The Racketeer

The expansion of the federal criminal code and the overreach of federal authority are background themes in this John Grisham page-turner. Reliably entertaining.

Get Ready for Battle

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's portrait of an Indian family, circa 1960, is elegant and wise with a dash of humor. The characters in Jhabvala's book are characters, somehow bigger than life but firmly circumscribed by reality. She also makes use, sparingly and therefore effectively, of overlapping dialogue when people talk around and past one another, giving these scenes a dramatic and comic intensity. And she simply writes beautifully, as here: "The shops were all lit up with electric bulbs and the barrows with flares of naphtha light, and there was music blaring out of various radios, sweet-sad music played at top volume, and horse-drawn carriages came trotting through with a merry jingle of bells from the harness of underfed but bravely plumed horses."

The Fall

One cannot escape guilt; one can only dilute one's own guilt by judging the whole world guilty. Whether this program as a practical matter will produce serenity or insanity isn't clear. (The narrator's scale tilts toward the latter.) But if serenity is just another word for obliviousness, and insanity is another word for for intensity, which is preferable?

Camus lays out a catalog of modern ills as backdrop to his tale, including this that resonates today: "We no longer say as in simple times: 'This is the way I think. What are your objections?' We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communique: 'This is the truth,' we say. 'You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right.' "

Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir

Ezra Pound supplies anecdotes, letters from the front, an explanation of Vorticism, and 30 illustrations in this memoir of sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. It is actually less about Gaudier than about Pound making the case for vibrancy in art as against superficial "prettiness." Pound can throw a poisonous dart, as when he calls the Tate Gallery a "sink of abomination" that has, by refusing a Vorticist's work, "rushed further into the sloughs of stupidity."

Ladies and Gentlemen

Adam Ross's outstanding novel Mr. Peanut led me to this collection of short stories. The work can stand with Cheever in tone and characterizations; there's not a single dishonest or tactical sentence; and the reader gets the added bonus of some surprise endings (the best kind: those that in hindsight aren't surprising at all).

Bookart #4

A sharp 1926 design from Boni & Liveright.

A Virtuous Girl

When Maxwell Bodenheim's publisher was hauled into court on an obscenity charge for the novel Replenishing Jessica, the book — all 272 pages of it — was read out to the jury. The result was almost instant acquittal. Many of the jurors had trouble keeping their eyes open during the recitation of the "evidence." I think I know how they must have felt during that 1925 trial, having just taken a seeming eternity to finish this 1930 effort of 260 pages. The theme is hammered from the opening page: a 17-year-old girl in 1900 who is vital and alive and yearns to live genuinely and fully, against a stultifying and prudish cast of adults who are dead, dead, dead inside. The prose is heavily ornamented with adjectives, as befits Bodenheim's poetical past, and often overheated. But it is a fire that gives off little light.

The ending, however, is effective, and Bodenheim offers a critique of mass media that still stands today when he has the girl (listening to records) think: "If you could sit down in a chair all the time and have everything brought to you — sights, music, words — you'd never have any adventures yourself ... just eat up the bold or laughy things other people were saying ... just be an open bag — everything pouring in, nothing coming out ... couldn't keep yourself from getting fat and dull and crazy ... " Sounds like a kid with an XBox.