A Family Affair by Rex Stout

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"'Warrants to take Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. You're Goodwin. You're under arrest'"

Rex Stout's A Family Affair (1975) is the last of his 47 Nero Wolfe novels and collections of shorter pieces. It was published just three months before the author's death. I had read all Wolfe books in the 1970's - 1990's and am returning now to a selected few of them curious about how the passage of time - both my chronological time and the fictional time of the novels - has influenced my reception of Mr. Stout's prose.

Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe's secretary and right-hand man, the only person able to cajole and tame the obese genius of detection, is woken up at night by a waiter from Wolfe's favorite restaurant. The man believes someone is trying to kill him. Reluctantly, Archie offers him a guest room to stay overnight. But then an explosion happens, the waiter is killed, and Wolfe's old brownstone seriously damaged. Wolfe is enraged by the violation of his precious physical space and commences an investigation, of course through always reliable and intrepid Archie. There is no client this time. "It's a family affair." By the way, the reader will certainly appreciate the cleverly double meaning of the title.

Soon the investigation becomes enmeshed in another case: a wealthy industrialist has recently been murdered and Archie discovers a connection between the waiter and the victim. Of course in the end, despite the efforts of the police and despite getting arrested, Wolfe and Goodwin manage to unmask the guilty person - here the readers will likely enjoy a really major plot twist.

The entire story has the Watergate affair in the background and the author is not shy to demonstrate his outrage at the President's malfeasance. Isn't the following passage cool:

"Five men being tried now in Washington for conspiracy to obstruct justice - Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Mardian, and Parkinson. Five being charged here with conspiracy to obstruct justice - Wolfe, Goodwin, Panzer, Durkin, and Cather."

Certainly far from the best of Nero Wolfe novels A Family Affair is quite readable, and the Watergate connection helps.

Two and a half stars.




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Rabbit, Run by John Updike

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"The clangour of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love."

John Updike's Rabbit, Run" (1960), considered a classic of American literature of the mid-twentieth century, has enjoyed wide popularity among readers for over 50 years and the author has published four sequels. It is embarrassing to admit that it is the first novel by Mr. Updike that I have read and even more so that I do not find it remarkable.

The outline of plot is well known. Henry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is a 26-year-old salesman who used to be a high-school basketball star. We meet Rabbit as he watches kids playing basketball. He joins the game and yes, he is still very good. But his marriage to Janice, who is pregnant again, is deteriorating and he loathes his wife both physically and emotionally. He runs away from home driving his car far from the town in an illusion of freedom. He moves in with Ruth, for whom the affair with Rabbit is certainly not the first. He also befriends Reverend Eccles who attempts to straighten Rabbit's ways. Then Janice is in labor and... The story may indeed be interesting for readers who care about the plot.

Alas I can barely stand the author's logorrhea, the flood of words of which much less than half would be enough. The verbosity is particularly disastrous in the sex episode with Ruth: the literalness and sheer physicality may make some readers renounce sex forever. The author's tendency of going on tangents is also infuriating.

On the positive side, there are some beautiful passages in the novel: I love Ruth's second "stream of consciousness monologue" (beginning on page 156 in the Penguin paperback). When focused and economical with words Mr. Updike is indeed a master of prose and his literary technique is flawless. Perhaps we have a case of an author who is unable to delete the words he liked writing so much?

Another strong feature of the novel is the portrayal of the late Fifties. When reading the book I almost felt I recognized these times even though I lived then in a completely different environment, geographically and socio-culturally.

Despite the author's loquacity and love of tangents this is still a serious novel. Literary critics will offer various interpretations based on socio-economic, cultural, or psychological analysis. Rabbit is a boy thrown into an adult world, mentally and emotionally a teenager: a pregnant wife, a two-year-old son, and a job are responsibilities that he is unable to handle. The only thing he does well is running. So he runs. Always away from something.

People say that high-school and college sports form students' characters. I think that sports, with the emphasis on winning, offer an insufficient support structure for people who outgrow it. I am afraid there are thousands and thousands of twenty- or maybe even thirty-something teenager boys out there, trying to cope with actual life, when the crutch of sports is taken away from them. Winning or losing are hardly applicable when one is an adult.

