AND THE 2018 MIMSIE AWARDS GO TO…

Every January I send everyone on my email list an essay about the best books I read in the previous year. I am still working on my essay for the year 2020 but to whet your appetite I thought I would post a few of my previous essays. Here’s 2018:

It’s the end of another year, and every time you go on the internet or pick up a newspaper or magazine these days you’re likely to see a lot of lists with titles like “The Ten Best Books of 2018.” Generally those “best books” lists don’t vary too much from publication to publication. The New York Times’ best books of 2018 are likely to look a lot like the books on the list at Slate or The Atlantic or The Washington Post. But here at the annual Mimsie Awards, we can guarantee you that our year-end list of the best books of 2018 won’t look like anybody else’s. That’s because the Mimsie Awards celebrate the best books that I, Kevin Mims, have read over the previous twelve months. And I rarely read anything that’s hot off the press. I work in a bookstore and I spend far too much of my life surrounded by books that are in great demand. Thus, when I want to forget about work and lose myself in a good book, I almost always turn to a title that isn’t even available in my store, either because it is too obscure, totally out of print, or both. Another thing that makes my “best books” list unique is that I do not confine the list to ten books. I read a total of 70 books this year. The Mimsie Awards honor every single book that I feel is worthy of recommendation. And so, without further ado, here are the twenty best books I read in 2018, beginning with the very good and working up to the best of the best:

CHINA DAWN by Robert L. Duncan. I was in the middle of this book and enjoying it immensely when New Year’s Eve rolled around last year. Here’s what I wrote back then: “Because I won’t finish it until sometime in January, the book is not eligible for the 2017 Mimsie. But barring a major crash and burn in the third act, the book seems sure to be in contention for the 2018 Mimsie Award.” The book did, alas, fall apart a bit in the end. But not badly enough that it doesn’t deserve some mention. I published an article in Quillette this year that celebrated novels set in Asia but written in English and featuring British or American protagonists. I called the essay “The Children of Shogun.” Here’s what I had to say about China Dawn:

If Duncan is remembered at all these days it’s probably for having co-written (with his wife Wanda) scripts for some of the worst TV shows of the 1960s, including Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel, and The Immortal. He also cranked out about a dozen novels, many of which were derivative of much better-known works. China Dawn, almost alone among his books, seems to have sprung from a well of deep, personal experience. Duncan was with the American Occupying Force that was stationed in Japan after World War II. In a forward, he mentions this experience and says that he spent forty years writing China Dawn. It shows. The book is full of believable characters and well-drawn recreations of historical events. It must be conceded that the novel is marred by a framing story that takes place in the world of Parisian high fashion circa 1981 and that feels as though it was cribbed from a Judith Krantz novel. But the parts of the story that occur between 1931 and 1945 are riveting. Though the action takes place mainly in China, the main characters are American and Japanese. Though not the best of Shogun’s children, it contains the most horrifying depiction of the Rape of Nanking you are ever likely to find in a popular novel.

Next up is another of the children of Shogun. This one is called Tanamera, and here’s what I wrote about it at Quillette:

Tanamera, by Noel Barber, has as much in common with Gone With the Wind as it does with Shogun. The title refers to the name of a grand family estate, a la Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara, and if you remove the letters that form the word “name” from it, you are left with “Tara.” Set almost entirely in Singapore and Malaysia, Barber’s novel is a towering tale of love and war. The love, as is usually the case in this genre, is interracial. Julie Soong is an admirably courageous, smart, and fairly liberated Chinese woman, although she can sometimes come across as too good to be true. Johnny Dexter, her soul mate, is the heir to a great British trading company located on Singapore. The fathers of Julie and Johnny are friendly business associates but both of them are dead set against any sort of romantic alliance between their offspring. The book does a fine job of delineating the racism of the British occupants of Singapore. Even the wealthy and educated Asians of Singapore are not allowed to play tennis at the British athletic clubs or join British social clubs or dine at British restaurants. To get anything done, Asian businessmen are pretty much forced to partner with a Brit. Punctuated by harrowing action sequences and torrid sex scenes, Tanamera is both deliciously pulpy and rich in historical detail.

Let us move away from Asia for a while. Next on our list is a book set primarily in Malibu, California. That Wilder Woman doesn’t deserve to be as obscure as it is – no reviews on Amazon (until I posted this one), Goodreads, Kirkus, or anywhere else as far as I can tell. Barry Jay Kaplan is a good writer. His novels Black Orchid (co-written with Nicholas Meyer) and Biscayne are both highly entertaining, but That Wilder Woman is my favorite of his books. It is a fictionalized account of how Frederick Rindge and his wife, May, acquired the land now known as Malibu, CA, in the late 1800s and fought for decades to see that it remained largely an unspoiled wilderness area/cattle ranch. Most of that fight was waged by May alone, for Frederick died young in 1905. In Kaplan’s novel the Rindges are called Emmett and Ada Newcomb (they are newcomers to California at the beginning of the book and treated like outsiders for the remainder of their lives by many of the regions movers and shakers, hence their overly-meaningful surname).

Ada is the star of this story. She grows up in tiny Desideer, MI, a dreary farming community. Her father abandoned the family when Ada and her younger brother, Obadiah (Obie), were young. Her mother became mentally unstable after that and died a few years later. It was up to Ada to raise her brother and run the household. When Ada’s own schooling ended, she took over the running of the town’s one-room schoolhouse. But she wanted nothing more than to escape dreary Desideer and lead a more adventurous life. Alas, she lacks the wherewithal to pursue this dream. Fortunately, her hometown boasts one genuine celebrity, a female photographer whose work is famous nationwide. A photograph of Ada taken by this photographer somehow manages to appear in a Boston newspaper, where it catches the eye of young Emmett Newcomb, scion of a wealthy family. For health reasons (bad lungs), his doctors have recommended that he move to southern California, preferably somewhere along the coast. Inspired by Ada’s photo, he decides to take a short detour on the way to California and stop in Desideer, where he asks Ada to marry him and join him on his great adventure. So anxious is Ada to escape that she doesn’t bother playing hard to get for very long. After a courtship of only a few days, Ada agrees to marry Emmett on one condition: after they are settled in California, Emmett must allow her to send for Obie to join them out west. Emmett has no objection to this condition, so off they go.

Alas, young Obie sees Ada’s marriage and departure as the worst of the three abandonments that have defined his life (his father ran off and his mother died young). Angry, he decides not to wait for Ada to send for him. He steals a gun and a horse and heads west. He plans to work his way west by hiring himself out as a cowboy along the way. But his psyche has become warped by all the hardship he has seen, and soon he becomes a murderous psychopath, killing primarily whores (upon whom he is no doubt taking out the anger he feels towards Ada, on whom he has a dangerous and incestuous fixation). His trek west is interrupted by various crime sprees and long stretches in jail. The famous photographer from Desideer writes to Ada and lets her know that Obie left town a wanted man. After that, Ada loses track of him for years.

In California, Emmett finds his Shangri-La, a 13,500-acre ranch located upon the Pacific Ocean just west of Los Angeles. Back then the ranch was known as The Malibu, from a Chumash Indian word meaning “place of loud surf.” He uses his $200,000 inheritance to buy the place and then he and Ada set about establishing a working cattle ranch on part of the land. The rest he hopes to leave relatively undisturbed. Sadly, various southern California business interests find it very inconvenient having a large track of undeveloped land lying just north of Los Angeles. The Southern Pacific Railroad wants to run a rail line through the property. The state highway commission wants to run a highway through it. Various L.A. merchants want to establish a large shipping port along the coast of The Malibu. And the owners of smaller ranches adjacent to The Malibu want easements over the property so they can water their stock and move them to market. The Newcombs (like the real-life Rindges) find themselves besieged by eminent domain lawsuits, class-action lawsuits, angry neighbors, opportunistic politicians, and even cattle rustlers. On top of all that are the wildfires that (even to this day) plague the area.

So here you have all the elements of a great two-pronged saga. While Ada fights off various legal and natural threats to The Malibu, she is unaware of what is potentially the biggest threat of all – the psychopathic brother she’s lost track of and who, like an avenging angel, is slowly but inexorably moving west, determined to have his revenge against the sister whom he believes is the source of all his troubles in life.

Obie bears a resemblance to the crazed protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Child of God. Ada’s portrait, on the other hand, owes much to an even more famous literary forbear. Her determination to save The Malibu calls to mind Scarlett O’Hara’s efforts to save Tara. So, is That Wilder Woman the equal of either of those two classics? Alas, no. But the fault would seem to lie not so much with Kaplan as with history itself. Kaplan’s book had a curious backstory. A note at the front of the novel informs the reader that the book is based on, among other things, an article (presumably about the Rindges) that appeared in Los Angeles Magazine, as well as a (presumably unproduced) screenplay that was developed from the magazine story. I’m not sure how the material fell into Kaplan’s lap, but he seems to have felt honor-bound to hew as closely as possible to the known facts about the Rindges. Anyone who knows anything at all about southern California knows that Malibu was eventually developed and is in fact one of the most expensive housing communities in the world these days. Thus the reader knows from the outset that Ada will eventually lose her battle against the forces of “progress.” The dénouement comes, as it did for May Rindge, with more of a whimper than a bang, a death by a thousand cuts. Whether or not May Rindge had a psychopathic brother to deal with, I can’t say. After building up the reader’s expectation of an Armageddon-like clash between Ada and Obie for much of the book, Kaplan resolves the conflict in a rather matter-of-fact fashion. One suspects that, given full artistic license, Kaplan would have delivered something much more cinematic, a crowd-pleaser.

Still, give the man his due. For a relatively short novel (258 pages), That Wilder Woman manages, for most of its length, to feel like a genuine historical saga. It packs a bigger wallop than many far longer California historical novels. Though it is fictional it gives the reader a reasonable overview of how a large tract of land that once belonged to the Chumash Indians went from being a largely unspoiled wilderness area to one of the most expensive zip codes in the country.

That Wilder Woman is no masterpiece bit is certainly not deserving of the almost complete obscurity into which it has fallen. I’m happy to include it on this year’s Mimsie Awards list.

From Malibu, we now move across the country to Maine. Maynard’s House was written by Herman Raucher, who is best known for his novel The Summer of ’42. Published in 1980, Maynard’s House is set sometime around 1972 or 73. It’s the story of Austin Fletcher, a young American who has just returned home from the Vietnam War. His best friend in the Army, Corporal Maynard Whittier, made Austin the beneficiary of his will. When Maynard was killed in combat, Austin inherited an old cabin that Maynard owned in the Maine wilderness somewhere near the town of Belden. Austin has no family to return to and no real place to call home, so when he is discharged from the Army, he travels, in the middle of winter, to Maynard’s rustic old cabin, which sits on a homestead of about 40 acres. Because it is winter and the roads are covered with snow, Maynard is pretty much a prisoner on the property. He can’t leave. At first, the house seems to be a bit of a godsend. It is full of books and is stocked with lots of food in cans or in the root cellar below the house. Thus Austin has plenty to eat and lots of books with which he can engage his mind. Soon, however, Austin begins to have some unsettling experiences. It seems that the property once belonged to an Indian tribe that has since been slaughtered. But the ghosts of the Indians appear to still inhabit the area. Also somewhat unsettling is Austin’s relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl who seems to live nearby and who occasionally comes by to talk – and flirt – with Austin. The girl’s name is “Ara,” and Austin describes her as “too pretty to classify as mortal.” So surreal do Austin’s everyday interactions with the world become that the reader gradually begins to suspect that the author is playing some kind of trick on him. Perhaps Maynard didn’t die in Vietnam. Perhaps it is Austin who died there and Maynard’s house is the afterlife that he has ended up in. Or perhaps Austin is alive but in a coma in some military hospital, and everything that is happening to him at Maynard’s house is really just taking place in his imagination. The ending of the book is somewhat nebulous and won’t necessarily answer any of these questions. But the bulk of the story, involving Austin’s arrival at Maynard’s house and his day-to-day activities, is compelling in a way that hallucinogenic novels rarely are. Yes, the story may just be one long LSD trip, or a fever dream, or something equally as quicksilvery, but the writing and the atmosphere and the sense of place made this book a very satisfying reading experience.

