You may disagree, but I believe that the many sleuths, amateur and professional in English crime fiction are also largely the creations of English, or British, writers.  In contrast, it also seems to me that the most famous sleuths in Italian crime writing have been created by non-Italians.  Guido Brunetti, the urbane, philosophical inspector at the Venice questura, is the creation of Donna Leon, an American.  The edgier, less settled character Aurelio Zen, also a Venetian, was created by the late English author, Michael Dibdin.  The utterly captivating carabinieri Marshall Salvatore Guarnaccia, a Sicilian fish out of water posted to duty in Florence, was the creation of the late Magdalen Nabb, also English.

A few years ago when I discovered Andrea Camilleri, a Sicilian-born writer of exceptional talent, and his estimable protagonist, Salvatore Montalbano, I was ready for something different: an Italian detective created by an Italian.  (Of course it is also true that many Italians, particularly in the north, do not consider Sicilians to be Italian at all but simply amalgams of human deviousness.)

Montalbano is a police inspector in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata where crimes of every description seem to occur, often with colorful or vulgar flourishes.  Although corruption is in the very air they breathe, Montalbano and his trustworthy staff serve a police commissioner of unassailable–if weary–integrity.  Camilleri is both sly and droll, qualities that enable him to write about the corruption that is central to his stories without giving in to despair.  In an author’s note to his first book, he writes that the story comes only from his imagination and not from crime news headlines.  He goes on: “But since in recent years reality has seemed bent on surpassing the imagination, if not entirely abolishing it, there may be a few unpleasant coincidences of name or situation.” Read the rest of this entry »

The pleasures of indulgence yield the worry of surfeit. To have too much is to lose appreciation of what is particular. Reading five or six works by Justin Cartwright, seriatim, has driven home this too obvious truism. The book jacket notes that Cartwright is South African by birth, and that he resides in London. His novels show he is well-traveled enough (in the USA in particular)  to write of three continents with easy authority. The New Book section of the library gave the first hint of his range and, being hooked by Other People’s Money, I read through five other novels. I put down the last, To Heaven by Water, with a sense that I had done the writer an injustice by way of excess. This should not be a surprising reaction, yet I wonder how often it is shared. Surely the strengths of a writer that attract at the start should not pall, yet, and perhaps this is the key, authorship is both the pursuit of an art and a profession. To be a writer, one must write and the daily “x” number of words demands to be cast as plot, character, analysis, voice.

Writers I have heard interviewed have mention being surprised where a character will take them as they progress with the fiction. Surely detective fiction writers, constrained by the “who done it?” or procedural aspects of the form, must work within a frame, but how widespread is this in other genre? Given the “professionalism” of the craft, certainly some books just get finished and others achieve mastery. Surfeit can blur discrimination of just such difference.

Cartwright’s great strength is his analysis of family dynamics. His plots often introduce a sharp disjuncture – unexpected death, infidelity, even imprisonment. His characters often wonder over their inability to know even their most intimate partners, and yet his plots move towards deep psychological understanding, at times issuing on to spiritual illumination. To Heaven by Water ends with the chief character quoting Hopkins’ “The Windhover”  in an assertion of divine presence.

Everything I have written points to a very gifted writer (He has been awarded many literary prizes.), and I feel I have done him a disservice simply by reading too much at once, Yet in spite of this, and almost perversely, I number as most memorable and remarkable the novel, The Song Before It Is Sung, which is somewhat uncharacteristic. It recreates in fictional form the long relationship of the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the German aristocrat Adam von Trott in the years before and during WWII. The story is the account of a student (Conrad Senior) of the fictional Berlin, E.A. Mendel, who has entrusted Conrad with all his papers. He has enjoined him ( a posthumous obligation) to tell the story of his relationship with Axel von Gottenberg (the fictional von Trott). The complexities of plot, the time shifts, the number of forms employed are remarkable as the conclusion of the work is low key – the resolutions occurring again by way of literary allusion (to W.G. Sebald). Cartwright is at pains to place before us the burden and the liberation that we inherit from the dead. The novel bears this heavy freight remarkably well – as its protagonist in the concluding lines swims, literally, in a lake of regeneration, inspirited by memory.  Such immersion is redemptive, but take it also as a warning of reading too much too closely in time.

