What Are You Reading

[Julian Shellhammer]

The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart. It's supposed to be young adult fiction, I guess, but I enjoyed it a great deal. Wordplay and riddles are used throughout the story. The basic plot is that four children, ages 10, 10, 11, and indeterminate, are recruited by a quirky yet charming doctor-scientist-professor and his two assistants to battle a villain intent on world domination.
There are multiple twists and turns, cliff-hangers, and kid spy craft. Author Stewart names some characters quite cleverly, such as a pair of young bullies called Jackson and Jillson. Without giving anything away, the main antagonist is named Letfalltha Curtain. If you google the phrase "let fall the curtain," it shows up as a line in a poem by William Cowper.
Well-written and readable, with many literary references, and word puzzles for the kids and the reader.

 

[Fading Fast]

Wickford Point by John P. Marquand originally published in 1939


Novelist John P. Marquand, despite having won a Pulitzer Prize, has been largely forgotten, most likely, because his stories were too commercial for the literary cognoscenti and his subject matter, east-coast WASPs, could not be more off message today.

If you, however, enjoy engaging, intelligent and well-written fiction that brings a time, place and characters alive, Marquand's novels, mainly written in the first half of the twentieth century, are enjoyable reads.

Wickford Point has the benefit of being a semi-autobiographical roman-a-clef of Marquand's own life and writing career, giving it an insightful, albeit biting look at the often lonely life of a writer. And in this case, of a writer with a half-cracked family.

Wickford Point is the Massachusetts "farm" of the Brill family, the offspring of John Brill, a poet of some small renown from the nineteenth century whose poems still have enough literary currency in the 1930s that the Brills remain somewhat respected in intellectual and social circles.

That "intellectual" halo, and a few modest trust funds, though, has stunted the growth of the three generations of Brills that we meet living at their rundown (the trusts truly are modest) country retreat.

Each Brill is a singular personality, but none of them can do much more than talk a lot about life, spend their dwindling trust funds and be unsuccessful when they try to engage with the outside world.

Jim Calder, a cousin and, we assume, the author's doppelganger is the one successful member of the family, perhaps in part because he's not a "real" Brill. It is through his eyes that we learn about this museum piece of a family and the career of a writer back then.

Calder loves his very offbeat family even if it exasperates him most of the time. The fun in this one is the family itself and Calder's hesitant attempts to develop a relationship with a successful career woman whose existence is almost an affront to the genteel Brills.

Clothhilde is the titular head of the family. She genuinely loves her four children, but has stunted their growth with her need to have them around her, which leads to her passive-aggressive discouragement of them building lives away from Wickford Point.

Her sons, Harry and Sidney, spend their days talking about life and the people they know as the Brills still move in "proper society." You feel, though, that these present-day Brills are a bit mocked in those circles. The boys also fail at everything they try to do in the outside world.

The daughters, Mary and Bella, are the more interesting offspring as Bella, in particular, gets out in the real world, in part, because her stunning beauty is perennial currency. But they, too, can't fully function outside of Wickford Point.

Much of the book is spent at Wickford point where this family manages to occupy their days in a sort of "Grey Gardens" neverland of insular thinking in a once grand house now suffering from disrepair.

Calder, the one almost escapee, visits frequently, but has made a career as a reasonably successful journalist and short-story writer when the latter was an in-demand talent. He, though, has aspirations of becoming a famous novelist, but can't make the career leap.

One assumes author Marquand is expressing his own thoughts when Calder speaks of his fears of the empty page. We believe it's the author again when he mocks the demands of his editors for formulaic outcomes to the short stories that pay his bills.

Rounding out the picture is Pat Leighton, Calder's girlfriend, a successful self-made advertising executive at a New York City department store who is everything the indolent Brills, living on the family's former glory and dwindling funds, are not.

The modest plot revolves around Calder's attempt to reconcile his love for his isolated, standoffish and, in truth, bizarre family with his desire to work and live in the real world. The latter would also include a marriage to Leighton, who could never fit in at Wickford Point.

It's not hard to understand why Wickford Point would be ignored today, with its focus on White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but that doesn't diminish the value of its outstanding writing, characterizations and insights into a now-lost time and place in America.


And how cool is this:

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

View attachment 537749
Wickford Point by John P. Marquand originally published in 1939


Novelist John P. Marquand, despite having won a Pulitzer Prize, has been largely forgotten, most likely, because his stories were too commercial for the literary cognoscenti and his subject matter, east-coast WASPs, could not be more off message today.

If you, however, enjoy engaging, intelligent and well-written fiction that brings a time, place and characters alive, Marquand's novels, mainly written in the first half of the twentieth century, are enjoyable reads.

