I encounter the lesbian strain in domestic thrillers

Stranger on Lesbos
By Valerie Taylor

Valerie Taylor started out in a conventional marriage with two kids, divorced, came out, and became an early advocate for gay women in the Midwest. Her novel, "Stranger on Lesbos," is part of a series, so even though this novel, written in the 1950s, ends on a rather conventional note, it behooves the reader to keep in mind that the story isn't over.

As the novel opens, Frances seems happily married to Bill. They have a son, Bob, who is almost grown. Born to poor and working class parents, Frances and Bill have come up in the world. He's an executive, and their home in the suburbs has all the modern conveniences. Bill worries about Frances's sense of fulfillment and encourages her to return to college to pursue her advanced degree in literature.

But there are signs of strain in this happy picture early on. Bill is often entertaining clients. His encouragement of Frances's studies seems as much motivated to distract her from the late nights he keeps as from any concern for her happiness. Bob is becoming independent, and Frances is beginning to question his need for her as a parent: "Good old mom, a standard piece of household equipment," she thinks as she tidies Bob's closet. It's also clear that Bill and Frances's love life has not been particularly satisfying--12 orgasms in 16 years.

If Bill and Bob have been indifferent, flashbacks to Frances's life with her father show a history of abuse and neglect. Pa is a drunk who thinks nothing of hacking up the doors in the house to burn in the cookstove and using a page from Frances's books as tinder: "Then he ripped pages out of Frankie's geography book, and her heart tore across like paper." Frances has had difficult relationships with men throughout her life, and it might have allowed readers in the 1950s to find a "reason" for Frances's attraction to women. This may be a nod to conventional wisdom at the time on Taylor's part, but it clearly is not wisdom that she herself buys into.

At college, Frances meets Mary Baker. She is drawn into an intense friendship with "Bake," as she is known, and, eventually, a love affair. But Bake is disturbingly like the men in Frances's life. She is insensitive, urging Frances not to bother to go home to make dinner for her son, and asking rudely why Frances married Bill: "You get pregnant or something?" She also pressures Frances to leave her husband and move in with her, and while Frances is deeply in love--or at least deeply gratified sexually--she resists Bake's plan. While she doesn't articulate, it, Frances seems to know at some level that Bake is has the same alcoholic and faithless tendencies as her Bill.

After starting a fight with another woman in a gay bar, the place is raided. Frances expects to see Bake in the paddy wagon, but she has somehow ducked the police, leaving Frances on her own. Worse, when Frances uses her phone call to contact Bake, she apologizes for running out, and urges Frances to get Bill to bail her out.

The novel covers the span of a few years, in which Frances graduates, gets a job, and continues to stay with Bill and manage her affair with Bake. And pretty miserable years they are, too; Frances is abused by both men and women, is betrayed by just about everybody, and becomes deeply confused about where she belongs. In a frank talk with Kay, a lesbian in Bake's circle who has been married and understands Frances's confusion, she acknowledges the realities of being a lesbian at a time when most homosexuals had to remain closeted and long-term relationships were difficult to sustain:

Maybe that's why so many of us drink too much. That's a kind of running away.... Look, it's none of my business, but if I had a husband and he was halfway decent to me ... I think I'd stick with him. Maybe it isn't all moonlight and roses. Okay, so it's very romantic watching your girl get soused and make a public fool of herself. Not to mention the nights when you wake up and wonder how long you've got before she gets interested in someone else.

When her son Bob, who is planning to get married, demands that she stop seeing "a lot of queers" to mollify fiancee Mari's conventional notions about family decency, Frances agrees, then falls apart. She does pick up the pieces in an ending that is somewhat ambiguous. The reader senses that Frances has rejected a good part of what is abusive, dangerous, and unhealthy about "the life," but she has also rejected who she is as well. She has learned something ... but not everything.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW*** In leaving Frances at Bob's wedding, reconciled to restarting her life with Bill, Taylor ends the story where many gay people ended their lives 60 years ago, making the best of it in conventional marriages and repressing their sexuality. Frances clearly hopes, as the book ends, that she can find contentment. She has a history with Bill. In the early days, he was kind. And he clearly wants to take her back, not just for appearances, but because she is the girl he fell in love with.

Taylor is generous enough to acknowledge that Frances is not the only victim in this domestic situation. Bill's happiness, too, has been (and the reader senses, will be) tied Frances's sexual identity and his demand that she follow accepted conventions.

Also, hovering at the edges of Bill and Frances's return to domesticity is Kay, who has crashed the wedding (though very discreetly and looking very chic). "With only a minimal qualm, [Frances] renounced Kay's friendship and whatever possibilities it might hold of emotional involvement. I'll leave the receiver off the hook, she decided firmly."

One senses that phone will not stay off the hook indefinitely.

I read about the "mother instinct," missing children, and menopausal women

Bunny Lake Is Missing
By Evelyn Piper

The Hours Before Dawn
By Celia Fremlin

I'm looking at these two novels together because they both deal, loosely, with the "mother instinct" and  missing children, and each is a tour de force of narrative style, albeit very different in tone and attitude.

In both novels a young mother beset with some adversity has a child who goes missing. In "Bunny Lake," the mother, Blanche, is struggling with managing a new job, a preschooler, as well as the social baggage of being an unwed mother in 1957. When she arrives to pick up her daughter, Bunny, from her new preschool, no one has seen the child. Blanche becomes distraught and, as her panic rises, the reader begins to suspect, along with the cops, that Bunny does not exist. In "The Hours Before Dawn" (1958) Louise is struggling with an inconsolable infant, Michael, a third child that her husband flat-out states he didn't want, and she is so exhausted that she actually falls asleep in a park and loses the baby for a time.

