Category Archives: Clifford’s Spiral

Book Review Revisited – The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

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I’m reposting this review because the limited TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson just came out on Apple TV! Watch it! #emmy

Walter Mosley is best known for his prolific detective fiction. But this book is a fond, thoughtful story about a man who finds reasons to live just when he doesn’t have much time left.

Here’s my book review.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey isn’t a whodunit. It’s artful, introspective literary fiction about a 91-year-old man near the end of his life.

Ptolemy Grey lives by himself in a shabby one-bedroom apartment in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. His place is stacked with the trash of a lifetime. You see, he hasn’t paid any attention to it since he woke up one morning to find his beloved last wife Sensia lying dead beside him.

When Sensia passed, he threw a tarp over everything in the bedroom and closed the door. He now sleeps on a mattress under a table in the kitchen. He rarely goes out, except when his grand-nephew Reggie walks him to the store for a few meager supplies. And he’s terrified to open the door for anyone.

The narrative is full of Ptolemy’s fretful thoughts. He has outlived almost all of his closest friends and loved ones. And early in this story, he finds that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Another nephew, Hilly, drops by to take him to Reggie’s wake. There Ptolemy meets Robyn, a gorgeous, slender girl who is about to turn eighteen. She decides to take care of him, becoming his last love, albeit platonic, but intense as any of the romances in his long life.

As Ptolemy says to her:  I love you and I couldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for you taking care of me. And if you were twenty years older and I fifty years less I’d ask you to be my wife and not a soul on this earth would have ever had better.

This may well be Walter Mosley’s best book.

In 2013 actor Samuel L. Jackson said in an interview with Red Carpet News TV that he had acquired the movie rights to Ptolemy Grey. Just released in 2022! Watch it!

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #26 – The Centaur – How did you make it through high school?

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Here’s my book review of The Centaur, a novel by John Updike. This book’s central metaphor from Greek mythology is that Chyron, the noblest of all the centaurs, took pity on humankind. The man-beast sacrificed himself to appease Zeus.

The Chyron of Updike’s story is George Caldwell, a middle-aged high-school teacher in small-town Pennsylvania. Although Caldwell would seem to be the main character, a lot of the narration is by his teenage son Peter. The lad loves his father but wishes the old man had a higher opinion of himself. George thinks he’s a loser, even though he seems to be beloved by most of his students, even the ones who mock him mercilessly.

The father-son relationship is the core of the book. Mother Cassie isn’t much of a character at all unless you sense the compassion between the lines. There isn’t much mythology in it except in bookend chapters that take us in and out. Updike seems to have done his homework and knows his Greek stories. But how those intertwine with the Caldwell family saga is obscure.

Updike’s legacy has been his Rabbit books, much like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. Updike’s came first. I sampled both and I wasn’t drawn to either. Too cynical, too bitter. Does anyone really care whether middle-class white men experience heartache and disappointment? I admit that’s a sarcastic rhetorical question. I haven’t read them all, but I suspect The Centaur might be John Updike’s best book.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #25 – Can you imagine living in the south of France?

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As we think back over the pleasures and pain of the past year, here’s my review of A Good Year by Peter Mayle.

A bored, urbane London career man inherits a rundown vineyard in the Bordeaux region of France. Fortunately, he speaks fluent French and doesn’t act so English as to be spurned by the locals. His predictable romantic adventures with bucolic hotties are not graphic at all, but the descriptions of his meals at the local bistro border on the pornographic. If reading about artfully prepared food and incredible wines get you excited, this is your book.

The wine, of course, is a topic of infinite variety. I’m familiar with rhapsodic descriptions including tastes of chocolate, berry, and oak, but this is the first time I saw “dirty socks” mentioned in connection with the taste of wine.

There’s a bit of a crime story here, nothing so stressful as to inspire a Hollywood blockbuster. Unanswered questions about the history and lore of this French farming community may pique your interest, like an appetizer course, or what the French call an amuse bouche, a tasty morsel to tease the mouth.

