THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Book: F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE GREAT GATSBY. Scribner Library paperback reprint (14th printing). Originally published 1925. Very good condition.
First read: 1980 (approximately)
Owned since: 1999 (this copy, approximately)

Some books work their way so deeply into our worldview that we not only can't remember first reading the book, we can't remember a time before we read the book. THE GREAT GATSBY is like that for me. I think I first read it as summer reading between my sophomore and junior years of high school, but it might have been earlier than that. I know I picked up this book cheap at a used bookstore to replace the heavily-marked trade paperback I'd owned since high school (which I still have), but I can't remember buying it.

THE GREAT GATSBY just is. I wanted to post about this yesterday, because it's always struck me as the American novel, more so than HUCK FINN or THE SCARLET LETTER or even TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Gatsby is the American dream distilled, and the last paragraph of the novel is a heartfelt cry about what it means to be American:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning --

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This is the key to American culture: we want to pretend that the past does not matter, but we cannot escape it and we ignore it at our peril. The same gift for self-reinvention that makes it possible for us to go from Bull Connor's water hoses to the real possibility of President Barack Obama in one generation is the curse that allowed us to train military intelligence operatives in discredited Chinese interrogation techniques. In the United States as nowhere else in the world, we take for granted that believing makes it so.

Gatsby is the personification of this idea. He arrives on Long Island in all his glory, a wealthy and glamorous man with a mysterious past that he lets his neighbors speculate about; he drops hints of a life of privilege and danger, time at Oxford, a heritage that warrants his current lifestyle. It is an elaborate construct -- not so much a deception as a castle of dreams, built on sand -- and inevitably collapses. But wasn't it worth doing? And wasn't it beautiful while it lasted?

Fitzgerald lets us feel wistful for this while recognizing that Gatsby's goals -- the careless Daisy, the society lifestyle, the wealth that requires dealing with gangsters -- aren't really worth having. He does this by telling the story in the voice of a narrator who is not the main character, but whose attitudes shape the story we get. It is an extraordinary piece of literary virtuosity, and all the more astonishing when you think Fitzgerald was only 28 when he wrote it.

What I Read This Week

Thomas Perry, RUNNER. Jane Whitefield is one of crime fiction's greatest characters, a woman of Native American descent who helps people disappear. Perry left the series with 1999's BLOOD MONEY, saying that he wouldn't write about Jane again until she had a story to tell. In the years since, the events of September 11 made radical changes to the way Jane used to operate, which made me worry that Jane would never come back -- but this return, due out next January, is everything I could have hoped for. A young pregnant woman comes to Jane for help, running from her fiance and his family; Jane, longing for a child of her own, can't say no. The book closes with the promise of more adventures to come, to which I say hurrah.

Brad Meltzer, THE MILLIONAIRES. Brothers Oliver and Charlie Caruso work for a private bank in New York, managing millions of dollars for clients eager to hide their money from the government. When they get the chance to take $3 million in abandoned funds for themselves, they can't resist -- but somehow $3 million turns into more than $300 million, and some scary people are after them. The relationship between the brothers is the highlight of this book, which bogs down in an unnecessarily complex narrative structure: Oliver tells half the story in first-person, present tense, while an omniscient narrator fills in the rest in the past tense. Annoying, and I can't imagine why an editor didn't talk Meltzer out of that.

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW by Laura Lippman

The Book: Laura Lippman, WHAT THE DEAD KNOW. William Morrow, 2007 (first edition). Inscribed by the author. Fine condition.
First read: 2007
Owned since: 2007

At one point I think I owned four copies of this book, including the advance reading copy; now it's down to two, this hardcover for my collection and a paperback to lend out. It was the best book I read last year, and ranks with the best mysteries I've ever read. This copy was signed at an event at Washington's iconic Politics & Prose bookstore (long may it flourish).

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW is inspired by -- not based on -- the real-life disappearance of two sisters from a Baltimore-area mall on March 25, 1975. No trace of those girls, Shelia and Katherine Lyon, has ever been found. In an Author's Note at the end of the book, Lippman makes clear that the characters in her book have nothing to do with the Lyon family, and the events bear no resemblance to whatever might really have happened.

I got to interview Laura about this book for a Mystery Bookstore podcast, and I keep meaning to transcribe that interview -- for my own benefit, as well as the store's. What interests her as a novelist is not physical violence, but emotional damage, and particularly the terrible things that women can do to each other, sometimes with the best intentions. In Lippman's novels, good people do bad things and bad people do good ones; the line is blurry and constantly moving. The evil in Lippman's world isn't malevolence; it's carelessness, greed, lack of empathy and the desperate desire to avoid consequences. Which I agree with.

