Jason Lisle. Fractals: The Secret Code of Creation. Master Books, 2021.

In recent years people have become more familiar with the concept of fractals. Fractals are geometric figures that are traced by repeating a formula over and over in a smaller scale each time. Fractals: The Secret Code of Creation gives us some of the formulas and many lovely and colorful illustrations of fractals.

Because fractals are created by repeating an algebraic formula, they could not really be described or even discovered until the invention of the computer. The man who first discovered and wrote about them, Benoit Mandelbrot, worked for IBM.

I first learned about fractals when I was attempting to teach Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Fractals and other iterating algorithms figure into that tale. A mathematician is trying to explain what an iterating algorithm is to a non-scientist and simply says—alas, typical of some experts in many fields who lack communication skills—“It’s an algorithm that iterates.” In other words, if you are plotting the solution to an algebraic formula containing x, let the solution become the starting point and your new x using the same formula. Try repeating that (iterating) many times and see what you get.

This book illustrates examples of a number of fractals, giving us the formulas and illustrating the results. Though softcover, it is the kind of book that one associates with coffee tables because it is full of color illustrations and photographic quality paper. We begin to see the pattern of fractals in many forms, going into great degrees of magnification.

What became fascinating to people about fractals is that they can be used to describe natural features and phenomena. Around 1980, for example, computer programmers were trying to create a graphical interface for a flight simulator program. They realized that the most realistic way to create graphics of mountains that looked real was with fractals.

We see that fractals can be used to describe or illustrate many other things we see in nature such as lightning, shorelines, river deltas, tree branches, nautilus shells, snowflakes, or fern leaves. This is fascinating, especially illustrated the way Lisle’s book does.

But the book has another purpose other than to introduce us to and illustrate fractals. Fractals are graphed by using what we call imaginary numbers. A little over a hundred years ago, imaginary numbers were simply a mathematical exercise. On an ordinary number line, negative numbers do not have square roots. Both negative and positive numbers when multiplied once by themselves yield a positive number. So 2 × 2 = 4, but also -2 × -2 = 4.

Mathematicians hypothesized imaginary numbers. For the sake of argument, let us say negative one has a square root. It is not on the number line, but let us call it i for imaginary. So i × i = -1. That would mean, then, that 2i × 2i = -4. Now negative numbers have square roots. The math is not too complicated for anyone who has had a year of algebra.

We can plot these imaginary numbers on a plane, rather than a number line, and it looks like the typical x and y axes of algebra. Soon, though, people realized that this kind of algebra helps us graph and solve problems involving waves, especially when describing electricity. These so-called imaginary numbers had a real purpose.

Graphs of fractals also use imaginary numbers. Lisle declares these fractal designs as “the secret code of creation.” He draws a conclusion similar to the one Newton concludes his Principia with. Just as Newton had to use a new mathematical system to help describe gravity and planetary motions, so the discovery (we really cannot say invention) of fractals helps describe many natural phenomena. We see that the universe hangs together using very sophisticated mathematical models. Yet these models are intellectual and thought initially to be abstract. The fact that there is deep math underlying these things demonstrates what Newton affirmed (and as we have quoted elsewhere) that:

This most beautiful system…could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being…This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of His dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokrator, Universal Ruler. (Newton 369-370)

In Newton’s day, it was the calculus. Now we have seen how many other abstractions have been used to describe natural phenomena, notably relativity, subatomic wave-particles, probability of habitability, and the apparent eleven dimensions needed for unifying the four known forces. It really appears that behind our existence is a very sophisticated mind.

The more sophisticated the math behind nature, the greater the evidence of the intelligence needed to create it. Random? Hardly. Check it out.

Newton, Sir Isaac. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. 1687. Translated by Andrew Motte and Florian Cajori, 1939; edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952. Great Books of the Western World.

Robert McCaw. Treachery Times Two. Oceanview, 2022. A Koa Kāne Mystery.

Robert McCaw has hooked us with his Koa Kāne novels. Treachery Times Two is the fourth in the series starring our native Hawaiian police detective. This may be the best one yet. This tale keeps the reader guessing with surprises to the very end. As with many detective stories, there are clues that readers may overlook, and there are few throwaway lines in this adventure.

The story begins with an earthquake caused by an eruption of the Big Island’s active volcano, Kilauea. It disturbs an isolated cemetery in aptly named Volcano Village, and some coffins surface. The wild pigs are rooting through the cadavers, but a visitor finds a relatively fresh cadaver buried in a large plastic bag.

