My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl

First published in 1979; republished by Penguin Books on August 28, 2012 

Oswald Cornelius takes pride in telling us that he is the greatest Lothario of all time. Portions of his "diary" are finally being published by Oswald's nephew, who appears in My Uncle Oswald only long enough to introduce volume XX of Oswald's diary. Oswald made his first fortune at age 17 by selling an early version of Viagra to men and women, his second by creating a forerunner of the sperm bank. His plan for stocking the sperm bank is both cunning and wicked.

As these delightful tales unfold, Oswald occasionally boasts of his sexual prowess. With rare exceptions, Oswald follows the self-made principle of "no-woman-more-than-once," a rule he commends "to all men of action who enjoy variety." More often, however, we follow the efforts of the woman he recruited to gather sperm (using a powerful aphrodisiac) from the kings, artists, writers, musicians, and scientists of Oswald's time, including (among many others) Einstein, Monet, Joyce, and Puccini. Unsurprisingly, Picasso proves to be a troublesome subject, but the episode involving Proust is the funniest.

Roald Dahl is acclaimed for his children's stories. Perhaps he found a need to balance his life by adding this decidedly adult novel (and two "Uncle Oswald" short stories that were published in Playboy and reprinted in Switch Bitch) to his oeuvre. Despite the subject matter, however, My Uncle Oswald is far from pornographic. The stories are ribald but restrained. Most of all, they are hilarious. My Uncle Oswald is a novel that deserves to be on any reader's shelf of comedy classics.

RECOMMENDED

Fires of London by Janice Law

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on September 4, 2012 

Fires of London follows a classic thriller formula:  a falsely accused man must avoid the police long enough to prove his own innocence.  In addition to its plot, Fires of London shares other attributes of memorable thrillers:  strong writing, solid characters, and a swift pace.  Yet in its protagonist and milieu, Fires of London departs from the classic formula to achieve a result that is fresh and fascinating.

To support his painting and gambling, Francis Bacon works as a “gentleman’s companion.”  His preference, however, is for “rough trade” -- clandestine meetings with strangers under circumstances that carry a hint of danger.  One of the men he meets, a man he believes to be Chief Inspector John Mordren, roughs him up during their encounter in a park.  Soon thereafter, a young man Bacon vaguely knows from gay bars is found beaten to death in Hyde Park.  Bacon wonders whether Mordren might be responsible. After Bacon stumbles over the dead body of an RAF pilot while making his way down a dark street, Mordren recruits Bacon to assist him in finding the serial killer.  Does Mordren really want Bacon’s help, or is Mordren setting up Bacon as the fall guy?  When Bacon finds a third murder victim after a bombing raid, Mordren has reason to identify Bacon as a suspect in all three murders.  Bacon, of course, must find the killer on his own while he tries to avoid arrest.

Francis Bacon is an unlikely thriller hero.  That’s consistent with the convention of the “innocent man” formula -- the innocent man is usually an ordinary guy thrust into a sinister world, relying on wits rather than training to solve the mystery -- but Bacon is truly a unique thriller protagonist.  Bacon describes himself as “a connoisseur of extremity, of excess emotion and extraordinary sensation,” for whom there exists only pain and pleasure.  He likes to live on the edge -- both in his sex life and in his nighttime work as a warden, enforcing blackout regulations and helping Londoners find shelters -- but he balances a life that is “dark and full of violence” with the brightness of art and the joy of celebration.

Bacon’s personality is carefully developed, but even minor characters are made real and complex with a few well-chosen words.  Wee Jimmy, for instance, is a criminal and thug, but he pitches in to help rescue crews clear rubble left by the Blitz, doing his part to help his countrymen in wartime.  From Bacon’s resourceful (and thieving) grandmother to his hard-drinking companions, every character is full of vitality.

