Alvah's Books

I have shamefully been remiss with reviews and I apologize to all of my readers. Why the long break? Well, I got a full-time freelance writing job with a brand new publication called HAND/EYE Magazine. Check it out and read my articles too while you at  it.

What does this mean for Alvah’s Books? It means I am back to requesting and receiving new books, reading and reviewing them. I can’t make any promises of how often I’ll post during the week because I do have an enormous backlog of books that were sent, and I did promise to review every single one, and I have a job. So…what’s in line for review?

Meg Tilly’s Gemma and Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic. Two very different books that kept me turning the pages in one fell swoop. I usually can’t pull off reading one book in a single session, but obviously these kept me riveted to my seat.

A few changes are also in the mix. I’ll restart the bestseller list this coming Sunday, but I’ve gone through the cookbooks I like and now it’s time to look at some of my favorite books on writing. Come Sunday, I’ll post a review I did a while back for my previous blog on William Zissner’s On Writing Well.

Ferryman
By Carole Sutton
YouWriteOn.com  2008
247 pages 
$10.99 

Reviewed by Randall Radic

In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, the ferryman was known as Charon.  His job was to ferry the souls of the newly dead across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.  And in a few cases, certain heroes – Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dionysus and Psyche – crossed the river while still alive and returned.  The ferryman carried them in his boat.

Ferryman, Carole Sutton’s new and delightful novel, dances around the edges of the Greek myth.  The hero is Steven Pengelly, who is accused of murdering a young woman.  The police can’t find her body but, because of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, Steven is tried and convicted of murder.  He is ferried to prison, essentially a dead man.  For he will never see the light of day again.           

Never say never.      

Two years later, the dead woman’s body miraculously appears.  Only she hasn’t been dead for two years.  In fact, she’s only been dead a few weeks.  Which means Steven couldn’t have killed her.  Accordingly, Steven is released and ferried back to the land of the living, where he is recruited by another young woman to help her find her missing sister, who may have had a connection to the dead woman responsible for his false imprisonment.           

So the gist of the story is this:  a former prisoner, who was as good as dead, is looking for a missing woman, who might be dead and may have known a woman who is definitely dead.  Sounds like a Michael Connelly novel, doesn’t it?          

Well, one thing is for dead certain:  Carole Sutton writes just as well as Michael Connelly.  Jumping from the past to the present and from the present back to the past, Sutton carefully erects a tantalizing who-dunnit.  The story swings about numerous axes of action and intrigue – called subplots – as it powerfully unfolds.  Sutton maintains control of all these plots within plots, leaving one to tend to another, but with a deft touch that implies mastery of her genre.  The whole thing exudes an aura of lethal expertise.           

The reviewer rarely reads mystery novels, other than those by the already mentioned Michael Connelly, because more often than not they are full of spurious histrionic devices, which are boring, to put it bluntly.  With Ferryman, though, it was quite the reverse.  There are no phony-baloney dramatic devices and, thankfully, no deus ex machina straining credulity to the breaking point.  Which means there are no “Jesus!” moments in Ferryman, where the reader wonders if he picked up the wrong book or somehow managed to skip a whole chapter.  Instead, there’s a sense of imminence on every page, an imminence that causes the reader to keep turning the pages to see what happened next.  The story moves gracefully and steadily forward, which is probably due to the fact that Ms. Sutton shows neither indecision nor diffidence in what to do next.  In other words, she doesn’t have something happen simply for the sake of procedural effect.  Rather, she knows where the story is going and knows how she wants to take the reader along for the ride.  

She’s just about right, always.  As is Ferryman.  Buy it, you’ll like it.

A Worthy Legacy
By Tomi Akinyanmi
Tommie Books, 2008,
112 pages,
$15.95

Reviewed by Leanne Flanagan

The Nigerian sun blazes as the author answers a phone call from her father. Her grandfather, who has been seriously ill, faces imminent death, and Akinyanmi must return home to the family’s village. Thus begins A Worthy Legacy and the author’s own spiritual journey. As she begins her travels, she relives vivid memories spent with her grandfather as a child. She was the first girl grandchild after eight boys and there were another eight boys born before the next girl. He had called her his little girl, and she coveted the feeling that she was his favorite. These thoughts magnified the urgency she felt to get to the village so that she could be with her grandfather before his death. In the old traditions of her people, being near a relative’s deathbed to say farewell was considered a most honored opportunity.

