Every month, we assemble a team of Salon critics to sift through the piles of new novels and short story collections we receive and look for that rare gem — a book we would eagerly recommend to a friend. Here’s our list of July fiction, a mixture that includes high-spirited lesbian Victoriana, a haunted boarding school, lovelorn teenagers, a very bad civil servant, a heartbroken professor and, for good measure, a Cuban Pynchon. (We also like Aimee Bender’s “An Invisible Sign of My Own,” reviewed earlier this month. And you’ll find a list of the new books that didn’t impress us at the very end.)
Affinity
By Sarah Waters
Riverhead Books, 352 pages
Sarah Waters’ terrifically entertaining “Affinity” is plumb in love with female swooniness. Its Victorian heroine, Margaret, is forever feeling lightheaded and jumpy, or fighting off the effects of the “draughts” her mother presses on her while she tries to write in her journal. She’s not a weakling or a fool, though. She’s battling both institutional cruelty, in the form of the women’s prison where she pays visits to the inmates, and the strictures society imposes on women, in the form of the domineering mother intent on making her daughter behave as a proper young lady.
Waters — whose first novel was last year’s “Tipping the Velvet” — writes lesbian Victoriana in which her heroines struggle to realize a place where they can live out their desires. Margaret’s desire is embodied by Selina Dawes, a young medium jailed for a disastrous siance that left a woman dead, whom she meets during her prison rounds. The vogue for historical novels makes now an especially good time for a writer like Waters. Her writing is atmospheric and supple enough to glide right past the artificiality of pastiche and immerse us in the period. Occasionally she allows her “point” to come to the fore (“Why do gentlemen’s voices carry so clearly, when women’s are so easily stifled?”), but primarily she’s a storyteller and a spellbinder.
In the past year some of the most pleasurable novels have come from authors who are writing literary versions of women’s romance fiction — Sebastian Faulks’ “Charlotte Gray,” Valerie Martin’s “Italian Fever” (which is indebted to E.M. Forster as well). Waters unashamedly plunges into Gothic melodrama, and what she comes up with is a rarity: a literate page turner. “Affinity” is a nifty example of the pleasure that a serious writer can still bring to a familiar gaslit form.
— Charles Taylor
The River King
By Alice Hoffman
Putnam, 324 pages
Alice Hoffman has a way of sneaking up on you. She expresses herself so simply, and with such unabashed willingness to skirt the edges of “once upon a time,” that a reader can be lulled into thinking that hers is a tamer world than it really is. “The River King,” Hoffman’s 14th novel, is populated with swans and roses, the detritus of fairy tales. But it’s also vividly marked by the fallout of class resentments and the cruelties of love gone wrong and youth gone wild.
The sleepy town of Haddan, Mass., is home to an elite boarding school where the ruling class of tomorrow vents its scorn on the townies of today. Into this sharply divided arena wanders an odd collection of social straddlers: Betsy Chase, the school’s unhappily engaged photography teacher; Abe Grey, the cop with a dark family past; August Pierce, an amateur prestidigitator who loathes his smug classmates; and Carlin Leander, a beautiful outsider on an athletic scholarship. Their lives begin to collide first in ordinary and then in extraordinary ways in the haunted halls of the Haddan School, and “The River King” boldly takes the reader with them over this strange terrain.
Hoffman glides with ease through potentially hokey matters — she has a lovely gift for writing about ghosts and karmic retribution as if they were the most natural things in the world. But her work doesn’t hang upon spectral photographs or floral-scented phantoms. What Hoffman does masterfully is crawl inside the heads of regular people as they fall in love, grieve and sink into the bitterest loneliness, as they find a place in the world, as they die. She doesn’t flinch from the despair of unrequited emotion or the horror of sadistic revenge, nor does she shy away from the giddy glory of love at first sight. In many ways, she’s like her own leading man, August, undeniably deft at simple tricks but blessed with a quietly breathtaking gift of true magic as well.
