A Summons to Memphis

What a delight to read! This Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Peter Taylor tells a story without any linguistic pyrotechnics or artificial "layering," but with the economy of a writer who made his reputation with short stories.

There are many layers, though, as the narrator, Philip Carver, casts back into the family history that culminates in a crisis when his widower father contemplates marriage to a younger woman and his spinster sisters connive to block it.

It is for the daughters a type of revenge, for their father at a critical point in time intervened to spoil marriages for both of them, as he did for his son. The arc of the novel is how the son, the only one to leave the family's Tennessee home to make a career in New York, comes to terms with his father's decision first to transplant the family from Nashville to Memphis, traumatizing all three children, and second to secretly visit the family of his son's girlfriend in Chattanooga to discourage any marriage.

The answer ultimately is that he does not come to terms with it. He speaks of forgiving and forgetting, but he remains emotionally damaged, living in a comfortable relationship with an equally damaged woman that has the narrowest of parameters and stifles any true happiness.

The daughters, who apparently are even less aware of the permanent damage to their emotional lives, succeed in taking their father captive and preventing his remarriage, safeguarding their inheritance but more importantly securing their revenge. But they have even less satisfaction from it than their brother.

The narrator skillfully portrays the father-worship of his three children, which neither the father's own tragedy of being duped by a close friend nor his selfish interference in the lives of his children can diminish. But the damage is plain to see in that none of his children then ever marry or have children.

So it is a story about fathers and daughters, and about fathers and sons, and the problems resulting from a dominating personality who is also narcissistic. There is something for virtually every reader to relate to. It is not uplifting because the narrator's disillusionment and disappointment end in resignation. By the end of the novel, it is the father -- despite the betrayal by his friend and the successful efforts of his children to block his marriage -- who triumphs. He is indomitable. But he dies and leaves a legacy of pain.

Taylor's lucid prose deftly unfolds the layers of emotion and history in this profoundly dysfunctional family. While the narrator retains the reader's sympathy, it is clear by the end of the book that he is not the best judge of what has happened.

It is a quick read, just over 200 pages. The depictions of Memphis and Nashville are entertaining -- I picked this up from my shelf because of our recent trip through Tennessee -- but they are less important than the universal emotions of the family relationships.

The Dark Vineyard

The charm is still there in Martin Walker's second French country cozy with Bruno, chief of police in a small Dordogne town. Walker wisely avoids a second dip into the dark history of French collaboration with the Nazis and constructs a new plot around very contemporary concerns about ecology, genetically modified crops and industrial production wine.

But the first rule of a murder mystery is to have a murder. The initial crime here is arson, so the suspense is hardly sufficient (not even Bruno seems to really care who set the fire) to help the reader along in the slowly developing plot. Walker's sparkling writing and his vivid descriptions of the quality of life in the Dordogne are sufficient for a Francophile, but the appeal of the series might be limited if it remains too low-key.

In the end a couple of deaths (maybe murder, maybe not) and the brutal killing of an aged dog add a little juice to the narrative.

One of the highlights is the meal Bruno prepares for some friends, featuring a game bird shot by Bruno, which Walker stubbornly and oddly refuses to translate (Wikipedia tells me becasse is woodcock). It's hard to imagine that English and American women would follow the example of the French men and actually slurp down the stomach and crunch the bird's skull as part of the meal, no matter how enamored they may be with lovable old Bruno, but it does give a sense of France's gustatory zeal.

The resolution is all a bit anti-climactic, perhaps because there's very little true villainy. The French characters are all just a bit too nice in the end -- Walker, unlike Peter Mayle, seems unwilling to offend his friends back in the Dordogne. But if you liked the first book, this one goes down easy, too.

Spies of the Balkans

Alan Furst is back creating another morally ambivalent, atmospheric thriller featuring a hard-bitten foreign protagonist. This time it is the Greek Costa Zannis, who is remarkably similar in his attitudes and cigarette smoking to the French, Hungarian and Dutch protagonists of Furst's earlier novels.

We listened to this on audiobooks during a road trip and it was entertaining enough, though Furst has clearly fallen into purely formula writing. Watch a few old movies (he even refers to one character as a real cinematic aviator), research a relatively obscure location (Salonika, Greece in this instance), insert above-mentioned hard-bitten protagonist, add a few lady friends, and wrap everything in a smoky nostalgia that makes it as blurry and comforting as the black-and-white movie you started with.

I happen to like a lot of this, particularly the obscure locations. Furst plays this one to the hilt, with Zannis shuttling off to Belgrade and Budapest, with a quick dash to Paris, and dispatching loved ones to Istanbul and Alexandria, while carrying on three love affairs in Salonika. Some of the romantic scenes were amazingly clumsy, bordering on the adolescent. And in an audiobook you don't have the freedom to skim over the embarrassing parts.

