American literary naturalism starts here
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, originally published in 1893, is the first novel by author Stephen Crane. It is also widely considered the first example of naturalism in American fiction, and it is by any measure a groundbreaking work in the history of American literature. Naturalism, the literary movement pioneered by French author Emile Zola, made a marked departure from the romantic tradition by calling for the depiction of the world with a brutal realism, scientific detachment, and meticulous attention to detail. Characters are not seen as individualistic heroes, but rather as organisms defined by their environment and the society in which they live.
Crane’s novel is an exemplar of this new, audacious literary approach. Maggie and her family eke out a sordid existence in the Bowery neighbor of New York City. At first she is a supporting character, waiting in the wings, as her brother Jimmie takes center stage. When the book opens, we find him engaged in a deadly street fight with a rival gang. The reader then follows him to his squalid home, where we meet his drunken parents. We thus experience first-hand the environment in which young Maggie is (or isn’t) raised and nurtured. One day Jimmie brings home a friend named Pete, who takes a liking to Maggie. With this first love, Maggie grows from a girl to a woman, and must contend with the challenge of sexuality vs. respectability faced by women in this harsh milieu.
Crane paints a vividly gritty portrait of life in the slums, and transcribes the dialogue of the denizens of Rum Alley in all its idiosyncratic accents. Nevertheless, he clearly pens his narrative in the literary voice of an academically trained writer. The closest stylistic approximation to Crane’s writing would be the impressionist paintings of the American Ashcan School, painters like John Sloan and George Bellows, who rendered scenes of working class life with lush brush strokes and an expert sense of color.
What’s missing from much of Crane’s narrative is sympathy. His descriptions of squalor appear devoid of any social consciousness, as if to empathize with the characters would be too sentimental. When he describes the drunken, uncouth behavior of Maggie’s parents and brother, there’s a ring of, “Look at these poor people. How they carry on!” Compare this to Zola’s much more sympathetic depiction of alcoholism in L’Assomoir. If Zola is guilty of turning the working class into heroes and martyrs, Crane could be guilty of turning them into buffoons. Maggie is the one character that escapes from this tone of condescension, and when she becomes the story’s main focus in the second half the book vastly improves. There’s almost a hint of proto-feminism in the way Crane points out the absurdity of the double standard that punishes women for being sexually active while their male counterparts are free to philander as they please.
Crane is best known for The Red Badge of Courage, his novel of the Civil War. I’ll confess I wasn’t overly impressed with that work, and my dissatisfaction with it temporarily steered me away from Crane. Maggie, on the other hand, I found a very compelling and affecting work, and I’m glad I gave Crane a second chance. I am now looking forward to digging deeper into his body of work.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2G0U7NGOOB2XY/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Assorted tales of doctors and patients
In addition to being a successful writer of fiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was also a physician. He worked as both a general practitioner and as an ophthalmologist. His book Round the Red Lamp, published in 1894, is a collection of 15 short stories of medical life. The title refers to a tradition among doctors of Conan Doyle’s day. British physicians would post a red lamp outside their offices to signify their profession, similar to how a striped pole represents a barber.
The medical scope of the collection is rather loose, admitting pretty much anything that remotely relates to doctors and patients. The only way “A Question of Diplomacy” qualifies, for example, is because one of the main characters suffers from gout. There are also examples of the mystery and horror genres in which doctors feature prominently. “The Los Amigos Fiasco” is a crime story with paranormal elements. “The Case of Lady Sannox,” which also appears in Conan Doyle’s collection Tales of Terror and Mystery, is a medical horror story. Neither of the two are very good, as both require some pretty heavy suspension of disbelief, but another story from the horror genre, “Lot No. 249,” is excellent. It’s an expertly crafted thriller about medical students terrorized by a mummy.
