Washington and the Cherry Tree

At Walmart last week, I committed the misstep of letting the kids go to the Lego aisle while I was shopping elsewhere in the store.  When I went to get them, Eric had a Lego set in his hand and a puppydog expression on his face.

"I'm not buying Legos today, Eric,"  I told him.

"You always say that!  You never buy me Legos," he sulked as we left the toy section.

"I bought you a Lego set last week," I countered, "and when I did, you said you wouldn't ask for anything again until Christmas.  Remember that?"

Cheerfully and matter-of-factly, he replied, "Sometimes I make promises I can't keep."

Words mean things

Is it just me, or is this not a sundress?

Birthday boy

Eric's tenth birthday

Book review: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

I read glowing reviews of Amor Towles' first novel, Rules of Civility, when it was new five years ago and came this close to ordering a copy, but I had a pretty full reading shelf at the time and didn't. When I saw a couple of copies at Half Price Books marked down to three dollars, therefore, I snapped at the chance, and it became the thirty-second book I read in 2016.

A few chapters in, I didn't think I was going to like the book at all and was feeling very happy I hadn't sprung for a copy back when it was new.  Katey Kontent, apart from the dumb name, is one of those annoying self-effacing cyphers of a narrator who barely seems like a character in her own story.  At first, I thought she was going to be a Nick Carraway, a character so bland and colorless that I barely remembered The Great Gatsby was written in first person, despite my affection for the novel.   (When the Leo DiCaprio version came out, I was at first flummoxed by the news that Tobey Maguire was playing Nick, since I didn't remember Nick even existing.)

It turns out that Katey's just a bit introverted and stoic.  Clear away some of the characters that overshadow her, and she turns out to have a few ideas and emotions of her own, if she does tend to be a bit of a martyr.  Civility reminds me of Gatsby in some other ways, however, that are more thematic.  It's a bit about reinvention, a bit about the second-generation immigrant experience, and a lot about parties with the rich and beautiful.  Frankly, if you took the dates out of the book, I would have identified the setting as the 1920s; however, the actual setting is the late 1930s, which strikes me as odd.  The tropes tell us that the Twenties were about frivolity and wealth and irresponsibility, while the Depression was about desperation, poverty, and despair, but the action of this book involves Katey (poor-ish but never in want for a meal or a roof over her head) going from club to fancy restaurant to country-house party with a wealthy crowd of carefree young people with trust funds. I'm not going to say it's wrong for the era, but it's certainly not the received wisdom.

The early turning point of the story, and the action which drives the main characters for the rest of the narrative, is a car accident.  Oddly, while it is clearly depicted in the text as being the fault of a milk van, everyone in the book acts as if the main character who was driving the car that was struck is completely responsible, both morally and financially.  Was there no auto insurance in 1938?  Could not the milk company have been sued or the negligent driver arrested?  My guess is that, in an earlier draft, the main character was at fault and the author chose to soften the fact in revision, for fear that a drunk driver wouldn't retain the reader's sympathy.

The greatest misstep of the book, in my opinion, is the character of Eve Ross, and I didn't really begin to enjoy the book until she had departed the action.  The author is clearly besotted and presents her as someone we're supposed to like and admire, but her actions are thoroughly selfish and manipulative. She keeps swearing her undying devotion and unending friendship to the narrator, a protestation that never once results in her acting in any way that shows the slightest bit of regard for Katey's well-being.  Perhaps the worst part is when the gold-digging Eve allows working-girl Katey to pay for champagne on Eve's birthday, promises to return the favor on Katey's birthday, then instead ditches her to go to Europe with a man she knows Katey is a bit in love with. Towles seems to think that everyone finds this sort of behavior forgivable if not flat-out endearing.  Unfortunately, he has written a sequel that is "all about Eve" after her plot-line thankfully diverges from the narrative.

If Katey never quite manages to ring true and her background remains frustratingly un-pinned-down, Wallace Wolcott is the best character in the novel.  Much like Katey, he appears bland and uninteresting when he is introduced, overshadowed like her by Eve and Tinker Grey, but his serendipitous reappearance reveals a charming and fully-realized personality.  He disappears from the narrative yet again afterward, but he has a final unexpected coda which provides one of the few unambiguously heartwarming moments in the story.

Book review: Pompeii by Robert Harris

I was a few chapters into the thirty-first book I read in 2016, Pompeii by Robert Harris, before I made the connection to the movie of a few years ago which was criticized for unbelievability and a tacked-on romance.  Now that I look it up, I find that the film wasn't based on this book, which I guess only goes to show that creators of historical fiction in general can't resist the urge to tack on an unnecessary romance (Hi, Jack and Rose!).

You've got Pompeii.  You've got Vesuvius.  You've got Pliny the Elder.  We all know what's going to happen while they don't, and that's not enough tension for you?  You've got to throw in a romance and an assassination attempt as well?

