“I’m afraid I’ve made more than a few mistakes along the way”

“Well, then, unmake them. That’s what life is about—making and unmaking mistakes, getting back on the track and moving on. The problem with mistakes is that they have the habit of growing into such big, fat, lovely excuses.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (SEP 17, 2011)

Thirty-one year old William Dysart should be on top of the world. He is a successful attorney, lives in a beautiful home, and is married to Arabella, a stunner who turns heads wherever she goes. Gregory Murphy looks beneath the veneer of the Dysarts’ seemingly enviable life in Incognito.

William is growing tired of doing the bidding of Phil Havering, the managing partner at his law firm. In addition, he has become disenchanted with his wife who, in spite of her great beauty, is insecure and demanding. After six years of marriage, the couple is childless, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that Arabella is a social-climbing, vain, and shallow individual who is more interested in material possessions and status than she is in her relationship with William. “It was rare now that their conversations did not end in a quarrel.”

This is Edith Wharton country —- New York society in 1911 -— and, for the most part, Murphy mines this fertile territory effectively. The premise is intriguing: William is dispatched by his boss to Long Island to convince the lovely Sybil Curtis that it would be in her best interest to sell her five-acre property to Lydia Billings, a fabulously wealthy widow who wants to augment her two-thousand acre estate. William is surprised to learn that Sybil is a self-possessed and independent young woman who is not interested in selling her home, even for the princely sum of ten thousand dollars. Dysart senses that there is ill-will between Lydia and Sybil that goes far deeper than the matter at hand. As the weeks pass, the attorney finds himself sympathizing with Sybil, while Havering is furious that William cannot convince Sybil to accept Lydia’s offer.

Incognito effectively unmasks the hypocrisy of affluent, prominent, and degenerate people who carefully hide their vices behind a veneer of respectability. William and Arabella spend a great deal of time attending charity functions, dinner parties, and other lavish events, and although Arabella is in her element, William is becoming bored with the strain of keeping up appearances. It is painful to observe his deteriorating marriage, and in flashback, we eventually learn why William settled for this loveless union instead of seeking a partner with more depth and character. This is a touching study of men and women at cross purposes. Although William is anxious to bring about a rapprochement between Sybil and Lydia, until he finds out why there is bad blood between them, he is powerless to accomplish his mission.

Murphy stumbles, however, when he makes some labored points about the pettiness, prejudice, and selfishness of those who occupied the highest strata of New York society. They socialize compulsively, spend money lavishly, and care little about such issues as the rights of women and the oppressed. Sybil is a mysterious and provocative character who is less than candid about her tragic past. William is at heart a good man who knows that he will never be content unless he makes some fundamental changes in his life. The book’s main flaw is that, as it progresses, the narrative becomes heavy-handed and melodramatic, with too many revelations, ugly confrontations, and a conclusion that is a bit too pat. Although most of us would agree that the keys to happiness are fulfilling relationships, meaningful work, and peace of mind, Murphy might have conveyed this message with a bit more subtlety. As it stands, Incognito has some powerful scenes, an appealing protagonist in William Dysart and, for the most part, a story that keeps us turning pages, wanting to know what will happen next.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Berkley Trade; 1 edition (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gregory Murphy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Bibliography:

• Incognito (July 2011)
• Maisie Villiers

“He was standing on a cliff…into a kind of arena enclosing…Spruce Lake…and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  AUG 30, 2011)

Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art—a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called “The Race.” If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book’s protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning —- at least, he didn’t know his parents, and neither did he know where he was from originally. Some cousin suspected Canada, and said that he spoke only French when he was left off in Fry, Idaho, circa 1893, arriving there on the Great Northern Railroad as a young lad. His aunt and uncle were his parents, and he grew up in the panhandle by the Kootenai River with the loggers, the Indians, the Chinese, and the trains.