Two and three quarter stars.



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Streets on Fire by John Shannon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"A voice spoke out of the sky, louder than any voice had a right to be.'Get indoors, now! All of you boys! This area is under curfew!'
There was an insistent dull pop-pop-pop from overhead [...]"

Streets of Fire (2002) is the tenth book by John Shannon that I am reviewing here. Sadly, the quality of his work has steadily been on the downward trajectory. I rated the wonderful The Orange Curtain with four stars and could confidently recommend all his early works. But then something happened to the author and after several weak books he produced one of the most idiotic mystery/thriller novels I have read in my life, the ridiculous Devils of Bakersfield . So I was understandably apprehensive about Streets and indeed, it is not a good novel at all.

Jack Liffey is a sort of private detective in Los Angeles, who specializes in finding missing children. He takes a job for the Davises - an elderly African-American couple who have been active in the civil rights movement since the 1960s. Their adopted son and his Caucasian wife, college juniors, disappeared several weeks earlier and the police have not found any promising clues. Their car has turned up empty so the worst is expected. In the course of his inquiry Mr. Liffey zeros in on several racist groups involved in fight against multiculturalism. Particularly troubling is a network of youth clubs promoting racism and advocating white supremacy under the guise of fostering moral growth.

Just as Mr. Liffey begins the investigation his 14-year-old precocious daughter Maeve comes to live with him for a while. When Maeve reads the paperwork of the Davis' case in her father's study, she begins the investigation on her own. Maeve soon befriends Ornetta, a niece of the missing young man, and recruits her to the investigation. They begin watching a biker gang and get into serious trouble. All this happens on the backdrop of riots in Los Angeles caused by police misconduct and brutality. The minority neighborhoods are erupting: people demand justice. Mr. Shannon's images of the riots, looting, and chaos are vivid and convincing. This is the best part of the novel.

Streets of Fire is really a thriller: the extended ending is a rollercoaster of events that I am unable to summarize without spoiling. Let me just mention that Mr. Liffey finds himself in grave danger and that Maeve and Ornetta play a prominent role in the later part of the plot. The portrayal of the girls is another good thing about the novel. All other characters including Mr. Liffey are paper-thin, without any depth. Mr. Shannon had shown that he could write characters in his earlier novels; here he is just coasting.

Now about the worst aspect of the novel. It is supposed to carry an inspirational and worthy message of condemnation of racism and prejudice. Mr. Shannon obliterates that message by using "in-your-face", stereotypical, and superficial literary means. The situations are cliché and the presentation is totally nuance-free. Basically every minority character - whether in the sense of race, gender or sexual orientation - is a wonderful person while any non-minority person is automatically suspect of prejudice. This crude approach to promoting a worthy cause is misguided. If not for the images of LA riots and the Maeve/Ornetta thread this book would not have escaped the lowest rating.

Two stars.



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The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by J.M. Coetzee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"... we can entertain the notion that we are continually engaging with constructions (fictions) of others, rather than with their 'real' selves [...] We can also entertain the more plausible (and more interesting) notion that our engagements are with a constantly changing interplay between shadows (fictions) and glimpses of the real."

The Good Story (2015) by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz is based on a fascinating premise. This non-fiction volume is framed as a discussion between Mr. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winning writer (and one of my most favorite authors), and Dr. Arabella Kurtz, a British psychotherapist. This combination of specialties is not as farfetched as it might seem: we read in the Authors' Note that literature and psychotherapy have a lot in common: for instance, the interest in human experience, the use of language as the "common working medium," and the analysis of "narrative structures."

The book is divided into chapters that focus on topics such as truth, memories and their repression, relationships between people, group experiences and mentality. The authors discuss issues of subjective truth, dynamic (evolving) truth, intersubjective truth and the closely related topics of malleability of memory, self invention, and psychotherapy as a scheme to create (reconstruct) a patient's memories.

