When She Was Good – and Roth is Great

The time had come to leave our boat and return to Florida.  We wanted to beat the weather for a safe drive.  Ann needed to see her surgeon because of an arthritic flare up in her knee and as much as we love being in Connecticut, seeing friends and family, living on our boat at our Club, there comes a time when the confines of the boat simply get to you and we long for the spaciousness of our home.  It’s the earliest that we’ve ever returned from our 15 years of bifurcated home/boat living, just in time for what we thought might become a Category 1 Hurricane, Erika, which thankfully disintegrated into remnants with only brief heavy rain and an eerie sunrise the day after.

Right before leaving the boat I picked up a novel I had brought (again, avoiding short stories for the time being), this time Philip Roth’s When She Was Good.  I’ve read a lot of Roth, and think his American Pastoral is one of the more important novels of my time.  I wasn’t expecting much from this novel, one often not discussed, but I was curious about it as to my knowledge Roth’s only novel with a woman (Lucy Nelson / Bassart) as the protagonist, particularly given the accusations over the years of Roth being a misogynist.  Furthermore, as Stanley Elkin’s brief blurb on the cover states, When She Was Good could be compared to Theodore Dreiser’s work ( I've read practically all his work in college and can count him among my favorite American writers), particularly in my mind his American Tragedy.

What mesmerized me is Roth’s lapidary characterization of Lucy.  This is a character, like the one in Dreiser’s other great novel, Sister Carrie, who you are unlikely to forget and it is Roth’s characterizations and dialogue which sets this novel apart. .  It reminded me of my own mother’s struggles in a man’s world.  There are two edges to this sword, though, Lucy as standing for and rationalizing what she considers “the truth” and then where her expectations stemming from” the truth” almost borders on mental illness.  Although she is described as a “ball buster” at one point, I think Roth is clearly rooting for Lucy in a world that does not reward her stalwart individualism.  Like Anita Shreve’s Olympia in Fortune’s Rocks, Lucy is a woman before her time. And like Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, this is a multigenerational novel, but with a darker view. 

Willard Carroll is from a dysfunctional family but as a young man he finds the American Dream waiting for him in “Liberty Center:”

     So at the sight of Liberty Center, its quiet beauty, its serene order, its gentle summery calm, all that had been held in check in him, all that tenderness of heart that had been for eighteen years his secret burden, even at times his shame, came streaming forth. If ever there was a place where life could be less bleak and harsh and cruel than the life he had known as a boy, if ever there was a place where a man did not have to live like a brute, where he did not have to be reminded at every turn that something in the world either did not like mankind, or did not even know of its existence, it was here. Liberty Center! Oh, sweet name! At least for him, for he was indeed free at last of that terrible tyranny of cruel men and cruel nature.

     He found a room; then he found a job-he took an examination and scored high enough to become postal clerk; then he found a wife, a strong-minded and respectable girl from a proper family; and then he had a child; and then one day-the fulfillment, he discovered, of a very deep desire-he bought a house of his own, with a front porch and a backyard: downstairs a parlor, a dining room, a kitchen and a bedroom; upstairs two bedrooms more and the bath. A back bathroom was built downstairs in 1915, six years after the birth of his daughter, and following his promotion to assistant postmaster of the town.

That daughter, Myra, becomes the mother to Lucy, Willard’s grandchild.  But Myra married a man with a drinking problem and as a young girl Lucy calls the police as her mother was hit by her drunken husband, Whitey, blackening her eye.  The shame of having the police involved, and their name the subject of gossip, seems worse to Lucy’s grandparents, and even her mother, than the act itself.  It is from this action that the novel finds its themes and its energy, Lucy condemning her father, totally ostracizing him, and men in general, unless they tell the “truth” and abide by her expectations of how a man should behave, taking responsibility, doing the right thing.

These “blue threads” of shame and anger and expectations culminate in her savage condemnation of her malleable husband, Roy, with whom they now have a child, the fourth generation in the novel.  These very words could have been spoken by my own mother during the height of her own unhappy marriage to my father:

     "You worm! Don't you have any guts at all? Can't you stand on your own two feet, ever? You sponge! You leech! You weak, hopeless, spineless, coward! You'll never change- you don't even want to change! You don't even know what I mean by change! You stand there with your dumb mouth open! Because you have no backbone! None!" She grabbed the other cushion from behind her and heaved it toward his head. "Since the day we met!" ….