Upon her arrival in the village, she reverts back to another old tribal tradition; the women’s show of respect for elders by kneeling when greeting them. In this tribe, there was more than one wife. Because Ms. Akinyanmi’s grandmother was the first of three wives, it was her duty to stay with Grandfather in his sick room and relay his wishes to the rest of the family. The story continues when Grandfather is carried into a courtyard by his sons as his entire family gathers around him. He begins to speak, and after persuading all to wear a smile, he proceeds to offer his last words.

He gives advice of how to live honorably. He speaks of fulfilling our destiny, developing and keeping self-respect, respecting others, believing in God and finding happiness in truth. There is poetry included about trusting others, not giving up and having hope. After his death, his family and the entire village mourn a beloved husband, father, brother and grandfather as well as a valued member of the village. He was buried within the estate of his home the next day, as he requested. After his burial, his granddaughter, Akinyanmi, came back to the city to resume her life, often remembering her grandfather’s last words, she writes.

A Worthy Legacy started out telling the story of an honest, simple man who taught his family to live with love, dignity and respect. This reader was drawn into the work and was fascinated by some of the old customs relayed in the story. However, as the book progressed, it stopped being a story about a family and its culture and became almost like a text of proverbs. There were too many pages of wise words that the reader has heard before, and book was reminiscent of the famous Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament of the Bible where Jesus Christ was teaching principles for living while looking down on his devoted followers. The length and the tone of the grandfather’s last words spoken made this portion of the book a segment of preaching rather than part of a story.

Because of the tone Ms. Akinyanmi uses to tell the story and the lack of narrative, this book would probably be more appropriate for spiritual groups or inspirational speakers rather than the general reader.

About Leanne Flanagan
Leanne has renewed her passion for writing after a 30 year sabbatical at experiencing real life—raising a family and having a career in health care. She now spends her free time writing most often, light, tongue-in-cheek observations of life in American suburban society, limericks and poetry. At present, she is working towards publication of a memoir written as a collection of essays and poetry.

Revolution in Cuba, by Herbert L. Matthews

In A World in Revolution (Scribner’s, 1971), Herbert Matthews wrote: “I have been the principal journalistic scapegoat for the rise to power of Fidel Castro and for the success of the Cuban Revolution, Owen Lattimore was assigned a similar role in the case of the Chinese Revoution in 1949 . . . ” The U.S. Senate Internal Security Committee, while never calling Matthews to testify, during its hearings on Cuba, “went on to pin the responsibility for Castro and the Cuban Revolution on me and The [New York] Times . . ” Matthews continued.

Certainly Matthews is one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents any American newspaper has fielded in our century. But the fact that Matthews covered Italy and its war against Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, India, England, the Italian campaign in World War II and Cuba is not the major reason for the easily applied (and rarely merited) adjective. What distinguished him over the forty-five years he worked for The New York Times (twenty-seven as foreign correspondent, eighteen on its editorial board), was his passion for the facts, his refusal to give credence to handouts, his insistence on covering wars from the front lines, his risking of his life and reputation to get significant news, and his conviction that “to expound things as they really happened is the sole purpose” of journalism.

That conviction cost Matthews dear, for not only were he and his newspaper attacked for his exposition of “things as they really happened,” but Matthews was also made to suffer by his employer, who did not seem to enjoy the truth about the Spanish Civil war or the Cuban Revolution.