Sometime around 1993 (I remember it was my first year of high school), the singer Joan Osborne had a hit song “One of Us.” At one point in the song, Osborne sang

If god had a face,

What would it look like,

And would you want to see,

If seeing meant that you would have to

Believe in things like heaven, and in Jesus and saints,

And all the prophets.

If I remember correctly, the song was an especially big hit among young Evangelicals, although their interest in Osborne was short lived after it became clear that Osborne was not particularly interested in Christianity. As a top 40 hit in the days before Spotify and iTunes and Napster, the song was catchy enough. (I’d take the Fleet Foxes or Wilco over Joan Osborne any day.) I don’t know what happened to Osborne’s career after that.

Of course, Christianity makes the startling – and, to some, blasphemous — claim that God does have a face. But Osborn’s question remains: what did this face look like? A show currently up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents one artist’s answer.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669) was born in Leiden in the Netherlands and in 1631 he moved to Amsterdam. In 1639 he moved again in Amsterdam, this time to Vlooienburg neighborhood, which was home to Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish communities. This move was to have profound implications for understanding what God’s face looked like and how Christians understand Christ. Read the rest of this entry »

A little over a week ago, I read Paul O’Donnell’s post on Wilco with eagerness. I love the band, and I was excited to see a Commonweal writer engaging with popular music so enthusiastically. (The post reminded me of Eric Bugyis’s interesting thoughts on the Hold Steady.)

Then, however, I got to the comments. There I found an awful lot of doom and gloom being proclaimed. Young people and their music are embittered and whiny, I heard; they express no hope in humanity; all popular music (or at least all somewhat popular indie rock) is just so much rhythmic moping.

Of course, this isn’t a true assessment of young people or their cultural expressions. Speaking from my own area of expertise, I can tell you that the defining characteristic of fiction in the last fifteen or so years has been an increase in sincerity and hopefulness. People like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace have argued again and again that an ironic, embittered attitude towards the world isn’t enough, and that any art that reflexively resigns itself to this kind of attitude is necessarily impoverished. One of the major projects of post-post-modernism (or whatever you want to call our current moment) is the reclaiming of huge swathes of human experience—love, joy, commitment, sacrifice—as viable subjects for literary representation.

But, looking back to music, I want to point out one band that should disprove any sweeping claims about the self-indulgent despair of my generation: Fleet Foxes. The band hails from Seattle, and it shows in their predilection for flannel shirts, unkempt beards, and long hair. Their sound, however, is anything but grungy. The band’s 2008 self-entitled debut album was filled with sweet-sounding harmonizing and pleasing melodies. (And the band appeared unembarrassed to write and perform sweet, pleasing songs.) Displaying a variety of influences from Neil Young to gospel and sacred harp music, Fleet Foxes was really more a tone poem than anything else: singer/songwriter Robin Pecknold seemed less interested in telling a story than in creating a particular mood or feel. The title of the album’s most popular song, “White Winter Hymnal,” hints at this mood: light, mysterious, haunting, angelic. (Here is a lyrical sample: “I was following the pack, / All swallowed in their coats / With scarves of red tied ‘round their throats / To keep their little heads / From fallin’ in the snow.” Lest this sound overly precious, listen to the song, through Spotify.) Fleet Foxes was a tremendous debut. The songs were lush and moving, with Pecknold’s lyrics often beautifully blending into a kind of choral chanting. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent essay, J. M. Coetzee offered a quotation from “Distinguo,” a short poem by the Australian poet Les Murray. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Prose is Protestant-agnostic,

story, discussion, significance,

but poetry is Catholic:

poetry is presence.

In a mere quatrain, Murray summarizes the vast theological and aesthetic differences between Protestantism and Catholicism. Obviously, Murray is being hyperbolic; as Coetzee mentions, Murray converted from Presbyterianism after marrying a Catholic, and his words have the convert’s fervor. And, to state the obvious once again, Murray’s prose/poetry, Protestant/Catholic division doesn’t quite hold: Protestantism has some pretty good poets, too, from Milton to Marianne Moore, and, thanks to Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, and others, whole courses are taught on the Catholic novel.

