increased Don’s alcohol consumption. This wreaks havoc on his BMI, which Don estimates for everyone he meets the way the rest of us might guestimate someone’s age.  This habit is consistent with his fixation on healthy eating, which he takes to extreme lengths to assure a nutritious regimen for Rosie and their unborn child.  Constantly advising Rosie what to eat/not to eat is a bad prescription for an expectant mother, one with her own nutty dietary preferences (she’s a “sustainable pescatarian”).  Don’s solution is the Pregnancy Version of his Standardized Meal System plus a Banned Substances List, but reducing caffeine and munching on tofu are not what a thesis-pressured, pregnant woman craves!  The absurdity of it all emphasizes the importance of wholesome eating during pregnancy and throughout the life span.
4. Halfway through the novel I felt a pang of genuine sadness for Don, because of the real prospect he could lose his one true love. Hence, beware labeling this novel pure “rom-com.” Within the comic are poignant life lessons.  A few more:
   • Don: “I have a theory that everyone is as odd as I am when they are alone.”
   • Don on bullying: “Highly intelligent people are often bullied.  As a result of being different.”
   • Playground Incident: When Don attempts to understand children’s behavior by observing play in a playground, his behavior may seem out-of-the-ordinary, but it’s not “against the law to be awkward.”

There are many more mishaps Don gets mired in: the Jerome Laundry Problem, Meat Pizza Incident, Loud Woman, Bluefin Tuna Incident, Lesbian Mothers Project, Good Fathers Program, Second Ultrasound Misunderstanding, stroller invention problem, and social worker deception problem.  Together, they comprise the marriage problem.  Can Don and Rosie’s marriage be saved?  Simsion keeps us guessing until the end.  Along the way, Don reminds us that while “love is a continuous state,” “happiness in marriage was not a simple function of time.”  It never hurts to tell your loved ones they are loved.

Lorraine

“Simple beauty,” “simple dignity” versus entrenched, complex issues: Appalachian Life in a Coal Mining Community (Eastern Kentucky, contemporary): Secret Wisdom is a perfect title for this multi-layered, standout novel.  It steers us to concentrate on all that is good and beautiful, rather than evil and destructive, in a fictitious town nestled in the hollows (or hollers) in-between the mountains and hills of eastern Kentucky Appalachia, where “scratch-a-living” lives have depended on coal mining since the early 1900s.

Medgar, Kentucky in Missiwatchiwie County may be a place name that exists only in debut novelist Christopher Scotton’s imagination (I googled to verify), but the novel mirrors real-life Appalachian concerns.  It may also be a place “people didn’t move into,” except for one life-changing summer when our  youthful narrator, Kevin Goolihy, did just that at age fourteen, with his grief-stricken mother.

Eastern Kentucky is where President Johnson came fifty years ago to launch his War on Poverty.  Then, poverty rates were 50%; today they’re 33%, still making counties here some of the poorest in the nation.  Progress?  And at what cost?  These are some of the profound questions Scotton wants us to think about.  And we do, thanks to his exceptional prose that rises to elegant when evoking serene landscapes of “monumental trees,” waterfalls, and canyons, or when musing on the ups-and-downs of the coal mining industry (the “bountiful plenty” compared to the “staggering lean”); prose that’s sprinkled with wisdoms, and brimming with authentic dialogue.

Frankly, I tend to shy away from what some call a “hillbilly style” of regional dialect, as it tends to jar the reading.  First, let me say this dialect is more appropriately described as Appalachian English, owing to a history of settlement by Irish, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants who came to mine the area’s rich bituminous coal, thus infusing Old English into a distinct language.  And, rather than distract, the realistic dialogue enhances our understanding of why proud, poor people who live here might feel misunderstood. “Simple folk – hardworking, some education,” explains Kevin’s grandfather, Pops, the novel’s commanding philosophical voice.  Although, he adds, there are some who “don’t go to school past the tenth grade; they live off the land, get handouts, and work the mines and odd jobs to make up the rest … gene pool is getting shallow.”  One of our hero’s many wise-isms (see more below).