Conflict over Matthews and with Matthews has made journalistic history. In the cases of Spain and Cuba, the Times was attacked for what its correspondent was reporting, and in turn put pressure on its correspondent by censoring his copy after reprimanding him for writing “propaganda,” or killing it outright. The Times’s editors were annoyed because Matthews reported that there were Italian Blackshirts fighting for Franco, when one of their other correspondents, William P. Carney, said there were none. Matthews replied by sending detailed accounts and photographs of the Italian troops routed at the battle of Guadalajara (Brihuega) in March of 1937 – their equipment, documents, uniforms, battle orders, diaries and even their conversations with him (in Italian). He ended his dispatch with the words, ” . . . they were Italians and nothing but Italians.” And since the Times always called Franco’s men “Insurgents,” the assertion came out: “. . they were Insurgents and nothing but Insurgents.”

So far as Cuba was concerned, Matthews was in a unique position. When everybody including the dictator Fulgencio Batista thought and announced that Fidel Castro and his handful of guerrillas had been wiped out in the Sierra Maestra, Matthews cooly up and went there, found Castro, and sent out a sensational interview that scooped the world. Matthews’s admiration for Castro, Che Chevara and their associates was of course reflected in his dispatches; but that alone could not account for the fact that the Times muzzled him continuously.

Why didn’t the Times fire him instead of rejecting many articles and refuse to print anything he wrote between 1963 and 1966? It even prevented him from getting the biggest story of all – the missile crisis of 1962. He still had access to the top Cuban leaders because they knew he told the truth about them even if he did not agree with their ideas or their actions. But as a result of its policy – at once spineless and biased – the Times got no news at all out of Cuba between 1963 and 1971.

Matthews himself may have provided the reason for the Times’s ambivalence toward its best foreign correspondent in making it clear in A World in Revolution, in two books about Cuba and a biography of Castro, and also in this latest book about Cuba, that he was opposed to communism in Cuba (as in Spain), but he was in favor of a radical social revolution in both countries. In other words, he was and is that increasingly rara avis, a genuine liberal. In fact he is so much a liberal that even though he hurts to this day over the treatment he received from the Times for his Spanish and Cuban coverage, he can still “understand” the Times’s position and almost sympathize with it.

Matthews’s new book is the product of enormous labor, and is a deeply researched, detailed and lived history of Cuba. It spans that history from the time of the Spanish-American war which made Cuba our colony in all but name, down to the headlines about the catastrophic U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, and today’s headlines about the CIA’s continued attempts to assassinate Castro.

Matthews calls his beautifully structured book “An Essay in Understanding.” This will not, of course, protect him from the hatred and contempt of those who simply cannot stand having a Communist country “only 90 miles from Florida.” But even the most prejudiced will be unable to counter the evidence Matthews has marshaled that what los barbudos have done under the leadership of Castro and Guevara has been for the benefit of the vast majority of the Cuban people. Matthews is as adept at re-creating the personalities and histories of Fidel and Che as he is at explaining the circumstances that made the revolution inevitable, the manner in which it was led, the defeats and triumphs experienced, and the reasons for both. The portrait and analysis of Che, ending with his death in Bolivia, in which the CIA played a notorious part, is a high point in this engrossing story.

The reader is led from the historical background of the revolution, the endless exploitation of the Cuban people by Spain – and the United States which “liberated” them in 1898 – to the failure of the Granma expedition in 1956 that forced a small band of revolutionaries to withdraw into the Sierra Maestra Mountains. From that stronghold they fought and propagandized their way into Havana in January 1959, winning decisive battles against the Batista army of 10,000 men with as few as 300 guerrilla fighters. Matthews continues:

“It is true,” Castro told Lee Lockwood [author of Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel] “that we had many more ready to join us, but they had no weapons . . . We captured 500 and some weapons . . . That allowed us, now with 800 armed men, to spread out throughout the country . . . At the end of the war we had 15,000 soldiers of Batista surrounded in Oriente Province alone. We had some 2500 men there, plus 500 in Las Villas, a total of about 3000men.”

These are the kinds of fact that most of our newspapers do not like to print, just as they did not like the truth about our criminal intervention in Vietnam. Revolutions are never popular with those who benefit by the status quo ante, and Matthews, a reporter who trained himself to get the facts, necessarily became a gadfly and a nuisance to more people than his boss.