Blanche and Louise could not be more different mothers. Blanche's mother love is tigerish, she blasts every stereotype of the unwed mother that the 1950s might have thrown at her: She is well-organized, energetic, educated, self-sufficient, rather chaste, and utterly dedicated to her child. Louise is utterly overwhelmed by her duties as mother, homemaker, and wife. She is a woman who seems to be drowning in domesticity.

Both of these novels raise real questions about the "fitness" of mothers, and (especially as companion reads) both could be construed as criticisms of the "normal" nuclear family that was touted in the 1950s. Fremlin's novel is full of wonderful minor characters, among them Mrs. Hooper and her psychologist friend, Magda, who have theories about child-rearing. Mrs. Hooper's ideas about giving children independence (backed up by the childless Magda) are excuses to dump her kids on friends and acquaintances and go off to meetings. There are also Louises's other children, Harriet and Margery, who at first appear to be charmingly eccentric little girls, but whose demands and querulousness torment Louise almost relentlessly. There's also Mrs. Morgan, a kind of working class Mrs. Grundy. And there's Mark, Louise's husband, who manages to make things worse no matter what he does because he is utterly clueless. Grandmothers don't come off well in this book, either. Bunny's grandmother tries to persuade Blanche to give up Bunny--the shame of illegitimacy! Louise's mother-in-law is a chic middle-aged woman who has blossomed in the absence of children and death of husband, and wants nothing to do with Louise or her brats.

SPOILERS (and mind the confusion that might arise because both novels have a character named Louise): In both Fremlin's and Piper's novels, the person who takes the baby turns out to be an older woman on the cusp of menopause. Both women are posing as people they are not. Louise Benton, who kidnaps Bunny, is a former preschool employee who's been dismissed for odd behavior. She pretends to be a school employee who fakes Bunny's registration and then absconds with her when Blanche drops her off. Vera Brandon, who takes charge of little Michael, poses as a teacher who rents a room in Louise and Mark's home. Vera, an unwed mother, believes she was told that her child died at birth, and that he was switched with Louise and Mark's sickly baby by the hospital nurses.

Louise Benton, Bunny's kidnapper, doesn't even appear in the story; she is merely a device that winds up the action. In fact, Bunny herself appears only in Blanche's recollections and at the very end of the novel. The novel is really about Blanche and the increasingly weird collection of characters who try to assist, seduce, or thwart her. Piper's narrative becomes more herky-jerky as Blanche's panic rises. Episodes sometimes don't come clearly into focus until later passages clarify them. This narrative trick ratchets up the tensions as they pile up throughout the novel.

Vera Brandon, in "The Hours Before Dawn," is a force to be reckoned with. Vera is an amazon whose search for the baby she believes to be alive is relentless and intelligent. She is the direct opposite of Louise, Michael's putative mother. She is, in fact, a lot like Blanche Lake. Fremlin plots this novel so deftly that it is entirely unclear by the end of the novel whether Vera or Louise is Michael's mother, though there is no doubt whom he ends up with. The book is like one of those tessellated optical illusion pictures that, looked at one way, seems to be a school of fish, and looked at another way, shows a flock of birds (see the pic above left).

Something probably ought also to be said about both writers' very dim view of psychology in these books. The psychologist dispatched to help persuade Blanche that Bunny does not exist may be the nuttiest character in the novel. And Mrs. Hooper and Magda are certainly the most opportunistic of psychological theoreticians. The emerging science of the mind so touted in the 1950s (and which was responsible for so badly diagnosing women's problems) clears up nothing in either of these novels.

I explore wartime domestic tensions with Lucia Holley

The Blank Wall
by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

It is a dark and stormy night, and Lucia Holley is writing about the weather to her naval officer husband at war somewhere in the Pacific. She catches her teenaged daughter, Beatrice, trying to sneak off to meet a man in the boathouse. Lucia sends her daughter back to bed while her elderly father goes out to see about the man, a would-be blackmailer. When Lucia goes for her swim the next morning, she finds the man dead, the point of an anchor sticking through his throat. Assuming the death was accidental and hoping to spare her father any unpleasantness, she does what any good wife, mother, and daughter would do: She pulls the anchor hook out of the corpse, hauls it into a boat, takes it to a nearby uninhabited island, covers its face with a bandana, and hides it in a swamp where few people go. Sadly, she forgets that sometimes people like to picnic on the island with their dogs. It's barely two days before a local canine finds the body and the place is swarming with cops and a parade of unsavory characters.

From there, the 1947 novel is less a police procedural--in fact, the cops don't make much more than perfunctory appearances--and more an exploration of how the unfolding crime and Lucia's increasing involvement with various criminals--the blackmailer has buddies--brings domestic tensions roiling within Lucia to a head.

Lucia's children, the brash 15-year-old David, and Bee, a self-willed 19-year-old, are disappointments to her, though she internalizes that disappointment.

She had always been faintly disappointed in herself, disappointed in school because she had not been remarkable, disappointed when she married because she had not become the perfect housekeeper, in herself as a mother. Whenever she visited her children's school she felt singularly inept among the other mothers. Simply not real, she thought.

Lucia's self-disappointment is intensified when Bee blows up at her: "I want to know all kinds of people; I want to live out in the world. I'd just as soon be dead, as have a life like you." Lucia's pat response that she has everything worth having--presumably a husband, home and children--falls flat even to herself. There are many more speeches like this that underscore the generational tension and rifts between mother and children, and between Lucia's inner doubts about her life and the rather placid and conventional woman she seems.

