Donna Leon’s ‘Drawing Conclusions’ – Art and Death in Venice

A mystery built on the theme that uncharacteristic behavior may reveal someone’s true character

Drawing Conclusions. By Donna Leon. Penguin, 260 pp., $15, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

Guido Brunetti has a wife he loves “to the point of folly” and two children in whom he has “invested every hope of happiness on this earth.” Those facts alone set him apart from the many fictional detectives who live by variations on Rudyard Kipling’s ”Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, / He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

But Donna Leon’s Venetian police commissioner also has a rare wisdom and humanity in a field littered with sleuths who get by on wisecracks and macho swagger. Like Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, Commissario Brunetti tends to solve crimes through a keen grasp of human nature rather than shoot-’em-up gunslinging or high forensic gimmickry. That pattern holds in the 20th Brunetti mystery, which involves the death of a widow who sheltered battered women in her Venice apartment. Several valuable drawings have vanished from the victim’s walls, including a Corot, and the case looks like an art theft turned tragic. Brunetti suspects that something more complex has occurred, and his findings ultimately make the lost artworks look like a red herring.

So the appeal of Drawing Conclusions lies less in its plotting than in its atmospheric portrait of Venice, its psychological insights, and its author’s ability to develop a theme across multiple characters, not  just in that of the victim or a foe. Brunetti knows that as Dante’s Inferno has “thieves transformed into lizards, lizards into thieves, the moment of transformation invisible until complete,” people can be two things at once. Or, as his mother believed, uncharacteristic behavior can show someone’s true character. In this novel Brunetti shows that he, too, can be two things at once. And he paradoxically shows an admirable dimension of his character when he acts in an uncharacteristic way.

Best line: No. 1: He was “seduced into the suspicion that trace elements of humanity were still to be found in his superior’s soul.” No. 2: “Brunetti had struck on a truth, and he knew it: even the worst men wanted to be perceived as better than they were.”

Worst line: “a blonde woman.” “Blonde” is a noun that refers to a person, “blond” an adjective that describes a hair color. [Please see Victoria Corby's comment on different uses of "blond" and "blonde" in the U.S. and U.K.]

Published: 2011 (Heinemann hardcover), 2012 (Penguin paperback).

Furthermore: Leon talks to Tim Heald in a Telegraph interview about her Brunetti novels.

You can follow Jan on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button in the sidebar at right.

© 2012 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Backscratching in Our Time: Denis Johnson and Michael Cunningham

The latest in a series of posts on authors who praise each other’s books

Michael Cunningham says that he and the two other jurors for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for fiction found it “upsetting” that the board that oversees the awards rejected all three of the books they nominated, including Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Here’s what others might find upsetting: In a 5,000-word post on the controversy for the Page-Turner blog for the New Yorker, Cunningham doesn’t mention a conflict of interest: As I noted in April, Johnson helped to launch Cunningham’s career by providing a blurb for his first book and did him another favor by allowing him to reprint his work in an anthology. Some people would argue that, given these conflicts, Cunningham should have recused himself from judging Johnson’s work for the Pulitzer. His New Yorker post makes clear that he participated actively in the process.

Here’s what the two writers say about each other:

Denis Johnson on Michael Cunningham’s Golden States:
“Michael Cunningham writes with wisdom, humor, and style about a difficult part of any life.”

Michael Cunningham on Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams:
“Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams had been written ten years earlier and been published as a long short story in The Paris Review. It was, however, magnificently written, stylistically innovative, and—in its exhilarating, magical depiction of ordinary life in the much romanticized Wild West—a profoundly American book.”

Read other posts in the “Backscratching in Our Time” series. You can follow Jan on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button in the right sidebar.

As noted on the “About This Blog” page on this site, comments on posts must relate directly to their content,  must contain no more than 250 words, and must  have a civil tone.  They must also include a name, a photo avatar, or a link to a site what includes these, unless their author is known to the moderator of One-Minute Book Reviews. 

