A crime novel that has the aspirations of literary fiction

I'm about half-way through Ernest Raymond's crime novel We, the Accused (1935) - amazingly, half-way through means about 250 pp. into the work, which means that this is no ordinary crime novel but is in many respects a work of literary fiction with the highest of aspirations. In fact, though the novel feels most indebt to the style of Dickens and some early 20th-century British writers in the realism tradition, the work most in Raymond's might could well be Crime and Punishment. He devotes for more of the time to full development of character, in particular the protagonist, Paul Pesset, giving us access to the workings of his consciousness as he contemplates and enacts the "perfect crime." Pesset also (unlike Dostoyevsky) develops a lot of serio-comic minor characters, and spends a lot of time on some topical descriptions of the British landscape and the working-class London neighborhoods - perhaps too much time (do we need such a lengthy rundown, for ex., of each of the members of Pesset's hiking club? - a smart editor could trim this novel by 25 percent w/ no significant loss). Yes, ER is in no rush to get his plot moving; the crime itself doesn't take place till about the midpoint - but still, this is a novel that one should just take at its own declared pace. We know from the outset that Paul will commit a crime - it's not even a spoiler to say here that he kills his wife by mixing arsenic in w/ her medicinal brandy - so the beauty of this novel lies in watching Paul get ever closer to that point, suffering the pangs of guilt and remorse - and of course in the parallel efforts of the London PD to solve the crime; as we read through the first half of the novel we're constantly on the lookout for Paul's mistakes: What does he do wrong or miscalculate that will lead the police to suspect that his wife was murdered? In the second half of the book, these clues and mishaps begin to build and coalesce into a picture - and, as the title tells us, will most likely involve more than one suspect.

An excellent story from Murakami on young love, music, and memory

I've been a big fan of Haruki Murakami for many years, beginning w/ his early work, A Wild Sheep Chase, and forward w/ his short stories in particular, though I have noticed w/ some distress that in recent years his stories have become increasingly mannered, drawing from the same sample drawer or tropes and conventions: cats, characters who disappear, ear fetishes, devotion to American jazz and coffee bars, spaghetti, distance running. I'm pleased to see that his story in current New Yorker, With the Beatles, draws on some of the familiar Murakami themes but unlike many other recent stories it has a real sense of mystery, loss, and nostalgia, a real fine piece of writing that stands up along side anything he's done before, in my view. The story begins w/ the narrator's odd but trenchant observation that, now in his 70s (like Murakami - giving the story the feeling of a memoir/essay/auto fiction, at least up to a point) senses that he has not grown older but that all of his h.s. classmates and friends have aged. Who in his/her 70s hasn't thought that, without exactly articulating the thought? He then recollects a vision of a beautiful young woman in his h.s. dashing through the hallway carrying the eponymous Beatles LP, and this image has stayed w/ him for many years, even though he, oddly, never saw this beautiful fellow student again; this, too, is a feeling that many of us of his age have about youth - a flash or a vision of a moment of beauty that stays w/ us mysteriously then, and over the years. He also quite accurately describes how the amazing success of the Beatles in the mid-1960s changed the course of popular culture and was more or less the soundtrack that accompanied our first attempts at mature (barely) love; this clearly is something that everyone in his/my generation can recognize and attest to (other generations of course have their own "theme" music, but the Beatles almost stand alone in this because of their international celebrity plus their musical originality). He then segues into a narrative about his first love/h.s. girlfriend (not a fan of the Beatles, as it happens) - some beautiful and thoughtful writing here that all can recognize as the narrative of a first, awkward attempt at and experience of love - loves that inevitably vanish, but that stay w/ us for a lifetime, I hope in most cases as a positive relationship, even if tinged with guilt and shame at times (unlike his, my h.s. girlfriend has gone on to live a happy and fulfilling life, I'm very glad to say). The heart of the story is his awkward encounter w/ the girlfriend's older brother, clearly a very disturbed, even scary, young man (sibling issues almost always play a key role in the development or dissolution of "first loves"); to his credit; Murakami avoids the obvious and melodramatic resolution of the plot - the older brother, for all of his ominous behavior, does nothing violent - and then concludes w/ a much later in life encounter, sad and mysterious and strangely believable. I would hope all readers could identify w/ and learn from this story, but it will have particular resonance, I think, to those of us in Murakami's age cohort (and there's not much contemporary fiction about which this can be said).

