Anne Brontë was the youngest and least known of the famous Brontë sisters. She completed only two novels in her lifetime, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

When I wrote my review of Agnes Grey, the critical reviews that I read all pointed to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as her better work. Furthermore, many of those reviews indicated that, had she lived longer, Anne would have been the most successful of the three sisters. This piqued my interest. As I had been underwhelmed with Agnes Grey, I decided to give Anne Brontë another opportunity to impress me.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (TWF) is framed as a letter that protagonist Gilbert Markham writes to his brother-in-law. He tells of the arrival of a new resident in their village, Linden-Car, a beautiful widow named Helen Graham. Helen and her young son have moved into Wildfell Hall, an Edwardian mansion that has stood deserted for many years. Over time Gilbert falls in love with her, but Helen becomes the victim of gossip and slander among the other villagers.

Helen leaves Linden-Car to escape the gossip, but not before giving her diary to Gilbert as a means of explaining her mysterious past and her behavior. The diary tells the tale of Helen as a young woman who is swept up in romantic love and marries Arthur Huntingdon, an alcoholic who becomes an abusive husband. In order to save her son from following in his father’s footsteps, Helen takes the desperate step of running away from Huntingdon and living in hiding under a false name in Linden-Car.

Eventually Helen returns to her husband, who is gravely ill, and nurses him until his death. After several missteps, Gilbert locates her, they reunite, and live happily ever after. This is, after all, a Brontë novel.

This novel is long-winded, preachy, and often tedious to read. Having said that, I found that I began to care about these people and wanted to know how it was all resolved, so I read somewhat eagerly to the end. The preachiness comes, in part, from the Brontës’ own experience with their brother, Branwell, who served as the model for Arthur Huntingdon. In her preface to the second edition of TWF, Anne Brontë writes:

I know that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.

TWF challenged Victorian morals on several levels, and is considered one of the first feminist novels. Helen’s behavior went against the tide of acceptable practice in many ways, but especially in one scene where she slams the bedroom door in her husband’s face following his abusive behavior. One critic at the time pronounced it “utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls.”

I can’t say that I came to agree with the conclusion that Anne had the potential to be the best or most successful of the Brontë sisters, but I would recommend this book for both its (admittedly limited) literary qualities and its historical value.

Grade: B-

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2011!

We all know the expression, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but in the case of Patrick DeWitt’s new novel, The Sisters Brothers, the cover was what caught my eye. The primative style, the bold red, black and white, the way the cartoon heads of the gunslingers, superimposed upon the full moon, look like a skull – I was intrigued.

And what’s more, I wasn’t disappointed. This book was exactly what the cover promised: mayhem, bloodshed, with a large dash of whimsy and humor.

This is the story of two brothers, Charlie and Eli Sisters, guns-for-hire at the start of the California gold rush. A shady character called The Commodore sends them from Oregon City to The American River in California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warms. The purpose isn’t immediately clear, but the structure of this novel is that of a classic quest journey. The brothers will experience many adventures and undergo significant change as a result of this journey. You, the reader, will enjoy the trip a lot more than they do!

Of the brothers, Charlie (the older brother) is the darker and more violent man. Younger brother, Eli, has a softer heart but is ultimately loyal to his brother. Eli is our narrator throughout the story, which allows us an innocent’s rationalized view of some pretty irrational behavior.

Charlie is appointed the leader of this expedition; sibling history and rivalries punctuate the narrative throughout. In the opening chapter, the brothers were forced to get new horses when their previous horses “had been immolated”. It is typical of Eli to give us this type of detail without further elaboration or emotion.

There is some tension about these horses, which the brothers acquired as partial payment for a job. The problem was the inequity between the two animals – one named “Nimble,” the other “Tub”. The names tell us everything we need to know about the two horses. Charlie, as older brothers will do, commandeerd Nimble and assigned Tub to Eli while Eli recovered from a leg wound. Eli describes Tub as “portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles a day.”

