The Spoils of Poynton or Why My English Teacher was right about Henry James

My English teacher said some writers often go in and out of fashion. A few, like some clothes, hardly ever go out of style.  You can like them forever and know they'll always be available for discussion and the worst opinion you'll hear is, "Well, of course, you like___, who doesn't?"   For example, if Shakespeare was fashion, he'd be a great pair of leather loafers or a white, short-sleeved shirt.  Good for practically everything.  Oscar Wilde might be a burgundy velvet vest: (waistcoat for citizens of the U. K.)  dramatic, a bit sensual, fairly versatile but not the go-to choice in every situation.  Shame, because I really like burgundy velvet vests.  But the writer who seems a bit neglected these days is Henry James. Except for Halloween revivals of The Turn of the Screw and the occasional big-budget costume picture, his work is largely ignored and that's a shame. He appreciated the complexity of human character and culture and he used it to create wonderful, memorable stories.   My favourite is The Spoils of Poynton.

Poynton is the story of four individuals who keep pairing off into irreconcilable teams.  Team One might be the Gareth, widowed mother and grown son, in trouble due to British probate laws.   Mrs Gareth and her late husband spent an incredible amount of time, effort and money to furnish their home, Poynton, with the greatest possible taste.   When the son (Owen) decides to marry, the house and everything in it become his property.  Legally, Mama doesn't own anything. That's hard on Mrs G, especially since she knows Owen didn't inherit his parents' taste or intelligence and she wants to make sure that his bride will be a better custodian.

Enter Team Two, the two main candidates, for Owen's hand in marriage. Fleda Vetch, has wonderful taste but no money and Mona Bridgstock who has terrible taste but Owen's interest.   Actually, Owen's interest seems to vacillate between the two girls because (are you taking notes, children?) Owen and Fleda are basically nice people who try to think of others and the ethical thing to do while Mona and Mrs G. both focus on how to get their own way(s).  

Okay, now we've seen the Gareths v. the would-be brides and the nice ones v. the naughties and I've hinted at the third set of teams (the aesthetes v. the barbarians or the tasteful v. tasteless, if you prefer) and the plot wheel begins to spin.   Owen proposes to Mona who says she'll wed when she gets the keys to Poynton and every stick of furniture inside it.  (Granted, Mona can't tell Spode from a spade but she's not about to let Owen's mum run off with the silver and soft furnishings.  As far as Mona is concerned, Poynton and its fixtures are Owen's dowry.)  Mrs G has developed a real friendship with Fleda Vetch and whenever Owen shows up wanting to talk about the wedding and mum's eviction, Mrs Gareth sends Fleda to the meeting.  Now for the cherry on the Sundae: Fleda's got a secret, world-sized crush on the son, Owen. She can't tell Owen how she feels (he's engaged!) and she doesn't dare tell Mrs Gareth who would try to manipulate her. Fleda feels bad that Owen's predicament and worse about her own role in this mess but she's under strict instruction never to accept or turn down his suggestions about "What to do About Poynton." 

Henry James

Now a couple of interesting side bits.  The plot of Poynton is partially based on legal case that Mr. James had seen in the news.  The dowager widow of an English estate didn't want to turn over the house and land to her son when he came of age.  The son sued to get his inheritance and mum testified he wasn't entitled to it because (wait for it!) her husband wasn't the boy's father.  When you consider how adultery was viewed in that culture, you'll understand how desperate the mother must have been to come up with that defense!  The other thing you'll notice if/when you read the book is that beyond one item, nothing in Poynton's collection is described or documented.   The house is supposed to be an assembled work of art, a cohesive collection that brings out the best in each piece and every room but we really don't know what it looks like.   Mrs Gareth continually refers to the contents of her home as "the things" (As in, "Has she any sort of feeling for the nice old things?"). The author originally wanted to call the novel "The Old Things" but he deliberately left most of the specifics of the collection off.   This allows each reader to conjure up a vision of what Poynton must look like to be worth this much trouble.