It takes a while to identify the woman’s corpse—indeed, the first challenge Koa Kāne faces is the rather time-consuming but ultimately fruitful way she is identified. The victim turns out to be Tiger Baldwin, supposedly a secretary at a top-secret defense contractor named X-Co.

It seems that the police are getting a runaround. They are told everything at X-Co is classified and even personnel questions are none of their business. Not only that, but X-Co’s board includes some high-powered individuals such as United States Senator Chao. Koa’s best friend from his youth Kāwika Kiahi has served as the senator’s long-time aide, but even that connection does not seem to help much.

The story X-Co tells them is that Miss Baldwin resigned her job and left for the mainland. Why would anyone want to kill her? Not only did her killer or killers not want her body to be found, but her fingertips were cut off to hinder any identification. In addition, a security officer at X-Co sold her car to a used car dealer. And someone moved all the furnishings out of her apartment and cleaned it quite thoroughly. These things happened after she had been killed.

Any time it seems they get close to a discovery, someone high in the government complains. Then the FBI shows up. They are peripherally interested in the Baldwin murder, but it seems that they have greater national security concerns that they do not want to share with the local police. Koa finds himself working with five federal agents, all with varying degrees of respect and cooperation with the local detectives. Clearly, they are onto something, and Tiger Baldwin was not just an office assistant.

We also meet Makanui Ka’uhane, a very competent young female detective who has been assigned to Koa’s office. She has a military background and law enforcement training. She also has a fascinating backstory involving Malay pirates in the Philippines.

Things get even more complicated because some of the same politicos connected with X-Co are putting pressure to open a thirty-year-old suicide case. The young Koa himself was involved in the crime and knows it was not really a suicide. The grandson of the victim is trying to restart the case. A fingerprint found at the old crime scene was never traced. It turned out to belong to a man who as a youth was a repeat offender. However, he had a born again experience and turned his life around. He has been a model citizen for twenty-five years.

Koa knows enough to know that the man is perfectly innocent. If Koa comes clean about what he knows, his life will change. He will undoubtedly lose his job, his girlfriend, and probably his freedom. So much of the story—and not just Koa’s story—concerns conscience. Is revenge outside of the law justified? What exactly is betrayal? Can people, corporations, or even government workers used to keeping secrets use their secrecy to cover crimes?

Tiger Baldwin will not be the only murder victim. As the hunt for her murderer morphs into a hunt for some person or people who are sabotaging a top-secret weapons program, things get more complicated and dangerous. There are Philippine pirates, Indonesian freighters, Buddhist temples, nearly inaccessible valleys, and the continuing volcanic action. And those are just what are on the surface.

As the Shadow would say, Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men?

M. C. Beaton. Death of Yesterday. Grand Central, 2013. A Hamish Macbeth Mystery.

We have been fans of the BBC mysteries set in Oxford: Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis, and Endeavour. The three series cover a period of about fifty-five or sixty years covering murders in that university city. Each episode usually contains two or three murders. These shows might give the impression that Oxford is a dangerous city.

If that is the case, then County Sutherland in northern Scotland must be under a reign of terror as we start adding up the body count in the Hamish Macbeth stories. Hamish loves the town of Lochdubh because it is quiet and nothing ever happens. At least we are meant to believe this until we start seeing how many people get murdered in this sparsely populated region!¹

In Death of Yesterday, an Englishwoman comes north to work in a textile factory that is the main employer of the notoriously insular (even by Highland standards) town of Cnothan. Her haughty attitude earns her few friends, and she is murdered not too long after she arrives. It is true that no one seems to like her, but it is also true that no one seems to know her very well to have any motive for killing her.

As Hamish Macbeth investigates Morag’s murder, he finds everyone at the factory from the lowliest worker to the CEO is tight-lipped. As always Sergeant Inspector Blair is trying to get Hamish in trouble. And Hamish’s constable partner, Charlie, is quite lazy, but he takes good care of the pets and is a good cook.

What at first seems to be an isolated murder of a stranger turns into a small crime wave. Hamish dates Hannah who happens to be the sister of a suspect. She appears prettier than Hamish’s old flame Elspeth, and is in line to be taking over Elspeth’s new gig as a news anchor on a Glasgow television station. But she is discovered murdered as well.

Hamish does not usually go too far afield, except for an occasional trip to London, but here he flies to—Estonia. The wife of the CEO likes to travel, so Hamish sees if he can get her to open up.

We also encounter the weather prophet/seer Angus who has appeared in some of the other Macbeth stories. Hamish, of course, is usually a skeptic, but some people take him more seriously. In this tale Angus may have met his match. Does he really have “the gift,” or is he just an attentive busybody?

