The Piker and the Long Story

Viewing, by Sand Pilarski

Many thanks to The Piker Press, and editor Sand Pilarski, for running my long story “End of the Ride” in four installments, beginning today. Linc, the story’s protagonist, attends the funeral of his scapegrace cousin, Wayne Shit-for-Brains, and tries to behave properly though he feels not a smidgen of sorrow at Wayne’s demise. Throughout the day—and this is the crux of the story—he tries to suppress his memory of a shameful escapade with Wayne when they were teenagers.

Sand herself created the accompanying illustration, and I think it expresses Linc’s conflictedness. Though he’s trying to appear nonchalant, you can see the stiffness and resistance in his posture.

Compared to print outlets, web magazines have an obvious cost advantage in publishing long stories, but most still prefer short pieces. Kudos to the few, like The Piker Press, that will give space to the long form. Serialization is one answer to the public’s supposed unwillingness to read long pieces online. Next Monday, after the latest episode of Downton Abbey on PBS, come back for more on The Piker Press.

Delicate Sensationalism

In my disorganized reading of found books—volumes that turn up in the house with no invitation on my part, usually left behind by my wife, daughter, or a friend—the most recent was Black Dogs, a 1992 short novel by Ian McEwan, a writer I admire but can imbibe only in small doses. As is typical of McEwan, the story is unconventional, a bit weird, unpredictable. It’s a good read. Yet it indulges in a technique that my purist side deplores.

When pop novelists use bodice-ripping and gruesome slayings to spice up a plot, serious critics can dismiss the effort as mere sensationalism. But what happens when a top-notch literary writer employs similar elements, in a much more skillful way, and presumably to a higher purpose?

In Black Dogs—SPOILER ALERT, if anyone who hasn’t read this 20-year-old novel still plans to—the narrator, Jeremy, is writing a memoir about his in-laws, June and Bernard. The two have long been estranged, in part because of a transforming experience in 1946, on their honeymoon, when June encountered two large dogs in the French countryside. The animals provoked a revelation about good and evil that propelled her into decades of spiritual exploration, at odds with Bernard’s involvement in politics. Tantalizingly, throughout the novel, the author merely alludes to the key event. The explanation arrives in the last chapter with a vivid description of June’s being cornered on a lonely mountain path by feral dogs “of an unnatural size,” as big as donkeys:

she saw them as a juddering accumulation of disjointed details: the alien black gums, slack black lips rimmed by salt, a thread of saliva breaking, the fissures on a tongue that ran to smoothness along its curling edge, a yellow-red eye and eyeball muck spiking the fur, open sores on a foreleg, and, trapped in the V of an open mouth, deep in the hinge of the jaw, a little foam, to which her gaze kept returning. The dogs had brought with them their own cloud of flies. Some of them now defected to her.

The beasts slink forward to attack; June fights them off with rocks, a penknife, a rucksack and a distracting sausage.

But that’s not the real climax.

Later, in the inn where the newlyweds are staying, the proprietress and the mayor explain the dogs’ origin. During the war, the canines were brought to the region by the Nazi Gestapo to terrify the populace, which had supported the Resistance. Left behind when the Germans fled, the dogs have been living off the sheep.

Against the wishes of Mme. Auriac, the innkeeper, the mayor then proceeds with the story of a young woman, Danielle Bertrand, who had moved to the village during the war. She turned up at this very inn one day bleeding and gibbering, with her clothes torn.

Mme. Auriac said quickly, ‘She had been raped by the Gestapo. Excuse me, madame,’ and she placed her hand on June’s.

‘That was what we all thought,” the Maire said.

Mme. Auriac raised her voice. ‘And that was correct.’

‘It’s not what we discovered later. Pierre and Henri Sauvy—’

‘Drunks!’

‘They saw it happen. Excuse me, madame’—to June—‘but they tied Danielle Bertrand over a chair.’

Mme. Auriac slapped the table hard. ‘Hector, I’m saying this to you now. I will not have this story told here.’

But Hector addressed himself to Bernard. ‘It wasn’t the Gestapo who raped her. They used—’

Mme. Auriac was on her feet. ‘You will leave my table now, and never eat or drink here again!’

Hector hesitated, then he shrugged, and he was halfway out of his chair when June asked, ‘They used what? What are you talking about, monsieur?’