If you've been reading about these precious, immovable objects and teams of irresistible forces, chances are you've thought, "Something's gotta give" and yes, it does.  Well, a lot of things do but not all at once and not the way you'd expect.  The Spoils of Poynton has a hum-dinging twist of an ending.  So pick up the book, brew yourself a good pot of tea and do not skip ahead to the ending.  This tale is wound up tight and you won't appreciate the ride if you miss hitting most of the curves.   It's the work of a master so appreciate it for what it is.   Intricate, archaic, wound up and beautifully designed, this work is the literary equivalent of a Victorian pocket watch.  And so is Henry James.  I hope he comes back into style.

When home is a place where you've never been: Cross Creek

William Shakespeare, that quotable fellow, said "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."   That's how I feel about home.  Many people I know are raised with a real sense of identity, knowing who they are and where they belong long before they learn how to read.  That place of origin, for good or for ill, is home, undeniable as DNA.  Others have to make a place for themselves in this world and a few of us enter a strange site and realize with amazement that this place centers us like no other.  It's a shock, like first falling in love, and it changes the folks who experience it.  That realization of finding home is central to Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's book Cross Creek  because it's not just about the first heady days of romance.  Cross Creek is the love affair between a discoverer and place.

The two were an unlikely match.  Mrs. Rawlings was a thirty-two year old journalist whose career and human marriage were both showing wear but not many signs of success.  She was educated, politically liberal and although she could write, she had not found her "voice", that prerequisite of transcendent writers.  Cross Creek was an undisturbed pocket of the Old South populated by black and white families who eked out an living on the land, through farming or sharecropping, hunting, trading or fishing.  Probably no one believed she would stay.   The greatest trait both parties shared was stubbornness.

Well that, and a love of the place.  It must have held beauty beyond measure because Marjorie stuck there without friends, without encouragement and soon, without her husband (who couldn't tolerate the isolation) or her dog (who hated the heat.)   Marjorie tolerated it all, including the bugs and the outhouse, adapted, repaired and plugged away at fiction that wasn't getting published.  She was also writing to an editor about her neighbors.   Those letters mark the beginning of her voice.

A key part of the success of Cross Creek is Marjorie's opinion of her neighbors.  She recognizes their residential seniority and values each individual for the merits in his or her own character.  She also recognizes her own fallibility and admits to her many mistakes.  That humility told the neighbors she might be be worth teaching.

From these new friends and the things they taught her, Marjorie gleaned the material for her best known work, The Yearling  (when her editor suggest she write a boy's story set in the Florida scrub, she replied to his suggestion, saying, "How calmly you sit in your office and tell me to write a classic!"  Irony, thy name is Marjorie.)  Cross Creek was the follow-up, a love song to the area she loved.

As in so many romances, the one between Marjorie and Cross Creek did not make it to the finish line.  First, she remarried and living with her second husband meant living some seventy miles away.  Far sadder is the fall out that came from this book.  One of the people Marjorie wrote of with affection and respect took offense over the description and sued for libel.  The case went on for years, dividing the community and draining the parties.  Marjorie stayed away after that.

In the end, Frost described it best: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."  When Marjorie died, she was buried in a cemetery less than five miles from the place she'd recognized as home.  Other Creek residents are spending their eternity there including the woman who sued her.  Thus far, the residents seem to be keeping their peace.

Marjorie wrote she was not the real owner at Cross Creek noting, "Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time." Instead, she belonged to this place that defined her, defied her and nourished her soul.  For good or for ill, Cross Creek became part of her, like DNA.  Call that what you like, I think it means "home".

The past through a prism: A look at David Copperfield.

