All happy families are unhappy in their own way

If you want to write a memoir (and who doesn't these days?) Hervé Le Tellier's All Happy Families, skillfully translated by Adriana Hunter, would be a good model to follow. Le Tellier is a French writer and linguist, and a member of the international literary group Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, which translates roughly as "workshop of potential literature"). He's published 21 books, six of which have been translated into English, including The Sextine Chapel, A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies), Enough About Love,  Intervention of a Good Man, Electrico W, (for which the translator Adriana Hunter won the 27th Annual Translation Prize founded by the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation), and Atlas inutilis,

One secret to writing an engaging memoir is to wait until everyone you are liable to offend by telling the truth about them is dead. Le Tellier was able to reach a certain emotional distance from his family and write All Happy Families after his father and stepfather were dead and his mother was suffering from late-stage Alzheimers and will never read the book.

Skip the chronology

Another secret is to avoid a strict chronology of the sort: "I was born on April 21, 1957. I grew up in Paris. We would go to the country in the summer . . . " Boring, boring, boring. Le Tellier is anything but boring. For example, by page 2, he's realized at age twelve he's a monster. He's been alone in the Paris apartment for the evening. The telephone rings and he imagines it to be the police reporting the death of his mother and stepfather. But it's not. It's his mother reassuring him that they were running late. "It occurred to me that I hadn't been worried. I'd imagined their demise with no feelings of panic or sadness. I was amazed to have so quickly accepted my status as an orphan, and appalled by the twinge of disappointment when I recognized my mother's voice. That's when I knew I was a monster."

Another secret is to explicate the family dynamics. Le Tellier's aunt married an exceptionally successful engineer who became wealthy. The uncle encourages Hervé's mother and stepfather to buy a studio in the Avoriaz ski area. A good deal because renting it to others during the season almost covered the mortgage and the family was able to go for a couple weeks in winter. "It was only later that I understood how much these holidays spent in luxury, thanks to her sister, exasperated and humiliated my mother. She may have been discreet in front of the whole family, but once alone with us she never stopped accusing her brother-in-law of taking kickbacks and making 'shady deals,' and—not without an element of self-contradiction—she criticized my father for being so honest or, worse still, for 'lacking ambition'; in a word for being 'stupid.'"

But sketch the personalities

Yet another secret is to sketch the personalities and relationships within the family. "My mother had complete authority over him [Le Tellier's stepfather]. He was visibly afraid of her fits of rage, which were both terrifying and unpredictable, and he had abidicated any form of resistance. She made all the decisions and she held such a hold over him that she even composed the letters he wrote to his family. He simply had to copy out her rough drafts. At the end of these letters my mother even added the name 'Guy' [the stepfather's] so he didn't forget to sign them."

Of course, for a really lively memoir, it doesn't hurt to have a character like Le Tellier's as a mother. After Guy died, she was infected by the idea that Guy and her sister had been lovers. A cousin reported a scene on the street when the estranged sisters happened to meet. Accused of the affair, the aunt shook her head in bafflement. "Well then swear to me, I mean swear to me," my mother said, "that you never slept with Guy."
    "I swear it," said my aunt.
    "Swear it on our father's grave, and I'll believe you," my mother insisted.
    "I swear it on our father's grave," said my aunt.
    There was a long silence, then my mother spat out, "I don't believe you."

It also does not hurt to have been involved with historic events—even if on the periphery. Her mother and aunt lived through the German occupation of Paris, which included deporting Jewish neighbors. His mother did not remember the girl in her seventh grade class who lived across the street and who vanished one day in 1942..

All Happy Families implicitly makes the case that all happy families are all unhappy in their own way. It is a delightful account by an astute and thoughtful writer. I was happy to make his acquaintance.

Relationships are the key to the solution

Guest review by my mystery-loving wife Marian:

Relationships are at the heart of the newest Eleanor Kuhns mystery starring Will Rees, The Shaker Murders. As a new reader of this series, I was introduced to the close relationship between Will and his wife Lydia, and waited along with these characters for the birth of their baby. Another set of relationships shown in the book is between the couple’s adopted children. And there are other family connections that affect what Will and Lydia do during the course of this sixth book in the series.

Equally intriguing were the relationships between our main characters and members of the Shaker community where Will and Lydia come to stay for two weeks, as their new baby’s birth approaches. Readers learn more about the community and the Elders as we see their reactions to sudden deaths that Will believes are murders. We also get a glimpse into the complex emotional issues some characters face as they decide whether to become or remain a Shaker.

