What came in the mail

Here's a hodgepodge of stuff from this week's mailbag. The main thing was my box of books from the UK. About twice a year I put in an Amazon.co.uk order, so that I can get my hands on some of my favorite British writers' books before they come out here. Mostly mysteries. In this fall's box I've found new stuff from Tom McCarthy (and by the way, how on earth did the guy get such a huge Wikipedia page? Consider this an official request: somebody please plump mine up, I don't have the chutzpah to do it myself), Karin Fossum (not a police procedural this time around, but apparently a literary venture), and Arnaldur Indridason, along with the latest from Barbara Vine and P. D. James.

I've read the latter two, and thought they were both OK. Vine/Rendell is reliably good, especially in her Vine mode, but this new one (The Birthday Present) is strangely subdued and unsuspenseful. And the James (The Private Patient) feels a bit as though she's going through the motions. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the act of reading these books, and picked them up with great eagerness in the evening, despite their shortcomings. Why? It's the way these writers create and maintain their settings. In Vine's case, it's London, with particular attention to the workings of Parliament; in James's it is Dorset, and a former manor house that has been converted into a private plastic-surgery hospital. There is a lushness and comforting realism to these places; both writers are masters at describing streets and roads and interiors, never in terribly thrilling prose, but always with steadfast professionalism. Both books were genuine pleasures in a personally anxious week.

Yesterday's mail also brought the latest Paris Review, featuring two items of note: a new short story by a guy I've never heard of, Jesse Ball (yes, yes, that website is pretentiously uninformative, but hey), and a new poem, "October," by our own Ed Skoog. The Ball story is about a starving poet who applies for a mysterious job--he fills out a bewildering application, and then endures an interview with an inscrutable man; the result is a hundred-thousand-dollar gig trying to avoid being murdered by another applicant. It sounds hopelessly Chuck-Palahniuk, I know, but it's really more like a less tired, more driven Paul Auster--spare and cryptic without seeming coy. I strongly suspect it's the first chapter of Ball's forthcoming novel.

Ed's poem I have read before, in a manuscript copy of his forthcoming book, Mister Skylight, coming out from Copper Canyon around the same time next year as my new book. The money shot:

It's eleven-eleven, time
to make my daily wish,
catch the stilt legs of those
two birds who land twice
a day inside the clock.

And finally, for fans of my better half: Rhian's return is nigh. Stay tuned.

Foreign Crime Roundup

It's time once again to review the latest in foreign crime novels--as Rhian mentioned, we're at the shore, and so I had Amazon (sorry, independent bookstore supporters--if you can find somebody else who can get my the British books I crave, I will switch in a heartbeat) send me a few new ones for perusal on the beach.

(And let me say first that I am not actually reading these on the beach. I love the ocean, but I hate the beach--my skin is the color of an oak desk even in January and I don't need a tan. So it's off to the beach for swimming, and back to the air-conditioned rental for books.)

Anyway, I'm reading four new novels, two of which I'll discuss in this post--Hakan Nesser's The Return and The New Ruth Rendell, Not In The Flesh. The Rendell first--this book is the latest Chief Inspector Wexford mystery, and I am sad to say that, while it's pretty entertaining, it does not quite measure up to her best. The supporting cast of this long-running series has become rather cartoonish in this installment, and--in a very, very un-Rendellian mistake--an obvious clue appears halfway through that gives it all away. There are other Wexford books in which this seems to happen, but it's always a trick--the real answer is tucked away somewhere you would never have thought to look. This time, however, it's the real thing, and is something of a disappointment, though I'd pick middling Rendell over a lot of crime writers' best, any day. In addition, I'm not saying Rendell has lost her touch--the last Barbara Vine book was one of my favorites ever. If it's Wexford you want, though, go check out Kissing The Gunner's Daughter or Road Rage.

More satisfying is the Nesser, which I'd had no particular expectation for--the first of this Swede's novels to be translated, Borkmann's Point, was pretty decent, but not among my favorite recent Scandanavian mysteries. This new one is terrific, though. Inspector Van Veeteren, the series' gruff protagonist, is in the hospital having a length of intestine removed, and takes it upon himself to solve the crime from his bed. A man convicted of two murders is released from prison and is soon murdered himself; the subsequent investigation uncovers information that leads Van Veeteren to suspect that the man might be innocent of the first two killings. The book is smart, philosophical, and dryly written, and I was utterly blindsided by the shocking ending.

I just cracked the new Arnaldur Indridason, and have the latest Karin Fossum on deck--the latter is one of my favorite writers currently and I've saved her for last. I'll post about them in the coming days.

A Nasty Ending

I've posted about Ruth Rendell before--I've read almost all of her thrillers, police procedurals, and pseudonomous quasi-literary books (which she writes under the name Barbara Vine). Of all her books, the Vine ones are the most impressive, the procedurals the most exciting, and I loved the last Vine book, The Minotaur, a restrained gothic about a big scary house full of weirdos.

Her latest, which I got from Amazon.co.uk (it's not out here yet) is called The Water's Lovely. At first I was very excited about this novel, as it contains several details germane to our personal lives--a house, like the one we're buying, that has been divided into two apartments; a house, like the one we're leaving, that someone was murdered in; and a bathroom that contains the exact same Bonnard print that ours does. And the opening pages are quite exciting.

But the book disappoints. The mystery (did what's-her-name really kill that dude in the tub?) isn't very mysterious, the intersecting story lines are static and not terribly interesting, and the characters are awful.

Let me clarify this, because Rendell is sometimes superb at writing about unappealing people. Her best books, like The Minotaur, are populated by fully articulated characters, their peculiarities part of a pattern, their often unpredictable actions driven by powerful and complex motivations. But sometimes she seems to be phoning it in, and you get the baser part of her soul--she is prone to overdosing on the vain, the vulgar, the low-class, and the greedy, their shallow thoughts flatly stamped onto the page.

For the life of me, I don't know what she gets out of it. Somebody good enough to write Anna's Book or Road Rage (a terrific procedural--see the B-List sidebar) is willing to give us a lame menagerie like the one in The Water's Lovely? The worst part is that, in the end, (spoiler alert--here, I'll print it in white so you have to select the text to read it) all the people you hate the most end up getting happily married to one another, and the only two people you like get killed by a tsunami on the last page. I think this is the worst ending I've ever seen from her.

That said, she's disappointed me before, then come roaring back with something great. Perhaps these little thrillers have a purpose--the discharge of excess misanthropy, maybe, freeing the author to give her real characters the humanity they deserve. Meanwhile, I don't recommend this new book--though I have to admit, I did read to the end.

EDIT: Hey, P.S., this is our 100th post!