© 2012 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Good Paperbacks for $16 or Less – Books for Your Economic Recovery

Get sand in your shoes, not in the gears of your Nook or Kindle, at the beach this summer

By Janice Harayda

Have you noticed that many of this year’s summer reading lists sound as though they were written for the economic boom times of the Reagan era? Some of the most prominent round-ups have consisted only or mainly of new hardcovers with $25–$30 price tags. Yes, those books may have had $9.99 digital editions. But do you want to drip suntan oil onto — or get sand in the gears of — a Nook or Kindle? If not, here are some of the best recent paperbacks that you can buy for $16 or less.

Fiction
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $15, 2012), by Deborah Moggach. A group of spirited British men and men women move to a retirement home in India in a comic novel that has a thicker plot and sharper wit than the 2012 movie based loosely on its story.

Drawing Conclusions (Penguin Trade Paperbacks, $15, 2012), by Donna Leon. The humane Venice police investigator Guido Brunetti makes his 20th appearance in a mystery about the murder of a widow whose art works have disappeared, a book that Library Journal called “literary crime fiction at its best.”

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $15, 2011), by Yiyun Li. Intelligent Chinese men and women maintain hope against the odds while trapped by circumstances fostered by a repressive Beijing government (“Souvenir”) or difficult upbringings (“Gold Boy, Emerald Girl”) in a collection of nine elegant short stories.

The Imperfectionists (Dial Trade Paperbacks, $15, 2011) by Tom Rachman. Staff members at an English-language newspaper in Rome face the decline of their publication in a collection of tragicomic parables about the human illusions that lie at the intersection of love and work in a digital age. Their grief doesn’t keep them from writing headlines such as “WORLD’S OLDEST LIAR DIES AT 126.”

Nonfiction
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (Scribner paperbacks, $16, 2011), by S.C. Gwynne. With journalistic balance and novelistic flair, S.C. Gwynne tells the story of the fall of the Comanches in a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He filters their decline through the lives Quanah Parker, their last great chief; Quanah’s white mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, kidnapped by the tribe as a 9-year-old and removed from it against her will 24 years later by Texas Rangers; and Ranald Mackenzie, a brilliant Indian fighter who attended West Point with Gen. George Armstrong Custer.

Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Misson of World War II (HarperPerennial paperbacks, $15.99, 2012), by Mitchell Zuckoff. Never mind that the “most incredible rescue mission” of World War II took place on the beaches of Dunkirk. Mitchell Zuckoff has written an exciting and fast-paced account of how in the last days of World War II, the U.S. Army rescued service members stranded when their military plane crashed into a mountainous rainforest in New Guinea, where pythons grew to 15 feet and the natives were believed to practice cannibalism.

Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School (Slightly Foxed paperbacks, £15, 2011), by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. An English biographer has written a captivating history of a London boys’ school that thrived despite an eccentric headmaster and a staff of largely untrained teachers. Yes, £15 is slightly more than $16, but this book has had too little attention in the U.S. It deserves a break.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau paperbacks, $16, 2012), by Barbara Demick. A Los Angeles Times reporter won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction for this remarkable portrait of North Korean defectors and the lives they had led under Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il. Demick shows the catastrophic effects of one of the world’s most repressive regimes as she tells the stories of six people who escaped to South Korea by dint of forged passports, bribed border guards, or other cloak-and-dagger efforts.

You can follow Jan on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button at right.

© 2102 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved

Deborah Moggach’s Comic Novel ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’

The book that inspired the hit movie with Judi Dench offers pleasures of its own

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel. Random House Movie Tie-in Edition, 336 pp., $15, paperback. First published under the title These Foolish Things.

By Janice Harayda

Deborah Moggach shows how much life a good writer can bring to an old literary device – the use of a hotel a metaphor for the transience of life – in this inspiration for the movie with the same title. As in the film, a group of Brits in their 60s and 70s move to a fraying retirement home in India that delivers at once more and less than its sunny brochure promised. These men and women have varied reasons for uprooting themselves, but all have been “deserted in one way or another by those they had loved.”

In India the wounded but hopeful exiles face new shocks – boiled buffalo milk for breakfast, “cruelly thin” cows on streets, children who call women “auntie.” As they try to adapt, their story becomes the rare comedy of cross-cultural manners that can absorb more than one tragedy while remaining true to the light-hearted spirit of the form. Some characters in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel appear in a similar guise in the movie — the xenophobic Muriel Donnelly, the proper but resilient Evelyn Greenslade, the ill-matched Doug and Jean Ainsley, and others.

