“Ragtime”, by E.L. Doctorow

 

336 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0812978186

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow is…peculiar. Not bad. Just…peculiar. Allow me to elaborate. The novel features several real-life individuals who lived during the time the novel is set, in New York City between about 1902 through 1912, but centers especially on a (nameless) family living in New Rochelle, New York, referred to as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather and “the little boy”, Father and Mother’s young son. The family is wealthy because their business makes American flags and fireworks, an easy source of wealth due to the national enthusiasm for patriotic displays at this time.

The peculiarity comes in the way the novel is structured, in which a nameless narrator guides the reader through a series of events – some historical, some invented – that happens to and around this nameless family, but in a rambling, steam-of-consciousness fashion in which one sentence runs on into another and thoughts butt-up together without letup. I imagined our mysterious narrator to be an elderly person, sitting in a sun-lit room at the top of an old Queen Anne house – built sometime when these events occurred – rambling on about the glorious events that happened when he was still in knickers (probably Father and Mother’s young son from the book).

Doctorow’s style of writing in this book is rather journalistic: straightforward, direct and fluid, but with only sketchy character development, which is not surprising as the characters aren’t meant to be people but rather archetypes that represent ideals rather than persons. Overall, the book reads as if a progressive writer/reporter chose to highlight the eccentricities of the rich and famous (never mind their contributions to America) and romanticize the down-and-out, struggling underclass as victims of the rich, greedy, and mean-spirited. Tiresome and typical. Oh, and Doctorow evidently loves long paragraphs, seeing as there are so many of them.

So then, is Ragtime a bad book? Well…No, it’s just that, to reiterate, the structure is peculiar. To readjust my prior descriptions, it rather resembles a piece of ragtime music, which is syncopated; that is, a variety of rhythms are played together to make a piece of music, making part or all the music off-beat or “ragged”. And so in Ragtime, we have a series of fictional and historical scenarios and vignettes interweaved together to the rough, relentless beat of history – to the drive of the music; the book twists and jives from one event, one thought, one happening to another, never concerning itself where one ends and another begins, so long as the beat goes on.

“The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag” by Alan Bradley

 

384 pages, Bantam Books, ISBN-13: 978-0385343459

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley is the sequel to The Sweetness At the Bottom of the Pie (reviewed last month) and once again stars everyone’s favorite precocious 11-year-old hellion, Flavia de Luce. As in Sweetness, Flavia is found running wild in her village of Bishop’s Lacey when beloved BBC puppeteer Rupert Porson (and his “companion” Nialla) arrive and set up shop – and all hell breaks loose. Once again finding herself not-so-reluctantly investigating not one murder, but two, our dangerously clever chemist-in-training endeavors to discover just what happened not only in her present day, but five years previously, when another seemingly unrelated tragedy rocked this most-English of villages.

While Sweetness started right out the gate with a murder in Chapter 2, Hangman’s takes more time to get going, with Flavia peddling ‘round on Gladys and giving exposition on the new visitors and the village, the happenings of several years prior and other character’s lives, both old and new. It isn’t boring, per se, and Flavia is never nothing if not interesting – although this time around her obvious need of adult supervision and discipline is more glaring and a smidge less charming (but only a smidge). When the vile act at last occurs and, thence, leads to the rediscovery of the death of a little boy five years previous – a little boy who, had he lived, would have been Flavia’s age – our favorite English answer to Nancy Drew comes alive and we are off to the races.

Hangman’s is a decent enough mystery, steeped in the sunny atmosphere of rural England after the War, but what makes it exceptional is, of course, Flavia. She is a wonderfully wrought character: dauntless, clever, manipulative and eccentric in the great English minor gentry tradition. She is fascinated by and skilled in making poisons, knows how to get people to tell things they would never otherwise reveal and relentless in her quest to find out who did what and why, if not to see justice done – no Crusader she – but to solve a problem as if it were a chemical equation. That she does so without the assistance of the police – indeed, independent of them – makes her all the more fascinating (and at times, I must admit, just a little…far-fetched. But just a little).

All of which makes her rather intimidating, which Flavia knows all too well; at one point, when she shows too much insight into the affairs of Nialla, the young woman she is helping, she says to her “You are terrifying…You really are. Do you know that?”, to which Flavia responds “Yes…[i]t was true – and there was no use denying it”. And, during the denouement, when Flavia reveals a crucial piece of information to Inspector Hewitt, he turns to his team and demands to know why they hadn’t discovered this, Sergeant Woolmer’s response is “With respect, sir…it could be because we’re not Miss De Luce”. Too true, Sarge, too true. If only all police forces had a Flavia on them crime would dry up in no time flat.