"I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child.  And his name is David Copperfield."  That's what Charles Dickens said in the preface of his famous novel and I believe he meant it.  History didn't record how his wife or his ten human children reacted to the statement (that would have been a Jerry Springer show in the making!) but, as sad as the remark probably made them, I doubt if they were surprised.  A large amount of fiction comes from the writer's re-imagination of his or her own past and much of the novel David Copperfield can be traced to the life of Charles Dickens.  The transfiguration of those experiences in David Copperfield redeemed a lot of the author's own childhood. It also made a much-loved book.

Every fan of fiction knows Charles Dickens had an unsettled childhood.  His father was always in debt and the family moved continually, trying to avoid Dad's creditors.  That ended when his father was thrown into debtor's prison and all of the family (except 12 year old Charles and his slightly older sister) were incarcerated there for a time.  His sister managed to stay in her school but his parents forced Charles to leave his studies and go to work in a shoe polish factory to support himself.  Charles Dickens never got over the humiliation of those experiences or the anger at his mother for trying to keep him in the factory after the family got financial relief and freedom.  After his father tried to capitalize on the adult son's fame (borrowing from his son's friends and publishers) Charles banished his parents to the country.

Those experiences found their way into David Copperfield. Dickens's  father becomes two characters, the terrible Mr. Murdstone who forces his orphaned step-son, David into child labor and the likeable, irresponsible spend-thrift, Micawber with his financial advice and unfounded optimism that "something will turn up."  By splitting the sin from the sinner, Dickens managed to write of his father with some remaining affection. (Since the Micawber ends up becoming one of the unlikely heroes of the story, a suspicious reader might infer a lot of fatherly affection remained with the author, despite his father's profligate ways.)

Reality seeps through the fiction in other ways.  Dickens examines his own experience as an impoverished child laborer in the book and the unrelenting shame he felt about that episode.  Like his creator, David is embarrassed about his familiarity with pawnbrokers, rats and extreme poverty and once firmly past it, he keeps it a secret from his new friends but fear of poverty fuels the ambition in both hero and author.  Reality also makes David Copperfield a more identifiable protagonist than some of the author's earlier heroes like Nicholas Nickelby or Martin Chuzzlewit.  David makes mistakes the earlier protagonists avoid, like drinking too much in the chapter, "My First Dissipation (The line, "'Agnes!' I said. "'I'mafraidyou'renorwell.'" is terribly funny) and falling for all the wrong people but that's because David Copperfield, like Charles Dickens is human.  The novel's weakest spot is that the David's "right people" are still too impossibly good to be believable but Mr. Dickens was still developing as a writer at this point.  If you want a Dickens heroine that isn't a saint, you'll have to pick up Great Expectations.  That's further down the line.

Yes, David Copperfield's an old-fashioned novel.  It has a million characters with silly names and everything works out for the best.  But that's part of the art of story, creating redemption through imagination and giving everyone a "good enough" ending. It's a way to resolve some old issues and keep alive those that we miss.  There's the life that we had and the life we wish we had and fiction connects the two.  Blessed be the fiction that binds. 

A little-known tale of Disaster: Under a Flaming Sky

My husband collects disaster stories.   I think it goes back to his childhood when he read A Night to Remember.  The account of Titanic's sole voyage was so researched, so well-written and evocative, he's been chasing disaster accounts ever since.   Me, I like these books for the slice-of-life history that comes with each account, the context of how people lived in some different time and era and who they were.  For whatever reason, we both love disaster accounts and this summer I found a good one.  Under a Flaming Sky (by Daniel James Brown) is one of those books that flies under the radar until the author gets a hit later on.  Here's hoping the author's good luck with his current release will give this story a deserved second look.

UAFS is the story of Hinkley, Minnesota, a town on the edge of the prairie near the end of the Guilded Age.  Hinkley had done well as a town, booming along with the twin streams of business and labor.  Lumber was the town's biggest business and a steady stream of immigrants kept it moving from forests through the sawmills to the trains.  Everyone was in a hurry to get up, get moving and make the product that brought a paycheck and that was fine, except there was rarely time to clean up. As the trunks of the trees went to the mills to be planed and sectioned, the extra got left behind.   Leaves, branches, pine needles and the wood shavings that come from lumbering were left in the fields with the stumps to dry in the air and sun.  A lot of debris had dried by September of 1894; less than two inches of rain had fallen since May. A fire was probably inevitable but Hinckley got an inferno.