The mystery is not much of a crime. The most violent act involves spitting into a crachoir (a spittoon for wine tasters), which as the Brits might say is a bloody shame, especially if the wine contains just the right hint of dirty sock.

But if in the midst of winter, you’re tempted to escape to the south of France, reading The Good Year is a quick and inexpensive vacation.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #24 – Do you speak the Bard’s English?

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Ever since I learned that Gerald and Shakespeare both mean “spear chucker,” I’ve had a long-standing Jones for the Bard. Quite coincidentally, a colleague recently suggested that I’d enjoy anything written by Bill Bryson. My friend suggested A Walk in the Woods or A Short History of Nearly Everything. The first sounded too much like a mossy travelogue and the ambitious scope of the second seemed far too cumbersome for casual sampling. So Bryson’s biography, Shakespeare: The World As Stage, was the irresistible choice for me.

I can now agree that Bryson may be the most entertaining nonfiction writer I’ve ever read. He dares to be a stylist in these days of plain-vanilla journalism, and that is praiseworthy in itself. Perhaps it’s in the blood: His father was a sportswriter with the flair of an H. L. Menken or a Heywood Hale Broun.

Apparently Bryson was assigned to write Shakespeare as an entry in the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books (a HarperCollins imprint, a News Corporation subsidiary, a Viacom competitor, and a prize possession of Rupert Murdoch et al). Right off, Bryson seems bewildered that so much material has been generated about the most illustrious English dramatist — and most of it on scanty and even nonexistent evidence. You can almost hear Bryson implore, “I got stuck with writing this, now how do I fill a few hundred pages without making stuff up?”

Chandos Portrait of William Shakespeare

He starts by describing the Chandos portrait (shown here), and after tantalizing us with intriguing details about the wealth of the sitter (apparent from the dark clothes, which require lots of expensive dye) to the earring (as rakish on a man then as now), the embarrassed biographer bestows the fact that no one knows whether this most famous likeness is actually the person we’ve been told it is.

Bryson chatters on, quite amusingly, making much ado about nothing as he overturns reams of research. Perhaps because statistics offer some hope of solid evidence, he informs us that Shakespeare’s vocabulary included about 20,000 words. You probably know about 50,000, but today’s world is a more complex place. But — and here’s the astounding factoid — when Shakespeare couldn’t find an appropriate word, he apparently made one up.

In fact, Shakespeare contributed about 800 words to your 50K. Among these coinages are: abstemious, antipathy, assassination, barefaced, critical, eventful, excellent, frugal, indistinguishable, leapfrog, lonely, well-read, zany, and, as Bryson quips, countless others, including countless.

Suffice it to say Shakespeare must have had a fairly deep knowledge of Latin and Romance-language root words and syllables, to so effectively concoct and combine new polysyllabic English ones. Is this more grist for the grinders who allege Shakespeare was in fact someone else? Bryson does not comment specifically, but he does a credible job of debunking various Baconian and Marlovian speculations later in the book.

Shakespeare’s turns of a phrase also enhanced the language. Many of his inventions are cliches of modern speech (Bryson’s compilation): one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father of the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, and foregone conclusion.

The King James Bible was a new translation back then. Most spiritual and scholarly works were still being written in Latin. So the English Bible and Shakespeare’s plays apparently contributed more to our daily discourse than you’d think.

I plan to read lots more Bryson, and thanks to him I now admire William Shakespeare (whoever he was) more than ever.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #23 – Can you enjoy a story you don’t understand?

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Here’s my book review of Invisible by Paul Auster.

First off, there are many books with the title Invisible. Make sure you get the right one. Paul Auster writes fascinating literary novels, which are often baffling. This book presents three interwoven versions of the same story as told by three different narrators.

Main character Adam Walker is a young poet in New York. Soon after graduation he meets a worldly couple at a party – Frenchman Rudolph Born and his mistress Margot. Born is an international man of mystery, an unscrupulous character who may be con-man or spy or both. Margot is a seductress. Born helps Walker hook up with Margot, and the first plot complication is a love triangle.

