The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey
The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey
Originally published in 1947.
In The Franchise Affair, the digestive routine of a rural barrister (Robert Blair) is happily upset and the reputations of an elderly woman and her middle aged daughter are put into question when a fifteen year old girl named Betty Kane tells a story abduction and imprisonment. Blair sets out to prove that the story is bunk—even though the police are disinclined to prosecute—in order to rescue the ladies, the younger of whom he is quite taken with, from local infamy. The tabloids get hold of story and rile up public opinion against the accused—who are said to have plucked the innocent teen from the street, beaten her and forced her into service as their maid—making them and their house, the Franchise, the target of hoodlums and vandals. Betty Kane’s seemingly intimate knowledge of the interior of the women’s house is seen as damning, but Blair’s faith in his clients, along with his newfound sense of heroism, leads him to investigate further than the police will.
Tey’s book was inspired by the true 19th century case of Elizabeth Canning, a London girl who disappeared for a month and then reemerged claiming to have been abducted by thugs working for an elderly madam who tried to force her into prostitution. The stakes were slightly higher in the Canning case, as one of her alleged abductors was sentenced to be hung before a judge reopened the inquiry. A firestorm in the press ensued and Canning was convicted of perjury and exiled to Connecticut. The whereabouts of Canning during her missing month were never discovered nor did she reveal them in her later life. Tey’s explanation for the gap—that the girl, a precocious vixen, picked up a married man in a café and spent a dirty four weeks with him in a hotel until his wife showed up and boxed her about the face—is in line with the American noir sentiment of the time about seemingly innocent young girls—“Whoever was going to suffer in any situation she created, it wasn’t going to be Betty Kate.”—though in this case the girl’s actions don’t lead to anyone being pumped full of lead or eaten by sharks.
Tey does introduce a hint of feminism when Blair’s proposal to one of his clients is rebuffed and he is told that she’d prefer to live with her mother:
“But Marion,” Blair says, “It is a lonely life—”
“A ‘full’ life in my experience is usually full only of other people’s demands.”
The Path to the Spider’s Nests, by Italo Calvino.
The path to the spiders’ nests, by Italo Calvino ; translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Martin McLaughlin. Originally published 1947
This was Calvino’s first novel, by his account written hurriedly in the final months of 1946—though the available translation incorporates revisions the author made years after the book’s initial publication, as well as including Calvino’s apologetic and nostalgic preface, written in 1964, in which he laments the short lived era of postwar Italian literature where it seemed possible to recreate the novel from scratch. Calvino also muses (absurdly in his case, given the inventiveness of his later work) on the idea that an author’s first book is his only truly original one and that all subsequent books are imitations of himself and others. Calvino at one time had kept the book out of print, feeling that it was unrepresentative of his work.
It certainly shares more with the Italian neo-realist novels published alongside it than with the playful and abstract style of Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but it does share some of the grace and nimbleness of Calvino’s best writing, employing the present tense to springheel jack the prose.
The novel focuses on the Italian partisan resistance to Fascist and Nazi rule during World War II, with a boy named Pin—whose sister is a prostitute: The Dark Lady of the Alley—drawn into the fight not by idealism or revenge, but simply out of the wish to belong. He likes to joke with the armchair partisans in the tavern, but is told that he will be shunned if he does not steal the pistol of a German soldier sleeping with his sister. The theft propels Pin into the partisan movement when he is arrested and then escapes from jail with a notorious teenaged fighter known as Red Wolf. Pin sees how quickly identities are created and shed in the chaos of guerilla war—some of the partisan fighter were once Fascists and others will later leave the resistance to join the enemy.
Pin joins up with a unit reminiscent of the Dirty Dozen, made up of thieves and rascals. The experience is unromantic: the leader spends most of each day scratching at the lice on his skin and the men argue about communism and women. This part of the book is the least effective as the focus moves off of Pin, who loves getting off a good insult more than dialectical debate, and onto the grown-up screw-ups of the unit.
The novel visits and revisits the place of spiders’ nests, a nearly mythical area where Pin hides the German’s gun. Pin’s childlike love for this spot and his dismay at its destruction, remind me most of Calvino’s later, more fanciful fictions, which came after the war had been dealt with directly and it was as exciting to stare into small crevices as at distant explosions.