Two wild fires started, one south, one southwest of town, each generating high convection winds and low-hanging smoke.  These winds (and the ground debris) fed the fires until they met and the combined flames beat up through the smoke into the cool air above.   It was like adding gasoline.  The wildfires became a gigantic firestorm, a moving wall of flame between four and five miles high.   The thermal winds produced blazing whirlwinds that broke away from the firewall and caught new things alight.  The heat on the ground melted barrels of nails and train rails and people.  In less than four hours,  480 square miles of Minnesota - almost a quarter of a million acres - were consumed.

No one knows how many died in the fire; officials weren't counting the Native Americans back then and many folks just disappeared.  But hundreds of people survived because a couple of trains drove through the conflagration, picking up fleeing settlers along the way.   Every bridge they crossed had to be checked for safety because the rails were softening under the hideous heat and that meant letting the fire catch up behind you while the brakeman tested the tracks.  A few other people survived by jumping into water, either the river or the standing water in the town's gravel pit.  But hundreds had no chance at all.

One nine year old boy survived the conflagration and moved to California, eventually becoming a family man and executive but he never really escaped from the fire.  Night after night, while his daughter was studying, the man dreamed of his Minnesota boyhood and woke up screaming.  His daughter couldn't forget his screams.  Her son created this book.

Under a Flaming Sky, is, in the end, not the story of a disaster but the people who faced it, both those that survived and died.  And that's why these stories are important.  The survivors inspire us to overcome our own low points and the lost are not forgotten.  We take all of them with us when we close the book and they continue because we remember.  And remember's a fine thing to do.

My sister, the Boss and The Willoughbys

I have a very bossy younger sister.  She is the greatest sibling  alive and her "take charge" attitude is fairly reasonable, considering she got it from both sides of the family and her teaching requires an air of command.   I just didn't know she'd want to boss me.  It all started out with a phone call.

"There's a children's book that's really good," she said, "You should read it." 

"Sure" I replied, thinking of the score of books I had praised and sent to her, still lying unread, on her shelves.  "Tell me the name and I'll look for it."  

"No, you should read it now." she replied. "I'll bring the book when I see you tomorrow.  You can read while we visit."

Then she hung up and I was out maneuvered.  I read The Willoughbys, per instruction.  Then I read it again, for fun.  Perhaps, I should mention it's good.

No one with a background in kid's lit will be surprised that The Willoughbys is good.  After all, it was written by Lois Lowry, that two-time winner of the Newbery Medal for The Giver and Number the Stars.  What might surprise you is how funny the book is.  The Willoughby children (eldest, Tim; youngest Jane and the twins, Barnaby A & B) have read so many 19th century children's books that they expect their lives will copy those tales of resourceful children who succeed, despite tyrannical authority figures.  Once they realize orphans have the lion's share of success in these stories, they decide to become orphans by sending their foolish, ill-natured parents on a succession of dangerous vacations.  Before you sympathize with the parents, understand two things: 1) the idiots go and 2) they leave the kids behind, putting their home up for sale. 
 
The narration shares much of the dry, tongue-in-cheek voice of Lemony Snicket.   How else could you explain a mother who will knit a sweater for the family cat but insists her twin sons share a garment (and a name) , saying, "“A, you wear it [the sweater] on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. B, you have Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. On Sunday you can fight over it.”  The sheer silliness of the idea will keep younger readers giggling.

Another treat is the glossary Ms. Lowry added to The Willoughbys.  It defines some of the "bigger" words for younger readers but in ways that will amuse any overseeing adults.   Consider these:

NEFARIOUS means utterly, completely wicked. The character in The Wizard of Oz could have been called the Nefarious Witch of the West but authors like to use the same beginning consonant, often. Perhaps L. Frank Baum crossed out nefarious after wicked came to his mind. Thank goodness, because Nefarious would be a terrible name for a musical.

