Tag Archives: book review

Book Review: A History of Loneliness

This review was originally published on 27 February 2015 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Very early in John Boyne’s latest novel, A History of Loneliness, we are given the measure of Father Odran Yates, and it is the man himself who reveals it. His second sentence to us is, “I might start with the evening I showed up at my sister’s home for dinner and she had no recollection of issuing the invitation; I believe that was the night when she first showed signs of losing her mind.”

He describes going to Hannah’s house for dinner almost a year since last being there after her husband Kristian died at only 42. It is just Hannah and her shy, awkward 16-year-old son Jonas there; the angry, older son Aidan has moved to London.

Odran describes the painful evening and how his beloved younger sister moves back and forth between lucidity and confused non sequiturs. And even as Jonas catches him on his way out and tries to articulate his concerns for his mother — during the same instance that Odran has asked whether everything is alright and says he and Jonas should talk more — we see Odran escaping out the door, cutting Jonas off and refusing to acknowledge that anything is amiss: “But I didn’t let him continue…I felt the guilt of it but could do nothing.”

If, at this point, readers are thinking, “How could you?” then they should get used to thinking that consistently throughout this story, with growing urgency and disbelief.

Odran is a middle-aged Irish priest working in a private school for privileged boys, teaching English, celebrating daily Mass, and keeping the library organized. He’s held this position since his ordination in Rome 27 years before, and he is safe and happy here. Not everyone has felt the same, though, because, as it turns out, one of the school’s teachers has recently been sentenced to six years in prison for sexual abuse of minors.

We learn this fact when Odran is summoned to a meeting with his archbishop, which he fears may be an interrogation about what he knew or suspected. Instead, it turns out to be something much worse: The archbishop is yanking him from his cloistered existence and reassigning him to a parish for the first time in his clerical career. The move is at the suggestion of Tom Cardle, the priest whose parish Odran will be taking over.

The reader spends most of the novel understanding far more of what’s going on than Odran, who, like a deliberate Forrest Gump, skates over the surface of his life, innocent and unaware, assiduously avoiding having to put two and two together. In choosing willful ignorance, Odran churns up a wake of pain and devastation, which cuts through his own family, while he plows along, unseeing.

For Boyne, Odran represents an entire denying populace. A History of Loneliness is a horrifying tale primarily for its truth, but it’s at its weakest when Boyne cannot find a way to channel his anger and vents it directly onto the page.

Archbishop Cordington — later made cardinal as a reward from “the Polish pope” for many years of service — embodies all of the brutal inhumanity of the Catholic bureaucracy, and therefore his character is a ridiculous caricature. The back-and-forth arguments and diatribes later in the book seem gratuitous and unnecessary; nothing will convince the church’s protectors that they were wrong, but for the rest of us, Boyne is preaching to the choir.

Odran tells us that he and Tom are best friends, but we never see what bonds them beyond proximity and time, and perhaps that is truly all that is there, and it is Odran who mistakenly equates time with closeness.

Certainly nothing recommends Tom to the reader. No matter how damaged we understand Tom to be — and we are sure to understand far more than Odran does — he is never a particularly sympathetic character. Thus, it seems odd when, later in the story after the extent of the abuse has been revealed, Odran denies knowing Tom three times in a row when he is called out in a hostile public situation, even though he has known Tom since their first day together in seminary.

Boyne uses the same device in The Absolutist, but the Christ/Peter analogy is far more apt in that story. Here, it’s a true head-scratcher as to what he wants the reader to think of his likening an unrepentant serial pedophile to Christ.

Through Odran, Boyne displays real affection for the newly elected Pope John Paul I, whose willingness to question Vatican finances and other apparent church corruption made him dangerous. When we finally learn what failure Odran committed the night the pope died, we are stunned by Boyne’s implication about historical events. Even after this, Boyne’s narrator, in true Odran fashion, retreats into self-absorbed obtuseness, noting that the events result in a black mark against him, effectively eliminating any hope of advancement in the church.

Odran isn’t despicable, and we are pressed to question how well we would do in his stead. In some ways, especially later in the book, I found myself thinking that Boyne might have done better developing a nonfiction treatise on inherent church corruption, and the protectionist attitude that has damaged the institution and all the people the institution betrayed. In particular, he highlights the endemic misogyny of the church to raise a thought that perhaps there’s a connection from that to its rampant pedophilia and tolerance of it.

