Summertime…and the Christie is Breezy

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Agatha Christie has been in the news lately along with other authors as someone whose “potentially objectionable” comments about characters needed to be censored for contemporary audiences.  Several of her novels have been rewritten by her publisher, as reported in The Guardian:

[The] edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as “of black marble” and a judge’s “Indian temper”, and removed terms such as “Oriental” and the N-word. The word “natives” has also been replaced with the word “local.”

Sure enough, this new collection of short stories seems to mock gay men and has a “fat Jewish woman” and “Asian” is used as a pejorative.  Moments like that might give you pause–or you might just accept them as representative of her time and her class.  Will they spoil your enjoyment of these light summer reads?  I long ago accepted her antisemitism as par for the course in The Gilded Age and in her social milieu.  My appreciation of her work inspired me to write three books including one of my best-known mysteries, The Edith Wharton Murders.

Christie is the first mystery novelist I read way back in junior high school and though she might make me occasionally wince, I’ve always relished her clever plots and her keen attention to incongruity in dialogue and action.  She’s masterful in that regard and often very entertaining.  Her satire of Brits abroad is always delicious, as in “The Oracle at Delphi”:

Mrs. Peters had tried hard to take an interest in Ancient Greece, but she found it difficult.  Their statuary seemed so unfinished; so lacking in heads and arms and legs.  Secretly, she much preferred the handsome marble angel complete with wings which was erected on the late Mr Willard Peters’ tomb.

We of course find Miss Marple here, in the very well-plotted–if not quite believable–tale The Blood-Stained pavement, remarking as usual that “There is a great deal of wickedness in village life.”  Poirot’s little grey cells are keenly at work in a story whose title is perhaps too much of a giveaway, but is diverting anyway: “The Double Clue.”  Poirot also solves a case without leaving his home in “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim,” demonstrating the superiority of thought over feeling once again.  But Miss Marple can do something similar elsewhere in the collection, based as always on her keen observation of human nature.

Throughout the collection, the characters are described briskly and the dialogue is well-tuned.  There’s sometimes the whiff of port and cigars shared by an after-dinner raconteur and you might feel you’re enjoyably back in the Edwardian era of a ghost story-telling.  

The best story is the fast-paced and highly amusing “Jane in Search of a Job” about a young women hired under unusual circumstances.  It’s got some lovely twists and tart observations like this:

In moderation Jane did not object to crime. The papers had been full lately of various girl bandits. Jane had seriously thought of becoming one herself if all else failed.

As with other new Christie titles published by Morrow, the book is beautifully produced with a pleasingly readable type font and an attractive cover. Though  Morrow’s volume of ghost stories released last Fall for Halloween is somewhat more entertaining, it’s still a fun, quick read for fans of the Queen of Mystery.

Lev Raphael was the longtime crime fiction reviewer for the Detroit Free Press and is the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries set in contemporary academia.

The Grand Affair: A Thrilling Biography of John Singer Sargent

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Growing up in Rome in the mid-19th century, John Singer Sargent could not have asked for a better informal education for the world-class artist he would become. He was surrounded by museums overflowing with great art and just as important, his ebullient, energetic American mother hosted gatherings of painters, sculptors, poets and writers. 

Sargent’s mother was obsessed with European culture and may have modeled that enthusiasm for her son.  She also was an inveterate traveler “for her health,” so the family traipsed all over Western and Central Europe with young Sargent watching, studying, sketching–whether in museums or on mountain tops.  It’s fascinating to read about the challenging mountaineering he did in Switzerland with his father, something you might not associate with a man who later spent so much time in salons and studios.

This was a period when living in Europe cost much less than in the U.S. and  Americans like his mother were ravenous for culture of the Old World. Sargent grew up multilingual, voraciously interested in art, and Rome is where he was first exposed to an artistic subject that would be a constant in his life, though somewhat secret: male nudes. 

Whether painter or connoisseur, back then you could appreciate these nudes as the “ideal representation of humanity” without arousing suspicion, but Sargent’s sketches and paintings showed more than just artistic fascination.  Fisher explores this terrain with wit and style, referencing many of Sargent’s sketches and paintings that were unknown during the painter’s lifetime to make this crucial point.   As he puts it, they “stood out as charged, emotional composition.”

