C10| Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Towards the End of the Morning
By Michael Frayn (1967)
1
Michael Frayn writes novels packed with
characters barely muddling through life.
In “Towards the End of the Morning”
John Dyson, a journalist at a failing
newspaper, is “heading for a crack up.”
The problem, both touching and hilarious,
is that John—an ambitious man of the most
ordinary kind—labors under the misappre-
hension that the world has simply failed to
appreciate his singular talents. When things go
wrong, he sets off on a new quest for success.
He buys a house in an insalubrious London
suburb and waits “in vain for the middle
classes to arrive.” He flubs an important
television appearance by repeating fatuous
irrelevancies. When he finally secures a
longed-for, all-expenses-paid freebie to the
Riviera, his plane is diverted to Ljubljana,
the cultural center of Slovenia. “I’m afailure,
an insignificant speck of human nothingness
trampled on indifferently by every casual
passer by,” John concedes, before returning, with
remarkable optimism, to his favorite barstool.
Cold Comfort Farm
By Stella Gibbons (1932)
2
Written in 1932 but set in the “near
future” of telephones and air taxis,
Flora Poste—a recently orphaned and
destitute 20-year-old with few other
options—takes a train to the home of her
father’s cousins, a “doomed” farmhouse
“huddled in the hollow like an exhausted
brute.” It’s an opportunity. Even in her darkest
moments Flora views all hardship and dreadful
encounters as “collecting material” for a novel
she dreams of writing. The farm’s inhabitants
have biblical names and pagan personalities.
They survive on a bubbling “snood of porridge”
and vegetables from an untended garden.
Undeterred by the resistance of her repressed
relatives, Flora uses all her charm and
manipulative skills as she sets about
transforming their lives. The once-comfortless
farm becomes a “gay and cheerful” rural
paradise, and its inhabitants pursue their
hidden dreams. Flora herself is whisked off
by her second cousin, Charles, in his Twin
Belisha Bat plane into “the soft blue vault of
the midsummer night sky.” Stella Gibbons’s
enchanting book has remained in print and
much loved for nearly a century.
The Pursuit of Love
By Nancy Mitford (1945)
3
Loosely based on her own upbringing
and siblings (including the famous
Unity, Decca and Debo), Nancy Mitford
weaves a story at once satiric andshe escapes to France, where she falls
for a dashing married French marquis.
Bliss is shortlived.TheWayWeLiveNow
By Anthony Trollope (1875)4
One of literature’s great villains,
Anthony Trollope’s Augustus Melmotte
will use anyone and anything for his
own enrichment. “Of course he had
committed forgery; of course he had
committed robbery. That, indeed, was nothing,
for he had been cheating and forging and
stealing all his life.’’ Melmotte, a foreigner,
deploys a lavish lifestyle and a beautiful
daughter to inveigle himself into British high
society. There he proceeds to sell nonexistent
shares to susceptible toffs prepared to overlook
sense and morality in the pursuit of gain and
instant gratification. Each believed, as Trollope
acidly explains, that “rank squanders money,
trade makes it; and then trade purchases rank
by re-gilding its splendour.” Trollope’s wit and
plot twists never lose their capacity to enthrall
as the novel’s cast of repellent characters dig
holes to slither into. Melmotte nearly gets
away with it; but is ultimately a victim of
hubris. His end is spectacular. And pathetic.The Buddha of Suburbia
By Hanif Kureishi (1990)5
Karim, the hero of this satire, is, as he
puts it, “an Englishman born and bred,
almost. I am...anewbreedasitwere,
having emerged from two old histories.”
His father, a besuited bureaucrat by day,
spends his evenings moonlighting as a dhoti-
clad Buddhist preaching enlightenment to
frustrated white housewives. For Karim’s
mother, “life was fundamentally hell. You went
blind...yourhusband fled with a blonde from
Beckenham.” Karim goes in search of his
identity—a journey that takes him to the stage,
where he briefly finds fame stereotyped as
the dark-skinned lead in “The Jungle Book.”
