The Devil and Miss Jones, directed by Sam Wood

I really enjoyed this film; having watched a handful of classic films it seems to me one of the best. It stars Jean Arthur, who is new to me but was obviously a wonderful actress. She's so charming in this film.

It's not quite a "Depression Era" film, having been made in 1941, but its concerns seem to be those of the Depression.

Charles Coburn plays a domineering businessman who is determined to foil an attempt by retail clerks at one of his stores to unionize. Dissatisfied with the private detectives who have been tasked with infiltrating and destroying the nascent union, he declares he'll do this job himself.

Hired as a shoe department salesman, he's quite lousy at it and he's quite uncomfortable. Edmund Gwenn, utterly unrecognizable as Santa from Miracle on 34th Street, plays his supercilious and unforgiving boss, Mr. Hooper. This is part of what's so wonderful about this film: great acting and lots of charm. 

Coburn's stony path is eased by the compassion of two female clerks in his department, Jean Arthur and Spring Byington. Unfortunately, Jean Arthur is also in love with the union's organizer.

Jean Arthur and Spring Byington soften the hard-heartedness of Coburn, and by the time he gets his hands on the list of employees willing to join the union, he's ready to negotiate to improve conditions at the store. The movie ends with Coburn's marriage and Byington and a celebratory cruise to Hawaii for the staff of the entire store. Just thinking about it makes me laugh.

Unfaithfully Yours by Preston Sturges

I've just been watching the Criterion Collection edition of Unfaithfully Yours and it's all just so delightful. I watched the introduction with Terry Jones, and am so glad I did. I think it helped me to enjoy the film. And, the fact that Jones' cat walks in front of him just as he is finishing up the interview, as if to say, "I want my part of this conversation!" sets just the right tone. Jones enthusiastically points out that there's lot of language, beautifully delivered, and that in general, the pace is snappy. There's also an interview with Sturges' widow, Sandy Sturges, who has lots to say about the story of how the picture got made and the inspiration for the screenplay. It's all very lovely.

 As Jones points out, some of the two slapstick sequences in the film don't necessarily fully work. I hardly noticed the first one; I had a "respectful" attitude about the second. In Jones' comments, he mentions that "slapstick" was not a speciality of Harrison's; when I watched it the second time, I found myself admiring because now I saw it as something hard. 

What makes this film engrossing is the idea: a jealous man who cannot accept that his beautiful wife loves him faithfully, and all the complications that come with it - and incongruities. The tailor he meets who's a bit of a philosopher; the private detective he meets who essentially says, "I am your biggest fan" and means it; the broken English and brilliant metaphor of Lionel Stander's character, who I think refers to the members of the orchestra as "meatheads." I loved Rex Harrison in Major Barbara and I love him here. There's something masterful in the way that he delivers dialogue; something wicked in that glint in his eye. 

About the orchestra: I read that Sturges was not a fan of classical music. This surprised me a little bit because I so loved the way he filmed the orchestra. I don't quite know how to express it. I guess I'd say he makes the orchestra seem like a football team or an assembly line. They're stripped of their glamour, wearing street dress, but their synchronization seems very impressive, their intensity workmanlike rather than exalted. Of course, it reminded me of Peter Schikele's Beethoven's Fifth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg). There's a little bit of comic business about the cymbals that I love: it's simple, it's modest but it seems to work.

I knew nothing about Linda Darnell before seeing this film and still know very little but here she was wonderful, really inspired.

 

 

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

I thought it would be fun to see this movie, based on the novel of the same name, because I really loved the novel. It was fun. I really loved this movie. It was very faithful to the novel (the screenplay was written by the novel's author, Jesse Andrews). Not perfectly faithful .. but details don't matter. But it was different, and for me, richer, to see the story with someone else's images. 

One of the things I loved about the movie was that it captured the humor of the book.  The film parodies that Greg makes with his friend Earl are just hilarious. I laughed out loud several times .. and that's unusual. 

One of the things that I loved about the book was that it was anti-dramatic. There's another, better word for what I mean but I can't think of it now. Greg does not fall in love with Rachel, who has leukemia. Greg does not want to be Rachel's friend, and certainly not just because she has a life-threatening illness. Greg flat-out refuses to befriend Rachel until he is coerced by his mother. (Greg's personal approach to surviving high school is just not getting involved with it, or its cliques, or its individuals.) At one point, Greg lashes out at Rachel in blind fury, completely reactive and completely insensitive to Rachel's pain. In other words, it's so much more like real life than books like these often are. And Greg doesn't have a brilliant career as a filmmaker, either.