Despite these forays into the genres for which Conan Doyle is famous, most of the stories in the collection do deal directly with the medical profession. A few of the selections, like “A Medical Document” and “The Surgeon Talks” are somewhat patchwork pieces in which fictional physicians relate various anecdotes illustrating the highs and lows of their careers. One of the better entries, “A False Start,” provides a glimpse of the medical profession that we don’t often see. It chronicles the occupational life of a young doctor just starting out in his practice. He faces hard times as he tries to drum up business and build a client base, longing for a big break that will ensure his financial security. Another good specimen, “The Doctors of Hoyland,” concerns a country physician who enjoys the comfort of his own private medical fiefdom, until another doctor invades his domain and competes for his customers. Though a bit formulaic, it offers enough unpredictable turns to prove engaging.
Not surprisingly, a lot of the stories venture into the territory of medical melodrama. More than a century before ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and Chicago Hope, audiences were already finding entertainment in operating table dramas and deathbed dilemmas. The collection also includes a fair amount of romance. “A Physiologist’s Wife” and “A Question of Diplomacy” have more to do with marriage than medicine. “The Curse of Eve” is a typical husband-frets-in-the-waiting-room-while-his-wife-gives-birth story. The medical stories included here seem more deliberate in their emotional manipulation than Conan Doyle’s usual fare. Perhaps that’s simply because while he’s usually inciting thrills or chills, here he’s trying to squeeze the tears out of you.
This is far from Conan Doyle’s best collection of short stories. In fact, it may be one of his worst, along with The Green Flag. Even so, it’s Conan Doyle, and mediocre Conan Doyle is still pretty good literature. So if you’re a fan of this master storyteller, it can’t hurt to give this one a try. If nothing else, “Lot No. 249” is definitely worth a read.
Stories in this collection
Behind the Times
His First Operation
A Straggler of ’15
The Third Generation
A False Start
The Curse of Eve
Sweethearts
A Physiologist’s Wife
The Case of Lady Sannox
A Question of Diplomacy
A Medical Document
Lot No. 249
The Los Amigos Fiasco
The Doctors of Hoyland
The Surgeon Talks
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3BVLZT36WTSSE/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Even better than Volume One
I was only slightly familiar with Clifford D. Simak’s work when I purchased a copy of I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume One. I was so impressed by the excellent stories in that first volume, I became instantly hooked. The Big Front Yard and Other Stories is the second collection of Simak’s short stories and novellas in what publisher Open Road Media projects will be a 14-volume series. Although I was thrilled with Volume One, I am pleasantly surprised to report that Volume Two manages to surpass it.
The series is edited by David W. Wixon, Simak’s literary executor and a close personal friend of the author. In this volume, Wixon provides a biographical introduction on Simak’s youth and early years as a writer. He also supplies a brief publication history for each entry in the book. The contents of each volume seem to be a grab bag, with no apparent chronological or thematic rhyme or reason to the selections. Simak mostly wrote science fiction, but he also penned western tales as well. Volume Two includes “Trail City’s Hot-Lead Crusaders,” a very good offering that would have made a great movie back in Jimmy Stewart’s western heyday.
The real attraction here, however, is the science fiction for which Simak is famous. Volume Two opens with the title selection, “The Big Front Yard.” A small-town antiques dealer and fix-it man discovers that the broken objects in his workshop have started fixing themselves. From that simple incongruity, the story escalates, gradually building up to more and more fantastic and mind-blowing phenomena. In “The Observer,” a near perfect story, a being wakes up on a foreign world, with no memory of its past. Simak takes us through the mind of this entity as it gradually gains awareness of itself and its reason for being. In “Junkyard,” an expeditionary force from Earth explores a newly discovered distant planet. When the crew finds a dumping ground of what appear to be alien engine parts, the narrative evolves into a baffling mystery in space. Yet another excellent entry, “So Bright the Vision,” depicts Earth in the 26th century, when our planet’s main interstellar export has become our fiction. Providing entertainment to alien races all over the galaxy, writers ply their trade by mechanically manipulating authorial machines called yarners. Simak not only speculates on the future of literature, he also wryly criticizes the publishing industry of his day, all while managing to craft a fun, engaging, and intelligent sci-fi tale. The three remaining stories, “Mr. Meek - Musketeer,” “Neighbor,” and “Shadow World,” are also very good examples of Simak’s masterful sci-fi skills.