He falls for a wealthy girl: “It was clear that
Eleanor had been to bed with a large and
random collection of people, but when I
suggested she go to bed with me, she said,
‘I don’t think we should, just at the moment,
do you?’ ” He finds this deeply insulting.
Karim returns to the suburbs to be with his
family and friends. “I was surrounded by
people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable
at the same time.” He concludes: “England’s a
nice place if you’re rich, but otherwise it’s a
fucking swamp of prejudice, class confusion.”
Thirty years has passed since the publication
of this prize-winning novel, which was turned
into a BBC series. Some may wonder if Hanif
Kureishi’s hero might be feeling any better
these days.Hannah Rothschild
The author, most recently, of the novel “House of Trelawney”
BOOKS
‘Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.’—ANTHONY TROLLOPE
FICTION
BYSAMSACKSHORDES OF PATHOGENS
loosed on the public can
paralyze a nation, but some-
times a single well-targeted
illness can have the same effect,
as happens in Alberto Barrera
Tyszka’s novel“The Last Days
of El Comandante” (Texas,
236 pages, $19.95), set in 2012,
when all of Venezuela became a
“waiting room” while its dema-
gogic president, Hugo Chávez,
battled the pelvic cancer that
would end his life.
The novel evokes a country
exhausted by over a decade of
Chávez’s divisive personality
cult, “doomed to the starkness
of picking a side, to living with
the desperate need to be in
favor of or opposed to the
government.” For the caudillo,
cancer is one last chance to
burnish his legend. As he
receives treatment in Cuba
under a shroud of secrecy,
returning at sudden intervals to
make gnostic pronouncements
about his imminent recovery,
Venezuelans are urged to
profess unwavering faith in
his leadership. “There was no
longer any pretense: Chávez’s
health was not a medical but
a religious matter. The govern-
ment’s high command began
speaking like priests. The state
began to look like a church.”
Mr. Tyszka unfolds a group
of connected stories in and
around a middle-class Caracas
apartment building. Events
involve both Chavistas and
“squalids,” as Chávez dubbed
his opposition, who then claimed
the term. In one subplot, ajournalist tries to write a muck-
raking exposé of the president’s
sickness but is ensnared by the
regime’s propaganda apparatus.
In another, a well-to-do woman
has to employ Chavismo revo-
lutionary tactics to force sub-
letters out of her apartment.
At the center of things is a
studiedly apolitical retired
oncologist, Miguel Sanabria—
an ivory-tower observer who is
sucked into the morbid national
melodrama when his nephew,
a government adviser, appears
one day and asks him to hide a
cellphone containing damaging
videos of the president.
Mr. Tyszka is a versatile
writer who merits wider
attention. He has co-authored
a biography of Chávez lauded
for its balance, and his fiction
includes “The Sickness,” a
trenchant, unsettling fable
about illness’s indifference to
man-made narratives that is
so sharply topical that I almost
hesitate to recommend it as
pandemic reading. “The Last
Days of El Comandante” sits
somewhere between these
books, blending brisk, ironic
parables with dryly disen-
chanted commentary. This novel
is, on balance, more analytic
than aesthetic (the translation,
by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie
Mendez Sayer, is clear and
straightforward), valuable
especially for Sanabria’s
insights into the destructively
politicized nature of Chávez’s
death. His illness was some-
thing that happened to his
body, in private, but themythology he spun from it was
something that happened to
everyone else. As Sanabria
remarks, with customary
concision, “The other face
of illness is miracle.”
Rita Indiana’s swaggering
novel“Made in Saturn”
(And Other Stories, 169 pages,
$15.95)offers a warning about
what happens when revolution-
aries live too long. José Alfredo
Luna was a fiery leader of the
Dominican Republic’s commu-nist movement, but after years
of uncompromising opposition
he struck a deal with the
government, and this onetime
comrade of Che Guevara has
become a wealthy member of
the “new Dominican nobility.”
His son Argenis, raised in
privilege, has rebelled by be-
coming a painter and a junkie.
