Review: The Size of the World

The Size of the World by Joan Silber is less a novel than a collection of loosely interconnected short stories – sort of a literary game of tag in which a character in one story has a connection with one, sometimes more, of the characters in the next story.  This structure is gimmicky, but clever. Ultimately, the stories come full circle when the hero of the final “chapter” sells the defective airplane screws that caused the problem that brought the hero of the first “chapter” to Vietnam to solve.

Silber’s writing is graceful and stories are interesting enough to pull a reader through to the end, but the book as a whole lacks depth. Several characters make adventurous choices to live and marry in foreign lands, but the short story structure does not give Silber room to examine the cross-cultural riffs she reveals.  Analysis of the relationships is thin.

Likewise, Silber’s bigger themes are nothing new.  The idea that, while the world may be a big place, people come together by personal connections, is intriguing if not startling.  But the premise that colonialism, corporations, and the military are heartless and bad is a pretty shop-worn formula.  All in all, there is not much to The Size of the World to keep a reader thinking after closing the back cover.

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Review: Franklin and Lucy

Franklin and Lucy is an intimate look into the personal life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the women close to him.

Joseph Persico examines the roles played by Roosevelt’s mother, wife, dearest lover, closest companion, daughter, and a cadre of others. While Persico occasionally makes assumptions based on no more than reasonable speculation, most of his conclusions are well-supported and persuasive.

The title is somewhat misleading in suggesting that the book focuses primarily on Lucy Mercer Rutherford, who became Franklin’s lover while working as Eleanor’s personal secretary during World War I, but then played only a peripheral role in his life until late in his third term as President.

Persico’s point seems to be that Lucy was Franklin’s true love. However, the same point could have been made about Missy LeHand, Franklin’s long-time secretary and best friend, who lived with him for decades. Although the timing is fuzzy, a case could be made that, had Franklin not discarded Missy when she suffered a series of mental and physical breakdowns, she, not Lucy, would have deserved top billing in the book’s title.

Just to describe this minor flaw in the book is to demonstrate its absorbing appeal. Persico keeps the tone personal rather than prurient, but the intimate details are thoroughly discussed. He shows Franklin’s domineering mother Sara using the family purse strings to direct Franklin’s life. He explores Eleanor’s complex relationship as simultaneous inspiration and aggravation, as well as describing her own personal intrigues as she led her parallel life as an international do-gooder. He considers Franklin’s lifelong appeal to women and his delight in their company, despite being crippled by polio.

Although designed to fit a niche in collection of FDR biographies, Franklin and Lucy provides enough context to provide a good introduction to the man’s life. The book is entertaining, thorough, and readable.

Review: The Golden Bowl

Only Henry James can take a beguiling idea like quasi-incestuous adultery, add an Italian prince, a billionaire art collector, and exotic foreign travel, and make a story so tedious that it is a true chore to read.

James writes in wisps of ideas, continually layering these wisps until there is a shimmery, translucent image that gives an idea of what he is trying to get at. These literary holograms are sometimes pretty, often interesting up to a point, but there is no substance to them. By the time the image emerges from the wisps, all I can think is, “So what?”

I can appreciate the talent it took to write an entire novel without saying anything directly. James definitely had a skill that he developed to the utmost. But while I admire the talent, I have no desire to make it a part of my life. I appreciate James’s talent the way I appreciate that of the artists who can paint the face of Jesus on a grain of rice. Impressive, but I’m not going to collect a gallery of rice portraits.

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NOTES

This was one of the three Henry James books on the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.

Review: Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

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Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, a collection of short stories by South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, has its hits and misses. The misses include a story about a tapeworm from the tapeworm’s perspective; a reminiscence of a cockroach trapped in a typewriter that doesn’t rise above casual anecdote; and the self-indulgent “Dreaming of the Dead” in which Gordimer recounts a dream of having dinner with Susan Sontag and two other deceased friends.

The hits more than make up for weaknesses in the collection. Gordimer’s elegant writing raises ordinary events above the tawdry and mundane, pulling out bigger ideas and themes, including the theme of personal identity in a changing world. In the title story, for instance, the protagonist goes on a half-hearted search for black relatives possibly descended from his white, diamond-prospecting great-grandfather. Gordimer subtly makes it clear that his search is driven by more than genealogical curiosity as he searches for a family that would unify his prior anti-apartheid political efforts and his personal history.

Likewise, in “A Beneficiary,” a young woman faced with the early death of her actress mother struggles to determine which is her real identity – daughter of the famous actor who sired her, or the loving businessman who raised her knowing she was the product of his wife’s brief, illicit affair.

Gordimer is at her best writing about marriage and its challenges. Adultery and sexual history are common elements. In “Alternative Endings,” for example, Gordimer examines adulterous affairs in three stories, using a different one of the five senses as the focus of each. Unfortunately, while one of the three involves hearing and another scent, it is entirely unclear which sense was featured in the third. More confusing, especially since this trilogy ends the book, is why Gordimer didn’t write five stories so as to feature each of the five senses.

Overall, this is a worthwhile collection of stories and a good introduction to Gordimer’s sophisticated writing.

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Author of the Day: Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald (Dec. 17, 1916 to Apr. 28, 2000) was a prize-winning British poet, essayist, and biographer. She is an inspiration because she did not write her first book until she was in her 60s. She won the 1979 Booker Prize for Offshore the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower.

Her novels, in chronological order, follow.  Those I have read are in red.  Those on my TBR shelf are ion blue.

The Golden Child (1977)

The Bookshop (1978)

Offshore (1979)

Human Voices (1980)

At Freddie's (1982)

Innocence (1986)

The Beginning of Spring (1988)

The Gate of Angels (1990)

The Blue Flower (1995)

NOTE

Last updated on April 19, 2012.