First I read The Judas Window by Carter Dickson, bought for the minimal investment of a dollar at Commonwealth Books in downtown Boston. I hadn't read a mystery in a long time (with a very few exceptions, such as Dissolution by C. J. Sansom), but this locked-room mystery was a novelty that sparked my curiosity. As I read, the courtroom drama engaged me; the barrister/detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, was a droll character. A few months later, I moved on to The Scandal at High Chimneys, written under the author's actual name, John Dickson Carr. This was an altogether different sort of mystery. For one thing, it was set in (a carefully researched) Victorian London. Overall, it was no less entertaining than The Judas Window...had I found a new direction in the area of light reading?
Simultaneously, I had noticed that I could find books by John Dickson Carr (or Carter Dickson) only in used bookstores, sometimes. I wondered, why had this excellent mystery writer fallen into obscurity? Then I bought The Hollow Man. It was a puzzle. By that I mean The Hollow Man focuses almost exclusively on murder as puzzle. The characters--although they often feature eccentricity, minor or major--manage to be dull. Similarly, the detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, is eccentric but ultimately dull. Meanwhile, though it becomes clear that the victim had a criminal past, the link between the victim's past and his murder--which soon becomes two murders--is as clear as mud. Thus, neither characterization nor possible motives compelled me, and I felt dragged along to the wondrous puzzle of it all.
I did not feel wonder. I felt something between annoyance and boredom, especially during chapter 17, "The Locked-Room Lecture," which I skimmed, then skipped...have I been spoiled by the complexities of, say, a P. D. James mystery novel? Or, had I discovered why John Dickson Carr has fallen into obscurity? In any case, I am now reading Sovereign by C. J. Sansom (and dedicated to P. D. James!).
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
A read to remember
There is much to love about All This Talk of Love, by Christopher Castellani. Let me count a few ways.
For one thing, love is not just talked about. Love is genuinely manifest in the Grasso family, from the first page, where Frankie Grasso and his mother are discussing a woman in a soap opera over the phone. Frankie praises this woman, faker of a pregnancy; his mother, Maddalena, emphatically condemns her. Maddalena reserves her praise for her daughter Prima (and husband Tom) for securing a lot to build a home on, and for managing her son Patrick's confirmation--"You know Prima saved you [Frankie] a place at the table for the confirmation." (7) All this is something of a burden for Frankie, but it does seem like a happy burden--unlike Frankie's dissertation, which seems like an unhappy burden.
Meanwhile, a restaurant--the Grasso family restaurant, the Al Di La--is a vital player in the life of the family. Its origins are poignant and powerful. Antonio Grasso, Maddalena's husband, named the family restaurant in Wilmington, DE, after the Al Di La Café in Santa Cecilia, Italy, where he is from. He chose the name of this café as a tribute to Maddalena, because, during his courtship of her, he had danced with her there. Overall, he "and his mother loved the Ristorante Al Di La like it was one of their own children." (33) The Al Di La is a center of work and profit for the Grasso family. It is also a place for pleasure and love. While Antonio meticulously supervises the restaurant, his children, Prima and Tony, and later his grandson, Ryan, set the tables, wait on the diners, and bus the tables. Although Prima turns out to be a poor waitress and Tony dies young (more on him later), Ryan labors lovingly at the Al Di La, e.g., at a party for prodigal son Frankie:
On the table are candles and the good white linens and fresh flowers. "All Ryan's idea," Prima's father told her, when the sight of it...took her breath away. (285)
Ryan's labor of love at the Al Di La is reminiscent of Tony's labor of love at the Al Di La, where Tony demonstrated--
...a talent for design, for making the perfect crease in the napkins, for spacing the knives and forks exactly the right distance apart. (93)
Tony demonstrated something else, not acceptable to his father Antonio, and that was passion for a waiter, Dante--who, it turns out, is making love to Prima.
After Antonio fires Dante, Tony, an adolescent, kills himself. Tony's death remains a hole in the fabric of the Grasso family. It is, really, more than a hole; it is a quiet indictment. Beneath all the seeming togetherness of the Grasso family, there is a lot of disconnect. There is a hint of it at the start, when Frankie's friends ask him--
"But what do you talk about [with your mother]? I haven't spoken an honest word to my mother since kindergarten."
"Who said anything about honesty?" [Frankie replies.] (5)
Meanwhile, although Prima saved a place for her brother Frankie at the table, she is mistrustful of him--with reason. After all, he does not tell anyone in the family about his lover, Professor Birch. At no time over the decades does Antonio tell his wife Maddalena (or any other family member) about Tony's homosexuality. Prima tells no one in the family about her affair with Dante. All this secrecy in the family belies its supposed unity.