Much for readers and writers to learn from in Lydia Davis's Essays

I've been reading, on and off, Lydia Davis's recent collection of her nonfiction work, Essays One; some pieces in this collection are random reviews and brief essays she's written over the years, some of which hold up better than others (the reviews of single books are less significant but her pieces of wider scope, such as her list of 5 "perfect" short stories," are provocative and instructive). Anyone who's read her stories, most of them extremely concise, and her translations from the French - Swann's Way in particular) know that she's about the smartest and funniest writer (and thinker) working today. And for further evidence, just take a look at the pieces in this collection drawn from a series of lectures on writing that she delivered at NYU. In these pieces she explains and dissects how she works, something few other writers would take on; these pieces are filled with fantastic advice and guidance for aspiring writers - although her advice, like her stories, is sly and subtle. She shows how her work develops from initial idea jotted in a notebook and through, generally, multiple revisions - and she shows us these revisions in stages. Any attentive reader (or listener) can see how she makes her writing better through stages and, more important, what constitutes her end game: wit, surprise, unease. She loves sentences, and stories, that keep the reader on edge, and she works every phrase, every word, toward a foreseen final effect. I'd steer any young writer to her essay on Revising a Single Sentence; every word is important, carries weight, and can heighten, or deaden, the effect of the piece as a whole. In fact, just see some of her comments on order and sequence - and why the last element in a sequences is of highest importance (in particular see her discussion of Shakespeare's sonnet "Bare Ruined Choirs.") Perhaps the end result of reading these essays is to lead us to her stories and poems - which I would recommend (and have recommended) - but for any developing writer (or reader for that matter) there is so much to learn from these essays, all present w/ Davis's formidable wit, style, and breadth of knowledge (see how this "list" builds?).

A long-forgotten novel that shows some potential

A note on the long-forgotten novel that I've just started reading, Ernest Ryamond's We, the Accused (1935), recommended to me by thoughtful reader w/ similarly eccentric tastes, DC: This British novel is billed (on the Penguin ed. cover) as a murder mystery (soon be be a "motion picture"!), but fromthe first 50 pp or so of reading it does not seem or feel at all like a conventional crime novel. ER spends a lot of time in the first chapters on character development and back story and on establishing a sense of place (a North London working-class neighborhood), making the novel feel more like a work of social realism, with obvious echoes of Dickens and perhaps of Zola as well? The protagonist is a 50ish man recently married, for the first time, to a widow a few years his senior and somewhat wealthy, at least compared w/ anything he's known. The man is a teacher in a third-rate private school, disappointed in his life, his failed aspirations to be a scholar or writer, and in particular unhappy in his marriage, as he sees his wife as petty, ill, and demanding. As ER introduces us to the protagonist's place of work, we meet a few other English eccentrics - not as extreme as Dickens characters of course but quirky, odd, and petulant - I see a touch of Graham Greene here as well. 'm impressed by the start of this novel, and if ER can manage to maintain the tensions of a good plot alongside his depiction of character and setting this will be a really good book that for some reason has sunk into obscurity (perhaps it was his only good book?).

A novel with so many strengths, but some shortcomings as well: The Volunteer

Many aspects of Salvatore Scibona's 2019 novel, The Volunteer, impressed me enormously, notably the range of his style (some passages of reflection and observation are moments of great beauty, and his many scenes in dialog are crisp, witty, and surprising) as well as the tremendous breadth of his knowledge (or at least seamless research), including his intimate knowledge about military history and procedures, underworld lingo, high finance, engineering, farming and ranching, medical matters, security measures - this list could go on, but point made. So what is this novel about, exactly? We follow a deeply troubled family through 4 generations of men, though most of the focus is on the 2nd generation, the Volunteer (named Vollie, though he goes by several aliases across this novel): We see, not in chronological order, his childhood on a farm or ranch with older, difficult parents; he enlists in the Marines and serves several tours in Vietnam, culminating in his year-long imprisonment in a Viet Cong tunnel in Cambodia. When they release him his entire military history has to be erased, as the U.S. will not acknowledge incursions into Cambodia; he's later recruited by a dubious intelligence officer to go undercover and do surveillance on an elderly man living (or may no longer living) in Queens; this leads to a double murder, from which V. flees, drives x-country, begins a new life, settling with a woman living in an abandoned hippie-ranch (which had been run by V's closest friend, who disappears from the novel) and raising a child, who will become V's son de facto, a troubled young man named Elroy - who enters the military and fathers a son in Estonia, whom he abandons at an airport - and we ultimately follow this young man through his college years (this part set 10 years in the future). Yikes! There's so much narrative incident, all of it quite vivid and relatively easy to follow despite the complexity - but the novel seems to be missing something at its heart: There's a lot happening, but really no plot per se, despite many opportunities to explore crises and character growth. To cite just one example: Elroy abandons his son in a German airport. Who would do this and why? We never get an answer to that, other than that E is troubled and has been arrested several times for violent crimes. Or another example: Volly spends nearly a year trying to find his quarry - maybe living, maybe dead - in Queens and when he does he almost immediately leads an agent to the elderly man's bedside; why is he surprised that agent kills the man (+ an innocent bystander)? In other words, many things happen in this novel, but they do not derive from the actions and ideas of the central character. He suffers, he survives, but does he learn and change? He feels guilt and remorse about several events in his life, but we don't actually see him interact with others. In essence, the novel is like a long road trip through time (there are several road trips through space in this narrative as well), but the stakes are generally low and the insight limited. I would read more by Scibona, but this novel - at +400 pages - delivered less than promised, of at least less than I'd hoped for.

