Harold Robbins’ The Looters

By Junius Podrug (Forge, 2007)

Harold Robbins' name is still selling books. Unfortunately, he died in 1997 and his name is all he has left to offer. With the blessing of the Robbins estate, the novelist's friend Junius Podrug has now written four Robbins novels. On the shiny covers of these poor substitutes, Podrug's name is dwarfed by Robbins's. The idea of continuing a successful franchise isn't deplorable (some of those Flowers in the Attic sequels are pretty good), but Podrug's complete lack of understanding about what made Robbins's novels great is a true literary crime.

In The Betsy and its sequel The Stallion, or Memories of Another Day or The Raiders or any of a dozen other titles from what I consider his most fertile period--in the 1970s and 1980s, after he'd moved on from his derivative-of-John O'Hara melodramatic page-turners--Robbins created a new class of upper-class hero. His characters were conflicted and engaged in savage confrontations for their entire lives, however cushily they were raised. Their sex drives were as strong as their lusts for power and money. They were always on the verge of being blackmailed or unmasked for closeted sins that ranged from homosexuality to impotence to, in several different novels, closeted Jewish upbringings. (Robbins himself was the Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, though he disguised that heritage--he put out that he was a Jew who'd lost his parents and had been raised in a Catholic boy's school. This and many other self-made myths were debunked by Andrew Wilson in his respectful, well-researched, and culturally contextualized biography, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, published last fall.)

Robbins was able to pin the needles on all possible megalomaniac meters and make his characters both shameful and pitiable: "Joni sucked on John's penis and wept at the same time. 'We'll never -- why couldn't you have just gone to Harvard?'" (In that passage, from Tycoon, it's worth noting that Joni and John are brother and sister.) Podrug, on the other hand, writes quaint adventure tales grounded in nothing approaching reality. The Looters involves a museum curator searching for the death mask of a legendary Babylonian queen. Worse, he jettisons Robbins' essential omniscient-narrator style for a clunky first-person: "We finally reached the larger boat and I went aboard to meet the band of pirates, smugglers and thieves."

There are many who wrongly considered Harold Robbins, despite his being one of the five biggest-selling novelists in history, to be the dregs of popular fiction. All those naysayers have to do to be proved outrageously wrong is to read his chosen successor.

Christopher Arnott is the managing editor of the New Haven Advocate.

Tales of Woodsman Pete

By Lilli Carré (Top Shelf Productions, 2006)

Strictly speaking, Tales of Woodsman Pete is a comic, and it is funny and action-packed and presented in a series of frames. But it’s also touching and tragic, tender and wrenching—a stellar example of the sheer range of possibilities implicit in this surprisingly expansive medium.

Let there be no doubt: Lilli Carré is an artist. Her words are pure literature: intelligent, economical, unexpected. On the visual side, her line is confident yet simple, resembling a woodcut incision; her figures are unassuming, endearing, and utterly distinctive.

Our hero Pete is a thickly bearded hunter who lives alone in the woods surrounded by things that he has killed: his best friend Philippe (an inanimate bear rug), some mounted deer heads, and the specter of a wife slain accidentally (by buckshot or pollen, we never find out which). Pete monologues endlessly in search of conversation, ever nostalgic for missing companions but cheerfully unaware of his complicity in finding himself alone. When Pete’s house is crushed by a falling tree, the narrative frame shifts to examining the lives of the blue ox Babe and his pal Paul Bunyan (presumably the one who caused the tree to fall on Pete’s house), who is gloomy from reading Proust and depressed that, because of his bulk, it takes so many beers to get sufficiently drunk. We learn of Paul’s problems with women, not a few of whom he has “mistakenly crushed” in the act of attempting intimacy. Paul—like Pete—leaves a heavy footprint, invariably annihilating the things around him without agenda or animus. He just doesn’t fit in this world.

The narrative shuttles back and forth between Pete and Paul, two sides of a coin, united by their full beards, their utter sincerity, their love of skipping stones, and their dogged pursuit of something undefined. They are dreamers both, and both marooned in solitude. We are left wondering whether Pete is dreaming Paul or Paul is dreaming Pete. Ultimately, the pleasure lies in the question itself.