 

 

New TBR

Sort of a very tentative TBR list 

(have long meant to read)

 

A fine Brush on Ivory by Richard Jenkyns

A Gentleman of Moscow

(YA)

 

The Hate U Give

To All the Boys

 

All That I Can Fix

Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda

 

If I Stay

 

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

 

One of Us is Lying

 

Dear Life, You Suck

 

Walkable City Jeff Speck

 

Right of Way Angie Schmitt

 

Belinda - Maria Edgeworth

 

 

Columbus by Kogonada

I loved this film. It has all the things I love: libraries, architecture, the Midwest. It captures the wonderful incongruity of modernist architecture set in a small Indiana town with its weed trees,  chain link fences and abandoned farmers' stalls. I loved it. The plot was minimal, but life affirming. The amount of silence in this film was daring. 

The film is set in Columbus, Indiana, a city of 40,000 people that is a living museum of modernist architecture.

https://columbus.in.us/columbus-the-movie/

 

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

I had never heard of this book, or the film it was made into ("Love, Simon"). I asked a bookstore clerk for some recommendations and this was one of them. The blurb on the front that read, "The love child of John Green and Rainbow Rowell" sold me. In many ways, I think that's pretty accurate description. This book is a fast, easy read and quite suspenseful as the plot develops.

Simon's a teen in an Atlanta suburb. He's a junior, and he's funny, and talented at entertaining his family with his sense of humor. He's gay, and no one knows he's gay.

And he's having an email correspondence/flirtation with one of his classmates. They're feeling each other out and getting to know each other. Neither of them knows who the other one is: they only know that they both attend the same high school as they met on a high school chatboard.  

Early in the story, a guy named Martin sidles up to Simon and lets him know that he'd left his email open in the library, and now Martin knows that Simon is gay and is having some kind of online relationship with another gay teen whose name is "Blue." And it's not just that Martin knows; Martin knows that Simon is not out and he wants to control Simon and force Simon to include Martin in his social circle, so that Martin can get close to Abby, one of Simon's friends.

Simon's shocked, disgusted and terrified. He's not ready to come out, and he's not ready to betray his friend Blue. He knows Blue's not ready to come out and disclosure could be really devastating for him.

Meanwhile, there's lots of stuff going on around him: his older sister has gone away to college and now she seems to have a secret boyfriend; his younger sister, always quite but always a comforting presence, seems to be gone all the time now. His two oldest friends, Nick and Leah, are his safe haven. He knows that whenever he spends time with them, he can just be. But something has changed: Leah has a major crush on Nick that is not requited; Nick is interested in Abby. Leah is often just .. miserable.

Then rehearsals for the winter musical, Oliver!, begin and everyone's thrown together is awkward ways. Simon thinks he's falling in love with Blue, but he has no idea who Blue is.

This book got so much love from so many places. It got a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, which also named it a "Best Book." Jennifer Niven, whose All the Bright Places I loved, gave it a blurb. Amazon named it the YA Book of the Year. And it was on the longlist for a bunch of prizes: the National Book Award, YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) Best Book for Teens Award, and the UK Literary Association Book Award.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

I've just finished Agnes Grey, and I'm a little confused or bemused or both. 

The first part of this book seems to be an expose of the social status of governesses and the second part a departure, a rather conventional romance. 

I find myself wondering at Charlotte Bronte's rejection of Austen: Agnes Grey seems to embrace romance, like Austen, and more so than either Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. 

I'm struck by how absolutely without redeeming qualities Rosalie seems to be; and, especially, how cruel she is to take up seducing Mr. Weston and preventing Agnes from seeing him; it seems completely obvious to me that she intends to hurt Agnes. And Agnes is so demure. Perhaps a little too demure for my taste. Her anxiety about the things she says to Mr. Weston is very touching and relatable. 

There is a passage, which I failed to note, where Agnes says that she is touched and delighted by Mr. Weston speaking to her as an equal, and this passage seems to me to echo that famous passage in Jane Eyre - which was, presumably, written later. 

I enjoyed the dramatic tension as Agnes longed for Mr. Weston to propose. I was relieved when it ended. I wondered why he waited so long. And, I enjoyed the novel as a whole and continue to marvel at Anne Bronte's mastery of the form. It amazes me that each of the sisters was so very accomplished in their debut novels. I haven't read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but I assume that it expresses more of Anne's true feelings.

