Sarah Weinman (ed), Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

Sarah Weinman’s anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense is one of the best collections of short stories I’ve read in years and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in mystery and suspense fiction. Featuring stories by Charlotte Armstrong, Barbara Callahan,Vera Caspary, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Miriam Allen DeFord, Celia Fremlin, Joyce Harrington, Patricia Highsmith, Elisabeth Saxnay Holding, Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Millar, Helen Nielsen, and Nedra Tyre, the book focuses on tales originally published between the 1940s and 1970s that are all examples of domestic suspense, i.e., stories that are located in that liminal space between the two extremes of the hard-boiled and the cozy mystery. Weinman’s introduction explains why this type of mystery has fallen from favor, and their reappearance in print is truly a cause for celebration. You’ll find neither private eyes nor female investigators of the Miss Marple type here. Instead, we’re presented with a range of young, middle-aged, and older women (Weinman makes a fascinating decision to order the stories by the age of their protagonist) who all confront examples of violence and conflict, sometimes as witness, sometimes as victim, sometimes as perpetrator, and sometimes as a mixture of all the above. The composite picture that emerges of women’s lives that most other writers would regard as too trivial to write about is gloriously complex in its ambiguity, ambivalence, and open-endedness. Never has the quotidian appeared more vividly than in this collection. Highlights for me included Patricia Highsmith’s first published story, “The Heroine” which demonstrates just how good she was right from the beginning of her career, and “The Purple Shroud,” by Joyce Harrington, a writer I’m embarrassed to say I had never read before but whose work I will be seeking out immediately. And that is another of the pleasures of this book: it opens up a new world of reading even for those who consider themselves aficionados of suspense fiction. We are all in Sarah Weinman’s debt and she is to be congratulated on a magnificent achievement.

56 Up (2012)

There is so much one can say about the Up series of documentaries, but in this post I’ll confine myself to a few observations about the latest installment, 56 Up (2012). This film was the first in the series for quite a while to vary the order in which the participants appeared. For a long time, Neil appeared last while Tony appeared first, and now they are switched. I’m not quite sure what impact these changes have on our perceptions of the participants and their relation to each other (if any), but I liked the change of format. One of my favorite things about the series as a whole is how much the original intention of the series (to show the continued dominance of the class system in contemporary British society) has changed, partly because the nature of class privilege (and the manner in which it is expressed) has changed so much since 1964, but mostly because the series’ participants have insistently talked back to Michael Apted and have resisted his attempts to make them personify one tidy category or another. The self-referential dimensions of the series have increased with each episode, to the point that many of the participants now spend a lot of their time talking about their feelings about participating in this project. 56 Up embraces this fact more than previous episodes, as we see when Suzy and Nick are brought together and talk about their experiences with the show. My favorite moment in this particular episode comes right at the end when Apted remarks that Tony seems quite racist, something that Tony vehemently denies. It’s such a symptomatic moment because race is so rarely mentioned in the series at any time. The sea change in Britain’s population since the 1960s, the extent to which it’s become a multicultural society, is what has blindsided the Up series most since it began (even though it was underway in 1964). In that respect, this series is, in many ways, increasingly a memorial to a Britain that was, rather than the Britain that exists today.

Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante's Handbook

In a few weeks, I’ll be hosting a conversation with writer Gary Shteyngart as part of the Buffalo Humanities Festival. In preparation for that event, I'm rereading his work, beginning with his first novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook, published in 2003. Shteyngart is an amazingly inventive and original winter and this coming of age story featuring his unprepossessing protagonist, Vladimir Girshkin, showcases the full range of his talents. It's a big book in every way--over 400 pages long, with multiple locations, and a dizzying array of characters--and yet at its heart the book's concerns are quite simple: what does it mean to be an American for an immigrant? Can an immigrant ever feel at home in America? Or anywhere else, for that matter? Of course, these are deceptively simple questions that have been tackled by dozens upon dozens of writers and Shteyngart does justice to the complexity of his themes. What's most original about the book is his use of humor; this, combined with his incredible eye for detail, make him a master satirist. And yet he's also capable of writing without sentimentality and with genuine pathos about the need to be loved and to belong and in this regard, there's something curiously old-fashioned about his writing. Although the novel maintains a running dialog with the American tradition of immigrant fiction, trying more often than not to make fun of it, the overall impact of RDH is to remind us of the timelessness of the problems and challenges that the expatriate faces when trying to understand her or his adopted country. It's inevitable that in this 'kitchen sink' of a book, into which Shteyngart throws everything, some parts work better than others, but on the whole it's an extraordinary first novel and should encourage anyone to read more of his work.

As you can tell from the gap between this post and the previous one, the reality principle showed up and kicked me in the head! With everything else going on in my life, posting every day is clearly not going to happen, so I will confine myself to posting whenever I can. Hopefully, this will prevent further kicks to the head. I've decided to keep the original blog title and description as a reminder of the temptations and dangers of hubris!