– Mary Elizabeth Williams
The Name of the World
By Denis Johnson
HarperCollins, 129 pages
Four years after the death of his wife and daughter in an automobile accident, Mike Reed is like a creature suspended in amber. The Midwestern university where he teaches history and attends a string of dinners that end in hot buttered rum sipped before the fire in an atmosphere like that “of a very expensive gift shop” has come to seem oppressive. He can’t muster the energy to hold onto his job or to land a new one at a place called the “Forum for Interpretive Scholarship” (the exquisite meaninglessness of that name testifies to Denis Johnson’s gift for low-key, sidewise satire): “Is there any limit, I thought, to how boring this place can be?”
Although Reed drifts through most of this slim, piercing novel — losing his job, taking up with a gambling partner who winds up punching him out in a bar, stumbling into a crush on an uninhibited student who keeps turning up to do wild things in the oddest places — his inertia hides the fact that he is on the verge of a transformation. It begins when he realizes that even his own grief has lost its initial integrity; he haunts a gallery where he stares at a drawing that “consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand outlines … at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast, chaotic wanderings.”
Concerned with sorrow and the task of continuing in a world riven with loss, where perfection always decays, “The Name of the World” is still often shrewd and funny. Here’s how Johnson describes academic leftists: “What they’d mistaken for a political philosophy had always amounted, they were seeing now, to an aesthetic, and the divorce it was undergoing from its previous claim to relevance could only serve to purify it. They were no-nonsense about being all nonsense.” He says in two sentences what it takes the average academic satirist a whole book to say.
Then there’s the prose. Johnson is the kind of writer who’s so good you don’t notice how good he is. There’s no effort to reading this novel — it just sort of slips in, less like reading than breathing in the cool dry air of winter. When you exhale, perhaps with a sigh as melancholy as one of Mike Reed’s, the warmth will surprise you.
– Laura Miller
Watch Your Mouth
By Daniel Handler
St. Martin’s Press, 272 pages
I was saddened that day a few years ago when Kurt Vonnegut announced he had written his last novel. But after reading “Watch Your Mouth,” I am comforted knowing that Daniel Handler is a writer who is more than ready to pick up the torch and write the kind of deftly funny absurdist story that both horrifies with its subject matter and hooks you with its humor.
“Watch Your Mouth” presents us with the Glass family — Dr. Ben, Mimi and their children, Cynthia and Stephen — and they’re about as far from Salinger’s Glasses as can be. Into their well-to-do Pittsburgh home one summer comes Joseph, Cyn’s college boyfriend, who expects a season of easy work at a local day camp and bountiful sex in the bedroom he and Cyn will share. That last hope is quickly dashed, replaced by the awful realization that the Glasses seem caught in a weird circle of incest. And, as if things weren’t strange enough, Mimi is spending a lot of time down in the basement, building what may be a fully functioning golem, a vengeful monster from Jewish folktales who can rise up and clean house, so to speak, in gruesome, brutal fashion.
Much of “Watch Your Mouth” is presented as an “opera in book form,” a device that could be too cute in the wrong hands; here it works for a house full of events, as Joseph describes them, “that were melodramatic, heart-wrenching, and absurdly — truly — tragic.” Joseph himself is the only character who seems afflicted by passivity, an inaction balanced by his funny, on-target narration (where, for instance, a woman wading topless into the surf is described as resembling “a Venus somebody was trying to throw back”). You don’t have to believe in golems to give yourself over to this novel. But it helps if, like Handler, you believe Tolstoy was wrong, and that each family is different, whether happy or not.
– Edward Neuert
An Obedient Father
By Akhil Sharma
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 292 pages
In the first two lines of his much-anticipated debut novel, “An Obedient Father,” Akhil Sharma makes it clear that he will seek no sympathy and make no apologies for the New Delhi characters he depicts: “I needed to force money from Father Joseph, and it made me nervous. He had bribed me once before, for a building permit, soon after he became principal of Rosary School.” Sharma’s gritty, shocking honesty and spare prose left me spellbound but struggling, trying to understand his elaborately tormented characters, who seem hellbent toward an unimaginable fate. Will these desperate people find redemption in this degenerate capsule of India, and if so, are they worthy of it?