At twenty-four years of age, Carré has loudly crashed the indie comic world, and is particularly well known in her hometown of Chicago. She also makes short animated films, one of which has shown at Sundance. She’s a genius in the comics medium, but would likely be a genius in any medium. Her Pete is a worthy introduction for the curious—an incisive, delightful primer in what’s so exciting about comics these days.

Freelance writer Matthew Swanson makes books with his wife, illustrator Robbi Behr, in a barn in Chestertown, Maryland.

Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900-1940

By John Alexander Williams (Stanford University Press, 2007)

Even though present-day enviros may protest that their movement is for all people, in the beginning—the early twentieth century—the conservation movement had some pretty unsavory roots. In the United States, the picture wasn’t pretty—scientific racists like Madison Grant and William Hornaday loved the mountains and wildlife of the American West, even while they hated the un-American immigrants they thought were ruining everything. In Germany, things look even worse—the Nazi regime was noted for its conservationist ethic, or at least its conservationist rhetoric, which associated purity of the German race with purity of the homeland (this is a topic that historians like Frank Uekotter and Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier et al. have chewed over at length). John Alexander Williams enters this fray in his book, in which he tries to reject the narrative of a backwards-looking, antimodern German environmentalism that led inexorably down the road to racism and Nazism. To that end, Williams uncovers various groups operating in the early twentieth century that tried to equate environmentalism with the liberation of German workers. These groups included nudists (whom we have to thank for some fantastic photographs of naked Germans doing group calisthenics), hiking clubs, and youth culture organizations.

Williams succeeds in showing that a range of different ideas of “nature” existed in Germany during this era, and that some of them were very much linked with socialism and seemingly blameless, un-Nazi-ish impulses toward personal freedom. Williams’s argument tries to save environmentalism from Nazism partially by showing how environmentalists who thrived in the Weimar era were put out of commission by the Nazi program. The freedom-loving socialist nudists, for example, were reduced to trying to survive with a variety of political strategies, including writing letters to Nazi leaders, as one such nudist did, praising the Hitler salute for its calisthenic properties (“the salute makes it impossible to have a crooked or rounded back”). Williams’ strategy sometimes leans overmuch toward an admiring glorification of socialism, but overall the book scrambles the green Nazi image enough that environmentalists can heave a momentary sigh of relief.

Rebecca Onion is a freelance writer and a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mandarins

By Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Translated by Charles De Wolf; Archipelago Books, 2007)

Everyone knows the name of the man who made Rashomon. But no one knows the name of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Japanese literary legend responsible for the stories on which Akira Kurosawa based his film. Reading Mandarins, a new collection of fifteen Akutagawa stories translated by Charles De Wolf, will make you wonder why he's not as well known as Mishima and Kawabata. He writes with melancholy, passion, tenderness, and irony of a country and its people making the transition to modernity; his elegant prose never buckles, even under the more melodramatic moments. “I must say that I have grown weary of all that is called modern enlightenment,” a character says, and Akutagawa himself, who committed suicide in 1927 at the age of 35, wasn’t convinced that the new Japan was better than the old one. His men hold out for love only to be cuckolded, his women sacrifice their talent to familial love, and even the landscape suffers—a family’s once-grand garden withers from neglect while they chase after money. The stories, some of which are based on the classical Japanese folk tales Akutagawa loved, bring to mind the Russians he also revered, but with that fatalism relieved by a capacity to be consoled by the world’s occasional, accidental beauty: a moon whitewashing a river at night, a young woman tossing an armful of oranges to her brothers from a train.

That last image comes from the title story, which turns on it, and which I regret mentioning in the way I might regret giving away what happened this season on The Wire. We’re very, very enlightened now, but hardly any writer working today could make you feel that in describing a visual detail you’ve spoiled a plot twist. Or would cede narrative power to the pleasure taken in beauty—pleasure unapologized for, and unadorned by sentiment.

Carlene Bauer has written for Salon, The New York Times, and n+1.

Thank you, Stranger

If you're here because of the lovely post about the New Haven Review by Paul Constant at The Stranger, thanks for coming by. Mr. Constant is the books editor at Seattle's only newspaper, and we're delighted by his enthusiasm. We only hope that we can live up to his expectations. Retroactively, we also owe a great deal of thanks to John Stoehr, arts editor at the Charleston City Paper, first for an engaging and generous essay that mentioned us back in August 2007, when we released our first issue, and then for another mention in January in a piece about the future of newspapers. Many people visited our old website (now defunct, happily) due to him.

