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."

VIENNA BLOOD by Frank Tallis

This is one of my trade paperbacks that I bought while on 'E-Time' on Fr 6/6/08 and finished reading at FitClub West on We 9/24/08.

Refinished 3/24/24

It's a Police Procedural set in Vienna, Austria in 1902. There is a serial killer on the loose and he is targeting people that are somehow connected to characters in Mozart's 'Magic Flute'. 

Detecitive Oskar Rheinhardt- he is similar to Sherlock Holmes and he works the case with Max Liebermann who is an early psychologist (Alienist?).

***The day before I started the novel I saw a film {THE CORSAGE}about Empress Elisabeth of the Habsburg empire. She lived in a 1,400 room castle called the Schonnbrunn Palace. It is featured in 'VIENNA BLOOD'. 

Sigmund Freud is a minor character in the novel. He recommends cocaine as a cure for heroin addiction.  

From the book's page at GoodReads:

"The second in the Dr. Max Liebermann series, literature’s first psychoanalytic detective.

In the grip of a Siberian winter in 1902, a serial killer in Vienna embarks upon a bizarre campaign of murder. Vicious mutilation, a penchant for arcane symbols, and a seemingly random choice of victim are his most distinctive peculiarities. Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt summons a young disciple of Freud - his friend Dr. Max Liebermann — to assist him with the case. The investigation draws them into the sphere of Vienna’s secret societies — a murky underworld of German literary scholars, race theorists, and scientists inspired by the new evolutionary theories coming out of England. At first, the killer’s mind seems impenetrable — his behaviour and cryptic clues impervious to psychoanalytic interpretation; however, gradually, it becomes apparent that an extraordinary and shocking rationale underlies his actions. . . .

Against this backdrop of mystery and terror, Liebermann struggles with his own demons. The treatment of a patient suffering from paranoia erotica (a delusion of love) and his own fascination with the enigmatic Englishwoman Amelia Lydgate raises doubts concerning the propriety of his imminent marriage. To resolve the dilemma, he must entertain the unthinkable — risking opprobrium and accusations of cowardice."

*******

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"An alarmingly prolific serial killer terrorizes turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Police inspector Oskar Rheinhardt is called to a modest house in the rundown Spittelberg district where a madam and three young prostitutes have been brutally murdered. The only definite clue is an enigmatic symbol scrawled on a wall. (It takes Sigmund Freud himself, chapters later, to identify it as a swastika, from the Sanskrit.) As in previous cases, Rheinhardt consults brilliant psychotherapist Max Liebermann, a classically trained pianist who also provides the accompaniment for Rheinhardt’s singing on their musical evenings. Because the weapon appears to be a saber, Rheinhardt begins with the questioning of a swaggering company of military officers. Amelia Lydgate, a feminist doctor with a knowledge of advanced forensic techniques, helps with blood analysis. Liebermann, recently engaged to the beautiful Clara, finds himself inconveniently attracted to the vibrant physician. Two more murders, of a Czech street vendor and the Nubian servant to an influential professor, confirm the presence of a serial killer but bring Rheinhardt no closer to his identity. Could he be connected to Vienna’s recent upsurge of xenophobia, or to the bizarre zoo killing of boa constrictor Hildegard, the emperor’s favorite snake, ritualistically cut into three pieces?

In this intricate sequel to the award-winning A Death in Vienna (2006), Tallis uses his knowledge of medicine, music, psychology and history to create an endlessly fascinating portrait of 1902 Vienna."

I would most definitely read more books by Frank Tallis. His knowledge of history and psychiatry really make the book 'come alive'. 

RABBIT AT REST by John Updike

 Finished Fr 3/15/24

I know I had read this one before, but the first time through this trade edition. The whole series is one of my favorite literary creations of all time. 

Harry is a pretty selfish and self-serving guy, but the beautiful descriptions of his environment tend to highlight the difference- A broken human in a alluring and divine world.

I was blown away when Harry sleeps with Pru, his daughter-in-law. Harry was clearly in the wrong, but the Angstroms blame Pru because she was 'so alluring'. 

The book's review at Independent.co.uk:

"My choice is almost entirely self-serving. I have just looked, and see that I have 23 books by John Updike. In 2006, he suggested me to write the foreword (it ended up as an afterword) for the new Penguin edition of Rabbit at Rest. So in a sense I am trying to attach myself to the great man's memory by choosing it as my Book of a Lifetime.

Other books which were highly influential – a different thing from literary favourites – were Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy and Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. In their very different ways, these two books opened my eyes at a very young age to what was going on in South Africa. I was about 17 when I first read anything by Updike, Pigeon Feathers. I was entranced. Although there are many books which are more obviously striking and even ground-breaking, Updike's novels - to use his own phrase – "take the ordinary and give it is beautiful due". He also said that he had no instinct for social criticism.

Rabbit at Rest is a wonderful book, honest, detailed, perceptive and moving. Although quietly charming and without any symptoms of Bohemia, Updike was ruthlessly forensic with his characters. His description of Rabbit's wayward son, Nelson, is devastating: in contrast to the free pass to life that Rabbit grants himself – he is, in his reckoning, tall, athletic, open and attractive, with a full head of hair - his son is small, balding and furtive with a drug habit and – worse – a trite kind of philophy, confidently uttered. How accurately Updike captures the new banality.