Wickford Point has the benefit of being a semi-autobiographical roman-a-clef of Marquand's own life and writing career, giving it an insightful, albeit biting look at the often lonely life of a writer. And in this case, of a writer with a half-cracked family.

Wickford Point is the Massachusetts "farm" of the Brill family, the offspring of John Brill, a poet of some small renown from the nineteenth century whose poems still have enough literary currency in the 1930s that the Brills remain somewhat respected in intellectual and social circles.

That "intellectual" halo, and a few modest trust funds, though, has stunted the growth of the three generations of Brills that we meet living at their rundown (the trusts truly are modest) country retreat.

Each Brill is a singular personality, but none of them can do much more than talk a lot about life, spend their dwindling trust funds and be unsuccessful when they try to engage with the outside world.

Jim Calder, a cousin and, we assume, the author's doppelganger is the one successful member of the family, perhaps in part because he's not a "real" Brill. It is through his eyes that we learn about this museum piece of a family and the career of a writer back then.

Calder loves his very offbeat family even if it exasperates him most of the time. The fun in this one is the family itself and Calder's hesitant attempts to develop a relationship with a successful career woman whose existence is almost an affront to the genteel Brills.

Clothhilde is the titular head of the family. She genuinely loves her four children, but has stunted their growth with her need to have them around her, which leads to her passive-aggressive discouragement of them building lives away from Wickford Point.

Her sons, Harry and Sidney, spend their days talking about life and the people they know as the Brills still move in "proper society." You feel, though, that these present-day Brills are a bit mocked in those circles. The boys also fail at everything they try to do in the outside world.

The daughters, Mary and Bella, are the more interesting offspring as Bella, in particular, gets out in the real world, in part, because her stunning beauty is perennial currency. But they, too, can't fully function outside of Wickford Point.

Much of the book is spent at Wickford point where this family manages to occupy their days in a sort of "Grey Gardens" neverland of insular thinking in a once grand house now suffering from disrepair.

Calder, the one almost escapee, visits frequently, but has made a career as a reasonably successful journalist and short-story writer when the latter was an in-demand talent. He, though, has aspirations of becoming a famous novelist, but can't make the career leap.

One assumes author Marquand is expressing his own thoughts when Calder speaks of his fears of the empty page. We believe it's the author again when he mocks the demands of his editors for formulaic outcomes to the short stories that pay his bills.

Rounding out the picture is Pat Leighton, Calder's girlfriend, a successful self-made advertising executive at a New York City department store who is everything the indolent Brills, living on the family's former glory and dwindling funds, are not.

The modest plot revolves around Calder's attempt to reconcile his love for his isolated, standoffish and, in truth, bizarre family with his desire to work and live in the real world. The latter would also include a marriage to Leighton, who could never fit in at Wickford Point.

It's not hard to understand why Wickford Point would be ignored today, with its focus on White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but that doesn't diminish the value of its outstanding writing, characterizations and insights into a now-lost time and place in America.


And how cool is this:
View attachment 537750

He was also the creator of the Mr. Moto detective character, was he not?

 

[Fading Fast]

He was also the creator of the Mr. Moto detective character, was he not?

You are spot on, good call. I wrote up the first Mr. Moto book in the series here: #8,812

Marquand, was obviously a talented and prolific writer who could write in different styles.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Bruce Fleming wrote Annapolis Autumn, Life, Death, and Literature at the US Naval Academy from his perspective
as English Literature tenured professor, and this splendid memoir caught my eye whilst wandering Judd's Bookshop
on Marchmont in Bloomsbury. I know nothing about the USNA outside regimental mess occasional American marine officer and SEAL visits and such so I scrounged a few shillings.

I saw Oppenheimer Saturday and dare say the man made impression. Any suggestion for further reading would be
appreciated. Judd's is a shop oriented to gown more than town so the place to find more on Oppenheimer.

 

[Fading Fast]

Daisy Kenyon by Elizabeth Janeway, originally published in 1945


Published in 1945, Daisy Kenyon is engaging time travel to the 1940s free of modern biases. It also belies the squeaky clean "traditional" world of movies from that period as, in print, Daisy is an independent, single, sexually active and successful career woman.

Fans of the movie will recognize the story's love triangle, but the book is set at the start of WWII, not as in the movie, at the end. Also, several plot developments and character motivations in the book were altered, left out or invented for the screen version.

In the book, we meet thirty-two-year-old Daisy who has been having an affair for the past eight years with Dan O'Mara, a successful and married attorney with children. Daisy is no gold-digging mistress, though, as she's paid her own way as a commercial illustrator.

