RIPLEY UNDER GROUND by Patricia Highsmith

 Finished the Kindle edition on Sa 4/27/24. For some reason they were 'on sale'. I got three of Highsmith's books for seven dollars. This novel is the second in the Ripley series. 

From the book's page at Goodreads:

"It's been six years since Ripley murdered Dickie Greenleaf and inherited his money. Now, in Ripley Under Ground (1970), he lives in a beautiful French villa, surrounded by a world-class art collection and married to a pharmaceutical heiress. All seems serene in Ripley's world until a phone call from London shatters his peace. An art forgery scheme he set up a few years ago is threatening to unravel: a nosy American is asking questions and Ripley must go to London to put a stop to it. In this second Ripley novel, Patricia Highsmith offers a mesmerizing and disturbing tale in which Ripley will stop at nothing to preserve his tangle of lies."

An interesting link for the book at wordpress.com:

https://kevinfromcanada.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/ripley-under-ground-by-patricia-highsmith/

THE ACCIDENT by Linwood Barclay

Refinished su 4/14/24

This is one of my paperbacks and it was a selection for The Contemporary Book Club- May, 2014.

It's a melodramatic thriller and is basically a story about how a group of middle class suburbanites coped with the recession of 2008. To make some extra money some women decided to sell 'off market' handbags and drugs at each other's homes like a 'Tupperware Party'. However, the people they were dealing with with very bad criminals.

***Grandpa was a murderer & Sally, the boss's 'right-hand gal' was also a killer***

Alcohol can be injected to produce a high and it has been used in this manner for three hundred years, however it's not recommended. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Barclay’s latest novel follows his staple formula of taking an ordinary guy and catching him up in something that turns out to be much bigger than it first appears.

In this case the ordinary guy is Glen Garber, whose wife, Sheila, is involved in a terrible car accident that kick-starts a series of bizarre events. The accident happened on a night when Sheila was supposed to be taking notes in a college class in a nearby town; instead she ended up dead, along with two others. The police tell Glen that Sheila was drunk and parked on a freeway access ramp when the other car hit her vehicle. Glen and his 8-year-old daughter, Kelly, take the news of her death predictably hard, but even harder for Glen is the idea that his wife, who was a social drinker at best, could have been so drunk. He also has other problems to compound his grief: His contracting business, already struggling in the economic downturn, is barely making its payroll, and Glen’s worried about a house fire in a place he had under construction. As he puzzles through his emotions and confusion, a frantic Kelly calls him, asking him to pick her up from a sleepover at her best friend’s house. While playing a game with her friend, Kelly has taped the girl’s mom having a private conversation on her cell phone. Although the conversation means nothing to Glen at the time, the call becomes more significant when the woman turns up dead. Soon, bodies and crimes begin piling up like recently harvested timber, and Glen realizes not all is right in his world. The Canadian-based journalist twists and turns the plot with believability and spices it with plenty of suspects and suspense. In some places, his homework does seem a bit lacking, but the book remains consistently interesting and ready to please thriller fans with both its action and pacing.  Barclay has turned in a home run with plenty of edge-of-the-seat moments."  

    

IN THE CUT by Susanna Moore

Refinished Mo 4/8/24

I saw the film on Amazon Prime last week and I happened upon the book in the stacks downstairs. I bought the book at the library book sale on Sa 1/13/01 {finished Sa 1/20/01}and then read it again on Su 5/22/16.  

The film is great and the book might even be slightly better. The ending of the book was very chilling. 

Basically, it's about a woman who falls in love (lust?) with a 'bad' man. The 'hook' is that the man she is attracted to is NOT the bad guy. It's his partner.

Lots of anti-women dialog in the police station that's probably right on the money.