The novel belongs to the
prodigal son, following Argenis
to Cuba, where his father has
sent him to get clean, and then
back to his seedy haunts in the
DR. The story is perambulatory
and episodic, and given his
upbringing and his addiction,
Argenis’s adventures take himamong the powerful and the
marginalized alike. He shares
quarters with a graying aristo-
crat of the Cuban Communist
party and a performing drag
queen from Havana’s China-
town; he visits his brother, a
sneering Dominican business-
man, and his pusher in Santo
Domingo’s Little Haiti. Nothing
human is alien to Ms. Indiana,
who is famous in the Dominican
Republic as a pop musician.
Like France’s brilliant punk-
realist Virginie Despentes,
she sees through the costumes
of class and ideology. Her
characters are raggedly real.
At heart “Made in Saturn”
is about generational struggle
(the title alludes to Goya’s
“Black Painting” of Saturn
devouring his children). What
has Argenis inherited from his
father, who traded his principles
for material luxury? Heroin is
the culmination of that “para-
digm of individual gratification,”
as Sydney Hutchinson puts
it in her crisp translation.
But with the mentorship of an
impoverished painter, Argenis
glimpses a different path
toward the absolute freedom
of art—the touchstone of this
wild and liberating book.
Discussing her American de-
but,“Hurricane Season” (New
Directions, 210 pages, $22.95),
the Mexican writer Fernanda
Melchor has said: “That’s exactly
the kind of books I like, the ones
that are like natural disasters.”
And that is the kind of book she
has written, a bilious, profane,
blood-spattered tempest of rageagainst what one character calls
“the full, brutal force of male vice.”
The story, set in the dead-
end Mexican town of La Matosa,
begins with the murder of a
woman known as the Witch, who
was infamous for her curses and
potions, as well as for the drug-
fueled orgies she hosted in her
cellar, and who was rumored to
have untold riches hidden some-
where in her dilapidated house.
The chapters alternate between
the points of view of the
villagers—most of them teen-
agers—who played some part
in the killing or the subsequent
arrests, and as they circle around
their confessions Ms. Melchor
fills in the sickening details of
her modern-day perdition.
The chapters, written in
obscenity-laden free indirect
speech, are not monologues
so much as diatribes. Sophie
Hughes’s translation carries
their furious momentum into
English. They have no para-
graph breaks, as if a moment’s
pause would represent an
unforgivable show of weakness.
Most enter the minds of boys,
whose cruelty is mitigated only
by their youth and stupidity
(though the most heartbreaking
chapter concerns a 13-year-old
runaway who is pregnant by her
stepfather). This is the Mexico
of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood
Meridian” or Roberto Bolaño’s
“2666,” where the extremes of
evil create a pummeling, hyper-
realistic effect. But the “elemental
cry” of Ms. Melchor’s writing
voice, a composite of anger and
anguish, is entirely her own.Of Illness and Miracle
THIS WEEK
The Last Days
of El Comandante
By Alberto Barrera TyzkaMade in Saturn
By Rita IndianaHurricane Season
By Fernanda MelchorIt’s 2012
in
Caracas,
and
all ofVenezuela
is praying
for the
recovery
(or the
death)
ofPresident
Hugo
Chávez.FIVE BESTBRITISH SATIRES
steeped in pathos. It seems at first a madcap
tale of dysfunctional aristocrats: “The Radletts
were always either on a peak of happiness or
drowning in black waters of despair; their
emotions were on no ordinary plane, they
loved or they loathed.” Their minor stately
home is ruled by the narrator’s Uncle
Matthew, who has a terrible temper, and
flourishes a World War I “entrenching tool”
as a weapon. His hobbies include smearing
his daughters with excrement and setting hisdogs on their trail: “the Kentish week-enders
on their way to church were appalled by the
sight of four great hounds in full cry after
two little girls.” A good part of the novel’s
strength derives from Mitford’s sympathy
for these characters—penniless sisters whose
only escape is marriage. Linda, the heroine,
jumps at the first proposal, only to realize
“she had found neither great love nor great
happiness, and she had not inspired them
in others.” Leaving her husband and child,LAMPOONAnthony Trollope, as drawn by Leslie Ward (aka Spy) in an 1873 issue of Vanity Fair.
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