Janice Law based the fictional Francis Bacon on the British painter of the same name, who (according to Wikipedia) is “known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw imagery.”  The same adjectives could be used to describe Law’s prose.  Law writes in a style that is both elegant and playfully lurid.  She recreates the climate of a weary London as pub crawlers carry gas masks, blackouts lead to traffic accidents, and everyone waits for the first bombs to fall.  Her description of the fiery aftermath of the air raids that finally come is just as vivid.  You can smell the smoke, hear the dogs howling at death.

Fires of London is a quick but engrossing read.  The plot is simple yet elegant, spiced with the addition of a tangentially related blackmail scheme, and leads to a satisfying (if slightly ambiguous) conclusion.  While the novel works as a mystery/thriller (although the identity of the killer isn’t difficult to guess), it is even better as a character study, a portrait of an artist who is drawn to more than one kind of peril in the dark nights of wartime London.

RECOMMENDED

The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

First published in 1956 

Scott Carey is dwindling to nothingness. Having been sprayed by insecticide and then irradiated, Scott loses an inch a week until his former self is all but lost. Although the movie version of The Shrinking Man and some later editions of the book add the word "Incredible" to the title, Scott finds his loss of stature to be humiliating and ultimately dehumanizing. The story might be incredible in the sense of "not credible" (how do Scott's organs, particularly his brain, continue to function normally when he is less than a half inch tall?), but Scott is no Ray Palmer. To the extent he demonstrates any heroism, it is in his dogged determination to survive.

Through much of the story, Scott finds himself trapped in the basement being chased by a spider. In Scott's mind, the spider comes to represent "every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form." Scott survives on soggy crackers and water collected in a thimble, although reaching the water becomes a challenge when he shrinks to less than half the thimble's height.

As Scott goes about the daily business of survival, he flashes back to the days that preceded his perilous life in the basement. Scott is 6 feet tall before he starts to shrink. When he sees his mother (at 5'3"), she is in denial. When he's down to 4 feet, his wife starts to treat him like a child (it doesn't occur to her that he might still want sex). At 3'6" he attracts a pedophile. At an inch under 3 feet, he feels despair because his wife pities him. At 21 inches, he fantasizes about a teenage babysitter but she, like his wife, is unattainable. Later he needs to be protected from his daughter, who comes to view him as a doll rather than a father. Pride prevents him from cashing in on his story; he refuses to be treated as a freak, even though his family desperately needs the money. He achieves a respite from the destruction of his self-image when he meets a female circus midget, but he knows the relationship will not last. Nothing can stop him from shrinking.

Richard Matheson fully imagines the physical dangers and difficulties of being less than an inch tall, but the story is more interesting for the emotional toll that Scott experiences. "Awareness of the shrinking was the curse, not the shrinking." Matheson creates a convincing psychological profile of a man who can't readily cope with the loss of everything he values: his job, his wife, and chiefly, his self-respect. Experiencing "a complete negation of spirit," he feels like "a pathetic fraction of a shadow," drained of purpose, unable to meet his basic needs, dependent upon others for survival. In the end, however, trapped in the basement and too small to be noticed by others, he can only depend on himself.

An ineffable sadness pervades the story. As Sam reclines on a dollhouse bed and says to the doll beside him "Why aren't you real?," the trauma of his vanishing life is palpable. There are many such moments in The Shrinking Man. Yet, in the end, this isn't a sad novel. The human spirit triumphs. Life endures. There is meaning to be found in even the smallest existence. This is Sam's ultimate discovery, and it is a metaphorical lesson for all who feel themselves shrinking, diminishing in importance, as their lives unfold.

RECOMMENDED

The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom

Published by Hyperion on September 4, 2012 

The measurement of time, Mitch Albom’s parable tells us, distinguishes man from other animals.  Man alone measures time, and man alone fears time running out.  Every parable has a moral, and Albom’s is this:  we should replace fear of losing time with an appreciation of the time we have.  It is a worthy lesson, even if the parable flounders as it makes its way there.

