Two from the Bascombe Tetralogy

The Lay of the Land     Richard Ford     (2006)

Let Me Be Frank With You     Richard Ford     (2014)

These books are the third and fourth in Richard Ford’s tetralogy that follows the adult life of the character Frank Bascombe. Some background:

• In the first novel of the series, The Sportswriter (1986), Frank is deep in grief over the death of his young son and his subsequent divorce from his wife. Although he had wanted to write fiction, he’s turned to writing about sports to support himself.
• In Ford’s second offering, Independence Day (1995), Frank has changed careers and is selling real estate in New Jersey. This novel, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is set at the titular American holiday.
• Holiday celebrations, which often cause simmering family tensions to boil over, figure prominently in all four books about Frank. An Easter dinner is a key scene in The Sportswriter, and the two books that I’m reviewing here are set at Thanksgiving (The Lay of the Land) and during the Christmas season (Let Me Be Frank With You).

In The Lay of the Land, the political backdrop is the contested presidential election of 2000, which was still not decided by Thanksgiving of that year, so tension and accusation and fear are in the air. As always, Ford’s focus is on Frank Bascombe’s inner life, narrated in first person. Speaking to his adult daughter, Clarissa, Frank says, “I’ll commit suicide before I keep a fucking diary. Diaries are for weaklings and old queer professors. Which I’m not.” (240) And yet this entire novel is like a very detailed, highly reflective diary. Frank is now fifty-five and married to his second wife, Sally Caldwell. He’s recently been treated for prostate cancer at the Mayo Clinic. You might find Frank’s trips to the toilet tiresome, but his need to empty his bladder frequently is a constant reminder of the threat of death that hangs over him.

He calls this phase of his life “the Permanent Period—no fear of future, life not ruinable, the past generalized to a pleasant pinkish blur.” (249) There’s a fatalism to Frank’s categorization of late middle age in this way. He’s still selling real estate, though he does have occasional regrets about giving up his dream of writing fiction. He rationalizes: “Realtors share a basic industry with novelists, who make up importance from life-run-rampant just by choosing, changing and telling. Realtors make importance by selling, which is better-paying than the novelist’s deal and probably not as hard to do well.” (84)

The Lay of the Land is expansive, exhilarating, and sometimes exhausting. It’s the work of an accomplished prose stylist who gives us a view into an ordinary life on ordinary and non-so-ordinary days. The exquisite specificity with which Frank describes his surroundings contrasts with his inability to connect with some people. These people are sometimes fairly conventional—like Sally—and sometimes quite unusual—like the Tibetan Buddhist with the Americanized name, Mike Mahoney, “a five-foot-three-inch, forty-three-year-old realty dynamo” (14) who works for Frank’s real estate office on the Jersey Shore.                                 

The theme of Frank’s relationships is developed further in the most recent volume of the tetralogy, Let Me Be Frank With You, four linked short stories in which Frank Bascombe meets with four different people from his past. The year 2012 is coming to an end, and New Jersey is reeling from the October onslaught of Hurricane Sandy. All around him is destruction, but Frank has survived that cancer diagnosis so far, and in retirement he’s withdrawn more into himself. “For months now—and this may seem strange at my late moment of life (sixty-eight)—I’ve been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don’t do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness.” (187) He provides a summation of how he sees his own character: “. . . a man who doesn’t lie (or rarely), who presumes nothing from the past, who takes the high, optimistic road (when available), who doesn’t envision the future, who streamlines his utterances (no embellishments), and in all instances acts nice.” (140-41) Well, Frank may think he’s always “nice,” but readers can catch him in some unkind deeds.

I found Let Me Be Frank With You less masterful than The Lay of the Land, and I noted a few discontinuities, such as Sally’s birthday moving from summer to near Christmas. Still, Ford’s trademark particularization pulls you in, letting you gape at the damage wrought by the hurricane (and by the previous collapse of the real estate market in 2008), letting you linger on the inevitable wrinkles in the aging faces of the characters.

The Frank Bascombe tetralogy is by turns hilarious and devastatingly serious, honest and deceptive, reflecting the life of one American man—and a slice of American history.

