Detective novels

Posted on by albrooke

“Indeed, the books I’d spent the afternoon packing—so varied in genre, including historical romances, detective novels, romantic thrillers, travel books—had in common a reassuring conventionality that couldn’t entirely be accounted for by the decades, the Thirties through the early Sixties, during which most of them had been written. My mother’s large collection of murder mysteries was particularly instructive. She much preferred the English variety, with its emphasis on the restoration of order. In books by her favorite “Golden Age” British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil might lurk around every foggy corner, and murder most foul would throw everything into temporary flux, but in the end the detective, often a rogue aristocrat like Lord Peter Wimsey or Roderick Alleyn, ferreted out the culprit in a stunning display of logic, intuition and, often, an understanding of complex social realities for which aristocrats, in novels like these if nowhere else, are famous.

“American murder mysteries left her cold. She thought they were less clever, which was true enough; Raymond Chandler famously couldn’t follow his own plots. But they also operated on an entirely different set of premises. Here detectives didn’t solve crimes by means of brilliant deductions or arcane knowledge. In American detective novels the hero’s primary virtues are his honesty and his ability to take a punch. Sam Spade hasn’t much interest in restoring order because, as he knows all too well, that order was corrupt to begin with. Villains are typically either rich men who made their money dishonestly or, worse yet, people of limited moral imagination who aspire only to what money and power can buy, who want to move up in class and don’t care how. In this noir world, cops are on the take, lawyers and judges all have a price, as do doctors and newspapermen. In a sea of corruption your only hope is a lone man, someone you can hire but who can’t be bought off by anybody who has more money. There probably is no figure in literature more romantic than Philip Marlowe, whose very name suggests knight-errantry, and my mother was herself a romantic of the first order, but she had no more use for Marlowe than she had for Anita Brookner. Men like Marlowe always ended up telling her what she didn’t want to hear. Okay, he might find your missing child or husband, but often you’d end up wishing he hadn’t, because he’d also find out something you didn’t want to know about that child or husband or even yourself, something you’d been trying hard not to look at, or admit to. What kind of escape was that? Better to get good news from a fop like Lord Peter, whose sell-by date in the real world would have long since expired, had anyone like him ever existed in the first place.”

Richard Russo, Elsewhere: A memoir 152-54 (2012).

Waiting

Posted on by albrooke

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013).

A rich tapestry of a novel which moves from childhood tragedy to misdemeanors and felonies, art and antiques. Some most memorable secondary characters, especially Hobie and Boris.

One of my “top fifty” because of passages like these:

  • Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that’s happened to me since is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. p. 7.
  • . . . I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way. p. 380.
  • And yet I was grateful for the work because it kept me too mentally bludgeoned to think. The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no clear origin: I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong — only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides. p. 392.
  • It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines. p. 470.
  • “Accidents, catastrophes — something like seventy-five per cent of disaster victims are convinced there were warning signs they brushed off or didn’t pick up on correctly, and with children under eighteen, the percentage is even higher. But that doesn’t mean the signs weren’t there, does it?” pp. 615-16.
  • Something in me had gone dead at the sight of him, almost like with my dad when I was a kid, long hours alone at home, the involuntary wave of relief at his key in the lock and then the immediate heartsink at the actual sight of him. p. 731.
  • “. . . good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Scary idea!” p. 745.
  • “Can’t good come sometimes through some strange back doors?” p. 758.
  • Shock and aura. p. 760.
  • [We always hear] “Follow your heart.” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted — ? p. 761.

This is the best of her three once-a-decade books, and here’s the kicker — it has been 10 years since it was published.

Crypto

Posted on by albrooke

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (1999). This book still feels cutting-edge 24 years after it was published. It is full of Stephensonian digressions and witticisms and is one of his best stories, as well. It is long and not for the faint of tech.

Some of my favorite nuggets:

  • “The town in question sports three small colleges: one founded by the State of California and two founded by Protestant denominations that are now actively reviled by the majority of their faculty. p. 50.
  • “Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best.” p. 213.
  • The company “is doing ‘systems integration’ work, which means plugging together a bunch of junk made by other people, and overseeing the installation of all the computers, switches, and data lines.” p. 214.
  • “The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.” p. 309.
  • “Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.” p. 342.
  • “Most of the brain’s work is done while the brain’s owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.” p. 348.
  • “It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be very interesting. But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over weddings and funerals but also to say something thought-provoking to large numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the profession of philosophy.” p. 398.
  • “War gives men good ignoring skills.” p. 421.
  • “Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire.” p. 481.
  • When the protagonists meet some church-going Christians: “Randy hadn’t the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post- modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.” pp. 585-586.
  • “In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can’t find your ass with both hands. This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get straightened out, people learn their roles.” p. 681.

