"Portobello" by Ruth Rendell

I have been a fan of Ruth Rendell, the British mystery writer, for years, but her latest novel, "Portobello", is something of a departure for her.  For one thing, there isn't really any character you could call crazy, and for another, the only murder is accidental.  What Rendell has done in this novel is present a slice of London life, circa 2010, not the London of tea rooms and green parks and intimate theaters, rather the gritty goings-on of what we might call the underclass, some of whom work, sort of, and some of whom live on what the government metes out.  Juxtaposed to the ramshackle lives of those who get by are Ella and Eugene, a long-engaged, middle-aged couple.  Ella is a doctor; Eugene runs an art gallery.  When their paths cross with Lance, Gemma, and Fize, there is trouble with a capital T.

As always, Rendell's characters are vividly drawn and quirky, if not eccentric.  Gemma is a pretty young mother who uses men for all manner of purposes, often playing one against the other.  Lance is in love with her, but she kicks him out when he hits her and knocks out a tooth.  She has better things in mind for herself than being kicked around by an unemployed lout.  Lance's friend Fize (Fizal), a Muslim who drinks and loves his mother, moves in with Gemma, mainly as a babysitter so Gemma can go out.  Fize's friend Ian is the closest thing to a psychopath in the novel.  There is no doubt he is capable of murder and worse, but when a Romanian immigrant is burned to death in a fire that Ian sets, it is an accident.  Ian and Fize, his reluctant accomplice, don't realize the house they're burning is occupied. 

With this unholy trinity, Rendell presents the sordid lives of many of Britain's young.  A young man with nothing to do and nowhere special to go, a basically decent Muslim who loses his cultural bearings and gets swept along by the current, a teenage mother with ambition and limited opportunity.  Of the three, I put my money on Gemma, but time will tell.  What is wonderful about this novel is the way Rendell takes us right into the thick of the noise, the crowds, the shops, and the hustle of Portobello Road.  A crossroads of sorts, it attracts all kinds and classes of people, who in rubbing elbows sometimes throw off sparks.

Eugene is a pip.  He's likable enough, I suppose, but he's a bit unformed for a forty-something art dealer.  His track record with women is abysmal, yet he has a loyal companion in Ella, a physician who treats all sorts, including Gemma and Joel, who, yes, I guess would qualify as the crazy and menacing, but ultimately harmless, character Rendell is known for.  Ella is on the cusp of forty and would like to marry, perhaps have children, but Eugene is evasive.  He is reluctant even to live with Ella because he harbors a deep, dark secret.  He is an addict.  He is addicted to chocorange, a sugarless sweet that he absolutely can't get enough of.  He hoards these candies all over his house and in his pockets the way an alcoholic keeps bottles of vodka in his underwear drawer or behind the commode.  He his ashamed; he tries to quit; he succumbs to temptation and feels wretched.  Yet, despite his obvious suffering, there is something ludicrous about a grown man who can't get married because he cares more about chocorange than a loving woman.

I'm tempted to say that Rendell dissects the corrupting influence of materialism, but that would be too simple.  Portobello Road is a place where practically anything can be bought, from trash to treasure.  Eugene's art gallery is cheek by jowl with kabab stands and cheap jewelry boutiques.  His home is comfortable and well-furnished, a perfect setting for an educated, professional couple, while Lance lives with his Uncle Gib, a reformed thief who now cares absolutely nothing about things of any kind.  His house is worth a lot, but it's falling apart, and he couldn't care less.  Rendell doesn't so much indicate that wealth, even relative prosperity, is a bad thing as show what living like Tantalus with the world's goodies just out of reach can do to unformed or chaotic minds.  Joel, Ella's patient, is obesessed with her and lives alone in the dark in a flat his wealthy father pays for.  His family is broken, and his father's response is to throw money at the problem in order not to have to deal with Joel or confront his own demons.  Joel's difficulty isn't material temptation; he lives like an ascetic, but his attachment to "stuff" is as pathological as Uncle Gib's or Ian's.  What should our relation be to the objects around us? Rendell seems to ask. 

