Stoner

Stoner by John Williams, 278 pages

When William Stoner left his parents' small farm to attend the University of Missouri, he never expected that he would be spending the rest of his life there.  By chance he discovers in Archer Sloane's English course a love of literature and poetry he had never known he possessed.  It is a love that remains with him all his life, through disappointments in his career, his romances, his marriage, and his fatherhood.  It is, in the end, the pattern of all his loves, and the one love to which he remains most true.

John Williams, who taught at the same university for a time, is clearly at ease describing familiar places and personalities.  This gives his writing a powerful realism, so that the novel is genuinely moving without being sentimental.  The flap of the first edition describes Stoner as "a man who is clearly out of keeping with his times," and if the lackluster sales of the book upon its publication bear this out, its subsequent rediscovery suggests that Stoner, like Sloane before him, is of a type that exists in all times.

Twenty Years Later

Twenty Years Later by Charlie Donlea 368 pages 

Welcome to another novel that was nothing like I expected…sort of. It was the cryptic postcard that serves as the book’s synopsis that made me want to read this one. Only one aspect, 9/11, was what I expected but not in the way I expected it.

A little over twenty years ago, 9/11 happened. Victoria Ford was visiting her lawyer, prepping for her murder trial when the Towers fell. Victoria, like so many others, was gone without a trace. But a trace did remain.

Fast forward to 2021. The New York Medical Examiner’s Office* has made a discovery. For the first time in many years, the OFFICE has made a successful identification. Using advanced DNA technology, a tooth recovered from the wreckage has led to the identity of one of the victims: Victoria Ford.

Avery Mason is a national television celebrity who hosts “American Events.” She flies to New York to learn more. With the 20^th anniversary looming, Avery knows looking into how Victoria was identified will be ratings gold.

But then Avery learns that Victoria was the primary suspect in a grisly, yet abandoned, murder investigation and heck, what kind of reporter would she be if ignored that? Victoria did leave one piece of information behind: In a last phone call to her sister, Emily Kind, she begs her to prove Victoria’s innocence. Emily has tried, but no one will take the case. It seems pretty cut and dry, but there wouldn’t be a thrilling novel if that was the case.

As Avery discovers, “Victoria had been having an affair with a successful novelist, found hanging from the balcony of his Catskills mansion. The rope, the bedroom, and the entire crime scene was covered in Victoria’s DNA.”  But as she pushes deeper into the past, Avery’s own past begins to surface; a past that the network and her fans would find very troubling.

This was quite the thriller until the climax. Events and people appear without any foreshadowing that makes the final fourth of the book implausible.

 Still, up to that point it was a great read, but “Twenty Years Later” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

 

*To date, The New York Medical Examiner’s Office has successfully identified 1,646 9/11 victims. There are still 1,106 remains that have not yet been identified.

 

White Mischief

White Mischief by James Fox, 288 pages

January 1941.  While German bombs fell on England, a very different act of violence took place in the British colony of Kenya.  Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, was found murdered in his car on the road leading away from the home shared by his lover and her husband.  Said husband was swiftly arrested, but eventually acquitted of the crime, which came symbolically to mark the end of a wild, hedonistic era in the colony's history.  The question of who had actually killed Erroll, and why, remained unanswered for decades despite widespread curiosity and an in-depth investigation by the journalist and critic Cyril Connolly.

James Fox worked closely with Connolly during that investigation.  His account of the goings on amongst the British colonists may not have much in the way of literary merit, but it is fine journalism.

From the Terrace

From the Terrace by John O'Hara, 897 pages

Born to an alcoholic mother and a father who had spent all his love on a son who died too young, Raymond Alfred Eaton grew up in a cold home with a cold future - one day he would inherit the family steel mill and live out his days as the biggest fish in the small pond of Port Johnson, Pennsylvania.  The larger world beckoned, however, and after a spell at Princeton he chose instead to seek his fortune on Wall Street and to serve his country in Washington, DC.  Along the way he struggles to maintain his integrity and reputation in the boardroom, the war room, and the bedroom.  His failure is an American tragedy.

John O'Hara, once considered to be a major American writer - even a potential Nobel Prize winner - is mostly forgotten today.  A mere two years after its publication, From the Terrace was made into a "major motion picture" starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but it is no better remembered than the novel.  If this is unjust, it is hardly surprising, as From the Terrace is today as redolent of its own moment in time as its descriptions of life in the first half of the twentieth century are reflective of those eras, particularly its prurient obsession with sex.  On the other hand, it is a remarkably complex page-turner.

Bonfire of the Vanities

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, 659 pages

Sherman McCoy imagines himself a Master of the Universe, spending his days making multi-million-dollar bond trades, or, as his wife puts it, collecting golden crumbs.  Larry Kramer is an Assistant District Attorney in the Bronx, Jewish by birth but Irish by vocation, his heavy caseload and meager pay compensated for by fantasies of power and virility.  Peter Fallow is a reporter for the City Light tabloid, struggling to stay sober long enough to write a story that will justify his continued employment.  All of them are desperately trying to find, keep, and increase their place somewhere in the heap of humanity that is 1980s New York, the capital of the world.  In their persons, the worlds of finance, politics, and the press collide, though in the end their defeats seem to possess more dignity than their victories.

In 2007, The New York Times published a retrospective on Wolfe's debut novel in which it crowed that "the New York of 'Bonfire,' to a degree that might well have shocked people in 1987, no longer exists."  It is true, of course, that street crime in New York is far below the flood crest of the '70s and '80s, but street crime - as opposed to the fear of street crime - plays only an incidental part in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and the last decade has certainly witnessed a resurgence of social unrest and tribalism, complemented by an outrage culture endemic to social media and epidemic in the press, so that we seem more than ever to be living in Bonfire's jungle.  For proof, one need only compare the treatment of Sherman McCoy by a fictional tabloid with the treatment of the Duke Lacrosse players by the actual New York Times.  The same Qoheleth who informs us that "all is vanity" also reminds us that "there is nothing new under the sun."

