Conspicuous Consumption

Lauren Groff, in her excellent essay on Virginia Woolf's second novel,  Night and Day , compares it to the drawings Picasso did as a young man. Picasso's draftsmanship was not revolutionary; it was, however, superb: evidence that he had mastered the tradition. In much the same way, Woolf's novel is evidence that she was more than competent in the tradition that gave us the novels of Henry James and of Woolf's friend E.M. Forster. Like Picasso, she would go on to break the traditional mold. Night and Day is not as formally adventurous as her later work. It is, though, daring in its vision of English society moving from the Victorian era to the Edwardian, and especially what that might mean for women. The two women around whom the novel revolves, Katherine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, struggle to see how to live in the new world they are entering. Katherine, the granddaughter of a famous poet comes from a family that might now be called "bourgeois bohemian." They...

  Like most contemporary non-believers, I've always found Greek mythology more alluring than Christian mythology. John Milton has helped me to see that the Christian stories make for just as good reading as the adventures of Zeus and company. Of course, as many have noted—whether or not this is what Milton intended, and whether or not Milton's contemporaries would have read the character this way—for a modern reader, Satan is the most sympathetic character. He's ambitious and a lover of liberty: he doesn't want to be under the thumb of an autocratic god-the-father, and makes a valiant attempt to get out from under that thumb. It's hard, at least nowadays, to fault him for that. The main reason, though, that Milton's Satan is so attractive is that he is the most richly drawn of all the characters, and this depth makes him fascinating in ways the other characters are not. Adam and Eve, for example, seem of little account, mere pawns (for all the big guy's clai...

 Marc Behm wrote the screenplay for Help! . His novel,  The Eye of the Beholder , has the same manic energy as that classic piece of madcappery.  It is an account of a private eye known only as the Eye  who is both looking for the daughter who he hasn't seen since his wife left him when the girl was one year old—his absent wife sends him a picture eight years later of little girls in a classroom and taunts him by pointing out that he won't know which one of them is his daughter—and a woman who is in the habit of seducing men, and then killing and robbing them. His relationship with this murderer quickly changes. She is at first his quarry, but then he becomes a sort of guardian angel for her, following her, stalking her, observing her life as she pinballs around the United States and, unbeknownst to her, helping to ensure that she gets away with her crimes. It's undeniably true that the great realist novels of our time are detective novels, but this is not one of tho...

 Nobody could ever like or dislike the poetry of Robert Kelly because it is this or that kind of poetry. His poetry is simply too various to make that sort of categorical judgement possible. He writes different kinds of poems over the thirty-three years covered in this book, but but also within each of those thirty-three years. For example, drawn from a 1978 book called Convections we find exquisite observations of nature, as in the first stanza of "The Acquisition":      I saw the web resplendent strung      in the crotch of a prostrate bay tree      so what little sunlight filtered down      through redwoods found its way here,      to be proclaimed & multiplied upon the strands      moulded by a small body, its house and instrument.  But we also find in the same book more elliptical, more cryptic offerings:      The Last Religion      and the pier ...

   Mary A, Ward , who wrote under her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward and founded the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, takes great pains to tell us in her introduction to this edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , that Anne Brontë is not the writer that her sisters, Emily and Charlotte were.  She's not wrong. The novel starts out well enough. We meet the mysterious tenant, a woman living alone with her young son in the dilapidated hall of the title and supporting herself by her art. That her life is hard, but that she is making it, in a way that few ladies did in those times, is the first evidence we have that this might be, as it has been called, the first feminist novel. When we learn more about her backstory, that she had deserted her cad of a husband and is hiding out from him for fear that he will take the child from her, this characterization of the book seems even more apt. "The slamming of [the protagonist Helen's] bedroom door against her husband re...

   E.C.R. Lorac is the only British "queen of crime" from the golden age of the English crime novel—think: Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham—who is not remembered as a queen of crime from the golden age of the English crime novel. She wrote something like seventy novels, and as far as I can tell, except for the odd reissue over the years, most of them have been forgotten. It's hard to know what accounts for this neglect. Perhaps it's because the protagonist of many of her novels, a Scotland Yard man named Robert Macdonald is not, like Poirot or Wimsey or Campion, notably eccentric. He's an intelligent, sensitive, hardworking policeman who gets the job done. (He's also a "confirmed bachelor," which may or may not be code for something whose name Lorac did not dare to name.) If Shroud of Darkness is representative of Lorac's work then it's a shame that her books are not better known. Her plot is predictably twisty, and will engage those w...

When I first heard about Mexican Gothic and Velvet was the Night  by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia I hurried out to buy both. The novels were set in Mexico, and were written by a Mexican author. I like all things Mexican, so why not? They got good reviews, too. I started with Mexican Gothic , and it was . . . just okay. I wished I hadn't, in my enthusiasm, bought two novels by an author who didn't, in the first work of hers I read, delight me. The good news is, though, that Velvet was the Night  was delightful. It is, like Mexican Gothic , Moreno-Garcia's take on a genre: historical noir. I guess if I had to choose I'd always take noir over gothic, so maybe it's not a surprise that I preferred this account of Mexico in the 1970s, when the country was still under the heel of the repressive PRI. A young woman, activist-adjacent, disappears, and with her some photographs that will compromise that repressive government by showing their involvement in a recent riot. A street kid...