While it is possible to be impatient when he seems to misunderstand the difference between socialism and fascism – Castro and his regime are characterized throughout as authoritarian and totalitarian and Western capitalism is always equated with “democracy” – Matthews is brilliant in detailing precisely what the key protagonists of his book did and why they did it. He traces the parallels and points of divergence between guerrilla warfare in Cuba and Vietnam, between Fidel and the late Salvador Allende, between Cuba and Chile. He compares the treatment of Cuba by the American press since 1957 with its treatment of the Russian Revolution of 1917. He exposes the many plans to kill or overthrow Fidel, in which successive American presidents played a major role.

Castro ended U.S. domination of Cuba, which made him no friends on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Contrary to U.S. propaganda, however, he never sold his country to the USSR. The roles played in the Bay of Pigs invasion by both Nixon and the late John F. Kennedy are largely forgotten now, but Matthews resurrects them and reveals how that fiasco was an attempt to repeat the CIA-Pentagon-Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles operation against Guatemala in 1954, which finally left that nation “as corrupt and with the same mass poverty and tiny wealthy minority as of old – but safe for American strategy and business.”

Herbert Matthews always refers to himself as a reporter, a journalist, a foreign correspondent. In this major work he becomes a historian, but one with a difference: he is not “objective,” for which we may be grateful; nor is he the cynic he described himself as being earlier in his career: “In those years of 1931 to 1936,” he wrote in The Education of a Correspondent (1946), “the issues did not touch me personally, and where I later felt willing and anxious to combat the forces which were acting evilly, I was then content to be a mere spectator, to applaud success because it was successful, and to refrain from any moral judgement.”

Unlike the woman in the cigarette advertisement, Herbert L. Matthews has come a long way, but even in 1946 he knew the way he had come and the direction in which he must go:

I was sick at heart that night when I wrote my last dispatch on the Spanish Civil War . . . But the lessons I had learned! . . . Even then, heartsick and discouraged as I was, something sang inside of me. I, like the Spaniards, had fought my war and lost, but I could not be persuaded that I had set too bad an example.

“Open they arms,” cried Sanco Pança, “and receive they son Don Quixote too, who, though he got the worst o’n't with another, he ne’ertheless got the better of himself, and that’s the best kind of victory one can wish for.”

Matthews must be singing inside again. The Cubans won their war, and the Spanish, after thirty-nine years of fascism, are winning theirs today; and he reported both causes “. . . aright to the unsatisfied.”

Revolution in Cuba, by Herbert L. Matthews, The Nation . Posted with permission of The Nation, November 8, 1975,  www.thenation.com.

[Editor's Note: Ibarruri was still alive, and had not returned to Spain at the time this review was written. After Franco's death in 1975 she returned and was again elected a member of the Cortes, representing Asturias. She died in Madrid at the age of 93.]

Pasionaria’s story of Spanish War

THEY SHALL NOT PASS (EL UNICO CAMINO)
By Dolores Ibarruri, International Publishers,
New York, 368 pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie for the National Guardian, 1966

For some reason we will never know, the late Ernest Hemingway, in his Cosmopolitan magazine version of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, felt it necessary to slander one of the greatest women of our time: Dolores Ibarruri, known then and now as Pasionaria.

The slander was not placed in the mouth of his hero, Robert Jordan, who “had no politics,” but it was uttered twice: once by a Spanish guerilla, who baited a young Spanish communist by telling him that Dolores “has a son in Russia since the start of the movement” – to save him from the war; the second time by a Soviet correspondent who referred to her contemptuously as “that great face . . . that great voice.”

It is true that Dolores Ibarruri’s son turned up in the Soviet Union, and he died there. He was buried in Stalingrad (Volgograd), where he fell with Soviet soldiers under his command, and his tomb may be found on its Avenue of Heros, where you will not notice his name unless you can transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet and read: Ruben Ibarruri. He was 18 when he died – in 1942.

Ruben Ibarruri’s mother, who will be 71 this winter, has lived in the U.S.S.R many years, ever since the French Republic made her life in southern France impossible through harassment and the same sort of slander Hemingway employed.