In order to deal with this horse, Eli tells us:

I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.

When Eli continues to complain about Tub, the following conversation takes place:

Charlie, “I’m done talking about your horse, Eli.”

“If you think it will not come up again, you are mistaken.”

“Then I’m done talking about your horse today.”

These exchanges, the way that a lifetime of familiarity shapes interactions between brothers, is one of the charms of this book. The other charm is watching Eli begin to question the life they lead and what impact it has on them.

In one scene, they come across a young boy who has been abandoned in the wilderness by his father. He wants the Sisters to allow him to travel with them, but they refuse. Eli, however, is disturbed and considers

I wished the boy safe travels, but these were empty words, for he was clearly doomed…He stood there weeping and watching us go, while behind him [the boy's horse] entered and collapsed the prospector’s tent, and I thought, Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.

When the brothers finally locate the object of their assignment, Hermann Kermit Warm, we realize that the journey has made subtle changes in both of them. The events that transpire at the climax of the book show us just how markedly they’ve changed. They return to Oregon City very different men than they were when they left.

There is plenty of bloodshed and many grisly scenes, but the warmth and humor in Eli’s narration distances us from it. Not long ago I reviewed another saga of the Old West, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s an interesting comparison to see how the desperate events in both of these books lead to such opposite conclusions: complete corruption of the human soul in one, salvation in the other.

I thoroughly enjoyed every page of The Sisters Brothers. It has everything you might want in a summer read: adventure, humor, great characters, and a satisfying ending. I recommend you get yourself a copy real soon!

Grade: A

I must confess that I thought this book had two strikes against it before I began to read it:

1. 1. It was yet another story of the Holocaust, and
2. 2. It was written by Erik Larson who, in my opinion, sometimes ruins a good story by overly pedantic attention to detail.

So why, you might ask, did I even give it a try? Mainly because I’m a sucker for 20th Century US history. Something that’s always troubled me about WWII and, particularly the Holocaust, is why it took us so long to get into it and why we did so little to help European Jews. The reviews I read of this book promised to address these questions.

If you haven’t read or heard about this book, it is essentially the story of William E. Dodd, America’s ambassador to Germany in 1933, Adolph Hitler’s first year in power. A professor of history at the University of Chicago when he was selected by Franklin D. Roosevelt to represent the US in Germany, Dodd had experience in Germany as a student, but no diplomatic experience whatsoever.

Dodd packed up his wife, Maggie, his grown children, Bill and Martha, and sailed to Germany with little idea of what lay ahead for the family. As Larson puts it, they

embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and ultimately, deepest heartbreak.

At the time, America was in the midst of the Depression and many Americans held a deeply isolationist opinion. There was fear that allowing Jewish immigrants to come to the United States in large numbers would draw off the few jobs that were available. Many felt that “Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.

Even within the Jewish community there were divisions, with some Jews frustrated by Roosevelt’s failure to speak out while others feared that protests and boycotts would make life more difficult for those in Germany.

It was against this backdrop that Dodd, a naive and inexperienced academic suddenly thrust into one of the most vicious and divisive regimes in history, entered the scene. Roosevelt had two priorities for Dodd: to ensure that Germany repaid the large debt owed to the US following World War I, and that Dodd do what he could to “protect [German Jews], and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.” In other words, Roosevelt’s direction to Dodd was to do whatever he could to straddle the fence, insufficient direction for a new ambassador with no political experience.

What follows is an account of the Germany that Dodd encounters, very different from that he experienced as a student. While initially striving to fulfill Roosevelt’s obscure direction, as his tenure in Berlin progressed Dodd found it more and more difficult. Following what is now called ”The Night of Long Knives” in which Hitler and his SS imprisoned and/or murdered those set against him, Dodd could no longer keep his own opinions to himself.  His attempts to bring forth more overt US interference in German politics earned him powerful enemies in Congress and eventually Dodd was dismissed from his post and returned to the United States.

