Liars and Saints

 "Kafkaesque" means "oppressive and nightmarish," and last night did earn the title. How surreal to stare at the droning CNN man, and to imagine that a report on one percent of a state’s vote total counts as news. Someone on the NYT website vowed to "take my dog for a walk and just check the news in the morning," and this helped me. My own version of "dog-walking" was to visit Book Lovers Cafe, a group on Facebook I very much like. These are introverted folks who enjoy fast-paced blockbuster books, and they write about their book-love, and sometimes their coffee-love, alongside photos of book nooks, individual book stacks, and snazzy bookmarks. These are my people. A nice feature of Book Lovers Cafe is that someone will occasionally ask a quick "ranking/preference" question, and you can fire away, and then move on. Here are my recent replies (using just the top of my head)..... Saddest Book I've Ever Read: Ariel Levy, "The Rule...

  If you love to read, and you particularly like a creepy story in the fall, I have to tell you about "The Monster in the Box." This was a late effort by my hero, Ruth Rendell ("the female Hitchcock"), and it concerns a possible serial killer. A guy seems to stalk people who have a "good" reason for offing a friend or loved one. Say, you're embroiled in an affair, and you want your spouse out of the picture. Or you're tired of caring for your demanding teenager--her presence is ruining your love life--and you'd just like to be unattached once again. This awful guy will find you and propose a murder--and then nothing can ever be proved. That's one part of the story. Elsewhere, in the village of Kingsmarkham, a woman may or may not have been the victim of a ritual killing. Maybe she just disappeared. She was once a promising high-school student, so the thought that she might not pursue further studies is distressing to a couple of liberal obs...

I can't (ever) stop talking about Ruth Rendell, and if you aren't sold yet, let me make this pitch. "The Secret House of Death"--like many of Rendell's other early novels--is quite short. (The later Rendell became "baggier.") The book involves a bizarre group of neighbors; the neighbors study one another, sometimes from afar, and they make inferences about certain behaviors (and the inferences are generally wrong). One woman, Doris, becomes convinced that another woman, Louise, is having an affair. Louise is continuously welcoming a certain man to her house for thirty or forty minutes, and no one knows who the man is. Our protagonist--Susan--doesn't want any part of this, but she becomes involved when Louise stumbles in and seems to utter a confession. The confession is interrupted; still, slightly moved, Susan is ready to be a sympathetic friend to Louise. But when Louise seems to lie to Doris (who also stumbles in)--"That man who v...

Rendell, "A Spot of Folly." Ruth Rendell wrote a million crime novels before dying in 2015; people said she was a literary genius, and her fans included Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and Ian Rankin. A few years after her death, her publishers collected ten of her tales—“tales of murder and mayhem”—and repackaged them as a collection, “A Spot of Folly.” As far as I know, you can’t easily get this book in America. You have to search for a European edition. It’s worth the search. Folly is Rendell’s main theme, basically always; she is deeply interested in the silliness of human behavior. Even a ghost story, in Rendell’s hands, is a chance to comment on “folly.” Here’s an example, a three-sentence tale from the start of the anthology: Alone in the four-poster, she glanced up from her book and saw in the mirror a little old woman sitting beside her. She shut her eyes, looked again, saw an empty bed, neatly made with fresh linen. The hotel staff, summoned by ...

One thing that gets me through a long weekend is Ruth Rendell. It's true that Rendell died, and that her output is finite; we won't be getting any new Rendell books, ever again. It's also true that there are some dips in quality; people seem not to get too excited about, say, "Grasshopper" or "Talking to Strange Men." But give the lady a break. She wrote approximately ten trillion novels. And there are mic-drop classics mixed in there: "A Judgment in Stone," "A Demon in My View," "Make Death Love Me," "An Unkindness of Ravens,""The Tree of Hands." Rendell's great gift was for characters who "jump off the page," as one reviewer noted. Even when they aren't admirable, you feel you know them, and you want to follow them on their weird, high-stakes journeys. I especially like Dora Wexford, who is resolutely sensible and courageous. And her daughters, with their young-people dramas. And...

Ruth Rendell's world reminds me of Shakespeare's. In a Rendell novel, there is often one character who is an example of unrepentant evil--like Shakespeare's Iago. A famous example is the murderer in "A Sight for Sore Eyes." In Rendell's last novel, "Dark Corners," the Iago figure is Dermot, who blackmails another man and also becomes increasingly irritating "just for the fun of it." (We can't call this behavior "motiveless malignancy"--since the obvious motive is money--but the behavior is still quite awful.) As in a Shakespeare story, Rendell's characters seem to wander into magical forests and undergo dramatic changes. The magical forests aren't literal, and the changes don't often involve gender-swapping or human-to-statue magic. (We're not talking about "The Winter's Tale.") Still, in Rendell's world, there's that same fascination with assumed and/or new identities. Rendell seemed in...

Home early for once. Maybe he'd start getting home early regularly now August had begun, the silly season. Criminals as well as the law-abiding take their holidays in August. As he turned the car into his own road, Wexford remembered his grandsons would be there. Good. It would be light for another three hours, and he'd take Robin and Ben down to the river. Robin was always on about the river because his mother had read The Wind in the Willows  to him, and his great desire was to see a water rat swimming. Sylvia's car was parked outside the house. Odd, thought Wexford. He'd understood Dora was having the boys for the afternoon as well as the evening and that they'd be staying the night. As he edged his own car past his daughter's into the drive, she came running out of the house with a screaming Ben in her arms and six-year-old Robin looking truculent at her heels....   "A Sleeping Life" is one of only two Wexford novels to earn a nomination for ...