The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961)

An unorthodox teacher at a 1930s Edinburgh girls' school selects six young acolytes whose lives will be changed, as will her own.

Book Review: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, although best known because of the film adaptation, is a classic because Jean Brodie is one of the great characters of literature. She is independent, unpredictable, original, nonconformist, eccentric, all of which are adjectives that apply equally well to Muriel Spark's novels, of which this may be the best. She is both adorable and unlikable. Miss Brodie is known only through the thoughts and observations of others, mostly her girls, and we never see inside her mind. She resorts to a few standard phrases: her mantras, precepts, incantations, talismans, which give order and hope to her life. She is in her "prime," her girls are the "creme de la creme," her opinions become facts and facts are whatever she wants them to be. Miss Brodie instructs her girls not in the academic curriculum but in life as seen through her unorthodox eyes. She is a character of bewildering complexity. She is barely holding on to her prime, her girls are not the creme de la creme, but that is the world she is trying to create by pure force of will. She admires fascism and art equally; she travels the world; she is ruled by her passions. Miss Brodie aspires to put her stamp on her followers. She fascinates her girls, who are drawn irresistibly into her loves, her affairs, her attitudes, as they examine their budding thoughts about sex, life, and the world. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, like Muriel Spark and Miss Brodie herself, is never predictable or simple, it contains contradictions, mixed motives, uncertainty. This is best illustrated by the moment in the book, repeatedly acknowledged beforehand, when Miss Brodie is betrayed by one of her girls. The discussion of the incentive for the betrayal is nearly infinite and endlessly arguable. Is it that she happily lived in fantasies until Miss Brodie's fantasy world became too real? Muriel Spark is never easy, her world is one of endless shades of gray. She cannot be fit into a box, there is subtlety beneath the subtlety, and her novels (novellas really) bear repeated reading. She is an exacting craftsman and a veiled philosopher. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie may not be for everyone in its careful construction and gem-like perfection, but for the right readers it is treasure. [5★]

Algren: A Life by Mary Wisniewski (2016)

A biography of the Chicago author who wrote The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side.

Book Review: Algren: A Life, like its subject, gets the job done. This is a solid biography, fair and balanced (a sometimes forgotten necessity), hitting all the major details and giving the reader all the required basics. Mary Wisniewski gives (too) long summaries of Algren's novels, but her analysis is to the point. The reader comes away knowing enough, without any big gaps or questions.

A friend to Richard Wright, lover of Simone de Beauvoir (author of The Second Sex), admired by (the often jealous) Hemingway, known for writing sexy potboilers. Algren felt he had to live where he was writing about, and cared about the people he was writing about. People liked him. How can you not admire an author who spent time in jail for stealing a typewriter? Because that fact is emblematic of Algren, who wrote not of the working class, but the class beneath that, those living in the shadows, the world of petty criminals, prostitutes, poverty, pimps, pushers, and addicts. Mentally damaged veterans. The wretched and confused. Those not employable in the traditional sense. But unlike most chroniclers of the underclass, his work was more literary than simply sensationalist, he had concern and compassion for those he wrote about. Algren may not have been a feminist, but his influence on The Second Sex, his recognition of the hypocrisy of those patronize hookers only to blame the women, and his take on the Playboy empire are all spot on. He also recognized the hypocrisy and corruption of "politicians who believe the poor can take care of themselves while the rich need government help."

Reading Algren: A Life I had no major complaints, but a number of smaller ones, though none that detracted from the essential value of the book. Wisniewski refers to Algren almost uniformly as "Nelson" throughout the book, sounding like an elderly aunt talking about her nephew. But this habit is not unique to Wisniewski, about half the biographies on my shelf do so; it just seems somehow unprofessional to me. More unprofessional is that the sentences sometimes sink to the elementary school level: "Nelson got so mad he threatened to tell the postal authorities on Wallie." "Got so mad," "tell on"? Editing or proofing could have helped: characters change names for no apparent reason and some sentences resist repeated reading. The Polish in Chicago get a fair amount of screen time, and the author very nicely quotes her dad. I've not read the 1989 biography, Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side by Bettina Drew (35 ratings, 3.9 on Goodreads), so I can't compare them. But Algren: A Life was a quick, informative, and valuable read if you're interested in this little known and largely forgotten American author. [4★]

Not This Pig by Philip Levine (1968)

The second book by working class American poet, and poet laureate, Philip Levine (1928-2015).

