A summer of loss

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, Madeleine L'Engle

This is the second of four "Crosswicks Journals" that Madeleine L'Engle published between 1972 and 1989.  I knew L'Engle only as the author of the classic young adult novels A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, and I discovered the first in this series because it had been improperly shelved in the children's section at Half Price Books.  "Crosswicks" is the 200-year-old farmhouse in Connecticut where L'Engle lived for many years with her husband Hugh Franklin and their three children.  When they later moved back to New York City, they spent their summers at Crosswicks with their extended family, including L'Engle's mother, also named Madeleine L'Engle.

Four generations gathered at Crosswicks in the summer of 1971.  When the elder Madeleine arrived, it was immediately clear that she was not well and was getting worse.  Now 90, she had been diagnosed with atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, which was causing increasing weakness and senility.  Her condition often left her confused, unable to recognize family members, and even hostile, stranded as she believed she was among strangers.  Her daughter Madeleine arranged for her to be cared for in their home, while struggling to accept the reality of her mother's condition.

I know that this is a classic symptom of atherosclerosis, this turning against the person you love most, and this knowledge is secure above my eyebrows, but very shaky below.  There is something atavistic in us which resents, rejects, this reversal of roles. I want my mother to be my mother. And she is not. Not any more. Not ever again.

But if her condition was irreversible, it was not terminal, and she could continue in this state for some time, a prospect that appalled her daughter.

Will I ever be like that, a travesty of a person? It was the last thing she would have wanted, to live in this unliving, unloving manner.  I look up at the sky and shout at the stars, "Take her, God! Take her!

This is not a journal in the sense of a daily record of her mother's condition and the challenges of being a caregiver, though these are part of L'Engle's story.  It is more a meditation on facing death, one's own and that of loved ones.  As L'Engle notes, we face many losses in life.  She herself had experienced the deaths of grandparents, aunts and uncles, as well as her father many years before.  With her mother, it was a different kind of loss, not the immediate finality of death, but the erosion of her mother's being, her identity, and of their relationship: "I want my mother to be my mother."

One of the ways that L'Engle tried to cope with this loss was by trying to understand, to capture the reality of her mother, even as she was slipping away.  Her narrative becomes part biography and autobiography, in sections titled "The Mother I knew" and "The Mother I Did Not Know."  As she acknowledged,

The mother of my childhood and adolescence and very young womanhood existed for me solely as mother, and I suppose it is inescapable that for a long time we know our parents only as parents, that their separate identity as full persons in their own right unfolds only gradually, if at all.

She considers her parents' marriage, complicated by her father's service in the First World War, where he was gassed, from which he never fully recovered.  Even in her childhood, she was aware of strains in their family, despite the care her parents took to shield her.  She looks back at her mother's childhood, in a small town in Florida, tracing her ancestry back to the earliest days of European settlement.  L'Engle clearly took great pride in her family heritage, but I found myself confused as she moved back and forth between generations and branches (a family tree would have helped).  Over the years her family owned plantations and the slaves that worked them ("servants" in the familiar evasive language).  L'Engle insists that they were benevolent masters and later good neighbors to the freed people.  At the same time she details the suffering of her family in the Civil War and Reconstruction period, with much of their property lost in the conflicts, without acknowledging what that property was, or the suffering endured by African Americans both in slavery and in freedom during these years.  But then she was writing in the early 1970s; perhaps a later generation would tell a different story.

Finally, this book is also a meditation on faith.  As a Christian, a believer, L'Engle struggles to reconcile what her faith teaches her about loss, death, resurrection, with the reality of what is happening to her mother, and what will happen to her in turn.  She struggles to find God in her mother's suffering, in her own pain; to find meaning; to affirm her belief in "a loving God who will not abandon or forget the smallest atom of his creation."

This was not an easy book to read, but a rewarding one in the end.  L'Engle writes movingly of parents and children, of her own family.  I enjoyed her account of her childhood and adolescence, following her birth in 1918 in New York City, including her years in a Swiss boarding school and later at Smith College (she herself died in 2007).  Her mother is a fascinating figure, who led an adventurous life travelling around the world with her journalist husband, and faced life as a widow with dignity and courage, and found joy in it.  Perhaps her daughter idealizes her small-town Southern childhood, but it is a lovely warm account.