Mariamne, a novel by Glen Petrie, was published in 1977 and appears to have garnered very little attention. It has been out of print for decades. Few people have commented upon it online. It’s very difficult to find any information about the author. I’m not even sure if he is dead or alive. He wrote close to a dozen other books, but they seem to be even more obscure than Mariamne. Pity. Because, judging by Mariamne, Petrie is an extremely talented writer of historical fiction. The book is based upon the life and crimes of a famous Victorian murderess named Madeleine Smith. Her story has been told many times before. Norah Lofts, a well-known author of gothic romances, and Christianna Brand (author of, among other things, the book upon which the Nanny McPhee movies are based) have both written novels based upon the activities of Madeleine Smith. In 1950 David Lean made a film noir, Madeleine, about Miss Smith’s life of crime. I haven’t seen the film or read any other works about Madeleine Smith, so the story was totally new and surprising to me. The only thing I didn’t like about the book was the title. How the hell is one supposed to pronounce Mariamne? Like Marian? Or Mariam? Or Mary Anne? Since the title-character’s friends refer to her frequently as Mimi and Mim, my guess is that the name is pronounced “Mariam.” The “ne” must be silent.

Petrie announces in a forward that he has played fast and loose with the actual facts of the case, moving the action from Scotland to England, changing the names, and also altering many of the particulars of the case. This was probably a good move. The book feels like a real novel, not like a so-called “nonfiction novel,” one of those true crime books that try to satisfy the demands both of fiction and of journalism. This book is beautifully written and doesn’t have the documentary feel of “true crime” books. The “heroine” is Mariamne Jenkins. She is seventeen years old when we first meet her and a student at an all-girls private school that caters to the daughters of the upper classes. Her father is a working man, however, an architect, and thus a few notches lower on the social ladder than men who have inherited their wealth.

The book does an excellent job of exposing the hypocrisy and misogyny of Victorian England. Society winks and keeps quiet when young men go out on the town and sow their wild oats with various hookers or barmaids and other members of the lower orders. But women, of course, are allowed no such outlets for their sexual desires. As a result, many of them form strong physical bonds with their female friends, frequently hugging and kissing and lavishing other forms of physical affection upon classmates, friends, co-workers, etc. Alas, Mariamne possesses a strong sexual nature, a nature that is constantly being repressed and frustrated. When an older man with a checkered past comes into her life and begins pressuring her into a physical relationship, she puts up only a weak façade of resistance before giving way to his advances. Alas, Mariamne’s passion for sex is surpassed only by her passion for writing letters. She writes letter after letter to her caddish suitor, Simon Tufnel. Eventually all these torrid missives give him an incredible amount of power over her. When a more appropriate suitor comes along seeking her hand in marriage, Mariamne begs Simon to allow her to end their relationship. But Simon threatens to show the letters both to Mariamne’s father and to her new suitor. If he does so, it will be absolutely ruinous to Mariamne’s hopes of a respectable marriage. No respectable young male of the aristocracy would think of marrying a woman who had been “soiled” by another man. Tufnel believes, with some justification, that if he informs Mariamne’s father of their affair, the father will force Mariamne to marry Tufnel. In Mariamne’s strata of Victorian England, once a woman has given her virginity to a man, he pretty much owns her. Eventually Mariamne can see no other way out than to kill Tufnel, and so she begins visiting the local apothecary seeking arsenic to deal with a fictitious infestation of rats at her house. In fact, she is storing up the arsenic so that she can stir some into the cocoa that she serves Tufnel whenever he sneaks into her house at night to engage in various sexual adventures.

I won’t spoil the book by telling you where all this leads. I will say that Petrie includes a lot of Mariamne’s letters to Tufnel in the text. And in his introductory note he points out that many of the letters are exact copies of letters sent by the real-life murderess Madeleine Smith to her own caddish lover, Emile L’Angelier. Mariamne/Madeleine was clearly a smart and articulate young woman, and might have been a fine writer if she had lived in a society where women were encouraged to pursue literary careers. And had she lived in a less prudish society, her affair with Tufnel might have been treated like nothing more than a passing fling. Alas, both Madeleine and Mariamne lived in a prudish, puritanical milieu where women were expected to engage in sex only procreatively and only with their lawfully wedded spouses. Men could make a sport out of hopping from bed to bed with various illicit lovers. But women were granted no such leeway.

Mariamne Jenkins was one of the most fascinating fictional characters I encountered this year. She is more sinner than saint, but she is nonetheless a fairly sympathetic character. She can be manipulative, shallow, selfish, and vain. But she is also smart, articulate, bold, and determined to live life on her own terms. The outcome of her story may surprise you. At one point the book becomes a courtroom drama and much of the legal wrangling is taken almost verbatim from the actual transcripts of Madeleine Smith’s own court case.

Over the course of the first 200 or 300 pages of this 500-page novel you may find it hard to believe that Mariamne is ever going to evolve into a tale of murder. That’s because Petrie does an excellent job of slowly recreating the period, the social milieu, and the relationships of the characters to each other. I love a mystery as much as the next avid reader, but I was almost sad when the book turned into a crime story. I was hoping it might just remain a riveting portrait of what life was like for young women with healthy sexual appetites in a society as buttoned-up as Victorian England.

Petrie really knows his material and his time period well, and part of the fun comes from encountering fairly obscure terms such as pele tower (a kind of castle-like watch tower along the borders of a town or village), pelmet (the top part of a drapery), abigail (a lady’s maid) and lappets (the side flaps of a bonnet, into which hair can be tucked). Here’s a brief sample of how cleverly he writes about Mariamne’s dual nature, her tendency to be only halfway hypocritical at times: There was a sort of truth in what she had said, which made every alternate tear which ran down her cheek quite genuine.

I learned at least one practical fact while reading Mariamne. If you’re going to try to kill someone with arsenic, don’t give them too much. Amateurs who try to commit murder or suicide with arsenic almost always use too much, which causes the victim to throw up and thereby rid himself of the poison before it can prove fatal. In arsenic poisoning as in so many other branches of life, moderation is everything.

If you’re looking for a copy of Mariamne online, you may want to purchase a hardback copy. My copy is the 1978 Jove paperback edition. It has a deliciously lurid cover illustration, showing our heroine both in her genteel Victorian lady mode and, below that, sprawled out in bed naked with her lover. For a forty-year-old book my paperback was in great condition and I treasure it for its luridness. But, damn! It had more typos than any novel I’ve read in years. The book appears to have gone completely un-copyedited. We see random parentheses that never close. Whole lines will be randomly repeated. There are tons of obvious typos such as “almoost” for “almost” and “drozzle” for drizzle, but there are others that are more confusing. Is “shreads” just an old-fashioned way of spelling “shreds” or is it a typo? And because the book employs so many antiquated terms, I was sometimes unsure if a word was meant to be obscure or just spelled so badly its meaning was unclear. When I first saw abigail spelled without a capital A, I assumed it was a typo and that the maid in question was named Abigail. When it appeared again and again with a small A, I realized that abigail must be a Victorian term for a maid. My unabridged American Heritage Dictionary has no listing for a small-a abigail (it has a listing for Abigail, which it defines as the wife of David in the Bible). I had to go online to learn that abigail is a noun meaning “a lady’s maid” and that it comes from a play called The Scornful Lady (1610) written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Apparently the Scornful Lady’s young attendant was the most memorable character in the play. I’m not overly fussy about typos. They seem to go hand-in-hand with the kind of cheap paperback books I’m so fond of. But if they bother you, you’d better try the hardbound edition of Mariamne and hope that it is better copyedited than the paperback.

Next up is a book that I was uniquely predisposed to enjoy, but which you may well want to steer clear of. I enjoyed the hell out of Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s novel Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife. Like Mariamne, this book has a very awkward title. For one thing, Joanna isn’t the standard spelling of the name Johanna. For another thing, whenever I find myself talking about this book to someone (usually my long-suffering wife), I tend to call it David’s Wife and Joanna’s Husband, or, worse, David’s Husband and Joanna’s Wife. So let’s admit it right up front, this book has a shitty title. Hailey is the author of A Woman of Independent Means (great title!), one of my all-time favorite epistolary novels. She is also the mother of Kendall Hailey, author of The Day I Became an Auto-Didact, one of my favorite memoirs. She was also the wife of the late Oliver Hailey, a legendarily awful playwright (he had three plays performed on Broadway, all of them cancelled after a single performance). I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Oliver, however, because he was the script supervisor on MacMillan & Wife, which was part of the NBC Mystery Movie rotation back in the 1970s. He also wrote a bunch of scripts for MacMillan & Wife and other TV shows. In the 1970s, I was a TV junkie who actually paid attention to TV writing credits. I wrote fan letters to a lot of scriptwriters back then, and I frequently got letters (and even scripts) back from them. I never wrote to Oliver Hailey but I knew who he was. So I am probably the only person not related to the family, who happens to be a big fan of at least three of the Haileys. 

But there is another reason why I was uniquely predisposed to enjoy this book. Back in February, I had my gall bladder surgically removed. It’s a routine operation and went smoothly, but the doctors warned me that the air that was blown into my body during the laparoscopic surgery would collect in my shoulders and cause me a fair amount of pain. I was under the influence of strong opioids when they told me this, so I didn’t pay much attention. But that night, as I prepared for bed, the pain kicked in. I fought it with Norco pills, but if I put any pressure at all on my shoulder, I was afflicted with unbearable pain. It soon became apparent to me that I was going to have to sit up in bed all night long. Seeing as how I was unlikely to get much sleep that way, I began looking around for a good book. I don’t know why I chose JH&DW, but I’m glad I did. It was so engrossing that I found the hours flying by and I didn’t mind at all sitting up all night long.

What’s it about? That’s the best thing about the book (from my perspective anyway). The novel is a very thinly disguised autobiography of the author. If you’re not interested in the Hailey family, it probably won’t appeal to you. But, as I mentioned, I am a Hailey family junkie, so it was like crack to me. What’s amazing is that the book didn’t break up the marriage of Oliver and Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey. Because Oliver (aka David) comes across in the book as an absolute prick. Like the Haileys, the fictional Scotts (Joanna and David) grow up in Texas where they become school sweethearts. She eventually follows him to New Haven, CT, where he attends the prestigious Yale School of Drama and she basically supports him with low-paying work in the publishing industry. Throughout their long and rocky marriage, the pattern will remain the same: David is the high-strung diva who gets all the attention, but Joanna is the workhorse who actually makes their lives possible. Like Oliver Hailey, David Scott manages to get a few plays produced on Broadway. Also like Oliver, his plays are colossally unsuccessful. Joanna meanwhile is moving up the ladder at the small publishing firm where she works. But when David decides to leave New York (where they moved after he graduated from Yale) and try his hand at writing for television in Hollywood, Joanna has no choice but to follow along. By now they have one daughter (a fictional version of Kendall) and will soon have another (a fictional version of Kendall’s sister Brooke). David, because he is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and has had his work performed on Broadway, thinks of himself as too good for television, but he eventually begins writing for it anyway. The money is good and the living is easy, but boy does he go on complaining. Eventually he is hired to write for a daily soap opera spoof (in real life he was a writer for the soap opera spoof Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman). He is too snobby to do a good job of it, so eventually Joanna takes charge and helps him write the scripts. Soon she is writing scripts of her own. Normally, this would be a wonderful development in a marriage. The Scotts are rich and they are both gainfully employed in Hollywood. But David suffers from intense jealousy over the fact that his wife appears to be a much better TV writer than he is. He eventually quits the soap opera, whereupon the producers dismiss Joanna from the writing staff, assuming that she has been riding her husband’s coattails the whole time when in fact the opposite is true. At this point David lands a cushy job as a writer and script supervisor for a prime-time network mystery show (obviously inspired by MacMillan & Wife). Joanna no longer has a writing job so she fulfills a lifelong desire by writing a novel based loosely on the life of her grandmother (obviously inspired by Elizabeth’s real-life novel A Woman of Independent Means). Despite David’s assurance that the book is crap, Joanna’s novel becomes a colossal hit (A Woman of Independent Means was a big bestseller that garnered mostly positive reviews), which naturally infuriates David. But what really drives him crazy with jealousy is when the book is adapted into a super successful Broadway play (A Woman of Independent Meanswas adapted into a relatively successful Broadway play as well as a TV movie starring Sally Field). As Joanna begins to emerge as a successful writer while David cranks out uninspired TV scripts, the marriage is strained to the breaking point. The reader is supposed to care about the marriage, but I hated David so much that I was constantly urging Joanna (in my head, of course) to leave him.