Garnethill by Denise Mina

I really enjoyed Garnethill by Denise Mina. The thing I enjoyed most about it was the local color, the descriptions of streets and neighborhoods in Glasgow. The other thing that really impressed me was the sheer originality of the plot. And the sense I had that Mina had used the format of the mystery novel to convey something she felt she'd learned about mental illness, sexual assualt, and both the mental health care system and society's attitudes toward mental health.

Maureen O'Donnell has only been out of an asylum, where she was treated for severe depression, for four months. She's dating a counselor from the outpatient clinic where she's having therapy - although he's not her therapist. She's just reached the point where she feels this relationship has run its course. The next night, she goes out for drinks with an old friend, and, having had too much to drink, comes home and goes straight to bed. In the morning, she is deeply shocked to discover that her lover has been murdered in the living room of her apartment. She didn't notice when she came in the night before because she went straight to bed and didn't enter that room.

Everything about this is terrible. The sensational nature of the crime has attracted the interest of the newspapers and reporters besiege her at work. She found the body and she's being treated for mental illness, so she's the police's first idea about a suspect for the murders. Her own mother and her lover's mother, a politician, also think she's the culprit. She sets out to do what seems impossible: conduct her own investigation and find the real culprit.

It starts with a rumor but she begins to gather evidence that there are a number of vulnerable mental health patients that may have sexually assaulted by a staff member. She speculates that this situation may be the cause of her lover's murder; perhaps he was killed to prevent him from revealing the identity of the attacker.

A scene I really enjoyed was a meeting Maureen has with her brother in a chipper. The chipper is so perfectly described that you can not only picture it but feel the whole atmosphere of discussing a difficult topic in the least conducive environment.

Garnethill is the first novel in a trilogy. Garnethill earned the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Dagger Award for best first crime novel. I think it was deserved.

 

11/19/2020: If you're interested in Denise Mina, or think you might be, I recommend this clip of Mina in conversation with Jane Casey at this year's Dublin Book Festival, talking about Tartan Noir, describing Glasgow, writing crime fiction vs. writing true crime, society's construct of women's mental illness, the value of awards, writing crime fiction as a feminist act, and Mina's latest novel, The Less Dead.

The MurderOne Festival @ DBF Denise Mina in conversation with Jane Casey

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqQEeF--vMA

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

I recently read Northanger Abbey with an online book group that's part of the Bonnets at Dawn Facebook page.

I read all the Austen novels when I was in college, but I've very much enjoyed rereading Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Rereading Northanger Abbey was kind of a revelation. The thing that I enjoyed the most was also the thing that surprised me most: Northanger Abbey is a comedy. All the novels are comedies, but this one is among the most light-hearted. Austen presents its heroine as an average woman of marriageable age, which means that she, like her peers, is mad for Gothic novels. The tone of the novel throughout is satirical but in a kind-hearted way, and funny. Although I really disliked the character of John Thorpe and found his company oppressive, a lot about him was funny. His love of gossip is the device by which the plot turns.

 

 Austen wrote Northanger Abbey at a time when the novels of Ann Radcliffe, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, were wildly popular. In fact, in Austen's novel, the heroine, Catherine Morland, and her friend, Isabella Thorpe, are both readers of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Monk, published in 1796, is also discussed by John Thorpe in the novel. John Thorpe is Catherine Morland's false suitor, the man who is interested in her but in whom she has not interest, who is less attractive than the hero, possibly morally deficient, and who is not destined to win the heroine. The fact that he is enthusiastic about The Monk and recommends it to Catherine is a sign that Austen does not hold The Monk in high regard.

Northanger Abbey is a satire on the Gothic novel. There's nothing sensational (except Catherine's youthful imaginings) in the novel; in fact, when Henry Tilney, Catherine's host and chief romantic interest, attempts to convince her that her Gothic novel-inspired suspicions of his father are fantasy, he asks her to consider that she is living in England (rather than the Italy of the Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk) where, Tilney presumes, the rule of law and difficulty of keeping anything secret in the small towns of the English countryside make it unlikely that a murder could be kept secret for years.