The narrator of the novel, a fat, loathsome and indolent widower named Ram Karan, introduces the reader to a world where relationships are built on mutual bribery and where to be “angry without power is to be ridiculous.” Ram, a bribe taker for the Delhi Physical Education Department and reigning Congress Party, constantly wrestles with his own guilt and self-abhorrence — the inescapable consequence of a life of excessive desire. His darkly comic and insatiable gluttony permeates the narrative, whether he’s salivating over expensive food, leering at a naked woman nursing her baby or extorting money from schools.
Not surprisingly, Ram must protect himself and his family from political vengeance, but it is his home life that poses the biggest threat to his own survival. Twenty years ago, Ram repeatedly raped his daughter Anita and barely fought the temptation to molest Anita’s daughter, Asha, his own granddaughter. When Anita discovers them together, she liberates her repressed rage, subjecting Ram to a peculiar punishment and a series of bribed confessions, the only retribution available to a poor, powerless woman in a country dominated by men.
Already, Sharma’s novel has ignited some controversy; after the New Yorker published an excerpt of “An Obedient Father,” outraged readers questioned Sharma’s graphic passages describing incestuous rape. Many of Ram’s rationalizations are monstrous; in the novel, he asks whether there is “much difference between what I did and a father who makes his children sing before guests at a party.” This extraordinary book, however, unveils a world in which punishment is taken for granted while moral judgment is difficult if not impossible to come by. As Kusum, Ram’s other daughter, who fled India for the United States, explains to her flippant American husband: “What’s a joke there, in your world — that’s the only reality in this world.”
– Suzy Hansen
The Color of Summer
By Reinaldo Arenas
Translated by Andrew Hurley
Viking, 417 pages
The foreword to Reinaldo Arenas’ rollicking Rabelaisian tour de force, “The Color of Summer,” comes more than halfway through the novel, when the Cuban-born author announces that what we’ve been reading constitutes “a grotesque and satirical (and therefore realistic) portrait of an aging tyranny and the tyrant himself … This novel presents a vision of an underground homosexual world that will surely never appear in any newspaper or journal in the world, much less in Cuba.” Arenas’ misplaced “preface” is but one example of the postmodern playfulness he displays throughout. But it’s playfulness with a purpose: “The Color of Summer” represents not only a hilarious and linguistically rich achievement but also a scathing critique of “the Island” (Cuba, of course) and its power-hungry, fatigues-wearing, been-there-practically-forever dictator, Fifo (guess who).
Part autobiography, part ribald re-creation of “the secret history of Cuba,” the novel is the fourth installment in Arenas’ five-volume pentagonia. We’re not talking the dreamy magic realism of Garcma Marquez or the labyrinthine worlds of Borges. Although he deals with themes common to Latin American literature (oppression, exile, the individual vs. society), Arenas creates a fictional universe totally unique, totally his own — a cross between “La Cage aux Folles,” Albert Camus and Thomas Pynchon. Through it all, Arenas places himself amid the action — or rather inaction, as the novel is essentially plotless and nonlinear — as three different personas: Gabriel, the dutiful son; Reinaldo, the tragic writer; and Skunk in a Funk, the “screaming queen.”
At times it’s too much to absorb, and “The Color of Summer” is too loose and baggy for its own good; but when Arenas, who committed suicide in 1990 while suffering from AIDS and who was repeatedly imprisoned by the Cuban authorities, is on (and that’s for the majority of the novel’s short 115 chapters), his writing soars with brilliance, with humor and with brimming rage.
– Andrew Roe
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Don’t bother: What our critics said about the rest
“A Man of Character” by Paolo Capriolo: “A somewhat diverting, but ultimately airless, novel of ideas.”
“Brigham’s Gate” by John Gates: “A great idea — a down-and-out lawyer taking on an insular Mormon town — ruined by the author’s cheesy vanity regarding the main character.”
“Grange House” by Sarah Blake: “The attempt to imitate Victorian narrative is unevenly applied and too precious.”