Despite my loathing of David Scott, I actually enjoyed the book quite a bit. For one thing, as a failed writer myself, I love to read about successful writers and imagine what that kind of life must be like. I also derive great pleasure when I read about successful writers whose lives are largely miserable. My life has largely been pleasurable, and my marriage has been the best part of it, so a book like JH&DW allows me to get all smug and to look down my nose at the characters and think, “I may not have gotten the breaks in my writing life that you did, but look at me all happily married and enjoying my life while you live in a writer’s paradise and are miserable.” Granted, this is immature and small-minded of me, but I take my enjoyment wherever I can find it.

JH&DW has a really awkward structure. It begins with a letter from Joanna to her now grown up daughter Julia. Although it doesn’t say so explicitly, the letter from Joanna implies that something drastic has gone wrong with Joanna’s and David’s marriage and that Joanna wants to explain her side of it. So Joanna has left thirty year’s worth of her diaries for Julia to read. Presumably she wants Julia to see just what a shit David has been throughout the entire 30 years that he has been a part of Joanna’s life. The diary format comes across as somewhat contrived. But even more contrived is that we are made to understand that David has found the diaries before Julia could get a hold of them, and he has decided to add his own editorial comments to the diaries. So each diary entry tells the story of Johanna and David from Joanna’s perspective at the time the events occurred. But each entry also includes David’s present-day commentary and rebuttals. Sometimes he insists that Joanna’s memory is wrong or unfair. Often he gives a completely different account of a particular episode in the marriage. Always his entries are self-serving and defensive. It’s hard to understand just how he is making these editorial observations. Is he writing in the actual diary? That seems unlikely, unless Joanna left lots of blank space between the paragraphs for him. Is he writing on Post-It Notes and inserting them into the diary? It doesn’t really make much sense. And one can’t help but pity poor Julia who will eventually, presumably, read these hundreds of pages about her parents’ miserable marriage. But I was so fascinated by the lives of these two writers that I really didn’t care much about how contrived the format was. The marriage it described and the writing lives it depicted both seemed real and believable to me. And I enjoyed the hell out the book. It’s the only book this year that I was able to read in a single sitting. True, it was a long sitting. I began it at about nine p.m. and finished it the next morning at about seven. I took a few potty breaks and medicine breaks, but most of the night I spent just sitting up in bed beside my sleeping wife reading all about Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife. It’s a book that I will always associate with my missing gall bladder. How’s that for a blurb!

Curiously, our next honorable mention goes to a book that has startling similarities to JH&DW. Blue Pages is a 1979 novel written by Eleanor Perry, a writer who is most famous for the screenplays she wrote. For eleven years she was married to filmmaker Frank Perry, who directed several movies from scripts written by Eleanor. Eleanor was 16 years older than Frank and had doubts about marrying him. She was already a successful writer when they met and he was a wannabe director. She feared (rightly as it turned out) that he just wanted to ride her coattails to show business success. But he insisted that he was madly in love with her and so, against her better judgment, she married him. He turned out to be both insecure and a colossal egomaniac. He was also a womanizer and a congenital liar. Like David Scott he was a terrible husband who resented the fact that his wife was more talented than he was and more successful. Eleanor Perry uses all of this painful material in a novel that is often quite funny, albeit painfully so. Lucia and Vincent Wade, the main characters of Blue Pages, are a barely fictionalized version of Eleanor and Frank Perry. Curiously, Perry, like Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey in JH&DW, employs a kind of complicated narrative device for telling her story. Parts of the story are written in third person as if they are a film treatment of the lives of Lucia and Wade. Other parts are written in first person by Lucia. Of course, it’s clear to the reader that even the third-person segments have been written by Lucia because they contain frequent critical asides to the reader that comment amusingly on the film treatment (I’d cut my throat before I’d write a line like that. Has she no pride? This dialog has got to be rewritten).

A feminist critique of gender roles plays as a sort of background music in JH&DW, but in Blue Pages, the feminism is loud and clear and very much in the foreground from the very beginning. Perry was a fiery feminist back before feminism was cool. According to her bio on Wikipedia, she got in trouble at the Cannes Film Festival back in 1971 for defacing posters to a Fellini film that she thought was demeaning to women. Her feminist fury fuels just about every sentence of this book without ever overwhelming it. In 1968, Eleanor Perry wrote a screenplay based on a Truman Capote short story. Her husband Frank directed a TV movie from the screenplay. Unbeknownst to Eleanor, he promised Truman Capote that he could share a screenwriting credit with Eleanor even though Capote did no work on the actual script. When Eleanor found out, she was furious. The script went on to win an Emmy Award for both Eleanor and Capote. Capote basked in the glory of this undeserved Emmy while Eleanor seethed about having to share it with him. This episode, very slightly fictionalized, appears in Blue Pages and the reader can’t help but be outraged by it. Again and again, the men in Lucia’s life either sabotage her work or take credit for it. In real life, after finally divorcing Frank, Eleanor set about looking for a novel that she could use as the basis for a feminist screenplay and film. She found what she was looking for when Marilyn Durham’s novel The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing was published in 1972. Eleanor used $50,000 of her own money to buy the film rights to the novel. She wrote a screenplay and then set about trying to find a studio where she could produce the film. Alas, no studio wanted to make a Western film produced by a woman. To be taken seriously by the studios, she was forced to partner with Martin Poll, a male producer. Poll proceeded to undermine all of Perry’s efforts to make a film from a feminist perspective. He held production meetings in secret without inviting her. Without her knowledge he hired William W. Norton, a hack screenwriter of numerous unmemorable films, to rewrite Eleanor’s screenplay (Norton had no illusions about his own worth as a writer. The day before he died, a hospital nurse asked him if she would have seen any of the movies he wrote. He replied: “I don’t think your IQ is low enough.”). When Burt Reynolds was hired to star in the picture, the script was reworked to make the film more about the male lead than the female lead (Sarah Miles). Over and over again, Perry got shoved out of the way so that the men could make the kind of film they wanted. This incident also appears in Blue Pages, also very slightly fictionalized.

Just about every man whom Lucia Wade encounters in Blue Pages ends up either fucking her, fucking her over, or both (her personal and professional lives constantly intertwine). Even today, fifty years after Perry’s heyday as a screenwriter, Hollywood doesn’t have nearly enough women in positions of power: studio heads, directors, producers, screenwriters etc. But it was ten times worse in Perry’s day and her book is one of the few artifacts of the era that seems to capture the unfairness of it all in a way that is fierce, funny, angry, articulate, and wholly believable. Just about every outrageous incident in the book can be traced back to an incident in Perry’s biography. As a work of literature, Perry’s novel strikes me as being on a slightly higher level than Hailey’s JH&DW. But as a work of feminism, it’s on an entirely different planet. There’s some slow-burning feminism between the lines of JH&DW but it explodes from every word of Blue Pages. This is a book that’s long overdue for a critical reassessment. Some feminist press ought to bring out a new edition of it with a forward by Tina Fey or Lena Dunham or some other prominent woman in the entertainment biz, someone who can tell us how far we’ve come since Eleanor Perry’s day and also how far we still have to go.

For the last two years, my lists of favorite books have included titles by Mildred Walker. Let’s now make it three years in row. In 2018 I read her novel The Brewer’s Big Horses. Like The Curlew’s Cry (which charts the rise of a young woman who turns her father’s failing cattle ranch into a successful dude ranch), The Brewer’s Big Horses is about a young woman who finds success in an industry dominated by men. In this case the industry is beer-making. I am forever giving away my copies of Mildren Walker’s books to feminist friends and urging them to read them. Alas, they never do. No one has ever reported back to me that they have read Winter Wheat or The Curlew’s Cry. This year I gave away my copy of The Brewer’s Big Horses to a woman and feminist whom I thought sure would love it. Alas, she hasn’t gotten around to reading it yet. Because I don’t have a copy handy, I can’t give the kind of detailed description of it that I have given of the other books on this list. But it is set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its main character is a young woman named Sara who comes from a family that is upper-crust but not very wealthy. She marries a man who is the son of German immigrants. The German immigrants own a brewery which makes them financially comfortable but nonetheless working class. Sara’s family look down on her for marrying into a family of brewer’s. When Sara’s husband is killed in a tragic accident just a few years after the marriage, her family expects her to leave behind the beer business and move back in with them. Instead, she defies them and takes over the brewery from her late husband. She runs into all kinds of hardships over the next thirty years or so, not the least of which is the onset of Prohibition, but she manages to keep the business afloat despite continued resistance by her family and by the town’s more genteel bluenoses. I have no inherent interest in beer or horses, but I loved this novel. The story contains plenty of drama and it brings small-town American life in the early 20th century vividly to life, detailing its virtues and its pettiness, its hardships and its rewards.

Rose is a Victorian sensation novel in same vein as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. But Rose was written by Martin Cruz Smith, and published in 1996, so it has the kind of kinky sex and graphic violence that Collins and his contemporaries could never have gotten away with. The plot is ultra-complicated. Like any good sensation novel it involves lots of deception and disguise. The story revolves around a mysterious explosion and fire at a mine that killed scores of miners. A curate disappeared from the area at about the same time as the mine explosion and the book’s main character, a specialist in mining, is hired to try to figure out what happened to the curate. The plot was almost too complex for my feeble brain, but I loved the way Smith brought the entire milieu to life. Wigan, England, is a dirty coal town populated mostly by impoverished coal miners and their families. But there is also a more genteel element of the town, represented mainly by the family that owns most of the mines. Our hero, Jonathan Blair, wants nothing to do with the town of Wigan. What he wants most is to return to his beloved Africa to do some mining work there. Alas, he hasn’t the money for a trip to Africa. To earn it, he agrees to help a Wigan mine-owner try to find out what happened to the curate who was supposed to marry the mine-owner’s daughter but who disappeared on the day of the explosion. The book is a mystery novel, so I can’t give away much more of the plot. What I will say is that the tale has numerous delightful twists and that the book contains the best last line of any novel I’ve read in the last five years. That might not seem like much, but I think it is a rare novel that ends with an absolutely perfect sentence. This one does. No matter what you think of the rest of the book, you’re bound to love that final line (although it will make no sense to you unless you’ve read the rest of the novel first).

Born of the Sun is a Western novel written by John H. Culp and published in 1959. It belongs to my favorite sub-genre of Western, the type in which the cowboys actually work with cows instead of just shooting up saloons and engaging in duels at High Noon. This novel has some of the traditional gunplay to be found in generic Westerns but it focuses primarily on the hardships of cattle-driving. The book details several long cattle drives from Texas to Abilene, Kansas. At one point, the cowboys are driving a particular breed of cattle whose hooves are so soft they have to be wrapped in leather booties before they can be driven any distance at all. That and plenty of other odd facts made the cattle work fascinating to read about. But the best thing about Culp’s book is the writing. I don’t know how his work has fallen so far into obscurity. He was an expert at evoking Western landscapes. Here are some samples of his writing:

I remember how the spring mornings glistened in Coleman County, the starry purple wild verbena blooming on the prairie, the blue-bonnet, and the sweet-smelling phlox and other wild flowers, and the thick buffalo and mesquite grass covering the earth, and how I scrambled up the cap rock of old Santa Anna Mountain, above the gap, and looked out upon the far country – the tree lines of the creeks, the close little cone peaks like Bead Mountain and Jim Ned standing brave and solitary, and beyond the peaks the blue walls of farther mountains, and the prairies. Sitting high on Santa Anna, my chin in my hands and dreaming a boy’s dream, I saw on all sides and far away the dipping mountain gaps which were the paths and trails of cows and settlers in and out of our wilderness, and as they had always been and still were the ageless paths of Indians and the buffalo. Herds of antelope frisked on the prairies and halfway up the mountainside, and dewy mornings gleamed wide and wonderful.