I gravitated to the novel because coal mining in Appalachia has been getting a lot of press lately.  Besides John Grisham’s bestselling Gray Mountain, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent editorial in the New York Times discusses two major cases involving safety and environmental contamination issues.  And yes, the soulful title grabbed my attention.  Indeed, this is a soulful tale.

On one level it’s a heartwarming, coming-of-age story of a “singular summer when we left the coverings of boy behind.”  The “we” our narrator refers to is the new teenage friend he makes when he arrives in Medgar from Indiana, with his nearly silent mother, to his grandfather’s Appalachian home.  Buzzy Fink’s real name is Elrod Fink.  We’re told quirky character names “tend to stick” around these parts.  Buzzy’s father is dying of black lung disease.  Kevin and Buzzy come from different worlds, yet they form an “easy friendship unburdened by the expectations of others.”

One reason their friendship blossoms is the nurturing of Pops.  Arthur Bradley Peebles is a distinguished veteran and former philosophy professor turned large animal veterinarian, whose wise words are intended to help heal his grandson, who is carrying a burden of blame for the tragic death of his toddler brother, Joshua.  Pops, who grew up in Jukes Hollow, “one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,” would rather die that sell off his land (like others are doing) to Bubba Boyd, owner of the Monongahela mining company.  Big money and greed are powerful forces to be reckoned when a town’s livelihood “was always coal.”

The days of underground coal mining seem over.  Today, the best method for extracting coal from seams that are fragile is mountaintop removal.  The result is “unimaginable devastation” with slurry contaminating the drinking water.  (“The slurry is what comes off the chunks of coal – dust, dirt, nasty chemicals – all mixed in water.”)  Of course, it’s making the townspeople terribly sick, losing teeth, dying of cancer.  (One study I read found a 42% increase in birth defects among babies born near mountaintop removal sites.)  Where there used to be the “majestic reach and perfect shape” of scenery with names like Prettyman Hollow, Pancakes, and Old Blue, “one of the last truly wild places left in the Appalachians,” this type of coal mining creates a “flat top rubble of the excavated mountains” that looks like a “gray moonscape.”  So, there’s much talk and action around “flyrock coming off the mountain from explosions.”

Today, stricter environmental laws are making it too expensive to mine in Eastern Kentucky where the coal is high in sulfur (when it rains it becomes acid rain, or corrosive sulphuric acid).  The result are people leaving, abandoning mines, gas stations, and “storefronts like October cornstalks.”  Still, some local businesses have survived like Hivey’s Farm Supply and Miss Janey’s Paris Hair Salon and Notion Shop, owned by Paul Pierce, one of the “good people.” Paul’s character brings out the goodness in the town’s people (he secretly delivers turkeys to feed forty families), as well as deep prejudices and hatreds.  Pops’ front porch – 22 Chishold Street – is another locale where the novel’s many characters gather, talk, and drink sour mash whiskey.

Another reason the reading flows is the short chapters, with catchy headings like What Horses Smell Like After the Rain, The Telling Cave, The Aerodynamics of Flyrock, The Next Best Kings of the Earth, The Occasional Shifting of Boot Sole on Pine, Two Hearts Beating Each to Each, How to Carve a Whistle Out of Green Willow, In the Weave of Time and Being, and Needfuls.

Although evil lurks and sweeps into town, Pops’ wisdom and impact on Kevin and Buzzy uplift us.  He’s an endearing man, still deeply in love with Sarah Winthrope.  (“It wasn’t her beauty that won me over.  It was the way she smiled from her eyes.”)  Sarah, a fine lady, was the 29-year-old wife he lost at childbirth; Kevin’s mother survived.  Pops’ wisdom is plentiful and shines:

• “friends can sometimes disappoint”
• “coveting is one of the three basic human emotions, right behind love and fear”
• “hate is overrated. People only hate if they can’t attain what they covet”
• “evil doesn’t have to be loud, son … Evil is quiet, stealthy”
• “focus on the local … what folks know and can see and touch”
• “most folks can be astoundingly brave or dog cowards depending on the circumstances”
• “son, the more people I meet, the less good I get at labeling them”

Beyond the layers of personal growth and healing, economic, environmental, and cultural issues tackled, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth is a heroic, page-turning “tramp” deep into mountains that “have their own memories.”  Pops takes Kevin and Buzzy on a camping adventure into remote Daniel Boone country.  They learn to catch rabbit, fish for largemouth bass, make use of wood sorrel, wild onions, watercress, black trumpet, wild garlic, chanterelle, shaggymane, goldenseal, and far more.  Theirs is a “watermark” experience that’s the stuff of character-making.  It changed them from boys into men.