Northanger Abbey opens in Bath, where Catherine is visiting as a guest of her well-to-do neighbors, the Allens. She meets Henry Tilney at the Assembly Rooms, a Bath institution that offered programming: dances, concerts, educational lectures, and concerts. The real purpose of the Assembly Rooms was, like the opera, to provide a place where one could see and be seen, where young women could display themselves and young men could meet them.

When Catherine meets Henry Tilney, she finds him charming. He certainly has plenty of conversation! In a world without raves and 501 jeans, conversation was a very important part of the courting process, so no little thing. But to modern sensibilities, Henry Tilney seems like a mansplainer, a patronizing, condescending, know-it-all.

What was so lovely about this "read-along" and discussion was that it was the consensus of most readers that while Henry started out as a rather predictable and annoying mansplainer, he grew to respect Catherine's values, intelligence, and sincerity. This new view of Henry Tilney catapulted him from being low in my estimation amongst Austen romantic heroes to exceeding Captain Wentworth to take the crown.

As a fan of Fanny Burney's Evelina, I'd like to point out that while Northanger Abbey is very different from Evelina, it share the same essential plot: a young, innocent girl enters society and has a number of misadventures where she makes a number of socially awkward mistakes and violates the rules of polite society with which she is unfamiliar. In both tales, virtue triumphs.

 

A Completing of the Watsons by Rose Servitova

I loved this "feel-good" novel and recommend it highly. I read it by flashlight during a power outage and was grateful for the way its lively plot, dialogue and humor held my interest.

As I read it, I found myself ruminating on what it is that I love about Jane Austen's work. It's the humor and satire, the elegance of her style, the values and yes, the happy endings.

A Completing of the Watsons supplies all these things.

The Watsons, a fragment begun and abandoned by Jane Austen while she was living in Bath, has a real humdinger of a plot. Like Mansfield Park, there's more than a little edge to it as Emma, a young woman raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle, suffers a reversal in fortune and must return to the family home. There her three sisters are engaged in a hunt for husbands as their dying father has no money or property to leave them - and they talk about it constantly, adding to the atmosphere of gloom.

Emma's change in fortune has occurred because when her mother died when Emma was just six, she was given to her aunt and uncle to raise and was presumed by her family to be the intended heiress of her uncle's estate, Claperton Park. Her uncle has recently died, however, without making any financial provision for her and her aunt has remarried to an Irish captain who did not want Emma to continue living with them.

Given a good education, she's a little bit too refined for the modest situation in which she finds herself now living. As the book opens, she is meeting the eldest of her sisters, Elizabeth, for the first time in 14 years.

At the first ball she attends after moving to Stanton, she meets a man she is immediately drawn to, Mr. Howard, a vicar. But she is also spotted by the stand-offish and socially awkward Lord Osborne. Lord Osborne never dances; his disdain for balls and dancing reminds me of Mr. Darcy. Lord Osborne immediately wishes to be introduced to her, and while that does not happen, he begins a campaign of courtship of Emma which she finds, while not welcome, certainly makes her life more eventful.

What I love about Rose Servitova's writing is her humor, her writing style, her delight in the foibles of human beings, and her fidelity to the language, manners and concerns of the Regency period.

I find myself wondering if Austen abandoned The Watsons because the dilemma Emma faces was just too close to Austen's own.

There are many elements here which remind me of other novels. Of course, Lord Osborne reminds me of Mr. Darcy. The discussion of lady novelists reminds me of the many discussions of books and reading in Northanger Abbey. Emma's status as a dependent, with an uncertain future, reminds me of Fanny in Mansfield Park. There is a passing reference to Box Hill, which, of course, reminded me of Emma - not to mention the sad hypochondria of Mr. Watson, reminiscent of Mr. Woodhouse in Emma and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The close friendship Emma and Elizabeth form in this novel reminds of Lizzie and Jane in Pride and Prejudice. The somewhat frosty relationship Emma and Elizabeth have with their other two sisters, Penelope and Margaret, also reminds of Kitty and Lydia from the same novel.

The Killing of the Tinkers by Ken Bruen

The Killing of the Tinkers fulfilled and confounded my expectations all at once. As I expected, it was so funny, charming and satisfying. On the other hand, I kept finding myself surprised: surprised that Jack has returned from London and his experience there earns about a paragraph. (After all, he ended up in Ladbroke Grove, not Battersea.)