When at last we came to the Red River, we rested. There was nothing else we could do. What, last year on my first trail drive, had been a shimmering sunlit land of tree fringe and promise and beauty was now a red mess of tossing water and crumbling banks, wind-lashed trees and rain-beaten cowhands, and bawling longhorns in their tens of thousands. As far as the eye could see were herds of cows, herds on the sides of us and gathering behind us – a milling unpredictable sea of wild hell and trouble – herds with lightning-swift impulses balked by a river, herds held together, held separately, herd by restless herd held by a thin chain of riders, worn, exhausted, and nerve-wracked.

I knew now that the greatness of a man was what he left of himself in others, and that in some way a good man never died, that his greatness lived on in those who knew him. When his time came, a man went like a leaf, and it was like a wind took him and scattered him to the prairie, but the good in him stayed behind in others as strong and sure as ever.

This was the year that I learned that much of what can be found in the romance section of a used bookstore is often more accurately described as historical adventure fiction. Before this year I rarely wandered into the aisles of romantic fiction, fearing that I would find there only generic love stories by the likes of Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts. This year, I discovered a secret known only to people who frequently visit the romance aisles: If a book is written by a woman and its main character is a female, the powers that be in the publishing world are likely to banish it to the romance shelves even if it doesn’t have a lot of lovey-dovey stuff in its pages. It was in the romance section of used bookstores where I found many of my favorite books of 2018, including the aforementioned Mariamne, That Wilder Woman, and Tanemara. Jade, by Pat Barr, was another great historical adventure novel that was also marketed as a generic romance. Here is what I wrote about it in my Amazon review:

If you are reading this you are probably standing in a used-book store holding a cheap copy of Pat Barr’s novel Jade in one hand and your cell phone in another, and wondering whether the book is worth buying. At first glance, the book doesn’t look too promising. The cover painting includes a pair of lovers (both of whom are too 20th-Century and too white-bread-looking to actually be characters in this novel) leaning into each other with bedroom eyes. In the background loom some rocky mountains, a pagoda, and a woman dressed in traditional Asian garb standing at the edge of a cliff. If you were lucky enough to stumble upon a hardback edition of the book, then the cover is the same only minus the tacky Caucasian couple leaning into each other on the right side of the painting. Neither the paperback nor the hardback edition carries any blurbs from famous authors or reviews from a newspaper or magazine. This is worrisome to you. Is this book just some fat and forgotten romance novel from the sleazy side of the Reagan era? You can be forgiven for thinking that this is the case. But you would be wrong.

Though it is not flawless, by any means, Jade (the British title – Chinese Alice – is much better) is actually a brilliant book. It is one of scores of fat historical sagas set in Asia but featuring Caucasian protagonists that were published in the wake of the huge success scored by James Clavell’s Shogun back in 1975. Some of these books were cheap knock-offs of Shogun rushed into publication to exploit the public demand for epic tales of the exotic Orient. Jade is not a Shogun rip-off. Though published in the early 1980s, it was probably in the works long before Shogun was first published. It represents the crowning achievement of Pat Barr, a woman who spent much of her life living in, and writing about the Orient. Most of her work on the East is nonfiction. Jade is written with the authority of someone who knows the culture, the history, and the people of China inside and out. Undoubtedly, another expert on Asian culture might be able to spot a few flaws in the book’s presentation of China and it’s people. No book is without a few missteps. But Barr’s book strikes me as being a much more accurate and less romanticized portrait of the Orient than Shogun was.

But don’t buy it because of its historical accuracy. Buy it because Jade is a thrilling adventure tale, shot through with love and terror and excitement and even some decidedly unconventional sex scenes. The book’s viewpoint character is Alice Greenwood, called “Uncut Jade” by her Chinese acquaintances. Born in China in 1858 to British missionary parents, Alice, along with her younger brother, Frank, are kidnapped at an early age by natives hostile to the spread of European culture in Asia. Eventually they end up in the household of a wealthy landowner. Frank becomes a stable boy. Alice works in the kitchen until, at the age of 15, her beauty attracts the attention of the lord of the estate, whereupon he takes her as his concubine. Their sexual encounters start out as nothing more than the rape of a young girl by a forty-something man. Eventually (and some readers will no doubt be put off by this) their relationship blossoms into something deeper, more mutually rewarding, more like love. For the rest of her life, Alice will end up comparing her lovers to the man who deflowered her, and most of them will prove wanting.

When her lord and master leaves on a long trip, Alice finds herself tormented by the Chinese women who work as housekeepers and cooks on the vast estate. They resent her exalted status as a concubine. Their harassment grows so unbearable that Alice eventually escapes and makes her way back to her own people (her father was killed in the same raid in which Alice and Frank were kidnapped, but her mother is still alive, as are her older brother and one of her uncles). By this time, however, Alice has become more Chinese than British. She is fluent in Mandarin. She is more comfortable with native dress and food and culture than any of the white people she knows. She has never lived in a country other than China, but because she is English, she is pretty much a woman stranded between two cultures. The whites don’t like her appetite for all things Chinese, and the Chinese don’t trust her because she is white.

All of this happens fairly early in this long novel. Over the course of the novel, Alice will find herself caught up in vast historical events, from the Taiping Rebellion to the first Sino-Japanese War to the Boxer Rebellion. She will find herself having to fight off the unhealthy lusts of her new stepfather. She will find herself ostracized from her family because she takes a Chinese lover. She will score successes and failures in business and in love. She will witness some of the most dramatic events to have roiled China in the 19th century. She will blossom into a radical feminist and seek to translate some of the West’s most important literature into Chinese. She will fight against the custom of foot-binding and help popularize the liberal writings of John Stuart Mill.

As historical pop fictions go, Jade is one of the best. It is very long, very intelligent, and very engrossing. A few stretches here and there might try the reader’s patience, but the novel gets stronger and stronger as it progresses, and it is unlikely that any reader will feel like skimming through the last few hundred pages. The action moves all over China, from Peking to Shanghai to Port Arthur and many other locales. The siege of Peking’s walled city during the Boxer Rebellion is particularly compelling.

So my advice to you, as you stand in that used-book store and mull over that tattered, disreputable looking paperback copy of Pat Barr’s Jade and wonder if it is worth your time and money is this: Buy it! It may not be a speeding bullet of a novel. But it is a book that you are not likely to ever forget. In a fair world, the name of Alice Greenwood would be as well known to lovers of strong female fictional characters as the names Elizabeth Bennett and Jane Eyre. This is a great piece of forgotten fiction. Read the book and then spread the word.

The best thing I discovered in the romance aisles of my favorite bookstores this year was the work of Diane Pearson. Several of her books will appear in the upper half of this year-end list. We will begin with the tenth best book of my reading year. The Summer of the Barshinskeys, the first novel I read by Diane Pearson, isn’t exactly a literary obscurity, but it deserves to be a lot better known than it is. It was published in hardback in 1984 and it got the mass-market paperback treatment from Fawcett-Crest in 1986. Looking online I can find several other soft-cover editions available, so I’m assuming it was fairly widely distributed. It has garnered only a dozen or so comments at Amazon.com and maybe 25 at Goodreads.com. The Fawcett paperback edition carries blurbs that mainly come from second- or third-tier publications such as The Tulsa World, The West Coast Review of Books and Empire Magazine (whatever that is, or was). So apparently it didn’t set the critical world afire. If it had gotten even a mediocre notice from the New York Times or L.A. Times the book cover would probably reflect that fact. Kirkus Reviews called it a “mellow period tale,” which makes you wonder if the reviewer actually paid much attention to what he was reading. Though indeed a period piece, the novel, which deals extensively with World War I and the Russian Revolution, is rarely mellow. It explores some of the least mellow of human emotions. A son attacks his father with an axe. Another father is gored by an ox. Another son strangles a man to death. A teenage beauty drives a curate to attempt suicide. Two women are raped – by men they love. Very little that happens in this novel comes across as mellow. It appears that only Anthony Olcott, writing in the Washington Post, gave the book the kind of review it deserves (although even he seems to have let his attention lapse a bit, referring throughout his review to the character named Edwin as “Edward”). His review pointed out that, “History may have no antithesis greater than that of the wealth, stability, and plenty of Edward's England, at one end, and the misery, anarchy, and sheer want of the Russian civil war, at the other. Pearson evokes both with equal vividness, showing how the Barshinskey vortex sucks in Edward Willoughby, who leaves a placid, sane career in England to pursue wild, unfaithful, and passionate Galina Barshinskey to St. Petersburg, where first war, then revolution overtake him. Pearson gives a fine picture of society unraveling, descending step by step into primordial ooze, just as she shows the same in Edward, who becomes first impetuous, then lax in duty, then dishonest (albeit of necessity), finally to end as a killer.”

Olcott went on to note that the book marries the sensibilities of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jane Austen, which sounds like it could be an insult, but Olcott clearly meant it as a complement. He sums up his review like so: “In fact, though Pearson gives nearly half her book to an excellent portrait of civil war in Russia, her novel in the end is a celebration of England, full of lush landscapes, closely-observed English manners, and fully analyzed, tested, and ultimately affirmed English values. The result is wholly satisfying, making The Summer of the Barshinskeys a great pleasure to read…”

            If anything, I was more enthusiastic about the book than Olcott. It struck me as being nearly the equal of Gone With the Wind, a big passionate novel about love and war that focuses at least as much on its female characters as it does on its male ones. Despite the title, it is really the story of the Willoughbys, a proud working-class British family whose world is forever altered when a boisterous, bigger-than-life Russian ex-patriot brings his timid British wife and three children to live next door. Each family has two daughters and one son. Each family has a beautiful and gifted older daughter and a plain but commonsensical younger daughter. The sons of the two families naturally fall in love with the other family’s older daughter. In both cases these sons would have been better off pursuing the younger daughter instead. One of those sons, Ivan Barshinskey, joins the British Army and follows a path that takes him first to India and then, ultimately, to the battlefields of war-torn France, where he earns a Victoria Cross but also becomes a victim of what nowadays we call PTSD. The other son, Edwin Willoughby, leaves behind his dream job (as a railroad fireman) to chase after Galina Barshinskey as she heads to St. Petersburg in search of stardom, wealth, and lots of sex. He finds himself, and everyone around him, being swept up in the revolution and unable to eradicate himself from either it or his love for the selfish Galina. This is the stuff of romantic melodrama and there is enough of both – romance and melodrama – to keep pop-fiction lovers such as me eagerly turning the pages. But Pearson is more than just a pop-fictioneer. Her insights into class differences, family dynamics, sexual obsession, and other subjects make her book not just exciting but also a master class in human behavior. She is especially good on the subject of money. Sentimental novelists tend to insist that peasants are happy people precisely because they are free of the materialism that obsesses the rich. But Pearson deftly points out that it is often those that have the least that place the most importance on material goods:

It is difficult to have a sense of self-esteem when you have grown up without home or possessions…It is hard to believe in your own worth when you are poorly educated, poorly dressed, and the constant recipient of charity and kindly condescension. She never met anyone who was more lowly than she but she realized that in some way it was her own fault. Because she had so little esteem for herself, no one else had either…

            “It’s possessions,” she said. “I know it is wrong to value possessions for themselves, but poor people have little else to measure themselves by. They need things.”

            “What kind of things?” Dr. Manning asked…

            “Anything…so long as it is theirs to keep. A book…A handkerchief, a basket, a saucepan. If you have something that belongs to you, then you begin to be someone. You are the owner of a black saucepan. You have an identity. You can begin to see yourself, measure yourself against the people around you. These people don’t know who they are anymore because they have no possessions. They are all…gray…all the same as each other…gray.

            Pearson is equally good when writing about friendship, especially between women: Life friendship is formed in funny ways. We used to stump to school together, not speaking: at playtime we hovered together in a corner of the playground, not speaking, and at dinner time and at the end of school we walked home together, still in the same selfish silence. But the habit of friendship (that friendship which had blossomed so bravely and gaily all through the summer) persisted and later I realized that those silent walks contributed just as much to our lifelong bonds as had the happier periods we spent together.