Finally, Boyne argues that Ireland is particularly vulnerable to this type of abuse because it is so thoroughly Catholic. Indeed, it’s hard to find a parallel example: Italy, in comparison, may love the pope, but only about 10 percent of the population attends Mass. A History of Loneliness highlights the dangers of allowing one institution to wield that much power over a society. Even today, Boyne reminds us, the church runs 90 percent of the schools. It’s a chilling thought.

In Praise of Nuance

Leave a reply

Are you one of those people who finds it impossible to look up a single word in the dictionary? I am. For me, opening a dictionary is a shiny-pebble adventure in which my eyes constantly race ahead of my lumbering brain—“Ooh, look at this one! Oh, and this!”—and it is the rare occasion that I don’t have to squint mentally to recall the word I was originally searching for. Though the impulse is sometimes aggravating, typically because I don’t have time just to sit and read the dictionary, there is still something wonderful in aimlessly splashing about in a sea of words.

Now let’s take a moment to consider how adorably quaint the preceding paragraph must appear to perhaps the majority of readers who are, after all, reading an online blog. “A dictionary. Really?” Yes, I’m describing the physical act of pulling a book from a shelf, using the helpful thumb tabs to orient myself somewhat close to my objective—the better to limit that inevitable distraction—and then using a finger to navigate through the inviting sea to the intended destination. “Oh, great,” I can hear some of you thinking, “you’re going to be one of those.”

No, I promise I am not here to rail against technology or bemoan the loss of whichever things it’s normal these days to bemoan the loss of. (Perhaps the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, which I’ve done twice now. Or using sentence fragments, also twice.) For example, I am without question a lover of physical books, reading for me having a tactile dimension that adds to the joy of the experience, but I applaud the advent of the tablet. Anything that encourages people to read more is aces in my estimation, and let’s face it, how else can you really read while brushing your teeth or drying your hair?

Okay, so if I’m not railing or bemoaning, what am I doing? I am praising. I am praising nuance, the subtle shades of meaning, hint, implication, freight, and history that words carry, that make them unique and therefore necessary, that allow each one the opportunity at a given time and place to be exactly the right word. I am not suggesting that there is something nefarious going on just now that is draining nuance out of language; complaints of that sort have been around since folks were working in cuneiform. Instead, I’m suggesting that it is worth the effort, that there is reward to both the writer and the reader, for the writer to know what she means to say, and to find just the right way to say it so that the reader knows exactly what she means, too.

I’m currently reading Steven Pinker’s wonderfully useful and thought-provoking book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. (And now you’re laughing doubly hard at the concept of my reading a style guide, as though the dictionary were not bad enough.) Pinker doesn’t have much use for the pinched and brittle self-appointed guardians of the language who approach the world with a red pen and a humorless inflexibility toward applying rules, many of which he shows to be misguided, contradictory, and typically not absolute. He shows rather than insists to his readers why one approach communicates better than another in a given context, based on how both our brains and English syntax work. I appreciate his measured, fact-based but still humorous approach to a subject too often addressed in overheated, bug-eyed invective about how wrong everyone else is.

I understand that impulse, of course; people who love language have trouble not getting their collective backs up at what seems like willful ignorance or just plain laziness in its general handling. My personal hot button is usage. Much as I love dictionaries, it’s worth remembering that dictionaries offer common usage, not necessarily proper usage. Word meanings are crowd-sourced, and the crowd isn’t necessarily all that concerned about what might seem too-nice distinctions among different words—that is, in the nuance. This is hardly a modern phenomenon: open the Oxford English Dictionary to any given word with a long history and you can trace the evolution of its meaning. Hence, common usage becomes accepted usage, which eventually becomes proper usage. The only difference these days is that the interconnected crowd works faster now and meanings can shift more quickly.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that Steven Pinker is fine with the use of anxious to mean eager, one example he uses in his discussion of word usage that people should stop fretting over. For me, it’s impossible to separate anxious from its obvious root in anxiety, which has little to do with eagerness. So while I understand that the use of one for the other is common, I’m pretty certain the careful reader feels how the substitution changes the tone and sense of a scene, and the careful writer makes a specific choice based on the tone and sense he means to convey. That’s the nuance I come to praise. And I know Pinker gets it, too. I’m right there with him when he says, “Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures.” Amen, brother.