The Time Keeper imagines Father Time as a real person, a man immune to the ravages of time.  In biblical times, Father Time’s name was Dor.  While his childhood friend Nim was building the Tower of Babel, Dor was learning how to measure time.  When Dor’s wife becomes ill, Dor tries to climb the tower in the hope that by reaching the heavens, he can make time stop.  When the tower falls, Dor is banished to a cave and cursed with immortality because he offended God.  By teaching man to count time, “the wonder of the world he has been given is lost.”

Alternating with Dor’s story are those of two other characters.  Victor Delamonte, the fourteenth-richest man in the world, has a tumor on his liver.  At the age of 86, he is running out of time.  He resolves to buy more time.  Sarah Lemon is a smart but unattractive seventeen-year-old who falls in love with an insensitive hunk named Ethan.  When he rejects her, she doesn’t know if she wants to keep living -- she wants less time than she has been allotted.  Dor’s penance -- his chance to atone for the sin of inventing clocks -- requires him to intervene in the lives of Victor and Sarah.

The Time Keeper is easily read in one or two sittings (depending upon how long you sit).  Albom uses simple sentences to tell a simple story.  As is generally true of parables, simplicity is The Time Keeper’s defining characteristic.  The proposition it initially advances -- that counting moments leads to misery, that we should lead simple and grateful lives -- isn’t particularly profound, but the nature of a parable is to illustrate an obvious lesson.

But is it an honest lesson?  Dor was punished (or readjusted) because he wasn’t content to live his life without counting its moments, but inquiry and invention are arguably a better use of a life than sitting still and being grateful.  There is much to be said for the human capacity to plan and to inquire, traits that inevitably lead to an understanding of time.  Albom’s point -- that we need to spend our life appreciating the time we have rather than fretting about the time we don’t have -- is a good one, but it’s also a half-truth.  The downside of measuring time is balanced by countless upsides, a reality that Albom’s story chooses to ignore.  The sense of urgency, the race to accomplish something before the clock runs out, has led to better medicine, longer lives, greater comfort, and a host of other worthy accomplishments that would never have been achieved if everyone were content to tend sheep and feel grateful for a quiet, uneventful life.

Albom’s expressly stated notion that life was more satisfying before the invention of time measurement is unsupportable.  Time measurement actually began with prehistoric man, long before Dor, and cave dwelling isn’t my idea of a fulfilling life.  There’s an undertone in Albom’s story -- simplicity is good, progress is bad -- that is reflected in Albom’s vision of a future in which people have “forgotten how to feel.”  A few hundred years from now, Albom posits, people will long for “a simpler, more satisfying world.”  Albom’s peek at the future is a denial of history:  life might have been simpler in biblical times, but it was also shorter and more difficult.  Lives were consumed by the struggle to survive.  The slaves who were building the Tower of Babel had little opportunity to feel grateful for their existence.  The ensuing millennia haven’t made people any less capable of “feeling,” and it’s difficult to believe that people will lose that innate ability as time marches on.  People are fond of believing that everything was better in the past, but as Woody Allen recently demonstrated, the present is a better place in which to live.

Of course, parables aren’t meant to be taken literally, and if one reads the story solely as a reminder of the need to appreciate whatever time we have, the message resonates.  There are conventional novels that make the same point with greater depth and more subtlety (The Chequer Board is a favorite), but parables aren’t meant to be subtle or deep.  Nor are the gaps in internal logic as important in a parable as they would be in a different kind of story.  At its root, The Time Keeper tells a good story, has a sweet ending, and delivers at least half of a universal truth.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

NW by Zadie Smith

Published by Penguin Press on September 4, 2012 

The primary characters in Zadie Smith’s new novel -- residents of North West London, from which the title derives -- are dissected and analyzed, or more often skewered, as Smith lays bare their hypocrisies, ambitions, facades, insecurities, prejudices, and fears.  The four central characters stand on different rungs of the social ladder.  The impact of class and social identity on relationships is the novel’s central theme, why some people rise above their beginnings and others don’t is the central question, but -- setting aside those social issues -- I enjoyed NW for the portrait it paints of troubled individuals coming to terms with their changing lives.