This is one of the more complicated Hamish mysteries. It will keep the reader guessing until the very end. There are surprises—both in the investigation and in his personal life. Fans of Beaton’s series will appreciate this one.

¹The latest (2021) mystery includes an introduction which assures us that Sutherland really is a safe place and that the Hamish Macbeth mysteries are fiction.

Martin W. Sandler. The Whydah. Candlewick, 2017.

The Whydah describes what we have been able to learn about the life and death of one of the most successful pirates and pirate vessels during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1690-1720). There are two parts to the story of the Whydah (the y is pronounced like a short i). The first tells of its construction in 1716 and its capture by pirates led by the young Black Sam Bellamy until its wreck in a storm off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1717.

The second part begins in 1983 when Barry Clifford began a serious search for the vessel. The first remains of the ship were found in 1984, and the wreckage, scattered over square miles of the seabed after nearly three centuries of tides and storms, was positively identified as the Whydah’s in 1987.

The Whydah’s relics shed new light on the lives of these renegade seafarers. They lived in a fairly civilized manner with a fancy galley (kitchen) and normal eating utensils. The Whydah was full of loot. One year’s diving, for example, uncovered approximately $40,000 in silver (I understand that is just the weight of the silver, not the value of the old coins to collectors). The Whydah had many pounds of silver and gold coins from the era. It also had quite a few articles of African gold jewelry.

Piracy appealed to many sailors because their treatment on pirate ships was generally better than on most merchant ships or naval vessels. Each sailor got an equal share. They voted for their captain and quartermaster. Most were volunteers. Nationality was not important—Bellamy was an Anglo-American, but sailors came from many European countries, various African and Caribbean locations, and included native Americans.

There were specific rules governing punishments and following orders. If a sailor was disabled while fighting or performing normal ship duties, there was a kind of insurance for him. Back then, sailors and soldier injured in battle simply became beggars when they returned home. More than one pirate complained that if the legitimate navies and merchants treated sailors better, they would not have become pirates.

Whenever the Whydah or another vessel in its small fleet overtook a vessel, they would ask if anyone on the vessel wanted to join them. In most instances, many did, though some were forced to join if they had a needed skill. The Whydah’s carpenter was forced to join, but most of the other 180 or so men in the fleet volunteered. One of the volunteers was a boy of about 8-10 years old, who had been a passenger with his mother on a vessel they captured.

The discovery and recovery of material from the Whydah still goes on today. One interesting tidbit was that when Mr. Clifford was organizing his first crew, John Kennedy, Jr., who had met him on Martha’s Vineyard, volunteered. Witnesses say he was enthusiastic and worked very hard.

Clifford located the wreck because he used an eighteenth-century map published by probably the most reliable American cartographer-sailor at the time. The map was published in the same year the ship went down and notes its location off the town of Wellfleet. Curiously, there was at the time a natural “canal” separating the northern end of Cape Cod from the mainland just north of the “elbow.” At the time, parts of it were shallow as a ditch, and eventually it filled in.

This book is geared towards late elementary or middle school readers, but it does contain a lot of information and helpful sidebars. Anyone thinking of researching pirates from this time period would do well to consult this book along with Daniel Defoe’s nonfiction A General History of the Pyrates and Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America. It debunks many myths about pirates and, perhaps, shows them in a more human manner.

Steven Kent Mirassou. Lineage. Val de Grâce, 2021.

Lineage shares the author’s life in the California wine business. He is a sixth generation vintner. His first French ancestors began growing wine grapes in California in the mid-1850s. Thanks to the film Sideways, there has been a growing interest in California wines—though Mirassou would say it began in 1976 when a California wine won top honors a prestigious Parisian wine tasting.

Mirassou has worked and lived in the Livermore Valley, due east of San Francisco Bay, and not as well known for wine as the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. It is striking that the same vineyard in California can have grapes growing at an elevation of nearly a thousand feet higher than other vines in the same field. We learn that elevation and soil as well as more obvious things like weather and grape variety all contribute to the distinct flavors of individual wines.

Lineage is a collection of essays on winemaking and life among winemakers with some family stories inserted. There is no specific order to the essays except for perhaps a slight chronological arrangement. For example, we read about the death of the author’s first wife before we meet his current wife. The focus, however, is on the grapes and the wine.

Even here the chronology is slight. We are told about varieties of grapes, and especially the sensitivity—even guesswork—that goes into deciding which pomaces are going to be used or blended for which type of wines. Mirassou tries to explain it to us, but it sounds like, as they say, “you have to be there.” Readers can only get a vague idea of the scents and flavors that the author tries to describe to us.