 Will is a loving husband and father, determined to find a good home for his growing family, despite the dangers and obstacles. This is the overarching theme as the book progresses. However, his frequent angry outbursts complicate these efforts. This makes him human, but it can also be frustrating to readers like me, who wonder why Will seems to be on the edge of boiling over time after time. Still, the mystery comes to a satisfying end, with relationships the key to solving the murders in the Shaker community.

Why Michael Connelly is so great

Dark Sacred Night is Michael Connelly's latest mystery starring California police detective Harry Bosch. Harry, as a result of events that occurred in an earlier book, no longer works for the Los Angeles Police Department but is working part time as a reserve officer for the San Fernando PD. Harry is probably in his early 60s, is a widow, with a daughter in college, and has taken in a recovering drug addict, the mother of a murdered child.

In this book, Connelly introduces Reneé Ballard, a 32-year-old LAPD detective who provoked a departmental transfer when she reported the sexual harassment of a superior. Ballard now works "the late show," the graveyard shift out of Hollywood Station. By the end of the book, Bosch and Ballard have formed a team. In fact the cover of Dark Sacred Night says that this is "A Ballard and Bosch Novel."

So what makes Connelly so great?

First, although Harry Bosch has been the main character in twenty previous novels, you need not have read them to understand and enjoy this one. Too often series writers have to (or feel they have to) explain why the detective is the way he is by summarizing a previous book. We don't need to know why Bosch no longer works for the LAPD; if we care we can read the earlier book.

Next, Connelly tells his stories from the limited third-person point of view. The Dark Sacred Night story begins with a title page: "Ballard" in which we travel with her to the scene of a death. Forty-three pages later, another title page: "Bosch," in which we learn that Bosch is working on a nine-year-old cold case. While we switch between Ballard and Bosch, which gives Connelly somewhat more freedom of action  we are never in any other point of view. Too often for my taste the writer puts us in the mind of the murderer,  coyly not identifying him (or her), or in the point of view of the victim; I think it's a form of cheap—unearned, perhaps—suspense.

Finally, Dark Sacred Night sounds as if this is what police work is actually like. Both Ballard and Bosch have to spend an inordinate amount of time on tedious, boring, unproductive tasks. Connelly is able somehow to evoke this side of police work without writing a tedious, boring book. Also, Ballard is called out to investigate at least three other cases during the time the novel covers. These a're not all deaths, not all the deaths are homicides, and the homicide is solved, like most, within forty-eight hours. (I've read that if a murder is not solved within two or three days, it may never be.)

Dark Sacred Night is a police procedural, with the stress on procedure. I can imagine a complaint that  Ballard and Bosch are too focused on the work; we don't get enough of their internal, their emotional lives. I would disagree, perhaps because I am a man. Neither Bosch nor Ballard is dropped from Mars. They do have, or have had, families and current relationships. They are not lonely figures riding off alone and separate into the dawn at the end of the book. They do solve the crime (a given in a mystery), and both the crime and its solution feel plausible. With Bosch and Ballard teaming up, there's more to come and I look forward to reading it.

Women: Four views of romance in pre-war Europe

Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian playwright, essayist, journalist, and novelist, was born in 1907 as Iosef Hechter. He worked as a lawyer and writer until anti-Semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, he was killed in early 1945 as he was crossing a Bucharest street teach his first class when he was hit by a truck. He's best known in English for his Journal, 1935-1944 published in 1999.

Women, originally published in Romania in 1933 when Sebastian was 26 years old, has now been translated into fluent and engaging English by Philip Ó Ceallaigh and published by Other Press. The book has four sections, all focusing on women in the protagonist's life: the first section covers Renée, Marthe, Odette; the second features Émile; the third Maria; and the last Arabela. Sebastian writes the first section in the third person: "It's not yet eight. Stefan Valeriu can tell by the sunlight, which has crept only as far as the edge of his chaise longue." Stefan, a medical student, is vacationing on an Alpine lake and has an affair with the wife of another hotel guest, Renée. However,  "As it turns out, Renée doesn't know how to love. Her first embrace is strikingly awkward; there is no reticence or delay in yielding, only a series of hesitations, more likely from awkwardness than from modesty . . . "

Sebastian writes the next section in the first person, the persona of Stefan: Here is his description of Émile: "I think making love was more a physical difficulty than a moral one for her. At the risk of using an ambiguous expression, I'd say that for her love had become a problem of balance. What must have seemed impossible for her about love was moving her center of gravity. Being a vertical creature and then assuming a horizontal position—that what I believed tortured her sensual dreams, if ever had any. I think the whole mystery of love was summed up for her in the fact, and she could't get her head around it."