In "Portobello" we have a whole range of socio-economic classes crashing into each other like calving icebergs.  We see death, theft, lies, family breakdown, loneliness, obsession, addiction, weakness, and grief, and what kind of an ending does Rendell provide?  Not the one you might expect.  Rendell's vision is generally dark, and even though the guilty may be brought to light in true English-mystery tradition, you wouldn't necessarily call her endings happy.  In this novel, however, there is a twist.  In a brief few chapters, everything sorts itself out.  Ian goes to prison, which he deserves even though he didn't mean to kill the Romanian; Gemma and Lance reunite, and she will be the making of him; Ella and Eugene marry; Uncle Gib ends up with his prophet's widow; and everyone lives happily ever after.  As a great American writer once wrote, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so."

Recent Travels: Third Stop

I was born in Newport, RI, right at the end of WW II.  Nine months after it concluded, actually.  My parents must have been feeling a new optimism.  I never spent any time there and until fairly recently I had only been back once, when I was a teenager.  Still, I have always felt attached to our smallest state and proud to call it my birthplace.

After leaving Boston, we made our way to East Greenwich, RI, where a dear friend of mine lives.  Our visit with her was restorative and relaxing, as well as intellectually stimulating.  I don't want to dwell on her story, but thinking of her makes me ponder once again the value of friendship.  I have almost always had a "best" friend.  My first was a little girl who lived up the street from me in the small town in Pennsylvania where I lived my first nine years.  I don't remember a time when I didn't know her.  I had other friends too; our neighborhood was teeming with kids.  But she was my closest friend, and when we moved to Indiana I missed her terribly.  My little grandson's best friend just moved to New York city, and I sympathize with the boys.  Parting from your childhood best friend is the first loss most of us encounter, and it hurts.

Here's what I find intriguing: how is it that so few of the people we know actually make it to that inner circle of "best friendness?"  Just now I have what I consider a large number of best friends, and I can count them on one hand.  We don't fall in love with every man we know or want to parent our friends' children, so perhaps it's only natural that our intimates are few.  I consider a best friend to be someone I can call on the phone at any time for no particular reason, just to talk.  In order to be completely happy, I need at least one such friend at all times.  There have been times when all my friends were "social" or "couple" friends, and they're fun too.  But I need a friend I can be totally open with and totally myself.  My visit to Rhode Island reminded me just how true this is.

Shifting gears, I'd like to talk now a bit about our day in Newport, where we visited the Elms and the Breakers, two of the many mansions built along the sea by wealthy nineteenth century industrialists, such as the Vanderbilts.  These amazing dwellings were built mainly as summer homes, yet they were as opulent as a king's small palace.  America may not have a certified aristocracy, but we did have our own version of "Upstairs, Downstairs."  The Breakers had a staff of over forty to cook, clean, tend the gardens, and serve the master's family.  That's a lot of people to manage one family's home.  But what really impressed me (if that is the right word) was the house itself.  (Somehow "house" doesn't do it justice.)  It was like a giant jewel box, with intricate designs on every wall, some gilded with platinum, as well as gold.  There were acres of imported marble and chandeliers whose crystals must have reflected candle light in a most romantic way.  The Breakers, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II (I think it was, the brother of the one who built Biltmore House in NC), was designed to impress.  It was the site of many a ball and dinner party, and I have to admit to being a bit overwhelmed by the whole enterprise.  I could imagine being a young woman whose sole purpose in life was to please her family and friends by marrying a wealthy or a titled man.  Those balls and dinner parties were not just fun, they were a high stakes engagement with a larger world where social connections meant everything.

I don't know if the Vanderbilts' several daughters felt their position to be a burden or an entitlement.  At least one of them went on to be a success in her own right.  She married a Whitney (I love how these people refer to themselves as a this or a that, as though a family were a category) and went on to found the Whitney Museum of Art in New York.  I fear I might have felt the whole rich girl role to be too much, but I am sure I would have twirled around the dance floor with abandon anyway.  What else was a woman to do?