Book Review: The Stone Wife

Leave a reply

This review was originally published on 3 December 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

What do a cliché-spouting Korean pop star, a love-struck weapons dealer, a brutally vengeful land developer, a haughty-but-position-hungry professor, and a 700-year-old carving of a large woman on a small horse have in common?

They all figure prominently in Peter Lovesey’s The Stone Wife, the 14th installment of his Peter Diamond Investigation series, a dependably popular set of British crime procedurals that debuted in 1991. Lovesey is a prolific crime writer with more than 30 novels and short-story collections to his credit; of his several historical and contemporary series, Diamond is his longest running.

Peter Diamond and his stalwart team of detectives are based in Bath, England. The locale offers a nice selection of plot devices, since the city is on a far more intimate scale than London but still world-renowned, cosmopolitan, and steeped in history. Because each Diamond book stands on its own, a reader new to the series can probably plug in anywhere along the way, though the central characters collect backstory as the series progresses.

All the standard types are here: the gruff and damaged team leader (is there no other way to lend gravitas to all these world-weary cops than to have their loved ones die brutally?); the steady second in command; the ambitious token woman; the irritating know-it-all; the naïve newbie struggling to find his place on the team; and the bureaucratic and political pest of a chief. While not cardboard, none of them are fully realized characters.

The most enjoyable element of a Diamond investigation is not necessarily discovering whodunit — because, frankly, the investigative components are not all that satisfying — but learning which arcane subject we will plunge into during the course of solving the mystery. In installment 13, The Tooth Tattoo, it was the inner workings of a classical music quartet. Here, the subject is Chaucer scholarship. The stone wife of the title refers to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, a bit of a local, if aged, celebrity.

In this story, she is carved astride her horse into a hefty block of stone. The coveting of the stone carving, which has a provenance that not only makes it a contemporary of Chaucer’s, but hints that it may have graced a house in which he once lived, drives the action of the story.

If that sounds just a tad too dry, Lovesey does keep the action bouncing along. The murder occurs just a few pages in, at the height of a hard-fought auction of the stone, which is interrupted by its attempted heist. The victim is a Chaucer scholar obsessed with possessing this particular Wife of Bath. He’s so horrified that someone is trying to make off with her that he charges at the thieves, and one of them shoots him.

Heist gone wrong or cleverly planned murder?

The story is peppered with an interesting cast of witnesses and suspects, and includes a dicey undercover stint for Ingeborg, the team’s blonde former investigative journalist who taps her old contacts to get close to the suspected supplier of the murder weapon. She does so by approaching the young Korean pop star under the guise of a journalist wanting to do a day-in-the-life profile of her and her bankrolling sugar daddy, the weapons dealer.

One fascinating point of cultural division: For an American reader, it’s hard to comprehend the team’s single-mindedness in attempting to track down the supplier of the murder weapon, a 50-year-old revolver, or the fact that apparently there is really only one person worth considering as its source. Even more incomprehensible is that the dealer is less a gun seller than a gun renter; guns are so scarce and valuable that criminals return them after use. It seems almost quaint by U.S. standards.

I’ll admit that I’ve only read a few of the later Diamond books, but I wonder if the series isn’t suffering from its longevity. If all the superfluous detective work in The Stone Wife were removed, we’d be left with a not-very-compelling short story. Lovesey fails to sell several plot points, one late in the story involving the weapons dealer that is so inorganic and unresolved that it almost feels as though the author must be planning to carry it forward into Installment 15, except that the stories don’t intertwine that way.

Finally, the willingness of Lovesey’s perpetrators to confess, and the speed with which they do so — of course, over the objections of their solicitor — is worthy of nothing so much as a “CSI: Miami” episode.

Perhaps that’s what these books are: the literary equivalent of an “NCIS” or “Bones” season finale. Both are entertaining and easy to digest, but it’s best not to think about them too hard or ask too many questions.