Gradually Lucia's disappointments turn into resentments. A knock on her bedroom door pulling her away from a chance to lie down and think about the blackmailers precipitates a rebellious line of thought:

Someone would come and see her. Someone always came. There was always a knock on the door. Everyone had a right to come to her; that was what she was for, that was her function, her reason for being. There was never an hour that belonged to her.... People are idiots to talk about getting married and being your own mistress, so much more free than women with jobs.

While Lucia struggles with her doubts about her role as wife and mother, and Lucia is drawn ever deeper into efforts to keep the blackmailers at bay, forced to act and sometimes to lash out at the family she is trying to protect. She breaks a social engagement to take the train to New York to meet one of the crooks. Her children protest. She ignores them, thinking:

I'm not a child, or an idiot, I'm not a slave, either. I can go to New York whenever I think best, and I don't intend to be cross-examined by my own children. they ought to have confidence in me, and so should Father. Complete confidence. 

She is less confident than she seems. She still answers her daughter's announcements that she wants a career with conventional platitudes, but her answers are motivated more by her sense that no matter what women do, the are trapped by domesticity. Her frustrations at her role as a mother mount:

That word [mother] was like a wave, like a tide beating against her. Mother! Where have you been? What were you doing? Open your door when I knock. Answer when I ask. Be there, always, every moment, when I want you. It's inhuman.... They [her family] would give her love, protection, even a sort of homage, but in return for that she must be what they wanted and needed her to be.

As another body presents itself for disposal, and Lucia finds herself drawn to one of the blackmailers who seems to have feelings for her, her resentments at the family she is trying to protect reach a pitch. She remembers her son David's dog as it lay dying, and David constantly petting it, trying to derive reassurance from the fact that the dog would still wag its tail. As the criminal activity reaches its climax, Lucia begins to feel like the dog, that her family demands her reassuring presence even as she is experiencing the most excruciating tensions.

I don't think it will spoil the ending of the crime story to note that Lucia does not emerge from it a self-directed personality: "... all that had happened to her would be, must be, pushed down, out of sight, the details of daily living would come like falling leaves to cover it." Lucia, at nearly 40, has lived too long and her habits are too ingrained to change the way she lives. It is a devastating ending ... and a rather devastating indictment of conventional domesticity. There are even references to her living a doll's existence, recalling Henrik Ibsen's unhappy Nora.

Holding's plot, overall, isn't quite cogent; it seems to wander. But she is a great scene writer and keenly delineates Lucia's inner turmoil and outer appearance. The vignettes between Lucia and her family, Lucia and the neighbors, and, particularly, Lucia and the household's African American maid, Sybil, with whom she shares a strong bond that conventionality never allows to blossom into real friendship, are extremely well done.

***

Holding also wrote a shorter, more conventional thriller about a May-December marriage gone bad, "Lady Killer." One of the fun things about that read was the attention to fashion that help convey character and move plot points along. 

I meet another Highsmith psychopath

Deep Water

by Patricia Highsmith

In "Deep Water," (1957) Highsmith gives us Vic, a pudgy, Thurber-esque character with a virago for a wife, who might get her comeuppance as in Thurber's "The Unicorn in the Garden." But this is Highsmith, and we can pretty reliably predict that the novel will take a darker turn.

The reader initially sees Vic, the long-suffering husband to his inebriate, nymphomaniac wife, Melinda, who has no qualms about bringing her boyfriends around to the house and letting Vic make dinner for them. But Vic prides himself on being civil and has consolations. He's built his own wing on the house where he raises snails and does experiments with bed bugs and fiddles around with foxgloves by depriving them of sunlight for long periods. He has an independent income in addition to what his tiny and exclusive printing press makes in carefully chosen and hand printed books. He's devoted to the couples' small daughter, Trixie.

Highsmith plunges the reader into this maelstrom of a marriage without much backstory:

Everybody considered [Vic] odd for enduring [Melinda's behavior], but Vic didn't mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else. Melinda had been odd, too, or he never would have married her. Courting her and persuading her to marry him had been like breaking a wild horse, except that the process had to be infinitely more subtle.

A close reading of this passage reveals that Vic enjoys the slow process of psychological domination, and he hardly views his wife as a person, merely an animal to manipulate--like his snails or bedbugs. The only weapon Melinda has is to fail to react to this domination with rage, drunkenness, or some other emotional outburst. Melinda is slow to realize this. Which keeps Vic generally happy. 

Lately, however, Vic and Melinda's friends have been openly asking him why he doesn't take Melinda in hand. Vic is discomfited by these imprecations, not on his masculinity, but on his ability to dominate. When one of Melinda's ex-boyfriends is murdered, Vic deflects this criticism handily by implying that he is the murderer. His friends think it might be a joke, albeit a tasteless one. But the rumor raises Vic's status and scares off many of Melinda's would-be boyfriends. This makes Melinda angry and miserable. Which makes Vic happy, and he goes back to tutoring his daughter, his snails and bedbugs and foxgloves and picking out end marks for his books of poetry with renewed vigor.

This happy period does not last when the real murderer of Melinda's former lover is found, and she takes a shine to a new boyfriend, one whom Vic finds particularly loathsome, not so much because Charley is boinking Melinda, but because he is unattractive and is only a middling musician. Vic seems to feel that this choice reflects poorly on Melinda ... and perhaps on him. So, at a neighborhood pool party, Vic finds himself alone in the pool with Charley, and drowns him. Then the weirdness really kicks in.