At thirty-two, Daisy is questioning the point of her affair just at the time that an art editor, Peter Lapham, from one of her client magazines takes an interest in her. Fast forward and Daisy is married, while she and Dan part as friends, although he wished they had kept going.

The book takes a long detour into Dan's efforts to get Washington interested in a new plane engine he's championing, but the bureaucracy wears him down. In WWII, that was a more relevant and interesting story than today when we know all about DC's soul-crushing bureaucracy.

There is also a long look at Dan's ugly marriage to Lucille, who hates Dan, in part, because of his affair. That's reasonable, but as shown here, you understand why he needed love outside of his marriage. You don't know enough to judge beyond being glad that theirs is not your marriage.

It's then back to Daisy who has a long summer honeymoon with Peter right before he's drafted into the army. Their time together drags a bit for the reader as we quickly get it, they are in love. Then, with Peter at basic training, Dan tries to reenter Daisy's life.

The long climax (no spoilers coming) involves Dan's attempt to win Daisy back as the guy doesn't quit. There is a very ugly incident involved in that effort that provides a revealing comparison in how the 1940s looked at things versus our modern take.

A lot of Daisy Kenyon takes place either in Daisy's head as introspection or as looooong "what does our relationship mean" conversations that could have used some editing. One guesses that author Janeway was writing, at least partially, from her own life experiences.

Usually the book is better than the movie, but here it's close to a tie. The book provides a better wartime story than the movie and it gives us fuller backgrounds for the characters and their motivations. But it also drags in several spots.

The movie, though, never drags as it focuses on an amped-up love triangle with several taut confrontations between the two men that don't happen in the book. It's a bit too Hollywood, but then the movie only had ninety minutes to tell a nearly three-hundred-page-long story.

Since the book and movie go off in their own directions, you can read the book, watch the movie and get two different Daisy Kenyon experiences. However, while the book is good, if time is a constraint, you can also choose to just watch the movie and read something else.


This is a link to comments on the movie version of Daisy Kenyon: #30,790

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Daisy Kenyon and Ms Janeway are complete strangers. Neither book read nor film seen but spoilers are welcome.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Cristina Caboni - The Island of the Honey-Daughters (2023)

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Cristina Caboni - The Island of the Honey-Daughters (2023)

This sounds like a birds and bees romp. Or an Errol Flynn biog-slog. Do keep us posted and be a good lad Trench.

 

[Trenchfriend]

This sounds like a birds and bees romp. Or an Errol Flynn biog-slog. Do keep us posted and be a good lad Trench.

Sure, it's "chick lit", but that doesn't detain me to read it until the end.

 

[Fading Fast]

Sure, it's "chic lit", but that doesn't detain me to read it until the end.

I'm not familiar with those books, but have always been down on the idea that certain books are "for women or for men only." Jane Austen is a great example. She's considered "chick lit" by some, but good writing is good writing and can been enjoyed by anyone. "Clive Cussler" and "Tom Clancy" are often said to write books for men, which my girlfriend, who is a fan of both, would call nonsense. I applaud you as we should all read whatever we enjoy.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Sure, it's "chic lit", but that doesn't detain me to read it until the end.

A birds and bees is quite androgynous in this gender pronoun transitional woke identity Western kultur
wherein Nietzsche's glove having hurled and thrown back is now clenched tightly within ursine teeth.
Und Ich hoffa das ist klar Trench mit dis buk Die Insel. Sounds utterly fascinating old boy.

As to my distant cousin Miss Austen whom never wed so is perplexing within chaste rectitude, I can only attest
my own genetic disposition to bachelorhood further strengthened by a forced Barbie viewing. Which will no doubt
include the Mouse House Snow Woke shown South Bank's Imax big humongous screen whenever and if.

 

[Fading Fast]

A birds and bees is quite androgynous in this gender pronoun transitional woke identity Western kultur
wherein Nietzsche's glove having hurled and thrown back is now clenched tightly within ursine teeth.
Und Ich hoffa das ist klar Trench mit dis buk Die Insel. Sounds utterly fascinating old boy.

As to my distant cousin Miss Austen whom never wed so is perplexing within chaste rectitude, I can only attest
my own genetic disposition to bachelorhood further strengthened by a forced Barbie viewing. Which will no doubt
include the Mouse House Snow Woke shown South Bank's Imax big humongous screen whenever and if.

It kinda sounds like you're married in all but name as you're going to the "chick" movies anyway.