As the book opens in the summer of 1917, Grainier is helping his railroad crew of the Spokane International Railway (in the Idaho panhandle) hold a struggling Chinese laborer accused of stealing. They meant to throw him from the trestle, sixty feet above the rapids at the gorge, but the man, cursing and speaking in tongues, broke free and went hand-over-hand from beam to beam, until he disappeared.

“The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully…and any bad thing might come of it.”

And that was the signal incident that curses, spirits, and demons would inhabit the landscape of Grainier’s dreams. Often, in the background, is heard the melancholic whistle of the trains.

Johnson’s story is a portrait of early 20th-century America as witnessed through the itinerant Grainier, a scrupulous, dignified man whose wife and infant daughter were consumed in a fire in their cabin while he was miles away working on the railroad or in the forest as a logger. Grainier’s long life is seen through snapshots juxtaposed in a deliberately disjointed style, submerging our thoughts deep into the great Northwest, as forests are cleared and the trains tracks are laid that connect one land to the next.

Grainier came back and rebuilt on the burnt lot, the grief of his loss now a thing in his soul, a muted or massive thing, depending on his memories or his dreams. The dead spirit of his daughter appears in abstract or animal form to haunt him, and the wolves enter his soul.

“…when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth…It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart…”

Love, loss, death, and lust are wound into this short but powerful story, a story of a time that is receding from the collective American memories. Denis Johnson’s ode is an evocative and sublime remembrance of things past—of railroads built, of people buried, and of souls lost and wandering. Johnson awakens them, and puts them to rest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Denis Johnson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nobody Move Tree of Smoke

Bibliography:

• Angels (1983)
• Fiskadoro (1985)
• The Stars at Noon (1986)
• Rescitation of a Hanged Man (1991)
• Jesus’s Son: Stories (1992)
• Already Dead: A California Gothic (1997)
• The Name of the World (2000)
• Tree of Smoke (2007)
• Nobody Move (2009)
• Train Dreams (August 2011)

Other:

• The Icongnito Lounge: Poems (1992)
• The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems (1995)
• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (nonfiction) (2001)
• Shoppers: Two Plays (2002)

Movies from Books:

• Jesus’ Son (2003)

“Through her letters she had become the voice of this land and this sky, of all that was here and was good. He had marched into battle with her summer-scented letters in his breast pocket. Long after he had forgotten what he was fighting for, her words had been his compass point, unwavering and sure, leading him home.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (DEC 3, 2010)

Although set around 100 years ago, including the period of the 1914–18 war, this gentle novel is not primarily about the soldiers, but the mothers, sisters, and loved ones they leave at home. The setting is Walvern, a small village in rural Ontario, where everybody knows everybody else. Or they think they know them, for acquaintance can turn easily into gossip and suspicion. Peg Staynor, the heroine, becomes a victim of it, even as a child. For her curiously pale grey eyes and solitary manner play into local suspicions that she is a “river child,” the reincarnation of someone previously drowned, who will bring them bad luck. It is a barely credible device (and unfortunately not the only example of somewhat strained plotting), but it works well as a metaphor for a loneliness that gradually turns into independence and strength. For this is essentially a coming-of-age story with a sweet touch of romance, and Peg makes a heroine who is very easy to care about.

The first part of the book takes us back to the girlhood of Peg’s mother, Rose. Growing up poor in the city, she suffers from gossip that she is the model for the pin-up drawings that her artist mother is forced to do to keep food on the table. Answering an advertisement for a housekeeper to a bachelor farmer, she moves to the country, marries, and has two children: Peg and her elder sister Sarah. So she understands when Peg is persecuted in her turn, and does all she can to protect her younger daughter’s freedom.

Unfortunately, Rose dies on the day that war is declared, and her husband turns to drink. So the girls are left to fend largely for themselves. The departure of young men to the front puts pressure on the local girls, rushing them into engagements, marriages, and in some cases pregnancy. Some of the soldiers return wounded in mind or body; others do not return at all. The beautiful and popular Sarah handles the situation poorly, though understandably so. The younger Peg is less directly affected, though she makes friends with a teenage boy who is counting the days until he can sign up to become a pilot. And she inevitably becomes involved in Sarah’s mistakes, finding in herself unexpected reservoirs of competence and kindness that bring this book at steady pace to a heartwarming ending.