The mother-daughter relationship seems intact, more or less happily--until it isn't. Prima badly miscalculates Maddalena's reaction to Prima's announcement that she has reserved plane tickets for the entire Grasso family to travel back to Italy. Maddalena does not "come around" as Prima expects; at the outset, she refuses to go, and she does not change her mind. Maddalena's point of view is especially compelling throughout. She wants to bring Frankie back into the family fold, but she does not want to visit what is left of her family in Italy. She loves her husband Antonio, but she is deeply exasperated with him, too. She tells Frankie her clear-cut views on love:
When we romance, we do it with our hearts, but we love our husbands and wives with our brains; our children and parents we love with our souls. (255)
Sadly, Maddalena's brain is fast deteriorating. This does not mean, however, that she does not feel. She approves of Frankie's girlfriend, Kelly Anne, she bonds with her sister, Carolina, and she expresses abiding love for Antonio. Maddalena looms.
The phrase "all this talk of love" comes from Prima, near the end of the story. This talk of love is rather gossipy--that is, when will Frankie propose to Kelly Anne?--but it reminds Prima of her long-ago love affair with the waiter, Dante, an affair that has had lasting impact on her--enough so that she is bringing it up, years later. Prima's disclosure of her "crush" on Dante in turn reminds Antonio of his son Tony's fatal attraction to Dante.
"All this talk of love" is, assuredly, more than talk.
For one thing, love is not just talked about. Love is genuinely manifest in the Grasso family, from the first page, where Frankie Grasso and his mother are discussing a woman in a soap opera over the phone. Frankie praises this woman, faker of a pregnancy; his mother, Maddalena, emphatically condemns her. Maddalena reserves her praise for her daughter Prima (and husband Tom) for securing a lot to build a home on, and for managing her son Patrick's confirmation--"You know Prima saved you [Frankie] a place at the table for the confirmation." (7) All this is something of a burden for Frankie, but it does seem like a happy burden--unlike Frankie's dissertation, which seems like an unhappy burden.
Meanwhile, a restaurant--the Grasso family restaurant, the Al Di La--is a vital player in the life of the family. Its origins are poignant and powerful. Antonio Grasso, Maddalena's husband, named the family restaurant in Wilmington, DE, after the Al Di La Café in Santa Cecilia, Italy, where he is from. He chose the name of this café as a tribute to Maddalena, because, during his courtship of her, he had danced with her there. Overall, he "and his mother loved the Ristorante Al Di La like it was one of their own children." (33) The Al Di La is a center of work and profit for the Grasso family. It is also a place for pleasure and love. While Antonio meticulously supervises the restaurant, his children, Prima and Tony, and later his grandson, Ryan, set the tables, wait on the diners, and bus the tables. Although Prima turns out to be a poor waitress and Tony dies young (more on him later), Ryan labors lovingly at the Al Di La, e.g., at a party for prodigal son Frankie:
On the table are candles and the good white linens and fresh flowers. "All Ryan's idea," Prima's father told her, when the sight of it...took her breath away. (285)
Ryan's labor of love at the Al Di La is reminiscent of Tony's labor of love at the Al Di La, where Tony demonstrated--
...a talent for design, for making the perfect crease in the napkins, for spacing the knives and forks exactly the right distance apart. (93)
Tony demonstrated something else, not acceptable to his father Antonio, and that was passion for a waiter, Dante--who, it turns out, is making love to Prima.
After Antonio fires Dante, Tony, an adolescent, kills himself. Tony's death remains a hole in the fabric of the Grasso family. It is, really, more than a hole; it is a quiet indictment. Beneath all the seeming togetherness of the Grasso family, there is a lot of disconnect. There is a hint of it at the start, when Frankie's friends ask him--
"But what do you talk about [with your mother]? I haven't spoken an honest word to my mother since kindergarten."
"Who said anything about honesty?" [Frankie replies.] (5)
Meanwhile, although Prima saved a place for her brother Frankie at the table, she is mistrustful of him--with reason. After all, he does not tell anyone in the family about his lover, Professor Birch. At no time over the decades does Antonio tell his wife Maddalena (or any other family member) about Tony's homosexuality. Prima tells no one in the family about her affair with Dante. All this secrecy in the family belies its supposed unity.
The mother-daughter relationship seems intact, more or less happily--until it isn't. Prima badly miscalculates Maddalena's reaction to Prima's announcement that she has reserved plane tickets for the entire Grasso family to travel back to Italy. Maddalena does not "come around" as Prima expects; at the outset, she refuses to go, and she does not change her mind. Maddalena's point of view is especially compelling throughout. She wants to bring Frankie back into the family fold, but she does not want to visit what is left of her family in Italy. She loves her husband Antonio, but she is deeply exasperated with him, too. She tells Frankie her clear-cut views on love:
When we romance, we do it with our hearts, but we love our husbands and wives with our brains; our children and parents we love with our souls. (255)
Sadly, Maddalena's brain is fast deteriorating. This does not mean, however, that she does not feel. She approves of Frankie's girlfriend, Kelly Anne, she bonds with her sister, Carolina, and she expresses abiding love for Antonio. Maddalena looms.