Kidding aside, and as I noted in my previous post, most of this "girl" or "guy" movie/book designation doesn't mean a lot, at least from my perspective. My girlfriend watches more action adventure and war movies than I do.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Kidding aside, and as I noted in my previous post, most of this "girl" or "guy" movie/book designation doesn't mean....

No, it certainly does not except deliberate construal within genre. I adore women writers and habitually press kids to
read them, males more keenly, though recognize that my reading preferences may not be shared.

 

[Fading Fast]

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, originally published in 1950


Nevil Shute is a storyteller. His novels aren't going to win any literary awards, but they are well-researched tales that engage you from the first page to the last with believable and likable characters who lead interesting lives full of romance, history, travel and challenges.

In A Town Like Alice, Shute, first, takes us to Malaysia (or Malay, as it was known then) in WWII where a young female English expatriate, Jean Paget, is captured by the Japanese.

Not wanting female prisoners, one Japanese commander after another forces the original group of thirty-plus women to go on long marches from one area of the country to another as each commander simply wants to get them out of his hair.

Marching and living under brutal conditions, which include almost no food or medicine, several members of the group get sick and die. Jean, with no experience, becomes their de facto leader as she bargains with the Japanese and locals for the group's survival.

Her plan to save the dwindling members is audacious and smartly executed by this young intrepid woman, which results in these former pampered expats truly learning something about the Malaysian people and its culture.

Along the way, Jean meets a kind Australian man, Joe Harman, who is also a prisoner. Joe helps the women, but pays dearly for his efforts as the Japanese, in response, literally, crucify him and leave him for dead.

Jean, whose deepening friendship with Joe was beginning to border on romance, warned him not to take risks for the women. Still, she feels guilt over his suffering.

After the war, Jean returns to England and takes a job in a small leather manufacturing concern as a secretary. She then learns that she just inherited a substantial amount of money from a distant relative.

While not super rich, she now has the resources to take a trip to Australia to see if Joe Harman survived and to see if their WWII inchoate romance can be reignited. After overcoming a few obstacles, she finds Joe, a manager of a remote cattle ranch, and romance blossoms.

Smart and industrious Jean sees several business opportunities in the underdeveloped one-horse town near Joe's ranch. With capital from her inheritance, she opens up a shoe manufacturing plant using local alligator skins and, yes, an ice cream parlor.

Jean is an outstanding example of an independent woman and role model for her time. Modern period novel writers, who make characters like Jean into cartoons perfectly aligned to today's unforgiving ideology, could learn from authors like Shute.

Back in Shute's book, the climax (no spoilers coming) involves the dangers of living on a remote ranch without any modern means of communication. But the real fun in A Town Like Alice is the journey.

Shute creates characters you like and find interesting, which in this one includes Jean's very kind and smart trust attorney who works to help Jean overcome some hurdles along the way. He also serves as the novel's narrator.

Nevil Shute, an engineer by day, researches the heck out of his stories, so your time with Jean in Malaysia becomes an easy but thoughtful history lesson on the Japanese occupation of Malaysia in WWII.

Back in England, you learn the intricacies of Jean's trust, not as a boring legal story, but as an engaging look at how estate planning can drive life-changing events.

Finally, the last third of the book doubles as an engrossing tutorial on the social, culture and economic conditions of Australia's Outback. Plus you meet a cute-as-all-heck baby Wallaby.

None of it is dry because, in A Town Like Alice, you care about Shute's complex characters as their stories rip through the years and across continents and cultures.


N.B. #1 In a brief note at the end, Shute explains that the story of Jean's experiences in Malaysia was based on the real story of a woman who had spent the war as a prisoner of the Japanese, but in Sumatra not Malaysia.

N.B. #2 I haven't seen it, but there is a 1956 movie based on A Town Like Alice starring Virginia McKenna. I'm up for any movie with Virginia McKenna. There is also a 1981 TV miniseries based on the novel, which I also haven't seen.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Midnight finds me Lounging while Saratoga wraps Travers day and wounds licked.
Alice I've known about but another slip sure enough and I didn't know of its earlier film other than the series remarked.
Brooklyn and Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Literary Society are also splendid and like Alice snatched for film.

 

[Fading Fast]

Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner, originally published in 1948


In Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner, delving into his personal perspective of the South, paints a region still deeply divided by race. While the races are, theoretically, legally equal, this division persists in the cultural norms, customs, traditions, and prejudices of the South.

It's fair to say Faulkner's is a white man's view, but keep distilling things that way and everyone's view, regardless of race, sex, et al., becomes one man's or woman's view. As Ayn Rand, a Faulkner contemporary said, "the smallest minority on earth is the individual."