            The novel isn’t without faults. Primarily, the book seems in need of a good edit. Many paragraphs and scenes and even whole sections seem to go on too long, repeating the same basic information. This is curious because Diane Pearson herself was a highly regarded book editor. In fact, though she wrote and published seven novels, most of her obituaries (she died at the age of 85 in 2017) were headlined Prominent Editor Dies, or something along those lines. She began her career in publishing at the precocious age of 16 and in 1994 she was given The British Book Award as Editor of the Year. She edited the works of such prominent authors as Kate Atkinson, Terry Pratchett, and Jilly Cooper. But when it came to her own work, if The Summer of the Barshinskeys is any indication, she wasn’t quite as handy with the red pen. The novel could have benefitted from the elimination of, say, somewhere between 25 and 50 pages. Of course, it is a rare 460-page novel that couldn’t benefit from the elimination of 25 or more pages. And even with its occasional longueurs, the book is nonetheless engrossing, moving, and deviously plotted. The ending is a bit too pat, and maybe even a bit too happy for some readers (not me), but this is one of the most entertaining works of historical pop-fiction I have ever encountered.

Next up is Riders to Cibola, by Norman Zollinger. I’m an avid reader of Western novels, so the fact that it took me until my 60th year to read a book by Zollinger is kind of embarrassing. Riders to Cibola appears frequently on lists of the best Western novels ever written. I’ve been aware of it for decades. I’ve owned a battered paperback copy for years, but only in 2018 did I finally get around to reading it. I’m sorry I waited so long. The novel is riveting. It’s also timely, because it deals with the hardships of Mexican immigrants to America and provides an insightful portrait of the toll racism takes on both its victims and its hosts. The book is set in the early part of the 20th century, and the action takes place mainly on a large and successful cattle ranch in New Mexico, where Ignacio Ortiz has wandered in his search for work and to escape the Mexican revolutionaries who murdered the rest of his family. Yep, it’s another Western about cowboys who actually work with cows. And it’s one of the best. Ignacio Ortiz, our viewpoint character, is a young Mexican orphan in desperate need of work when we first meet him. Luckily he crosses paths with Douglas MacAndrews, the owner of the D cross A cattle ranch. Douglas is a man of immense integrity. He is free of the racism that stains the characters of so many white Americans of his era. He judges men by the content of their character. Mainly he values men who are hard workers and who love the land as much as he does. And Ignacio is one of those. For a while, it seems to Ignacio as if he has stumbled into some sort of garden of Eden. Alas, there is a very poisonous snake in this garden, Douglas’s son Jamie. Jamie is a wastrel and a ne-er-do-well. He has no love for the land or for cattle (except on a dinner plate). Rather than do ranch work, he prefers to spend his time on skirt-chasing and get-rich-quick schemes that never work out. His sexual predations are aimed mainly at very young Mexican girls who, because of their illegal immigrant status, aren’t in a position to complain about him.

When we first meet Jamie he is callow and selfish but, like his father, we have some hope that he’ll grow out of it and mature into a decent human being. When America enters the First World War, Jamie, blinded by dreams of easy glory on the battlefield signs up, against the wishes of his father. Ignacio would like to go to war with his friend Jamie (yes, they are friends of a sort, at least for a while), but he knows that when they find out about his illegal immigrant status at the enlistment center, he will be deported back to Mexico. And so all he and Douglas can do is watch as Jamie goes off to war in Europe full of foolish naiveté. At this point, the reader, like Douglas and Ignacio, has some hope that military experience might make a man out of Jamie, instill in him a sense of duty and responsibility to others. Alas, this doesn’t happen. Towards the end of the war, Jamie is seriously injured. He’ll return home a cripple, barely able to walk on his own anymore, and he becomes filled with both self-loathing and rage at the forces that did this to him. His disposition is now worse than ever. This might not be such a problem except that, shortly thereafter, Douglas suffers a disabling stroke and Jamie decides to take over control of the ranch. Instantly he begins hiring oil-and-gas experts to dig exploratory wells on the property in a vain search for mineral wealth. These explorations prove fruitless, but they wreak ecological disaster on vast stretches of the ranch. Jamie is also forced to sell off parts of the ranch in order to pay for his failed venture into the oil-and-gas business. Each failure makes him meaner and angrier. Often his anger is aimed at Ignacio. But poor Ignacio cannot leave the ranch. Douglas MacAndrews, though severely incapacitated, is still alive. And Ignacio refuses to abandon the man who took him in when all the world had turned its back on him. He will spend the rest of his days trying to save the D cross A from Jamie’s mismanagement. Along the way he’ll find himself entangled in race riots, a dangerous interracial love affair, and the many hardships and dangers of operating a cattle ranch. At one point he’ll be beaten nearly to death.

Riders to Cibola is not a happy book. In fact, it was very hard to read at times. I learned fairly quickly that whenever Zollinger held out the possibility of some plot development turning out happily he always eventually went in the other direction. Frequently Ignacio or one of the other likeable characters (there are several of them) will get their hopes up about the possibility of some great success coming their way, but always it crumbles to dust just as it seems about to come true. This made the book a little bit predictable. You couldn’t predict exactly how some dream was going to die, but die you knew it would. I complained about this to my wife as I was reading the book. Several times I put the book down determined not to pick it up again. But always I found the lure of Zollinger’s excellent prose and deviously crafted plot impossible to resist. In the end, I found myself loving the book. After I finished it, I went online to the American Book Exchange website and found that someone was selling a first edition of the hardback that was signed by Zollinger to his friend Peter Taylor, an author I love and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his novel A Summons to Memphis. The price -- $100 – seemed ridiculously cheap considering that the copy was signed by one great author and once belonged to the library of another. Alas, I couldn’t bring myself to buy the book. One hundred dollars is a lot of money to an impoverished author. I forced myself to forget about the autographed copy and I never mentioned it to my wife. Imagine my surprise, then, when a few months later, on my birthday, I opened a present from my wife and found the same autographed copy I had been pining for earlier. Julie said, “I wasn’t sure if you loved or hated that book. I only knew that you had a lot of strong feelings for it. But when I went online and saw a copy that was signed to Peter Taylor, I figured I’d take a chance and buy it for you.” Taylor and Zollinger are both dead now, but the copy that one man signed to the other is one of my dearest possessions.

In seventh place on my Top 20 list is perhaps the oddest book I read this year. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s novel Reindeer Moon is set around 20,000 B.C. in the part of the world we now know as Siberia. Siberia is one of the coldest places on the planet these days, but 20,000 years ago, if Thomas’s research can be trusted (and I’m confident it can), its climate was relatively mild (though it could still be horrifically cold at times). My mother became a victim of Alzheimer’s disease several years ago. Though she is still alive, she has lost much of her memory. She no longer knows who I am. To try to garner insights into her personality, I’ve been reading some of the books and genres that she read back in the days when she was an avid reader. My wife Julie says that the first time she met my mother, they talked about books. Mom told Julie that she was reading and greatly enjoying Jean Auel’s book The Clan of the Cave Bear. That book was an international sensation. And because the author was a resident of Portland, OR, (and a graduate of my father’s alma mater the University of Portland), the book was damn near ubiquitous in Portland. Everywhere you went in Portland in 1980, you’d find people gobbling up The Clan of the Cave Bear. It was the first book in a series called Earth’s Children. I know that my mom (who was born and raised in Portland) read them all and enjoyed them. I’ve tried several times to read Clan of the Cave Bear but have never gotten very far in it. I’ve never had a real appetite for fiction set in prehistoric times. But it recently occurred to me that if I read one of the more highly-regarded books in the genre, it might serve as an gateway drug to the entire genre. So I selected Reindeer Moon, a book I had long seen held up as one of the best prehistory novels of them all. Thomas is the daughter of a noted anthropologist and the sister of a noted ethnologist. She studied at both Smith and Radcliffe Colleges, obtaining a degree in English from the latter. She interrupted her college education to spend some time in Africa studying a tribe of Kalihari bushmen who live largely as hunter gatherers. This experience informed her writing of Reindeer Moon, which is set in a time before the advent of farming and the cultivation of agriculture, among people who derive nourishment only from the animals they kill and the plants that grow wild around them. She is both a skilled writer and a gifted amateur anthropologist. Intelligence is the leading characteristic of Reindeer Moon. But it is also compellingly plotted and deftly populated with fascinating and believable early humans. What’s most striking about the lives of these cave (and teepee) dwellers is how much they have in common with us contemporary humans. Love, marriage, sexual infidelity, annoying in-laws, divorce, spousal abuse, gender roles – most of the things that dominate human relations today were just as vexing 20,000 years ago. That’s one of the beauties of the novel, the way it makes people who should seem as strange to us as space aliens, seem instead like kinfolk. Our toys and technology have changed, but our innate humanness hasn’t evolved any over the course of the last 20 millenia. In fact, Thomas’s characters seem almost more human than we are. They understand the rhythms of the natural world in a way that few living Americans do anymore. They are better in tune with the animal world and with the lunar cycles than are contemporary peoples. Far from seeming primitive, they often come across as more human than we are. If one of them were transported 20,000 years into the future, they would undoubtedly find the world largely unrecognizable but they could probably survive in it. Even the hardiest of American survivalists would be unlikely to last a year in prehistoric Siberia. They’d be mauled to death by a tiger or stampeded by a herd of wooly mammoths inside of a month or two.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is its feminism. The story is told through the viewpoint of a teenage (thus middle-aged) girl named Yanan. Today we hear a lot about the #meetoo movement and the terrible price women pay when powerful men behave badly. This novel shows us that it was ever thus. The novel is incredibly moving and had me in tears on several occasions. I became more attached to one of the wolves in the story than I ever thought I could to a fictional canine. But mainly my heart ached for Yanan and her younger sister as, after the deaths of their parents, they attempted to negotiate a landscape fraught with man-eating animals, famine, horrific changes in temperature, and, the most dangerous peril of all, predatory adult males.

At the very beginning of Yanan’s story, she informs us that she is dead and that she is narrating this story from a land beyond the grave, a place that she shares with all her dead ancestors. At regular intervals, we return to this land of the departed. The passages set in this world have a sort of hallucinogenic/new-agey quality that I didn’t much care for. They were beautifully written but they were also kind of pseudo-mystical in a way that struck me as forced. Your mileage, of course, may vary. You could skip these passages entirely without doing any harm to the plot of the story. But I don’t recommend it. I found them trying at times, but they were always eloquent.

In mid 2018 I wrote an essay celebrating the 35th anniversary of a great American novel. Alas, I could find no one willing to publish it. Since the novel in question is number six on my favorite books of 2018, I shall print my essay about it here:

This year marks the 35thanniversary of the publication of Famous All Over Town, one of the best coming-of-age stories in the American literary canon, but don’t expect to see any retrospectives or appreciations of this masterpiece in the mainstream media. The book is funnier, more moving, and better written than Catcher in the Rye, but the fact that it was written by an old white guy rather than a young Hispanic guy keeps it from being better known. Originally, this wasn’t a problem. The book was published under a pseudonym – Danny Santiago (a sort of Latinized version of the author’s real name: Daniel Lewis James) – and the author’s bio suggested he was young (“grew up in Los Angeles,” “his first novel”). The book received raves upon publication. The reviewer for the New York Times wrote: “It is cheering to report that Danny Santiago is a natural…His Famous All Over Town is full of poverty, violence, emotional injury and other forms of major disaster, all vividly and realistically portrayed, yet, like a spring feast-day in a barrio, it is nevertheless relentlessly joyous. Best of all is its language…a rich street Chicano English that pleases the ear like sly and cheerful Mejicana music. Famous All OverTown is a classic of the Chicano urban experience. And Danny Santiago is good news.”

            The book was published in 1983. In early 1984 it won a $5000 literary prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The publisher wanted to nominate the book for a Pulitzer Prize but the author refused to provide an author’s photo (a necessity for a Pulitzer nomination). But soon the forces of political correctness turned against it. On August 16, 1984, the New York Review of Books published an essay by novelist John Gregory Dunne in which he exposed that the book was written not by a young Chicano born in L.A. but by an old white guy with a patrician background: moneyed family, Andover Academy prep school, classics degree from Yale, etc. Dunne’s exposé was well intentioned. Daniel Lewis James was not only a friend of Dunne’s and his wife, Joan Didion, but also their former landlord. For a while, in the late 1960s, Dunne and Didion lived in a home owned by James and his wife, Lilith. Dunne thought it was a mistake to publish the novel under a pseudonym. He wanted to show the world that fiction writers don’t need to be born into a particular culture in order to write effectively about it. But Dunne’s essay ignited a bit of a firestorm. Soon the self-proclaimed arbiters of authenticity began pointing their fingers at James and crying “cultural appropriation.”