But Flavia is still a well-drawn character, as, for all of her ferocious intellect and startling preciosity, she is only an 11-year-old girl; observant enough to uncover an affair but innocent enough not to be entirely sure what is involved in such an undertaking. She is also a lonely girl without enough love in her life: her elder sisters treat her badly; her father is distant, repressed and as obsessed with stamps as Flavia is with poisons; her mother is dead and her only connection to her is to sit in the Rolls she owned or to ride the bike she used, which she has rechristened Gladys and treats as if it were sentient; there is also family jack-of-all-trades, Dogger, but he suffers from PTSD and isn’t always there, in every definition.

Flavia is not a girl who is trying to be anything other than what she is; above all she seems to be trying just to be herself which she does with great self-assurance. When she turns up late (again) and her father describes her as “Utterly unreliable” she thinks to herself: “Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself. Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable”. Quite. And she is willing to overstep the bounds of politeness and perhaps even decency to get the information she wants but is perfectly reconciled to that aspect of herself, saying, after out-right lying to someone to ferret out what she wants to know: “Sometimes I hated myself. But not for long”. No, never for long.

“Orient Express: The Life and Times of the World's Most Famous Train” E. H. Cookridge

 

287 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0394411767

Orient Express: The Life and Times of the World's Most Famous Train by E. H. Cookridge has been floating around the Fraser Public Library for so long that it still has its original checkout card inside of the front cover – blank, sadly; I would have loved to have seen the names of the past readers of this book. But anyhoo…

I am unfamiliar with E. H. Cookridge but, judging from Orient Express, he seems to me to be a straight-forward no-nonsense old school historian who has written a history that subscribes to this brand of history. In structuring his chapters, Cookridge encapsulated the life and times of this famous train, leading us from the original concept and a biography of its creator – Georges Lambert Casimir Nagelmackers, a Belgian civil engineer and businessman – the formation of its parent company – Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits or International Sleeping-Car Company – its Maiden Voyage – on 4 October 4^th, 1883, from the Gare de l’Est in Paris to Giurgiu in Romania via Munich and Vienna – and all of the other glorious adventures and misadventures of both the train and some of the notorious, celebrated passengers, to the sad demise and final auctioning-off of its original remains in Monte Carlo in 1977, though the service continued.

While Cookridge explores many of the invented outlines, plots and subplots of the famous fictional accounts – James Bond, Agatha Christie and Hollywood and all the rest – these fictional accounts pale in comparison to the true-life adventures of robbery, banditti, kidnapping, near-starvation and frostbite in the ice-age winter of 1929 and derailments into snow and German station restaurants (however, I was hoping for more photographs of the train and passengers in question; I had to settle for mostly artistic renderings). The last train with the name Orient-Express (now with a hyphen) departed from Vienna on December 10^th, 2009, and one day later from Strasbourg; however, on December 8^th, 2020, it was announced that sleeper service between Vienna and Paris via Munich would be reestablished in 2021 (sadly, as of this writing this has yet to happen, although the Austrian Nightjet runs three times per week on the Paris-Vienna route).

Perhaps – just perhaps – this Old World form of luxurious travel can and will reestablish itself as the standard for travel?

“1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs – The Election that Changed the Country” by James Chace

 

336 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0743203944

So, you thought the elections on 2016, 2020 and 2024 were bitter and divisive? Hell, they’ve got nothing on the election of 1912 in which four – FOUR! – men wanted to be POTUS (well, maybe really only three; Taft was in the White House because that’s where his wife wanted him). And just who were these men? Well, William Howard Taft the Republican, Woodrow Wilson the Democrat, Theodore Roosevelt the Progressive and Eugene V. Debs the Socialist. The whole of this most peculiar and never-repeated event is recounted by James Chace in 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs – The Election that Changed the Country. Some histories relate an oft-repeated tale using research already unearthed by others; others offer a new interpretation with new evidence and unearthed research. Chace’s work is the best of the former, being a lively, balanced and accurate retelling of an important (if mostly forgotten) moment in American history.