We learn a lot about the various things that go into making good wine. It seems the author’s best product is Cabernet Franc, but he also makes many other varieties including some sparkling wines. While he oversees much of the winemaking process, he also spends a significant part of the year on the road selling his product to stores and distributors.

We get a sense of the complicated business of winemaking. The family many years ago sold the rights to the name Mirassou. This reminded me of something I recall from my youth. My father liked Taylor wines from upstate New York. At some point the Taylor family sold the rights to the name to a larger company. The Taylors could not even use their own name for wine they still produced!

It may also be a little hard for the reader to follow the ins and outs of who owns what vineyard. One family vineyard that had been worked for generations was sold by some cousins for building lots. Towards the end of the book the author himself has to leave the vineyard where he had worked with his family for a number of years.

Lineage is tied to the earth just as grape vines are. In a few spots the author’s language may be earthier than some readers would appreciate, but winemaking like breeding is a natural process. As suggested by the title, the vines, the wine, the earth itself, go on like Ecclesiastes from generation to generation. Mirassou is surprised and delighted when his son takes an interest in the family business. It becomes clear that the lineage will continue.

The author also notes that wine is so much a part of special events. If I recall correctly, the last time I imbibed was at a wedding about four years ago. But I also understand how what the rabbis called “the blood of the grape” features not only in marriages but in other covenant relationships all over the world. Yes, the Bible tells us God began his covenant relationship with Abraham when the priest Melchizedek gave him bread and wine. So the Chinese classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins with an oath sworn over a cup of wine. In some ways, this is nearly universal. Yes, there is a lineage to this as well.

The author mentions at least two lines of wine that he sells. One is called Steven Kent for obvious reasons. The other he has called Lineage, like the title of the book.

The book has a great visual appeal. Its two-tone black and white cover, its size and thickness, its semi-glossy pages, and the artistic black and white photos throughout the volume suggest a yearbook. It does contain many memories. It contains a few episodes and many observations.

Because of its visual appeal, I could not help think of a stage direction from Stoppard’s Arcadia: “a handsome thick quarto, brand new, a vanity production…” It is gorgeous, if the language in places gets a bit florid. I ask myself was the title chosen because of the slight sense of history in the book or because it promotes his latest line? To be honest, this reviewer rarely drinks. Perhaps someone who knows more about wine would have a better idea of an answer, but we all can learn something about C.S. Lewis called the miracle of grapes becoming wine.

Jeff Rovin. Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: The Black Order. St. Martin’s, 2021.

As readers of this blog may know, we have been fans of Tom Clancy since the eighties. We have still kept up with the “Clancy” novels written under the auspices of his estate since he passed away.

The Op-Center novels are different. While Clancy may have inspired them and co-authored a few, they are really a product of his hired writers and, now, his estate. They are still entertaining stories, but reading The Black Order felt like Clancy lite.

Most of the “classic” Jack Ryan and Jack Ryan, Jr., tales are international. With few exceptions, even when they are set in the United States, they involve foreign activity, whether a hostile government, terrorists, or organized criminals. The Op-Center is a branch of Naval Intelligence that is given a certain amount of free reign like the Campus of the more recent Jack Ryan stories.

The Black Order reminded this reviewer of The Wilkes Insurrection. Both stories involve what appear to be random acts of terror by Americans on Americans in America. The perpetrator in The Wilkes Insurrection used Islamic jihadist language but may have been an anarchist who used Islamic activists to do his dirty work.

The Black Order is a secret group also organized by an American who specializes in computer technology and networks. However, what is perhaps interesting about the CEO of Stroud Safe at Home is that he at least claims to believe that American values are worth preserving—he pretty much believes the same things that the Navy and Marine Corps member of the Op-Center believe. The difference is that Mr. Stroud thinks that the country is abandoning them and needs to be shocked back.

Stroud is clever. His workers are dedicated. Terrorist attacks happen in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Why those places? To be reminded of our roots and how they are being undermined. Without going into too much detail, his awful attack on the Philadelphia Navy Yard is really quite ingenious. Like certain cartoon villains, this may ultimately be his downfall: He thinks he is smarter than nearly everyone else.

A retired Navy Admiral is murdered in front of his wife. The disguised murderer tells his wife that war has begun. The retired admiral seems like a strange victim. He still consults with the Navy, but spends a lot of his time in the woods of western Pennsylvania collecting deer from hunters so he can deliver the venison to needy veterans.

It seems that Navy connections might be singled out, but then a random killing of owners of an ice cream stand and the bombing of a hotel in Atlanta follow. What is the “war” about? Why such targets?