Although the works included here were originally published from 1944 to 1972, they’re not the least bit antiquated. When Simak writes about everyday objects—cars, radios, tractors—you can tell that these stories were written decades ago. Nevertheless, his marvelous visions and ingenious concepts, grounded in science but limitless in imagination, are fresher than much of what passes for science fiction in today’s popular culture. His best stories have great psychological and philosophical depth and attain a level of literary quality that belies genre labels. The stories included here are like the best episodes of the old Twilight Zone TV series—not the kitschy ones, but the ones that have held up incredibly well over time. Needless to say, I will be tuning in for the next installment. Bring on Volume Three!
Stories in this collection
The Big Front Yard
The Observer
Trail City’s Hot-Lead Crusaders
Junkyard
Mr. Meek - Musketeer
Neighbor
Shadow World
So Bright the Vision
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2JC5WBBZNICUE/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
For the ballistically inclined
From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, H. Beam Piper was a prolific author of science fiction. Among his dozens of novels, short stories, and novellas of time travel and space politics, Piper wrote one mystery novel, Murder in the Gunroom, published in 1953. Piper was a firearms enthusiast, and he uses the mystery format to indulge his interest in that area. As such, the book will primarily appeal to those who share his fascination with the history of guns, but even those who can’t tell a butt from a barrel will still recognize this as a competently written and suitably perplexing murder mystery.
Lane Fleming, founder and president of the Premix Foods corporation, has died of a gunshot wound. Fleming was a collector of historic firearms who amassed one of the best collections in the nation. One night in his gunroom, while cleaning one of his newly acquired weapons, Fleming gets a bullet in the forehead. The shooting is judged to be an accident, but would a firearms expert make such a fatal mistake? Some speculate that the death was a suicide, but such rumors are hushed in order to keep the company stock from falling. Concerned about the distribution of her husband’s estate, the widowed Mrs. Fleming hires Jefferson Davis Rand to assess the value of her husband’s firearms and negotiate a sale of the gun collection that will be advantageous to his heirs. In addition to being a gun expert, Rand is also a private detective, and although he was not hired in the capacity of sleuth, he can’t help noticing indications that Mr. Fleming’s death may have been a murder.
Piper skillfully constructs this mystery narrative with plenty of twists and turns. To its detriment, it may be too intricate. Piper offers the reader a lot of suspects, whom Rand spends much time diligently interrogating. Piper doesn’t do enough to memorably distinguish all the characters from one another, however, which creates more disorienting confusion than mysterious puzzlement. While Piper keeps the reader fed on a steady diet of bread-crumb revelations, there’s no action scenes to alleviate the tedium of the questioning. Instead, there is a lot of detail about a merger between two processed food companies, and, as is to be expected, much ado about guns.
If this mystery had been about a collection of paintings, archaeological artifacts, or even rare gems and minerals, I probably would have found it fascinating. It is a book about guns, however, and Piper goes into a level of detail that assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge on the part of the reader. He obviously loves his subject, and the book is aimed at others who share his passion. When he describes Fleming’s gun collection, he’s both showing off his expert knowledge and sharing his private wish list. As a novice on the subject myself, I couldn’t tell a flintlock from a wheel lock, much less a Leech & Rigdon from a Griswold & Grier.
