Conspicuous Consumption

 Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander is the first in his Aubrey-Maturin series of sea novels—novels that are perfect as novels of derring-do on the high seas, but also so much more than that. I've just finished this initial installment for maybe the third time: These books compel one to read them and read them again. For the lovely language of which they are made, the characters we become fascinated with, the look into a distant time—the Napoleonic wars—and place—on board ships and in port towns, they are true classics. O'Brian says somewhere that he kept two sets of Jane Austen at home, one downstairs and one upstairs. Apparently he never wanted to be far from the novelist who, it seems clear, was his mentor and inspiration. Like Austen, the Aubrey-Maturin novels take place among a small defined group of people who live under a rigorous code in a small defined space. Like Austen, he finds the world among those people in that tight space, and shares it with us in a ...

A lot of people enjoy recently written novels about people like themselves, people who live at roughly the same time, and do and say roughly the same sorts of things that they do. Borrowing from a quip Eliot Weinberger dropped in an interview —"I don't want to read about divorce in the suburbs, I can make a phone call and hear about that."—I can't help but think of these kinds of books as "divorce in the suburbs novels." Of course if that's the sort of thing those people enjoy, they should go right ahead in their search for the next Corrections . (I don't really remember what that novel was about—does anybody?—but it's a safe bet it contained at least one suburban divorce.) For some of us, though, fiction provides a way to expand our worlds, to move beyond the people and places we know to different places, different cultures, different times. Published in 1749, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones takes us to Augustan England, and as some other old ti...

Almost everyone who writes about this novel notes that it evokes a milieu similar to the one through which George Harvey Bone moves in Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square . Although Hamilton's novel is set just before World War II and Henderson's during the war, Bowling and Bone are similarly alienated and exist in the same seedy London.  What I haven't seen anyone mention is the possibility that James Hogg's Memoirs of a Justified Sinner  was also an inspiration. Like Hogg's gothic masterpiece, Mr. Bowling  is about a murderer who manages to justify his crimes at least in part through an appeal to his faith. Mr. Bowling finds in his Christianity the excuse that if he happens to kill someone, he is carrying out God's will, because how could he be doing otherwise? He reflects on one of his victims:  He thought, instead, upon matters do do with Destiny, wondering, for instance, whether up in God's Kingdom, there had long ago been placed a little flag, marki...

  I've decided to read Virginia Woolf's novels in order this year. I began with The Voyage Out and Night and Day ,  both of which are fine books. One sees, though, why they are probably the least read of Woolf's novels. They are competent and professional, but they aren't Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse . They are good, but that's all. With Jacob's Room , though, we see that the Virginia Woolf of those early novels has at last freed herself from Victorian novelistic convention, and begun to make it new. Start with her decision to make Jacob Flanders, the novel's protagonist, a cypher who we know almost entirely from the impressions others have of him. In this she does something that is perhaps parallel to but different from what Joyce (who she dismissed as an "egotistical self-taught working man," even as she acknowledged his influence on Jacob's Room ) did in Ulysses . In Joyce's work we follow different characters' streams of con...

This is something like the fifteenth book in Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series. One could argue that there was a slight sag in the middle volumes, but the later entries are the strongest yet. I guess it's not surprising that a dedicated writer gets better with years of experience.  After gallivanting to Hong Kong in a recent entry, Harry is back in California, traveling from his Los Angeles hometown to the agricultural center of the state. He's still in the cold cases unit, and he has a new supervisor to lock horns with. Harry's working post-retirement on a contract, and his new boss, who would like to move Harry on into post-post retirement, does his best to make that happen. Harry, of course is not having it, but his adversary remains standing at the end, so no doubt their quarrel will continue. The novel begins with a flashback to the LA riots. Harry and his then partner, Edgar, are called out in the midst of the chaos to a murder victim that turns out to be a Eu...

 This is a forgotten novel by a forgotten writer. I just finished it for the third time, and once again loved the mystery with which it is saturated. What exactly is going on remains mysterious throughout, both to the man we are reading about and also to the reader, who is never allowed to feel smarter or more perceptive than the protagonist. That the reader shares the protagonist's bewilderment adds to the novel's power. There is knock at the door of the house where the bank teller,  Raynard Langrish, lives with his mother. It is Roy Archer, someone Langrish feels he might know . . . maybe. Archer takes Langrish to a boxing match and then for a few pints after the match. The bank teller finds himself exhilarated by the violence he has witnessed in the ring and by the alcohol he consumes. Under Archer,'s spell, Langrish begins training for . . . an emergency of some sort? a military operation? defense against an invasion? a war?—“But is there a war on, sir, or what?” “A wa...

  George Orwell acknowledged the influence of an Ernest Bramah novel on 1984 and maintained that Bramah's  Max Carrados stories were, along with the Sherlock Holmes stories and  R. Austin Freeman's  Dr Thorndyke stories, the only detective stories since Edgar Allan Poe worth reading. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but the Carrados stories, or at least the four of them collected in this short volume,  are fun, though nothing like as good as the Holmes stories. Bramah follows Doyle in that his detective, Max Carrados, is a genius, and has as his foil a partner who is, well, not a genius. Bramah's departure from the Holmes formula is that his genius detective is blind, the twist being that even though he is unable to see, he is astoundingly perceptive.  Will I read more Max Carrados stories (free from Guttenberg)? We'll see.