I have found everything in the book interesting but the theme that I relate to most strongly is the one I refer to in the epigraph: human relationships as interactions between projected fictions. Here Mr. Coetzee even mentions the so-called Turing test for dialogue where one has to decide whether their interlocutor (who is not visible) is an actual human being or rather a computer program. Another of his key observations is:

"[...] relations between people as a matter of interlocking fictions. When the fictions interlock well, the relation works or seems to work (I am not sure that there is a difference between the two). When they don't interlock, conflict or disengagement follow."

When noting the human tendency toward creating fictions about themselves, Dr. Kurtz claims "We need the fictions of others to know ourselves", Mr. Coetzee clarifies the claim:

"We need the fictions of others about us in order to form our fictions of ourselves."

If it were proper to take sides in the discussion between Mr. Coetzee and Ms. Kurtz, I would certainly be on the author's side. I agree with most everything he says in the discussion and - more importantly - I believe that the ideas he puts forward are deeper and more fundamental. To me, Ms. Kurtz is too immersed in the Freudian canon with its limited and restrictive intellectual toolkit. To me her most important contributions are the fascinating insights into the practice of psychotherapy.

A captivating, illuminating, and deep read which I would rate with five stars if not for the fact that the authors too often talk past each other and not necessarily with each other. Still, a great book!

Four and a quarter stars.



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Ghost Hero by S.J. Rozan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"If you stir the water vigorously enough, [...] you can drag mud up from the bottom. In all that swirling, muddy water, a lot of things might be able to escape."
(Lydia Chin concocting a Chinese saying)

Ghost Hero (2011) is the eleventh book by S.J. Rozan that I am reviewing on Goodreads. Certainly not among the better ones, although the historical background of the Tiananmen Square bloody events of 1989 gives the novel some weight and significance. I would rate the novel somewhere below the average for the author, far from the class of Stone Quarry or Winter and Night but luckily not as bad as the atrocious On the Line .

This is a Lydia Chin novel, which is a good thing because she makes a much more interesting protagonist than the amorphous and painfully clichéd Bill Smith. We meet Lydia as she talks to her client about new paintings of Chau Chun - known as Ghost Hero Chau - that have emerged in New York. Since it is believed that Mr. Chau was killed during the Tiananmen Square massacre the works must be fakes. Unless Mr. Chau is in fact alive.

The complications in the plot multiply fast. Mr. Chau's paintings were political in nature thus their sudden appearance may have been a result of some major political forces in action, possibly connected to anti-Chinese-government movement. Chinese gangs' involvement is another possibility. The plot complexity increases even more rapidly when Lydia learns that yet another private detective with Chinese roots, Jack Lee, is working the same case of Mr. Chau's paintings, but for a different client. And, ironically, while one client would love the paintings to be authentic, the other wants them to be fakes.

The setup of the novel is indeed very promising and the plot keeps the reader's attention up to quite late in the novel. There are too many twists towards the end, though, including a major one in the denouement. Ms Rozan seems to be following a clichéd template for a best-selling mystery novel: twist the plot so much that the reader is not able to see how implausible the whole thing becomes.

Yet again the reader has to suffer through the tired cliché of young genius hackers - Linus and Trella from On the Line appear again. I suspect that Ms. Rozan who is unfortunately rather close to my age is trying to pander to the "young adult audience," thus losing the mature readers. Even worse, though, we are served gross silliness when Mr. Smith affects a cheap Russian (Rooshin) accent, pretends to be Vladimir Oblomov, and manages to fool supposedly smart businessmen, or when Mr. Lee alters his appearance via make-up and ethnic clothing to impersonate an academic from the Central University at Hohhot in Inner Mongolia. So lame!

To be fair, I am happy to note that for once guns do not play a prominent role in the plot; alas the avalanche of twists and clichés almost completely cancels out the improvement.

Two and a half stars.




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What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"Knowledge is constructed, not received."

Ken Bain, a professor and higher education administrator, had spent his academic career at Vanderbilt, Northwestern, NYU, and University of the District of Columbia, before he became the founding director of several major teaching and learning centers, currently the President of the Best Teachers Institute. His What the Best College Teachers Do (2004) is a bestseller and a higher-education classic. I have read the book with great interest as I have been teaching university-level math and computer science for over 35 years and in the distant past I was also involved in research on creativity and mathematical problem solving.