Sometimes the old Clancy novels seemed prescient. Whether The Black Order is remains to be seen. We know now that the American military will resort to distant operations using automated means like drones. What if someone who knows about commercial security systems decides to go rogue? What might happen?

This reader feels he has come to know the Ryan family (Jack, Dr. Ryan, Jack, Jr.), Ding Chavez, John Clark, and other actors form the CIA and the Campus in the main Clancy novels. I have to ask myself if I am ready to get to know or even care about the actors in the Op-Center. That remains to be seen.

Spencer Quinn. Tender is the Bite. Forge, 2021.

Tender is the Bite, as some readers might guess, is the latest installment of the adventures of Chet and Bernie. That is, for the uninitiated, private detective Bernie Small and his German Shepherd sidekick Chet.

As usual, the novel title is a word play on a famous novel. Usually the title is clever but not especially relevant to the story except that the narrator is a dog. This time it is slightly different. Bernie actually says the line, “Tender is the bite.” And there is another creature that does bite Bernie, but not too badly, i.e. a tender bite.

That creature is Griffie the ferret. One of the recurring mysteries of the story is that Griffie keeps showing up, but always in a different place with a different person. Whom does he actually belong to? And why does he turn up in the possession of so many different people like Mavis, Johnnie Lee, Neddy, Olek, and whoever it is that owns a dumpster?

The mystery is a drawn-out affair. Bernie meets the very attractive Mavis who thinks she wants to hire him but doesn’t. When he follows up, he finds out she has moved and her former roommate clearly does not trust Bernie. We soon discover that the roommate, Johnnie Lee, had placed a restraining order on her former boyfriend who may have had criminal ties.

To say much more would give away too much. Needless to say, though, a few of the main characters end up dead. There is an intricate plot that involves some high stakes international finance, an organized criminal syndicate, and a state senator. Bernie believes that at least one of the victims may have not realized how high the stakes were and that he really had gone in over his head.

The ongoing mistrust between Captain Ellis of the local police department (Yes, he got promoted) and Bernie continues. In fact, it gets much worse. We also learn something of why Ellis may have held a grudge against Bernie.

There is also a tip of the hat to Butch Cassidy. There is a remote desert hideout that the local high school kids call the Hole in the Wall. So, yes, we are back in Chet and Bernie’s home territory. In this case there is even a side trip (maybe two, Chet’s not big on geography) to New Mexico. That’s speed trap territory to Chet.

Because of Chet’s keen sense of smell and hearing, the reader knows certain things before Bernie does. Still there is a lot of mystery in this story, and the dots are not connected until the end.

As always much of the enjoyment of these stories comes from the narrative voice of Chet, the dog. Here are some examples:

The air was full of horsey smells, somewhat like cattle, actually, but grassier and way more nervous. Horses are prima donnas, each and every one, always moments away from a panic attack. That makes it tempting to…to…I kept that bad thought to myself. (111)

Some restaurants don’t welcome me and my kind. That’s a bit of a puzzler. Me and my kind love food. Lots of humans are food lovers, too, but they can be fussy. Take Leda [Bernie’s ex-wife], for example, who sends something back at every meal. You don’t see that with my guys. (172-173)

When speaking of another dog, Trixie, Chet says:

Oh, poor Trixie! Not the cone! But it was the cone, all right. There are many great human inventions—the Porsche, for example—and also some bad ones, of which the cone is one of the very worst. (195)

You get the idea. Chet is a great storyteller, even if he gets distracted. Some stories have recurring scents as well as, in this case, a recurring ferret. In To Fetch a Thief there is the recurring scent of elephant. In Tender is the Bite Chet keeps noticing the scent of vinegar. It is remarkable what criminal minds can do with vinegar.

Stephen Kirkpatrick and Marlo Carter Kirkpatrick. Lost in the Amazon. W Publishing, 2005.

Lost in the Amazon is a modern true story of—well, you can guess from the title. In some ways it is not as harrowing as earlier jungle expeditions such as the one former President Teddy Roosevelt took in the Amazon Basin. Nevertheless, it is intense. One is very much aware that the man versus nature conflict is truly elemental.

Kirkpatrick was a freelance photographer of forty-one when he undertook this little expedition. He and another American went to the Peruvian Amazon to report on and photograph the wildlife and possibly indigenous cultures there. They flew to the inland town of Iquitos and took a boat to a village. From there they hiked through the rain forest to another village with three native Peruvian helpers and guides.

It turned out that the trail to the second village had probably not been used in a generation. There was no trail. Of course, it does not take long for the jungle to grow over any trail. One of the interesting observations about the story of the Lost City of Z was that there truly was a city, but once its inhabitants were decimated by European diseases, it took less than a generation for the city to be swallowed up again by the rain forest.