“Isn’t it something, Buzzy?” divined Kevin.  “Ain’t it just.”

Happy New Year, and thanks for reading Enchanted Prose in 2014, Lorraine

Of all the long book signing lines I waited on at Book Expo America (BEA) 2014, the longest was Colm Tóibín’s, award-winning Irish author and Columbia University professor.  Having read The Master and Brooklyn, I understood why.

“Dignified” Grieving: Imagined and Personal (Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, 1969-1972): Colm Tóibín is a master of pitch-perfect tone.  His Henry James novel, The Master, is elegant, atmospheric prose evoking the 19^th century period.  In Brooklyn, a young Irish woman’s coming-to-America story – immigrating from the author’s hometown, Enniscorthy – the vibrant prose befits an innocent’s experience in lively Brooklyn in the 1950s.  In Nora Webster, Tóibín ages the unworldly Irish woman, places her back in Enniscorthy, where the prose can slow down and fit Nora’s understated grieving.  Of the three, Nora’s is the simplest prose, deceptively so, given all its thoughtfulness and meaning.

For Nora Webster is a complex character, intentionally so, someone who admires her sister-in-law when she “disguises her feelings.”  That’s because Nora “kept silent about everything on her mind,” so she draws us right in.  While there’s undertones of a range of emotions we’d expect a grieving Nora to feel – sadness, anger, guilt among them – much of the time we’re trying to figure her out, just as she is trying to figure out how to live again, having recently lost her well-liked schoolteacher husband of twenty years, Maurice.

Nora is the mother of four (two older girls, Fiona and Aine, not living at home; two younger boys, Conor and Donal, who are), who in her forties is suddenly faced without an income (money is so tight she doesn’t even own a phone) and a life that’s “oddly pointless and confusing.”  The reader should note that Donal, the older son, is twelve – the same age Colm Tóibín was when he lost his father.  No wonder this fiction feels so real.

Still, in another writer’s hands, Nora’s three-year journey of quiet grieving – hiding and controlling her emotions – while going about the ordinary business of living might not be so riveting.  Because she’s closeted, emotionally complex yet authentic, she fascinates us.  We really want to know what happens to her.  And so, what’s ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Tóibín style also contributes significantly.  It’s rhythmic; you can hear his words and the natural dialogue being read aloud – softly, not loudly – tuned to a character who strives to “control herself and her emotions.”  At times, Nora succeeds heroically; at other times to a fault, particularly when it pertains to her children.

Donal appears to be most at-risk.  His emotional pain is visible.  Since his father died, he has developed a stuttering problem.  Note: this detail is autobiographical too.  So is the fact that Tóibín’s father was also an admired schoolteacher, and, like Donal’s father and his brother Jim, active members of Fianna Fáil, Ireland’s conservative Republican Party.  (One of several political overtones.  Violence in Northern Ireland another.)

While you might judge Nora an uncaring mother – “it was strange, she thought, that she had never before put a single thought into whether they were happy or not, or tried to guess what they were thinking” – when something egregious happens to Conor at school (which would never have happened if Maurice were alive having taught there), she’s nothing but fierce, determined, and extremely effective.  Best of all, here, Nora doesn’t care what anyone thinks!

Worrying about what others think in a community where everyone knows your business is a recurring theme intruding on intensely private Nora.  When we first meet her, she’s weary of all the good-natured characters constantly stopping by her home, unannounced, to pay their condolences – a “hectoring tone” that she “tried to understand that it was shorthand for kindness.”  Two of those well-intentioned visitors Nora welcomes the most are her brother- and sister-in-law.  They help her get her footing financially, circumstances that improve over time in part due to her rising widow’s pension – another political issue that offers a window into Ireland’s social reforms, and another aspect of the novel that rings true for the author.