Lots of descriptions of sex, but it's almost 'cold' and a very detached feel. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reveiws:

"Moore's latest ought to come with a warning label for unwary fans of Sleeping Beauties (1993) and her earlier works. There's nothing beautiful about this one, and you won't be doing much sleeping once you've sampled its nasty fare of mutilation, decapitation, and coldhearted sex. The narrator is a woman who lives in New York City, near Washington Square, and teaches creative writing to college freshmen. Her name may be Frannyone character calls her that twicebut it's never quite acknowledged or made clear. One night, in a bar, this teacher opens the wrong door, searching for a bathroom, and witnesses a red-haired woman's technique: the way she moves her head ``with a dipping motion,'' the noise her mouth makes; the man's black socks, his unshined shoes, the tattoo of a playing card on his wrist. The only thing she manages not to see is the man's face, which turns out to be a fateful omission when the red-haired woman is found murdered (well, not just murderednobody in this book is simply murderedshe's ``disarticulated,'' or pulled apart, joint by joint). The teacher is unwillingly caught up now in a drama that involves a serial killer, more gruesome death and dismemberment, and plenty of sex along the way, in every position, clinically detailed, with handcuffs or without. Where all this leads to is a horrific ending involving razors, torture, and the lingering smell of blood. In Moore's previous work, a good, dark undercurrent of sex and violence played well against the lush Hawaiian settings and family stories. Here, there's nothing to offset the darknessnot one real and likable character, never one moment of redemption. In the end, repugnant. That's what a warning label might tell you." 

FRANNY & ZOOEY by J.D. Salinger

 Refinished Fr 4/5/24

I probably read this novel 40 years ago and have read it a few times since then. I always preferred this book to Salinger's opus, 'THE CATCHER IN THE RYE'. 

Features The Glass Family; 7 kids- 5 boys and 2 girls. 

Franny has lost it. She is trying to 'Pray Incessantly' and she is hung up. Is she doing it for vanity or really accepting the Christ?

For much of the novel Zooey (Zachary) is in the bathtub talking with his mother, Bessie. They are both concerned about Franny's meltdown. 

From the book's page at 'Collegium institute. org':

"I recently finished Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. This provocative novella occurs in Salinger's universe of the brilliant and precocious Glass children. Franny and Zooey are the two youngest, with Franny being the youngest and Zooey the brightest. Like some of his other work, F&Z is an attempt by Salinger to respond to superficiality and phoniness in society. 

From a young age, both Franny and Zooey are instructed by their older siblings in spiritual knowledge (a conglomeration of Zen Buddhism, Hindu Advaita Vedanta, and Eastern Orthodox mysticism), as they believe that secular knowledge should be grounded by spiritual wisdom. Equipped with their keen intellects and high moral standards, both Franny and Zooey perceive  superficiality, selfishness, and stupidity as the mode de faire among humans. People are acquisitive for money, pleasure and status, and seem to fit predictable cookie-cutter patterns of lifestyle. But from their upbringing of being treated as brilliant know-it-alls (albeit correctly), F&Z inherited arrogant attitudes. While they are correct in their critiques of society, they themselves are arrogant, judgmental and self-righteous. 

Franny, in particular, is disgusted by society, and feels the need to detach herself from the world. She begins repeating the Jesus Prayer to connect with God. But then she hyper-analyzes her motivations for attaining spiritual enlightenment and wonders if she is just as acquisitive as everyone else. She wonders how wanting to store up for herself treasures in heaven is in principle different from wanting to store up for herself treasures on earth. How is chasing enlightenment and peace less egotistical and self-seeking than chasing money and prestige, she asks. The possibility that she is just as acquisitive and greedy as the society she condemns and alienates herself from sparks existential despair. She has a nervous breakdown during a weekend date with her shallow boyfriend, and then curls up on the Glass’s family couch repeating the Jesus Prayer, not wanting to eat or interact with anyone.

Then Zooey, worried about Franny’s health, walks in and begins lecturing her. Zooey doesn’t tell her not to say the Jesus Prayer, but he addresses her potential motives for saying it. 

First, Zooey argues that Franny’s hatred of society is actually hatred of individual people. It’s okay to hate the stupid things humans do, but Franny hates the people themselves, as evidenced, for example, by her disdain for a personal quirk one of her professors exemplifies.