Does the excellent writing get in the way of the tenuous plot?

No question Salvatore Scibona is an excellent writer; open any page at random in his recent novel, The Volunteer, and you'll find great topical description (scenes vary and cover an enormous range, from the below-ground tunnels and torture chambers in Cambodia to Queens street life to a x-country jaunt along the highways and back roads of the U.S. - and many others) and excellent quirky, sometimes enigmatic dialog. Also I'm blown away (now about half-way through this novel) by the range of his knowledge - military history especially, but also incidental knowledge about so many topics, medical, scientific, legal, illegal. Yet for all of this I have to wonder: Does the excellence in his style get in the way of his plotting, character development, narrative? At the halfway point the 3 main characters of his narrative at last come into focus together, but I'm a little puzzled about the whole arc of the story; sometimes he writes so well that his prose obscures rather than lightens what he's trying to convey. Or, put another way, sometimes he writes so well that we gloss over the improbabilities of his story line. For one example, there's a scene in which the protagonist, Vollie (aka Tilly, plus other pseudonyms and nicknames) witness as shooting and himself takes a bullet to the foot - and then he takes off. Is that possible? Would the police investigation of a murder scene not pick up some information about his presence? Could he really just walk into a VA hospital with this kind of bullet wound and get medical treatment (for free?) and not provoke any kind of investigation? Well, maybe - and that's why I'll read along - but I'm thinking that this novel is more about mood and atmosphere and incidental drama than about the true development of the life of a character. Maybe I'm wrong; we'll see.

Some excellent writing in Salvatore Scibona's multi-generation war novel

I'm about 100 pp (25%) in to Salvatore Scibona's 2018 novel, The Volunteer, one that seems right in my wheelhouse (a painful lookback at the Vietnam War era) but that somehow slipped past me - but was thankfully recommended to me by faithful friend and great reader DB - and so far I'm impressed with the writing: How could someone who clearly did not participate in the war re-create the mood, the angst, the suffering, the fear, the boredom and deprivation with such seeming accuracy and detail? This goes well beyond the work of most historical fiction (strange to think of the Vietnam era as "historical," but there you have it) and in that he's created characters that feel vivid and alive, not just windows through which we gaze at the past. My question and concern, however, is: What will SS make of this material? He does a great bone-in-the-throat intro as we see a very young boy abandoned at an airport in Germany (this echoes a similar theme/plot element in Wim Wenders's film Alice in the Cities), and we meet Elroy, his criminally incompetent father (it does require a stretch of the imagination to believe anyone could be so careless about the custody of child). Then we meet Elroy's father, Volly (short for Volunteer) as we learn in great detail about his difficult childhood and his impulsive decision to enlist in the Marines and to serve 3 tours of duty in Vietnam. As noted, SS presents all this material vividly and dramatically - one piece was excerpted in the NYer and was subject of any earlier post - but at the 100-page mark it's time to begin setting a plot in motion - we know pretty much all we need to know about the protagonists and their back story. DB assures me that SS will rise to the occasion.

