Favorites of 2021: Books
Reality keeps outstripping invention these days, so it may come as no surprise that I found that 2021 was not a great year for fiction. In any case, I found fewer favorites among my reading (both fiction and non-) than usual. My apologies for the truncated lists that follows. My favorites, as always drawn from books first read (but not necessarily first published) in the past twelve months, in the order in which they were encountered:
FICTION
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Emily Eden: The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House (Dial Press/Virago, 1979) Emily Eden was born in the year the 21-year-old Jane Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice, and died in the year the 49-year-old George Eliot began writing Middlemarch. As this chronology suggests, Eden is a bridge between the fictional worlds of Austen and Eliot. Her witty, ironic style echoes Austen, while her fictional themes of unhappy marriages and the social constraints on women anticipate those of Eliot and other late Victorian writers such as Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell. In The Semi-Attached Couple (1859), Lord Teviot marries local beauty Helen Beaufort, but the marriage is not a success. He is short-tempered and jealous, and she is quick to take offense. They seem to willfully misunderstand one another. In her portrait of their union Eden anticipates Eliot's dissection of the mismatched marriages of Dorothea Brooke and Casaubon or Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy. Yes, I knew Helen from her childhood, and had thought that such a gentle, gay creature could never be touched by the cares and griefs that fall on the common herd. . .Why was she to escape? I do not wish to be cynical; but if a stone is thrown into our garden, is it not sure to knock off the head of our most valuable tulip? If a cup of coffee is to be spilled, does it not make a point of falling on our richest brocade gown? If we do lose our reticule, does not the misfortune occur on the only day on which we had left our purse in it? (Vol. I, Ch. I)But unlike in Middlemarch, the central marriage in The Semi-Detached Couple does not end in the death of one of the partners or with the couple chained together endlessly in mutual misery. Instead, like Austen, Emily Eden enables her characters to find happiness at last: ". . .give them time and opportunity, and there is no saying whether the warm heart will not soften and conquer the hard one at last." (Vol. II, Ch. VI) The Semi-Detached House (1860) was written decades before The Semi-Attached Couple, but then left in a drawer for 30 years until the success of the latter enabled the earlier manuscript to be dusted off and published. The novel's heroine is Blanche, Lady Chester, who, while her husband is away on a diplomatic mission, takes the abode of the title during her pregnancy (a word that never occurs in the novel; you have to read carefully not to be surprised when she goes into labor). "Semi-detached" means, in the way of all real-estate listings, completely attached, and Blanche is at first concerned about the proximity of her plebeian next-door neighbors, the Hopkinsons. But she is soon chastened when she learns of the dangers of prejudice and comes to know of the Hopkinsons' decency, generosity, and goodness. As I wrote in my post about the Virago Modern Classics omnibus edition of the novels, "Emily Eden's fiction features scenes of marital disharmony, class snobbery, political chicanery, and financial fraudulence, but it is not primarily for their plots that her novels deserve to be read. Instead, it is her witty and ironic narrative voice that makes her seem to speak to us so vividly." |
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Daphne du Maurier: My Cousin Rachel (Gollancz, 1951) For many years I uncritically dismissed Daphne du Maurier's fiction (without, of course, bothering to read any of it). But I discovered that her fiction is far from escapist; instead, often for the women in her novels there is no escape. My Cousin Rachel (1951) is another of du Maurier's under-celebrated works. It is set sometime in the first half of the 19th century (there are no trains or telegrams, only carriages and letters). The 24-year-old Philip has inherited the estate of his cousin and guardian Ambrose, who died in Italy after marrying his young Anglo-Italian cousin Rachel. The beautiful Rachel, left penniless by the terms of Ambrose's will, comes to England to meet Philip. Do her gestures of affection merely express her gratitude for Philip's increasingly extravagant gifts and financial support, or is she manipulating him to try to gain control over the estate? Philip finds himself torn between his suspicions of Rachel's complicity in his guardian's death and his increasingly ardent feelings: . . .every day, haunted still by doubt, I ask myself a question which I cannot answer. Was Rachel innocent or guilty?. . .How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?. . .Perhaps, when all is said and done, I shall have no wish to be free. (Chapter One)My Cousin Rachel is a novel of doublings, recapitulations, and the haunting of the living by the dead. These are recurrent themes in du Maurier's fiction, along with the unbridgeable gulf of understanding between men and women and the misapprehensions and jealousies which that gulf inspires. This is hardly the stance of a writer of "escapist women's romance"; as critic Nina Auerbach writes, "I was, and remain, enthralled by Daphne du Maurier because of her antiromantic refusal to satisfy predictable desires." |
