Jane Bowles: Two Serious Ladies
I'll be teaching this, so I've just reread it. It is rich enough that it bears many rereadings. Jane Bowles never wrote a boring sentence, and also creates characters who, in their actions and decisions, are mysterious enough to be compellingly human. As Millicent Dillon has pointed out in her excellent biography of Bowles, the novel is autobiographical, not in the crude story-of-my-life-lightly-fictionalized sense but in that each of the characters has Jane Bowles in her: her neuroses, her wit, her dissatisfaction, her splendor.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We Should All Be Feminists
I take it as a given that we should all be feminists (though some of us will fail, from time to time, in our attempts to attain that status). I'm surprised, therefore, when I meet young women who, on the one hand, seem sympathetic to every goal associated with feminism, but who balk at calling themselves feminists. (It surprises me less and disgusts me more that many men not only won't call themselves feminists, but are actively hostile to the notion that women are human beings, too.) This little book (you can read it in thirty minutes) will enlighten many as to why, yes, we should all be feminists, and why we should be proud to wear that label.
Emily Hahn: Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North
Emily Hahn, in the 1930s, drove 3000 miles across the United States dressed as a man. She was the first woman to be awarded a degree in mine engineering from her American university. She wrote more than 50 books and 200 articles, most of which were published in The New Yorker. And she is almost forgotten today.
She also spent time in the Congo when it was still a Belgian colony and writes interestingly, if sometimes jarringly, about her time there. Interestingly, because she is insightful and observant, jarring because the things she observes are repellent, and though she would sometimes agree with that assessment, as a woman of her time, she attempts to understand and not to judge too harshly the way the colonists and their white hangers-on treat the Africans. She assures us that the worst savagery of the Belgians is a thing of the past—they no longer cut off hands—but she observes with a shrug the way the colonists use the Africans as slave labor and deal harshly with them when they misbehave. They sometimes, for example, attempt to flee from the chain gangs on which they work on short rations and return home. This was judged to be appallingly bad behavior.
This is an interesting book by an interesting woman who lacks the moral vision and historical perspective to see clearly (though she comes close sometimes) the horrors going on around her.
Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust (New Edition) (New Directions Paperbook)
Nathaniel West didn't write much in his short life, but what he did write, particularly these two short novels, packs a punch. The Day of the Locust, in particular, remains an essential Hollywood novel, a novel in which everyone and everything is ersatz, but perhaps in a city and an industry built on illusion, this is nothing but crude realism. What is a constant surprise and delight is West's sharp eye and the equally sharp prose he uses to convey what he sees.
Don Winslow: The Cartel
This novel about the narco-terrorists who have done much to destroy one of my favorite countries (in service to an insatiable North American demand for drugs) is superb. It can stand on the shelf next to Charles Bowden's non-fiction work, particularly Murder City, which focuses on Juarez, a location where some of Winslow's wide-ranging novel is set.
Avram Davidson: Masters of the Maze
Much of the best of Avram Davidson's work has been republished. That leaves the less than five-star Davidsons, and 1965 Masters of the Maze, I am afraid, falls into that category. That's not to say the Davidsonian wit and eccentric erudition is not there and not a delight; it's just that the novel as a whole is less than gripping. For completists only, I would say.
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers (with a Preface by Henry James)
The Turn of the Screw is among the best short novels I have read. It a ghost story in which we are uncertain that the ghosts exist, an examination of class anxiety, and it contains one of the most subtly constructed unreliable narrators in English literature. As ghost stories should be, it is terrifying, but mostly because it unmoors us: we are never quite sure how we are to take this uncanny, unsettling tale.
Attica Locke: Bluebird, Bluebird
Attica Locke seems to understand that who done it is always the least interesting part of any who-done-it. Thus she builds a world—rural East Texas—and gives us a look into African American life in that part of the world, that is complex and compelling. Her protagonist, a Texas Ranger whose marriage is on the skids, who is drinking too much, and who cares too much—or so his colleagues seem to believe—about the injustices African Americans suffer in much of the United States, is someone we're glad to meet and follow as he comes to understand that the two murders that happen in Lark, Texas are not simple, and that, as another Southern writer said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
Maria Thomas: African Visas
I read Maria Thomas's first two books years ago, and remember enjoying them. I thought that was all she had written, but then I stumbled across this in a used book store. It is a collection published a couple of years after she died in a plane crash in Africa, her subject, the place she had spent much of her life.
As is often the case with posthumous publications, it's a mixed bag. The novella, The Jiru Road, which anchors the collection is not as accomplished as her other work; one guesses it was an early attempt at a novel, though her talent does shine through in places. The short stories are a mixed bag: some barely concealed memoir, others that seem to end without resolution, but not in a way that resonates.
Maybe I'll go back and have another look at the two books published before this one: Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage and Antonia saw the Oryx First.
Marghanita Laski: Little Boy Lost (Persephone Classics)
I am grateful to the feminist presses such as Persephone that have that have long been at the forefront in bringing us superb novels that have been forgotten. A recent discovery they, and then, thanks to them, I, have made is Marghanita Laski's 1949 novel, Little Boy Lost. It survives as much more than a period piece: it is a book that grips one both intellectually and emotionally.
Set mostly in post-war France we follow the protagonist, a prissy, self-centered English intellectual with whom it is quite easy to identify in spite of (because of?) his less than attractive personality as he moves through a France still far from recovery in search of his child, a boy who, in the chaos of war, was lost. The problem is, he's not sure if he wants the boy, and when it's impossible to prove that a boy who may be his son and who is living, malnourished and deprived with the rest of the inmates in an orphanage, he is tempted to use that as an excuse not to take responsibility for him, to return to his ordered and comfortable life.
Read the book and find out what he decides.
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