Once an Eagle

Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer, 817 pages

Once an Eagle is the story of Sam Damon, a square-jawed Nebraskan with an unerring instinct for the right thing.  When the US enters the First World War shortly after he has managed to secure a place at West Point, Sam enlists as a common soldier.  Through intelligence, luck, and courage he wins a commission and the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Then follow his marriage to the spirited general's daughter Tommy, the long, slow, difficult interwar years, and the long, fast Hell of the Pacific Theater of World War II.  Throughout, his career is paralleled by that of Courtney Massengale, a Machiavel who understands only power and disdains Sam's values of obligation, sacrifice, and love.  Together, they represent opposing forces in the American military, government, and society - Sam's personal virtue against Massengale's careless self-aggrandizement.

Anton Myrer does not write with the sweep of Herman Wouk or the battlefield intensity of Harold Coyle, and, as a result, is less engaging than either.  This is true despite having a length sufficient for one of Wouk's soap opera epics.  One of the themes of the novel's central third is the tedium of peacetime military service - unfortunately, it proves tedious for the reader as well.

Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, 242 pages

The protagonist of The Heart of the Matter, Major Henry Scobie, is an Assistant Commissioner of Police in an unnamed British African colony during the Second World War.  Scobie is an honest, though not necessarily virtuous, man in a sink of corruption, but his apparent honesty only results in rumors of some secret, deeper, and more shameful corruption.  Meanwhile, Scobie is able to please neither his superiors, who pass him over for promotion, nor his wife Louise, who has been desperately unhappy since the death of their daughter, nor the clandestine agent sent to investigate possible espionage, whose personal dislike of Scobie leads him to target the major, nor the young widow with whom he begins an affair, but for whom he cannot leave his wife, nor his God, to whom he is above all else responsible.

In a novel as bleak and gloomy as the seemingly neverending rains, Greene painstakingly maps "the wide region of repentance and longing" as Scobie works out his damnation with fear and trembling.  If such a thing is really possible.

Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, 308 pages

A Handful of Dust is an emotionally devastating, wickedly funny novel of shameless self-interest.  Tony and Brenda Last have found a measure of peace and comfort in Tony's spacious but unfashionable ancestral home, seemingly insulated from both the ordinary vicissitudes of life and the treacherous jungle of London society.  All that crumbles with stunning speed, however, sending Tony fleeing into the relatively safer confines of the Amazon.

The title is an allusion to The Waste Land, and the book shares the same moral universe as Eliot's early poetry - a heap of broken images inhabited by genteel savages.  The writing is executed with Waugh's renowned wit and light touch, all in service to a tale of moral despair, resulting in a novel that masterfully manages to be both dreadful and amusing.

Elgin Affair

The Elgin Affair: The Abduction of Antiquity's Greatest Treasures and the Passions It Aroused by Theodore Vrettos, 220 pages

In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Lord Elgin, acquired permission from the Ottoman Turks to conduct excavations on the Athenian Acropolis and to take various antiquities back to Britain.  In perhaps the most extensive act of vandalism in history, Lord Elgin used this permission as a blank check to strip the Parthenon of every piece of decoration his team could pry from the structure, including much of the sculpture from the pediments and roughly half of the internal frieze, as well as a column capital and a caryatid from the Erechtheum, both of which were literally sawn off in order to remove them.  Elgin answered protests with the claim that modern Greeks were unworthy of their heritage.

In Vrettos' account, all this is secondary to the Elgins' domestic woes, culminating in a high profile divorce and a lawsuit by the aggrieved husband against Lady Elgin's lover.  Aside from the identity of the actors and the suggestion that Lord Elgin's preoccupation with the marbles may have contributed to his wife's estrangement, there is no connection between the archaeological and the personal dramas.  Exasperatingly, Vrettos includes a 13 page excerpt from a letter by Lady Elgin and a 24 page trial transcript, both of which merely repeat information which is present elsewhere in the narrative.  The incorporation of this filler is sadly consistent with the superficiality of the work as a whole, which reduces "the abduction of antiquity's greatest treasures" to a subplot in favor of a not particularly passionate tale of adultery.

The Perils of Pauline

The Perils of Pauline by Collette Yvonne   298 pages

It may be colder than a well-digger’s can outside, but inside, I’ve come across the first must-read novel that will make perfect beach (or couch cozy if the thermometer continues to fall) read.

Pauline’s perils begin while she is at work. Although she is a highly regarded employee, downsizing can affect even the most promising career track. A termination letter throws her into a tailspin.

Now the military veteran doesn’t know what to do with herself. She thought she had a solid marriage, but it seems like her husband is growing distant and spending more and more time with one of his co-workers, Lindsay.

Pauline decided to take advantage of the G. I. Bill and goes back to school.  She wants to start a business, but has no idea what kind. She takes business classes and one poetry class. Her professor is a heart throb. Pauline’s life spirals further out of control.

What ensures is both heartbreaking and hysterical, but leaning more toward the hysterical. I laughed so hard at times that I almost wet myself. I think the funniest scene, and there are so many, was when Pauline left the dog, George Bush, tied to the garage door, forgot about him, then hit the button to raise the door. The second funniest scene is when both Pauline and her 16-year-old daughter are in the doctor’s office.  No more tips…you have to read this! It’s the funniest book I’ve read since Jackie Lee Miles released Divorcing Dwayne in 2008.

I give The Perils of Pauline 6 out of 5 stars