            Scholar Arnd Bohm, writing in The International Fiction Review, summed up the response this way:

The reception turned negative and indeed hostile when John Gregory Dunne revealed "The Secret of Danny Santiago" in the New York Review of Books…The reaction ranged from consternation to anger. How could James have managed to dupe the publishers and the critics? How did an elderly affluent white author dare to appropriate the voice as well as the topics of minority writing? The Before Columbus Foundation sponsored a symposium at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco on the question "Danny Santiago: Art or Fraud," with the consensus opinion of those who participated leaning toward the accusation of fraud.

            Fortunately, political correctness was not as powerful a cultural force in those days as it is now. Plenty of voices in the literary community, including some Hispanic ones, came to James’ defense. Interviewed by the New York Times, novelist Thomas Sanchez, an early champion of James’ novel, said, “A work must be judged by the work itself, not the political or ethnic orientation of the author. A lot of professional Chicanos, professional blacks, professional Jews, professional Anglo-Saxons say no one else can cut into their territory. I don't believe in terms of the human race there is any such thing as territory. What creativity and art are all about are the absolute freedom to cross all those lines and go into any point of view in terms of the context of the work.''

            Had it been published in 2018 the book might have inspired the kind of pearl-clutching from the illiberal left that recently motivated The Nation to apologize for a poem it had published, called “How-To,” that was written by a white man (Anders Carlson-Wee) from a black man’s perspective. Or it might have created the kind of tempest that brewed up when author Laura Moriarty decided to include a Muslim character in her young-adult novel American Heart (2018). Accused of creating a “white savior narrative,” Moriarty was denounced in often obscene terms on numerous online forums devoted to young-adult fiction. Spooked by the outcry, Kirkus shamefully took the unprecedented step of withdrawing a positive review it had published of Moriarty’s novel.

            The backlash against “Danny Santiago” wasn’t as harsh. His book remained in print and no positive reviews were pulled. But, given the magnitude of James’ achievement, the book’s relative obscurity these days is damn near a crime. At the website GoodReads.com, the book has only fifteen reader reviews. This comment, by “Melissa” demonstrates that the pseudonym controversy still hovers over the book’s reputation: “The fact that the author's name is fake so that an old white dude could pretend it was written by a Chicano author does, in fact, take away from the book.” At Amazon.com the book has a mere thirteen reader reviews, including such comments as: “The author has a controversial background and that disrupted the whole reading experience.” The book deserves the kind of prominence that To Kill a Mockingbird (10,175 Amazon.com reader reviews) and Catcher in the Rye (3,613 reader reviews) enjoy. But misguided notions about authenticity have denied the novel its due.

            The book does an excellent job of illustrating that Chicano culture, which nowadays is more likely to be referred to as Latino or Hispanic-American culture, is not a monolithic entity. Among the Chicanos in Famous All Over Town, the American-born tend to look down upon the Mexican-born. Those who arrived from Mexico recently are looked down upon by those who arrived years ago. The book shows that even the Spanish language has many permutations, not all of them appreciated equally by all Spanish speakers:

“Ai-yi-yi,” Mr. Pilger said when he saw [the narrator’s grades]. “C-minus average with a D in Spanish? In Spanish, Rudy Medina?”

            I didn’t mention it but Miss Helstrom’s Spanish was from Spain. If you talked Mexican, forget it. Only Anglos got A’s with her.

            While visiting Mexico with his family, the narrator and his sister find the local Spanish hard to fathom. “Eeeho,” his sisters says, “but they sure talk real crazy Spanish down here. Mercado for marketa, camion for troque, and I had to act out lip-stique, if you can believe it.”

            At another point, the narrator says: I went in and found my grandma jabbering that rattle-tattle language of hers…

            Of an Italian-American bank manager in L.A., Rudy says: He spoke Spanish almost like a native but with spaghetti sauce on it.

Famous All Over Town engages with many issues that are even more inflammatory now than they were in 1983. At one point the police shoot dead a Chicano teenager who has stolen a car worth only about $50. The author makes clear that the youth was killed not because he stole a car, but because he was poor and Hispanic. The shooting and its aftermath are major episodes in the story:

“You mean to tell me,” Mr. Pilger shouted, “you mean to tell me two weeks’ suspension is all that killer gets?”

            “Without pay,” I added.

            “And then goes back in uniform to shoot some other kid. And nobody protests? Nobody brings charges? Where’s the ACLU?”

            The best reason to read Famous All Over Town isn’t its topicality or its insights into Chicano street life in East L.A. circa 1970. The best reason to read the book is that it is beautifully written. The family’s trip to Mexico goes sour when Rudy and his sister Lena criticize their macho father in front of his in-laws. Almost instantly the father decides to end the vacation and drive his family back to L.A. Here’s how the author describes it:

We climbed into the Buick like strangers on a bus. Nobody came outside to see us off. Four days ago we rolled in there like the Three Magic Kings. Today we were scuttling off in the dawn like the cucarachas…When you’re a kid, your father is like the sun in the sky. Your whole family circles him like a bunch of planets. He gives you your winters and your summers, your good days and your bad, and it’s a black night when his back is turned to you. But we had disobeyed him. We had shamed him in public, and now our Gravity was all gone. The only thing that held us together was the Buick.

            Throughout the novel, the Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation is trying to use eminent domain to get the city to condemn and destroy Shamrock Street, the neighborhood where Rudy Medina and his family live. The family and their neighbors fight this effort but, inevitably, the railroad wins. Here’s Rudy describing the destruction of his neighborhood:

It’s enough to make you cry to see Shamrock Street, the way they murdered it. Don’t tell me houses have no feelings. You should have heard them scream when the bulldozers ripped them down, boards splitting open, plaster crashing, nails hanging in there for dear life. I had to hold my ears…”Stop and look even if it hurts,” I told myself. “Look hard so later you could testify.”

            When his proudly Mexican father is humiliated by his countrymen at a border inspection, and Rudy’s mother has to buy their passage through the barrier gates with a pair of beloved earrings, Rudy writes: And after that, on our long road south, my father never saluted the Mexican flag again, and he talked more English than I ever heard him speak in L.A., in gas stations and other public places.

            In his short story “Red Wind,” Raymond Chandler produced the most famous literary description of the Southern California weather phenomenon known as the Santa Ana wind: There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

            For my money, this description from Famous All Over Town is even better: A certain wind visits L.A. from time to time, and the Santana is its name. It comes roaring in hot off the desert like a raging bull, and so dry your mouth tastes full of sand. Women snatch washing off the line before it goes flying over the next-door roof. They scream their kids off the street, spank them for nothing, and then turn up the television to drown out the world while the beans burn black on the stove. Men do worse things. Everybody seems to hate that wind. Not me. It stirs my blood around till I’m ready for anything, and the harder it blows, the better I like it. It could blow L.A. into the ocean for all I care.

            Here’s one of Rudy’s neighbors describing her precarious financial situation:

“All my life I’ve lived with second-hand,” Virgie preached, “first my father’s house, then my own. Salvation Army and Goodwill, they were my department stores, and sometimes the city dump. Day-olds from the bakery, dented tomato cans, sunburned shirts from store windows. Never two chairs alike and lucky if one shoe matched the other. To me the prettiest thing in the world is a price tag without a Fire Sale on it.”

            And here’s Rudy describing the appearance of a cop car on his street:

A black-and-white had just turned into Shamrock and now it came prowling up the street. A black-and-white on Shamrock is like a cloud passing across the sun, it chills you. Loud guys get quiet, quiet guys get loud. Some walk casually into backyards, others start flaky conversations and everybody feels Wanted For Murder. The cops raked the sidewalk with those glassy eyes of theirs, and I stared right back at them. They don’t like that.

            There is a beautiful little book lost inside the American literary canon that’s just perfect for readers both young and old but almost nobody is reading it because of a 35-year-old controversy involving a pseudonym used by the book’s long dead author. Curiously, Daniel Lewis James came by his pseudonym out of necessity. He and his wife, while successfully employed in the film industry in the 1940s (he was an assistant director on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator), were active members of the communist party. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee called them to testify. Both James and his wife refused to self-incriminate. They were blacklisted. To make ends meet, James needed to work under a pseudonym. He began writing screenplays under the name Daniel Hyatt. For 25 years Daniel and Lilith James served as volunteer social workers in the largely Latino East L.A. neighborhood depicted in the novel. When it came time to write a novel set in that neighborhood, the penname Daniel Hyatt didn’t seem to suit. It wasn’t until he came up with the name Danny Santiago that James finally felt free to write about the people and places he knew so well. If Senator McCarthy hadn’t come gunning for him, he might never have even considered the use of a pseudonym. If you don’t like the fact that the name Danny Santiago appears on the cover of Famous All Over Town, you have the U.S. Government to blame for it.

            The ending of the novel strongly suggests that the author was planning a sequel. If so, the controversy surrounding the book may have dimmed his enthusiasm for continuing the project. In any case, the author died in 1988 at 77 years old without ever publishing another book. The one novel he left us is a masterpiece of cultural appropriation. You can no longer punish him for his “crime” by refusing to read his book. You can only punish yourself.

Shanghai, by Christopher New, clocked in at Number 6 on my 2018 Literary Hit Parade. Here’s what I wrote about it in Quillette last year:

Shanghai by Christopher New is among the best written and most intelligent of the Children of Shogun. The author was educated at Oxford and Princeton and was a long-time professor of philosophy at Hong Kong University. His familiarity with the culture and people of China informs every page of this long novel, which charts the fortunes of James Denton, a Brit who arrives in Shanghai in 1903 to take a job as a customs inspector. Eventually he becomes an important member of the British business community in China, as well as a leading member of the local governing body in Shanghai. Like nearly every protagonist in novels of this genre, he finds himself embroiled in a decades-long love affair with an Asian native. Reading this novel (which stands alone but is also the first in a loosely connected three-book series) is almost certainly the most entertaining way possible to learn about the rise and fall of the British concession in Shanghai.

Quillette had given me a rather tight word limit, so I didn’t have time to go on and on about Shanghai’s many virtues. Don’t let the fact that I’m not going to go on at length about it here, cause you to doubt my love for it. It’s a difficult book to summarize because it spans practically an entire human life and takes in an immense amount of East-meets-West history. Being a sentimental American I tend to prefer epic novels like Gone With The Wind and (last year’s Mimsie Award Champion) Omamori, which are filled with gushing emotional outbursts and lots of demonstrative characters. Christopher New is a Brit and so are all of his white characters. They are more buttoned-up and emotionally reserved than the type of characters I am usually drawn to. But that only makes the book’s high ranking on this list more impressive. I am generally some what chilly towards books peopled by chilly British characters, but this one is so damned intelligent, so well-written, so well-researched that I found myself in awe of New’s accomplishment. The book starts out a bit slowly (although there are several beheadings within the first few pages to keep things lively) and it sort of runs out of gas towards the end (New creates a difficulty for himself by confining his viewpoint character in a POW facility for much of the final 100 pages). But it reminds me of two of my all-time favorite novels, Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Both of those novels start out at a glacial pace (literally in the case of East of Eden, wherein Steinbeck begins by describing the geologic formation of the Salinas Valley). And both of those novels sputter to a conclusion. But somewhere between those dull openings and blah endings lie sections of about 300 or 400 pages in length that are positively riveting. What makes those middle sections so compelling are the femme fatale’s who dominate them. Once those female characters have been neutered by their authors, the books lose steam and interest. Something like that happens in Shanghai. However, the opening chapters of the book are better than the openings of the Maugham and Steinbeck novels. Likewise, the closing chapters are better than Maugham’s or Steinbeck’s. The long middle section may not be as insanely compelling as the midriffs of both Of Human Bondage and East of Eden, but it is still fascinating as hell.

