Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Mapping of Love and Death is Jacqueline Winspear’s latest Maisie Dobbs novel. I’ll admit at this point that this series isn’t wowing me, exactly, although I do want to keep reading the latest installments, just to see where it goes. The Maisie Dobbs books are good ones to turn to at this particular point of the year, when I’m tired and busy and ready for the end of the school year, but the end of the school year is still so far away. At this point I need something familiar and absorbing and not terribly challenging, and Maisie Dobbs is just the thing.

The series doesn’t wow me for two reasons, basically, one of which is that the plots have begun to feel lackluster. I’m not one to read much for plot, though, so this is okay. The historical context and the character development are more interesting, so that’s good. The other problem, though, is that I get irritated by the way Maisie uses her unusually strong powers of intuition to figure out who committed the crime. This feels too much like cheating. Yes, Maisie is smart and has the powers of deduction we would expect of a detective, but still she relies too heavily on feelings of foreboding that come over her whenever something significant is about to happen.

But, on the other hand, I do want to know what happens to Maisie, having followed her story this far, and the book is satisfying in that regard. Significant things happen to her, and I’m glad I know about them. For a much better, much more thorough review, read Danielle’s thoughts here.

On to other bookish things: I finished Balzac’s novel Cousin Bette and never wrote much about it, and at this point, I’ve forgotten too much about the novel to have much to say. I’ll just say that I didn’t like it much and move on. I’m not ready to give up on Balzac entirely, though, as surely I’m missing something? I’m not one to dismiss a classic author quite so easily just because I failed with him once. So some day perhaps I’ll pick up a shorter novel of his, if there is one, and see if my mind has changed.

I just now finished W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, but more thoughts on that later, as the Slaves of Golconda are discussing the book this Wednesday. I am also in the middle of David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I am enjoying it immensely. I have read five of the book’s seven essays (many of them quite long), and I think every one of them is great. Wallace is a writer who can make any subject interesting. I just finished an essay on the film director David Lynch and I loved it, even though if I’ve ever seen a Lynch film I don’t remember it. There’s another great essay on the Illinois State Fair and another one on tennis, math, the midwest, and wind. The other two I’ve read are more literary in nature, one of them a pre-Infinite Jest essay that shows Wallace thinking through some of the ideas that made their way into the novel. It’s all excellent, and I haven’t even gotten to the title essay yet, probably his most famous essay of them all. It’s crossing my mind now and then that I might want to reread Infinite Jest soon. I don’t know if I will, but I am tempted. It’s just such a fabulous novel.

I didn’t expect to love Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel American Wife as much as I did. I liked her first book Prep quite a lot, so I know she’s an author whose sensibility speaks to me, but I thought this book was even better than the previous one. Now, I listened to this on audio, and I tend to like books I listen to more readily than those I read, so I’m not sure how reliable my response is, exactly, but still, I spent several weeks looking forward to the time when I could get in the car to listen to a little bit more of the story.

As I wrote about here, reading this book was an odd experience because I never expected to enjoy being in the company of characters who are modeled on George and Laura Bush. But, while the George character was often irritating (though not as much as I would have expected, given how I feel about the real-life person), Alice, the one modeled on Laura, was a fascinating person whom I came to admire.

Alice is a first-person narrator, and she tells her life story up until about 1 1/2 years from the end of Charlie’s (George’s) second term as president. I was talking to a friend recently about how knowing the trajectory a novel will follow — that we will move from Alice’s childhood up through the time she becomes first lady — can get dull, but in this case it wasn’t. As soon as she met Charlie, I knew who he was and that she would marry him, and, of course, I knew that he would be politically successful beyond her wildest dreams. But the story of their journey to the White House was enthralling the entire way, all because of Alice’s thoughtful, careful, measured, and balanced voice. That description doesn’t sound enthralling, I know, but when extraordinary things happen to someone who thinks and talks kind of like I do and whom I feel I could be friends with, I’m drawn in.

The first extraordinary thing that happens to Alice is something tragic: at 17, while driving to a party, she ran a stop sign and hit a car driven by a high school classmate, Andrew Imhof, with whom she was just beginning to realize she couldpossibly fall in love. This tragedy follows her for the rest of her life, not just because she was responsible for someone else’s death, but because she could never know whether their relationship would have blossomed into romance, had he lived. What, she thinks later, if she and Andrew had married and she had become a farmer’s wife? She may never have met Charlie in that case, much less married him and become the first lady.

But marrying Andrew is not what happened, and instead when Alice meets Charlie, the two fall for each other hard. They are engaged in six weeks and married in a few months. In so many ways, Charlie is perfect for Alice — he is funny and gregarious and light-hearted, to balance out her seriousness and thoughtfulness. He is confident and carefree, to balance her worried and insecure nature. She makes him a little more serious, while he helps her loosen up. Their differing traits attract them to each other, but, not surprisingly, they become a source of conflict over time, and eventually Alice comes to question the choice she made.