This (after Ami Sands Brodoff’s The White Space Between) is the second book that I have reviewed from Second Story Press, a company founded in 1988 “dedicated to publishing feminist-inspired books for adults and young readers.” The young-adult designation fits this particular book well. True, there are other female Canadian authors who treat similar subjects more compellingly: Alice Munro, for instance, or Jane Urquhart in The Stone Carvers. But Lori Ann Bloomfield has an honest voice with little self-consciousness and much warmth, and this alone makes her novel worth reading.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Second Story Press (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lori Ann Bloomfield
EXTRAS:	Interview with Lori Ann Bloomfield
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other Canadian women writers: Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart And one set in a small town in Ontario: The Girls by Lori Lansens

Bibliography:

• The Last River Child (2009)

“Did it really happen?” I ask. Her smile fades, her lips pressed and thin. “Oh, it happened,” she says, her voice low and alive. “Don’t let anyone tell you it didn’t. It was, it remains, genocide.” The word spills from her mouth.

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 2, 2010)

With the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian deportations only a few years away, author Mark Mustian has set himself a daunting task: to follow his character’s footsteps and to serve as his own gendarme, a guide in the wilderness. For the most part, he succeeds admirably.

As Mr. Mustian writes in the epilogue, “Genocide perhaps represents the ugliest of human deeds, the mass killing of often defenseless fellow beings…Saying it didn’t happen is a mere recipe for recurrence.”

The focus is on one gendarme – a 92-year-old Turkish man named Ahmet Kahn on the verge of senility with a non-operable brain tumor – who suddenly begins memories of events that he has previously denied or purposely forgotten. Side effects of his medication produce extraordinarily vivid dreams that transport him back to exquisitely painful times – to World War I, when he was a gendarme, charged with escorting Armenians across the border from Turkey to Syria. Many died from the grueling march and the lack of proper food and shelter and medicine.

Women, in particular, had a tough time of it: they were frequently used as the playthings of the Turkish men who have grown hard and bored and demand women to do their physical bidding before killing them. One woman captures Ahmet’s attention: her name is Araxie and her eyes are her exotica, one nearly turquoise, one greenish-brown. Ahmet falls head over heals for her, sheltering her from the excesses of the trek that become, for all intents and purposes, a true genocide.

Araxie demands of him, “Why not just shoot us all now? What is it about us you hate so?” And he must answer impotently, “I am only a small piece of the puzzle. I have a job to do. I did not ask for it, nor have I questioned its rationale.” As in books from the past – Sadie Jones’ Small Wars, for example, or the more famous A Separate Peace – Ahmet must eventually realize that his answer is non-satisfactory and that his love for Araxie outweighs the senseless slaughter.

The novel is divided into two portions: the present day, where Emmett Conn suffers through mental disorientation, hospital confinement and the coldness of his grown daughter, and the past, where Ahmet Kahn – same person – struggles to survive amidst swollen corpses, monstrous murders, and clannishness, duplicity, and trickery. As the memories swell in intensity, the reader must ask, “How much of his memory is true and how much is a product of extreme guilt? What happened and what didn’t?”

