book-reviews

One Size Fits Who

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

We all have a list of books we feel we should read, should have read long ago, and somehow passed by. My own includes such classics as Catcher In The Rye, A Canticle For Liebowitz, A Separate Peace…and until recently, The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.

The title alone suggests and entire era, a movement, a period in history to be both remembered and forgotten. A cultural cul-d-sac that an entire generation rebelled against. Even in my own experience, it suggested a lifestyle of formal acquiescence to a stifling conformity that set an example to be either embraced or scorned.

And yet, I wonder how many of us knew nothing about the story.

So this year I did due diligence and read it. It was not what I expected. 

Published in 1955, it’s the story of a war veteran trying to make a life in the exuberant possibilities of post-war America. He works for a foundation, his work is appreciated, but the fact is he simply doesn’t make enough money to meet the expectations of wife, three kids, and his own notion of success. Upon advice from an acquaintance he applies for a job at the United Broadcast Company. 

Now, he comes from money, but his grandmother has pretty much squandered it all. She still occupies a sprawling house that sits on a lot of untouched acreage, but as to cash reserves, not much. 

Our Hero gets the job, but not the one he expected. Instead he will be working directly with the president of the company on a special project. When he reports to work, he discovers an elevator operator he knew in the army, someone who knows a secret about him he worries might become a source of blackmail. During the war, in Italy, he had a lover, a young woman trying to get by. She has a child by him. The war ends, he goes home to his American wife, and enters the struggle.

Everything turns on these points. Will he succeed at his new job? Will his indiscretion be revealed? Will his grandmother leave him the estate? 

The novel made a huge impression when it was published. Bestseller and then, almost immediately, a major motion picture starring Gregory Peck. And this was Sloan Wilson’s first novel.

Reading it today…

It’s a fairy tale. It’s a wishfulfilment, semi-cautionary yarn about honesty and backbone and what can only be described as the entrenched innocence of that decade of American history. Everything comes out fine. Or if not exactly fine, no one ends up impoverished, imperiled, or negatively impacted in any way they can’t handle. Our Hero walks a thick tightrope between integrity and conformity that pays off. Granted, a few things are left unresolved, but we know it will all be fine. Everything will be fine. He even tells his wife about the Italian lover and the child and after a day or two of near-panic, she adjusts and say it will be fine and they should send money.

All in all, it is a dissection of the components of 1950s corporate aspirations. There is a former servant who tries to pull a scam about the grandmother’s estate—he fails. It’s possible that the immediate superiors of Our Hero will engineer his ignominious ouster from what looks to be a privileged, plum job—they don’t. The community where he lives might not agree to a new school, which would torpedo his nascent plans for a housing development on the land he inherits—the school passes.

Nothing really bad happens to Our Hero. He doesn’t even seem to be suffering much from his war experience, which in some ways reads like the core of another novel which might be much better, particularly as he inadvertently kills his best friend. By his own admission he killed 17 men during the war. No PTSD. Well, one wouldn’t expect that from a 1955 novel, not the way we understand it today, but psychological damage was not unknown, even if it did get little public attention. Still, Our Hero is remarkably well-adjusted.

The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit is a guidebook as much as anything else, but as I say, it is an American post-war fairytale. Warnings about dangerous corners, potholes, alleyways, but all the warnings lead to nothing much, and at the end we know he’s going to achieve everything he wants to.

One can see the rejection coming not a decade later. The lessons, such as they are, suggest the old “work hard and keep your nose clean and you’ll be a success” chestnut, and they must have rung a false note even then. But not a decade after WWII, it must have been a welcome balm to an uncertain public. People would have cheered for this guy. (Compare this to James Jones’ Some Came Running, 1957, which deals with many of the same themes, but much more plausibly, which was also a bestseller and quickly made into a movie.) The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit is a kind of prayer that everyone should have a life worth having with the minimum of resistance, since, one assumes from the war sections, penance has already been paid.

It’s not even that the characters are falsely drawn. The psychology is consistent and believable (mostly) and carries us through the various scenarios without challenging us with implausibility—not even shallowness, really. But then, fairytales must be psychologically true to have any utility. Its tactic, though—and tactic is, I believe, the correct word—is to take us up to the edge of genuine pathos, let us peek over the rim, and promise the harsh catharsis of reality…and then veer off and let things come out the way we might prefer. It teases, all through.