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Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot (Penguin, 1951, translated by Marion Ayton Crawford) Père is a seemingly simple word to translate: it means "Father." And indeed, late Victorian translator Ellen Marriage renders the title of Balzac's novel as Father Goriot. [1] But that makes the title character sound like a priest, which assuredly he is not. Marion Ayton Crawford, translator of the first Penguin edition, rendered the title as Old Goriot, which captures the sense of dismissive familiarity which can be suggested by "Père," but misses the crucial implication that the character is in a literal sense a father. Olivia McCannon, the translator of the new Penguin edition (2011), Englishes the title as Old Man Goriot, which is even more chummy than Old Goriot but also elides his central paternal role. Perhaps the best choice is made by those translators who leave it in the original. Père Goriot, a former merchant, lives in poverty in the Paris boarding house of the penny-pinching Madame Vauquer. Goriot has transferred all of his substantial wealth (earned by profiteering on flour in periods of food scarcity during the Revolution) to his two daughters, who have married well, if not wisely. The daughters, now the Countess de Restaud and the Baroness de Nucingen, refuse to acknowledge their father openly (though they are not above appealing to him privately to cover their debts and those of their feckless lovers, which he does at great personal sacrifice). A second narrative concerns Eugène Rastignac, a young law student from the provinces who also lives at Madame Vauquer's. After encountering the alluring world of Parisian high society he is determined to enter it, even after he learns what's required to do so: large sums of money, promotion by a fashionable and well-connected woman, and a ruthless determination to use and discard others for his own advantage. Unfortunately for Rastignac, there are men far more ruthless than he is who have no scruples about twisting his ambitions to their own ends. Père Goriot was published about halfway through what became Balzac's 90-plus novel series La Comédie humaine. It contains some extended (and effective) melodramatic scenes, and some sensationalistic elements (such as a criminal kingpin living in disguise in the same boarding house, whose funds and cynicism are both seemingly unlimited). But fundamentally Père Goriot conveys the insight, a decade before Marx and Engels, that in a capitalist society the social and emotional bonds between people are reduced to a cash nexus. As Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), ". . .the social war, the war of each against all, is here [in great cities] openly declared. . .People regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot." [2] Or, as Balzac puts it, . . .Rastignac. . .saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. . .there lay the splendid world that he had wished to gain. He eyed that humming hive with a look that foretold its despoilation, as if he already felt on his lips the sweetness of its honey, and said with superb defiance, |
Honorable mentions
In a different year, either or both of these novels might have made it into my Favorites list. Generally for a book to be a favorite it doesn't have to be flawless, but I have to think that I might want to re-read it someday; neither of these books ultimately met that criterion.
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Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959)
". . .the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it. . ."Like Freud, Shirley Jackson locates the uncanny in the return of the repressed. Eleanor Vance is a shy, lonely woman who spent her teens and twenties as a caregiver for her disabled mother, for whose recent death she feels an ineradicable guilt. When Eleanor is invited to spend a few weeks at Hill House as part of a group that will be investigating paranormal phenomena—the house is rumored to be haunted—she eagerly seizes on the chance to break out of her stultifying routines. Besides Eleanor and Dr. John Montague, who is leading the investigation, only two other people wind up coming to the house. They are Theodora, an artist who lives in Greenwich Village with her partner (whose sex is never specified), and Luke Sanderson, the nephew and heir of the owner of Hill House. The house has a history of unexplained deaths and suicides, and it's not long before strange things start happening: doors shut by themselves; the guests repeatedly get lost in the mazelike first floor trying to find their way to the dining room, as though walls and doors are shifting locations; everyone feels a barrier of bitterly cold air outside the nursery; and Eleanor senses a repulsive smell that prevents her from entering the library. On the second night, after Theodora has painted Eleanor's toenails red (an intimate act with a hint of sex) and everyone has gone to bed, Eleanor hears the voice of her dead mother calling her. She flees in panic to Theodora's room, where the two women cower together as an unseen force crashes against the door. The next morning the ambiguous words "HELP ELEANOR COME HOME" are found scrawled in a hallway. More terrifying and inexplicable things happen, both to Eleanor alone and to others when they are with her. Despite her fear, she feels strangely drawn to the house, and to the library, where a suicide occurred. In The Haunting of Hill House Jackson effectively creates an eerie atmosphere. But if the weird phenomena are all in Eleanor's mind, no one else should experience them. And if the phenomena are somehow external