Zadie Smith's Latest

Swing Time     Zadie Smith     (2016)

Two young girls meet at dance class in 1980s London, both poor, both with one white parent and one black parent. Tracey is a preternaturally talented dancer, but the other girl, the unnamed narrator of the novel, is not. The girls watch videos of old movies to study dance technique, and Swing Time, the 1936 musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, is one of their favorites.

We follow the diverging lives of Tracey and the narrator as the novel skips back and forth in time over twenty-plus years, with issues of race and class always at the fore, always presented frankly.  I got pulled into caring for these two characters with the brilliant scenes of childhood and adolescence, as the friends are finding their life paths in the cultural excitement of late-20th-century Britain. Tracey, flashy and outspoken, becomes a professional dancer, albeit in the chorus line. The narrator, reserved and sensible, goes to university and then lands a job as a personal assistant to a famous globetrotting singer-dancer named Aimee. The supporting cast is strongly delineated, with the mothers of the two friends playing major roles. The mother-daughter relationships are depicted with a clarity that can make you squirm.

We know from the start of the novel that the narrator will suffer some major career and personal setback, so part of the tension in the narrative is watching how she will arrive at that outcome. The details play out in West Africa, where the pop star Aimee decides to splash a portion of her wealth on humanitarian projects that, predictably, go awry.

At this point, when the story moves to Africa, my eyes started to glaze over as I tried to read. After the superb London chapters, I found the descriptions and dialogue in the African part of the plot boring: a white pop star sweeps into an impoverished black village for brief visits while her mixed-race assistant handles the details of the distribution of largesse. If the novel hadn’t ventured back to Britain once in a while, I would have abandoned it.

What was wrong with me? I was reading a novel by Zadie Smith, the acclaimed author of White Teeth. How could I find the African segments boring? Did I need to drink more caffeine before reading?

After I trudged to the last page of Swing Time, I decided to look up a few reviews to see if I was missing something. I don’t usually read book reviews by others before writing my own, but I was perplexed. Almost all the reviewers gave Swing Time raves (including Annalisa Quinn for NPR and Taiye Selasi for The Guardian). Michiko Kakutani (for the New York Times) praised the London sections of the novel but called the African sections “perfunctorily rendered” and “formulaic and predictable.” Aha! Kakutani, the Supreme Goddess of Book Reviews, had exactly the same take that I had about those scenes in Africa!

If you decide to read Swing Time, skim over the chapters set in Africa. The true heart of this novel is in its exploration of friendship. Friends can comfort or exasperate you. They can protect or betray you, and they can swing back and forth between these extremes. But you need friends to be a whole person. The characters in Swing Time show us these truths.

Summer 1976, England

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep     Joanna Cannon     (2015)

When I noticed that The Trouble with Goats and Sheep was set in England in the summer of 1976, I had to read it. I spent that summer traveling around England, doing research on medieval manuscripts housed at several university libraries there. Librarians, proprietors of bed-and-breakfasts, and strangers on the train all wiped their brows and commented to me on the exceptionally hot, dry weather. I did notice that the rain that usually greens up the countryside was absent, but the temperatures didn’t seem excessive to me—in the high 80s Fahrenheit during the day.

I now realize that I was accustomed to summers in the midwestern US and that I was immured all day in British libraries with thick stone walls, so the nationwide lack of air conditioning wasn’t too burdensome. In retrospect, we know that the summer of 1976 was Britain’s hottest in at least 350 years—even hotter than recent toasty summers.

So heat permeates Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. Instead of the typical overcast skies and intermittent showers, the sunshine is relentless. Here’s a sample of Cannon’s descriptive powers:  “Evening had tempered the sun, and a wash of gold folded across the living room. It drew the sideboard into a rich, dark brandy and buried itself in the pleats of the curtains.” The heat and drought make the characters a little bit crazy: “The bonds which held things together were destroyed by the temperature . . . but it felt more sinister than that.”

In this summer of 1976, several mysteries unwind on “the Avenue,” a block of English suburbia. First, Mrs Creasy has disappeared. Grace and Tilly (both age ten) decide to figure out where she went and why she left. They are also searching for God, because the local vicar has said that people are like sheep and God is like a shepherd who gathers lost sheep. Grace, who narrates some chapters in first person, expresses skepticism at whether God, at the Last Judgment, can tell His beloved sheep from the goats, whom He plans to cast away into eternal punishment.

