Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

So when the title sounds like chick-lit, and the cover looks like chick-lit, you expect chick-lit, right? But I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised when I opened up Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife  a few weeks ago. It’s a view of Hemingway’s Paris years through the eyes of his first wife Hadley, and I’m happy to report that anyone with a predilection for the writer, and for Paris in the 20’s, will probably enjoy the book.

Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t read it like a novel, though the writing is fine and the story is certainly strong enough to carry the reader along. Rather, I read it like a Hemingway biography. Call me a pig, but that’s what I was interested in. And say what you will about McLain as a novelist, the woman did some pretty serious research to get the thing off the ground.

I was looking for fresh angles on familiar characters (the Fitzgeralds do not come off well, Joyce barely shows up at all), new tid-bits I’d never heard before (did you know it was almost Rome, and not Paris, for example?) and Hadley’s take on some of the bigger plot points (how would she handle the tragic loss all of Hemingway’s early work at the Gare de Lyon? Or the affair with Pauleen Pfeiffer?).

There were no huge surprises, but there were a few eyebrow raisers. I think we’re all fully prepared to see Hemingway revealed as a bit of an ass, but McLain makes Hadley out to be far more athletic, lythe and attractive than she really was. I mean, not to be mean, but we do have pictures after all. Here’s Pfeiffer, Hemingway and Hadley together in Pamplona:

At the same time, she portrays Hadley as such a weak, accepting, milquetoast of a character, who lets Pfeiffer walk all over her marriage and even right into her bed. (A diligent Googler will find some evidence of Hadley’s easy acquiescence, but no hard proof that the three ever shared the same bed— outside the plot of Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden , which contains a similar episode.)

Regardless of the Hemingway-McLain ‘he said-she said,’ you almost get the impression that you could read The Paris Wife  alongside A Moveable Feast , and between the two of them, start to arrive at some version of the unvarnished truth behind Hemingway’s first marriage. But it was an interesting read, and I’d recommend it to others who suffer from Hemingway "aficion."

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 13

Georges Perec and Daniel Stern: “All the great ones leave their mark. We’re the wet bandits.”

Someone get Honore de Balzac a perm and a luchador mask. He’d make as good a Nacho Libre as Jack Black:

Orhan Pamuk and Rick Steves aren’t an exact match, I’ll admit, but they have enough in common—the semi-shaggy “dad” haircut, the “don’t notice my glasses” glasses, the affable and harmless expression—for the one to remind me of the other.

George Eliot. Not exactly a looker, huh? Sadly, the closest match I could find for that schnoz was F. Murray Abraham:

The hair, the dramatic pose, the fact that she’s a little past her prime… alright Mr. DeMille, Katherine Anne Porter’s ready for her close-up.

(Fictional) First Line Friday: Chuck Stone spy novel, by Jay Pritchett and Manny Delgado

I’m a big fan of meta fiction. I love stories about writers and their stories. Movies like “Barton Fink” or books like Slaughterhouse Five  always seem to hit home. We’ve looked at fictional tidbits of fiction on Mad Men, and on Wednesday night’s episode of Modern Family (Career Day), Jay Pritchett and stepson Manny Delgado revealed their own dreams of penning the great American novel—or at least a compelling spy thriller—and we got a taste of what they came up with. Here are their first lines, in case you missed them:

Jay’s opener:

“Chuck Stone, six foot three inches of steely-eyed determination, sat at the interrogation table.”

Manny’s opener:

“Chuck Stone smiled and lit a cigarette as if he had all the time in the world, when, in fact, the world was about to end.”

And as a bonus, Manny’s final lines, which served as the episode-ending voiceover:

“We all weave a web of lies. Some we tell to try to help the ones we love, some we tell to try to fool ourselves, and some we tell because when you’re out of bullets and staring down the barrel of a Kalashnikov, the only weapon you’ve got left is guile.”

Love it.

The Great Trimalchio?

So the premiere of the new Great Gatsby movie was held last night in New York. I’ve been wrestling with whether I want to re-read Gatsby before I see the flick, but I think I’ve landed on ‘no.’ That is, until I learned that Baz Luhrmann’s film may not be an adaptation of The Gatsby Gatsby , so much as it is an adaptation of an earlier, unpublished version of Gatsby called Trimalchio – that features a much darker James Gatz, who is more menacing and violent than the character moviegoers are probably expecting.

"'Trimalchio' was a tremendous resource," says Mr. Luhrmann, noting that Gatsby and Daisy's relationship is more fleshed out in that version. Several key bits of dialogue between Daisy and Gatsby were pulled from "Trimalchio." Mr. DiCaprio became obsessed with it, and carried a copy of "Trimalchio" with him at all times.

