Novel Readings

October was a fitful reading month. I blame . . . everything? including my own bad habits, which currently include far too much election doom-scrolling on social media. I began the month by finishing up The Bee Sting, which I already mentioned in my September reading round-up. I really enjoyed it until, perhaps paradoxically, nearly the end. The reason this might seem odd is that the novel is a really slow burn, building up to the cataclysm of the conclusion, so it seemed as if I should have been more and more engrossed as the suspense built. But honestly, there was just so much going on that I got a bit worn out, especially as it eventually started to seem as if Murray was just deliberately and heavy-handedly deferring revelations about what exactly was going to happen. Suspense easily becomes cheap if it’s just about exploiting our dread while ramping up the stakes. I was relieved when the book was over, although it is a pretty shocking ending.

The only other book that really stood out to me of the seven I read in October (not counting Adam Bede for class) was Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, and I gave that its own post, which seems at the moment to be how this works: I can only muster the energy and enthusiasm for a one book post if the book really lights me up!

That said, I did quite enjoy Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, which I picked up quite randomly at the library, mostly because it’s a Europa Edition but also because I vaguely recalled hearing good things about it online. It turned out to be a sharp and very funny send-up of the “great literature transformed my life” genre. Its narrator, whose life is in something of a shambles, reads Treasure Island and decides it offers her a template for turning things around. She adopts the novel’s “Core Values”—BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, HORN-BLOWING—and applies them to her job (which, improbably and hilariously, is at a “pet hotel,” where clients sign out cats, dogs, rabbits, even goldfish), her boyfriend, and her family, with hilarious if also sometimes weirdly poignant results. I have such a love-hate relationship with books that purport to turn literature into self-help manuals that I relished the premise, but Levine uses it as a launching point for something much zanier than I could possibly have expected or can possibly summarize.

I read another Abby Jimenez novel, Part of My World, and have already forgotten what it was specifically about. I read another Katherine Center novel, The Bodyguard, and did not like it nearly as much as Hello Stranger. I’m still on the waiting list for her latest, The Rom-Commers: it looks promising but clearly for me she’s a hit-or-miss author.

I finally read Jane Harper’s The Dry—I say ‘finally’ because I regularly shop around for new mystery writers, partly for my own interest but also because I like to refresh the reading list for my mystery & detective fiction course, and Harper is someone that keeps coming up as a likely suspect. I thought The Dry was a good crime novel, but I can’t see assigning it. I thought the drought might be more of a theme, rather than primarily an aspect of setting, and a crime novel that turns in some way on the climate crisis would be a welcome addition to the syllabus, but The Dry did not seem to me to be built around that kind of political message. (If you know of a crime novel with a plot that intersects with ideas about ‘climate justice’ in an effective way, please let me know!)

Finally, I began but so far have not finished Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies. This is the first of Piñeiro’s novels that I have found a slog. I’m not sure why it isn’t working for me: it has a good and very political murder plot brewing—its protagonist, recently released after serving time for murdering her husband’s mistress, is hired by another woman to provide poison that will, presumably, be used to kill someone else. As this storyline is unfolding we got long sections of overt commentary, including citations to many famous feminist writers. This interferes with the momentum, but that’s clearly deliberate, and the combination could and should still be interesting, and yet somehow I’m just not getting through it. I am determined to persist: the root problem is pretty clearly a mismatch between my expectations, both for crime fiction and for Piñeiro, and what she has chosen to do in this case, and she’s smart enough that I believe it’s probably done well. At the very least I would like to know how the plot develops and concludes, but it seems like cheating to skip the talky bits, so I won’t. Probably.

November is off to an OK start: I just finished The Lady of the Camellias, by Dumas fils, which I read for my book club. It is our follow-up to Colette’s Gigi, which was our follow-up to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, which was our follow-up to Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce. In other words, we have been on a French-themed kick! I think we are probably ready to go in another direction: I wonder what thread we will follow from Dumas’s tragic tale of passion and self-sacrifice. I have always known that La Dame aux Camelias was the original for Verdi’s La Traviata but I was surprised how closely the opera follows the plot, so closely that at every key scene in the novel I could match it exactly to the music. (It is the opera I know best, as it has been my favorite quite literally since I was 5 years old and got an LP of the highlights for my birthday.) What I enjoyed most about The Lady of the Camellias is that it entirely lived up to all the snarky comments about French novels in English novels of the period; in fact, I am reading Lady Audley’s Secret with my class at the moment and in his moments of idle self-indulgence Robert Audley himself is reading Dumas fils.