The book starts promisingly, with the aquarius, or chief engineer, investigating some unusual behavior by the aqueduct which carries water to the cities around the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius towering silently in the background.  A slave is put to death for killing a rich man's valuable fish, screaming that it wasn't his fault but something wrong with the water.  It is reminiscent of the beginning of Eruption or of a Michael Crichton novel: random people going about their ordinary day just before all hell breaks loose.

It's hard to believe that this is the same author who wrote Imperium, though.  This is an airport novel of a book, full of squalid sex scenes, many more instances of harsh language than the book about Cicero, and the aforementioned romance, which seems to be based on nothing more than the fact that both participants are young and the girl is good-looking.  (I was going to say they were both young and good-looking, but it's only Corelia's legs and breasts that rate a description.)  Much like Jack and Rose, we seem to be supposed to believe they're meant for each other only because they are our designated hero and heroine.  I don't recall who it was now, but I recall reading about an actor who said he alternated blockbusters, for bankability, with movies he wanted to make for art's sake; perhaps Harris works on the same principle, with a beach read like Pompeii giving him the leeway to write his Cicero trilogy.

The bits about Pliny the Elder and the looming mountain are brilliant, as are the technical descriptions of the Aqua Augusta and its repair, but the romance and the plots of the villain against the aquarius Attilius merely distract from the real drama of the eruption.  A fictional digression which does pay off is the mystery of the disappearance of the previous aquarius; the scene where his whereabouts are finally discovered is worth the price of admission and even partially justifies the murder-for-hire angle, which ties in with it.

The villain Ampliatus is a bit unfortunately-drawn, I think.  He is a freed slave and a self-made man and owes a great deal to Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now.  As he is the only freed slave in the narrative, his grasping villainy and his daughter's contempt for his vulgarity come across as classist.

A commonality with Eruption is the vanity of the human species vis-a-vis nature.  In the Mount St. Helens account, it's the conservationists desperate to protect old-growth forest from the rapacity of the lumber industry; in this book, it's Rectina, willing to die herself if only she can preserve her husband's invaluable library of irreplaceable books in Herculaneum.  In both cases, the mountain destroys what human beings feel so responsible for stewarding.

"[Human beings] always had to put themselves at the center of everything," Harris has Pliny muse in his last moments, as he faces the oncoming pyroclastic surge.  "That was their greatest conceit.  The earth is becoming warmer -- it must be our fault!  The mountain is destroying us -- we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little -- a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded.  But here was nature, sweeping toward him -- unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent -- and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretension."

Book review: Something Wicked by Carolyn G. Hart

The thirtieth book I read in 2016 was the third book in Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand series, Something Wicked.  Amusingly enough, Hart wastes little time dealing with one of the quibbles I pointed out in my review of the previous book: the unspoken distinction between Max Darling (good-rich) and Harley Jenkins III (bad-rich).  Hart herself, through the ponderings of Annie, prefers the terminology "attractively rich" versus unattractively rich, which is frankly even more subjective and self-serving than I gave her discredit for.  But, hey, at least she addresses the hypocrisy.  Ironically, in this book we learn that Harley actually did make his money by earning it, unlike Max, who is an idle heir.  It's not generally my experience that Trips come from nothing, but okay.

The plot in this installment revolves around a ridiculously high-stakes local theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace, which everyone involved seems legitimately to feel could launch their Broadway careers.  Rehearsals are bedeviled by pranks and acts of sabotage which ultimately culminate in the murder of one of the actors.

Hart branches out from her usual hobgoblin of Boss-Hogg-like-small-town-police-chief by introducing a ludicrously over-the-top prosecuting attorney who orates to small groups of people as if they are a courtroom.  Brice Posey is a paper-thin caricature who bears as much resemblance to any real person who might ever have lived as a stick figure does to Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.  My gosh, even Willie Stark laid off the schtick in private.  To make things worse, Mrs. Brawley has suddenly taken to adopting the personae, in dress, accent, and tone, of various literary detectives, a development which Hart seems to think is quirky and endearing but makes me think she has had a mental break and needs to be committed.  Frankly, too many of Hart's supporting characters, like Max's New Age mom Laurel, are straight out of a wacky '80s sitcom for me to develop any suspension of disbelief while reading the novel.

This time, it's Max instead of Annie who is the prime suspect in the eyes of the incompetent authorities, once again on the premise that the pair just wouldn't get involved unless their hands were forced, which is a poor attitude for the protagonists of a detective series.  Chief Saulter, the Boss Hogg of the first book, is Annie's new ally in the quest for justice, which is a bit of an abrupt about-face, but he's a likeable enough gruff-but-helpful sidekick that I forgive it and hope to see him continue in the role.