But the novel is less of a fairy tale than the film and, as such, is more interesting. It has a thicker plot, a sharper wit, and a richer perspective on India, rooted in part in two years Moggach spent in Pakistan. In the novel a high-born Indian regards the shadow of a lower-caste countryman as so dirty he must disinfect it. “The law forbids the caste system,” a Hindu woman tells Muriel, “but of course it still continues as strongly as ever.” Many cultural subtleties, left out of the movie, emerge in the novel.

Moggach has a free hand with coincidences, and she drops a few plot stitches (one involving a cobra that people hear but never appears, which makes the mention of it seem a bit of a cheat). But that doesn’t explain why after 18 books of fiction, she is so little known in America. Moggach is an admired London novelist and screenwriter who adapted Pride and Prejudice for the film that starred Keira Knightly, and if she has learned about comedy from Jane Austen, she has clearly absorbed ideas on plot from Agatha Christie and other crime writers. She is certainly a more thoughtful and entertaining writer than many British authors who have found a larger American readership. Evelyn Greenslade vows in India to “make the strange into the familiar.” Moggach, too, deserves to be made “into the familiar” on these shores.

Best line: No. 1: “Increasing years, of course, render us invisible as if in preparation for our eventual disappearance.” No. 2: “While she was pruning her forsythia, it seemed, the world had been transformed.” No. 3: “‘You’re as old as you feel.’ ‘Then I feel old,’ said Evelyn.”

Worst line: “ ‘I wish I could jettison my tights,’ Evelyn said.” Evelyn Greenslade is an intelligent woman, but would she really say “jettison”?

Recommendation? Highly recommended to book clubs and others looking for light but intelligent fiction.

Published: March 2012 (Random House movie tie-in edition). Originally published under the title These Foolish Things by Chatto & Windus in 2004.

Furthermore: Read a rave review for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that ran in the TLS when the book first appeared under the title of These Foolish Things. Learn about the movie on IMDb.

Janice Harayda is a novelist and award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour and the book critic for the Plain Dealer. You can follow Jan on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button at right.

© 2102 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

‘Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School’ – The True Story of an Eccentric Headmaster and His Beloved English Boys’ School

A captivating portrait of “a hundred little anarchists in a London townhouse” 

Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School. By Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Introduction by A.N. Wilson. Afterword by Julian Fellowes. Illustrations by Kath Walker. Slightly Foxed, 199 pp., £15, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

A nun once stuffed young Bruce Springsteen into a garbage can because, a biographer reports, “that’s where you belong.” Such incidents abound in books about American Catholic education in the middle decades of the 20th century and tend to turn them into horror stories or bleak comedies of errors that wrest humor from pain.

Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School is something rare: a book about a Catholic school that is at heart a love story. This captivating history of St Philip’s in South Kensington has its share of anecdotes that might horrify anyone unfamiliar with how common such episodes once were at English boys’ schools – pants-down beatings with a slipper, meals of Spam and watery mashed potatoes that all children had to eat, and cricket games played in frigid weather in just a shirt and itchy wool shorts, with underpants forbidden. The book also offers ample hilarity in its teachers’ efforts to control what a former student called “a hundred little anarchists in a London townhouse.”

But the eccentric founding headmaster and staff of St Philip’s loved their charges in a way that, to judge by the sparkling anecdotes gathered by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, was largely reciprocated. Richard Tibbits and his “ragbag of untrained teachers” had a quality that rarely surfaces in books about American parochial schools: They were human. American Catholic students of his era were taught mainly by nuns whose flesh-and-blood realities remained a perpetual source of mystery. It was far from uncommon for young children to ask their parents, on first glimpsing their new teachers in black habits and stiff white wimples, “Do nuns go to the bathroom?”

No one would have been likely to ask that question about Tibbits, who resembled “a Beatrix Potter drawing of a very nice old pig” and was known for “extreme strictness” mixed with “the deepest kindness, compassion and care for the forming of boys’ minds and souls.” Nor would anyone have asked it about his wife, who chain-smoked Benson & Hedges as she presided over the ground-floor corridor in a nylon housecoat.

