….I’ll try to knock a few more recent reads off here.
Last week I read Aunt Jeanne by Georges Simenon. All I knew about Simenon was that he was prolific, and that he wrote mysteries. I have a vague memory of a row of books by him somewhere – I want to say the ancestral home in Maine, but that really doesn’t seem likely – the image is more likely a ghost of my younger teen years spent in the library “mystery” section. I don’t know why I never tried him out then, but c’est la vie.
Aunt Jeanne isn’t a mystery – it’s a psychological novel, I suppose you’d call it, about an older woman returning to her family home to find her brother having just committed suicide and a family in disarray. Her efforts somehow begin to set the family right – or at least give them the resources to move in the proper direction once everything’s been taken out from under them. There is a woodenness about the prose which I imagine is partly due to translation, and it’s fairly obvious and melodramatic, but as a relatively light but not mindless read, I found it much preferable to –
 – the two books by Janet Evanovich I read at the Maine beach house. I think they were 11 and 12, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
On the one hand, I can see how, like a bag of chips, they could get mildly addictive because that natural human curiosity that fiction rouses in us leads us to wonder what Stephanie Plum will be up to next, how she’ll balance the two men in her life, etc. But on the other hand, it was generally so dreadful – I just didn’t get it.  The Stephanie Plum character, I’ve got to say, seems to express some sort of fantasy fulfillment, authorial or otherwise.  It’s not that she’s glamorous – she’s a hardscrabble, accident-prone bail bonds(person), but she’s got a tight body and two hot men live to get her into bed or tease her about it I read on Evanovich’s website or maybe in the ad copy for one of the books that she’s glad to meet her fans’ desires for hot love scenes in her books. Whatever. I guess if you’re 17 or wish you still were.  Otherwise, the ethnic stereotypes flew fast and furious, the scenes were on the level of a bad sitcom, and there was no real mystery. Now, on that subject, here’s something.
When young readers branch into adult books, they generally do so via genres. For me, it was mysteries. I read Christie, Ellery Queen, and the rest – Rex Stout was my favorite, and I will confess, at this late date, to having been a little in love with Archie Goodwin.
And there are plenty of real mysteries still out there. Plenty. I read some of them, when I run across something intelligent and truly intriguing. But there’s this subgenre – Evanovich is an example, and I think Faye Kellerman is, too – I’ve read several of her books because I was interested in the orthodox Jewish characters, and there may be others. I hesitate to call them “mysteries” because I don’t think there’s much mystery-solving that happens in them. Instead, what happens is that a crime evinces itself, and for the course of the book, the protagonist sort of bumps into the criminal or evidence of the criminal, and then it becomes clear that the criminal is going to pull another one, and it’s going to be big, and so then the last third of the book is a chase to try to find the criminal or beat him to the situation he’s setting up for his next crime, and in the end, the protagonist hasn’t really solved anything. She’s just sort of run parallel to the criminal and in the end, they meet, and the criminal is captured.
I’m not quite sure if that make sense. But it’s sure an easier way of plotting.
The past couple of days, I read The Pawnbroker – the film, starring Rod Steiger, is one of those I’ve always wanted to see but haven’t yet. I think I need to wrest the Netflix queue from my daughter’s Doctor Who-obsessed clutches for a disc or two for myself, I think. Anyway, the novel, by Edward Lewis Wallant is about a Holocaust survivor who runs a pawn shop as a money-laundering front for a shadowy, criminal Italian. The book is essentially about emotionally dead Sol (the pawnbroker), in the days approaching the worst day of every year for him, the day of his wife and children’s death in the camps. It is, like any literature about the Holocaust, wrenching, but it’s also a close, absorbing study of the survivor’s emotional life, and what eventually resurrects it – and the term “resurrect” isn’t entirely inappropriate. I am not sure if the end is heavy-handed or not – but it was consistent, I think, with the tone and movement of the tale.
I happened to search out the Simenon and Wallent because I’d been perusing the NYRB list. Remember, I wrote about J.F. Powers the other day, whose work has been republished by NYRB. I was also exploring it because I’d been reading (for months!) Terry Teachout talking about his forward to the NYRB edition of The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. I saw that they have republished several Simenon books as well as Wallent’s The Tenants of Moonbloom, and so I went, armed with my list, to the library, to find…none of them. That is, they didn’t have any of the Simenon that NYRB has republished, and only had the Pawnbroker, and the Dud Avocado wasn’t even on order. So, I settled, happily.
(Another book that was at the beach house, of which I read about 30 pages before I had to stop because we were, well, leaving and stealing is wrong was The Silent Traveller in Boston (1959)  – part of a series of works I’d never heard of by a writer who is new to me – Chiang Yee – a Chinese writer, artist and scholar who died in 1977. He lived, from the 1930’s to two years before his death, in England and the United States, and among other works, penned this series of The Silent Traveller in…Boston, Paris, London, etc. What I read of the Boston book was intriguing, but, as I said, time flew, and the book had to stay in Maine.)
I think I’m going to read this next. Or at least look at it. The Amazon reviews are rather wildly divided, and the 1 and 2-stars are pretty strongly felt, for a book that was very-well reviewed in the press. I’m sort of intrigued, and am going to pursue it as a point of self-education as I polish up my outline and the backstory on my protagonist and put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard for chapter one.