“La Grande Terese” by Hilary Spurling: “Too thin, a skeletal story with not enough social history of France during the period in question.”
“How to Be a Chicana Role Model” by Michelle Serros: “Funny and sweet but strictly for the very young.”
“Pure” by Rebecca Ray: “I’m getting sick of stories about young girls finding their sexuality, and as a teenager myself, I didn’t even find this believable.”
“All We Know of Love” by Katie Schneiderman: “Bleached-out realism set on an American farm alternates with Italian passages that don’t make a successful sensual contrast. Glum.”
“Birds of Passage” by Robert Sole: “Trying to write ‘The Leopard,’ the author aims at sensory overload, but the result is very by the numbers.”
“Daniel Plainway” by Van Reid: “Overly sweet.”
“Stacking in Rivertown” by Barbara Bell: “An S/M thriller about the secret life of a bestselling novelist and suburban wife who gets mixed up with the mob. Improbable overkill.”
“Blackberry Wine” by Joanne Harris: “The superficial tale of a British writer with a younger woman and a cellar full of magic wine. Unengaging.”
“A Far Better Rest” by Susanne Alleyn: “An alternate telling of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ in which the artificial Victorian style is painfully awful — like a bodice ripper.”
“Conditions of Faith” by Alex Miller: “Like Michael Ondaatje, but without the craft. Elliptical, with too much omniscient narration.”
The title of Andrew Blum’s “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet” is a ricocheting joke. When Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens described the Internet as a “series of tubes” back in 2006, he was roundly mocked for not understanding the online world despite being chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and therefore instrumental in overseeing it. Stevens may not have known what he was talking about, Blum (a correspondent for Wired magazine) acknowledges, but he wasn’t wrong, either. In writing this account of “the Internet’s physical infrastructure,” Blum found that “one thing [the Internet] most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes.”
The average resident of the developed world uses the Internet constantly, contemplating its impact on contemporary life and exploring its numberless delights, temptations and annoyances on a daily basis. Yet, for most of us, any notion of how all this information arrives in our homes and workplaces is weirdly immaterial. Stevens was ridiculed for his hopelessly old-fashioned reference to the physical world and the movement of palpable objects, while smart kids and late-night comics grasped that the Internet has zipped beyond all that to become the disembodied essence of human communication.
Only it’s not, and “Tubes” is about the actual, physical things — many of them tubes — that make up the pathways of the Internet. For all their significance to contemporary life, governance, commerce and industry, these conduits aren’t an alluring topic. Like a lot of important things, they are superficially dull and trivial: bundles of cables; deserted stations ringed in cyclone fencing beside lonely highways; featureless, windowless buildings in old warehouse districts and, above all, rooms filled with metal boxes, blinking lights and cool, dry processed air. This is not the stuff that dreams are made of — and at the same time it is, because dreams of every sort thrive online.
Fortunately, Blum is a smart, imaginative, evocative writer who embraces the task of making his readers feel the wonder represented by these unprepossessing objects. In the Cornish seaside town of Porthcurno, he’s shown a black cable emerging from the floor, “spooled into steel trays the size of merry-go-rounds, like something stolen from Richard Serra’s storehouse,” and pictures the thousands of miles it extends, through the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, all the way back to Long Island, where, in the form of light shining down strands of glass, it will carry home the email he writes to his wife from his hotel room that night. (Another cable, running from Portugal to Africa is a “nine-thousand-mile path of light… that would transform a continent.”) Swathes of cables lifted from beneath the streets of Manhattan by workmen are likened to “giant squid under the streetlights.”
This book is more than a electrical engineering travelogue, however; in the course of his research Blum interviewed representative examples of the people who make the Internet work and a smattering of those who helped build it in the first place. The computer science professor at UCLA who, in 1969, used a phone line to connect that university’s computer network with Stanford’s shows Blum the IMP (Interface Message Processor) used for the task: a file-cabinet-sized box — the first piece of the Internet! — now shoved into the corner of a shabby conference room. He attends a meeting of network operators, the people who, among other things, negotiate the direct, plug-in, network-to-network connections that are the building blocks of the net, and hears a Dutch woman imitating an old-school street hawker: “I have eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. For all of you with content, please send me an email.”