CRYPTIC means seeming to have a hidden meaning. If your mother says, “Consider yourself grounded, mister!” it is not at all cryptic . But if she says in a certain voice, “We need to talk,” she is being cryptic. And you are about to be grounded.

See what I mean?  Funny!  There's a bibliography of books the Willoughbys mention with the same type of descriptions. I can't read Huck Finn's without snickering.

Yes, the book is a parody but like many parodies, it's clever.  The sub-plots come together as the reader fits disjointed pieces of information in the story, not unlike Louis Sachar's Holes.  But if you think you are going to guess the name of the famous candy tied to the story, forget it.  No one can anticipate that.

So, if you are forced to read to children this holiday season, listen to what they have to say.   Look over what they want to read.   Then adopt my sister's most autocratic tone and say, "Here's the book for us," and  bring out your copy of The Willoughbys.  Settle down and put a back finger on the glossary page, for easy flipping.  Then start to read aloud.  The children will listen and have a good time.   They'll admire your taste in literature.   But they'll never forget that you're bossy.

Maus

I'll admit it, I'm a snob when it comes to comic books.  Early in my reading career it became apparent that an inverse relationship existed between the number of illustrations in the book and the expected IQ of the reader.  (i.e., more pictures meant lower IQ).   As soon as I figured that out, I headed for chapter books at high speed.  Oh, I still enjoyed a great illustration once in a while but I knew better than to focus on them.  And I couldn't grasp why so many males in my generation continued to buy, read and discuss comic books after they reached legal maturity.   It was like being trapped in a life-long, joke-less episode of "Big Bang Theory".    People could call the publications graphic novels or comics, I didn't care.  They were still just "funny books" for dorks.

So I didn't see Maus coming.  Maus, if you haven't seen it, is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust.   And it's animated, because Mr. Spiegelman is an illustrator.   And, to put the icing on the cake, Mr. Spiegelman drew the characters in his work as animals.  It sounds crazy but, believe me, it's a work of genius.

The story works this way: the adult mouse, Art, is trying to rebuild a relationship with his father, Vladek, also a mouse.  This is not easy because Vladek is a difficult old stinker with nightmares for memories and Artie is is no poster child for mental health either. Art finally gets the old mouse to start talking about his life.  After some prodding, we hear about (and see through Art's imagination) Vladek's early life in Poland when he married Art's mother and settled down in a job in manufacturing.  Then Hitler knocked at the door.

Since the Jews are mice, it only follows that the Germans are cats (not nice kitties, either - all cat lovers here, beware) because cats hunt and exterminate mice.   Art's father, Vladek and his wife, Anja, try to avoid the Nazi juggernaut overrunning Europe but are unable to escape, are split up for a time and eventually taken to Auschwitz.   They survive, but their first born son does not.  And the story makes it clear that while the active Holocaust ended with Germany's surrender, the damage from that experience flows on for years.  Art's mother made it through the camps but mental illness and PTSD probably induced her suicide in 1968.  Art's father can never transcend his terrible experiences and Art himself needs therapy to adjust to life.  Maus's existence is proof that art is created in spite of trauma, not because of it.  It's also a brilliant fusion of ideas.

The animal metaphor doesn't end with cats and mice.  The non-Jewish Poles are swine, particularly those that end up fellow prisoners but still dangerous to the captured Jews.  And the American soldiers, black and white, are the species most likely to scare cats: dogs.  But the anthropomorphized illustrations allow Art to recount  his parents' story so the readers understand the horrors of the Holocaust without facing the terrible(forgive the pun) graphic images that remain.  It's a brilliant way to teach children about tragic events without creating more trauma.  Come to think of it, that's what illustrations have been doing for a very long time.  I believe I've been wrong about comics.