Murder Mysteries

Posted on by albrooke

Richard Russo, Elsewhere: A memoir 153 (2011) on the difference between English and American mysteries:

  • My mother’s large collection of murder mysteries was particularly instructive. She much preferred the English variety, with its emphasis on the restoration of order. In books by her favorite “Golden Age” British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil might lurk around every foggy corner, and murder most foul would throw everything into temporary flux, but in the end the detective, often a rogue aristocrat like Lord Peter Wimsey or Roderick Alleyn, ferreted out the culprit in a stunning display of logic, intuition and, often, an understanding of complex social realities for which aristocrats, in novels like these if nowhere else, are famous.
  • American murder mysteries left her cold. She thought they were less clever, which was true enough; Raymond Chandler famously couldn’t follow his own plots. But they also operated on an entirely different set of premises. Here detectives didn’t solve crimes by means of brilliant deductions or arcane knowledge. In American detective novels the hero’s primary virtues are his honesty and his ability to take a punch. Sam Spade hasn’t much interest in restoring order because, as he knows all too well, that order was corrupt to begin with. Villains are typically either rich men who made their money dishonestly or, worse yet, people of limited moral imagination who aspire only to what money and power can buy, who want to move up in class and don’t care how. In this noir world, cops are on the take, lawyers and judges all have a price, as do doctors and newspapermen. In a sea of corruption your only hope is a lone man, someone you can hire but who can’t be bought off by anybody who has more money.

This does seem more-or-less right, and I wonder if it holds true for film?

Ng

Posted on by albrooke

Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts (2022):

  • “His father hasn’t been a professor for years but he can’t stop himself from trying to teach. His brain is like a big dog penned in his skull, restless and pacing, aching for a run.” p. 25.
  • “He has never been in a place like this, where no one gives him a second glace. . . . For the first time in his life he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.” p. 124.
  • “She loved this about him, the unshakeable belief that the world was a knowable place. That by studying its branches and byways, the tracks it had rutted in the dust, you could understand it.” 175-76.
  • “No one saw it yet, but by then, almost imperceptibly, the story of the Crisis had begun to solidify. Soon enough it would harden, like silt from turbid water, settling in a thick band of mud.” p. 178.

Essay questions from the Primer

Posted on by albrooke

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995):

  • “[He] began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as could be, and that some cultures were better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.” pp. 16-17
  • “[A]s many first-time fathers had realized in the delivery room, there was something about the sight of an actual baby that focused the mind. In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.” p. 150
  • “[T]he difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.” p. 256

Each of these is thought or voiced by one of the father figures in this novel. Discuss among yourselves.

Seven from Six

Posted on by albrooke

It is perilous to abstract quotations from a novel since context is the key and otherwise all you have is epigrams. Nevertheless, I don’t want to give spoilers, so here goes with some excerpts from Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six (2019):

  • “You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.” (pp. 65-66)
  • “When you have everything, someone else getting a little something feels like they’re stealing from you.” (pp. 149-150)
  • “If I’ve given the impression that trust is easy—with your spouse, with your kids, with anybody you care about—if I’ve made it seem like it’s easy to do . . . then I’ve misspoken. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But you have nothing without it. Nothing meaningful at all. That’s why I chose to do it.” (p. 215).
  • “When [redacted] died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed [redacted]. You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.” (pp. 295-296).
  • I was getting a lot of phone calls from [redacted] at all hours of the day. I’d say, “Let me come get you.” And [redacted]’d refuse. I thought about trying to force [redacted] into rehab. But you can’t do that. You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.” (p. 299).
  • “She said, ‘Don’t count yourself out this early . . . . You’re all sorts of things you don’t even know yet.’ That really stuck with me. That who I was wasn’t entirely already determined.” (p. 320)
  • “But if you get to be my age and you can’t look back at your life and wonder about some of your choices . . . well, you have no imagination.” (p. 331).

Misha on Depression

Posted on by albrooke

Talcott Garland:

  • “I am depressed. And I almost like it. Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it . . . or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.”

Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park 207 (2002).

AJ

Posted on by albrooke

You should visit Alan Jacob’s blog regularly or have Snakes and Ladders (blog.ayjay.org) on your newsfeed. You know this, because I write it all the time. Of course you will not find everything he writes (or reads) interesting, but many things are quite striking. Four recent examples:

  • In “hubris” (Aug. 26, 2021) [link], Jacobs revisits the question of whether it might just be better to opt out of social media.
  • On August 25 [link], Jacobs points us to his January 6, 2021 piece “School for Scale” in The Hedgehog Review [link] and reminds us why it is really, really important to understand decimals.
  • Jacobs refers us to something Oliver Burkeman wrote long ago in the Guardian: “Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time” (May 21, 2014) [link]. Eerily reminiscent of observed reality!
  • “Tolkien and Auden” (Aug. 16, 2021) [link] concerns the two famous writers who were good, though unlikely, friends. Jacobs wrote a delightful short play (“Sandfield Road”) about the two men. You can read it in 15 minutes, here [link].

Jacobs has twenty eight posts since August 15, so you have some catching up to do.