Poetry Review: Not This Pig was Philip Levine's second book, published at age 40, five years after his first, On the Edge. During his lifetime he won two National Book Awards, the Pulitzer prize in 1995, and in 2011 was appointed poet laureate of the United States. Levine was a proud poet of the working class, born in the industrial city of Detroit, then still car maker to the world. He was influenced by Spanish poetry, having traveled there and having read Garcia Lorca, Jimenez, Machado, Alberti, among others. He also was an admirer of John Keats, and edited a collection of Keats's poems. In this early collection, Levine wrote often about work, family, time and memory. His wife, children, father live here. In Not This Pig, people and places are named: Eugene, Little Joe, Dr. Leo, Lonnie; Toledo, Dubuque, Fresno, Barcelona. The late 60's were a turbulent time in America, and he wrote of Latinos, blacks, Jews. He wrote of things that are used, are worn from use, and of work. Levine describes the assembly line: "the slow elephant feet/of the presses sliding down/in grooves"; lunch break: "marked/my bread with the black/print of my thumb/and ate it,"; mornings on the job: "it's 5:30, middle June./I rise, dress,/assume my name/and feel my/face against a hard towel." Perhaps in part because of the Spanish poets, in these poems Levine takes everyday incidents and finds the poetry in the moment, abstracting it from the commonplace, placing it at a higher level, a better thought. As such, although there is something valuable to be found in each of the poems, some are difficult to understand, and I won't lie, some are downright baffling (the titles are often a valuable clue). Here are bits of four of the poems that stood out to me:

"To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop"
    You think your life is over?
    It's just begun.

"The Midget"
    no one hears or no one cares
    that I sing to this late born freak
    of the old world swelling my lap,
    I sing lullaby, and sing.

"Animals Are Passing from Our Lives"
    The boy
    who drives me along believes
    that any moment I'll fall
    on my side and drum my toes
    like a typewriter or squeal
    and shit like a new housewife
    discovering television

"Baby Villon":

    ... he holds my shoulders,
    Kisses my lips, his eyes still open,
    My imaginary brother, my cousin,
    Myself made otherwise by all his pain.

This was only his second book, but already the strengths that mark Levine's later work were visible. In Not This Pig Philip Levine sees the real world through a poetic veil, but he sees the real world. [3½★]

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (2016)

A story about dance: a dance between friends, families, strangers, colors, cultures, countries.

Book Review: Swing Time is a transitional novel for Zadie Smith, but also deceptively simple. Dedicated to her mother, here Smith ventures into first person narration for (I think) the first time in a novel. This is not an optimistic book. None of the characters grow in the novel as they only fulfill their destinies, as the twig is bent. None succeed and in the end there is no resolution and little hope. No one escapes their fate. There are three time-lines here, one beginning in childhood, one as young adults, and the third, a framing device, after the book's climactic event. Two young, brown girls who want to dance become friends and frenemies. Our unnamed narrator (OUN) has an ambitious, immigrant black mother who works hard at her own education, but is distant and removed, and a loving, white, English father who supports the family but is otherwise passive and ineffectual. The other girl, Tracey has an absent, black father, ambitious but criminal, and a white, English mother who is a bit of a mess but dotes on her daughter. Tracey becomes a dancer in the West End until she hits a ceiling in her career. OUN becomes a personal assistant to an older, international pop star (picture a younger Madonna) who decides to build a girls' school in West Africa, another invading white savior. There OUN meets and slowly (she may be too African for England, but she's too English for Africa) makes friends with Africans who have a poor but idealized (they can connect) life, however, their lives too are changing as the effects of colonization continue.

