Slacks for Ella Funt

This was a book I read for my book club, from our brief period of reading National Book Award winners, which followed our brief period of reading South American authors, which followed our longer period of reading books set in New York. Now we seem to be back to reading contemporary fiction.
I didn’t expect to like this at all, mostly because I don’t end up liking many of the book club picks. But I actually ended up enjoying it. It’s set on a Turkish island that’s just starting to get tourists. The narrative shifts perspectives between a large cast of characters, mixed between Americans and Turks. Frequently, Settle describes a conversation from one character’s perspective and of course the character considers him or herself to be very wise/enlightened/interesting and that the other person is enthralled by the conversation. Then the perspective shifts to the other character, who had been bored by the conversation.
I was thinking about whether the same idea applied to the role of the author. In writing the book, Settle seems to be saying that she understands both the Americans and the Turks. But reading the book, I wondered whether she was just another foolish American, like the characters in her book, thinking that she knows what everyone is thinking.

As much as I love McEwan’s more recent books, particularly Atonement, I haven’t read all of his earlier stuff. He’s always been fond of the twist ending, but it feels more integrated into the book as a whole in the more recent books. The Innocent starts out like a relatively normal Cold War spy thriller. Leonard Marnham is a normal, average Englishman who lives with his parents and works for the phone company. He gets transferred to a contract with the CIA in Berlin on a top secret project. He socializes with the Americans, works on his specific tasks to the project, and starts seeing a German woman named Maria. He’s pretty pleased with his new life when (of course) something goes horribly wrong. At some point, I had half forgotten that this was McEwan, and was expecting the plot twist to be an espionage-style betrayal. But being an early McEwan book, it was much more gruesome than that. He’s a brilliant writer, but I think he’s learned since then that plot twists can be shocking without having to be grotesque.

Mina’s protagonist is the most unlikely crime solver I’ve ever encountered. Maureen O’Donnell has had severe mental health issues, and stuck in a menial job at a theatre ticket office. She’s sleeping with one of the married psychologists from her clinic (though at least not her personal psychologist) and her family, besides for her drug dealer brother, don’t believe her about her childhood sexual abuse and think she’s insane. When her psychologist boyfriend is found murdered in her apartment, the police treat her and her brother as the prime suspects. Eventually Maureen sorts out who really killed him, but at no point does she seem sure of herself as a crime solver, which is unusual in crime fiction. I liked this quite a bit–Mina has an dry, witty authorial voice and the gritty side of her Glasgow reminded me quite a bit of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.

There’s something a little otherworldly about Meg Rosoff’s books. They’re not set in some fantasy world, but it doesn’t quite seem to be our world either. Likewise, the time period that they are set isn’t obvious. I suspect it makes them hard for the publisher to market and sell, though it helps that they put absolutely lovely covers on them. In What I Was, the unnamed narrator, a student at a mediocre boarding school, becomes obsessed with Finn, another teenage boy who lives alone, completely outside of society. Finn turns out to be not what the narrator thought he was, in a twist that I didn’t see coming.

I realized that I hadn’t read any non-genre, for adults, literary fiction in a while. This was a perfect fit. Not mind blowing brilliant, but satisfying to feel like as a reader you’re putting yourself in the hands of an author who knows what she’s doing, with interesting but believable plotting, well-developed characters, and skillful prose. I’m surprised Valerie Martin doesn’t get more recognition, she’s every bit as good as a lot of authors who are more well known than she is.

As the series continues, I’m finding myself less and less interested in the Maisie Dobbs books. Maisie is still a likable heroine, and time period of England between World War I and II is still interesting, but the series is starting to feel repetitive. I know that the war changed Maisie’s life, but I’m ready for her to move on. Even more than that, I’m ready for Winspear to move on. It’s time for a mystery where the motive doesn’t go back to something that happened during the war.

Obviously I’m not the target audience for this, but it’s one of the better YA boy-books I’ve read. Spud balances crude adolescent-boy humor with the indignities of growing up and puberty. Even more impressive, it works in more serious emotional issues and the end of apartheid in South Africa without being overly earnest or preachy.

When I was a kid, one of the first things I read obsessively were Agatha Christie mysteries. There are something like 70 or 80 of them total. I read them all. Some of her books have up to 3 or 4 alternate titles (British title, American title, etc.), so I was always picking one up thinking I hadn’t read it yet only to start it and realize that I had read it under a different title.
Agatha Christie mysteries are pretty straightforward—the crime is at the beginning, there’s a set cast of suspects, and at the end you find out whodunnit. For a long time, this was my standard for mysteries: they had to be British, and the crime had to be solved at the end. It took me a long time to appreciate procedural mysteries, where characters are more complex, the story is more complicated, and it doesn’t start with a crime and end with a solution.
When we stayed at my coworker’s place in the country a few weeks ago, he had a big collection of classic mysteries, many of them in the original 10¢ paperback editions. They were the perfect vacation read, famiilar and engaging. Now, my favorite for classic British mysteries is Dorothy Sayers, because in addition to the standard mystery plotline, there’s also the escapism of the the fabulous lifestyle and surroundings of her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. I love reading about aristocratic London in the 1930s, with the butlers, private clubs, and country houses.
The best Dorothy Sayers, for me, is Gaudy Night, because it combines a few of my obsessions—classic mysteries, old Oxford traditions, London in the 30s—and even has a female protagonist in Harriet Vane, Wimsey’s love interest.
I always wish I could travel to different time periods, as well as places. I want to go to Egypt, but I want to go to Agatha Christie’s Egypt, when you could take houseboats down the Nile and stay at Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo, which burned down in the 1950s. I want to go to Paris in the 60s of the great French films. And I want to go to Lord Peter Wimsey’s London.

This is one of those books that annoyed me to read because the main character is frequently facing multiple options, including one option that will sort out all his problems and one that will make the situation much worse. In this book, Sam Pulsifer always chooses the option that will make his situation worse. I know that the compounded disasters make the story, but I still wanted to shake him a lot of the time. It’s also all postmodern-y and sarcastic, but I think it was supposed to be much funnier than I thought it was.

This seemed less like a book than a script for a teen movie, something in the Superbad or American Pie genre. It’s more or less a classic teen movie scenario—graduation night, nerd has just confessed his love to his longtime cheerleader crush, a long night of hijinks ensues. It would probably do ok as a movie, but it wasn’t a very good book.