     She charged off the sofa. "And no courage!" she cried. "And no determination! And no will of your own! If I didn't tell you what to do, if I were to turn my back-if I didn't every single rotten day of this rotten life ... Oh, you're not a man, and you never will be, and you don't even care!" She was trying to hammer at his chest; first he pushed her hands down, then he protected himself with his forearms and elbows; then he just moved back, a step at a time.

This tirade is in front of family and in front of their child.  It is a novel that resonates with me for personal reasons.   I’ll leave it to the reader as to whether Lucy is a “ball buster” or just a person living in a world that has turned on her because “of that terrible tyranny of cruel men and cruel nature” -- as experienced by her own grandfather before he fled to “Liberty Center.”

I’ll miss Roth (who has vowed to write no more) as I’ve missed Updike.  To hear from them no longer is like losing close friends.

Hamilton Hip Hops into Broadway History

Ann and I once again boarded the New Haven train to NYC, this time to see Hamilton.

It’s everything that has been written and said about the show, probably the most talked about Broadway musical prior to its opening in history.  No sense repeating the story here about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius in putting together the most original Broadway musical since, perhaps, Oklahoma.  As with Oklahoma, Hamilton breaks all the rules, but similar to its predecessor, it uses dance, music, acting, and a fine “book” to move the action along.  The action is explosive, a constant pulse measuring the beginning of our nation, the meaning of compromise, and the contributions of immigrants, particularly the Caribbean born Hamilton.

This nation’s historical founders are played by minorities in period customs, singing history through the medium of rap and hip hop, where the copious dialogue springs to life.  There are very few speaking parts, and that factor as well as the staging, the subject of revolution, and some of the love songs hearken back to a previous transforming musical, Les Misérables.  The reminder of the latter in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work is omnipresent.  And like “Master of the House” there is a change of pace humorous song embedded in Hamilton as well, one sung by a foppish King George entitled “You’ll Be Back,” which contrasts with the hip hop in the show.  It was sung with such a recognizable Beatles’ beat that the audience erupted into instant laughter.  Nevertheless, the other music, even for old Rodgers and Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim fans, was memorable. Rap songs such as “My Shot” and “The Room Where it Happens” run like leitmotifs throughout the show and get under your skin (not that I could sing them or even play them on the piano).

If I had to sum up the musical in one word, it’s pure raw energy. Never a dull moment, with many emotional ones, particularly if one has an understanding of the beginnings of this nation, as well as cautionary inferences pertaining to our own times, it is the must see show of this season, and probably many to come.  We were fortunate to be able to get tickets months and months ago when we first heard about it.

 

 

Time and Again – and Again

While An American in Paris transported me to post War II Paris, the glorious Gershwin music brought me back to a New York of another time, a segue to the next novel I selected from my “bullpen bookshelf,” Time and Again by Jack Finney.

Compared to Fortune’s Rocks, the novel I wrote about in a prior entry, this is lightweight as far as literature is concerned but a compelling read nevertheless.  It harkens back to the nascent roots of my reading life.  My parents were not readers, so I had to fend for myself.  As a teenager I discovered science fiction, particularly H.G. Wells and his classic, Time Machine.  His novels ultimately led to other SF writers such as Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov (with whom I briefly worked early in my career on a series of SF reprints).  Finney’s novel is science fiction, but it is also a mystery and romance novel as well, and most prominently, an historical portrayal of NYC in the early 1880’s. 

As some of the novel takes place around Gramercy Park, and lower Manhattan, it is evocative of my early working life: 100 Fifth Avenue during the summers of 1956 – 1964 for my father in his photography studio during my high school and college years, and from 1964 – 1970 at 111 Fifth Avenue, only three blocks from my father’s studio, my first job in publishing.  Those buildings were built soon after the era described in Finney’s novel.

The novel’s protagonist, Si Morley, is an illustrator for a magazine in 1970 (when the novel was written) and he is selected for a secret government project involving time travel.  No complicated machinery involved, but instead a clever conceit involving hypnosis and self-hypnosis, so the reader needs to merely suspend belief.