La Pasionaria’s “great voice” may be heard again – in all its eloquence, its passion and its dedication to her people and her cause – in the pages of her “autobiography,” originally titled El Unico Camino (the only way). It is the same voice that spoke on Radio Madrid July 18, 1936, and which has been quoted ever since: “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

That Dolores Ibarruri was and is something more than a sloganeer scarcely needs documentation, for even her worst enemies acknowledge she was a leader and a major focus of the resistance of her people during three years of war against Franco’s forces and the Nazi and Italian invaders. If quotation marks are used around the word autobiography, it is only because her book is far more than the history of her tortured country and her heroic people than it is the sort of personal history to which Western readers are accustomed.

The daughter of a miner, born in Gallarta in the Basque country, Dolores “finished” her education at 15; she had neither the money nor the health to continue. At 20 she married a miner and at 20 she became a communist. She bore six children, of whom four died in infancy – a tragedy common enough to her time, place and class. With her husband she was not happy, although they shared the hardships of organizational work among the miners, as well as several individual jail sentences. By 1936 she was in Madrid and a communist deputy in the Spanish Republican Cortes.

On August 12, 1961, near Moscow, a handful of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade sat in her dining room at a lunch she had prepared and served herself, and listened, as she spoke for 20 minutes without interruption about the situation in Spain, its present and its future. The detailed information she had astonished us; you would have thought she had a pipeline to Madrid or had just returned from Barcelona that afternoon.

But it was her confidence in the future of a Spain she had not seen in 22 years that astonished us even more: this was no bitter, sad, defeated expatriate such as we have all met from time to time; this was a Spanish woman who had never been separated from her people since she was born in a mud hovel in Vizcaya.

She may not live to return to a new Spanish Republic, but when that republic is reborn, it will owe much of its vitality and health to this powerful and utterly feminine woman who was for so long its great face, its great voice.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY
by Carlos Baker; Scribners, 697 pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie in the
Marin Independent Journal, Saturday, April 26, 1969

Although Carlos Baker says that no definitive biography of Ernest Hemingway is likely to be undertaken until after the year 2000, he has come very close to writing it himself. And since Baker had previously published a critical estimate of the American novelist’s work that is still in print, the reader will not find such an estimate here. This is precisely what its author says it is: the story of a man’s life from his birth in Illinois in 1899 to his suicide in Idaho in 1961.

It was a relatively incredible life in many ways and the man who lived it deliberately created a legend about himself in addition to leaving a body of fictional work that may or may not live beyond the year 2000. His biographer obviously feels it will.

This attitude is implicit throughout the long narrative and the story itself generally maintains the reader’s interest, for Baker writes very well.

Since this is an “official” biography (it is even copyrighted jointly by its author and Hemingway’s widow) the reader will understand the integrity of Baker’s achievement when he discovers that Hemingway bore little resemblance to the legend he so successfully created about himself – a legend that in time returned to plague him.

Given his estimation of the man as a writer it is most gratifying that his biographer resisted any temptation toward the sort of craven adulation to be found in A.E. Hottchner’s cheap little memoir called Papa Hemingway. To the contrary, Baker’s book reveals the fact that the man who could be loyal, generous, warm and modest to those he considered his friends could also be (and much too often was) cruel, petty, a braggart, a bully, an anti-Semite and a permanent adolescent.

He also practiced his cruelty on those he claimed to love, including his four wives, two of whom he rejected and one of whom rejected him. It is this third wife, the gifted writer Martha Gellhorn, whose treatment in the biography is the sketchiest and the least satisfactory, but it could very well be that she refused her cooperation to the biographer. The portrait that emerges bears little resemblance to the actual woman.

Given his honesty it is curious that Baker could still retain such admiration for Hemingway the artist once he had developed such cogent insights into Hemingway the man. For the two are inseparable and anyone who has read the bulk of his work is aware that he was in no way comparable to Tolstoi, Dostoevsky or Balzac – or even to Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe or Theodore Dreiser, most of whom Hemingway denigrated in one way or another.