The Tibbitses attracted teachers with similar quirks. A retired Cockney customs officer, flush with his wife’s money, taught math and boasted, “I could buy the whole lot of you out.” A beautiful Polish princess arrived as a maternity-leave replacement for one of the few women on hand and fell in love with the geography instructor. John Tregear, the French teacher, “wore black boots with red cork high heels and drainpipe trousers.” He leaps to immortality in one of the witty line drawings by Kath Walker that add as much charm to this book as Arthur Watts’s do to E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady.

Richard Tibbits had founded St Philip’s in 1934 as an academy for the 7-to-13-year-old sons of middle and upper class Catholics, many of whom attended Mass at the Brompton Oratory, and his teaching methods suited that group. As late as the mid-1960s, the school had no classes in biology or chemistry because, Tibbits said, “Gentlemen do not study science.” When St Philip’s finally dipped its toe into such fields, its approach might have struck some people as curious – students, for example, learned to make gunpowder. The school had crucifixes and pictures of the Pope on the walls, but it welcomed doubters with a warmth rare in American Catholic schools of its era, where many jokes involved variations on the words “Protestant” and “prostitute.”

For all of this, St Philip’s had high educational and spiritual standards that boys strived to uphold. One former student told Maxtone Graham that at the age of seven he was reading Treasure Island: “You were expected to be good at drawing, good at reading, interested in foreign lands.” The high-achieving the families associated with the school suggest that students met those standards: Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes attended St Philip’s, the biographer Antonia Fraser sent her son, Orlando, there, and the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mother taught singing. Maxtone Graham has rewarded the trust of those who spoke with her by writing a history distinguished by the perfection of its tone: She writes in the first person, so that her story reads like a memoir, but keeps her focus on St Philip’s. In its casual tone, her book resembles many English schoolboy stories less than Diana Athill’s recent memoirs, including Somewhere Towards the End. Mr Tibbit’s Catholic School might have been called Somewhere Towards the End of the Reign of Richard Tibbits.

St Philip’s began to change after Tibbits’s died in 1967, and the process sped up in the 1980s as a new generation of working mothers dared to suggest improvements the old regime would not have tolerated, such as the purchase of a computer. But the fearless spirit of the school endures in its administrators’ willingness to display on its website this melodious hymn to its idiosyncrasies, a book that shows how much American and other schools lose when they impose enough restrictions to drive away the most gifted and creative teachers. Ninety percent of the teachers at St Philip’s were “certifiable,” the historian  and former student Adam Zamoyski admits. “They wouldn’t be allowed within a mile of a school now. But that was often what made them such good teachers.”

Best line: All. An example: “The teaching was old-fashioned, and sometimes downright out-of-date. Textbooks had not been renewed since the founding of the school: in geography lessons, 1960s boys found themselves learning about the exciting new invention of the mechanical combine harvester – which had actually come into widespread use in the 1930s.”

Worst line: None. But a few more details on some would have been welcome. The book notes, for example, that Antonia Fraser was a school mother but not whether she sent all her sons there or just one.

Publication date: 2011

Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website. Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School is available from Crawford Doyle Booksellers in New York. Allison Pearson wrote about the book in the Telegraph.

About the author: Ysenda Maxtone Graham also wrote The Real Mrs. Miniver, a finalist for the Whitbread biography prize.

Janice Harayda is a novelist and award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book critic for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. You can follow Jan (@janiceharayda) on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button at right.

© 2012 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

‘A Ball for Daisy’ – A Review of the 2012 Caldecott Medal Winner

Chris Raschka brings the spirit of modern art to to American picture books, but is that good?

A Ball for Daisy. By Chris Raschka. Schwartz & Wade/Random House, 32 pp., $16.99, Ages 2–4.

By Janice Harayda

A vacancy has existed at the summit of American picture book illustration since the death of Maurice Sendak, who shared that spot with Chris Van Allsburg and Nancy Ekholm Burkert. Some critics might usher in Chris Raschka, who won his first Caldecott Medal for The Hello, Goodbye Window and his second for A Ball for Daisy. And it’s easy to see why reviewers like the more than 40 books for children that he has produced alone or with authors such as Norman Juster and Jack Prelutsky.