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW begins with a car accident on the Beltway. A woman leaves the scene of the accident, and when police find her, she identifies herself as "one of the Bethany girls," who had disappeared 30 years earlier. The Baltimore detectives assigned to the case sense that she is lying, or at least hiding something; they investigate her claims, and bring the Bethany girls' mother up from Mexico to settle the matter once and for all. But nothing here is that simple, and the truth of what happened then and what's happening now unfolds in ways that are by turns tragic, horrifying, and full of grace.

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW is, above all, a book about the complex bonds among sisters and mothers: love, joy, anger, envy, guilt, pride, resentment. My own mother didn't get a chance to read it, but I gave copies to my sisters, my daughter, and several friends who are as close to me as sisters.

MY DARK PLACES by James Ellroy

The Book: James Ellroy, MY DARK PLACES. Vintage trade paperback reprint, 1997 (11th printing). Inscribed by the author: "To Clair -- She lives!" Fine condition.
First read: 2000
Owned since: 2007 (this copy)

I already owned a copy of this book, but could not pass up the chance to have James Ellroy sign one for me when he came to the Mystery Bookstore's booth at the LA Times Festival of Books last year. He was so charming he could have led a parade of adoring fans through the streets of Westwood, and I wanted to remember that. James Ellroy has been through the wars and back again -- as MY DARK PLACES describes -- and it was magical to see him laughing.

In 1958, 40-year-old Geneva Hilliker Ellroy was found dead near a baseball field in El Monte, California. She left behind a 10-year-old son, Lee Earle, and her murderer was never found.

Lee Earle, who hated his name, went to live with his father, a small-time grifter who sometimes used the alias "James Brady." MY DARK PLACES tells the story of how Lee Earle Ellroy, juvenile delinquent, became the world-famous crime writer James Ellroy -- but could not escape the central, horrifying mystery of his life.

In 1994, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles to reopen the investigation into his mother's murder. With the help of L.A. homicide Sergeant Bill Stoner, he retraced the old investigation and followed up new leads, looking for connections with other, similar unsolved cases. The prime suspect was someone identified as "a swarthy man," but Ellroy and Stoner have still not been able to give him a name.

By the end of MY DARK PLACES, though, Ellroy found a different kind of success. His beautiful red-haired mother left him on a Saturday night to go out partying, and got herself killed -- and Ellroy never forgave her. At some level, he blamed her for putting herself in that situation, for making herself a victim; his rage, unrecognized and unacknowledged, shaped his life for the next 40 years.

In the course of the investigation, he learned things about his mother that surprised him, as adult children always do. MY DARK PLACES ends with Ellroy coming to terms with the woman who bore him, who was a great mother five days a week and something else on the other two. He's learned to live with the anger and the guilt; he ends the book with a promise that he will never stop looking, and an apology for exposing her secrets to the world.

MY DARK PLACES is far and away James Ellroy's best work, so powerful and intimate that it is often hard to read. I'm glad to have this copy, and so sorry he had to live it to write it.

Five Random Songs

"Don't Let Me Down," Marcia Griffiths. A reggae cover of the Beatles song; it works perfectly.

"Pinch Me," Barenaked Ladies. Ugh, I got so sick of this song. Way too cute. Next.

"Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead," Warren Zevon. I own a couple different versions of this song. This one is from the soundtrack of the movie, directed by my lifelong friend, Gary Fleder. According to Crystal Zevon's oral biography, Zevon was pissy about the use of his song title for this movie, and I wish he were still alive so I could argue with him about it. Isn't it annoying when people die just so they can have the last word?

"Sign of the Times," Bryan Ferry. For some reason I hear this song and have a mental image of Bryan Ferry looking down from a pair of very tall platform shoes. Is that my imagination, or was that the video for this song?

"How Can You Live in the Northeast?" Paul Simon. Perfect -- a song about the 4th of July and the judgmental nature of Americans. "If the answer is infinite light/Why do we sleep in the dark?"

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote

The Book: Truman Capote, IN COLD BLOOD: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences. Book of the Month Club facsimile first edition reprint, 1986. Fair condition; spine is badly cocked, dust jacket is scuffed and rubbed at corners.
First read: 1987
Owned since: 1987

This was one of the first "real" books I bought after I got out of school; like millions of others before me, I succumbed to the temptation of four books for a buck and joined the Book of the Month Club. They had just reprinted this facsimile first edition in honor of the Club's 60th anniversary. Unfortunately, book club editions have a deserved reputation for not being quite as well-bound as the originals.

No matter. It's a great book, and I own a second copy as well, a heavily marked-up trade paperback that I used to lead a discussion group on the book at The Mystery Bookstore in 2004. (Maybe that will be this week's theme: books I own multiple copies of. There are a few.)