Some books are best read in their day or at certain times in one’s life. I’m not sure what I would have made of this had I read it at, say, 16. In terms of content, it has a certain historical interest (the prices discussed would rattle anyone’s suspension of disbelief today) but would pass today as YA but for the ages of the protagonists. It is rather well-written. 

Anyway, this one I chose to check off my list. Some of the others…who knows?

So Together, So Alone: Souls In Orbit

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

As William Gibson once suggested, the future is here, it’s just unequally distributed. We live in the dreams of past wishful thinkers, what with all the technological marvels surrounding us and permeating our daily lives. We’ve become blasé about much of it. Many of us walk around with the equivalent of a tricorder in our pocket and I heard an interview the other about an eight-year-old in Gaza hunkering down in the midst of chaos with her laptop and cellphone. We walk the hallways of tomorrow and often fail to appreciate the wonder of it all.

But the oldest of media can bring it home how wide our world has become and leave us with an ancient estrangement about ourselves and our place in the now. Words on paper. Stories. People coping with the strange and trying to make it “normal” even as they acknowledge how utterly amazing it all is.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is about a group of astronauts during their tour on the international space station. A mixed group, Russians, an Italian, American, Irish, Japanese…an international bunch with experiments to run and tests to conduct and marvels to experience, within a microgravity environment their bodies tell them is not as it should be. And below on Earth a massive typhoon forming in the Pacific which they can do nothing but watch grow and move toward land.

What are their thoughts? Their reactions? What do they tell themselves about all this humanly anomalous circumstance? 

The time is not very far in the future. We know this because a mission is on its way to the moon. Such a mission is scheduled but not for a while yet. The next phase in the human expansion into space.

But mostly an expansion is the conscious space of accommodating this future and its implications. Each of these people have private reactions, philosophical methods for dealing with who they are and where. Orbital is an elegant examination of becoming. It is a literary novel about something once upon a time you would only find between the covers of science fiction novels. 

Orbital has also won the Booker Prize.

For some, this is in itself is a moment of dissonance. A space story has just won one of the most prestigious literary awards on the planet. 

Well, of course. We’ve been moving toward that for decades. And reading Orbital produces no surprises on that score. It is a beautiful novel and does something for the 21st Century both necessary and unexpected. It establishes a bridge between dream and reality, between what once could not have been and what seems inevitable. But it does so with the full recognition that we carry all that we are into tomorrow, wherever we are or wherever we go. It is a literary work for the science fiction age, which is a period more and more people are actively embracing and living in.

The question then is: is Orbital science fiction? We’ve gotten into the habit of using that label for work that features new technology and some sort of life-and-death adventure, possibly aliens, certainly the Unknown. As far as it goes, one could argue all of that is at hand (except perhaps the aliens—but on a certain level, aren’t we all aliens to each other?) but folded within a rich fabric of simple human coping. “We’re going to be living here,” it says, “at least some of us, and some us will visit, but even if we don’t, this is now part of the space we inhabit as members of the human race…so what will it be like to be ourselves in that extended world?”

On another level, Harvey has captured the awe we will be challenged to manage when we come face-to-face with the new territory. Mitigated of course by the price and consequence of going there. These people in this fragile container, cycling through sunrises that test their internal circadian, and watching the world of their birth from a vantage that allows a perspective most of us must actively work to achieve and which they can find by simply looking out a window, must learn to accommodate their attachments to Earth with the limits of a new physical proximity and the trade-offs to come.

The details are well realized, the science if solid, and so it had to be for the emotional impact to unfold with the truth of recognition. Here we are. There we will be. The universe is ancient and new. What now will we do? 

And we glimpse that while the questions and answers emerge with a timeless familiarity, they are not after all quite the same. 

23

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It’s interesting that one of the axioms of retirement is that once entered one will have time to do all the things the day-job obstructed. Like read as much as you like. And like so many such things, it turns out not to be true. The habits of decades are still in force, and while maybe you get more chores done, you find reordering all those deeply-rutted paths more difficult than you thought.