Born pulls Walker into a publishing venture, and then – out of the blue – he murders a man in front of him on the street. He intimidates Walker into helping him cover it up.

Walker is now carrying a burden of guilt that will haunt him forever. When he thinks Born and Margot are out of his life, Walker has a love affair with his own sister. More guilt.

Walker tries to make sense of it all by writing an autobiographical novel. When circumstances prevent him from completing it, he challenges his friend Jim, who is also a writer, to finish the story. Jim then narrates the next part of the book, describing what he’s been able to discover about Walker’s past.

In a third narrative, a French woman named Cécile narrates. She was a minor character earlier in the story, but now she’s center stage. She met Walker by way of Born. She was in love with Walker and tormented by Born. Near the end of the book, she meets up with Born, and he tries to pull her into yet another of his traps.

The book ends on a final scene which seems to have no connection to Walker’s story. Like his protagonist Walker, Auster is a poet. It’s up to the reader to find meaning in this concluding image. This plot is complex and not easily understood. But Invisible isn’t a pulp-fiction whodunit. In the end, you probably don’t have all the facts, and the facts you do have, may not even be true.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #22 – Musicianship – When can a band come out of the garage?

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The topic of this book review is musicianship.

Musicianship is a common theme of three different stories. The first is An Equal Music, a novel by Vikram Seth about a European string quartet. Another about chamber musicians in New York is the movie A Late Quartet. The third, and most unusual, is The Bear Comes Home, a novel by Rafi Zabor.

Musicianship is the first thing you notice about any band. Do you hear individual instruments and voices or a mellow blend? Inexperienced amateurs are too concerned with projecting their personal sound. Professionals know that listening to each other is a measure of not only artistry, but also of generosity.

In An Equal Music, a violinist who plays in a chamber quartet carries on a love affair with an accomplished pianist. The main issue with them is mutual trust, which is also the crucial element that binds a successful quartet. However, one of them has been slowly growing deaf and is hiding it from the other. As we learn, a relationship can work, for a while, even if it is not based on truth, but on a willingness to agree.

In A Late Quartet, the second violinist and the violist are married to each other. The violinist is having doubts about his playing, which leads a brief affair with a dancer. The arrogant first violinist is giving music lessons to his colleagues’ talented daughter. He betrays his bond to them by allowing the girl to seduce him. Again, it’s all about trust and cooperation, sometimes in spite of the underlying truth.

In The Bear Comes Home, the bear in the title is an alto sax player who is crazy about jazz, girls, and Shakespeare. He’s not a bearlike man, he’s a furry animal. And, he’s beset by the blues. Oddly, he blames his difficulties getting along with his human musician friends on everything except his essential bearishness. His situation reminds us how immigrants must feel, knowing they’re so much like the rest of us, while we can only see their differences.

Musicianship – it’s about collaboration, and what it takes for all us kids to play nice. Not just in music, but in personal relationships and even in international negotiations.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #21 – A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn – Can a rabbi be a good detective?

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Here’s my book review of A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn, a Rabbi Ben mystery by Marvin J. Wolf.

Author Marvin J. Wolf

If you’ve followed these reviews, you know I talked about Abandoned in Hell, a Vietnam war memoir coauthored by Marvin Wolf. That review has had more hits than any of mine so far, both in text on the Splash Magazineswebsite and in the GetPublished! Radio podcasts. I believe that’s because Marv is a masterful storyteller who has a knack for finding compelling subjects. (I call him by his first name because, I proudly confess, he’s a colleague and a friend.)

You may come to think of Rabbi Ben, the protagonist of Marv’s mystery series, the same way. Here is the kind of righteous, empowered avenger you’d want as a friend if you ever found yourself the target of unscrupulous thugs in a dark alley in the boroughs of New York.