Sargent never married and had many deep friendships with male artists and models as long as he lived, while cultivating rich, powerful “iconoclasts and divas” like the famed art collector and Isabella Gardner.  Was he queer?  It seems obvious that he was and that it was part of his unique vision of people which astonished other painters, including tutors and teachers–and eventually made him famous. 

Some of the best writing in the book explores the not-so-hidden gay salons and haunts in Paris, New York, and Venice and how artists, writers, and wealthy men flirted with this subculture or made themselves at home in it. Fisher also deftly explains all the ways in which Sargent often focused on wealth and celebrity in his work while interrogating it as well, with many subtle touches of eroticism.  Fisher couldn’t be a better guide in analyzing paintings: he’s illuminating without ever coming across as academic or dry.

He also deftly analyzes Sargent’s keen business sense: even in his early twenties, Sargent knew how to cultivate wealthy sitters so he could attract more of them and knew what was daring and unique enough to have work publicly displayed.   He did that while remaining in his public persona “understated, hard-working, and self-effacing.” The author does a splendid job charting Sargent’s peripatetic life and the ways in which he presented as comme il faut but was actually innovative and even disruptive in his art, testing the limits of what the public might accept.  That thread is important for contemporary readers who might need some of the painter’s work decoded due to its subtlety.

Given the book’s subject and the gorgeous color plates, it’s strange that the cover is so grim and unappealing.  Fisher’s luscious book deserved better production, something worthy of his subject’s style and genius, worthy of this “painter of luminous complications.”  It also deserved much better copy editing because there are too many missing words and repetitions throughout the book.

All the same, this masterful biography is perfect not just for fans of the painter but for anyone eager to read more about The Gilded Age.  One celebrity after another passes through these pages–including Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Monet, Isabella Gardner–and Fisher ably interrogates the privilege that artists like Sargent benefited from, without sounding like too much of a scold.

Be prepared to spend some time on Google looking up paintings and painters you might not have heard of before. And readers might also want to try Donna Lucey’s brisk and entertaining Sargent’s Women which explores the colorful biographies of the women behind four of his iconic portraits.

A lifelong fan of vivid biographies, Lev Raphael fell in love with Sargent’s portraits in college.  One of the most enthralling exhibitions he’s ever attended was the mammoth 1987 show of the painter’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Raphael has reviewed books for Bibliobuffet, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, The Washington Post, and The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

Tribute to My First Editor

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The famous New York editor who helped launch my book publishing career, Michael Denneny, is dead. He was a founding editor of the highly influential magazine Christopher Street, and in 35 years at Macmillan, St. Martins Press, and Crown published major authors like Edmund White, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Buckminster Fuller while championing gay fiction and nonfiction.

I’d been publishing stories for over a decade before approaching this giant of LGBTQ publishing at St. Martin’s Press with a collection of gay stories, but he thought it was incomplete. He knew my work and asked, “Why don’t you bring all of yourself into the book: you’re gay, you’re Jewish, and you’re the son of Holocaust survivors. Nobody has ever written a book quite like that.” He was right, and we launched a beautiful partnership when he offered me a contract for the book that became Dancing on Tisha B’Av.

That book put me on the map, with dozens of reviews across the country and the Lambda Literary Award it won the year after publication. I’m the figure on the cover. I was doing heavy weights at the gym and Michael thought pairing my body with a skull cap would hit the right notes. It did. Another well-known editor, the late George Stambolian, told me it was “the cover of the year.”

 

Denneny had started at St. Martin’s Press in 1977 when there wasn’t a single mainstream publisher in New York bringing out gay books.  He soon became celebrated as the doyen in that field for hardcover originals and his line of Stonewall Inn Editions, handsomely produced paperbacks of gay fiction and nonfiction.

Michael was an amazingly hands-on editor. He had me bring copies of dozens of stories to New York and we sat on the floor in his bohemian living room and looked at what might fit, what could be left out, what order the stories should take to seduce and enthrall readers. But that wasn’t the end: he and I spent easily seven months after that going back and forth with revisions as he helped me hone each story to make it as clear and forceful as possible. It was a master class in editing and revision, and his insights were never short of brilliant. He’s one of the many editors who have helped me enormously in my career as a teacher and editor myself—and one of the best.

Here’s an example of his help: I had shied away from writing sex scenes, but he said that sex revealed a side of characters that couldn’t be known in any other way and especially with characters who were venturing into new territory, so it was important for me to follow them. I did. The book was a success, winning a Lambda Literary Award after receiving dozens of reviews, most of them adulatory.