The text is the end result of almost a 15-year study which - as the author claims - was conducted observing all rules of the scientific method. The Appendix explains the methodology of the study. Mr. Bain's book does not disappoint even if the reader may doubt if it delivers on the promise of the catchy title. To me, the weakest aspect are the criteria used to select sixty-three outstanding college teachers as the subjects of the study. Outstanding teachers are defined as those who "had achieved remarkable success in helping their students learn in ways that made a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how those students think, act, and feel." This is so vague that inclusion or exclusion of individual teachers is essentially arbitrary.

The book is organized into chapters that answer six broad questions about the practices of outstanding college teachers: What do they know and understand? How do they prepare? What do they expect of their students? What do they do when they teach? How do they treat their students? How do they assess the students' progress? I agree with virtually all conclusions of the author and if I am less successful in my own teaching than I would like to be it is because I am not conscientious enough to always adhere to all these practices. It is exactly as the author quotes:

"'When my teaching fails,' [...] a professor told us, 'it is because of something I have failed to do.'"

Exactly! Here's a selection of other great quotes from the text:
"[T]eaching is fostering learning and [...] it requires serious intellectual work [...]"
"You don't teach a class. You teach a student."
"Teaching is about commanding attention and holding it.'"
"'The most important aspect of my teaching,' one instructor told us in a theme we heard frequently, 'is the relationship of trust that develops between me and my students.'"

One of the non-obvious observation I particularly agree with emphasizes the difference between great lecturers - professors who use classroom teaching as an opportunity to display their intellectual brilliance - and best teachers who consider teaching an investment in students. I also commend the author for including the Decalogue of critical thinking: a list of ten reasoning abilities and habits of thought that deserves to be printed in large font, framed, and hanged over every teacher's bed.

One topic that I might consider under-emphasized is discussion of the best practices of dealing with largely non-homogeneous classes of students. I have struggled with the ways of individualizing classroom instruction for students of greatly differing levels of preparation and abilities throughout my entire teaching career. I also wish the text were more focused on teaching mathematics. While most of the general guidelines apply to math pedagogy, the discipline clearly has its peculiarities, which would need to be addressed in more detail. And, of course, I smiled when I encountered a reference to Richard Feynman. No book on great teaching can avoid mentioning the name.

Three and a half stars.




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McNally's Gamble by Lawrence Sanders

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"I won't tell you where she held the mistletoe."

McNally's Gamble (1997) is the fourth installment of Lawrence Sanders' Archy McNally series that I am reviewing here on Goodreads and the least successful of the four. While the novel is quite strong on humor and the pleasantly flowery language is a joy to read the plot is not engrossing at all and the strange twists at the end seem artificial and lame.

After an awkward "criminal anecdote" only loosely connected with the plot the novel begins with Archy buying Courvoisier for his father's birthday. Of course Mr. Sanders' readers know that the father is the boss of a legal firm in Palm Beach, Florida, where Archy is the only employee of the Discreet Inquiries Department. One of the firm's wealthy clients, Mrs. Westmore, is planning to buy a Fabergé egg from a seller in Paris on recommendation of an investment advisor. Archy's discreet inquiries are focused on the advisor's bona fides and the soundness of the transaction. Later in the plot we meet Mrs. Westmore's adult children and we learn that the money she is planning to spend for the egg could be more productively used to finance her son's paleontology research on the origins of bipedalism. The plot becomes more serious when one of the characters marginally involved in the planned transaction is murdered.

Of course, this being an Archy McNally novel we cannot get away without some tactfully and delightfully told sex passages. Not only does Archy have a good time with his steady partner Connie, but we also are shown a glimpse of The Paroxysm of the Collapsing Cot that occurs during Archy's coupling with yet another fan of his manly charms. The reader will also learn about a rather imbalanced marriage between two of the characters in the plot, where an uxorious husband is juxtaposed with a concupiscent wife. Hey, three long words in one simple sentence! I am expanding my English vocabulary...