Jack Taylor is surprising in so many ways. His greatest aspiration is to drink as much as he wants and just keep reading. His wife unexpectedly turns up (A wife? Did you know he had a wife? I didn't know he had a wife) and disappears again before the end of the chapter, leaving behind beautiful boots so exceptional that their virtues must be extolled at regular intervals.

Jack's perfected hedonism, and his reading connoiseurship, does not seem to interfere with his detective work (or perhaps it does). He's been approached by the head of clans, Sweeper, to find out who has been killing young tinker men. His search for the culprit finally ends in a way that I found surprising -- and it's nagged at me ever since finishing the novel. That's the kind of guy Jack Taylor is - surprising, offering you the truly unexpected, some might say, shocking.

Jack's reading diary alone is worth the price of admission. Jack's the kind of detective who believes that when his powers of deduction lag, it's time to read the greats: Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, George Pelecanos, believing that they inspire his mystery-solving powers to come forth.. 

This book is short, snappily written, and hugely entertaining.

TBR: Garnethill by Denise Mina & Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

Reading Garnethill by Denise Mina. I haven't felt much like reading lately, but I'm finding that I really am enjoying this book. I was quite surprised to discover that it's more than 20 years old - the clue was that the library copy I'm reading is quite well-loved.

What I love most about Garnethill is the "local color"; the thing I love second-best is the feminism at the heart of the story.

Also on the list:

The One-in-A Million Boy by Monica Wood

A Completing of the Watsons by Rose Servitova

The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

7/27/2020
Having finished Garnethill, I'm now reading Agnes Grey. This is the first time I've ever read Anne Bronte (her other novel is the The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). What strikes me first is just how different her style seems from that in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Dead Certainty by Glenis Wilson

I have several wonderful things to read, but right now I'm reading Dead Certainty. When I began it, I wasn't sure that I would continue reading. The exposition seemed to me to move slowly; quite a few paragraphs seemed to be devoted to spiritual healing, which seemed off-topic for a horse racing novel; and the protagonist shared that he wasn't too interested in genealogy. Something about it seemed inauthentic. But I find I'm still reading it.

I have a relative who has enjoyed Dick Francis, the horse racing mystery writer, in the past. I was curious if there were other authors writing horse racing mysteries, thinking that a really good horse racing mystery might make a good gift. I went to my library's website, clicked on the Novelist database, and typed "horse racing mysteries" in the search box. I was surprised by the long list of titles that came up - 203. And the very first on the list was Dead Certainty by Glenis Wilson, so I put a hold on it and picked it up at my library's drive-through.(Another book on the list that looked interesting, and was owned by my library, was High Stakes: A Jack Doyle Mystery,

In a larger sense, I was looking for a horse racing mystery series writer, so I scrolled down the list to a title by Dick Francis called Wild Horses. Underneath the title, there was a link for "Title Read-alikes," that is, books very similar to Wild Horses. I clicked on another link, right beside the first one, "Author Read-alikes," because I wanted to find other authors writing horse race mysteries.

It was an interesting list: the very first author name on the list was Sam Llewellyn, who writes mysteries related to the sea, chosen because he also provides details about an intriguing milieu. The second author on the list was cited for mysteries set in the world of auto racing. The third author, Kit Ehrman, also writes about the world of horse racing. And, Glenis Wilson was on the list.

I notice that there are many reviews of Glenis Wilson's books on GoodReads, and that Dead Reckoning, the third in the Harry Radcliffe series, got a 4.44 rating, quite high for GoodReads where readers tend to be critical.

Now that I've finished Dead Certainty, I can't quite make up my mind about it. I wanted something light and suspenseful, and I think it was both. When I got to about page 75, it started to be much more suspenseful and I finished it in two days.

Harry Radcliffe is a jockey who takes a great spill, injuring his knee. Afterwards, he's not sure if he'll be able to race again, but certainly faces a long period of physical therapy rehabilitation. His boss suggests Harry, while he's recuperating, take on a special commission: ghost-writing the autobiography of a famously successful trainer who's now retiring. Harry writes a column for the local racing newspaper, but he think it's a stretch to take on penning a biography. Still, needs must - he needs the dosh.

Shortly after he begins work, a number of frightening things start happening: he's involved in a car crash with a horsebox, and an unknown person enters his kitchen in the middle of the night, splasing around petrol, and would have started a fire with Leo, Harry's formidable ginger tom.

Harry's scared and angry. He doesn't know who's out to get him. Does it have something to do with his accident? The book commission he's taken on?