So thank you both, Mr. Constant and Mr. Stoehr, and welcome to all of you who came by on their advice. Look for our next review, coming in just a few days. Meanwhile, we're currently copyediting the print edition (Issue 2) and preparing to send it to the printer. It should be out in early May. Then we party. Then we do it all again.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Thanks, National Book Critics Circle

We just got a nice shout-out from Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle. If that's what brings you here, then welcome. It’s true: in addition to our print version, published twice annually, we’ll be posting reviews of unfairly neglected books on our website. A couple things: 1) By “neglected,” that doesn’t mean Walter Kirn dissed the book in the Times and nobody else reviewed it. It means the book was missed by the Times, The New York Review, Washington Post Book World, etc., etc. As in, nobody’s heard of the book. In our hopper we have one review of a book also reviewed in The Nation, but it’s a book of poetry, so our hearts went out to it. 2) If you want to get in touch with us, navigate around our site at left—you’ll find a mailing address and emails. 3) A small correction to the NBCC post: we’ll be running one review every Monday, not four. They got confused because there are four up right now (see below). But those were posted over a period of four weeks. In time, we may begin posting more than once a week. Meantime, we are looking to put up an RSS feed, so you can just get yourselves a little helping of neglected-book-review to start your week every Monday.

Thanks.

Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

By Dorothy Gilman (Ballantine Books, 1983)

The Mrs. Pollifax series belongs to a subgenre of mysteries called cozies, which are the G-rated reads of the crime world. Cozies are often set in small towns and there is little graphic sex or violence. People die, but there isn’t much grief; no one close to the protagonist ever seems to die. The protagonist is usually a female amateur detective who relies on her nosy demeanor to solve the crime. There is sometimes a kitschy hook that ties the series together, be it knitting, crossword puzzles, crime-solving pets, whatever. You know a cozy from other mysteries because you’re not afraid or disturbed while you’re reading it and because the reading experience is, well, cozy.

Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station is the sixth in the Mrs. Pollifax series, a lovable cozy that centers on a grandmother in New Jersey who joins the CIA. Though as a spy in her sixties she meets with a lot of skepticism from the undercover community, she plays the part of the harmless and bumbling tourist perfectly, which makes her invaluable on her missions abroad. She remains dignified and unruffled under interrogation, and eventually becomes quite skilled at karate. She never compromises her commitment to gardening, so the neighbors never suspect a thing.

In China Station, Mrs. Pollifax must go to China and bust Mr. X, a man with sensitive information, out of an isolated labor camp. To allay suspicions, the CIA signs her on with an American tour group. There is another CIA operative in the group who will only reveal himself (or herself) to Mrs. Pollifax after she’s made contact with an intermediary. In the meantime, Mrs. Pollifax and the reader try to guess which of the six other Americans on tour is the secret operative.

The plot thickens when Mrs. Pollifax suspects that her bags have been searched and that she’s been followed on a secret nightly reconnaissance outing. This being a Cold War-era book, the Soviets are trying to get to Mr. X before the Americans do -- could they have planted an operative in the tour group as well? Mrs. Pollifax navigates this dangerous terrain with her trademark decorum and charm.

I’ll admit that in the past I’ve scoffed at some cozy conventions: titles like Murder with Plankton or plots in which the cat solves the crime. But China Station has fine writing that will satisfy those who appreciate sharp turns of phrases and descriptions. Mrs. Pollifax has the wisdom and presumption that come with age and Gilman gives the narrative voice a wry humor. True to cozy form, the tension doesn’t get too high and the characters are never in white-knuckle danger. But the plot is clever with some surprising twists, and overall, the read is delightful.

Cameron McClure is a literary agent and amateur bike mechanic.

Reader’s Block

By David Markson (Dalkey Archive, 1996; reissue, 2007)

David Markson’s 1996 novel Reader’s Block concerns a writer called Reader who plots a novel about a character called Protagonist and, by the by, sketches this novel, the one that the lower-case reader—you, me—reads. It’s less confusing than it sounds, and more emotionally gripping than tangled issues of authorship tend be. It also takes up precious little space on the page. The book consists mostly of snippets concerning artists and writers—facts about them, quotes by them. These fragments tilt toward the truly depressing. That Reader ponders this flotsam, rather than writing his novel, constitutes his block. The first snippet: “Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen’s family that he had been killed in battle one week before.” War, early death, sorrow following hard upon happiness: there are 185 pages of this to go. Markson’s narrators, like Beckett’s, often teeter on the brink of going absolutely bananas, and his approach is two parts Eliot: as plangent, tonally, as Prufrock—the monologue of another aging, lonely man—and possessed of the appropriative strength of The Waste Land. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” neatly summarizes the book, as the book’s back jacket duly notes. “Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?” the narrator asks himself near the book’s end, after citing some 150 pages of literary and artistic arcana.