And now we return to the work of Diane Pearson, whose novel The Summer of the Barshinskeys was reviewed earlier. I read four novels by Pearson this year. She wrote a total of seven and I hope to read them all before I’m through. Her first novel, Bride of Tancred, was published in the late 1960s. It is a fairly formulaic gothic romance novel, but that isn’t meant as an insult. It has many of the virtues of the two books it most resembles, Jane Eyre and Rebecca. There is the dark brooding Byronic hero, tormented by the memory of a previous wife whose mysterious disappearance our heroine seeks to understand. Like Jane Eyre, it’s the story of a young orphan who goes to a dark and mysterious mansion to take over the care of the lord of the manor’s oddball young daughter and uncovers all sorts of dark and disturbing secrets. I enjoyed Bride of Tancred, but it didn’t make my list of the year’s best books.

In 1969, Pearson published her second novel, The Marigold Field. Every paperback copy you’ll find of this book tries to give you the impression that it is a generic romance novel, a story of young lovers and obstacles that must be overcome on the way to the altar. Those covers are a lie. The Marigold Field is a gripping tale of working-class Brits struggling to keep food on the table during some extremely lean years at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The canvas is broad and encompasses both the Boer War in Africa (the 2nd Boer War, I believe) as well as the killing fields of France in the First World War. This should be categorized as both a historical novel and a novel of social commentary. Like George Gissing’s New Grub Street or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Jack London’s socialist works, this is a novel that shines a light on a social problem (the extreme poverty that existed in much of rural England, not just at the beginning of the 20th century but during its middle years as well, when Pearson was writing her novel). Yes, there are courtships and marriages and childbirths and a few happy times. But primarily Pearson appears to be trying to shame her countrymen into taking better care of the least of their brethren. The book isn’t preachy at all. There are no speeches about Socialism or Poverty or the Condition of England. It’s just an incredibly moving and believable depiction of some people living near the edge of starvation and ruin. Indeed, some very sympathetic characters do die of starvation or neglect or of freezing to death. Not all of these poor people are noble and nice. They all have their faults and some of them are downright despicable. The women at times have to put up with sexual harassment (and worse) just to keep their jobs or to keep a roof over their heads. I know this sounds incredibly bleak and miserable, and much of it is. But Pearson keeps the story moving with all sorts of incidents that, even when they are unbearably sad, are also compelling and intriguing. She is a great student of human nature and her characters don’t feel like types. They all come across as flesh-and-blood individuals. They live close to the land and in some ways have more in common with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s cavemen then they do with us contemporary Americans, even though they are separated from the former by 20,000 years and from the latter by only about 100.

The Marigold Field has a sequel that was published in 1971 and is an even better novel. In England the sequel was published under the title Sarah Whitman. In American the title is simply Sarah. You’re likely to find the book listed under both titles if you go looking for it online (and you should definitely go looking for it). I read Sarah first, not knowing that it was the sequel of another book. You don’t need to read The Marigold Field first in order to enjoy Sarah. It works as a stand-alone story. And it is a great story. It too deals with poverty in early 20th century England. The Marigold Field dealt mainly with rural poverty.  Sarah explores urban poverty. Sarah Whitman is the daughter of two of the main characters of The Marigold Field. She doesn’t come into the story of The Marigold Field until after the halfway point and she plays a fairly small role in that book. She is the star, unsurprisingly, of Sarah. As the book begins, she has left behind her impoverished farm family to seek a better life as a teacher at a grammar school in a poor section of London. I read some fiercely feminist fiction in 2018 and Sarah is among the fiercest of them. Whereas The Marigold Field portrayed the effects of poverty on men, women, and children, Sarah focuses a bit more narrowly on the plight of poor, unmarried young women in the big city. To be sure, it contains plenty of poor men and children. But The Marigold Field was a novel about an entire community of farm people. Sarah is more tightly focused upon the plight of its title character, and it is a slightly better novel because of it. In London, Sarah encounters women (the mothers of her young pupils) forced to conceive child after child that they can’t afford to feed and that they are not physically strong enough to bear in good health. She sees how even conjugal sex is often little more than rape from the perspective of the wife. In this novel there are actual discussions of Socialism. In fact, Sarah’s first sexual attraction is to a young Jewish Socialist who is trying to organize the impoverished mine workers of the area. The socialists in the book may have their hearts in the right place, but Pearson does a good job of showing how little those good intentions do the people they are supposed to be in service of. Sarah’s Socialist boyfriend talks the mineworkers into an ill-advised strike that ends up costing many of them their livelihoods and turns former friends and co-workers against each other. This isn’t a novel in which the good guys all wear white hats and the bad guys black hats. Often the good guys end up causing harm despite their good intentions. Eventually Sarah ends up accepting a marriage proposal from one of the most sympathetic and meekest-seeming males in the novel. She marries him mainly to escape the bleak poverty that life as an underpaid teacher has condemned her too. Also, he is a bit of a traveler and she wants to see more of the world. But even marrying a meek and ineffectual male more than twice her age doesn’t protect Sarah from the marital rape that seems to be the lot of wives in her world.

Yeah, I know: bleak, bleak, bleak. But Sarah, unlike, The Marigold Field, actually moves from darkness towards light. Sarah Whitman is not a meek and mild mouse of a woman. Like the unnamed narrator of Rebecca she grows immensely over the course of the novel. She survives poverty, the abuse of a horrible headmistress at her school, marital rape, and even a disastrous earthquake in India (Yep! She manages to escape and see a bit of the world). She doesn’t get an impossibly happy Hollywood ending, but by the end of the novel she finds herself in a much better place than where she started out. The reader is given some hints as to what life might hold in store for her, but her future isn’t spelled out by Pearson (the ending is much less heavy-handed than the ending of The Summer of the Barshinkeys). The Marigold Field and Sarah occupy the number four and three spots on my Top Ten list, respectively. But it’s now hard for me to think of them as two separate novels. Taken together they constitute a single continuous story about a community of people striving towards middle-class respectability, though only in Sarah will one of them come close to achieving that goal. Somebody ought to publish the two books in a single volume under a single title such as The Whitman Family Chronicles. Because the books were written by a woman and because they focused a lot of attention on the plight of female characters (this is more true of Sarah than of Marigold), they appear to have been relegated by the publishing world to the ghetto of the Romance Novel. It’s a real shame. Like Eleanor Perry’s aforementioned Blue Pages, these books beg to be rediscovered by a feminist press and brought back into print in a manner that befits their stature as literature of a very high caliber. Had the two novels been published as a single novel, it would probably have made the top spot on my list. As it is, the books managed to nail down spots number three and four. If you want the experience of reading a great epic novel, read Marigold and Sarah back-to-back. But if you’re only going to read one of them, make it Sarah. It chaps my ass that American high schools go on force-feeding students the same old tired fare year after year (Gatsby, Mockingbird, Catcher) while far better books about the struggles of young protagonists, like Sarah, languish in obscurity, out of print and out of mind.

The number two spot in our countdown goes to Patrick D. Smith’s 1984 novel A Land Remembered. It’s an odd book on several counts. For one thing, it’s a Western novel set in one of America’s easternmost states, Florida. What qualifies it as a Western? Well, it deals almost entirely with cowboys, Indians, and cattle. Also odd is its publishing history. It was first published in hardback by a Pineapple Press, a small publishing house that deals exclusively with Florida topics. The first printing was very small. The book might have languished in complete obscurity if not for the publication in the following year, 1985, of Larry McMurtry’s enormously successful Western epic Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove was a big bestseller in both hardcover and paperback. It won a Pulitzer Prize and it spawned an award-winning TV mini-series. Just as the Western literary genre appeared to be dying out, McMurtry almost single-handedly resuscitated it, making it profitable once more. It seems unlikely that Signet Books, a division of New American Library, would have snapped up the paperback rights to A Land Remembered, which was nothing more than a little-known regional novel at the time, and given it the splashy mass-market paperback treatment if Lonesome Dove hadn’t come along and made big fat Western epics popular again. Had A Land Remembered been published by a big-time New York publishing house and given the kind of huge publicity push that Lonesome Dove got when it first came out, it might have been Patrick D. Smith’s book that resuscitated the cowboy novel, and Larry McMurtry might have ridden his coattails. Lonesome Dovei s one of my all-time favorite novels, and I’ll concede that it is somewhat better than A Land Remembered. But it seems unfair that, while McMurtry’s novel is renowned worldwide, Smith’s novel, despite the paperback push by Signet Books, remains largely a regional phenomenon, highly regarded by Florida literature enthusiasts but little known outside of the Sunshine State. If Lonesome Dove scores a perfect 10 on the cowboy-novel scale, A Land Remembered is no less than a 9.8.

So what’s it about? A Land Remembered is a historical saga that follows three generations of the MacIvey family, white settlers in the Florida wilderness, as they attempt to carve out a living for themselves. The novel employs a framing device that consists of a short opening chapter set in 1968 and a short concluding chapter set in 1968. Most of the rest of the book takes place in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Wikipedia sums up the plot of the novel like this:

“A Land Remembered focuses on the fictional story of the MacIveys, who migrated from Georgia into Florida in the mid-19th century. After settling, this family struggles to survive in the harsh environment. First they scratch a living from the land and then learn to round up wild cattle and drive them to Punta Rassa to ship to Cuba. Over three generations, they amass more holdings and money, and move further from their connection to the native, untamed land.”

That’s an accurate though bare-bones description of the story. What’s missing is all the flesh and blood and tears and sweat involved in establishing a cattle business in the midst of a tropical swamp. The cowboys in A Land Remembered face all the hardships encountered by McMurtry’s cattle-drivers in Lonesome Dove (flash floods, rustlers, lightening storms, wolves, stampedes) plus numerous other hardships McMurtry’s boys never had to deal with. Smith’s cowboys have to worry about losing their cows in quicksand. While crossing bayous and swamps, Smith’s cowboys lose cattle to aggressive alligators and crocodiles. But the worst menace of them all is the enormous death clouds of mosquitoes that can descend seemingly out of nowhere and choke both cows and cowboys to death in a matter of minutes. The cattle drives in A Land Remembered (and there are several of them) tend to make the single long cattle drive that Lonesome Dove commemorates seem like a walk in the park.

If it were just a great Western adventure novel, Smith’s book would still be worth reading. But what give it extra heft are its environmental and racial dimensions. Without ever being preachy about it, Smith shows explicitly how white politicians and business interests conspired not only to deprive the Native Americans of the land that was rightfully theirs, but also how those same white politicians and businessmen wrought enormous and irreparable environmental harm upon what was once one of the most diverse and distinct ecosystems on the planet. By draining swamps and damming waterways and killing off native species and bringing in nonnative animals and plants, all in the name of Progress and Capitalism, the white man turned one of the most spectacular ecological environments on earth into a bastard hybrid of Disney World and pre-Revolution Havana, Cuba. But Smith isn’t judgmental. He simply allows the reader to see how a handful of hardy, impoverished white settlers struggling to survive in a harsh environment eventually gave birth to the kind of rapacious capitalists that eventually deformed the state’s natural character so drastically that no 19th century Floridian would likely recognize it any longer.

If the above makes the book sound bleak and depressing, I am giving you the wrong impression of it. The story is actually very exciting and exhilarating and is populated by plenty of honorable, good-hearted characters of all different racial backgrounds. There are also a handful of blackguards and scoundrels. For most of its length the book seems like a hybrid of two of my all-time favorite novels, Lonesome Dove and Marjorie Kinan Rawlings’s The Yearling, both of which were Pulitzer Prize winners. Smith’s novel is still in print and is widely regarded in Florida. In numerous newspaper polls, Floridians have voted it their favorite Florida novel. There are special teaching editions of the book available, which are widely used in Florida schools. But A Land Remembered isn’t just a great Florida novel. It’s a great American novel and it’s a real shame that more Americans aren’t award of it.

I was tempted to make A Land Remembered my number one book of the year because it is a sober, serious, and traditional piece of work. No one could make fun of me for being so fond of a book that is so obviously honorable and well-intentioned. Alas, honesty requires me to confess that my favorite book of 2018 is James Robert Baker’s Boy Wonder (it hasn’t escaped me that my two favorite books of the year both have dull, generic titles and were written by authors with common and easily forgotten names). Boy Wonder is a deliberately provocative novel that is filled with ridiculously over-the-top scenes of sex and violence, wholly improbable coincidences, plot twists that defy believability, and a heavy-handed critique of American politics and culture. It was written during the height of the AIDS epidemic and during the Reagan era by an angry and uncloseted gay man who would later be criticized for a subsequent novel that overtly endorsed the idea that murdering one’s political foes is an honorable thing to do. Anger and a political agenda seem like unpromising sources for a great work of art. But plenty of highly readable novels – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, Slaughterhouse 5 – have come out of the same materials. None of those books is anywhere near as profane or as over-the-top or as much fun to read as Boy Wonder.