If, like me, you haven’t traveled to the towns and villages dotting the southeastern coast of Ireland – names like Blackwater, Bunclody, Curracloe, Ballyconnigar, Ballyvaloo – places Nora’s outings take us to, you might want to glimpse images of what Nora’s world looks like, to better picture her.  Photos of beauty and solitude beg the question:  Why didn’t the landscape give Nora the kind of peacefulness and privacy she craves?  The answer, I think: Too many memories.

That’s why Nora’s so willing to so quickly dispose of the family’s summer home in Cush, without even consulting her family, one of the first bold steps Nora takes early on.  It gives us clues into her strength, her love, and her pragmatism.  She does not want to hold onto these memories.  She may be “surprised” by “the harshness of her resolve, how easy it seemed to turn her back on what she had loved,” but she’s a realist.  “This was the past then … it cannot be rescued.”

Among the many questions it is up to the reader to assess – again resonating with Nora’s circumspect character – is how happy was Nora’s marriage?  Understandably, Maurice’s death hit her as an enormous “shock to her system, as though she has been in a car accident.”  But how happy was she?

When she’s forced to return to a job she held so long ago that she never imagined she’d have to go back to, where she must also endure the wrath of a bitingly unpleasant supervisor, an ex-friend she hasn’t spoken to in over twenty years, she reminisces on her lost freedom but, as for what should be her greatest loss, she never explicitly tells us she misses Maurice.  She reflects that it was a “life of ease,” but one “that included duty.”  Was it duty to her husband and/or to her children she laments?  One of her sisters remarked that, after Maurice, Nora changed from a “demon” to “meek.”  Was she his shadow because she preferred it that way?  Or, because everyone gravitated to him?  We’re not entirely sure.

Sometimes, Nora reveals herself at the cusp of being a more modern woman, if only she knew how.  Again, the historical backdrop matters.  This is the end of the sixties.  Nora may not be a self-proclaimed feminist, but she seems proud of her daughter, Fiona, doing her teacher training in Dublin, and for getting mixed up in the cause of the city’s slum housing.  When Fiona disappears for a few days after riots broke out there, others are frightened but Nora remains calm and resolute that Fiona will be okay.

Nora shows us that she’s open to change and in some ways feels freer – dying her hair, taking singing lessons, joining the Gramophone Society, buying a record player and albums, redecorating, going on a trip to Spain with her Aunt Josie– but these try-outs don’t necessarily go smoothly.  To her credit, she agrees to participate in things, but mostly she’s not interested in them, has regrets, or worries that people will think she’s “lost her mind” or been “extravagant.”

As in real life, some things naturally lead to another, gradually moving Nora along.  In her grieving process, she wonders what her life might have been like had she been born elsewhere?  Without responsibilities?  She may have lived a conventional life, but Nora has dreams.  Did she always have dreams, or has her new situation given her an opening to dream?  Again, we’re not entirely sure.

What we do know is that Nora Webster wishes to be transported away from the “dullness of her own days” to a “dream-life.”  What that “dream-life” is we cannot say.  What we can say is that music is where she finds the space to dream.  Music sets her free.  Drifting softly, not loudly.

Lorraine

Unsung heroes – real and imaginary: America at the brink of WWII (Great Britain, Washington, DC, Moscow, mostly 1941/ends 1946): When does historical fiction attain historical value?  Who was Harry Hopkins, FDR’s eyes and ears, sent to war-torn London at the dawn of 1941 to be his go-between Churchill?  Would an unknowing, fiercely isolationist American public (80% against entering the war) been swayed to enter WWII earlier, as Churchill’s “rich timbre” voice boomed nearly a year before we did on that infamous day, December 7, 1941?  What if Hollywood had made a major motion picture based on James MacManus’ eye-opening Sleep in Peace Tonight, and released it around the time the novel opens? These are questions I asked my non-historian self after finishing MacManus’ provocative novel, steeped in historical details and atmosphere, like watching a riveting black-and-white film.  The movie could have been billed as the “story of a people who would not be broken.”