I am left with mixed feelings.  On the one hand, the whole Newport scene, with its mansions overlooking the Atlantic and its amazing gardens, is beautiful, a wonder to behold.  On the other, it is an egregious display of wealth from a day when there were no income taxes and a rich man's fortune didn't have to be shared with anyone.  I can't help thinking about the poor marble cutters in Italy or the sweating workers in dangerous factories or the frazzled kitchen help who made this whole edifice possible.  There is something unseemly, something gauche, about such flamboyance, yet without these millions there would be no art, no great architecture, no beauty to inspire and awe.  This is something that has always bothered me: is a great disparity of wealth necessary to the creation of monumental art?  I fear the answer is yes.  What would St. Petersburg be without the wealth of the czars?

Recent Travels: Second Stop

I'd only been to Boston once before, when I was in my early twenties and living in New York with my then-husband, an artist I met through my brother.  What stood out in my mind from that long-ago visit was the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum of Art.  This is one of my four favorite art museums in America, which include the Gardner, the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Frick in New York City.  These are all small, privately built museums that embrace the viewer as a family friend.  The Gardner was designed by Mrs. Gardner herself and reflects her passion for Roman antiquities, as well as housing a wide range of European art.  Everything is exactly as she left it, and it is stipulated in her will that nothing ever be changed.  What you see is what she created, dark, ornate, a bit over the top, but utterly charming.

After our museum visit, we had an hour to kill, so we crossed the street and strolled down to Harvard Square.  I had never been there before, and I was slightly amazed to see that it looked like any college campus, with brick buildings, criss-crossing sidewalks, and incredibly young-looking students lumbering along with their bulging backpacks.  We sat down on two chairs under some trees and settled in to people-watching.  One exuberant student led a tour of prospective students and their parents; he was a hoot.  Maybe he was an acting major (if there is such a thing at Harvard) or maybe he simply enjoyed being the center of attention, but if I'd had to join a tour group, I'd have wanted to be in his.

I always enjoy watching family threesomes navigating an unfamiliar space.  Gangly teens with big feet stumble alongside eager parents, whose lostness is undoubtedly an embarrassment to their offspring.  I like to see the noses in particular.  Every kid's nose resembles at least one of his parent's, and you can project a middle-aged face onto the undefined features of the young.  I have been that awkward teenager; I have been that tentative parent; I have been that professor who alone seems to know where she is going.  Now I am the observer, a graduate, if you will, of the institution we call "higher education."  I have sailed through its straits, survived its turbulence, and come ashore on an island afloat in time.  It is good to be still and sit under the trees and remember where I've been.

I have concluded that I am not a big-city person.  I find the idea of small-town life suffocating, but large cities make me feel like a bug about to be crushed.  Too many strangers, too much traffic, too much dirt.  The Gardner and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were like ports in the storm to me, places where I could put down an anchor and look about.  I do love art museums--better than concerts, plays, or operas, probably because I prefer walking around at my own pace to sitting still while other people do the moving.  I want to be able to speak, to push ahead, or to pause, without following someone else's timetable, even if it is Mozart's.  I love the four above-mentioned museums, for their scale as well as for their art, but my very favorite museums have to be the ones I visited in the South of France many years ago.  The Fondation Maeght, the Matisse Chapel, the Leger Museum, the Picasso Museum in Antibes, as well as others, combine the attributes of a human-scale, a single vision or focus, and the tranquility of nature.  Renoir's house, with its small collection of the master's paintings, could almost be any French family country home, and the monastery in Nice that houses a fine collection of Matisse vestments perches on a mountainside amid tangled olive trees, overlooking the Mediterranean.  Of course, the Louvre, the Metropolitan, or MOMA are impressive, but I still prefer the small jewel to the mountain of marble.  I have refreshed my memory of the Isabella Stuart Gardner.  Perhaps one day in the not-too-distant future, I'll be able to walk through the farmers' market on the way to Picasso's fortress, picking up an armload of flowers along the way.

Addendum: I have been reminded that the Gardner museum is nowhere near Harvard, so obviously we didn't walk from one to the other.  The way I described it is the way I remember it, however.  Memory is indeed a slippery fellow who, as the psychologists point out, has his own agenda.  Sometimes I wonder if we don't create the narrative of our lives, rather than  simply remembering it.  As Wordsworth put it, "We half perceive and half create."