Still, Murray seems to be on to something. A list of the great sacramental poets of the English language, those who most memorably render the divine presence manifesting itself in the world, would feature more than its fair share of Catholics. There is perhaps no greater sacramental poet than Gerard Manley Hopkins, and there is certainly no greater sacramental poem than “God’s Grandeur,” which opens with the dramatic pronouncement that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” and closes with a vision of the Holy Spirit “brood[ing] with warm breast and with ah! bright wings!” Read the rest of this entry »

There is an art to reading book blurbs and my wife has mastered it. She has an astute way of working through the new book shelves at the library and finding authors we will both find so good that we read them exhaustively. The key for her is remembering which of the blurb writers are reliable witnesses. Her knack has yielded impressive results, the latest Justin Cartwright. If you are shaking you head wondering that we had not heard of him “before” (mea culpa), we have made up for this in the number of his works we have read through happily.

To go back to “What do I read next?” Blurbs are one sort of cue, but I know I rely on the literary periodicals – TLS, LRB, NYRB, Commonweal – and the New York Times books columns – for suggestions.  There are also publishers of particular genres that I look to: The SoHo Press, for one, which features detective fiction set in unusual locales. We also listen to the radio and often hear, on NPR or using the internet radio, to BBC Radio 3, of books to read. I have friends who assiduously write down any titles I might mention, but I never seem to remember to reciprocate in a similar way. There is also the accusatory uprightness of books on our shelves that have arrived in myriad ways; these I have never read but sometimes I yield to their stiff regard and read them.

The major literary prize winning titles are a sure way of piquing interest. The Booker Prize, the Pulitzer, the Orange or Whitbread Awards, those for crime fiction, and many others can all point a way.

Then there is the question of an approach to an author. Do I read exhaustively through the works of someone new to me? Sometimes, virtually gagging from surfeit, I stop and return later, perhaps with more appreciation. The negative aspect of reading every title of an author available, especially in detective fiction, is that the plots and characterization show themselves to be formulaic, a problem which is one inherent in the genre. In another sense, if this limitation does not distract from the novels, it marks a really good writer. Familiarity need not always breed negative responses.

Then there are favorites to reread, classics to revisit, the suggestions offered by “Staff Picks” on library shelves. In the end, “What next?” is bedeviled only by the choices available. E-readers and the internet have only broadened these. The question becomes in its own way an invitation to discover.

One of the blessings or perhaps curses of Netflix is that you can sit down any time and fill in the episodes of The Sopranos or Inspector Lewis that your busy schedule forced you to miss. You can even start at the beginning and go through to the end. Which is just fine if there aren’t too many episodes.

If you are addicted to police procedurals you might want to take a look at Midsomer Murders. Then again, you might not. There are 59 episodes of this show, all taking place in a quiet corner of rural England more or less at the present, and in all but the last few you can watch Inspector Barnaby solve a murder or two, occasionally three. Obviously, you have to like police procedurals, but there’s a bigger problem and it has to do with the willing suspension of disbelief. Each of the four or five little villages is idyllic, from Midsomer Norton to Badger’s Drift, and each houses a murderer, or two, or seven or eight. Because you see, there might be a population of about five thousand people in all the villages combined, but there have been approximately 130 murders in the course of the series. That makes for about 2.5% of the population gunned down or poisoned or stabbed or drowned. Equivalent to perhaps 250,000 murdered in New York or London, or 1200 in sleepy Fairfield, Connecticut. And an additional 1% incarcerated for the crimes (that would be 100,000 in New York City, by the way). Oh, by the way, all these murders are the middle and upper classes preying up one another. No gang warfare and drug culture here. This is England, after all.