Full story here. Luckily for all of us, the Trimalchio  version has been published for purists and curiosity-seekers alike. I just may read this one before I see the film. You should, too:

Review: The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson

It’s been a couple weeks since Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son  won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and about a week since it nabbed the Pulitzer Prize. So I know what you’re all wondering: “Well, MacEvoy, what do you  think of it?”

Sagely anticipating your question, I have undertaken the reading of it. Here are my thoughts.

First off, it is a really good book, and a very compelling read. For most readers, myself included, it’ll be the first peek you’ve ever gotten inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And you will not be disappointed with the sweep of history, culture and color that Johnson supplies. Some of the vignettes, like a fishing vessel’s discovery of mysterious radio transmissions from the international space station or from a pair of female American rowers working their way across the Pacific, give you a fascinating window into what it must be like for North Koreans to encounter the real world outside their borders.

Now, I’ve never set foot in the DPRK. But while Johnson’s sensationalized portrayal of North Korea doesn’t strike me as completely  believable, I’m going to go ahead and assume he’s done far more research than I’ve ever done on the subject. So, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on the details.

Here’s what’s really wrong with the book: He’s taken his research into a half dozen unrelated facets of life under the Kim regime, and woven them into a single character’s experience. And for me it just doesn’t ring true.

Pak Jun Do is introduced as a tunnel soldier, trained for combat in the pitch darkness of passageways beneath the DMZ. But then he is recruited as a kidnapper, plucking people off the coast of Japan by boat. After that, he becomes an intelligence officer who monitors radio signals on a fishing boat in the Sea of Japan. He is beatified as a hero of the people, and is whisked off on some high-level diplomatic talks with an American Senator in Texas. Then he is thrown into a prison camp. Then he escapes and assumes the identity of a government minister. Etc., etc. It just got to be a little much to swallow.

If you’re asking me— and let’s be honest, nobody is—this book should have been written as a mosaic story, with multiple main characters whose intersecting plot lines are woven together at the end of the book (Think “Crash”, or the “Modern Family” pilot episode.) That would have fixed it for me. Told as it was, with a character who wears just about every possible hat, just so he could observe every possible North Korean atrocity, I half-expected him to be fine-tuning nuclear weapons or performing open-heart surgery on the Dear Leader just because some government goons roughed him up and told him, “Okay, you’re a scientist now” or “ Your next assignment is as a heart surgeon.” Heck, he’d been everything else by that point.

But the sentence-level writing is first class, beautiful stuff. And he brings references from early in the book full circle so that there are plenty of overarching themes for the reader to absorb. I would gladly pick up Johnson’s next book, and I’ll even gladly recommend this one, with the one caveat mentioned above. Check it out.

The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu

We don’t generally link to content in other corners of the web, but I thought this story about the rescue of rare texts from the Timbuktu library was pretty interesting:

“Starting in early May, every morning before sunrise, while the militants were still asleep, Haidara and his men would walk to the city’s libraries and lock themselves inside. Until the heat cleared the streets in the afternoon, the men would find their way through the darkened buildings and wrap the fragile manuscripts in soft cloths. They would then pack them into metal lockers roughly the size of large suitcases, as many as 300 in each. At night, they’d sneak back to the libraries, traveling by foot to avoid checkpoints on the road, pick up the lockers, and carry them, swathed in blankets, to the homes of dozens of the city’s old families. The entire operation took nearly two months, but by July, they had stowed 1,700 lockers in basements and hideaways around the city. And they did it just in time, because not long after, the militants moved into the Ahmed Baba Institute, using its elegant rooms to store canned vegetables and bags of white rice. Haidara fled to Bamako, hoping the Islamists’ ignorance about the texts would keep them safe.”

If only the Ptolemaic Egyptians had been as careful with the library of Alexandria…

Review: All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

Don’t know how I’ve missed mentioning this, but I’ve plowed my way through Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men , and it absolutely blew me away. Brilliant, brilliant book.

Warren melds pitch-perfect descriptive language with deep-fried country-boy-isms to create an extremely distinctive style. Here’s a free-sample tray:

“…her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act.”

“ ’I know you and the boss was like that.’ He held up two large, white, glistening episcopal fingers as in benediction.”

“Then the boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison wearing jean pants and a brance of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen…”

I mean, come on, how good is that! Right?

The story doesn’t disappoint either. He weaves links to the past into the story in rewarding, surprising ways. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a sure-fire way to win me over as a reader. He also makes use of something I’ll call the Literary Cosmic Boomerang. It’s not quite Karma, and not poetic justice. But one way or another, the unseen ramifications of a character’s actions come right back to kick him in the crotch and give the story new and deeper meanings. (And even though Willie Stark’s assassination by the same doctor who  just days before had operated on his son should have taken a private tale of corruption public, I can overlook that simple oversight.) I loved it.

