The Silence - Don DeLillo

 I've reviewed two DeLillo novels previously on this blog, Running Dog in 2015 and Libra in May this year.   The Silence is nothing like either of them and yet it is quintessentially DeLillo.

DeLillo specifically calls it a novel but it is really a novella, only 116 pages in huge and beautiful American typewriter font.   There are only five characters: Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, who we find onboard their flight from Paris to New Jersey; and an older couple in their New York apartment, Max Stenner and Diane Lucas, and their guest Martin, who is a physics teacher and Diane's former student.   Martin has an obsession with Einstein's 1912 manuscript of The Special Theory of Relativity, which he can and does quote from.

It is Super Bowl Sunday 2022 (but DeLillo wrote the book in 2020) and the game is about to start.   Jim and Tessa are due to join the party later.   But something happens.   The TV blacks out.  The same system failure hits the plane.   Fortunately the pilot is able to glide in.   Motor vehicles still work but all digital systems are down.

There is no resolution - and, of course, in real life we would be able to do nothing in this situation, no matter if our domestic group included a retired physics professor and a savant on the theory of Relativity.  The lack of resolution is another trait suggesting this is really a novella or longish short story.   Whatever it is, it's damn fine writing.

The Underground Man - Ross Macdonald

 This is one of the later Lew Archer novels.   Archer is middleaged, methodical.   He is, basically, Paul Newman in his prime.   Newman played him in Harper and The Drowning Pool but Peter Graves took the role in the TV adaptation of The Underground Man.

The story is essentially one of a disfunctional family in and around old money.   The old rich are aloof and stuck in their ways, the infiltrators are either nouveau riche or grifters.   Macdonald comes up with a brilliant metaphor.   The Broadhurst family owned the entire canyon until Mrs Broadhurst entered into a dubious deal with property developer Brian Kilpatrick.   Now the hills and forest above the new housing are ablaze.

Mrs Broadhurst married a fly-by-night pilot after the war.   He soon left her for a local teacher.   Mrs B's son Stanley is obsessed with finding his father - but now Stanley has disappeared.   He was last seen in his sports car with a very young woman who the day before was so stoned she jumped off a yacht into the sea and Stanley's young son Ronny, whom Archer had come across in his yard that very morning.   It's all very incestuous (without actually being incestuous) - a restricted number of closely interrelated relationships most of which involve abandonment.

Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar, 1915-83) was a master craftsman and was in his prime with the Lew Archer series.   The story moves along at a brisk place, the writing chiselled to a fine edge without ever going to extremes.   There is psychological depth, suspense, and whilst Archer himself never seems to be in danger, the necessary jeopardy comes from the fire, which is especially effective given what happened lately to Southern California.

Another (#21) in Penguin's magnificent Crime & Espionage series of Modern Classics.

Requiem for a Dream - Hubert Selby Jr

 Requiem for a Dream takes us straight into the rotting heart of New York in the disaster years when heroin ruined everything.   Harry Goldfarb and his buddy Tyrone C Love dream of one big score.   Harry's mother Sara sits in her apartment and dreams of being on a TV show.   Harry and Tyrone do indeed score.   Tyrone's contact has some dynamite dope which, even when cut, gives good bag.   But the boys can't resist a taste of their own product.   It is only right to share with their ladies, Marion and Alice.

Harry is a good Jewish boy.   When he is in funds he splashes out on a giant TV for his mother, the best Macy's has on offer.   He finds his mother changed.   She's lost a lot of weight.   She's twitchy and grinds her teeth.   It turns out Sara has been cold-called by a guy claiming to discover contestants for TV quiz shows.   Naturally Sara applies - and immediately starts creating the persona she wants to the viewing public to see.   She especially wants to be able to fit into the red dress she wore for Harry's bar mitzvah.   A friend recommends a doctor, the doctor prescribes weight-loss pills and before you know it Sara is hooked.

At the same time Harry and Tyrone's contact runs out of dope.   There's no decent heroin to be had.   The friends find themselves hustling the streets like the runny-nosed dope fiends they once looked down on.   Things get really bad, really quick.   No one does grim like Selby.   

Selby writes free-form, a sort of bridge between the Beats and the likes of James Ellroy.   It takes a moment to get used to - and he isn't always consistent - but it works brilliantly.   Any other approach and I don't believe readers would stick with it.   As it is, Selby's characters are fully rounded from the moment we meet them.   We empathise with their dreams even though we hopefully don't share them.   Somehow our empathy enables us to bear the horror.   A masterpiece of a very bleak genre.

The Magician out of Manchuria - Charles G Finney

 My only other acquaintance with Charles G Finney was back in October 2018 with The Unholy City.   I suspect I bought this soon after and then lost it in my to-read mountain.

The Magician out of Manchuria is even shorter than The Unholy City.   It is billed as adult fantasy, because the female lead spends a lot of time nude, and not once but twice depilates.   It is in fact a fantastical tale with a sexual side to it.   None of the three main characters has a name, they are simply the Magician, his chela or apprentice, and the Lascivious Queen of La.   The magician's black ass does have a name, Ng Gk.

The main inspiration seems to be Communist China.   There has been a Great Leap Forward; the old lordships have been overturned and the bureaucrats have taken over; magic is being driven from the world.   Some fishermen land an unusual catch, a naked woman whom the magician is able to resuscitate - by the kiss of life rather than magic.   She is dumpy and unattractive but the magician has magic balm that can fix that.   She tells her tale - one of three sister queens who have been betrayed by the ultimate scheming bureaucrat Khan Ali Bok.   The mage and his chela undertake to help her recover her throne and in so doing manage to secure a haven for magic.