Fiction with a Christmas Setting

Whether Christmas for you is a religious observance, a civic holiday, or just another day of the week, you can’t avoid the hype in modern American culture. Fiction titles set at Christmastime abound.

In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, is the 2002 novel that inaugurated an excellent series of contemporary murder mysteries set in upstate New York. Since this book takes place in December, you can get a good dose of drifting snow and icy winds to put you in a wintry mood. Russ Van Alstyne is the police chief in the small town of Miller’s Kill. (A “kill” is a small river in Dutch, but there’s that double meaning.) Clare Fergusson is an Episcopal priest who just started her first job at a local church. On a bitterly cold night, Clare finds an abandoned baby in a box on the church doorstep. She accompanies the baby to the hospital in an ambulance, where she meets Russ, who’s investigating the case. The plot, as twisty as the mountain roads of the Adirondacks, includes multiple murders, red herrings, and scenes of sheer terror. I don’t usually like to read thrillers (because of the sheer terror), but this novel has so much more. Spencer-Fleming makes her characters’ struggles of conscience totally believable and in no way sentimental. Clare has a deep faith that is impressive even to the agnostic Russ. And the sizzling attraction between married Russ and single Clare, evident from chapter 1, grows as the plot develops, pulled along by snappy and intelligent dialogue. Get yourself a copy of In the Bleak Midwinter and plan for some non-stop reading.

For an easy read by the fireplace after a day of feasting, try one of Anne Perry’s gentle Christmas mysteries. Perry is the bestselling author of full-length historical mysteries set in the Victorian era and in World War I. Every year since 2003, she’s also published a novella-length mystery set during the Christmas season, usually in the nineteenth-century England that she knows so well. These short Christmas mysteries are not complex in their plots like Perry’s full-length novels, but they do display Perry’s signature approach of recording her characters’ brooding introspection. The sleuth of the novella may be a professional or an amateur, but the Christmas festivities are always poignant. A Christmas Garland (2012), set in India during the British colonial rule there, was to me the least successful of these books, but I recommend the series overall. I especially liked A Christmas Secret (2006), about newlyweds moving into a vicarage in rural England and facing a murder. In A New York Christmas (2014) Perry ventures across the Atlantic in 1904. Yes, I do have a weakness for fiction set in New York City!

For the ultimate in British classic-era Christmas mystery, pick up the 1934 Nine Tailors  by Dorothy L. Sayers. This novel requires that the reader acquire some background knowledge of two subjects: the Fens and the change ringing of church bells. The Fens are low-lying marshy areas in the eastern part of England that were made into arable lands centuries ago by an extensive system of drainage channels. Change ringing is the practice of pulling ropes to sound tuned bells in a tower in a particular and complex order, not for the production of a discernible melody but for the precision of the sequence. Okay, okay, it’s esoteric. But Nine Tailors is worth this price of admission to an adventure of Lord Peter Wimsey that begins on one New Year’s Eve and concludes at Christmastime a year later.  

The twist in Francesca Hornak’s Seven Days of Us (2017) is that a British family is forced to stay quarantined in their rural home for a week at Christmas because one daughter, a physician, has just returned from Africa, where she was treating victims of a deadly virus. Their mandatory togetherness evokes the traditional English-country-house mystery novel, though this is not a mystery. Novelist Hornak brings out some well-worn plot elements, such as the concealment of a medical diagnosis and the arrival of an adult son whose existence was previously unknown. The story is updated to the twenty-first century with emails, text messages, Twitter hashtags, and a bit of gay sex, but the characters are recognizable British types: the grumpy and self-centered paterfamilias, the frivolous young woman, the dense rugby player, the noble doctor. This is pretty good quality chick lit, suitable for light reading over the winter holidays.