This book also resonated deeply with me because I lost my own mother last year, after many years of debilitating illness.  "I do not know how to say goodbye. All I can say, within my heart, is, 'I love you, Mother.'"

Very slowly down the Ganges

Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric Newby

Earlier this year, when I finally got around to reading Eric Newby's Round Ireland in Low Gear, which had been on my TBR stacks for years, I was instantly smitten.  I went on quickly to his book of autobiographical essays, A Traveller's Life, and I started collecting and reading his other books.  I was especially interested in Slowly Down the Ganges, an account of a trip he took in 1963 with his wife and intrepid fellow adventurer Wanda.  While I knew their trip wouldn't be anything like the Governor-General's tour of 1837-1839 that Emily Eden chronicled in Up the Country, or even Lilah Wingfield's A Glimpse of Empire in 1911, I was looking forward to comparing their experiences of India.  But I was as unprepared as they were for the constant mishaps and the miserable travelling conditions that they suffered on their excruciatingly slow journey.  Things got so bad at one point that Wanda threatened to leave not just the trip, but their marriage as well.

Had I paid more attention to the title of this book, I would have realized that the Newbys' journey was a mirror image of Emily Eden's.  She started from Calcutta, heading up the Ganges on her way to the Punjab.  The Newbys started theirs in the far north, as close as they could get to the river's source in the Himalayas, to travel its length down to Calcutta.  Eric Newby admitted in the introduction that theirs would not be a great journey of exploration: "This was no uncharted river. Millions lived on its banks. . ."  He wanted to explore that river, which he had first seen twenty years before, as a young officer stationed in India during the early months of World War II.

I love rivers.  I was born on the banks of the Thames and, like my father before me, I had spent a great deal of time both on it and in it. I enjoy visiting their sources: Thames Head, in a green meadow in the Cotswolds; the river Po coming out from under a heap of boulders among the debris left by picnickers by Monte Viso . . . I like exploring them. I like the way in which they grow deeper and wider and dirtier but always, however dirty they become, managing to retain some of the beauty with which they were born. For me the most memorable river of all was the Ganges.

It took him more than twenty years, but he finally got back to the Ganges.  On his forty-fourth birthday, he and Wanda set off on their 1200-mile journey.  This was on December 6, 1963, and as with their first biking tour of Ireland, the main problem was one of timing.  In northern India, winter is the dry season.  When they set out, the water level in the river was falling an inch a day.  In the first six days, they ran aground 63 times; with their three boatmen they ended up dragging the boat for much of the first hundred miles of the trip.  The boat itself was on loan for only a few days, and there were none for sale, at least that they could afford.  The Newbys frequently had to abandon the river, taking trains between towns, at each stop searching for a boat to hire or borrow.  Those they did manage to find were small sailing or rowing boats, with little space for the native crews, let alone passengers and their gear.  The living conditions aboard were primitive and Wanda, as the only woman, must have found them particularly difficult.

The Newbys being who they were, they still found much to enjoy in the river and in India itself.  At one point, Newby described himself,

- a typical traveller in India, at one moment elevated by the splendour of the country; the next cast down by its miseries. The only thing that was constantly agreeable was the river; life on it was sometimes hard, but it was always supportable, and in some strange way it produced feelings that were a combination of elation and contentment which neither of us experienced anywhere else.

The Newbys followed their usual pattern of travel, talking to everyone they met and visiting every temple, fort, palace, and battlefield they could find (or Eric could drag Wanda to).  As in his book on Ireland, Newby quoted history and legend and religious epics.  Some of the names were familiar from a class on Indian history that I took long ago, though I had forgotten that there was a real Sher Khan, an Afghan invader in the late 1500s.  Newby was particularly interested in the holiest sites on the Ganges, the confluences where other rivers join the great mother.  He and Wanda were present at one of the major winter festivals, joining the millions who came to bathe in the icy sacred waters. 

In his introduction, Newby informed his readers that his book "is not a book about India today; neither is it concerned with politics or economics."  It is certainly not a travel guide, but a personal account of a particular voyage, very much off the normal tourist tracks.  Even more than Lilah Wingfield, the Newbys immersed themselves in India, in the life of the river and the people who lived along it.  I have no desire to follow in their footsteps, at least on those first miserable stages, but as always I am glad to travel in their company.