The phrase "all this talk of love" comes from Prima, near the end of the story. This talk of love is rather gossipy--that is, when will Frankie propose to Kelly Anne?--but it reminds Prima of her long-ago love affair with the waiter, Dante, an affair that has had lasting impact on her--enough so that she is bringing it up, years later. Prima's disclosure of her "crush" on Dante in turn reminds Antonio of his son Tony's fatal attraction to Dante.
"All this talk of love" is, assuredly, more than talk.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
On the 20th century, unfortunately
As an English major, over twenty years ago, I did not read much American literature. So, in the past year, I went on a campaign to study, on my own, 20th century American literature. I started with Invisible Man (by Ralph Ellison), which had recently been dramatized by the Huntington Theatre Company at Boston University. I moved back in time to Main Street (by Sinclair Lewis) and The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair), and I moved forward to The Sun Also Rises (by Ernest Hemingway). These early 20th century American novels, not to my surprise, featured severely disillusioned individuals struggling to breathe free despite the broken promise of the United States of America. Then I leapt from Ernest Hemingway, in 1926, to William Styron, in 1951.
The issue is no longer the same. Styron's Lie Down in Darkness chronicles the collapse--nay, the dramatic implosion--of a family in Virginia. The Loftis family begins soundly but soon sickens, literally. Helen takes refuge in Nembutal and cigarettes. Her husband, Milton, drinks continually and joylessly. Their elder daughter, Maudie, is physically crippled, while their younger daughter, Peyton is spiritually--well, more on her later. The interactions among Helen, Milton, and Peyton tend toward the theatrical, often theatrically furious. For instance, Helen whirls to face Milton in outrage that he has given their daughter, Peyton, one drink of whiskey at her 16th birthday party; shortly before, Peyton confides frankly to Milton that "I just don't love [Helen]...I just don't think I love her." (85)
The awfulness of the Loftis family reaches a climax at Peyton's wedding, described in pp. 260-305. At first, all is proceeding OK. Then, Peyton pushes her father away angrily, exclaiming, "Don't smother me, Daddy! You're crazy!" (286) Helen becomes "so distraught as to be on the verge of some striking biological change" (292). Milton develops the "face of someone on the verge of apoplexy" (304). None of this promises future happy times for bride and groom, but least promising is the bride's own attitude to her marriage, as observed by the minister, Carey Carr--
...her "I will" had seemed less an avowal than a confession, like the tired words of some sad, errant nun. (291)
The marriage does not last. Peyton quickly exasperates and outrages her husband, a New York Jew named Harry Miller, who ultimately turns away from her. While, at the end, Peyton goes in search of Harry, her mind keeps reverting to memories of her mother telling her things like "you mustn't mustn't can't you be proper. God punishes improper children." (366) Has Peyton internalized her mother's judgments? Has she become her mother? An inquiring mind will never know, because Peyton commits suicide. At Peyton's funeral, Milton nearly kills Helen. Darkness, lying down or not, seems to characterize all three.
More specifically, despair characterizes their lives. At one point, after tending to Maudie, Helen considers taking an overdose of Nembutal. Milton experiences his marriage as "brutal and agonizing" but he is unable to act, "like a bug wriggling upside-down on the floor." (155) Long before she commits suicide, Peyton is dangerously fixated on her mother and father. While she physically leaves them behind in Virginia--to live with her husband Harry in New York--emotionally, she cannot let them go. She never moves past the confounding legacies of her parents, as if they are an impenetrable wall.
The word "despair" or a word like it is omnipresent in the novel. Consider these phrases:
"a predicament, overwhelming and hopeless, such as this one, couldn't be helped by piety, or prayers..." (105)
"a sort of hopeful despair on his round, friendly face, but with more despair than hope" (144)
"past the frozen reach of ice the bay was as black as dusk, as despair..." (171)
Two of them are from the point of view of the minister, Carey, who is supposed to provide transcendent hope.
Not only has the family collapsed, but religion has collapsed. Although religion is paramount for most of the characters in the novel, it is rarely effective or redeeming. Christmas Day at the Loftises is not a festive celebration of the birth of Christ but rather is "Pure hell." (163)--and the hell lasts. As for Maudie--if she places faith in another being, that faith is not in Christ but in a wild man named Bennie who performs tricks for her (220-223). Meanwhile, the minister fails to convince Helen that there is a God--"...he had not saved her, he had not taught her faith enough to endure disaster." (239) In her stream-of-consciousness narrative at the end, Peyton seems to have an exaggerated sense of her sinfulness, which leads her to, as she puts it, "lie down in darkness."