The reading by Daniel Gerroll was easy to listen to and follow. His comfortable pace was well-matched to Furst's unhurried narrative style and he was consistent in his characterization of Zannis and other main figures, so there was virtually no confusion in a book populated by people with names that are strange to our ears. No small feat.

Furst belabors the history a bit more in this book than he has in some earlier works, probably because this location and the action he describes (Greece girding for the Nazi assault) is so obscure to American readers. He is at his best describing the fin du monde atmosphere of a country coming under siege and the desperation that accompanies it. The story of an underground railroad smuggling Jews out of Germany to freedom, in Turkey of all places, was moving and rich in historical context.

Less successful was Furst's attempt to show a Gestapo officer at work, which seemed to owe too much to Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone to be called original.

We bought the audiobook at Books a Million in Tennessee because we inadvertently left behind the audiobooks we had bought for the trip in our hotel the first night. Out of the dozens of audiobooks on sale, it was the only one we felt both of us could enjoy and that proved to be the case.

The Secret History

This book had a secret history for me -- apparently quite popular when it came out, but I missed it entirely. Donna Tartt's psychological thriller -- because it's more that than a mystery -- is so erudite you feel smarter when you're done.

Though narrated by Richard Papen, an ambivalent college student who has the patent dishonesty of a Tobias Wolff creation, the novel turns around the enigmatic Henry, a brainiac who by his own admission was dead inside until he killed a man during a bacchanalia he engineered with his fellow classics majors. When one of these students gently begins to blackmail them, Henry, clearly a psychopath, devises the plot to do away with him as well.

There's no mystery to it -- Bunny's death is disclosed on the first page. It is the subtle psychological interplay between this handful of students before and after the deed that propels the book forward.

There's much I love about this book -- the academic setting, the glimpses of the classic Greek and Roman authors, the wonderful literacy of the writing, which reverberates with intelligence. None of the characters are that sympathetic. The narrator's inferiority complex, his anxiety to please, his hopeless love for the only woman in the group, are rather more pathetic. Henry, to the end, remains a cipher. One wishes his fabulous learning would charm, but seeing how hollow the charm of Julian, the teacher, is in the end, it's just as well it doesn't. Bunny, the murder victim, begins to look the most human to Richard after his passing and the crumbling facades of the others, but he was in fact an obnoxious, loud-mouthed, self-absorbed moocher.

The reader nonetheless can relate to the narrator's gradual disillusionment as one by one the mythic heroes of his classics group display their clay feet. In the end, Richard returns to California, yes, wiser and sadder, after a coming-of-age saga that is novel in its twisted values and sardonic air. Because even after the fact, Richard identifies with the sense of superiority that carried his little band through their adventure. But it is Henry who stands as the existential anti-hero at the end of the novel, while Richard appears to be really just a bystander.

The book was published in 1992, based on the author's experiences even earlier at Bennington College in Vermont (called Hampden College in the novel). The students drink, do drugs and smoke in keeping with the period (perhaps it's still the same, though I wonder about the smoking). There are no cellphones, laptops or Internet, no iPods, iPhones or iPads -- making it almost an historical novel. The action skirts the borderline of the surreal -- whether the bacchanalia or murder, or even Richard's harrowing winter break in Hampden or Bunny's funereales. The very existence of Julian and his coterie is surreal. The reality of money intrudes in the plot with the baffling vagary of an East Coast private college with its subterranean seams of trust funds, rich aunts, and financial aid.

More real is the difficulty of discerning betrayal and trust among the friends. Did any of the group ever really like or accept Richard, the poor boy from Plano, California? Did Henry set him up as the patsy by manipulating his desperate need for acceptance or at least acknowledgment? Not least, the sexual undercurrents so important at that age keep the little band roiling in emotion.

The book was fascinating to read, though I wonder how substantial in the end. Tartt's second novel, The Little Friend, set in a completely different time and place, came only 10 years later and earned only mixed reviews. A third novel is said to forthcoming ca. 2012. Safe to say, Secret History remains sui generis.

Bruno, Chief of Police

This odd-duck title belongs to a charming book that creates a new genre one could dub the French country cozy. Bruno is an engaging municipal policeman in the village of St. Denis, equivalent to a country constable and firmly on the bottom rung of France's elaborate law enforcement hierarchy.

An easy familiarity with that complicated hierarchy as with all things French enables Martin Walker to transport the reader into the earthy, satisfying life of southern France. Despite the macabre murder that is the focus of the plot, the reader feels bathed in simple luxuries like a homemade paté or the ubiquitous vin de noix.

Walker's lucid, quietly eloquent prose carries the reader through Bruno's idyllic existence and through the mystery of why an elderly Algerian immigrant is brutally killed. The plot is well-drawn, taking the reader into an obscure corner of French collaboration during World War II that most of us never heard of.

Bruno sometimes borders on the too-perfect realization of some male fantasies, but a bachelor in a small town really is the cock of the walk, so we accept his simultaneous flirtation with a female police officer from Paris and an English expatriate -- not to mention his heroic prowess in singlehandedly taming a small riot.

