Conspicuous Consumption

 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...

 This is the first James Bond novel in the series and the first James Bond novel I have ever read. My only encounter with 007 is through the two or three Bond film I've seen, and the books, if Casino Royale is representative, are quite different. First, there is a great deal less action. If one were to make the book into a movie (which has been done) and chose to do it literally, I don't think any special effect would be called for.  Also, I seem to recall the Bond of the movies as a sort of charming rogue. In this book he's mostly just unpleasant. And I'm pretty sure that 007 is the only one who doesn't know that the femme fatale love interest who he considers marrying is, in fact, an agent of the bad guys, so maybe he's a bit thick. I'm not sure if Fleming intended his main character to be unpleasant and only ordinarily perceptive, but neither detracts from the tightly written yarn that the book is.  I'll probably read another Bond somewhere down th...

 As I may have mentioned in my post on The Emigrants , after rereading that masterpiece I was so certain that I was in the presence of genius that I stopped reading Sebald. I acquired all his books, but decided to hold the pleasure those books would give, the wonder, the awe, in reserve. I am entering that pleasure, that wonder, that awe now, with Austerlitz . Sebald's concerns in Austerlitz , which is no less stunning than The Emigrants , are the same: how survivors make their way through the post-Holocaust world. A Sebald-like narrator hears, over many years, the account of one Jacques Austerlitz, a child who was brought to Wales as part of the  Kindertransport. Austerlitz has only the sketchiest of memories of how he got to Wales; he does not learn his real name until he is sixteen. Later, he attempts to find out what became of his parents, the mother who remained in Czechoslovakia and the father who had made it to France. It is this search that he tells the narrator a...