I’m sure in some ways I am reading more, but not the way I’d hoped. I average around 70 books a year, cover-to-cover, with a great deal of spot reading, fragmentary, excerpts, short pieces, dipping into and out of research or sidetrips. I suppose if I did a page count I might find myself in the 150 plus range (total book equivalent), because this past year I did a lot of that, as I’m back at work on a new historical novel and much of my reading is taken up with research, most of which is not whole books.

But other things have also gotten in the way. Well, that’s an ungenerous way to put it. Since my dad’s death, my time spent on mom has gone up considerably—and quite happily—and of course I’m still trying to settle into a new routine.

That said, I read—cover-to-cover—66 books in 2023.

Setting aside the research material, some of which I do include in this tally, quite a lot of it was spent on old novels either read back in my adolescence or for various reasons never read at the time. Catching up, so to speak, on the work that was part of my youthful encounter with, especially, science fiction.

There were a few writers I remember bouncing off of back then. I never quite connected with, for instance, Avram Davidson. I read Rork!, which is a colonial adventure with some curiously subversive takes on the whole idea of imperial encounters; The Island Under The Earth, which I’m still not sure I quite understood, but a sort of mythologically-oriented fantasy; The Phoenix and the Mirror, the first in his loose series about Vergil, again a fantasy (of sorts) and truly magnificently done, a pleasure to read; and A Clash of Star Kings, which could have stood a little more fleshing out, but given the publishing requirements of the time, he delivered a rather fascinating take on the idea that the ancient MesoAmerican “gods” were warring aliens. The pleasant surprise, even with the material I did not quite get, was the beauty of the prose.

I also reread a couple of D.G. Compton novels. Compton died recently, one of those artists one loses touch with and assumes has long since passed away. He published four novels via Terry Carr’s old Ace Special series, the most, I believe, by any single writer, and I know I read them back then (as I read all the Specials because, after all, they were special) but I barely remembered them. They were perhaps too sophisticated for me at the time. But I read Synthajoy and The Silent Multitudes and found both remarkably made narratives about the disjunction between expectation and new technologies or events. His handling of character was quite uncharacteristic of the majority of science fiction of that time (the Sixties) and psychologically fascinating. I will be reading another one for the reading group I host.

Other older titles I read included the complete Cities In Flight by James Blish, which in the end left me a bit disappointed. I thought it began very strongly with the mines of Saturn and the advent of longevity in They Shall Have Stars, but by the last book (chronologically), Triumph of Time, I thought it strained against the limitations of form available at the time. The characters and social milieu did not, in my opinion, match the more cosmological aspects Blish was attempting, but he was never an epic writer in the sense we think of it today. Somewhat more successful was his quasi-fantasy set Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, which dealt with an actual apocalypse and its aftermath. Thematically related to his classic A Case Of Conscience, Blish seemed to have been in his element dealing with the collisions of theology and materialism.

A writer who worked with such themes in quite different ways was Michael Bishop, who also passed away recently. Bishop should, in my opinion, enjoy a much larger and wider reputation than he seems to. At his best, he was compelling and richly engaging. I decided to read those of his early titles I never got around to and with that in mind I read A Little Knowledge and Under Heaven’s Bridge, which he cowrote with Ian Watson. Both examine the impact of aliens on human philosophical concerns, both in different ways. Neither was a great work, but you can see the greatness to come. I also reread his excellent novella Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana which, among other things, took a hard look at South African apartheid. Published before the collapse of that system, it is an uncomfortable read that deals with police-state mentality and brutality and tragedy of enlightenment within a system designed to snuff it out. It carried unfortunate resonances into today in unexpected ways, which the best fiction will always do.

We read Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca aloud. The elegance of her prose allows entree into a psychologically engaging family drama that involves murder and shattered illusions and the demands of expectations based on half-truths and lies. What begins as a rather pedestrian romance becomes inexorably a portrait of dysfunction and questions the sacrifices we make in order to find a place in the world with people we wish to love.

Another read-aloud we did was the superb satire The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Russian to its core, it was Bulgakov’s last novel, unpublished during his lifetime, and it is a romp. The devil arrives in Moscow, takes over a theater, begins granting wishes, and thoroughly upends daily life for certain people and leaves the state with a puzzle it is incapable of solving. Delightful.

