President David R. Anderson's Bookshelf
An English professor and lifelong reader, David R. Anderson '74 is rarely without
a book (or three) to read. Here's what is on his bookshelf today:
Wicked Prey It’s always a big day when I get my hands on a new John Sandford novel. It’s like sitting down to a piece of homemade raspberry pie topped with fresh cream: you want to devour the whole thing right away, except that then it will be all gone. Wicked Prey is set during the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, and it’s an interesting blend of political thriller and detective novel. There are really three plots going on here: the gang that is robbing political operatives of their walking around money; the depressing story of a mean-spirited petty criminal and his abusive relationship with a young woman; and the story of Letty, Lucas Davenport’s ward, who is growing up too fast and is just like Lucas. It’s a lot to juggle, and sometimes you feel like you’re reading a couple of different novels at once. It’s interesting to watch what the writers of great series detectives — Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, even the venerable Rex Stout — do when they get into the middle of their series. They look for new directions without abandoning what’s working. Parker, for example, is keeping up the Spenser series while starting a new series featuring Jesse Stone and another new series featuring Sunny Randall, and now he is integrating characters from one series into the others. Stone and Sunny Randall have begun a relationship, and it seems inevitable that at some point Stone and Spenser are going to confront each other. Sandford also has two other series going, the Kidd novels and now the Virgil Flowers novels. The Prey novels and the Flowers novels have interlacing characters. The most interesting part of Wicked Prey for me was the treatment of Letty. She is clearly going to be a force in future Prey novels, and the male-female, father-daughter dynamic that Sandford has set up is going to be fun to watch. |
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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I’m continuing my exploration of Scandinavian crime fiction. According to a note at the beginning of this novel, the author died in 2004 shortly after sending the manuscripts for this novel and two others to the publishers. One of the other novels is called The Girl Who Played With Fire. The other is untitled. Thus, his entire corpus of crime novels consists of these three works. This is an intricately plotted novel because it is telling more than one story at once. There is the story of “Carl” Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist and co-founder (with his lover, a wealthy married woman) of a center-left magazine who has just been convicted of libel; the story of Lisbeth Salander, a ward of the state with an appalling life story, amazing investigative skills, and the morals of a cat; and the crime that brings them together, a forty-year-old missing person story involving the family of a prominent Swedish industrialist. It sounds unmanageable, but it isn’t. Larsson tells a compelling story about a crime and an investigation while developing two fascinating characters, Mikael and Lisbeth, and offering a critique of modern capitalism that resonates in light of the recent economic downturn. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s the character of Lisbeth Salander that makes this book worth running out to read right away. In my view, she is clearly the most interesting female investigator in crime fiction today precisely because she is so ruthlessly amoral and portrayed as such so unapologetically until the end of this novel. I am eager to read the next one to see where Larsson goes with this character. This is a gritty novel. Gosh, the Scandinavians are dark! (And I can’t believe how much coffee gets drunk in this novel. How do they ever get to sleep?) If you’re offended by graphic depictions of brutal sexuality, don’t read this book. But if you accept that as a convention of this kind of fiction and you want to encounter a truly novel female character in a crime novel, read this one. |
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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream This book caught my eye at the public library. I’d read Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, in which she reports on the lives of low-wage earners by taking a series of such jobs. This book adopts a similar approach to a different group: white-collar unemployed. Ehrenreich creates a new identity for herself and then tries to get a job in corporate public relations. In the course of her search she seeks the help of resume writers and career coaches, attends networking events and job fairs, joins professional associations, and even gets a style makeover, but in the end she is unable to find a job as she defined it for the purposes of this book: a reasonable middle-class salary, benefits, an office from which to work. This was a timely book when it was published in 2005: it is much more so today, when we are in the grip of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and unemployment the day I am writing this stands at 9.7 percent. General Motors emerged from bankruptcy last week announcing that, among other things, it would cut more than 6,000 white-collar jobs. Many Americans today are in precisely the situation Ehrenreich examines in her book, and reducing unemployment is undoubtedly one of the keys to emerging from this downturn. I wish this book were more helpful, but it’s mostly interested in excoriating the institutions Ehrenreich blames for the plight of the white-collar unemployed and the “transition” industry to which the unemployed turn for help. Ehrenreich comes at her topic from a distinct point of view. She argues that the white-collar unemployed have done the things that are supposed to lead to success. They earned college degrees and worked successfully in meaningful jobs. They have skills, experience, and professional accomplishments. They are supposed to be living the American Dream. That’s the “bait.” But in a tough economic environment (Ehrenreich’s book grows out of the recession in the early 2000s), businesses and corporations cut costs by downsizing, “rightsizing,” and outsourcing. The workforce gets smaller, salaries and benefits get cut, and people who have skills, experience, and accomplishments find themselves not comfortable in mid-career but unemployed. They are supposed to be valued employees, but instead they are disposable. That’s the “switch.” This book describes what it’s like to be in that situation. To be fair, it does close with a solution. The best thing would be a return to fuller employment. The next best thing would be an expansion of benefits, such as universal health-care and expanded unemployment benefits to assist workers in transition. But Ehrenreich admits these solutions are “unlikely or even utopian in the current political climate,” which brings her to what is possible: self-defense. She argues that, “No group is better situated, or perhaps better motivated, to lead the defense of the middle class than the unemployed — assuming they could recognize their common interests and begin to act as a political force” (p.236). (The political climate in 