Book Review: The Dog: A Novel

Leave a reply

This review was originally published 20 November 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Living in a swanky waterfront highrise, cruising in a sweet ride, pulling in big bucks from a cushy (if mind-numbing) job, rubbing elbows with the mega-rich: not hard to take, you say? Then you haven’t read The Dog: A Novel, Joseph O’Neill’s long-awaited follow-up to Netherland. Unfortunately for fans of the lovely, restrained, and insightful writing of O’Neill’s previous novel, The Dog is disappointingly unlovable: a painful, sometimes painfully funny, tortured treatise on the everyday horrors and miseries of modern life, written with such lack of restraint that it feels almost like an endurance test. Do you have what it takes? Are you tough enough to finish this novel? Perhaps that really is what O’Neill is striving for in this cautionary tale that illustrates no matter how bad things are at any given moment, they can always get exponentially worse.

When we meet our almost-nameless hero, X, previously a midlevel corporate attorney, he is several years into living with the aftermath of an imploded long-term relationship; whoever he once was, which perhaps wasn’t all that much to begin with, appears to be permanently unrecoverable. He’s paying dearly, and on many levels, for the crime of having stayed too long and too quietly in a lopsided and suffocating situation, but one that didn’t present a compelling reason to leave until it was just that much too late.

It’s a testament to how bad things are made for him stateside — his bank account drained, his professional reputation in tatters, and his personal Google results sabotaged through “a fiendish new form of defamatory publishing that one might term ‘search libel’” — that X is willing to take a job offer after a chance meeting with an old college chum, Eddie, to be the “family officer” of Eddie’s ultra-rich Lebanese family in Dubai. This even after he is stood up for his surprise interview with Eddie’s irrational brother Sandro in an epic and expensive way.

In this case, “family officer” translates as well-paid errand boy, janitor, and baby sitter, the rubber-stamping drudge whose signature is required on byzantine and highly suspect financial dealings. We see almost immediately how badly this is working out, as X composes mental emails to the two Batros brothers that he knows he will never send. They are pointless; no one listens to him.

So, yes, X works for the Batros family and, yes, we end up meeting Alain, the “Al” in the family — Get it? Al Batros. Albatross. — Sandro’s sullen, obese, badly parented 15-year-old son who portends ill for X.

More than anything, X — who offers that he is the dog, always living in the doghouse — wants simply to be acknowledged as “your presumably decent human being presumably doing a pretty decent job of doing his best to do the right thing in what is, however you look at it, a difficult world.” He expends significant effort attempting to be considerate of others, especially the less fortunate, offering a 10-point treatise (with subclauses) to outline his position on providing charitable donations to help out the foreign workers who toil in near-slavery in the United Arab Emirates, and taking pains to ensure that the women he pays for sex are not victims of trafficking or coercion.

His only comforts in an otherwise intolerable existence are sex with those women, of whom he only requires that they be nice to him; occasional pedicures provided by his diving buddy Ollie; and the use of a state-of-the-art massage chair. He defends his ownership of this chair by saying, “It’s not as if it’s stuffed with miniscule underlings coerced into massaging me.”

If all this screams “first-world problems,” it’s still hard to watch X “dreading the empty and shameful hours and days and weeks and years ahead.” Everyone deserves to be the hero of his own life, but X understands that he has washed out of his: not a has-been, but a never-was.

It is tough to understand what O’Neill is going for in the approach he takes in the novel, making his readers work very hard in puzzling ways. The voice is markedly inconsistent. Sometimes, the story comes almost as one long aside, as though X might be offering all this to some guy he met in a bar, and it is stuffed with pages-long, multi-nested, parenthetical digressions. It’s a gimmicky and aggravating device, with O’Neill insisting you notice how many asides he can nest inside the next and then close them all at once. (The answer is six.)

Then, in huge stretches, X launches into disquisitions on a stunning array of topics, usually in protracted and impenetrable pseudo-legalese. O’Neill dares his readers to slog through it, to read it all. The effect is alienating — perhaps intentionally so, but it’s a perilous tactic.

At times, the prose is engaging, though, and some of the more pithy observations are spot-on. O’Neill adds a new collective noun to the vernacular: “a sadness of masturbators,” for the group of men awaiting their turn with the plastic cup and bad porn in a fertility clinic jerk-off room. He treats with disdain the people who keep score of others’ lives, and notes, “The uncharitable observer — is there another kind?”

As the book nears its close, the reader who has made it this far wonders with increasing urgency how the tale will end, since it does not appear to be working its way toward resolution. O’Neill keeps us anxious to the very last. In a story like this, “happy” is far too much to expect, but the fact that X finally makes one decision for himself is perhaps the closest we can hope to get.