Oxford

Review: Revenge is Best Served Boiling Hot

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★★★★

Meet wildly paranoid and sociopathic Jane Morgan. She’s a midlist author with a dismal career; an obnoxiously superior, unsupportive husband; and a deep wellspring of jealousy and rage.  Being half-Asian has always been a source of shame for her because her family is poor and she’s not slim, glamorous, and beautiful.  She thinks she deserves to be one of those Crazy Rich Asians.

She hates herself as “wildly mediocre,” hates that husband, her career, social media influencers, successful writers, and especially hates California where she grew up because it’s the worst place in the world for someone antisocial like her:

“It’s too loud, too sunny, too fucking friendly. Everyone gets revved up on kale smoothies and cocaine so I can’t even get a tub of hummus without the Trader Joe’s checkout lady grinning at me and calling me honey and asking me how I’m doing and what are my plans for the weekend?  Californians just can’t help themselves.  If I stayed there any longer I was bound to kill someone.”

Jane’s rancid, roiling sarcasm doesn’t simply cut with a razor throughout the book, it wields an axe–and that’s perversely entertaining in this dynamic thriller.

When Jane did her creative writing masters at Oxford University, she became obsessed with Thalia, a gorgeous, charismatic, and wealthy woman in the same program. Thalia seemed to like her, which astounded Jane. Their lives mesh in reality and fantasy as the book goes back in forth in time, taking readers deeper into Jane’s pathologies. 

Sutanto has a superb ear.  She’s given Jane a dazzling, dark, compelling, sometimes appalling/sometimes hilarious voice of a woman trapped inside her own head who hesitates at the simplest reply because she has to make sure that it sounds “normal.” After all, she thinks that her “thoughts are spiders waiting to leap from my tongue and poison everything they touch.”  And they’re worse than that since she often thinks of stabbing people just to shut them up.

She can also imagine walking through a museum “with a little razor, casually slicing apart priceless canvases” because “there’s just something about perfection that makes [her] want to defile it.”  Plain Jane is a ferocious savage inside.  Does Thalia tame her?

Some readers might find the multiple plot twists in the final chapters excessive.  All the same, Jane and Thalia’s story is a cunning exploration of hero worship, shame, internalized racism, and the splendors and miseries of female friendship. On top of everything else, it’s a sharp and knowing satire of publishing: “Anyone who thinks that publishing is a meritocracy is not in publishing.”

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

 

One Clique to Rule Them All…

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If you’ve ever wondered how someone as goofy as Boris Johnson got to be  prime minister of the UK, Chums by Simon Kuper is the book you need to read. Short, sharp and devastatingly insightful, it explains how a tiny clique of posh and semi-posh conservative aristocrats and wannabe aristos have ruled Britain on and off since 1945.

They almost uniformly attended Eton where they learned both public speaking and self-presentation as an art.  Charm, cutting wit and discoursing on subjects about which they were ignorant–and their privileged backgrounds–proved a gateway to Oxford.  Once there, they continued to be focused on style over substance.

Playing student politics in surprisingly byzantine ways prepared them for positions in Parliament and government (sometimes by way of journalism), positions which they believed they deserved.  After all, hadn’t their class historically been in charge of Great Britain?  More than one “chum” felt that entering Westminster was “coming home.”

Boris Johnson seems like the apotheosis of this trend, with his endless blather, his comic hesitations, and his “shambolic” hair:  a rumpled Bertie Wooster. Oxford was his dress rehearsal: In a setting that emphasized and rewarded eccentricity, he was glib, clever, entertaining, “an unthreatening funny man.”

Did he and his ilk stand for anything?  Power for themselves and a fantasy of Britain when it ruled he world or seemed to.

Brexit was something they cooked up as students and young men well before they actually had any power, and their well-documented deception and fakery around the vote to remain or stay in Europe have changed history.

For the Brexiteers, “Brexit was the grand cause [they] had lacked all their political careers.  It would give them a chance to live in interesting times, as their ancestors had.  It would raise the tediously low stakes of British politics.  It would be a glorious romantic act, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, only with less personal risk.”

Chums is a ruthless, penetrating, and very funny indictment of a tiny class of Britons who show no sign of letting go of power no matter how hapless or wrong their policies are.  They believed, in the words of author Anne Applebaum “that it was still possible for Britain to make the rules–whether the rules of trade, of economics, of foreign policy–if only their leaders would take the bull by the horns, take the bit between the teeth, if only they would just do it.”

The clichés are deliberate mockery of a caste that has done irreparable harm to Britain and its citizens.  While some of the names might be unfamiliar to American readers, the dynamics of contempt and wanton disregard for the public good while aiding the wealthy should feel very familiar. 

Listening to the latest Oxonian PM, Liz Truss, try to explain her new economic moves that have sent shock waves through the UK and beyond, I’m reminded of lines from The Maltese Falcon.  Humphrey Bogart asks Mary Astor “Was there any truth at all in that yarn?”  Her reply:  “Some…  Not very much.”

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report and several public radio stations in Michigan.