The story is interesting and insightful, providing the unique perspective of an American citizen and family who lived through and within Germany’s transformation to a fascist state. As a reader, you travel down that road with the Dodds and experience their growing concern, and finally their disgust and terror, at that transformation.

I have to say that my one complaint – and it is an ongoing complaint I have with Larson’s work – is the attention to minutiae so often present in his writing. I will share only one small example here, information that would probably be appropriate in an academic work, but not in a book meant for the general public. This passage introduces “The Night of Long Knives”:

At 2:00 A.M. Saturday, June 30, 1934, Hitler left the Hotel Dreesen and was driven at high speed to the airport, where he boarded a Ju 52 airplane, one of two aircraft ready for his use. He was joined by two adjutants and a senior SA officer whom he trusted, Viktor Lutze. (It was Lutze who had told Hitler about Röhm’s scathing remarks after Hitler’s February 1934 speech to the leaders of the army and SA.) Hitler’s chauffeurs also climbed aboard. The second aircraft contained a squad of armed SS men. Both planes flew to Munich, where they arrived at four thirty in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise. One of Hitler’s drivers, Erich Kempka, was struck by the beauty of the morning, and the freshness of the rain-scrubbed air, the grass “sparkling in the morning light.”

See my point?

Grade: B+

This is the story of a murder trial. Perhaps even more, it’s the story of a series of failures in the justice system that may, or may not, have ultimately resulted in justice served IN SPITE OF, not because of, the system. Or it may be that justice wasn’t served at all. The story is an interesting one; the outcome may be frustrating to the reader, but anyone who has had dealings with our judicial system knows it isn’t without its shortcomings.

Here’s the skeleton of the case:

• Daniel Malekov and his estranged wife, Mazoltuv Borukhova, become embroiled in a bitter divorce. Their four-year old daughter, Michelle, balks at visiting with her father, who has been ordered to have supervised visitations due to an allegation of molestation.
• In the process of working out these arrangements, Malekov is incomprehensibly – and without requesting it – given full custody of the child. Mother and daughter are both distraught.
• Shortly thereafter, while delivering the daughter to her mother for visitation, Malekov is murdered in broad daylight and cold blood.
• Mikhail Mallayev, a cousin of Borukhova, is found guilty of the murder. Borukhova is found guilty of ordering the execution.

Janet Malcolm is not here to give us an unbiased view of the trial, but she is here to try to shed light on what, seen through her eyes, is a strange and one-sided trial in which the members of the court, the press, and nearly all the principles in the case have presumed guilt before a single word of evidence is presented. Malcolm is not so sure, and tells us early on that “[Borukhova] couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.”

She goes on to show us how the system failed this family. Michelle’s court-appointed law guardian, who never spoke to the child, seems to make the quixotic recommendation that she be moved to her father’s custody based on his personal dislike of Borukhova. Both the judge in the custody hearing and the trial judge, Robert Hanophy, seem to be biased against her as well. Hanophy is also shown to be seriously worried about the trial extending past the date that he is to begin his vacation, making decisions based on expediency rather than jurisprudence. The list of people who harbor ill-will toward Mazoltuv Borukhova is astonishing. The fact that her defense team is less that Clarance Darrow-material is another problem.

There are other factors that are unexplained and somewhat perplexing. Why is there no one brought to testify in Borukhova’s defense or as character witnesses? How to explain the 90 phone calls that took place between her and Mallayev if they were not in some type of collusion? How does she happen to bring out such vitriol among everyone who has dealings with her?

Malcolm doesn’t weigh in on Borukhova’s ultimate guilt or innocence. Her purpose is to argue that Borukova was denied a fair trial based on a system that seemed to pass judgement on her because of her personality, before there was opportunity to assess her guilt. In making this argument, Malcolm is successful, if not unbiased.