The third section is written as a letter from Maria to Stefan describing her affair with Andrei. Here she describes him eating: "He was greedy, cheerful, and communicative, with a candor that suited him wonderfully and an absence of self-awareness that would have been an excuse for any crime or betrayal. I had always enjoyed watching Andrei eating and I think his greed is the only truly good thing in him, because (maybe I'm talking nonsense, but I'll tell you anyway) there's something childlike about a greedy man, something which tempers his roughness and self-importance and reduces the intimidating aspect of his masculinity."

The last section is again written in the first person, an older Stefan who presents himself as the technical adviser to the Ministry of Health of Romania in its relations with the International Commission for Medical Cooperation. He attends a circus performance in Paris in which Arabela stars. He falls in love with her, and they create their own act: "I was grateful to Arabela for unintentionally knocking me off my reasonable, predestined course and turning the serious gentleman she'd met that November night into somebody who forgot that he was a doctor, adviser, and diplomat and became again what he had always wanted to be: a young man."

The book feels very European in its attitudes, assumptions, and landscapes. As such, it's interesting for its observations and insights. Interesting that the telephone, radio, even the automobile barely exist. It does not feel as if it were written by a 26-year-old, although, having been born in a small city in Romania (Brăila on the Danube) and growing up a cultured Jew and experiencing growing anti-Semitism, Sebastian may have been more mature than his years would suggest. 

Women is a fascinating picture of a time and the relations between people. The citations above may suggest how well Sebastian is able to convey both the characters and their relationships. A novel worth reading more than once.

"The Fun Parts": Fun but exhausting

Sam Lipsyte knows how to start a story (he should; he teaches writing in Columbia University's School of Arts). Here are three examples from his collection The Fun Parts:

—"Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut," said Mandy's father. American traps tended to hang open. Pure crap poured out. What he and the other had gone through shouldn't have a name, he told her friend Tovah all those years later in the nursing home. People gave name to things so they could tell stories about them, goddamn fairy tales about children who got out alive."

—My wife wanted another baby. But I thought Philip was enough. A toddler is a lot. I couldn't picture us going through the whole ordeal again. We'd just gotten our lives back. We needed to snuggle with them, plan their futures."

—Everybody waited for me to get skinny. My father said it could be any day. My mother said if I got skinny, it would improve my moods. She promised me a new wardrobe, one more congruent with my era, my region. My sister said if I got skinny, there would the possibility of hand jobs from her friends in the Jazz Dancing Club. Blow jobs, even. All the jobs. It was only fair, she said. Her friends had brothers. She'd done her part.

The stories are funny—sometimes laugh-out-loud funny—and sometimes grim and sometimes funny/grim. But they are also difficult to sum up fairly and accurately. The flap copy writer does a better job than I can do: "A boy eats his way to self-discovery . . . [a boy] must battle the reality-brandishing monster preying on his fantasy realm . . . an aerobics instructor, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul . . . Other stories feature a grizzled and possibly deranged male doula, a doomsday hustler about to face the multi-universal truth of 'the real-ass jumbo,' and a tawdry glimpse of the northern New Jersey High school shot-putting circuit, circa 1986." In other words, Lipsyte's range is prodigious.

He writes the stories in short bursts with line breaks, usually filled with crisp dialogue, but even the prose between the dialogue crackles: "Goth girls, coke ghosted, rehabbed at twelve and stripping sober, begged for my sagas of degradation, epiphany. They pressed in with their inks, their dyes, their labial metals and scarified montes, cheered their favorite passages, the famous one, where I ate some sadistic dealer's turd on a Portuguese sweet roll for the promise of a bindle, or broke into a funeral parlor and slit a corpse open for the formaldehyde . . . "

My problem with the stories—and I admit it's my problem and may not be anyone else's—is that they're too bouncy, too rich while being stripped down, too glittery surface. They're written for people with short attention spans. They're not written to be read one after another. Nothing sticks. Once I put the book down, I could not recall a week later any of the characters or their situations, only brief glimpses of a situation or a character remained.

That said, I think anyone interested in writing could read The Fun Parts to see how Lipsyte does it. How he can set up a situation or a character in a few sentences. How he uses dialogue to reveal (or hide) character and advance the action. One caution: The style is so vivid you have to take care not to allow it to creep into your own writing. One Sam Lipsyte writing like Sam Lipsyte is enough.