More aggressively than any recent illustrator, Raschka has brought to American picture books the spirit and techniques of modern art: Fauvism’s symbolic use of color, Cubism’s fragmented geometric forms, Expressionism’s bold lines and emotional drama. That pattern holds in A Ball for Daisy, a wordless tale of a shaggy dog who suffers acute but fleeting heartbreak when a poodle punctures her adored red ball during a romp in the park. Raschka works with familiar materials – ink, watercolor and gouache – but uses them inventively enough to refresh an ageless theme: A new love eases the pain of losing an old one. His debt to the modernists shows up clearly in the destroyed ball, which in its shape and intensity of color resembles one of Matisse’s six-bladed leaf cutouts.

Raschka certainly deserves credit for originality in the conservative field of picture books – a realm that, as Sendak said, “is becoming a creatively exhausted genre.” But whether he should have won the latest Caldecott Medal is debatable. Novelty isn’t the same as greatness. And all the modernist influences on display in his book don’t lift it above some of the animal tales that the 2012 Caldecott judges rejected, including Ekholm Burkert’s Mouse & Lion. Like the 2011 winner, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, A Ball for Daisy is a sweet book unlikely to offend anyone.

Then there is the issue of the wordlessness of the story. The presence or absence of a written text is neutral in picture books, which can work with or without one. But words can add layers of meaning to a story. When they don’t exist, those layers must come from the art in order for a picture book to stand up to multiple rereadings. And A Ball for Daisy doesn’t really have them. What you see is what you get.

Three of the past six Caldecott winners have had no words, and that fact has led to speculation and some anger online. Have the judges bypassed worthy books because of fonts or stories when the medal is an award for illustration? Are they dumbing down America’s most prestigious picture book prize? The deliberations of the Caldecott judges are confidential, so it’s unclear why wordless books are winning a disproportionate number of medals. Whatever the reason, for the second year in a row they have played it safe. Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are still inspires spirited arguments more than a half-century after it won the 1964 Caldecott Medal. Gift-shoppers may see it as a strength — while others can only see it as a weakness — that  A Ball for Daisy gives you so little to debate.

Best line/picture: A wordless spread in that has eight roughly square pictures showing Daisy’s stages of grief for her destroyed ball, which include confusion, sorrow, anger, and finally a pained resignation. The spread makes the most sense when “read” horizontally across the two pages, which gives you a background that darkens with each image to show the dog’s growing despair. But it also works if you read the images on the left-hand page first (as some children will do) in an up-and-down, clockwise, or counterclockwise direction.

Worst line/picture: The young girl who owns Daisy remains headless until she and her beloved pet return home, more than halfway through the book, after the ball deflates. Raschka clearly did this to keep the focus on the dog’s emotions. But it distracts you from the story by adding a subplot: Who is Daisy’s owner?

Furthermore: A Ball for Daisy won the 2012 Caldecott Medal from the American Library Association, which also honored him for The Hello, Goodbye Window. Meghan Cox Gurdon reviewed A Ball for Daisy for the Wall Street Journal. One-Minute Book Reviews reviewed Jack Prelutsky’s Good Sports, which Raschka illustrated.

Janice Harayda is an award-winning journalist who has been the book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland and a vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle. You can follow can follow Jan on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button in the right sidebar.

© 2012 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

How to Write Good Book Reviews When Publishers Toss You Their Worst

A Neon Sign at the Topless Bar of Literature
12 Tips for Writing Good Book Reviews
When Publishers Hit You With Their Worst

By Janice Harayda

A well-known book critic once said that she hoped that her reviews would be “a soft light in the alcove of art.” Some of the books I’ve reviewed have made me feel more like a neon sign at the topless bar of literature. But I share that critic’s view: A reviewer’s most important task is to help you see a book clearly and, especially, to show its uniqueness. A question I ask every day is: How can I show how this book differs from all others? And I’ve tried to develop a few guidelines for answering it.

I was the book critic for the Plain Dealer for 11 years, and during that time, I had to follow the Associated Press Stylebook, which has 448 pages in its current edition. I also had to follow the house style sheet for the Plain Dealer, which had more than 100 pages. Together these guides had thousands of rules. If their rules clashed, you had to know when the Plain Dealer rule would override the AP rule and vice versa. On a deadline, you could feel like an accountant trying to parse an obscure point of the federal income tax code just before midnight on April 15.