Updike wrote: "Rabbit Angstrom was for me a way in – a ticket to the America all around me." And this, I think, is his beautiful legacy: that, for all his profligacy, he was always a generous and observant chronicler of America and the ordinary life, ever mindful of his own background in small-town Pennsylvania.

I think that Rabbit at Rest may be the finest America novel of the late 20th century. And it has my name on it, in very small print, on the Penguin editon, which is a source of pride to me."

I loved the book and have read the earlier books within the last couple of years. 

 

HOPE OF HEAVEN by John O'Hara

Finished We 3/6/24

This is a novel that I bought for my Kindle ($1.99). I also bought 'BUTTERFIELD 8' ($4.99).

 

THE GREEN RIPPER by John D. McDonald

 This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I first completed on Fr 2/18/94 and refinished Mo 3/4/24. {Also the day that Joe's sister, Bonnie died of complications from lung cancer}.

This was a Travis McGee novel that was a cut above his earlier adventures. In this novel he is looking to destroy leaders of a religious cult that have turned into a domestic terrorist outfit. 

Much of the action takes place at the cult's camp. In the end he must fight twelve soldiers that have been highly schooled in weapons training and hand to hand fighting.

The love of Travis's life was killed by these terrorists because she recognized one of their leaders. He infiltrates the camp claiming that he is looking for his daughter who joined the group.

From a review at 'The View From The Blue House;:

"Travis McGee, salvage consultant and some-time detective, has finally found love with the lithe, Gretel.  Working at fat farm/real estate development as an all-round help – running with the fatties, coaching tennis, looking after the paperwork – Gretel has managed to stumble across a secretive organisation plotting a terrorist incident.  A fanatical religious sect, with cold war enemy connections, is trying to buy twenty acres of undeveloped land.  Only Gretel recognises one of the men, having encountered him when trying to rescue the sister of her former husband from the cult.  In order to protect their cover, the sect murder Gretel, and in so doing ignite the wrath of McGee.  Going undercover, expressly against wishes of the feds, McGee infiltrates the cult with the aim of exacting revenge.

The Green Ripper is the 18th McGee novel in a series of twenty one.  Macdonald writes elegantly in an easy and engaging style.  His characterisation is excellent, and he has a keen eye for observing and commenting on different social phenomena.  The first half of the story is well plotted and paced, unfolding in a way that draws the reader in.  The second half though lacked any real credibility.  Whilst how the religious cult operates and the motivations behind their actions seemed realistic, how they act with respect to McGee is a nonsense.  The rule of the camp is to kill all interlopers.  McGee is not only spared, he is invited into the group and becomes a confidant to all the other elite combat group members.  Then when they discover the truth, he triumphs against odds of 11 to 1.  All tense stuff, but it’s all but impossible for the reader to buy it.  I was confident based on the first thirty pages or so that this was going to be a five stars book, but in the end it tailed off to be a slightly above average affair.  There is more than enough here though to convince me to read more of his books."

MISSING YOU by Harlan Coben

 Finished Tu 2/27/23

This is a hardback that I think Janny loaned to me. It might have been a Xmas gift. I had read the book before, but remembered little of it. 

Two Storylines:

1). A female detective is trying to find out who killed her cop dad and her first boyfriend seems connected. 

2). People are being 'catfished' and their bank accounts are cleaned out. 

The book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Eighteen years after her fiance dumped her, a New York City police detective runs into him again online, with results that make her head spin and leave several people dead.

Given a one-year subscription to YouAreJustMyType.com, Kat Donovan browses languidly through the photos of eligible men looking for love until she sees the face of Jeff Raynes. Although she’s not exactly carrying a torch for her ex, she can’t resist dropping him a line. His reactions are puzzling. First he doesn’t seem to remember her, then he greets her with warm affection, then he says they’d better not continue to be in touch. Jeff’s not the only one acting oddly. Brandon Phelps, a college student from Connecticut, comes all the way to New York to ask for Kat’s help in finding his missing mother, Dana. Even though he’s asked for Kat by name—how does he even know her name?—it’s obvious that he’s hiding something from the detective whose help he begs. And there’s more. When Kat goes to visit Monte Leburne, the dying contract killer who was convicted years ago of shooting her father, another NYPD detective, and the prison nurse puts Leburne into twilight sedation, he denies killing Henry Donovan. No matter where she turns, Kat can’t figure out what’s going on or whom she can trust. Jeff, who’s vanished once more? The unreliable Brandon Phelps? Her partner, Charles "Chaz" Faircloth, who’s convinced he’s God’s gift to Kat? Her father’s ex-partner, Capt. Thomas Stagger, who’s clearly not telling everything he knows about Donovan’s death? Her judo instructor, Aqua, a schizophrenic, homeless sometime transvestite? Her defensive mother, Hazel, who seems determined to protect Donovan’s reputation? Her own cherished memories of her father?

The setup is irresistible, the twists generously piled on and the climax suitably pulse-pounding, even though best-selling Coben (Six Years, 2013, etc.) is hard-pressed to tie all those complications together or produce a payoff that rises to their deliciously suspenseful levels."