Leah Hanwell, 35, is married to an African named Michel.  Leah has a love/hate relationship with Michel, and also with her friend Natalie (formerly Keisha), a barrister whose upward mobility (assisted by marriage to a prosperous money manager) has eluded her childhood friends.  Just as J-Lo tried some years ago to convince her audience that she was still “Jenny from the block,” Natalie is experiencing something of an identity crisis.  Having shed the name Keisha, she still clings to her past, at least to Leah, whose attendance at Natalie’s posh parties seems designed to contrast Natalie’s humble beginnings to her current status.  Although Leah has done well for herself, earning a degree and finding employment with a nonprofit, she remains tongue-tied in the company of educated professionals (Natalie invites Leah to tell stories and then gladly tells them for her) and is embarrassed by Michel’s sincerity (but only when they are in public).  Leah also seems envious of and disquieted by Natalie’s children.

A couple of lesser characters haven’t made the same progress as Natalie and Leah.  Nathan Bogle, the recipient of Leah’s childhood crush, is mired in a slang-filled, weed-smoking life, a life on the streets that is dedicated solely to survival.  His role in the novel is to teach Natalie that she knows nothing about his social class despite attending the same school when they were both ten.  Nathan knows Natalie has “made it” because she can squander her tears on something as insignificant as a distressed marriage; she has left more fundamental worries behind.  Yet for all her success and despite Nathan’s complaint that she is needlessly self-pitying, Natalie feels trapped by her circumstances.  Her desperate sadness motivates foolish behavior.

Positioned somewhere between Nathan and Leah on the ladder of success is Felix Cooper, whose Jamaican father lives in the West End.  Felix craves the freedom of a better life in the North West with Grace (half Jamaican, half Nigerian), who wants to free him of his “negative energy.”  While interesting and well written, Felix’s story seems out of place, having only a tangential connection to the rest of the novel.

Readers who cannot abide unconventional writing might dislike NW.  Each of the novel’s sections is written in a different style.  Dialog is often (but not always) set apart in condensed paragraphs; in the first section, quotation marks are nonexistent.  Sentences, like the thoughts they reflect, are sometimes incomplete or scattered.  One passage is written as free-form poetry; another as an online chat.  The largest chunk of the novel is written as a series of vignettes, scenes that deftly sketch out Leah’s and Natalie’s lives from their childhood to the present.  One section follows Natalie as she takes a long walk through the North West.  It is divided into subsections (“Hampstead to Archway”) like a guide to a walking tour.  I enjoyed the different styles -- they aren’t particularly daring and they don’t make the novel inaccessible -- but readers who favor a straightforward narrative might be put off by the jarring changes in format.

As we have come to expect from Zadie Smith, much of the story is wryly amusing, if not laugh-out-loud funny.  Her description of “marriage as the art of invidious comparison” is one of many sly observations I admired.  Smith’s prose is as graceful and unpredictable as a tumbleweed.  The pace is relaxed, not slow but unhurried.  In a good way, the story is slightly meandering.  Smith takes her time, developing the characters and their surroundings bit by bit until it all becomes real.

I suspect that readers who dislike Jonathan Franzen’s most recent novels will dislike NW for the same reasons:  there isn’t much of a plot and the characters aren’t always likable (although Smith’s characters aren’t as determinedly self-centered as Franzen’s).  Both writers strive to say something about society at large by focusing on smaller segments, families and friends who are defined by geography and class.  Readers who believe that good writing often illuminates the world as it exists, not as we want it to be, that it is just as important to understand flaws as perfection, will find much to admire in Smith’s surgical exploration of characters struggling to come to grips with their changing lives.

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