So ingeniously beguiling is Blum’s way of conveying all this that, before you know it, you have acquired a sense of the basic structure of Internet — from old-school exchanges to fiber-optic regeneration stations. The Internet turns out to be not quite what Blum (and a lot of other people, including myself) assumed. “I expected to find a loose arrangement of little pieces,” he writes, expressing an idea probably shared by many of his readers. “It was all supposed to be distributed, amorphous, nearly invisible.” True, information can travel via a variety of routes, but most of the time it makes its way along major thoroughfares. While the Internet doesn’t exactly have a center, it certainly has nodes and backbones where most of the connections are made and the data stored. Blum tried to lay eyes on as many of these as he could.
It wasn’t always easy. Having arranged to visit a brand-new Google data center in rural eastern Oregon, Blum never gets closer to the servers than the lunchroom, and his interviews are supervised so oppressively it’s like taking an official tour of North Korea. (Perhaps ironically, a Facebook center in the same region proved much more open.) For months, Cablevision, his own Internet service provider, dodged his requests for an overview of how data got from their network to his home in Brooklyn. While the more secretive of the organizations he contacted often attributed their caution to security concerns, Blum was skeptical. He compares a stopover at the friendly visitor center at nearby Bonneville Dam to the “Orwellian atmosphere” at Google; both are important, strategically sensitive resources, but only one is shut up tighter than Fort Knox. Blum questions whether it’s wise to hand over “so much of ourselves” to corporations that are not obliged to return the trust.
Part of the utopian romance of the Internet is that it has no weight, no friction, no footprint, no smell. The buzzword of the moment — “cloud” — promises ethereality, pure information, a dream with almost supernatural intimations. Yet as one of Blum’s data-center tour guides explains, “This is the cloud. All those buildings like this around planet create the cloud. The cloud is a building. It works like a factory.” It needs power, raw materials and staff. And its roots are in the earth.
Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days she’d become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didn’t match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.
One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.
Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.
Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.
Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.
The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.
But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”
Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.
Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.
As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.
The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”
Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.
Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.
An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.
The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”
The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.
All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.
It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.
The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”
While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.
This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?
The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.
If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.
This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.
Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”
“Bring Up the Bodies,” Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, “Wolf Hall,” is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form — by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted — but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we’re sharing with them.
As with “Wolf Hall,” the central character in “Bring Up the Bodies” is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from “Wolf Hall” declares, “He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.”
This is, incidentally, Cromwell’s own assessment, but he’s saved from vanity by the fact that his confidence is not just well-placed but precisely placed; he is the ultimate realist, and he possesses that most potent of assets, an excellent knowledge of himself. In the thousands of fictional retellings of Henry’s reign — most of them focused on his ambitious second wife, Anne Boleyn — Cromwell is typically depicted as a ruthless schemer. He got rid of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when Henry wanted Anne, and he got rid of Anne, too, when the time came. The first ejection led to the foundation of the Church of England and the second to the execution of six people.
As Mantel tells it — she describes the novel as “a proposal, an offer,” rather than an assertion of historical truth — Cromwell represents the vanguard of a new era, one in which ability trumps noble birth. He can countenance any number of insults from the arrogant aristocrats he works with because he knows that “chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the money lender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and the kings are their waiting boys.”
He would never dream of voicing such thoughts, of course, and part of the marvel of Cromwell the character is his self-control. “I never forget myself,” he tells the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire at a moment when his temper has been sorely provoked. “What I do, I mean to do.” The style Mantel employs to write about this exemplar of the will is declarative to the point of bullishness; her voice is his. The character’s allure lies in his energy and his resilience, and it’s thrilling to hitch your readerly perspective to a man who can seemingly do anything and furthermore has the nerve to try.