Waltz into Darkness, by Cornell Woolrich
Waltz into darkness, by Cornell Woolrich
Originally published, 1947.
Cornell Woolrich was a favorite of moviemakers: his novels and stories were adapted into more than 25 motion pictures, with Rear Window as probably the most famous. Two (Francois Truffaut’s 1969 film Mississippi Mermaid and 2001’s Original Sin—which, though it is already largely forgotten in whole, has achieved an extended internet lifespan in the form of a much-viewed clip of an explicit sex scene) were based on Waltz into Darkness, a 1947 novel published by Woolrich under the pseudonym William Irish. Both of these adaptations postdate Hollywood’s noir explosion of the 40s and early 50s, and the story takes place not in hardboiled Chicago or Kansas City but in post-Civil War New Orleans. Still, this is a classic noir study of a femme fatale—in this case a woman who goes by the names Julia and Bonnie. The two women who have played Julia/Bonny, Catharine Denueve and Angelina Jolie, are beautiful actresses who can possess a serpentine coolness on screen that is, despite the deficiencies of both films, appropriate for the role.
Louis Durand is a businessman hoping to augment his financial happiness with a marriage to a mail order bride. When he arrives at a steamboat dock to meet her for the first time he finds not the plain looking woman whose photograph he was sent but a beautiful young girl. The girl, Julia, gives an unconvincing explanation as to why she deceived him about her looks, and Louis, pleased by her beauty, lets none of her ensuing suspicious behavior—a coarse crossing of the legs, the neck snapping of a song bird—convince him that she is not really the woman she claims to be, until, that is “Julia” cleans out his bank accounts and disappears. This expected betrayal, coming less than a third of the way through the book, turns Louis murderous: he stalks women who resemble Julia on the streets, hires a private detective, chases a mask wearing girl through Mardi Gras to press a revolver into her chest. These hallucinatory chapters are a fine writing performance by Mr. Woolrich, whose style throughout the book is more fluid and graceful that those of his tough guy peers.
After a chance dinner invitation brings Louis back in contact with Julia, who explains that her real name is Bonny, and he is placated by her flimsy sob story, we know that loss of money was not what drove Louis to near insanity but the loss of love. And to protect this woman he will not only cheat and murder but allow himself to be murdered.
As is typical in noir the femme fatale’s motives are ambiguous. We see her through Louis’s eyes, and are only privy to the careful chosen thoughts she shares with him. She exists as much as hints and clues left behind—as when the name “Billy” is seen on a burnt letter in a fireplace—as she does as a full bodied presence. Julia/Bonny, however, has more depth than other characters of her type—since she is revealed early on as a thief and liar, the reader doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wondering when she will show her evil, but rather is given a few hundred pages to watch her vacillate between the world she is comfortable in, that of con games and crime, and that which she aspires to, the high class life of New York fashions and fine dining. That her behavior in both of these worlds is that of a sociopath is hardly surprising, given the way that female strivers were commonly portrayed. (And perhaps still are: one of the more frequently voiced views of Hillary Clinton was the ominous one that she would “do anything to win.”) I’ll leave to the reader to judge whether the ending reveals that Julia/Bonny is a more complex being than we imagined or a hopelessly cardboard figure having an unconvincing epiphany. That Louis becomes a vehicle for her redemption, short-lived though it may be, just as she is the vehicle of his brilliantly described downfall is a nifty turnaround of a noir convention.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid
The reluctant fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid.
Originally published, 2007.
A few decades ago, before publishers felt the need to justify the eight dollar price tags of mass market paperbacks with page counts of 400 or more, a thriller novel could be as tightly plotted as any Hitchcock masterpiece—and lean books like John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold were both global bestsellers and geopolitical commentaries at least as astute as most now forgotten serious non-fiction studies of the Communist Threat. By bloating themselves with romantic subplots and chase scenes, thrillers have lost much of their ability to thrill. Still, they sometimes find themselves ahead of the news. When Gorbachev and Reagan had warmed to one another, there was a brief period in which the United States seemed to have no significant foreign enemies. Serious scholars wrote about “the end of history,” and many joked that writers like LeCarre had been put out of business. Thriller writers, however, merely cast about for the next great threat. China was a top candidate for a time, but the Middle East quickly became the preferred source of villains.