Highsmith's ability to get into the mind of a psychopath probably reached its apex in the first two Ripley novels. She shows the reader a character who seems only slightly "off," and then slowly peels away the layers of normality to show just how deep that "off-ness" goes. But, while Ripley's victims have a chance of getting away, Melinda is married to Vic, and in the days before no-fault divorce, escaping him seems much harder. Plus they have a small child. The domestic setting increases the horror of the situation as the reader watches Vic's descent.

***

Most of Highsmith's psychopaths are men. For those looking to see what she does with female counterparts to Vic and Ripley, I recommend "Little Tales of Misogyny," a short story collection of truly scary women who terrorize their families.

I revel in a classic noir voice that happens to be female

Some time ago, I wrote about my guilty Charlie Huston noir vampire pleasure, not least of which was Huston's tough-guy style. Helen Nielson's 1951 "Dead on the Level," while devoid of vampires, is equally addictive right from the opening paragraph:

The way Casey figured it, life was a sour deal. It was something with a beginning you didn't ask for, an ending you couldn't help, and nothing in between that would sell even at a charity auction. But it came in a package, like a Christmas tie, and once the package was opened you were stuck with it.

Those three sentences sum up the cynical view of life, the wise-cracking metaphors, and the rat-a-tat cadence of classic noir that makes the style as recognizable and seductive as Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. Nielson sustains that style for nearly 200 pages, deftly maneuvering through plot twists and stock noir characters as handily as any of the great male crime writers, only Nielson, to crib from Ginger Rogers, does it backwards and in heels.

What's memorable about "Dead on the Level" is not the rich dame with the smoky purple eyes who gives Casey Morrow $5,000 to marry her, or the Irish gal sidekick who paints nudes in a drafty loft, or the rich dame's mother (think Barbara Stanwyck) or the rich dame's lawyer/fiance (casting call for Dan Duryea). Nope, it's the sneaking suspicion that, beneath the surface, Nielson has that noir style down so well that it COULD just be twitting her male counterparts by mimicking their style, and that makes this book all the more fun.

What IS remarkable about Nielson is that the brash crime drama schtick covers a lot of info in an economy of words. For instance, the book opens with Casey Morrow drinking up his last few bucks in a Chicago bar after a failed business venture in California. He wakes up in a strange place wondering if he needs an alibi, leading the reader to understand Casey isn't a stranger to situations in which he might need alibis. It's only later that he learns that the dame with the smokey purple eyes is the daughter of a wealthy philanthropist who's been bludgeoned to death a poker in his study.

What's also notable about Nielson's book is that we get a backstory on Casey Morrow that makes him vulnerable in a way Sam Spade never was. Casey, we learn, is a Chicago native, born Casimir Morokowski, a skinny kid who lived over a bar with a mother who often resorted to the strap and a step-father who owned the bar and was probably sympathetic but didn't like to interfere. Meeting his mother after eight years away in the war and his ill-fated venture on the coast, Casey considers, "It was terrible what a lot of silence stood between them; what number of things could never be said and never be told." Morrow is not just a hard-boiled guy who might be taking the fall for the Brunner murder; he's a person with a past, with regrets, and he sometimes wants to "bawl his eyes out" like Casimir Morokowski. (He doesn't, of course.)

There are two domestic noir stories running on parallel tracks in this little novel, and that gives it texture and depth. There's the back story we get about Casey's working-class family, hardscrabble, sad, but resilient, and the outwardly perfect Brunner family, whom Casey later observes had fallen into a gutter the Morokowskis would never stoop to.

Also remarkable is the fact that Nielson's tale is full of women--perps, victims, and helpers. Women dominate this novel, and they dominate Casey Morrow. Maggie Doone, the plucky artist, helps Casey with stakeouts and is ready with hot coffee and blankets when needed. Phyllis Brunner of the purple eyes is running a con game to save her own life (or ruin her mother's) and drags Casey smack into the middle of it. And Mrs. Brunner, Phyllis's mother, has nerves of steel and lots of secrets. Even Casey's old Ma can run a good subterfuge; when the chips are down and the cops are at the door, she knows how to look harmless and elderly and stall for time to let her boy get away.

Nielson's novel should also be enjoyed for the wonderful period piece that it is. This is America after World War II, when ethnicity and social class still mattered, and clothes and your last name gave you away if you were hoping to get away with some pretensions above your station. But it was also the eve of the Beat generation, the questioning of all those social rules and gender roles. Worthwhile reading on many levels!

I nearly drink a dram of poison

A Dram of Poison
by Charlotte Armstrong

Armstrong's 1956 domestic thriller starts out as a Pygmalion story: Kenneth Gibson is a middle-aged bachelor and poetry professor at a humble California college. He's a sensitive guy, and when he attends the funeral of an addled and elderly colleague, he is bothered to see that the man's daughter, in her early 30s, is friendless, ill, and dispirited. Her curmudgeon father has left her with no money, no skills, and no confidence. After Kenneth gets to know her more, he proposes to marry her as "an arrangement," so he can help her regain her health and so she can make a home for him. They are both clear that this is not a love match, but when they move to a little cottage and Rosemary gets well again, romance seems to be in bloom.

However, a car accident throws Kenneth into the hospital--Rosemary, the driver, is largely unhurt, but a bit unhinged--and Kenneth asks his sister, Ethel, a career woman nearing 50, to come and help out.

At first we like Ethel a lot. She's a no-nonsense, take-charge kind of person, just the kind of Eve-Arden-type woman friend who could broaden Rosemary's circle of friends and be a role model for her. But Ethel has always lived alone, is set in her ways, has definite opinions, and imposes her own regime on the household in ways that the convalescent Kenneth, who is left with a bum leg, and fragile Rosemary seem unable to fight.