Hemingway worshiped what he thought was courage, virility, endurance and “honor”; he feared and was obsessed by death; he did not understand (and was contemptuous of) women. He adored soldiers (especially officers), bullfighters and prize-fighters, hunters and sportsmen. It was crucial to him to be thought a man of courage, a lover “who bedded every woman he ever wanted,” a marksman, an authority on military science, a fighter and two-fisted drinker. And while Baker’s biography makes it plain how these qualities led step by step to the man’s pathetic disintegration, it also makes plain to the critical reader why his perception of life was so limited and his range as an artist so narrow.

Baker is gentle in the extreme when faced with Hemingway’s mendacity, preferring to call it “romantic pretending.” For Hemingway boldly claimed that he had commanded troops, had gone ashore in the Normandy invasion, was present at the breaching of the Nazis’ West Wall, “killed plenty Nazis” himself and was the first man into liberated Paris – when none of these things were true.

They were part of the legend he was compelled to create out of his own sense of insecurity, which was also manifested by his inability to accept criticism, to tolerate the idea that anyone could write a better book, make more money, shoot a bigger lion, catch a bigger fish, or be more widely admired as a person and as an artist.

As a political thinker Hemingway was a child, which explains why his picture of the Spanish Civil War was attacked by the men he so much admired: the American veterans of that war. Curiously enough, Baker features a scurrilous letter E.H. wrote to the last man to command the Lincoln Battalion – Milton Wolff – but fails to give equal prominence to Hemingway’s honorable apology a short time later.

This unfortunate slip in judgement aside, the book is a solid and almost final telling of the story of a man whose appetites were sometimes larger than life, but who was generally much smaller than the man that he – and that his biographer – thought he was.

[Editor's Note: As part of the tribute to Alvah Bessie, we are running several of his book reviews that he wrote for numerous publications. Below is the first one of the series. Special thanks goes to Dan Bessie for typing and forwarding these reviews]

A LOOK AT SPAIN BY MICHENER

IBERIA
by James Michener,
Random House, 313 Pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie in the Marin Independent Journal,
Saturday June 1, 1968

James Michener is a professional tourist and every few years he comes up with an enormous book, either fiction or non-fiction, covering his most recent travels or continuing interest in foreign lands.

In this way he has made a considerable reputation out of lengthy accounts of Oceania, Japan, Hawaii and Israel, among others. Now he has “done” Spain, and the reader interested in this fascinating country will be able to pick up an enormous amount of undigested information – and enjoy a remarkable series of fine photographs made by a young man named Robert Vavra.

The photographs, unfortunately, are far more evocative of Iberia than the text. For while Michener presents himself as an authority on the history, language, religion and philosophy of the peninsula, its music and theater, dance, poetry and drama, painting, sculpture and architecture (both lay and ecclesiastic), its food and drink, amusement, literature and geography, flora and fauna, the most important resource of Spain is singularly skimped: its people. The aristocracy, the wealthy and “government officials” are quoted, but not the working people who constitute the majority.

Even stranger is his omission of any comprehensive analysis of the Spanish Civil War, the central fact of Spain’s recent history, or of the Spanish scene today, 30 years after the “victory” of Francisco Franco. These omissions are doubly strange, because Michener makes it plan that he was deeply grieved by the defeat of the Spanish Republic, for which he had contemplated fighting “in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade . . . Some of the men I respected most in American life were so serving, and when I thought of them doing the job that I should have been engaged in, I felt ashamed . . . ”
Why, then, didn’t Michener enlist? He gives three reasons:

1. “I was not invited.”

2. He was (correctly) convinced America would soon be at war, and “I was willing to wait until we made our entrance, satisfied that the Republic could hold out till then.” (It couldn’t.)

3. The people engaged in enlisting Americans for the Brigade were “Communists,” who he had never been able to trust.

It is scarcely worth laboring the point, but nobody was “invited” to fight in Spain; people volunteered and Michener “rarely volunteered for anything.” Less honest, however, if he was as well informed about the course of the war, as he wants the reader to believe, is his contention that in 1938 “The defense of a free democracy had been subordinated to the expanded goal of establishing a Communist government. . (Page 697). Such a “goal” never exited.