Michael admired my sense of humor and urged me to write a mystery series with a Nick and Nora Charles feel. That’s how the Nick Hoffman mysteries were born and that’s how I started getting reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, ended up as a professional reviewer for newspapers and radio stations, got invited around the country and abroad to speak about my work, and saw professors take me on an as a subject for academic essays, papers, and book chapters.

Without Michael, I doubt that Special Archives at Michigan State University’s Library would have pursued my papers for a decade and finally purchased them for a hefty sum.

It’s not self-serving to say that his taste was superb and he didn’t just publish major gay writers, he published Ntozake Shange—and she’s the writer who apparently encouraged him to publish gay authors. I remember Michael made a prediction about my career. He said, “You might never have a best seller, but like Shange, you’ll be making a lot of money doing speaking engagements because people will want to hear you speak from your unique perspective.”

He was right. I’ve done hundreds of invited talks and readings across the U.S. and in Canada, Germany, Scotland, England, France, Belgium, Italy and Israel. Without his intense belief in the value of my work—and its quality—I might never have gotten this far.

Or felt so very grateful.

Blood, Fire, & Gold

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Even if you’ve read a dozen books about Elizabeth I, you might enjoy this study of the Tudor queen and her decades-long rival Catherine de Medici, Queen of France for over a decade and Queen Mother to Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III.  The two most powerful women in sixteenth-century Europe, both queens were highly educated and masterful stateswomen.  They learned while young how to navigate dangerous royal courts and religious turmoil, how to stay strong but outwardly pliant when necessary, and how to deal with demanding, powerful men in a world where they would be in the minority as women of power.  Both survived dizzying plots, war, and shifting allegiances “while enemies hid around every corner.” 

The dual biography deftly charts the twisting European alliances that could shift with a marriage as well as a treaty or just the threat of war, and demonstrates what excellent politicians both queens were as they maintained and expanded their power.   Mary Queen of Scots is the perennial wild card for each queen, and the book’s best surprise is its focus  on the fascinating trials and tribulations of an English ambassador to France, Sir Nicolas Throckmorton, who frequently begged to be released from his dangerous and demanding post but was unafraid to speak plainly to the Queen Mother.  

I wish the book had been more thoroughly copy edited.   That would have eliminated readers being told three times in a short space that Thomas Cramner was Archbishop of Canterbury and that Frances II was nine years old two paragraphs apart.  Or having to look up the translation of the French title of a religious work that Elizabeth gave us a gift even though it was highly controversial in France. Paranque says nothing at all about the controversy.  And good copy editing would have eliminated repetitious diction as well as odd phrasing like  “appease tensions” in place of “ease tensions.”  Some long conversations during negotiations between England and France could also have been summarized.

Paranque is no Alison Weir, Leanda de Lisle or Dan Jones, and the book doesn’t quite live up to the jazzy title.  But there are some good stories here, like the gruesome joust that wounded France’s King Henry II, Catherine’s husband, and led to his miserable death.  The intervention of a famed surgeon is an unforgettable classic of bizarre medical practice in that period.   Even more fascinating is elderly Elizabeth’s interview with a French envoy, dripping with jewels in her gorgeous dressing gown, bosom exposed, a picture of sad ruin and abiding grace.

Lev Raphael has been reading about the Tudors since elementary school. He has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report and three public radio stations.  He hosted an interview show where guests included Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong.

Marrow and Bone

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Jonathan Fabrizius is a journalist living comfortably in 1980s Hamburg thanks to a rich uncle, but his thoughts often turn to the Nazi years and the end of WWII when his family fled East Prussia.  His mother died in a cart giving birth to him and that death and the chaos of flight sometimes seem more real than the life he’s living.

Out of the blue, he gets an assignment to travel in a luxurious new Japanese car into former East Prussia to report on local culture while the driver and another passenger record the route for a future rally.  And the fee is tremendous: 5,000 marks with negotiable expenses.

As he thinks of it, “his job was to write an article about the cultural riches of the People’s Republic of Poland.”  Given that he’s traveling through a once-German region that was called Masuria, despite new Polish names for towns, those riches don’t seem very Polish or even much in evidence.  He’s most impressed by a massive medieval fort built by the Teutonic Knights and a huge Gothic redbrick church.  Such churches in northern Europe are his obsession.

