31 October, 2001: Some Deaths Before Dying
One of Peter Dickinson's great strengths as a writer is his ability to offhandedly create entirely fictional details that don't seem fictional at all. One of his mysteries, Sleep and His Brother, lays out an perfectly plausible childhood medical syndrome upon which the plot rests; another, The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest deals with African tribesmen living with an anthropologist in England. It's a shame that this talent is wasted in Some Deaths Before Dying. The premise is rather intriguing -- an elderly, bed-ridden British woman sees an antique gun (one of a set of dueling pistols her late husband owned, which she believed to have been safely stowed away decades ago) on "Antique Roadshow" and begins leafing through her numerous photo albums and reconstructing its history and that of her husband. But none of the revelations are particularly surprising, and Dickinson's invention could have been done away with, as it is (for all intents and purposes) the Bataan Death March. Further, while I'm not necessarily familiar with the milieu of homes for convalescent children and I cannot be familiar with a fictional tribe, fiction and movies have made me more than familiar with upper-class British life in the '40s and '50s. A pleasant timewaster of a book from an author who usually does much better.
9:56 pm 
29 October, 2001: The Baron in the Trees
I don't know what it is about Italo Calvino, but I've never read one of his books that hasn't just plain made me happy. The Baron in the Trees is a romp -- an Italian nobleman in the late eighteenth century takes to the trees as a boy (in a fit of pique, and to avoid being punished for not finishing his dinner) and simply never comes down, while the events of the century swirl around him. He becomes a freethinker, corresponds with Rosseau, meets Napoleon, joins the Freemasons, fights with Jesuits (who were, at the time, suppressed by papal decree), finds then loses (then finds again, then loses again) love, all without ever descending to the ground. Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler were experiments in storytelling in which Calvino avoided simply telling a story. The Baron in the Trees isn't an experiment or a meditation on the nature of storytelling. It's just a delightful, happy-making bonbon of a story.
11:21 pm
18 October, 2001: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
When I read a translation, I'm never quite sure how much to credit to the author. Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man has parts that are wildly funny, but most of the humor comes not from the dialogue or the situation but from the voice Mann gives to the young hustler, Felix. Felix has limited education (and, quite possibly, not so much upstairs), but boundless confidence, vanity, and self-satisfaction. Every paragraph drips with Felix's unearned sense of worth. But how much of this is Mann and how much is the translator, Denver Lindley? I have no idea, having never read any other Mann (I read this only because my father once mentioned enjoying The Magic Mountain and because I confused it with Melville's The Confidence-Man, which my college roommate spoke highly of). It just be cheap humor from a piece in a wicked piece of parody (Mann begun Felix Krull in the early years of the century and returned to it decades later, in 1954). I don't know, and given what I've heard about Mann's other work, I'm not sure that anything else he wrote is like this. But what it's good to see that a dour German (and a Nobel Prize winner, no less) cold occasionally cut loose with tremendously funny prose.
10:50 pm
9 October, 2001: The Long Lavender Look
The formula of the Travis McGee books -- one of his friends or acquaintances has been somehow fleeced, often ending up dead in the process, and Travis sets out to serve justice -- didn't stand up well to tampering. In The Long Lavender Look, events (being arrested for murder, for starters) sweep Travis along. Without the central premise of Travis as the outside enforcer, brought in to settle a score, the delicate balance of McDonald's writing seems slightly off. The idea that McGee is, to use the frequently repeated phrase, a "knight errant" in tarnished armor, doesn't seem quite right when he is reacting rather than acting (and when he lacks the not-entirely restrained avarice and lust that gets him involved in most of the books). McGee books are always worth it for the musings on a rapdily suburbanizing Florida or the mid-Seventies remnants of the counterculture, but The Long Lavender Look (like another McGee book that messes with the formula, The Green Ripper) is probably for enthusiasts only.
9:20 pm
2 October, 2001: Valediction
Validiction may represent the absolute peak of the Spenser series. Susan Silverman gets her doctorate and departs for California and another man, leaving the painfully autonomous Spenser struggling with another's absence for the first time in his adult life. It becomes rapidly apparent that he's no longer cut off for the single's life; without the person who's become his anchor of sanity, he's miserable and angry, and it makes him oh so sloppy. (I have to wonder how many of the recurring characters in the Spenser series were originally planned as such. The cops Quirk and Belson, Hawk the leg-breaker, yes. But Susan? Henry Cimoli, who owns the gym where Spenser trains? And they're good characters, even if they've become as ritualized as ones in Noh drama.) One of the knocks on Parker's series is that Spenser gets smugger and smugger as the series goes on, but in Valediction, he's unfocused and hurt. People die because he's wrapped up in himself and not paying attention. For this one book, Spenser remains a wise-ass, but he's certainly not smug.
11:01 pm