Or was it even a choice? There is a sense in which Alice was pulled into that relationship by forces beyond her knowledge, or perhaps it was her unconscious that led her there. At any rate, she thinks deeply about why she did what she did, and why people do what they do, and the extent to which any of us have any real say in the course of our lives.

These questions become even more urgent when she finds herself as First Lady and wife of a husband who has taken the country to war, in highly questionable circumstances. How in the world did she end up there? And what is she supposed to do now? What are her responsibilities, given that she’s not entirely sure that the war is right — or that it is wrong? And what exactly does she owe her husband’s administration? Should she hide her true feelings if they conflict with administration talking points?

American Wife covers a lot of ground, moving from small-town middle-class Wisconsin to the upper-class Wisconsin sanctuaries where Charlie’s family resides (Sittenfeld changed some key details — I don’t know how many, in fact, and it would be interesting to know), to the campaign trail, to the Governor’s mansion, to the White House. The wonder of it, to Alice, is that she is the same person through it all. How does an average middle-class midwestern woman who never in her wildest dreams would have thought she could become as powerful and famous as she became end up where she did? This question never ceases to puzzle Alice, and I loved the book’s implication that this is only an extreme version of the question that plagues us all. How in the world did any of us end up in the places we did?

My mystery book group met last night to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, a book that indicates we are branching out a bit from mystery fiction to crime fiction more generally. Detectives appear in Highsmith’s book, but only briefly, and they aren’t very good. They are pretty foolish, in fact. The real star of the book is Tom Ripley, the murderer.

What a wonderful, difficult, bizarre book this is. I loved it, but it left me feeling anxious and vaguely guilty, as though I’d done something wrong myself. The reason for this is that the story is told from a very close third-person perspective that leaves the reader in Tom’s consciousness the entire time, with no relief. It’s such a disturbing consciousness that I was both fascinated by the person that Tom is, and deeply unsettled.

As the novel opens, Tom finds himself followed by a man who turns out to be the father of an acquaintance. Tom was worried that the man was following him because of the tax fraud Tom had recently committed (he sent out letters to people telling them they owed more in taxes — just for fun and to see what would happen), but it turns out he wants Tom to travel to Europe to try to bring his son Dickie back home to run the family business. Tom soon figures out that even though he doesn’t know Dickie as well as his father thinks he does, this is a great opportunity to live in the lap of luxury for a while.

He meets Dickie in a small, coastal Italian town and quickly becomes a part of his life. He and Dickie’s friend Marge spend their days swimming, sunbathing, and eating long and luxurious meals. Tensions soon develop, though: Tom is devoted to Dickie but jealous of Marge, while Marge decides that Tom is a bad influence on Dickie and treats him coldly and suspiciously. This love triangle of a sort (Marge is in love with Dickie, although he appears not to return the feeling, and Tom is obsessed with Dickie to a degree that is obvious but ambiguous in nature) gets more and more complicated until one day Tom, in a fit of jealousy and worried that Dickie is pushing him away, kills him in horrifically bloody fashion in a boat on the ocean.

What’s so awful about this murder is that it’s so senseless, so horrible, and yet to Tom it’s simply an unfortunate action that he had little control over. Once the idea entered his mind, he knew there was little he could do except follow through. He’s not remorseful at all, just cautious about what to do next. What he does is become Dickie himself, stepping into his shoes, forging his signature to collect his money, and living the life that Dickie might have lived.

Tom not only lacks any moral sense, but he lacks any sense of himself at all; he’s a cipher, an empty shell who is incapable of caring for another person. He is extremely isolated. The people around him are pawns in his personal game or they are nobodies to be gotten rid of if necessary. What Tom has — or what he wants to have — in place of any sense of self or any emotional connection to others is objects and money. Once he has taken Dickie’s place, he enjoys himself extremely well wearing Dickie’s clothes, eating fabulous meals alone in expensive restaurants, and traveling across Europe seeing the sights. As long as he has the objects that make up the right kind of identity, it doesn’t matter to him that the identity is a sham. For him, it’s real, or, at any rate, it’s enough.

He slips into the role of Dickie frighteningly easily, and not only that, but he quickly forgets what it was like to be Tom:

It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley’s voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his ears was exactly the same as he remembered it.

It’s possible to say that this is a psychological exploration of a sociopath, but I think the book resists psychological explanations and is therefore even more chilling. The narrator explains that Tom lost his parents when he was young and that he was raised by an emotionally abusive aunt. But this history is told so quickly, with so few details, that it’s almost as if Highsmith is playing with our need for an explanation, making fun of it by providing us with one so unsatisfactory. There’s no real reason for Tom, no way of explaining him or of avoiding him.

As other members of my book group said, I loved the book, but I don’t necessarily want to read more of the book in the series or even more of Highsmith’s work at all. It’s good — very good — but so disturbing it’s hard to subject oneself to it.