"The ill-starred folly of a few spring weeks"

Ankle Deep, Angela Thirkell

Angela Thirkell's novels are so hard to find these days that I did a classic double-take when I saw this on the library sale carts.  It's been a long time since I've had a new Thirkell novel to read - new to me, anyway.  Ankle Deep was published in 1933, the same year as High Rising, the first of the Barsetshire novels.  Though it isn't part of the series, it does share some familiar themes.

The story opens with a phone call, as Fanny Turner invites an older couple, Mr and Mrs Howard, to spend a weekend at her family's country cottage, Waterside.  Next she invites Valentine Ensor, a divorced man, one of her string of swains, for whom she is trying to find a rich second wife.  Mrs Howard then calls back to ask if they can bring their married daughter Aurea, home for a visit from Canada.  Fanny, who knows that her husband Arthur once hoped to marry Aurea, agrees to this, planning to pair the two off for a nostalgic flirtation while she occupies herself with Valentine.

When Aurea arrives with her parents, however, she and Valentine upset Fanny's plans by their immediate attraction to each other, which develops quickly into love.  Both have suffered from unhappy marriages.  It is apparently no secret among Val's friends that his wife had a series of affairs, and after discovering this he allowed her to divorce him (he completed this noble sacrifice by paying her a handsome alimony, which he can hardly afford).  As he tells Aurea, "She was - rather promiscuous" - not the sort of blunt statement one finds in the Barsetshire books.  Now Val plays the man-about-town, moving from woman to woman while avoiding any real attachment.  On the other hand, Aurea has what seems on the surface a tranquil marriage to Ned, a kind husband and father to their two children.  She fell in love and married him at eighteen, but now she dislikes and despises him - not apparently because of anything he has done, but because she has fallen out of love with him.  She cannot even bear his touch, let alone sex with him.  She winces at the memory of repeated scenes with Ned "whimpering, actually whimpering, because she was not what he called 'kind,' of the utter contempt with which she finally gave in."  Even in allusive language, this caught me off-guard.  Thirkell presents Aurea as a woman married too young, and to the wrong man, who has reacted by withdrawing into herself, barricading herself physically and emotionally against everyone but her children and her parents.  Then she meets Val, and they fall into a physically chaste but emotionally torrid romance that plays out over her last remaining weeks in England.

The Barsetshire books are packed with engagements and marriages, in most of which the couples live happily ever after.  The problems they face are usually external, like finances, or for the older couples the complicated lives of their children.  There are exceptions, of course, like the hints we get that Francis Brandon is not a satisfactory husband.  But for the younger couples at least, the stories seem more concerned with courtship.  There is nothing in those books like the marriages here, or in O, These Men, These Men, published in 1935 and generally considered a roman a clef, the heroine of which escapes an abusive and drunken husband.  In Ankle Deep, Thirkell uses her six characters to explore both happy and unhappy marriages, and particularly to analyze the character of Aurea.  As in the Barsetshire books, she also considers parenthood, including the parenting of grown children (I was reminded especially of the Grantlys and the Beltons).  Aurea is the Howards' only child.  They are painfully aware of her misery but unable to help her, and they watch her growing intimacy with Val with great concern.  Aurea's children are one of the only ties holding her to her marriage.  At the same time, she can hardly bear the separation from her own aging parents (something Thirkell herself probably knew well, from her years living in Australia).  Fanny, on the other hand, is happy to turn her children over to her mother-in-law at every opportunity, freeing her time for her constant flirtations.

With Aurea staying in her parents' home, she and Val must meet elsewhere, in restaurants and clubs.  They spend one frustrating evening at the cinema, seeing a film about Benuto Cellini, "The Great Italian Medieval Lover and Craftsman of All Time."  Thirkell's parody of an epic historical film here adds a welcome lighter note, and a familiar one.  As far as I can tell, this film is the only one mentioned in her books that doesn't star Glamora Tudor.

In the end, I found Ankle Deep an interesting rather than an engaging read.  Aurea is a difficult character, child-like and on some levels immature, and I found her recurring emotional storms a bit wearying after a while.  I understand her isolation, and her inability to confide even in her own mother; in Thirkell's world outside help is apparently not an option, unfortunately.  I am glad to have read this, and to see how it fits into the arc of Thirkell's stories, but in the end I prefer her Barsetshire world.

The edition I read is from Moyer Bell, with the usual missing sentences, transposed names and misspelled words (I was puzzled for a moment by a "car thorse").  I'm very glad to see that Virago is republishing the Barsetshire books, though now I'll be tempted by the new editions.

