Are You Reader Enough? Book Selections, Shaken and Stirred

Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation by George Washington.

Food for Thought  

Rule the 1^st: Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.  Long before he Fathered Our Country and in the horticulturally ambiguous aftermath of the Cherry Tree Incident, adolescent George Washington put aside his prunus avium-whacking axe and made tentative gestures toward Greatness and Immortality, hand-copying one-hundred-and-ten precepts from a sixteenth-century Jesuit work for aspiring young gentleman of quality.  An exceedingly correct teenager with a compulsion for list-making, George completed the exercise and carried his rules across a lifetime of historically significant civility and decency.

Just look where the exercise carried him!  Delegate to Continental Congresses, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, First President of the United States... his likeness on postage stamps and currency, a big tall obelisk on the National Mall in the Nation’s Capital.  And let's not forget a most heroic moment: George, resolutely standing and refusing a florescent orange life jacket during the celebrated crossing of a storm-tossed Delaware River.

All of this accomplished without overt helicopter parenting by Augustine Washington and without attachment parenting by the First Mom Enough of Our Country.  Even as we refrain from commentary on civility and decent behavior, we maintain that Mary Ball Washington would not have dressed young George in camouflage gear, balanced him upon a rustic stool, ripped open her bodice and exclaimed, Come hither, eighteenth-century portrait painter Robert Edge Pine, and capture this intimate moment of maternal bonding for all eternity... oil on canvas, if you please!  None of that: just one-hundred-and-ten ridiculously sublime maxims, dutifully transcribed and scrupulously executed, by George.

Rule the 107^th:  If others talk at the Table be attentive but talk not with Meat in your Mouth.  In other words: Listen up, but refrain from proffering opinion and sentiment regarding this month’s book selection until you have both masticated and downed the final delectable fork full of Pear (Pyrus Communis) Upside-Down Cake that MH so civilly and decently prepared for us.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.

Viking, 2011.  335 pages.

Fiction Favorites 

Rule the 18^th... come not near the Books or Writings of Another so as to read them unless desired or give your opinion of them unask’d.... Fair enough, George, but had we not come near the Books or Writings of Another at Sages Pages, and had Another not given an opinion unask’d as we irresolutely browsed hardcover fiction, we may never have discover’d this immensely stylish debut novel by author-and-investment-banker Amor Towles.

It's New Year's Eve in Manhattan, 1937.  Brooklyn-born Katey Kontent and Midwestern-beauty Eve Ross, affably impoverished twenty-something career chums, meet dashing banker Tinker Grey at a Greenwich Village jazz club.  Not surprisingly, vintage behavior ensues. The inveterate flirts and their new romantic interest cultivate plot-thickening camaraderie and formulate predictable triangulations until Fate intervenes, Fortune intercedes, and the Future unfolds with black-and-white cinematic panache: There was Eve... In a new white dress... reclining on one of the couches with one arm behind her head and the other at her side.  It was a been-here-all-my-life sort of pose.  With the lights of the city draped behind her and the martini glass on the carpet, she looked like an advertisement for being in a car wreck....

Ferociously ambitious Eve battles back from the brink of catastrophe, and fiercely independent Katey finds her way to the penthouse floors of New York society, where she drinks martinis, broadens her social skyline, makes less impoverished friends, drinks martinis, waits for Tinker to return to her life, realizes a few dreams, regrets a few choices, and drinks a few more martinis.   
Rule the 76^th... Point not with your Finger at him of Whom you Discourse nor Approach too near him to whom you talk.... Nevertheless, we express Gratitude to the Bookstore Stranger who Approached near and Pointed with her Finger to this charming consideration of how decisions made in a Manhattan moment define the days and decades to come.  

 

A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell.

Yarrow Press, 1991 (1942).  327 pages.

Oldies But Goodies

Rule the 24^th: Do not laugh too loud or too much at any Publick Spectacle.... Here’s a wonderful companion piece to Rules of Civility, a reissued classic, a rediscovered gem, full of Devastating Wit, Scathing Satire, and Publick Spectacle that had us laughing too loud and snickering too much on a recent flight from Newark, New Jersey, aka Brick City, USA, to Nashville, Tennessee, aka Music City, USA.