The tone of dark and sometimes bizarre humor is set almost immediately by the work his Swedish girlfriend is doing to curate a museum exhibition on cruelty.  She’s gathering materials about massacres and torture with a museum director who actually believes that excessive “pedantry” can be a form of “secondary” cruelty–and so can hit-and-run accidents.

There are no accidents on Jonathan’s off-kilter road trip, but it’s broken up by an unexpected robbery, encounters with curious peasants and obnoxious German tourists, meals that are inconsistent or not available, shabby hotels, and Jonathan’s travel companions. They work for the car company:  Hansi is a famous race car driver with epic adventure stories behind him and chatty Frau Winkelvoss wears twenty-six necklaces, harem pants and a blizzard of scarves as she and Hansi help record the route in meticulous detail. Their “map” will guide drivers in some future rally.

Jonathan’s snark is his shield against feeling anything much at all.  A typical observation: When Frau Winkelvoss can’t get good coffee at a Polish café he notes “Presumably during the war there wouldn’t have been any coffee here under the Germans either.”

The trip into his past (and Germany’s) challenges and then slowly strips away his sarcasm as he comes closer and closer to where his parents died and to an infamous concentration camp–that he can’t get into.

In Europe Kempowski is considered one of Germany’s greatest postwar writers but I hadn’t heard of him until I was on a book tour for the memoir My Germany and a professor said I had to read his book Have You Ever Seen Hitler? It’s based on interviews with people who lived through the rise and ruin of Nazi Germany and had wildly different opinions of their Fuehrer.  The book is a stunning record of a country where many people worshiped Hitler like a god,.

Equally stunning is the richly layered and detailed novel All for Nothing, set in an East Prussian manor house whose inhabitants see waves of refugees fleeing the Russian troops.  That book and this one have particular bite because Kempowski apparently himself witnessed waves of refugees as a teenager near the end of WWII.

Marrow and Bone is a sobering meditation on memory, forgetting, and the price paid for both.

Lev Raphael is the author of The German Money and twenty-six other books in many genres.

Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939

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At a time when democracy is faltering around the world, this brilliant book makes salutary and scary reading.

The author’s aim in the first of two volumes is to strip away myths from Hitler and see him as the individual he was, not just a giant of megalomania and crazed antisemitism. He was petty, vicious, paranoid, deft at spotting anyone’s weaknesses and exploiting them, cruel, socially awkward and proudly uncomfortable with his social betters.  The pages describing his rage dealing with the King of Italy and the royal court on a state visit are truly hilarious and bizarre.  Likewise, it is beyond satire to read about his obsession with flower arrangements at meals and how he stupefied dinner guests with his endless speechifying.

Ullrich takes time in his introduction to survey the major biographies of Hitler and demonstrate quite clearly that they all have one way or another failed to see Hitler in the round because of their narrow focus. His focus is global and mesmerizing. The author is especially good at laying out the complex political currents during the Nazi party’s rise to power and exploring the widespread German longing for a savior. The quasi-religious nature of Hitler’s regime and the ways in which he was basically worshiped by millions as a messiah may remind readers of more current leaders who are also brutally larger than life–and yet very small.

Hitler was a chameleon, a talent actor and a brilliant orator, which readers who have only seen snippet of his speeches and don’t know German cannot appreciate.  Ullrich does a superb job of analyzing one crucial speech after another to demonstrate Hitler’s dark brilliance.  And he’s just as deft at eviscerating the army of toadies and sycophants Hitler surrounded himself with.  Here, the recently available diaries of Goebbels serve as stunning evidence of the hero-worship Hitler thrived on.

A passage near the end sums up his dark talents and how they meshed with the time and the damaged nation he would lead to disaster:

“Never stop–that was the law by which the National Socialist movement and its charismatic Fuhrer operated and which gave the process of coming to and consolidating power its irresistible dynamic. After the great foreign policy triumphs of 1938 [which included dismembering Czechoslovakia], Hitler never for a moment considered taking an extended break and being satisfied with what he had achieved, as Bismarck had done after 1871. He constantly needed new victories to compensate for nascent popular dissatisfaction and to bolster his own prestige. As a result, he was willing to take ever greater risks, and his fear that he would die young lent further urgency and impatience to his expansive activism. Hitler both drove events and was driven by them.”  ★★★★★

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing about The Second Generation, the children of Holocaust survivors.  He’s the author of My Germany and 26 other books in many genres.  Special Archives at Michigan State University’s library collects his literary papers.