We also read a couple of Willa Cather novels, O, Pioneers! and My Antonia. Cather is among those authors I’d always intended to read but for one reason or another never got to. But I confess, when I was tearing through the so-called “classics” in high school, neither of these would have stayed in my memory very clearly. I’ve had to grow into a state of mind to appreciate them, so it’s just as well I waited. These are the kind of novels kids like me dismissed because “nothing happens.” Which is to say, the careful setting of character in landscape and examining the evolution of them in concert requires a certain interest. Not that I didn’t encounter such work back then and enjoy it, but it would have been the exception. I’ve now reached the point where I look at some of the works I praised as terrific then and have to admit that, really, nothing happens in them, other than a lot of frenetic running around.

However, I also finally opened up a novel whose virtues are so widely extolled that one feels like a literary troglodyte when its charms fail to excite. One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. A few years ago I read Love In The Time Of Cholera and quite liked it. This, unfortunately, left me a bit perplexed. It’s not so much that nothing happens, but rather for all that does happen fails to change anything. Except, perhaps, the women. They change. They alone in this vast epic exhibit a capacity for change, for growth, for evolution, but then all of it is constrained to the task of adapting to men, who do not change and whose inability to do so distorts the lives of these women whose marvels and talents we will never see because they are in bondage to a stagnant domesticity. If this were written to suggest a criticism of such male intractability, then it might be something, but I found the narrative guileless in its acceptance that this is how the world is and one cannot alter it.

The older I get, the more I find my sentiments engaged by the women—writers and characters—who struggle to be themselves and stop conforming to long-desiccated expectations. Which is why I look forward these days to the next novel by Becky Chambers (whose The Galaxy and the Ground Within I read this year and found amazing) or Ann Leckie (Translation State, marvelous), or Malka Older (The Mimicking of Known Successes, a novella of remarkable invention)or S.B Divya (Machinehood).

One of the most remarkable novels I have read in a long time was Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea. Extraordinary visualizations, great characters, and a rich intellectual conceit. I reviewed it here not long ago.

Once again playing catch-up, I read Greg Bear’s last trilogy, War Dogs, killing Titan, and Take Back The Sky. On the surface, military SF, but that’s just the veneer. Beneath is a twisty interstellar puzzle, a clash of civilizations, and questions around the nature of knowledge and how to discern truth is an ever-changing environment. Bear died last year. I have only a handful of his yet to read. However one might have thought of his perspective, he was a boundary-pusher.

Of the nonfiction I read this year, the stand-outs are A Spectre Haunting by China Mieville, a well-considered reassessment of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. While Mieville is sympathetic, he is no sycophant, and this book would be a good bridge into a reasoned examination of Marx and socialism itself. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte, a very good narrative examination of the history of those long ago creatures who somehow have never let go our popular imagination. Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood, a long history of the early republic, one of the Oxford History of the United States entries.

But perhaps the best history read this year was Blood and Ruins by Richard Overy, a history of World War II. Overy casts a wide net, spanning the period between 1931, when he claims the events we now call WWII began, and 1945. He examines the military history, of course, but then he gets into the backgrounds, deeply, and the economics, and then the law, the underpinnings of all the tensions and terrors. He goes well beyond the actual fighting to look at the state of humanity at each stage and provides that ever-so-rare thing, context. It is a brutal read, and very long (I’m guessing a good 300K words) and in the end the book I would presently recommend to anyone who wants one book on the war. He has done an admirable job of maintaining objectivity. Whether he succeeded at that is debatable, but he is not partisan.

The research I’ve been doing has mainly to do with the colonial period of the St. Louis region. Kaskaskia, Cahokia, the Osage. I’m spending a lot of time on minutiae in the constructions of the next Ulysses Granger novel, which I am halfway through a first draft. Some of the books I did not cover here, I have done reviews already on the Proximal Eye.

The pile awaiting my attention is as usual stacked too high, and once in a while I find myself wishing I could recover some of my speed-reading skills from 50 years ago. But I enjoy what I read now and back when I was breezing through texts at 2500 words a minute, I did not. Nor did I retain as much as I’d like. So this suits me. I’m enjoying the meals now.

Have a great 2024, filled with wonderful books. I wish you all good reading.