Summer Time and the Reading is Easy

by

Lev Raphael

Over the years, reviewing has brought out the contrarian in me. If a book is being hailed as a  work that gives the word “genius” new meaning, the acclaim puts my back up. When other reviewers sing a book's praises as effusively as if they’re auditioning for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, I don’t just harbor doubts, I invite the doubts to stay for the weekend. And over the years, the seemingly endless assault of PR—whether through phone calls, emails, or lavish publicity packets—has predisposed me to look suspiciously at books that are over-hyped. 

That's especially true in the summer which teems with as many Big Books as Cape Cod does with whale watchers. Summertime’s when I look for the opposite: slim books that can easily fit into someone's backpack, purse or briefcase, but have a power out of proportion to their negligible weight. Books off the beaten path, by authors I don’t know or from presses most people haven’t heard of, and sometimes books from authors who aren’t as well known as they should be. Here are three recommendations for summer’s end.

On November 14, 1940, hundreds of German bombers set Coventry in northern England ablaze and destroyed some 60,000 buildings, killing perhaps as many as 1,000 people. The town was an industrial center and all but demolished in a night of brilliant moonlight and stark horror. Canadian author Helen Humphreys has personalized that disaster in her new novel Coventry by linking the story of two middle-aged women struggling to stay alive in the midst of a catastrophe that rocks their very perception of reality.

Harriet Marsh is a “fire watcher” on the roof of Coventry’s famed medieval cathedral, ready with sand and scant supplies of water to fight any fires breaking out from bombs or sparks from other buildings that have been hit. But as the German air assault turns the city into an inferno, she has to abandon her post, and teams up with Jeremy Fisher, another fire watcher half her age. His fate is oddly linked with hers over the course of the evening, and for the rest of her life. Jeremy is the son of Maeve Fisher, a woman Harriet met in passing during the First World War. Before the evening is over, they will all have saved or changed one another’s lives in the flaming, exploding ruined city where reality itself is inverted at every step.

Humphreys excels at lyricism and at sad, brusque poetry: “Nothing holds its truths for long enough. Home leaves us, not the other way around . . . And what are we meant to do when we come to know that?” This reflection becomes a prediction as both Maeve and Harriet suffer tremendous losses the night of the fire-bombing. As the city sizzles and shudders around them in a combination of earthquake and volcanic eruption, and they see death and destruction in countless permutations, each holds on to something that will give them strength long past this night. Maeve sees the world through an artist’s eye, Harriet through that of a poet and writer. Sketches and words are the tenuous claim they make on life, keeping their humanity alive, and later salvaging memory itself. Coventry is a moving, elegantly written book whose pages reverberate with despair annealed by the sad hope Eliot wrote of at the end of The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

The threat of violence looms around every corner in Joel Stone's terrific Jerusalem File, set in a city where buses and cafes are potentially dangerous places, where even standing near a soldier might invite a terrorist’s attack. Everyone “lives on the edge of the unknown.” This smoldering tension gives a deeper resonance to Levin, the hard-boiled narrator, who blends observations about human nature with observations on the political situation of his city, a place he’d sourly like to see religion completely kicked out of. Maybe then, he thinks, there’d be a chance of sanity between two enemies, Jews and Arabs, that are historically made for each other.

Sure. Might as well try to eliminate greed or envy or jealousy. Or husbands suspecting that their wives are having affairs, a classic of PI literature and basic human turmoil, and the starting point of this book. Levin’s been hired to follow Professor Kaye’s wife and cinch the professor’s suspicions that she’s having an affair, but in a nifty twist, Levin is soon working for the lustrous, enigmatic wife, who penetrates the fog of grayness Levin lives in post-divorce, post-retirement. 

Almost immediately, they’re not telling each other the entire truth. He’s caught by her beauty and her contradictions: “She had a way of seeming untruthful, even shrewd, when she probably was being sincere.” And she, well, her motives are mysterious, of course. Deborah hooks him hard with a femme fatale line that ranks with the very best in the genre. Aware of his intense longing to sleep with her, she says, “I wonder what you’d think if I told you it wouldn’t mean that much to me.” He’s of course utterly bedazzled, so that the simple act of waiting for her inspires romantic reverie: “Crowds of people passed before him. Watching for her face was like standing in a galaxy: every other face, ever other form, was cosmic waste, dark matter, counted for nothing.”

But of course he waxes poetic only about Deborah. Otherwise he’s as full of downbeat observations as you’d expect from a former intelligence analyst who hates his life but won't lift a finger to change it. In a city of spectacular views he can’t even muster the energy to find one for himself, and so his windows lead nowhere. “Opening his black shutters to a small blind street, morning after morning, his world shrank to an alley before he even went out.”