2009 obviously differs from the one Ehrenreich wrote in: at least one of her “utopian” ideas, expanded health insurance for all Americans, is under serious consideration in the House and Senate today.) The publisher’s blurb on the jacket of this book calls it “alternately hilarious and tragic.” I would call it “alternately self-righteous and mean.” Here’s an example. Ehrenreich has been working with a job coach, who does seem pretty ineffectual, and one day she decides to use a coaching session to try to persuade him that he needs to hire her as his PR person. She recounts that experience and then, driving home, observes: I make my way back down the freeway toward the hotel, aware of all This is fancy writing, but it’s silly. Trying to persuade someone to hire you isn’t a mortal sin. This passage reflects Ehrenreich’s view of what she calls the “corporate world.” She’s so certain of its failings (and of her own superiority to it), that she can’t deliver much insight into it. There’s good reporting in this book, and good writing. I recommend it to those who agree with, or can put up with, the agenda. |
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Lima Nights This is another book I picked off the shelf of new books at Rolvaag Library, not knowing anything about the author. I’m trying to be adventurous in my fiction reading. Set in Peru, it tells a story that, though familiar in many ways, holds your attention with exoticism that is curiously mixed with a hard-edged realism. Carlos Bluhm is a middle-aged man, descended from wealthy German immigrants, married to Sophie Westermann, also descended from German immigrants, with two sons. Carlos has not been as successful as his father and grandfather, so he and his family live in faded splendor — they still belong to the exclusive Club Germania, for example, but only because his grandfather was one of its founders, not because they can afford it. One night after a social evening with their wives at Club Germania, Carlos and his male friends go to a place called Lima Nights. There, women wearing red collars around their necks are available as dance partners. A young woman approaches Carlos and utters the novel’s first sentence: “Give me your hand.” She is beautiful, erotic, dark-skinned, and 15. You can see where this is headed, and that is indeed where it goes. Carlos embarks on a passionate affair with the young woman, Maria Fernandez, they are discovered, and his wife and sons leave him. Maria moves into the house and for the next 20 years they live together, unmarried. Bluhm ran with the wrong crowd. His married male friends were promiscuous, but even in that context he was known as someone who turned to indigenous women for his affairs. The novel is brutally frank in its explanation for Bluhm’s preference: “It wasn’t the fragrant skin, the tiny toes, the thick black hair. An Indian woman was more disposable. It was a matter of convenience. And Bluhm’s friends understood this about him very well” (p. 19). Maria is “disposable” not only because of her race but also because of her class. She lives in one of Lima’s worst slums, her father has died, and her mother takes in laundry for a nearby prison. There’s a different abusive man in her mother’s bed every night. When Bluhm arranges to pick Maria up on a street corner early in their affair, it’s the first time she has ridden in a car. He represents her path out of that life. The question ultimately posed by this novel is whether Maria is, indeed, “disposable.” After she and Bluhm have been living together for 20 years she begins to worry that he has made no commitment to her, that he could throw her out on the street at any moment, and that she would be right back where she started when she first approached him at Lima Nights. I don’t want to give away the plot, so I’ll simply say that she begins a campaign for commitment, Bluhm responds, and things end badly. The novel’s depiction of the culture of German Peruvians, its fascinating glimpses into the world of videntes, or fortune-tellers, its evocation of passion, its hard-eyed analysis of privilege and abject poverty — all these are compelling. The characters I found less so. I don’t understand what happened at the end. |
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Bordeaux: A Novel in Four Vintages I was in Rolvaag Library looking for a book to read, and — judging a book by its cover, which you’re not supposed to do — grabbed this one. I’m glad I did. The novel has four sections (the “vintages” referred to in the subtitle), each prefaced with a date: 2006, 2004, 2003, and 2002. This is the order in which they occur in the novel, so you begin the story at the end, so to speak, and in the course of reading the novel come to understand how the situation with which you started came to be. Bordeaux unfolds, in this way, somewhat like a mystery novel where you begin with a murder and as the detective learns who committed it, so do you. In this case, however, there isn’t a detective, nor is there an omniscient narrator. Bordeaux is narrated in the first-person by its protagonist, Francis Wilberforce. First-person dramatized narrators are always tricky. You have to take everything they say with a grain of salt because they are in the story — it happened to them — and they may well not understand what happened, or they may slant their interpretation of events to serve their own interests. That certainly happens in this novel. Wilberforce is not someone you will like, though you may at various points feel sorry for him. Raised in a loveless home by foster parents, utterly lacking not only in social skills but in social instincts, naïve about people and relationships, alcoholic — this is neither a recipe for a happy life nor the description of someone likely to bring happiness into the lives of others. This novel reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited because it also tells the story of a solitary young man who is taken up by a wealthy, upper-class set and it doesn’t go well, particularly in matters of the heart. Here’s Wilberforce’s reaction to his first visit to Hartlepool Hall:
This “unsettling” is very important. Indeed, it is at the heart of the novel, which you could think of as the story of how Wilberforce gets unsettled and what he then does. Here’s a hint as to how Wilberforce gets unsettled. It’s from an interior monologue as he sits watching a glorious sunset on the moors after his first grouse hunt with his new friends. He’s just overheard himself described by one of them as a “Nobody,” and at first it’s crushing, but then he thinks:
The novel depicts that happening. I wouldn’t read this book if you an oenophile looking for a wine-themed novel. There are a lot of wine names tossed around, some compelling descriptions of how fine wines taste, a depressing portrait of alcoholism, thoughts about wine collecting (“you own the wine; don’t let the wine own you”), but at the end of the day this isn’t a novel about wine. The love of wine is a symptom. Bordeaux is a disciplined novel: tautly written in spare prose, carefully constructed, complex in its atmosphere and tone. I admired the craft as I was reading it, and I think you will too. |
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President Anderson's bookshelf from 2008-2009. President Anderson's bookshelf from 2007-08. |