Among My Faves: David Sedaris

Among My Faves:  David Sedaris

In 2017, David Sedaris published Theft by Finding:  Diaries 1977-2002. This book of excerpts from Sedaris’s extensive diaries is for serious Sedaris buffs, and I count myself as one. If you’ve never read any work by David Sedaris, do *not* start with Theft by Finding, because it will seem rambling and possibly ridiculous. First go read several of Sedaris’s collections of essays or stories. I especially recommend the following:  

• Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) has two sections of essays—one about Sedaris’s youth in Raleigh, North Carolina, and one about his move to France as an adult, with his partner, Hugh Hamrick. The essays about Sedaris’s attempts to learn to speak French are so hilarious that I laughed until tears obscured the words on the page.
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) has widely-ranging essays, with a focus on family relationships. Sedaris’s realization that he’s gay is presented frankly and yet with comic self-deprecation.
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008) includes one of my favorite Sedaris humor pieces: the story of his trip to Japan to try to quit smoking. His idea was to get far away from his usual haunts to break his habit, but he found that smoking is very common in Japan.
• Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk:  A Modest Bestiary (2010) is a collection of animal fables, a departure from the usual Sedaris essay form.
• Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013) continues with Sedaris’s droll observations on humanity. Of particular note is the essay about Europeans’ reaction to the election of President Obama in 2008.

If we have all these other books about David Sedaris’s upbringing and family members and encounters with odd strangers, why do we need to read his diaries? Well, Theft by Finding provides insights into the creative process that produced so many excellently sardonic essays and stories. For example, there are entries that give the background to Sedaris’s most famous piece, “SantaLand Diaries,” about his experiences working as an elf at Macy’s in New York during the Christmas season. “SantaLand Diaries” appears in his 1994 book, Barrel Fever, and also in his 1997 book, Holidays on Ice, but Theft by Finding records the day in December 1992 when Sedaris first read this essay on National Public Radio and caused a sensation among listeners.   

Theft by Finding also includes entries for important events in history, so that you can read Sedaris’s first notice of the AIDS epidemic, as well as his reaction to the attacks on September 11, 2001, while he was living in France. In Theft by Finding you can watch the development of Sedaris’s style, from jotted observations to more expanded commentary on those observations. Sedaris notices absolutely everything and is a master at capturing offbeat, ridiculous, and sometimes illegal activities occurring around him. In his twenties, his existence on the fringes of life, in crime-ridden neighborhoods, put him in the company of panhandlers, drunks, and drug addicts. In mid-life, his expanding celebrity status exposed him to the rich and famous, who can be equally absurd. From reading the diaries, you can see how Sedaris blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, taking scenes from real life, amplifying them, and surrounding them with extraordinary contextualizations.

For years, David Sedaris scrimped by on odd jobs—refinishing furniture, cleaning apartments. He kicked his meth habit, cut out alcohol and tobacco, and by sheer hard work became one of the most celebrated humor essayists in the English language. He’s among my favorites.

15th-Century Mysteries: Part 2

The Roger the Chapman Series     Kate Sedley     (1991 to 2013)

Before reading this post, you may want to check out my essay “Reading Medieval Mysteries” in the Portfolio section of this website. It has a sidebar on the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters, set in the twelfth century. But moving on to the end of the medieval period . . . 

Roger the Chapman is an itinerant purveyor of small household goods and haberdashery in late fifteenth-century England. He tells his tales in first-person narrative, looking back, as an old man, on the adventures of his youthful travelling days. This narrative voice gives an immediacy to the novels, and I find Roger’s voice quite believable. 

The first couple of entries in this series have some weaknesses, with tangents about, for example, how to full cloth, but the series quickly picks up speed, with less didacticism and more challenging convolutions of plot. Roger is an engaging, burly fellow with a large backpack who tramps all around the country—and even to France—to unravel mysteries. His wanderlust allows him to get involved in murders near and far and even to work as an agent for the nobility. Still, he always returns home to Bristol, in southwest England.

Roger has a complicated family history, and the secondary characters such as his wife and his mother-in-law are well developed over the course of the series. If you start with a title later in this series, you’ll still catch on, since author Kate Sedley does a good job of filling in her readers about Roger’s family connections.