Recent Travels: First Stop

This summer's vacation took us to upstate New York, Boston, East Greenwich, RI, Litchfield Ct., and Winchester, Va.  It's always good to do things in the right order, and this time we hit it just about right.  First stop: my brother's house, which perches above a small lake where the Colgate University crew practice.  My brother has a pontoon boat that putts happily around the lake, and I love being out on the water.  Truth to tell, I prefer a lake to the ocean.  Oceans are so infinite and ultimately threatening.  Excepting the Great Lakes, a lake tends to lap the shore gently and smells comfortingly of water, rotting plant life, and boat fumes.  This may sound like an unpleasant combination, but when I smell it and feel the wind in my face, I am young again and anything seems possible.

For us, a couple of days hanging out on my brother's deck was a wonderful respite from the deadly heat in NC.  It had been hot in Hamilton too, but fortunately it cooled down in time for our stay.  Global warming is changing everything, as this summer's droughts, floods, storms, and heat waves attest.  Human beings' long history has been witness to many climate changes, and people have had to adapt in order to thrive, if not to survive.  The Thames used to freeze solid, and the Sahara used to be under water.  Nothing stays the same.  But sitting among the trees that shelter my brother's house, I felt the past--both my brother's and mine--as a presence that I could see out of the corner of my eye.

My brother had a cache of old family photographs, most of which I hadn't seen before, strangely enough.  Together we pored over them, recalling long-dead relatives, our own childhoods, and an America where cars had running boards and swim suits were made of wool.  One photograph in particular sticks in my mind.  It shows my father lying prone on a diving board that projects from a lakeside dock.  Hanging from his arms, with her feet just grazing the water, is my mother.  They both look so young, this photo must have been taken when they were in college.  My dad looks much as I  always think of him, except his hair is dark.  My mother, though, seems a different person from the one I knew.  Here, caught in a playful moment where she literally depends from my father, she is a slender sprite.  Will he continue to hold her, perhaps pull her up beside him?  Or will he let her go into the water?  My mother never really learned to swim; the water was an alien environment for her, and I imagine the thrill of fear, hilarity, and love she must have felt at that moment.

When I observe young people today, I am conscious of what lies ahead for them: the pains and joys of parenthood, the anxiety over career and money, the pressure of never having enough time.  Imagining my mother as one of those hopeful kids, with a World War, seriously ill children, and a year in Afghanistan no one could have predicted all ahead of her, I feel a lurch.  It is as if I were seeing her as my own daughter.

My brother moves more slowly now than he used to.  He nods off as I continue riffling through our shared family history, and I try not to disturb him.  My big brother.  My hero when I was a child, my advocate when I was an unhappy teenager, my friend when I most needed one.  I feel time nudging us from behind, and I want to say, "Stop!"  I want to stop the reel of memory from spinning; I want memory to be more than a black and white photo or a whisper of an emotion once felt.  I want to say everything I know I won't say, because to do so would be to admit mortality, and I can't do that.

And so we embrace and laugh and say goodbye until next time.  I never lived in Hamilton myself, but I spent a lot of time there over the years, so much so that I almost feel it as a kind of home and am struck by how much the familiar can be so exclusive.  In the end, I know I don't belong there, don't even want to, but leaving seems to pull something precious out of my hands.

"State of Wonder" by Ann Patchett

I haven't written on my blog for a while, mostly because the books I've been reading have been mysteries--good ones (Ruth Rendell, Henning Mankell, et. al.)--and I don't see a whole lot of point in writing about them.  But I did just finish a novel that knocked my socks off.  "State of Wonder" by Ann Patchett is, quite simply, an amazing book.  Spoiler alert: don't read further if you haven't read the book and plan to.

Imagine "Heart of Darkness," "Mosquito Coast," Greek and Roman myth (Orpheus and Euridice, Laocoon); throw in a love quadrangle of sorts, a beautiful bohemian couple, a wise child with no parents, and a journey to hell and back, and you have some idea what this book is about.  Marina, a forty-something researcher for a pharmaceutical company, is hiding out in the lab. after doing a botched Caesarian while she was in medical school, studying with the formidable Dr. Annick Swenson.  She has never told anyone about this mishap that cost an infant an eye, and her guilt accompanies her everywhere.

