Bookchat continues!

Weary of working the film and music reviewing salt mines, I turned to books in 2014. Then I got a steady freelance reviewing gig at The Miami Herald. When this ended after nine months, I saw little incentive to cobbling sentences for nine-hundred-word essays few people read. Thanks to my investigations of Tom Hull’s efforts, I’m gonna try to write monthly blurbs for books new to me regardless of publication year.

John Banville – Mrs. Osmond (2017)

What’s this — a sequel to the nineteenth century’s most exquisitely calibrated novel written in English? The Portrait of a Lady, which I devoured in the summer before high school, is many readers’ favorite novel; Banville imagines an Isabel Archer, sullen but not embittered, returning to Gilbert Osmond after she has gone to England to keep a deathbed vigil for her beloved cousin Ralph Touchett. Structurally Banville mirrors late James — the Difficult Henry James of legend — and writes brief “scenic” chapters, which allows him to bring onstage Henrietta Stackpole, Mrs. Touchett, Ned Rosier, and other characters from the original novel for their Big Moment with Isabel. Yet consider: the schlock idea, worthy of slash fiction websites, loosens up the prose of one of the most ponderous of stylists.  Mrs. Osmond isn’t great, but wondering how long Banville can stick to the lineaments of James’ characterizations gives the novel a page-turning tension.

Jeffrey A. Engel – When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (2017).

Writing biographies about a president whose tenure as head of the CIA has swathed files in bureaucratic darkness is impossible, hence the resort to booklength Father’s Day cards like Jon Meacham’s Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. To its credit, Jeffrey A. Engel’s book on the man whom referred to simply as George Bush concentrates on the president’s post-Cold War policy. We learn that “policy” is a kind word for the concentration of received thinking and presumptive solutions; few in the American elite were ready for so hasty a collapse of the Soviet Union. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft bumbled along for about a year after Ronald Reagan returned to California and obsolescence, still distrusting Mikhail Gorbachev because their DNA insisted on distrust. As a result, they almost failed to grasp how Gorbachev’s domestic popularity was inversely proportional to his overseas popularity. How Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand sanded down Margaret Thatcher’s chromosomal reluctance to see a united Germany dominates the book’s middle section, and Engel’s prose matches his reporting. The Gulf War, for which its coalition demonstrated Bush’s putative mastery of so-called soft power, failed to deepen the American public’s affections for a company man, the sort of apparatchik whom, to quote Richard Nixon, you appoint to things. On the other hand, Engel gives us a glimpse of a president guzzling two martinis on Air Force One in response to a kind of war-induced postpartum depression.

Alan Hollinghurst – The Sparsholt Affair (2018).

After peaking with 2004’s The Line of Beauty, a novel canonized on publication, Alan Hollinghurst’s verbal fluency has become the crutch on which his elongated and often hysterical plots lean. Like 2011’s The Stranger’s Child, Hollinghurst’s narrators span decades when minutes is all it takes to get the measure of the handsome nullity with whom they’re fascinated.

Michael Todd Landis – Northern Men with Southern Loyalties (2014).

Territorial expansion for the sake of carving new slave states served as lodest, ar for the Democratic Party in the era between Andrew Jackson and the Dred Scott case. Michael Todd Landis’ book waves aside the myths of the pre-Civil War Democrats as the People’s Party: it was the party of slaveholders and their Northern allies, called doughfaces, and The People got stump speeches to eat with their crumbs. Because American history is American political history, expect no changes to high school curricula. A strong AP course would use Landis and Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy as foundational texts.

Herman Melville – Redburn (1849)

Or, the straightforward version of Moby Dick. The closest Herman Melville approached the conventions of the page turner, Redburn looks forward to Joseph Conrad’s “Youth” and other tales of the high seas. This bildungsroman of a senator’s son joining a ship’s crew boasts two extraordinary passages: a chapter presaging the Nightown episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses but in a homosexual brothel; and the hero’s approvingly noting the casualness with which English women and black men walk arm in arm on Liverpool streets. Although it wasn’t the hit that Typee was, Redburn offers more digestible goods for modern times.

Kenneth Whyte – Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (2018).

As long as I’ve been alive, Hoover has been subject to revisionism. From Robert S. McElvaine to William Leuchtenberg, historians have brought shadings to the scarecrow against whom Democrats built winning campaigns for almost thirty years. to say that he stretched federal intervention as far as his nature and Congress allowed is boilerplate in 2018.Engineer, mining expert, food administrator for Belgium and later Europe, Herbert Hoover was the only person whose reputation survived the Great War intact. As commerce secretary for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he essentially created the position, which for the last time made its holder into what we’d call a business czar: every aspect of production from a federal standard for the girth of nails to public relations fell under Hoover’s purview, to Coolidge’s annoyance; he called him “Wonder Boy,” derisively.

But Hoover soon learnt that his triumphs had happened because he had never held elective office. Once he sailed to the Oval Office in one of the largest of popular and electoral landslides in history in a decade replete with them, he ran aground persuading Congress to enact tariff revision, the details of which Whyte is good at recounting. Before the income tax became a funding source and weapon, tariffs comprised among the most baffling points of debate in American political life. Then the Depression came. Surpassing predecessors in detailing what Hoover did to combat it, Whyte makes the classic biographer mistake of identifying too closely with his subject; by the last third, he intimates that the Depression would’ve have ended had Hoover been reelected, for, after all, Whyte argues, the FDR Brain Trust looked at or stole wholesale many of Hoover’s ideas. When Whyte acknowledges Roosevelt’s superior political skills, it’s like a mother in law acknowledging that her son’s wife at least picks up the kids on time.  The last thirty years of Wonder Boy’s life he spent writing orotund books in the seclusion of his Xanadu, the Waldorf in Manhattan (guzzling martinis — did Poppy Bush learn from the Master?), waiting for the GOP to come to its senses and nominate him for a third term.  To his delight, he saw the party that had uneasily accepted him as its head renounce, for the sake of electoral victory, the Progressivism it had disliked in him.