The Maire, who had been so anxious to deliver his story, dithered over this direct question. ‘It’s necessary to understand, madame.… The Sauvy brothers saw this with their own eyes, through the window … and we heard later that this also used to happen at the interrogation centers in Lyon and Paris. The truth is, an animal can be trained—’

At last Mme. Auriac exploded.

Though the proprietress goes on to accuse the mayor and his cronies of spreading vicious rumors, the lurid secret is out. The tale is told ever so delicately, with many hesitations by the characters themselves, the culminating words never actually spoken … but it’s sensational nonetheless, and in this moment the titular black dogs acquire their full load of symbolism for June and for the reader.

And at this point in the book, a dozen pages from the end, I was annoyed at McEwan.

Not that I mind hearing about monstrous things in fiction. But there’s a tawdriness in this teasing and titillating of the reader to build toward a revelation of appalling sexual torture. It doesn’t matter how fine the prose—which indeed is brilliant—and it doesn’t matter whether rape by trained dogs was in fact a Nazi method. Nor does the symbolic intention justify this device. The author is playing with the reader’s ability (and willingness) to be shocked, and in my snooty opinion that’s a low-class trick unworthy of the best fiction.

All right, I admit it: in literary terms, I’m a prig.

Now I’ll move on to the next found book, which an unidentified person just slipped through our mail slot: the peculiarly appropriate Dogs for Dummies—a donation inspired, no doubt, by our new terrorist puppy.

Precious Nonsense

A couple of years ago, the University of California at Berkeley employed its marketing sleuths to track me down. Not that they have any idea who I am, but they get the fundraiser’s frisson of delight whenever they can tag someone by mail or phone. Recently they’ve shared their data with the English Department, which now sends me a glossy departmental newsletter for “alumni and friends.” The current issue celebrates Kent Puckett for winning the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and in a separate article boasts that department members have won the award as often as the “second and third most awarded departments … combined.”

I would like to think that the person who wrote and/or edited the phrase “most awarded departments” was not one of our graduates. However, the article got me thinking about the incidents I remember from the English faculty’s pedagogy. I recall Stephen Booth spending long moments chewing his fingernails and gazing out the window while formulating the perfect question for his freshman composition class. His skills earned him the teaching award in 1982, or perhaps the university decided to save his fingernails. Another fond memory is of Stanley Fish challenging his entire Milton seminar to a basketball game with him and his friend Booth. Those who know the height differential will chuckle to imagine Fish and Booth together on the hardwood. Our seminar members, though, were far too cognizant of Fish’s personality to take up the invitation; hell, he was aggressive enough around a seminar table—who’d want to try to stop him on a drive?

My best story from that time, though, concerns the final exam that Booth gave to his struggling, straggling frosh writers. His highly individualistic syllabus that year had included, among other motley items, several New Yorker essays by A. J. Liebling, Thoreau’s Walden, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. (Since then, I don’t think I’ve met any nonacademic who has ever read any portion of Carlyle, much less a complete book.) Our final exam—probably administered only because an exam was required—consisted of two questions. One item presented the entire text of the Gettysburg Address (less than 300 words) and asked why it was a great speech. Many scholars have studied the Address—including Booth himself, in his book Precious Nonsense—but to 18-year-old undergraduates (actually, I was 17, with the astonished mind of an 8-year-old) the question was flummoxing. We had not studied Lincoln in class; we had not discussed oral rhetoric. Most of us had little notion of the historical context. How to begin an answer? If the famous G.A. was indeed a great address, we hardly knew that.

The exam’s second question was worse. It consisted of a passage by Thoreau describing the experience of reading Carlyle. Though I can’t be certain, I think it must have been this paragraph from “Thomas Carlyle and His Works”:

Such a style — so diversified and variegated! It is like the face of a country; it is like a New England landscape, with farmhouses and villages, and cultivated spots, and belts of forests and blueberry swamps round about, with the fragrance of shad-blossoms and violets on certain winds. And as for the reading of it, it is novel enough to the reader who has used only the diligence, and old line mail-coach. It is like traveling, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a gig tandem; sometimes in a full coach, over highways, mended and unmended, for which you will prosecute the town; on level roads, through French departments, by Simplon roads over the Alps; and now and then he hauls up for a relay, and yokes in an unbroken colt of a Pegasus for a leader, driving off by cart-paths, and across lots, by corduroy roads and gridiron bridges; and where the bridges are gone, not even a string-piece left, and the reader has to set his breast and swim. You have got an expert driver this time, who has driven ten thousand miles, and was never known to upset; can drive six in hand on the edge of a precipice, and touch the leaders anywhere with his snapper.

The task was to explain how this passage reflected the styles of both Thoreau and Carlyle.

OK, one might think, Carlyle is indeed varied, unpredictable, sometimes difficult, emphatic and lyrical by turns, with odd broken rhythms; Thoreau of course is highly metaphorical, a guy who would rather take you on a jolting ride through an alpine mountain pass than tell you straight out what he means. That’s not very deep; what else can you say?

For this exam you have three hours to scribble in your blue book (literally blue, purchased for this express purpose from the college bookstore). Your output should reflect intense thought and careful writing, all that you have learned in the course. Are you getting nervous? Have you bitten through your ballpoint yet?

Man, I was terrified, and I left the room knowing I’d failed. Till then, to my surprise, I’d managed an A in the class, and now I had to hope for an overall C at best.

At that time, the system for discovering your final grades was simple and highly impersonal. Along with your blue book, you handed in a self-addressed postcard with two lines on it for your grades:

Grade in Course: ______
Grade on Final Exam: ______

Some week or ten days later, the news would arrive in the mail. A highly expressive instructor might write one or two extra words on the card in addition to the two all-important letters.

So I waited. The cards came from other courses: success! But from Professor Booth? I imagined him mauling his nails as he contemplated the collection of precious nonsense that 25 pimpled idiots could write in three hours. From my current perspective, I wonder how any instructor can bear to read three hours of drivel from a single freshman.

The card arrived. At this point I don’t remember whether any of my roommates saw it first; if they did, that surely increased my embarrassment. Slowly I inverted the post-office-smudged rectangle to reveal the back. It read:

Grade in Course:      A      
Grade on Final Exam:  Forget it!

That’s when I knew I led a charmed life.

After all these years, thank you, Professor Booth.

Keeping Up with the Ancestors

In keeping with the holiday tradition of honoring ancestors, even those long forgotten, this item from the 12/9/11 edition of the Gridley Herald (published in Gridley, CA) caught my eye:

75 Years Ago (1936)

Following complaint by W.P. Smith of Live Oak of violations of the State wage act, Sam Gridley, local grower, appeared in the Live Oak Justice Court yesterday settled his account with Smith in full and paid a $15 fine.

Though I’m not aware of any Gridley relatives in that part of California (near Yuba City), I’m happy that my namesake was brought to justice. If he has any remaining debts, I disown them and him. I swear that the only field hand I employ is my wife, who makes the garden grow and always exacts a fair wage from me for the basil and parsley she produces. Peace and good will to all.

Blogging in Kenya

Kisumu, Kenya (from Wikipedia)

For those who aren’t yet following Busara Blog, David Sanders’s ongoing account of his return to a Quaker mission in Kenya (where he is both researching a novel and exploring his childhood memories), be sure to check out his latest post. “The News from Kenya, Part Two” is a highly colorful description of a part of the world that few outsiders are unlikely to encounter. And he proves that, no matter where you live, home renovation is excruciating.

Historical Delvings

When I was an English major, way back before Garrison Keillor started making fun of our tribe, historical fiction was considered minor-league, pop-culture fare, beneath the notice of highbrows in my high-class department. It was OK for Homer, Crane and Tolstoy to set tales in the past—those Great Writers were already in the canon—but in Vietnam-era USA it was incumbent on serious artists to confront the muck and mire of the present day.

Having long left academia behind, I don’t know exactly when that view began to change, but it must now be as archaic as Papa Hemingway’s bullfighters. Doctorow, Eco, Mantel and many others have impressed the critics with fiction set far back from the present time, and today’s readers, whatever their literary pretensions, seem more fascinated with Anne Boleyn’s head than with any contemporary character’s heart.

Cultural anthropologists may want to speculate about why so much modern fiction has taken flight from the modern. Or maybe it’s obvious.

Personally I enjoy good historical novels and always have, even when under the thrall of my snooty English department. Recently I’ve read a couple of fine ones: The Confession of Jack Straw by Simone Zelitch (Black Heron Press, 1991) and The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead by Paul Elwork (Putnam, 2011; an expanded version of The Tea House, published by Casperian Books in 2007).

Zelitch recreates the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when tens of thousands of English folk marched on London to protest an onerous tax (a flat tax—Republicans take note!), a low cap on wages, and other legal shenanigans by which the rich exploited the poor. Professing loyalty to fourteen-year-old King Richard II, the rebels wanted to rid the country of his handlers and advisers, whom they took to be corrupt usurpers of power. Chants of the now-famous rhyme,

When Adam Delved and Eve Span
Who was then the Gentleman?

fostered an idealistic hope that class distinctions might be ameliorated—kind of like our yearning that Wall Street float back down toward Main Street, someday, somehow.

The rebels managed to dispatch several of the supposed usurpers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, and they torched John of Gaunt’s great Savoy Palace; yet they were eventually betrayed by the teenage king himself. Peasant leaders John Ball, Jack Straw and Wat Tyler were all apparently killed or executed. Straw, the most mythical of the three, was said to have left a “confession,” reproduced in the chronicles of Thomas Walsingham; this dubious document may have been wholly invented—for, as we know all too well, it’s the victors who write the history books.

Zelitch imagines for us the true, undistorted confession of Jack Straw, as dictated to his captors. Her Jack is a conflicted and dynamic figure, compelled to betray either his mentor, the half-crazed preacher John Ball, or his own crippled sister, who needs him back home. Poetic and earnest, full of folk tales and country ale, Jack is a sensuous man who drinks in both the beauty and the stench of his surroundings:

The sun rose to our backs, and we reached Maidstone by late morning. The whole town filled the square to greet us. We had to stop if only to push through the hundred who bore baskets and banners. Two women bore a proud new standard, Adam delving, Eve with spindle. Kate Tyler stood among them, some ways off, and she swung a basket full to overflowing, warm with bread and sour with cheese. Her hair was twisted back, and her face was round and white like a moon or a cheese. (p. 174)

We had to climb many a steep mount of cobbles. Townsmen call them hills. Some streamed stink like waterfalls down clefts you call a gutter. Those guts of rain and dung would overcome the deepest gutter. At odd banks of these hell-rivers the merchants hawked their pies or caps or buckles. (p. 201)

The style—lyrical, evocative, but set in those short chunky sentences like the solid clop of a peasant’s boots—gives the story its unique earthy flavor. This is a strong novel and an impressive feat of recreating the past.

Paul Elwork’s book is also well done, but in his case the historical setting—a country estate on the outskirts of Philadelphia in the 1920s—seems more a convenience than a structural necessity. His principal characters are a twin brother and sister, Emily and Michael, thirteen years old, who pretend they can communicate with spirits. Discovering that she can make an eerie cracking noise with her foot, Emily uses this technique to spook Michael, who at once sees the potential for duping adults in the community. Their con game of “spirit rapping” is loosely based on the real-life saga of the Fox sisters of New York state, who helped spark the spiritualist movement in the mid-1800s. Elwork shifts the story forward to the post–World War I era, when so many have perished in the war and the flu epidemic that the survivors make easy marks for a spiritualist who professes to connect with the dear departed.

Though the details from the 1920s feel authentic, the main interest here is the spiritualism itself—its motivation, its psychological effects, its sometimes tragic consequences. Elwork draws a nice contrast between Emily, who remains dubious about the play-acting, and the cynical Michael, who takes up with a professional con man. Both of these kids seem remarkably adult but believable. And if the harrowing outcome is plotted a bit awkwardly, the tale is a compelling one, drawing out buried family secrets and guilts, recollections and imaginings about the dead, plus a long-suppressed romance. The novel ends by taking advantage of its time frame to skip ahead to 1939, when the world is entering another murderous conflagration. Emily, now a semi-recluse who has studied Dr. Freud in college, reflects on “old things” and on what she has learned or failed to learn. There’s a sense that some passions, dreams, mysteries, misunderstandings—the components of our Freudian underground—are best left unexplored. About her mother’s erstwhile romance, Emily remarks that “as the years went by, I acquired the habit of not asking, and found myself not wanting an answer, despite my occasional curiosity.”

The Bridge-World of Gregory Frost

There was a time when I read a lot of science fiction. I think of that period as physical adolescence, as distinguished from the mental adolescence which, as an American male, I have the constitutional right to prolong until my eighties at least.

My physical teens were a long time ago, not quite as far back as Mary Shelley or Jules Verne, but before Dune, before Le Guin. It was the tail end of what’s now considered the golden age of science fiction, dominated by Asimov and Heinlein. Asimov’s Mule became such an unforgettable malignancy that he appeared in my novel The Shame of What We Are.

Today, as a slowly maturing adolescent reader, I value realistic situations, complex characters, and a plot pertinent to current life on earth. These are not the staples of much science fiction or its twin, science fantasy. And yet I dip into the genre now and again, drawn back by the power of the best practitioners to imagine an alternative universe that obliquely and often savagely references our own.

These meditations are prompted by my recent reading of Gregory Frost’s Shadowbridge, the first of a pair of novels positing a world of huge, perhaps endless bridges, one linking to another over a giant sea, with only occasional bits of solid land below. Most of the humans and humanoids live on one span or another and know of other spans only by rumor and legend. Underclasses, barely acknowledged, scrape out a squalid existence in the infrastructure beneath the bridges. Though the spans must have been built by great engineers, their origin is shrouded in creation myths. Social customs and government vary chaotically from span to span. Enigmatic threats abound.

So far, without having read the sequel, Lord Tophet, I can’t say I’m captivated by the characters, who seem strongly bound to archetypes. For my taste, too, the tale dips overmuch into the fantasy side of the genre, with multiple kinds of magic, talking snakes, a malevolent elf, a trickster fox, and an ambient medievalism.

But the image of this bridge-world haunts me, a fascinating nightmare. The cover art doesn’t begin to capture the vivid picture the author conveys. Here’s a description of one of the underworlds:

He lived neither on an island nor on land, nor even upon the water, but within the frame of a span itself. Chiseled supports and struts formed the foundation of the span, beams and cross-ties created an intricate latticework of layers between them. … Few houses beneath the bridge had roofs because there were no elements to protect anyone from—save the prying eyes of those situated above. The thick stalactitic surface of the span provided all necessary protection, and just acquiring the materials to erect walls was hard enough. In most cases divers, who lived on the lower levels, brought up the stone from the sea bottom, especially from around the piers, where the rocky ocean floor had been crushed and heaped as far down as anyone could see. It cost money to pay the divers, and more to have the stones hauled up on ropes and pulleys from layer to layer through the underspan hierarchy. Everyone knew that a stone was going to disappear here and another there as the pile of rock ascended, and if you were lucky and the pullers not too greedy, perhaps half of the original pile made the journey. It was the way of the underspan and no use railing at its unfairness; it had been thus for centuries and would be thus for centuries more. What it meant, however, was that walls were not built very high, but more like boundary markers than sides of a house. Most were not even as tall as the inhabitants themselves. … Privacy was at best an untested notion.

On Halloween night, with ghouls and witches outside, this is scarier, and truer. Gotta try not to dream about it.

Alice Has a Latte

Alice Bliss is now in a very cool place, a Philadelphia coffee shop frequented by theater people, schmoozing professionals, young mothers, wide-eyed kids (the cupcakes in the display case are at eye level for a three-year-old), natural-food and buy-local enthusiasts, and occasional salespeople with BlackBerries who wonder why everyone else has a MacBook or iPhone. Alice is waiting on a table for someone to pick her up—in a totally innocent way, of course, since she’s only 15.

For those who are totally mystified: Alice Bliss, by Laura Harrington, is a “travelling book” that I reviewed in my previous post. My copy is now poised to travel along with anyone else who adopts it. It’s a cool novel, with a winning protagonist, so I hope it/she finds a new home soon. The coffee shop staff has been alerted to assist her in her quest.

UPDATE SIX HOURS LATER: She’s gone—eloped with someone else. We hope she’ll send a postcard.

Travels with Alice

A Bookcrossing “travelling book” recently came my way: a copy of Laura Harrington’s new novel Alice Bliss. Bookcrossing.com encourages readers to pass along their books, either to acquaintances or to strangers, and then track them to see where they end up. The site supplies tracking numbers along with labels to paste inside a book. Harrington’s publisher, Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, has sent out some prelabeled copies to bloggers to begin the process for Alice Bliss. The idea is to give Alice, a 15-year-old from Massachusetts, a tour of the world. Currently, according to the website, she has reached 30 states and five continents. I suspect my handoff won’t add another state or continent, but I will surely pass the book on.

In a reversal of the typical process, this novel grew out of a musical, Alice Unwrapped, a solo piece that has been performed in New York and Minneapolis. Harrington won a 2008 Kleban Award for the libretto. The tale is a modern-day version of the homefront story—what goes on at home when the men march off to war. And indeed it is the man, Alice’s father Matt, who flies off to Iraq, leaving his wife and two daughters to fend for themselves. They have the support of a grandma, an uncle, and various friends, all of whom prove vital to the family’s well-being.

Somewhat alienated from her mother, teenaged Alice is especially close to her father, who has taught her gardening, baseball, roofing, puttering around a workshop, and other important life skills. Once he’s gone, she wears an old shirt of his every day and insists on planting the garden, by herself, exactly as he would have done it. Her mother worries about Alice’s obsessions but clearly has struggles of her own.

During this stressful time, Alice is also developing feelings about boys, two of them in particular, who provide exciting, ambivalent, and incoherent substitutes for her missing father. Unaccustomed to girl-coming-of-age stories, I found it comforting to discover (if Harrington can be believed) that girls are almost as stupid in their first romances as boys. There are many funny, poignant moments as Alice wavers between the nerd she’s known since childhood and the popular hunk who suddenly notices her.

Though the novel dives deep into Alice’s psyche, Harrington skips on occasion into other points of view, and she does this skillfully enough that I didn’t feel jarred. There are bits seen from the viewpoint of Alice’s mother, her comical Uncle Eddie, and her proto-boyfriend Henry. Although a few of these asides seem unnecessary, they generally add to our understanding of the characters.

The novel’s world, rich as it is, is limited in certain ways: Aside from Eddie, a cool variant of everyone’s disreputable uncle, grown men are scarce in this story. Aside from the war overseas, evil is even scarcer. Everybody is well-meaning. All are trying to make things work. Nobody is inordinately selfish. And yet this world seems true to life—even when everybody means well, suffering happens.

Alice Bliss is an accomplished novel, remarkably so for the author’s first effort in this genre. Though the main audience will surely be female, men won’t be injured by perusing the book, I promise. Maybe men with teenaged daughters will even learn something useful.

The Winters’ Suspense

Suspense is just about the oldest trick in fiction. Get the reader on the edge of the seat, demanding to know if the dark figure on the staircase was the villain, if the rescuers will arrive on time, if the assassin will squeeze off his shot—then postpone the revelation till late in the story. Even in literary novels, which presumably have loftier aims than tickling the reader’s thrillbone, prickly suspense is not uncommon. Recently, though, I’ve read a novel that creates suspense at the outset and then downplays it—to the reader’s benefit, I think.

Lisa Tucker’s latest, The Winters in Bloom, begins with the kidnapping of five-year-old Michael, only child of Kyra and David Winter, and both parents quickly and separately assume that their past has come back to haunt them. The suspense is immediate and intense, and we don’t learn the boy’s fate or recognize the kidnapper till the end of the book. You couldn’t ask for a more suspenseful setup.

Nevertheless, early chapters from the boy’s point of view let us know that he’s not in immediate danger, and the author gives us information like this:

“his [the boy’s] assumption that his parents knew this lady would … turn out to be true.… Even his feeling that the lady loved him was true, though her love was a desperate, entirely unexpected response that he couldn’t possibly have made sense of.”

A desperate love—not reassuring, but not likely to lead to murder or abuse, it seems.

The following chapters examine the background of each person in depth, weaving interlocking stories in which the fascination lies not in the plot but in the character development. Though the mystery of the kidnapper’s identity remains strong, the author doesn’t amp up our worry about the boy. The tone is calm, the pace unhurried; it doesn’t feel like the book will end in disaster.

This muting of suspense allows us to pay attention to the characters and to ask, not just who would snatch the boy, but why—what exactly in the past has come back to haunt this family, and how does it make psychological sense? The technique shows a mature author, someone who knows she can hold our interest without sensationalism.

The Winters in Bloom turns out to be a fine novel, both clever and profound, full of subtle characterizations that make sometimes bizarre behavior entirely convincing. I even found myself believing in David, the husband/father of “steady reasonableness” and “cheerful good nature” whose “enormous amount of compassion” leads him time and again to assume the fault is his own. I won’t say whether he proves correct, but on behalf of all husbands I should point out that we aren’t always to blame.