Ethel is suspicious of the "foreign" Mrs. Violette, the housekeeper who comes in once a week to help the Gibsons. Rosemary begins to talk of getting a job and not being a "parasite," clearly an idea Ethel has put in her head. Ethel pokes what seems like gentle fun at Kenneth for adopting his wife like a "stray" and noticing that Rosemary seems quite fond of the dishy widower neighbor, Paul Townsend, who is much younger than Kenneth. As Ethel blithely sows these poisonous seeds of doubt, she points out how comfy it would be if Rosemary, restored to health, found a man her own age and Ethel and Kenneth could live together in a little apartment into their old age.

Kenneth becomes so despondent by Ethel's cheerful administered put-downs that he decides to heisting a bottle of poison and end it all. The problem is that Kenneth hides the poison in a small olive oil bottle and, before he can drink it, loses it on a bus.

The police are notified. Rosemary and Paul Townsend pack Kenneth into the car to try to retrace his steps. Along the way, a bus driver, a young nurse, a society matron, and an artist, all of whom were on the bus, join the hunt. With Ethel away at work and unaware of the drama, these interesting minor characters begin to restore some perspective for Kenneth and Rosemary.

The search section of book--roughly the entire second half--takes on an almost farcical tone that is at odds with the much more subtly limned first half of the novel, and, sadly, as a thriller, this makes the book flop. I imagined a more prolonged sequence in which the three Gibsons continued their unspoken struggle to control events, at least one of them ending up as fertilizer for Rosemary's garden.

But I think I understand why Armstrong couldn't bear to kill off Ethel or Rosemary. Ethel is solid, homely, self-sufficient, wrapped up in her career, and her comfortable success makes her feel she can dictate how others should live. She is the 1956 version of the woman who has "leaned in" and gone overboard. Rosemary, on the other hand, is thin, hesitant, and has always lived in the shadow of her overbearing father. She is the 1956 cautionary tale about what happens when women are devalued and seen solely as conveniences. Flawed as the novel is, Armstrong, as a wife, mother, and career woman herself, seems to want to underscore the balance both women need in their lives. She wants to save them both. So she does.

I get some quick reads in domestic thrills

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives
by Sarah Weinman

This is a great compendium of short domestic thriller stories written by women and edited by Sarah Weinman. Standouts in the anthology include Vera Caspary's "Sugar and Spice," almost a novella, a deftly told complicated love quadrangle in which two cousins play out a lifelong rivalry; Helen Nielsen's "Don't Sit Under the Appletree" in which a woman is terrorized by 4 a.m. phone calls that are even more terrifying when she finds out whom they're from; Margaret Millar's "The People Across the Canyon," which could have been a great Twilight Zone episode; and an early short story by Patricia Highsmith, "The Heroine," which in which a young nanny, who seems just a hair "off" in the beginning is slowly revealed to be quite mad.

Weinman's introduction to the anthology and to each author are interesting, if rather breezy and biographical rather than analytical, but she has selected a nice collection of authors for those who want to explore this genre more. Like me.

I explore split personalities with Shirley Jackson

The Bird's Nest

By Shirley Jackson

I’ve been thinking about the features of the domestic thriller genre, and so far I’ve noticed: 

• At least one character has to be in mortal danger
• Family conflict--marital, parental, or fraternal—drives the plot
• Conflict stems from criminal activity or insanity (sometimes both)
• At least one character’s true motives, identity, or personality remains hidden, and the revelation brings the plot to its climax.

 There may be more features in this genre I have yet to discover, but Shirley Jackson’s “The Bird’s Nest” has all them … in just one character. The novel is about a young woman with multiple personality disorder and four distinct personalities (Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, and Bess). Interestingly, Jackson's novel and predates the hugely popular “The Three Faces of Eve” by three years (novel published in 1954, while the Eve book and movie came out in 1957).

Jackson is less interested in the causes for Elizabeth’s disassociative personality (though glimpses of a chaotic home life and child abuse are part of the landscape) than in the sibling rivalry between the personalities and in the way others respond to them.

In truth, none of Elizabeth’s personalities seem all that crazy on their own, though the “sister” personalities, who range in age from 16 to 24, compete and manipulate each other in ways that sometimes lead to violence. Nope, the really crazy ones are the people closest to Elizabeth, her psychiatrist and aunt.

In two long sections narrated by Dr. Wright, Jackson establishes that he is a prissy, jealous, misogynistic, and egotistical jackass. He keeps a detailed dossier on Elizabeth that he seems to hope bears some resemblance in style to his literary hero, William Makepeace Thackery, and he prefers the weepiest, and clingiest of the personalities, Beth. He likens Betsy to a demon and despises Bess’s arrogance and callousness. Elizabeth, so sickly from trying to contain all these personalities, the one who might elicit the most sympathy, makes little impression on him.

Aunt Morgen, who also has her own section, has her own personality problems. Like Elizabeth’s personalities, Morgen still lives in the shadow of her pretty sister, Elizabeth’s dead mother. She has remade herself as her sister’s opposite number, but deep down she shares some of her sister’s worst flaws and remains damaged and self-deluded. The fact that she has custody of her sister’s orphaned child and the trust of her deceased brother-in-law, with whom she was secretly in love, are not enough to help her come to terms with seething anger and resentments.

This fragmented narrative style meshes nicely with the fragmentation of Elizabeth's personalities. We see bits and pieces of Elizabeth's life as in a shards of a shattered mirror, some elements not quite coming together, others missing entirely. And Jackson has the restraint to leave things that way, allowing the reader to enter into the confusion and struggle Elizabeth and her "sisters" have to cope with.