On the bummel

Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome K. Jerome

I had already read and loved Three Men in a Boat when I came across a Penguin edition that combined it with Three Men on the Bummel, which I hadn't.  I immediately bought it, and then it sat on the TBR pile for too many years.  I always meant to re-read Boat before Bummel, and I never got around to it.  Helen's recent review on She Reads Novels made me move it up the stacks. I was also interested to compare Jerome's account of his German travels with Elizabeth von Arnim's picture of the country and its people in her novels (particularly her account of an English holiday in The Caravaners, whose Baron von Ottringel so despises the British).

I might as well confess straight off (and with a blush) that I initially thought "the Bummel" was a river, and that this would be Harris, George and J. off on another boating expedition.  Instead of course it is about what was meant to be a cycling tour of Germany, though the three of them spend much of their time, at least in J.'s telling, on trains or wandering around cities and towns.  Jeremy Lewis, the editor, points out that when this book was published in 1900, cycling was all the rage, and women particularly were finding in it a freedom they had never had.  This made Jerome's book very topical, and his typical digressions into the different kinds of bicycles, their equipment and repairs, and even the advertisements for them, provide some interesting social history.

Like the earlier book, this one starts off with the three men sitting around, complaining that they need a change, worn out with work and worry as they are.  But now Harris and J. are married men with families, and they can't just set off on a trip.  They hatch a cunning plan to get their wives to agree to a bachelor's holiday, to which the women just as cunningly agree.  So with a tandem bike and a single in tow, the three set off for Hamburg.  At that point, J. stops his narrative to explain that

There will be no useful information in this book.  Anyone who should think that with the aid of this book he would be able to make a tour through Germany and the Black Forest would probably lose himself before he got to the Nore. . . I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte.

In one of my favorite digressions, he then goes on to recount his career in journalism, working on a paper that "combined instruction with amusement," such as how to make one's fortune keeping rabbits, or how to learn dance-steps by means of diagrams.  J. also wrote the advice column, "Straight Talks to Young Men," by "Uncle Henry," and his co-workers included a shabby little woman who wrote the cooking and fashion sections.  After an unfortunate article involving experiments with hydrogen gas, the editor advised him to avoid giving useful information in the future, and J. reluctantly came to accept that advice (though not before instructing a friend "about how to marry his deceased wife's sister at Stockholm" - I'd love to hear that story).

Returning to his main story, J. travels with his friends from Hamburg to Berlin and Dresden, and then to the Black Forest.  Along the way he has fun with the accidents of travel, and with the British abroad (especially their inability to speak foreign languages).  In turn he mocks the German passion for order, which in his telling leads them to "improve" nature out of all recognition, not to mention spoiling scenic areas with restaurants.  He also has great fun with German law and social rules, which the three are constantly if innocently breaking, running up quite a tally of fines. "This is the charm of German law: misdemeanour in Germany has its fixed price."

J. spends much more time discussing the German people and their society than his travels. On the one hand, he appreciates the good order and prosperity of the country, and he finds Germans themselves "an amiable, unselfish, kindly people."  He notes their proverbial kindness to children and animals, but he contrasts that with the universal habit of duelling among university students.  I was unprepared for his detailed account of a night spent watching young men slice each other to the bone, himself falling under the spell of the "curious hot odour of blood."  Jerome was troubled by what he saw as most people's overly-regimented life, under a paternal government. "In Germany you take no responsibility upon yourself whatever. Everything is done for you, and done well."  But all will be well, unless "by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine."  As the editor also points out, there was at this time great interest and some concern about the German Empire, staking out colonies and building its navy, and Jerome was one of many British writers trying to get a handle on the country and its people.

I enjoyed this, though it was not what I expected.  Like the first book, there is great fun in the misadventures of the Three Men, and I particularly enjoy their sometimes snappish exchanges, like the debate over who has to ride the tandem and who gets the single bike.  In Three Men in a Boat, J. sometimes pauses in his story to muse on Life and Faith and other big topics, which really took me aback the first time I read it; I kept waiting for the punchline.  Here he follows the same pattern, mixing the comic and the serious, with the more serious sections focused on Germany and its people.

I have Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad on the top of the TBR stack, an account of a European tour that also began in Hamburg, and it will be interesting to travel some of the same ground in his irreverent company.