Grade: A-

I don’t much like reading a book after I’ve seen the movie – I feel at the mercy of the film’s interpretation, rather than the author’s. However, it’s been a long time since I saw the excellent Cate Blanchett/Judi Dench version of this story, so I thought I might not be overly influenced by it. Not so. Cate was Sheba, Judi, Barbara, as I read, but that wasn’t really such a bad thing.

In case you missed the film (and I highly recommend that you rent it, if you did), this is the story of Sheba (Bathsheba) Hart and Barbara Covett, high school teachers at St. George, a school in a lower class London neighborhood. Sheba is the newly hired pottery teacher; Barbara a very veteran history teacher. The two women are opposite in every way. Sheba is fey, artsy, wealthy (or as she puts it, “at most only upper middle class”). Barbara is a lonely spinster. There are hints at her attractions to women, but this is a storyline that was emphasized more in the film than the book.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Barbara, under the auspices of “mentoring” Sheba, worms her way into Sheba’s life. Sheba, married and the mother of two children, begins an affair with Connelly, a fifth-year student. Barbara does a lot of “tsk-tsking” about the situation, but it isn’t until Bangs, a male teacher, invites Barbara to lunch – raising her hopes of a possible romantic relationship, but in fact wanting to quiz Barbara on how to get Sheba’s attention – that the older woman lashes out and reveals the affair to him. Barbara’s been having a bad week: her cat is sick, Sheba has rejected her to meet with Connelly, and now Bangs, whom Barbara has seen as “a message of hope,” disappoints her. She immediately regrets her indiscretion, but she has set in motion the events that lead to both Sheba’s and her own downfall.

The story is told by Barbara who, after the affair becomes public and Sheba has been banned from the school and her family, begins to develop a timeline of the events (these are the “notes on a scandal”), putting gold stars by those she considers most significant. She says that this might be “helpful for the court case,” but Barbara is such an obviously unreliable narrator that, as readers, we cringe to think of her interpretation of events becoming public.

There are several interesting subtexts to this novel, the main one being the difference between how men and women are treated when found to have engaged in inappropriate relationships with minors. In Sheba’s case, the press is titillated, men view her not as a child molester but as a tramp, no one except Connelly’s mother sees him as a victim. The general consensus is that Connelly is one lucky boy.

This is a story that works on many levels, only occasionally dropping the ball on what is, ultimately, a fascinating psychological study of a bitter and disturbed woman. Joanna Briscoe, writing for The Guardian, says:

This is a fascinating, brilliant, irritating novel, consistently defying definition by genre, literary worth, or even purpose. It’s a quiet little read – yet horribly addictive. Underlying breathtakingly acute observations, and much fine writing, there’s a lightness of sentiment that sporadically propels the novel into the realms of commercial pap.

Personally, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “commercial pap,” but there are a few missteps, particularly where the interactions between Sheba and Connelly are addressed. Nevertheless, I found it an interesting, funny, sad, and thought-provoking read. I’d recommend it.

Grade A-

Susi Wyss’s debut novel is set primarily in Africa – Ivory Coast and Ghana – with side trips to the US, Ethiopia, and other African locations. It’s written in what will undoubtedly become an even more prevalent style since A Visit from the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – connected short stories that are packaged together into a novel-length book.

The Civilized World follows the lives of five women: Adjoa, a stalward Ghanaian woman; Janice, an American living and working for the Health Service in various African locations; Ophelia, a pathetic foreign-service wife in Malawi; Comfort, another Ghanaian who travels to the US where her son is married to American Linda. These women all travel different paths in their search for security and “civilized” society but, eventually, their lives intertwine.

There is  much to like about this book, and I found that it was a book I read with enjoyment. The stories are simple, but generally interesting and even charming in places. It is reminiscent of The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, without the mysteries.

Another advantage The Civilized World enjoys is Wyss’s obvious knowledge of her subject. She grew up in the US and the Ivory Coast; she had a lengthy career managing health programs in Africa. Many of the scenes is the book are culled from her personal experiences, and that gives each story the ring of authenticity.