There are no clear answers. But as Mr. Mustian writes, “The point of the story seemed to be that to think is to forget, to filter from the mind the unnecessary, I have told myself this, repeated it to myself. I have called it our gift from God. This headstrong, heedless survival.” At the end of the day, love does survive…and so do the never relenting memories. Mr. Mustian states in his epilogue, “Decades on, even centuries on, our shared history remains vital…”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (September 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mark T. Mustian
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels on the Armenian genocide: The Last Day of the War by Judith Clair Mitchell Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières And another holocaust novel: Lovely Green Eyes by Arnost Lustig Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Bibliography:

• Gendarme (September 2010)

“I kept thinking about what Alice had said that day at the mill with Lizzie and Winslow. Yes, I had Geoffrey now but what was I going to do?…I told her what I knew: I could run the house, if Ham stayed out of my way. I could bring up Geoffrey. I knew how much I loved my boy, and I was pretty sure that I loved Winslow. But Alice hadn’t asked about any of that, she had asked me what I was going to do.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAY 31, 2010)

The city of Lowell, Massachusetts, was once a thriving home to the textile industry. Just before World War I broke out, the city was at the peak of a huge economic boom. In just a couple of decades however, a slow reversal of fortunes took place. By the early 1920s work was moving south to the Carolinas and once the Depression took hold, the slide was pretty much irreversible.

Rock Harbor, the fictional New England town painted by Rebecca Chase in her new novel, feels a lot like Lowell or even New Bedford, both towns marked by severe downturns in manufacturing industries.

The story follows the fortunes of Frankie Ross, who as a teenager, moves with her family to Rock Harbor from Poughkeepsie, NY. Her father is a skilled engraver of textiles and lands a good union job. The pretty Frankie soon attracts the attention of two teenaged boys. There’s Winslow Curtis, the privileged son of a powerful local politician, Ham Curtis, and Winslow’s best friend, Joe Barros, the son of a Portuguese immigrant.

The three become inseparable and Frankie often finds herself the center of their attentions—not knowing for a while whether either of the two actually harbors any romantic thoughts about her. For her part, Frankie finds herself strongly attracted to Joe. As a Portuguese immigrant, he occupies a lower rung in the very hierarchical class system in town. It’s probably this element of “forbidden love” that makes Joe even more attractive to the young Frankie. Joe also works as a mill-hand in one of the factories in town while Winslow, the son of privilege, hardly has to lift a finger. Despite the strong class differences, Winslow and Joe are fast friends and Frankie too becomes a strong element of their friendship.

But before any of the three has had a chance to speak up about any romantic feelings brewing, Joe goes off to fight in the war. From Europe he sends fevered letters to Frankie. Eventually these letters become mere catalogs of events—they do nothing to still Frankie’s passion toward Joe. Slowly Frankie turns her attentions solely towards Winslow and comes to love him. The two get romantically involved. This alliance is also one Frankie’s parents encourage so their girl can move up in society.

Frankie eventually marries Winslow despite simmering feelings for Joe. She has a child, Geoffrey, with Winslow and gets used to a life of luxury and servants, as she becomes a part of the Curtis family.

Predictably Joe returns from war, wounded—he loses one eye. When he returns to Rock Harbor, he becomes a union organizer and a potent force in the working community in town. His stance often brings him in confrontation with the political establishment.

Slowly Frankie finds her old feelings for Joe returning and it remains to be seen whether she will make peace with her place in life.

Meanwhile the mills’ fortunes go south (both literally and figuratively) and along with that so does the Curtis fortune.

Chace, who has modeled the story after experiences from her own family, does a wonderful job of portraying the smallest of details in the fictional New England town. The everyday workings of the mill—including the horrific use of child labor—are drawn in vivid detail. Chace also does a wonderful job portraying the subtlest class divisions among the residents of the town. The Portuguese were among the lower classes but even Frankie’s mill-working family is aware of the difference between themselves and the Curtises. Chace brings out these details in nuanced observations. For example, when the Rosses are invited to a casual family dinner at the Curtis residence, they turn out in their Sunday best.

Chace also does a wonderful job with Frankie portraying her conflicting emotions for Joe over Winslow. She shows Frankie’s struggle with her emotions as she settles for Winslow worrying that if she didn’t, time would run out against her.

Unfortunately there are many predictable turns to the story and while Chace does her best to keep the melodrama down, it sometimes slips through. Chace’s storytelling occasionally feels as if she is rushing through events—they read like a mere cataloging and one doesn’t have time to linger and get the full impact of events as they occur. Despite all this, Chace’s storytelling skills are so tight that Leaving Rock Harbor keeps the reader hooked.