There is, however, one chief complaint: The Cass Mastern side story. Our main character, Jack Burden, interrupts his main narrative thread tracing the rise and fall of a folksy southern political star, with a too-long, overly thorough side story of star-crossed lovers in the Civil War era. It was still well-written, and pretty compelling in and of itself, but I was antsy to get back to the main story, and saw little if any parrallels that would justify its inclusion in the book. And yeah, I’ve read the commentary that says the Cass Mastern line of research helps Jack see that every action will have implications and ripples we can’t control, but I just didn’t see the point. Warren and his editor were asleep at the switch on this one.

But it still won the Pulitzer, and it still deserved it. That’s how awesome the rest of the book is. Run, don’t walk…

Feature Film Friday

Another short one today, How about giving 7 and a half minutes to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart?”

Short Story Club: "How the Devil Came Down Division Street" by Nelson Algren

Hey! Welcome to Short Story Club. Glad you could make it. Come on in and grab a seat. Jami was just about to tell us what she thought of this month's story— and there should be a shrimp cocktail floating around here somewhere. Jami?

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“How the Devil Came Down Division Street” is a nice snapshot of Algren’s world view, a view that permeated the many novels and short stories that followed, a world view that can be summed up nicely by a quote from the story: “The devil lives in a double-shot.”

This quote sets the tone for a tale that, at its conclusion, is an introspective look into the mind of a man not quite thirty years old, a man who has yet to overcome what his thirteen year old self saw, what he didn’t see, and what he feared because of the space between the two perspectives.  Roman is the son of a renowned drunk, a street performer, a sad excuse of an accordion player who doesn’t live with his family so much as he has a place to sleep when he returns home in the mornings after a night of roaming the streets for pennies.

Roman’s father hears a constant knocking at the door of their home, at least that is what he tells his family but no one believes him.  Rather, Roman and his twin siblings think their father is crazy. They share a bed at night when he is philandering or at worse, begging and in the daytime while their father sleeps it off, the children go to school and pretend he is different.  Their mother doesn’t encourage nor does she dissuade her children from feeling this way and by allowing the speculation, she is implicit in the reactions her children have to their father, a mixture of  embarrassment, shame, and ultimately, misunderstanding.

One day Roman’s father returns without his accordion.  Things change.  He doesn’t wander the streets at night any longer.  He becomes a husband to their mother again, takes a job as a janitor but, he takes a bed too.  The knocking is heard by Roman.  He believes his father, doesn’t think he is crazy any longer but his mother does the unthinkable and trades the sanity of her son for the newfound respectability of her husband.  So  Roman then, at age 17 is pushed out, finds himself with nowhere to spend his nights, no place to call his own and so he takes to the bars himself.  As Algren puts it, “he came to think of the dawn, when the taverns closed and he must go home as the bitterest hour of the day.”  

The bitterest hour of the day.  That’s where Nelson Algren takes the reader and with straightforward language and crisp descriptions, Roman is any one of us or all of us, giving up our accordions for a place to sleep, a place to call our own.

 —Jami McFatter Balkom is an attorney, practicing in Panama City, Florida who writes short story reviews for her blog, www.wherewordslive.blogspot.com.  She is currently writing fiction, working on a novel of literary fiction and a series of short stories centered around her hometown in northwest Florida.

So what did the rest of you think of the story?

Short Story Club Returns

We’ve been derelict in our Short Story Club duties, but leave it to our audience to rekindle the flame. Reader and blogger Jami Balkom has offered to throw the spotlight on a short story by Nelson Algren, an author we’ve never covered on this blog. We’ll post the story today, and invite you all to throw in your own two cents tomorrow. Without further ado, here’s Jami’s introduction (Thanks, Jami!) :

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Nelson Algren was one of the most popular literary fiction writers in America during the later 40’s and early 50’s,  providing a unique and loud voice for the down-and-outer, for the failures of society, for those who never made it to the inside of any circle.  This reputation was largely based on Algren's novel A Walk on theWild Side   which was made even more famous by this Lou Reed song:

But it was his short story collection, The Neon Wilderness, that started it all, published in 1947, just two years before the release of his National Book Award winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm.  The loser in all of his manifestations-- drug addict, homeless scavenger, cheating husband, street performer begging for change, all of them came to life in Algren’s short stories, paving the way for a career that would define the author as much as the author shaped the world inhabited by his stories’ characters.  The short story “how the devil camedown division street” is a nice snapshot of Algren’s world view, a view that permeated the many novels and short stories that followed, a world view that can be summed up nicely by a quote from the story: “The devil lives in a double-shot.”

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Here’s how Algren kicks off the story:

“Last Saturday evening there was a great argument in the Polonia Bar. All the biggest drunks on Division were there, trying to decide who the biggest drunk of them was. Symanski said he was, and Oljiec said he was, and Koncel said he was, and Czechowski said he was.

“Then Roman Orlov came in and the argument was decided.”

Read the rest here, and come back tomorrow for Jami’s take, and to add some thoughts of your own!