Hitler’s Little Helpers

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Hitler’s Aristocrats by Susan Ronald could just as easily have been called Hitler’s Stooges. It’s a survey of wealthy and upper-crust Britons and Americans who for various reasons supported and even idolized Hitler in the 1930. Some of them were grotesque and paranoid anti-Semites, others admired the man or were even hypnotized by him. Still others believed in his mission to create a strong, stable Germany–no matter the human cost.

Whatever their reasons, they were wildly deluded and dangerous because they either ignored the truth about Hitler’s Germany or just didn’t understand it. For readers of WWII history in books like The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson or a novel like Munich by Robert Harris, the material here in general might not seem new, though its scope might as you explore the range of this informal international propaganda machine.

Ronald writes in a surprisingly breezy style given the subject matter and calls these people “influencers.” You can decide whether you think that term makes them more understandable or seems too mild for the profound damage they tried to do to democracy and the aid they gave to the dictator and his criminal regime. 

Perhaps most fascinating of all here is the story of British press baron Lord Rothermere and his quixotic-verging-in-nutty campaign to restore the German and Austrian monarchies, believing that Hitler was on his side.  That story deserves a book of its own.

Ronald takes more time than necessary explaining Hitler’s rise to power before we actually see the “influencers” plying their filthy trade.  She also isn’t quite as evocative a writer as Lynne Olson, who’s written extensively about WWII and the lead-up to that war in books like Citizens of London, but she does keep her dark tale moving briskly in short chapters filled with often quirky details.  Like noting that one German émigré  had “irregular teeth, with one tooth on the upper left side of his mouth protruding to force his upper lip over the gum whenever he laughed or spoke emphatically.  At some point during the Nazi rule, he had the offending tooth capped in gold.”  

Make of that what you will, and welcome to a despicable rogue’s gallery of wealthy businessmen, quisling politicians, real and fake nobility and lots of very odd ducks.  Of course the notorious Duke and Duchess of Windsor make their appearance here though readers might prefer a whole book about the couple, Andrew Lownie’s recent Traitor King.

To her credit, Ronald can turn a phrase more often than not, as when she notes that the mass producer of cars, Henry Ford, also mass produced antisemitism via his newspaper and endless crazy pamphlets.

Whether malign, naive, power-hungry or ambitious in other ways, these reckless and ruthless people functioned as a kind of PR Third Column to aid Hitler’s regime and his war effort.  Hitler’s Aristocrats is a solid introduction to a sordid time.  And for readers who want a deep dive in Hitler and his Germany, I highly recommend the amazingly-detailed biography by Volker Ullrich.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations. He is an #SMPInfluencer.

A Death in Denmark

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Danish Gabriel Præst is not your typical PI.  He’s intellectual, dandyish, and upscale.  He quotes Kierkegaard and Sartre, wears designer clothes, loves fine wine and good whiskey (though he’s also a beer aficionado).  His high-end coffee maker likely costs several thousand dollars and he’s fastidious in other ways, too: he’s been working for a decade on remodeling a townhouse he inherited.  Latest DIY problem? Locating more hard-to-find 17th-century Spanish tiles to finish the bathroom that already has a wildly expensive antique French claw-foot tub.

Præst’s main clients are corporate law firms in Copenhagen, and his brief is corporate theft, embezzlement, industrial espionage, corporate corruption, insurance fraud and that old PI standby, adultery.  The man’s personal life is intriguing.  He has a woman journalist friend-with-benefits, gets along amicably with the mother of his daughter, really likes her new husband, and even rents space in the husband’s law firm building.

Unlike most crime fiction–whether screen or book–his daughter in this book is not troubled, difficult or any other cliché of the genre.  In fact, she’s “morally sound, smart, self-aware and courageous.”

The story begins when Præst has been asked by an ex-lover to investigate the case of a Muslim Dane convicted of killing a right-wing politician.  He accepts the case because he’s still under the spell of this ex-.  She’s “the one who got away.”

In a classic genre scene, he’s warned off the investigation by a tough advisor to the Danish prime minister himself.  Of course nothing will stop Præst and every step of his investigation seems to expose right-wing bigotry against Muslims living in Denmark even if they were born there.  As the investigation unfolds, we learn that the victim was secretly working on a book about Denmark’s time under German occupation that might reveal a less-than-heroic role for some important Danes.