Toward the end of the novel, Dr. Wright gives a long disquisition at a dinner party about human sacrifice. It’s a rather jolting and unsavory topic, but, in the end, that’s what the book is about: The sacrifices we make—especially women with their maternal sacrifices, sacrifices to societal norms, sacrifices to please others—that slowly kill us. 

I find Tey's domestic thriller a bit too horsey and tame

Brat Farrar
by Josephine Tey

English novelist Josephine Tey plays with the ideas of what it means to belong to a family, to share its intimacies and secrets, and to examine the play of personalities in her mild domestic thriller, “Brat Farrar” (1942). These elements of family help heighten the suspense in the book, such as it is, though the novel in is marred by long descriptions of thoroughbred training, competitions, races, and shows (I didn't feel this equine info added anything to the plot), and sometimes borders on the "cosy" rather than the thriller. 

The set-up: Loner Brat Farrar is noticed by Alec Loding, a washed up actor, who enlists the young man to impersonate Patrick Ashby, who supposedly committed suicide as a young teen. Loding, who has a long-time association with the Ashbys, will coach Brat/Patrick, who will, of course, funnel a modest but comfortable allowance to Loding on Patrick's fast-approaching 21st birthday.

Brat is a perfect candidate for the caper, not only because of his resemblance to the dead Patrick, but because of similarities in temperament. Under Loding’s coaching, Brat is accepted by the family, though each member has some misgivings about his identity, particularly Patrick’s younger twin, Simon, who was set to inherit the Ashby estate until Brat /Patrick showed up.

The Ashby family is closely knit. Its matriarch, Aunt Bee, raised the five Ashby children and protected their legacy after their parents’ death in a travel accident. Bee is warm and accepting, as are the three Ashby sisters. But Simon is clearly antagonistic. Not only has Brat/Patrick stolen his inheritance on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, but he knows that Brat is an imposter. One of the mysteries is how he knows and why he is not more forthright in outing Brat, though the reader will probably be able to guess before the reveal. Despite Simon's animosity, Brat becomes increasingly torn by his ruse as he grows to love the family he is deceiving. It’s clear that the climax will involve a showdown between Brat and Simon, and the ending and resolution, with its deus ex machina in the form of Great-Uncle Charles, who helps uncover some of the family secrets, is far too pat.

The novel is engaging enough. Tey even hits some nice stylistic points as in her description of Loding, who “had a pink, collapsed face that reminded one of the underside of fresh mushrooms.” The description captures Loding’s pallid and unhealthy mind and body, and suggests something of the parasitic nature of his soul. Sadly, there aren't enough of these grace notes to make the novel more memorable.

I return to the mid-20th Century for some domestic thrillers

In an effort to shape my promiscuous reading habits, I hit on the idea to go on a course of mid-century domestic thrillers by women for the summer. The advantage of this program is that it allows me to re-read "The Price of Salt" by Patricia Highsmith and "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier.

I'm not rating selections now, but will when I've done.

Anyhow, first up is ...

Cassandra at the Wedding
by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra Edwards is deeply attached to her twin sister Judith. They live together in San Francisco, own a piano together, and Cassandra has their whole life together planned. Judith has been in New York City for nine months, has met a young doctor, and plans to marry him. Cassandra is feeling angry, lonely, betrayed, and is drinking too much. She may also have more than sisterly feelings about Judith; she talks frequently about being afraid of men, she has no boyfriends, and Judith refers to a series of Cassandra's women friends whom she seems to take up and cast off as she might a series of lovers. But if Baker does mean to imply something sexual, she keeps it oblique.

The story is told in alternate first-person sections by Cassandra and Judith, which makes the novel wink back and forth between darkness and light. But it’s not always clear which is the book's dark sister. Cassandra’s attachment to Judith seems unhealthy. But Judith’s decision to marry seems precipitous, a running away from her genteel and alcoholic father, blinkered grandmother, and memory of the twins’ mother, long dead of lung cancer, but lurking around the periphery of the story in memories in that echo Cassandra’s volatility and frustration.

The climax of the book resolves far too quickly. (SPOILER: Cassandra tries to commit suicide on the wedding night, and Judith’s fiancé must bring her around with emetics, colonics, and a stomach pump. She recovers from all this quicker than from a hangover 24 hours earlier. I admit this marred the ending for me somewhat. There is also a very strange sense that--not to put too fine a point on this--Doctor Finch consummates his relationship with Cassandra before his wife, an observation Judith herself suggests.) But there is a long and interesting denouement in which Cassandra gets the last word, reflecting on her upbringing, considering her economic privileges, thinking more empathetically about others, looking afresh at her scholarly efforts.

Written in 1962, a year before Betty Friedan gave voice to “the problem that has no name,” Cassandra seems to be on the road to envisioning a self-directed life; Judith disappears into matrimony and is never heard from again. Baker doesn’t imply that Judith’s story has a sad ending so much as a very conventional one. For all her selfishness, dramatics, and quirks—in fact, because of them—Cassandra is the one Baker wants us to be interested in.

I offer more review haikus

Still trying to catch up on reading and reviews:

The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfrid Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals***1/2
Wendy Jones
Wilfrid Price, a Welsh undertaker in the early 20th century, is pretty dim where women are concerned, creating a muddle when he proposes to one woman while he's in love with another. It sounds humorous--and parts of it are--but the woman to whom he proposes is in terrible trouble, the kind of trouble that nobody could say out loud in those days. Jones handles the story with an almost Victorian delicacy, except for the colorful idioms about "popping your clogs" (dying) and "farting in a colander" (doing something useless).