Much of Swing Time seemed like a simple description of the lives of two girls (sometimes friends) growing up, with no apparent reason for telling the story. The meaning, however, is not in the events, but the interplay between the characters, their trajectories, how their backgrounds create their futures, how love is not found, lives are not lived. Smith, using OUN, is endlessly perceptive, defying stereotypes, seeing through pretense and political correctness, creating rounded, contradictory characters who fail to connect. She creates seemingly meaningless, throw away scenes (especially in the two girls' childhood) that only resonate much later, providing insights that complete the jigsaw puzzle of these lives. Characters love and are not loved in return, become shadows in the lives of others, live on the periphery, fail to find joy or even contentment. Few people work. As the seeds are sown so they've grown. At times the reader just wants to shake them and say, use your skills! Use what you've been given, do what you can! Swing Time's most driven character, OUN's mother, can't pass on that ambition, even as she can't parent and has little time for love. They can't escape their "tribes" (Smith's word). Although the characters are all flawed and frustrating, I had to keep reading, I still wanted to know what became of them, and I still wonder even now after finishing the book. My only negative here is that at times Zadie Smith seemed to lose interest, her writing becoming quite average, as if she'd lost her way for a page. Part of it may reflect the lack of direction, or the frustrated direction, of the characters. But I wonder if Smith herself became a little frustrated with the story, as she tried to find her way in what I think is a new direction for her. But no mistake, this is a book worth reading, society on the page, with endless parallels between characters that will become people you know, and leave you thinking. [4★]

Moonglow by Michael Chabon (2016)

A man recounts the incredible stories told him by his dying grandfather.

Book Review: Moonglow is a work of fiction. A novel. I only say that because so many in the national media seem to be treating it as a lightly fictionalized memoir, when Michael Chabon himself says it's all made up. In interviews he's said that he believes that many memoirs out there are not memoirs, that is, not truthful, so he decided to make Moonglow feel "like a genuine work of literary memoir," wanting his work of "mimicry" to seem "plausible," that "it's a game." His maternal grandparents were not like that. While creating verisimilitude with footnotes, bits and bobs of fact, and imaginary interviews, he also drops numerous hints within that it's all just a work of fiction (the mention of Munchausen should've been enough). And a very well done work of fiction at that. Chabon is a facile writer and he recreates the human swirl of memories in the structure of his novel: time darts back and forth, from person to person, from state to state, from country to country. Reading Moonglow I felt the warm heart within the novel; I was sucked in by the character of the stoic grandfather, but even more so by the shattered grandmother and the mother who bore the brunt of the family's insanity. These are strong, imprinted characters, and the narrator is the least interesting of all, but he tells a mean, powerful, and at times disturbing story. Chabon is in complete control of the many brilliant moments in the book (at times I felt Philip Roth hovering Chagall-like above the page -- Gravity's Rainbow is cited). Not just a master of time and space, but of the portraits he creates, the wonderful language he uses, how the stories are presented. I loved the framing device of the grandfather with a cat and a window at the beginning of the book, and the grandfather with a cat (Ramon!) and a snake at the end of the novel. Just one of many such touches for the reader to find. And that's my one problem (and it is just my problem) with the book. Moonglow does a fantastic job of appearing as a warm, heartfelt memoir that tells the family history of "Chabon's" grandparents, but at the same time as he reaches for my emotions, the IRL Chabon, the author, can't let go of the fact that it's all meta, a shuck, post-modern. As though he can't quite commit either way. For me (and just me), Moonglow would have been stronger if he had wholeheartedly picked one road, if he'd really committed. But that's not what he wanted to do here. Chabon makes us see all the masterful touches that say: "It's just a play, I made it up, but isn't it a great story?" Yes it is. [4★]