The strange challenge involved in reading Cerces's novel Soldiers of Salamis

The central event in Javier Cerces's 2001 novel, Sodiers of Salamis, is the escape of Sanchez Mazas from a firing squad as he faced death near the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939). SM ran into the forest amid the chaos of the mass shooting; as the soldiers later searched for escapees, one came directly upon SM. Their eyes met. A voice called out: Anyone over there? The soldier looked at SM and said: No. Then left the scene. A heroic moment, or so it seems. But in fact SM after the war became a leading propagandist for the brutal Franco dictatorship, and thereby responsible in part for thousands of deaths and detentions. In the final third of the novel, the narrator - Cerces himself - encouraged by his girlfriend (and fortune teller on a local TV station!) and by the writer Roberto Bolano tries to track down the soldier who let SM escape; he finds a likely candidate in an elderly war veteran, Millares, living in a retirement home in Dijon; in the finest passages of the novel, Cerces visits Millares, a crusty old guy, and over the course of a day of conversation they develop a mutual respect and rapport. The actual role M may have played in the firing-squad episode is left ambiguous, as is his moral culpability for allowing a fascist to escape unpunished. This novel seems to be closely based on facts and on the author's actual historical research - though it doesn't pretend to be anything but fiction. In the style of many works from the 60s till the end of the century, this novel also continually reflects on the nature of literary composition itself: We get accounts not only of the "true events' of the story but of the author's struggle in writing and completing the work we're reading - a hall-of-mirrors effect. Some of the material may be baffling for English-language readers, and it's an uncomfortable read throughout in that it's impossible to empathize with a protagonist who was one of the most powerful men in a brutal, fascist government - but in a way that's what gives the novel its tension: It would have been easy to write a romance about the narrow escape of a hero. This novel tests the limits of our capacity for empathy.

A historical novel about a Spanish fascist: Worth reading?

I've read the first two sections (now reading the 3rd and final) in Javier Cercas's 2001 novel, Soldiers of Salamis (a reference to the Persian wars of antiquity - no idea why this is his title). On one level it's pure and simple a piece of short historical fiction, recounting the adventures of a leader of the fascist party in Spain at the end of the Civil War (ca 1938), Sanchez Mazas, an accidental "hero" (he saw no combat and exhibited no particular bravery) who was lined up before a firing squad, managed to escape in the chaos of the mass shooting, survived but barely after a few days in the forests, was aided by 3 young men from the countryside, and survived in time for the success and triumph of Franco's fascist forces. Over the rest of his life, the families of the men who helped him would send him requests for amnesty for various Republican soldiers held captive, and he would always oblige - though he never saw the men who helped him again in his lifetime. He went on to be a leader in the Franco dictator ship, essentially their house intellectual, publishing many works of altogether mediocre literature. This material does not seem particularly promising, especially for non-Spanish readers who, like me, will be repeatedly confounded by complex history of the Spanish Civil War and its various parties and ideologies. What makes this novel worth a read, however, is Cercas's structure; as w/ so many Spanish-language writers of the past 50 years or so, he's interested in self-reflective, postmodern fiction. So the first section of the novel is entirely about JC's attempt to gather information to enable him to write the story of Sanchez Mazas, including interviews with surviving witnesses, tracking down documents (such as SM's diary) and official records, etc. The 2nd part is the historical narrative itself. The 3rd section is about the aftermath: JC publishes the novel and returns to his job as a newspaper reporter, which he finds a bit demeaning. He's assigned to interview Robeto Bolano - one of my favorite writers, in fact - and they discuss the book and Bolono's work and JC's foundering career - all of which has the ring of truth. So the novel seems to engulf itself - it's the before, during, and after of its own composition, which of course leads us to speculate on what's "real" in an narrative and what's fabrication. But that's an intellectual's pastime. More to the point: Why does JC feel compelled to tell the life story of a fascist and a long-forgotten pseudo-literary figure?

A demanding but lagely successful novel about a dysfunctional family in Italy: Ferocity