If you’re even moderately informed on American history, then you already know that Wilson would ultimately win (though only by a plurality of the popular vote, albeit a huge electoral majority) and become the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson to serve two consecutive terms in the White House. It would, also, ultimately give us American intervention in World War I and Wilsonian Internationalism, God help us. All of which was a tragedy in Chace’s telling, for, according to him, Roosevelt would have made a stronger, more effective leader on both the domestic and international fronts; furthermore, many of the achievements of his cousin’s New Deal would have been realized a generation earlier, which may or may not be such a good thing; all of the myriad problems of over-taxation and intrusive government would not, I believe, be mitigated just by being introduced a few decades earlier than they were.

But there is more to the election of 1912 than that, for because of TR’s never-a-dull-moment campaign as the nominee of the Bull Moose Party – that’d be the Progressive Party – the campaign deepened the public’s acceptance of the idea of a more activist presidency, for good or for ill, you decide (it’s ill, just so you know). This election also saw Socialism’s peak political performance after Debs won 6% of the popular vote, which also serves to showcase the innate conservatism (note the small “c”) of the American voter, for even if all those votes for Taft were combined with the conservative white Southerners who supported Wilson, it is not clear that even the 1912 election showed a solid electoral majority for radical change (oh, and then there’s William Howard Taft, whom Chace succeeds in making a believable, sympathetic character, if a lackluster chief executive; hell, no mystery there, as he really wanted to be on the Supreme Court, finally being appointed Chief Justice in ‘31).

What made the 1912 campaign unusual was that candidates of four, not just two, parties vied for the presidency. The race was also marked by a basic decency, honesty and quality of debate we will probably never see again.

“Old Yeller” by Fred Gipson

 

158 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0060115456

Show me a man or boy who was not traumatized by Old Yeller and I will show you a corpse. For some of us the opening sentence – “We call him Old Yeller” – is enough to get us blubbering away as we recall the story (nope, not gonna do it). Fred Gipson’s 1956 bestseller has become one of literature’s great weepies, exploiting that most pure of relationships: a boy’s love for his dog (I am NOT crying right now). Set in Texas in the late 1860s, the novel begins with a frank prophecy of the emotional pain to come: our narrator, 14-year-old Travis Coates, remembers the moment a dog strays into their cabin on Birdsong Creek, seemingly out of nowhere: “He made me so mad at first that I wanted to kill him. Then, later, when I had to kill him, it was like having to shoot some of my own folks. That’s how much I’d come to think of the big yeller dog” (I’m keeping it together…keeping it together…)

Much like Charlotte’s Web (review coming next month), Old Yeller exposes children to life and love utilizing beautiful prose, deep emotions, vivid descriptions – and profound loss (still dry-eyed, damnit). The book is as crisp, laconic, deadpan and straight as any classic cowboy/rancher story could be; yeah, it tells the story of Old Yeller, but even more it tells the story of ranching in Texas in the 1860s and it does so in the most clear-eyed, upstanding, realistic way possible. Travis is as authentic as a mesquite switch and this is a classic coming-of-age story; every line is a gem of no-nonsense western storytelling and it is filled with multitudes of little incidents and bits of ranch life that ring true and inspirational. Hell, even Travis’ realization of the extent of his affection for his annoying little brother after a bear attack makes the book worth reading, even if no Old Yeller had ever showed up.

NOT crying.

Be warned, however; if you were raised on the (it must be said) excellent Disney adaptation from 1957, then the amount of animal cruelty described in the book may come as a shock (for that it is a faithful adaptation, which it should be, seeing as Fred Gipson wrote the screenplay). This is a great example of showing what good things in life might come your way, if you let them, and showing that in life one cannot have the good without the bad – that wasn’t a sob – and that, for all of life’s many challenges and hurdles – didn’t gasp just then – you cannot shut yourself off from the world in expectation of never feeling pain. Old Yeller is yet another example of how a past masterpiece can teach us so much more than any modern-day piece of Woke trash could ever hope to, and how, for however many trials and tribulations we may suffer – here we go – life is for the living and suffering makes us stronger…

…ah, hell, where’s the Kleenex…

“The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie” by Alan Bradley

 

384 pages, Bantam Books, ISBN-13978-0385343497

So, back in June of 2022, I got a new job at the Fraser Public Library in beautiful Fraser, Michigan, and one of my assigned duties was coordinating the Mysteries & Munchies book club in which a new mystery book is read every month and we discuss it while chowing down on junk food. A job right up my alley. One of the first books I assigned for the group was Alan Bradley’s first-ever mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and am I ever glad that I did. In a nutshell: it is 1950 in England and Flavia de Luce, third daughter of a minor gentry family and aspiring chemist, finds herself in the middle of a series of events that have struck Buckshaw, the crumbling manor house her family has called home for centuries. Oh, and she’s only 11-years-old.