When the 9/11 attacks occurred it was widely noted that Tom Clancy’s novel Debt of Honor included a passenger airliner being flown into the Capitol Building by a suicide pilot. (Not as noted: The pilot was not Muslim but Japanese.) The Turner Diaries also ended with a White Supremacist terrorist flying a plane into the White House, but that character was, of course, the hero of the novel. Still, the media image—provided by thriller novels as well as the movies made from or inspired by them—of the Islamic male as the author of spectacular mayhem was so widespread that not only did nearly everyone comment that the attacks seemed like something “out of a movie” but they had little doubt, before any evidence appeared, that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible. This was not even something new. When the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed the media immediately cast it as an act of Islamic terrorism. Even after Timothy McVeigh’s arrest and conviction, some had trouble letting this notion go—the theory that Sadaam Hussein was in collusion with McVeigh had currency amongst some in the White House who lobbied for the Iraq invasion of 2003. Indeed, when they were not in the news in connection with actual terrorist attacks, the only time most Americans heard or read about Middle Easterners was when they were represented as terrorists in thrillers.
Now the Islamist terror and America’s reaction to it is the dominant story of our time, one needn’t even go to the supermarket for their fix of fictional representations. 24 provides a weekly supply of interrogation porn on television and respectable authors like John Updike and Martin Amis employ their powers to enter the minds of suicide bombers. But with the publication of The Reluctant Fundamentalist we get a literary perspective on current events that has been largely missing. The book’s cover design does not shout thriller. It looks, in fact, with its image of an unshaven Pakistani man’s face partially covered by strips of flag, like another of the many non-fictional memoirs that have appeared in the past few years, with subtitles such as My Two Years in Gitmo. And the fact that the author, Mohsin Hamid, was born in Pakistan and educated at Princeton and is writing about a character born in Pakistan and educated at Princeton, might lead one to suspect that this is, like many novels, a thinly veiled memoir. The word thriller does, however, appear on the front cover, in a blurb, and while this book doesn’t even crack the 200 page mark and no murdered art historians are to be found within, it is a thriller, in the same sense that Graham Greene’s entertainments were thrillers.
Hamid’s protagonist, Changez, speaks directly, and cordially, to “you,” an American (who may or may not be a tourist) at a café in Lahore. He assures you that he loves America and proceeds to tell his story. A lucrative position at a slightly cultlike New York valuations firm raises him out of his family’s financial ruin and begins to give him an American outlook on the world. He starts dating a beautiful writer, Emily, and easily blends in to multicultural Manhattan. But when the 9/11 attacks occur, Changez feels a sense of pleasure, not he says at the loss of life, but at the idea of America brought to her knees. After all, he asks you, “Do you feel no joy at the video clips—so prevalent these days—of American munitions laying waste to the structures of your enemies?”
At this point, Changez’s assimilation begins to come undone. On business trips, he is subjected to intense scrutiny at airports while his colleagues travel on without him. On the streets he is glared at by drivers. Pedestrians mutter insults. Emily stops returning his calls and at first he believes it has something to do with the attacks and his ethnicity. The actual reason, he learns, is perhaps more troubling—Emily is sinking into clinical depression and obsessing over a previous boyfriend who died of cancer. She tells him, “I kind of miss home too. Except that my home was a guy with long skinny fingers.” He tries to hold on to his love for America and for Emily, but neither seem to want him anymore.
On a trip to visit his family in Pakistan, at a time, late 2002, when a war with India seemed inevitable, Changez’s perspective changes. He acquires the sense—perhaps the same one Americans felt briefly after 9/11—of being a citizen of a homeland under siege and starts to think about what responsibilities such citizenship entails. When he returns to his job he wears a two week old beard that evokes images of terrorists in the minds of his co-workers. A friend advises him to shave, telling him, “You need to be careful. This whole corporate collegiality veneer only goes so deep.”
As America, wrapped up in its 9/11 memorial and the run-up to the Iraq invasion, ignores Pakistan’s troubles (or, as he comes to believe, even encourages India’s aggression), and Emily vanishes, Changez acquires twin obsessions, personal and political, and begins making choices that eventually lead to the very conversation you are having with him in Lahore. I will not reveal the ending, but will say that it, unlike the artificially twist-heavy endings of most bestselling thrillers, is logical and genuine. The book doesn’t mean to merely shock, it sets out to create “a certain shared intimacy” with a character that events may have led you, as an American, to see as your enemy.