IN COLD BLOOD was Capote's masterwork, and changed American journalism for good. It started as a New Yorker article; Truman Capote traveled to Kansas to attend the murder trial of two men accused of slaughtering a Kansas family for no apparent reason. Capote was fascinated with the story: who were these people? What made the Clutters victims, and what made the two men -- Dick Hickok and Perry Smith -- killers? Was this a purely random event, and if so, how did the police manage to catch the killers?

Capote spent years digging for answers, and those he could not find, he confabulated. He described this book as "a nonfiction novel," meaning that he assigned motives and causality to events that might not have been related, and he filled in details he could have no way of confirming. Most of all, Capote brought his own moral judgment to the events of November 13, 1959 and the execution that followed five years later. His sympathy for Perry, in particular, colored his disgust with the death penalty, and the book draws none-too-subtle parallels between the cold-blooded murder of the Clutters and the cold-blooded execution of Smith and Hickok.

In the years after the book's publication, several residents of Holcomb, Kansas objected to details that Capote had gotten wrong, or characterizations they felt were unfair. The power of IN COLD BLOOD is that it holds some deeper truths that seem to override the impossibility of getting every detail right.

Writing the book -- and witnessing the executions -- ruined Capote. Although he was famous for talking about a great work in progress, he never wrote anything substantive again, and the shorter pieces he did publish were treated as personal betrayals by his friends. He must have been surprised at those accusations of betrayals; after all, hadn't they all read IN COLD BLOOD?

Two very good movies about the writing of IN COLD BLOOD came out in 2006: Capote, which won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar, and Infamous, which spends more time on the relationship between Capote and Perry Smith (and features a smoking Daniel Craig as Smith). Both are excellent, but have only half their intended impact if you haven't read IN COLD BLOOD first.

WORLD'S END by T. Coraghessan Boyle

The Book: T. Coraghessan Boyle, WORLD'S END. Viking, 1987 (first edition). Fine book in near-fine Brodarted dust jacket.
First read: 1988
Owned since: 1997 (approximately, this copy)

I own two copies of this book: this first edition, and a trade paperback reprint that the author inscribed to me at a signing on St. Patrick's Day 1989, in Washington, DC. As I think I've said before, I'm not a serious collector of books, but I do like to have good copies of my favorites. This is a book I like to lend out, so it's good to have the more durable hardcover copy in addition to my own signed one. (The first sign of addiction, they say, is rationalization...)

WORLD'S END is a sweeping epic about the inexorable power of heredity, following two New York families from the early Dutch colonial days to the late 1960s/early 1970s. Walter van Brunt, wastrel son of an old farming family, has a near-fatal motorcycle accident when confronted with a vision from his family's past. Recovering, he makes an unlikely connection with Depeyster van Wart, heir to an old fortune and scion of a family that was always the enemy of Van Brunts. Seventeenth-century conflicts between Van Brunts and Van Warts play out into the 1970s; for 300 years, they ignore the importance of the natives who lived there first, but those natives wind up offering a weird kind of redemption to both families.

It's been a few years since I reread WORLD'S END, and I'm due. It's a young man's book: ambitious, clever, angry and funny, complex in structure, cynical in outlook, but drunk on the realization that ours was not the first generation to want things desperately and hope for the best. I'm curious to see how it holds up for the midlife reader.

JOY OF COOKING by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker

The Book: JOY OF COOKING. Plume trade paperback reprint, 1973; 14th printing. Poor condition. Front cover is torn off, pages are age-browned and food-stained, spine is badly bowed and creased, book is held together by a rubber band. Owner's signature on front flyleaf.
First read: Who knows?
Owned since: 1983 (this copy)

I do have a spiffy hardcover copy of the revised edition of JOY OF COOKING, but I will not give this one up until it crumbles. For one thing, it includes recipes the revised version doesn't have; for another, it was a Christmas gift from my parents; for yet another, its markings and stains are a history of my adventures in cooking.

Weirdly, the book falls open naturally to a page in the vegetable section, on tomatoes and turnips. I don't care for turnips, and have never cooked them; the recipe I used here was one for stuffed tomatoes filled with onions, a long-ago disastrous attempt at a vegetarian dinner. What a mess that was... although in retrospect, it was so hilarious I'm tempted to try this recipe again. What I wound up with was stewed tomatoes with onions and brown sugar, and it tasted pretty good on egg noodles.

I have baking to do for tonight's show, slightly purgatorial since the temperature's hit the mid-70s and I still don't have an air conditioner. Time for the old reliable "Quick Oatmeal Cookies," p. 657, which can be made and baked in under an hour.