These prototypical eccentric members of the English gentry consist of the father, Colonel de Luce, a distant man still grieving for his dead wife (Harriet de Luce, the mother, disappeared in a mountain climbing accident when Flavia was an infant) and sisters 17-year-old Ophelia and 13-year-old Daphne. Things around Buckshaw become interesting when a dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak…while mere hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches as he takes his dying breath – and is absolutely delighted: “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life”.

And that, my Dear Readers, is Flavia de Luce for ya, one of the most interesting, unique and engaging heroines I have ever read about. To call her “precocious” would be an understatement, for as the youngest of three daughters to an old family in good standing in the English peerage, our Flavia has always had it good and sees no reason not to go about her business as if the world existed for her alone to glory in. But she has reason to feel so, as her intelligence, her drive and her moxy are second to none, and as she pursues her own investigative lines of inquiry (quite independent of Inspector Hewitt, the patient if put-upon detective ostensibly in charge of the case), we cheer her on and follow her reasoning as easily as if we were there ourselves.

Which is another thing to like about this book and this character: as intelligent and tenacious as Flavia is, she is still realistically drawn. While her knowledge is the result of aristocratic homeschooling and self-taught discovery, I never got the sense that it was unrealistic or over-the-top; Flavia knows a lot, but she doesn’t know everything. Her lines of inquiry are the result of logic and reasoning, not dumb luck or convenient events. And the adults in her world – her father, the folks of the village, the inspector and other policemen – treat her as they would any other 11-year-old girl in 1950s England: with polite contempt, something Flavia feels and is infuriated by. But, as the old saying goes, she doesn’t get mad, she gets even.

She goes charging around Bishop’s Lacey on Gladys (her bicycle, inherited from her long-lost mother) while going into rhapsodies about her love of chemistry and exhibiting that annoying preteen quality of being able to notice things you wish they wouldn’t and arguing constantly in support of their viewpoint – two qualities needed by tenacious detectives everywhere. A truly well-realized and believable character, Flavia de Luce captures the reader as much for her mistakes as for her successes, and as she goes about her business in attempting to rescue her father from an accusation of murder, she does so in a spirit and a style all her own, and we glory in her pride of knowledge and confidence right along with her.

Should The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie prove as popular with the book club as it has with me, I fully expect to read the further adventures of Flavia de Luce – precocious girl, aspiring chemist and accidental detective – in the very near future.

“In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods” by Galen Rowell

 

326 pages, Sierra Club Books, ISBN-13: 978-0871561848 

Galen Rowell’s In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods was first published in 1978 and is an account of the 1975 American K2 Expedition’s attempt on the northwest ridge of that peak, interspersed with the history of mountaineering in the Karakoram Range of the western Himalayas and with earlier accounts of K2 attempts (some successful; most not). Be advised, though, for almost the entire book deals with the myriad problems and disputes between the members of the climbing team, their porters and so forth; as stated in the Foreword, “the book is about the personalities of those who climb” and not about the climb itself.

This is itself ironic, for after all the team discussions about the possibly negative implications of having a woman – Dianne Roberts, the wife of the leader, Jim Whittaker – on the team, she really figured very little in the disputes and quarrels; it was also ironic that there was still a lot of dissention and miscommunication amongst the team members on the actual expedition, even after the team expelled Alex Bertulis, due to lack of confidence in his ability to be a team player. After a while one finds these (overly detailed) accounts of bickering to be boring and welcomes the interspacing of the historical accounts and those of the more interesting concurrent expeditions.

But all is not lost, for the excellent color plates and black-and-white photographs help the reader to forget his unhappiness with the detailed personality problems of the 1975 expedition. Looking at these images of the highest spot on the planet is enough to make one forget that the humans clinging to the sides of K2 were pretty miserable. In fact, after reading about the latest dust-up between this or that unhappy person I often just flipped through the book for the pictures, the people be damned. So if you find In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods someplace cheap – like I did – by all means pick it up, for the pictures and nothing else.