We read about all kinds of obstacles. Diseases, check. Insects, check. Bat droppings while sleeping, check. Foul water, check. Jaguars, check. Anacondas, check. Fer-de-lances, check. This is dangerous territory. People have to know what they are doing.

Still, probably the feature that added the most misery was the feature that gives the rain forest its name, namely, rain. There were two season there. One season it rains every day. The other season it rains constantly. The men were never dry. Even the native villages were subsistence operations at best.

Kirkpatrick had plans. None of them worked out, except that he and his group did all survive. We are told that God told Kirkpatrick that he would get out, just not the way he planned it. There are swamps to wade through, rivers to cross, balsa rafts, a dugout—all contribute to the adventure. By the end, even the other American, a skeptic at the beginning, is almost ready to admit that their ultimate survival was supernatural.

One clear takeaway from Lost in the Jungle is that, in spite of frustration and impatience with each other from time to time, the men stayed together. No one was ultimately lost. Together they had enough to survive. No, Kirkpatrick’s film and equipment got lost or damaged at various points. He regrets packing more film instead of Cipro. But they made it.

Lest it seem like an unrelenting tale of survival, there were lighter points, too. Villagers were hospitable. There were many beautiful flowers and creatures to observe as well. If there is a hero of the story, it is the native Peruvian guide Ashuco. Although only weighing 120 pounds, he carried more weight than anyone. He knew survival in the jungle including what to eat and how to get drinkable water. Together they make it.

One small critique of the book is the map in the end covers. It apparently is a map of the part of the Amazon and many tributaries where the story takes place, but the only name on the map that was in the story was the aforementioned Iquitos. The other villages and rivers named in the book do not appear on the map. It would have been interesting if the track the travelers took had been noted on the map. Perhaps the point was to show us that the towns, villages, and rivers they visited still do not appear on anyone’s map. There are still regions which, as Thoreau put it, are white on the chart.

Maureen Corrigan. So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. Little Brown, 2014.

So We Read On is a collection of seven essays by the author, a literary critic for NPR, about F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby. Because the different essays each have a different focus, this review mostly shares of some of the ideas about The Great Gatsby that the author shares in her book.

There is a certain amount of duplication in the essays; it appears each was written at a different time for a different purpose. In this case, though, the repetition may be helpful to the reader. After all, repetition helps us remember better. Even so, as I was reading this, I said to myself, if I were still teaching The Great Gatsby, I might want to read this a second time. It contains a lot.

One item of interest is that T. S. Eliot and Fitzgerald admired one another’s writing. Corrigan tells us that Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land. We think not only of the Valley of Ashes, which is a kind of literal wasteland, but of the “unreal city” Nick visits with Jay Gatsby on occasion and the made-up words to popular songs like Eliot’s “Oh, that Shakespearean rag.”

T. S. Eliot may have been the very first person to reread and reread The Great Gatsby for pleasure. In a much quoted verdict, he said that Gatsby was “the first step that American fiction had made since Henry James.” (205)

Fitzgerald himself admired Edith Wharton, whose social perspective and background were similar to those of James. We are told that Andre Malraux’s Man’s Hope inspired Fitzgerald as well.

Corrigan notes in a number of places the extent of the water imagery in the book. Some of it, of course, foreshadows the way Gatsby dies. But there seems to be more. Early in the novel Daisy speculates about a nightingale coming across a White Star luxury liner. Readers of the novel when it first came out would recognize that the Titanic belonged to the White Star Line. Daisy is like a river, like water, taking whatever shape she needs or wants to. I am reminded of Othello’s insult when he accuses Desdemona of infidelity, “She was false as water.” (5.2.137)

Corrigan also questions the incident that Hemingway tells about Fitzgerald saying “the rich are different.” Anyone who has read the opening paragraphs of FSF’s short story “The Rich Boy,” gets an explanation of what Fitzgerald meant by that. According to critic Mary Colum, it was Hemingway who actually made the comment, and Colum gave the rejoinder, “Yes, they have more money.” Hemingway would fictionalize the incident and attribute it to Fitzgerald in two different works.

Corrigan also considers The Great Gatsby an early example of noir fiction. It glamorizes the underworld, and the more “hard-boiled” people like Meyer Wolfsheim and the Buchanans survive. That is why she likes the 1949 Gatsby film with Alan Ladd of all the Gatsby films that have survived. To this reviewer, the film was preachy, and I find it hard to believe that Nick ends up marrying Jordan. But it is certainly the most noirish film version, perhaps because it came out when film noir was big.