The cynicism of PIs can sometimes feel recycled or little more than a pose, but it seems totally natural here in a city Levin thinks should be “one of the spent old cities of the world, a museum of a place, like Venice. By all appearances, it should have been, but frighteningly it was still alive. It had all the vital signs, the pulse, the breath, the veiny brain, and plenty of blood, more blood than water. It still bled—the world’s oldest wound—and likely it would never scab over, not with so many fingers picking at it, so many, over so long a time.” 

For all his having been born there, it’s “a bad fit, tied to Jerusalem, a city living on faith, feeding on faith, choking on it.” Levin is actually part-French and half-heartedly longs for Paris but feels stuck in Jerusalem where his elderly mother stays locked in her apartment as if she’s still trapped in the Siege of Leningrad. Whenever the radio has a story about a terrorist bombing she cranks up the volume, reinforcing her sense of peril.

PIs are often drowning men whose cases might just throw them a rope and The Jerusalem File makes that clichéd situation brand new. Stone’s achievement in this book is impressive, from the perfectly pitched voice to the relentless accumulation of details of character and place that make you feel you’re bathing in that special Jerusalem light, and gazing with alarm into the city’s ominous shadows.

Despite its title, William Trevor’s new novel Love and Summer starts with anything but sunshine. It opens on a funeral, fittingly enough in the Irish town of Rathmoye where decay and desuetude seem part of the air everyone breathes.

Trains don’t stop at the railway station anymore; the cinema is a charred ruin with no sign of plans to rebuild it; the pretty smile of the row houses in the town’s central square is marred by a rotting house; and the local bigwigs’ mansion that once boasted a famous library has been demolished, the library itself “pillaged by dealers, the remnants they rejected thrown on to a fire in the yard when the house was emptied and its roof stripped of lead and slates. Mantelpieces and ceilings, doors and paneling, the balconies that had had curved on either side of the stairs as a feature of the wide first-floor landings, were taken out and put aside to be sold. The ruined shell was razed, tons of stone carted away to be sold.”

The spirit of the town seems incarnated by the wandering Orpen Wren, once the librarian of that noted library, who awaits the return of his former bosses, doesn’t always know who or where he is, and engages in ambiguous conversations with the townsfolk.

Amidst all this, quotidian life goes on in and around Rathmoye: meals are served, beds are made, fences are repaired, chickens are fed, groceries shopped for. There’s a gentle, quiet beauty to Trevor's descriptions, as if we’re watching interiors of a Dutch master come to life. But there's more to life than getting things done, as Ellie Dillahan surprisingly discovers. Ellie came from an orphanage to Dillahan’s farm to be his maid and cook after his wife and child died in a tragic accident. She stayed to be his new wife, learning the ways of the farm and his own simple needs. He’s not much of a talker, but he’s kind, and what more should she long for, as a “child of an institution, child of need and humility, born into nothing, expecting nothing.” 

Fresh winds stir when Florian Kilderry literally crosses Ellie's path in town. The importunate presence of this shambling handsome amateur photographer instantly shines a harsh surprising light on her loveless, utilitarian marriage. For the first time in her life, Ellie realizes how lonely she’s been. But that doesn’t matter, because even the humblest detail in her life is now aglow: “She kept seeing him, standing against packets of Bird’s jelly in the Cash and Carry, tins of mustard, Saxa salt. As if they meant something . . . as if they were more than they possibly could be.”

Florian’s been lonely, too, drawn to photographing decay while he’s in the process of trying to sell his family’s dilapidated big house, from which the meager treasures have long since disappeared. Ellie and Florian are instantly struck with each other, and that doesn’t go unnoticed. How could it, in such a small town? But the outcome of this meeting is almost shocking in its defiance of one’s expectations. Love and Summer is absolutely riveting in its depiction of withered lives suddenly bursting into bloom—whether in reality or imagination. Trevor has a genius for creating great drama out of people  simply making their “meek adjustments,” as Hart Crane put it, to go on, and even his least sympathetic or accessible characters are portrayed with gentleness and compassion. This book filled the day in which I read it, making me appreciate Trevor’s keen eye and compassionate heart.

Books mentioned in this column:
Coventry by Helen Humphreys (Norton, 2009)
The Jerusalem File by Joel Stone (Europa Editions, 2009)
Love and Summer by William Trevor (Viking, 2009)


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His new memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.