I sneaked a look at the NYT review of Nicola Lagioia's novel Ferocity (2014, English tr 2017) and completely disagree w/ reviewer's main points (in 1st and last paragraphs; will read full review later). First of all, Ferocity has little in common w/ noir fiction, no matter what the setting (reviewer joked that this is Southern Italian noir - it's set in Puglia): Aside from the almost utter lack of night-time street scenes, the protagonist, Michele, is hardly a detective, though he is on a quest to determine the true cause of the death of his half-sister, Clara. But Michele is a memorable character because of his lifelong battles, first against the wealthy real-estate development family into which he joins at birth (the out-of-wedlock child of the father; mother died in childbirth - in one of the many appealing quirks of this novel the narrator recognizes how unlikely that is outside of bad fiction), later his struggles against mental illness, which gets him booted out of the army and consigned to various mental hospitals for many years. He's, in essence, a bumbling and ineffective seeker of truth. Second, I was surprised that the reviewer said the NL developed lots of material but never knew quite what to do w/ the narration; not so - if anything this narrative is over-determined, bring about more of a resolution that most contemporary works of literary fiction, which tend to be "open" narratives, with ambiguous or inconclusive endings. In essence, this novel begins with the death of the daughter/sister Clara, which we see from the start involved her walking naked down a highway and struck by a passing truck; the family then goes to great lengths and expense to cover up her cause of death and to give out that she killed herself by leaping from a parking-garage deck. Why? Though there are various clues throughout, we don't learn until near the end of this relatively long (447 pp) novel exactly what motivated this deception - but along the route toward the resolution we get an inside look at the corruption and violence behind the family's business enterprise. There's a ton of material in this book - it's much longer than most contemporary plot-driven novels - and sometimes I felt lost or in the dark; that's because NL's style is an extreme example of the show-don't-tell dicta; most of the time we are right in the middle of a scene or confrontation and it takes a bit to get out bearings; the narrator never steps in with background or scene-setting. Everything we see is through the eyes of one of the characters - so we don't even get the usual transitional phrases such as "She left the car in the garage and took the elevator up to her father's office" - we constantly have to figure out where we are, who these characters are, have we met them before?, etc. So, yes, this novel requires some degree of effort on the reader's part, but it's rewarding in that the journey is actually going somewhere and along the way we get to know and empathize w/ a # of characters, some of whom are by most standards quite unsavory. This seems to be a novel yearning to become a TV series - and maybe it will.

A fine story in current New Yorker that feels like an excerpt from a memoir or "auto-fiction"

The New Yorker is on a bit of a run, with another excellent story in the current issue, this one, Things We Worried About When I Was Ten, by David Rabe (best known as a playwright, but a multiple-threat writer); the story, as you can surmise from the title, has the feeling of a memoir or essay about the narrator's childhood, and of course we suspect that the narrator is closely aligned w/ Rabe (though I know nothing about the facts of his life) - in other words, this feels close of the commanding style of the moment, auto-fiction (of which I'm an advocate, btw - write what you know, to the extreme, and what nobody else knows as well as you, but that w/ which all or many can identify with or learn from). The piece stands well as a story, but it could likely be a part of a longer manuscript, a novel or memoir. In a short space, Rabe gives a detailed and sometimes harrowing depiction of the working-class neighborhood in which the narrator was raised: fathers who work quick w/ the back of the hand, mothers overworked and emotionally distant, the constant bullying and threats and the fear of older and bigger boys - these all familiar notes - but the story becomes increasingly tense as Rabe introduces new "things we worried about": initial sexual longings, humiliations, broken families and the unexplained disappearances of those who moved in hard times, and finally a gruesome injury that traumatizes an already vulnerable child.

A challenging but thoughtful and intelligent Italian novel about a demise of a powerful family

Finished Part One of Nicola Lagioia's 2014 novel, Ferocity (Anthony Shugaar tr from the Italian), and after some rough going in the first chapters I've come to really like and appreciate this sometimes challenging 450-page novel. In essence, it's a crime novel that focuses on one family in Southern Italy (Bari), whose very wealthy father who from nothing built a vast empire of holdings and constructions projects - housing, highways, etc. - mostly in Italy but also across Europe. The adult children include a son who's young and highly successful oncologist, a two daughters, and a half-brother (father had a midlife affair) living in Rome and having some kind of severe psychiatric problem. At the outset, we see the older daughter at night walking naked and bloody in the middle of a highway, where she's struck by a truck and killed (the driver loses his leg in the collision). For some reason, as yet unexplained, the family goes to great lengths to redirect the story of the accident and to make it look as if the daughter killed herself by jumping from a parking-garage deck. Over the course of the first 200 pp., we learn much about the family history - and in particular how the father has entwined the children in many financial schemes by having them sign their names to documents promising collateral - all of which circles the mystery of the daughter's death and the strange cover-up. NL writes some really fine interior monologue - the foundation of most of this novel - but beware that, in following closely the workings of the minds of the various characters, he never steps back and to give context and he moves about quite a bit among various periods of time in the life of the family: Quite realistic, in that he captures how or minds actually work, but at first disorienting, at least until we get the characters more firmly established in our minds. There's all the material here for a Telanovela; I wonder if it's been optioned or produced already?