Sedley doesn’t affect fake medievalisms but still conveys a sense of the period. I especially enjoyed The Christmas Wassail, in which the murders are set against the festive late medieval celebrations of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Kate Sedley is the pen name for Brenda Margaret Lilian Honeyman Clarke, who has written numerous other novels under different names. Here are the twenty-two books in her Roger the Chapman Series:  Death and the Chapman (1991), The Plymouth Cloak (1992), The Hanged Man aka The Weaver’s Tale (1993), The Holy Innocents (1994), The Eve of Saint Hyacinth (1995), The Wicked Winter (1995), The Brothers of Glastonbury (1997), The Weaver’s Inheritance (1998), The Saint John’s Fern (1999), The Goldsmith’s Daughter (2001), The Lammas Feast (2002), Nine Men Dancing (2003), The Midsummer Rose (2004), The Burgundian’s Tale (2005), Prodigal Son (2006), The Three Kings of Cologne (2007), The Green Man (2008), The Dance of Death (2009), The Wheel of Fate (2010), The Midsummer Crown (2011), The Tintern Treasure (2012), The Christmas Wassail (2013).

Happiness in Denmark

The Little Book of Hygge:  Danish Secrets to Happy Living     Meik Wiking     (2017)

Unless you’ve been trekking in the Himalayas for several months, you’ve probably heard about “hygge,” the Danish approach to living that at least partially explains why Danes emerge in almost every international survey as the happiest people on the planet.

According to author Meik Wiking, hygge is pronounced something like “hoo-ga,” though Danish speakers I’ve consulted say it’s more like “HUE-guh.” As for a translation, well, Wiking admits that’s also difficult:  “Hygge has been called everything from ‘the art of creating intimacy,’ ‘coziness of the soul,’ and ‘the absence of annoyance,’ to ‘taking pleasure from the presence of soothing things,’ ‘cozy togetherness,’ and my personal favorite, ‘cocoa by candlelight.’” Wiking credits the development of hygge mainly to the Danish climate. Copenhagen is at about 56 degrees N latitude, which is like being in Hudson Bay in Canada, where there’s minimal sunlight for half of the year. And with Denmark’s location on the North Sea, the inhabitants have to deal with harsh winds and frequent cold rain.

To survive in this climate, Danes have developed ways to make themselves comfortable, especially in winter. Wiking includes chapters on hygge as it relates to light, to food and drink, to clothing, and to friendship. To promote hygge in your home, Wiking recommends that you have candles, a nook to snuggle up in, a fireplace, objects made of wood, sheepskins, vintage objects, books to read, Danish ceramics, and blankets. The candle part is especially important. Surveys have shown that Danes light a lot of candles and are very fond of the dim, flickering glow that candles create.

Physical environment aside, togetherness with friends and family is essential to hygge. You can snuggle up by the fireplace alone for your hygge fix, but sharing your sheepskin is even better. Wiking explains that Danes think workaholics are crazy. They eschew overtime, preferring to leave the office or factory promptly, in order to light candles with their besties.

According to Wiking, you can achieve hygge in the summer, with picnics, barbecues, and biking. But the all-around best time of the year for hygge is the Christmas season, over which the Danes apparently go nuts. They have a special word for Christmastide hygge, “julehygge,” which has distinctive traditions. Wiking includes a recipe for aebleskiver, a treat that’s like a cross between a pancake and a doughnut, and detailed directions for crafting the woven paper hearts with which Danes decorate their Christmas trees.

Since Wiking is the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, his Little Book ventures beyond an exploration of hygge to a broader analysis of why the people of Denmark are so darn happy. Danes enjoy universal free health care, free education through college, and generous unemployment benefits. Although they pay high taxes, they don’t seem to mind this, since the services they receive greatly reduce the stresses of life. They don’t have to worry about paying off crippling student loans or about going bankrupt because of medical bills. Other Nordic countries—Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland—have similar services and also high levels of happiness, but Wiking argues that the practice of hygge boosts the happiness in Denmark to the top. 

The Little Book of Hygge is profusely illustrated with muted graphics in a rustic Scandinavian style that I liked. (Sadly, the illustrator is not credited.) This is a lightweight, fun book that you can buzz through in an hour or so. You may find some ideas for bringing more happiness into your life. Or at least you can learn how to make woven paper hearts.