manifestations of Eleanor's psychosexual conflicts, then everyone in the house should experience them. While that's true of some of the phenomena, some are felt, seen, heard, or smelled only by Eleanor, and some are experienced only by other members of the group. Which leads to the conclusion that the house is "really" haunted, and contains some malevolent force—perhaps the misogynistic spirit of its first owner Hugh Crain—that acts selectively on the inhabitants, but mainly targets women (and especially Eleanor). Your full enjoyment of the book may depend on how willing you are to suspend disbelief and accept this implication. The novel has been filmed several times. If you're looking for Halloween or All Souls' Day viewing, the first version, The Haunting (1963), features Julie Harris as Eleanor and Claire Bloom as Theodora, and was directed by Robert Wise as a change of pace between his duties on West Side Story and The Sound of Music. |
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Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021) In an interview with The Guardian Kazuo Ishiguro once said, "I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it." That subject is our partial and distorted perspective on ourselves and our world. In an Ishiguro novel the reader's understanding slowly and almost imperceptibly diverges from those of the main characters, until we know more about them and their situation than they do. The main character in Klara and the Sun is a solar-powered android, or AF (Artificial Friend). Klara, although she has remained on display unsold until her model is slightly outdated, is finally chosen as a companion by Josie, a young girl suffering from a life-threatening illness. Through Klara's eyes we gradually learn more about what has caused Josie's condition and why, in this near-future world, many children are reliant on AFs. We also recognize the irony that Klara is kinder, less judgmental and more selfless than her human owners. My favorite of Ishiguro's novels is The Unconsoled, a strange, dreamlike work in which a classical pianist is supposed to give a concert but can never quite make it to the stage. Klara and the Sun is not as richly imaginative as that novel, nor does it quite achieve the pathos of Never Let Me Go (which has a similar near-future setting) or provide quite as keen a sense of growing dismay as An Artist of the Floating World or Remains of the Day. Still, in a year where much of the fiction I read was disappointing, Ishiguro's measured, precise prose and daring choice to write from the point of view of a non-human consciousness offered many pleasures. Speaking of disappointing fiction. . . |
Biggest disappointment
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Maggie O'Farrell: Hamnet (Knopf, 2020) Maggie O'Farrell's novel about Shakespeare's son has been highly, not to say extravagantly, praised. It won prizes (the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, whose jury called it "truly great") and was named to many "best fiction of the year" lists, including those of the New York Times, The Guardian, and LitHub. Hamnet's cover blurbs call it "a thing of shimmering wonder" (David Mitchell), "beautifully imagined and written" (Claire Tomalin), "finely written" (Sarah Moss), full of "flawless sentences" (Emma Donoghue), or "one of the best novels I've ever read" (Mary Beth Keane). I seem to be in a minority of one: I found O'Farrell's writing at times unwittingly anachronistic ("epicentre" was coined in the 19th century), dully repetitious (the word "noise" is used eight times in the first six pages), disconcertingly inconsistent (on a hot windless summer day a fire is left burning untended in an empty house and the drapes—a rare thing in 16th-century England—are moving in the non-existent breeze), or simply wrong (a sigh involves an exhalation, not an inhalation). And all of these examples (and more) come from the very first chapter. For me details matter, especially in historical fiction, and most especially when they are so carefully established and emphasized by the author. And as regular readers know (see my comment on Michael Chabon twice bungling the Celsius temperature scale in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), I'm one of those unfortunates for whom lapses like the ones I've listed are so grating they render imaginative entry into O'Farrell's fictional world impossible. |
NONFICTION
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Margaret Forster: Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller (Doubleday, 1993) Daphne du Maurier came from a famous family. Her grandfather George du Maurier wrote the hugely popular novel Trilby (1894), in which the manipulative (and literally hypnotic) musician Svengali transforms the working-class Trilby O'Ferrall into a star singer. Daphne's aunt, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, was an artist and the mother of the five boys who inspired J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). Her father, Gerald du Maurier, was a theatrical manager and actor who played the dual role of Captain Hook and the father of the Darling children in the première performance of Barrie's play. Gerald and his actress wife Muriel had three daughters; Daphne was the middle child. Although her parents were highly self-involved, Daphne adored her father and sensed (or was told) that he had really wanted a boy. Perhaps this contributed to her feeling that she had a dual nature that was both female and male. Forster was given access to Daphne's intimate letters, and her groundbreaking biography was the first to reveal the extent of Daphne's