This got me thinking of the other film versions I am familiar with. The 1974 with Robert Redford focuses on the stars of that era. It seems a lot of it is just Redford and Farrow looking gorgeous. The 1999 version with Paul Rudd was a made for TV version that more resembles a soap opera, a standard for the small screen. The recent one with Leonardo Di Caprio emphasizes excess just as our Internet age seems to do. “Anything you can do, I can outdo it.”

Like elements in most noir tales, Corrigan also notes that The Great Gatsby is funny. Even though the story ultimately has serious themes, there is a lot of humor. Some of it is ironic, some of it is dark humor (molar cuff links?). She tells of a stage adaptation of Gatsby in which the audience laughed quite a bit. Ring Lardner and others noted this when the book first came out.

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway tells us he and Fitzgerald were friends. Both in that book and in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” we get the sense that Hemingway feels sorry for him, that he never met his potential and that Zelda was no good for him. Corrigan presents Hemingway as a false friend who torments Fitzgerald. She quotes Lillian Hellman describing conversation between Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett. They both have had too much to drink, and Hemingway starts showing off. Hammett says to him:

“Why don’t you go back to bullying Fitzgerald? Too bad he doesn’t know How good he is. The best.” (143-144)

Hemingway understood this as a rebuke both to his behavior and to his writing.

Corrigan observes that “Gatsby is neither a character-driven nor a plot-driven novel; instead, it is that rarest of literary animals: a voice-driven novel.” (171) The plot is simple and even trite. Except for Tom Buchanan and Meyer Wolfsheim, the characters are “unreal.” Even Fitzgerald’s legendary editor Maxwell Perkins noted that “Gatsby [the man] is somewhat vague.” As Corrigan puts it, “Nick projects as much onto Gatsby as Gatsby projects onto Daisy. This is a novel about illusion, after all…” (173) Its “power,” she says, is in its language.

Corrigan spends much time going over the life of Fitzgerald. This is what led this reader to believe the various chapters were originally written as stand-alone essays because numerous details from his life are mentioned in more than one place.

Although one of Fitzgerald’s college friends said that all Fitzgerald’s women are modeled from Zelda, Corrigan notes that his first big crush was a rich beauty from his home state of Minnesota, one Ginevra King. Unlike Zelda but like Daisy, for example, she had brown hair. (Corrigan notes that only the 1925 film version has Daisy as a brunette rather than a blonde—typical Hollywood, I guess). While they dated and corresponded quite a bit, Ginevra’s father made it clear that his daughter must marry a rich man. Besides Daisy, this also resonates with Judy Jones in Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams.”

Corrigan suggests that The Great Gatsby has some latent racism or anti-Semitism, but this seems overstated. First, simply that in the 1920s Irish (like someone with the name of Fitzgerald) might be considered as inferior. Ronald Reagan said that in the 1920s and 1930s his father, a traveling salesman, could not stay at a lot of hotels because he was Irish. Tom Buchanan is the one overt racist, and he is the least sympathetic character. He is the one character who looks down on Wolfsheim because he is Jewish.

Corrigan notes that Meyer Wolfsheim speaks with an accent. It was not unusual in Fitzgerald’s day for realistic writers to write dialogue in dialect. This is true at least from Twain to O’Neill. The character of Wolfsheim is loosely based on Arnold Rothstein, who likely was involved in the 1919 World Series fix and the Great Bond Robbery and was Jewish. It would have been less realistic to portray him as something else. From his own words, we know that Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York had connections to Rothstein. Why wouldn’t Meyer’s co-worker Jay Gatsby be connected with the police commissioner? Wolfsheim and Gatsby were connected, but were they accepted?

This does get to what may be Corrigan’s greatest contribution to the discussion of Gatsby besides her observations on its style. Gatsby is a novel about class. Corrigan believes that Tender is the Night is Fitzgerald’s other good, if not great, novel. This reviewer prefers The Beautiful and Damned to that—probably because it is more believable and because it also emphasizes class.

The water imagery connects with floating. To Fitzgerald the “very rich” do not struggle or work, they float. When we first see Daisy and Jordan in the novel, Nick describes them as floating like the curtains in the breeze.¹ They also float off, like Sally Bowles in the film version of Cabaret: “Goodbye.” One word. That’s all. I’m elite, Daddy’s an ambassador; I can do whatever I want, and you can do nothing about it.

Corrigan might be getting into some pop psychology here, but Fitzgerald, though he went to a prep school and Princeton, was not really part of the elite. His immediate family was lower middle class, and so there was a sense that while he associated with the elite, he was not one of them. When I consider my own middle class, public school background when I attended Harvard, I get it. The rich were different. One friend would imitate one of the elite students by saying, “My God, man, where did you prep?” It was kind of an uneasy joke.