It is easy to see the parallels between the downturn in Rock Harbor’s fortunes and those of Frankie Ross. The emptiness Frankie feels, the regrets that tug at her every day, mirror the dwindling options left for a once-thriving town.

And while reinvention might sound liberating, as Frankie discovers, it is not always easy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Chace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels set in New England mill towns: Sea Glass by Anita Shreve Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Bibliography:

• Capture the Flag (1999; July 2010)
• Leaving Rock Harbor (June 2010)

Nonfiction:

• Chautauqua Summer: Adventures of a Late-Twentieth-Century Vaudevillian (1993)

“It is agonizing. Life here at Yasnaya Polyana is completely poisoned.  Wherever I turn, it is shame and suffering…”
Diary entry, 3 July 1880, Leo Tolstoy

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (APR 25, 2010)

Leo Tolstoy famously opened Anna Karenina with the observation that, “All happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He was 45 when he wrote that. Thirty-seven years later, at age 82, he would die at the remote Astapovo train station, not far from his home, after fleeing, in the middle of the night, his estranged wife of 48 years, abandoning his family, his wealth, and setting out to live the life of a wandering ascetic. Ironically, he fulfilled the observation that his family was, indeed, singularly unhappy. A.N. Wilson described marriage between Leo and Sofya as the most unhappy in all literary history. The Last Station is the fascinating fictional construction of what transpired in the life and household of Tolstoy’s last year.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into a family of landed aristocracy. He inherited the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, along with 700 serfs, after serving in the Crimean War in the 1850s. Prior to that, to settling down and writing two of the greatest works of world literature, War and Peace and Anne Karenina, he lead a life of, as he later reflected, “vulgar licentiousness”–or whoring around, to use his wife’s phrase. He fathered thirteen children by Sofya and was grandfather to at least twenty-five. He cared for his serfs and established a school for their education. He attempted to bring about emancipation for all serfs, thus labeling him a threat to the state, albeit a world-famous one. In the 1870s he underwent a spiritual crisis. He renounced his former beliefs and literary works. He embraced and expanded upon a primitive Christianity, developing a simple theology based on love and asceticism. He took vows of chastity–ironically–and vegetarianism. His influence was so far-reaching that Gandhi cited Tolstoy, or more properly Tolstoyism, as his major influence in the development of non-violent social reform.

Against this background, The Last Station, picks up in 1910, Tolstoy’s last year. The Tolstoy household is a buzzing hornet’s nest of intrigue, pent-up anger, fear and distrust. Sycophants and toadies fill the hallways, along with family members, disciples and admirers. To some the great man is a Christ-like figure, to others, particularly his wife and the very few of her supporters, he is deemed a selfish eccentric. Tolstoy had been developing his Christianity against a backdrop of luxury and affluence. He had a family to support and a wife who accustomed to her lifestyle. He was a torn man. He was viewed by the world as a mystic and original Christian thinker, yet he saw himself as a hypocrite. The reader can’t help but tune into his personal tension. But the experience does not stop with Tolstoy. One also feels for Sofya. She bore him all those children, transcribed War and Peace by hand, three times–she put up with him. “Only I could read Lyovochka’s [Tolstoy} handwriting,” she writes in her diary. “His crablike hieroglyphs filled the margins of his proof sheets, driving the printers wild…Even he could not make out what he had written much of the time. But I could.” And she withstood his eccentricities until she could no longer.

The author, Jay Parini writes in an afterward to his book, “The Last Station is fiction, though it bears some of the trappings and affects of literary scholarship.” He continues to describe how fifty years ago in a used book store he stumbled upon the diary a Tolstoy house member, Valentin Bulgakov. Bulgakov was there for the last year, observing and taking notes. From there Parini collected and read other diaries and memoirs of family members, visitors and students. “Reading them in succession was like looking at a constant image through a kaleidoscope. I soon fell in love with the continually changing symmetrical forms of life that came into view.” He tells us that the quotes attributed to Tolstoy in the book are, indeed, his; too, that he drew from major and minor sources, biographies and letters, in fleshing out the chronology of the book.