Rabbi Ben Maimon made his literary debut in For Whom the Shofar Blows (originally titled The Tattooed Rabbi). Ben’s mission in this second thriller is to track down a missing ancient manuscript, the Aleppo Codex, the oldest known Hebrew copy of the Tanakh, which contains all twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible. If you think a quest for some crusty, old parchment would be a scholarly snore, you’ve been living in a cave and never heard of Dan Brown or never seen Tom Hanks’ portrayals of the obsessive Dr. Robert Langdon. And, like Langdon, Ben has a talent for finding obscure facts, beautiful women who offer their passionate assistance and support, and more physical threats than your average street-wise operative could handle.

As to the physical threats, you’d think a man of God would rarely if ever need to resort to violence. But, as in ancient times, these days not only books but also places of worship are being destroyed by zealots who want to rewrite history. And, as the global underground economy grows ever larger, there are thieves and cutthroats who don’t hesitate to kill for religious artifacts because one side or the other is willing to pay for them with suitcases full of cash.

So, as is the deceptively mild-mannered Mr. Wolf, Rabbi Ben is accomplished in the martial arts. If your heart beats faster when a good thriller is peppered with against-the-odds altercations, some bloody, you will not be disappointed.

Another close colleague of mine, the sci-fi cult author Thomas Page, recently reminded me that Ian Flemingbelieved readers lust after pointless detail. That’s why fans of his James Bond thrillers know a Walther PPK from a Smith & Wesson .45 and why if you drive an Aston Martin you will thank your mechanic for tuning up the turbocharger when you need to make a fast getaway.

Readers of A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn whose scavenger minds likewise lust for detail will learn so much here about Jewish arcana that you might feel as though you’ve successfully completed a college-level course in religious studies.

And you won’t want to wait for the next Rabbi Ben mystery.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #18 – Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

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Here’s my book review of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson.

Retired British Army officer Major Ernest Pettigrew is a modest man with domestic tastes. Since his dear wife died, he’d like nothing better than to shut himself up in their cottage in the village of Edgecombe St. Mary and expire quietly while sipping tea. Not surprisingly, his main problem is not so much grief as loneliness. But his quietude is suddenly disturbed by other worries. His brother Bertie dies, and he must both console the widow and supervise the wake. The event brings an extended visit from Pettigrew’s son Roger, an overachieving wiz of London finance, who attends the funeral with his social-climbing fiancé.

Although Pettigrew must now take on another load of grief, his immediate challenge is the covetousness of family members. Bertie’s widow Marjorie remembers that the brothers inherited a matched pair of antique shotguns. Pettigrew has cared for one of them meticulously, knows how to use it, and Bertie had the other and allowed it to tarnish on a shelf. Marjorie wants the guns sold as a pair at auction. Pettigrew had expected he’d have custody of both guns as family heirlooms. Another claimant on Pettigrew’s worldly goods is son Roger, who expects his father to move into more modest digs and gift him the cottage. Pettigrew fears that either Jemima will gut the place and redecorate garishly, or the couple will turn around the flip the property and pocket a tidy profit. Both the guns and the house represent cherished traditions that no one but Pettigrew intends to honor.

In all this strife, Pettigrew has a growing friendship with and fondness for a widow, Mrs. Jasmina Ali, proprietress of the village shop. They are both shy people, and they court as awkwardly as a pair of pre-teens. Given her Pakistani heritage and Pettigrew’s stuffy pedigree, their love affair is one more indication that longstanding traditions don’t mean so much anymore.

You’ll come to love this crusty and affable fellow, and you may identify with his valiant attempts to maintain his pride and his values he begins to face the challenges of old age.

Toward the end of the book, author Simonson has inserted an episode of violence. In my view, it’s not organic to the plot. It’s as though her agent or editor told her to raise the stakes. Authors, please resist the temptation to smear icing on your freshly baked pound cake, and don’t put both lemon and milk in your tea! Some things are simply not done.

Producers Paula Mazur and Mitchell Kaplan of the Mazur / Kaplan Company have partnered with Kevin McCormick of Langley Park Pictures to do the movie version and hired screenwriter Jack Thorne (Skins) to adapt the novel. So Simonson’s adding that nasty plot point may have been just the right choice – at least, commercially. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Major’s adventures become a franchise for a spinoff TV series. However, in my humble view, making him a detective would be an unimaginative and all-too familiar choice, especially if, as I further predict, it gets picked up by the BBC.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #20 – Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler – Sweet and sour?

