by Nancy Pearl
Two British mystery novelists—Ngaio (pronounced Nyo, rhyming with “my toe”) Marsh and Simon Brett—use a theater setting for many of their books. My favorite Marsh theater mystery is Night at the Vulcan, in which the main character, an aspiring actress who’s just arrived in England from New Zealand, gets caught up in the general infighting and travails of a theater troupe. At the center of more than a dozen of Simon Brett’s novels is Charles Paris, the bumbling and incompetent actor who is always able to detect his way to the ultimate solution of any crime he encounters. Two of Brett’s best Charles Paris mysteries are A Reconstructed Corpse and Dead Room Farce.
ʺALMOST HEAVEN, WEST VIRGINIAʺ
Idon’t know quite why I’m so taken with so many novels set in West Virginia, where I’ve never been but hope someday to visit. Maybe it’s that I’ve always loved “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the John Denver song that gives this section its title; maybe it’s the fact that I love native West Virginian Mary Lee Settle’s writing so much. Whatever the reason, here are some awfully good works of fiction set in one of the smaller of the United States.
Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet series covers three hundred years of American cultural and political history as lived by three fictional West Virginia families; the five novels are Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scapegoat, and The Killing Ground. (The two Settle novels that I most frequently settle down with are Celebration, the story of two emotionally wounded people—an American anthropologist and a Scottish doctor—who become the focal points of a star-crossed group of friends, and Blood Tie, about a group of American and British expats in Turkey, which won the 1977 National Book Award for Fiction. Although, neither book takes place in West Virginia.)
Dogs of God by Benedict Pinckney depicts the violence that ensues when two men become mixed up with DEA agents, illegal immigrants, and gunrunners in rural West Virginia.
Sisters Lenny and Alma become friends with Buddy, the abused son of the camp cook, in Shelter by Jayne Anne Phillips.
Katherine Mosby’s Private Altars, set in the 1920s, and Keith Maillard’s Gloria, which takes place in the 1950s, describe two women, each of whom tries to balance her own sense of who she is and what she wants from life against the expectations of family and fellow small-town citizens.
The coal miners at the heart of Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth struggle for their lives and livelihood against mine owners who are determined not to improve the working conditions or safety of the men and boys in the mines.
THE ALPHA, BETA, GAMMAS OF GREECE
Without the Greeks, where would we be? In philosophy, art, literature, rhetoric, history, sports, and science, the Greeks were there—at least one step ahead of everyone else.
Much of what we know about Greek history we owe to two men: Herodotus and Thucydides. It is Herodotus, often referred to as the father of history, whose rousing Histories serve as our guide to understanding the epic battles between Greece and its archrival, Persia. But it’s Thucydides who gave me one of the most meaningful reading experiences I had in college. I was assigned his History of the Peloponnesian War, the story of the twenty-seven-year war between two major Greek city-states, Athens and Sparta, which took place between 431 and 404 B.C.I read the translation by Thomas Hobbes, and was struck again and again by how events of the war echoed in World War II and the long Cold War that followed, and even its relevance to many of today’s events.
Donald Kagan, Hillhouse Professor of Classics and History at Yale University and the foremost Thucydides scholar of this or probably any other day, wrote a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, but perhaps feeling that four books were a bit much to ask anyone except scholars in the field to read, he also published The Peloponnesian War, a wonderful one-volume condensation of his own work, which is intended for a general audience. Kagan’s’s account supplements Thucydides, whose own account ends seven years before the war officially came to a conclusion, with added commentary from other Greek writers.
Other good books about ancient Greece include The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece—and Western Civilization by Barry Strauss, which recounts an epic sea battle between Persia and the Greeks, and Tony Perrottet’s The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games. As Perrottet tells it, had those ancient games and related activities been filmed, they’d have gotten an R rating.
As for fiction, don’t miss The Last of the Wine and The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault, two novels set during Greece’s classical period, and The Sand-Reckoner,Gillian Bradshaw’s biographical novel of Archimedes, who is known for his boast “Give me a lever long enough, and a prop strong enough, and I can single-handedly move the world.”
Two of the best-known novels of Nikos Kazantzakis, perhaps Greece’s—or to be more specific, Crete’s—most famous writer, are Zorba the Greek and the more controversial The Last Temptation of Christ.
You definitely don’t want to miss the four great Greek playwrights and these plays—Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone,Euripides’s Medea,and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata.
Francine Segan’s The Philosopher’s Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook is fascinating to anyone interested in ancient history and contemporary cooking, and my friends who cook assure me that the recipes work just fine.
For more about Greece, see the section “The Classical World” in Book Lust.