Meeting old friends in Morocco

Garment of Shadows, Laurie R. King

After reading Pirate King back in January, which reminded me why I love Laurie King's books, I have been eagerly awaiting Garment of Shadows, published earlier this month. There is nothing quite like the anticipation of a new book by a favorite author, especially in a series whose characters feel like old friends met again. This is the twelfth in King's series featuring Mary Russell and her partner & husband Sherlock Holmes. Set in Morocco and following quickly on the events of the previous book, it opens with a brief preface, in which we learn that Holmes has returned from some adventure of his own, expecting to meet Russell, who had remained on location with the Fflytte film crew (after their adventures in Pirate King). Instead he learns that she has not been seen since she walked out into the desert one night in the company of a young boy, leaving behind a note saying only that she was going to the city of Fez.

The first chapter opens in what seems to be Russell's familiar voice:

I was in bed. A bed, at any rate. I had been flattened by a steam-roller, trampled under a stampede of bison. Beaten by a determined thug. I ached, head to toe, fingers and skin. Mostly head. My skull throbbed, one hot pulse for every beat of my heart.

I was immediately caught, drawn in, wondering where she is, what happened to her on the road to Fez. But those aren't even the most urgent questions: why is there blood on her hands, under her fingernails? And even more shocking, the question she asks herself: "Who the hell was I?" Before she can even start to answer these questions, she sees two French soldiers coming toward the building, and in a panic, she flees to the roof and over it, out into what proves to be a honeycombed old city in North Africa. For the first few chapters we follow Russell, as she explores the different quarters of the city, gradually regaining her strength, haunted by flashes of memory, trying to figure out who and where she is. I enjoyed watching her cope. She is such a resourceful young woman, with some unusual skills, like the picking of locks and an idiomatic command of Arabic. Using those skills, she manages to find food and shelter, and she also collects information about the fraught political situation, with Morocco divided between Spanish and French influence, though she doesn't understand all that she hears.

The story then turns back to Holmes' adventures. These books are ostensibly Russell's memoirs, which Laurie King is editing, and hers is the narrative voice. Russell and Holmes often separate during an investigation, to pursue different lines of inquiry, but the story always stays with Russell. Only once before, in Locked Rooms, did it shift to Holmes (and that story played an important part in another book, The Art of Detection, one of the books in King's modern series featuring Kate Martinelli). Other authors with first-person narrators, including Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody and Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott, have also found a way to bring in third-person narration, to widen the story beyond one character's experiences or point or view.

Here, the sections that follow Holmes provide much of the context for the story. Holmes too is in Fez, part of French Morocco, whose Resident General, Maréchal Lyautey, is a distant cousin. Morocco is in turmoil, with a rebellion against the Spanish control of the north, with its rich iron mines. There are rumors that Germany is funding the rebels, known as "Rifi" from the Rif mountains that divide the country. Just six years after the Great War ended, neither France nor England wants a German foothold in Tangier, just across the Straits from Gibraltar and Europe. Holmes is planning to travel south, away from the troubled areas of the rebellion. But when he returns, to find Russell gone, he meets instead an old comrade, Ali Hazr, whose connection with the Rifi will draw both Holmes and Russell into the country's troubles and into danger. Like an earlier book, The Game, which took them to India, this is a story of statecraft and espionage, of the "Great Game" of empire that Holmes' older brother Mycroft plays from his shadowy office in Whitehall.

There is so much to enjoy with this book. Laurie King marvelously evokes the settings, particularly Fez, as we wander its streets with Russell and Holmes. She weaves the history of Morocco into the story, and in an end note explains the fate of the Rif rebellion. Her shift in narrators gives us both the familiar pleasure of Russell's company, but also the unusual experience of Holmes' point of view. Generally we see him only through Russell's eyes, and I enjoyed the change of perspective, including seeing Russell through his eyes (and his heart) for a change. There also is the pleasure of meeting old friends, like Ali and his brother Mahmoud, and new ones like the Maréchal. Lyautey is an historic and heroic figure, respecting Islam and the Moroccan people, trying to guide his Protectorate into a modern nation. Laurie King, dedicating this book "to those who reach across boundaries with a hand of welcome," quotes Lyautey: "Let us learn their ways, just as they are learning ours."