Equilateral****
Ken Kalfus
Kalfus is one of the most imaginative writers around, and I wish he would write more books. In this novel, a nutty scientist plans to construct a huge trench in the shape of an equilateral triangle and then set it on fire, thus hailing intelligent life on Mars. The media excitement over the building of the trench begins to turn to terror over what kind of response Earthlings might get from the Martians, proving that humans will expend large amounts of energy on a lot of really dumb and short-sighted notions.

Raylan**1/2
Elmore Leonard
Cowboy noir in which the hero gets laid, which is nice for him, but kind of off-putting for me because my mental image of this character was sort of a cross between Festus on "Gunsmoke" and Columbo. I guess if I'd imagined Timothy Olyphant (who starred in the TV version of this book, "Justified") I might have liked it better.

If You're Not Yet Like Me***
Edan Lepucki
A monologue by a single mother to her unborn daughter. The mother's coarseness and her sad life are well drawn. That she's telling all this to her baby--the title could have been "If You're Not Yet Like Me You Will Be Someday"--is very jarring, and makes it hard to know whether we're meant to sympathize with the narrator or not. And I don't know whether I like this book or not.

The Bees***
LaLine Paull
This book begs comparisons with "Animal Farm" in that it is a dystopian novel that uses animals as stand-ins for humans. This time the animals are bees. Paull clearly did a lot of research on hive behavior and creatively imagines the bees, but you can see where this is going a mile off.

Dear Committee Members****
Julie Schumacher
A selfish, neurotic professor reveals his character, his feuds with his ex-wife and girlfriend, and his attitudes about his students through nothing but letters of recommendation. It's all pretty hilarious, but sadly dated. In these days when a growing number of college faculty are adjuncts humping for a living at two or three institutions, few have the luxury of being cosseted enough to engage in the Ivory Tower tantrums and spite depicted here.

Stoner**
John Williams
Stoner makes an interesting parallel read with "Dear Committee Members" above. Stoner is a medieval literature professor with an awful wife, a sympathetic mistress, and a daughter he loves, but he isn't strong enough to help any of these women. This book replaces "Jude the Obscure" as my standard for depressing books.

I take a stab at blog updating with review haiku

Someone on a book blog I like used to offer three line book reviews, which were dubbed "review haiku." She was better at the form than me, but, frankly, this is the only way I'm going to catch up on the scads of books I've read since last posting in August:

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch**1/2
Alison Arngrim
Former "Little House on the Prairie" child star Alison Arngrim survives sex abuse and parental neglect. Lots of Michael Landon stories (he was short and wore tight pants as Pa to please the lady viewers). Almost succeeds in rising above the Hollywood trauma genre.

Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China ***
Pearl S. Buck
Fictional biography of Cixi, whose main challenge was allowing a reluctant empire more access to Westerners. Cixi's internal struggles reflect those of the nation, which blend the personal and historical aspects of the novel nicely. A bit romantic for my taste.

A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World**
Rachel Cantor
A dystopian mess in many ways. Everything from the dull, sad world of service employees in the future to Marco Polo and a library of Judaica. A lot of stuff just isn't explained.

The Circle ***1/2
Dave Eggers
Another dystopian set in a Silicon Valley tech company. People are urged to "go clear" and give up their privacy; everyone becomes accessible to everyone else. A lot of people hate this book, but I think the themes are worth talking about.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America****
Barbara Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich goes undercover to work minimum wage jobs to show how impossible it is to be poor in America. Nothing I didn't already know, but I appreciate her ability to document it. She gets pretty worked up at times, which was a plus for me, but might turn some people off.

What Is Visible****
Kimberly Elkins
Absolutely excellent fictional biography of Laura Bridgman, child with no real working senses but that of touch, left in the care of Samuel Gridley Howe, who both petted and repressed her. Elkins' novel sensitively delineates Laura's inner life and the outside forces that brought her joy and misery. Helen Keller makes a brief appearance, appalling the reserved Laura with her grabby hands. (There's Laura's photo above left.)

The Panopticon***1/2
Jenni Fagan
A Scottish juvenile delinquent is sent to the titular home for wayward girls. What the warders don't count on is how much the girls care about each other and their fierce desire to direct their own lives. Very nicely done, though the slang takes some getting used to.

Gone Girl***
by Gillian Flynn
Girl goes missing, husband suspected. Well-plotted but utterly strains credulity after awhile ... and the "surprise" isn't that hard to figure out. Certainly a page turner, but hard to care about any of the characters.

The Pillars of the Earth**
Ken Follett
Medieval master builder and his friends might be subtitled "Bob the Builder Goes Back in Time." Clearly Follett is all stoked up about cathedral building ... so much so that the novel is only a frame to allow Follett to tell what he knows. Good if you don't care about the story and like a lot of architectural description.

I don't think "Little Brother" will ever replace Big Brother in my heart

Cory Doctorow's novel, "Little Brother," a high-tech book about government surveillance and terrorism, is a kind of weird agitprop/YA mixture. Didn't care for it myself, but maybe I'm just too old and cynical to be reading books for Our Young People. Here's the last paper I wrote for my scifi/fantasy class about Doctorow's book:

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother reminded me not so much of 1984, which the title references, but of protest classics like Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman. The work is essentially agitprop/revolutionary handbook in novel form. 

While I like Doctorow's motivation and message, it isn't great literature. It includes long irrelevant sidetracks (Jane Jacobs's philosophy of urban planning, for example) that a generation noted for its short attention span would likely tune out. There are also tired YA tropes: the first love (with obligatory safe sex), the clueless parents, the spunky geeks, and evil jocks (Charles). 

