C10| Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
When a
tech
investor
searches
for his
kid-
napped
spouse,
he turns
to herold flame
for help.
‘THIS IS NOT a regular case,”
says a police official of the
kidnapping of Anastasia
Christakos, an aid worker
abducted while in Italy at the
start of Henry Porter’s com-
pelling “White Hot Silence”
(Mysterious Press, 439 pages,
$26). Law enforcement is
baffled that there has been no
ransom demand, despite the
fact that the victim’s husband,
California-based tech investor
Denis Hisami, is a billionaire.
Hisami tasks some highly
skilled associates with finding
Anastasia, who is being held
captive in a container ship
traversing the Mediterranean.
But he suddenly has other
crises to cope with: His pass-
port is confiscated, and he
eventually lands in prison for
not disclosing his association
with terrorists in his past life as
a military commander in Iraq.
In reality, Hisami was
working at the time with U.S.
forces to combat extremist
insurgents, contrary to
misleading photographs—
purporting to show him taking
part in atrocities—that have
come to the government’s
attention. When he is arrested,
Hisami is investigating the
shady transactions of a
company in which he has
invested; this global firm
appears to be engaged in
massive money laundering.
Hisami immediately grasps that
the launderers are behind the
false evidence that has gotten
him incarcerated, but present-ing his defense takes time and
money. Meanwhile, his business
and reputation suffer. All of
Hisami’s travails—not least the
kidnapping of his wife—seem
engineered to prevent his
leaking what he has learned
about the corrupt company
he has taken a position in.
Just before landing in
prison, Hisami has his people
reach out to Paul Samson, a
former U.K. espionage agent
who was romantically involved
with Anastasia before her
marriage to Hisami. Samson
(who realizes that hestill loves
Anastasia butinsists that he
can perform his job with un-
emotional objectivity) signs on.
The appeal and force of
“White Hot Silence” springs
from its convincing depiction
of settings and characters,
its palpable tension, and the
enduring bond between Samson
and Anastasia. “Samson was
right and his love for this
woman was right,” judges a
British ex-spy who helps them
both. “In a world of bad actors
and liars, that counted for a lot.”
Leilani Santiago, the young
woman of Filipino, Japanese
and haole ancestry who
narrates Naomi Hirahara’s
sparkling “Iced in Paradise”
(Prospect Park, 210 pages,
$16) , has just dropped out of
college in Seattle to return
home to the Hawaiian island
of Kaua‘i. Leilani’s mother has
taken ill, and she has come to
help her younger sisters and
her grandmother run the familybusiness—a shave-ice shack.
Her father—a veteran competi-
tive surfer—spends long
periods away from the family,
due to his work. When he does
come home, he’s preoccupied
with chancy business schemes.
This time, it’s a line of sports-
wear (“Killer Wave”) to be
endorsed by his protégé, theup-and-coming surf star Luke
Hightower.
But Luke bails on Killer
Wave and signs instead with an
Australian clothing company.
Right after this move, his
corpse is found—by Leilani—
in the family’s shave-ice shack.
Leilani’s father is arrested.
How can the family save its
no-doubt-innocent patriarch?
And who really did kill Luke?
Leilani suspects that Luke’s
own father, a wealthy Kaua‘i
developer busy buying up
native lands, may have had
something to do with his child’s
death. But her theories get a
cold reception from the conde-
scending policeman in charge
of Luke’s case: “We don’t need
a Nancy Drew on this.” Mean-while, her Seattle boyfriend
also lectures her long-distance:
“Leilani, you are your own
person. You need to create
boundaries between yourself
and your family.”
A new acquaintance, though,
another local landowner, gives
Leilani moral and logistical
support—even as her hunt for
Luke’s killer conjoins with her
search for her own identity:
“The ground below me seems
to be shifting. I can’t hold on to
what I’ve known or who I’ve
been.” The solution to her
personal mystery, as well as
the answer to who murdered
Luke Hightower, turn out to
be surprisingly intertwined.
S.D. Sykes’s “The Bone Fire”
(Pegasus, 309 pages, $25.95)
is the author’s fourth medieval
mystery to feature Englishman
Oswald de Lacy, otherwise
known as Lord Somershill.
In this latest entry, plague
has returned to England in
the winter of 1361. “These
are wretched, savage times,”
Oswald states. With his mother,
wife, child and valet, he has fled
his own disease-threatened
estate to take refuge at the
remote Isle of Eden in Kent. But
this enticingly named destina-
tion proves not a place of ease-
ful respite but “a stretch of land
that rises from the waters like
the long back of a sleeping sea
monster.” Oswald’s mother
declares: “There is a malig-
nance here. A pervasion of evil.”
The weather is ominous, the
servants grumpy (“Alice Crosswas justly named”), and
Godfrey, lord of the Eden castle
where Oswald and his family
are staying, believes the end of
the world is nigh: “To his
mind,” records Oswald, “plague
was a punishment from God
upon humanity.”