Second, Zooey argues that Franny’s attempt to connect with Jesus is disingenuous because she ignores the parts of Him she doesn’t like. She makes Jesus to be more of a stereotyped St. Francis of Assisi hippie than the all-powerful Son of God; she ignores those parts when Jesus overthrew tables in the synagogue and said humans are more valuable than sparrows.

Third, Zooey argues that Franny’s standards for egoism are hypocritical. Under her standards, no artist could publish work because it could always be related back to ego. Zooey points out Franny’s inability to apply her own standards to her favorite artists, such as Emily Dickinson.

Fourth, Zooey argues that citing the Jesus Prayer should not replace exercising her respective duties. She should perform to the best of her ability -- whatever it is she’s doing.  If it’s connection to God that she wants, she should do her due diligence in trying to the best of her ability to understand the God she prays to. Pray to the real Jesus, not to the one she imagines.

To summarize: Zooey says that if the point of the Jesus prayer is Christ-consciousness, not to simply "pray away" people you hate, then Franny should act like it.

Zooey ends with a series of advice:

You cannot claim to be spiritual in lofty matters when you, first and foremost, ignore the religious action in the more mundane parts of living. This hints at the idea that all aspects of living is sacred. It responds to the notion that the spiritual response to a corrupt world is complete detachment.

However, the most important thing is to maintain detachment through desireleness. How this comports with the previous advice is not clear.

But act, for God if you want.

Shoot for perfection on your own terms.

But here’s the most revealing part. Franny’s later conversation with Zooey shows that nothing he said truly registered with her. He failed.

The book ends like this. The siblings’ older brother Seymour told them to shine their shoes for the “Fat Lady” even when no one sees them. Neither understood what this cryptic metaphor meant. At least, until recently. Because Zooey realized that “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.” In fact, the Fat Lady is Christ Himself. What I interpret Zooey/Salinger to be saying here is the application of the transitive property of equality. If we are to perform before the Fat Lady, but everyone is the Fat Lady, but the Fat Lady is really Christ, well, then to love (perform for) Christ is to love (perform for)  every individual person. This raises the sacredness of every encounter, every conversation, every play and scene Franny acts in, how they treat their mother, and so on. It’s all shoe-shining for Christ. It’s this insight, revealed mystery that appears to resolve Franny’s angst and give her peace. And so the book ends.

There are many possible interpretations to this novella, but here's what spoke to me.

Salinger is spot on in his identification of certain flaws of society, but more so in the Glass children. Specifically, the effect their brilliant thinking abilities have on their demeanor, attitude and behavior towards themselves and others. It raises interesting thoughts on the nature of Reason, which I’ve capitalized to indicate an idealized form of being gifted with or relying on logic, thinking, intelligence, rationalism, etc to navigate life.

In Franny and Zooey, both characters are among the most intelligent and bright characters in the world they inhabit. And they are recognized as such. They are rarely proven wrong. But this fame and success causes them to be arrogant, haught and judgemental. That’s the first effect Reason has on the human condition: elevation of pride.

One benefit of Reason is it enables great self-reflection and introspection in its user. Its user is more cognizant of other people’s actions, and hyper-analyzes their own. The downside is indecisiveness. The person imbued with excessive Reason is unable to make a decision or determine what is right because they overthink their actions and motivations. Are they making an action for a selfish reason or for a virtuous one? Franny faced despair when she could not determine whether her desire for peace wasn’t just as selfish as society. So Reason can be a crippling force.

Yet at the same time, Reason enables its user to create and justify elaborate moral standards that condemn other people’s behavior and gloss over their own similar behavior. Its user can convince themself that what they are doing is qualitatively different from other people, and that this difference creates substantial moral discrepancies.

Finally, and most paradoxically, Reason exposes its own limits. Reason cannot work on its own -- its existence relies on something other than itself -- but it is through itself that this is made known. We see this through the uber-introspection Franny puts herself through.