Maus won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, the first graphic novel to attain this high honor and since then, the field has exploded.  Some great graphic novels include Barefoot Gen, Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and the brilliant Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.   But these artists, great as they are, stand on the shoulders of Art Spiegelman and his terrifying, brilliant book, Maus.  Once there was a wall between graphic novels and literature.  Spiegelman kicked the damn thing down.

The Book in the Corner of my Soul: John Chancellor Makes Me Cry

I am not Southern by birth.  I was born in north Texas and raised in the west, in spaces known for harsh winds, wide horizons, and voices loud enough to get through the first and reach the second.  Because of this I was a stranger in a strange land when I moved to the South and  I worried I would always be an outsider.  Over several  years, I read a barrel load of books on how nuanced, complex and wonderful life here can be here, but no book taught me more or made me feel more at home  than Anne Rivers Siddons's collection of essays, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry.


Mrs. Siddons was raised in a small Georgia town and graduated from Auburn before beginning a career in Atlanta, first in advertising and then as a novelist. Between those two jobs came the essay collection in this book.  It is a heartfelt account of adjusting to adult life after the raw newness (and gleam) of one's twenties has disappeared but before the confidence that comes with seniority has set in.  In Passages, Gail Sheehy wrote of this as the age when 30-somethings double down on the mortgage/kids/picket fence paradigm and Ms. Siddons had her home off Peachtree Street and a collection of cats but she she also had the perspective of an outsider in a well-settled neighborhood.  As the educated observer, she became a guide I needed to understand modern Southern protocol.  From her, I learned to recognize the blue-haired doyennes and their good old boy husbands that still wield power in my city.  (The South is the only place I know where cut-throat businessmen and landed millionaires are known as Junior and Bubba).  I learned someone's accent could not always predict their education, net worth or opinions.  I also learned that feeling unsure, frightened and unprepared is par for the course but it's not enough reason to quit.

Anne's essays detail facing troubles most of us confront sooner or later: fearsome weather, bad fights with the spouse, a lost job, the death of a family member. She also writes of the stresses that come of being a step-mother and second wife, a role I was learning to fill back then.  Each of these are explored with respect, sensitivity and gentle humor. There are also the odes to the good and everyday things in life such as the seasons, vacations, traffic,  the joys of work (her essay on advertising is hilarious) and the comfort of long friendships.  Her voice is intelligent, comfortable, and well-inflected with humor.  It's impossible not to imagine her as a friend.

In the years since the publication of JCMMC, Mrs. Siddons has written many novels and they have sold well, as they should, although calling her the "the thinking-woman's novelist" is still kind of left-handed compliment. Better is another reviewer's observation, "One doesn't read Anne Rivers Siddons's books, one dwells in them."  I've been dwelling in her fiction for a few decades now but JCMMC is different.  That's the book that dwells in me.

The Wizard of Weirdness: Hunter S. Thompson and the The Great Shark Hunt

I'm proud to say that a writer once cost me a job.  At one time, the U. S. Air Force  thought of making me a journalist so I could write for base newspapers.  I had passed all the tests easily and was interviewing with an editor of one of the largest papers in the command, a young Sargent in love with uniform creases and rules.  We were talking about veterans of various branches who became successful writers and I mentioned liking the work of an Air Force veteran named Hunter S. Thompson.  Steam poured out of the editor's ears.  "Thompson?" he squeaked, "Thompson!   My college invited him to our Controversial Speakers forum and he showed up stoned!!"   Internally I had two thoughts: 1) Well, yeah, everyone knows Hunter hates doing those speaker gigs, he's going to show up wrecked and 2) I believe I just blew this  interview.   The next day, the Air Force decided I would be a better Supply Clerk than Reporter and ended my adventures in Journalism.  I didn't care.  To be rejected because of liking Hunter Thompson's writing is a badge of honor for me, and I've missed his wild, unpredictable forays since his death in 2005.

