Acquired Tastes

The next installment in my Peter Malye casual re-read, Acquired Tastes is a collection of essays Mayle wrote in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  He covers, well, acquired tastes - expensive yet visible items most of us would partake of if only we could afford it (or have an expense account allowing us to explore them).  Truffles, custom-fit clothing, cashmere, champagne, and limousines get their day along with the less pleasant expenses of house guests, lawyers, and tipping.   It's a bit more "guy" oriented than I remember it (I can assure you that I covet cashmere sweaters as much as any man - or more so, since I don't have a shirt coming between the exquisite softness and my arms and torso), and the numbers are a bit off thanks to the inflation of twenty-five years.  Like most of Mayle's work, it's aspirational, leaving the reader wanting a custom-made suit, hand-made shoes, and a five-star dinner date as an excuse to wear them.

The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism

I've got a bit of a gap in my knowledge of European history.  Once you pass the Renaissance, I'm a bit hazy on the mainland.  I haven't thought about Napoleon III since I took European History in high school.  That made it hard to enjoy The Judgment of Paris.  I thought it would narrate the artistic revolution that brought us Delacroix, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Cassat, and others.  While Ross King addressed the artistic trends at the time, he mixed professional politics with real politics, and with the European wars that flared in the middle of the 19th Century.  So I'm torn - it's a well written book covering a fascinating topic, but not a topic about which I particularly care.  I'd much rather read the book I thought it would be.

Rebecca

I've seen Rebecca, of course.  20 years ago, as a first year law student, Friday night was movie night and I focused on classics.  I bought the book over a decade ago (at Atlantic Books in Stone Harbor; the free bookmark listed several stores but by 2008 they were down to that store and the warehouse) and it sat on my shelf long enough for me to forget all but the most basic parts of the story.

I'm glad I did, because I don't think the creepy atmosphere would work quite as well if I knew the real relationship between Rebecca and Maxim.  The narrator, the second Mrs. de Winter, is a young, naive woman who'd been working as a paid companion to a delightfully vulgar character when Maxim de Winter courts and marries her over the course of a few weeks.  She's madly in love, but afraid that Maxim doesn't love her as much as he could have loved Rebecca.  Rebecca de Winter, whom everyone admired and loved.  A woman who inspired such devotion that the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, keeps her room as if it were a shrine.   Du Maurier's elegant but slightly claustrophobic story unrolls through Mrs. de Winter's eyes, letting us know only what she does and leaving the twist truly shocking (at least if you haven't seen the movie recently).

And When She Was Good

Laura Lippman introduced Heloise Lewis in Scratch a Woman, a work too long to be a short story and too short to be a novella, published in Hardly Knew Her.  Given an entire novel, she's less of a cypher and a much more sympathetic character than I expected from the Suburban Madam set-up.

We first see Heloise in her other guise, perfect suburban mother, getting coffee in Starbucks.  As she coolly and logically dresses down two patrons sneering at the story of a murdered suburban madam, she reflects on how shocked those customers would be to know that the perfectly calm and coiffed redhead standing next to them is also a prostitute who both sees personal clients and runs an escort service under the guise of a lobbying firm, the Women's Full Employment Network.  No one knows, or suspects, that the slightly standoffish widow with the perfect life is not as she appears.

Lippman could have used the Suburban Madam Murder as an impetus for Heloise to get out of her business, but she's a more subtle writer.  The crime does nag at Heloise, but it's not her greatest problem.  One of her former employees claims to have contracted HIV while working for WFEN, her contact (and occasional protector) on the police force is about to retire, and her accountant *may* suspect that there's something wrong.  But how can she get out of the business when her imprisoned former pimp (and her son's father) takes half the profits and will have her killed if she tries to leave?  Lippman combines a tightly constructed mystery (although one with two or three more coincidences than I'd like, and a denouement that's just a bit too pat) with flashbacks which show how an emotionally and physically abused teenager named Helen became a prostitute, an informant, and finally the woman she appeared to be.

The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

Warning - potential spoiler

Genre fiction gets dismissed as fluff that doesn't address issues the way "literature" does.  Personally, I'd rather read a mystery that sneaks in a lesson than a literary work staggering under the weight of its importance.  The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken starts out as a typical Vish Puri mystery with a particularly silly case (someone removed the #1 mustache in India from its owners face while he slept) and a cricket match featuring Rumpi's nephew, a rising star.  At the dinner celebrating both the match and the opening of a new stadium, the father of the opposing bowler drops dead, poisoned by his butter chicken.

The next day, an English acquaintance currently leading a Clean Up Cricket campaign hires Puri to investigate the murder.  Kamran Kahn, the dead man's son, appears to be throwing games - if he wanted to get out, gamblers may have killed his father.  Mummy-ji, who was also at the dinner, suspects another motive, one related to the years directly following the partition of India and Pakistan.  Working on both sides of the case and both sides of the border, Vish and his mother solve the mystery and, as Poirot sometimes did, weigh justice against the written law.  

I mentioned that Tarquin Hall snuck a lesson into Puri's case, and, unusually, it's mainly a history lesson.  I know very little about that era, but it's not a leap to see that the current animosity between the countries springs in part from their similarities.  Puri's visit to Pakistan is a mix of the familiar (his family is from Punjab, which had been divided in 1947 so to his surprise he understands the dialect) and the strange (restaurants offer beef but not alcohol).  The pain of separation is deeper in Mummy-ji's story, in which she tells her son about her work helping women trapped by politics, religion, and family in the late 1940s.  Hall seamlessly integrates this story, as well as the usual domestic matters (Vish and Rumpi are in an arranged marriage, one that involved love at first sight and which deepened over the decades), with the cricket star's father's murder, tossing in the mustache case as (occasionally) comic relief.