Dr. Swenson has spent decades in the Amazonian jungle, befriending an indigenous tribe and studying their incredible fertility.  Lakashi women never lose the ability to bear children.  Women in their seventies get pregnant, including, we eventually discover, Dr. Swenson herself.  Issues of medical ethics, profit and loss, and dedication to a cause are all gone into, not dogmatically but as a natural working out of the plot, which really kicks into high gear when Mr. Fox, Marina's lover and the CEO of Vogel Pharmaceuticals, dispatches Marina's research partner, Anders Ekstrom, to Brazil to investigate the investigations of Dr. Swenson.  The good doctor is incommunicado, as she is deep in the jungle, no one knows quite where, and she refuses to have so much as a cell phone.  Anders will have to find her first, then persuade her to come home or at least hand over her results.

Anders is a lovely man, a husband and father to three young boys.  An avid bird watcher, he eagerly takes on the Vogel mission.  He can hardly wait to see species he has so far only read about.  The novel begins with Anders' death.  Dr. Swenson has sent a brief explanatory letter to Mr. Fox.  Anders has died of a fever, and they (Dr. Swenson and the other doctors who work alongside her) have buried him in the jungle.  Now it is Marina's turn to head south from Minnesota, where the world is clean and cool and predictably safe, to an Amazon tributary that she hopes will lead her to Dr. Swenson's camp and a fuller explanation of Anders' death. 

I'll say no more about the plot, except that it is beyond suspenseful.  From the start, a sense of dread hangs over everything, as indeed it should.  So many things in Brazil can kill you: a bug bite, a snake bite, malaria, unexplained fevers.  Survival is definitely of the fittest.  One of the things I like about the book, and there are many, is that the heroine, the rescuer, the brave soul who goes where no one else has gone before and lived to tell about it, is Marina, a woman.  "State of Wonder" could count as an adventure story, but it is more than that.  It is an exploration of how deep a human being can go and in so doing be redeemed.  I felt almost as if I were holding my breath as I read every page, even up to the last word on the final page.  Ann Patchett takes her reader on a journey that is as life-changing as the one described in the book.  I await the movie.

Follow Up: Belief

It's happened again.  I think about something, and next thing I know I see an example of it somewhere else.  This is a follow up to the previous blog about belief.  This morning on Stephen Colbert (we watch a tape from the night before), Colbert interviewed an author (name slips my mind) who wrote a book called The Believing Brain.  The author contends that each of us develops a belief system, then  looks around for corroboration.  Since many things are beyond proof--ie., religion--we see the truth we want to see.  Science is the only way to see things clearly.  As they say, you can't argue with facts.  There's no such thing as a scientific fundamentalist.  No one today could get away with saying Copernicus was right about the cosmos.  We should not be dismayed when "truth" gets shoved aside by fact.  Just as no one can prove that one religion is right, no one can prove that gravity is wrong.

Where Does Belief Come From?

Why do we believe the things we do?  A complex question, but one I enjoy thinking about.  There used to be a series on NPR called "This I Believe."  Random people would record a 2-minute statement of what they believed: love rules the world, nature heals, education is (or is not) all it's cracked up to be.  That sort of thing.  Not necessarily religious belief, but something you carry with you in your core.

I used to know someone who was accused of preferring things to people.  Knowing that person, I'd have to agree.  "These fragments I have shored against my ruin" seems to encapsulate his attitude toward his possessions.  Margaret Thatcher once said, there's no such thing as "society."  I've always thought of her as an Ayn Rand sort of person, who puts the individual above all else.  Sometimes it's an activity that shapes a life.  My brother is an artist and has been since he was two years old, perhaps earlier.  He's 75 now, and he is still and always has been a painter.  Making art is the way he sees the world.  And, of course, there are those for whom religion is central.  I have come to believe that religious feeling is simply another way of seeing the world.  Religion, art, music, politics, literature, public service, acquisitiveness, the need to control, the need to submit (not a complete list)--all provide angles of vision that shape whatever belief system we may have.  This kind of belief, like personality, is not something we choose.  It is who we are.  That is why logic is often insufficient, persuasion ineffective, and true conversion rare.