With such an interpretation of the conduct of the war it is scarcely surprising that on those few occasions when Michener refers to the war itself or details one of its more celebrated incidents (such as the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo, the fascist massacre at Badajoz, etc) he chooses to rely on accounts written by Franco apologists rather than the opposite. Example:

“Facts concerning the Alcazar are so confused and open to challenge that I have relied upon one principal source, The Siege of Alcazar, by Cecil B. Eby (1965), which is in the main pro-Franco.” (Page 140). Or, concerning the current “Bible” of the war, Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War, Michener says, “It seems to me that he writes the general truth concerning these sad events. . . ”

These “sad events” determined the subsequent history of Spain – and determine it today. Not a week passes that we do not read of mass demonstrations of workers and students, supported by priests, directed against the regime, demanding an expanded democracy and a decent standard of living (The minimum wage in Spain is 96 pesetas a day – currently worth $1.37.)

Such facts do not seem to trouble the professional tourist.

Lush Life
By Richard Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
455 pages
$26.00

Set in Manhattan’s historic Lower East Side, Richard Price’s gripping detective novel, Lush Life is the story of the cops and the two different classes-hipsters and street kids-who work and live in the area.

The story centers on the tragic death of Ike Marcus, a bartender at Café Berkmann, a trendy neighborhood restaurant, and Eric Cash, an unsettled aspiring actor and screenwriter. On a late night/early morning drunken tour of all the local watering holes, Eric, Ike, and Steven Boulware, are approached by two Hispanic young men, demanding their wallets. The outing ends with Ike’s last words, “Not tonight, my man” and with a gun shot.

At least that’s how it’s told to the cops, but then come Cash’s own discrepancies, and entirely different accounts of the event told by nearby witnesses. It’s at this point that Detective Matty Clark and his partner Yolanda Bello attempt to unravel the truth from an exhausted Cash, questioning and holding him at the precinct for a number of hours.

Although, both Clark and Bello are convinced that Cash is lying about his role, Clark attempts to get a paraffin test to determine and confirm Cash was indeed the shooter. After a series of frustrating phone-calls up the chain of command within the police unit, Clark is constantly put-off and the paraffin test never occurs. Ultimately, Cash is held for the murder of Marcus-and then everything falls apart. The other eyewitness testimony is inaccurate. Cash is set free and it’s Clark’s and Bello’s job to find the shooter.

Lush Life is a rich tale of haves and have-nots. Price vividly describes the young, privileged middle-class kids who come in droves to Manhattan’s new real-estate hot spot and spend their evenings dining and bar-hopping from trendy to trendier establishments. While the other half, project kids, spend their time, hanging out in front of their buildings or roaming the streets, not straying too far from the ‘hood.

Each character–including the dead Ike and peripheral ones like Matty’s two boorish sons–is beautifully fleshed out. The reader sees this on every page, from Bello’s sympathetic questioning of project kid Tristan to Matty’s increasing frustration with his commanding officer and Ike’s father, Billy Marcus. With the Marcus family, Price poignantly captures their anguish and attempts to cope with Ike’s death.

A master in dialogue, Price creates realistic and rapid exchanges. Each sentence uttered takes the reader further into the world of the Lower East Side and into the heads of each character. As for descriptions of the neighborhood, Price writes a worthy travelogue of the area. Residents and former residents will nod their heads in approval that Price hasn’t whitewashed the neighborhood in spite of developers’ attempts of flagrant gentrification.

Lush Life is intoxicating. It grabs readers from its first pages to its final ones. It is life on the Lower East Side as it is with its wannabe Bohos, cops, and project kids.

PATCHES OF GREY
By Roy L. Pickering, Jr.
M.U.D. House Books
329 pages.
$12.95

Reviewed by Randall Radic

Roy Pickering is a writer who lives in New Jersey. Roy wrote a book called Patches of Grey. It’s a coming-of-age novel, which is set in the projects of New York City. Most, if not all, of the people who live in the projects occupy a zone known as below-poverty-level. They are on welfare, live in subsidized housing, own nothing, have nothing and hope for nothing. Their daily lives revolve around drugs, violence and survival.