There is an approach to the popular “historical novel” that is often foot-loose and fancy-free. My sense here is that of an extremely well-employed and detailed accuracy. (I have read the major works, but am no Tolstoy authority.) Reading The Last Station was akin to reading the best biography. Only better. There is the opportunity to get lost in a period, a life and follow it through the ups and downs, the history and intrigue.

Parini employs multiple voices in the telling of this tale, bringing into focus multiple perspectives and view points. There is, of course, Tolstoy, as revealed by his voice, his writings and his diary entries. And his wife, Sofya Andreyevna, is a major presence, as one would expect. But too, we hear the voice of the doctors, adult children and onlookers. (Daughter Sasha: “Mama does not understand my father’s goals. He is a spiritual creature, while her chief concerns are material.”) Each voice speaks in first person, their chapters weaving one through another, to form the kaleidoscope Parini refers to. One voice, in particular, that of the young new hire, Valentin Bulgakov, acts as a touch stone of reason and balanced observation throughout.

Bulgakov has been hired by Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov, Tolstoy confidante and threat to the status quo, to act as literary secretary and quotation-gatherer for Tolstoy. Bulgakov gets thrown into the household when all contrasting forces are at fever pitch. Sofya is afraid that Leo is re-writing his will and leaving his copy-writes to Chertkov for distribution to the public domain. She fears that Chertkov is plotting to undermine her and further the rift between she and her husband. (“Since Chertkov came to live here again, the situation has grown even less tolerable,” she writes in her diary.) Her fears are well founded. But she takes them to hysterical pitch and drives the great man mad, sending him fleeing into the winter Russian night. The children take sides, fearing on one hand destitution once their father dies and, on the other, immense pride at being a child of such an individual. Coming and going throughout is a mix of personalities whose allegiance and trust is never fully established.

The Last Station reads much like life: there is no omniscient narrator, only participants functioning from their individual perspective. It is a wonderful and immensely interesting method. The knowledge that it was created with a scholarly approach to accuracy only makes the reading experience so much the richer. Tolstoy had a profound influence on the creative literary tradition. That he renounced all of that and set out to follow an idiosyncratic voice pulling him in an opposite direction is fascinating. Parini renders the experience in a remarkably entertaining fashion. This is a wonderful book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Mti edition (January 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jay Parini
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel on Leo Tolstoy’s last day: The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus

Selected Bibliography:

• The Love Run (1980)
• The Patch Boys (1986)
• The Last Station (1990)
• Bay of Arrows (1992)
• Benjamin’s Crossing (1996)
• The Passages of H. M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (November 2010)

Nonfiction:

• John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995)
• Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Literature and Politics (1997)
• Robert Frost: A Life (1999)
• The Apprentice Lover (2002) (with A. Kenneth Ciongoli)
• One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004)
• The Art of Teaching (2005)
• Why Poetry Matters (2008)
• Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008)

Movies from books:

• The Last Station (2010)

“The world was at war, but the world also seemed like a Charlie Chaplin movie, full of scowlin society matrons, mountainous mustachioed toughs, pretty girls who hadn’t enough to eat, and pies left at dangerous angles at the edges of tables.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JAN 2, 2010)

In the first chapter of Gold’s ebullient, complex, over-the-top Charlie Chaplin novel, Chaplin dies in a rowboat accident off the stormy, rocky northern California coast in 1916. At the same moment he also causes a riot in a small town in East Texas and is spotted engaging in various acts of mayhem around the country.

This bout of mass hysteria or “Chaplin-itis,” serves to introduce the primary members of the supporting cast, whose lives will intersect crucially and randomly at least partly because of the events of that day.