An Islamic fundamentalist intent on restoring the caliphate, had he been born in Alabama, would no doubt be a foot-washing Baptist.  It is our minds that matter, far more than the message.  Belief comes from within; then we find rationalizations to support it.  Everything we think is an attempt to wrench the world into the shape we already see.  So what do I believe?

When I was a young child, I overheard the adults talking about the Hungarian Revolution.  I had no idea where Hungary was or what the people were revolting against, but I picked up enough to know that innocent people were suffering.  I wanted to do something to help--collect clothes to send them, anything.  I didn't, of course, but I thought a lot about it.

My parents used to take us to Youngstown, Ohio, just over the border from Pennsylvania, where we lived, to go shopping in the big department stores there.  Getting downtown meant driving through a poor, African-American neighborhood.  The streets were so unlovely I could not understand how anyone could live there.  I remember once passing an old man who was waiting at a stoplight to cross the street.  He looked so sad.  The image of this poor old man, bowed with the weight of years and who knows what sorrows, pierced me like a shard of glass.  Our car moved on and left him behind, still standing in the same place.

When I was in the eighth grade, a poor family was burned out of their house just before Christmas.  I rounded up some friends, and we all bought gifts for the children.  My dad drove us to their rundown neighborhood, a place I never went otherwise, and we delivered the packages.  What I remember is an empty room with bare floors, a worried woman who stood in a doorway and spoke not at all, and a toddler, dressed only in a diaper, running about barefoot.  The emptiness was like the inside of a bell. 

The sadness in other people's lives is something I have always been aware of.  I don't remember a time when I didn't know that I was lucky and many others were not.  How could I be happy, knowing that so many were broken and alone?  I still ask myself the same question.  This all sounds rather depressing, and it is.  So how do I manage not to drown in the pity I constantly feel?

There are two things I base my life on: love and beauty.  To me, love means giving comfort, nurturing, supporting, and encouraging another person(s).  Lacking a human being, I would need a pet to care for.  I'm sure most people would feel the same way, or say they do, but I can never know if others feel what I feel.  I believe in MY feelings.  I don't have to do anything to feel these emotions any more than a believer has to do anything to believe in a religion.  My core--and I say this not to boast but simply to describe--is empathy.  It is natural for me to put myself in another's shoes and feel what I would feel in their situation.  When my teenage children went through break-ups, my heart was broken as well.  When my grandson wants his "lamby," I want him to have it.  If I cherished something, wouldn't I want to hold onto it too?  I don't always act in accordance with my own deepest values, but when I don't I feel tremendously guilty.  Shame is what you feel when you are caught by others doing something amiss.  It is related to embarrassment.  Guilt is your judgment of yourself, and for me that is far more unforgiving.  I am not religious, but when the Bible says that of faith, hope, and love the greatest of these is love, I have no trouble agreeing at all.

Love is my connection to other people; beauty is my connection to the world.  A melting Mozart aria, the clarity of a Bach fugue, the lushness of a Beethoven symphony are all enough to push me toward the sublime.  The paintings of Monet, the poems of W. H. Auden, a beautiful garden take me places I can't get to on my own.  I prefer a panorama to a pinpoint, an ennobling idea to an ideology, a wilderness to an urban grid.  I believe people are more important than ideas, philosophies, religions, ideologies, abstractions of any kind.  I believe justice is conditional and truth elusive.  If I had to choose one philosopher, it would be J.S. Mill.  If I had my life to live over, I'd do things differently, but I'm glad I don't, because I want to be right here, right now, right where I am.  If it's the past that got me here, then of course I wouldn't change it, pain and all.  I hope it doesn't sound cruel to say it, but I wouldn't be so happy if I weren't so aware of the unhappiness that lies just off-shore of every life.  Virgil wrote of "the tears in things."  I believe he would understand what I am talking about.