ALPHABET SOUP
I think my interest in books about the alphabet came from my childhood, when I read two of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, “How the First Letter Was Written” and “How the Alphabet Was Made.” Who’d have thought there would be such interesting books about those twenty-six little letters?
Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z by David Sacks is a thoroughly delightful and delightfully thorough look at the history of the Roman alphabet, as well as a compendium of little-known facts about each individual letter. It includes essays on lexicographers, printing, and other lovely oddities sure to please language lovers. Despite the amount of research that Sacks obviously did for this book, he is refreshingly free of self-importance. His linguistic history is written in a conversational tone and is filled with puns that Sacks always apologizes for, admitting to a proclivity for these groaners.
In his breezy yet informative Quirky Qwerty: A Biography of the Typewriter and Its Many Characters, Torbjorn Lundmark offers readers not only the explanation for why the typewriter (and computer) keyboards are configured as they are (do you recognize the word qwerty?), he also gives the history and background of the alphabet and diacritical marks, along with other fascinating bits of information that are perfect for dropping into casual conversation at cocktail parties. Did you know that the Remington who became famous for the guns he produced also made the first typewriters? Did you know that you could type “typewriter” by using just the third row of letters on a keyboard? Did you know that consonants are much older than vowels? Wh nds vwls nyhw?
AND THE AWARD FOR BEST TITLE GOES TO...
If you can’t judge a book by its cover (see page 237), how do you pick a book out of the sea of titles out there? Why, you’re drawn to a particular book by its title, of course. Some titles provoke a visceral reaction of pleasure that compels you to reach out and take the book off the shelf. Even if many of these turn out to be duds, a few are pure gold.
Leah Hager Cohen’s Heart, You Bully, You Punk (the title comes from a poem by Marie Ponsot called “One Is One”)
James Conrad’s Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago
John Dufresne’s Love Warps the Mind a Little
DaveEggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Herbert Gold’s She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me
Allan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
Alice Mattison’s Men Giving Money, Women Yelling and The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (in addit
ion to being a superb novelist, she’s hell on wheels at coming up with compelling titles)
Sharyn McCrumb’s If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him
Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters
W.M.Spackman’s Armful of Warm Girl
ANIMAL LOVE
Now these are strange and wonderful novels, but they’re sometimes a hard sell to readers. My advice is, give ’em a try, follow the fifty-page rule as promulgated in the introduction to this book, and see what you think. Personally, I adore them.
One of the funniest and tender novels I’ve ever read is His Monkey Wife by John Collier. Collier, who wrote many Hollywood screen-plays including The African Queen, sets this novel in the 1920s in colonial Africa, where a chimp named Emily (one of the best creations in all fiction, and a real fan of the novels of Emily Brontë) falls in love with her owner, Alfred Fatigay, a British schoolteacher. When Mr. Fatigay goes home to England to marry his bluestocking wife, Emily goes along with him, contriving with great élan to prevent the wedding. From the first line of the introduction all the way to its oh-so-satisfying (and romantic) last sentence, this not-nearly-well-enough-known novel will warm the heart of even the most cynical reader.
Many a husband asserts that though his beloved wife may change, his love for her will remain constant, but Mr. Tebrick, the narrator of David Garnett’s Lady into Fox, is challenged more severely than most when Mrs.Tebrick unaccountably—and suddenly—becomes a fox (that’s a literal fox)—and leaves for an assignation with another fox, returning to the Tebrick family home some time later with her fox children in tow. Scholars can delve into the effect of the author’s complex sexuality on the theme of the novel (he had a love affair with Vanessa Bell’s lover, Duncan Grant, to whom this 1922 book is dedicated, and then, years later, married Grant and Bell’s daughter), while the rest of us can simply enjoy this strangely affecting tale.
Of all the many odd novels I’ve read, Marian Engel’s Bear ranks high on the list, not only because of how strange it is, but also because of its total believability. Winner of Canada’s Governor-General’s Literary Award in 1976, this novel tells of a young woman’s love affair with—what else—a bear, on an ostensibly deserted island near Ontario, Canada. This gem of a novel has long been out of print, but it’s well worth searching for.
Another out-of-print book about a close relationship between humans and animals is Peter Dickinson’s superior mystery The Poison Oracle. British psycholinguist Wesley Morris comes to an unnamed Arab kingdom to study its language; when a murder occurs, the only witness is Dinah, a chimpanzee whom Morris has been teaching to communicate with humans. (A similar plot is at work in a terrific children’s book called The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit by Carol Ryrie Brink.)