This is an excellent addition to a great series, built on well-crafted plots, intriguing settings, and most of all on its endearing characters. I found Mary Russell's voice irresistible from the first page of The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and greedy reader that I am, I'm glad to see from "About the Author" that Laurie King "is at work on her next novel, City of Dark."

BBAW: Underappreciated books

With today's BBAW theme of promoting a book that in my opinion needs more recognition, my first thought was to write about Anthony Trollope. Before I started blogging, I didn't know anyone else who read him, and I felt like I was alone in a world obsessed with Charles Dickens. But now I've found a wonderful community of fellow Trollopians, some long-time readers and others just falling under his spell.

Instead, I chose someone born almost a century later, Betty MacDonald. Many people know her as the author of the beloved Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories, which I read growing up and which are still on my shelves. Much less-well known are her four autobiographical works, the first of which is The Egg and I. Published in 1945, it became an immediate best-seller and the basis for a movie starring Fred MacMurry and Claudette Colbert. No film could possibly do justice to this book, because it couldn't capture MacDonald's unique voice:

Along with teaching us that lamb must be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wife's bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work . . . [This] philosophy worked out splendidly for Mother for she followed my mining engineer father all over the United States and led a fascinating life; but not so well for me, because although I did what she told me and let Bob choose the work in which he felt he would be happiest and then plunged wholeheartedly in with him, I wound up on the Pacific Coast in the most untamed corner of the United States, with a ten-gallon keg of good whiskey, some very dirty Indians, and hundreds and hundreds of most uninteresting chickens.

Unfortunately all of these books include unflattering stereotypes of drunken and dirty Native Americans.

Before she got to the chicken farm on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, MacDonald described her childhood in mining camps across the west and later in Seattle. In addition to her parents and her four siblings, the family included her paternal grandmother Gammy, "who wore her corsets upside down and her shoes on the wrong feet and married a gambler with yellow eyes." Each of the four books includes stories from her childhood, and it's a wonder she survived it. Her older sister Mary was constantly leading her into temptation, not to mention mortal danger, like the time she convinced Betty to slide down an old mining flume, which nearly dumped her headfirst into the mine itself.

When her marriage to Bob the chicken farmer ended, MacDonald took her two daughters back to the family home in Seattle. This was in 1931, in the deepening Depression, a bad time to be looking for work, but Mary convinced her that finding a job would be easy. In Anybody Can Do Anything, MacDonald related her adventures looking for, and then losing, job after job. Mary told her, "I'll always be able to find us jobs doing something, and whatever it is I'll show you how to do it." Mary's other motto was, "Just show me the job and I'll produce a sister to do it." MacDonald dedicated the book "To my sister Mary, who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to." It's a fascinating picture of Seattle in the early 1930s, and of the working world. Like all four of her books, it's also a lovely portrait of a family:

It's a wonderful thing to know that you can come home any time from anywhere and just open the door and belong. That everybody will shift until you fit and that from that day on it's a matter of sharing everything. When you share your money, your clothes and your food with a mother, a brother and three sisters, your portion may be meagre, but by the same token when you share unhappiness, loneliness and anxiety about the future with a mother, a brother and three sisters, there isn't much left for you.

Seven years later, MacDonald was living in the family home with her daughters when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She spent the next ten months in a sanitarium, which she chronicled in The Plague and I.

By the time I had gone through my sixth cold, I noticed that I seemed much more nervous, that I slept badly and that I had a heavy feeling over my heart and occasional sharp pains in my lungs. I attributed the heavy feeling and the pains to my indigestion and my indigestion to my nervousness and my nervousness to my job . . . It never occurred to me that my complaints were symptoms of tuberculosis. (Actually they all were.) From Gammy's training, the movies I had seen and the books I had read, I thought that the only real symptoms of tuberculosis were a dry hacking cough and a clean white linen handkerchief delicately touched to pale lips and coming away blood-flecked.

She wrote in detail about the treatments she underwent and the condition of other patients, and this is not a book for the medically squeamish. I would not have thought there was anything funny about TB, but Betty MacDonald proved me wrong. Like her other books, it has truly laugh-out-loud moments, but it is also the most serious of her books. In the sanitarium she roomed with a young Japanese woman named Kimi. This was actually Monica Sone, who later wrote a book, Nisei Daughter, about her experiences with the Japanese internments during World War II. MacDonald apparently accepted Asian and African Americans without the prejudice that she showed toward Native Americans.