Piper won’t go down in literary history as the next Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie, but he is a pretty good mystery writer. The specificity in which he goes into his favorite subject, however, limits his potential audience. If you’re nuts about historic guns, this is the book for you. If you’re just a curious fan of Piper’s science fiction, reading this mystery won’t be a complete waste of your time, but don’t expect to be thrilled by it.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R23Y3PJN1O4A2N/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
One bad novella spoils the bunch
Swords in the Mist, originally published in 1968, is a collection of sword-and-sorcery fiction by sci-fi author Fritz Leiber. This is the third in a series of books featuring Leiber’s recurring characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The former is a big, burly swordsman of Nordic extraction; the latter is a sly and slender thief known for his speed, agility, and cunning. I first read Swords in the Mist back in junior high. It inspired fond enough memories that when I discovered Open Road Media was offering inexpensive ebooks of this series, I decided to reread it for nostalgia’s sake. Four of the stories in this book were previously published between 1947 and 1964 in Fantastic Science Fiction Stories magazine. The other two entries are brief interludes written by Leiber expressly for this collection. They serve as segues between the meatier tales, in an attempt to establish some continuity to the duo’s adventures.
Although one of the stories is set in ancient times on Earth, most of the selections in the Swords series take place in the fictional world of Nehwon and it’s main city of Lankhmar. The best story in this volume is “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” which I still recalled fondly from having read it over 30 years ago. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser take a temporary break from each other’s company, during which the Mouser hires his services out to a mobster while Fafhrd becomes a religious acolyte in the service of an obscure god named Issek of the Jug. Leiber introduces us to Lankhmar’s Street of the Gods, a sort of spiritual free market where deities compete for popular appeal and donations of alms. Though on the surface this series may resemble Robert E. Howard’s Conan books, Leiber takes a much more tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre. “Lean Times in Lankhmar” is a great example of his ability to combine sword-clashing action with hilarious humor.
“The Cloud of Hate” and “When the Sea King’s Away,” though not masterpieces, are also good examples of Leiber’s skill with this sort of fare. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the collection’s final entry. Fully half of the book is taken up by its worst selection, a novella-length work entitled “Adept’s Gambit.” This was the earliest written of the selections, and Leiber’s sense of humor had apparently not yet fully developed. While in the other stories he pokes fun at the cliches of the fantasy genre, here he wholeheartedly embraces them. The two heroes find themselves the victims of a curse that causes every woman they kiss to turn into pigs or snails. This leads them on a quest to find the sorcerer responsible. Of course, they must gather a laundry list of mystical objects along the way. Though it starts out comical, in the end Leiber takes this one far too seriously. His prose is overly verbose, piled high with so many gratuitous adjectives that at times his writing resembles a round of Mad Libs. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser end up becoming sidekicks in their own book as one of the supporting characters goes off on an interminably long back story. “Adept’s Gambit” is a bore to be endured rather than enjoyed.
The first half of Swords in the Mist brought back some pleasant memories of a brief youthful dalliance with Dungeons & Dragons. The second half, however, reminded me why my interest in the fantasy genre did not stick. Even so, Leiber’s stories are better than most. I’m unlikely to pursue this series any further, but there will always be a soft spot in my heart for Issek of the Jug.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R1SYN40IOED3Z/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Prose from the playwright
 |
| Eugene O’Neill |
“Tomorrow” is the only published short story by Eugene O’Neill, one of America’s greatest playwrights and winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. The story first appeared in the June 1917 issue of the literary magazine The Seven Arts. Although not written for the stage, “Tomorrow” shares some common elements with the plays that made O’Neill famous: sailors, alcohol, dysfunctional relationships, and desperation. The story is narrated by a sailor named Art, who hangs out at a New York waterfront tavern known as Tommy the Priest’s. Art shares a room in a run-down boarding house with a fellow hard-luck case named Jimmy Anderson. While Art seems content with his listless, wayward life, Jimmy dreams of something bigger. He always has a plan for the future, a scheme to turn his life around, and that plan always starts “tomorrow.” Those who know Jimmy have little faith in his dreams, but they like him too much to burst his bubbles. When Jimmy scolds Art for his drinking and laziness, however, Art retaliates by chiding Jimmy for all his tomorrows that never come. When yet another of his plans falls through, Jimmy is forced to confront his own failings.