Leland Wheeler, the mother-dominated lighthouse keeper who failed to save the seagoing Chaplin hallucination, breaks from the family tradition and runs ashore to Hollywood to become a famous actor.

Hugo Black, the effete son of an ill-paid college professor, has proved clownishly inept at a string of railroad jobs, his mind ever lured away to the more refined world in his imagination. When his train is burned by the mob in the East Texas riot, he loses his last railroad job.

And Rebecca Golod (who is more a recurring imp than a real main character) discovers she has inherited the family calling when she breaks her conman grandfather’s precious spyglass and adroitly manages to blame Hugo Black without saying a word.

The center of the story, of course, is the most famous man in the country, maybe the world, Charlie Chaplin. Two years before, at age 24, he had made his first film. Now, almost 60 films later, he is the highest paid man in America.

But Charlie suffers. Before a party he crams his pockets with conversational gambits designed to dazzle and discomfit his hosts. He loathes Mary Pickford. Her fame nearly eclipses his own and her wholesome, sweetheart image grates on his nerves.

He is an inveterate, obsessional skirt chaser who can’t recall a pretty face. In a scene of high hilarity and charmed misunderstanding, Pickford’s writer captivates Chaplin with clever repartee. She thinks he knows she is Pickford’s writer – his greatest nemesis – while he thinks he’s conducting an artful seduction of a kindred soul.

Charlie is also a driven genius, obsessed by ideas and images. Gold shows him at work on several films, culminating in his 1919 tortured, ambitious, over-budget flop, Sunnyside.

As the world plunges deeper into World War I, Hollywood, a fledgling industry, stands on the brink of soaring flight. The film industry in Europe has been co-opted by propaganda where it hasn’t simply been stifled. But the unhappy population demands the respite of moving pictures more than ever and Hollywood is rushing to comply.

War fever is growing in the US too. Chaplin (a Brit) is condemned for making movies instead of enlisting, but there are rumors that the State Department has asked him to stay out of the fray since he can best serve the war effort through his celebrity and talent. In fact, to ensure his cooperation, they have agreed to prevent his dreaded, beloved mother from visiting by refusing her entry into the country.

Meanwhile, Leland has seen his acting dreams evaporate as a misunderstanding involving his weakness for women (and catalyzed by young Rebecca Golod) forces him to enlist and be sent to France. Here another incident sparked by his weakness for women nearly gets him killed and leads to a fateful rescue.

Hugo Black is as unhappy in the army as he was on the railroad. But as war ends for the rest of the world, Hugo finds himself in the frozen misery of a Russian winter; a place bereft of all comforts and mired in a forgotten bloody fight.

Gold (Carter Beats the Devil) has poured the whole WWI era out on the page – American cowboy shows in Europe, crumbling political structures and the scary new ideas behind Bolshevism, patriotic Liberty Bond rallies and a burgeoning propaganda machine, a runaway train in Russia, grinding misery in France. But above all, there’s the movie business – the stars, the studio system, the glitter, the insatiable demand of the audience, the magic, and the work. Underneath the glamour and flush of triumph is the lingering insecurity; the fear that it’s all just a fad and people will tire of looking at moving pictures by tomorrow or next year.

This is a sparkling, sprawling story with frequent jarring jumps. From Beverly Hills fretting to an eerie tableau of frozen, stripped soldiers, their dead limbs emerging from rock-hard mud, to the angst and intensity of a Chaplin vision to a scene of callous cruelty in the trenches of France, to the backrooms and boardrooms of American business and government. Sometimes we experience the book like a panoramic film that then zooms in on the individual. We find ourselves inside lots of heads, empathizing with a plethora of personalities, ambitions and fears.