same-sex attractions. In 1947 Daphne had sailed to America with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher Nelson Doubleday, to defend herself in a plagiarism case brought against her novel Rebecca (1938). In a letter written to Ellen after Daphne had returned to England, she explained that as a child she had imagined herself "never being a little girl. Always being a little boy. And growing up with a boy's mind and a boy's heart. . .so that at eighteen this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would, with someone quite twelve years older than himself who was French and had all the understanding in the world, and he loved her in every conceivable way." This first love was Fernande Yvon, a teacher at Daphne's boarding school in the mid-1920s. "And then the boy realised he had to grow up and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and not an unattractive one at that, and the boy was locked in a box forever." At age 25 in 1932 Daphne had married army officer Frederick Browning, and the couple had three children. But 15 years later at Daphne's first sight of Ellen, the boy inside her had escaped once more: she felt like "a boy of eighteen all over again with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady's feet." In court the plaintiff's lawyer had called Daphne a liar, and she thought "this was so very perceptive of him. . .my life has been one long lie as far back as I can remember." Ellen could not reciprocate Daphne's love. (A later trip the two women took together to Italy did not end well; after "one kiss which lasted about forty seconds" Ellen tearfully reiterated to Daphne her inability to feel more than friendship for her.) But in the fall of 1948 Daphne met the married actress Gertrude Lawrence, for whom she had written the starring role in September Tide (a play that heterosexualized her love for Ellen). The two women embarked on passionate affair. Forster's biography is not only revelatory about Daphne's life, it is insightful about her work and provides a rich context for the harrowing masterpieces Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel (which also draws on her feelings for Ellen), and "The Birds." The biography is also vividly written, perhaps because Forster herself was a novelist; 1965's Georgy Girl was made into a successful film whose title song was a hit for The Seekers. In 2007 the biography was itself made into the faithful and evocative film Daphne, directed by Clare Beavan and starring Geraldine Somerville as Daphne, Elizabeth McGovern as Ellen Doubleday, and Janet McTeer as Gertrude Lawrence—also recommended. |
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Victoria Sweet: God's Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Riverhead Books, 2012) While writing her doctoral thesis on Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century visionary and healer, Victoria Sweet worked as a physician at San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital ("God's Hotel"). Laguna Honda is a long-term care facility for the indigent with chronic or recurring health issues; Sweet calls it "the last almshouse." Her time there enabled her to integrate her work as a doctor and her research in medical history into a practice she calls "slow medicine" (the title of another of her books). Patients were often sent to Laguna Honda after receiving hurried emergency room treatment elsewhere, and as Sweet reports, they had frequently been given mistaken diagnoses and were taking incorrect or overprescribed medications. Seeing the patients over days and weeks rather than minutes, observing closely, and listening carefully to what they had to say about their own conditions allowed Sweet and the other doctors at Laguna Honda time "to think, to read, to consult, to catch their mistakes." It is a kind of medicine that is as much art and intuition as science, but, as evidenced by the many compelling stories Sweet tells, can be highly effective even, or perhaps especially, in difficult or intractable cases. Many thanks to the good friend who read this in his book group and immediately realized that both I and my partner would love it. He was right. |
Honorable mentions
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Joan Schenkar: The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (St. Martin's, 2010) Like Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith wrote books that were too popular to be taken seriously by literary gatekeepers during her lifetime. Her novels won many awards for crime and mystery writing, but no National Book Awards, National Book Critics' Circle Awards, or Pulitzer Prizes—nor even, so far as I am aware, any nominations. Joan Schenkar's thoroughly researched and well-written biography convincingly advances a claim that Highsmith's work, as the subtitle has it, is not only popular but "serious art." Despite her relative neglect by the literary establishment, Highsmith's writing met with immediate success. Her first novel, Strangers On A Train (1950), was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock (his company paid her $7500 for the film option, roughly equivalent to ten times that amount today). Her second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan due to its lesbian theme (an affair between Therese, a young woman trying to make her way in New York, and Carol, an older woman going through a divorce and a custody battle over her young daughter); by 1958 it had sold over a half-million copies, and by 1963 had more than a million copies in print. Her fourth novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), inaugurated the series of Ripley