Finney is at his best when he lets his imagination run riot.  The riverboat 'Flower of the Lotus' transforms into a craft than can walk on land and then sprouts wings; it therefore becomes triphibian.  Excellent.

(I still haven't tracked down a copy of The Circus of Dr Lao.   That's an asap essential.)

Defy the Foul Fiend - John Collier

 I was not up to speed on John Collier.   No wonder, really.   He was noted (never famous) for contributing the screenplays of famous films (The African Queen, I Am A Camera) and short stories for magazines like the New Yorker.   He died in 1980.   His only novels, three of them, appeared in the 1930s and did well but not brilliantly.   In other words he was before my time and long since out of my main sphere of interest.

I forget now how I came across him.   I acquired two of his novels some time ago and they gradually disappeared into my ever-increasing mountain of the waiting-to-be-read.   Then, by chance, I unearthed Defy the Foul Fiend, the last of the three, published in 1934.   It is a comic novel very much in the style of the young Evelyn Waugh.   Time has moved on however, the dark cloud of the Great Depression hangs over the comedy.

Willoughby Corbo, our hero, is the illegitimate son of the aristocratic waster Lord Ollebeare.   When the cook who bore him runs off with her lover, Ollebeare dumps the boy on his brother Ralph, a grim stockbroker who has a wife desperate to be a mother.   The wife dies and Willoughy is left largely to his own devices.   In the fullness of time he has to go out into the world with which he is largely unfamiliar.   Ollebeare manages to get him a post as secretary to Lord Stumber, an elderly campaigning peer who happens to have a very young wife with remarkably compelling breasts which fascinate Willoughby and other young men of his acquaintance.   So Willoughby gets the boot and embarks on his quest for feminine beauty and a meaningful role in life.

He tries all options - a young prostitute, a sultry siren; hawking unnecessary domestic appliances door-to-door on a purely commission basis.   But Willoughby is essentially mule-headed and a bred-in-the-bone Tory.   We all recognise early on that the rather limpid and artistic Lucy is the girl for him and that Willoughby is fated to follow the Corbo inheritance in all its aspects.

I was fascinated with the twist at the end that is strikingly similar to one in Mrs Craddock which I finished immediately before starting reading this.   Defy the Foul Fiend is also let down by a problem which I noted in the post below Maugham never had.   Maugham always knew when to finish.   Collier very much doesn't.   At least a third of this book could have been cut and what remained would have been brilliant.   There are great jokes here, affecting characters, many well-drawn scenes, but there is also waffle, pages I ended up skipping.   Perhaps this is why Collier only contributed to famous screenplays.   He could enliven and amplify but he cannot construct.

Mrs Craddock - W Somerset Maugham

 

Mrs Craddock was the third or fourth of Maugham's novels, written in 1900 but not published until 1902 - because William Heinemann, of all people, thought it was in some inexplicable way offensive.   He agreed to publish a slightly expurgated version but since 1955 we have all had the real deal.   And there is nothing in any way offensive about it.

This is Maugham's attempt at a New Woman Novel.   The New Woman was a literary genre in the last decade of the Victorian era, sparked by suffragism and various campaigns for womens' rights.   It found expression in 'Theodora: A Fragment' by 'Victoria Cross' in The Yellow Book and the publisher of that journal, John Lane of The Bodley Head, launched a series of books on the theme called Keynotes after the first in the series, a novel of the same name by 'George Egerton' (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright).   Two notable works in the series were The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen, and The Woman Who Didn't by the aforementioned 'Victoria Cross' (Anna Sophie Cory.

Because of the difficulty in getting Mrs Craddock into print Maugham missed the crest of the New Woman wave.   Nevertheless it was a success and in many ways cemented the reputation he made with his debut Liza of Lambeth five years earlier.   The intervening novels, The Making of a Saint and The Hero, hadn't done especially well and Maugham was still searching for his central theme.   He found it in the question of quiet nonconformity.

Bertha Ley is a New Woman.   Coming up to twenty-one, and about to come into a comfortable inheritance, she forms a passionate attachment to the young farmer, Edward Craddock, one of her tenants.   She is determined to marry him immediately and no one can persaude her otherwise.   Her aunt, a middleaged spinster and a woman of independent opinions, sees no point in trying.   The marriage goes ahead and for a time Bertha is blissfully happy as Mrs Craddock.   Edward is an excellent manager of the estate and she finds him physically irresistable.   But she loses her baby son after a nightmare confinement.   The local doctor warns her she can never have another.   Edward does his duty but Bertha cannot recover her passion for him.   So she leaves him and goes to London to lodge with her aunt.

Ultimately Bertha returns to her family home in Whitstable where Edward has simply got on with things in her absence.   Things about him that Bertha once found attractive - his manly appetite, his old-fashioned code of behaviour, his lack of sophistication - she now finds offensive.   Edward is putting on weight, balding slightly, and standing for the County Council.

Maugham handles it all brilliantly.   Bertha is compulsive and irritating.   Edward is dogged and dull.   The character who holds the narrative together, acting as the reader's voice, is Bertha's aunt, Miss Polly Ley, who has actually been a New Woman since before the term was invented.   She lives alone in London and spends the unpleasant winter months abroad.   She has a busy social and intellectual life.   Her counter is another spinster, Fanny Glover, the vicar's devoted sister, who would have made Edward the perfect wife.

For me the proof of Maugham's genius is his ability to make his fiction exactly the right length - a few pages under 300 in this instance.   Unlike so many modern novelists he always seems to know precisely when to stop.