Each element engages the reader; the writing is dazzling, visual and intense; the history is thorough and authentic, the ideas are ambitious. While it often feels like trying to hold on to too much at once during a bumpy, spectacular ride, in the end it feels like you’ve been someplace.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	Sunnyside
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Glen David Gold Glen David Gold blog
EXTRAS:	Guardian interview with Glen David Gold
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read an excerpt from Carter Beats the Devil

Bibliography:

• Carter Beats the Devil (2001)
• Sunnyside (May 2009)

“It does you credit to want to set the world to rights, my dear, but…I see no point in investigating a tragedy that lies in the past where it belongs. Fifteen years is a long time, witnesses die, attitudes change, and it is almost impossible to make a judgment on new facts when the old ones can’t be reconstructed.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (OCT 5, 2009)

A Duty to the Dead, by the mother-and son writing team known as Charles Todd, opens in 1916 on a hospital ship, Britannic, that is sailing off the coast of Greece. Elizabeth Crawford is a nurse stationed on the ship, who has worked tirelessly tending to the British casualties of World War I. Some of the soldiers in her care suffer from severe mental and/or physical wounds, and many do not pull through. Bess’s work has toughened her up considerably; however, she remains an extremely sensitive and compassionate woman. Against her better judgment, she develops strong feelings for an injured soldier named Arthur Graham. On his deathbed, Arthur begs Bess to deliver an important message to his brother in Kent. After putting off the task for a while, Bess finally finds the time to visit Arthur’s relatives.

Much to her consternation, Bess discovers that the Graham family is dysfunctional, if not delusional. Mrs. Graham, the widowed mother of three boys, is brusque and bossy; her cousin, Robert, has the run of the house, but rarely expresses a personal opinion; Jonathan, a lieutenant who is recovering from a severe facial wound, is blunt and prickly; and Timothy has a clubfoot that has kept him out of battle. Most troubling of all is the fate of another brother, Peregrine, who for fifteen years has been locked up in an asylum after allegedly butchering a housemaid when he was a teenager. Rather than see him hang for his crime, Peregrine’s mother arranges for him to be kept under lock and key for the rest of his life. Bess soon suspects that the Grahams are withholding key information, but she has no hard evidence to support her theory.

Bess Crawford is one of those formidable “stiff-upper-lip” individuals who is intolerant of liars and makes no excuses for herself or others. Whether she is nursing a patient with pneumonia, calming a shell-shocked veteran, or conducting an investigation that may shed light on the past, Bess is courageous, highly intelligent, keenly observant, and not too concerned about her own safety. Her father, Richard Crawford, is a career army officer who is appalled but unsurprised at his daughter’s rashness. Bess has always been fiercely independent and determined to finish what she starts, no matter how difficult the task.

The authors skillfully evoke the bleak atmosphere of wartime England when all able-bodied men are shipped to the front. Even those who survive often return disfigured or so severely traumatized that they can no longer function in society. In addition, Todd vividly portrays the insular life of a small village where the rector does his own carpentry, everyone gossips about their neighbors, and long-buried secrets are difficult to unearth. A resolute Bess not only spends her own time and money conducting a lengthy investigation, but she also endangers herself to help someone who may be an innocent victim of a vicious conspiracy. A Duty to the Dead is a strong work of historical fiction that forcefully depicts the horrors of war and illustrates the terrible consequences of covering up the truth for all the wrong reasons.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	William Morrow (August 25, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Charles Todd
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: A Pale Horse A Test of Wills If you like this book, you will like: Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear The First Wave by James R. Benn

Bibliography:

Inspector Ian Rutledge series:

• A Test of Wills (1996)
• Wings of Fire (1998)
• Search the Dark (1999)
• Legacy of the Dead (2000)
• Watchers of Time (2001)
• A Fearsome Doubt (2002)
• A Cold Treachery (2005)
• A Long Shadow (2006)
• A False Mirror (2007)
• A Pale Horse (December 2007)
• A Matter of Justice (December 2008)
• The Red Door (December 2009)
• A Lonely Death (January 2011)

Francesca Hatton series:

• The Murder Stone (2003)

Bess Crawford, British army nurse:

• A Duty to the Dead (August 2009)
• An Impartial Witness (August 2010)