But if Cromwell is a man of action, he’s also, at age 50, prone to reflection and haunted by the dead. “Bring Up the Bodies” opens with falconry in the picture-book English countryside during the king’s summer “progress” (a sort of nationwide tour) of 1535. Cromwell’s falcons are named after his two daughters, who, with his beloved wife, died in London’s intermittent epidemics. He hasn’t forgotten them, but it’s significant that he’s memorialized them as birds of prey. Above all, Cromwell nurses a grudge against all who participated in the downfall of his mentor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Yet, he is not without warmth. A conscientious and covertly tender householder, he presides over the lives of assorted dependents from various social classes. His carefully concealed soft spot for distressed gentlewomen and exiled court figures like Catherine and her daughter, Mary Tudor, leads him to make small but largely unappreciated efforts on their behalf.
We are shown that Cromwell is ruthless — there’s passing mention of hangings in Ireland, among other things — but we also know that he is loyal. This is his saving virtue. His allegiance is to England and to Henry, who, like the late Cardinal, has recognized his worth and raised him up. Some of the more notorious highlights of Cromwell’s career — the dissolution and sacking of monasteries and other Church property and the execution of Thomas More, depicted in “Wolf Hall” — are cast in this light: England’s riches should belong to the state, not to Rome, and be utilized for the benefit of her king and people. Like a modern Labor Party politician, Cromwell tries to pass poor laws and work programs in the face of mighty resistance from Parliament and the aristocracy.
Throughout the first two parts of “Bring Up the Bodies,” this is the Cromwell we accompany. He is the king’s most valued councilor and is effectively running the country. His enemies are preening, scornful and often foolish noblemen, out to promote clannish interests or reconciliation with Rome. Anne Boleyn, his former ally, has turned on him, and turned off the king. “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist,” Cromwell thinks. “He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does,” yet she has overestimated her own security. They are two of a kind, perhaps, but unlike him, she has let her success go to her head and will, in consequence, lose both.
Discouraged by Anne’s inability to give him a son and harried by the vixenish ways that once enthralled him, Henry falls for Jane Seymour, “a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.” It becomes Cromwell’s job not only to clear the way for Jane to become Henry’s third wife, but to make the king feel that he is justified in discarding a second spouse. Cromwell pursues this goal in the conviction that sooner or later Anne would have come after him and his friends.
That’s the setup, but as the interrogation and trials of Anne and her alleged lovers commence, Mantel carries the reader into harrowing territory. Cromwell tricks a foppishly romantic musician into boasting of having slept with the queen (Mantel does not endorse the view that the man was tortured into this admission) and conducts a series of interviews with the four doomed noblemen accused of being her lovers and of plotting against the king. The four also happen to be Cromwell’s political enemies and, furthermore, key participants in a satirical court entertainment that depicted Cardinal Wolsey being dragged to hell by devils. “He needs guilty men,” Cromwell tells himself. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”
Political horror is not a new literary mode — you can find it in the New Testament as well as in such 20th-century works as George Orwell’s “1984.” However, the protagonist in those stories is invariably the victim. “Bring Up the Bodies” devotes 270 pages to developing its hero, investing the reader in the superiority of his personality and cause, and then ushers him into the interrogator’s chair. Cromwell is contriving to send these people to the scaffold for crimes they quite possibly did not commit, however “guilty” they may be of others. Because he is our man ever bit as much as he is Henry’s man, we are, in some obscure way native to the laws of fiction, implicated. These are not easy chapters to read, although they are magnificently realized.
As assured as her implacable protagonist, Mantel walks the edge of a very sharp knife in the last part of “Bring Up the Bodies.” I don’t believe she cuts her feet on it, but sometimes it felt as if she were cutting mine. It’s impossible to repudiate Cromwell, but embracing him has become infinitely complicated. Of all the many fictional depictions of the moral quandaries involved in the exercise of great power, this may be one of the most disturbing. It comes much closer than any I’ve ever encountered to letting you know how it must feel to manage the fate of a nation: how intoxicating and how very, very perilous.
When people use the term “rhetoric” these days, they usually mean empty language — be it high-flown or spoken in high dudgeon. A few may think of rhetoric as a deadly classical discipline devoted to the exhaustive parsing and labeling of figures of speech: zeugma, anyone? Yet as Sam Leith points out in his delightful and illuminating “Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama,” we live in the most rhetorical era in human history, surrounded by and embroiled in argument, enticement, invective and panegyric wherever we turn.