The characters are vividly described, the translation from Danish feels smooth and the story is compelling, though readers might feel the author overdoes Præst’s foodie lifestyle since it feels like he’s eating or drinking on almost every page.  And  awareness of his “white privilege” is practically a flag he waves as if he has to prove some kind of point.  A careful editor might have suggested a lighter touch, and did he need to be beaten up so often–and shot too?

However, the author does a good job of leavening this mystery with humor. There’s a constant joke that everyone refers to the mother of Præst’s child as his “ex-wife” when they were never married and it frustrates them.  And some of the best parts of the book are Præst’s sarcastic observations about the difficult weather in Denmark and complaints about people lacking style.  Readers who don’t find the food references overdone may feel like they’ve been given a welcome tour of cool places to eat and drink in Copenhagen.  As well as a style guide for men who want to look like what one character calls “a southern Swedish metrosexual.”

Lev Raphael has reviewed crime fiction for The Detroit Free Press and is the author of the Nick Hoffman mystery series.

 

What Was Missed in the Frenzy About American Dirt

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A recent Persuasion opinion piece titled “Beware of Books” reminded me of the national uproar that was swirling around American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins before the pandemic. It aroused so much fury, it’s surprising that Congress didn’t launch an investigation, or that our 45th president didn’t try moving some Pentagon funds to build a wall around the book.

Its part-Hispanic author was pilloried far and wide for many things:  ignorance, stereotyping, shallowness, whitewashing, appropriation, trauma porn, inaccuracy and saviorism. What seemed to infuriate some of her detractors most was Oprah Book Clubism, making-a-lot-of-moneyism, and movie dealism.

How dare this literary imposter tread on sacred Mexican/Mexican-American ground when apparently only someone of that ethnicity could handle the subject matter? Didn’t she realize that her book must represent the entire rich reality of Mexican culture, not just some sordid aspects of it?

There’s apparently a Geneva Literary Convention stipulating restrictions like these that I must have missed while I was publishing and teaching over the last few decades. Some of the strongest protests attacked her for daring to make money, lots of money, when there are apparently so many more deserving Latinx authors who were being ignored by publishers and readers and should be doing better. What a selfish woman….  A seven-figure advance?  Outrageous! 

Cummins was even vilified for what she said in her Acknowledgments, which must be a first. In a slash-and-burn review loaded with relentless invective, writer Myriam Gurbo scored Cummins’ gratitude:  “In Dirt’s acknowledgements, Cummins announces her ignorance by thanking people for ‘patiently teaching me things about Mexico.’ She lists writers ‘you should read if you want to learn more about Mexico’ and lists a slew of authors.” I suppose the book’s type font was okay.

Memoirist Marcelo Hernandez Castillo even attributed super powers to the American Dirt author. As he put it, “The problem is the gross bastardization of the subject and the erasing of others who have written about this and are writing about it.”  Imagine one author doing all that with one best seller.

I’ve been a published author for a long time and guess what? The world of publishing is wildly unfair and complaints about who does well and who doesn’t reek of jealousy and childishness. Books have their own karma, and grousing about how a certain book hits a cultural sweet spot while others languish is a total waste of time. Likewise besieging an author because she happened to write a popular or noteworthy book at the right time.

Let’s not forget that before the dirt hit the fan, the book won extraordinary pre-publication praise from some major American authors who seemed to agree with the publisher’s claim that “it is one of the most important books for our times.”  Stephen King hailed it as “extraordinary: a perfect balancing act with terror on one side and love on the other. I defy anyone to read the first seven pages of this book and not finish it. The prose is immaculate, and the story never lets up.”

Ann Patchett opined that “American Dirt is both a moral compass and a riveting read. I couldn’t put it down. I’ll never stop thinking about it.”  Tracy Chevalier advised that the novel was “essential reading for our time.” Latina author Sandra Cisneros was adulatory: “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas. It’s the great world novel! This is the international story of our times…a masterful work of great spiritual power.”  John Grisham got very personal in his praise: “I strive to write page-turners because I love to read them, and it’s been a long time since I turned pages as fast as I did with American Dirt. Its plot is tight, smart, and unpredictable. Its message is important and timely…It is rich in authenticity.”