novels which has sustained her reputation ever since. [4] Schenkar is an nigh-ideal biographer of Highsmith: she knew Highsmith personally and was a later participant the Manhattan lesbian culture that helped to shape her. Schenkar is also an engaging and inventive writer: she organizes the book thematically, rather than chronologically, which seems an especially fruitful approach to the life and work of a writer obsessed with doubles, repetitions, and recurrences. But the problem with Schenkar's biography is that Highsmith could be thoughtless as a friend, completely careless of the feelings and sensibilities of those around her, utterly lacking in generosity, and thoroughly nasty when drunk (and she was drunk pretty much all the time). To her credit Schenkar does not try to gloss over how unpleasant Highsmith could be. But it becomes tiresome to read example after example of Highsmith's incorrigible behavior, and ultimately it's difficult to enjoy spending 700 pages in her company. |
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Olivia Laing: To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (Canongate, 2012) To the River is Olivia Laing's account of her solo trek tracing the entire course of the River Ouse, from its headwaters near Haywards Heath in southeastern England to the English Channel at Newhaven, midway between Brighton and Eastbourne. (Ouse is pronounced, we learn, like "ooze," not like "douse.") It's not a long journey, perhaps 30 miles (roughly 50 kilometers), but the river's meandering course passes through a landscape rich in both beauty and history. The history that Laing recounts is fascinating. In 1264 the Battle of Lewes, pitting the armies of barons led by Simon de Montfort against that of the autocratic King Henry III and his son Prince Edward, was fought in the hills, fields and marshes surrounding the village of Lewes. After great loss of life on both sides, the barons defeated King Henry and forced him to make concessions (at least temporarily). In 1912 the fossil remains of the "missing link" between ape and man were found by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson in gravel beds near Piltdown. Alas, in 1953 Piltdown Man was definitively exposed as a hoax; Dawson had combined human and orangutan bones to construct his "missing link." Also in 1912, Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard rented Asham House in Beddingham, about a two miles southeast of Lewes. In 1919 they bought the Round House (actually an octagonal former windmill) down the narrow Pipe Passage from the High Street in Lewes, and then within a year sold it to buy the larger Monk's House in Rodmell, about 3 miles south by road. They split their time between Monk's House and London until 1940, when they moved permanently into Monk's House to avoid the Blitz (bombing destroyed both their London homes). It was from Monk's House on 28 March 1941 that a despairing Virginia, suffering from the deep depression that she'd periodically experienced throughout her adult life, walked down to the Ouse, filled the pockets of her coat with stones, and waded into the river until she was in water over her head. Leonard found her suicide note later that day; her body was found three weeks later about a mile downstream. Laing's prose, though, is not quite as compelling when she's describing the landscape. She falls into the nature-writer convention of providing long lists of the common names of the flora and fauna she observes as a substitute for description. That's fine if you have the wildflowers of Sussex committed to memory, but if not, it's meaningless. And when she tries to write poetically the effect can sometimes seem overdone. Which is why, despite the engaging history it retells, Laing's book did not finally make my list of favorites. |
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Geoff Dyer: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence (North Point Press, 1998) The cover of the hardback edition of Out of Sheer Rage boasts a blurb from no less an eminence than John Berger: "The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious!" It's certainly the funniest book you'll ever read about D.H. Lawrence, who was notably humorless. Although it's not actually a book about Lawrence, thankfully—if it had been, I doubt I ever would have read it. Instead it's a book about being unable to write a book about Lawrence, due variously to distractedness, a tendency to procrastination, and a compulsive need to visit locations associated with Lawrence, combined with a neurotic avoidance of any person or text that would serve as a primary source about Lawrence. To give you the flavor (and test your tolerance for Dyer's approach), here is a characteristic passage from late in the book: Writers suffer more from the flu than other people and I suffer more from the flu than other writers. If you're going out to an office or a factory every day then there's always a holiday element in being sick. You might not feel great but you are at least having a few days at home: it's a rest, a chance to watch afternoon telly. Whereas writers are home all day anyway; they can watch all the afternoon telly they want. What the flu does is stop them working—so there is, albeit in heavily diluted form, a sense of being on some kind of holiday. Whereas for me, even when I was feeling a hundred per cent I rarely got down to any work. I could be in the best of health and all I did was mope around, shuffle around in my slippers, wait for the early-evening news. In terms of what I got up to on a daily basis there was next to no difference between my healthy routine and my flu routine. Basically, I realised when I was laid up with flu, I lived each day as though I was laid up with the flu even when I didn't have flu. Having flu made no difference—except that I felt terrible. As well as feeling terrible from the flu I also felt terrible about the way I squandered my flu-less days—and by squandering my flu-less days I also made the days when I had flu even worse because if I had stuck to a rigid work schedule I could at least have enjoyed flu as a relief from work. As it was, having flu was simply an intensification of everyday misery; all flu did, I realised, was render bearable misery unbearable. But in retrospect even this unbearable misery—I've said it before and I might well say it again—turns out to have been bearable. Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.Except for many people, life isn't bearable when it's unbearable. Perhaps because I read Out of Sheer Rage right after reading about Virginia Woolf's suicide in To the River, I was sensitized to the position of privilege that Dyer is writing from. He lives in London and Paris, but relocates to Rome to move in with his girlfriend; they later travel to paradisical Greek islands (which eventually pall) and to Taos, New Mexico. Nice work if you can afford not to do it. Into this non-narrative Dyer inserts (so to speak) graphic and gratuitous descriptions of the sex he's having with his girlfriend. Perhaps in this book it's intended as a Lady Chatterley's Lover allusion, but since similar scenes occur in every book of Dyer's I've read, no matter what the subject, I have to conclude that he includes them to prove something to himself or to his readers. In any case, for this reader the sex scenes were unnecessary and unwelcome. The book is filled with ironic paradoxes like the one quoted above, but in my view Dyer makes that move a time or two or three too often. His grasping for excuses not to get on with writing about Lawrence eventually becomes predictable, and so loses comic impact. Perhaps he was hoping that, as with a Monty Python routine, if he described his self-constructed impediments often enough the fact that repetition had drained them of humor would actually make them funny again. Alas, for me it never reached that condition of secondary hilarity. But there's certainly enough primary hilarity in the first part of the book to make it worth including here, despite everything I've outlined above. |
Biggest disappointment:
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Victoria Wilson: A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940 (Simon and Schuster, 2013.) Barbara Stanwyck led a life that seems almost as improbable as the plot of a Hollywood movie. Born Ruby Stevens and orphaned by the time she was four, she grew up in foster homes and with overburdened relatives. By age fourteen she was working as a chorus girl in New York nightclubs, and before she was 20 had begun appearing in movies. Her first films were not successful, but her husband Frank Fay paid for a screen test that convinced director Frank Capra to cast her in Ladies of Leisure (1930). After it did well at the box office, Stanwyck went on to appear in a series of Pre-Code films now considered classics. And instead of fading in the late 1930s, like many other Pre-Code actresses, Stanwyck appeared in films directed by King Vidor, Cecil B. DeMille, and Preston Sturges. She would go on to star in films directed by Capra (again—they made five films together), Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk, becoming one of Hollywood's highest-paid stars. This material would seem to require little effort on the part of a biographer to maintain the reader's avid interest. But Victoria Wilson's A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel True, 1907-1940 is such a mess it's hard to know where to begin. It offers page after page (nearly 900 of them) of runaway research, poor writing and sloppy editing. (Ironically, Wilson is a senior editor at Alfred Knopf.) Wilson seems to have no sense of the significant—or even relevant—detail, and no idea what to leave out. Amid all the dross Wilson does manage to record a few insights about Stanwyck's film work, but they are buried in such a mass of undifferentiated detail that they lose impact. Steel-True reads like a first draft that went straight to the printer; the book would be twice as good if it were half as long. Is there no such thing as a copy editor any more? One also quails at the thought of the second volume to come, covering her remaining 48 films and television career. Wilson takes about 800 pages to cover the years 1927-1940; at that rate she has about 3000 pages to go before her biography will be complete. The time required to read Wilson's recounting of Stanwyck's life would be far more profitably spent watching Stanwyck's movies instead. |
Other Favorites of 2021:
- Is "Ellen Marriage" her mother's bitter joke: "Hell in marriage"?
- Friedrich Engels, "The Great Towns," from The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky, George Allen & Unwin, 1892. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306.
- Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny." Translated by Alix Strachey. First published in Imago, Band V, 1919. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
- $7500 film option for Strangers On A Train: Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, Ballantine Books, 1984, p. 341. Sales of The Price of Salt: Yvonne Keller, "Pulp Politics: Strategies of Vision in Pro-Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1955-1965," in Patricia Juliana Smith, ed. The Queer Sixties, Routledge, 2013, p. 2.