So the last thing I want to do is to flash-freeze more rules. The joy of blogging is that you get to make your own rules. But I write a lot of copy (which, if you’re under 30, was the old word for “content”). Since 2006 I’ve written 1,763 posts for One-Minute Book Reviews. And I’ve been able to keep up that pace in part because I’ve set a few guidelines for myself. I write better and faster if I don’t have to ask each time I do a post: What are my goals as a critic? For whom am I writing? When does a review cross the line, legally and ethically?

My guidelines keep evolving as I learn from the best critics working in print or online, but here are a dozen that I’ve used for years. Freelance reviewers for the Plain Dealer also had to follow most of these (so that — yes! — their work had to pass the test of three style sheets).

1. Seek out books that you can review uniquely well, and say what you alone can say about them.

2. Report facts accurately. Every reviewer’s judgments are at times flawed. But you can build trust with readers, authors, and publishers by getting the facts right even if you’re wrong about the merits of a book. Don’t trust your memory. Go back and check every fact and quote, and the spelling of every character’s name, before you post a review.

3. Know what you want your review to be: A consumer’s guide? A news report? A literary or scholarly analysis? A combination of all of those? Or something else entirely? If you aren’t sure, find a review you admire of a similar book and use it as a model.

4. Answer these questions in every review: What makes this book different from all others? And why should anyone care?

5. Write conversationally. Read your reviews aloud and rewrite or cut anything you wouldn’t say to your smartest friend.

6. Purge your work of “reviewese” (words and phrases you see mainly or only in reviews). Would anyone you know call a novel “an affecting literary debut full of lapidary prose”?

7. Aim to be fair rather than “kind.” A kindness to an author (such as failing to mention a serious defect in a book) can be cruel to readers who use reviews as a guide to what to read.

8. Criticize the book, not the author, if you don’t like what you’ve read. Focus on what’s on the page, not a writer’s character defects.

9. Give people enough information about the plot of a novel or the facts in a nonfiction book that they have a context for your opinions. Don’t give so much that your post turns into a book report instead of a review.

10. Never review a book by a friend or an enemy. Make this point part of a strict ethics code that includes avoiding any conflict of interest or appearance of a conflict. (The trouble is, as others have noted: You don’t know who your enemies are until you review their books.)

11. Find paper mentor, a great critic whose work you love. Read his or her work regularly and take it apart to see how it works. Hand copy the critic’s reviews or parts of them (with a pen or by typing them into a computer) to absorb their rhythm and structure.

12. Never post a review that isn’t the best work you can do in the time available. If you might improve a review by sitting on it for a few days and you have the freedom to do that, hold it back.

I also respect the unofficial motto of American journalism: “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” A partial translation of that slogan is: Look for “afflicted” books that need your review, including underappreciated gems from the past and from contemporary small presses. And have the courage to “afflict” overpraised books that don’t deserve their medals or comfortable spots on bestseller lists. Will the author of Fifty Shades of Grey really suffer if you say it offered Fifty Shades of Boredom?

Update, Aug. 19, 2012: A point I made in my BEA Bloggers talk that did up appear on this list when I first posted it: Whenever possible, put the good things about a book or author up front — if not in the lead, at least close to it.

Helpful or Entertaining Links

1. “Mrs. Post Enlarges on Etiquette.” Dorothy Parker’s review of Emily Post’s Etiquette.
2. “Politics and the English Language.” George Orwell’s classic essay on writing, which offers advice related to “reviewese.”
3. “40 Publishing Buzzwords, Clichés, and Euphemisms Decoded” and “More Publishing Buzzwords Decoded With Wit on Twitter.” A tongue-in-cheek list of book-review clichés submitted by editors, authors, and others and its sequel.
4. “A Sampling of Five Decades of Phobe-Lou Adams’s Brief Reviews.” A collection of short, witty reviews by a longtime reviewer for the Atlantic.
5. “Weblog Ethics.” Rebecca Blood’s excellent guide to ethics for bloggers.

6. Ruth Franklin’s acceptance speech for the 2012 Roger Shattuck Prize for literary criticism from the Center for Fiction, delivered on May 30, 2012.

7. “Tips for Successful Book Reviewing,” Rebecca Skloot’s excellent post on how to get started in book reviewing.