Hunter is best remembered today as the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but if you want a collection of his work that stands on its own, read The Great Shark Hunt. It includes excerpts from some of HST's longer works (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, The Hell's Angels, etc.) and reprints of some of his incredible essays. Each piece shows Thompson's patented Gonzo journalism (where the author gets involved with the story and reports on the story, his involvement and the crazy things that happen) and his view of the world: a combination of moral outrage, amazement, eloquence,sardonic humor and integrity made each essay a treasure.

It seems strange to associate the word integrity with Hunter S. Thompson, considering his well-earned reputation for chaos, but Thompson always wrote about life exactly as he saw it, from seeking and revealing the worst of humanity in "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" and "Strange Rumblings in Azatlan" to a hilarious account of following Jimmy Carter and his Secret Service agents through a Law Day function in Athens, Georgia.  The title essay captures the paranoia, fear, hilarity and exhaustion of drug-addled writer trying to cover a fishing tournament. and the genuinely mournful "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat." recounts the chaotic life and strange disappearance of his friend, Oscar Acosta.  Hunter never shies away from his friend's faults because Hunter made it a policy never to shy away from anything when he wrote. He went for the extremes, grabbed for high, bright edges of reality in every experience and ignored all the margins. It was his way of articulating the truth, as he saw it. No word was off-limits, no person beyond reproach, if that was part of the story. Consequently, his writing offended almost all of the right people; the rest were offended by his existence.

If the world holds less potential since Thompson's passing, it is only because his writing enriched it so much during his life. The Great Shark Hunt is a mother-lode of words from one of the most outraged and original voices of the last century.  That Air Force editor can choke on his uniform creases. You enjoy the book.

A whole new way of seeing: My Name is Asher Lev

Picking up a new book is like setting off on an unknown road: you never know where it will take you.  In the late 1970's, I was reading every non-fiction book I could find about Judaism.  The religion fascinated me, a lot of my college friends were Jewish and I was deciding if I should convert.  Of course, I would not leave the delights of fiction, no matter what faith I followed, so I added several novels by Jewish authors thinking this would add dimension to my non-fiction studies.  One novel proved I have literary ADD; after I read My Name is Asher Lev, I put books on Judaism aside and became obsessed with art.

Even now I envy the reader who has not yet picked up Asher Lev because they haven't heard his mesmerizing voice spilling through that opening sentence:

My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev, about whom you have read in newspapers and magazines, about whom you talk so much at your dinner affairs and cocktail parties, the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion.

That beginning  has all of the power and immediacy of the opening paragraphs in  All the Kings Men or Rebecca.   You hear the man's insistent voice pouring out what will be a long confession of confusion, frustration, realization and art.  Because Asher is, first and foremost, an artist.

What follows is a Catch-22 of duty, responsibility and need.   First, Asher is a member of a Hasidic Jewish community, that branch of Orthodox Judaism where the men keep the locks of hair in front of their ears very long and wear very conservative, dark clothing.  These are very modest, pious people and because so much of art leans toward graven images, nudity and non-Jewish images , Asher's community avoids the field altogether.  This is a problem because Asher is compelled to create art.  I mean driven.  If this kid were locked in a room without any other way to make pictures, he'd open a vein and paint blood on the walls.  Asher can't deny his artistic impulses any more than he can deny his parents or the Rabbi.  Now Asher's creative drive causes great dissension and pain, first within his family and later, his community.  He knows the only way he can justify this pain is to create greater art.   Unfortunately, the greater the art is, the greater the pain.    Out of this conflict comes a great story.

This book has so many revolutionary ideas.  In one paragraph a fellow artist comments, "In all the history of art, there are only two ways of painting the world.  One is the way of Greece and Africa that sees the world as a geometric design.  The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower."   Do me a favor will you?  Next time you look at a painting, really look at it and you'll see the speaker is right.   The brush strokes and design will remind you either of geometrical shapes or flowers.