BARSETSHIRE AND BEYOND
During my first Book Lust book tour, a gentleman in the audience at the Louisville Free Public Library in Kentucky stood up and asked in an aggrieved tone, “Where is Anthony Trollope?” Which gave me the chance to utter a sentence that I venture to say few others have had the opportunity to use: “In his grave, in Kensal Green cemetery, along with Wilkie Collins,William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Babbage,” I said smartly. (Oh, the obscure facts one can pick up through a lifetime of reading!) More seriously, of course, the gentleman was reminding me that I’d forgotten to include one of my favorite writers, the indefatigable author of more than four dozen books, part of whose fame rests on the fact that he got up before dawn every day to write his self-imposed ration of pages, then went off to his job at the post office (where he invented the letter box).
My favorite Trollope novels are the whole Barsetshire series (in order): The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage,The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset, and the whole Palliser series (in order): Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke’s Children.
Besides these, though, every Trollopian worth his or her salt will have an additional must-read list, and mine is headed by the amazingly prescient The Way We Live Now.
But what do you read when you finish all of Trollope? (You can, of course, as many of the most loyal Trollopians do, read them all again.And then again.) If not, though, you could go on to the novels of Angela Thirkell, who not only set her novels in the county of Barsetshire, but also invented characters that are direct descendants of Trollope’s. Thirkell wrote forty novels, beginning when she was forty-three. Her characters endure the home front of World War II with stoic fortitude, maintaining that particular sort of stability unique to the English, which was being threatened within and without. What’s so hard about reading Thirkell—and this makes it really difficult to recommend her with all my heart—is that she allows her characters to say appallingly nasty things about blacks and Jews. Granted, this was the prevailing attitude of the English upper and middle classes (a good example of someone who thought this way was the English Nazi, Unity Mitford), and you find such sentiments in the novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as well, but I feel awfully uncomfortable every time I re-encounter a Thirkell novel.
Still, you can’t beat Thirkell at writing about nostalgia and scenes of light romance amid domestic coziness and the minor vicissitudes of village life. Try Pomfret Towers, with its description of a party at a seventeenth-century English country house, and What Did It Mean?, set during Elizabeth II’s coronation summer of 1953.
Other scenes of British village life can be found in the novels of Miss Read (Thrush Green and Summer at Fairacre are a good sampling) and in E.F.Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and his other novels set in the small villages of Tilling and Riseholme.
If you’re in the mood for good old-fashioned Trollopian storytelling, but want something set in the present-day United States, then Morningside Heights by Cheryl Mendelson (who is also the author of the nonfiction Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House) should go high on your list. Set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in the neighborhood around Columbia University, the richly detailed and complicated plot features a young couple living well beyond their means, a suspicious death, a missing will, a priest unhappy with his vocation, and an unscrupulous lawyer, as well as various friends and relations of all the characters. As in the novels of Anthony Trollope, to which this novel pays loving homage, the good are ultimately rewarded and the bad are suitably punished.
THE BEATS AND THEIR GENERATION
The phrase “Beat Generation” was first used by Jack Kerouac in an interview he did with his friend and fellow writer John Clellon Holmes, for an article (worth reading) called “This Is the Beat Generation” that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in November 1952. There were really very few “true” beats (Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William S. Burroughs were among the earliest to identify themselves as such). But despite that fact, the Beats had a huge influence on succeeding generations of writers. Here are some of my favorite books by and about them and the period they defined.
First, take a look at Holmes’s own chronicle of the times, Go, generally considered the first Beat novel (it was published five years before On the Road) and filled with lightly fictionalized portraits of his contemporaries.
Then move into the biographies. Ann Charters, who went on to be one of the acknowledged experts in the area of Beat literature and the men who wrote it, started it all with Kerouac: A Biography; a good companion read is Gerald Nicosia’s Memory Babe, another view of the movement’s best-known personage. (You’ll also want to read Kerouac’s autobiographical first novel, The Town and the City, which sets the stage for the man who goes On the Road a few years later.)
Steven Watson’s The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 looks at the relationships among the major players. An added pleasure of this book is that it’s cunningly designed to include many quotations, anecdotes, and relevant definitions in the margins.
The
Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957- 1963 by Barry Miles transports the Beats to the Left Bank and shifts the focus away from Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso, all of whom lived for a time in a cheap boardinghouse where they wrote (or finished) some of the best works of their careers, including Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish.”
In Sam Kashner’s When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, the author looks back on his experiences as the first student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Allen Ginsberg in 1976, long after the heyday of the Beat movement.
Joyce Johnson’s claim to fame was her 1950s relationship with Jack Kerouac (whom she met on a blind date, arranged by none other than Allen Ginsberg) just months before On the Road made him the spokesman for the Beat Generation. Her book Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming-of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is one of the two best memoirs of the period. It includes solid portrayals of other luminaries of the time, including Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky.