The Epicurean Psychopath or How to Murder a Book

When I was reading The Epicure's Lament, I saw a cross reference to The Debt to Pleasure, a book about another self-absorbed male, compulsive about food and Provence, who was described as an evil foodie. Tarquin Winot (is that "Win-ot" ... no I think, Why Not) is more a Ripley reprise.

Unlike Hugo Whittier in the Hudson Valley who at least attempts to portray his family members and contemporaries, Tarq is penultimately self-centered, keeping the references to his parents, brother and other family functionaries to highly interpreted asides, nothing of the nature of a direct quote and neutral portrayal. All the world is depicted through Tarq's mind.

He protests that this book is his journey through England and France as his taste buds are refined. But alas, through double entendres and interviews with a reporter interested in his brother Bartholomew's life, Tarq alludes to his murdering mater and pater, resident tutor, aforesaid brother, and finally boldly acceding to poisoning the interviewer and her husband, bragging about his knowledge of poisonous mushrooms and justifying it as mirroring I, Claudius.

Like Ripley, all these people get in the way of his complete enjoyment of the good life. He kills for an inheritance, to eliminate a more talented sibling, eventually just because he can. But unlike Ripley where the reader can be attracted to Tom's skill and chutzpah, John Lancaster's novel never makes Tarq appealing or in the end even interesting. Towards the end, where Lancaster intrudes using Tarq's voice to explain how he wrote this story, he says:

"Only the style of the book would remain consistent, driving, forceful (not), its stable nature underlying the chaos and limitless mutability of everything else in the narrative -- though it would no longer be clear if the book was a narrative since the essential mechanisms of propulsion, surprise, development, would seem largely to be forgotten ... gradually as the stability of lot and character fell away (well, that's reason alone not to pursue to the finish line), and all certainties became erased, the work would become more troubling ... until the appalled readers, unable to understand what was happening either to them or to the story... would watch the wholesale metastasization of the characters into one another, the collapse of the very idea of plot, of structure, of movement, of self, so that when the finally put down the book they are aware only of having been protagonists in a deep and violent dream whose sole purpose is their incurable unease." Ya think ya want to read this?

Again, closer to the end, Lancaster writes about the inferiority of an artist who creates something when compared to a murderer who creates the absence of someone. Tarq's rationalizing arguments at the summation evoke de Sade's writings of the self against all societal norms, because evil exists, because violence is common and unprosecuted in all instances. These debates are as bland and irritating as they were centuries ago.

Speaking of the Dick Francis Mystery Formula

Displayed at the library's check out desk on seven day loan was the latest "Francis" horse racing murder mystery, Gamble, by Felix Francis, son of Dick and recent co-author. There is so little difference between father and son, "just the bob of a head," that it makes one wonder how much of Dick's most recent books were completely ghost-written.

All elements present and accounted for: overbearing parent, strained relationship with significant other, series of violent deaths, hero attacked viciously, decadent horse owners and all too human jockeys and trainers.

Even a mediocre Francis story is a quick, exciting ride.

Another Lippman: Every Secret Thing

Reading Laura Lippman is like reading Dick Francis: if you like revisiting a variation on a plot, you're happy with the talented technique. Lippman writes about crime in Baltimore, crimes involving pre-teen girls, depicting single parent households and strained race relations, both contributing factors in the lives of the criminals, victims, survivors, investigators and counselors. Everyone appears tainted by the poverty and white flight from the city. Crime is inevitable but somehow unsympathetic.

After my first Lippman, I reserved all I could track down. One I couldn't even pretend to get into. Every Secret Thing is engaging, if formulaic. Two white girls, aged 11, abduct a black infant, the granddaughter of a prominent judge. Both are sentenced to seven years in juvenile facilities as it is impossible to determine which of them killed the baby. Upon there release and return to their old neighborhood, another black toddler disappears. Suspicion focuses on them, directed by the mother of their first victim. Everyone, every woman, in the book is flawed: the said mother and her marriage and her relation or lack thereof with her replacement daughter; the investigating newswoman; the policewoman who found the first victim and seems to have been selected again to take a fall; the self-aggrandizing defense lawyer who may herself be the illegitimate daughter of a former mayor; etc etc. Lippman loads the story with losers.

Nonetheless, she still weaves a plot with hidden clues and surprise, if out of left field, endings. Good enough to make me move on to her What the Dead Know.

PS The day after: finished What the Dead Know and found it way too over-constructed. This plot has two sisters being abducted and a woman showing up thirty years later claiming to be one of them but reluctant to reveal her assumed identity in order to preserve her anonymity. The Baltimore detectives return along with the themes of dissolving families. Not as good as EST.

Prescient Artists

When my oldest son was a boy, at the end of each school year, I would get a notice from the administration that either he couldn't advance or his grades would be held because he had never returned several books to the library. He just could not turn back in those ones he cherished the most. Only occasionally do I have the same feelings and being a better financed adult, I usually can get my own copy at the store. One such book I read a couple of years ago was Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. Maybe I lent the library copy to a friend or it vanished under the car seat, but then it was the library notifying me of a past due and ultimately lost book. I paid the cover cost grudgingly.

And time went by, thought of the book often, but only bought it last week as part of the order for Pat Conroy works for my younger son. I probably used up all the ink in a ball point pen underlining ideas that were insightful, beautifully written. This book will now join those august few I designate coffee table books, an eclectic collection including de Tocqueville, A Year of Magical Thinking, and French Women Don't Get Fat.

Lehrer was a post-graduate technician in a neuroscience lab reading Proust waiting for an experiment to finish. Those two juxtaposed talents bode well for the rest theses that in striving to understand sensory perceptions and the mind, many geniuses articulated biological facts years before science caught up to their ideas and proved them true. Not only does Lehrer explain how Proust's madeline triggered childhood memories, but also how Cezanne drew the observer into his paintings by having them fill in his blank spaces or delineate objects crisply. He explores Escoffier's gestalt for fine dining and the importance of aroma (quick on the heels of Remembering Smell). For Stravinsky, he concludes that all art must be jarring and break with the unexpected; for Whitman, he agrees that the soul is created by the body.

Equally well analyzed but more difficult geniuses are Gertrude Stein and Virginia Wolfe, the former for her attempt to emphasize the structure of languages over the content of words. Extending her ideas to Pinker is fine, but somehow, Lehrer does not compel his reader to move on to Tender Buttons. I was motivated to pick up the copy of The Waves that was in the pile of books to read next to my bed and I finished about ten pages when I gave up. Lehrer is correct when he says the mind imposes logic and order and predictability ... it was too late at night to struggle with Wolfe's rhythmic and inundating prose.

Read this book.

My Reading Life, Not Pat Conroy's

Face to face book club, as opposed to this virtual one, has leeched into my postings. The Slacker who belongs to both groups received a copy of Pat Conroy's My Reading Life as a birthday present from her son, who knows her to be a person to whom books come in a close second to daily sustenance. And my younger son is a big Conroy fan, urging me to read Lords of Discipline which he read when himself in military school. So with this confluence, I ordered Conroy's latest, South of Broad to read with my son and the club this fall.

Back to My Reading Life: Conroy writes not only about influential books, but equally wonderfully about the people who introduced him to all kinds of literature. His essays on his favorite teacher and first book rep are lyrical. The ones set in places, the Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta, and being a Southerner in Paris, a personal disclosures on the importance of "being there." And best of all, is the one on being a military brat, the quintessential Conroy.

I don't think I want to adhere to a 2012 list on Conroy-inspired books; however, he has pointed out my lack of essentials and I am committed to read both War and Peace and Gone With The Wind next year ... and South of Broad as soon as I can wrench it out of my son's grip.

All About Love -- Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

I recently read a review for All About Love by Lisa Appignanesi and decided it came close enough to add to the 2011 lust list. It reminds me of one of those forgettable nonfictional "love" psycho-anthologies I read earlier in the year (not worth trying to figure out which one, as the same sin seems to pervade all such compendiums). The authors try to define and explain "love" in all its permutations, from first love attraction, to passionate lust, to married comfort with its ancillary risks of adultery and divorce. It is almost that they have to be politically correct and push on to cover maternal love and friendship. Maybe love is too broad a word to write about ... it's like writing about "walk" ... to many various interpretations.

That said, LA has flashes of brilliant writing; her her insights when writing about Poe:

"... love ... a return to a primal sense of oneness where lover and beloved merge ... and there is no demarcation between inside and outside. We are recognized, known by, and know the other ... our best self comes into being, one filled with new potential ... the abiding loneliness, that emptiness that human beings are prone to recedes, at least momentarily ... a sense of pastoral at-homeness reigns ..."

As I culled her topics for wise words to impart to my soon to be married son and his wonderful fiance, I found plenty of quotes:

"Core to keeping the hopes we have of a relationship alive and making them as successful as we can may be a re-estimation of habit ... Our world of plenty and constant stimulus, our enshrinement of the excitements of youth and novelty, shroud habit with a negative aura ... A habit, as the dictionary tells us, is the protective garment we put on to go out into the social world ... Habit is also our "habitation," a place of security and our settled disposition, the way we prefer to live"

Her summary of Emmanuel Levinas' understanding of love:

"... a uniquely ambiguous relation, at once possessive and deferential ... Though motivated by desire and need, loves comes into authentic being only when a reciprocity is set up with the other; there is a simultaneous sense of needing without being able to bring the other into possession, the sense of being needed, but without surrendering to exploitation ... that freedom and bondage here coexist."

Quoting Shelley's The Cencis, a poem about libidinal siblings, near books end, LA reminds us all that desire is all in the yearning and recollection:

"Our breath shall intermix ... and our veins beat together; and our lips with other eloquence than words, eclipse the soul that burns between them, and the wells which boil under our being's inmost cells."