Janice Harayda runs One-Minute Book Reviews and tweets at @janiceharayda. She is a novelist and an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. She wrote this article in conjunction with her appearance on the Critical Reviews panel at BookExpoAmerica’s 2012 BEA Bloggers conference in New York. Dorothy Parker and Phoebe-Lou Adams are two of her paper mentors.

© 2012 JaniceHarayda. All rights reserved.

Against the Term ‘Literary Fiction’ / Quote of the Day, John Updike

“I am dismayed by the recent rise of the term ‘literary fiction’ …” John Updike

By Janice Harayda

There’s a lot of competition for the title of the Worst Publishing Trend of the 21st century. Best sellers written at a third-grade level. Ebooks with no proofreading and bad formatting. Pink covers on novels by women when books of comparable quality by men don’t get bound in baby blue.

Then there’s a trend that, if less obvious, may be the worst of all — the increasing practice of labeling novels either “literary” or “commercial,” or high or low culture. The trend gained force about two decades ago as the largest bookstore chains were becoming more important. And it may exist in part because when you have thousands of feet of floor space to fill, you need an easy way to classify books.

But if the “literary” and “commercial” labels help big-box stores, they hurt others. The artificial divisions set up misleading expectations. All novels don’t fall neatly into one of two categories. The terms “literary” and “commercial” – if they are valid at all – aren’t absolutes. They are points on a continuum. Some “literary” novels sell millions of copies, and some “commercial” never find a following. And the terms often have little to do with the quality of a book.

Complaints about this taxonomy typically come from authors who rightly or wrongly see themselves as misclassified as “commercial” when they deserve better. So it’s refreshing that the late John Updike – as “literary” as they come – takes stand on the issue in his posthumous essay collection, Higher Gossip. Updike writes: “I am dismayed by the recent rise of the term ‘literary fiction,’ denoting a genre almost as rarefied and special and ‘curious’ in appeal, to contemporary Americans, as poetry.” His words a welcome reminder that no authors – even members of the publishing elite – benefit from capricious labeling.

You can follow Jan (@janiceharayda) on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button at right.

© 2012 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Susan Gubar’s ‘Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer’

Current methods of treating ovarian cancer are “a scandal,” a scholar says

Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer. By Susan Gubar. Norton, 296 pp., $24.95.

By Janice Harayda

Susan Gubar once hoped to die as swiftly as a relative found dead in her seat by ushers at the Metropolitan Opera House after a performance of Aida. She won’t get her wish.

Gubar was 63 years old and looking forward to retiring from an influential teaching career when she learned in late 2008 that she had Stage III epithelial ovarian cancer. Most women her age who develop the disease die within three years of the diagnosis. Doctors nonetheless treat them with draconian procedures that include “debulking” surgery, which reduces the size of tumors that can’t be removed completely. Such efforts, Gubar came to believe, may “destroy the pleasures of existence” for someone who gains few or no benefits from them.

Is the misery worth it? Gubar often sounds ambivalent as she describes the catastrophes that occurred during and after her debulking. Her calamities began with a bowel perforation during her operation. That mishap led to an ileostomy and to surgical drain irrigations that, she says, “exceeded any level of suffering I thought imaginable” and that morphine couldn’t touch. Afterward she kept “getting sucked into procedure after procedure, each with its ghastly physical repercussions.”

Gubar explains her repeated acquiescence partly by saying that she had two grown daughters who weren’t ready to lose her and that her treatments fostered a helplessness born of pain, fatigue, depression, and sedation. But you sense that there is more to it than that. Gubar calls herself a secular Jew “with no conventional religious faith to speak of.” Did she unwittingly turn medicine into her God? Did her lack of belief in an afterlife make it harder to let go of barbarous treatments? She asks but never satisfactorily answers the question: “how can those of us without firm religious convictions integrate the awareness and actuality of death and dying into our lives?” On the subject of faith, she offers what she acknowledges are “garbled” views such as: “I will love my family until death departs, and since death will never depart, I will love them always and forever.” What on Earth does “until death departs” mean?