Having said that, there were places where I found the book predictable and stereotypical. The American women were neurotic; the African women earthy and honest. The stories of each woman were broken into two or three sections that alternated throughout the book. I had the distinct impression that each had been written as a separate story and then cut apart to fit the format. I may be wrong about that. There were few surprises in the outcome of the individual stories; it was easy to see what was coming.

If you’re in the market for a book that will keep you diverted without packing too much of a punch – say you’re on the beach or in an airplane - you will probably enjoy this book. If you’re looking for more substance, you might be disappointed.

Grade: C

One thing I think we can all be grateful for is that we weren’t born female in early Victorian England. The other thing we can be grateful for is that the lives and rights of women at that time were so restricted as to provide great subjects for the Brontë sisters. Of course I read Charlette’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights years ago, but with the new movie version of Jane Eyre out in theaters, I decided to read something by sister Anne. Anne Brontë died at age 28, so there weren’t too many choices: Agnes Grey, her autobiographical first novel, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I decided on Agnes Grey.

Agnes’s parents married under a bit of a dark star: although deeply in love, Mrs. Grey came from a wealthy family who objected to her marriage to a lowly rector. Mrs. Grey’s father disinherited her, but the Reverend and Mrs. Grey were able to get by and raise their family fairly comfortably on the small income generated by land owned by the Reverend. This, of course, does not make for a very engaging plot – happy marriage, well-loved, healthy children, adequate income,  so this family had to – and did – fall upon hard times. To help the family finances, Agnes decided to take one of the few avenues available to well-bred girls and hire herself out as a governess. The bulk of this novel deals with the trials and tribulations that arose from that decision.

Poor Agnes had truly terrible luck with employers and their offspring. Anyone who complains about the way children behave today, or the way their parents coddle them, should open a copy of Agnes Grey. They’ll find that things haven’t really changed all that much. The first home in which she works is the Bloomfields, where she is put in charge of three perfectly awful children. Agnes is given responsibility with no authority over these three, and when she unable to make them either learn or behave, she is dismissed.

You would think this was enough to make her consider another line of work, but there weren’t many options available to her, so she puts herself out for hire once again. This time she ends up at the Murrays, where she is put in charge of two older girls – one vain and insipid, the other “outdoorsy” and uninterested in learning. However, it is an improvement over the Bloomfields, and Agnes stays on to see the girls grown.

Because this is a Brontë novel there is, of course, a thwarted romance, impoverishment, illness and death, all followed by a happy ending. The novel tends toward lengthy exposition on manners, morals, religion, etc. which drags it down and, I must admit, I skimmed in many places. Still, it was an interesting look at what life for Anne Brontë must have been like and, I suspect, far more realistic than the novels of her sisters.

I understand that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne’s better work. Brontë scholars postulate that had she lived, Anne would have been the best writer and most successful of the three, so I may just give Tenant a try.

Grade: C

Rarely have I been so happy to FINISH a book as I was Blood Meridian. There are so many reasons why!

This is at least my third stab at reading this book. Maybe more. I decided to read it years ago when I read Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why. Bloom named it the definitive story of the American West, and I love stories of the American West. I went right out and bought a copy of Blood Meridian and quickly discovered that I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Here’s a sample sentence:

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

Yep, that’s one sentence and there are a LOT of sentences like that. I couldn’t face it. Then I took not one but TWO seminars on the work of William Faulkner, and felt that I was finally ready to try Blood Meridian again. I have to admit, I was better able to handle the structure of the novel, but this time I was sent packing by the content.

Any book with “blood” in the title should be a hint that there’s going to be violence, but in this book the violence is graphic and unceasing. Take, for example, the tree of dead babies (WARNING – this quote is not for the squeamish):

The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. . . These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky.

So, that was as far as I got the second time I tried to read Blood Meridian.