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Here’s my book review of Vinegar Girl,by Anne Tyler.

Vinegar Girl is a title in the publisher’s Hogarth Shakespeare series, which implies the book was inspired by one of the Bard’s plays. Tyler’s romantic comedy is not so much a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew (which Broadway musical fans will recognize as Kiss Me, Kate) as it is a latter-day riff on its theme.

The main character’s name is Kate, which is the key similarity to the old tale, but this Kate is by no means a shrew. She’s an independent woman. (And perhaps that’s the essential point.) It’s not that this Kate hates men – she’s mostly indifferent to them. She honors her father, widowed Dr. Louis Battista, a ditsy research scientist who spends most of his time holed up in his lab with dozens of mice. She indulges her sister Bunny, a teen-with-attitude who (no surprise) won’t clean her room or do her own laundry. Kate tends to the two of them in a big, old house and not only washes their clothes but also cooks and does just enough housekeeping to avoid the appearance of a rat’s nest. As well, she works as an assistant at a private preschool where the teachers are mostly fussy older women who disapprove of both her unmarried status and her wardrobe, which consists of jeans and tops and the one denim skirt she wears when her pants are all in her neglected pile of laundry.

She’s not unattractive – she’s tall and slender with olive skin and long, silky black hair. But she hasn’t had a date in mouse-ages, and she isn’t sufficiently motivated to go after the only male teacher at the school, who happens to be about her age and presumably unattached. But her life’s awkward routine changes suddenly when the doctor formulates a solution to a problem that has been nagging him: The work visa of his brilliant research assistant Pyotr is due to expire. A neat resolution would be to induce Kate to marry him so the klutzy fellow needn’t go back to Russia before their research project is completed.

How this plays out won’t come as a surprise if you know your Shakespeare or your Cole Porter. As in Tyler’s other novels, the emotional turning point is subtle. One clue is an exchange between Pyotr and Kate when she warns him that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Kate begins to realize that his grasp of English is much better than he lets on when he wryly asks his “vinegar girl” why she would even want to catch flies.

Happily ever after? Gimme a break – what world do you live in? But as Kate might say if you pressed her, if she’d wanted to be bored she’d have married someone else.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #19 – How can a clever girl beat the game?

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Here’s my book review of An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin.

You may already know that actor-comedian Steve Martin not only writes gags and skits, but also screenplays, plays, and several books. (He’s also a talented five-string banjo player!) An Object of Beauty is a humorous novel about a scheming young woman making her way in the aristo world of New York art galleries. Oh, and you can add art connoisseur, historian, and collector to Martin’s credentials. He has his own multimillion-dollar private collection, so researching this book probably took little more effort than looking around the walls of his home and remembering details of those transactions.

Main character Lacey Yeager is a looker with brains who has no qualms about sleeping her way to the top of the art-world rat heap. She is sexy, clever, manipulative, shameless, and almost totally heedless. And in this story she goes from being a newbie intern to proprietor of her own trendy gallery. And along the way she goes through boyfriends almost as often as the Manhattan fashion trends shift. There’s the serious, caring metrosexual journalist, a gallery owner or two, a pop artist, a rich playboy broker who may be a scammer, and an FBI agent.

You’ll learn a lot about art – how it’s made, how it’s valued, and what’s in and what’s out. Lacey is one of those characters whose outrageous attitudes don’t fail to fascinate. She’ll hold your attention and keep you guessing what clever ploy she’ll try next. But, oddly enough for a book so well crafted, there are several major plot threads that simply go nowhere or are resolved in uninteresting ways. Did Martin get bored with them? Or did he decide those yarns would be too much of a hassle to spin out or explain? Or is he somehow saying – that’s life – that situation you’re worried about might not turn out as you expect – in fact, it might not go anywhere at all!

For example, I’m dying to know whether there’s a Rembrandt under that Russian painting. So if you happen to run into Steve in the grocery store, please ask him for me.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.