Other mysteries in the novel are connected to a house fire on the Avenue back in 1967; fragments of these old, smoldering mysteries are revealed to the reader in flashbacks. Lesser mysteries about individual characters also emerge. Why is Brian Roper still under the thumb of his harridan mother? Does Dorothy Forbes have Alzheimer’s or is she just badgered too much by her husband? Why is Tilly so sickly?

The action in The Trouble with Goats and Sheep moves very slowly; I got annoyed at having the plot doled out in such tiny tidbits. But character development is more important than plot here, since the reader, like God, has to know how to separate the sheep from the goats. We dive deep into the individual secrets in each house on the Avenue, with dialogue that’s witty and occasionally acerbic.

Some of the characters eat more sweets (Britspeak for candies), both generic and brand name, than is good for them. Since I’m not familiar with the British sweets market, I may be missing a specific authorial implication, but I’m guessing that the sugariness in those middle-class homes is barely coating the paranoia and cruelty of the residents. As a reader, you can wander in and out of the sweltering, stuffy kitchens on the Avenue. You can peer out the windows with the nosy neighbors. But don’t be taken in by the surface sweetness. Nastiness lurks.

Family Sagas: Three Reviews

Review #1

Commonwealth     Ann Patchett (2016)

I can accord all the usual accolades to Patchett, who deftly spins a saga covering fifty years of a family that she admits is somewhat like her own—it doesn’t matter exactly how much. Commonwealth is a set of interconnected novelettes about the affairs, divorces, and remarriages of the older generation and the resultant dysfunctions visited upon them and their children in California and Virginia. The characters are wonderfully crafted, the scene-setting is vivid, and the pacing is energetic. But there’s a serious flaw in this book that I simply cannot get past (spoiler coming). One character, who has a clearly known allergy, dies from anaphylaxis. Patchett repeatedly presents Benedryl tablets as the antidote that the character should have ingested, possibly because these tablets have other roles in her story. In fact, the death could have been prevented only if epinephrine (in an EpiPen) had been administered quickly. This is not a footnote in the novel but rather a defining event. Is Commonwealth still worth reading? Yup. But I’ve warned you.

Review #2

The Turner House     Angela Flournoy (2015)

For a comprehensive examination of the decline of the great city of Detroit, read the classic nonfiction text, The Origins of the Urban Crisis:  Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue. For an intimate portrayal of the effects of that crisis, read The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. I’m pretty familiar with Detroit. Flournoy has captured the city in its gritty bleakness of the early 2000s as well as, through flashbacks, in its manufacturing glory of the mid-twentieth century. Her angle in is the varying fortunes of the African American Turner family, with thirteen children who were born in the better days and are aging in the dying urban landscape. Although the cast of characters is huge, Flournoy keeps the plot manageable by developing primarily the stories of the oldest and youngest of this clan. The house that the Turners grew up in is depicted lovingly, as an organism in decline. The Turners are African Americans, but The Turner House is about working class Detroiters of any race or ethnicity who are trying to maintain family bonds through tough times.

Review #3

The House at the Edge of Night     Catherine Banner (2016)

Like Shakespeare’s island in The Tempest, Catherine Banner’s island of Castellamare is a tiny Mediterranean refuge for shipwrecked souls, a place of implausible coincidences and occasional magic. Banner follows a family on Castellamare throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, starting each section with a local legend that sets the tone for her archetypal, folkloric characters. The titular House at the Edge of Night is a bar and gathering place for the island community. Readers watch as the succeeding generations of Amadeo Esposito’s family take on the management of the bar, through periods of prosperity and depression, war in the surrounding world, and conflict in the village. Although the novel has a dreamlike, wistful quality, Banner treats serious issues such as clan loyalty, sibling discord, political clashes, and the rival demands of career and family. 

Two Tudor Mysteries

Dark Fire     CJ Sansom     (2004)     PLUS    Lamentation     CJ Sansom     (2014)

Matthew Shardlake is the subject of ridicule on two fronts. He’s a lawyer, so he’s the butt of jokes about acquisitive lawyers. And he has a hunchback, so he gets crude comments about his physical disability. He’s trying to keep up with the everyday demands of his legal practice in London, that great center of political intrigue, when a high-level government official draws him into a time-pressured investigation of a dangerous new military weapon. And it’s also the hottest summer anyone can remember.