It is a quick, entertaining read and a pleasant sojourn in God's own country.

Work books

I don't read many nonfiction books and rarely get all the way through them. Not that I have anything against them -- I've written two myself and most of my writer friends write nonfiction. But you don't have to get to the end of a nonfiction book in the way you do with a novel. If you don't finish, you may miss something of the author's detail but you have probably absorbed the book's main thesis and much of the salient detail just by reading part of it.

Walter Ong, a prolific Jesuit scholar whose course I took at Saint Louis University, gave us long reading lists and told us he didn't expect us to read every word in every book, but to "read in" the books -- dip into them, sample them.

Instead of a list, I now have a stack, because even though I read few nonfiction books, that doesn't stop me from buying them. Many of them I want to read because they are related to my journalistic work, and I wanted to profile a few of those in this post.


Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin of course has been a huge bestseller and came highly recommended to me by friends. It is entertaining and offers a gossipy, behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 campaign. It is a virtuoso piece of reporting, but I can't say that it has fundamentally altered any of my impressions about the candidates.


Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin has been surprisingly fun to read. I'm generally underwhelmed by Sorkin's journalism and often find him suspiciously in league with the financial institutions he covers -- almost to the point of being an apologist. But this book offers a lot of narrative, with fascinating profiles of some of the figures involved, such as Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers. So far, so good, but at 600 pages it may be, as a friend remarked when he picked it up the other day, "Too Big to Fail may be too big to read."


The Big Short by Michael Lewis is, well, shorter. In his usual deft style, Lewis focuses on a narrower group of participants in the financial markets, the shorts, who are, or were, by and large unknown to the general public. One has to marvel at Lewis's versatility, when you consider he also authored The Blind Side and other very successful non-financial books. While he is clearly comfortable with financial markets, I have found him in the past, as well as so far in this book, sometimes uncomfortably glib, too often willing to sacrifice precision or accuracy for a nice turn of phrase.

13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak is the much-heralded book by one of my heroes, economist Johnson, and his co-blogger, Kwak, who plays Robin to his Batman as much as I can figure out. Johnson is passionate in his opposition to the big banks and has had an amazing impact through his endless flow of blogs -- two of his own, Huffington Post, you name it, he's blogged there -- op-eds, and his very controversial article last year in The Atlantic when he said the U.S. was in the grip of a financial oligopoly much like some Third World banana republics. As former chief economist of the IMF, he knows whereof he speaks. The 13 bankers of the title are those who met last year at the White House as the financial crisis was reaching its zenith. I mistakenly wrote at the time that they should "be very afraid" because they might share the fate of GM's Rick Wagoner, who was booted out when the government seized control of the auto maker. Well, hardly. The most amazing thing is that virtually all of these bankers, who undeniably fomented this dramatic financial crisis, are still in their positions and still enriching themselves in unimaginable fashion. Johnson's book, which I've only just begun, is to tell us what that means about the society we live in -- and it's not a pretty picture.


Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed is a book I jumped on when it came out because I have a weakness, oddly enough, for financial history. This chronicle of the four financial experts -- the Alan Greenspans of their time -- who midwifed the Great Depression is such a brilliantlycautionary tale that Ahamed eventually won a Pulitzer Prize in History for bringing this perspective to our current crisis. I would really like to finish this one.

Cannery Row

I picked this up on a whim and it turned out to be a delight to read. The Post or Times recently ran a story about the last sardine cannery in the U.S. closing down – the end of a world, the reporter wrote, chronicled by John Steinbeck in Cannery Row.

The reporter neglected to mention that while it was set in a Monterey dominated by the canneries, the Steinbeck novel never ventures into the factories or factory life. Rather, it portrays a small Depression-era community on the other side of the tracks that includes a flophouse with a group of deadbeats, a whorehouse, a Chinese-operated grocery, and a “marine laboratory” that probably would be shut down by a dozen laws nowadays.

It is a series of vignettes about this community rather than a narrative, though events do move towards a climax of sorts with the second effort to host a party for Doc, who operates the laboratory. The main characters are Mack, the leader of the flophouse group, and Doc, though we get little inkling of their interior lives.

What moves the reader along are the wonderfully observed details of the life in Cannery Row, the character quirks of the individuals, and above all the delicious irony of the narrator. This is a very funny book, with touching moments of a broad tolerance for human failings and the small joys that all of us try to salvage from larger dreams gone awry.

Take this riff on the Model T Ford: “Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars…Most of the babies of the period were conceived in the Model T Fords and not a few were born in them….”

Steinbeck's style is spare, but still has soul – Hemingway with heart. For instance: “The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have. It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live. In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer its is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in….”

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize largely on the strength of Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, but his smaller books, this one and Of Mice and Men, also stay in print for a reason.