The novel, then, is mostly a frame for Doctorow's attempt to agitate young readers about their loss of privacy in the guise of homeland defense that grows ever more tyrannical. The setting is near-future San Francisco, where cameras, school-issued tablets, and even library books track students's every move, and where any attempt to thwart surveillance makes the surveillance more foolproof. The message is designed to appeal to teenagers who, in any era, chafe under the idea that adults are spying on them, and particularly to tech-savvy Millennials.

Doctorow gives Marcus technical know-how as well as knowledge of 1960s street theater tactics as he plans his VampMob toward the novel's close. It's a brilliant plan--peaceful, designed to smoke out the brutal tactics of the power structure and to maximizes press coverage. This and other passages show Millennials how to be a political force to be reckoned with. 

However, as a college teacher in my 60s, Marcus strains my credulity. I've met few students in my career with any knowledge of or interest in political action as I knew it. Millennials are immersed in information clutter, which makes it hard for them to focus on a single movement or effort. To Millennials "sharing" memes on Facebook constitutes political action--and Little Brother's Facebook page has only 3,313 "likes." Hard to see Doctorow's message sinking in as he'd hoped.

P.S. Also read Kit Reed's dystopian-in-a-monastery, "Enclave" (quite good) and another YA dystopian, Lydia Millett's "Pills and Starships," which was OK.

I revisit Gethen

I read Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" in the mid 1970s. In these intervening years, I've come to believe that this book isn't addressing feminist concerns directly so much as it is trying to take gender out of the human equation to look at what it means to be human, regardless of gender. I didn't feel this week's essay for my scifi/fantasy class did justice to the thinking I've done about this novel for many years--hard to cram it into the 320 word limit. But here's my stab:

Ursula LeGuin's introduction to the 1976 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness offers ideas about science fiction literature that informs this and other works. LeGuin says some science fiction is "extrapolative"; it follows a current situation to a predictive and hellish conclusion. But she calls Left Hand a descriptive "thought experiment," the purpose of which is to better understand what is by placing it in an imaginary world, like a game of "what if?"

Our "experiment" as readers, then, is like the Ekumen's: To learn what it means to be human from many people in many cultures. Space travel is how we arrive at the experiment, and the experiment's boundaries are Gethen, where, like Genly Ai, we have no guide in a harsh climate among androgynous people.

What do we learn? For one thing, environment shapes human endeavor and behavior. For example, where the landscape offers only bleak vistas of snow and ice, radio, plays, and storytelling are ascendant artistic forms. Religion evolved to help Gethenians cope, through ritual fasting and strength concentration (dothe), with a climate that inflicts periodic deprivation. Gethenians must often wait on weather, thereby learning patience as well as deep subtlety that often eludes Ai. 

Gethenian androgyny (resulting from a long ago bio-engineering experiment?) works with the planet's environment. Gethenians do not waste precious energy on constant sexual tension except during brief periods of kemmer. Androgyny connects them to family and community because they can both mother and father children. Gethenians can be perfidious and murderous, but climate and biology have left them free of warfare.

Some feminist critics, focusing solely on the novel's androgyny, condemned Left Hand as an imperfect vision of sexual equality. But LeGuin says that the book is not prescriptive or predictive; humans are already androgynous. The reader must decide how to understand that. What this reader decided is that love is a human constant that transcends biological and environmental constraints.

I decide an Earthling is an Earthling, even if he calls himself a Martian

I have read Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles" several times in the past, and one of the reasons I wanted to take the science fiction/fantasy class was to re-read the latter novel. While the class prof sees hope for the human race in the final chapter of this composite novel, I see no such thing. For all that the Earthlings try to make their break with their past, I think Earthling-ness is hard-wired into us. As long as we exist, a certain percentage of us will fear the unknown and try to beat it into a senseless pulp. SPOILERS in this week's paper:

The Martian Chronicles re-examined imperialism at a time when the last European colonies were regaining autonomy and American political dominion was on the rise (1940s-1960s). Much in Chronicles mirrors historical encounters between interlopers and natives: Martians die off from chicken pox as Native Americans died from diseases brought by Europeans. Earthlings dismantle Martian cities as colonialists razed holy sites for coffee plantations or strip mines. Like its contemporary novel, The Ugly American, Chronicles shows how Americans interact with other cultures. The results aren't pretty.

Most Earthlings dream of remaking Mars in Earth's image. Sam Parkhill, who uses Martian windows for target practice in an earlier story, is one of these. In "The Off Season," Parkhill builds a hot-dog stand to feed Earthling immigrants. Martians try to warn him of Earth's impending destruction, but Parkhill, reacts with terror and violence. The Martians, in an ironic gesture lost on Parkhill, deed him vast gem-laden territories just as Earth descends into global war. Nobody will be coming to buy hotdogs or emeralds now. Parkhill, like the rest of the colonists, returns to Earth and death.

A few Earthlings approach Mars with respect, but they are usually seen as nuts by fellow Earthlings. In "The Fire Balloons," Fr. Peregrine aborts his attempt to convert Martians when he sees they are higher beings who have worked out their own salvation and do not need his. The encounter strikes one of the book's few hopeful notes as Fr. Peregine and his missionaries recognize God in a new form.

As the Chronicles ends, the reader sees that the same competition for dominance that Earthlings show on Mars results in Earth's final world war. In the Chronicle's last story, Earthling families return to the now abandoned Mars to preserve the human race. Will Mars change them for the better? Will they be wiser than their predecessors? Given the stories that have gone before, it seems doubtful.