Set in the months preceding the United States’ entry into World War II, Dawn Powell’s spoof-on-the-rocks features a cadre of misanthropic, martini-swilling Manhattanites employing all manner of mercenary means to egocentric ends.  At the center of the spoofiness are self-absorbed publishing baron Julian Evans and his ambitious, pseudo-novelist trophy spouse, Amanda Keeler Evans, purveyor of publick spectacle and perpetrator of deliciously uncivil and indecent behavior.  Amanda has no compunction about exploiting a newly-arrived and convenient acquaintance from her nebulous Ohio past as she embarks on an affair with former boyfriend Ken Saunders to satisfy narcissistic impulses and reckless compulsions. 

Our Heroine, self-conscious Midwestern transplant Vicky Haven... tried to act very much at ease by taking a martini every time it was offered and refusing the canapés.  This was because what she really wanted was the canapés, having had nothing but coffee since she got off the train, but she had learned long ago that whatever she wanted was certain to be bad form or in some way wrong.

The Big Apple Cinderella motif employed so charmingly in Rules of Civility and A Time to Be Born reminds us of the 1988 romantic comedy Working Girl.  Remember how Staten Islander Melanie Griffith, armed with nothing but pluck and ingenuity-- and fortified with vintage hair product and encouraging vocals from Carly Simon-- exacts revenge upon her uncivil and indecently wicked boss Sigourney Weaver? 

Dawn Powell, 1914

Once upon a time, Ernest Hemingway called working girl Dawn Powell his favorite living author. Powell’s biography explains her literary fascination with transplanted Midwesterners and the Martini-Drinking City.  Born in Ohio, she spent an unhappy childhood with a wicked stepmother who destroyed precious diaries and notebooks.  She moved to Manhattan after college graduation, married a struggling poet, lived and loved and wrote in Greenwich Village for the remainder of her uncelebrated yet prolific days.

And now for something completely different: a full-scale replica of the Athenian Parthenon located in Nashville Tennessee!  It was constructed in 1897 as part of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition and has been lovingly preserved and protected through the years by the good people of Nashville, aka the Athens of the South.

 

Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Booth Luce by Sylvia Jukes Morris.

Random House, 1997.  561 pages.
Non Fiction and Biographies

Rule the 7^th: Put not off your clothes in the presence of others, nor go out your chamber half dressed.... Powell initially denied that preternaturally beautiful, promiscuous, talented and ambitious Amanda Keeler Evans of pen-and-ink fiction was modeled after preternaturally beautiful, promiscuous, talented and ambitious Clare Boothe Luce of flesh-and-blood nonfiction-- until she discovered a crumpled note-to-self she’d jotted several years before the publication of A Time to Be Born that ruminated, Why not do a novel on Clare Luce?  Hmm....

This lavish biography, narrated by the writer-wife of Edmund Theodore Rex Morris, establishes oodles of common ground between imagined Amanda Keeler Evans and imaginative Clare Boothe Luce.  Over time, our peripatetic real-life heroine casts herself as fashion journalist, social activist, snarky playwright, temperamental editor, trophy wife, southern hostess, war reporter, Eisenhower Republican, two-term congresswoman, globe-trotting ambassador, ardent anti-communist, serial home decorator, sometime home wrecker, and Most Interesting Woman in the World!  For another Most Interesting Woman in the World, please refer to Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations in Non Fiction and Biographies.

And while the historical record indicates that often-absent Clare was not Mom Enough to make the cover of Time, she apparently was more than willing to put off her clothes in the presence of others and was known to emerge from her chamber spectacularly half dressed.  To wit, she was Fascinating Enough to capture the matrimonial attentions of Time, Life, and Fortune alpha-publisher Henry Luce:  After dessert Clare tapped her glass for attention and said that she had met the man she intended to marry.  But with infuriating coyness she refused to name him, saying only that he was ‘connected with the movies.’  Speculative names came from around the table.  ‘Clark Gable?’  ‘Robert Taylor?’  ‘Douglas Fairbanks?' You're getting warmer, just like MH's Pear Upside-Down Cake....

Indeed, one might imagine that Clare's announcement was preceded by a slice of MH’s Pear Upside-Down Cake and followed by lively conjecture, in which case the heroine's civil and decent dinner guests undoubtedly followed Rule the 97^th: Put not another bite into your mouth till the former be swallow; let not your morsels be too big.

  

Clare, coincidentally, spent several restive formative years in Nashville, Tennessee, aka the Buckle of the Bible Belt.  One is left to wonder how restive and formative they were, as vague references to unbuckled buckles appear at an increasingly alarming rate in Rage for Fame.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson.