It’s enough to make anyone miserable, and yet sifting all this misery is not without its consolations. Categorize chaos, and perhaps you can keep the sadness that comes of it at bay. As coping mechanisms go, this would seem a decidedly male approach. What do men want? Not to go crazy is a good start, but sometimes, to stave off insanity, you have to do things that seem nuts. Often, the result is less than nothing. In rare, wondrous cases, the result is something like Reader’s Block.

Paul Clemens is the author of Made in Detroit.

A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe

By Geoffrey Hartman (Fordham University Press, 2007)

“I feel embarrassed,” writes the great literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman in this short, epigrammatic intellectual autobiography, “when, occasionally, younger colleagues, usually Jewish, address me as ‘my teacher.’ I realize this is fond and purely honorific, a secular version of ‘Rabbi.’ But it makes me aware of the fact that I have never thought of anyone in so personal a way as a role model.” This charming and defiantly smart book helps the reader to see that no one ever could have been Hartman's role model. His is so quirky an intelligence — and so roundly informed by his own, sad past as a teenaged refugee — that his only teacher in fact was Wordsworth. Separated from his family during the war, lacking for friends, Hartman wandered the countryside with the Prelude for a companion. All that he has done since, all the difficult, brilliant essays and books, began in that war-haunted boy’s solitude with his slim volume of poetry. You can read this book for explanations of critical theory — though they are still too abstruse to make much sense to the neophyte — or you can read this book for the droppings of academic gossip (Paul de Man, Auerbach, Harold Bloom). But ultimately this book is worth reading above all for its depiction of the kind of mind that has gone out of fashion: the omnivorous European reader, fluent in many languages, autodidactic, with enough whimsy left to suggest that at Yale May Day be celebrated as Midrash Day. (“The idea had a longevity of two years,” Hartman writes, with a touch of gallows humor.) If we never really know the man — wife and family and pastimes hardly feature in this book — we know the mind, and we do get lovely reminiscences of the child, “father of the man,” as Wordsworth himself told us.

Editor Mark Oppenheimer writes for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Thirteen and a Day, and lives in the Westville neighborhood.

Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl

By Mary Mycio (Joseph Henry Press, 2005)

Triggered or not by An Inconvenient Truth and its fallout, the meme is in the air of contemplating what the planet would look like if everyone vanished, which is really just a polite way of asking whether the planet might not be better off if we weren't on it. There is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend, the special Life After People on the History Channel. Somehow we have trouble staying away from the image of New York City alternately underwater or covered with flowers.

In the acknowledgments to The World Without Us, Weisman tells us that his book was inspired by an article he wrote for Discover about the Zone of Alienation, the 30-kilometer circle of land around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which was suddenly (almost) depopulated in a matter of days after the reactor's catastrophic meltdown in 1986 and never resettled. Wormwood Forest is the book he could have written, as Mycio takes us on a long and eerie tour of the deserted towns and cities, overgrown fields, government posts, and squatters' farms inside the zone, where the irradiated remnants of Soviet-era civilization are crumbling into ruins as the flora and fauna reoccupy the territory we kicked them out of centuries ago. The strange news is that nonhuman life inside the Zone of Alienation--as in the DMZ between North and South Korea — is absolutely thriving, in a way that some U.S. national parks would envy, and despite the serious levels of radiation that will persist there, as far as we are concerned, almost forever. The details of this simple conceit are more than enough to fill a book, and while Mycio may not be as lyrical a writer as Weisman is, her book equals Wesiman's in power for its solid, no-nonsense reporting and, more to the point, its grounding in truth. The World Without Us speculates that the world could recover from us; Wormwood Forest shows us that it most certainly can.

Editor Brian Francis Slattery is a banjo player and the author of Spaceman Blues.