The Web and the Rock, by Thomas Wolfe
The web and the rock, by Thomas Wolfe.
Originally published in 1939.
The protagonist in The Web and the Rock, George Weber, writes a novel deemed unpublishable due to its extreme length—lazy editors send him insulting rejection letters without bothering to read the manuscript, alcoholic writers give it backhanded praise after admitting to having only read “a page or two, a line here and there” (even Weber’s lover, who believes him a genius, counsels him to cut a few hundred pages). The critical establishment is portrayed as populated by unsuccessful authors who bitterly attack the great writers of the day and explain their own failures by saying that literature isn’t possible in an age (how little has changed!) when “the real poetry is written by advertising men.” These rejections drive Weber into bitterness and paranoia, and ultimately he rejects his lover.
Wolfe himself was a man at war with the attitudes of the critics, with time itself, with his own body, and most of all with the publishing world’s idea of the appropriate length for a novel. His first, Look Homeward Angel, had faced less the editor’s red pen than the paper shredder, losing countless pages he thought necessary to the story. Outraged, he left his publishing house and sought a contract that allowed no editor to tamper with his works. Wolfe handed off five thousand pages to his new editor, Edward Aswell. This was not a completed manuscript but parts of a large, almost hubristically ambitious project called “Of Time and the River” the basic architecture of which Wolfe hoped to familiarize Aswell with. Unfortunately Wolfe died shortly thereafter, leaving his publisher with a “mess.” Conspiring with Wolfe’s literary executor, Aswell used a loophole in the contract to chop the huge manuscript into three separate books. The story of George Weber was told in “The Web and the Rock” and “You Can’t Go Home Again” with some of the hundreds of pages about Weber’s lineage forming “The Hills Beyond,” published last of the three. But Aswell did not merely make a trilogy of the work—as John Halberstadt writes, “Aswell would take a few pages from a chapter or variant version of a chapter, a few pages from a second, write a line himself, then mix in third and even fourth sources until he had the hybrid he desired.” He also merged characters into composites. This is comparable to the relatively recent editing of Ralph Ellison’s massive incomplete manuscript into a book called “Juneteenth” for posthumous publication, except that in that book’s case the editors were upfront about their process, while Aswell wrote a disingenuous essay claiming that his task had been mainly to polish a nearly complete work. It is almost certain that in both cases the intrusive editing brought the works to a larger readership than they would have found in their behemoth states.
But knowing all this, how does a critic approach “The Web and the Rock”? This, after all, was nothing like Ezra Pound blowing “The Wasteland” to bits and resembling it with TS Eliot’s consent, but nor was it like a ghostwriter inflating a scribble in the notebook of Robert Ludlum or VC Andrews into a complete novel. A literature professor who had been teaching the book for years vowed to stop doing so after dis- covering that it brought up issues of authorial intention more likely to spark smiles on the faces of his more post-modern oriented colleagues. Wolfe criticism was upended by the revelation and as Halberstadt writes, “We may need to study Aswell’s biography for clues to Wolfe’s psyche.”
The real question then is: did Aswell do a good job in assembling these novels? Richard S. Kennedy believes so, writing, “Wolfe’s manuscript was unpublishable in the state he left it, but it contained magnificent material and an over-all design that was generally clear. Aswell fulfilled Wolfe’s intentions, as well as he could discern them, and two generations of readers have been grateful.”
As a reader who knew nothing about the book’s editing until I’d read half of its 700 pages, I didn’t notice any odd transitions or shifts in tone. Of course after learning the book’s history I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened in-between each scene. While Wolfe can be fairly windy and overly focused on transcendence (this was a man who would hold his breath on the subway in an effort to “break through” into something or other) many of his extended pieces are magnificent, from the evocation of a lynching early in the novel to the scene where a multiple murderer kneels by a river rather than run from the mob chasing him. The book’s first half follows George Weber’s boyhood in the south while the back half treats his adult life in New York City and follows him to Germany. Weber’s love affair with a married woman (Edith) dominates this second half, and the conversations between the lovers, especially as Weber descends into suspicion and begins acting erratically, have remarkable power.
That this material would have likely remained unpublished or put out a state that only scholars would have bothered attempting to navigate had Aswell not intervened argues for the editorial position he took—coherence over completeness.