Ideas like that can blow the mind of a young reader, even one whose art appreciation began and ended with the board game, Masterpiece.  I ate up this book, picking up information about Hopper's sunlight and Picasso's Guernica instead of Hebraic culture and beliefs and started looking at the world in terms of line, light, color and tension.  When I told a Jewish friend I had fallen in love with My Name is Asher Lev, she cleared her throat and said that probably wasn't the ideal novel to study for Judaism.  I didn't have the heart to tell her my focus had shifted from Kabbalah to Kandinsky.

I still go back to Asher Lev every few years and I read the sequel but nothing beats that first breathless realization of getting lost in a compelling story.  Nevertheless, I owe Asher Lev and his author (Chaim Potok) a debt of thanks.  Other books gave me new ideas to believe; Asher Lev taught me to see.

Inferno and I finally admit I like some SF/Fantasy

Science Fiction and Fantasy  weren't respected literary genres when I was little.  That's hard to believe in the age of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games but the fiction welcomed on the best-seller lists and the book award nominations tended to fall in the "could-be-true-but-isn't" category.  These were heavy tomes with heavy ideas by heavy hitters in the writing game: Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Bill Styron.  (In those days, it was good to be a Southern Writer).  Liking SF and Fantasy were almost considered the hallmark of an immature intellect.  By the mid 1970's the stigma was starting to lift but it was still heavy enough to obscure a brilliant novel.  If you are looking for an intelligent, fascinating, often humorous trip through hell, I suggest you find a copy of Inferno by Niven and Pournelle.

Inferno is dedicated to Dante Alighieri and is an homage to the first part of his Divine Comedy but the authors updated the structure.  Instead of Dante himself, the hero of Inferno is Alan Carpentier, a minor SF writer who managed to fall from an eight story window while showing off at a Science Fiction convention.  He returns to consciousness trapped in a bottle, lying beyond the Vestibule of Hell.  Once he screams out the only open-sesame that will work in this paradigm (Why does it take so long for some characters to say, "Help me, God!"?   Don't they notice that's the only way some movie characters survive?) he meets a guide named Benny who says the only way out is to walk down through the center of Hell.   Carpentier has to go to the bottom to get to the top.

Carpentier and his guide traverse the levels of Underworld laid out by Dante.  However, there are some modern updates to exact punishments on contemporary professions. (When Minos, Judge of the Underworld gets an argument from Carpentier's guide, he replies, "Lawyers.  I have problems with lawyers.  There are so many places appropriate to the breed.")  For example, Real estate developers and tree huggers wage never-ending war against each other and the punishment for advertising men is so bad, the cast of Mad Men will start wearing sackcloth and ashes to avoid being mistaken for their characters in the next life.   (Trust me, you don't want to know!)

In each case, the condemned face a punishment that is appropriate to their actions but ludicrously out of proportion.  My favorite is Himuralibima, the first bureaucrat (a candidate for suffering, surely!)  who will be allowed to retire once he submits the proper application forms in his accustomed format, cuneiform.   That means he's writing out his application on mud tablets which dry out in Perdition's heat long before he can finish them.   Some four thousand years after his death, he's carved out a bay-sized (as in San Francisco Bay) amount of mud from one side of the Wall of Dis and his discarded, baked-too-soon efforts have become a ford over another river but his application's not done yet. Another soul, who bought irreplaceable books but refused to spend the necessary bucks to take care of his library, is caught in the DMZ between the Hoarders and Wasters as they roll Cadillac-sized diamonds at each other in another eternal battle for moral superiority.

Without letting go of the humor, Inferno asks the reasonable question, "What is the purpose of Hell?"  Because the suffering is eternal, the punishment of the condemned always ends up being far worse than the crimes they committed to enter this place.  The authors, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, get the credit for coming up with a reasonable answer.   But I'm not going to tell you what it is.  Read the book and find out for yourself.  It's the only way someone should  voluntarily go to hell.