In “The Suicide of Thought” in Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton explains how exclusive reliance on reason alone is self-contradictory and debilitating. He uses reason to show how reason must rely on something other than itself to even exist and be useful.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself...Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"...There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped... In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved…

We know that Reason cannot conclusively prove nor disprove the existence of God -- and it is through Reason that we know this. We know that Reason does not give us happiness -- and it is through Reason that we know this. We know that Reason, if unreined, enslaves us and drives us mad -- and it is through Reason that we know this.

Reason points to its own limitations. Ironically, this statement is itself irrational. It is circular. 

Insert a few Pensées de Blaise Pascal:

“We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. We know that we are not dreaming, but, however unable we may be to prove it rationally, our inability proves nothing but the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge as they maintain.”

When I first read this it blew me away.

Whether one thinks that the fact that we cannot prove we are not dreaming means that our reason is weak or that knowledge of first principles is uncertain is itself a matter of faith. 

There is no way of proving it either way. 

Here’s a fact: we cannot prove that our lives are not a dream or a simulation. I would contend we know “deep down” that this is not the case. But this is where the epistemology diverges.

Some would take this inability to prove such a foundational truth about reality as evidence that reason is limited in its ability.

Others would take this inability as evidence that we cannot trust any form of knowledge, that all truth claims are unverifiable, and therefore unknowable from an absolute or objective point of view.

But this latter view rests on the assumption that for a truth-claim to be held as true it must be proven logically, and that if it is not proven logically it cannot be considered true. Yet this statement itself is unprovable. 

In the words of G.K. Chesterton, this time some Philosophy from the Classroom: 

Every argument begins with an infallible dogma, and that infallible dogma can only be disputed by falling back on some other infallible dogma; you can never prove your first statement or it would not be your first. 

Fundamentally, skepticism – including its underlying "reason-based" notions of epistemic proof – is a form of faith.

Thanks to the relentless eye of reason, we uncover the hidden assumptions behind every framework. After all that introspection and mental struggle, we landed back on square one. We realize that everyone – from the most devout religious disciple to the most devout agnostic – all have faith in something."

 

AMSTERDAM by Ian McEwan

 Finished Mo 4/1/24

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I had not read. However, there was a note that I listened to the booktape We-Th 1/12-13/00; 1) Troy/ East St. Louis 2) Crane to Maryville/ Pick up scrap Ofallon. That brought back memories that I do not miss. 

The novel begins at Molly's cremation ceremony. Two of her lovers, Vernon and Clive meet and discuss their ex-lover. 

Vernon is a newspaper editor and Clive is a symphony composer.

Clive is working on a big and new work and goes for a hike in the wilds of England. He witnesses a rape, but doesn't report it because he doesn't want to take time away from his work. He tells Vernon and Vernon insists that he report what he saw to the authorities. 

Vernon receives photos of a hated conservative member of parliament in drag. Vernon wants to expose the man and Clive feels that the MP has the right to privacy. To release or not to release the photographs is the theme of the novel.

Both men poison each other and the photos are released to the public. The country rallies behind the conservative 'drag queen'. Trump in a dress would probably not hurt his popularity. 

From a review by NY Times:

"Ian McEwan's new novel, "Amsterdam," which won the Booker Prize in Britain this autumn, is a dark tour de force, a morality fable, disguised as a psychological thriller.

A chilling little horror story, easily read in one enjoyable gulp, "Amsterdam" is by no means McEwan's finest work: It is less ambitious than "Enduring Love" (1998) and "Black Dogs" (1992), and less resonant than "The Innocent," his 1990 masterpiece of Cold War suspense. One can only hope that this small, perfectly fashioned novel -- novella, really -- will send readers back to the rest of the talented McEwan's oeuvre.