Hollywood, to my Googling surprise, did not produce one film prior to Pearl Harbor that championed America’s entry into war, despite Churchill’s chilling oratory that “western civilization would be decided on the grey seas of the Atlantic” and his conviction that Britain could not win without America’s naval power.  (By now, Germany had advanced into France, the Low Countries, Poland, and the Balkans.)  Hollywood, it seems, reflected the powerful isolationist mood of the country, led by pro-Nazis Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.  Even then, the three-term President who consoled us that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is portrayed as afraid of impeachment because the isolationist movement was so strong.  The only other novel that scared me as much politically was Philip Roth’s, The Plot Against America, in which Lindbergh is fictionalized as President of the United States.  Yet most of this novel is based on historical facts, with the exception of a love affair inspired by the brave women of Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAFF), who’d do anything to sabotage the enemy.

While the novel is certainly a remarkable depiction of “two very different, very difficult, very determined men” – FDR and Churchill – its focus is to shine a light on a remarkable, unknown household name in American WWII history: Harry Hopkins.  Remarkable too that this one man – sickly and underweight (he’d had stomach cancer); politically unpopular because FDR’s most trusted advisor was unelected; so coveted by the White House that he lived in the Lincoln bedroom under Eleanor Roosevelt’s motherly (and matchmaking) activist eyes, for he pressed for New Deal and social reform issues – was America’s crucial link to Churchill, assessing the Prime Minister, the morale of his people, our entry into a world war.  It was Hopkins who forged the pivotal relationship between these two great leaders when they met in August 1941 off the coast off Newfoundland (The Atlantic Conference).  Prior to that, FDR apparently “detested” Churchill when he first met him as naval secretary during the First World War.

We’re introduced to a ghastly, sleep-deprived Hopkins when he lands in London in January 1941 after four grueling days of flying to remain undetected, as London was besieged by “incendiaries” dropping like “candles in the air.”  Met by a personal driver, Leonora Finch, whose mission was to open Harry’s mind and heart to the sights and sounds of a London that no one back home seemed to realize or care was “another planet.”  The character and evolving romance between Leonora, in her twenties, and Harry, in his fifties, is the part of the novel that is good, thoughtful fiction.

Leonora’s sympathies for the war effort stem from the death of her father on the battlefields of Somme.  From a quintessentially British town outside of London, Leamington Spa, she studied at the Sorbonne; her fluency in French is an asset to British intelligence.  A mysterious Richard Stobart, a ‘60s cloak-and-dagger type, appears periodically, dropping hints about the jade-eyed beauty’s secretive role beyond Harry’s driver.  Harry, twice married and now engaged to a fashion designer/turned nurse who Eleanor Roosevelt deems is the solution to Harry’s fragile physical self, grows accustomed to Leonora, who tends to his every need,  including his dependence on alcohol and cigarettes.  She drives and accompanies Harry everywhere, to pubs, savaged cities, on the train, so he can see and report back to FDR how ordinary British souls are coping during wartime.

There’s a coolness and smoothness to the British author’s/The Times Literary Supplement director’s prose that resonates with the fog of war, offset by the warmth of Harry and Leonora’s liaison.  It fills the pages with a rhythm that flows with the boozy, jazzy music heard in the pubs (“Like all pubs … having a good war”).  This may be an historical period when “lust and love got confused,” but by the time the novel closes (and sooner) the reader knows which of these emotions rings true for both of them.

Leonora’s first stop is to drop Harry off at Claridge’s Hotel, which he discovers is overrun by our press corps.  It “crossed the threshold of the world at war into the comfort and luxury of what looked like an English country house.”  Despite Harry’s wanting anonymity and quiet, he immediately meets CBS broadcaster, Ed Murrow, who airs “This … is London.”  Despite his poor Midwestern roots (like Hopkins’), the handsome Murrow finds himself at ease with the upper echelons of British class society that America shuns.  Murrow becomes as beloved and famous in England as in America – as he should be for the “lone voice” the journalist played.  He believed FDR was weak, and agreed with Churchill that America needed to engage in the war.

More of MacManus’ fascinating characterizing of major historical figures peopling Sleep in Peace Tonight:

FDR: A mixture of “serpentine ambiguity” and “folksy charm,” he was “guided by what he could not do as a politician than more than what he might achieve as a statesman.”  In the midst of war crises, he managed to spend an hour or more working on his obsession, stamp collecting.