The story has an atmosphere like something out of an Ashcan School painting by John Sloan or George Bellows. The reader gets a sense of life drawn in rich blacks and muddy browns, accompanied by the smell of stale beer and cigarettes and the sounds of the wharf. In terms of literary style, it resembles the urban naturalism of Frank Norris, but with the more modern psychological acumen of a Joseph Conrad. The friendship of Art and Jimmy rings true, in both its brotherly camaraderie and its petty jealousies and resentments. “Tomorrow” may be a depressing tale, but it’s a genuinely moving one. The reader can’t help but feel for Jimmy and identify with his plight.
Although not a theatre enthusiast, I’ve always enjoyed reading O’Neill’s plays. To me, they’re like powerful realist novels that just happen to be written in the form of stage directions and dialogue. “Tomorrow” gives an inkling of what O’Neill could have done with a novel. This story reveals him to be such an accomplished prose stylist, it makes one wish he would’ve published more stories.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R397GUQYFBCSKM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
He sees dead people
Published in 1901, The Purple Cloud is a science fiction novel by M. P. Shiel, which is the pen name for Matthew Phipps Shiell (intentionally misspelling his own surname). H. G. Wells praised this novel as “brilliant,” but that just goes to show that even the great H. G. Wells can make mistakes, because The Purple Cloud is anything but.
Given the title and an inkling of the book’s contents, I was expecting something along the lines of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1913 novella The Poison Belt, and the plots of the two books are built upon a similar premise. The latter work is likely a derivation of Shiel’s book, watered down for popular appeal. Early on, Shiel’s narrative voice does sound remarkably similar to Conan Doyle’s, and the two share a predilection for supernatural phenomena. In the opening chapter of The Purple Cloud, Shiel constructs a convoluted set-up by which a psychic medium, while under hypnosis, astrally projects her spirit through time to read a book that was written in the future. That book is the journal of Adam Jeffson, a British doctor who joins an expedition to the North Pole. The story is awkwardly weird at first, but nevertheless quite interesting. There are hints that Jeffson’s involvement in the polar expedition is supernaturally destined, which whets the reader’s appetite for whatever strangeness may follow. The rest of the novel, however, never lives up to the promise of its opening chapters.
Jeffson’s journey to the Pole does not go as planned, and he spends more time in the arctic than he bargained for. On his return voyage, he grazes the edge of a mysterious cloud of purple gas, possibly volcanic in origin, that renders him violently ill. When he makes it far enough south to reach human civilization, he finds that the purple cloud has poisoned the entire planet, killing every human being in its path. The deadly cloud has since dispersed, allowing Jeffson to survive unscathed in this global graveyard. He then spends several chapters wandering the earth, compiling a long-winded travelog of cities filled with corpses. Adding absurdity to tedium, Shiel has Jeffson, a physician by training, unrealistically operating locomotives, large cargo ships, and power plants all by himself.
Part of the fun of post-apocalyptic science fiction is that through vicarious experience of the hero’s adventures in the future world the author has created, you can imagine what you would do if you were the last man on Earth. Once Jeffson resigns himself to the fact that he is humanity’s sole survivor, what he chooses to do with his alone time is simply ridiculous. Shiel makes a lame attempt at philosophical depth by setting up a symbolic dichotomy between black and white, good and evil, God and the devil. This spiritual conflict is too simplistic to be taken seriously and is never fully explored enough to matter. I wish I could complain about the second half of the book, which is just as annoying as the first, but to do so would be to give away the novel’s only surprise.
The Purple Cloud takes itself too seriously to be much fun, yet its attempts to be profound come across as silly. Even worse, it commits the sin of being boring. It may have been innovative for its day, but today’s readers will likely find it dull and disappointing.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2QDB0HBRNAF6O/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