Godfrey is punished, but not
via the plague: No sooner are
the de Lacys settled into their
Spartan quarters than their host
is found dead—his head bashed
in and his body stuffed into a
clockmaker’s chest. Oswald,
intent on finding out who put a
stop to Godfrey’s earthly span,
takes charge of the inquiry.
From letters that Godfrey
entrusted to him to be read in
case of his death, Oswald learns
that Godfrey secretly wed and
sired a son and heir—thus
disqualifying his own dissolute
brother, Edwin (a castle resi-
dent), from inheriting Eden.
Edwin must thus be the killer,
argues Oswald’s wife. But
Oswald isn’t certain: “My
instincts told me Edwin was too
stupid to be guilty.” He wants
to learn more about a great
theological project that Godfrey
had hinted at, in person and in
correspondence: something
ambitious (and blasphemous?)
enough to bring down the
wrath of the Roman church,
if not God himself. Oswald,
though irreligious himself,
feels it his moral obligation
to unpuzzle this fatal mortal
riddle. Watching him do so is
one of the great pleasures of
this medieval whodunit.Where Have They Taken the Billionaire’s Wife?
THIS WEEK
White Hot Silence
By Henry PorterIced in Paradise
By Naomi HaraharaThe Bone Fire
By S.D. SykesSCIENCE FICTION
TOMSHIPPEYBYTIMPAGE
IN OREGON’S Malheur National
Forest, there’s a giant, tree-
killing mass of fungus that covers
3 square miles. It’s 8,000 years
old, it’s genocidal to other plant
life, and it’s slowly spreading.
Why haven’t organisms like the
Honey Fungus taken over the
planet, strangling plant roots and
turning the atmosphere to poison gas? Lack of
nutrients is one reason, and adverse climate
another. But what if it were to mutate?
In “Cold Storage” (Ecco, 308 pages, $27.99) ,
David Koepp imagines that scientists tried
sending samples of fungus into orbit. When the
bits of Skylab started falling out of the sky, it
was pretty bad, Mr. Koepp writes, but that was
all 30-plus years ago. The mutant fungus from
space was locked away in secure storage in the
Atchison Caves in Kansas, a former limestone
mine “dug as far down as God and physics would
allow.” There they were kept below freezing by a
natural cold spring: No problem with power
outages, and so well con-
tained that everyone forgot
about them.
Then the world started
warming. And the
government storage facility
was sold off to give people
a place to keep their junk. When the thawing
fungus begins to produce spores, the first line of
defense for the human species is two minimum-
wage security guards, who have problems of their
own: Naomi, with her no-good ex-partner, and
Teacake, an ex-con with an associate who wants
him to look the other way while he retrieves all
those flat-screen TVs from a storage unit.
Meanwhile the people who actually know
how great the danger is have long since retired.
Nobody remembers their names any more, and
that Cold War-era defense agency they worked
for? It’s been swallowed up in a bureaucratic
reorganization.
That’s the setting for a classic nerve-shredder,
written with all the pace and sudden switches
you would expect from a screenwriter like Mr.
Koepp, with a list of big-hit credits that includes
“Jurassic Park.” The threat builds exponentially,
first underground and then above ground, one
security breach after another. First on the scene
are the minimum-wagers, who are young and
strong but ignorant. They don’t know the
acronym on the heavily secured door deep in the
mine until they Google it: DTRA, Defense Threat
Reduction Agency. Meanwhile the cavalry
coming to the rescue argue on the phone, try to
wake people up, and eventually reach for their
just-in-case kits. They know exactly what to do,
but have bad backs and stiff knees, and last did
this kind of thing decades ago.
We get to see things the way the fungus sees
them as well, or anyway perceives them. If
there’s a moral, it’s a good sci-fi one: We’ve
gotten used to things being OK, but humanity
can’t afford to drop its guard. Not all fungi
move slow.
The Thing
That Strangled
Planet Earth
THIS WEEK
Cold Storage
By David KoeppMYSTERIES
TOMNOLANM
ORE PEOPLE
have likely read
about Gertrude
Stein than have
actually finished
one of her books. Stein’s prose,
with its reiterative cadences
and distinctive mingling of the
straightforward and the com-
plicated, requires a certain accli-
mation before it is possible to go
too far, and some readers never
sign on to the journey. But Stein
herself was the sort of character
around whom legends will form:
As in the cases of Ernest Heming-
way, Sylvia Plath and Dorothy
Parker, Stein’s life makes an
engrossing story in itself, and
the books about her continue to
proliferate.
Roy Morris Jr. has now told
part of that story in his new
book, “Gertrude Stein Has
Arrived: The Homecoming of a
Literary Legend.” It is the sort of
literary biography that used to
be enormously popular, a sympa-
thetic narrative in the manner
of Van Wyck Brooks’s anecdotal
volumes on the 19th-century
New England authors or Nancy
Milford’s “Zelda,” aimed at a
general audience but welcoming
to all but the highest brow.