Churchill, the “ringmaster:”  A “cigar-smoking, brandy-swilling bulldog in a bowler hat,” whose “ego was considerably greater than his talent, a man who seemed to believe that a nation of 40 million people could rule 400 million people around the world, a man determined to drag America into a war.”

Eleanor Roosevelt: whose “austere” style was the extreme opposite of Churchill’s exuberance for fine foods and drinks.  She “valued principles over politics,” truly caring about the rights of the people.  At this point in FDR’s presidency, theirs is a political marriage as she knows about his infidelity.

Brendan Bracken: Churchill’s personal assistant who was not afraid to tell the Prime Minister the truth.

Frank Sawyers: Churchill’s “factotum.”  More than his butler and valet, he knew precisely what Churchill needed during his darkest, moodiest hours.

James Stewart: the famous actor becomes even more loveable.  He really did join the military against the wishes of Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, and flew dangerous missions for the British Royal Air Force.

Cabinet secretaries: Cordell Hull (State), Henry Simpson (War), Henry Morgenthau (Treasury), George C. Marshall (Military Advisor).

Stalin:  His “hands are huge and as hard as his mind.”

Hopkins was overwhelmed by all that he saw and heard.  He couldn’t believe the “UK and British Empire had been run from this small three-story house in a London side street for two hundred years.” Churchill, larger than life, would summon him for diplomatic talks from a steamy bathtub over champagne.  Meals were “theatrical occasions.”  Churchill had an incredible energy level, needing little sleep which Harry craved.  He could pore over details on military ops, U-boats, cargoes, convoys, briefings, sinkings, casualties, Lend-Lease, Hurricanes and Spitfires vs. Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf.   Indeed, this may be the most readable, detailed historical fiction you’ve come across.

The depictions of FDR as a “master of ambiguity” who refused to be rushed into critical decision-making reminded me of the criticisms of President Obama.  And Leonora’s bravery brought to mind the terrific British TV series: Wish Me Luck.  Here is where fiction and fact mightily converge, as Hopkins enlists Averil Harriman  (who oversaw aid to Britain) to snuff out Leonora’s whereabouts.  Sleep in Peace Tonight ends with the answer.  An ending that is the stuff of Hollywood movie-making.

Lorraine

Serendipity again: another perfect complement to my last posting.  Again, the author tells us this is a “love story.” Again, there’s a character with a scientific mind.  That’s where the similarities end!  This time, I was looking for something not so intellectually taxing, but nonetheless heartfelt.  David Nicholls’ writing style is immediately engaging, blending prose that is laugh-out-loud-funny, poignant, and wise.

Is Love Enough? (London/suburb and a “Grand Tour” of Europe covering Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Venice, Verona, Florence, Rome, Naples, Barcelona, Siena; present day/twenty-odd years of seamless flashbacks): Some love stories and romantic films you never forget.  Four come to mind: An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and One Day, based on David Nicholls’ 2009 sensational hit novel.  Penning another romance after One Day is a hard act to follow.  Us is British film actor/novelist’s five-year effort to do so.  You will not be disappointed!

The writing flows effortlessly.  The story is told with tremendous heart.  You will find yourself rooting for Douglas Timothy Petersen – one of three characters meant by “us.” Douglas may have said that he “loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so I rarely did,” yet he expresses himself to us with his-heart-on-his sleeves.

Not so for #2 in “us:” Connie Moore, Douglas’ painter turned arts administrator wife of twenty-some years.  It’s not that she isn’t well-realized; it’s that we want to knock some sense into her middle-aged hippie, artsy, “live-in-the-moment” head for the anguish she is putting this endearing man through.  The realists among us side with Douglas – “the trouble with living in the moment is that moment passes” – because he adores her to a “ridiculous degree.”  He’s a charming list-maker, like his wistful listing of “seven things about her” – her fifties movie star looks, her style, the way she listens, her voice, the “grace and life in her.”  Still love-struck at 54, he divides his life into “B.C and A.C” – “Before Connie and After Connie:”

Before Connie: Douglas was a passionate biochemist whose only love was “fundamental science” like studying that infamous drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), which is to say that he experienced life through “reinforced glass.”  He may have been lonely at times (wasn’t everyone?), living in his comfort zone (wasn’t that the point? To be comfortable), and not very worldly when it came to travel (his father was xenophobic), or Connie’s enriching world of “art, film, fiction, music; she seemed to have seen and read and listened to pretty much everything.”  Everything he was not.  But then, “who wants to fall in love with their reflection?”