Well, all the sound and fury from the nay-sayers made me have to sample the book on Amazon, and I confess that I gave up at the end of the first chapter. The writing bugged me in various ways, partly because it seemed too sophisticated in describing what a kid was feeling. But what truly turned me off were the closing lines after a scene of major gunfire:

“Outside the window he hears Mama’s tentative footsteps, the soft scuff of her shoe through the remnants of something broken. A solitary gasp, too windy to be called a sob. Then a quickening of sound as she crosses the patio with purpose, depresses the keys on her phone.”

This is truly a hot mess. How does the kid know that the steps are tentative? What are the remnants of something broken? Is that poetic or a reference to objects of some kind? Bodies? Something else? And why would she be scuffing through them, why wouldn’t she avoid them? How can he possibly know that his mother is crossing “with purpose”? And finally, if he’s inside, how can he see her depressing the keys of her phone?  Is he some kind of superhero?

Sloppy point of view kills a book for me because I lose faith in the author’s ability to tell a story deftly and clearly. In the many years I reviewed books for the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post and half a dozen other newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, I learned to trust those warning signs. Maybe a novel like that gets better, but I’d rather not continue when a novel raises serious doubts in the very first chapter.  Sorry, Mr. King.

The uproar over Cummins’ so-called lack of authenticity and every other publishing sin she apparently committed drowned out possible complaints about the prose in American Dirt. And for that I blame the author’s use of the present tense which as a reviewer I’ve seen hypnotizes far too many readers and reviewers.  They seem to end up believing that the book they have in their hands is important and deep, perhaps even a cultural milestone.

Of course readers like those never got to hear this leaden prose in person because Cummins’ 40-stop book tour was cancelled. As quoted in the New York Times, the publisher cited the cancellation was due to “specific threats to booksellers and the author [and] we believe there exists real peril to their safety.”

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from mystery to memoir.

The New Agatha Christie Biography

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This engaging biography explores why and how Agatha Christie in effect lived a life of disguise: Despite her international fame and mammoth audience, she sought to be inconspicuous.  Not an easy task given that fans could come from as far away as Finland to try to meet her–and bang on her door!

When Christie was growing up, the ideal British woman and wife was like the one depicted in a revoltingly sentimental poem by Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House.”  This ideal figure was meant to be “devoted and submissive to her husband….passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all–pure.”

Christie was anything but passive, however, in both her marriages or when dealing with agents, publishers, and directors.  As a young woman she was funny and flirtatious despite being shy, a great dancer, loved to surf and seemed nothing like the grande dame we see in later publicity photos.  Through most of her adult life she was a “compulsive writer” despite self-deprecating remarks about her work as an author and she could turn out a fine mystery in six weeks when inspired.

If she were alive today, she might be a fan of makeover shows on HGTV because one of her great loves was buying a house, then remodeling and redecorating it.  At one point she actually owned eight homes.

The book devotes a great deal of time to Christie’s famous “disappearance” in 1926 when she seemed to be missing (and possibly dead) for almost two weeks.  Worsley does a fine job untangling what really happened amid of welter of possibilities, and is especially clear on how Christie’s image seemed to suffer at first when journalists and others suggested it was a publicity stunt.  That story gripped England and America, and readers might be surprised at how sexist some of the contemporary analysis of her reasons for going off the grid were.

Curiously, the author doesn’t tell us anything about Christie’s sales figures until almost midway through the book.  That’s especially puzzling for her early books.   Surely sales figures are a significant part of her story as a famously best-selling author who’s sold more books than anyone else in the world?  And how can we judge the success of her early books–or even later ones like Death on the Nile–without comparisons to books by her contemporaries?  Worsley also classes a number of Christie’s techniques as “tricks,” which seems a strange label.  There’s nothing unusual about novelists using real settings and real news stories in their books–it’s common practice.

Mystery fans can sometimes be ticked off that the genre they love is considered inferior  to Literature, but what struck me as revelatory was the sexism she face throughout her career. Christie was demeaned, diminished, and derogated not because of her genre but primarily because she was a woman.  Far too many critics couldn’t resist saying something sexist when they reviewed her books or plays. 

In An Elusive Woman, Christie has found a keen-eyed and witty biographer who honestly assesses her strengths and weaknesses, and makes a solid case for considering Christie one of the 20th Century’s most important writers.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations.  He recently reviewed a collection of Christie ghost stories and a volume of new Miss Marple stories.