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A fat man wearing a splendidly tailored wool suit and bright white tennis shoes arrives by ferry on the beautiful, remote Greek island of Thiminos.  Tourist season is over; winter wind and rain will soon begin to make life miserable for the natives.  In Anne Zouroudi‘s novel, The Messenger of Athens, Hermes Diaktoros is the stranger, the fat man of mysterious origins, whose unorthodox behavior roils the waters of this closed, patriarchal, and sometimes primitive society.

The novel begins with the recovery of a woman’s body from the foot of a cliff.  Since Irini Asimakopoulos was reputed to be an unfaithful wife and shunned as such, everyone considers her death to be a suicide.  There is no police investigation and burial is swift.  Suddenly, Hermes Diaktoros arrives, referring obliquely to “authority in Athens” as the basis for his further inquiry into Irini’s death.  Panayiotis Zafiridis, the new–and corrupt–police chief, only wants him out of the way, gone.

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Late last month my wife and I buzzed up to Boston to catch Wilco, the long-suffering folk-rock group out of Chicago, in advance of their new album, The Whole Love (click here to listen via Spotify). Led, in a sort of disconsolate slouch, by songwriter Jeff Tweedy, Wilco was once a poster child for the desultory pop genre called indie rock. But Wilco has become something bigger: not only a big seller but  more professionally packaged onstage and online, and more ambitious artistically. In its choice of instruments—lap steel to digitized loops—and its influences—the Dead, Woody Guthrie,  and early punk—Wilco is verging on becoming, as I someone in my row in Boston called them, the Great American Rock and Roll band.

I bring Wilco up on this blog because Tweedy’s music is as Christ-haunted as the American landscape itself. Christianity comes up on nearly every Wilco album—in the voice of a skeptic, in words that sound like genuine praise, and in closely observed moments from the pews. “You’ll stand each Sunday / a hymnal steady in your hand,” a soldier sings to his wife in “I’ll Fight” (click here to listen via Spotify). “You’ll sing to yourself the rising falling melody / that you could never read/without the choir’s lead.

“I’ll Fight” is Tweedy’s Iraq War song from his 2009 album, Wilco, The Album (or maybe his Civil War song; the 40-something Tweedy affects the extravagantly unkempt look of a Matthew Brady battlefield portrait). The song’s soldier goes on to sing of the trade he’s made with the civilians he left behind, and the deal is as spiritual as it is civic: “If I die / I’ll die alone / Like Jesus on the cross / My faith will not be tossed / My life will not be lost / if my love comes across.”  Read the rest of this entry »

I have been listening to two unsettling men, Fabian Vas and Wyatt Hillyer. Both seem to filter the violence and passion of their lives through a distance in time and expectation that works oddly against the events they relate. The mismatch is the more effective in that they offer little, if any, analysis of their motives. In some sense, they seem unable to control what they had done, and yet maintain a self-assurance that defies irrationality. They have acted and now they, in their narratives, confess. These are first person narrators and, of course, fictional. Their creator, Howard Norman, has a distinguished career both as a translator of legends and stories of Cree Native Americans and as a novelist, but, as seems to me too often the case, I am belated in reading him. Despite the traditional forms of two of his novels, The Bird Artist and What Is Left the Daughter, he produces uncanny effects, and these are largely the result of narrative voice. (What Is Left the Daughter is cast as a letter to Wyatt’s daughter.) Both books are set in tiny communities of costal Nova Scotia, just before the First World War (The Bird Artist ) and during the Second World Ward (What Is Left the Daughter). These are tales of passion, infidelity, small town pressures, and eccentric characters.  The women are exceptionally strong. The books are tied to the sea, to Nova Scotia weather, to fishing, and to stoical acceptance of obligation and loss.

The plot twists are accounts of unexpected and apparently uncharacteristic actions which precipitate events: sudden infidelities, abrupt unions, and obsessive revenge. Fabian commits murder, as he tells us on the first page; Wyatt is an accomplice in a similar act. The exigencies of circumstance appear more understandable than the impetus for action. We see through their eyes as if they were distorted by cataracts.  Despite the heady drama, the quotidian remains and is effortlessly realized: fish at every meal, workshop ledgers, scones, a minister’s rhetoric, and bus rides to Halifax. Some folk drink hard, all seem to scrabble for a living, and everyone knows of the others’ lives. Fabian is a competent artist, Wyatt a salvager of flotsam and jetsam. They are both more wrecks than whole. Norman’s world is visionary in the most mundane of senses: his realist fiction depicts times and places that are not exotic so much as ancestral. He tells the tales I might expect to hear from my grandparents, speaking out of their memories from that strange country, the past. To read him is to travel very far away, just there where things are not simpler but different.