Encore Provence

Peter Mayle returned to Provence in the late 1990s after a few years in New York.  He simultaneously returned to writing about Provence after a handful of novels (starting with the delightful Hotel Pastis).  The result was Encore Provence, fourteen essays on village life, olive oil, wine, lavender, and how to enjoy your time in rural Provence.  They're the literary equivalent of a bar with unusual appetizers and good wine - enjoyable (particularly in good company) and worth revisiting on a regular basis.

Looking for Yesterday

I've said that Marcia Muller's Shraron McCone has never really slumped, but I've now read two consecutive books which, while good, are not up to her standards.  Looking for Yesterday (which precedes The Night Searchers) was entertaining and engrossing, but it never quite added up.

McCone Investigations has relocated to a quaint but inconvenient building (found by office manager Ted Smalley) and Sharon isn't coping well with the transition or the balky elevator.  Grumpily arranging her office, she takes on Caro Warrick's quest to prove her innocence.  Warrick was acquitted of murdering her best friend, but that's not enough for a young woman devoted to the gun control movement.  Someone beats Warrick and leaves her for dead on Sharon's doorstep soon after, and Sharon continues the case on her own, while being stalked and threatened by an unknown assailant.   Is her stalking connected to her case?  In the end, it doesn't really matter because Muller uses it to set up the subplot of The Night Searchers (the potential merger of McCone Investigations with her husband's Ripinski International).

The Face of Trespass

I'm still not sure why Ruth Rendell's editors asked her to use a pseudonym for her later psychological thrillers.  The Barbara Vine books are a bit deeper, and maybe more likely to be written from a female POV, but the tone is similar.  Who committed a crime doesn't seem as important as why, her narrators may not be reliable, and there's often a twist at the end.

Rendell frames The Face of Trespass with brief scenes featuring a newly elected MP.  At an alumni function, an old friend mentions a schoolmate of theirs, Gray Lanceton, who published a novel and is now living in the MP's district.  Lanceton is living in semi-squalor, minding another classmate's home (rurally placed yet within a few miles of London) and experiencing complete writers' block in the wake of a breakup.  Drusilla wanted Gray to kill her husband; he refused, ending the affair and his ability to write.  He's scraping by on ever-decreasing royalties when his mother's second husband calls him to France to attend her deathbed.  This trip, along with a promise to watch a dog for a vacationing family friend, lead him to call Drusilla for help and eventually to his arrest for the murder of Drusilla's husband in Gray's home.  We know he didn't (couldn't have) committed the murder, but who did?

I enjoyed Rendell's depiction of a tatty, squat-filled, 1970s London, made hazier by the obvious unraveling of her narrator's mental state.  The murder's identity is obvious, and we watch Gray walk through a London neighborhood miles from the murder site.  So why does The Face of Trespass work so well?  It's because Rendell so tightly plotted her mystery, and because the dread I felt as I saw an innocent man stumbling towards a certain murder conviction.

I Ain't Afraid of No Trolls

When I first heard about the Ghostbusters remake, I thought it was unnecessary.  The original isn't "sacred" but it's a very funny part of my teen years.  I spent too many hours quoting the movie and deconstructing the video with my friends, and my initial group of college friends bonded over a freshman orientation showing.  It was original - one of the first successful combinations of deadpan humor and special effects.  A remake just wasn't necessary, it was contradictory.

Then the backlash hit.  Not because a studio was remaking a classic for no other reason than a quick profit.  No one objects to that today - most summer movies (and a fair share of winter releases) are remakes and reboots, often of more recent movies.  It was because the 2016 Ghostbusters would be women.  Sure, we can win the World Cup and serve in the Senate, but star in an action comedy?  Blasphemy!  Bring on the trolls.

And they came.  They went on YouTube and down voted the trailer in record numbers.  They flooded IMDb with one star ratings before the movie's release date (so obviously on principle rather than merit).  They launched a Twitter war, particularly against star Leslie Jones.  So much time and effort, and over something so insignificant - a summer movie.  Something that exists only to make people laugh and enjoy the air conditioning.

Despite my disinterest in remakes and reboots, I had to see it.  Even if it wasn't very good.

But it was good.  It's not perfect and won't make me forget the original, but it was funny, tightly scripted, well acted, and full of cool special effects.  Everything you need in a summer movie.  Ghostbusters isn't perfect, but I can only complain about two major flaws.  They had one or two too many scenes showing that the blond beefcake secretary was dumber than a box of rocks.  That could have been established with a lighter touch.

My second complaint surprised me.  The friendship scenes early in the movie felt awkward and slowed down the pace, especially the product placement pizza party.  More than that, they were unnecessary.  The entire battle against the ghosts demonstrated more clearly than any piece of dialog that these were four smart, strong, kick-ass women working as a precision team.  They backed each other up and anticipated each other's moves in a way that only highly competent, well practiced, close friends and colleagues can.  They were what every woman can be and often is.  And what we rarely see on the big screen.  That's what scares the trolls - the possibility that fantasy will include aspects of reality.