Needless to say, there are the obvious themes such as the danger of disturbing the past so as not to affect the present, and that is a fine line Si has to walk.  He makes multiple visits and has follow up debriefings from his government overseers.  His last visit becomes a more involved and revelatory one, his becoming more a person of the late 19^th century and getting to know the people of the time, not as images of the long deceased, but real, living people.  When Finney deals with that, it gave me the chills.  These are the New Yorkers who passed through Ellis Island. 

Si catches a Third Avenue horse drawn bus, on a cold winter’s night in 1882:  Here in the Third Avenue car, my feet ankle-deep in dirty straw but still cold, toes a little numb, I caught a glimpse – through the window of the closed door ahead – of the driver as he drew back on the reins to bring the car to stop.  A middle-aged woman, her face as Irish as an anti-Irish cartoon on a back page of most any “Harper’s Weekly,” climbed aboard.  She wore a heavy knitted shawl over her gray hair that covered her shoulders too; she had no other coat; she carried a basket on one arm.  As she opened the door, the cold air rolling in and stirring the straw in the aisle, I heard the horse’s hoofs slipping and clattering for a purchase, heard the crack of the driver’s whip, and just a the door closed I saw the driver’s body move as he stamped his feet, hearing the muffled sound of it, and he suddenly turned real for me as I understood how cold he must be out there on that open platform.

And then the city, too, turned real, this car no longer a quaint museum piece of the future, but of the here and now:  solid, scarred, uncomfortable, dirty because the straw on the floor was stained with tobacco spit driven by a harassed overworked man and pulled by a badly treated animal.  It was cold out on that platform, I knew that, but I got up, walked up front, slid open the door, and stepped out pulling the door closed behind me.  I had to talk to this man. 

And indeed Si does, nearly freezing in the process, learning of the man’s struggle to make a living at $1.90 a day to support his wife and two children, working 14 hours a day.  The heart of the issue, which is also examined in Anita Shreve’s novel Fortune’s Rocks, is the extreme differences in social strata, still rife in our modern times.  Our families economic and class status still governs much of our future working lives, hard work being secondary. As the driver relates to Si: Nine tenths of the people in New York find scarcely a moment in their lives which they can call their own, and see mightily little but misery from one year’s end to the other.  How is it possible for me to thank God in my heart for the food he gives me for life, while every morsel I eat I earn with my toil and even suffering?  There may be Providence for the rich man, but every poor man must be his own Providence.  As for the value of life, we poor folks don’t live for ourselves at all; we live for other people.  I often wonder if the rich man who owns great block of stock in the road and reckons his wealth in the millions does not sometimes think, as he sits at his well-filled table and looks at the happy faces of his children, of the poor car driver who toil for his benefit for a dollar and ninety cents a day, and is lucky if he tastes meat twice a week and can give the little ones a home, warm clothes and blankets for the winter.   Could Dickens have said it better?

The guiding rule for Si during his time travel is “observe, don’t interfere.”  To do the latter is to possibly change the present, perhaps substantially.  Can the empathetic Si actually abide by the rule?  That is one of the mystery themes running through the novel. I’ll leave the ultimate answer to the reader, but suffice it to say, Time After Time is a compulsive read, especially for an old Sci-fi veteran like myself.  I found it particularly amusing, though, when Si finally returns to 1970 from his last round trip, the world he describes, one from 45 years ago, seems as foreign to me now as the 1880’s did to Si.  Change, one of the few things one can count on in life, in our hyper-cyber world seems to have taken on a geometric construct.

Fortune’s Rocks

One of the books that I squirreled away on the boat some time ago for ”summer reading” was Anita Shreve’s Fortune’s Rocks.  I keep a number of “emergency books” on our bookshelf in our dinette in case I “tire” from other summer reading I bring up from Florida.  I’ve been reading William Trevor’s short story collection, Selected Stories, interspersing Thomas McGuane’s new short story collection, Crow Fair, focusing on short stories with the hope I will learn more about the art of the short story so I can successfully carry forward my own stories (thus far, the osmotic learning method has failed as it’s difficult on the boat to concentrate on writing – it’s just much easier to read).  The Trevor collection has become increasingly maudlin and focused on rural Ireland, not that I mind either, but I felt I just needed a break.  Although McGuane’s collection provides a stark contrast to Trevor’s, his writing reminding me more of a cross between Raymond Carver’s short stories and Sam Shepard’s plays, I needed a novel to break up the routine.  Anita Shreve to the rescue!