That is the real conflict in The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was a “nobody from nowhere.” Tom Buchanan could look down on him with scorn. Daisy was attracted to him, but in some ways her attraction was like Tom’s for Myrtle. Tom Buchanan with his race theories is a real example of “white privilege.” He is a genuine “one percenter.”

Fitzgerald was very good looking. He was voted the “prettiest” in his college class. He could attract and be attracted to elite beauties like Ginevra and Zelda, but could he really fit in with them? Corrigan shows that Zelda’s affair with a French aviator took place while her husband was writing Gatsby. So could Jay Gatsby really fit in, in spite of his lavish parties and expensive lifestyle?

Corrigan sees this as a distinctively American problem, though I suspect it is more universal. America’s political liberty and free market system provide opportunities for nobodies from nowhere to succeed financially. But how do they fit in socially? In a couple of different places she notes a line from Fitzgerald’s story “The Swimmers,” an ironically humorous story but with a keen observation about America that suggests the lines at the end of Gatsby:

France was a land; England was a people; but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter…(302)

The only people at Harvard I felt sorry for were those who were trying to identify with the elite when everyone knew they weren’t there yet. Was it worth it? Was it worth it for Jay Gatsby? “For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36) That verse suggests what it may really mean to “beat on, boats against the current.”

Note
¹ One of the cleverest panels in the recent graphic novel version of The Great Gatsby is the image of the two ladies floating in the breeze as Nick encounters them.

Chris Bohjalian. Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands. Doubleday, 2014.

I have reviewed another novel by Chris Bohjalian that had connections to F. Scott Fitzgerald. I heard that this one had connections with Emily Dickinson, so I had to check it out.

Like The Double Bind, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is set in Vermont, mostly in the Burlington area. It is clear Bohjalian knows and understands this location well. I could not help think of Infinite Jest at the novel’s outset, however. A nuclear power plant in rural northeastern Vermont (known as the Northeast Kingdom) experiences a meltdown. Many square miles of Vermont and adjacent parts of Canada and New Hampshire become uninhabitable, though not as wide an area as the Great Concavity in the Wallace novel.

Like The Double Bind, this novel is told in the first person, this time by teenager Emily Shepherd. Her parents both work for the power company and are killed in the meltdown. Orphaned, she flees the area along with many other meltdown refugees and ends up in Burlington, the one urban area in the state.

Like The Double Bind, this novel is very raw. In this case, though, Emily hides nothing. News reports blame her father, a nuclear engineer with a drinking problem, for the disaster though no one really knows what happened. He just seems a likely scapegoat. Since her mother is a publicist for the power company, she gets blamed for covering things up. With her parents cast as villains, Emily begins calling herself by a different name.

While described by her teachers as an underachiever, Emily is a fan of literature. She likes Emily Dickinson and frequently quotes her. When she chooses a pseudonym, she calls herself Amy Bliss after one of Dickinson’s close friends.

Like other teen girls on the streets, she gets picked up by a man named Poacher who offers her a warm place and some food. Poacher is a pimp and drug dealer, and soon Emily is prostituting herself and taking drugs. She is direct about her experience, and some readers may be repelled. She also is taught cutting by one of the other girls and uses this as a kind of psychological release. The reader begins to understand that self-harm is an appropriate name for this, and that it is a form of self-punishment.

Still, there is a sense of hope. Emily knows her parents have been unfairly accused. She is not a quitter. She senses there may be a way out of her predicament. She knows, for example, not to leave for a bigger city like Boston or New York the way some of the other street girls have done. That will just be worse.

Eventually, she meets up a with nine-year-old orphaned boy named Cameron who is also on the streets, having fled an abusive foster home. Together they live among the homeless as she knows bringing him to Poacher’s would be a death sentence for him. She divides her story into two parts, B.C. and A.C., before Cameron and after Cameron.

Emily is a survivor. She survived the radiation. She is surviving on the streets. Can she find solace? Can she find a home? Can she endure the disapprobation she experiences when people find out her real identity?

As with The Double Bind, we get a look into the social services that minister to the down and outers in Vermont. Emily/Abby learns when and where to get free food or a shower. She becomes adept at shoplifting. She and Cameron survive a Vermont winter on the streets by making an igloo out of stuffed trash bags.

Interwoven through this are allusions and quotations to Dickinson, famously a recluse who really did have a few friends. The final page (excluding the brief Epilogue) of Emily/Abby’s tale is a fitting tribute to Dickinson and to the power of literature to give us hope and point us to eternity.