The one character in the book who receives any joy from religion is Ella Swan, housekeeper and cook for the Loftises. She looks up to an itinerant preacher named Daddy Faith, whose invigorating words lead her to proclaim, "You, Daddy! Yes, Jesus, you loves us!" (397) and, a little later, "Yes, Jesus! I seen him! Yeah! Yeah!" (400) Ella's cries of faith in God conclude the novel, which has been characterized by faithlessness.
Her cries of faith, however, feel too little, too late. If the Loftises are any indication, the South is already in full self-destruct mode.
The issue is no longer the same. Styron's Lie Down in Darkness chronicles the collapse--nay, the dramatic implosion--of a family in Virginia. The Loftis family begins soundly but soon sickens, literally. Helen takes refuge in Nembutal and cigarettes. Her husband, Milton, drinks continually and joylessly. Their elder daughter, Maudie, is physically crippled, while their younger daughter, Peyton is spiritually--well, more on her later. The interactions among Helen, Milton, and Peyton tend toward the theatrical, often theatrically furious. For instance, Helen whirls to face Milton in outrage that he has given their daughter, Peyton, one drink of whiskey at her 16th birthday party; shortly before, Peyton confides frankly to Milton that "I just don't love [Helen]...I just don't think I love her." (85)
The awfulness of the Loftis family reaches a climax at Peyton's wedding, described in pp. 260-305. At first, all is proceeding OK. Then, Peyton pushes her father away angrily, exclaiming, "Don't smother me, Daddy! You're crazy!" (286) Helen becomes "so distraught as to be on the verge of some striking biological change" (292). Milton develops the "face of someone on the verge of apoplexy" (304). None of this promises future happy times for bride and groom, but least promising is the bride's own attitude to her marriage, as observed by the minister, Carey Carr--
...her "I will" had seemed less an avowal than a confession, like the tired words of some sad, errant nun. (291)
The marriage does not last. Peyton quickly exasperates and outrages her husband, a New York Jew named Harry Miller, who ultimately turns away from her. While, at the end, Peyton goes in search of Harry, her mind keeps reverting to memories of her mother telling her things like "you mustn't mustn't can't you be proper. God punishes improper children." (366) Has Peyton internalized her mother's judgments? Has she become her mother? An inquiring mind will never know, because Peyton commits suicide. At Peyton's funeral, Milton nearly kills Helen. Darkness, lying down or not, seems to characterize all three.
More specifically, despair characterizes their lives. At one point, after tending to Maudie, Helen considers taking an overdose of Nembutal. Milton experiences his marriage as "brutal and agonizing" but he is unable to act, "like a bug wriggling upside-down on the floor." (155) Long before she commits suicide, Peyton is dangerously fixated on her mother and father. While she physically leaves them behind in Virginia--to live with her husband Harry in New York--emotionally, she cannot let them go. She never moves past the confounding legacies of her parents, as if they are an impenetrable wall.
The word "despair" or a word like it is omnipresent in the novel. Consider these phrases:
"a predicament, overwhelming and hopeless, such as this one, couldn't be helped by piety, or prayers..." (105)
"a sort of hopeful despair on his round, friendly face, but with more despair than hope" (144)
"past the frozen reach of ice the bay was as black as dusk, as despair..." (171)
Two of them are from the point of view of the minister, Carey, who is supposed to provide transcendent hope.
Not only has the family collapsed, but religion has collapsed. Although religion is paramount for most of the characters in the novel, it is rarely effective or redeeming. Christmas Day at the Loftises is not a festive celebration of the birth of Christ but rather is "Pure hell." (163)--and the hell lasts. As for Maudie--if she places faith in another being, that faith is not in Christ but in a wild man named Bennie who performs tricks for her (220-223). Meanwhile, the minister fails to convince Helen that there is a God--"...he had not saved her, he had not taught her faith enough to endure disaster." (239) In her stream-of-consciousness narrative at the end, Peyton seems to have an exaggerated sense of her sinfulness, which leads her to, as she puts it, "lie down in darkness."
The one character in the book who receives any joy from religion is Ella Swan, housekeeper and cook for the Loftises. She looks up to an itinerant preacher named Daddy Faith, whose invigorating words lead her to proclaim, "You, Daddy! Yes, Jesus, you loves us!" (397) and, a little later, "Yes, Jesus! I seen him! Yeah! Yeah!" (400) Ella's cries of faith in God conclude the novel, which has been characterized by faithlessness.
Her cries of faith, however, feel too little, too late. If the Loftises are any indication, the South is already in full self-destruct mode.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