In Faulkner views, the prejudices and separations of the races run so deep that even sincerely fair white men can't see certain truths staring them in the face. So much so, a black man accused of murder has to turn to a white child and an elderly white woman for help.

When Lucas Beauchamp, a black man, is accused of murdering a white man whose dead body he was found standing over with a discharged gun in his hand, the town prepares for a lynching as Lucas sits in jail.

Lucas asks a white teenager, Charles Mallison, who had met Lucas several years ago, to get his uncle, Gavin, a lawyer to come to the jail. Gavin comes, but he is already so sure of Lucas' guilt that only later does Lucas ask Charles to dig up the dead man's body.

Lucas wants the body dug up to show that it wasn't his gun that was used in the murder. From here, the novel follows two threads.

Charles, with a black teenager and an elderly white woman, a woman who believes in justice, goes out to covertly dig up the body at night. At the same time, the town sits on tenterhooks waiting for the white men to drag Lucas out of the jail to lynch him.

Faulkner uses this set up to show the very deep racism embedded in the South. Most of the whites see the blacks as poor, unclean and inferior, while ignoring that it is their racism that has put them in that state. It's racism justified by a tautology.

Faulkner shines at capturing the small details - clothes, walk, eye movements and other nuances - that expose the embedded racism. It's a very ugly picture of a Southern town in the middle of the twentieth century.

There is hope too, though, as some whites, like Charles and the elderly lady, are willing to stand up for equal justice. They are heroes, but not cardboard ones as they have absorbed so much racism that their attitudes will not please modern unforgiving ears.

Slowly the story unwinds as some initial assumptions are exposed as wrong, which leads to a few honest people facing their mistakes, while most just "forget" what happened and go back to their daily routines.

The movie version of Intruder in the Dust follows the same plot. Yet, by placing much more emphasis on Lucas, it subtly shifts the focus of the story from one of white racism to one of black character and integrity in the face of white racism.

That's not a modest shift as it changes the perspective of the narrative from something Faulkner directly experienced, whites' views of racism, to one that Faulkner has observed, a black man's response.

The movie also gives the viewer an easier narrative to follow than in the book, where Faulkner's penchant for paragraph-long sentences and page-long paragraphs, often with little punctuation to guide the reader, requires serious concentration to keep the tale straight.

It's been argued that Faulkner's stream-of-conscious style is part of his brilliance. Maybe, but it also can feel like hand-to-hand combat, sentence by sentence, between the author and the reader.

One also wonders if Faulkner has to use pronouns as a weapon against his reader, which often makes knowing who is speaking or being spoken about an exhausting tangle.

The movie's straight-forward storytelling approach pleasantly solves these "style" issues.

Intruder in the Dust is a powerful book that had the courage, in its time, to denounce Southern white racism both directly and through a painstaking reveal of how whites impose it through many small and not-small day-to-day actions.

Its resolution, no spoilers coming, is neither satisfying nor unsatisfying. It simply shows that the South, in the middle of the century, while not beyond hope, wasn't upholding the ideals of equality laid down in the Constitution almost two-hundred years earlier.


P.S. Comments on the movie here: #30,846

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Faulkner's grammar is a failing of his I recall but another work, The Sound and The Fury I cannot fault by
recollection. Such great themes wrought and perhaps distorted or twisted innately by perception. When I studied
American Literature at Cambridge a film documentary on Faulkner was shown. Faulkner lectured at the University of Mississippi, Oxford and he answered a question with ''What's love got to do with respectability?'' Dressed in a white
suit reminiscent of Yeats, Faulkner cut quite a majestic figure, Nobel Laureate and all tied with Southern style.

 

[Fading Fast]

^ Faulkner's grammar is a failing of his I recall but another work, The Sound and The Fury I cannot fault by
recollection. Such great themes wrought and perhaps distorted or twisted innately by perception. When I studied
American Literature at Cambridge a film documentary on Faulkner was shown. Faulkner lectured at the University of Mississippi, Oxford and he answered a question with ''What's love got to do with respectability?'' Dressed in a white
suit reminiscent of Yeats, Faulkner cut quite a majestic figure, Nobel Laureate and all tied with Southern style.

That's a cool story. I had to tackle his "The Sound and the Fury" in high school (is he still read in high school classes today?) and the Benjy section turned me off to him for years. I eventually came to understand what he was doing with it, but having to slowly pickup each word, examine it and put it down was too much for high school me.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Faulkner's The Rievers was turned a gem of a flick with my man Steve McQueen taking lead with a boy who
narrates from time's distance voiced Burgess Meredith, and an adult black male along for a model T Ford jaunt
to Memphis circa 1917-20; which is a classic odyssey as educational as it is delightful.