Like so many of the author's stories, "Amsterdam" concerns the sudden intrusion of violent, perverse events into his characters' mundane lives, events that cruelly expose the psychological fault lines running beneath the humdrum surface of their world. In "The Comfort of Strangers," a pair of middle-class tourists fall prey to a Machiavellian sadist during a trip to Venice. In "The Cement Garden," a group of children are orphaned and bury their mother in the basement. And in "The Child in Time," a man's 3-year-old daughter is kidnapped during a trip to the supermarket.

In the case of "Amsterdam," two old friends -- one a famous composer named Clive, the other a mercenary newspaper editor named Vernon -- enter into a strange euthanasia pact that will determine both their fates and send shock waves through their privileged world.

Toby Melville/ The Associated Press

Ian McEwan holds a copy of "Amsterdam" at The Guildhall in the City of London.

Now in their middle years, Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday have both achieved prosperity and influence. How lucky they were, Clive thinks, to have been "nurtured in the postwar settlement with the state's own milk and juice, and then sustained by their parents' tentative, innocent prosperity, to come of age in full employment, new universities, bright paperback books, the Augustan age of rock and roll, affordable ideals."

Clive, who regards himself as Vaughan Williams' heir, has been commissioned by the government to write a Millennial Symphony; in his more optimistic moments, he dares to think of himself as a genius, an artist worthy of comparison to Shakespeare.

Vernon, who has become editor of a tabloid paper by default, is decidedly less confident: There are moments, alone in his office, when he wonders whether he even exists. All the exchanges in which "he had decided, prioritized, delegated, chosen or offered an opinion" made him feel he was "infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all."

Back in their impoverished, bohemian youth, Clive and Vernon had been lovers of a "restaurant critic, gorgeous wit and photographer" named Molly, a daring, glamorous woman who also had an affair with Julian Garmony, a conservative, xenophobic politician who would go on to become Britain's foreign secretary. Molly would eventually marry a rich, stuffy publisher named George Lane, who detests (and is unanimously detested by) her former lovers.

When a sudden illness leaves Molly delirious and incompetent, George seizes control of her life, forbidding her old friends to visit her sickbed. In the wake of her funeral, Clive and Vernon not only commiserate over her death but also make a pact with each other to avoid ever suffering such an undignified end: Should one of them become as sick and incoherent as Molly, the other will help him finish things off.

Writing in his usual spare, evocative prose, McEwan deftly conjures up the glittering London world Clive and Vernon inhabit, and he also does a nimble job of depicting them at work, showing us how Vernon is trying to boost his paper's falling circulation with trendy, tasteless stories, how Clive is trying to create an ending for his symphony commensurate with his ambition to commemorate the millennium.

Though there's a faint satiric edge to McEwan's portraits, he uses his psychological insight, as he's done so often before, to create sympathy for some decidedly unsavory people. Indeed, we find ourselves rooting for Clive and Vernon, even as it becomes clear that both of them -- much like James Penfield, the hero of "The Ploughman's Lunch," a movie written by McEwan back in 1984 -- are conniving opportunists, willing to use virtually any means necessary to achieve their ends.

Within days of each other, Clive and Vernon are both faced with moral dilemmas that will test just what sort of people they are. Clive must decide whether to put aside his beloved symphony to help a woman who may be in trouble, while Vernon must decide whether to publish some compromising photos of Julian Garmony that could end his political career. Their respective decisions will forever alter their careers, and imperil their decades-long friendship.

For all the appeals to high-flown principles like art and freedom that Clive and Vernon make in coming to their decisions, their problems do not really open out into the sort of weighty philosophical debates that animated "Black Dogs" and "Enduring Love." Nor, given the predictable outcome of the story, is there the sort of grisly narrative tension that made "The Innocent" so suspenseful to read. Instead, there are the simple pleasures of reading a writer in complete command of his craft, a writer who has managed to toss off this minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb that it has won him the recognition he has so long deserved.

BUTTERFIELD 8 by John O'Hara

Finished Fr 3/29/24

I owned an anthology by O'Hara and I loved the stories. I got a deal for 'HOPE OF HEAVEN' and 'BUTTERFIELD 8 by John O'Hara for under ten dollars on Kindle.