What I've Read These Weeks

I've been busy, I've been distracted, and I've been terribly disappointed with quite of lot of my recent reading. That might be me, or it might be the books; I can't say. Anyway, here are a few of the highlights and lowlights.

Christa Faust, MONEY SHOT. Hard Case Crime's first female author delivers classic pulp, the story of a semi-retired porn actress who's the target of a murder plot for reasons she doesn't know. Great stuff.

Ian Fleming, CASINO ROYALE. I was sure I'd read this in middle school, but recognized almost nothing of it. James Bond is a cold creature, Ian Fleming's much too fascinated with sexual torture, and the misogyny of this book made me gasp.

Sebastian Faulks, DEVIL MAY CARE. Ian Fleming's estate hired Sebastian Faulks to write another James Bond book "as Ian Fleming," and he did it: all the misogyny, lifestyle porn, tedious details of upper-class amusement, and sexual torture of the original! But it feels like homework, a James Bond paint-by-numbers kit without a shred of joy. Bleah.

Vivian French, THE ROBE OF SKULLS. Now, this was more like: a young-adult romp about the evil Lady Lamorna, who needs to pay for a new dress and devises a most nefarious plot to extort the money from the local royalty. Gracie Gillypot, escaping from her wicked stepfamily, manages to thwart the scheme. Ingenious and joyful, with perversely happy endings all around -- even for Lady Lamorna.

Joshua Kendall, THE MAN WHO MADE LISTS. A biography of Peter Mark Roget, the inventor of the thesaurus. Polymath and obsessive, Roget turned to his lists as solace for the catastrophes of his life. Unfortunately, what we get here is not much more than a list of the events of Roget's life and the people he knew. Despite novelistic narratives of conversations between Roget and his family members that seem weirdly disconnected from the rest of the book, we never get any sense of Roget's interior world, or even his objectives.

Ron Hansen, EXILES. Ron Hansen is such a beautiful writer that it almost hurts to read him, knowing I will never come close to that level. EXILES is the story of Gerard Manley Hopkins's great poem "The Wreck of the Hesperus," moving back and forth between Hopkins's own story, those of the five German nuns who died in the wreck, and the nightmare of the shipwreck itself. I am always astonished by how much Hansen manages to cram into such compact tales; this book is less than 200 pages, and gives us Hopkins's world better than a 700-page biography could.

PACK OF TWO by Caroline Knapp

The Book: Caroline Knapp, PACK OF TWO: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. The Dial Press trade paperback, 1998 (first printing thus). Good condition; book shows signs of exposure to damp, covers are rubbed at corners.
First read: 2001
Owned since: 2001

No theme to this week's books; I just realized that this incarnation of the blog has only about a month left to run, and I'd better get to the books I want to write about before the calendar runs out. (I know, it's an artificial deadline; if I wanted to extend it, I could. Allow me my small compulsions.)

This book was a gift from Sy, a man who used to bring his dog to an informal Saturday morning dog park in my old neighborhood, a underused playing field behind Fairfax High School. Every so often, LAUSD police would come and roust us out, and they weren't always polite about it; a few careless dog owners wrecked it for everyone.

I see Sy clearly in my mind's eye, but cannot remember his dog's name, or even what his dog looked like. It was an odd community of people -- we were all kind of odd separately, and feuds arose among owners for weird, almost random reasons. One morning, two owners came to blows after a scuffle between their dogs, and everyone took sides. I stopped going after that; Dizzy and I did not need that craziness.

Almost all of us, though, were packs of two. This book is Caroline Knapp's memoir of her own intense bond with her dog, Lucille, as well as a broader study of how people find things in their relationships with dogs that they can't get from their relationships with people. Healthy or unhealthy, it is what it is; dogs become our surrogate partners, siblings, parents, children.

I live alone and work at home, and if not for Dizzy, I'd pass some days without saying anything at all. As it is, I wonder whether Dizzy makes it possible for me to be more of a hermit than I would be without him -- if I didn't have Dizzy, maybe I'd have to be more social. Or maybe I'd never leave my apartment at all, at least in winter.

Knapp's book looks at this phenomenon without flinching or judging. Here is Marjorie, 48:

When she's with a group of people, particularly people she doesn't know well, she has a hard time turning off the voices of self-criticism, the harsh judgments: is she smart enough, is she adequate? Oh, you jerk; you sound like such a jerk: that's the kind of thing she hears in her head, a burden that's blessedly absent when she's at home with a dog.

Caroline Knapp died of lung cancer in 2002, at the age of 42. Obituaries listed her survivors as her husband, Mark Morelli, and her dog, Lucille.