Essentially, Boy Wonder is a documentary film in novel form. The whole book consists of short first-person observations on the life of a legendary film producer named Shark Trager by those whose paths he crossed and whose lives he influenced (mostly for the worst) during his short but meteoric career. Trager was born around 1950, and from the beginning of the novel it seems clear that he is no longer alive, although not until the end of the novel will we learn his ultimate fate. Thus the novel focuses on his boyhood in the 1950s, his teens in the 1960s, his efforts to become a professional film producer in the 1970s, and his professional triumphs and tragedies in the 1980s. The future film producer and lifelong movie junkie is born in a car at a drive-in movie theater in southern California. This is only the first bit of heavy-handed symbolism involving movies and automobiles (his despised father runs an automotive shop) to be found in the novel. Making cameo appearances in Shark’s life story are celebrities such as his father’s hero, John Wayne, who is a client of Mr. Trager’s automotive shop. When Mr. Trager proudly shows off his infant son to The Duke and hands him over for the great man to hold in his arms, baby Shark Trager lets loose with a stream of diarrhea that ruins John Wayne’s expensive new leather cowboy boots. This is just the first of many occasions on which Shark will shit all over the whitebread American iconography of his father’s middle-class dreams. As I said, there is literally not an ounce of subtlety in this book. Everything in this book happens for a reason, and Baker always makes sure to rub the reader’s nose in that reason. I find it nearly impossible to recap the action in this book because it is the most incident-filled novel I can ever remember reading. Every few pages someone is decapitated or loses a limb or has wildly inappropriate sex. At one point, a sex-crazed donkey gets loose in the Reagan White House and tries to join the activities of a couple who are having inappropriate sex in the Lincoln Bedroom. There are explosions and car crashes and murders and rapes and sex and sex and sex and sex and sex. The prose is workmanlike and there doesn’t appear to be a drop of artistry in either the plot nor the characterizations. Baker was a homosexual but his gay and lesbian characters don’t come off as being any better than his heterosexual ones. Wild caricatures abound. And yet…

Sometimes the opposite of a thing can be a lot like the thing itself. Humility, if carried to an extreme, becomes a sort of egotism. Love, if carried to an extreme, can become as harmful as hatred. And sometimes a creative work that eschews all the norms and niceties of traditional art can seem almost brilliantly artistic. Boy Wonder sometimes seems like a beautiful statue sculpted out of human shit. You hate yourself for admiring it so much, but damn if it isn’t impressive to look at. I was never a big fan of the late Robin Williams. I thought he was overrated as an actor and that he tried way too hard to be funny in his supposedly ad libbed exchanges with talk show hosts. In his standup routines he always seemed to be straining way too hard for humor or profundity and rarely achieving either. And yet, when I saw the incredible levels of manic energy he brought to his stand-up performances I couldn’t help but be impressed. He would try absolutely everything to get a laugh out of you. He would do impersonations of famous people, he’d make funny faces and rude noises. He’d flail his arms, he’d get down on his knees, he would throw out obscene words and mimic obscene acts. He would sing, he would dance, he would imitate Jewish voices and African American voices and British voices and French voices. Eventually his impersonation of a man desperately trying to be funny became pretty close to the real thing, and I couldn’t help being entertained by him. Something like that is at the heart of Baker’s novel. He seems to have a love/hate relationship with everything: movies, sex, America, southern California. Every page seethes with hatred for these things, but that very hatred is a kind of love. Why write so voluminously about things you consider worthless?

A blurb on the back of my paperback version of Boy Wonder says “Cross Citizen Kane with Blue Velvet and you’ll get some idea of this wide-screen send-up of the movie business.” The reference to Citizen Kane is on point. At times the book explicitly evokes Orson Welles’ classic film. Charles Foster Kane had his “Rosebud,” a childhood sled that never stopped haunting his dreams. Shark Trager’s Rosebud is a girl named Kathy Petro. She is the classic California Girl of song and cinema. She is young, blonde, ethereally beautiful, and always just slightly out of reach. Shark worships her. He pines for her. He is arrested as a teenager for standing outside her bedroom window at night and surreptitiously filming her with a Super 8 camera while she masturbates with a soda bottle. His hatred of her is almost as powerful as his love for her. He wants to possess her and he wants to destroy her. They meet in high school and their lives intertwine personally and professionally for the rest of Shark’s days. She sleeps with half of the male characters in the book and several of the female ones, but for the longest time Shark’s aching physical desire for her goes frustratingly unfulfilled. Indeed it is this unsatisfied longing that fuels much of his creative fury.

No synopsis of the plot can truly capture the book’s crazed rollercoaster ride from Hell aesthetic, but essentially this is the story of a middle-class California kid, born at a movie theater and raised on the cinema, who longs with every fiber of his being to make great, towering, revolutionary films that will express his love/hate relationship with the world. He uses and abuses everyone that comes into his orbit, although, to be honest, he gets used and abused by most of them as well. Every human interaction in this book is transactional. Everybody wants something from everybody else. No one does anything in this book for altruistic reasons. But Shark’s passions and ambitions are so powerful as to resemble forces of nature. Reading about his efforts to make films is like reading about a great fire or a tsunami. Those things are horrible and destructive but they aren’t evil. They are natural forces and all you can do is look upon them with awe and tremble.

Shark Trager is of the same generation as Stephen Spielberg. I don’t think Spielberg is ever mentioned by name in the book, but he seems to hover over the proceedings like Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol. Spielberg was born in December of 1946 and James Robert Baker was born less than a year later. Trager’s obsession with cinema seems to mimic Spielberg’s. Spielberg was making movies on 8 mm film even as a young child. His first movie was a train wreck he filmed using his Lionel toy train set. Shortly thereafter he made a nine-minute Western called The Last Gunfight. At the age of 16 – at roughly the same time that Shark Trager was filming Kathy Petro doing unspeakable things with a Coke bottle – Spielberg made his first full-length film, a 140-minute sci-fi adventure called Firelight. Reading Boy Wonder, it’s hard not to see Shark Trager as a sort of photo-negative version of Steven Spielberg. Whereas Spielberg’s films have been criticized for being naively idealistic and filled with childish wide-eyed wonder, Shark’s films focus mainly on the darkness and depravity of contemporary human life. I imagine that Baker admired many things about Spielberg: his commitment to excellence, his passion for cinema, his early success. But I think he resented Spielberg for his rosy view of human nature. Baker didn’t possess a rosy view about anything. He was a gay man in a homophobic world during the midst of a homosexual holocaust. He hated Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party, and the smugness of middle American values. I think he longed for a Spielberg who would tell the truth about America as he himself saw it. And I think he created exactly that type of Spielberg in Boy Wonder. Although he scrupulously avoids mentioning Spielberg, and although he makes his protagonist a film producer rather than a director, to avoid direct comparisons to the famous director, the tell is in the name of his protagonist. Spielberg’s breakout film was Jaws, the story of a shark that will stop at nothing to satisfy its appetites. Baker’s protagonist is also a Shark who will stop at nothing to satisfy his appetites. Shark Trager is the anti-Spielberg. All of this is supposition on my part, of course, but I’m convinced its true. 

So there you have it. I read 70 novels (and abandoned dozens of others) in 2018. Many of them were graceful literary triumphs. But my favorite book of them all is a graceless, heavy-handed, nihilistic raunchfest about a man determined to fuck and bully and brawl and lie and cheat his way to cinematic immortality. A book that includes a sex-crazed donkey wreaking havoc in the Reagan White House. I can’t claim to be proud of this decision. And I certainly can’t guarantee that you’ll like Boy Wonder. If you value good taste and delicacy and decorum, you are almost certain to despise Boy Wonder. But it walloped me like no other book I read in 2018. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it. The author killed himself in 1997 at the age of 50. He published a handful of other novels in his lifetime, none of which I have read yet. I’m not even sure I want to. Boy Wonder seems like an unrepeatable achievement. I don’t know that I could endure another novel so full of anger and vituperation. But I’m glad I read Boy Wonder. I don’t know if it qualifies as an underappreciated American classic. It wasn’t a big hit when it was published and it is currently out of print and likely to stay that way. There doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of support for a re-evaluation of Baker’s life and works. Perhaps it is just as well. Judging from his literary work, he hated anything embraced by the cultural establishment. He would probably spin in his grave if he learned that his book was being brought back into print by a tasteful literary press and being taught in the better MFA programs. Lucky for him, then, that neither of those things seems remotely possible.

Here again are the Mimsie Award-winners of 2018:

1)  Boy Wonder by James Robert Baker

2)  A Land Remembered by Patrick A. Smith

3)  Sarah by Diane Pearson

4)  The Marigold Field by Diane Pearson

5)  Shanghai by Christopher New

6)  Famous All Over Town by Danny Santiago

7)  Reindeer Moon by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

8)  Riders to Cibola by Norman Zollinger

9)  Jade by Pat Barr

10)                 The Summer of the Barshinskeys by Diane Pearson

11)                 Born of the Sun by John H. Culp

12)                 Rose by Martin Cruz Smith

13)                 The Brewer’s Big Horses by Mildred Walker

14)                 Blue Pages by Eleanor Perry

15)                 Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

16)                 Mariamne by Glen Petrie

17)                 Maynard’s House by Herman Raucher

18)                 That Wilder Woman by Barry Jay Kaplan

19)                 Tanamera by Noel Barber

20)                 China Dawn by Robert L. Duncan

Nine of the novels have female main characters. At least five of the novels could be described as overtly feminist. Twelve were written by men and eight by women. The only person to make the list more than once was Diane Pearson and she made it three times. Although the novels include important characters who are Native American, Japanese, Chinese, Singaporean, European, prehistoric, Hispanic, and African American, all of the authors on the list are white people, either Brits or American. The oldest novel (The Brewer’s Big Horses) was published in 1940 and the newest (Rose) was published in 1996.

Here are the other books I read this year (an ® after the author’s name means I recommend the book):

A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles (my least favorite book of the year)

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty ®

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

The War Lord by Malcolm Bosse ®

The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger

December 6 by Martin Cruz Smith

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin

The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard ®

A Glimpse of Stocking by Elizabeth Gage ® (entertaining schlock)

At Home In the World by Joyce Maynard ® (the best nonfiction book I read in 2018)

After Her by Joyce Maynard ®

Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler ®

A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne ®

You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfield ®

The Cardinal Sins by Andrew Greeley ®

Queenie by Michael Korda ®

The Happiness Curve by Jonathan Rauch ®

Members of the Tribe by Richard Kluger

The Court Martial of General George Armstrong Custer by Douglas C. Jones

The Collected Stories of Jack Schaefer

The Bobby Gold Stories by Anthony Bourdain

Dragon’s Teeth by Michael Crichton

Making the List by Michael Korda

Traveller by Richard Adams

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows

I Heard The Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven

Again Calls The Owl by Margaret Craven

A Journey to Matecumbe by Robert Lewis Taylor ® (almost made the Top 20)

Sunflower by Marilyn Sharp (the most enjoyable bad novel I read all year, but I can’t recommend it)

Emily Climbs by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Under The Influence by Joyce Maynard ® (almost made the Top 20)

Other People by Sol Stein (another enjoyable but awful book that I can’t recommend)

Baby Love by Joyce Maynard (I attended a writing seminar at her house, so I read a lot of her work prior to that)

The Seven-Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

Ballet! by Tom Murphy (a ridiculous tale of international intrigue grafted on to a pretty decent tale of life in ballet company)

Thornyhold by Mary Stewart ® (Stewart was one of my mother’s favorite writers; I’ve been reading a her work lately and enjoying it. This was my favorite so far)

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell ®

Moonraker’s Bride by Madeleine Brent ® (a pseudonym used by Peter O’Donnell, creator of the Modesty Blaise books)

Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart

I left a few titles off the list out of sheer embarrassment.

See you next year! Good bye, and good reading!