Set in NYC of 1931. Gloria Wandrous leaves the apartment of her lover. He had ripped her dress, so she borrowed a mink coat. The coat was expensive and this is kind of the driving force in the novel. 

From 'isak.typepad.com':

"The most interesting dimension of O'Hara's novel is how it was both set and written in the 1930s, but the Depression hangs like a husk around the plot, rather than being its centerpiece. The people we meet on its pages are impacted by their thin dry era in slight and provoking and haunting ways, but they nonetheless live rather privileged lives. They carry their manners and habits forth even as they are foregrounded against a changed New York City landscape. Normal rituals of drink and dates and social indignities and gossip are where their attention lies. Their interest in politics and inequality doesn't go much further than their concern about being tipped to the logistics of getting into a particularly good speakeasy.

My surprise at this -- to read a novel set in 1931 where the Depression is not the primary concern -- is telling. It revealed how rare a cultural artifact that is, as if the only stories worth telling about the time are really one story. As if only one thing (albeit a large, complicated, and compelling thing) happened during those ten or so years of, as Studs Terkel would put it, hard times. O'Hara's characters are hardly models of broad-minded social concern; it is fitting that the Depression scarcely carries weight on the pages of their novel. It is simply not something they think much about. For whatever impact the Crash had on them, most of them are wealthy people all the same -- culturally and relatively, if nothing else. The fact that there were wealthy people in America in the 1930s is somehow startling to me, again revealing how very focused the cultural artifacts from and about that time are, at least those that still have audiences today. O'Hara is masterful at conveying the tense, edgy atmosphere of New York City at the time, when so many fearfully hoped that the Crash's aftermath was nearing its end and recovery would soon blossom. A hungry waiting time. It is present, whether or not the characters of BUtterfield 8, moving through those panting streets, pay it mind.

That said. I didn't like the book. The character of Gloria Wandrous, on whom the novel turns, is intended to be mysterious, but is only thin and unmeaningfully obscure. She makes haphazard decisions that -- despite her tragic backstory, which seems posited as a hazy sort of explanation -- are heavily plotted and often hit a tin ear: they read like O'Hara hasn't spoken much with the sort of woman he means to portray through Gloria. As if O'Hara believes that her magnetic appeal to men and sheen of tragedy are enough for readers to find her interesting.

The married man who becomes hooked on her, Weston Liggett, begins as intriguingly flawed, but soon becomes ridiculous (making it all the more difficult to figure out what in the world Gloria sees in him). Weston's final ignoble act truly is affecting, however: it is how O'Hara got him to that point, in a sort of grotesque series of coincidences and abrupt decisions, that troubles.

I can see why the novel was the success that it was. ("Will leave scar tissue in reader's brain..." reads the Chicago Tribune blurb.) Sex is all over the book, sometimes beautifully portrayed in its absurd machinations and patent hunger. When we first meet Gloria, she walks out of the apartment in the stolen mink coat of her lover's wife, naked underneath because her clothes had been torn off the night before, and were unwearable. O'Hara, to a sometimes frustrating point, depends upon the language of gesture and implication to speak sex, but it suits the do-but-don't-tell culture he's conveying. That Gloria is not only a victim but an enthusiastic consumer of sex, while still being an empathetic (if doomed) character must have been revolutionary for 1935, when the book was published. This is not least because so much of the sex and sexuality in the book is rendered from the woman's point of view.

As well, money and illegal liquor adorn the lives of Weston, Gloria, and the others, like apples do an apple tree. BUtterfield 8 gives the reader an insider's peek into the soap-operatic lifestyles of Depression-era cosmopolitans and bohemians. The book practically screams "mass appeal!" But it has just enough of O'Hara's writerly ambition -- his literary panoramas of the city, his doubling-back in the plot's structure, his graceful style of unfolding narrative -- to appear above the fray.

But in the end, the sort of thing that O'Hara tried to do in BUtterfield 8 were done much, much better sixteen years later by William Styron in Lie Down in Darkness."