Mr. Morris’s book is essen-
tially a day-to-day timeline of
Stein’s return to the United
States in 1934 after a 30-year
absence. She was suddenly
famous, through her collabo-
ration with composer Virgil
Thomson on the nonpareil opera
“Four Saints in Three Acts”
(which, to everybody’s amaze-
ment, ran for a while on Broad-
way) and through “The Auto-
biography of Alice B. Toklas,” her
most accessible book. Both titles
are misnomers: There are many
more than four saints in the op-
era’s four acts, and Stein wrote
the supposed Toklas autobiog-
raphy herself, admitting as much
on the final page.
Toklas (according to Thomson,
she pronounced her name “TOCK-
less”) had been Stein’s constant
companion since shortly after
they met in 1907, and the two of
them lived for almost 40 years
together in a grand Paris house at
27 rue de Fleurus. There they sur-
rounded themselves with a fabled
collection of modern paintings—
and sometimes with the artists
themselves (Henri Matisse and
Pablo Picasso were regular visi-
tors, as were the authors Sher-
wood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzger-
ald, Paul Bowles and, for a time,
the young Hemingway). It was, as
the author James R. Mellow titled
his 1974 study of the Stein salon,
“a charmed circle.”
Before the word “lesbian”
would have been understood by
even a tiny percentage of Ameri-
cans, Stein and Toklas were obvi-
ously a couple, but their precise
relationship was never specifiedto the public. Instead, they were
treated as merely different —as a
pair of “maiden aunts,” perhaps—
and permitted the leeway that
had traditionally been the due of
the wealthy and creative. As with
vaudeville’s “female imperson-
ator” Bert Savoy in the 1910s and
’20s, and later on with the fantas-
tic success of Liberace, the United
States was long willing to accept
manifestations of homosexuality
most comfortably when there was
no hint of sexual activity.
“I used to say I would not go
to America until I was a real lion
a real celebrity,” Stein wrote in
her unpunctuated building-block
prose. “At that time of course I
did not really think I was going to
be one. But now we were coming
and I was going to be one.” Celeb-
rities indeed—the two were
coaxed back to the U.S. for a lu-
crative and well-publicized tour.
They would cross the countryBOOKS
‘I never knew [America] was so beautiful. I was like a bachelor who goes along fine for twenty-five years and then decides to get married.’—GERTRUDE STEIN
Gertrude Stein
Has Arrived
By Roy Morris Jr.
Johns Hopkins,
252 pages, $24.95
over the space of seven months,
making appearances in 37 cities
in 23 states. According to Mr.
Morris, “not until Timothy
Leary’s psychedelic caravan in the
1960s would another speaker
rival Gertrude Stein’s reception
on American campuses.”
“The trip would be great fun,”
Mr. Morris observes, “not merely
for Gertrude and Alice but for
thousands of literally depressed
Americans who would find some
much-needed diversion in the
unpredictable antics of a pair of
eccentric, accessible, uninhibited
women who were apt at any given
time to say or do anything. The
headline crawl on the New York
Times Building in Times Square—
‘Gertrude Stein Has Arrived...
Gertrude Stein Has Arrived...
Gertrude Stein Has Arrived’—was
both literally and figuratively
true.”
This is a fair sampling of Mr.
Morris’s style: His writing is brisk
and breezy, and he seems eager
to tell his stories in as entertain-
ing a manner as possible. For the
most part the trip was great fun
for Stein, and she was surprised
by the affection she felt for her
homeland. “Chicago too was good
to look at,” she said. “I had not
seen winter for many years and
Alice Toklas had never seen it....
They told us that the modern
high buildings had been invented
in Chicago and not in New York.
It is interesting that it should
have been done where there was
plenty of land to build on and not
in New York where it is narrow
and so must be high of necessity.
Choice is always more pleasing
than anything necessary.”
“Gertrude Stein Has Arrived”
is not necessarily a book for the
Stein scholar. There is little
original research here and no new
theories are advanced. Mr. Morris
seems content to take us through
the trip chronologically, relying
closely upon the press coverage
of the time (which, to his credit,
he magnifies and makes new,
vignette after vignette). Stein
once expressed regret that the
general public was more inter-
ested in her life than in her cre-
ations. “Gertrude Stein Has Ar-
rived” may not change the
situation, but one may hope that
some readers find spark in this
lively book and investigate
further.Mr. Page is a professor at the
Thornton School of Music and
the Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism
at the University of Southern
California.She Came Saw Conquered
CELEBRITY Stein at Newark Metropolitan Airport, Nov. 7, 1934.
UNITED AIRLINES/BEINECKE DIGITAL COLLECTIONSAfter an absence of
30 years, American
modernism’s ‘maiden
aunt’ returned to
the U.S. a ‘real lion.’