The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion — which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master’s “Rhetoric” is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it’s their own idea) throughout his book. “He was the first person,” Leith writes of Aristotle, “really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself.”
Rhetoric is also, to be blunt, the art of talking people into things, and it flourishes in courtrooms and on campaign trails, in singles bars and television commercials, over dinner tables and in Internet forums. Leith, a British journalist and novelist, wants to revive the formal appreciation of rhetorical technique, but he acknowledges that today it’s precisely when we are most aware of rhetorical skill that we condemn it. If Barack Obama won the presidency largely on his strengths as an orator (a testimony to rhetoric’s importance if there ever was one), that same eloquence has become a stick to beat him with in the hands of his critics. Rick Santorum is typical in dismissing Obama “just a person of words.” “It seemed,” Leith writes of the 2008 election, “that though we expected politicians to make speeches, we didn’t like them to be too good at it.”
This isn’t precisely true; Obama’s supporters celebrate his speechmaking. But the potshots do illustrate the contemporary ambivalence toward smooth-talking of any kind. Whereas the ancients admired rhetoric as a consciously mastered skill, we prefer (we think) people who speak “from the heart” — if not quite spontaneously, then at the very least approximating a free outflowing of their supposedly true selves. To appear to have thought too much about what you’re saying, to be obviously conscious of it as a performance, is to seem insincere. No wonder the study of rhetoric per se has fallen by the wayside.
But of course, as Leith also points out, “being anti-rhetoric is, finally, just another rhetorical strategy.” “Words Like Loaded Pistols” sports a fabulous assortment of examples of time-tested rhetorical gambits in action. Exhibit A for “anti-rhetorical rhetoric” is Sarah Palin’s taped television address following the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others in Arizona. The lunatic gunman, some observers felt, had been egged on by the paramilitaristic language and imagery of right-wingers in general and Palin’s own website in particular. Leith breaks down Palin’s statement using classical rhetorical terminology, but he also holds it up as an illustration of the ironic paradoxes of anti-rhetoric. “The way she chose to defend herself against trial by media was through the media; while denying that words could be held responsible for inciting hatred and violence, she asserted that media reporting on her” was inciting hatred and violence.
In further case studies, Leith examines the rhetorical technique of everyone from Eminem and “South Park” to Frederick Douglass, the courtroom combatants in “A Few Good Men,” Richard Nixon and his famous Checkers speech and Earl Spencer in the eulogy for his sister, Princess Diana. Interstitial chapters highlight “Champions of Rhetoric”: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Cicero and Martin Luther King Jr., etc. (not excepting Hitler, because whatever else can be said about the man, he knew how to fire up a crowd).
Although this greatest-hits element is key to the appeal of “Words Like Loaded Pistols,” Leith also provides a brisk overview of rhetorical principles and terms — the latter of which, in tongue-twisting Greek and Latin, many readers will promptly forget. (It is amusing to learn that the lyrics to the Carpenters’ “Close to You” present a textbook specimen of hypophora.) However obscure the terminology may seem to modern readers, however, the thinking underlying it is rock solid.
And to judge by much of the public speaking and ostensibly persuasive writing one sees these days, it’s also woefully neglected. “Words Like Loaded Pistols” isn’t a how-to book, but chances are that anyone who reads it will acquire a trick or two. Many a catastrophic best-man toast or limping pitch meeting demonstrates the need for a better understanding of the elementary guidelines laid down well over 2,000 years ago: Know your audience and strive to portray yourself as one of them; adjust your style to the tenor of the occasion; consider starting with a tactical concession; and so on. The marvel is not that the old techniques still work, but that we ever persuaded ourselves that we could do without them.
Andrew Blum 
Joji Obara and Lucie Blackman (Credit: Estate of Lucie Jane Blackman) 
Matti Friedman 
Sam Leith (Credit: Alice Bowden) 