After Connie: No matter what our soulful narrator does, he can’t win with #2 or #3, his downcast teenage son.  Now head of R & D of a profit-making corporation, he’s shunned for making money.  (He can’t figure out what his son is so against: “Warmth? Comfort?”)  Beneath that comedic coping voice, lies sadness.  Naturally, one thing he cannot joke about is the “blue” period, a heart-wrenching time of unbearable grief when the couple’s newborn daughter died.  Douglas’ voice is so human and eloquent in expressing grief: “I’ve never sleepwalked … but we sat and stood, walked and ate without really being alive.”  The painful prose he uses – “torn away” – makes us wince, the imagery of your flesh being ripped off, and yet he manages to stay a “capable butler” tending to Connie’s every need.  Besides rescuing his marriage, Douglas is desperately seeking to kindle a connection with his alienated son, a chronically strained relationship akin to an “awkward chat show.”  We feel how badly he wants to be his “idol.”  But his no-nonsense/wanting-the-very-best for his child parenting style bumps up against Connie’s laissez-faire one.  How could he possibly win?

Albert Samuel Petersen, Albie, nicknamed “Egg” – #3 in the triad: Seventeen-year old Albie is a tough nut to crack. “He sometimes regards me with a pure and concentrated disdain, filling me with so much sadness and regret that I can barely speak.” At first, you assume he’s your typical, rebellious, moody teenager.  But as the story evolves – told to us in 180 numbered, cleverly named short chapters that weave back and forth in time smoothly – Albie seems far more troubled, engaging in disturbing behaviors (like dressing up as a Nazi at a costume party).  Before he heads off to college, Connie dreamed up a grand idea, a “Grand Tour” of Europe.  She wants to set Albie off “like in the eighteenth century.” Keep in mind this was Connie’s plan, not Douglas’.

Us opens with Connie informing Douglas in the middle of the disorienting night that when Albie leaves, she’s likely to leave too.  Their marriage, she says, has “run its course.” Douglas cannot accept such a premise, so he proposes they continue their grandiose travel plans hoping a trip of a lifetime can turn things around.  The scientist in him meticulously plans the itinerary, only to be poked fun of at every turn.  Making sure they hit some of the greatest art museums in the world, intending to please artist Connie and awaken his disappointing, technologically-glued son, his best intentions run up against Albie’s only artistic interest: photography.

The globe-trotting reminded me of that hilarious movie, “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium.”  But even with the best of travel plans, things don’t go as planned.

Douglas’ efforts to make things right are herculean.  The more hysterical and pathetic the mishaps, the more Douglas endears us.  We want to believe like he does that “surely, surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.” And he does!  Passages and passages of zany adventures.

Douglas’ tender and wise reflections should be savored.  For instance, when he cogitates at what point the light and passion went out in his marriage: “The edges of unhappiness are usually a little more blurred and graded than those of joy.”  Or, torments himself as to what he did wrong as a father:

“Perhaps it’s a delusion for each generation to think that they know better than their parents.  If this were true, then parental wisdom would increase with time like the processing power of computer chips, refining over generations, and we’d now be living in some utopia of openness and understanding.”

This posting began by mentioning my last one (see The Goddess of Small Victories).  Fascinating the differences between two wives, two husbands, in these two novels.  Both women were artists with a zest for life, be it dancing or painting.  The dancer gave up her life; the painter is not willing to.  The logician is revered for his genius; the doctor of biochemistry denies he’s one.  Instead, he repeatedly stresses that talent must be nurtured through discipline, diligence, hard work (qualities he wants his son to have).  The genius petrified of making mistakes became paralyzed to act and was called a “madman”; the biochemist is willing to jump out of his comfort zone to a ridiculous degree into temporary madness, never losing sight of what matters most.

Douglas Timothy Petersen may not be Connie’s or Albie’s idol.  But he’s ours.

Lorraine