Miranda July’s “The Future,” her second full-length film following 2005′s “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” is decidedly offbeat. It features a talking cat and a walking t-shirt, for starters, and viewers not used to surrealism may be put off by such oddities. Unless you know that you absolutely can’t tolerate talking cats under any circumstances, though, July’s sophomore effort is worth checking out. (Perhaps you will even like the cat. I originally went to see the movie last week because I got a brief email recommendation from a friend: “You should see this movie. It wasn’t fantastic, but there were parts I appreciated.  The narration was done by a cat named Paw-Paw, there were some crazy metaphors about the suburbs, and a bit of magical realism. The best part is the cat.”)

The story centers on a thirty-something urban couple, Jason and Sophie, who are considering taking the next big step toward maturity and adopting a cat. Not a kitten who might be around for ten or fifteen years; that would be an unfathomable commitment. They choose a sickly, older cat, who will live six months – or up to five years, “if he bonds with you.” The latter possibility terrifies them, but they work up enough courage to sign the papers anyway. Then they have a month to wait until the cat, Paw-Paw, is healthy enough to go home with them.

They decide to spend that month enjoying the last of their freedom, but the impending responsibility of cat ownership propels them into an existential crisis of farcical proportions. Jason decides to stump around the neighborhood collecting donations for an environmental nonprofit; Sophie has the internet shut off to their apartment and they share a frantic last few minutes of web access, with Sophie urging Jason to “google important things – like flu warnings.”

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Because I spend quite a bit of my working life talking and thinking about the Catholic intellectual tradition, I was more than a little humbled to read Patrick Hayes’ excellent new book, A Catholic Brain Trust, which is the history of the Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs (hereafter the CCICA) during its first twenty years of existence from 1945-1965. Who knew? Certainly not me. Yet this organization, which came into existence immediately after the end of the Second World War and was only finally disbanded in 2007, provided a forum  where Catholic intellectual leaders, both lay and clerical, gathered regularly to try to engineer a distinctly Catholic influence on American public life. Hayes’ book discusses the founding of the Commission in considerable detail and tracks some of its principal interests. At first it is engaged in war relief and interested in the newly-forming United Nations, then—not surprisingly since John Courtney Murray was an early participant—takes up church and state issues, and later turns to the fall-out from John Tracy Ellis’s 1955 lecture on “American Catholic and the Intellectual Life.” It also was deeply involved in the plans for a New Catholic Encyclopedia and, towards the end of this very active two decades, with the Kirby Seminars, a venue for young Catholic scholars that in some ways anticipated current programs like Collegium. Hayes lays this all out very clearly and ends his book with a brief look at the later history and demise of the commission.

Don’t we still need this kind of organization? We periodically hear complaints about the “decline of the public intellectual” and see articles bemoaning the vacuum left by worthies like Reinhold Niebuhr or John Courtney Murray, but rarely appeals for associations of Catholic intellectuals along the lines of the CCICA. Of course we have some academic organizations of Catholics in theology, philosophy, scripture and canon law, but not the kind of marriage of theological, social, political and economic thought that marked the CCICA. The CCIA was an independent group that owed nothing formally to the bishops, though many clergy participated in it alongside lay scholars and, at least in its later stages, cultural icons like Tim Russert, John Noonan, Walker Percy and Annie Dillard. And here of course is where the Commission helped most with the issue of the public intellectual. Academic silos do not breed intellectuals, though they do produce a fair number of scholars. The mark of the intellectual is the capacity to bridge different realms in the service of public good, and this is the more likely to be aided by associations like the CCICA than the Catholic Theological Society of America (a favorite of mine though it is).

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