Patches of Grey is the story of Tony Johnson, who is a high school senior. Tony is bright and ambitious, and Tony wants out. Tony recognizes that there’s a great big world out there. He can’t imagine what it’s like – not really – but he knows it’s there. He has his sights set on a college scholarship as his magic carpet to a new life. Then he meets a girl. She is white. Tony is black. Which means Tony’s status – the amount of melanin in his skin – becomes a focal point of tension. And racial tension exists because people, who differ in skin-color, exist.

Right away, the reader groans. Not another version of West Side Story steeped in the quandary of race relations and gangs and loss of innocence and heartache and teenage angst and blah, blah, blah. Yawn. Been there, done that.

Actually, Roy Pickering pulls it off without sliding down the slippery slope into the miasma of the same old same old. He pulls it off because he’s one heck of a writer. His metaphors are wonderful, and far from cliché. And he moves from scene to scene smoothly and avoids making the reader feel like he’s being dragged along against his will. Pickering accomplishes this feat through restraint, unobtrusiveness, and delicacy of allusion. Which is a pretentious-literary-reviewer way of saying that the guy can really write.

Patches of Grey deftly immerses the reader in a world that, according to some, is black and white. Good and bad. Rich and poor. The haves and the have nots. Law-breakers and law-abiders. But in the end, the world isn’t that simple. Really, the world is made up of lots of grey patches – those areas where human beings compromise. Human beings compromise because they don’t know what else to do. And when compromise enters the picture, a sense of tarnish oozes across the panorama.

In Patches of Grey, many of the characters are tarnished. Tony’s father has black skin, but he’s a grey person. His bitterness and hatred of everything and everybody, especially of himself, make him grey. Janet, who is Tony’s white girlfriend, suffocates in cloudy thinking, which results in grey actions. She tries to please everyone and doesn’t please anyone, not even herself.

In the end, Tony steps out of the grey patches and walks into the light. Which means the conclusion of the story is far from cliché. In fact, it’s unpredictable. And this alone recommends the book – because in the end, Patches of Grey is about the cost of loss, the cost of being human, the human cost of life not turning out the way it should.

All that being said, the reviewer would make a suggestion to Roy Pickering, who has written an admirable novel in Patches of Grey. Roy should ramble on in his next book. Choose a meandering story of Roberto Bolano-like aspect, and let his tremendous talent seize control of him, rather than him trying to control his talent. For as Nicole Kidman told Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder – another coming-of-age-story – “control is an illusion.” And if/when that artistic surrender happens – to quote Led Zeppelin – “ramble on.” Let the words flow. And because Roy Pickering’s talent is astonishing and ignores every precedent, he doesn’t need to be bound by the constraints of a traditional novel. With his literary gift, he can jump out of that box and nurture his advantages. He can produce an epic novel as vast and as powerful as the tundra of Siberia.

I recently reviewed A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers, and Snitching in a California Jail by Randy Radic for The Internet Review of Books. I had some questions concerning the book, but Randy, who has contributed to this site, took my comments very gracefully and viewed them as constructive criticism. Below is the opening paragraph of the review.

A PRIEST IN HELL:
Gangs, Murderers, and Snitching in a California Jail
By Randall Radic
ECW Press
342 pgs 
$17.95

In early November 2005, Randall Radic, the former pastor of the First Congregational Church in Ripon, California, was arrested for fleecing his flock. The specific crime: Radic sold his parsonage and the church for more than $725,000. With the loot, he went out and bought himself a spanking brand new BMW valued at $100K, wined and dined at exclusive California restaurants, and smoked pricey and aromatic Hoya cigars. When he made a sizeable deposit in his bank account, he writes, “…somebody flushed the toilet.” The bank became suspicious and all bets were off-Radic’s accounts were frozen before he could transfer the dough down to San Diego and make a swift getaway. The church has its main building back, but still owes huge transaction fees.

To read the rest of the review, please visit the April issue of The Internet Review of Books.

Within the next week, I’ll post an interview with Randy about his life, writing, jail, and his plans for upcoming books.