Unfortunately Binky Watrous also participates in the events: this slows the plot down and the meager comedic payout does not justify the many, many pages of text, dedicated to this least interesting of all Archy McNally regulars. Another weakness is the character of Natalie Westmore - totally implausible to me. On the positive side I love the reference to The Rule of Seventy-Two (I often mention it when teaching calculus) which is used for testing the legitimacy of a financial advisor.

The novel is worth reading only for the florid prose. To use the author's own phrasing the inanity of the plot gasts my flabber.

Two stars.



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The Aunt's Story by Patrick White
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"But on a morning the colour of zinc old Mrs Goodman died."

Patrick White's novel The Eye of the Storm which I read over 40 years ago is one of the books I love the most, one that touched me in the strongest way possible and made me realize that great literature is the apex of all arts, encompassing both beauty and truth. Of course I need to re-read it, but the 600-page volume intimidates me. So instead I decided for now to read shorter works by Mr. White, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1973. And I am ecstatic that I chose The Aunt's Story (1948), one of the earliest books by Mr. White. I am completely in awe of the magnificent prose and so very happy to assign the rare highest rating.

The novel, divided into three parts, relates the story of one woman's dissolution of identity and her descent into madness. We meet Theodora Goodman as a fiftyish spinster, an aunt to her sister's children. The first part recounts Theodora's childhood and youth. The story is so beautifully told that I was unable to put the book away. Theodora is a disappointment to her mother, the "old Mrs. Goodman" because she was an odd, sallow, and ugly child, and has not fulfilled the mother's hopes. Theo's pretty sister, Fanny, leads a comfortable and utterly conventional life. Theo takes care of Fanny's children and also of her aging mother. As she is socially awkward and unattractive, men are not interested in her; only one man courts her but he probably needs her only as yet another item on the long list of his material possessions. The closest she gets to love is when she has an epiphany of sorts during a concert of a Greek cellist - a sublimation of her needs to be close to another person.

The dreamlike, phantasmagoric second part of the novel takes place in Hôtel du Midí somewhere in Europe where Theo goes after her mother's death. She meets a number of strange and interesting characters in the Jardin Exotique at the hotel. Or does she? The hallucinatory atmosphere of unreality is so overwhelming that the reader will be right to ask whether all these people exist only within Theo's mind. Of course she herself may not know whether they are real. The boundary between her consciousness and the so-called real world has disappeared. The third part takes place somewhere in the United States, where Theodora is in the final stage of her journey into madness. Unable to adapt to any conventional norms of society she disposes of the last components of her external identity.

While the story is powerful and deeply affecting, it is the phenomenal prose that made a tremendous impression on me. Virtually on every page the reader will find a delicious nugget of truth packaged in a wrapping of stunningly original prose. In my long years I have never read a book so rich in fresh and vivid metaphors and metonyms. The following is one of the most extraordinary paragraphs of prose that I have ever read:

"All through the middle of America there was a trumpeting of corn. Its full, yellow, tremendous notes pressed close to the swelling sky. There were whole acres of time in which the yellow corn blared as if for judgement. It had taken up and swallowed all other themes, whether belting iron, or subtler, insinuating steel, or the frail human reed. Inside the movement of corn the train complained. The train complained of the frustration of distance, that resists, that resists. Distance trumpeted with corn."

(After the five-star rating I include three other fragments of Patrick White's breathtaking prose.) The novel is exactly 70 years old yet it does not feel dated at all. It could have been written last year. It reads completely fresh despite references to Hitler's annexations of countries in the 1930s or to Lenin and Kerensky from the times of the Soviet Revolution of 1917.

A magnificent novel!

Five stars.

"In Paris the metal hats just failed to tinkle. The great soprano in Dresden sang up her soul for love into a wooden cup. In England the beige women, stalking through the rain with long feet and dogs, had the monstrous eye of sewing machines."

"But Theodora did not reject the word. It flowed, violet and black, and momentarily oyster-bellied through the evening landscape, fingering the faces of the houses. Soon the sea would merge with the houses, and the almost empty asphalt promenade, and the dissolving lavender hills behind the town. So that there was no break in the continuity of being."

"She walked out through the passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died."

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