I’ve always admired Shreve, an Edith Wharton, in our midst.  She loves to write period pieces or contemporary ones set on the New England coast, but at the core of her works are affairs of the human heart -- I’m thinking of The Weight of Water, Body Surfing, and Sea Glass in particular.  Fortune’s Rocks is in that ensemble, a novel rich in 19^th century language with Shreve’s unique eye to detail.  As she’s successfully done before, she writes this novel in the present tense, rendering the reader a sort of eavesdropper onto unfolding events.  She also juxtaposes the present tense narrative to the omniscient author’s eye, commenting on various social issues.

It is a page turner or perhaps I should say a page burner as it is reminiscent of a high brow Harlequin Romance.  It is the “steamiest” novel I’ve ever read by Shreve, particularly unusual given the late 19^th century setting.  It is even shocking in some respects, not because of the language but because of the story in the context of the times.

Precocious fifteen year old Olympia Biddeford is the daughter of a prominent and wealthy Boston family who own a vacation cottage, formerly a commodious Convent, on the New Hampshire coast.  This well connected summer community at Fortune’s Rocks borders Ely Falls, a mill town where immigrant Franco—Americans toil away in noxious factories.  She and her parents arrive for their summer on the eve of her 16^th birthday.  Olympia’s perspicacity has not escaped notice of her father, who has removed her from school and taken upon himself the extensive education of his daughter at home.  They are very close.

Shreve’s superlative prose sets the tone:  It is the late morning of the day of the summer solstice, and through an open window Olympia is trying to capture on her sketch pad the look of a wooden boat, unpainted, its sails old, a dirty ivory.  But she is not, she knows, terribly gifted as an artist and her attempts of rendering this boat are more impressionistic than accurate, the main purpose of her sketching being not so much to improve her drawing skills as to provide herself with an opportunity for idle thought.  For at this time in her life, Olympia is much occupied with the process of thinking: not constructive thinking necessarily, and nothing that will produce brilliant solutions to problems, but rather drift thinking, like dreaming, the thoughts moving randomly from one place to another, picking something up, looking at it, putting it down again, the way people move through shops.

But it is not only the maturation of her mind this summer, but the emergence of a woman from the body of a child.  In this regard, she meets one of her father’s married friends, John Haskell, a physician who is opening a clinic in Ely Falls, a progressive-minded man.  He is building a cottage in Fortune’s Rocks which he will soon occupy with his wife and children.

Without going into spoiler details, suffice it to say, one of the novels Olympia is reading that summer is Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  Olympia and Haskell are enveloped in a relationship that has disastrous consequences, Olympia becoming utterly ostracized in an era that is intolerant of straying from social norms.  

The novel reads like a mystery in many respects.  It also reminded me a little of Dickens’ social commentary on the ills of 19^th century mill life working conditions.  In fact, as much as the novel is about the coming of age of Olympia, it is about her growing awareness of the schism between the wealthy and working classes:   She watches a fisherman working from his boat not fifty feet off the rocks at the end of the lawn.  A not unfamiliar sight, the boat bobs in the slight chop while the man hauls in wooden pots from the bottom of the ocean.  The craft is a sloop, no, perhaps a schooner, laden with barrels of bait and catch – a charming sight, but testament only to a life more harsh than any Olympia has ever had to endure….Olympia had hardly ever given any thought to such men or to their families.  She has passed by the rude fish shanties from which the lobstermen work dozens of times, seeing the shacks and the boats themselves and even the men aboard them as mere backdrop to the true theater of Fortune’s Rocks, the life of the privileged summer colony at its leisure; when of course it is much the other way around, these farmers of the sea being the time-honored inheritors of the native beach and its environs.  And it strikes her again, as it has so often lately, how easy it is not to see what is actually there.

Ultimately, the novel brings these two worlds in direct conflict:  the Franco-Americans working in the mills of Ely Falls and Olympia’s, a clash of class and culture.

It is a testimony to Shreve’s ability to create a compelling architecture for her novel – not merely a passionate love story, but one told on a broader canvas of issues.  To say more is to reveal too much, but, for me, it was the perfect change of pace given the number of short stories I’ve been devouring.  I’ve picked up still another novel (more on that in a later entry) from my “bullpen” as I’m not ready to return to my short story education.