For some reason this book has stayed with me as a sort of literary Mt. Everest for me to conquer. It helped to read Harold Bloom’s interview with AV Club where the great man himself admits that it took him three tries to actually finish the book. He blames the first failure on poor health, but I’m guessing that reading the book just made him sick. Still, if three times was a charm for him, I thought it might be for me – and sure enough, it was.

I’m not going to try to convince you that this was an easy or a pleasant read. It was neither. I had to read with a dictionary beside me (and ask my husband to translate the frequent lapses into Spanish). The book is full of arcane, biblical, and just plain hard words that were completely unfamiliar to me. As  noted, the syntax was challenging, the content gruesome, but in between was some beautifully lyrical writing, such as the following:

They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn.

Not just anyone can put together a sentence like that.

I have to say that I’m glad I read this book, challenging and disturbing as it was. As Bloom points out, this is the final expression of the American Western. He says, “It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don’t think that anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition.”

It’s a great relief to know that. Now I’ll never have to read anything like this again.

Grade: A

The story is subtle and intricate, and ­rouses the reader to conflicted sympathies: you ache for Victor’s rehabilitation, yet he’s so exasperatingly incorrigible, you simultaneously side with the bureaucrat who wants him castrated and imprisoned.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of short stories. I signed up for an online fiction writing class at Gotham Writers’ Workshop  and decided to immerse myself in this format. Those of you who follow this blog already know I’m a lover of short stories – it probably has to do with my inability to stick to a project for any sustained amount of time. But I also really admire the ability of someone to take a large concept and distill it to its most critical elements. As a child, I loved miniatures – miniature horses, dogs, doll house furniture, those tiny wrapped candy bars that Hershey’s makes. . . It fascinates me when something so small can be so lifelike. I love Twitter - and Six Word Memoirs  - and Post Secret, where people manage to communicate so much, so succinctly. For me, less is often more.

An author who tops my list in his ability to give us a whole world in a few pages is TC Boyle. Every word he puts on paper means something, every image carries more than the sum of its parts. He has numerous short story collections in addition to his novels, the newest collection being Wild Child. This new volume is grounded by the novella-length “Wild Child,” based on the true story of the feral child, Victor of Aveyron. I’ll review this story in a separate post.

The rest of this collection covers a wide range of topics and locations, from Hollywood, California to Caracas, Venezuela. His last story collection, Tooth and Claw, focused closely on the intersection between the natural world and modern society. If there is a unifying theme is Wild Child, I would say that it is an examination of those dark and wild places that reside in each of us. No matter our station in life, Boyle’s scenarios show that the right set of circumstances can push any of us over the edge.

Each story stands on its own merits some, obviously, more successfully than others. The critical reviews on this collection have been mixed but, as far as I’m concerned, Boyle at his worst is better than many short story writers at their best.

A few highlights from this collection:

• “La Conchita,” in which a messenger, charged with delivering a liver to a hospital in time for a transplant, is delayed by a mudslide. Worth reading if only for the in-your-face description of the reality of being in a mudslide, which doesn’t generate the fear of, say, earthquakes or hurricanes. Our narrator tells us, “Maybe it was the fault of the term itself – mudslide. It sounded innocuous, almost cozy . . . as I now know, is nothing short of an avalanche, but instead of snow you’ve got 400,000 tons of liquefied dirt bristling with rock and tree trunks coming at you with the force of a tsunami.”
• “Sin Dolor,” the story of a child born with a genetic malfunction rendering him unable to feel pain. While the story takes place in Mexico, it could easily be in India or other third world countries where poverty determines the fate of nature’s anomalies. A touching and, ultimately, heartbreaking story.
• “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado,” where a Venezuelan baseball hero’s success causes his mother to be kidnapped by a down-and-out band of banditos. Marita Villalba, the mother, is a heroine you will love.

Each and every one of the stories here is an enjoyable read. Some are humorous, some exciting, some touching, but all expose us to a bit of the “wild child” that lives in us all.

Grade: B+