Da Capo Press, 2002 (1955). 276 pages.

Oldies But Goodies

Rule the 110^th:  Labour to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial Fire Called Conscience.... We select Sloan Wilson’s mid-twentieth century classic because it is copiously referenced in respected contemporary discussions of 1950s American culture and because respected contemporary novelists like Jonathan Franzen maintain that it prefigures their own respected contemporary novels of domestic discontent, dysfunction, and suburban malaise.  We cannot tell a lie: we laboured through The Corrections and Freedom and hope for better things here....

 

World War II veteran Tom Rath, aka The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and his good wife Betsy yearn for a larger house and all sorts of silly material things for their family, but social striving and ladder climbing yield diminished happiness and contentment. Tom finds himself disappointed with his job, distanced from his wife, and disillusioned with his iconic gray flannel life.  He demonstrates interesting behaviors and problem-solving strategies as he reconciles with his past, stakes responsibility for his life, and gradually rekindles that elusive, easily extinguished Little Spark of Celestial Fire Called Conscience: Tom... threw the dirty laundry down the cellar stairs, then went to the kitchen and mixed himself a martini.  Let’s take a retro-peek at the trailer for the 1956 film adaptation of the novel:

Ending specialist NWC may find the final pages outmoded and syrupy, but we revel in the cast of smart, restless, sympathetic characters as they toss laundry, guzzle martinis, and search for purpose and meaning amidst the detritus of postwar material culture.

The Expats: A Novel by Chris Pavone.

Crown, 2012.  327 pages.

Mysteries and Suspense

Rule the 51^st: Wear not your Cloths, foul, unript or Dusty but See they be Brush’d once every day at least and take heed that you approach not to any Uncleaness.   Even as martini-drinking Tom Rath chucks his gray flannel suit down the cellar steps, former CIA agent Kate Moore deals with foul, ript, and Dusty Clothing of her own in another early summer reading selection, The Expats.  When her husband is offered a lucrative job abroad, Kate eagerly moves the family to Luxembourg: to escape a dirty secret, to begin a new life, to become Wife Enough and Mom Enough now that she is off the CIA Enough payroll.  She reinvents herself as an expat, learning a new language, scheduling playdates, attending coffee klatches, trying new recipes, shopping at Ikea, and accumulating laundry, laundry, laundry!  Load upon load upon load of dirty stinkin’ laundry.... The Expats offers this scintillating cell phone exchange between Kate and a former comrade in covert activity:

She said, I’m bored... more bored than I’ve ever been.  In my life.

I’m sorry, he said.

I’m doing laundry.

That’s good, he said.  It’s important to dress your family in clean clothing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Husband Dexter is working long hours, acting distant, dodging questions. A newly-arrived couple, Julia and Bill, are omnipresent, incongruous, oddly avuncular.  Kate begins to investigate and, turns out, everyone is suspicious and nothing is as it seems!  Before we hit the rinse cycle,  Kate is inching along building ledges, disassembling Ikea furniture and, absurdly, we think, putting off her clothes in the presence of others while negotiating a firearms purchase.  She discovers: double identities, bogus offices, phony corporations, concealed weapons, weird farmhouses, fluffed-up bank balances, and spin-cycle deception that threatens marriage and family, life and limb.

While the spy-thriller-espionage-whiny-laundress genre has never been a Cellar Door favorite, GW, KMJ, and BJM read The Expats and find it mildly entertaining, mildly suspenseful, mildly sophisticated, mildly flawed.  CS does not venture forth into the fray.  SC borrows a hard copy which, unlike the electronic version, includes a supercilious author profile and helpful font cues to locate the reader in time and space.  For example: on the printed page, yesterday looks like this, while today looks like this. Very important, GW declares, if we wish to comprehend a complex web of international intrigue and to sort through The Expats' twisted accumulation of dirty laundry.

Speaking of spies and laundry and martinis... shaken not stirred is the beverage-serving catchphrase popularized by Ian Fleming’s well-dressed-martini-drinking British Secret Service agent James Bond. As we venture forth in our summer reading, let’s remember George Washington's civil and decent Rule the 2^nd: When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered... and let's add a Rule the 007^th codicil:  When in Chambers, shake and stir not your historically significant False Teeth in a martini glass Overnight.