In Memoir of a Debulked Woman Gubar interweaves her story with an overview of ovarian cancer in history and literature and with a polemic against the woeful state of treatments for it.  This approach gives her book a breadth lacking in most illness narratives while depriving it of the sharp focus of cancer memoirs such as Joyce Wadler’s My Breast and Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness. Much of the writing is stilted, repetitive, and padded with irrelevant anecdotes about Gubar’s family and friends. It would have benefited from a few pages on how doctors in other industrialized countries treat ovarian cancer.

But what Memoir of a Debulked Woman lacks lacks finesse, it makes up for in importance. No first-person account offers a more comprehensive description of the dismal options for women with late-stage ovarian cancer or makes a more passionate case that the current methods of treating it are “a scandal.” And in an age of medical overkill, those women share many of the dilemmas of patients who have other cancers with low three-year survival rates and who must decide whether to have potentially soul-destroying treatments. This gives the book a relevance that goes beyond the disease at its center.

Gubar’s cancer is in remission, an article in USA Today said last month, so her treatments seem to have extended her life at least slightly beyond what she could have expected. But her memoir makes clear that the precious extra months have come at a price that not everyone would want to pay. Gubar says that, when she’s feeling cynical, she believes that fifty years from now “doctors will look back at the treatment of ovarian cancer today and judge it medieval.” Her book should hasten that process.

Best line: No. 1: “the state of contemporary approaches to ovarian cancer is a scandal.” No. 2: Gubar offers a good list of “the cockamamie conundrums confronted by people treated for ovarian cancer” (although “cockamamie” is too light-hearted a word for some of them). Among them: Debulking surgery calls for surgeons to remove, while a patient is under general anesthesia, any organs to which the ovarian cancer has spread. So women don’t know beforehand which body parts they will lose and can’t “decide that they would prefer not to … risk the high rate of postoperative complication.”

Worst line: No. 1: Gubar criticizes Joan Acocella (who called her an “amateur” who spouts “shocking nonsense” in The New Yorker) in a way that makes her look worse than Acocella. No. 2: One of many padded sentences: “The radiologist inserted the thick tube into the center of my right buttock: in the Midwest, ‘the butt’; in New York, ‘the tush’; in the South, ‘the bottom’; in fancy French, ‘the derrière’; in pseudo-science, ‘the gluteus maximus’; on the street, ‘the ass’; in Don’s jokey repetition of the nurse’s word, ‘the bee-hind.’”

Caveat lector: Gubar warns: “For those who have reason to believe or need to believe that their cancer is curable, please remember that this book is not about you.”

Published: April 2012

About the author: Gubar is the co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, a finalist for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Read an excerpt from Memoir of a Debulked Woman.

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© 2012 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.co

What I’m Reading … ‘Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School’ by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

What I’m reading: Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School (Slightly Foxed, 199 pp., £11), by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Introduction by A.N. Wilson. Afterword by Julian Fellowes.

What it is: A history of St Philip’s school in London and its idiosyncratic founding headmaster, Richard Tibbits.

Why I’m reading it: Alison Pearson raved about it in a Telegraph column that begins: “While David Cameron was writing in these pages about the shocking mediocrity of many comprehensives in leafy suburbs, I was reading Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, a wonderful book by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. It’s the history of St Philip’s school for boys in Kensington, started in 1934 by Richard Tibbits, who is described by one former pupil as ‘like a Beatrix Potter drawing of a very nice old pig.’

“The headmaster was known for ‘extreme strictness and loss of temper on occasions, mixed with the deepest kindness, compassion and care for the forming of boys’ minds and souls… He was a genius at teaching.’ When it came to eccentricity, Mr Tibbits faced stiff competition from his staff.”

Quote from the book: “The teaching was old-fashioned, and sometimes downright out-of-date. Textbooks had not been renewed since the founding of the school: in geography lessons, 1960s boys found themselves learning about the exciting new invention of the mechanical combine harvester – which had actually come into widespread use in the 1930s.”

Probability that I will review the book: 100%

Publication date: 2011

Read A.N. Wilson’s introduction to Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School.

To learn more about the book or buy a copy, visit the site for Foxed Quartely. Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School is also available from Crawford Doyle Booksellers in New York.

About the author: Ysenda Maxtone Graham also wrote The Real Mrs Miniver, a finalist for the Whitbread biography prize.

You can follow Jan on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button in the right sidebar.

© 2012 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com