The final book of the four is Onions in the Stew, which tells of MacDonald's second marriage to Donald MacDonald and their life on Vashon Island. It is the most domestic of the books, and I think the quietest. Her daughters Joan and Anne were growing up, as were her nieces and nephews. Part of the fun of these books is seeing the connections with the later Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, which are dedicated to them, "who are perfect angels and couldn't possibly have been the inspiration for any of these stories."

These books are classics, with some of the funniest episodes I have ever read. They remind me of Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, and also of the Gilbreth family of Cheaper by the Dozen, but MacDonald's voice is uniquely her own. Unfortunately only the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories and The Egg & I are still in print, but it's well worth tracking down library or used copies. These are books to be re-read and treasured, and they deserve to be better known.

R is for Rediscovering Sue Grafton

R is for Ricochet, Sue Grafton

I've been culling quite a few books from my overflowing shelves lately. I seem to be clearer about which ones I'm never going to read again (or in some cases for the first time). I've been pleasantly surprised at how easy it is let these books go, and how good it feels to clear them out. There are some, though, that I have waffled over. I just can't decide about Martha Grimes; I'll probably have to re-read one of them before I can make up my mind. I felt the same way about Sue Grafton. I've been reading her series featuring Kinsey Millhone, a PI in Santa Teresa, California, for many years, but somehow I got stuck at this book, her 18th. I bought it back when it was published in 2004 but never got around to reading it, nor any of the books that follow (the series is now up to V for Vengeance).

The first book, A is for Alibi, was published in 1982. Grafton has chosen to keep the books' internal timeline consistent, so while 30 years have passed in the real world, only five have in Kinsey's world. Grafton doesn't overwhelm her stories with what's now period detail, but you can catch something of the timing in passing, when Kinsey uses a pay phone instead of a cell phone, or when she mentions graduating from high school in 1966 - or when she enters a bar where "Eighty-seven per cent of those present were smoking, the air as gray as morning fog."

When this book opens, Kinsey is on her way to meet a new client, Nord Lafferty, wealthy and socially prominent. To her surprise, the job he offers involves his daughter Reba, who is being released on parole after serving twenty-two months in prison for embezzlement. She pleaded guilty to stealing $350,000 from her employer Alan Beckwith, a local real estate developer. The only child of an elderly father and an absent mother, Reba has been in trouble for much of her life, addicted to both drugs and gambling. Mr. Lafferty wants Kinsey to keep an eye on her for the first few days following her release, as she makes the transition to freedom again, and Kinsey agrees.

Spending time with Reba, Kinsey soon realizes that she and the married Beckwith were having an affair before she went to prison, which they are quick to resume. Then Kinsey is approached by a local police officer, Cheney Phillips, who tells her that the FBI and IRS are interested in Reba, because Beckwith's real estate business is just a front for some serious criminal activity. They are hoping to turn Reba, and they want Kinsey's help. Cheney is also interested in Kinsey, in a completely different way of course, and the two begin seeing each other. Reba, who has her own plans, manages to drag Kinsey along and into trouble with both the cops and the bad guys. For much of the book Kinsey plays an atypically passive role, following Cheney and Reba's leads. She acknowledges this in the last line of the book: "So here's what I've learned. In the passing drama of life, I'm usually the heroine, but occasionally I'm simply a minor character in someone else's play."

I did enjoy this book. It was interesting returning to this series after so many years. Much of it felt familiar: Kinsey's essentially solitary life, the dull routine of much of her work, her passion for junk food (she regularly eats two Quarter Pounders with Cheese at a time), and her Paul Newman-esque landlord, the sexy 87-year-old Henry. Other things I'd forgotten, like Kinsey's history with Cheney, but Grafton is good at dropping clues and details to fill in what's now a complicated backstory. Her story here is complex and twisty, with scams, betrayals and counter-plots. Beckwith's criminal activities include money laundering, which means Kinsey (and the reader) get lectures from the cops and the FBI not just about how the laundering is done but also about the laws meant to prevent it, and that did slow the story down in places. There is also a subplot involving Henry, his slightly annoying brothers and a woman he is interested in, which balances the Kinsey-Cheney pairing and the Reba-Beckwith. As Kinsey announces on the first page, "This is a story about romance - love gone right, love gone wrong, and matters somewhere in between."

So Sue Grafton is staying on the shelves (she'll be relieved, I'm sure), and I'll probably be looking to catch up on the books I've missed as well.