In some ways, not a lot has changed since the year 1540.

Dark Fire is the second in the series of historical mysteries by British historian and former lawyer CJ Sansom. We’re  in Tudor England, with Henry VIII on the throne, unhappily married to the fourth of his six wives. Thomas Cromwell is his chief minister, seeking to keep both his job and his head. Our hero, Shardlake, is in Cromwell’s camp, supporting the reformer against those who want to restore Catholicism to England. But Cromwell is about to be executed, and the novelist knows that his readers know this—or if they don’t, they can read his Historical Note at the back of the book.

In first-person narrative, Shardlake takes us along on his frantic mission, twisting through the streets of London and back and forth on the mucky Thames, sweating profusely and reeling from the reek of rubbish and ordure. He’s pretty peeved that Cromwell has coerced him into taking this dangerous assignment, by helping him on an unrelated criminal case. Shardlake is also terrified by the numerous attempts on his life; his many narrow escapes do become implausible, but mysteries are often like that. The book has numerous sub-plots, as Shardlake tries to satisfy Cromwell’s demands, carry on with his own legal cases, maintain his household, and possibly pursue romance.   

The mysterious weapon, Dark Fire or Greek Fire, is a petroleum-based liquid that’s propelled out of a metal device to quickly engulf a target in flames. As an ethical man, Shardlake is conflicted about the moral implications of the use of Dark Fire. His pursuit of the formula and of the flame-throwing equipment sends him into the secretive and fantastical world of Renaissance alchemy—a tough place for a man of logic and reason to find himself.

The cast of characters in Dark Fire is large, including both historical and fictional people, and corruption among the court toadies is rampant. Through the diverse characters he creates, the novelist explores Tudor-era prejudices that still trouble humankind: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, disability discrimination, and intra-religion persecution. His treatment of these issues blends into his narrative, so it doesn’t come off as heavy-handed.

I was surprised to see Sansom’s fairly positive portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in this novel. Dark Fire was published five years before Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novel Wolf Hall (2009) rescued Cromwell from the opprobrium of history with a detailed portrait of his rise to power. Mantel and Sansom both seem to be saying that history should not be reduced to simplistic good-guys-vs-bad-guys pronouncements. The historical figure Thomas Cromwell and the fictional character Matthew Shardlake are juggling a dozen balls at once, struggling to stay alive, to build their personal careers, and to act for the good of the nation.

Since Dark Fire was such a fine historical mystery, I decided to read the most recent volume in Sansom’s series, Lamentation. This sixth installment of the Shardlake stories is a slower read than Dark Fire, and it wades deeper into religious and political controversies. I relish the dissection of dogmas and doctrines in Tudor England, but if you aren’t interested in the Tudors’ ever-shifting definition of “heresy,” you may find Lamentation somewhat dismal.

The mystery in Lamentation centers on a possibly heretical religious book, handwritten by the queen and stolen from a locked chest in her private chambers. The queen is Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, who must get nervous in the night about the fact that four of her five predecessors were either divorced or beheaded by Henry. Queen Catherine calls upon our hero, Matthew Shardlake, to make discreet inquiries to find the secret book, to keep her from burning at the stake.

The queen’s book did actually exist, but its theft is fictional, as are the ensuing murders and escapades in taverns and dungeons and wherries all over London town. As in Dark Fire, most of the characters in Lamentation have been invented by Sansom. The pleasures of this novel lie in the interaction of the fictional characters with actual figures in Henry VIII’s court during the final year of the king’s life, 1546-1547. Throughout the text, Sansom points gently to the chaos that we know is waiting at the door when Henry dies: the throne passing to his underage son, King Edward VI (Protestant), then to his daughter Queen Mary I (Catholic), then to his daughter Queen Elizabeth I (Protestant). Sansom even gets in a few non-explicit predictions about the execution of King Charles I, which will occur a century later.

Sansom’s historical references are, to my knowledge, accurate, and only a very few anachronisms of speech creep in to his dialogue. The subplots are engaging, and the scenes of sixteenth-century London, in both the palace and the gutters, are constructed well. So if you like wallowing in convoluted royal intrigue, jump right in.

Here are all the books in CJ Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series so far: Dissolution (2003), Dark Fire (2004), Sovereign (2006), Revelation (2008), Heartstone (2010), Lamentation (2014).

This book review is a bonus Sunday post!